Snake Eater (19 page)

“Brady, can you hold on for a sec? I can’t hear you very well.” She put the phone down, and when she came back on a minute or two later I no longer could hear the music. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“That’s better. What’s up?”

“I was mainly just wondering if our friend Sergeant Oakley is behaving himself.”

“Oh, yes. Since you did whatever you did, I haven’t seen him.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Cammie, remember those names?”

“Names?”

“Daniel’s photos.”

“Oh. Yes, I guess so.”

“Have you thought about them?”

“Truthfully, no. I mean, I didn’t recognize any of them. They didn’t mean anything to me. Just names. You know?”

“Listen. I’m going to read them to you again. I’ve learned a few things about them. I want you to write them down, think about them some more, maybe rummage around among Daniel’s stuff, see if you can come up with anything.”

“Do you think this is going to get us anywhere?”

“I don’t know. It’s all I can think of. Fusco—the state cop—he’s apparently given up on the case. Charlie McDevitt and my friend Horowitz are practically ordering me to stop poking around in it. So I can’t think of anything else to do.”

“You want me to write them down?”

“Yes.”

“Hang on. Lemme get a pencil and paper.”

A minute or so later she came back on the phone and said, “Okay. Read ’em to me.”

I read the eight names to Cammie. I told her what I had learned about each of them. How they all had either died or disappeared. Murder, suicide, accident. Dates. Connections. I went slowly, and several times Cammie asked me to repeat what I had said. When I finished, I said, “And I’m willing to bet that Daniel and Al Coleman—he’s the one I sent the manuscript to—that they belong on that list, too.”

“Jesus, Brady.”

“Any bells chiming for you, Cammie?”

She let out a long breath. “Afraid not.”

“You sure?”

She hesitated. “Brady, what are you trying to say?”

“Nothing. I guess I had hoped that with the information that goes along with the names, maybe something would click for you.”

“You sound as if you had an idea. A suspicion or something.”

“No,” I said. “I hoped you did.”

“I’m sorry.” A pause. “Hey, Brady?”

“Yes?”

“Why don’t you come visit me tomorrow? I’ll cook something, we can take a walk down by the river.”

“It’s tempting, Cammie. But I can’t. I’m going to meet the widow of Daniel’s agent. She might have some information for me.”

She laughed softly. “You’re incredible.”

“Me?”

“You have all these people trying to scare you off the case, and it only makes you poke deeper.”

“Somebody’s got to.”

“And it might as well be you, huh?”

“It might as well,” I said.

“Well, will you come see me sometime?”

“Yes. Soon. I promise.”

I stared up into the darkness of my bedroom hearing a Tennessee mountain stream in Cammie’s soft chuckle and remembering how she looked standing by her easel silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling glass in her studio, a paintbrush clenched in her mouth, her honey-colored back smooth and bare, her legs long and sleek, how she turned and came to me, the firm slope of her stomach, the high lifting curve of her breasts, and it became a dream, and in the dream I did not grasp her wrists to stop her from undressing me, and when I was completely undressed and she was, too, Cammie had somehow become Terri and I abruptly woke up.

Terri.

I hadn’t returned her call.

I drifted back to sleep thinking about it.

I was halfway down the elevator before I realized I was clutching my briefcase. I cursed Julie. Every afternoon she stuffs the thing full of paperwork—my homework, she calls it. She’s gotten me into the habit of lugging it back and forth to the office. The habit of opening it every evening has thus far mercifully eluded me. Usually I drop it inside the doorway of my apartment when I get home and pick it up the next morning on my way out.

So now, on a Sunday morning on my way to Vermont, I was carrying my briefcase for my meeting with Bonnie Coleman.

I tossed it onto the backseat of my car and headed out.

The sky was high and pale and the air was brittle on Sunday morning. Calendar winter was still a month away. But in the shaded spots along Route 2, hoarfrost whitened the ground like snow and skim ice glittered in the puddles from Saturday’s rain.

I turned north on Interstate 91, then west on Route 9 in Brattleboro, heading across the narrow southernmost width of Vermont. I ascended, then descended the Green Mountain spine, found Route 7A just north of Bennington, and pulled into the peastone lot in front of Dave’s Café north of Manchester a few minutes before noon.

There were half a dozen cars already parked there. One of them was a burgundy Honda Accord with New York plates.

I went inside. To the left of the lobby was a small bar, apparently closed. To the right lay a dining room. A sign by the entryway said, “Please Seat Yourself.” I went in. Some mounted brown trout and deer antlers and framed Currier and Ives prints hung from the knotty pine walls. High-backed booths lined the front and side by the windows. Tables were scattered across the floor. None of the tables was occupied. Everyone wanted a window view of the highway.

I stood there for a moment. Then I saw a hand and a glimpse of blond hair. I went over and said, “Bonnie?”

She nodded. “I thought that was you. Thanks for coming.”

I never would have recognized her on the street, but knowing who she was, I remembered her. Aside from three parallel vertical creases between her eyebrows and a barely noticeable thickening of the flesh on her throat, she still looked pretty much as I remembered her at twenty, although I knew she was at least twice that.

I slid into the booth across from her.

She smiled at me. Her eyes were the same color as the Vermont sky. “I remember you,” she said. “You and your friend Charlie. You guys were wild.”

I nodded. “We still are.”

“I bet. Want some coffee?” She gestured to an earthenware urn and two matching mugs that sat on the table.

“Coffee would be great.”

Bonnie poured the two mugs full.

I picked up the one she pushed toward me and sipped. “How are you doing?” I said.

She shrugged. “I’m doing okay. It’s hard, but I’m getting there. Al’s parents are like big solid slabs of Vermont granite. They’ve been great. I lean on them and they hold me up. We weren’t especially close when—when Al was alive. The kids aren’t handling it that well.” She shook her head. “It takes time, I guess.”

I nodded. “I’m really sorry. Anything I can do…”

“Thanks. Time. That’s all.”

Bonnie talked about New Haven, how she’d met Al when he was a law student and she an undergraduate at Yale, the parties at the place Charlie and I rented on the ocean, how Al started as a State Department attorney, their early married life in Georgetown, how Al became disillusioned, quit, set up a practice in New York and eventually became a literary agent, the famous writers whose passes she had rebuffed.

She waved her hand in the air and smiled. “Hell,” she said. “You didn’t come all the way up here to listen to my life story.” She reached down to the seat beside her and brought up a spiral-bound notebook. She placed it on the table.

“Al’s?” I said.

She nodded. “He was pretty haphazard about things. A lousy record keeper. He kept track of his appointments in his head. Otherwise, it was my job. Keeping track of things. Or else we would’ve gone broke. After he died, I spent more than a month going through all the little scraps of paper he left scattered around, just trying to make sure all the loose ends got tied up before I turned the business over to Keating. Anyway,” she said, tapping the notebook with her forefinger, “I found this.”

“What’s in it?”

“More notes. When he got a manuscript he liked, he’d sometimes want to suggest some changes. He liked to play editor, and he was pretty good at it from what the writers used to tell me. You know, cut a scene here, change the ending there, tighten up a plot line, sharpen a character. He’d usually call up the writer and they’d talk about it. A few of them would even listen to him. Most of them would argue with him. But he kept doing it, because he wanted his books to be good. Anyway, there’s a couple of pages in here I wanted to show you, and you’ll see why we couldn’t really discuss it over the phone.”

She picked up the notebook and flipped through it, then turned it around so that it lay open and facing me on the table. She leaned over and twisted her head so that we both could read it.

At the top of the page a black felt-tipped pen had printed the words
SNAKE EATER
, and under that, “BC anony.—Daniel??” I looked up at Bonnie. “The man who wrote the book was called Snake Eater by some of his war buddies,” I told her. “This BC would mean me. Brady Coyne. The author was anonymous. His first name was Daniel. I must’ve mentioned that to Al.”

She nodded. “My guess was that this might be your book. This was the only set of notes I couldn’t account for.”

I glanced through the scratches and scribbles on the page. Much of it was illegible. There were sketches and squiggles, some recognizable such as a bird and a woman’s breast and a snake and a palm tree and a man smoking a cigar, others just abstract designs, as if Al’s black felt-tip kept doodling randomly as he read. A Freudian could find vast significance in all of it, probably. But I couldn’t. Here and there I was able to decipher some of his hieroglyphics, although figuring out what they meant wasn’t so easy.

I looked up at Bonnie. “He had awful penmanship.”

She smiled. “I think he did it on purpose.”

“These are the only ones I can make out.” I moved my finger from place to place on the two pages, stopping where the letters made sense to me:

—ed for gramm & spel

—ch w BC re au 2 talk

—needs prol

—ch w PV
This was underlined three times, and beside it, in green pen, Al had scratched:
Fr 1:00 Rock Cent

—PV—Sun
This was the last notation on the second page. It was written in pencil.

I flipped forward through the notebook, but the rest of the pages were blank.

“I know it’s not much,” said Bonnie.

“Can you make sense of any of it?”

She pointed to
ed for gramm & spel
. “This means edit for grammar and spelling,” she said. “Al was a stickler for removing as many objections as possible before he’d show anything to an editor. And this BC must be you again.”

“Check with me regarding the author. Al told me he wanted to talk with the author. I told him that Daniel wouldn’t do it.” I moved my finger. “And here. It must mean he thought it needed a prologue.”

Bonnie nodded.

“What about PV?” I said. “It’s mentioned twice. Mean anything to you?”

She shook her head. “I thought it might be somebody’s initials. An editor or publisher or something. But I know all the publishing people Al dealt with, and there’s no house and no editor with the initials PV. I checked our Rolodex. There are a couple of V names who are writers, but none with the first initial of E. There’s also a television guy, someone Al liked to talk to about movie rights. Vance. But it’s Jack. There’s no PV that I know of.”

“Rock Cent?” I said, touching the marks Al had made.

“Rockefeller Center is my guess,” said Bonnie. “Al liked to go there to meet with editors, have lunch, watch the girls in little skirts twirl around on their skates, do business.” She frowned. “Maybe this refers to some other book, nothing to do with this one. PV could be an author’s initials. Or even some kind of abbreviation of a title.”

“It could be the pen name Daniel—the author—used,” I said.

“But Al didn’t know who he was. How could he have an appointment to meet him?”

I shrugged. “Good point.”

“And here,” she said, twisting her head around so that it was close to mine, “PV again. And Sun must mean Sunday. Another…”

Her voice trailed away and she slouched back in the booth. I frowned at her. Tears had welled up in her eyes. “Bonnie?” I said.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. Sunday, that’s all. Al died—got killed—on a Sunday.” She tried to smile. “Oh, I’m doing just fine, I am. Shit.” She rummaged in her pocketbook and found a tissue. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. “Dammit,” she muttered.

“I know this is hard,” I said.

She sipped her coffee and made a face. She looked at her watch. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got to get back to the kids.”

“Sure. Would you mind if I photocopied these two pages? I’d like to have them to study.”

“There’s one of those twenty-four-hour places down the road. They’ve got a copier.”

I put a five-dollar bill on the table and we left. I followed Bonnie a mile or so south on 7A. We stopped at a convenience store that doubled as a video rental. I photocopied the two pages from Al Coleman’s notebook. It cost me twenty cents.

Outside, Bonnie and I shook hands. “Sorry about the tears,” she said.

“You’re entitled.”

“Thought I was done with all that.”

“I don’t suppose one ever is.”

She smiled, then held out her hand. I took it. “Thanks,” she said.

She climbed into her Honda and I watched her drive away.

I slid the two sheets of photocopied paper into my briefcase and headed home. And all the way back to Boston I pondered who—or what—PV could be.

I
GOT BACK TO
my apartment around four in the afternoon. We were approaching the shortest day of the year, and already the sun had sunk low behind the city’s buildings. In my childhood, Sunday afternoons in the wintertime were always my most depressing times, and little has changed since then.

I tucked my car into its reserved spot in the basement garage, retrieved my briefcase from the backseat, and took the elevator up to the sixth floor.

The instant I opened the door I knew something was wrong.

I have an eccentric concept of order, I readily confess. Shoes, T-shirts, bath towels, magazines, fly rods—everything finds its place in my apartment. They usually happen to be places that most people wouldn’t consider appropriate. But I know where things are, and if they’re not there I know where to look.