Dead Winter (15 page)

She led me into the living-room area. She pushed me gently onto the sofa. Then she turned on her stereo. She found a station that was playing Charlie Byrd. She turned to me with arched eyebrows. I nodded.

She came and sat beside me. She tucked her bare legs under her and lay her cheek against my shoulder. “Thank you for tonight,” she said softly. “It was a huge kick, catching that fish.”

“He caught you, actually.”

She turned over her swollen hand in her lap. “I won’t be able to play the violin for a few days. It’ll be fine.”

She hitched herself closer to me. I pried off my shoes. I lay my head against the back of the sofa, put my arm around Kat’s shoulders, and closed my eyes.

“Brady?”

“Mmm?”

“What’s going to happen to my brother?”

“He didn’t do it,” I said. “Andy Pavelich can vouch for him. Zerk’ll take good care of him.”

She was silent for a minute. “That’s good,” she said. “I think one more thing would kill my father.”

“Des is tougher than you think.”

“He isn’t tough at all,” she said quietly. “He has never recovered from…” She stopped.

“I’ve always wondered,” I said.

“What?”

“When you and your mother—when you went away…”

I let the question trail away. Kat didn’t answer.

I felt her weight shift. Then her lips were on my cheek. She kissed me softly. I could feel her breast press against my arm. Her hand crept onto my chest, then to the back of my head. Her mouth opened on mine. A tiny moan came from the back of her throat. My hand touched the smooth skin on her bare leg and slid under the hem of her robe to her hip. She wore no underwear. Her mouth twisted and pressed against mine. I touched her robe over her breast. Her hand covered mine, pressing, urging.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Please.” She pushed at my hand.

I moved away from her. She tugged at the short hem of her robe and hugged herself.

“Kat, look,” I said.

She touched my lips with her forefinger. She tried to smile, and didn’t quite make it. She took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. She shook her head slowly back and forth and smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t worry about it, Kat.”

“You want to finish your beer?”

“I probably should go.”

“You don’t have to.”

I got up and she took my hand and walked me to the door. I opened it and turned. She peered at me, frowning. “Brady?”

“Kat, it’s all right.”

She reached up and touched my cheek with the palm of her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

I nodded. “Good night, Kat.”

“S
O THIS COP, THIS
Fourier, he come out,” said Zerk, his grin broad in his strong black face, “and he ask can he help me. So I tell him I want to see Marc Winter, he my client. And Fourier, he smile, like maybe he gonna let me, then again, maybe he not. He ask me what I wanna see him for. I repeat to him Marc my client, I got a right to see him, ’specially since they ain’t even arrested the man.”

Zerk swung his big frame from the corner of my desk, where he had been perched, and settled into the chair. He gave me a big white-toothed grin. He enjoyed his self-parody. Listening to him, it would be hard to tell that he had been magna cum at Tufts and third in his class at law school. He took a sip of coffee and peered at me from over the rim.

“You
are
quite sensitive to racial innuendo,” I said mildly.

“Yassah, boss, I shore is. And you isn’t.”

I shrugged. “I try to distinguish ordinary rudeness from racially motivated rudeness.”

He grinned. “Safe to say, you have a different perspective on that sort of thing from me.” Xerxes Garrett, whose middle-linebacker construction was not at all disguised by his gray three-piece suit, had clerked for me several years earlier in exchange for the tutoring I gave him for the Law Boards. He had since become a first-rate criminal lawyer, and while much of his practice consisted of
pro bono
work for poor families in Dorchester and Roxbury, he did enjoy defending white people. “I like the way they depend on you. How they call you up for reassurance, and you’ve got to soothe them like they were children. Anyway,” he added, “it pays well. You taught me the importance of that.”

When Marc Winter was arrested on the drug charge a few years earlier, it was Zerk who I asked to take the case.

“Finally,” he continued, “I say to the cop, Fourier, I say, ‘Listen. I wanna know where my client’s at.’ And Fourier, he tip his head over to the side, like he the teacher and I the dumb burrhead student, the pompous prick, and he say, ‘You should never end a sentence with a preposition.’ So I nod my head like I just learned something important, and I say, ‘Oh, right. Thank you for reminding me. So where’s my client at,
asshole?
’”

“Perfect,” I said.

Zerk grinned and nodded. “I understand you’re taking a real interest in this case,” he said.

I shrugged. “There’s some interesting aspects of it.”

“‘Interesting aspects,’” he repeated. “You do have a nice way with words, boss. You never end your sentences with prepositions. This case might be less complicated than meets the eye, though, actually.”

“You think Marc killed Maggie?”

Zerk shook his head. “He might’ve. Says he didn’t. I talked with him a long time last night. Then I talked to his old man, the minister. I try to look at this as if I were prosecuting it. Look at what we got. We got this young wife of dubious background who’s out gettin’ it on with some other guy in her father-in-law’s boat. That certainly takes care of Marc’s motive. Opportunity? We’ve got a witness who sees him drive up and call the cops about the crime without his going to the boat, which clearly means he already knew there was a corpse in there. Nobody can account for the husband’s whereabouts between nine and the time the cops show up at the marina.”

I lifted up my hand. “Didn’t Marc tell you about Andrea Pavelich?”

He nodded. “Yup. He told me. He even told me you talked to her. He told me about your encounter with the lady’s old man, too. You’re losing a step, boss. But he won’t let me talk to her, and he won’t ask her to testify for him. Which means, thinking now like a prosecutor, it’s no different than if he’s got no witness.”

“Well, I
did
talk to her, and she
does
verify his story.”

“But she’s got this mean sombitch husband who beats the shit out of her whenever she looks sideways at another man.”

“That she does. I can verify that, too.”

Zerk sighed. “If she won’t testify, it’s like she doesn’t exist.”

“I think she’s telling the truth.”

“The truth isn’t necessarily the point, bossman,” said Zerk. “You taught me that. It’s evidence that’s the point. Anyways, young Massa Winter wouldn’t let me talk to his gal. But he said he’d talk to her, try to persuade her to agree to testify, work out some way to handle her husband.” Zerk shook his head back and forth slowly.

“You don’t believe she told me the truth, do you?”

He put his elbows on my desk and leaned toward me. “A prosecutor assumes she’s lying, that she was there, maybe participated in the murder. A prosecutor figures Marc and Andy, they go to the boat and hear Maggie and her boyfriend groaning and thrashing around. So they wait till the fella leaves, go aboard. Maggie’s lying there in the berth, all naked and satiated. Maybe Marc asks her what in hell she thinks she’s doing, and she sees Andy there and says she figures she’s doing what he wants to do. So Marc and Maggie have an argument. He whacks her a few times. Andy’s standing there. When Marc realizes what he’s done, he tells Andy she’s an accessory, she’s in trouble like him, but she can cover for him, they can cover for each other. She’s worried about Al, but she’s worried worse about herself. So they make up a story they both can stick to. A prosecutor’d love to get that gal on the witness stand.” Zerk smiled at me. “That’s something else you taught me, boss.”

“What’s that?”

“To think like a prosecutor.”

“Well, hell, I taught you everything you know.”

“One thing you taught me that you keep forgetting yourself.”

“What’s that?”

“You always say the commonest things most commonly happen.”

“Meaning in this case?”

“Meaning husbands most commonly beat hard on wayward wives.”

“That’s how the cops see it.”

“It is. Less commonly do we have mysterious attorneys from North Carolina on the scene getting knifed in their motel rooms ten miles away having some convoluted connection to the wife getting whacked.” Zerk frowned at me. “I want to know what you’re thinking.”

I held out my arms, palms up. “This Greenberg called me, then got killed. That interests me. He was seen with Maggie the day before they both got murdered. That seems to me a connection.”

Zerk held up his hand. “Whoa. What I understand, you don’t know whether this dead one is the same Greenberg who called you, and you don’t know if he’s the same bald guy your retarded friend saw with Maggie Winter.”

“He was driving the same kind of car. And I don’t know any other Nathan Greenberg.”

“What if Snooker Lynch was lying?”

“Why should he lie?”

“That,” said Zerk, “is the question the prosecutor asks. A good question. Point is, this Mr. Lynch doesn’t sound like the most impressive witness. Meantime the cops are assuming the commonest thing most commonly happens.”

“They’re going after Marc.”

He nodded. “Looks that way. Local cops want to see if they can crack the case before the state cops.”

“But they haven’t arrested Marc.”

“Not yet.”

“Sounds to me as if Andy Pavelich is a key.”

“Marc’s going to talk to her. And what’re you doing?”

“I’m flying down to North Carolina tomorrow,” I said.

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Just curious, maybe. I want to see if this Greenberg is the same one who called me. If so, why. And if there’s any connection between him and Maggie.”

“Bringing your fishing pole?”

“Rod,” I said. “It’s called a rod. And no, I’m not.”

“Nice trout fishing in North Carolina, they say.”

“I’ve heard that.”

Zerk unfolded himself from the chair and stood up. “Anyway, boss, you don’t have to worry about Marc Winter any more.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m defending him.”

“We will all sleep better.”

After Zerk left I put through a call to Doc Adams’s office in Concord. Doc is a master oral surgeon and one of my fishing buddies. He spent some time in the western part of North Carolina a few years earlier. I intended to allow him to tell me tall tales of fabulous trout fishing in the mountain streams, which would persuade me to stow some fly-fishing gear on the airplane and maybe stay over in Asheville an extra day. It would be a hedge against the likelihood that my pursuit of the Nathan Greenberg mystery would turn out to be another in a lifetime full of wild goose chases.

I got Doc’s answering service. Dr. Adams, a friendly young female with a faint trace of Dublin in her voice told me, was on vacation. She could reach him if it was an emergency. I said it wasn’t. She said he’d be in his office on Monday. I told her that was too late. She seemed genuinely disappointed that she couldn’t help me. She said he checked in every afternoon, she could give him a message.

“Okay,” I said. “Ask him if he heard about the couple who didn’t know the difference between Vaseline and putty.”

She giggled. “Shall I tell him the answer, too?”

“No. Let him try to figure it out.”

“Will you tell me?”

“You’ve got to promise not to tell Doc.”

“I promise.”

“Their windows all fell out.”

I spent the rest of Thursday dictating memos to Julie and chatting with clients on the telephone. For most of my clients, most of the time, the ability to chat with a lawyer about hypothetical problems is worth a lot of money. For me, being available to chat with wealthy clients about imaginary legal issues is my work, for which I am rewarded with handsome retainers. Sometimes real problems appear. Usually they don’t. People—especially very rich people—get nervous when they don’t have problems. Not having a problem becomes a problem. My peculiar legal specialty is helping wealthy old people feel comfortable about not having problems.

I rarely am asked to write articles for learned journals about my specialty.

Sometimes my clients actually do get divorced or arrested. Sometimes they decide to buy a new business, or sell an old one. They set up trusts for children and grandchildren. They look for tax dodges. Eventually, they die. All of these activities require planning, consulting, conferring. Options need to be studied. Game plans must be drawn up.

It keeps me busy.

It does not preoccupy me.

My friends marvel at my law practice. How easy it is, how lucrative.

How boring.

They usually seem envious.

I explain to them that I fish for trout. Often and avidly. Fishing, I tell my friends, is a great deal like sex. When it’s good, it’s absolutely wonderful. And when it’s bad, it’s still pretty damn good.

In fast-moving parts of eastern rivers, small trout lie in shallow riffles. They feed eagerly. They strike willingly at almost any sort of artificial fly that floats near them. Sometimes, I tell my friends, I will cast to these fish. They pose no particular challenge. I never doubt that I will catch several of them.

Fishing for them keeps me busy.

It does not preoccupy me.

I am also acquainted, I tell my friends, with a large brown trout who lives in a slow moving stretch of the lower Swift River. He lies behind a sunken log up against a steep bank which is overhung by birch trees whose branches nearly brush the surface of the water. My brown trout feeds on the small insects that get trapped in the sluggish eddy, where it is impossible to make a dry fly float in a natural manner. He weighs at least four pounds, and I would like to persuade him to strike at my fly.

I like to sit on the bank and smoke and ponder the problem. What fly might that old brown trout take? How can I cast it without spooking him? Should I wait until evening? Perhaps come at night, or before sunrise in the morning, to fish for him?