Authors: William G. Tapply
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She turned to look up at me. “You don’t need to apologize to the hired help, Brady. It would just help if I knew you weren’t going to be in, and if you wanted me to consult with your clients, or what. You’re the boss. I’m not complaining.”
“Things came up. Bad things.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Why don’t you take the afternoon.”
“I’d rather have tomorrow. Okay?”
“Sure. Fine. Tomorrow’s Friday. We’ll just close up the shop for the day. I could use a day off myself.”
She smirked at me, but refrained from commenting on the time I had been taking off lately. “I’ll have to change a couple of appointments,” was all she said.
“That’s okay. Do it.”
“Brady, really. Your clients—”
“I know, I know. I’ll take care of them. What did Stern want?”
“You think he’d tell me?”
I squeezed her shoulder. “No. Not Stern. I’ll go call him.”
Back at my desk I lit a Winston and took my appointment book from my jacket pocket. I stared at the six telephone numbers I had copied from the wall in Eddie Donagan’s apartment. Then I picked up the phone and punched out a number.
“Mr. McDevitt’s line,” answered Charlie’s secretary, a little dumpling of a lady who looks like her picture should be on the label of a can of apple pie filling.
“Shirley, you gorgeous creature,” I said. “How can Charlie get any work at all done with you sitting there to distract him?”
She giggled. “Talk like that will get you a sexual harassment suit, Mr. Coyne. Hold on a minute, I’ll get him for you.”
A minute later Charlie came on the line. “Hey,” he said. “You wanna go golfing?”
“Sure. Sometime. Right now I need a favor.”
“What’s it worth?”
I paused, pretending to calculate. “How about scallops at the Union Oyster House?”
“With good wine?”
“The house white.”
“Sold,” said Charlie. “Listen. We really gotta get out.”
“Last time we played, I seem to recall, I lost my shirt,” I said.
He chuckled. “Speaking of that, did I tell you about this guy I know, Carl, who lost his boat?”
“I’m really not in the mood, Charlie.”
“Carl’s got this nice little eighteen-foot sloop,” he said, ignoring my protest. “Moors it on the Annisquam River right in front of his house. Carl loves his boat. He’s always down there polishing the brass, scraping and varnishing and swabbing it out. Anyhow, he goes down to the dock after supper a couple of nights ago and his boat’s gone. Carl is very upset, as you can imagine.”
“Um,” I said.
“So he goes wandering around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking everybody if they’ve seen his boat, and, of course, they haven’t, but they’re neighborly types, so they invite Carl in for a quick snort. Which Carl doesn’t turn down. A few hours later he has paid a visit to just about everyone on the river, and he’s feeling no pain. Finally his wife looks out the front window, and there’s Carl, with his arms around the flagpole on the front lawn. She goes out and says, ‘Carl, what in the hell are you doing?’ And Carl looks at her and he says, ‘My boat, my boat. I found my boat.’”
I lit another cigarette and waited.
“You there, Brady?”
“I’m here,” I sighed.
“Carl’s wife told me about it,” Charlie continued. “Know what she said to me?”
“What’d she say, Charlie?”
“She says to me, she said, ‘Poor Carl. He still doesn’t know his mast from a pole in the ground.’”
“Is that a true story?”
“As God is my judge,” he said solemnly. “So. What can I do for you that’s worth scallops at the Union Oyster House?”
“I’ve got some phone numbers. I need names.”
“Local?”
“All but one. That’s a 413.”
“That’d be Western Mass. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Give ’em to me.”
I read the six telephone numbers to him. He repeated them to me. “It’ll take me a couple of hours. Okay?”
“Fine. Listen. One more thing. Can you check with your fellow federal employees over at the Medford Post Office and see what they’re doing with the mail of a guy named Eddie Donagan? Can you do that?”
“Donagan the ballplayer?”
“Right. The ex-ballplayer.”
“Give me the address.”
I gave it to him, and we hung up. I swiveled my chair around, stared out the window for a minute, then turned back to my desk. I found the number for the Shawmut County Bank branch in Medford, tapped it out, and was finally connected to somebody named Mr. Marley.
“My name is Edward Donagan,” I said, crossing my fingers. “I have a question about my checking account.”
“Certainly, sir. May I have your account number, please?”
“Ah, jeez. I left my checkbook home. You can look it up, can’t you?”
“Well, normally…”
“Listen,” I said. “I think you guys have screwed up my account, okay? I think someone’s been writing checks on my account, or else you guys are taking money out of my account, because it don’t seem to add up, see, and if they are, or you are, then you’ve got trouble. So just look it up for me, will you? I want to know all the checks you think I’ve written in the past three weeks, and what my balance is. Okay? I don’t want to have to bother my lawyer.”
“How did you spell your name again, sir?”
I spelled “Donagan” for him, and he put me on hold. I lit another cigarette and waited. I was just stubbing it out when Mr. Marley came back on the phone. He sounded quite jovial.
“According to our computer, Mr. Donagan, you have written no checks on your account since the seventh of July.”
“Let’s see,” I said. “That was a little more than three weeks ago, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which check was that? The last one.”
“New England Telephone. Twenty-two dollars and forty cents.”
“Okay. And what’s my balance?”
“Seven hundred and thirty-six dollars and nineteen cents.”
“No other checks?”
“No, sir.”
“What about deposits?”
“Your last deposit was on the second of July. Five hundred and eighteen dollars and seventy-one cents.”
“Right. My paycheck. That’s it, huh?”
“Yes, sir. That’s it.”
“Hm. Guess I was wrong. My mistake, I guess. Well, thanks, anyway.”
“Any time, sir. Glad to be of assistance.”
I pondered the information Mr. Marley had given me for a moment, then called Stern.
“Coyne,” I said when he answered. “You called?”
“Keeping our bargain,” he said. “You keeping your part?”
“Sure. I’m here at my office being an attorney. What do you have?”
“Couple of things that might interest you. First, you remember one of the names on that list the Mikuni girl gave you, the ballplayer, Halley?”
“Sure. Bobo Halley.”
“Just thought you might want to know that he was drummed out of baseball. Gambling.”
“Gambling,” I repeated, “No kidding.”
“Yeah. They decided to cover it up. I guess he was tight with some bad boys in Detroit. Owed them some money. Suspicion that he might’ve thrown some games.”
“What do you make of that?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We checked the other guys on the list and there was nothing like that with them. I talked to the cops who investigated Halley’s death. All they could say was he’d had a few drinks when he cracked up.”
“Hmm,” I said, pretending that was all news to me. “What was the other thing? You said you had a couple of things.”
“The other thing is, I decided to send one of my guys through Donagan’s apartment.”
“Good idea.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“Of course,” I said, “you know the cops have already been there.”
“Like hell they have. This is my case. No cops do anything without my say so.”
“Well, according to the landlord, two cops were there two weeks ago.”
“And just how in the hell do you know that, Coyne?”
I didn’t answer.
“You keep playing Dick Tracy, Coyne, you’re gonna wind up with some big holes in you, know that? Understand, I’m not worried about you particularly. I just don’t want this case fucked up. You’re interfering with an FBI investigation, and I’m about ready to have you locked up. I mean it. You are pissing me off, Coyne. So you went to Donagan’s apartment. I suppose you handled everything and moved stuff around and left your fingerprints everywhere.”
“Look, I don’t see how—”
“Butt out, Coyne.”
“Okay. You’re right. I’ll be a good boy.”
“Sure. And I’m gonna swear off Cutty Sark, too.” I heard him sigh. “Look. Do you want to cooperate with me on this, or what?”
“Sure I do.”
He sighed again. “Yeah, well anyhow. I’m gonna have Travers get Donagan’s description out, see if we can find him. They’re good at that kind of stuff. Better than you. So you can relax, okay? We’ll take it from here. Nice work, and all that shit.”
“Okay. I hear you.”
“Of course,” he said, “you’re probably right.”
“How’s that?”
“Donagan’s probably dead.”
It was close to three hours later when Charlie McDevitt called me back. “You got paper and pencil?” he said. “You want to write these down?”
“I’m all set. Go ahead.”
“Okay. The 5081 number’s in Billerica. Name of Suzanne Anders.” He spelled it for me, and gave me the street address. “Next, 2170’s the number for the office at the Herman’s store in Burlington. That’s at the mall. Okay? And 2663 is someone named Anthony Sandella in Medford, forty-six East Street. Now this one here, Brady, this makes me wonder what you’re up to. This 9957 is in Dorchester. It’s for Bond’s Variety Store. You know about Darryl Bond?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, Darryl Bond’s a bookie, among other things. Not a nice man. Likes to break people’s thumbs.” He hesitated. “You’re not planning to talk to Darryl Bond, are you?”
“You seem to be implying, in your usual circumspect manner, that perhaps it might not be a wonderful idea.”
“Right. Not wonderful at all. You don’t want to go near that neighborhood, and you don’t want to go near Darryl Bond.”
“He’s a bookie, huh?”
“Oh, yes. He’s been picked up a few times. Hard to nail him down. Does a little dope, runs a few hookers, too, just for recreation. Stay away from him.”
“Okay. What about those other phone numbers?”
“That’s what took me so long,” said Charlie.
“Even with all the resources of the United States Justice Department at your fingertips?”
“Even then. Now this 3327 number is a pay phone in Central Square on a corner by a Gulf station on Mass Ave. And this 413 number’s in Lanesborough. It was disconnected a year and a half ago. It’s a bitch to run down disconnected numbers, you know. It’s for somebody named Jacob Grabowski.”
“I know who that is,” I said. “Did you have a chance to check the post office?”
“Did you ask me to? Sure I did. They’re holding Donagan’s mail for him.”
“Did he request it?”
“No. Evidently it started building up in his mailbox, so the mailman checked with the landlord, who said Donagan was away. So they put in a notice that they were holding it for him. I guess that’s what they do.”
“For how long?”
“Nearly a month.”
“Okay. Listen, thanks a lot, Charlie.”
“Brady, old buddy, I’ve got this feeling maybe you should tell me what’s going on. You do tend to, you know, get involved.”
“Nothing to worry about. I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Sure.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Don’t worry. If I need you I’ll holler.”
“Well, I hope you will. I really do. I’m looking forward to those scallops. Don’t want something to happen, you can’t pay up.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon making Julie happy by talking with clients, filling in the blanks on wills, and even keeping an appointment with Mrs. Bartlett. I assured her that things at probate could be straightened out, that I’d get to it at the beginning of the week. She was smiling and calling me “dear boy” by the time she left. Plucking the heartstrings of rich old ladies was what I did best.
Off and on throughout the afternoon I rang the number of Suzanne Anders in Billerica. It was five-thirty when someone answered the phone.
“Is this Suzanne Anders?” I said.
“Yes, this is Suzanne.” She had a husky, Lauren Bacall voice.
“My name is Brady Coyne. I’m Eddie Donagan’s attorney.”
“Yes?” The voice was cool.
“You know Eddie, don’t you?”
“I did, yes.”
“I’d like to talk to you about Eddie.”
“I’ve got nothing to say about Eddie Donagan.”
I sensed she was about to hang up on me. “Wait, please,” I said. “It’s important.”
She hesitated. “Why? Why is it important that we talk about my former friend, that son of a bitch Eddie Donagan?”
“I have reason to believe that he’s in trouble.”
“That’s not news. I could have told you that. He is in big trouble.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He stood me up on a date about a month ago. No call, no apology, nothing. The hell with him.”
“I mean
real
trouble, Miss Anders.”
“Miz,” she corrected—automatically, it seemed. But her tone softened. “What do you mean, real trouble?”
I paused dramatically and dropped my voice, a ploy that always works. “I’m not at liberty to say right now,” I said.
“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Really heavy lawyer stuff, huh?”
“You’re mocking me,” I observed.
“Why, yes, I suppose I am,” she said. She paused. “Okay, Mr. Coyne. You’ve done it. I’m curious. If it’s really that important, why don’t you meet me at work when I get my break, and then we can talk. I’m on nights at Lauriat’s. At the mall.”
I told her how she could recognize me, and we agreed to meet at the Haagen-Dazs stand at the Burlington Mall at nine o’clock where she said we could get the best ice cream in the world and where we could sit and talk. It sounded good to me.
T
HE SHOPPING CENTER IS
here to stay, as closely attuned to the American psyche as the department store was a couple of generations ago. Where else can Americans do everything they want to do all at once? They can drive in their cars, mill around with hordes of strangers, and buy things they didn’t know they wanted until they got there.