Shadow of Death (24 page)

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Authors: William G. Tapply

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BOOK: Shadow of Death
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“This isn't funny, you know,” he said. “Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“After you think about it,” I said, “and when you figure out that it's not in your interest to lie to me, call me.”
“Mr. Coyne,” he said, “with all due respect—”
“Never mind respect,” I said. “I want answers. I want to know what happened on that Columbus Day on Mount Monadnock thirty years ago when you and Bobby Gilman and Albert Stoddard and Oliver Burlingame and Mark Lyman got caught in that snowstorm, and all of you came down except for Bobby.”
He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “You must have me confused with somebody else. I'm sorry.”
“I'll be expecting your call,” I said. Then I hung up.
R
andy St. George was my last appointment on Monday afternoon. Barbara Cooper, his wife's lawyer, had faxed over some changes she wanted to make in their separation agreement, and I needed to explain them to Randy and help him decide how to respond to them. He thought they were insignificant. I reminded him that nothing in any legal document—no comma, no conjunction, no passive verb—was insignificant. If these changes weren't significant, Attorney Cooper wouldn't have wanted to make them. It was my job, as Randy's lawyer, to understand their significance, however hypothetical, and then make sure he understood them, and then help him decide if we should let them stand. That's why he was paying me the big bucks.
Randy and I ended up deleting a couple of those changes and leaving the others, and when I ushered him out of my office a few minutes before five, I saw Roger Horowitz sitting in the waiting room. He had an attaché case on his lap and a frown on his face. His knee was jiggling up and down like a piston.
I did not acknowledge his presence.
Randy and I shook hands, and when he left, I turned to Julie, who was tidying up her desk the way she does when she's getting ready to leave for the day. “No other appointments, right?” I said.
She cast a quick glance past my shoulder in Horowitz's direction. “No scheduled appointments, no.”
“Good,” I said. “I'm going home then.”
“Coyne,” said Horowitz from behind me. “Quit fooling around. We gotta talk.”
“Did you hear something?” I said to Julie.
She smiled.
“My imagination, I guess,” I said.
“He's been here for half an hour,” she whispered.
“Tough.”
“He's not going away, you know.”
“Please tell him,” I said to Julie, “that even if I wanted to, I can't talk with him.”
She craned her neck and looked over my shoulder. “Mr. Coyne can't talk with you, sir,” she said to Horowitz.
“Tell him he's gonna talk to me whether he likes it or not,” he said. “Tell him I'll follow him home, if that's what it takes. Tell him I'll convince Evie to let me in, and I'll spend the night sitting on the foot of their bed 'til he talks to me. Tell him I'm not going away. Tell him he doesn't want to piss me off any more than he already has. Might as well do it now.”
Julie shrugged, then looked at me. “He says—”
“Got it,” I said. “Thank you.” I turned around to face Horowitz. “Nothing's changed, Roger.”
“Everything's changed.” He stood up. “Let's go into your office.”
I arched my eyebrows at Julie.
She nodded.
“Tell him he's got ten minutes,” I said to her. Then I turned, went back into my office, and sat at my desk. I left the door open.
I heard Julie say, “You've got ten minutes,” and I heard Horowitz's sarcastic guffaw.
He came in, closed the door, sat in the client chair across from me, and put his attaché case on my desk.
“Evie tells me she got you a cell phone,” he said.
I nodded. “She did. So what?”
“So gimme your number.”
“Why?”
“In case I want to call you. Why else?”
“I don't want you to call me,” I said. “I don't want anybody to call me on the damn thing.”
“You should cooperate with an officer of the law,” he said, giving me his wicked Jack Nicholson grin. “If you know what's good for you.”
“I don't even know the number,” I said. “Why would I want to call my own phone?”
“Turn it on. It'll show your number.”
I shrugged, took the phone from my pocket, turned it on, and when my number popped onto the screen, I copied it down on a scrap of paper. Then I turned off the phone and slipped it back into my pocket.
I pushed the paper across my desk. Horowitz picked it up and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. “You oughta leave your phone turned on,” he said. “In case somebody needs to get ahold of you.”
“All these years without a cell phone,” I said, “I've done just fine.”
“Some people might disagree with that,” he said. He took a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, then blew out the breath. “I don't appreciate you advising the bereaved widow to not cooperate with me,” he said.
I shrugged. “Advice is cheap.”
“Yours is,” he said. He flicked away that irritation with the back of his hand. “Anyway, I've been talking with Lieutenant Bagley from the New Hampshire state cops. I believe you made his acquaintance.”
I nodded.
“He's with the Major Crimes Unit,” said Horowitz. “In New Hampshire murder is considered to be a major crime.”
“I guess it is most places,” I said.
“I'm not sure how sharp this Bagley is.”
“He seemed sharp enough to me.”
“Sharp or not,” said Horowitz, “Bagley's got a murder on his hands, just like me. Funny how you have managed to pop up in the middle of both of them.”
“I wouldn't say in the middle, exactly,” I said.
“Hell,” he said, “you found one body. The other body belonged to a guy who was working for you.”
“These are facts you don't need me to confirm.”
Horowitz waved his hand. “Bagley and me, we've been comparing notes. The way you assumed we would when you gave him my name. You saved the two of us a lot of time finding each other. So thank you for that, anyway.”
I shrugged. “I'm an officer of the court.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Good for you.” He opened his attaché case, took out a manila folder, and put it on my desk. “You've been looking for a guy name of Albert Stoddard, who happens to be the husband of the Democratic candidate of our beloved Commonwealth for the U.S. Senate, whose
mother happens to be a client of yours.” He arched his eyebrows at me. “Which goes a long way to explaining your reticence about your case.”
“What do you want me to say?” I said.
He held up a hand. “All told, you've been up to Southwick, New Hampshire, three times in the past week. Asking questions of the townsfolk. Questions about Albert Stoddard, near as Bagley can determine, though he doesn't seem to have determined much else. One of those townsfolk was an old guy named Farley Nelson, who you found garroted in his back yard day before yesterday. Who you'd been conferring with at the local inn just a few days prior.” He squinted at his notes. “Last Thursday, that was.” He looked up at me. “Have I got that right so far?”
I nodded.
“Well,” said Horowitz, “that's about all Bagley can seem to pry out of anybody. I got the feeling there's more, but like I said, I'm not sure how sharp he is.”
I wondered if Bagley had talked to the Goff brothers, or Helen and Carol at the real estate office, or Paul Munson, the young cop. If he had, I wondered if any of them had mentioned Bobby Gilman or Oliver Burlingame or Mark Lyman. I wondered if he'd followed up with Dalton Burke, and if he had, if he'd had any more luck with him than I had.
“Now me,” said Horowitz, “my first thought was that Gordon Cahill was killed by mobsters from the Winter Hill Gang. Revenge for his excellent undercover work ten, twelve years ago. It's still a pretty good theory, and I'm not inclined to abandon it out of hand. But then I hear from Lieutenant Bagley about this other murder, and it makes me think, hm, I wonder if Gordie was driving home from Southwick, New
Hampshire, when he had his tire shot and gasoline poured all over him. And if that was what he was doing, I'm wondering if he was up there for the same reasons you've been going up there lately.” Horowitz arched his eyebrows at me.
“I'm not going to tell you who my client is or why they hired me or anything about them,” I said, carefully—if ungrammatically—using the plural pronoun in order to avoid using a gender-specific singular one.
“I'm not asking for a name,” said Horowitz.
“Then what do you want from me?”
He pounded his fist on my desk. “Dammit, Coyne. I want to know why you wanted to go to Albert Stoddard's hunting camp in the first place. I want to know if you found anything there. I want to know what went on between you and that Farley Nelson that got him murdered. I want to know what questions you've been asking those people in Southwick, New Hampshire. What I really want to know is, what's your theory on Gordon Cahill's murder, and what do you think its connection is to this other one.”
I shook my head. “I gave Bagley your name, figured he'd do some snooping around, put two and two together, and so would you, and between the two of you …”
“Bagley hasn't come up with much. Says he's finding the local folks pretty unhelpful. He hasn't got any theories about his case. He says the old guy didn't have any enemies.”
“That's obviously wrong.”
Horowitz nodded. “Bagley figures you've got a theory.”
I shrugged. “I really don't.”
“He thinks you do.”
“Maybe he's just not sharing with you.”
Horowitz narrowed his eyes at me.
“Are you sharing with him?” I said.
He shrugged. “I'm sharing what I think should be shared, sure.”
“Did you mention the Winter Hill Gang to him?”
Horowitz gave me one of his ironic smiles. “You're the one who's been talking with Vinnie Russo. You tell me.”
“Russo said it was amateurs,” I said. “Of course, he's not the most reliable witness.”
“To answer your question,” said Horowitz, “no, I didn't bother mentioning Whitey Bulger or the Winter Hill Gang to Lieutenant Bagley. They'd never kill some old farmer in his back yard.”
“Well,” I said, “I can't help it if you guys can't work out your petty territorial issues.”
“You better not criticize the way I do my job, Coyne.”
“Why not? You're criticizing the way I do mine.”
“I'm just asking for your theory,” he said.
I waved my hand. “Do you have a theory?”
He blew out a long breath. “Two murders,” he said slowly. “Two different jurisdictions. Two different means. Two victims who apparently didn't even know each other. They don't look like they're connected. But then, lo and behold, there you are, in the middle of both of 'em. Can't be coincidence. So what we've got is two murders, one murderer, one motive. That's my theory.”
I smiled. “It's a start.”
“Albert Stoddard,” he said. “You think he killed Cahill when you put him on his tail, and then he killed the old guy who was going to tell you about it. That it?”
“I should terminate this meeting right now,” I said.
“But you won't,” said Horowitz, “because you liked Gordie and you liked that Farley Nelson, and you feel responsible for what happened to both of them, and you really do
care about justice being done in spite of the fact that you're a pain in the ass.” He reached across the desk and put his hand on my wrist. “Help us out here, Coyne.”
I pushed his hand away. “I'm not responsible for what you guys figure out by yourselves,” I said. “Good luck. I sincerely and profoundly hope you catch the bad guys. But I can't help you, and it's not fair that you should expect me to. I don't want to talk to you anymore. So please go away and leave me alone.”
Horowitz opened the manila folder and pulled out some sheets of paper. “Got something for you to look at.” He handed one of the sheets to me.
It was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph, evidently taken at night. It showed the burned-out corpse of a small sedan. Its hood was sticking up at a cockeyed angle, and the left front tire was flat, and the window on the driver's side was smashed. In the photo, you couldn't tell what the original color of the car had been. The paint had peeled and blistered, and it was all charred and blackened.
I blew out a long breath. “Gordie's Corolla?” I said.
He nodded and handed me another photo.
I glanced at it, then pushed it away. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
“Take a good look at it, Coyne,” said Horowitz.
I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it. I pulled it to me and looked again.
This photo was in color. It showed what I could only surmise by its general shape had once been the upper torso and head of a human being. Like the automobile, the skin was blackened and charred and blistered. It looked as if it had half melted. The hair, nose, ears, lips, and eyes were cinders.
The face was lumpy and unrecognizable. It was only vaguely human.

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