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Authors: William G. Tapply

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Past Tense
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Maybe she had lied to me. Maybe she had expected to encounter Scott there in our driveway that morning. Maybe she
had taken a knife from the kitchen. If she had, and if she'd killed him with it, it would give state police detective Neil Vanderweigh a good argument for malice aforethought. Intent and premeditation. Not just murder, but murder in the first degree.
How well did I really know Evie?
That was the question.
I figured Vanderweigh planned to try some misdirection on me. A pleasant lunch, some casual conversation. He'd already shown me his inquisitor side. Now he'd probably try to show me what a nice guy he was.
I assumed he still suspected both of us, either as alternate suspects or as a team.
Objectively, we were both damn good suspects.
Well, it didn't matter. Vanderweigh could think whatever he wanted, and he could pick my brain to his heart's content. I wasn't hiding anything, so telling the truth would be easy.
I arrived at the Ford place in Brewster a few minutes before noon, and just about the time they finished checking the Taurus for dents and scratches and verified that I'd topped off the gas tank, my green BMW pulled into the lot and Detective Neil Vanderweigh got out. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, and without his bald head showing, I didn't recognize him at first. He came inside, saw me signing papers with the salesman, lifted his hand and nodded, and went back outside.
I joined him a minute later. We shook hands and got into my car. I waved my hand around the inside. “So what'd you find?”
He smiled. “If we found anything incriminating, I wouldn't tell you. On the other hand, if we found anything incriminating, I probably wouldn't be returning it to you. Feel like some lunch?”
“Sure. Where to?”
He directed me back to Dennis, then down a side street to a low-slung shingled place on the water. It was called the Lighthouse Tavern. Poetic license. I knew of no lighthouse on the bay side of the Cape.
I found a slot at the far end of the jammed parking lot, and we went inside. The place featured dim, indirect lighting and soft music and dark woodwork, fishing nets with cork floats draped on the walls, fake portholes, and a solid glass back wall overlooking still another Cape Cod tidal creek. The lobby was crammed with middle-aged men in baggy shorts and tanned women in capri pants and whiny children in foul tempers, but when Vanderweigh took off his cap to reveal his bald head, the hostess looked up, smiled at him, and waved us over.
We shouldered our way through the crowd, and when we got to the hostess, she put her hand on Vanderweigh's arm, kissed his cheek, and led us to a table by the window. “The usual?” she said to him.
He nodded.
“Sir?” she said to me.
“Coffee, please. Black.”
She put menus in front of us. “Want to know the specials?”
Vanderweigh shook his head, and so did I.
When she left, I said, “Friend of yours, huh?”
“That's my daughter-in-law. My son owns this place. This is my table. They hold it for me unless I tell them not to. I eat here just about every day.”
I picked up a menu. “Any recommendations?”
“The fish is always fresh.”
A middle-aged waitress brought iced tea for Vanderweigh and coffee for me, and the two of them talked about her son, who was working on a fishing boat out of New Bedford for the summer and planned to take business courses at UMass Dartmouth in the fall. I ended up ordering a lobster roll. Vanderweigh asked for the turkey club, no mayonnaise.
After the waitress left, he mentioned fishing, and I told him I loved fly-fishing, so we talked about that for a while, and the more we didn't talk about Larry Scott's murder, the more I began to suspect that Vanderweigh knew something, or had what he thought was strong evidence of something, and that he was trying to lull me into dropping my defenses.
Well, that was okay. Since I had no secrets, I needed no defenses.
When our sandwiches arrived, Vanderweigh asked about my family and my job, and I answered all his questions. I had the feeling I wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know.
We finished eating, the waitress cleared our table and brought more iced tea and hot coffee, and still the subject of Larry Scott's murder had not come up.
Then he said, “How well do you know Evelyn Banyon?”
I smiled. “Aha.”
“You were wondering when I'd get around to that subject.”
“I figured you'd wait till you'd softened me up.”
“So?”
I shrugged. “I met her nearly a year ago. We've been—I never know what to call it—in a relationship, I guess you'd say, for five or six months. I know her intimately. But you're not asking about our intimate life … are you?”
“No.” He smiled. “But if you want to talk about it—”
“I don't.”
“Of course you don't.” He cleared his throat. “I talked with my colleague and your friend Roger Horowitz the other day. He urged me to consider you an ally. I told him it was impossible to eliminate you as a suspect in this case, and he told me that was a waste of time. I have a lot of respect for Horowitz, but I do have some doubts about you.”
“I don't blame you,” I said. “I'm a good suspect. I didn't do it. But I guess I'd suspect me, too.”
“Horowitz rarely places much stock in somebody's character,” he said. “We've both seen too many fine, upstanding people with no history of anything criminal committing horrific crimes.” He waved his hand in the air. “Anyway, for the record, and in the interest of candor, you should know that I have been unable to find any evidence that you did not commit this crime, so you have got to be a suspect. The same goes for Ms. Banyon.”
“Any evidence that either of us did it?”
“Compelling circumstances,” he said. “As you know.”
I nodded. “Means, motive, and opportunity.”
“Right. Both of you are obvious suspects, and nine times out of ten it's just that simple. The obvious suspect is the one who did it.”
“Occam's razor,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever.” He took a sip of iced tea, gazed out the window for a minute, then turned back to me. “We learn in cop school to pay a lot of attention to the obvious. When we don't, we generally end up looking stupid. Remember the Stuart case?”
“Sure,” I said. “Chuck Stuart. They found him in his car outside a hospital in Dorchester with a gunshot wound in his gut and his wife shot dead beside him. He told the police some black guy robbed them. Very plausible in that part of the city. So the cops went looking for a young black guy who fit Stuart's description. Found him, too, and dragged him away in a flurry of flashbulbs. Turned out Stuart had set the whole thing up, killed his wife, shot himself, had his brother drive by to collect the weapon and dispose of it, invented the black suspect. Chuck Stuart ended up writing a confession and jumping off the Mystic River Bridge. Got a lot of ink, that story.”
“That,” said Vanderweigh, “was one of those cases where there were two obvious suspects, and the Boston cops picked the wrong one. There are plenty of robberies and murders in
that part of the city, and they're almost always committed by young black men. On the other hand, whenever somebody is murdered, your first suspect has got to be the spouse.”
“As I remember it,” I said, “when it all shook out, the Boston cops caught hell from the black community for having the temerity to actually suspect a black man from the worst neighborhood in New England of breaking the law.”
“How it goes. Everybody fucks up sometimes.” Vanderweigh shook his head. “The worst thing is to ignore the obvious, and as it turns out, that's what the Boston cops did. They were too willing to believe the story of a white guy, even if it did make a lot of sense. Hell, the man had a bullet hole in his stomach. Still, they forgot that he was the spouse.” He sighed. “Point is, we also learn that sometimes things aren't that obvious. I've spent the last several days trying to find holes in what you and Ms. Banyon told us.”
“And?” I said.
“And I see three possibilities.” He held up three fingers, then bent one of them down. “One, you're both lying.” He bent down the second finger. “Two, you're both telling the truth. And, three”—he bent down the third finger—“one of you is lying and one of you is telling the truth.” He shook his head. “I'm bothered by the fact that if you're both lying, and the two of you invented this story, it's seriously flawed.”
“Because neither of us can give the other one an alibi,” I said. “It's not a very good story, is it?”
He nodded. “I'd expect an experienced attorney to do better. This leads me to believe that one of you, at least, is telling the truth.”
“The one who didn't kill Larry Scott, you're thinking.”
“Right. Ms. Banyon could've gone running, just the way she said, and on her way back found his body. In which case, you could've killed him.”
I started to speak, but he held up his hand. “Or,” he said,
“she could've encountered him there on the driveway and knifed him while you were sleeping. Either way, one of you's telling the truth and one's lying.”
“Or,” I said, “neither of us killed him and we're both telling the truth.”
“Of course,” said Vanderweigh. “For the sake of argument, let's say you're both telling the truth.”
“You might find that line of thought productive,” I said, “given the fact that it happens to be true.”
“In that case,” he said, “somebody else did it.”
“I am witnessing a brilliant deductive mind at work.”
“Yeah, Horowitz said you had a smart mouth.” He smiled. “So the question is, if not one of you two, then who?”
“You asking me?”
He arched his eyebrows.
I shook my head. “I don't have a clue. Do you?”
Vanderweigh stared out the window, and without turning to face me, he said quietly, “When you've got not one but two excellent suspects, what a good detective does is, he starts building the case. He questions the suspects. He takes testimony from witnesses. He checks backgrounds. He gathers forensic evidence. He looks for the anomaly, the fact that doesn't fit, the thing that makes him doubt his case, and he tries to maintain his objectivity. A good detective does want to get it right, Mr. Coyne, because he does not want some competent defense lawyer making him look stupid. But when he can't find any anomaly, he doesn't see much purpose in looking around for other, less obvious suspects.”
“You're telling me that Evie and I are your only suspects.”
He turned his head, looked at me for a minute, then shrugged.
I planted my forearms on the table and leaned toward him. “So why are you telling me these things, Detective? What's
this”—I waved my hand around the restaurant—“this friendly lunch all about?”
“Was it that friendly?”
I smiled. “It was friendly enough.”
“I didn't give anything away, did I?”
“Nothing I haven't already thought of. I was hoping you'd tell me what your forensics experts turned up.”
“Is that a question?”
“Sure.”
He shrugged. “They concluded that Lawrence Scott died of two knife wounds to the abdomen sometime between five and seven A.M. on Saturday morning. They found no defense wounds on his hands or arms.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning,” he said, “that he was standing very close to his assailant and didn't expect to be attacked, that he didn't see it coming.”
“You think he knew his killer?” I said.
“Very likely,” said Vanderweigh.
Larry Scott knew Evie well. He had also made my acquaintance. “What else did forensics find?” I said.
“Scott died where he fell,” he said. “The sand under his body was saturated with blood. According to the medical examiner, his body had not been moved.”
“That's why I got my car back so soon,” I said. “You knew we hadn't transported a dead body in it.”
“It's more complicated than that,” he said.
“But my car was clean.”
“Clean?” He laughed. “They found a fully packed overnight bag, not to mention pieces of monofilament, old fishhooks, dirty socks, rubber boots, a couple of hats, dried mud, pine needles, an old Army blanket—”
“That's what a trunk is for,” I said.
Vanderweigh nodded. “That steak knife was the murder weapon, Mr. Coyne, and it was, in fact, a match for seven other six-inch steak knives that were in the kitchen drawer of that cottage you were renting.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

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