JM03 - Red Cat (20 page)

The news had gone from plowing and digging to melting and flooding, and there was footage of water, water everywhere— on roads, in basements, and coursing through storm drains and subway tunnels. Images of JFK came on the screen, where the runways were clear, and long lines of planes were landing and taking off, and the stranded, rumpled, bleary, and unwashed were more or less on their ways. I looked at Clare, who drank her juice and watched in silence. When the images shifted again— to scenes of plows pushing mountains of snow into the river— she looked at me. I opened my mouth to speak, but Clare beat me to it.

“He’s not flying in from anywhere, if that’s what you’re wondering.” I had been, and now I was wondering why not. A tiny smile flickered on Clare’s lips. “He’s not snowbound anywhere, except at home.”

I sat up. “No?” I said. My voice was tight.

Clare shook her head. “No.”

“Then where does…” There was a little rushing sound in my ears. “What did you—”

“I left him.”

“You…”

“I left him. I walked out.”

I nodded, more out of habit than because I understood anything. “You…what are you—”

“Don’t worry; I’m not planning on moving in. But the storm made it impossible to get a hotel room.” She drank some more juice and looked at me over the top of her glass. “I was going to give it a couple of days, but I can start calling the hotels now if you like.”

“No…I…You don’t have to do that,” I said.

Clare nodded. She went to the kitchen and put her glass in the sink and stood by the windows. Her back was straight and stiff.

“What happened?” I asked. She shook her head but didn’t turn around. “You can stay as long as you need to,” I said, “as long as you want.”

“Which is it,” she asked softly, “ ‘need’ or ‘want’?”

“Whichever,” I said.

She nodded, and watched a wing of snow slide from a rooftop across the street and break into diamonds on the way down. “It’s all coming loose,” she said.

* * *

Clare went for a walk in the afternoon, and didn’t ask for company, and I went for a messy run. My shoes were heavy with water when I got back, and my eyes ached from squinting. Clare was still gone, and still gone when I got out of the shower. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and opened my laptop and my notebook.

I found Phil Losanto’s telephone number on-line, and found him at home, in Yorktown Heights. He had just gotten back from forty-eight hours of skidding across northern Westchester County, covering the county’s response to the storm and, according to him, freezing his freaking nuts off. His voice was permanently tired and permanently amused.

“Plus the wife’s on my ass now ’cause our drive’s the only one on the block that isn’t shoveled. Christ, let me get a Pepsi first.” There was a lot of noise on his end— a television playing loud cartoons, the piercing trills and beeps of a video game, small children fighting, or playing, or both, and a shrill, exasperated woman yelling at them. My heart went out to Phil.

“You wrote a couple of articles a few years ago about Jamie Coyle.”

Phil thought for a while amidst the noise. “Yeah, in Peekskill, right. The kid who beat the crap out of that video store guy. He got sent away for a while.”

“And got out about a year ago. You recall much about him?”

“Enough. Why?”

“Your article talked about him being a star athlete, local-hero type. Was that for real, or was it just good copy?”

Losanto snorted. “What, you don’t trust the press? No, that was mostly for real. Until the knee thing, the kid was a phenomenal defensive tackle— made all-county in his sophomore year— and he was Golden Gloves champ in his class since he was fourteen. As far as the hero part goes…that’s a different story.”

“Don’t leave me hanging, Phil.”

He laughed. Behind him something glass shattered, the woman yelled, and one of the children shrieked. “Even before he got into the collection business, Coyle was no altar boy. He was a hell-raiser in high school, with a bad temper. He got in a few fights, boosted a few cars, and was generally one of the kids the local cops knew by name.”

“Doesn’t sound like a criminal mastermind, though.”

“No, not a mastermind.”

“What happened with the video store guy?”

“Ray Vessic? The usual thing that happens when a guy gets behind and doesn’t listen: somebody like Coyle comes around.”

“Yeah, but when they do, they usually leave the guy in good enough shape to pay— that’s the point of collection, after all. But that guy took a hell of a beating. I was surprised they let Coyle cop to Assault II.”

“He had a good lawyer— Jerry Lavin, rest his soul— and there were maybe some other things going on.”

“What other things?”

Losanto sighed wearily. “I heard it came up in Coyle’s plea negotiations. Apparently Vessic had a sideline going in the back of his store, something a little less mainstream than the latest teen screamer flick.”

“Porn?”

“The kid variety. He was selling the shit, ran chat rooms for the fans, and even made some films himself— all in all, a real prince. Coyle tipped the prosecutors to it, and Jerry even managed to sell them on the idea that finding out about the porn was the reason Coyle went off on Vessic. At the end of the day, it bought the kid the D felony deal.”

“Good lawyer and good luck for Coyle. You have much faith in the outrage story?”

Losanto snorted again. “Who knows? It makes a good tale, and Jerry, God bless him, was a creative guy, but I don’t know.” There was another crash at Losanto’s end, and more yelling. “And now I better get my ass in there, before I got outrage of my own to deal with.”

I put down the phone, pulled my laptop over, and transcribed my notes about Coyle. I read them over, and reread what I already had on him from Arrua, Krug, J.T., Lia, and Werner, and tried to square it all. And couldn’t quite do it. Scary, bad-tempered, and violent— I’d seen those qualities in Coyle firsthand, and they didn’t jibe with the gentle giant, protector of the weak whom Lia had described. And then there was Coyle’s relationship with Holly. According to Krug, Holly was happier than he’d ever seen her, while Werner’s spin was that she was scared and wanted out. I knew who I was inclined to believe, but still…Losanto’s story was interesting but ultimately inconclusive. And of course I still had no idea of where Coyle might be or what he wanted with Werner. I shook my head. Maybe Coyle’s PO…maybe tomorrow.

I pushed the laptop away and looked at my dim windows and wondered where Clare had gone. I got up and stretched and looked outside. The sky was drained of color and darkening at its eastern edge, and the cityscape was gray. I saw cars on the street, and more people, though none who looked like Clare returning. Lights were coming on in windows across the street and across town, scattered yellow pinpoints that only made the dusk seem colder.

23

Mike Metz was wrong about Thomas Vickers: he did call back, or rather his frail-sounding secretary did it for him. It was hideously early on Monday, and I was wrapped in a dream, and in a tangle of blankets, and in Clare’s long legs. She elbowed me awake and I groped for the telephone.

“Mr. March?” the parchment voice said. “I’m calling from Mr. Vickers’s office.” I croaked something back at her, I’m not sure what. “Mr. Vickers would like to see you here, this afternoon at three,” she said. There was no Are you available? and not the slightest thought that I would decline. And I didn’t. She gave me the address, on Broadway south of Wall, and rang off.

I looked at the clock: too early to call Mike. I propped myself on my elbow and looked outside. Ridged fangs of ice hung from the tops of my windows and shook in the wind that shook the glass. The sky was a thin, clear blue. Something— a gull— blew sideways across it, east to west and gone. A chill ran through me. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. Dust motes swam, and the last pieces of my dream tumbled past. Something with Holly— her icon’s face and kohl eyes and thousand-yard stare, and behind her the shadowed figure of a man, Bluto, maybe. And then it vanished, spinning away, faster than the gull.

* * *

When we finally rose, hours later, Clare moved quickly, showering, dressing, breakfasting, and slipping on her coat, all before I’d shaved. I asked her where she was going, and even to me the question sounded odd.

Clare smirked. “To see my lawyer,” she said, and she turned up the collar of her long black coat.

I nodded. “Is he a good one?”

“Jay’s the best,” she said. “Not that there’s much for him to do. The pre-nup leaves nothing to the imagination.”

“And that’s a positive thing?”

“It is to me,” she said, and her grin turned chilly.

After she left, I showered and shaved and sat at my laptop with a slice of toast. It took an hour and a half of typing, calling, navigating mazes of telephone menus, and waiting on bad-music hold, for me to find the guy who’d been Jamie Coyle’s parole officer. He was in the Division of Parole office in New Rochelle, and his name was Paul Darrow. He had a rich Bronx baritone, and what sounded like a nasty head cold.

“Don’t tell me Jamie got himself jammed up again. For chrissakes, he was one of my success stories— one of the few.”

“I don’t know if he’s jammed up, but I came across his name in a case, and I’m trying to find the guy, or at least find out a little more about him.”

Darrow coughed and snorted, and somebody spoke to him in Spanish. “I got six customers waiting here already, March, so it’s not a real good time.”

“When is?”

He laughed. “Next month maybe, or how about next year?”

I chuckled along with him to be polite, and eventually he consulted his calendar and found a slice of it that he could spare. “I got a meeting down in the city this afternoon, if you want to grab a coffee before.”

“Fine,” I said, and we agreed on a time and place.

I ate more toast and flicked on the news. The storm stories had already begun to fade, coming in fourth behind oil prices, cabinet appointments, and the arrest of a popular action-movie star for exposing himself to the nanny. There was no mention of the Williamsburg Mermaid, not on TV or in the papers. David’s luck was holding.

I called Mike Metz to tell him about the meeting with Vickers, and he was quiet for a bit, while the gears turned.

“You touched some kind of nerve,” he said.

“And maybe not surprisingly. If Vickers’s client really was one of Holly’s costars, he might’ve seen the picture in the papers and recognized the tattoo, and he might find himself in the same kind of leaky boat my brother is in.”

“In which case, we need to be very careful around Tommy.”

“We? You’re coming along.”

“I figure you can always use a little help being careful. And besides, it’ll be good to see that bastard again.”

“You hear any more about the autopsy?”

“Not yet, and I’m assuming the storm slowed things down a little— which is good news for us. Have you spoken to your brother yet?”

“No.”

“But you will?”

“I will,” I said, without enthusiasm.

I went for a run instead.

* * *

I met Paul Darrow at a diner on West Thirty-second Street, not far from the Division of Parole’s Manhattan office. The last of the lunch crowd was paying up and the windows were fogged and dripping. The air was heavy with bacon and burnt coffee and, underneath, some kind of cleaning fluid. The booths were gray vinyl, liberally taped.

Darrow was a bald, barrel-shaped black man of about fifty, with a drooping face, a gray mustache, and wary, watery eyes. I knew him by his sneeze. He wore a sagging jacket of hairy gray tweed, a white shirt gone beige, and a shiny striped tie. His coat and hat sat next to him in the booth, and he was hunched over a teacup, breathing the steam. I slid into the seat across.

He looked up and looked me over. “March?” I nodded. “I didn’t wait for you.” I shrugged and flagged down a waitress and ordered a ginger ale. Darrow sipped at his tea. “You worked that Danes thing, a couple of years ago,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “And that other thing, upstate.” The point being: I looked you up.

I nodded. “What can you tell me about Jamie Coyle?”

Darrow shrugged. “What’s to say? He’s a big, tough kid who, if you looked at him on paper, you’d think, Back inside in a year— two years tops, but who somehow managed to turn it around. Unless you calling me up means something different.”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure it means anything. I’m looking for his girlfriend, so I’d like to talk to him. I can’t seem to find him, though.”

Darrow nodded. “His girlfriend, the artist?”

“You know her?”

“He talked about her— a lot. He was real serious about her.”

“Real serious how?”

“Serious like how she changed his life, and turned his whole world around.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me he was saved by the love of a good woman?”

Darrow smiled and sneezed and blew his nose. When he was done, he shook his head. “I’m saying that’s how Jamie tells it. To me, it sounded like the girl was pretty, and smart, and had money and some class, and that she wanted more from life than pumping out four kids and riding them on the bus on the weekends to see their daddy in the joint. I don’t know that Jamie’s met too many girls like that before, or ever. She lives in a different world, and he sees maybe how he can live there too. For his sake, I hope he’s right. But as for turning his life around, truth is he mostly did that himself, up in Coxsackie.”

“A lot of good time?”

“Yeah. He had trouble to start— that place is no tennis camp, and him being a white boy and all— but he didn’t hurt anybody too bad, or get hurt himself, and he went through a lot of the anger management courses, counseling and stuff, and did a lot of college work. He was halfway to a degree by the time he got out. Said he wanted to finish.”

“Smart kid?”

“Smarter than he looks, and especially smart when he watches his temper. He’s not afraid to work, either; he’s ambitious in his own way.”

“He have problems with the temper?”

“He used to, but it looked like he had it beat.”