Out Cold (9 page)

I woke up all of a sudden. Henry was curled against my hip, and flickering colored lights were dancing on the bedroom ceiling. I hitched myself into a semisitting position and looked down at the television set at the foot of the bed. A red-and-blue racing car was skidding across the track. It caromed off the wall and went spinning back toward the infield, spewing smoke and gravel. Other cars swerved and skidded around it. One of them smashed into another car's rear end, flipped, and went tumbling end-over-end down the track.

It all happened in eerie silence. Somewhere along the way I'd muted the TV.

Then the phone rang, and my mind registered the memory that it had also rung a moment earlier.

I groped for the phone beside the bed, pressed it against my ear, and mumbled, “H'lo?”

“I'm sorry,” said Evie. “I woke you up.”

“No you didn't.”

“Yes I did. Why lie about it? Nothing to be ashamed of, being asleep at…what is it there? A little after midnight? Oh, hell. No. It's like one-thirty in the morning, right?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It doesn't matter. I was watching car racing on ESPN.”

“You were sleeping,” she said. “You never watch car racing.”

“It's
SportsCenter
. All kinds of news. There was this awesome accident.”

“Sports scores are not news,” she said.

“You usually call earlier.”

“I always call, though, don't I?”

“I meant to stay awake for your call,” I said.

“Long day?”

“Friday, you know?”

“I just got back to my room,” said Evie. “It's not even midnight here.”

“Out drinking,” I said.

“Sure. With some underwriters from Salt Lake City. Mormons.”

“Men,” I said.

“There's no such thing as a female Mormon underwriter,” she said. “We talked about insurance. They drank Diet Dr Pepper. Not me. I had Margaritas. Yum-yum.”

“You're a little drunk,” I said.

“A little. Makes me horny. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I'll be home day after tomorrow. No, wait. Tomorrow, where you are. I'll be home tomorrow. It's Saturday already in Massachusetts, right?”

“You're pretty blasted, huh?”

“Kinda. See, it's still Friday in Arizona. So I'll see you, like I said. Day after tomorrow.”

“Right,” I said. “Sunday afternoon. Four-fifty. American West number eight-twenty. Nonstop, Phoenix to Boston. Expensive.”

“The hospital's paying,” she said.

“I'll pick you up at the airport.”

“That would be dumb,” she said. “I'll get a cab. Just be there when I get home, please. You and Henry.”

“Dumb?”

“Sweet,” she said. “But dumb.”

After I hung up with Evie, I lay there for quite a while watching the muted television. I pictured Evie, sitting in some bar surrounded by men in white shirts and black suits and dark blue neckties, Evie laughing and drinking Margaritas, the men short-haired and smooth-faced, not smiling, sipping Diet Dr Pepper, watching her out of hooded eyes.

She'd been gone for nearly a week. I'd almost gotten used to living alone again.

Henry was pressing hard against my hip. He grumbled and twitched when he slept. I reached down and scratched his forehead. I didn't think I could get used to living without a dog.

 

I spent Saturday morning tidying up our house. We have a cleaning lady who comes in every other week. Her name is Sammie. She takes the T over from Dorchester on alternate Tuesdays. She has her own key. Usually Evie and I are at work when she comes. We leave her a check for eighty dollars, made out to cash, on the kitchen counter. When we get home, the check is gone. That's how we know she's been there.

Sammie vacuums the rugs and washes the floors and cleans the toilets, and she seems to do a decent job of it, although neither Evie nor I is the sort of person who notices a little dust or grime—or its absence. When Sammie unplugs something so she can plug in her vacuum cleaner, she never remembers to plug it back in when she's done. So when we go to turn on a light or toast a bagel, it doesn't work. That's another way we know for sure that Sammie's been there.

We told her when we hired her that we didn't want her moving anything, organizing anything, putting anything away, or throwing anything out. Evie, for example, hoards catalogs. I save old fly-fishing magazines. Any sensible cleaning lady would throw away last year's Crate and Barrel catalog or some 1998 issue of
American Angler
. We didn't trust Sammie's judgment. We were worried that she'd be sensible.

On the day Sammie's due to appear, Evie suddenly becomes a whirlwind of housecleaning energy. Gotta get the place tidied up. Can't have the cleaning lady go back to Dorchester and tell her friends that the white folks in the Beacon Hill townhouse are messy and sloppy and tolerant of filth, even though, basically, we are.

That, I keep telling Evie, is why we need a cleaning lady.

I wasn't cleaning up for Sammie on this Saturday. It was for Evie. She'd be home tomorrow, and I'd been living like a bachelor. So I collected six days of newspapers from the coffee table and the bathroom and the floor beside the bed and piled them in their special box in the storage room behind the kitchen. I loaded the dishwasher with coffee mugs and frying pans and cereal bowls. I changed the sheets on the bed and the towels in the bathroom. I ran a load of laundry.

While I was getting the house ready for Evie's return, my mind kept swirling with thoughts about the dead girl in my backyard, bled out and frozen, and Sunshine, dead behind a Dumpster in Chinatown, her throat ripped out by a broken bottle. I was wishing that somebody would call me and tell me they'd figured it all out.

I thought about the street girl, Misty, which I doubted was her real name, seeing my dead girl throwing up on the sidewalk the same night she came into in my backyard. That reminded me of the panel truck with the New Hampshire plates. Misty said the guy behind the wheel was looking for a young blonde. Most likely he was just another predator, hung up on young blond girls.

But it was possible that he was looking specifically for my dead girl. Maybe he knew her. Maybe he was her father. Or maybe he was her high-school chemistry teacher, or her minister, or her soccer coach, or her uncle. Maybe he was the man who got her pregnant. Maybe she'd been running away from him.

I closed my eyes and conjured up the logo on the side of the guy's truck. In my memory it looked like two cartoon bears, with a couple of pine trees spiking up in the background. It could have been intended to represent some other animals, but to me, they looked like a mother—or father—and a baby bear.

I sketched my mental image of the bears on a piece of scrap paper. There had been writing under the logo. It was in a fancy script, and I hadn't been able to read it, and squeezing my eyes shut and seeing the truck in my mind didn't make it any clearer.

I tried to see the license plate. No numbers appeared in my mental picture. Just the green-and-white New Hampshire plate.

I went on the Internet and Googled “New Hampshire business logo.” That produced the web addresses for half a dozen logo designers and an endless list of sites with “New Hampshire” or “logo” in their names or text.

I tried “New Hampshire trademark” and got a long list of Granite State trademark attorneys, several sites at the Secretary of State's office, consulting firms on incorporation, information about intellectual property…

I typed in everything I could think of that might convince Google to show me what I'd seen on the side of that panel truck, with no hits. After an hour, I gave up.

I ate a ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich on pumpernickel, with a dill pickle and a handful of potato chips, standing at the sink to catch the crumbs and save a clean dish. I gave Henry a corner of my sandwich and a couple of chips. He turned up his nose at the pickle.

Then I leashed him up and we strolled down to the Common, where I let him off his leash. He hooked up with a yellow Lab and a springer spaniel, and the three of them raced around in the snow chasing squirrels and pigeons and each other while I stood on the plowed path with the elderly couple who owned the Lab and the springer. Their names were Gladys and Irv. Late seventies, I guessed. Spry and happy and in love with each other. They lived in a townhouse on Beacon Street, convenient to restaurants and theaters and the T and the Common. They especially loved theater.

They'd lived in Massachusetts all their lives, they told me, but they were starting to get a little sick of New England winters. They said they were thinking of selling the townhouse and moving down to Asheville, North Carolina. Their daughter lived in Asheville. They weren't ready for Florida. They still enjoyed the change of seasons. The Carolina hills seemed like a good compromise, although they weren't sure if there was any decent theater in Asheville.

I glanced at my watch. It was almost three-thirty. I called in Henry, leashed him up, said good-bye to Gladys and Irv and their two dogs, and with Henry at heel, I headed for the Shamrock homeless shelter.

I rang the bell, and a minute later Patricia McAfee opened the door. Today she was wearing denim overalls and a green plaid flannel shirt and red sneakers. Her gray-blond hair was pinned up on top of her head.

She smiled and held open the door. “Mr. Coyne. You're back. How nice. Come on in.” She looked down and saw Henry. “Oh, is this your doggie? Is he friendly?”

“His name is Henry,” I said. “He's a veritable pussycat. Can he come in, too?”

“Of course. Animals are welcome here.” She scootched down and patted Henry's head. He tolerated it. Then she straightened up and said, “The children always love animals. The women do, too, actually, most of them. But especially the children. We used to have a cat, but it ran off. I want to get another one. Come on. Let's sit.”

She led me over to the television nook, and we sat on the sofa. Henry lay down and plopped his chin on my instep.

At the rear of the dining area, a dark-haired woman in a white smock was talking with a beefy black woman and a little girl of four or five with lots of pink plastic clips in her hair. The black woman's daughter, I guessed.

Otherwise, the place was empty.

“Where is everybody?” I said.

“A few women are upstairs,” she said. “Most of them have places to go during the day. I don't encourage them to hang around. Our whole mission is for them to get their lives back. They have jobs, they take classes, they attend meetings, they go for interviews, things like that.”

I jerked my head in the direction of the back of the room. “Is that Dr. Rossi?”

Patricia nodded. “She's just finishing up. Is that what brings you here today? Did you want to talk to her?”

“Yes. I've got a question for you, too.”

She put her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists and leaned toward me. “Fire away.”

“After I left here yesterday,” I said, “I noticed a panel truck outside. It had a picture of bears on its side. Looked like a logo of some kind. I wondered if you might've seen it before?”

She frowned. “Bears? What kind of bears?”

I shrugged. “Sort of stylized bears. A mother and a cub, maybe. A line drawing, with what looked like pine trees in the background. I think they were supposed to be bears. There was some writing, but I couldn't read it. Why? Does it ring a bell?”

“I don't know.” She shook her head. “I don't think so. Maybe if I saw it…”

I had the sketch I'd drawn in the morning folded in my shirt pocket. I took it out, opened it up, and showed it to her. “I'm no artist, obviously,” I said. “It looked something like this.”

She narrowed her eyes at it, then looked up at me. “Sorry, no. Why are you interested in this truck?”

“The driver was talking to some girls. They told me he was asking about a young blond girl.”

“Your dead girl?”

“I don't know. Could be.”

“You think he knows her?”

“I'd like to ask him.”

“Some of the shelters,” she said, “have vans that drive around the city looking for folks without any place to go at night. But I don't know any that have a picture of bears on them.”

“This truck had New Hampshire plates.”

She shook her head. “That doesn't make any sense. Maybe Dr. Rossi can help you.”

The black woman and her daughter were talking to the doctor. Then Dr. Rossi stood up and gave them each a hug, and the mother and daughter turned and headed for the door.

Patricia stood up and went over to talk to them.

Henry was lying on the carpet with his chin on his paws. I told him to stay, then went to the back of the room, where Dr. Rossi was sitting at a table with half-glasses perched down toward the tip of her nose, writing on some note cards.

I stood there for a moment. She kept writing. I cleared my throat. “Uh, Dr. Rossi?”

She looked up at me over the tops of her glasses. She was somewhere in her forties, I guessed. Up close I saw streaks of gray in her short black hair. Creases bracketed her mouth and squint lines wrinkled the corners of her eyes. “Hello?” she said, making it a question.

“I wonder if I could talk with you for a minute.”

She nodded. “For just about a minute. I've gotta be someplace in half an hour.”

I pulled a chair up to the table where she was sitting. “My name is Brady Coyne. I'm a lawyer.”

She smiled. “Oh, dear. A lawyer.”

“Not intimidated, huh?”

“Should I be?”

“No. This has nothing to do with being a lawyer.” I took the photo of the dead girl out of my pocket and put it on the table in front of her. “I wonder if you ever saw this girl.”

She poked her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, peered at the photo, then looked up at me. “She's dead?”