Vulgar Boatman

by William G. Tapply

  “A ten-spot,” I observed. “Something heavy, Les?”

  “Are we…”

  I took a ballpoint pen from my pocket and scribbled on a napkin. I pushed it across the table. Les glanced at it, wrote his name on it, and pushed it back to me. I folded it and stuck it into my shirt pocket.

  “Now,” I said, “I am officially and legally retained. You are my privileged client. I am your lawyer.”

  “I can talk?”

  “Freely. Liberally. Talk dirty if you want.”

  “It’s a little embarrassing.”

  “It usually is.”

  “Actually, it’s not as sordid as it may sound.”

  I lit a cigarette. “You figure you’re getting your money’s worth out of this, Les?”

  “Okay,” he said. He clamped down on his cigar and fired it up. “You’ve got the meter running, huh?”

  “Spit it out.”

  He nodded and leaned toward me. “Good-looking lady comes to your office, wants you to get the goods on her old man, who she thinks is scraping his carrot somewhere else. What do you conclude?”

  “I conclude,” I said, “that maybe this good-looking lady’s shagging somebody on the side, wants a little insurance in case her old man hires an investigator to check her out.”

  “I thought of that,” said Les. “The other thing I thought of, though, is maybe this good-looking lady’s got something wrong with her, her old man needs to play around. Two sides to every story, right?”

  “Everybody plays around,” I observed.

  Les cocked his head at me. “That ain’t true.”

  “Okay. I stand corrected. People who aren’t married, you don’t call it playing around. Anyway, so what?”

  “So this lady is telling me she thinks the guy is finding some interesting new place to dip his wick, and she’s looking at me through these eyes that make you want to jump right in. Slim, tall, all this blond hair. She looked like that actress there. Farrah Fawcett. Had this voice, made you feel like you just finished having sex with her to hear her talk. Brady, I’m telling you, she was absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, I tell her, sure, that’s what I do for a living. I ask her a few questions, trying to get a line on the guy. She’s acting typical. Last thing she wants is the guy finding out she’s sicced a gumshoe onto him. She’s nervous. Like she wants to know, but doesn’t, too. Pays in cash. Don’t try to call her. Don’t go near their house. Anyway, to make a long story short—”

  “It’s a little late for that, Les.”

  He frowned at me. “Huh?”

  “It’s already a long story.”

  “Right. I follow the guy. Sure enough. She’s right. Nooners. Superdiscreet. Twice a week, but different days, always they meet in a different place. Once she’s in a taxi that stops on the corner for him. Another time they have lunch at separate tables at the Oyster House and he follows her out, they go to a hotel in Brookline. Once he sits beside her on a bench on the Common, they don’t go anywhere. Just lean close to each other and talk. I got my trusty three-hundred-millimeter lens working. Still, nothing definitive, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he continued. “So I follow them for three weeks. They’ve got a thing going, no doubt in my mind. But damned if I could get what I needed. And you know I’m good at what I do.”

  “Photos. Tapes. In flagrante delicto. You got nothing juicy.”

  “Right. I never knew where they were going until they got there. I had the feeling that she was running the show, making the arrangements. She’s done this before, you ask me. So there I am. The old lady, she’s gonna call me, find out what I got. What do I say? I think her old man’s messing around, all right! I can show her a picture of the alienator of her husband’s affections. But no evidence of anything. In other words, I haven’t earned my money.”

  “For all you can tell, these are business meetings,” I said.

  “Hell, Brady, I know they ain’t business meetings. I know exactly what they are. But these two’ve got me stumped. I admit it. Funny thing, though. I started thinking, this guy keeps meeting this lady, they’ve obviously got something going, and next thing I know I start to feel sorry for them. They’ve gotta sneak around, and this lady, she’s not all that attractive, so I begin to think they’re really in love or something. More than just, you know, good, healthy hormones run amok. They’ve got something nice, it seems to me, and who am I to interfere?”

  “Come off it, Les.”

  “No, really. I actually began to feel guilty.”

  I shook my head slowly. “Why don’t you buy us another drink.”

  “Capital idea.” He glanced over at the two Vietnamese waitresses and nodded. They discussed it for a moment and then one of them came toward us. Her skirt was so tight that she walked as if her feet were bound, little birdlike steps, one foot precisely in front of the other.

  “Gennumun?” she said, an expectant smile on her rosebud lips.

  “Another,” said Les, gesturing to our empty glasses. “Bourbon for my uncle. Coke for me.”

  The girl glanced over her shoulder at her friend at the table across the room. They exchanged small shrugs before she tiptoed away.

  “So,” resumed Les, examining the dead end of his cigar, “I thought about it for a while. Finally I realized what I had to do.”

  “Les—”

  “No, listen. My heart was in absolutely the right place. I call the guy up at his office. Tell him my name, my job, and ask him if he’d like to meet with me. He sounds very shook up. Naturally. So I meet him at this grungy bar in Chelsea, for God’s sake. His choice. We sit in a booth. He refuses a drink. I tell him, I say I’ve been following him for three weeks, I know what he’s doing. I’ve got photos of him and the lady. I tell him I got nothing really incriminating, but he probably still wouldn’t want his wife to see them. He agrees instantly. I tell him, who am I to butt into his life? He seems to agree with that, too. Then you know what he did?”

  “He offered to buy the pictures from you,” I said.

  Les sat back and placed both of his hands flat on the table. “How did you figure that out?”

  “I think you left the little hints you might have let slip out of your narrative, Les. You did suggest to this man, in a very circuitous way, I’m sure, that if he had the photos, then you wouldn’t have them to show his wife. Am I right?”

  “Well,” he said, his eyes slipping away from mine, “maybe I did. Not that I really intended to, understand, and not that I necessarily went there with that in my mind. I am not a devious man, Brady.”

  “Ho, ho,” I said.

  Les shrugged. “Anyway, he wanted the photos real bad. See, I said to myself, Les, I said, you give the wife these pictures, all it’s gonna do is make everybody unhappy. She can’t use them to divorce the guy and take him to the cleaners, because they’re just not explicit enough. So she gets nothing out of it. But she’s miserable, even so, and she makes things miserable for the poor guy. But if he gets the pictures—see, Brady, they just show the two of them getting out of a cab together, walking into a hotel, sitting beside each other on a park bench—if he has them, that way nobody gets hurt.”

  The waitress brought our drinks and scurried back to her friend across the room. I removed the paper parasol from mine and sipped. Cheap bourbon. I put the drink down, lit a Winston, and studied Les.

  “You’re thinking bad thoughts,” he said.

  “It’s blackmail, Les. Legal opinion.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Unethical. Illegal. Is that what you paid me ten bucks to tell you?”

  “I do feel a lot better, telling you all this.”

  “Convert, then. Priests don’t charge anything for hearing confessions. You going to tell me the rest of it?”

  He frowned at his cigar. Then he smashed it into the ashtray. “The wife called me. That was how we had left it. She’d get in touch. Didn’t want me calling her.”

  “What’d you tell her
?”

  He smiled apologetically and lifted his hands palms outward, as if it were self-evident. “I told her I had nothing on the man and as far as I could tell I wouldn’t be able to get anything. I told her to forget it. I told her I couldn’t help her. I told her our slate was clean. She had given me a retainer and expenses for the three weeks. Cash on the spot when she hired me. And that was that. End of story.”

  “A happy ending, then.”

  “You think so?”

  “Are you worried?”

  He shook his head doubtfully. “Nope. Guess not. I’m clear, huh?”

  “What could happen?”

  He sighed loudly. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. She could tell him she hired me, right? How relieved she is that he’s still the faithful spouse. But hell, he knows this already. Nothing new to him. No problem to me. Now, he sure as hell isn’t gonna tell her that he bought these photos from some creepy private dick that show him with this broad he’s banging, and if he does, the last thing on her mind is my, ah, dubious ethics. So nothing can happen.”

  I studied the half-empty glass of bourbon that sat in front of me. There was a large black speck frozen in the middle of one of the ice cubes. It could have been a cigarette ash. Or a bug. “Les,” I said evenly, “you extorted money from a man. You lied to your client. You took money from both of them. You are a disgrace. Another legal opinion.”

  “I know, I know. But I think I did the right thing.”

  “You’re a social worker, maybe you did the right thing. You’re a private investigator, you plain fucked up.”

  “So what do you think I should do?”

  I grinned. “You should give the guy his money back. You should go to the wife and tell her what you found out. You can’t play God in people’s lives, and you can’t blackmail folks.” I leaned forward, my elbows planted on the table, my chin on my fists. “By the way,” I said, “didn’t the man ask for negatives?”

  “Oh, sure he did.”

  “And did you give them to him?”

  “I hate to tell you this.”

  “So don’t. I rendered you more than ten bucks’ worth already.” I pushed my chair back and started to stand.

  He reached across the table and put his hand on my wrist. “No, wait. You want another ten-spot?”

  I sat down. “The hell with it. What about the negatives?”

  “You’re not going to like this.”

  I shrugged.

  “I had a set of negatives with me. We burned them.”

  “We?”

  “Well, actually I burned them. In the ashtray on the table in that cruddy bar in Chelsea.”

  “What negatives were they, Les?”

  He rolled his brown eyes upward. He reminded me of a sheep. His expression certainly qualified as sheepish. “It was a roll of film I shot last summer on the Cape. Nothing much good. Artsy stuff. Boats. Sand dunes. Surf. Not my forte.”

  “And the man didn’t examine them?”

  “I kinda did it quick. Talked through it. He never questioned it.”

  “You are a piece of work, you know that?”

  Les smiled. “What can I say?”

  “You still have the negatives, then.”

  “Yep. I got ’em.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  He shrugged elaborately. “What can I do?”

  “You can make another set of prints, show them to your client. You can give the poor guy his money back.”

  Les stared over at the two waitresses. One of them waggled her fingers at him. He waggled back at her. She opened her mouth and ran her tongue all the way around the inside of her lips. Les smiled and turned to me. “Nah. I don’t think so. But thanks for the advice. It was worth ten bucks. Easy.”

  2

  A BRILLIANT JANUARY SUN had burned away the smog and crud that usually hung over the city. I kept sniveling around in my chair to look at it. The fishing season was too far off to allow myself to dream about it. The golf courses would remain frozen for months. I liked the gray days of January better, when slush lay in puddles on the sidewalks and the dirty snow huddled miserably against the buildings, and a man could more easily accept the futility of wishing for spring.

  Anyway, I had contracts to revise, estates to settle, codicils to compose, clients to call. There might be the odd divorce, perhaps a deed to research. I would get through this day, and the next.

  There came the scratching of long, well-tended fingernails on my door. I called, “Come on in, Julie.”

  My dark-haired, green-eyed secretary entered, with a smile that eclipsed the brilliance of the sun, and a mug of coffee, freshly brewed. She placed the mug on my desk and herself on the chair beside it.

  “We have a problem,” she said.

  “Keeping our passions in check,” I answered.

  “Not that one. That is not a problem.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “I emphatically was. This concerns our telephone system.”

  I sipped my coffee and lit a cigarette. “Sounds like just the kind of problem I’d like to tackle today. Shoot.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “When we put somebody on hold, because you’re making plans to go fishing with Mr. McDevitt or Dr. Adams or somebody, like the time you were arranging that trip to Alaska, and Dr. Adams wanted to bring his wife and you really didn’t want a woman along but you couldn’t figure out how to tell him and besides you’ve got this little thing for her anyway, and while you were beating around the bush with your friend, Mrs. Bailey had to wait for nearly twenty minutes to tell you that they were taking her husband off life support—”

  “Jesus, Julie. Get to it.”

  She scowled. “I am. Anyway, you do spend a lot of time on the phone.”

  “So I do. The telephone is an indispensable tool for attorneys.”

  She gave me a phony smile. “You bet. Listen. What we can do, they say, is, we can have music play into the phone while somebody’s on hold.”

  I nodded. “Good. Sounds good.”

  “Well, the question is, what music? I don’t know about you, but that Ray Conniff stuff makes me feel like I’m on an elevator and want to get off. No way I’d stay on hold if they played that crap into my ear. So what kind of music do you want?”

  “Mötley Crüe. Twisted Sister. Ozzy Osbourne.”

  “Get serious, Brady.”

  “Okay,” I said. I frowned for her so she’d know I was giving this conundrum my full attention. I swiveled around to study the Copley Square skyline. Then I swiveled back. “For my clientele, I think Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, maybe a little Sinatra.”

  “Don’t you think that stuff is a little avant-garde for your clients?”

  I nodded. “Good point. They do tend to be pretty old and conservative. What about Bach, then?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “All that weird counterpoint. Unsettling for old nerves.”

  “Mozart?”

  “Hmm,” she said, pretending to cogitate on the matter. “Maybe Ray Conniff isn’t such a bad idea after all.”

  The light on my desk phone blinked. Julie reached over and picked it up. “Brady L. Coyne, attorney at law,” she said into it. “Good morning.”

  She paused, then smiled, first at the phone and then at me. “Well, I’m trying to get him to do a little work for a change. Not having much luck, actually. … Sure. I’m sure he’ll be happy to. Hang on a sec.”

  Julie held her hand over the receiver. “It’s Gloria.”

  My former wife called me at least weekly. Julie considered all of Gloria’s calls urgent. Julie believed—not without some justification—that my relationship with Gloria had not been entirely resolved by our divorce eight years earlier. She hoped we would, as she persisted in saying, “get back together.”

  Gloria had raised our two sons, Billy and Joey—William and Joseph, Gloria usually called them—through all the tough times. She never accused me of evading my responsibilities. She didn�
��t have to, because I slogged around in my own guilt without any encouragement. Usually when she called me it was with a problem. A balky oil burner. Squirrels in the attic of the house in Wellesley that I moved out of when we split. Billy’s physics grade. Joey’s experimentation with cannabis.

  There were other agendas between us that remained unstated. I was sure she was as aware of them as I. Never either during or after our rocky marriage had either of us declared an end to love. It was a subject that, by tacit agreement, remained taboo.

  I took the phone from Julie. She winked at me and left the office, closing the door behind her.

  “Hi, hon,” I said into the phone, using a term that had once been an endearment and remained as a habit.

  “Brady,” said Gloria, “do you know what today is?”

  “Um, Friday. January something-or-other.”

  “Try again.”

  “Well, it’s not Groundhog Day, I know that, because Groundhog Day is my favorite holiday and I’ve got it circled on my calendar. That doesn’t come up until next month. And we just had Martin Luther King Day. Oh, shit. Did I forget somebody’s birthday?”

  “Nobody that I know of. One of your Hungarian ladies, maybe.”

  “There’s only one Hungarian lady, Gloria. It’s not her birthday. Give me a hint.”

  “Something important happened in your life on this date several years ago.”

  “I passed the bar exam. No, that was in August. I remember, because I had just gotten back from Montana and—”

  “Brady, I’m serious.”

  “I give up, Gloria.”

  “It’s our anniversary, damn you.”

  “Aha!” I said, “if this is a test, you can’t nail me with trick questions. We got married in May. I missed a whole week of trout fishing because of our honeymoon trip to that little tropical island where I got a sunburn surfcasting and there were twin beds in our room.”

  “Not of our wedding. Our divorce, dummy.”

  I sighed. “Oh. Right. I had forgotten the exact date.”

  “Do you remember the day?” Gloria’s voice was soft.