Close to the Bone (22 page)

When he asked me if I could think of anybody who might be inclined to kill Paul Cizek, I said, “Yes. Several people.”

I told him about Thomas Gall, who had threatened Paul in court and who I had seen twice at Paul’s place on Plum Island.

I told him about Eddie Vaccaro, who was looking for Paul and who certainly was capable of blowing away a man who crossed him. Or maybe one of Vinny Russo’s gunmen, trying to use Paul to find Vaccaro.

I even mentioned Roger Falconer. The old man might have found a way to blame Paul for what had happened to Glen. Anyway, Roger hated Paul.

Capshaw kept nodding and taking notes, and when I paused, he said, “How would any of these people find him? He was hiding out up here, wasn’t he?”

“Paul might’ve contacted one of them,” I said. “Anyway,
I
found him. I guess someone else could, too.” I hesitated. “Shit,” I said. “Somebody could’ve followed me up here the other day. I could have led Paul’s killer to him. This could be all my fault.”

Capshaw nodded. “So it could,” he said. Then he turned to me. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

“Me?”

“You and her.” He jerked his head in the direction of the other sedan, where Olivia was having her own conversation with a police officer. “The wife. You and the wife.”

“No,” I said. “We didn’t do it.”

He shrugged. “I was just asking. Better to confess up front, you know?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You two weren’t—you know, having an affair?”

“No.”

“What about her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Think she did it?”

“Lieutenant,” I said, “for one thing, I am Olivia’s attorney, so if I did think she did it, I wouldn’t tell you.”

He looked at me for a minute. “What’s the other thing?”

“The other thing is, I don’t think she did it.”

“She could’ve, you know,” he said. “She could’ve come up here, blasted him, driven home, called you, and brought you up here to witness her grief when she saw the body.”

“That’s interesting,” I said.

He shrugged.

“If she’s a suspect,” I said, “I should be with her.”

“If or when she’s a suspect, you will be, Mr. Coyne.” He paused. “Unless you are, too, of course.”

They were photographing Paul’s body where he lay on his belly. The flashes lit up the pine grove like summer lightning. Then they zipped Paul up in a black body bag and loaded him into the wagon.

They took Olivia and me to the police station in separate vehicles. They assured me someone would be following along behind in my car.

Capshaw took me into his cubicle, gave me coffee in a Styrofoam cup, and questioned me all over again, this time with a tape recorder. He asked me the same questions and I gave him the same answers. Then he thanked me and led me out into what resembled a small hospital waiting room, with plastic chairs and a stack of frayed magazines on a table. I smoked a cigarette and drank coffee and ignored the magazines.

After a few minutes, Olivia came out with her interrogator. She stood in front of me, rubbing her hands together as if they were cold. “They want me to identify his body,” she said.

“Jesus,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to—”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s got to be done.”

It was a fifteen-minute drive to the little country hospital. Olivia and I sat in the back of a police cruiser. The two officers who had been the first to arrive at Paul’s cabin sat in front. Neither of them spoke for the entire ride, either to each other or to us.

They led us inside. I waited with one of them in the lobby while the other took Olivia to an elevator.

I asked the cop if it would be okay for me to go outside for a cigarette. He shrugged and followed me out. We leaned against the building.

“Rough one,” he muttered.

“It’s her husband,” I said.

“Don’t know how they can expect her to look at him. I never seen such a mess. Looked like both barrels of buckshot from about ten feet. The whole side of his head was blown away. Shit.”

I turned to look at him. He was staring down at the ground, shaking his head slowly back and forth.

We were still standing there when Olivia came out. She was holding onto the policeman’s arm. She looked blankly at me, then gave me a small nod. “We can go home now,” she said quietly.

It was after three in the morning, and the New Hampshire back roads were empty. Now and then we passed a house where a single downstairs window glowed orange, and I imagined a farmer or a milkman or a fisherman sitting at his kitchen table drinking coffee and getting ready for his day.

I had turned off the tape deck. Olivia said nothing, and I didn’t try to talk, either. After a while, her breathing became slow and rhythmical and I figured she was sleeping.

About the time I turned onto Route 2 heading east, Olivia cleared her throat, and in the darkness she said, “The wedding ring and the watch. I gave him the watch on our fifth anniversary. The ring’s inscribed with our initials and the date we got married. I had the watch inscribed, too. It says, ‘Stand by your man.’ It was a joke. They had taken the ring and the watch off him, and they asked me if there was any way I could positively identify them. I told them what the inscriptions said. And then they asked me if I’d be willing to look at his body, and I told them I’d try. They had put a towel or something over his face and chest and said I didn’t have to look if I didn’t want to, and I didn’t. I couldn’t. But they’d removed his clothes, and I told them I didn’t need the ring or the watch. I slept beside that body for almost ten years.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Olivia,” was all I could think of to say.

“No, it’s all right, Brady.” I felt her hand touch mine on the steering wheel. “It’s not your fault.”

“Maybe if I’d told you—”

“Shh,” she said. “He made you promise not to. You did the right thing.”

“I might’ve believed suicide. He seemed very depressed when I saw him. Struggling with it. Looking for answers. Hiding out in a cabin in the woods.”

“Yes. He’d been depressed for a long time.”

“He quoted Thoreau to me,” I said. “The reason Thoreau went to Walden was to get away from everything and sort things out. His brother had unexpectedly died. Thoreau was probably pretty depressed, too, although you don’t get that in his writing.”

“Nobody murdered Thoreau,” said Olivia.

T
HE SKY WAS TURNING
silver when I pulled into Olivia’s driveway, and when I turned off the engine I could hear the mingled twitters, chirps, and squawks of several different species of suburban birds greeting the new day. They were dissonant and arrhythmic, like an orchestra warming up, but beautiful and comforting, too.

Olivia sat beside me looking at her house.

“Is there somebody who can stay with you?” I said to her.

She nodded. “Oh, sure.”

“Look…”

She turned to me. “I’ll be okay, Brady. I accepted the fact that he was dead once. I guess I can do it again.”

“If there’s anything I can do…”

“I know. Thank you.” She leaned to me and kissed my cheek. Then she opened the car door, slid out, and closed it softly behind her. She walked up the path to her front door and went inside without looking back at me.

By the time I got to my apartment, the sun had risen above the harbor and was streaming through the glass doors. I slid them open and sprawled in one of the aluminum chairs on the balcony. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the sunlight and the salty cool of the sea breeze wash over my face. My eyes burned and my head ached and my stomach sloshed with acid and adrenaline, and I couldn’t figure out whether to make coffee or go to bed.

Bed, I decided. I prepared a pot of coffee and set the timer for eleven. Then I called the office, and when the machine answered I told Julie that I’d had an all-nighter, that I’d explain when I saw her, that I’d try to be in by noontime, and that she’d have to reschedule anything I had for the morning.

Then I went into my bedroom. The shades were drawn, and it was cool and dark in there. I shucked off all of my clothes and crawled in naked.

And only then did it occur to me that Alex was not there. She had decided not to stay. She hadn’t even left me a note with
X
’s and
O
’s on it propped against the coffee pot.

I lay awake longer than I’d expected to, trapped in that fuzzy place between consciousness and sleep. I thought that if Alex had been there in my bed, all warm-skinned and languid and mumbling, and if I could have held her against me with my chest against her back and my belly pressed tight against her bottom and my arm around her hip and her breast in my hand and her hair in my face, then maybe those pictures of Paul’s dead body lying facedown on the pine needles would have stopped flashing in my brain and I’d have fallen asleep much more easily.

It was nearly one in the afternoon by the time I got to the office. Julie looked up at me, grinned, and said, “You look like roadkill.”

“Compared to my usual bright-eyed, incredibly handsome self, you mean,” I said, trying to smile and doing a poor job of it.

“No. Compared to anybody.” She cocked her head and looked at me. “What happened? Wanna tell me about it?”

I nodded.

“Another all-night orgy?”

“You flatter me,” I said. “I haven’t had an all-night orgy since college.” I sighed. “No, this was not a fun night.”

I sat beside her desk and started to tell her about it. When I got to the place where Olivia found Paul’s body lying on the pine needles, Julie murmured, “Oh, that poor woman,” and I remembered the tube of KY lubricant and the half-empty package of condoms beside Paul’s bed in the Plum Island cottage. I thought of telling Julie that Paul had apparently been screwing Maddy Wilkins. But I didn’t see what difference that made. Paul was still dead and Olivia still mourned him. So I left that part out, and about halfway through my recitation, she slapped her forehead and said, “That reminds me. Lieutenant Horowitz called. He said it was important. I almost told him he could get you at home. You better call him.”

“I didn’t finish my story.”

“It’s an awful story,” she said. “I’m not sure I want to hear the rest of it.”

“I want to tell it to you. But I guess I better call Horowitz first.”

I went into my office and dialed Horowitz’s number at the state police headquarters at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue.

“Horowitz,” he growled when the switchboard connected us.

“Coyne,” I said.

“Our colleagues in the Live-Free-or-Die state ask us to pick up a couple guys they want to interrogate, and when I inquire as to what the fuck it’s all about, they mention a homicide and damned if your name doesn’t pop up. So maybe you can shed some light on it for me.”

“Thomas Gall?” I said.

“Yup. And Eddie Vaccaro.”

“So did you pick them up?”

“We got Gall. Haven’t tracked down Vaccaro yet. I guess we’re not the only ones trying. The feds are looking for him, too. But we’re doing the neighborly thing. It’s New Hampshire’s problem, and they’ve got no obligation to explain it all to us. Still, Paul Cizek used to be a helluva prosecutor, and then he became a big pain in the ass as a defender. But he was always an okay guy, and more or less a friend of mine, and when my friends get murdered it kinda bothers me, and when I’m asked to pick up people who might’ve done it, I get curious. So talk to me.”

I told Horowitz everything. I began back in November when I persuaded Paul Cizek to take Glen Falconer’s case, and I told him how Paul had seemed depressed and confused when he’d miraculously gotten Glen off, and how Thomas Gall had threatened everybody connected with Glen’s shocking not-guilty verdict, including the jury and the judge and, of course, Paul Cizek, the defense attorney, and Glen himself. I told him how soon thereafter Paul had left his wife and moved to Plum Island and then, a few months later, disappeared, and how I’d run into Gall when I went to Paul’s place, and how Maddy Wilkins had told me that she’d seen Paul and Gall together. I told Horowitz how I’d tracked Paul down in New Hampshire, where he’d seemed edgy and still a little depressed and, in retrospect, frightened. I told Horowitz about my unsettling visit from Eddie Vaccaro and my subsequent, and even more unsettling, encounter with Vinny Russo’s thug, and I told him how Glen Falconer was run down by a hit-and-run driver, and how Paul had been killed, and that I thought it added up to Thomas Gall avenging the death of his wife and the injustice that had been done in court.

When I finished talking, Horowitz was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah, okay. Makes sense.” Then he hung up.

I held the dead telephone in front of me. “You’re welcome,” I said to it.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I called Alex’s number at the
Globe.
Her recorded voice invited me to leave a message.

“It’s me,” I said. “If you’re upset, I want to explain. I didn’t get back until about six this morning, and there’s no logical reason why you should have waited all night for me, and I don’t blame you for leaving. But I was sad that you weren’t there. It’s important for me to know what you were thinking and why you didn’t leave me a note. A note with an
X
and an
O
on the bottom would’ve reassured me, and I probably would’ve gotten to sleep quicker. As it was I lay there with a million random thoughts colliding in my head, thoughts about you all mixed in with thoughts about Paul Cizek, who, as you probably know by now, we found murdered in New Hampshire, and I don’t know why I’m rambling on like this except I am feeling especially lonely, which death always tends to do to me, especially the death of a friend.” I took a deep breath. “I love you. Call me, okay?”

I waited at the office until after six, but Alex didn’t call. Maybe she’s going to surprise me, I thought. She’ll be waiting at my place when I get there. She’ll have her feet up on the rail of the balcony with her skirt bunched up around her waist. Or maybe she’ll be curled in the corner of my sofa, wearing my baggy sweatpants and watching the evening news. She’ll be eating an apple or sipping from a bottle of beer, and there’ll be a pot of lentil soup simmering on the stove.