Tight Lines (26 page)

So we did. He stayed for more than two hours, and we went over all of it. He shared forensic information with me—the absence of useful fingerprints in Jill Costello’s apartment, medical examiner reports on both Jill and Dave Finn concluding that Jill had died instantly from a stab wound directly to the heart and Finn had died from inhaling poisonous fumes with enough alcohol already in his bloodstream to make him comatose before the fumes got him, and the Townsend fire chief’s verdict that the electric space heater had ignited the fire.

I told him about the tenuous connection among Mary Ellen and Jill and Finn. It was a lovers’ triangle of sorts, of course, but it was an incomplete geometric shape. Mary Ellen had many other people in her life.

I told Horowitz that both Sid Raiford and Sherif Rahmanan had inherited one hundred thousand dollars from Mary Ellen. They might’ve also been her lovers, although both of them denied it. Rahmanan, at least, had been at one time, and he admitted that he continued to be obsessed with her. Raiford, for his part, had supplied her with marijuana and cocaine and helped her consume it.

I told him about Willard Ellington who also, indirectly, benefited from Mary Ellen’s timely death, but there was no indication that he had ever laid eyes on her.

Any of them could conceivably have been a jealous lover.

Otherwise, neither of us could invent a reason why any of these men would care whether Jill Costello or Dave Finn lived or died.

I did not tell Horowitz all that I knew about Warren McAllister. Most of it was privileged information. I was his lawyer.

And when we finished talking, both of us shook our heads. Mary Ellen had not lived a conventional life. But there was nothing unconventional about the fact that she had many varied acquaintances and friendships. Hell, so did I. And aside from the fact that all of them had a relationship of some kind with her, coincidence still seemed to account for any other connection among all of them. Each death—Mary Ellen’s, Jill’s, and Finn’s—had its own separate logical explanation.

I walked Horowitz out of my office and past Julie’s desk to the door. We shook hands. We promised to share anything else that occurred to us. I got the impression that he already had other things on his mind. A Massachusetts state homicide cop always has lots of things on his mind.

After I closed the door behind him, Julie said, “What was that all about?”

I flapped my hands. “Just the Mary Ellen Ames thing.”

“Well pardon me,” she said.

I went back into my office and called Warren McAllister. His machine answered and I asked him to get back to me.

Julie left at five. I stayed. I had a messy desk to clean up.

Warren called me back around seven. When I answered the phone, he said, “Wow! You attorneys put in long hours. I tried your house first.”

“It’s been a busy day,” I said. “Hey, have you heard the forecast for the weekend?”

“No. Why?”

“Supposed to climb up into the seventies. I don’t know about you, but to me that’s a gift, a weekend in October in the seventies.”

“I like the way you think, Counselor. God, I haven’t been fishing for weeks. I need it.”

“Me, too. How’s Sunday for you?”

“You got it. Where do you want to go?”

“I got a place in mind,” I said. “I’ll pick you up around nine.”

“Trout, right?”

“Right. Bring your fly rod.”

“Think they’ll be biting?”

“Hell,” I said, “even if they’re not, it’ll still be worthwhile.”

I
GOT TO THE
McAllisters’ big Victorian in Brookline a few minutes before nine Sunday morning. As promised, the day had dawned sunny and warm. It felt and tasted more like early September than late October.

Warren already had his fly-fishing gear piled on the back porch—two aluminum fly rod rubes, a pair of waders, his fishing vest, a net, a shapeless old canvas hat studded with bedraggled flies, and a small duffel for his fly boxes, reels, spare socks, rainwear, and all the other stuff that fly fisherman cannot travel without.

I rang the bell and a moment later Robin opened it. She smiled radiantly. “Brady, hi,” she said. “I’m so jealous of you guys. What a beautiful day you’ve got.”

She was wearing a comfortable old pale blue terry-cloth robe. The hem brushed the floor, and her bare toes peeped out from underneath. Her hair hung in a ponytail down the middle of her back. She wore no makeup. She looked quite beautiful without it.

She hugged me quickly. “Thanks for doing this,” she whispered. “He’s really been looking forward to it.”

“Hey,” I said. “I like fishing.”

“Well, come on in,” she said, taking my arm. “Old Izaak Walton is in there making sandwiches.”

She tugged me into the kitchen, where Warren was piling slabs of roast beef onto thick slices of dark bread. “Hey, partner,” he said when he saw me.

“Hey, yourself.”

“Grey Poupon on your roast beef, a little horseradish?”

“Terrific.”

“I’ve got a thermos of coffee and some Coke on ice, okay?”

I smiled and nodded. “Perfect.”

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I never drink beer or anything while I’m fishing.”

“Me neither. Booze and fishing don’t go together.”

Robin handed me a mug of coffee and then went over to help Warren stuff the thick sandwiches into plastic bags. I leaned against the wall, sipping my coffee and watching them. She actually seemed happy for her husband that he could go off fishing on a Sunday in the autumn. My experience was limited, but I believed that this was a rare and wonderful thing between married people.

The two of them loaded up a wicker basket, and then Warren said to me, “Ready?”

“I’m ready.”

I drained my mug and put it in the sink. Robin crossed her arms around Warren’s neck and kissed him. Then she smiled at me. “Have fun, boys. Tight lines.”

We went out, gathered up Warren’s gear from the porch, and loaded it into my car. Then we got in.

“Where are you taking me?” he said.

“Little pond in New Hampshire. It’s supposed to be full of native brook trout. They should be dressed in their spawning colors by now.”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Absolutely perfect.”

It took about two hours to get there. Warren and I sipped coffee from the thermos and swapped fishing stories the entire way.

We crossed the border into New Hampshire, and a half hour later, when I turned off the main road onto a narrow country lane, Warren said, “What’s the name of this place?”

“Teal Pond.”

“Wasn’t that…?”

“Yes,” I said. “The place where Mary Ellen drowned. I heard the fishing was good here. Our friend Horowitz told me how to find it.”

Warren said nothing. I turned down the unpaved driveway that wound for nearly a mile down a long wooded slope before the sparkle of sunshine on water appeared through the trees. The driveway ended in a thinned-out pine grove surrounding a modest shingled cottage that was perched on the rim of the pond. A pine needle path led down a gentle slope to the pond’s edge where a dock extended out over the water. Two aluminum canoes rested upside down on the dock.

I turned off the ignition. “Pretty spot, huh?”

“Beautiful,” said Warren.

“Come on. Let’s go look at the water.”

We walked down the path and onto the dock. I lit a cigarette. The two of us gazed across the pond. It nestled snugly in a bowl formed by the foothills of the White Mountains. The subdued oranges and russets of autumn oaks reflected on the water’s surface. In the middle it was riffled by the soft breeze, but along the edges and in the coves the pond’s skin lay as smooth and flat as glass. Off to the right I thought I saw some tiny dimples in the surface that could have been feeding trout.

After a minute or so, Warren said, “Brady, why did you bring me here?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are lots of places we could’ve gone fishing. Why here?”

I shrugged. “I heard it was good. It’s always fun to try new places.”

“Come on,” he said. “This is Mary Ellen’s cottage. What’s on your mind?”

“I guess I was just wondering if we might talk some more about it.”

“About her?”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’ve been here before.”

“I thought you might’ve been.”

“It’s where we used to meet. When we…”

“Yes.”

He touched my arm. I turned to him. His intent gaze held my eyes. “Brady, you’re my lawyer, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I want to tell you about it.”

I nodded. “Good.”

He sat on the edge of the dock. I sat beside him. We dangled our legs over the edge and looked out at the pond. The sun was warm on our faces. He talked without looking at me.

“She was different from my other patients right from the beginning,” he said. “The first time she came to my office it was clear that she was interviewing me, trying to determine if I was suitable to treat her. I didn’t know what she was looking for, and I certainly didn’t consciously try to impress her, but even before I knew anything about her I found her unusual. And—and attractive. There was something about her that made me uncomfortable. Something subtle, sexual. I even considered refusing to accept her. But I’m an experienced shrink. I know about attraction between analyst and patient. It’s often present, and a skilled analyst can manage it, even use it to advantage. Anyway, the decision was hers. I guess I passed muster, because I began to see her. This was a little over four years ago. And right from the beginning there was a different agenda between us. For Mary Ellen, psychoanalysis was a long leisurely process of seduction. That’s what it was. She was paying me a hundred dollars an hour, four days a week, for purposes of seducing me.”

“And you didn’t realize it?” I said.

“Of course I did. It was not a problem. Or it shouldn’t have been. It offered a useful way of proceeding with treatment. We talked about it. I was direct with her. I asked her why she had chosen me, why she was setting about in this obviously calculated way to seduce me.”

“You were her father,” I said.

Warren turned to look at me. He smiled and nodded. “Sure. Your classical case of transference. I can quote you the Great Man on it. Freud said, ‘The patient sees in his analyst the return—the reincarnation—of some important figure out of his childhood or past, and consequently transfers onto him feelings and reactions that undoubtedly applied to this model.’” Warren smiled at me.

“Sounds risky to me,” I said.

“Yes, it can be.” He nodded. “Freud went on to say, ‘It soon becomes evident that this fact of transference is a factor of undreamed-of importance—on the one hand an instrument of irreplaceable value and on the other a source of serious dangers.’”

“Serious dangers,” I repeated.

“Usually,” said Warren, “transference happens over a long period of time. It grows and develops as a natural part of the analytic process. But with Mary Ellen, it was instantaneous. It’s what she was looking for even before she became my patient. A father substitute.” He paused. “How did you know about this?”

“It’s common, isn’t it?”

“Well, sure.”

“Mary Ellen had a portrait of her father in her condo,” I said. “It’s very large, and it’s hung prominently in her living room, and she even had a little light mounted in the ceiling to spotlight it. You resemble Charles Ames remarkably.”

“I look like him?”

I nodded. “I didn’t catch it at first. But I was back there a week ago and saw the painting again. After having seen you, I caught the resemblance immediately. It’s almost uncanny. The eyes and the mouth especially. Even your hair.”

Warren smiled. “Well, she never told me that, and of course I had no way of knowing what Charles Ames looked like. I certainly know what kind of a man he was—or at least what kind of a man lived in Mary Ellen’s memory of him.”

He stopped talking. I lit another cigarette. We stared at the water.

“It’s about the biggest failure a psychiatrist can ever have,” he began softly after several moments of silence. “Worse even than suicide.”

“What is?”

“Allowing a patient to seduce you. It destroys everything. There are philistines in my profession who rationalize it otherwise, and some who have even rationalized sex with their patients into a form of treatment, who are themselves the seducers. But that’s all bullshit. It was, to say the least, very humbling for me to learn how weak I was, how readily all of my training, all of my good professional judgment, all of my experience with transference could be swept away by simple lust.”

“But it wasn’t simple lust for her, was it?”

He shook his head. “No. That’s what makes it so bad. Mary Ellen lost her father at the worst possible time, for her, in her life, and she spent the rest of it trying to find him. All of the men in her life were considerably older than she, substitute fathers for her. None of them ever quite lived up to the standards in her mind—to him, her imagined father, the Charles Ames in her head. Not Dave Finn or Sherif Rahmanan or any of the many others. We talked about all of this, of course. She claimed I was it. I was the one. Finally, her search was over. So, Brady, no, for Mary Ellen it was far more than simple undifferentiated lust. For her, it was fulfillment. I was her cure.”

“And for you?”

He sighed deeply. “I love Robin. She’s a perfect wife. She is my life. Mary Ellen simply taught me that I am a weak, imperfect man, a man who may understand the complexities of the human psyche, but who can still be victimized by them. Mary Ellen was a temptation that a better man should have resisted. I did not.”

I touched his leg. “So…”

“Hell, Brady, I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking. I already told you that.” He frowned at me. “Is it? Is that what today is all about?”

I shrugged. “I just wanted to hear the truth about it.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Her death must have been a vast relief for you.”

“That’s very cruel of you,” he said softly. “But I guess you’re partly right. It saddened me profoundly. But, yes, I was relieved, too.”

“What
had
you intended to do before she conveniently took you off the hook by dying?”