Third Strike (12 page)

“Is your husband at home? I'd like to talk with him.”

“Oh, dear. I'm afraid not. Bob is almost never home these days. He's working all the time. It's the steamship strike, you know. Bob is ferrying people and cars and freight night and day. I hardly ever see him.” She laughed.

“I'm sure you'll be glad when the strike is over and you have him home again,” I said. “Still, I'm also sure he's glad to be making good money. Fishing is a tough way to make a living, and fishermen have to make it when they can.”

“That's certainly true. But you know how we wives are. We like to have our husbands home with us as often as possible. Ha, ha.”

“I won't keep you,” I said, nodding agreeably. “Maybe you can help me. Do you know a man named Harry Doyle? I'm told he works for your husband.”

Her smile dimmed, then disappeared. “Harry Doyle? Yes, he works for Bob, and he's been here to the house once or twice. I hope you're not his friend, because to be frank, I don't really care for him. I don't know why Bob keeps him on, in fact, but I don't interfere with Bob's business, so my opinion doesn't count.”

“I'm not his friend,” I said. “What is it about him that you dislike?”

“I just don't like him. I didn't like him the first time I saw him. Call it woman's intuition.” She raised her chin.

I thought of Dr. Fell. “What does he do for your husband?” I asked.

Her smile was long gone. “I'm afraid I can't tell you. I really don't know much about business. I was one of those stay-at-home mothers raising the children. Now they're gone, and I'm learning to play tennis to fill the time. Bob doesn't talk much about his work except to complain about the price of fish and the cost of doing business.”

I glanced around at the house and grounds. “He seems to be doing very well.”

The smile came back small. “Yes, but don't ask me how. To hear him tell it, you'd think we were about to go to the poorhouse.”

The television voices behind her lifted into a spat.

“Well,” I said, “thank you for your time. I'll try to catch up with your husband in Vineyard Haven.”

She was turning back toward the television set as she shut the door.

I drove to our house and found no one home. It was a perfect beach day, and my family was taking advantage of it while I was driving around talking with strangers about a case that until very recently had been of no personal interest to me. Dumbness is its own reward.

Visitors to our house are usually surprised to discover that I keep a set of lock picks on the living room coffee table, along with a couple of practice locks. I got the picks at a yard sale long ago from a widow who was selling her deceased husband's goods and didn't know what the picks were. At the time I'd wondered what he really did when he supposedly was doing legitimate work. Over the years since, I'd gotten better at picking, but I was far from a master. Now I took the picks and a pair of latex gloves, returned to the truck, and drove back to Harry Doyle's street. I parked about a block from his apartment and walked the rest of the way.

There was still nobody around. I climbed up to Doyle's door, knocked, waited, peeked through the dirty window again and saw no one. I looked around and still saw nobody, so I put the gloves on my hands and put the picks to Doyle's lock. It was a cheap one and didn't put up much of a fight. Inside, I shut the door behind me and walked around looking the place over. It was a four-room apartment: small living room, small bedroom, small kitchen and dining area, small bathroom, all in need of housekeeping.

There was no sign of any roommate living there. All of the clothes were the same size. One dirty plate was on the table, and one dirty coffee cup was in the sink. There was nothing to indicate that Doyle had friends or family: no photographs, no mementos of good times together, no old letters in the drawer of his bedside table. There was a religious pamphlet in the drawer, but I didn't think God was a relative.

There was a magazine rack beside the sagging chair that faced the television set. It held a news magazine, one of those army surplus catalogs, a book of Sudoku puzzles, mostly done wrong, and copies of island and mainland newspapers. One of the papers was folded to a story about ex-President Joe Callahan possibly coming to the island to serve as a mediator between union and management. I wondered if Doyle wanted him to come or wanted him to stay away, since he and his boss were making good money off the strike.

I peeked under the seat of the chair and under the mattress on the bed, looking for anything of interest. Nothing. I poked around the kitchen. Nothing. I looked at the ice cube trays. Did Doyle have diamonds hidden in the ice? I didn't think so.

His checkbook was on the bedside table. It showed a small balance and regular deposits. Bob Mortison paid him pretty well, and Doyle spent it pretty fast.

Doyle didn't have a computer. Interesting. He was the only person I knew of who didn't. Even I had a computer.

Beside his bed was a thin book about survival in a country gone corrupt. The United States was the country, and the book was full of tips about how to make counterfeit money, make explosives out of soap, survive interrogations and worse, live off the land using homemade traps and weapons, live in a city without money, and make $40,000 a year as a musician without a contract.

I leafed through the last part, hoping for instructions, but I found none and decided not to go that route. I didn't see any musical instruments in the apartment.

I heard an engine, felt my guilty heart jump, and moved quickly to the front door. A truck had pulled into the yard. Words and an emblem on its door identified it as the property of a registered local heating contractor. The door opened and a man in shorts and a shirt with the same emblem over its pocket got out and walked toward the building. He was whistling.

I inched the door open and listened. Below me, there was a click as the padlock on the double door opened, then the sound of the door itself sliding open. The whistling disappeared inside and I eased through Doyle's door and shut and locked it behind me, then soft-footed my way down the stairs and up the dirt driveway.

When I got to my truck, I was panting. I was getting too old for this sort of thing.

I looked at my watch. Time to do something useful for a change. I drove home, woked some chicken breasts, went out to the garden and picked vegetables, and made a big chicken salad for supper. We still had some homemade white bread in the breadbox. Between the bread and the salad, the Jacksons and Brady Coyne would eat well that evening.

I took a Sam Adams up onto the balcony and drank it, thinking about what I'd seen and done that day. By and by a neighbor's car came down our driveway and emptied out my wife and children. While they took turns washing off sand in the outdoor shower, I went down and collected cheese, crackers, and smoked bluefish pâté on a platter, made two vodkas on ice with olives—green for me, black for Zee—and put them on the platter, then took the platter back up onto the balcony.

By the time Zee joined me, her long, blue-black hair still damp from the shower and her tanned skin shining, I was well into the nibblies.

We exchanged a kiss.

“Well,” I said, “how was your day?”

“Excellent. And yours?”

“I made little progress, but I didn't lose any ground.”

“You had no ground to lose.”

“There is some bad news and some good news.”

“Tell me.”

“I've prepared supper,” I said. “That's the good news.”

“Indeed it is. Tell me about the rest of your day, including the bad news.”

So I did. Not everything, though. Not the part about the red haze. That was passed over lightly as a shoving match. Finding Larry Bucyck was the bad news.

When I was through, Zee said, “What do you think?”

“I'm not sure. Somebody executed Bucyck, but I don't know anything about that. My focus is Eduardo Alvarez's death. What I want to do is talk with Doyle and Mortison.”

She frowned. “Maybe I shouldn't have talked you into taking that job. Why don't you just give their names to Dom Agganis and let him deal with them.”

Sensible advice, but I said, “Dom has Bucyck on his plate.”

“Brady has him on his plate, too.”

“Maybe he'll know something when we see him,” I said. “He'll be staying here tonight, and you can play Grand Inquisitor.”

“I'm glad he's coming,” she said. “Maybe we can do some fishing before he goes home. He can't do anything more for his friend.”

“The fishing is a good idea,” I said. But I didn't think Brady Coyne would be abandoning Bucyck, even though he was dead. I figured he'd be around for a while.

T
en or fifteen minutes after J.W. left, state-police officer Dom Agganis led me back up the hill to Larry Bucyck's house. We got there just in time to see the emergency wagon pull away and go bumping down the driveway—carrying Larry's body, I assumed.

“Can I go now?” I said to Agganis.

He turned to me and smiled. “Nope.”

“What now?”

“Now we head over to the police station so we get your story on tape.”

“How many times do I have to tell it?”

“Which version?”

“Look,” I said, “I haven't rehearsed it, you know? My old friend, my client, we found his dead body in a pigsty and you tell me he was executed. It's all kind of spinning around in my head.”

“Good thing, too,” said Agganis. “I don't trust pat stories. But we've got to get it on tape, and it's going to take a little while. You might as well get used to it.”

“You could at least say you're sorry.”

He smiled. “I'm truly sorry about your friend. I'm not sorry I have to interview you some more.” He touched my arm, steered me over to the Chilmark PD cruiser, and opened the back door. “Get in, please, Mr. Coyne.”

“Chilmark?” I said. “We're in Menemsha, aren't we?”

“Chilmark and Menemsha,” he said. “One police force. Same jurisdiction. The village of Menemsha is part of the township of Chilmark. Get in, now.”

I bent over and began to slide in. Agganis guided me with his hand on top of my head as if I were a criminal.

I sat on the backseat and looked out at him. “What about my car?” I said. “Zee's car, I mean.”

“Someone will drive it over to the station for you. Got the keys?”

“They're in the ignition.”

He nodded and shut the door. Then he went to the front window and spoke to the uniformed officer behind the wheel for a minute.

The cop in the passenger seat half turned and looked back at me through the wire mesh. “Bucyck was dead in pig muck?”

I nodded. “You knew Larry?”

“Sure. Everybody does. Did. I don't mean
know
him. He was too strange to know. But everybody knew who he was. I don't think he had any what you'd call friends, but he was kind of a legend around here. Looney old sonofabitch, some kind of hermit, living in the woods, no electricity or anything. Totally harmless, of course. Used to pitch for the Sox, for God's sake.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “he's dead now.”

The cop shrugged and turned around. We were bouncing slowly down the driveway. I spotted a couple of Larry's rock sculptures in the woods. Now they were monuments. There wouldn't be any more of them.

There was a buzz from up front, and the cop behind the wheel put a cell phone to his ear. “Radko,” he said. He listened for a minute, then said, “No shit? Tomorrow? So that probably means…” He paused. “Everybody, huh?” Another pause. “When tomorrow, do you know?” He blew out an exasperated breath. “Well, fuck, you know? It's gotta be Sunday, of course. I was gonna have a cookout. Already invited the neighbors over…Yeah, sure. I hear you.” Radko snapped his phone shut and tilted his head toward his partner. “It's happening sometime tomorrow, they think.”

“It's really happening, huh?” said the other cop. “I figured it was just gossip.”

“It's in all the papers,” said Radko.

“That's what I mean. Rumors. They were just reporting rumors. That's what newspapers do. They don't know anything. I never thought he'd come back.”

“Well, he's coming back, all right. Private plane, and it's gonna be sometime tomorrow. If they know exactly when, they're not saying. So everybody's on duty, in case you were planning anything, like a cookout.”

“I was maybe gonna go fishing is all,” said the cop. “Since you didn't invite me to your cookout.”

“It was supposed to be for the neighbors,” said Radko. “People with kids. A family thing. No cops. You can forget about fishing tomorrow. I hear the stripers've been biting pretty good at Lobsterville, though, huh?”

“Yeah, well fuck it, I guess.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence, and after about ten minutes we pulled up in front of a little wood-frame building with weathered cedar-shake shingles and white trim. It had a bell tower and a brick chimney. I thought it once might have been an elementary schoolhouse, but the sign indicated that it was the Chilmark police station.

The two cops led me inside and put me in a big square room with a few rectangular oak tables and tall windows. I would have taken it for a fourth-grade classroom, except the windows were covered with thick wire mesh.

Radko told me to sit at one of the tables. “You want some water or something?”

“Coffee would be good.”

He shrugged and left the room. The other cop stood at the doorway and ignored me.

A few minutes later Dom Agganis and Olive Otero came in. Olive set a mug of coffee in front of me. They both sat across from me.

Agganis put a tape recorder on the table. He spoke into it, played it back, nodded, then said, “It's Saturday, August 23, um, two twenty-seven
P.M
. We're at the Chilmark police station. State-police officers Agganis and Otero interviewing Mr. Brady Coyne regarding the Larry Bucyck homicide.” He looked at me and nodded. “State your name and occupation for us, please.”

“Brady Coyne. I'm a lawyer.”

“You were Larry Bucyck's attorney, is that right?”

“That's right.”

“Okay, Mr. Coyne,” said Agganis. “Let's go over this again. Why don't you start where Larry Bucyck called you at home and just tell us everything. Don't leave anything out.”

It was a little after four-thirty when they finally let me go. Agganis told me not to leave the island without checking with him, and I assured him that I'd be staying with the Jacksons and he could always reach me by cell phone. I promised not to talk to the newspapers about Larry's murder.

An officer at the front desk gave me the keys to Zee's Wrangler, and I went outside into the August afternoon. I sat on a bench next to the parking area and lifted my face to the afternoon sunshine. My brain was spinning with scenarios and conjectures and doubts and sadness.

The only thing I knew for certain was that Larry Bucyck had been alive this morning, and now he was dead. I was having You-never-know and Count-your-blessings thoughts.

After a few minutes, I got up and went over to the Wrangler. I started it up and turned onto the road heading to the Jacksons' house in Edgartown.

Then I remembered Rocket, and Larry's hens, and the pigs, too. What would become of them?

So I turned around and drove back to Larry's place in Menemsha.

I half expected the driveway to be barricaded with yellow crime-scene tape, but it wasn't, nor was Larry's house, nor was there a cop standing guard over it. It looked just the way it had looked when I woke up in the morning. Larry's bicycle still leaned against the wall, and Rocket was snoozing in a patch of sunshine. As if nothing had happened. As if I'd find Larry out back stirring a big kettle of quahog chowder.

Rocket's water dish was empty. I picked it up, went inside, and took the dish to the sink.

I was pumping water when a voice said, “Put your hands on top of your head,” and something hard rammed into my kidneys.

I let go of the pump and set down the dish and put my hands on my head. I remembered how Larry had gotten the drop on me with his walking stick. “Is that a piece of wood you're poking me with?”

“Try something and you'll find out.” It was a low, growly voice. A woman's voice.

“Look—”

“Who are you?” she said.

“I'm Larry Bucyck's lawyer. From Boston. I stayed with him last night.”

“What's your name?”

“Brady Coyne.”

“You got ID?”

“Left hip pocket.”

“Take it out. Slowly.”

I reached back with my left hand, took out my wallet, and held it there.

She took it. “Put your hand back on your head.”

I did.

After a moment, she said, “Okay, Mr. Brady Coyne. I bet you can tell me what's been happening here today. Here's your wallet.”

I reached behind me, and she put my wallet into my hand. I shoved it back into my pocket. “Somebody murdered Larry,” I said.

“Murdered,” she whispered.

I nodded. “I'm sorry.”

She didn't say anything for a minute. Then she blew out a long slow breath and said, “I was afraid of that.”

“You thought somebody was going to murder him?”

“That's not what I meant.” She cleared her throat. “I saw all the police cars, and that was my worst-case scenario. Did you do it?”

“The police have been asking me versions of that question all day. The answer is still no. I'm the one who found his body.”

“Why'd you come back here?”

“I was worried about the animals,” I said. “Can I please take my hands off my head?”

“Just let me think.” She didn't say anything for a minute or so. Then the stick, or whatever it was, stopped poking me in the back, and she said, “Okay. I remember your name. Larry used to talk about you. He thought you were a good guy. You can turn around.”

I lowered my hands and turned around.

She had taken a couple of steps back from me. She was holding a pump-action shotgun at her hip. Twelve-gauge, I guessed, judging by the size of the bore, which was pointing at my stomach.

She was younger than I'd guessed from her voice. Somewhere in her thirties. Quite tall. Taller than me, six-two maybe, with muscular arms and shoulders. She wore snug-fitting jeans and a black tank top and dirty white sneakers. Black hair and unwrinkled skin the color of an old burnished penny.

Her chocolate eyes were glazed with tears.

“I'm sorry about Larry,” I said.

She tried to smile. It didn't work very well. “Somebody ought to cry for him, don't you think?”

I nodded. “What's your name?”

“Sedona. Sedona Blaisdell. I live in one of those big butt-ugly houses you passed on the road in.”

“A neighbor, then.”

She shrugged. She had a wide mouth, even white teeth, and a long thin nose with a bump on the bridge, as if it had once been broken. “I sort of took care of Larry,” she said. “He was good to his animals, but he didn't pay much attention to himself. It was our secret. If my husband knew about me coming here…” She waved her hand. “I liked him a lot.” She stopped and looked up at the sky. “I've been visiting Larry just about every day for the past six years,” she said after a minute, “and my husband never notices. He doesn't notice me when I'm there, so I guess he doesn't notice me when I'm not.”

“I'd say that was his loss,” I said. “Would you mind aiming that thing somewhere else?”

She looked down at the shotgun she was holding and frowned as if she hadn't seen it before. “Sorry.” She lowered the muzzle so it was pointing at the floor.

“There were all those worrisome vehicles traipsing in and out, and I had to know what was going on. I figured it wasn't anything good, so I grabbed my husband's gun and snuck through the woods.”

“You and Larry were more than just neighbors,” I said.

She cocked her head and smiled. “Well, I guess you could say that. You could certainly say we were friends. It wasn't easy being friends with Larry Bucyck. He lived pretty much in his own muddled head. But sometimes we'd talk about baseball. We had that in common.”

“You're a baseball fan?”

She shrugged. “I played college hoops on scholarship. We both used to be athletes, that's all. He'd talk about the pressure, how it got so it wasn't any fun. I could relate to that. I mean, he did it for money, I did it for an education.” She shrugged. “He was a very sad man. Reason I used to come see him, I worried about him doing something to himself. Then today, seeing all those vehicles, that ambulance…”

“I used to worry about that, too,” I said. “But I thought he'd made peace with it.”

She shook her head. “He could put on a good front. But he was haunted. Look, you don't need to worry about the animals. I'll take care of them till I can figure out what to do with them. I guess I'll take Rocket home with me. My husband won't like it, if he even notices, but the hell with him. Rocket's the sweetest dog.”

We went outside. She leaned her shotgun against the side of the house, and we sat on some rocks. Rocket came over and nuzzled Sedona's leg. She dropped her hand so he could lick it.

“Can you think of anybody who'd want to murder Larry Bucyck?” I said.