Snake Eater (23 page)

“Miss Russell, Mr. Coyne, you folks better get back to the house and find some dry clothes or you’ll catch pneumonia. Call the station for me and tell them that I’ll be here with the body. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Wait there until they come, then maybe one of you can bring them here. We’ll talk all about it later.”

I put my arm around Cammie’s shoulders and we trudged back through the woods to Daniel’s house. We walked as fast as we could in our wet clothes, and as long as we were moving and the blood was circulating I didn’t feel the chill.

As soon as we got into the living room we stripped off our clothes. Cammie padded naked to the bathroom and came back with a pair of big bath towels. We rubbed each other’s bodies with them, and after a minute or two of that Cammie put her arms around me and pressed herself against me, and I held her while she sobbed.

After a while I felt her body relax. She tilted up and kissed my jaw. “I’ll find some clothes for you,” she said.

I wrapped the towel around my waist and went to the phone. I dialed 911 and told them to come to Daniel’s house, that Sergeant Oakley was here with a dead body.

When Cammie came back, she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and had a bundle of clothes in her arms. Daniel’s sweatshirt fit fine except the arms were too short. His pants were loose at my waist and the cuffs came halfway up my calves.

We went into the kitchen. Cammie poured some Wild Turkey into a pair of glasses. We stood there leaning against the counter with our own thoughts, not talking, just sipping and staring out into the night until the police arrived behind the wailing of their sirens.

Cammie and I went out onto the front porch to meet them. There were four or five cars and an ambulance. Police Chief Francis Padula stepped from the passenger side of a squad car and came to the steps. “Where is he?” he said.

“I’ll show you,” I said.

I led a parade through the woods to the river where Oakley was waiting with Sweeney’s body. Besides the chief there were two uniformed policemen, one detective, two EMTs, a photographer, and a medical examiner. After I showed them to the place, one of the uniformed cops walked me back to the house. Cammie was seated on the sofa in the living room. A detective had pulled up a chair in front of her, and they were talking quietly. They looked up when the cop and I entered. Cammie tried to smile at me and failed. The detective said, “Take him into the other room.” Then they resumed their conversation.

The cop and I went out into the kitchen. I poured a little more bourbon into my glass and sat with it at the table. The cop remained standing. He was guarding me. I ignored him.

After a while the detective came in and nodded at the policeman, who left, presumably to go stand watch over Cammie.

The detective sat across from me. “Nichols,” he said, and he held his hand to me. I shook it.

“Tell me,” he said.

“It’s much too complicated to try to tell more than once.”

“Let’s start with an easy one. Who’s the dead guy?”

“His name is Brian Sweeney. He was a friend of Cammie Russell’s.”

“Oakley killed him?”

“Yes.”

“You see it?”

“Not exactly.”

“Explain.”

“Look,” I said. “Really. Am I going to have to do this again?”

“Probably.”

“For the DA?”

“Among others. Yes.”

“I don’t understand much of it,” I said.

“Just what you know, Mr. Coyne. What you saw. I just want you to tell me what happened tonight. Your speculations you can hang on to for now. Okay?”

“Okay.” So I told Detective Nichols that I had come to visit Cammie and Sweeney, that she had cooked dinner for us, and that afterward, while we were in the living room, Sweeney had gone into another room and come back with his gun. He forced us to walk down to the river and then wade in, and I assumed he was going to shoot us, but Oakley got him first.

I could see the questions in Nichols’s face. But he didn’t ask them. “Okay” was all he said.

When Chief Padula came back an hour or so later, I told him the same story, and he just said we’d have to make a deposition the next morning, and I realized that the Wilson Falls police were mainly concerned with the fact that one of their officers had killed a man, and they needed to know whether it was justifiable.

All the other questions would be asked eventually, I assumed.

The cars pulled away one by one, as the various jobs were completed. Finally the only ones left were Padula and Oakley.

“If you wouldn’t mind putting on some coffee, Miss,” said the chief, “Richard and I would like to talk to you.”

Cammie eyed Oakley warily, then went into the kitchen. The rest of us followed her. She put together the coffee, and all four of us sat at the table listening to the pot burble. We didn’t talk. When the coffee was ready, Cammie got up and poured four mugs full.

Oakley looked at Cammie. “Francis says I gotta tell you this. That I owe it to you.”

She shrugged, avoiding his eyes.

Oakley glanced at Padula, who nodded quickly to him.

“I guess you think I’ve been harassing you,” said Oakley. “That I’ve been out to get you or something.” He paused, staring at Cammie, as if he wanted her to say something. When she didn’t look up at him, he said, “Okay. Maybe I owe you an apology. So I’m sorry. I am. I never meant it that way. But I want you to understand.”

She glanced up at him, then looked back down into her coffee.

“I had—I have a daughter,” said Oakley. “About your age. What’re you, twenty-four, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-nine,” mumbled Cammie.

He nodded quickly. “Janie’s her name. She was a sweet, nice girl. National Honor Society. Played field hockey. Organized a Students Against Drunk Driving club at the high school. Never a problem. Her mother and I split when she was about twelve, and she handled it. Loved us both, never acted out. Not like a lot of kids. When I got remarried, she and my new wife hit it off fine. Anyway, the summer after she graduated, I lost her. She was all set to go to college. Westfield State. She planned to be a PE major, wanted to coach and teach. And then she was gone. I mean, she disappeared. Her mother didn’t know where she was. Me neither. And I’m a cop.” Oakley stopped and rubbed the palm of his hand across his forehead. “Look,” he said. “I won’t drag this out. She turned up in Boston. She was living with this bastard—this guy. She was hooking for him, getting money for him so he could buy drugs for the two of them. He was an older guy, a Vietnam vet, a burnt-out crazy bastard who carried knives and guns. A Boston cop found her for me, told me where she hung out, a bar in Dorchester, for Chrissake, and she was living with this guy, and I went there ready to kill the son of a bitch, and I was gonna bring Janie home. Something happened. I don’t know. They were gone. Disappeared.” He shrugged. “That was seven years ago. I don’t know where she is. I still don’t know.”

Oakley looked up. Cammie had been staring at him while he talked. He gave her a quick smile. “I know this isn’t your problem, Miss,” he said. “And maybe I made it your problem, and if I did I am really sorry. See, she was… I can’t tell you about the big empty place that’s always there inside of me, and how loving my little girl is a lot like hating her for what she did to herself I hated that guy, that was easy. But I hated her, too. It’s as if she was two people, one of them my beautiful little girl and the other one somebody different who ruined her. She did it to herself. I blamed her for that.” He shook his head. “This probably doesn’t make any sense. See, when you showed up with McCloud, and then I found out about you, what you’d been into, it was like you were the bad half of my Janie, and he was that bastard who ruined her, and…”

He looked at Chief Padula, who stared back at him without expression. Oakley shook his head. “Fuck it,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry, that’s all. I just couldn’t stand it, seeing you with him and his drugs and knowing that he had ruined you just the same way that other screwed-up Vietnam vet had ruined my girl. I wanted to save you. I tried to keep an eye on you, to protect you. Maybe it didn’t look that way. When I arrested him, that was a good bust. It wasn’t just me. But in my head I was doing it for you. To get him away from you. For your own good.”

He stared down at the tabletop for a moment. Then he blew out a loud breath and glanced up. His eyes moved from Cammie to me to Padula, then returned to Cammie. “Look,” he said quietly. “I got nothing against vets. I did a tour in country myself. But it works two ways, you know? I mean, it messed up a lot of guys. I don’t really blame them. But a lot of them never got better. I just figured McCloud was one of them. Like the guy Janie…”

He shrugged.

“I wanted to put him away somewhere where he couldn’t ruin you anymore. I guess cops aren’t supposed to think that way. But I did. I admit it. Anyway, something happened. He got off. I blamed you for that, Mr. Coyne.” He glanced at me. “If it wasn’t for you, McCloud would’ve gone to prison and she would’ve been okay.” He turned to Cammie. “And I hated you, God help me. But I loved you, too, and I wanted to protect you. Does this make any sense to you?”

“No,” whispered Cammie.

“You had it wrong,” I said. “Daniel McCloud saved Cammie. He wasn’t the one who ruined her. He rescued her from it.”

Oakley stared hard at me. “I don’t buy that shit,” he said softly. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The cops all knew what she’d been into,” he said. “And I knew what he was after. McCloud, I mean. I could see. I knew. He was old enough to be her father, and he grew enough dope in that garden to keep the whole town stoned. There were times when I wanted to kill them both. And sometimes I just wanted to grab her and take her away. What I mainly did, though, was I watched over her. I figured I could protect her. I was just… I kept seeing Janie…”

Oakley slumped back in his chair, shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “That’s all. I’m just sorry.”

I looked at Chief Francis Padula. “You knew all this?”

He shrugged. “He didn’t do any harm. He followed the book. I understood. I thought he was right. About Miss Russell and McCloud, I mean.”

“He was wrong,” said Cammie. “It was Daniel who kept me going.”

“Well, it’s a good thing Sergeant Oakley was here tonight,” said Padula quietly.

I
T WAS AFTER ONE
in the morning when Oakley and Chief Padula finally left. Cammie and I poured the dregs from the coffeepot into our mugs and topped it off with Wild Turkey. We went into the living room. Cammie put on one of Daniel’s Jimmy Reed tapes. We sat close together on the sofa and sipped and hummed.

Once she said, “Thinking of him?”

“Daniel?”

“Yes.”

“I was, as a matter of fact.”

“I don’t understand much of it,” she said.

I shrugged. “Me neither, really.”

After a while Cammie squirmed against me and rested her cheek on my chest. My arm went around her shoulders. We dozed until the tape ended.

Cammie yawned and stood up. “Ready for bed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Time to hit the road.”

“That’s really dumb. We’ve got to give our depositions at nine in the morning. By the time you get home, you’ll have to turn around and come back.”

“Good point,” I said. “I’ll take the sofa.”

“You don’t have to sleep on the sofa, Brady.”

“The sofa will be fine.”

She looked at me for a moment, then smiled. “Okay. I’ll get some blankets for you.”

We were sipping coffee in the kitchen. The early-morning sun was streaming through the windows. When the phone rang, Cammie picked it up.

She said, “Hello?” and then listened for two or three minutes without saying anything. Then she said, “He’s here. I’ll tell him,” and hung up.

She turned to me. “That was Chief Padula. He says they don’t need our depositions.”

“That’s impossible.”

She shrugged. “It’s what he said.”

“Did he say why?”

“Nope.”

“Will he want them sometime later, is that it?”

“That’s not what he said. He said they wouldn’t be needing them, everything was under control, and thanks for all the help.”

“You sure you understood properly?”

“Dammit, Brady,” said Cammie softly.

I went over to her and hugged her. “I’m sorry,” I said. I kissed her hair. “It makes sense, I guess. They got Daniel’s case dismissed. Then they quashed the investigation of his murder. This fits. Are you going to be all right?”

I felt her nod against my chest. “I better go, then,” I said. “I know.”

“Let’s keep in touch.”

“Right,” she said. “Give me a call sometime.”

“I will,” I said.

“Or just drop in. Anytime. I’ll be here.”

“Sure.”

She tilted up her face. I kissed her forehead, found my briefcase, and headed back to the city.

At seven-fifteen Thursday morning Charlie called me. “You awake?” he said.

“Still on my first caffeine injection. Go slow with me.”

“Nine o’clock. My office.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ve got to.”

“Is this…?”

“You gotta be there, Brady.”

It was the tone of his voice, not his words, that convinced me. “Okay. I may be a few minutes late.”

“Brady, hang on a minute,” said Charlie. “Man here wants to speak to you.”

I waited, then a soft, cultured voice said, “Mr. Coyne?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Philip Varney. I’m delighted that we’ll be meeting.”

I said nothing.

“You, um, you have in your possession, I believe, some government property that we’d like returned.”

“Six photographs.”

“Exactly. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you.”

Philip Varney. PV. From Al Coleman’s notes.

I got to my office a few minutes after eight-thirty. Julie wouldn’t be in for another half hour. I loaded up the coffee machine and left a note on her desk. “Unscheduled meeting. Should be back by ten. Kisses, BLC.”

I went into my sanctum and emptied the contents of my briefcase onto my desk. The envelope with the photographs and index cards. The printout Charlie had given me. Al Coleman’s photocopied notes. My .38. I put all of it into my office safe. Then I gathered up the assorted manila folders, loose papers, and fly-fishing catalogs from my desktop and stuffed my briefcase full.