Marine Corpse (23 page)

What if David Lee had killed nobody except himself?

But I knew that history, both cosmic and personal, is etched mainly by forces beyond our control. It is a surging river, moving too fast, and it carries us all in its eddies and currents. The best we can do is splash and flutter in it for the few moments that we have. It tumbles us downstream, through time, whether we like it or not. And eventually we drown in it. All of us. No choice.

No, there was no purpose to be served by what-ifs, and whenever I doubted that, I only had to go sit on my balcony for a few minutes and see how the moon and the stars and the planets splashed puddles of light onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. You could look back a million years out there. A million years forward, too.

It put things into perspective.

Julie buzzed me in my office one afternoon in the second week of March, about six weeks after David Lee’s suicide.

“A Joe Barrone for you?” she said, with that rising inflection that demanded to know who this Joe Barrone might be.

“The priest,” I told her. “Put him on.”

“Mr. Coyne,” he said, after I had said hello, “how have you been?”

“Pretty good. You?”

“Still here, ministering to the lame and the halt.”

“They haven’t given you your little parish by the sea, then, eh?” I said.

He chuckled. “No. I’m still waiting.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got something here. I guess you’re the logical person to have it. Old Altoona’s personal effects. There’s not much, just a shopping bag full, but you’re the closest thing to next of kin he had, and I thought you might like to have them.”

“There’s nobody else?”

“The Welfare people checked it out as well as they could. I guess they got nothing out of the computers in Washington or the records of the Commonwealth. As far as they know, Altoona never existed. No idea what his real name was, even. Anyway, I’ve had this stuff sitting here all this time gathering dust.”

“If it’s clothes, why don’t you just give them to your men?”

“I already gave away the clothes. There’s some other things. Couple wood carvings, a pen knife, some paperback books, a transistor radio.”

“Nothing anybody wants?”

“I suppose one of the men might like to have the radio and the knife.”

“I’d like the carvings,” I said, remembering the wooden hand Altoona had crafted for me. “And, just for the sentiment of it, the books. Give the other stuff away. I’ll drop by sometime.”

“I’ll be right here, Mr. Coyne. Doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere.”

A few mornings later I started to head to Marie’s for lunch. It reminded me of the old Monday ritual, when I used to collect Stu’s notebooks and feed Altoona vermicelli and we’d talk current events. It was one of those warm late winter days when little rivulets of melting snow ran from the bottom of the gray piles and formed puddles on the sidewalks. The kind of day that reminded a right-thinking man that the trout season was only a few weeks away. A good day to be outside. So instead of heading back for Marie’s, I pointed myself in the direction of Father Barrone’s mission.

I got there twenty minutes later. The front door of the narrow building was ajar, so I stepped inside. Five or six raggedy old men were lounging in the dimly lit hallway. They glanced at me briefly, without interest, and then looked away. I touched the arm of the man nearest to me. He turned his head slowly and lifted his eyebrows, as if to say, “I’ve already looked at you, sized you up. What now?”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for Father Barrone.”

He ran his hand over the white stubble on his cheeks. “Joe’s up there,” he said, jerking his head toward the end of the hallway.

I nodded. “Thanks,” I said, and shouldered my way around the men. I walked down the hallway to the clinic door and rapped on it lightly. A moment later Joe Barrone stuck out his fox face and said, “I told you, you’ll just have to… Oh, Mr. Coyne. Sorry.”

He stepped out and closed the door behind him. “I’m trying to help the doctor get some medical history in there. Some of the men will talk with me a little. You came for Altoona’s things, right?”

“Yes. If you’re busy…”

“No. It’s all right. Come on.”

I followed him out through the empty diningroom to a tiny office. There was a desk littered with papers, a tall file cabinet, a wall of bookshelves that contained stacks of manila envelopes, loose papers, and a few books. The room had a single dirty window that looked across an airshaft to another brick building. There was a Girl Scout calendar on the wall, along with a framed photograph of Father Barrone shaking hands with Mayor Flynn. The room, from what I could see of it, was completely devoid of religious artifacts. No artist’s rendering of Jesus, no crosses, no photographs of the Pope or the Cardinal. I didn’t even see a Bible on the bookshelves.

The priest moved behind his desk, bent over, and came up with a shopping bag, the kind with twine handles. He handed it to me. “Altoona’s stuff,” he said. “There was a cap and scarf in there, which I forgot to mention to you on the phone. I gave them to a poor fellow who was as bald as Altoona.”

“Good,” I said. “I gave that cap and scarf to him for Christmas.”

“Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t have given them away.”

“No. That’s fine. I’m glad you did.”

He smiled. “Thank you.”

We left the office and walked back toward the front door, where two men were still waiting for their turn in Dr. Vance’s clinic. “Well, thank you for thinking of me,” I said to the priest. “I was very fond of Altoona, as you know.”

“Are you in a hurry, Mr. Coyne?”

I glanced at my new watch, a cheap Timex that I wouldn’t mind having stolen off my wrist. It was a couple of minutes after twelve. “No, not really. Why?”

“Would you like to talk?”

I shrugged. “Sure, if you want.”

“Good. Look, I’ve got to get back to the clinic for a minute. The fellow in there’s in really bad shape. Looks like advanced liver disease. Dr. Vance wants to get him admitted to the hospital, but he needs to pry some data out of him. We’re almost done. Those other fellows are just waiting for their medication, so he doesn’t need me for them. I’ll just be a few minutes. Okay?”

I nodded and took the paper bag that contained all of Altoona’s earthly possessions into the dayroom. I put the bag on a table and peered inside. There were three wood carvings. One had been completed, a miniature decoy, a teal, so exquisitely carved that it looked feather-soft. The other two were roughed out but recognizable—a female torso, and the head and shoulders of what looked like a German shepherd. Both struck my untrained eye as perfectly proportioned. The man had had a talent.

I glanced through the books. They were mostly old, tattered, and evidently well-read paperbacks. In addition to several novels by authors I had never heard of, there was a pocket dictionary, Edith Hamilton’s
The Greek Way
, and John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
. The single hardcover volume was rather new looking, a book called
The Harlem Globetrotters
minus its dust jacket. It explained Altoona’s basketball pantomime. He must have been reading the book at the time of that strange performance.

I lit a cigarette and wandered into the library nook. I glanced idly at the rows of books on the shelves and wondered how many of the St. Michael’s patrons other than Altoona had sampled them. One of them caught my eye.
The Harlem Globetrotters
was printed in bold red letters on the spine of the dust jacket. I slid it from the shelf, assuming it was a duplicate of the book in the shopping bag.

This was a thin volume, and the jacket was too big for it. When I opened it I understood that the old saw about not judging a book by its cover could actually apply to books.

“Sampling our library, eh, Mr. Coyne?”

I closed the book hastily and turned.

“Not many of our men are readers,” said the priest. “It’s too bad. Books are one thing that people are willing to donate.”

I nodded. “Do you mind if I borrow this one?”

“There’s no waiting list. Help yourself.”

I put the book into the shopping bag that contained Altoona’s things. “There was something you wanted to talk about?”

He touched my arm. “Come on.” He steered me out of the dayroom. I brought the shopping bag with me. “What happened to poor old Altoona points up a real problem our men have. Many of them, as you may imagine, are veterans, and should be receiving benefits. A lot of them are entitled to Social Security, or food stamps, or various other forms of welfare. Most of them don’t get it, for the simple reason that they don’t know how, or are unwilling, to negotiate the bureaucracies. They slip through the cracks. They are non-persons. I try to help. But I’m a priest.” He shrugged.

“You’re not a lawyer,” I said.

He grinned. “I’m not a lawyer. Sometimes I wish I were.” We had moved down the hallway, now empty of men, and he pushed on the door that led into the clinic. “Ah, here we are.”

Dr. Vance stood when I entered and offered me that big snowshoe of a hand. “Ah, Mr. Coyne, indeed a pleasure to see you again, sir,” he said. His toothy grin gleamed in his dark face.

“Mr. Coyne was a friend of Altoona, you remember,” said the priest. “He’s an attorney.”

“A nice mahn, ol’ Altoona,” said the doctor. “On the rare occasions when he would come down here, before he got crazy, he’d only talk politics. ‘Adrian,’ he’d say, ‘what you think about the Caribbean? Next battleground, don’ you think?’ He was a sick ol’ man, refused medication. ‘I’m goin’ die,’ he’d say. ‘I’m goin’ die anyway. Nothin’ you can do about it.’”

“It didn’t happen the way he expected,” I observed.

Vance shrugged his great shoulders. “Better this way, maybe.”

“Adrian donates his time to the clinic,” said Barrone, emphasizing the word “donates.”

The big doctor grinned. “Since the President decided to spend his money on sending guns and boats into Haiti instead of on poor ol’ folks like Altoona, public health funds been drying up.” He shook his head. “I do what I can. Bring medicine samples from the hospital. Come over a few hours, three times a week. People should do what they can.”

“I get the picture,” I said, smiling at the two of them. “You’ve ganged up on me. What is it you think
I
can do?”

The priest said promptly, “They need an ombudsman. They need an advocate on Beacon Hill. They need legislation. They need somebody to cut through the red tape.” He stared at me.

“You’re trying to shame me,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “I am.”

“You’re very good at it, both of you.”

They both smiled. “Give it some thought, Mr. Coyne,” said the priest.

I nodded. “Okay. I will. Let me think about it. I’ll call you.”

“If you don’t,” said Barrone, “I’ll call you. Count on it.”

“What’ve I got this afternoon?” I said to Julie when I got back to the office.

“Where’ve you been? You said you’d be gone for an hour. You’ve had a million calls.”

“Sorry, Mother,” I said. “You can unfold your arms and stop tapping your foot. I went over to St. Michael’s and then I stopped by Marie’s for a big bowl of potato gnocchi, with her special meat sauce, Italian sausages, hot bread…”

“You’re supposed to meet Mr. Boynton at his office at four-thirty. The Bruner estate?”

“Oh, right.” I glanced at my Timex. It was a little after three. “Okay. Hold any calls, please. And have a cab come by for me about four-fifteen.”

“My goodness, we’re suddenly businesslike. I suppose when one grows accustomed to four-hour lunch hours—”

“I said I was sorry,” I said, and I went into my office.

I put the shopping bag on top of my desk and removed the volume with
The Harlem Globetrotters
on the dust jacket. It was not a book about the basketball team. This dust jacket had been taken from the book it originally covered, and it was used to disguise this one.

This one wasn’t a book at all.

It was a diary. Stu Carver’s diary.

Altoona hadn’t been as crazy as he had seemed. It occurred to me that he hadn’t been crazy at all. His miming Bob Cousy and his singing the Globetrotters’ theme song had been intended to convey a message to me. He had given me too much credit. I had accepted the opinions of Father Barrone and Dr. Vance and the superficial evidence of Altoona’s behavior. I had thought he was just crazy. It was nothing but good luck that I had happened to find the diary.

I wondered why he had gone through the elaborate charade. Maybe it was simply paranoia.

On the other hand, he
had
ended up getting killed.

Fear, when it’s justified, isn’t paranoia at all.

Who, then, did old Altoona fear so much that he felt compelled to disguise Stu’s diary, and hide it, like Poe’s purloined letter, in such an obvious place, and then direct me to it with his weird theatrics?

Father Joe Barrone was the first name I came up with. The priest could have been Stu’s enemy, and Altoona’s, too, for that matter. But I didn’t see how Heather fit in. One thing was clear: Altoona hadn’t trusted Father Barrone. Otherwise he logically would have turned Stu’s diary over to him.

Dr. Adrian Vance was the second name I came up with. I remembered how confidently the big doctor had wielded his surgical lancet. Might he handle an icepick with similar deftness? And if there were a drug connection, might his power to write prescriptions, and his access to hospital medicines, somehow explain Vance’s apparent commitment to the poor and downtrodden at St. Michael’s?

What had Stu Carver written in that diary that provoked such fear in old Altoona, and that made the little volume so valuable that someone had been willing to kill three times for it?

I would find out. I sat down to read it.

“
SHE WAS FUNNY ABOUT
doing a will,” said Zerk. “She kept saying, ‘Do you think something’s going to happen to me?’ I assured her that it was simply a good policy for anybody with any kind of estate to have a will. She said she didn’t want to think about it. Anyway, we did one.”

“And I’m the executor,” I said. “I was flattered that she asked me. We laughed about it. Some joke.”