Dead Winter (23 page)

Tears came to Cooper’s eyes.

Fourier nodded to me by way of dismissal, and said, grudgingly, I thought, “Thanks, Mr. Coyne.”

I smiled. “You’re welcome.”

In the parking lot across from the station, Cooper pumped my hand. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you,” he said. “I feel so much better. I can live with whatever comes next. I’m going to go home now and tell Jane everything. I’ve got to trust she’ll forgive me.”

“Good luck, Ernie.”

He drove off. I sat in my car with my feet stretching out the open door and smoked a cigarette. I wanted to ponder insignificant matters such as love and death, and how they so often seem to walk hand in hand. The butt burned down to my knuckle before I flicked it away and went to the pay phone I’d seen at the corner.

Kat answered on the second ring. “It’s me,” I said.

“Brady?”

“Yes.”

“How nice.”

“I’m just around the corner.”

“Coffee? Drink?”

“Coffee. Be there in five minutes.”

Then I went back to my car and sat and smoked another cigarette.

“W
HAT A SURPRISE,” SAID
Kat when she opened the door. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a man’s white shirt with the tails hanging loose. “What brings you to town?”

“Who, you mean.”

“Okay, who, then.”

“A guy named Ernie Cooper.”

I followed her into the living room. “You really want coffee,” she said, “or was that a figure of speech?”

“Really coffee.”

I sat on the sofa and she moved across the room to the kitchen area. “Who’s Ernie Cooper?” she said. Her back was to me as she loaded up her coffee maker.

“Maggie’s boyfriend. He was with her that night.”

Without turning around, she said, “The night she was killed, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Did he kill her?”

“No.”

She came back and sat beside me. “It’ll be ready in a minute. I was going to get it started when you called. Then I thought maybe it wasn’t coffee you really wanted.”

“No, that’s what I wanted.”

“So what is it?” she said. “Something’s bothering you. What’s the matter?”

“I’m trying to start over again. Thinking about these murders.”

“Why don’t you let the police worry about them?”

“I’d like to. I can’t help it.”

“So what is it you’re thinking?”

I stood up and went to the big windows that looked out over the moored sailboats in the Merrimack. Lights showed from some of them. Their reflections belly-danced on the rippling currents. “We’ve got three murders,” I said. “I’m thinking that it’s three times more likely that there’s one murderer around here than three of them. I mean, most people don’t commit murder.”

“But which one? Do you think Marc…?”

“No. Marc didn’t kill anybody.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I’m not sure about anything. I just don’t think he did. I talked to Andrea Pavelich. Anyway, he couldn’t have killed her. They know where he was when she was shot.”

“Her husband?”

“Big Al? A mean son of a bitch. Maybe. Except I can’t think of a single reason why he’d want to kill Maggie or Greenberg. And of course, neither one of them could’ve killed Andy.”

“They were dead before her.”

“Yes.”

She came and stood beside me. She leaned her cheek against my shoulder. “I like to look at the boats at night,” she said softly. “It’s so peaceful.”

“I’ve made a lot of assumptions,” I continued. “They all more or less seemed to work. Then along comes Ernie Cooper.”

“How does that change anything?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. It just seems to skew everything a little. It knocked over my assumption that Greenberg made love with Maggie, for example. It’s like a row of dominoes. Maybe Greenberg didn’t even see Maggie that night. Maybe it wasn’t even Maggie he was looking for. Maybe…”

She squeezed my arm. “Maybe you’d like your coffee now.”

She moved away from me. I went back and sat on the sofa. In a minute she brought me a mug of coffee. I lit a cigarette and sipped from the mug. “Snooker told me he saw Maggie with a bald man.”

“Snooker Lynch?”

I nodded. “Ernie Cooper is bald. So was Greenberg.”

“So?”

I shrugged.

“You think too much,” she said.

“It’s a curse.”

Kat lay her head back against the top of the sofa and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I’m so screwed up,” she whispered.

“Me too.”

“You’re nice to still be my friend.”

“Or at least your lawyer.”

She sat up and turned to look at me. She was frowning. “No, I mean it. Most men…”

“Are just after what they can get,” I finished for her.

She nodded. “It’s true, actually.”

“Maybe for teenagers, Kat.”

She smiled. “You think everyone is like you.”

“No I don’t. Some people commit murder.”

“Anyway, it’s nice to have someone who understands.”

“You think I understand you?”

She arched her eyebrows and smiled. “Better than most.”

“It’s not that I necessarily understand,” I said. “Maybe it’s just that I’m willing to accept. That doesn’t make me nice. Or smart, either, for that matter.”

“I think it’s nice.” She put her hand on the back of my neck. “I wish…”

I leaned forward to stub out my cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. Her hand fell away. When I sat back, she had retreated to the corner of the sofa, where she huddled with her legs tucked up under her.

“Tell me more about what you think,” she said after a minute.

“About what?”

“All the murders.”

I shook my head. “It’s like some sweater that was all knitted, and maybe the sleeves weren’t quite the right length, and maybe there was a stitch dropped here and there and the design was a little messed up, but it was okay. It kept you warm. It worked. And then you look at it a certain way and you know it just isn’t right. I mean, I don’t knit, but it seems to me that once you see something you spent a lot of time on, that you worked hard to create according to a picture in your head, once you see that it doesn’t look right, you’ve got to tear it apart and start all over again. So that’s how I feel about all of this. I feel like I’m sitting here with big snarls of yarn all around me and I’ve got to start putting it together in some new way that makes sense, so it’ll look neater than the sweater I just ripped apart. I’ve got to get the old sweater out of my mind. I’ve got to find a new pattern and start over again.”

“A pattern,” she said.

“Yes. Reasons. Logic. Sequence. Cause and effect. I’ve got to see how everything fits together.”

“If it does.”

“Well, yes. But it has to.”

“Things aren’t always neat,” said Kat. “There’s a lot of randomness in this world.”

“Well, I don’t believe in randomness. I believe randomness is just a rationalization. Something for the simpleminded. A way of accounting for what we don’t understand without needing to explain it.”

“What about faith? What’s left over after we understand all we can, the randomness, the unexplained, if we attribute it to God, or the gods, we can account for everything.”

“I don’t think we need God for that. God is just as bad an explanation as randomness. God is for lazy people.”

“Or frightened ones.”

I finished my coffee and put the mug on the table. I stood up.

Kat watched me out of big, solemn eyes. “Are you leaving already?”

“Yes.”

She got up and walked with me to the door. “Going home to do some knitting, huh?”

I smiled. “It’s a weakness of mine. Trying to make order.”

She put her hands on the fronts of my shoulders with her head bowed. “Well, good luck, I guess,” she mumbled.

I kissed the top of her head. “Thanks.”

“I suppose you’ll lay awake all night.”

“It happens to me sometimes.”

She lifted her face. “You probably don’t want to kiss me.”

I touched her cheek. “Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

As I walked down the corridor from her door, she said, “Be careful, Brady.”

I turned. She lifted her hand to me and then closed the door.

It was a little after eleven when I got back to my apartment. My bottle of Jack Daniel’s was on the counter where I had left it when Ernie Cooper called me. I found the tumbler on the table by the sliding doors that opened onto my balcony. There was about a half inch of piss-colored dregs left in the bottom. I rinsed it out, poured in some more Black Jack, dropped in four ice cubes, and took it out to the balcony. I sat on the aluminum chair, tilted back, and propped my feet up on the rail.

I realized I hadn’t eaten any supper. Somewhere along the way hunger had come and gone. The hell with it. I could think better on an empty stomach anyway, with maybe a little sippin’ whiskey to lubricate the gears.

The big sky over the harbor was full of stars. The moon was low and big, a few days shy of full, and it lit up the flat black skin over the ocean and the islands scattered out toward the horizon. First booze, then coffee, then booze again. I figured they all neutralized each other.

I drank and smoked and thought. The breeze came at me from the sea, moist and organic. The bell buoy out there clanged its mournful rhythm. From behind me came the muffled city noises—the wheeze of traffic through the nighttime streets, the occasional punctuation of siren and horn, the almost subsonic hum and murmur of dense human life.

I remembered the Vermont woods, and my picnic with Kat, and how the birds and bugs and animals and river sounded, and how the pine forest smelled, and how my rainbow trout never missed his mayfly.

And while one part of my mind registered all of these surface things and wandered freely on its own associations, a different part of it looked for pattern and purpose in three North Shore murders, and a third part watched what was going on and tried not to judge it or guide it.

I might even have dozed, because the buzz of the telephone startled me.

I went inside and picked up the receiver in the kitchen. I tucked it against my neck and said, “Coyne,” as I poured more whiskey into my glass.

I heard silence. “Yes? Hello?” I said again, taking the phone on its extra-long cord to a chair by the table, from which I could continue to watch the harbor.

After another long moment, a soft voice said, “Brady?”

“Kat? Is that you?”

I could hear her breathing. “Yes.”

“What’s up?”

“Oh, Brady…”

“Kat. Are you all right?”

She yawned softly. “Oh, yes. I’m fine. Sleepy.”

“Feeling lonely?”

A quiet chuckle seemed to get stuck in her throat. “You got it all figured out yet?”

“I don’t—”

“All the murders.”

“I’ve done some thinking.” I sipped my drink and looked out at the night.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said after another long pause. “She hit her head and her eyes… She was lying there, her head was all twisted, and she was looking at me and I knew she couldn’t see me. She just slipped when I pushed her. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way. But I couldn’t let her tell. She was going to tell him.”

I sat erect in my chair. “Kat?”

“Shh,” she said. “You’ve got to understand. He couldn’t know. She was going to tell him. She said when we got home she was going to tell him. I was just trying to make her not tell. It was just for him. Everything was for him. Oh, I miss her so.”

“How did it happen?” I asked quietly.

I could hear her breathing. She didn’t speak.

“Kat? Tell me how it happened.”

“He came into my room. Oh, I loved him so much, then, and he touched me here… and he touched me here… oh, it feels… he made me feel so good when he came into my room at night when they were sleeping and I was sleeping and he’d wake me up touching me here and whispering and we had to be so quiet… And then she took me away and I was sick and it hurt and hurt and she was going to tell him, she said she had to tell him, and I said you can’t. You can’t tell him. It’s not fair. I told you. It’s a secret. And she said she had to anyway. So I pushed her, and she… her eyes… So I took her purse by the trains, I left her there and I got on the train and I saw the people running and rushing and yelling and I watched from the window and then the train moved faster and faster.”

I fumbled for a cigarette. When I held a match to it, I saw that my hands were trembling.

“Oh, Brady. Oh I want you. But I can’t. And you won’t. Since he came into my room at night and touched me oh I just can’t.” She sighed deeply. I waited. “I tried to be so good,” she whispered in a slurry voice. “For him. Perfect. I could make it all right if I was perfect. But then that man… He knew and he told her so I had to…”

“Greenberg?” I said.

“Oh, shh,” she said. “Please. Shh.”

“Did you kill Greenberg, Kat?”

“He wanted to… you know, he wanted… what they all want. All except Brady. Brady’s always knitting, knitting…”

A cloud drifted across the moon. I heard Kat yawn.

“Blood, blood, blood. And she laughed at me, lying there all sleepy-eyed, full of her sex, I couldn’t let her laugh like that.”

“Kat, listen to me. I’ll be right there, okay? Don’t do anything, don’t go anywhere. Just wait for me.”

“Her eyes, just like when the train, and her eyes, too, and it made me remember and I didn’t want, I never want to remember, I sometimes forgot for a minute and it was like dreams underwater all fuzzy and faraway, and then she laughed so I had to make her stop before she found out. Brady? Brady? Are you there, Brady?”

“I’m here, Kat. And I’m going to come to be with you.”

“No. You keep knitting.” She yawned. “It’s all soft and cottony here. See, oh, it was his fault, when he came to me and touched me here like this. So he had to pay the way I had to pay but he never knew so he couldn’t feel it the way I always felt it. He didn’t have it, that hurt in my belly, Brady, always there, and the buzzing always in my head. And that’s why… I didn’t think about her children, little things in their pajamas, but that wasn’t fair, either, not when I had to… I was just a little girl, then, and I always felt like a little girl, and her children were crying at the blood but it was only fair that he should pay, too.”