Shadow of Death (16 page)

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Authors: William G. Tapply

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BOOK: Shadow of Death

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“I doubt if that man really likes anybody.”

“He loves his family passionately,” I said. “He certainly seemed to like you.”

“He's smooth, all right. But the way he looked right through me with those â¦ those eyes of his. Such cold, bottomless eyes. Lizard eyes.”

“I just need information,” I said. “Either he has it or he doesn't, and if he has it, he'll either share it with me or not. Whatever, that will be the end of it. Then we'll be even, and both Vincent Russo and I will feel better.”

“Jesus,” she murmured.

Evie was quiet for so long that I found myself drifting back to sleep. Then she said, “I
was
worried.”

“You mean last night? When you made a nice dinner and I didn't show up?”

“I tried to be angry,” she said, “but I couldn't do it. Not until you got home and I knew you were okay. Then I could let myself be angry.”

“How about now?” I said.

She let out a long sigh. “Go to sleep,” she said. She squirmed herself back against me. “I'll let you know.”

I smiled in the darkness. I knew I'd never understand women. I figured it was about time I gave up trying.

SEVENTEEN

I
spent Thursday morning in court, and afterward I had the cabbie drop me off in front of Manny's Deli in Copley Square. When I walked into my office fifteen minutes later, I had a paper bag tucked under my arm.

Julie looked up from her computer and made a show of sniffing the air.

“Lunch,” I said. “Let's go.”

I went into my office. Julie followed me.

I cleared the fishing magazines and catalogs off the coffee table, plopped down the bag, and began removing the plastic containers from it. California avocado-and-mango salad. Pakistani cold curried chicken. Cuban rice with beans and baby shrimp. Maryland crabcakes. Alaskan salmon salad. An American Coke for me, a Diet for Julie.

She sat on the couch and began prying the tops off the containers. “What is this,” she said, “some kind of international peace offering?”

“I didn't realize a peace offering was called for,” I said.

“A peace offering is always called for.” She gestured at the
containers of food. “Is there some kind of theme here?”

“No theme,” I said. “Just stuff I thought you might enjoy.”

“What happened to our tuna sandwiches and dill pickles and potato chips?”

“Oh,” I said with a vague wave of my hand, “I just thought, something different for a change â¦”

Jule narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?” she said.

“What do you mean, why?”

“You're about to tell me you're taking tomorrow off, aren't you? Long weekend in Maine? Some fishing thing? Softening me up? Is that it?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “Nothing like that. Maybe just a few hours this afternoon, but these crabcakes are special, aren't they? Did you try that red sauce? Manny had about a dozen different sauces for them, but â¦”

Julie was grinning at me. “You don't have to do this, you know.”

“Do what?” I said.

“Ply me with food and drink.”

I shrugged elaborately. “I wasn't plying you. I'm offended that the idea would even occur to you. I just thought, we have tuna sandwiches every day, and Manny's got all this great stuff, so why notâ”

“Brady,” she said, “you are the lawyer. If you want to abandon your practice for an afternoon, leave the people who depend on you in the lurch, you can just do it. It's best, of course, to inform your secretary in advance so she can make up excuses for you when clients and judges and other attorneys call. But that's optional. Because you
are
the lawyer.”

“I am, aren't I,” I said.

She sighed. “Where are you off to this time?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Fishing?”

I smiled. “In a manner of speaking.”

After Julie and I finished our lunch, I called Evie's office at Beth Israel. I expected to get her voice mail, but she answered on the second ring.

“It's me,” I said. “Your very own sweetie.”

“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “What's up?”

“Wanted you to know I might be late tonight. Didn't want there to be another failure of communication.”

“Okay,” she said. “How late?”

“I don't know. I'd rather not mention a time.”

Evie chuckled. “Which is it? You want me not to worry, or not to be angry?”

“Both,” I said. “Either. I'm just trying to be considerate.”

“You find that difficult?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I'm working on it.”

I walked home from the office and changed into jeans and a flannel shirt. Then I whistled up Henry, and he and I strolled down Charles Street to the parking garage.

It was a little after two-thirty when I turned onto Storrow Drive in downtown Boston.

Two hours later I pulled up in front of the Goff brothers' garage in Southwick, New Hampshire.

The red sign hanging in the office window said “CLOSED,” and the doors to both bays were down. A tow truck was parked in front of one of the bays. “Goff's Garage” was stenciled on its door, along with a telephone number.

I got out of my car and peered in through the office window. All the lights were out. From somewhere inside the building a radio was playing.

I backed away and looked up at the second-floor windows. It didn't appear that any lights were on behind the curtains up there, either.

I walked around behind the building. The back yard, if that's what it could be called, was littered with rusted car bodies. Beyond them, on the edge of the woods, an ancient mobile home, the kind made of shiny aluminum with rounded-off corners that was intended actually to be pulled behind an automobile, was half buried in the weeds.

I continued my circuit of the house. A back door opened into the office, and when I looked through the window, I saw that an inside stairway led up to the apartment on the second floor. There were several narrow basement windows. I assumed they once had been glass, but now there was no glass. They were covered from the inside with plywood. Vehicles were lined up in a big lot beside the building, apparently waiting to be repaired. Many of them had obviously been in accidents. I suspected the Goffs rented their space as a holding area for wrecks while they waited for insurance appraisers to come and examine them.

I finished my circuit of the building and concluded that Harris and Dub Goff had called it quits for the day and were not home. So much for the stereotype of hardworking country folks.

This was disappointing. The Goff brothers had lived their entire lives in Southwick. I'd hoped to ask them if they remembered Oliver Burlingame and Mark Lyman.

My next stop was the general store, where I found Farley Nelson, the garrulous old-timer, at the cash register. He
smiled when he saw me, showing me his extra-large teeth.

I smiled back at him, went to the cooler, snagged a bottle of water, and took it to the counter.

“That's a buck,” said Farley.

I put a dollar bill on the counter.

“So howya doin'?” he said.

“Good,” I said. “You?”

“Holdin' my own,” he said. “Got your dog with you?”

“He's in the car. This”âI touched the bottle of waterâ“is for him.”

“Need another bowl?”

“Still got the one you gave me the other day. Which I appreciate.”

“Well,” he said, “it's gettin' to be that time of year. My setter smells it in the air. Bird season. She's gettin' itchy. Bet your feller is, too.”

“I don't hunt with him.”

Farley Nelson craned his neck and looked out at my car, where Henry was pacing the backseat. “Brittany, huh?” he said. “Hell, don't matter whether you hunt him or not. He's a hunting dog. It's in his blood. Don't matter how old he is, or how he's been trained, or if he's ever done it before. It's bred into him. You put him in the woods, he'll go hunting.”

“Look, Mr. Nelson,” I said. “I was wonderingâ”

“Farley,” he said. “Call me Farley, for goodness' sake. Makes me feel old, being called Mister by a grown-up.”

I smiled. “Farley, then. I was wondering if you could spare a few minutes to talk with me.”

“Don't see why not. What's on your mind?”

“I was thinking maybe we could find someplace where we wouldn't be interrupted.”

He glanced at his wristwatch. “I'm supposed to get off at
five, actually, if that Jennifer girl shows up on time. She's on the soccer team, has practice every day she don't have a game. What's on your mind?”

“I wanted to test your memory about some people who might've lived here in Southwick a long time ago.”

“Like Albert Stoddard, you mean? The fella you were asking about the other day?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Him and a couple others.”

“No promises,” he said. “My memory ain't what it used to be.”

“Neither is mine,” I said.

“Feel like buying an old coot a cold beer?”

“Of course.”

“Why don't you meet me across the street.” He pointed out the front window of the store. “I'll be along soon as Jennifer gets here to relieve me.”

“At the inn?”

“They got a nice pub,” he said. “Usually pretty quiet this time of day. If they don't get backed up with folks waiting for a table, they'll let you sit there all evening if you want to, just sippin' away at one beer.”

Just then a woman appeared from somewhere in the back of the store. She was juggling a box of Cheerios, a bunch of carrots, a head of lettuce, a can of Maxwell House coffee, and a six-pack of beer. “How's that arthritis today, Farley?” she said as she dumped her groceries on the counter.

“I ain't complaining,” said Farley.

“Turned over a new leaf, then, did you?” she said.

I lifted my hand to Farley. He nodded and jerked his head in the direction of the Southwick Inn across the street.

I went outside and let Henry out of the car. He squirted
on a few bushes while I emptied the bottle of water into his bowl.

He came over, drank it all, peed once more, and then I let him back in the car. I told him I'd be gone for an hour or so and he should guard the car, then crossed the street and went into the Southwick Inn.

The floorboards were wide and burnished and warped with age. The ceiling rafters were dark and low, and the woodwork was layered with two centuries of paint. There were pewter sconces on the walls and gingham curtains in the windows.

A thin, half-bald man was sitting at a rolltop desk with his back to the low counter inside the front door. When the bell dinged behind me, he swiveled around and looked at me. “Can I help you?”

A midwestern accent. Wisconsin, I guessed. He was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans and a red bow tie and round, silver-rimmed glasses.

“I'm meeting somebody in the pub,” I said.

He pointed across the hallway with his thumb. “Grab a seat. I'll be with you in a minute.”

The pub was a smallish room in the front corner of the inn. There were six stools pulled up to the bar and five tables lined up against the front wall by the windows. A dark oil painting of a clipper ship dominated one wall.

I took a corner table by a window that looked out onto the street. A minute later the half-bald man came in. “What can I get for you?” he said.

“A beer, I guess. Got anything local?”

“Want to try a Double Bag?”

I smiled. “Double Bag? What's that?”

“It's an ale.”

“You recommend it?”

He nodded. “Oh, absolutely. Excellent. Brewed over in Vermont.”

“Sounds good, then.”

He went behind the bar and came back a minute later with an open bottle and a chilled glass mug.

“What do I owe you?” I said.

“Oh, we'll figure that out when you're done. You said you were meeting somebody?”

“Farley Nelson, from across the street.”

“Ah. Farley.”

“Are you the innkeeper?” I said.

“Yep. Jeff Little.” He held out his hand.

I shook it. “I'm Brady Coyne. From Boston.”

Jeff Little seemed in no hurry to get back to his roll-top desk, and he ended up sitting with me and telling me about how he'd cashed out of a dot-com start-up in Oregon less than six months before it crashed and burned, just lucky, it wasn't as if he saw it coming, and he came to New England looking to buy himself a bed-and-breakfast, prowled all over Maine and Vermont before he heard this inn was for sale, fell in love with the area, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“So how long have you been here?” I said.

“Two years next Christmas.”

“You haven't run into a man named Albert Stoddard, by any chance?”

He frowned. “Stoddard. Rings a bell. Oh, right. That Democrat, the woman who's running for senator down in Massachusetts.”

“Right,” I said. “Same last name.”

“Don't know any Albert,” he said. “I know most of the
people in town, though not all of them by name.” He smiled. “It's a pretty small town.”

“Albert doesn't live around here,” I said. “I just thought he might've dropped in for a beer or dinner sometime recently.”