Close to the Bone (16 page)

When I returned to the table, a black-haired fortyish man in a business suit was sitting with Roger. They both looked up at me, as if I’d interrupted something. I slid Roger’s cup of coffee in front of him, then sat down.

“This is Brady Coyne,” said Roger to the other guy. “He’s my attorney.”

“Dick Carlson,” said the man, extending his hand. “Concord police.”

“Lieutenant Carlson’s a detective,” said Roger.

I shook Carlson’s hand.

“Start over,” said Roger to Carlson. “I want Brady to hear it.”

Carlson nodded, then turned to me. He had sharp gray eyes and a mouth that seemed too small for his face. “Basically,” he said, “it looks like a hit and run. We think a car traveling at a high rate of speed ran into him head-on and kept going. There’s no other way to explain it. The, um, the extent of the injuries. The bike is completely mangled. Somebody on a bike’d have to be going about sixty and run into a brick wall for that kind of thing to happen.”

“Head-on?” I said.

Carlson nodded. “Looks that way.”

“He couldn’t have just run into a tree or something?” said Roger.

Carlson shook his head. “There wasn’t any tree. Just thick weeds. Oh, he’d have hurt himself if he took a tumble. Maybe broken an arm or something. But not a fractured skull.”

“So what are you thinking?” I said.

He shrugged. “Kids out late driving too fast, maybe they’ve had too many beers, they come around the corner and there’s this guy riding a bike, weaving down the middle of the road. They hit him, he goes flying, they panic and keep going.” He shrugged again.

“Any way to verify that?”

“The state police lab has the bike. Maybe they’ll find traces of automobile paint or something on it.”

“What can we do?” said Roger.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Carlson. “Pray for your son, I guess. I just wanted you to know what was going on. We’ll find ’em sooner or later. There’ll be dents and scrapes on their car. If it was kids, their old man’ll see it or someone’s conscience will get to them. You can’t keep something like that quiet for very long.” He glanced at his wristwatch, then stood up. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll keep in touch with you.”

He shook hands with Roger, then with me, and started for the door.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Roger, and I hurried after Carlson. I caught up with him in the corridor. “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” I said.

He turned. “Sure. What is it?”

“I have an idea of who might’ve run down Glen Falconer.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“You’re thinking it wasn’t an accident.”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

I told him about Glen’s trial and how Thomas Gall had threatened to “get” him and everyone else who he seemed to feel was responsible for the “not guilty” verdict. I told him how Paul Cizek had disappeared from his boat, and how I had seen Gall at Paul’s house on Plum Island the next day. I told him that I believed Thomas Gall was carrying out his threat. I told him that Lieutenant Kirschenbaum of the Newburyport police was investigating Paul’s disappearance.

Carlson leaned against the wall and listened, his eyes focused on my face. When I finished my story, he pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket. “Spell ‘Gall’ and ‘Cizek’ and ‘Kirschenbaum’ for me,” he said.

I spelled the names for him, and he scribbled in his notebook. Then he looked up at me and said, “Falconer kills Gall’s wife with a car, so Gall kills Falconer with a car. That’s what you’re thinking.”

“Yes.”

“An eye-for-an-eye sort of thing.”

I nodded.

“Interesting,” he said.

I shrugged. “It fits, doesn’t it?”

“Easy enough,” he said thoughtfully, “getting someone to take a look at this Gall’s car. And I suppose somebody could check on where he was Saturday night.”

“And where he was the night Paul Cizek went off his boat,” I added.

“They didn’t find a body, though, huh?”

“No. Not yet.”

“It’s been what?”

“A week ago Friday night.”

Carlson shook his head. “Over a week, no body.”

“I know. Anything could’ve happened.”

“No body, no homicide,” he said.

“At this point, they don’t even know if there was a crime.”

“Well,” he said, “it sure looks like there’s a crime here.”

And if Glen Falconer died, I thought, it would be a homicide. Just as it had been when the woman Glen hit died.

It seemed too ironic to be a coincidence.

A half hour later Roger and I returned to the ICU. Brenda Falconer was seated in the waiting room with a magazine spread open on her lap. She was wearing a short blue skirt and a white blouse and high heels, and her hair was done up in an intricate bun, and she smiled quickly when she saw us.

I went to her and she held out her hand. I took it and said, “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said, as if it had been a dumb question.

Roger sat two chairs away from her, folded his arms, and put his chin on his chest. Neither of them had acknowledged the other.

I stood there looking from one to the other, then said, “Well, I’ll leave you folks to enjoy each other’s company. I’ve got to run to the office. Let me know if there’s any news, okay?”

“Sure,” said Roger without looking up.

Brenda glanced sideways at him, then looked at me and nodded. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

I
CALLED KIRSCHENBAUM AT
the Newburyport police station as soon as I got back to the office, and when I told him what had happened to Glen Falconer and how I thought Thomas Gall was making good on his threat to get revenge for the death of his wife, the lieutenant said, “Accidents
do
happen, Mr. Coyne.”

“It’s not hard to make something look like an accident.”

“It’s harder than you think, actually. Automobiles hit people on bicycles all the time. And we’ve investigated the Cizek thing pretty thoroughly, believe it or not. Now, I can’t tell you whether he went overboard accidentally or on purpose. But we can’t find a stitch of evidence that someone pushed him.”

“If you had his body…”

“That could tell us a lot, sure.”

“Isn’t it unusual that his body hasn’t washed up somewhere?”

“Well, yes, kinda.”

“So don’t you think
not
finding his body is a kind of evidence?”

He chuckled. “I get your drift, Mr. Coyne. Like the dog that didn’t bark in one of those Sherlock Holmes stories. Sure. But that’s a big ocean out there, and it’s full of scavengers with sharp teeth, and tides and currents do funny things. I’ll tell you the truth. I wish we had his body. But without it, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m pretty much inclined to believe Mr. Cizek had an accident. Accidents happen all the time.”

“And murders don’t?”

“Murders that leave no clues? Murders that are cleverly made to look exactly like accidents?” He laughed quickly. “Hardly ever.”

“You released Paul’s boat. Does that mean you’ve closed the case?”

“Mr. Coyne,” said Kirschenbaum, “there was never any case to close. At least, not a police case. Without a crime, there’s no case. We examined the boat. Looking for clues, like responsible policemen. The Coast Guard wanted to get rid of it, and it had nothing more to tell us.”

“And the fact that Glen Falconer—”

“I’m trying to be patient with you,” he said. “On account of you’re a lawyer, and you’re sincere, and you’re really not too much of a pain in the ass. But I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Somebody should talk to Thomas Gall.”

“Sure. And every other individual who might’ve had harsh words with Cizek. You’re right. One of ’em might’ve murdered him. And if we had evidence that there was a murder, we’d most likely interrogate every last one of them.”

“Glen Falconer got run down, don’t forget.”

I heard him sigh. “I’ll talk to somebody in Concord if it’ll make you happy.”

“Carlson,” I said. “He’s the Concord detective. Dick Carlson. I gave your name to him.”

“I’m sure I speak for both Detective Carlson and myself,” he said, “when I say thank you, Mr. Coyne, for all your help.”

After I hung up, I lit a cigarette. I swiveled around to gaze out the window at the steel and glass and concrete of Copley Square. When I finished the cigarette, I picked up the phone. I pecked out half of Alex’s number at the
Globe
before I replaced the receiver. I wanted to talk with her. I wanted to tell her what had happened to Glen. There might be a story there for her. It would interest her. We could discuss the implications. She could tell me whether I was crazy to think Thomas Gall was involved.

No. That’s not why I wanted to call her. I really wanted to hear her say that she’d changed her mind. She’d canceled her lease on the post-and-beam home in Garrison, Maine. She’d decided not to take a leave of absence from the paper. She’d thought about it, and she’d decided she wanted things to stay the same. She liked it just the way it was. She liked how we took turns making dinner and how we played Trivial Pursuit, and although we kept our separate apartments, we slept together most nights and woke up together almost every day, and it was too perfect to change.

She wouldn’t say that. If I called her, she’d be friendly and warm and she’d listen to my story about Glen and cluck sympathetically when I told her that the police were patronizing me, and we wouldn’t talk about what was going to happen with us.

Alex wasn’t going to change her mind, of course, and it was selfish of me even to wish that she might. If there was any mind-changing to be done, I’d have to do it.

I didn’t know how much I could change.

I didn’t talk to Alex all day. I wanted to call her, but I didn’t. Even more, I wanted her to call me. But she didn’t.

I knew she wouldn’t be there when I got back to my apartment after work, and she wasn’t. I heated up a can of Dinty Moore beef stew and ate it on the balcony.

I watched
Jeopardy
and tried to shout out answers before the contestants could. But I was slow and I felt stupid. Alex would’ve gotten most of them right.

At eight o’clock I snapped off the TV, went down to my car, and drove to Plum Island. I wanted to talk with Maddy Wilkins again. It was something to do. Better than spending a quiet evening alone in my apartment.

By the time I crossed the bridge to the island, the sun had set and the moon had risen. I turned left, crept down the narrow street, and then turned onto Meadowridge. I parked beside Paul’s Cherokee, which was where Olivia and I had left it in the driveway.

The full moon lit the yard and the marsh out back, but the house was dark, and I felt a stab of disappointment. I realized I had been vaguely hoping that Paul would be there, and that he’d greet me at the door and offer me a beer, and we’d sit on his deck gazing out over the marsh and laugh at the big misunderstanding, and afterward I’d go home and call Alex and tell her all about it, and she’d laugh, too, and everything would be all right.

But, of course, everything wasn’t all right. Paul was not there and Alex was moving to Maine.

I walked back to the street that ran the length of the island. Maddy had said she lived a couple of streets down, and I thought I recalled her waving her hand to the left. So I took a left. Short, sandy roadways similar to the one Paul lived on bisected this main street. The moonlight turned the sand white, and I walked down each of the little roads, and near the end of the third one I spotted an old yellow Volkswagen pulled up beside a cottage almost identical to Paul’s. When I moved closer, I saw the bumper sticker that said,
JUST SAY YO.

The house was ablaze with lights, and the bass throb of rock music thumped out of the open windows. I walked up to the front. A young couple were seated side by side on the steps. She had one arm slung across his shoulders. Both of them were holding beer cans, and they looked up when they saw me.

“Lookin’ for Karen?” said the boy.

“Maddy,” I said. “Maddy Wilkins.”

He half turned his head and yelled through the screen of the front door, “Hey, Maddy! There’s a guy here for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No prob,” he said.

After a couple of minutes, I said, “Um, maybe she didn’t hear you? The music and all?”

“Why’n’t you go on in,” said the girl. “Maddy’s in there somewhere.”

I nodded. They edged over and I squeezed past them, pulled open the screen door, and went inside. The interior of the place was like Paul’s, except that it pulsated with rock music I didn’t recognize, and about a dozen young people were sprawled on the furniture and sitting cross-legged on the floor. Some were drinking beer and some held bottles of designer water. Their legs and fingers jiggled and twitched to the beat of the music, and not a single one of them was smoking dope.

Maddy was sitting on the floor leaning her back against a chair. The bearded young man in the chair was absentmindedly stroking her hair as he talked with the two girls sitting on the sofa across from him. It reminded me of the way Roger Falconer dangled his hand down to pet Abe and Ike, his retrievers.

I went over, and Maddy looked up. She frowned for an instant, then widened her eyes and smiled. “Oh, hi,” she said.

“Hi, Maddy.”

“Hey, want a beer or something?”

I shook my head. “I wondered if we could talk for a minute.”

“Oh, geez, sure.” She scrambled to her feet, came over, and took my hand. “Come on. It’s too noisy in here.”

She led me outside. We walked away from the music. She was still holding my hand.

“I remember you, but I forget your name,” she said. “I’m pretty bad with names. I’m sorry.”

“Brady,” I said. “Brady Coyne. I’m—”

“I know. Paul’s friend. Is that why you’re here? You know something about Paul?”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t. It’s been over a week. I was hoping—”

“That I’d heard something?” She shrugged. “I haven’t. It makes me furious, you know?”

“What does?”

“That he’d do that.”

“You think—”

“That he killed himself? Yeah. That’s what I think. He was a sad guy. Always moping around. I kept trying to cheer him up. You know, flowers and stuff. Some guys like flowers. But he was too far gone, I guess. I’d try to talk to him about making plans, doing stuff. You know, get him to think about the future? He’d just say, like, well, I’m not going to be here much longer. You know—”