Dead Winter (9 page)

She usually found a way of setting me straight.

I made a few phone calls. Charlie McDevitt was out to lunch. Shirley, his secretary, told me about her new granddaughter. I expressed awe that she could be a grandmother. She told me this was number nine. I guessed she had been a child bride. She giggled.

I caught Kat Winter between appointments. “It was nice to see you,” she said.

“Ditto.”

“So tell me. Did my darling brother do in his wife?”

“I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”

She was silent for a moment. “I wish I could believe that.”

“Marc’s not a murderer, Kat.”

“You know him so well.” She laughed quickly. “Anyway, Brady. I hope you’ll take Daddy fishing one day soon. He’s not going to handle this thing too well.”

“I should be able to shake loose later in the week.”

“Try to arrange it so we can have dinner. Swordfish’s fresh at the Grog.”

I promised to try.

Doc Adams was at the hospital repairing a cleft palate. Susan Petri, his unbearably sexy assistant, told me he wouldn’t be back to the office. I wondered how Doc ever got anything done around there, with Susan slinking around to distract him, or how his wife, Mary, tolerated it. Something solid in that marriage.

So much for returning my phone calls. I glanced at my watch. A little after three. I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. My stomach had passed the point of hunger. A vague nausea had set in. I went over to the mini refrigerator in the corner and took out a can of Pepsi. A little jolt of sugar and caffeine would straighten me out.

My phone buzzed. I sat at my desk and picked it up. “Mr. Horowitz is on line two,” said Julie. “Look, Brady. There are two columns of Greenbergs just in the Boston directory. Seven Nathans, plus two with N for an initial.”

“So call ’em up.”

She sighed. “I haven’t even looked in the suburban books.”

“Whatever you can do.”

“Take line two.”

I hit the button. “What’d you come up with?” I said to Horowitz.

“Time of death,” he said without preliminary, “estimated between ten and one. See, they take the body temperature, factor it in with the environmental temperature, compute the loss. They examine the stomach contents, and if they know when the deceased ate last—”

“I know about this stuff,” I said.

“—add in lividity. That’s—”

“Yeah. How gravity pools the blood when it stops circulating.”

Horowitz paused. “Anyway. Between ten P.M. and one A.M. That’s what they came up with.”

“She hadn’t been dead that long when Marc found her, then.”

“If you want to trust this estimate,” said Horowitz. “Forensic pathology’s not a very precise science. Even when they do it right. Which they don’t always do, you know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t shatter my illusions that way.”

“Hey,” he said. “One of the pleasures of my life, shattering illusions. Especially yours.” I heard him chuckle softly. “More to the point,” he continued, “the police will take this estimate—what the M.E. very candidly calls an estimate, and what everyone knows is crude at best—and they’ll convert it into rigorous fact. If you were at the scene of the crime at five minutes of ten holding a bloody bludgeon, you’re clear. Because the thing had to’ve happened after that. If you’ve got an alibi starting at ten-oh-five, tough shit. You’re a suspect. That’s how cops think.”

“Which would seem to clear Marc.”

“Assuming his girlfriend is telling the truth, and everybody’s got their times straight.”

“I assume those things.”

“The Newburyport cops don’t know those things. The Newburyport police don’t even know about the girl. If there was a girl.”

“Oh, there was a girl.”

“And if she was telling you the truth.”

“I felt she was,” I said lamely.

Horowitz snapped his gum. “Before ten, after ten. That’s all they’ll care about.” I heard the rustling of papers. “I talked with our officer on the case, who’s real intrigued by one thing.”

“I’m not going to have to beg you, am I?”

“You’re buying me lunch, I’m helping you out.” He cleared his throat. “It’s the sperm they found in the girl. It seems to explain things.”

“Sure,” I said. “It gives Marc his motive. Cheating wife. Tried and true motive. He suspects she’s fooling around. Follows her to the boat, waits for her paramour to show up, listens while they murmur and moan and cry out in ecstasy, getting more and more pissed off, waits for the guy to leave, goes aboard, confronts Maggie. They argue. She makes reference to his diminished masculinity. Taunts him. Tells him she’s got a million lovers. He calls her a slut. Whatever. He loses it. Clobbers her. She dies. So he leaves. Changes his clothes. Goes back and calls the cops.”

“Except for this girl you say can alibi him.”

“Right. Fourier doesn’t know about her. So, okay. After Marc kills Maggie, he calls Andy Pavelich, goes to meet her, brings her back to the boat and pretends to discover the body. Takes his date home, goes back to the marina and calls the cops.”

“That would fit,” said Horowitz.

“Except for the times.”

“Those estimates are crude.”

“There’s something else, too, of course.”

“Sure—”

“The guy who screwed Maggie,” I said.

“Naturally. That guy could’ve whacked her. Problem is—”

“They don’t know who that guy is. And they do know who Marc is. Bird in the hand.”

“Cops tend to think that way,” said Horowitz.

“Well, what does your investigator say? They going to arrest Marc?”

“Our investigator doesn’t say anything. Fourier’s the one who’s on Winter’s case. They’ve got nothing but circumstance. They can’t place your client there at the alleged time of death. No weapon. No certifiable motive. Supposition, that’s really all they’ve got. Still,” he added, “it doesn’t look good. There is this witness who saw Winter drive up and go directly to the telephone. Neat sort of case, actually. Real nice suspect. Possible motives up the ying yang.” Horowitz sounded a bit nostalgic, as if he wished it were his case.

“You got a name for that witness?”

Horowitz paused. I heard papers riffle. “Nope.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Anonymous tip. Unreliable witness. Vague on description. Drunk, maybe. Hard to say.”

“Well, listen. I appreciate it,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll pay.”

“Willingly.”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“Me? I’m going home, have a bowl of Lipton’s chicken noodle soup and go to bed. I feel cruddy.”

“About your client, I mean.”

“Nothing. He hasn’t been accused of anything.”

“That’s what I’d do, too.”

I watched the first three innings of the Red Sox game. It was six to one, Baltimore. Hurst was wild. I snapped off the television and went out onto the little balcony that clings to the side of my apartment building. I snuffled in a few lungfuls of sea air. From my perspective six stories up in the air, Boston Harbor lay tranquil before me. A ferry, carrying a load of pleasure seekers on an aimless, alcoholic cruise of the harbor islands, scrolled a white wake across the sea’s moonlit surface. The sounds of a rock band echoed up to me. In the harbor’s murky depths, I knew, all sorts of foul chemicals were busy reacting with each other. Deadly bacteria mutating like crazy. Fish gasping and dying. Mollusks growing fat on the poisons.

The patch of Atlantic Ocean in front of me had recently been proclaimed the dirtiest in the land. Considering all that, it didn’t smell so bad.

I went back inside, brushed my teeth, dropped my clothes onto the floor, and crawled naked between the sheets. I picked up my tattered copy of
Moby-Dick
and opened it to a random page. Excellent bedtime reading. It never failed to make my eyelids droop.

The phone beside the bed jangled. This was getting to be a habit. I picked it up.

“This is Coyne,” I said.

I heard a series of staccato grunts, like a chain saw that was reluctant to start.

“Hello?” I said. “Who is this?”

There was a moment of silence. Then a high-pitched voice stammered, “Eyesore maybe swisher ballman.”

“Excuse me? I didn’t understand—”

I heard a click.

I wondered what Snooker Lynch had been trying to say to me.

I
SCRIBBLED THE SYLLABLES,
as well as I could phonetically work them out, into the inside cover of
Moby-Dick:

Eyesore maybe swisher ballman.

I looked at it and added a couple question marks.

It must have been Snooker Lynch, the retarded guy who had been leaning on my car in Des Winter’s driveway, though I wouldn’t have thought Snooker would know how to use a telephone, never mind look up my number in the book. Hard to know how much significance to place on anything that Snooker Lynch might tell me, even if I knew what he was trying to say.

I put Melville’s tome back onto the bedside table and flicked off the light. My eyelids clanged shut.

I awoke, as usual, before I wanted to. I pulled on a pair of sweat pants and shuffled barefoot to the kitchen. Beyond the expanse of glass of the sliders, I could see that a heavy cloudbank had cruised in overnight and settled over the harbor. It hadn’t yet started to rain.

I loaded up the electric coffee machine and retrieved the morning
Globe
from outside my door. I tossed it onto the kitchen table and retreated to the bathroom, where I showered and shaved. By the time I had donned my office clothes, my coffee was ready. I poured a mugful and took it and my newspaper out onto the balcony.

I found Maggie’s story in the Metro section on page twenty-seven under the headline
NORTH SHORE WOMAN CLUBBED TO DEATH
.

The body of a Newburyport woman was found aboard a pleasure craft moored in the Merrimack River early Monday morning by local police. She had apparently been killed by repeated blows to her head with a heavy clublike object.

According to police spokesman, Newburyport Detective John Fourier, the dead woman has been identified as Margaret Winter, wife of Marcus Winter of Newburyport.

“At this stage of the investigation,” said Fourier in a prepared statement, “we have arrested no one. We are cooperating fully with the state police.”

Fourier indicated that the police are pursuing several promising leads.

Dozens of trees had been slain to provide enough paper for all the words that had been written about the bones in Bill Walton’s feet. Barrels of ink had been consumed in printing the stories about an obscure tendon in Oil Can Boyd’s pitching arm.

Maggie’s death got four short paragraphs.

For Des’s sake, I was glad it was short and obscure and made no mention of his connection to her.

Another story on the page facing the piece on Maggie caught my eye.
SLAIN ATTORNEY IDENTIFIED
, it read.

The body of a man found stabbed to death in a Danvers motel Monday has been identified as Nathan R. Greenberg.

Greenberg, 43, was an attorney from Asheville, North Carolina.

Bernard Tabor, manager of the Sleepytime Motel in Danvers, told reporters that he became suspicious when a Do Not Disturb sign remained on Greenberg’s door after checkout time on Monday. “Finally,” said Tabor, “I unlocked the door. It was about one in the afternoon. There was blood all over the place, and this little bald guy is lying there on the bed with no clothes on and he sure looked dead to me. But I knew enough not to touch anything. I called the police.”

Danvers police indicate that Greenberg died of multiple stab wounds. They are seeking for questioning a woman who allegedly visited the victim in the evening.

Julie had observed that there were a lot of Green-bergs in the phone book, several of them named Nathan. She called them all. None admitted to calling my answering machine on Sunday.

Here was another Nathan Greenberg. This one was from North Carolina. He wouldn’t have been in any of the phone books Julie used. He had been a lawyer. He could have called me on Sunday and left a message on my machine. He probably couldn’t have called me on Monday. He was dead on Monday.

In a motel in Danvers.

Which lies very close to Newburyport.

I reread the story. Something bothered me about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I pondered it as I ate a cold wedge of leftover pepperoni and sausage pizza and drank a big glass of orange juice for breakfast.

I tried to figure it out as I drove from my apartment to my office in Copley Square.

When I sat at my desk, I read the story again.

The motel owner referred to Greenberg as a “little bald guy.” I reread the phrase. Bald guy. Bald man.
Ballman.

Eyesore maybe swisher ballman.

What could a person who talked as if he had a mouthful of congealed oatmeal be trying to say that would come out sounding like that?

Something about a bald man, I was willing to bet. And I was further willing to bet the bald man in question, the
ballman
Snooker Lynch tried to tell me about over the telephone, was none other than the dead Nathan Greenberg who, I also believed, was the identical Nathan Greenberg who had tried to contact me.

I wrote Snooker Lynch’s verbal burps and grunts, as I had spelled them phonetically, onto a yellow legal pad and stared at them. If
ballman
truly was “bald man,” and Snooker’s ballman
was
Nathan Greenberg, then I was prepared to believe that Greenberg’s death was connected to Maggie’s.

I went out to Julie’s desk. She was busy at the computer. “Excuse me,” I said.

Without turning she said, “Hang on a sec.”

She tapped at the keys for another minute or two, then swiveled her head to look up at me. “Yes, my lord?”

“Remember that phone message from Greenberg?”

She nodded.

“You said he didn’t sound Jewish, remember?”

“Well, he didn’t.”

I touched her shoulder. “Don’t get huffy. What did he sound like to you?”

She frowned. “He spoke soft. Southern accent, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

She shrugged. “He sounded southern, yes.”