Marine Corpse (22 page)

I stubbed out my cigarette. My head hurt. “Well,” I said, “Becker didn’t seem to make that kind of connection.”

“He probably did, but didn’t share it with you. I wouldn’t tell you anything if I was him, that’s for sure.”

“I do seem to have a penchant for fouling things up.”

“A penchant. That you do.”

“I was very fond of all three of them, Zerk.”

“You were sleeping with Heather, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m sorry, man. Really.”

“I know,” I said. “I’d like to have a chance at Lee with an icepick,” I added.

“Let’s not get melodramatic, my man. You’re the same guy who puts back all his trout, and picks up spiders and takes them outside, right?”

“This is different.”

“Leave it to the cops.”

“I am. I will.”

“You all right?”

“I’ll get by.”

“If you need anything…”

“Like spiritual counseling? You’re a master at that.”

“I know,” said Zerk.

I didn’t sleep much that night, and I made it through the next morning because, after I told her what had happened, Julie pushed me unmercifully to catch up on my paperwork.

In the afternoon Al Santis came into the office.

“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said when Julie showed him in.

“I’ll bet,” I said. “Coffee?”

“Yeah. Good.”

“I’ll get it,” said Julie. “My turn.”

“I think it’s mine,” I said.

“You can owe me, then,” she said.

When she left, Santis said, “You take turns getting coffee?”

“Sure. It’s only fair.”

“If I had a secretary, she’d always get the coffee.”

“Not if you had Julie for a secretary you wouldn’t.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. We sat on the soft furniture in the informal corner of my office. He ran his hand over the blood-red Moroccan leather upholstery of the armchair he had chosen. “Nice. Very nice.”

Julie came in with two mugs of coffee. Santis accepted his with a grunt, spooned in two helpings of sugar, and sipped it, watching Julie over the rim of his mug as she bent to give me mine. When she left, he said, “That’s nice, too.”

“The coffee, you mean.”

He squinted at me, to see if I were joking. I smiled perfunctorily to let him know I was.

“So,” I said, “you just happened to be in the neighborhood. This is a social call, then.”

“Naw. ’Course not. Thought you might like to fill me in on what happened last night.”

“You heard.”

“Oh, sure. We’re getting all coordinated and organized and mobilized and everything, now. Something happens out in the ritzy suburbs, all of a sudden it’s a big deal. We got the State cops in on it now, and that Fed, Becker, he’s right in the middle of things. I understand it was you who found the body.”

I nodded, and told Santis what had happened. While I talked, he sipped his coffee and allowed his eyes to wander around my office. He grunted a few times to let me know he was still listening.

When I finished, he said, “Well, we picked up David Lee this morning.”

“And?”

“And we let him go.”

I set my mug down on the coffee table. “You
what
?”

“We let him go. We had him in there for three hours. We had four different guys interrogate him. He told everybody exactly the same story. The same one he told you. So far, we’ve got no evidence, nothing to hold him on.”

“What about last night? Where was he last night?”

Santis shrugged. “Home correcting papers, he says. He can’t prove it. But the burden of proof isn’t on him.”

I shook my head. “God,” I muttered. “What do you think? How did he seem to you?”

Santis scowled. “I don’t think anymore, Mr. Coyne. I’m not some kind of headshrinker. I always assume a guy’s lying. I always assume he’s guilty. That’s the way I hafta do my job. But think? What I think is, we’ve got no evidence to hold this guy.”

“He’s got motive, he’s got opportunity…”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What about the forensics? Can’t they come up with something?”

“A murder weapon would help a lot. A bloody shirt. Fingerprints at Kriegel’s house. His skin under her fingernails. All that shit they find on TV that we hardly ever manage to come up with. Hey, maybe we will. But so far, zilch.”

“So David Lee is free.”

“Yup. Oh, we’ll keep an eye on him, as well as we can. Something comes up, we can always invite him back in for more conversation. But right now, that’s it. You know,” he said, cocking his head at me, “you might want to take care of yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re kinda involved in this thing.”

“You mean, Lee might come after me?”

Santis shrugged. “Lee. Or whoever did it. Yeah, I think it’s worth keeping in mind.”

I laughed. “You’re joking. It’s one thing to kill a comatose drunk or an old derelict who’s already dying of tuberculosis. Or an unsuspecting woman, even. But David Lee doesn’t scare me. I hardly think I need to worry.”

“If it was Lee.”

“Who else could it have been?”

He shrugged. “Even so, be careful.”

“Is that what you came to tell me? To be careful?”

He grinned. “That was one thing, yeah.”

“Your concern,” I said, “is touching. Unnecessary, but touching.”

That evening promised to pass slowly. I heated up a frozen pizza and took it and a bottle of Molsen’s to the sofa in front of the television. The seven o’clock news failed to cheer me up, and my mind kept wandering back to the previous night, when I had put my hand on the slope where Heather’s hip dipped to her waist. I had felt a twinge of desire, not realizing that the body under the covers in her darkened bedroom was not alive. The fact of her death seemed more dramatic to me than other deaths I had known. Because, I supposed, she had been especially alive—vivid, energized—and because we had made love, and because I had felt in my own body all the life that was in hers.

And because I had maybe loved her.

I snapped off the tube at seven-thirty, and if anyone had asked me what the big stories of the day were, I couldn’t have told them. Heather’s death was not news, that much had registered.

When the phone rang, I felt an unexpected surge of gratitude. I didn’t care if it was an insurance salesman. I would engage him in conversation, ask after his health and that of his family, and tell him it was good to hear his voice.

It was Gloria. “How are you, Brady?” she said, with that huskiness in her tone that still stirred me.

“Oh, okay.”

“You are an absolute magician, do you know that?”

“A veritable Houdini, that’s me.”

“Well, that goes to show what a father can do. Oh, I think you’ll have to admit that I’ve done a pretty good job with the boys, and, let’s face it, you weren’t always there when they needed you. When
I
needed you. I always felt that there were some things—and I’m as liberated as the next woman, as you know, but still—some things that, especially with sons, a man, a father just had to do.”

“Fishing, camping, baseball, the dangers of venereal disease. Like that,” I said, still trying to figure out what she was talking about.

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

“Sure.” I cleared my throat. “Well, you’ve done a fine job with Billy and Joey, Gloria.”

“Yes, I know. But I’ve got to admit it. This time, when I needed you, you really came through.”

“Well, I try.”

“It’s a big relief, believe me.”

“Oh, well,” I mumbled.

“It’s one of the things I always loved about you, Brady. You were firm in your convictions. You were never a wimp, never wishy-washy. You said what you believed. You knew right from wrong, and you were never afraid to say so.”

“Well, that’s what legal training does for you.”

“The amazing thing,” she went on, “is that he doesn’t even seem to resent it. It’s almost as if it were his own idea.”

“Billy,” I said. “You mean Billy.”

“Of course. Not only is he finishing up the semester, but he seems committed to the next two years, too. He even mentioned graduate school. Amazing.”

“Well, we did have a little conversation.”

“I’ll say you did. I wish I’d been a fly on the wall.”

“It’s probably just as well that you weren’t.”

“Pretty rough, huh? Well, I do appreciate it, anyway. They talk about a woman’s fury, but I guess a father’s fury is something else.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “It can be.”

“Anyway, thanks.”

“I left it up to him,” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, sure. I can imagine. An offer he couldn’t refuse. Listen. I feel like celebrating. Suppose we meet somewhere for a drink? I’ll pay, how’s that?”

“Sounds great, Gloria. Really. A good idea. Ordinarily, I’d say let’s do it. But I’m kinda tied up this evening. Another time. Okay? Let’s do it soon.”

“Sure,” she said. “Understood.” She forced a laugh. “Anyway, I’m glad you read the riot act to Billy. He’s still a kid, you know. He still needs to be told what to do.”

“It was his decision,” I said.

“Right,” she said, chuckling. “Thanks, anyway.”

“It was the least I could do.”

“That,” she said, “is true.”

After we hung up, I sat there in the gloomy, empty silence of my overpriced apartment cell and wondered why I had refused Gloria’s offer. Moments earlier I had been eager to talk to telephone salesmen. It’s not that I don’t like my former wife. I do. I continue to love her, in fact. But I didn’t want to see her, not that evening. Heather was on my mind, I realized, and it seemed that I’d feel better if I suffered a little, if I felt some loneliness, some emptiness of my own. It would be nothing compared to Heather’s.

I pulled on a heavy coat and went out onto the little balcony that hung on the side of the building. The winter air was clear and sharp. It bit at my face like a mouthful of tiny, pointed teeth. The moon and the stars lit up the water, which was as shiny and inky-black as Heather’s plastic body bag. I slouched on one of the aluminum folding chairs I kept out there, staring without focus at the point where the ocean’s curve disappeared over the horizon. I stayed there long after the chill had invaded the last layers of insulation on my body, and the skin on my face had become taut and numb. Then I went inside and stripped for a steamy shower.

And by the time I was toweling myself dry, I found myself humming an old Chuck Berry tune, one that Heather and I had sung together not that long ago in her living room. The memory of her bawdy interpolations made me smile. Coyne’s balcony and shower therapy. Cheaper than a shrink’s sofa, safer than drugs, and, for Coyne, damn reliable. The big empty sky and the boundless sea never failed to pull unraveling strands back into some kind of logical pattern.

Heather was dead, and I had cared for her, and now I missed her. But I knew I would soon be ready to hum our tunes and remember her well.

When the phone rang, I mumbled, “Now what?” before I picked it up.

Al Santis’s voice was decidedly not cheerful. “Mr. Coyne. Some bad news.”

“Christ! What now?”

“Your friend David Lee. He shot himself this afternoon.”

I
FELT AS IF SOMEONE
had rammed his elbow into my solar plexus. I sat down heavily. “What happened?” I said.

“It was around suppertime tonight. He was in his classroom there at the school. Custodian heard the shot. The door was locked from the inside. The janitor had enough sense not to go inside. He just took one look through the window in the door and called the local cops. They eventually called me, and I went out to take a look. Quite a mess.”

“I can imagine,” I said quickly, fumbling for a cigarette and trying
not
to imagine the scene, which worked about as well as when somebody tells you not to think about elephants. “You’re sure it was suicide, though?”

“Like I said, the door was locked from the inside. He ate his gun. A .38, snub-nose, registered to him. Makes a neat little hole going in and a great big mess coming out. All over the blackboard.”

“Spare me, please,” I said. “Was there a note or anything?”

“Of sorts. He wrote something on the board.”

“What?”

“‘You win,’ is what it said.”

“That’s it?”

“That was all. The janitor had washed the boards that afternoon, after all the kids had left, so it’s pretty certain that Lee wrote that. It’s all there was. ‘You win.’ What do you suppose it means?”

“I think the ‘you’ refers to me,” I said.

“Ah, I don’t think you should worry about that,” said Santis. “We were pretty rough on him today. I think it’s simpler than that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I think it means that David Lee was guilty as hell. A bona fide wacko, just like I always thought.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Me, too,” said Santis.

A few days later Al Santis called me again. The Medical Examiner’s reports on both Heather and David Lee had been completed. All the forensics had been done. The police were satisfied that David Lee had been responsible for both deaths—Heather’s and his own—as well as those of Stu Carver and Altoona. The cases were closed, wrapped up and knotted into a tidy package and filed away. They had not recovered an icepick from Lee’s home, but otherwise, according to Santis, the evidence was compelling.

Circumstantial, but compelling.

I tried to sketch out scenarios in my own mind to help me understand it all. I liked the drug story less than the jealous lover script. I saw David Lee as a desperate, insecure, paranoid man, whose personal and professional life had been shattered. Neither murder nor suicide would be unthinkable for such a man.

I tried to persuade myself that Lee was a murderer. Because if he wasn’t, then his suicide was my fault.

As the days passed, it became easier to tranquilize the little jerks and tugs at the edges of my conscience. I just had to remind myself that it was David Lee, after all, not I, who had committed murder. And gradually it became easier to believe.

Oh, there was a twitch now and then, usually at night when I was alone in my apartment and the sky and the ocean outside were black and cold and vast and the world seemed especially empty. Then I would see David Lee’s face, and it wouldn’t be the face of a murderer. I missed Heather then, too, and a little rodent of doubt—or guilt—would nip at the back of my neck. What if I had just minded my own business right from the beginning? What if I had never insisted that Heather tell me about Lee? What if I had refused to tell Lee how I had gotten his name? What if I had showed up at Heather’s house an hour earlier the night she was killed?