Close to the Bone (18 page)

Then I went back to the table, lit a cigarette, and took Paul’s phone bills and bank statements from my pocket.

Tearing them open felt vaguely criminal.

The first bank statement covered the period from April 15 to May 14. I recalled that Paul had moved to Plum Island sometime in March or early April.

There were just six canceled checks. One was for $476.27 to a bank in Virginia. A credit card payment, I guessed. To Skibbee and Fosburg Realtors, $1,200. Two months’ rent, probably. One each for gas, electricity, and telephone.

The last check was made out to cash for $40,000. It was dated April 29.

Forty grand in cash. It left a balance of a little over $2,000 in his account.

There were five canceled checks in the second bank statement. One month’s rent, $600; $329.40 for the credit card; the three utilities.

The monthly phone bills, for some reason, covered the period from the twelfth to the eleventh. The first one, from April 12 to May 11, itemized no calls. Nothing collect, no long distance, no credit card.

The second phone bill showed a cluster of long-distance calls between the fifteenth and twentieth of May. All to the 603 area code. New Hampshire.

One of the numbers had been called three times on three consecutive days. The rest had been called just once.

I wondered who lived at that number, and I wondered if that person had collected forty thousand dollars in cash from Paul Cizek, and if so, I wondered what it was for.

The next morning after Julie and I had reviewed the day’s schedule, I gave her Paul’s phone bill. “See if you can find out who lives at these numbers,” I told her.

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s the point?”

“I don’t know. I guess I want to know what happened to Paul.”

“You think the answer is at one of these places?” she said, tapping her fingernail on the phone bill.

“Maybe. He apparently talked to several people in New Hampshire. Maybe he mentioned something to them. He took forty thousand dollars out of his checking account in April, then he made all these calls in May. He called one number three times in three days. Maybe he was paying somebody off or something. I don’t know what I think right now.”

“How do you want me to handle it?”

“Call the numbers. Talk to whoever answers. Don’t mention Paul. See if you can get their names. Improvise.”

“You mean lie.”

“Sure. Lie. Make something up. Maybe you could be selling something. Lightbulbs. Newspaper subscriptions. Investments.”

Julie grinned. “Sounds like fun. We haven’t got anything pressing until eleven. We’ll do it now. I’ll go into your office. You stay out here and play receptionist.”

“I can handle that.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. It’s not as easy as it looks.”

She went into my office. I sat at her desk. I called Roger Falconer’s number in Lincoln. His answering machine invited me to leave a message. I declined. Then I called Emerson Hospital. They connected me to the ICU. I identified myself as Glen’s attorney, and a pleasant nurse told me that there was no change in his condition.

About an hour later, the phone rang and a button began blinking on the console on Julie’s desk. I picked up the phone, depressed the button, and said, “Yes? Hello?”

“Geez,” said Julie. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Brady Coyne, Attorney. May I help you?’ ”

“I’ll never get it right,” I said. “I’m just no good at this receptionist stuff. I guess I should go back to being a lawyer.”

“Well, I’m awfully good at lying and wangling information out of strangers,” she said. “Why don’t you come in here?”

I went in. She had her feet up on my desk and a big grin on her face. I sat in the client chair across from her. “What’ve you got?” I said.

She touched the phone bill with the tip of a pencil. “I figured this number, the one he called three times in three days, might be the important one. But he called the other ones first, so that’s what I did. I called them in the same sequence he did. There are six of them. He called four of them one day, two the next. Guess what?”

“Come on, kid. I don’t know.”

“All right. I checked the calendar. The first four calls were all made on a Sunday afternoon. See, it gives the date and time.”

“And?”

“And the other two were the following morning. And guess what else?”

“Julie—”

“Okay. They’re all real estate places.”

I remembered how Alex had pored over the real estate classifieds in the Sunday
Globe.
I imagined Paul Cizek doing the same thing. “Peculiar,” I said. “He’d already rented the place on Plum Island. What’s he calling real estate firms for?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “But I did find out that all these places are in Keene, New Hampshire. Except this number, the one he called three times. That’s in Jefferson.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“He made the first call that Tuesday. Then one on Wednesday and the last one on Thursday.”

“Did you call it?”

“Of course. I said to myself, I bet this is also a real estate firm. Guess what?”

“Julie, for Christ sake, stop asking me to guess.”

“I’m not asking you to guess. I’m just building the suspense.”

“Consider it built. What’d you find out?”

“It’s
not
a real estate firm.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“But it
is
a woman with a place to rent. And guess what?”

“Listen—”

“Sorry,” she said. “The place has been rented.”

“Could you find out when it was rented?”

“Yep.”

“Sometime shortly after Paul Cizek called for the third time?”

“Bingo,” she said with a snap of her fingers. “It’s a summer place on a little lake. Very isolated. It’s the only place on this lake. Comes with a rowboat, no outboard motor. Not winterized. She rents it monthly or for the season. May through September. Sleeps four comfortably. A couple of rollaway cots so you can squeeze in six. A nice little place for a couple or a small family to get away from it all. There’s bass in the lake and a little swimming beach. Just four-fifty a month or two thousand for the whole season. That sounds pretty cheap to me.”

“You learned all that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You’re amazing.”

“I know. I even found out where the place is located. Jefferson, New Hampshire, is about a half hour northeast of Keene. I told her that it sounded like just what we were looking for and we might want to rent it, but she said it was taken for the entire season, so I said we might be interested for next year, and she said why didn’t we take a drive up there, check it out, and then we could call her back. She gave me directions. She said she didn’t think the man who was staying there now would mind.”

“A man is staying there now?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Jesus,” I whispered.

K
EENE IS TUCKED IN
the southwest corner of New Hampshire about equidistant from the borders of Vermont and Massachusetts. I’d been through it a few times, always on my way somewhere else, and I remembered it as a pretty little community, which, at around twenty thousand people, made it one of the most populous in the state. I figured the state college there inflated the population figure. When I checked the road map, I saw that no significant highway passed very close to Keene.

I located Jefferson an inch or so northeast of Keene. No red line on the map passed through it.

I left the office at four on Wednesday, went back to my apartment, changed into comfortable clothes, and joined the daily exodus from Boston at around a quarter of five. I slid a tape of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony into my cassette. It kept me company through all the traffic on Storrow Drive and Route 2 and ended around the time I reached the rotary in Concord. The Emperor Concerto took me from there to Keene, and I thanked Beethoven for the diversion.

The directions Julie had taken from the woman on the telephone were precise, and twenty minutes later I found the dirt driveway on the right, four-tenths of a mile past the barn with the rusty tin roof. It was marked by a slab of wood nailed to a pine tree with
GALLAGHER
hand-painted on it.

I turned onto the roadway, stopped, and got out of the car. The driveway sloped downhill through a meadow for a couple hundred yards, then disappeared into a pine grove. I could see the late-afternoon sunlight glinting off a ribbon of water beyond the pines.

I keep binoculars in the trunk of my car. I fetched them, then rested my elbows on the hood and scanned the place. I saw the outline of a cottage through the trees. Nothing else. No sign of movement or life.

I got back into my car and followed the rutted roadway down to the bottom of the hill. The cottage was tucked into the pines on the right. Vertical, unpainted cedar sides, a brace of big rectangular windows facing the pond, a brick chimney at one end, and an open porch across the front. An old Chevy pickup truck had been backed in behind it.

I pulled up next to the truck, got out, and stretched my legs. Nobody came out of the cottage to greet me, so I mounted the two steps onto the porch and knocked on the screen door. After a minute or so, I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered in through the screen, but I saw no sign of life.

“Anybody home?” I called.

After another minute, I decided nobody was home.

I wandered down to the pond and stood at the little sand beach. It was no more than fifteen feet wide, and about five feet into the water the sand stopped and the muck bottom began. A minimal swimming beach.

The sun was sinking toward the hills on the far side of the pond. It ricocheted off the water into my eyes. I used my hand as a visor and scanned the pond. I saw the silhouette of somebody in a rowboat coming around a point on the left, moving slowly toward me parallel to the shore. A long wake trailed out behind the boat on the glassy water.

I went back to the cottage. There were two sturdy rocking chairs on the porch, and I sat in one of them. The rhythmic clank of oarlocks echoed across the pond. Somewhere a crow cawed, and a chorus of bullfrogs grumped at each other. Swallows swooped over the water. Their wings ticked the surface here and there, leaving rings like rising trout.

The sound of the oarlocks grew louder, and then the rowboat appeared from around the corner. The bow crunched on the sand beach. Paul Cizek shipped his oars and climbed out. He stood there for a moment, shading his eyes, looking in my direction. Then he walked up to the cottage. He nodded at me. “Brady,” he said. “It’s you.”

“Hello, Paul.”

“So you found me.”

“I guess I did.”

He shook his head and smiled. He showed me the fly rod he was holding. “I’ve been doing it your way,” he said. “Some nice large-mouths in here.” He leaned the rod against the wall. “Towards evening when it gets shady along the shore, they come to the surface for popping bugs. It’s really a lot of fun.”

He had bare feet and a half-grown reddish beard with gray streaks around his chin. He wore a pair of denim overalls over a black T-shirt. From behind his beard, he was grinning at me. “Come on in. Let’s have a beer.”

I got up and followed him inside. The description of the place the woman had given Julie over the phone had been generous. It was a single room with a ladder leading up to half a loft. A galley kitchen at one end, a woodstove at the other. A round table and four wooden chairs sat in front of a window with a view of the pond, and three raggedy sofas—convertibles, I assumed—occupied the rest of it. It was far less messy than the place on Plum Island. I figured Paul hadn’t brought enough stuff with him to make a serious mess of it.

“Nice,” I said.

Paul bent to the refrigerator, then turned and handed me a can of Budweiser. “We can sit on the porch,” he said.

We went back out and sat in the rockers. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the surface of the pond lay flat and dark.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I said, watching the birds dart over the water.

“I heard your car coming down the hill. Sound travels clearly over the water. I knew it was somebody.”

“I rather thought you’d be amazed at my canny detective work,” I said.

“I give you more credit than that, Brady. You’ve done many cannier things than track me down. After it was too late, I realized I’d left my mail on the table. I figured the longer my body didn’t turn up, the greater the chance that somebody would start snooping. I didn’t think it would be the police. In the absence of a crime, they’d have no reason. It wouldn’t be Olivia’s style. But I know you.”

“I’m the snoopy type.”

“Yup. You like to know things.”

“Well,” I said, “now I know.”

“If it had to be anybody,” he said, “I’m glad it was you. So what are you going to do about it?”

“Do? I don’t even know what I know. All I know is, you’re here. You didn’t fall off your boat.” I turned to him. “But you tried to make it look that way.”

He shrugged.

“Olivia’s a wreck, you know.”

“I figured she would be. She’ll get over it.”

“She’ll be relieved—”

“No,” he said. “You can’t tell her.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Trust me, Brady. It’s fair.”

“You’ll have to convince me of that, my friend.”

“It’s really simple. This was the only way I could make a clean break. I tried the Plum Island solution. It didn’t work. I couldn’t get away from anybody or anything. Old man Tarlin had me involved in a bunch of cases that I couldn’t gracefully pull out of. Olivia was hurt and confused. I realized there was no half measure. I had to find a way to start over again.” He sighed. “I told you last winter, Brady. I was heading for a crack-up. Since I’ve been here, I’m a new man. Paul Cizek is dead. I guess this makes no sense to you.”

“Actually, it does make sense,” I said. “I’ve been thinking of making some changes myself. But I doubt if I’d fake my own death to accomplish it.”

“Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it.”

“You’ve hurt a lot of people,” I said quietly. “There has to be a better way.”

“You think it’s a cop-out, huh?”

I nodded. “I guess I do.”