Authors: William G. Tapply
That hummingbird reminded me of kingfishers swooping along a riverbank, making their odd clattering sound in flight, and kingfishers reminded me of trout rivers.
At the Deerfield, my favorite trout stream this side of Montana, the trout would be sipping mayflies on a beautiful day in June, and I could be there by early afternoon.
I didn’t want to think about Kaye Fallon’s sprawled body, emptied of its lifeblood, smashed and sliced in the living room of her own home. I didn’t want to consider the possibility that her husband—my client—had done that to her, and whether or not he actually had, that he was a suspect and it was my job to defend him. I just wanted to go fishing.
Not today.
A realtor’s red-white-and-blue Apartment for Rent sign hung on the chain-link fence in front of the big square three-decker that Mick Fallon now called home.
Half a dozen aluminum trash cans were jammed into one corner of the porch. Two unpainted wooden rocking chairs sat facing each other in the other corner, and a row of plastic flower pots were lined up on the rail with brown plants drooping out of them.
Although I’d never been inside, I knew that Mick had the top floor flat, the cheapest and smallest in the rickety old triple-decker. I opened the front door, stepped into the tiny inside entryway, and hit the bell for apartment three. A minute later I heard heavy footsteps coming down the inside stairs.
The door opened, and a man I’d never seen before stepped into the entryway. “Please,” he said, “will you people just leave him alone?”
He wore a gray summer-weight suit, pale green shirt, blue-and-green necktie. He was a couple of inches shorter than me, neither fat nor skinny, brown hair, brown eyes, neatly trimmed mustache, glasses. An utterly nondescript guy.
He was peering over my shoulder. “Where are the rest of them?” he said.
“The rest of who?”
He frowned at me. “Who are you?”
“Suppose we introduce ourselves,” I said. “Then maybe we can start over again. I’m Brady Coyne.”
He cocked his head, looked me up and down, then nodded. “You’re his lawyer. Jesus, I’m sorry. I assumed—”
“What, that I was a reporter?”
He nodded. “They’ve been here all morning, swarming all over the sidewalk, creeping around out back, double-parking their vans on the street. Mick’s up there crying his eyes out, and these—these
monsters
are banging on the door and yelling for him to come down and talk to them.” He blew out a long breath, then held out his hand. “I really apologize. I’m Lyn Conley. Mick’s best friend.”
I shook his hand. “Good of you to be with him.”
He shrugged. “I was up all night with my wife. I tried to call Mick early this morning, but he wasn’t answering. I figured he could use some company, so I came right over. He’s a mess.” He smiled. “I guess you know that. You were with him last night.”
“Conley,” I said. “Gretchen…?”
He nodded. “My wife, yes. She’s the one who found Kaye’s body.”
“How is she doing?”
“Better. She’s calmed down a little. Her mother’s with her now. Look, Mr. Coyne, Kaye and Mick are—were—our best friends. Our families were very close. Kaye was—well, everybody loved Kaye. You met her?”
“Just once,” I said. “Not under the most favorable conditions.”
He nodded. “The deposition. Sure. Well, that’s your loss. She was warm and funny and just a terrific person. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to do anything except hug her. And Mick?” He shook his head. “This is a terrible, terrible thing as it is. But the way they’re playing this story on TV, it’s as if Mick has been tried and convicted already. And that incident at the bar last night…”
“What’s Mick told you?”
Conley shrugged. “He’s a wreck. There’s no way he killed her. You never saw a man who loved his wife like Mick.”
“Well,” I said, “I just came over to see how he was doing, maybe try to reassure him a little.”
“I know he’ll want to see you,” said Conley. “Next time just ring and come on up. This door here doesn’t lock.”
I followed him up the narrow flight of stairs, which paused at a landing on the second floor, took a 180-degree turn, and climbed steeply to Mick’s third-floor apartment. The entire stairway was lit by two bare sixty-watt bulbs, one in the ceiling at each landing.
The door at the top opened directly into the kitchen—cracked linoleum floor, open shelves above the sink, dirty white refrigerator, scarred wooden table in front of a sooty window that looked out onto a small weedy backyard and, beyond it, the back side of another three-decker. A door in the corner of the kitchen led out to a small porch. Soot—or just years of house dust—covered the windowsill, the top of the baseboard, the edges of the linoleum. Three rickety wooden chairs were pushed in against the table. Beer bottles and dirty glasses and dishes and pots and pans were piled in and beside the sink and on the table. It smelled of old cigar smoke, sweaty socks, stale beer.
“Mick’s in the living room,” said Conley. “Coffee?”
“Please,” I said.
Conley picked up some beer bottles and dropped them in a trash basket that was already brimming over. “I keep telling him,” he said. “He drinks too damn much. He doesn’t watch out, he’ll end up where I was.”
I arched my eyebrows at him.
He nodded. “I’ve been dry for four years, seven months, and thirteen days. I came damn close to blowing everything.”
“You think Mick’s an alcoholic?”
“I see my old self in him.” He shrugged. “He’s not ready to face it. I don’t know. Maybe this—” he waved his hand “—this tragedy will make him see the light.”
“You don’t think…?”
“What, that Mick killed Kaye?” He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not.” He found the electric coffee pot and began filling it at the sink. “He’s in the other room. Coffee’ll be ready in a minute.”
Mick’s living room was smaller than my bedroom. An old faded sofa, two ancient chairs, and a new big-screen console television made it feel cramped. A goldfish bowl sat on top of the TV, and a rather large blue fish hovered motionless in the water.
Aside from an insurance company calendar featuring an Audubon bird print hanging behind the TV—it was still turned to May—there were no decorations in the room.
Mick was lying on the sofa staring up at the ceiling. The television was on but muted, tuned to an exercise show. A muscular young brunette in skimpy Spandex was leading a gang of senior citizens in a slow-motion aerobics class.
Mick lifted his head. “Hey,” he said.
“How you doing, Mick?”
He let his head fall back. “You seen the TV this morning?”
“No.” I sat in the wing chair. A spring poked at my left cheek through the upholstery.
“Well, you should. You’re on it. You’re a fucking hero, man. You saved poor Skeeter O’Reilly’s life from a crazed, knife-wielding, wife-killing monster at an early-morning hostage-taking. They’re already debating whether they should restore the death penalty specifically for me. They got some footage from outside Skeeter’s—you arriving with Horowitz, going inside, us coming out, me getting cuffed. Somehow they even got some of the conversation Horowitz and I had on the damn telephone. How in hell did they do that? Horowitz give it to ’em?”
“Of course not,” I said. “They’re expert snoopers, that’s all.”
Mick shook his head. “And then they showed the crowd gathered outside our house—mine and Kaye’s—in Lexington, with all the police cars there, lights flashing, the EMTs loading Kaye’s body bag into the back of an ambulance. They interviewed some of my old neighbors, people I’ve known for twenty years, friends whose kids played with my kids, folks who we had neighborhood barbecues and yard sales with. Know what they’re saying?
“They’re saying,” I said, “that Mick Fallon was a loving husband and a good father and they never would’ve guessed he could do something like this.”
Mick turned his head and smiled quickly. “Exactly. Like, well, he obviously did it, and we sure are surprised.”
Lyn Conley came into the room. He handed me a mug of coffee, started to sit in the other chair, then straightened up. “Oh,” he said. “Am I interrupting?”
I waved my hand. “Not at all.”
“Lawyer-client conversation?”
“No. Friend-friend conversation.” I took a sip of coffee, then lit a cigarette. “I’d like to talk to your wife,” I said to Conley.
He frowned. “Why?”
“He thinks I’m gonna be arrested,” said Mick.
I shrugged. “I want to be prepared, that’s all.” I turned to Conley. “Gretchen—Mrs. Conley—was Kaye’s best friend, right?”
“Yes,” said Conley. He glanced at Mick. “We were all best friends. The four of us. I don’t know what kind of shape Gretch is in to talk to anybody, though.”
“I imagine the police spent some time with her.”
“Hours.”
“The whole experience must’ve been horrific for her,” I said. “But she’s an important witness. I’ve got to interview her. I was hoping sometime today or this evening…”
He nodded. “I guess it’s important. Why don’t you come by around seven, seven-thirty. I’ll give you directions.”
He went back into the kitchen, and a minute later returned. He handed me a piece of notepaper. “It’s not hard to find,” he said. “I wrote our phone number there, too.”
I folded the paper, jammed it into my jacket pocket, and fished one of my business cards from my wallet. “If you need to reach me,” I said, handing it to him.
He nodded, then turned to Mick. “I gotta get to the office, my friend. Anything I can do?”
Mick shook his head. “Appreciate everything, man. Give my love to Gretchen. Tell her how bad I feel that she had to…”
“I will.” Conley held out his hand to me. “Good to meet you, Brady. See you tonight.”
We shook hands, and then he left.
I turned to Mick. “Get up. We’ve got things to do.”
He lifted himself onto one elbow. “I don’t feel like doing a damn thing, Brady.”
“I want to get this place cleaned up, and I don’t intend to do it by myself.”
“Oh, fuck the place.”
I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. I rolled up my cuffs as I headed for the kitchen. “Get your ass out here,” I said. “This is a dump.”
I started moving the dirty dishes from the table to the sink. A minute later Mick appeared in the doorway. “My wife’s dead and you want to clean up the kitchen?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right now, that’s exactly what I want to do.”
He frowned at me, then shrugged. “You rather wash or dry?”
An hour later we had the dishes all washed and put away and a fresh pot of coffee brewing.
On our way back into the living room, Mick paused at the TV. He bent over and tapped the goldfish bowl with his fingernail. The blue fish tilted its face to the top of the water.
Mick turned to me. “Erin gave him to me when I moved in here. To keep me company, she said. My daughter.”
I smiled.
“I call him Neely. Named him after Cam Neely. Helluva hockey player, Neely. I ran into him a couple times at Skeeter’s. Would’ve had a great career, weren’t for bad wheels.”
“He had a pretty good career as it was,” I said. “But I don’t exactly get the connection. A blue fish and Cam Neely?”
Mick shrugged. “No connection. Good name for a fish, that’s all.” He picked up the little fish food shaker and sprinkled some onto the water. Neely began to gobble the flakes off the surface. He reminded me of a trout sipping mayfly spinners off a slow-moving stream.
Mick tapped the bowl again, smiled, then slouched into one of the chairs. I sat on the sofa.
He looked at me and spread his hands. “Okay, so the dump’s cleaned up and the goldfish is fed. So what’s the point?”
“The point,” I said, “is that you’ve got to live your life. We can’t do anything about what happened. It couldn’t be more tragic, but it’s done. I know you’ve got to mourn Kaye, and you should. But you’ve still got to eat and take care of yourself and get through the days.”
“I really don’t want to do anything,” he said. “I just want to go to bed and stay there.”
“Sure,” I said. “It was a late night.”
“I mean, like forever.”
“What good would that do?”
“What harm?”
“Look, Mick,” I said. “Somebody murdered Kaye. It wasn’t you, okay, but it was somebody. Now aside from the fact that I’d just as soon you weren’t convicted of it, I think both of us would like it best if the actual murderer was found. Don’t you want that?”
He cocked his head and frowned at me as if that were a new idea. Then he nodded. “Well, sure. God damn right I do.”
“Here’s what I think, then,” I said. “I know Horowitz. He’s a good cop. One of the best, actually. But he’s seen a helluva lot of homicides. To you, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. To Horowitz, it’s just one more in a long string of tragedies that he’s had to investigate. Want to know something?”
“What?”
“Probably three-quarters of the cases Horowitz investigates are domestics. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, ex-spouses, children. Now I know Horowitz is open-minded, fair, and thorough. He’s not likely to cave in to political or media pressure. But—”
“But he’s got me,” said Mick.
I nodded. “Objectively, you’re a great suspect, Mick. You’ve got no alibi for Sunday evening, you were in the process of getting divorced and probably cleaned out financially, you were upset with Kaye, and your behavior at Skeeter’s last night was—well, it was bizarre, to say the least.”
“So what’re you saying?”
“I’m saying that Horowitz is human. The cops like to say, ‘The commonest things most commonly happen.’ When a wife is murdered—especially when the murder is obviously passionate—most commonly it’s the husband who did it. They’ve got a good circumstantial case against you already. God knows what they’ll find when they get their forensics and physical evidence and talk with witnesses. But you’ve got to be prepared for the possibility that they’ll arrest you.”
He shrugged. “It’s a certainty, if you listen to the TV.”
“If I’m going to help you,” I said, “you’ve got to help me.”
“What can I do?”
“Well,” I said, “the question is simple. Who killed Kaye? Think about motive, means, and opportunity. Start with motive.”