Close to the Bone (8 page)

She lifted her mug, drained it, then stood up. “I’ve got to get to the office,” she said. “Will you be okay?”

“Sure. It’s Olivia I’m worried about.”

Olivia called a little after eight. “They want to talk to me,” she said.

“Who?”

“The Newburyport police.”

“When?”

“As soon as I can get there.”

“If you want,” I said, “I can be in Newburyport in an hour.”

“Oh, yes, thank you,” she said softly. “I could really use your support.” She was silent for a moment, then she said, “Brady?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think they want?”

“I guess they’re just trying to figure out what might’ve happened.”

“If they found him—his… his body—they would’ve told me, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes, I think they would.”

“So…”

“Try not to jump to conclusions, Olivia. Let’s take it a step at a time. How well do you know Newburyport?”

“I’ve been there. Not well, I guess.”

“When you turn off the highway onto Route 113 you’ll see a Friendly’s ice cream place on your left. I’ll meet you there. We’ll have a cup of coffee, then we can go talk to the police together. Okay?”

“Yes. Okay.”

I hung up the phone and headed for the shower. The police wanted to question Olivia Cizek because they always want to question the spouse when someone dies mysteriously or violently.

The police were already assuming Paul Cizek had died.

Olivia may not have realized it, but she needed a lawyer.

I found her sitting at a booth staring into a cup of coffee. It didn’t look as if she’d slept much.

I slid in across from her. “Good to see you again, Olivia.”

She looked up and smiled quickly. “Thank you for coming,” she said. She had pale gray eyes, almost silver, and a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and when she smiled the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and her mouth crinkled.

I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “It’s a tough time for you. I’m your lawyer. And your friend.”

“I’m a lawyer, too, you know.”

I nodded.

“They think I might’ve done something,” she said.

A waitress appeared at the table. “Just coffee, please,” I said. “Bring the lady a refill.” When she left, I said to Olivia, “You know how it works. You’re the spouse. But I doubt if the police are pursuing any theories right now. They’re investigating. They want all the information they can get. It’s logical for them to talk to you, that’s all.”

“But you think you should be with me.”

“Yes.”

“To protect me.”

“To protect your rights, yes. But mainly because I figured you could use a friend right now.”

“I sure can. That’s why I called you.” She smiled quickly. “And I guess I understand that if that friend is also a lawyer, so much the better.”

“So tell me about last night.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you did.”

She frowned, then said, “Oh. Like, do I have an alibi?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

“I had a meeting up in Salem until about seven-thirty or eight. Then I went home.”

“Directly home?”

“Yes. Directly home.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. I went home, heated a frozen chicken pie in the microwave, ate it while I watched the news on CNN, and went to bed. I read for a while and then went to sleep.”

“Any phone calls?”

She frowned for a moment, then shook her head. “No. No calls. Nobody to verify where I was. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”

“The police might ask,” I said.

The waitress brought our coffees. Olivia stirred milk into hers.

“I don’t have any alibi, Brady,” she said. “After I left the meeting I went straight home. I had no visitors. I didn’t talk to anybody on the phone until I got that call from the Coast Guard. I could’ve gone up to Newburyport and dumped Paul off his boat. There’s nobody to say I didn’t. Except me. And if you don’t believe me—”

I gripped her wrist. “Stop,” I said softly. “Cut it out. The police might ask these questions, and I want to know the answers before they do. No one’s accusing you of anything.” I let go of her wrist and took a sip of coffee. “It would help me to know what happened to the two of you.”

She shrugged and looked down into her cup.

“You were separated,” I said. “Paul moved out. What happened?”

She lifted her cup to her mouth and held it there for a moment. Then she put it down. “We just drifted apart, I guess.”

“That’s no answer, Olivia.”

She looked at me, then nodded. “No. It’s really not. It’s true, but it’s not really what happened. See, as soon as Paul took the job with Tarlin and Overton, he changed. Before, when he was prosecuting, he was a wild man. Just bubbling with energy and enthusiasm and—and righteous zeal. Oh, he loved to nail the bad guys. He was making justice happen, he liked to say. He really believed in it. He was like a kid. It was like electricity just crackled out of him. We had so much fun. I loved it. I thought he was the sexiest man. You know?”

I nodded. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I knew Paul back then, too.”

She took a quick sip of her coffee. “I mean, sometimes he’d work fourteen or sixteen hours a day. And when he got home he’d be absolutely wired. He’d keep me up half the night talking about his cases. We didn’t see that much of each other. But when we were together, it was intense. I had my own career.” She smiled. “Our life was full and complicated and exciting.”

She bowed her head for a moment. When she looked up, she was no longer smiling. “Everything changed when he took that job. He still worked long hours, and he was making about ten times as much money. We bought a nice house and he got a new boat and everything, and we tried to pretend things were great. We were moving up in the world, right? But when he’d come home, he’d plop himself in front of the TV. Or during the fishing season he’d just change his clothes and hitch the trailer to his car and take off. He didn’t talk much about his work. When he did, all he’d say was that he was keeping bad guys out of prison. He didn’t really complain about it, at least not at first. It took me a while to realize that he was trying to protect me. He didn’t want to make me unhappy or to make me feel like he was suffering on account of me. But I knew he didn’t believe in what he was doing. And he kept getting worse. He kept winning cases, and they’d reward him by giving him nastier people to defend. I mean, he had that child molester, and he had that Mafia man, and then he got that drunk driver—”

“I talked him into that one.”

She shrugged. “It didn’t matter. If it hadn’t been that man, it’d’ve been someone else. The point is, gradually we just stopped talking. I finally started telling him he should quit and go back to work for the DA. He’d just smile. I tried to talk him into getting help. He was depressed, and I was worried about him.”

“Did you ever think—?”

“He’d kill himself?” she said. “Is that what you think happened last night?”

“He’s seemed awfully depressed to me last time I saw him.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He had his fishing. During the season, he seemed okay. Getting out on his boat alone at night always seemed to make him happy.”

“He’d been worse lately, though?”

She smiled. “He never left me before.”

I nodded.

“It was his idea, Brady. I didn’t stop loving him or wanting to be with him. But he felt it was the only thing left to do. I don’t know, maybe he thought it was just the only way left that would protect me. I never felt he didn’t love me. But he was tortured, and he knew I was miserable. Even the fishing didn’t help him anymore. He was desperate. I think part of it was that he put a lot of pressure on himself, trying to be admirable for me. He figured if he despised himself, I must despise him, too. I didn’t. I loved him. But if we got divorced, he could stop worrying about how I felt about him. Does that make any sense?”

I shrugged. “I guess so. As much as anything makes sense.” I took a sip of coffee, then said, “Did you ever go out on the boat with him?”

She frowned. “What…? Oh. You mean, did I know how to operate it? Did I know his routines?”

“Yes.”

“Could I have gone out with him last night, you mean.”

I nodded.

“I could have. I mean, I’ve got nobody to say I didn’t. But I didn’t. But, yes, I went out with him a few times, especially… before. Before he changed jobs. It was sort of fun, but I knew he really liked it best when he was by himself. I could drive a boat, yes, and I could stun an eel and rig it on a line, and I knew how to read the currents and the tides and how to get a good drift through a rip. I didn’t much care about the actual fishing. But I liked being on a boat with Paul at night. And I guess I could’ve been there last night, and I could’ve picked him up and thrown him overboard and then swam to shore and…”

I took both of her hands in mine. “Hey,” I said softly.

“I know. I’m sorry, Brady.”

“Just as long as you’re telling me the truth.”

She nodded. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. Let’s talk to the police. Maybe they’ve learned something.”

O
LIVIA LEFT HER CAR
in the Friendly’s lot and rode with me into the business center of Newburyport. We parked in the municipal lot and headed for the police station. Newburyport, like most of the cities along the New England coastline, began as an old seafaring town because of its sheltered harbor. It was a fishing town and a trading town that grew and flourished inside the mouth of the Merrimack River. During the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, factories were built along the riverbanks. Then, inevitably, the factories shut down and the merchant shipping industry faltered and Newburyport went through the predictable stages of decline.

During the past decade or two the city has been revitalized. The old factories have been converted into contemporary office buildings and condominiums. The downtown area features brick-fronted shops that sell books and candles and chocolates and antiques. There are a dozen restaurants and taverns within a few blocks of each other, and all of them seem to be profitable.

Politically, Newburyport is a city. But it feels like a quaint old New England seaport town, just the way it’s supposed to.

On this perfect Saturday morning in June, the twisting streets and the wide sidewalks were thronged with shoppers and tourists. Seagulls sailed overhead, and beyond the shops and restaurants the masts of schooners poked into the sky. The air tasted salty and clean.

“Where was Paul’s house?” I asked Olivia as we crossed a brick-paved plaza.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Somewhere out on Plum Island.”

“You’ve never been there?”

“No. He called it a shack. It’s on some back road overlooking the marsh.”

“He wouldn’t let anybody borrow his boat?”

She laughed quickly. “Absolutely not.”

“But he might’ve invited somebody along with him.”

“Sure.”

At the station, Olivia told the female desk cop that Lieutenant Kirschenbaum was expecting her, and a few minutes later a lanky, stoop-shouldered guy wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and baggy chino pants came out. “Mrs. Cizek?” he said.

“Yes. This is Mr. Coyne.”

“Oh?” He had a thick mop of curly gray-blond hair. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses perched atop his head.

“He’s my—our lawyer. Mine and Paul’s.”

Kirschenbaum looked at me and shrugged. “Sure, okay. You folks want to come on in here?”

He turned and slouched down a corridor, and we followed him into a small office. He folded himself into the swivel chair behind his desk, and Olivia and I took the straight-backed wooden chairs across from him.

Olivia put her forearms on the desk. “Do you know anything?”

“Nothing since we talked this morning,” he said. “Someone radioed the Coast Guard that there was a boat adrift. That was around two in the morning. So they went out and towed it in. Nobody was aboard. They’ve got it at the Lifeboat Station on Water Street. There’s a vehicle registered to Paul Cizek of Lynnfield parked at the public landing. It’s got a boat trailer hooked to it.” He poked at his hair, found his glasses, and placed them on the desk in front of him. “That’s really all I can tell you. I was hoping you could shed some more light on it.”

“You didn’t find…?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t see how I can help you,” she said.

“You two were, um, living apart.”

She looked at him sharply. “Yes, we were. We separated at the end of March.”

“Right,” he said. He picked up his glasses and fitted them onto his ears, then rummaged around on his desk and found a manila folder. He opened it and bent to study the papers it held. Then he looked up at us. “He was renting the house at the end of Meadowridge Road, out on the island?”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“He liked to fish,” he said, still peering at the papers he was holding.

“He went out whenever he could. That’s why when he moved out, he came up here. So he’d be near the ocean. He liked to go in the river and around Plum Island.”

“And he fished at night?”

“Mostly at night, yes. He preferred to fish at night. He felt that’s when the stripers bit the best. Anyway, he worked long hours during the day.”

Kirschenbaum removed his glasses, folded them, and pointed them at Olivia. “He was pretty well known for defending some unsavory types.”

“It’s what he did.”

“Yes. And he was very good at it, I understand. Was your husband suicidal, Mrs. Cizek?”

“Paul?” She frowned. “He was not happy. In fact, he’s been quite depressed lately. But suicide?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. No. That wasn’t Paul.”

“Would you say he was a careful man?”

“What do you mean?”

“In his boat. Did he take risks?”

She shook her head. “I don’t…”

“He never wore a life jacket,” I said. “At least not when I was with him.”

Kirschenbaum glanced at me, then turned back to Olivia. “There was a bad storm last night. We had big seas outside. Wind, heavy rain, lightning. Some pretty violent squalls. But he was out there in his boat.”