Vulgar Boatman

by William G. Tapply

  Sylvie found eight.

  Horowitz thanked us anyway. He said they would have word from the fingerprint computer in Washington within forty-eight hours on the man I had killed. If his prints were on file, perhaps we’d know more.

  He said they had searched my apartment thoroughly but did not find a file containing Alice Sylvester’s school records. “Turned the place upside down” was the phrase he used.

  He said he’d call to let me know when I could get my gun back. I told him I was in no particular hurry.

  Sylvie and I had lunch at the Union Oyster House. She had a green salad and a glass of tomato juice. I had fish stew and a bottle of beer.

  She said she wanted to be alone for a while. I told her I understood. I dropped her off at her place, and I went home.

  The police may have done a thorough job of scouring my apartment for mysterious school records, latent fingerprints, specks of rare mud, stray pubic hairs, and whatever arcane clues they were looking for. But they did a lousy job of cleaning up.

  Of course, most of the mess was there before they arrived.

  My Harlan Fiske Stone briefcase was gone. I assumed the cops had taken it for evidence. I hoped I hadn’t ruined it by shooting a bullet through it.

  I called the office. When Julie answered, I said, “Before you say anything, I’m home and I’m all right.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” she said. “I was pissed off.”

  “Well, if you knew what happened to me, you’d have been worried.”

  “You’re all right. So I can be pissed if I want. Are you coming to work, or what?”

  “Or what, actually,” I said. “Be in tomorrow. Just wanted to let you know. Common courtesy, that sort of thing.”

  “You probably have no interest in who’s been calling, or which clients are looking around for new attorneys, or anything, huh?”

  “Nope. It’ll keep. Be in tomorrow.”

  “Fine. Maybe I won’t.”

  “Julie, I’ll need you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  After I hung up, I went into the bathroom. I peeled the Band-Aid off my nose. The gash didn’t look so bad, now that it wasn’t bleeding. The rest of my face looked considerably worse. I took two aspirin for the vague throbbing behind my eyes, which I ascribed to the displacement of bone and cartilage, but which may have been an adrenaline hangover. Then I hooked a can of Tuborg from the refrigerator, found the new Thomas Jefferson biography I had just started, and lay on my bed.

  The telephone jarred me awake. I fumbled for it, found it, and muttered, “Whozit?”

  “Sylvie,” came a small voice.

  “You all right?”

  “I am very lonely.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “No,” she said. “I must go to your place.”

  “Are you sure…?”

  “I am very sure. I want to see you. And I want to be in your house again.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty.”

  “Will you take a taxi?”

  “Yes. If you are not busy.”

  “I’m not busy,” I said. “I’ll cook us dinner.”

  “I am not very hungry.”

  I took a quick shower, shaved, and slid into my comfortable jeans. I found a big can of Hungarian goulash on the back of the top shelf where I had been hiding it. I opened it up, dumped it into a pot, sprinkled some paprika and tabasco and garlic salt onto it, and put the heat on low. I carefully shoved the empty can down into the bottom of the trash basket. Sylvie wouldn’t know the difference.

  I put candles on the table. I decanted a nice Portuguese red wine. I found two linen napkins that matched.

  I chopped a large onion, four strips of bacon, and a sweet red pepper into a frypan, added two garlic gloves, and stirred them over high heat for about three minutes. Then I peeled and halved a just-ripe avocado and dumped my stirfry into each half. I shook a little Italian salad dressing over the top, covered them with Saran Wrap, and shoved them into the refrigerator to chill.

  When Sylvie arrived, I was lounging on my sofa looking at the newspaper. She kissed me shyly, then wrinkled her nose. “What do I smell?”

  “You like?”

  “Did you open a can again?”

  “Would I do that?”

  She giggled. I took her coat. She had worn a slick off-white blouse and a simple blue skirt. She looked smashing, and I told her so.

  “I cannot stop feeling dirty,” she said.

  “Perhaps another shower…?”

  She grinned. “Perhaps. Later.”

  I served her with as much elegance as I could muster. She laughed at my fake Continental accent. When she praised the goulash, I thought I detected a smirk lurking in her eyes. I chose to ignore it. We did not talk about the events of the previous evening. But Sylvie cleaned her plate, which I took to be a good sign.

  Afterwards we took coffee into the living room. We sat side by side on the sofa and watched the evening news. There was a brief clip of Governor McElroy on the subject of the sales tax. Tom Baron received his equal time, discoursing, as usual, on the evils of drugs.

  Sylvie picked up the remote control device and snapped off the set. “Mr. Baron will fool many people,” she muttered.

  “Don’t confuse Tom Baron with what happened last night.”

  “I am not stupid.”

  “You had a very traumatic experience.”

  She stood up abruptly. “I do not want to think about last night,” she said. She wandered into the kitchen and began to clear off the table.

  “Leave it,” I said. “We’ll do it later. Come on. Finish your coffee.”

  She shrugged and went over to the glass doors. It was murky and moonless outside, and the scattered ship lights that drifted by were blurry blots. Sylvie stared out for a few minutes. I watched her without speaking. Finally she turned. “Would you like to get beaten at chess?” she said.

  She must have read something in my face, because she came over to me, reached down to touch my cheek, and said, “Did I say something wrong again?”

  I pulled her down onto my lap. “No. Not really. It’s just that the last time I played chess, it was with Buddy Baron. You reminded me of that.”

  She nuzzled my neck. “There are other games we can play.”

  “No. Let’s play chess.”

  “You will pick out some music. I will find the chessmen.”

  I went over to the stereo and shoved a Rolling Stones tape into the tape deck. Then I went to the kitchen to pour some brandy for us.

  Sylvie was bent over the drawer. Suddenly she said, “What is this?”

  “I forgot,” I said. “Buddy insisted on putting the pieces away properly. They’re in the wooden box where they belong.”

  “I found the box. There’s a piece of paper in it.”

  She handed it to me. It was a sheet of perforated computer paper, the kind with alternating green-and-white horizontal stripes. It had been folded into a thick wad so that it would fit into the box. I unfolded it.

  “Buddy left it,” I said.

  Sylvie stood close to me, looking over my shoulder. “It was on the bottom, under all the chess pieces. What is it?”

  “It looks like a report card. Alice Sylvester’s report card.”

  “From the file that Christie took,” said Sylvie.

  “Yes. It’s what Mr. Baron and Mr. Curry were after.”

  “But why?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Sylvie huddled against me. “What does it mean?” she whispered.

  “I have no idea,” I said slowly, staring at the rows of words and letters and numbers. “But when I figure it out, I think I’ll know why Buddy left here that night, and why he came back. And maybe I’ll know why they killed him.”

  Fourteen

  I SAT ON A wooden bench outside Ingrid Larsen’s office the next day, feeling a little like a miscreant schoolboy awaiting his sentence for a da
y of hooky. Phones jangled. Typewriters clattered. Students and secretaries bustled. Everybody carefully ignored me.

  I had dropped in at my office first thing that morning to mollify Julie. I read the mail, signed some letters, returned some calls, and canceled the only appointment I had for the afternoon. Then I took off for Windsor Harbor. By sheer good fortune I found myself motoring past Gert’s at just about noontime. Actually, I had to take an earlier exit off Route 128 to pass by Gert’s. But it was a scenic way to get to Windsor Harbor.

  And it seemed silly to drive right on past Gert’s. I had so few opportunities to slurp down a bowl of her seafood chowder. Fresh scallops. Big hunks of lobster tail. Littlenecks. Oysters. Crabmeat. Fresh halibut. Cream, butter, onion, potato, pepper. With a glass of ale to wash it down.

  So I sat outside the principal’s office at Windsor Harbor High School burping quietly and feeling quite content, not at all offended that I had to wait for Ingrid Larsen to become available.

  When I had arrived, the white-haired one named Emma had said, “But you don’t have an appointment.” She seemed quite flustered by my presence. Her words were an accusation.

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s true that I have no appointment. I am willing to wait until Dr. Larsen has a spare moment.” I gave her what ordinarily was a foolproof winning smile. It worked infallibly with old ladies. Emma, however, appeared immune to its magic.

  “Well”—she sniffed—“you’ll just have to wait and take your chances.”

  “Please let her know I’m here.”

  “She’s quite busy.”

  “I know you’ll do your best for me.” The smile, again, and I thought I detected a flicker in Emma’s eyes.

  So I waited. Alice Sylvester’s computer-generated report card was in my pocket. With Sylvie the previous evening, I had speculated on its significance.

  “Maybe Buddy wrote something on it,” I said.

  “There is no writing,” said Sylvie.

  “Hmm. No. There’s not. Perhaps there’s a microdot. One of the periods, a dot over an i.”

  “A microdot?” said Sylvie, leaning close to me and examining the report card.

  “Just a joke.”

  I hugged her. We looked at the numbers and letters and words, all printed out in dot matrix. “This is from two years ago,” I observed. “Alice’s sophomore year.”

  “She was a good student.”

  “She was supposed to have been an excellent student.”

  “Except, look,” said Sylvie, running her finger down a row of grades. “A D is not so good.”

  Alice Sylvester had received a final grade of D in biology from a teacher named Tarlow. “That is odd,” I told Sylvie. “I saw Alice’s records when I was at the school. I don’t remember seeing any D’s. She had mostly A’s, as I remember it. I’m positive she didn’t have a D on that record.”

  Sylvie put her hand on the back of my neck. “You have been hit on the head recently. Much has happened. Perhaps you don’t remember so well.”

  “Mm. Maybe you’re right. And it’s true. I just glanced over Alice’s record that day. Still…”

  So I’d decided to check out my memory with Ingrid Larsen. Because unless I was mistaken, it was this report card that had gotten Buddy Baron killed, and had brought the two hoods who called themselves Mr. Curry and Mr. Baron back to my house for another attempt to find it. If these two guys wanted it so badly, there was a story in it. The story that told how Alice Sylvester was murdered, I guessed.

  I just couldn’t read the story.

  As I sat there, I reviewed the pieces that seemed to fit together. The scenario, as I constructed it, went this way: Buddy appeared at my house when he heard Alice Sylvester had been murdered; when I told him the police wanted to arrest him, he ran away; he contacted Christie Ayers, a friend of Alice’s and his, and persuaded her to filch Alice’s file and hand it over to him; he removed the report card from the file, presumably because it was the only item in it he wanted; with the report card, Buddy felt he had evidence that would exonerate him, so he returned to my apartment, ready to face arrest, confident he would be cleared, and perhaps even convinced that he could identify the real murderer; the two guys calling themselves Mr. Curry and Mr. Baron somehow picked up his trail and followed him to my place; when Buddy heard them at the door, he hastily stuffed the report card into the box of chess pieces, assuming that no one else would find it there and that sooner or later I would.

  He probably also assumed I would have the wit to figure out the significance of it all.

  Which, thus far, I hadn’t. But it was important enough for Buddy to withstand excruciating torture to protect, and I intended to try to vindicate his faith in me.

  Still, aside from that D in biology, I had no clue.

  The door to the principal’s office opened. A man and a woman and a teenage boy appeared, followed by Ingrid Larsen. She was wearing a silky pale blue blouse and big dangly earrings of the same hue. She looked great.

  The four of them paused at the doorway. The two adults, parents of the boy, I assumed, looked grim. The boy sulked. His hair looked as if he’d slept on it. He had a hoop in his left ear. Ingrid was talking to the three of them in a low voice. I saw the father shake his head, which caused Ingrid to frown and lean toward him to speak. He shrugged. He wore a gray suit, expensive, conservatively cut. He picked imaginary lint off his lapel. Then he touched his wife’s arm and began to steer her away.

  Ingrid spoke to the boy. He hesitated, then looked up at her, his eyebrows arched. She cocked her head, said something else, and smiled. He shrugged and nodded, then turned to catch up with his parents.

  She looked around the open office area. Her eyes passed over me without registering. Then she went back into her sanctum.

  I got up and walked to her door. Emma hurried over. “Oh, you can’t go in there now.”

  “Will you please tell her I’m here, then.”

  “Now, I’m sorry, but—”

  “You are forgiven.” I walked through the door into Ingrid Larsen’s office.

  She was standing with her back to me, leaning with both hands on her desk, studying something on top of it. I cleared my throat.

  “Yes? What is it?” She didn’t bother to turn around.

  “It’s not Emma’s fault. I trampled her.”

  She turned. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “You don’t have to pretend to be thrilled like that. I know seeing me is probably the highlight of your day, but—”

  She smiled. “I’m sorry. My mind was somewhere else.”

  She came toward me with her hand extended. I grasped it. “I’ll only take a minute,” I said.

  She gestured to a chair, and we both sat down. She sighed deeply. “Thank God I’m not a parent,” she said.

  “Rough session, huh?”

  “Sometimes I think teenagers would be better off without parents entirely. Maybe I ought to be running a boarding school. Keep the bad influences away.”

  “Wasn’t it Plato who said that children should be taken from their parents at birth and raised by experts?”

  “In the Republic. Yes. Plato among others. Of course, Plato was a fascist.” She smiled at me. “I’m not a fascist.”

  “No. I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “That boy misbehaves so that he can get his parents’ attention. It’s the only way he knows.”

  “It seems to be working.”

  “I told them to let the kid grow up in his own way. Let him make some mistakes. Ignore some of the behavior and it’ll go away.”

  “Sounds risky,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It is. I think he still has a chance to become an autonomous human being. His parents have to give him a fair shot at it.” She sat back and tilted her head at me. I suspected she was giving me what she thought was her best angle. It was an excellent angle, at that. “What can I do for you, Mr. Coyne?”

  “First, is there any way you can check and see if Chri
stie Ayers is in school today?”

  She frowned at me, then shrugged. She went to her computer monitor and tapped at the keyboard. A minute later she turned to face me. “She’s here. At least she was in homeroom this morning. Why?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing you need to know about.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To see if Christie’s in school?”

  “No, that wasn’t it. You heard about Buddy Baron?”

  “Yes. A horrible thing. It was at your apartment.”

  I nodded. I took Alice Sylvester’s report card from my pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to her. “It is possible that the men who murdered Buddy were after this.”

  She frowned. “I don’t see…”

  “Me neither. The only thing is that D in biology. I don’t remember seeing a D on her transcript.”

  “It is odd,” she murmured, studying the paper. “Alice was elected to National Honor Society her junior year. Usually you can’t go into NHS with a D. She had Ira Tarlow for biology. I suppose he could have entered the wrong grade and had it changed later. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise what?”

  She shrugged. “Otherwise, I don’t know. Let’s take another look at that transcript.”

  She stood up and again went to the computer terminal on a table in the corner of her office. She sat in front of it and began tapping on the keys. I moved so I could watch over her shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Entering the codes. There’s a secret six-digit number, and then three separate code words, before you can get into the data base. Gil Speer changes the codes every week.”

  After several seconds the machine beeped. The words ACCESSING FILE appeared on the screen. “Takes a while,” Ingrid muttered.

  “Who knows these codes?”

  “Gil and I are the only ones who can get into this particular file. There are other files open to some of the secretaries. Attendance, for example. There’s a different set of codes for them. Ah,” she said, as the machine beeped again. She typed Alice’s name. The machine gave her a number. She hit the return key and typed the number. Alice Sylvester’s transcript almost instantaneously appeared on the screen.