The Price of Malice (8 page)

Lyn had been a bookkeeper for years, as well as a bartender. She and Joe had met in Gloucester, where he’d been on a case. The attraction had been mutual, if initially chaste. Indeed, by the time she found a bar up for sale in Brattleboro, he’d placed her in a backlog of very pleasant but distant memories. Her reappearance in his life had been surprising and extraordinarily welcome. Right place, right time.

He climbed the concrete steps to the bar’s carved wooden door, and left the swelter of the darkened street for the air-conditioned bedlam of a night spot in full swing.

Joe was no lover of bars. He barely drank, found no pleasure in drunks, disliked loud music, and hated crowds. Still, he had a regular seat here, when Lyn was on duty, which she was several times a week, both to support her staff and to keep an eye on the business.
Many a night, Joe would park himself on the last bar stool against the wall and nurse a succession of Cokes as he watched her ply her trade, impressed by her natural ease with people—all the more so since he knew her to be an introvert at heart, happiest alone or in his company. Until recently.

“Joe,” came a woman’s voice. “You want the usual?”

He looked over the tops of the heads lined up at the bar and saw a young woman’s face glimpsing out from between them—the night’s barkeep, Holly.

“Not tonight, thanks—was hoping to catch Lyn.”

Holly’s brow furrowed. “You been away?” She gestured to the far end of the bar, where they could have some semblance of privacy. He squeezed in between his usual perch, now occupied, and the wall.

“Kind of,” he told her. “Why do you ask?”

She was leaning far over the bar, with her ear almost pressed against his mouth. She now straightened enough to face him and shout, just inches away, “She left for home, about three, four days ago. Family emergency.”

“She all right?”

“Yeah, yeah. She’s fine. It’s her mom, I think. Her brother, Steve, called. Is she all right, by the way?”

He was able to hear about every other word. “All right?”

“Yeah,” Holly spoke louder. “She’s been really weird lately. I mean, before the phone call from home.”

“A different piece of bad news,” Joe explained vaguely.

Holly knew better than to ask. “Well. I hope it gets better. We miss her. Give her our love when you see her. You going there now?”

He considered the idea. He hadn’t thought of it—merely rued his
bad luck when he’d heard she’d left town. But for a man with his needs, and who often went sleepless for days, a night of travel to and from Gloucester sounded feasible and possibly restorative. To hell with her “space,” he suddenly thought.

“Yeah,” he yelled. “I think I am.”

O
n the map, Cape Ann, of which Gloucester is the dominant town, forms the top of a capital letter “C” that cradles Boston Harbor in its embrace, with the bottom arm being the Hull/Cohasset area. As a result, where it isn’t a working-class fishing port, Gloucester is a Boston playground, hemmed in by Martha Stewart mansions and country clubs. During the summer, during the day, and certainly during weekends, it is a recreational madhouse, filled with Type-A urban-ites charging through their supposed time off like a bunch of drunks at a liquor store sale. Not fun to watch, and even worse to experience, especially in heavy, SUV-clogged traffic.

Fortunately, Joe had none of that to concern him. He drove through the middle of the night with his windows down, his air conditioner off, and his radio barely murmuring—virtually the only car visible on the entire 150-mile trip. As he crossed the Annisquam River onto the cape itself, swung around the Grant traffic circle, and headed south on Washington Street, he could fully appreciate the salt-tinged quiet of the maritime breeze that had enwrapped this quintessential fishing village for over 350 years. Approaching the center of the
town—incongruously decorated by a statue of Joan of Arc—he felt the hyped-up, modern tensions of Boston’s extended commercial crush yield to something more permanent and stubborn. Perhaps Joan wasn’t so misplaced after all, he thought. She, too, persevered against reason and all odds, just as the fishing fleet in this town had defied both financial and ecological dread.

Of course, he only hoped that Gloucester would end up better off than Joan.

Like many of its ilk, the town has two faces—a glossy one for tourists, offering lobster meals, boutiques, ocean tours, and overpriced latté; and the time-tested working-class reality, with its docks, factories, bars, and a cluster of churches offering whatever solace the bars lacked. In a town from which, over its history, some ten thousand people had died at sea, any kindness, from any quarter, was worth consideration.

Joe turned east, leaving the photogenic Gloucester for its grittier back bay, crested a small hill, and drove into a scene of boats, docks, and processing plants, garishly isolated from the black of night by a scattering of sodium lights, hung on high.

Working from strained memory, he left the primary street and entered a cobweb of narrow lanes—Webster, Friend, Elwell, and more, all riding a hilly terrain like boats on a rolling sea—in search of the address he knew Lyn’s brother shared with their mother, Maria.

Eventually, no longer sure where he was, he suddenly recognized the building—small and tired—and pulled over to the curb. In both directions, he was boxed in by rows of similar homes, mostly painted white, crowded together as if warding off wind and cold. It seemed they knew, like the generations they’d sheltered, that despite the balmy weather, bad times were just over the horizon.

Joe craned his neck to see the house’s dark facade, recognizing Lyn’s car parked before it, and pulled his cell phone from his belt.

A sleepy, quizzical voice answered after the sixth ring. “Hello?”

“Lyn? It’s Joe. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

A long pause was followed by, “It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

“I’m all right. I know this sounds crazy, but I wanted to hear your voice again.”

He could hear her shifting, no doubt rearranging a pillow behind her head. “Jesus, Joe.”

“I know, I know. Stupid . . .”

“No, not stupid,” she interrupted. “I’m glad you did.”

“Really?”

Another silence, followed by, “I’ve been a little jammed up, not sure what to do. I thought I had to figure that out alone.”

“And now?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. It’s still pretty confusing.”

He nodded in the darkness, sharing the feeling. “How’s your mom doing?”

“You know about that?”

“I dropped by the bar. They told me Steve had called, and that you’d gone home.”

“Yeah. She’s doing better. She just had a meltdown when I told her about the boat being found, and Steve couldn’t handle it on his own. He’s a little beaten up, too. With his history, I figured I better head down.”

After his father and brother had been declared lost at sea, Steve had caved in, first indulging in drugs, and then dealing them. He’d just recently emerged from prison, barely in time to help his quasi-catatonic mother in her last years. It was no wonder they’d both been shaken by Joe’s discovery.

“I don’t know how you’ll take this, Lyn,” Joe admitted, “but I followed you down.”

He could almost see her astonishment. “You
what?
”

“I drove to Gloucester. I’m parked outside your house right now.”

No response.

“There’s no obligation to it, Lyn,” he said quickly. “I can leave just as easily. I yielded to impulse.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said, to his relief. “I’m sorry. I had to get my head around it. I’m still half asleep. Let me come down.”

“You don’t have to.”

She laughed, albeit less with delight than at the stupidity of the comment. “Of course I do. Hang on.”

It didn’t take two minutes for her to appear, dressed in jeans and a light sweatshirt, and dart across the street to slide into his passenger seat. They hugged awkwardly across the center console, making him regret that he hadn’t waited for her on the sidewalk.

“You really are crazy, you know that?” she told him, settling back in the corner and shaking her head. “This is pure high school.”

“I know,” he conceded. “It was just getting under my skin. I feel so guilty about all this.”

“That you stumbled across the
Maria
?” she asked. “How’s that work?”

He gazed out the windshield, appreciative of the way even stationary cars allowed for conversation without eye contact. “I was worried I was being held to blame a little.”

She didn’t answer directly, but joined him for a few seconds, studying the dark street ahead. “Maybe you were.”

“What do I do about that?” he asked slowly.

“Maybe you just did it.”

He wasn’t sure what to say.

She crossed her arms and tucked her chin in slightly. Now it was her turn to avoid eye contact. “Look,” she said, “I know this has been weird. You probably had no idea you were hooking up with such a psycho.”

“That’s not what I’m seeing.”

“Because you only see what I show you.”

He couldn’t say much to that.

“Joe,” she said in a stronger voice, shifting in her seat and looking straight at him. “When you first told me you’d found the
Maria
, I didn’t give you a chance to explain. I mean, you told me it was way up north and in some bad guy’s boathouse, but then I shut you down. Can you give me all of it now? I promise I won’t get weird again.”

Joe nodded, happy to talk about something concrete. “It was your brother, Steve, funnily enough. He was telling us how your dad would take the whole family up the coast of Maine, pretending to be on vacation but actually picking up tips on the lobster trade.”

“I remember that,” she said.

“Well, he mentioned how, when you were in Jonesport, you and your mother went off shopping or something, while he, José, and your dad went to the docks to talk shop with a boat captain.”

“Okay,” she said, her excitement building. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. Yeah. It’s coming back.”

“Well, both things stuck in my mind at the time,” Joe continued. “That the captain did some smuggling on the side, and that his name was Wellman Beale.”

“
He’s
the one who had the
Maria
?” she asked, astonished.

Joe nodded. “And the smuggling involved prescription drugs from Canada. Beale was up to his neck in that case in Maine, with the
Customs task force and all the drug cops. He wasn’t a major player, but he was part of the overall scheme to use fishing boats to import the goods.”

Her expression saddened and her gaze shifted to her lap. “And Dad was involved, too,” she stated listlessly.

“I didn’t say that,” he emphasized. “According to Steve, your father didn’t even know Beale back then, much less about his smuggling. The way he told it, your dad and brother just happened to meet him on the dock and they talked shop while Steve climbed all over Beale’s boat.”

Lyn looked at him sourly. “Joe, he was a kid, and he loved them. What do you think he was going to say?”

“What are
you
saying?” Joe asked.

She hesitated before avoiding the question. “Did Beale explain how he got the boat?”

“That part I told you in full, since there wasn’t much to it—he said he found the
Maria
floating abandoned at sea and brought it home. Since ‘home’ in this case is an island he shares with nobody else, no one was the wiser. It just sat there from then on, collecting barnacles and seaweed. You got it back, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” she admitted vaguely. “Steve runs it like a taxi service now, for Realtors with offshore property, or rich people wanting groceries . . . Whatever. He renamed it
The Silva Lining
, which I hate. But it gives him something to do and keeps him out of trouble. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

Her face hardened. “Well, think of it. You’re a cop. Here’s a guy with a rap sheet and a boat going out to sea at all times of the day and night for vague purposes. You just told me about drug runners using fishing boats. Steve did time for dealing drugs. I even had an obnoxious
little chat about that with a local cop, who was insinuating the same thing.”

“Based on anything?” Joe asked, and instantly regretted it.

Lyn stared at him through narrowed eyes, and then threw open the door.

“Wait. Lyn,” he said, getting out, too.

He circled the front of the car and met her on the sidewalk. He didn’t touch her, and she refused to look at him, but she stayed by the open door.

“Lyn,” he said quietly. “You started this. You were the one expressing doubt.”

Her arms were by her sides, her hands forming fists. She swung them in frustration and then crossed them tightly before her. “Fuck.”

He let her breathe for a few seconds in silence.

“He’s not the most stable guy in the world,” she finally said, adding, “and he screwed up before. I’m worried, too.”

“But not based on anything solid,” Joe suggested.

“No,” she agreed.

“Well, then,” he tried comforting her, “that’s all it comes to right now: a concern. Right?”

She nodded, and then changed topics. “You talked to Beale, didn’t you?”

“Yes, for what it was worth.”

“Did he say he worked with my father?”

“Denied even knowing him.”

“When did he get the
Maria
?”

“He claimed it was just a few days before we busted him. Total bullshit, of course, but we couldn’t prove otherwise, and his sternman, Dougie O’Hearn, said the same thing. So, we were stuck.”

She raised her arms above her head and clasped her hands behind her neck. “Oh,
God
. I hate this. Can we walk a little?”

He looked around them, taken off guard. “Sure, I guess. Where’d you want to go?”

She pointed vaguely ahead. The street angled uphill and around a slight curve. “Up there. I feel like I’m about to explode.”

They fell in side by side, the only moving things on an empty, silent sidewalk.

“Is Beale in jail at least?”

“I don’t think so,” Joe admitted. “Last I heard, he was about to cut a deal with the prosecutor. They didn’t have much on him.”