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Authors: William G. Tapply

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“You're the best, Gordie. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, bullshit.” He sighed. “You at home?”

“Yes. Use the back door off the alley.”

“Gimme an hour. Make sure there's coffee.”

Henry and I went for a walk, and then I brewed some coffee and filled a carafe, and I was waiting at the table in the garden when there came a knock on the patio door. “It's me,” called Gordon Cahill.

“It's not locked.”

He unlatched the door, came in, and headed straight for the coffee. He poured himself a mugful, then sat down across from me. “So this vulture is getting on an airplane,” he said. “He's got a big paper bag under his arm.”

“Oh, jeez,” I said. “Here it comes.”

“The flight attendant says to him, âMay I see what you've got in that bag, sir?' The vulture opens the bag, and the stewardess looks in and sees that there are two dead raccoons in there. She looks at the vulture and shakes her head. âI'm sorry, sir. We'll have to put one of these raccoons in with the cargo.' The vulture says, âHow come?'”

Cahill paused, sipped his coffee, and peered up at me.

I sighed. “Okay, Gordie. How come?”

“Airline policy,” he said. “Only one carrion per passenger.”

Aside from his unfortunate penchant for bad puns, Gordon Cahill was one of those utterly bland, forgettable guys who might sit beside you for nine innings at Fenway Park, and that same night, when he came into the bar where you were having a drink, you wouldn't make the connection. He was somewhere in his fifties, with brown hair going gray on the sides and thin on top. He was neither tall nor short, fat or skinny, handsome or ugly. He had a roundish face and bluish-gray eyes and a quick, shy smile when he chose to show it. He drove a sand-colored four-year-old Toyota Corolla, which was one of the most unnoticeable cars ever made.

I happened to know that Cahill had been there for the Saigon evacuation, ended up in a VA hospital, then put in twenty years with the Massachusetts state police, including several years undercover, before he took his retirement and opened his own shop on St. Botolph Street, just a few blocks from my office in Copley Square.

“How busy are you?” I said to him.

He shrugged. “I'm always busy.”

“Too busy for another case?”

“You think I'm here because I heard there was coffee?” he said. “What've you got?”

I pushed the manila envelope Jimmy D'Ambrosio had given to me across the table toward him.

Cahill put his hand flat on top of it. “Tell me about it.”

“Not much to tell,” I said. “I want to know what this guy does with his spare time.”

“Who's the client?”

“Me,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I mean, the fiancÃ©e, the wife, the employer, the insurance company, or what?”

“Just me, Gordie.”

He shrugged, fumbled in his shirt pocket, and put on his reading glasses. Then he opened the envelope, took out the photos and papers, and studied them for several minutes while he sipped his coffee. When he was finished, he looked up at me over the tops of his glasses. “Albert Stoddard, huh?”

I nodded.

“Husband of the former cover girl for the Essex County D.A.'s office? The guy who's the future senator's husband?”

“Provided she wins the election.”

“He's a college professor, huh?”

“Yes. At Tufts. History. Been there close to twenty years.”

“And you suspect him of â¦?”

I shrugged. “He's acting weird, quote unquote. Furtive. Evasive. Like a man with a guilty conscience. He might be fooling around.”

Cahill nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I get the picture.”

“I knew you would,” I said. “That's why I wanted you for the job. You'll do it?”

“Why not?”

“This has got to be superconfidential,” I said.

He smiled. “I've been doing this work for a while, you know.”

“I know, Gordie. I justâ”

“Had some pretty high-profile clients. Never once â¦”

“I apologize,” I said. “I trust you.”

“You better,” he said. He stood up and tucked the envelope into his jacket pocket. “You hear about the Buddhist monk, went in for a root canal?”

“Oh, jeez.”

“Dentist wanted to give him a shot of Novocain,” he said, “but the monk refused it.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

“Gordie, I'm warning youâ”

“Monk said he wanted to transcend dental medication.”

THREE

T
wo nights after I hired Gordon Cahill to tail Albert Stoddard, Evie and I were sitting on our new living-room sofa watching the eleven o'clock news on our new big-screen TV with Henry, our new dog, wedged in between us.

And there was Ellen, delivering her evening sound bite at some fund-raising dinner in Springfield. Her theme was the overriding obligation of government to protect its citizensâwomen, children, ethnic and religious minorities, the elderly, the ill, the mentally incompetent, all the hopeless and helpless and downtrodden members of societyâand her promise was to make sure that government fulfilled its obligation, should the voters of the Commonwealth see fit to elect her.

It was a smart strategy for a woman who'd built her reputation on prosecuting criminals, especially at a time when the threat of terrorism hung over the land like a distant grumbling thunderhead and greedy corporate CEOs were absconding with their employees' retirement moneyâand particularly when her Republican opponent, a conservative family-values African-American businessman named Lamarr
Oakley, kept pounding away at the importance of cutting taxes, reducing the size of government, requiring schoolchildren to pray and salute the flag, and keeping faith in good old American free enterprise.

I only half listened to what Ellen was saying. I'd heard it before. I was waiting for the camera to pan over the head table, and when it did, I looked for Albert.

He wasn't there.

I wondered where he was and what he was doing and if Gordon Cahill was sitting nearby in his sand-colored Toyota Corolla watching him.

Ellen finished her speech with her trademark refrain: “I will be the friend of those who have no friends and the enemy of those who make me their enemy.” It was pure Jimmy D'Ambrosio, even if he'd stolen it from an old fifties television show called
Boston Blackie
.

“Oh, I like her,” said Evie when the commercial came on.

“Me, too.”

“You know her, right?”

“I've done some work for her mother,” I said.

“Is she as attractive in person as she is on TV?”

“She's much shorter,” I said.

When Ellen Gallatin Stoddard decided to run for senator, she invited me to join what she called her “brain trust.” I declined, citing a mediocre and untrustworthy brain, not to mention a profound lack of interest in the hurly-burly of campaign politics.

I assured Ellen that it had nothing to do with my feelings for her, either as a candidate or a person. I told her I would talk her up with my friends, and I'd surely vote for her.
Anyway, the last thing she needed was some lawyer giving her advice. She already had Jimmy D'Ambrosio lined up to run her campaign. He was a brain trust all by himself.

Before she quit to run for the Senate, back when she was still putting away murderers and rapists for the Essex County D.A., Ellen and I occasionally bumped into each other in the lobby outside a courtroom. We never opposed each other, of course. She prosecuted high-profile criminal cases, while I did most of my low-profile work in the civil courts. But sometimes we both found ourselves free for lunch or for an after-court drink.

When her father, Clifford Gallatin, had his last heart attack in his duck blind on an Ipswich salt marsh, Ellen hired me to straighten out her mother's financial situation. Cliff had left chaos behind himâa thirty-year-old boilerplate will, stocks in his own name, scattered insurance policies, a few annuities, several real estate holdings, certificates of deposit in six different Massachusetts banks, and various checking and savings accounts in other banks in other states.

Doris Gallatin, Ellen's mother, a pleasant but severely scattered woman in her mid-seventies, had left the family's financial affairs up to her husband. She had no idea what she had coming to her, or even where Cliff had kept his records. When he died, she was totally flustered by the whole mess, to the point where she threw up her hands and refused to deal with it.

So I dealt with it. After the usual hassles with probate, we got everything into a tidy trust with Ellen as trustee, and everybodyâespecially Dorisâwas happy.

Ellen seemed to think I'd performed some kind of miracle. I protested that it was routine stuff that any lawyer with patience and perseverance could do with his eyes closed. But
as far as she was concerned, I'd salvaged her mother's future and her own sanity.

Now and then Doris would call asking me to explain something or other, or to help her decide whether money should be moved around, or to consider whether the terms of the trust needed a tweak. I would've been happy to drive out to her house in Belmont, but the old lady used our meetings as an excuse to get dressed up, take a taxi into the city, and meet me for afternoon tea at the Ritz. I suspected that whenever Doris got it in her head that she thought she'd rather enjoy high tea at the Ritz, she dreamed up some issue that required a consultation with her lawyer.

I didn't mind. I never had tea, though. The Ritz made good martinis.

Ellen thought all this was pretty special. As far as I was concerned, it was business as usual, although I always got a kick out of how much fun Doris Gallatin seemed to have at our matinees at the Ritz.

And so, the way those things go, Ellen Stoddard and I became friends. She wasn't my client, and couldn't be. Her mother was my client. I could have played the conflict-of-interest card if Ellen had pressured me about joining her brain trust when she decided to run for senator, but she didn't. Maybe she was just being polite, asking me in the first place.

Albert was in his mid-forties, a few years older than Ellen. He was a gangly, sad-eyed, distracted sort of guy who always seemed preoccupied with thoughts that were too esoteric and obscure to share with laypeople such as me. He'd earned his tenure in the history department at Tufts when he published his only book many years before I met him. The book, Ellen once told me, explored the cultural roots of capitalism in
America, and there had been some chatter about a Pulitzer, although no nomination had been forthcoming. Ellen confessed that she found Albert's book turgid. I never tried to read it.

Albert and I had gone trout fishing a few times. He loved the outdoors and seemed to get as much of a kick out of spotting a cedar waxwing or a muskrat as he did from catching a trout on a dry fly.

I am a restless fisherman. I inevitably convince myself that there are more and bigger fish around the next bend, so I'm always on the move.

Albert, on the other hand, liked to find a good-looking spot and work it thoroughly. He could spend an entire afternoon happilyâand optimisticallyâcasting over the same water, even when he never got a strike.

That was pretty much the difference between Albert and me.

Albert and Ellen had been too busy with their careers to have children. From what I'd been able to observe, they were quite supportive of each other, but they had gone their separate professional ways from the beginning, and now they moved in worlds that couldn't have been farther apartâEllen, always in the spotlight, first handling the pressure of life-or-death, headline-grabbing criminal trials, and now running for the United States Senate, with vague rumblings about the presidency down the road, and Albert, huddled up in a library carrel or cloistered in his office at Tufts, peering at a computer monitor or thumbing through musty old books and stuffing his laptop with footnotes and his head with theories.

Albert Stoddard just didn't strike me as the kind of guy who'd carry on some sneaky extramarital affair under any
circumstance, but especially not when his wife was running for public office.

But I'd been wrong about a lot of people a lot of times.

On Saturday morning when Henry and I got back from our stroll on the Common, Evie said, “I thought I heard your phone ring while you were gone.”

So I went into my room and checked my voice mail. The message was from Cahill. “Gimme a call,” he said. “I'm on my cell.”

I dialed his number.

“Yeah?” he said.

“It's Brady, returning your call,” I said. “Where are you?”

“On the road,” he said. “Got a pun for you.”

“Don't you ever run out of them?”

“Nope. Some guys in my line of work, they do crosswords, listen to tapes, play solitaire. Me, I happen to enjoy wordplay. This job, I sometimes have a lot of time on my hands. Like now, driving the back roads. I could listen to the radio, play tapes. But what I do is, I make up puns. The trick is, you start with the punch line, and once you've got that, you work backward, make up the story that leads to it. It keeps my mind active and alert.”

“Surely,” I said, “there's got to be a more productive way to spend your time. Knitting pot holders, for example.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I knew a guy like you once. Told him some excellent puns, couldn't get him to crack a smile. It got to be a kind of challenge for me. Finally I made a bet with him. I bet him if I told him my ten best puns, one of 'em, at least, would make him laugh.”

I figured I was being suckered, but I said, “And? Did it?”

“Naw,” he said. “No pun in ten did.”

I said nothing.

“You there, Brady?” said Cahill after a minute. “Did I lose you?”

“I'm here,” I said. “You called me for that?”

“Sure. Well, I also wanted you to know I'm making good progress on your case.”

“That didn't take long.”

“This ain't brain surgery, you know.”

“So what can you tell me?”

“Not quite sure what it adds up to yet,” he said. “I'm working on it this weekend. Should have a handle on it in a day or two. Let's get together Monday morning. Sometime between seven and nine work for you?”

Cahill's office was in Copley Square, right around the corner from mine. I could leave for work a half hour early. “I'll be there around eight or eight-fifteen,” I said.

His voice crackled and stuttered. I heard him say, “ â¦ bring me a muffin or something.”

“You got the muffin. Can you hear me?”

“ â¦ losing you,” he said.

“Where are you now?”

“Heading into the hills.”

“What hills?”

“Hang on 'til Monday morning, okay? I don't â¦” His voice faded for a second. When he came back, he was saying, “ â¦ those boys â¦”

“What?” I said. “What boys?”

But I'd lost him completely.