Dead Winter (12 page)

We ordered blackened swordfish and a bottle of chilled Chardonnay, which we consumed rapidly to cool our overheated tongues. As we ate, I told Kat what I had learned from my talk with Andrea Pavelich, who confirmed Marc’s alibi, and my encounter with big Al Pavelich in the parking lot outside Michael’s restaurant afterwards.

“He beat you up?” she said, grinning.

“He threw a sucker punch. I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t have a fair chance to defend myself.”

“She said she was with my brother, though, huh?”

I nodded. “I believed her.”

“But she won’t tell the police?”

“She’s afraid. Marc is trying to protect her. From Al.”

Kat sipped her wine. “Understandable. Especially if she’s not telling the truth.”

“Well, I think she is,” I said, and Kat shrugged.

I told Kat about Snooker Lynch’s late-night phone call and my visit with him at the marina and the suspicions I was harboring about a connection between Maggie and Nathan Greenberg.

“We didn’t really know anything about Maggie,” mused Kat. “I don’t think Marc did, either. Suddenly she was there, in the middle of our lives, as if she had just been born full grown, with no history, no family, no connections. But of course, she had them. Connections, history, I mean. Maybe this guy Greenberg was part of that.”

“Maybe he killed her,” I said.

“But why?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe Marc killed them both,” she said. “Who knows?”

“I want to know,” I said.

“Why?”

I laughed away the question. “Why not?”

“Like the mountain, right? It’s there, might as well climb it. Is that it?”

“Oh, I’m sure my motives are more complex than that,” I intoned with mock solemnity.

“What the Freudians call displacement and sublimation.”

“The Freudians make it all into sex.”

She grinned. “Isn’t it, though?”

We lingered over coffee. Kat had landed a new account, a developer who was renovating an old warehouse on the waterfront and wanted to market the units as office condominiums. She hoped I’d help her with the contract. She was thinking of expanding, taking on an artist and a copywriter to free herself up to do what she believed she did best, which was to solicit new accounts and plan ad campaigns. I assured her I could help her work out the details.

I walked her to where she had left her car. The breeze off the waterfront carried moisture which glistened in Kat’s hair when we passed under the streetlights.

When we arrived at her Saab, she fumbled in her purse for her keys. She unlocked the door and then turned to lean back against it. “Suppose I can’t talk you into coming over for a nightcap,” she said.

“Nope. Tired. Thanks.”

She brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. “Didn’t think so. What I’d really like…”

“What would you really like?”

She cocked her head for a moment, then shook it. “Nah. Forget it.”

“Come on. What?”

“Would you take me fishing?”

“You?”

“What, I’m a girl?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know you were interested in fishing.”

“What I want to do is stand in the surf and throw those big plugs way out there like those macho men do. Can’t women do that?”

“I don’t know why not.”

“Well?”

I nodded. “Okay. We’ll do it sometime.”

She put her hands on my hips and held me there, leaning the top half of her body back against the car, her eyes mocking. “Not good enough, fella. You’re putting me off. Daddy always did that. Ask him to do something, he’d say, ‘maybe,’ or ‘we’ll see,’ or, ‘sometime.’ When, Brady?”

“Soon, okay?”

She laughed. “Not good enough. Tomorrow.”

“Jesus, Kat. You are a tough broad. I’ve been out of the office too much lately.”

“After work, then. Say around six.”

I calculated. I could break away around four, go back to my apartment and change, and easily get to Newburyport by six. The tide would be coming in, just as it was on this day. The bluefish might be running near the beach.

I could do it. Did I want to do it? I rarely declined a chance to go fishing. I liked teaching tyros how to do it. But there was something about Kat’s flirtatious demands that discomforted me. On the other hand, there was something else, too, the way her eyes flashed…

“Okay,” I said. “Your job is to get the gear organized. Des has it all in the garage. He’ll help you put together what we need. I’ll meet you there at six. We can go over to Plum Island, try the outer beach.”

“Really? You’ll really take me?”

“Isn’t that what lawyers are for?”

“And you’ll teach me how to do it?”

“We’ll see how apt you are.”

She reached up and put her hands on the tops of my shoulders. “You are a dear man,” she said, “and I think you will find me very apt.”

Her mouth approached mine as if in slow motion. Her eyes were wide and inquisitive, as if she might retreat if she detected a negative clue in my face. The truth was that her pelvis pressing itself against mine more than counteracted the feeble, if sensible, “no” that came from my brain.

She was Des’s daughter, after all. I thought of her as the college kid she had been when I first met her, not this thirty-two-year-old businesswoman. Besides, I preferred my seductions to be mutual and subtle.

But there was her pelvis, and when she kissed me I kissed her right back, and I had the distinct feeling that kissing was an art she had practiced, an exercise more in proficiency than in spontaneous passion. A marketing tool, perhaps.

Proficient, hell. She was truly gifted. Her tongue and her teeth and her lips all embarked on separate but neatly coordinated missions, complementing perfectly the work of her fingers at the back of my neck and that persuasive thrust and roll of her hips.

She slid her mouth away from mine an instant before I would have—another measure of her gift. She stood away from me smiling. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Jesus, Kat.”

“Something else lawyers do?”

“Oh, yeah. We are great kissers.”

She grinned and had the good sense to refrain from innuendo. She opened the car door and ducked inside. Then she rolled down the window. “Tomorrow at six, then,” she said.

“At Des’s house.”

“You will see just how apt I can be.”

I
LEFT KAT AND
aimed my BMW for Boston. When a sign announced that I had entered Danvers, I had an idea. So I exited Route 95 in Topsfield and got onto Route 1. I found the Sleepytime Motel on the right. It was almost eleven o’clock. I hoped the same night manager who had discovered Nathan Greenberg’s body would be on duty this evening, too.

The motel looked like it had been built during the postwar automobile boom, forty years earlier, when U.S. Route 1 funneled vacationers from Boston and Hartford and even New York City to resorts in Hampton and Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, and truckers steamed up and down the coast, and businesses boomed everywhere. Then along came Interstate 95, all eight lanes of it, and Route 1 was left to the locals and the occasional aimless tourist. The motels and gas stations and ice cream stands that had sprouted along the roadside like goldenrod in the forties and fifties were mostly either boarded up or torn down or converted into shops selling automobile parts and carpet remnants.

The Sleepytime Motel typified that postwar, no-non-sense, put-’em-up-quick-and-cheap school of architecture, a series of plywood boxes joined and stacked in the shape of a shallow angular horseshoe. Twenty-four units, twelve down and twelve up. A red neon sign boasted of waterbeds, telephones, and cable television. Grass grew from cracks in the concrete turnaround. The neon failed to illuminate the L in the word MOTEL on the sign. There was a half-finished swimming pool under construction in front. Judging by the way weeds sprouted from the piles of dirt, that project had been terminated.

I parked outside the office and went in. A pale young man with a short fuzzy haircut was lounging in a swivel chair behind the counter. He wore earphones and was reading a paperback book. My “Hello” failed to capture his attention.

I moved into his peripheral vision and waved my hands. His eyebrows jerked up and he smiled. He turned off the radio in his shirt pocket, closed his book onto his forefinger, plucked off his earphones, and stood up.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Can I get you a room?”

“Are you Bernard Tabor?”

He frowned. “Yes, sir.”

“You were here the night Nathan Greenberg was murdered, then?”

He nodded eagerly. “I found the body. It was me who called the police. They quoted me in the paper.”

His paperback was a detective story by Ed McBain. I wondered if crime fiction was a recently acquired taste of his. He leaned his forearms on the counter toward me, eager, it seemed, for an audience.

I lit a cigarette. “I have to go over some questions with you again.”

“Boy, you guys are thorough.”

I gave him a stern, no-nonsense, official-business glare. “We have to be,” I said. He nodded eagerly. He wouldn’t ask me for identification. He wanted me to be some sort of official person. He had lucked into a moment of fame and would welcome every chance to milk it.

“Tell me what happened again, Mr. Tabor.” Joe Friday had nothing on me. Just the facts.

“Well,” he said, “I was on duty from four to midnight Sunday, okay? At midnight we close up, because there’s just not that much transient business on Route 1 these days. Not worth keeping a man on duty all night. Mr. Franklin, the day man, he was sick so he asked me to take his place Monday. Yesterday, that is. That’s how come I was here in the morning. I’m happy for the work. I mean, it’s not that hard, you know? I’m working my way through school, I can use all the money I can get. Mr. Franklin worked today. He was pissed he’d missed all the excitement. Anyway, I came back on at seven yesterday morning. Terry, the girl who cleans the rooms, she comes on at eight. So about eleven thirty she tells me number seven’s got the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Now, I figure the man’s still got the girl in there—”

“What girl?”

“Like I told the papers. He had a visitor, oh, maybe nine Sunday night. I didn’t check the time. Didn’t really think about it. Girls come and go in this place, to tell you the truth. Anyhow, I didn’t notice her leave, which doesn’t mean she didn’t, just that I didn’t notice. Or she could’ve left after I closed the office. But I figured maybe she was still there, or else she stayed late and Mr. Greenberg was sleeping in. You know, not much sleep…”

He waggled his eyebrows. I nodded and smiled appreciatively at his suggestion. “What did the girl look like?”

“I didn’t really see her. Not so I could describe her. I just happened to glance out the window and saw the car pull up in front of seven. I wasn’t paying attention. She got out of the car and went in.” He shrugged.

“Did you get a look at the car?”

He shook his head. “My view was blocked by the other cars.”

“How do you know it was a woman?”

“She was wearing a dress. I could see her bare legs.”

“Color of hair?”

“It was too dark to see.” He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “You guys asked me all this already. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“Anyway, about one Terry came by again. She’s all upset, because she still hasn’t gotten into seven, and she’s done all the rest and she wants to leave. So I went over and knocked on the door. I yelled for Mr. Greenberg. It was completely quiet in there. Thinking back, it was spooky quiet, you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“At first I figured the guy just forgot to flip the sign around when he left. Then I noticed his car was still there. I knocked again. I had this weird feeling. Last winter some guy had a heart attack in his room, and when they found him he’d been dead for two days. So I unlocked the door. The curtains were closed and it was dark, so it took me a minute before my eyes adjusted. Oh, man! There was blood everywhere. I backed out and told Terry not to go in. Then I called the police.”

“You did exactly the right thing,” I said.

He pursed his lips. “I had to use some judgment.”

“How did Mr. Greenberg pay for his room?”

“Visa card. He took it for three nights.”

“Did he make any phone calls from his room?”

“Nope.”

If this was the Nathan Greenberg who had tried to call me, he must have called me from a pay phone in Newburyport. It would have been at around the same time Snooker Lynch saw him talking to Maggie in front of Des’s house on High Street. Still, it would have been nice to be able to pin it down.

“What about other visitors, Mr. Tabor?”

He shrugged. “Not that I noticed. It’s not my business. People rent a room, they can do what they want in it. Most of the people who take rooms here are local, if you catch my drift.”

“I catch your drift. Did you talk to Mr. Greenberg at all?”

“Uh uh. Like I said, I came on at four. He had checked in by then and he was gone. I didn’t notice when he came back.”

“But he was here when the girl came?”

“I assume he was. His car was there. The girl parked beside it.”

“But you don’t know what she was driving.”

“No. She parked on the opposite side of his car from here. Not that I was paying that much attention.”

“Is there anything you forgot to tell us before,” I said, “that you’ve remembered since then?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been over and over it in my head. Wish I could picture that girl. She probably did it, right? Anyhow, I can’t. Don’t you sometimes—you know—hypnotize important witnesses? Get them to recall something that’s in their subconscious?”

“We do that sometimes,” I said. “It’s a good idea. I’ll pass it along.”

“I’m happy to help, you know. Anything I can do.”

I nodded and held my hand to him. He seized it eagerly. “I appreciate your help, Mr. Tabor. We’ll be in touch.”

He frowned. “I didn’t catch your name, sir.”

“Horowitz,” I told him. “Detective Horowitz. State police.”

He nodded slowly. “I figured you were a state police officer. I just put two and two together.”