High Season (26 page)

“I'm one gigantic ear.”

“The guy fifteen years ago was an art dealer in New York. Supposedly reputable—friend of a friend. He had a hot new gallery in SoHo. Getting lots of press, very big deal. He likes my stuff, gives me a one-man show. Two years' worth of work. It's a huge success—the show sells out within a week.”

“No wonder you beat the crap out of him.”

“Do you want me to tell the story or not?”

“Sorry.”

“The show comes down, the art gets shipped—I don't get paid. I'm not worried. The guy's got a major reputation; all the word of mouth is good. Two weeks, I give him a call. Don't worry, he says—as soon as he collects from all the buyers, he'll write me a big fat check. A month later, nothing. I start dropping by the gallery, but he's never there. I call him at home—answering machine. The guy has gone fucking invisible. One day I go to the gallery and the place is empty, locked up with a
FOR RENT
sign in the window. I hire a lawyer—we're gonna sue the guy, but we have to wait in line. Turns out he's a total cokehead and has pissed away millions of dollars on houses in the Hamptons and fancy cars and lingerie models, God knows what.
Every
body's suing the little bastard. The cops are after him. He goes into bankruptcy and disappears. No lawsuit, no money, no
nada
.”

“So you were pissed.”

“Pissed? I was fucking
furious
. I swore if I ever ran into him I'd rip his head off and cram it up his ass.”

“So . . .”

“So one day, about two years later, I'm in this bar in Brooklyn. I go to take a leak, and guess who's standing at the next urinal?”

“Uh-oh.”

“That's pretty much what
he
said. He almost drowned. Took three guys to get him out of the toilet.”

“So he called the cops . . .”

“And the rest is history. Ancient.”

“Did you try to kill him?”

“I was a navy SEAL, Coffin. If I'd wanted to kill him, he'd be dead.”

“A SEAL? You?”

“Six years. Three tours in Nam. My unit was so fucking secret it didn't have a name.”

Coffin's eyebrows went up. “You're full of surprises today.”

“Whatever,” Kotowski said, waving a hand. He belched softly, then took a swallow of beer. “I've been thinking.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I've been
thinking,
” Kotowski said, scowling at Coffin, “about the whole scene at Town Hall the other day. My rage got the better of me, and that's not good. I'm damn near sixty years old—I need to find some serenity. I'm thinking of becoming a Taoist.”

“What about therapy? Psychotropic drugs, maybe.”

Kotowski snorted. “Therapy's for suckers,” he said. Then he raised his beer bottle in a mock toast. “And I prefer my drugs in nonprescription form.”

“What do you have to do to become a Taoist?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? No burnt offerings or ritual mutilation?”

“Nope.”

Coffin sipped his beer. “Then how do you know if you've become one?”

“There's no becoming. There's just being. If it's in your nature to be a Taoist, then you're a Taoist.”

“Okay, fine. So what exactly do Taoists believe?”

“That things are the way they are because that's how it's supposed to be.”

“That's it?”

“Yep.”

“That's not a religion—it's just a giant excuse. What about war and famine and AIDS?”

“You're negative like that because it's in your nature. You can't help it, see?”

“But religion is supposed to help us understand things—it's supposed to comfort us when times are bad. Just saying things are the way they are because that's how they're supposed to be doesn't explain anything.”

“And Western religions do? A God with a big white beard who lives in the sky and claims to love us but tortures and kills us by the millions? That helps you make sense of things?”

“What about
faith
? What about
believing
in something?”

“It's your nature to want to believe in things.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Coffin said.

 

It was late when Coffin finally got home. Jamie and Lola were gone, and all the dishes were washed and put away. There was a note on the kitchen counter:

Dear Frank,
You're gone. It's late. We thought about taking a long, hot, sudsy shower together but decided it wouldn't be any fun without you.
Kidding.
See you tomorrow?
XO
Jamie

Coffin drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink. The tap water tasted mossy and metallic. He sat on the porch swing and smoked a before-bed cigarette, listening to the crickets and the faint rush of traffic along Route 6. In the old days, according to Thoreau,
when the wind was blowing right you could hear the Atlantic surf from the town center. Not anymore. The dunes and the densely built town blocked it; the small hubbub of thousands of human lives drowned it out. Now all you could hear was the
Tonight Show
on the neighbor's TV set. He finished the cigarette, flipped the glowing butt out into the yard, and went to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W
hy don't you go sit down, Frank? Why don't you come outside with me and get some air?”

“The other one,” Coffin said. His hands are shaking. “The one in the bathroom.”

“I don't think you should go in there, Frank. You really don't look so good. I think you should come outside with me and get some air.”

But Coffin pulls away and walks down another short hallway to the bathroom. His legs seem too long, like he's walking on stilts
—
the floor keeps falling away in front of him. The bathroom door is open and at first he doesn't see the body, just the big clawfoot tub, the floor still tracked with dirty water. “Oh boy,” Coffin hears himself say. “Oh boy. Oh boy.” The tub is half full of gray water. A naked child, a girl maybe eight years old, rests just below the surface, her long blond hair streaming around her narrow shoulders, around her face, which is angelic, intact.

Oh boy. Oh boy.

Rashid comes in. Coffin is on his knees by the tub, clutching the drowned girl in his arms. Her head and arms flop as he cradles her
against his chest. He keeps patting her back. “Oh boy,” he says, over and over. “Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy.”

“Frank, man,” Rashid says, putting a hand on Coffin's shoulder. “Easy now. Easy now, Frank.”

 

“Frank.”

“No . . .”

“Frank.”

“Lights. Bad.”

“Frank,” Lola said, “it's Louie Silva. They found him in the marsh. You need to get up.”

Coffin opened his eyes, then closed them again. The lights in his bedroom were unbearably bright. Lola, in uniform, was shaking his arm.

“Okay,” he said. “Enough with the shaking already. What time is it?”

“It's 5:00
A.M.
”

“Louie's dead?”

“Yes. I'm sorry, Frank.”

“I think I'm naked,” Coffin said, looking under the sheet.

“I'll wait in the car.”

 

The Rescue Squad had already arrived. They stood around the ambulance in big rubber waders, smoking cigarettes.

Tony was wrapping everything in sight in yellow police tape.

“He's still out there, Frankie,” Tony said. He was pale; his lips were pressed into a tight line. Louie was his first cousin. “It's pretty bad.”

The roof of Louie's car was just visible, a gleaming silver dome
emerging from the marsh's green, muck-clotted surface. There were tire tracks on the bank and a clear trail through the cattails and duckweed, leading out to the all but submerged Mercedes.

Coffin borrowed a pair of waders from one of the rescue boys; they were enormous, like rubber clown pants. He slogged into the marsh, fighting the edge-tangle of cattails and the deep muck on the bottom. His heart felt huge and heavy in his chest. He was light-headed, the walking-on-stilts sensation strangely complicated by the marsh's sucking goo.

The Mercedes's passenger compartment was half-filled with water; Louie's silver titanium briefcase floated lazily behind the passenger seat. Louie sat belted into the driver's seat, his head slumped forward. The inside of the windshield was streaked with blood. Louie's forehead was missing. Blood and brain matter covered his face. Gently, Coffin turned Louie's head to the right: There was a scorched entry wound in the back of his skull, just above the spinal juncture.

Coffin turned and vomited into the waist-deep water. “Fucking Christ,” he said when he was done. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. On an impulse, he reached into the car and fished out Louie's briefcase. Then he slogged back to the ambulance, stepped out of the ridiculous waders, and sat down heavily on the bank.

“I'm sorry, Frank,” Lola said, sitting beside him.

“He's got three kids, you know,” Coffin said. “Three girls.” His mouth tasted sour; his eyes hurt.

Lola put an arm around his shoulders. Its weight surprised him.

The roof of Louie's car glowed like a crashed UFO in the aqueous half-light. Tony found them after a while and sat down next to Frank. Mosquitoes whined around them. For a long time, no one said anything. Then Vincent Mancini's black Lexus rolled to a stop on the dirt road.

“Shit,” Coffin said. “The briefcase.”

“I was waiting for the right moment to ask you about that,” Lola said. “Are we removing evidence from a crime scene?”

“Yes.”

Mancini and Pilchard climbed out of the Lexus.

“You two go and distract Mancini,” Lola said, shoving the briefcase under her jacket. “Keep him busy till I get to the car.”

 

“Well, well,” said Mancini, standing next to Coffin's discarded waders. “I see the local constabulary has once again taken it upon themselves to fuck up a perfectly good crime scene.”

“He was my cousin, Mancini.”

“I don't care if he was your goddamn grandmother, Coffin. You and your Keystone Kops have got no business tracking up
my
crime scene.”

“Or harassing witnesses,” said Pilchard.

Mancini leaned toward Coffin. His cologne smelled like cedar shavings. “Detective Pilchard raises an interesting point, Coffin. You've been interviewing witnesses before we get to them. You're not supposed to do that.”

“Jeeze, Frankie,” Tony said. “The briefing—remember?”

“Professional curiosity,” Coffin said. “We live here, you know.” He saw Lola out of the corner of his eye, picking her way around the marsh, thirty yards from the car.

Mancini stuck out his chin. “Your
curiosity
is bordering on criminal misconduct, Detective. If you don't stop fucking up my crime scenes and tainting my witnesses, your next job in law enforcement will be security guard at a 7-Eleven.”

“That's a
very
nice suit,” Coffin said, fingering Mancini's sleeve. “Is that rayon or what?”

“
Rayon?
It's wool, for God's sake. This is
Italian
.”

“If he gets fired,” Tony said, “can he still collect unemployment?”

Pilchard scratched his head. “Fired or laid off?” he said. “If he's fired, it depends on
why
he was fired.”

“For Christ's sake,” Mancini snapped, snatching his sleeve out of Coffin's grasp. He pointed a manicured finger. “Keep away from my crime scenes and my witnesses, Coffin,” he said. “You only get one warning.”

Lola was standing next to the car. She waved, opened the driver's door, and got in.

“No more crime scenes,” Coffin said, patting Mancini's shoulder. “It'll be my pleasure.”

Tony bent close to Mancini's ear. “Dead people freak him out,” he said as Coffin walked off, heading for Lola and the car.

“Hey, Frank,” Tony called. “If you get fired, who gets your office?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C
upcakes and a gun,” Lola said. “Care to guess what's in the envelopes?”

“What the hell was he up to?” Coffin said. They were leaning over his desk in the dank basement office, peering into Louie's open briefcase. It contained three fat manila envelopes, a black and silver Montblanc pen, a yellow legal pad, a Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, and a package of two cellophane-wrapped, cream-filled Hostess chocolate cupcakes.

Coffin wasn't used to wearing latex gloves. They made his hands feel sweaty and swollen. He reached into the briefcase and took out one of the manila envelopes. It was sealed. He slid a letter knife under the flap and looked inside, then passed it to Lola.

“Wahoo,” she said. “Can we keep it?” She turned the envelope upside down, and five rubber-banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills flapped onto the oak desktop.

“If only,” Coffin said, dumping ten bundles of hundreds out of the second big manila envelope.

“God, I love that sound,” Lola said.

Coffin picked up a bundle of bills and riffled it with his thumb. It was nearly an inch thick. “Probably a hundred hundreds in each bundle,” he said.

“Times fifteen is a hundred and fifty grand.”

“Good Lord,” Coffin said, peering into the third manila envelope, which was bigger than the other two and stuffed to the top. He dumped it, too, and counted the bundles. “Plus two hundred fifty thousand.”

“What on earth was he doing with this much cash?”

“I smell bribes,” Coffin said. “I'll bet Louie was on his way to buy a little influence.”