A Fine Line (4 page)

“I don’t know. He was like that when I got here.”

“He doesn’t have use of his legs, right?”

“That’s right,” I said. “They’re paralyzed from an accident.”

“Fell on his crutches here, you think?”

“I guess so. Is he going to be all right?”

“Hard to say.”

“What about—?”

“Sir,” said the paramedic, “the police will be here. They’ll want to talk to you.” He turned to his partner. “We should bring the wagon around to the alley.”

She nodded.

I stood back and watched them get Walt’s head immobilized, strap him on a board, and load him onto a collapsible gurney. Then the Asian guy jogged back through the house, and I held the door while the blond woman wheeled Walt out to the alley.

Just about the time their siren started up, I heard a voice calling “Hello?” from the front of the house.

I went to the front door. Two uniformed Boston police officers were standing there. One looked about forty. He was beefy and pink-skinned. The other one was a little younger and trimmer and darker.

“This the place?” said the older one. His nameplate read: Sergeant A. Currier. “The accident?”

“Yes. The paramedics just took him away.”

“The victim’s name is—” Currier checked his notebook “—Walter Duffy?”

“That’s right.”

“And you are?”

I gave him my name, told him I was Walt’s lawyer. He asked for my address and both my home and business phone numbers, too. He wrote everything into a notebook.

“We gotta ask you some questions, Mr. Coyne,” he said, “and take a look around.”

“Sure,” I said. “It happened in the garden out back.”

I led them to the patio and showed them where I’d found Walt lying. There was a patch of half-dried blood about the diameter of a grapefruit on the bricks. Walt’s crutches still lay where I’d found them.

“He was expecting me,” I said. “When nobody came to the door, I went around back and came in through that doorway.” I pointed. “I found him lying here.”

“Was he conscious?”

“Sort of, at first. I think he recognized me. Then he seemed to lose consciousness.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He tried to. He whispered something, but I couldn’t
understand what he said. I asked him to repeat it, but that’s when he closed his eyes.”

Currier was writing in his notebook. “When you got here, the door, it was unlocked?”

I pointed. “The back door. He knew I was coming. I guess he left it open for me.”

“Nobody else lives here?”

“His son lives here with him. Ethan. Ethan Duffy. Oh, and he has a dog. They’re not here. Ethan’s probably walking the dog. Henry. That’s the dog.”

Sergeant Currier was writing it all down in his notebook. I wondered if he included Henry’s name. He looked up at me. “You figure, um, the son, Ethan, and the dog, they were gone when this happened?”

“Right. Otherwise Ethan would’ve called for help.”

“When did they go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been here about twenty minutes, and they weren’t here when I got here.”

“They go for long walks?”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. Yesterday when I was here they went to the duck pond on the Common.”

“You were here yesterday?”

“I’m Mr. Duffy’s lawyer.”

“Here on business, then? Yesterday?”

“Mainly a social visit. I’ve been dropping in on him just about every Tuesday evening since his accident.”

“Accident?”

“He’s paralyzed from the waist down. It happened a little over a year ago.”

The cop jerked his chin at the crutches. “Those are his, then?”

I nodded.

“You said ‘mainly.’ About your visit yesterday. It wasn’t entirely social?”

“Like I said. I’m his lawyer.”

“Meaning you can’t tell me his business?”

“No, I can tell you. He wanted me to have some old documents appraised for him.” I told Currier about the Meriwether Lewis letters and how I’d delivered them to Ben Frye.

He asked me for Ben’s address, wrote it into his notebook, then said, “And today? Why were you here today?”

“He called me, asked me to come over.”

“What’d he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something about those letters?”

“He didn’t tell me. Maybe he just wanted company. Look,” I said, “he fell and banged his head. I didn’t see it happen. That’s about all I know. Where did they take him?”

“Mass General,” he said. “What time did you say you got here?”

“Five-thirty or so.”

“And you found him lying there.”

“Yes.”

And it was about then that it finally dawned on me that the cop suspected I might’ve had something to do with Walt’s accident—and that it might not have been an accident at all.

Currier proceeded to ask me the same questions over again in a different sequence, and I proceeded to answer them truthfully, and finally he snapped his notebook shut. He handed me one of his cards. “If you think of anything,” he said, “cell phone number’s there. Call any time. Now I’m going to ask you to leave, Mr. Coyne.”

“Leave?”

He nodded.

“Somebody’s got to tell Ethan what’s happened when he gets back,” I said. “Let him know his father’s in the hospital. Will you be here?”

“For a while. We’ve got to, um, secure the area, talk with neighbors. You know how it works.”

“Crime scene,” I said.

He shrugged. “For now.”

“You think there was a crime committed?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “We’ll know better when we can talk with Mr. Duffy. And we’ll want to talk to the son, of course.”

“Ask Ethan to call me, would you?”

“We don’t run a messenger service here, Mr. Coyne.”

“Sure,” I said. “You don’t mind if I leave him a note, do you?”

“He won’t be allowed inside.”

“I’ll put it on the door.”

Currier shrugged. “Go ahead. I’ll be in touch with you if I need you.”

“Okay if I wait out front for him?”

“It’s a free country, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Just stay out of the house.”

So I took out two of my business cards, and on each of them I wrote: “Ethan. Call me ASAP. Brady.” I wedged one under the knocker on the front door, then went around back and stuck the other one under the latch on the garden door in the alley.

As I left the alley, Currier’s partner came out and began draping crime-scene tape across the door to Walt Duffy’s bird garden.

I
sat on the front steps of Walt’s townhouse to wait for Ethan. The sun had sunk behind the rooftops, and overhead the sky was turning purple.

I was torn. I wanted to go see how Walt was doing. But I didn’t like the idea of Ethan coming home to a house wrapped in crime-scene tape.

I smoked a couple of cigarettes, and finally I decided that Ethan had taken Henry with him somewhere. He could be gone for the evening. When he got home, he’d see my card on the door, and he’d call me, if the police didn’t get to him first.

Right about then I remembered my picnic with Evie.

I glanced at my watch. It was a little before seven-thirty. She’d already been waiting for half an hour. By the time I walked to the parking garage where I’d left my car and drove to Walden Pond, it would be nine o’clock and Evie would be gone.

Anyway, I couldn’t just leave Walt in the hospital.

So I walked down Mt. Vernon Street to Charles Street,
went into the first restaurant I came upon, and found a pay phone inside the doorway. I dialed the number for Evie’s cell phone, knowing it was a futile hope. She’d never bring a cell phone on a picnic at Walden Pond. She liked the quiet of the place the way Thoreau did. He would’ve considered an electronic gadget to be a profound violation of everything the pond and the woods represented, and I knew that Evie shared his transcendental sensibilities.

Her voice mail clicked in immediately, meaning she’d turned the phone off, and invited me to leave a message.

“I guess you noticed I didn’t make it,” I said. “Sorry about that. I had a meeting with Walt Duffy this afternoon. You met Walt, remember? The man with the bird garden? He’s paralyzed, writes that column you like? Anyway, when I got here, he’d fallen and banged his head, and he was unconscious and nobody else was here, so I called 911 and the paramedics came and took him to the hospital. Then the cops came and asked me a lot of questions, and now it’s about seven-thirty and I’m supposed to be at Walden with you, but I’m not. I’m still here in the city, and I’m about to head over to Mass General to see how Walt’s doing, so—”

At that moment the time for my message expired with a rude click.

I redialed the number and told Evie’s voice mail, “Just to clarify, I can’t make it tonight. I hope you’re having a nice picnic without me. I’ll call you later.”

Massachusetts General Hospital was about a fifteen-minute walk down Charles Street on the other side of Cambridge Street. It’s a massive series of structures, and it took me some time to locate the emergency room. People of all descriptions and speaking myriad languages huddled in the waiting room, and various interns and residents and nurses
and orderlies were bustling around ignoring them.

When I finally got the attention of one of the women behind the glass-fronted counter, I told her I wanted to see Walter Duffy.

“Spell it, please,” she said. She had black close-cropped hair and pink lipstick and dark skin and a faintly Bahamian accent. She sounded neither rude nor friendly. Mainly stressed.

I spelled “Duffy” for her.

She poked at the keyboard of her computer, frowned, then checked a clipboard. “Walter Duffy?” she said.

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Upstairs. Surgery.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder.

“How do I find him?”

She shrugged. “I can’t help you. He’s not here.” She looked past my shoulder dismissively.

I turned. A young man holding a baby in his arms was standing behind me. Both of them were crying.

I went outside, walked around to the front of the building, and went in the main entrance. It was less chaotic there. A white-haired woman behind the information desk told me that visitors were not admitted to the surgical floor.

I asked her if she could give me any information on Walt Duffy.

She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t.

I asked her what she’d do if a friend of hers had been brought to the hospital for emergency surgery.

She pointed to a bank of telephones. “House phone,” she said. She gave me the extension number for the surgical unit.

I went over and dialed it. A woman answered.

“I’m calling about Walter Duffy,” I said.

“Who is this?”

“A friend of his. I’m in the lobby.”

“Mr. Duffy is being prepared for surgery,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I have no more information for you, sir.”

“How can I get more information?”

“Call when he’s out of surgery. Ask for Acute Care.”

“When will he be out of surgery?”

She sighed. “I have no idea. I’m sorry.”

I hung up the phone. Now what?

Well, Walt was alive and being treated in one of the best hospitals in the world, and there was nothing I could do for him.

I went outside and lit a cigarette. I realized my stomach was grumbling. So I walked over to Skeeter’s and had a burger and a glass of ale from a microbrewery in Vermont that Skeeter recommended.

While I ate, I watched the Red Sox game on one of the big TV’s over the bar, but my mind kept wandering. I was thinking of Walt, how he looked lying on the bricks with blood dribbling out of his nostril and pooling under his head, how his eyelids had fluttered and he’d tried to tell me something before he lost consciousness.

I assumed he’d fallen and hit his head. Standard police procedure required them to proceed on the assumption that a crime had been committed.

The crime, if there was one, would be shoving a man on crutches, causing him to fall backward hard enough to make him bleed from the nose.

Who’d do that?

The only name I could come up with was Ethan.

That struck me as far-fetched and unlikely. On the other hand, a lot of unlikely things happened in this world.

“Another beer, Mr. Coyne?”

I blinked. Skeeter was leaning his elbows on the other side of the bar frowning at me.

“No,” I said. “Thanks, Skeets. I’m heading home.”

“You okay? Nomar hits a home run, you don’t even smile?”

“A friend of mine’s in the hospital,” I said. “He got hurt pretty bad. I’m worried about him.”

Skeeter nodded. He’d played a little second base for the Red Sox back in the seventies. When he blew out his knee, he bought this seedy little bar down the alley off State Street, named it Skeeter’s Infield, paneled the walls, installed several big television sets, and turned it into the first sports bar in Boston. Skeeter still wore his faded and stained old Red Sox cap when he was behind his bar.

“You been to see him?” said Skeeter. “Your friend?”

I shook my head. “He’s in surgery.”

He took a swipe at the bar in front of me with his rag. “They do magic with surgery nowadays, Mr. Coyne. If they’d had arthroscopic surgery when I was playing, I might’ve had another four or five years.”

“My friend banged his head,” I said. “He was bleeding out of his nose.”

Somebody down at the other end of the bar called to Skeeter for a refill. He reached over and touched my arm. “Your friend, he’ll be okay,” he said.

I left in the middle of the eighth inning. I didn’t even notice what the score was.

When I got home, I checked my answering machine. No messages, from Ethan or from Evie or from anybody else.

I found my portable phone, took it out to the little iron balcony outside my apartment, and tried Evie’s home number.

She didn’t answer, and I didn’t leave a message. It was a little after eleven o’clock. She had to be home from her solitary picnic at Walden Pond by now. Probably in the tub. Or maybe she was already in bed. She always turned off the ringer on her phone when she went to bed.

The point was, she hadn’t tried to call me back.

I lit a cigarette and gazed across the harbor at the lights of East Boston and Logan Airport. Overhead, the moon was an orange wedge that reflected off the water.