Void in Hearts
Authors: William G. Tapply
A Brady Coyne Mystery
William G. Tapply
For Mike and Wendy McGill
1
L
ES KATZ PEERED AT
me with his dirt-colored eyes. “It has occurred to me,” he said slowly, “that I may have committed a crime.”
I glanced around. The restaurant was empty of other patrons, not that surprising at three on a Thursday afternoon in January at Hung Moon’s in Somerville, Massachusetts. Two waitresses—they looked Vietnamese to me—sat at a table across the room under a plastic fern, watching us. I knew if I lifted a finger or arched an eyebrow I would be offered an hour of exquisite oriental pleasure at reasonable rates. I was not tempted.
Les spent a lot of time at Hung Moon’s. “I’m addicted to MSG,” he once told me. “Also, there’s this chick named Soo Ling who’s got a tongue like an anaconda.”
Les Katz was a private investigator whom I used on those relatively rare occasions when I needed one. My law practice consists mostly of estates and contracts, the mundane paper stuff that my wealthy clients need. Now and then, however, a client asks me for services that I don’t perform myself, and that’s when I call Les. Once, for example, he found the fourteen-year-old daughter of a State Street banker in the back room of a Combat Zone bar for me, and he took her back to the private school in Weston where her estranged parents had placed her for safekeeping. Another time Les nailed an engineer who was selling company secrets to a competitor.
Les was very good at his work. He had never failed me. This made me a hero in the eyes of my clients and Les a hero of sorts in mine.
He was a brown-and-gray man, distinguished by his nondescriptness. Medium height, medium build, medium middle-aged, neither attractive nor ugly, he blended in. He was blessed, moreover, with a seemingly limitless supply of patience. “How,” I once asked him, “can you sit in a car all night staring into the dark? How can you spend weeks on end twirling on a barstool?”
“Simple,” he said. “I play old bridge hands in my head. The real secret is to drink Coke, not booze. A slow, steady intake of caffeine. We Sam Spade types gotta be alert, you know. Danger lurks behind every door, and all that shit. What I don’t understand is how you can devote a career to shuffling manila folders and changing commas into semicolons. I mean, how many times can a man write ‘party of the first part’ on yellow legal pads before he begins to claw at his own eyeballs?”
Now he was leaning across the damp table at me, a glass of Coca-Cola in front of him, a half smile on his forgettable face. After a moment he removed his cigar from his mouth and jabbed at me with its soggy end. “Did you hear me?” he said. “About me maybe committing a crime?”
“I heard you, Les.”
“Well?”
I shrugged. He frowned. Then he said, “Oh, right.” He extracted his wallet from his hip pocket, removed a bill, folded it once the long way, and extended it to me between two fingers. I took it and smoothed it out.
“A ten-spot,” I observed. “Something heavy, Les?”
“Are we…”
I took a ballpoint pen from my pocket and scribbled on a napkin. I pushed it across the table. Les glanced at it, wrote his name on it, and pushed it back to me. I folded it and stuck it into my shirt pocket.
“Now,” I said, “I am officially and legally retained. You are my privileged client. I am your lawyer.”
“I can talk?”
“Freely. Liberally. Talk dirty if you want.”
“It’s a little embarrassing.”
“It usually is.”
“Actually, it’s not as sordid as it may sound.”
I lit a cigarette. “You figure you’re getting your money’s worth out of this, Les?”
“Okay,” he said. He clamped down on his cigar and fired it up. “You’ve got the meter running, huh?”
“Spit it out.”
He nodded and leaned toward me. “Good-looking lady comes to your office, wants you to get the goods on her old man, who she thinks is scraping his carrot somewhere else. What do you conclude?”
“I conclude,” I said, “that maybe this good-looking lady’s shagging somebody on the side, wants a little insurance in case her old man hires an investigator to check her out.”
“I thought of that,” said Les. “The other thing I thought of, though, is maybe this good-looking lady’s got something wrong with her, her old man needs to play around. Two sides to every story, right?”
“Everybody plays around,” I observed.
Les cocked his head at me. “That ain’t true.”
“Okay. I stand corrected. People who aren’t married, you don’t call it playing around. Anyway, so what?”
“So this lady is telling me she thinks the guy is finding some interesting new place to dip his wick, and she’s looking at me through these eyes that make you want to jump right in. Slim, tall, all this blond hair. She looked like that actress there. Farrah Fawcett. Had this voice, made you feel like you just finished having sex with her to hear her talk. Brady, I’m telling you, she was absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, I tell her, sure, that’s what I do for a living. I ask her a few questions, trying to get a line on the guy. She’s acting typical. Last thing she wants is the guy finding out she’s sicced a gumshoe onto him. She’s nervous. Like she wants to know, but doesn’t, too. Pays in cash. Don’t try to call her. Don’t go near their house. Anyway, to make a long story short—”
“It’s a little late for that, Les.”
He frowned at me. “Huh?”
“It’s already a long story.”
“Right. I follow the guy. Sure enough. She’s right. Nooners. Superdiscreet. Twice a week, but different days, always they meet in a different place. Once she’s in a taxi that stops on the corner for him. Another time they have lunch at separate tables at the Oyster House and he follows her out, they go to a hotel in Brookline. Once he sits beside her on a bench on the Common, they don’t go anywhere. Just lean close to each other and talk. I got my trusty three-hundred-millimeter lens working. Still, nothing definitive, you know?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” he continued. “So I follow them for three weeks. They’ve got a thing going, no doubt in my mind. But damned if I could get what I needed. And you know I’m good at what I do.”
“Photos. Tapes.
In flagrante delicto.
You got nothing juicy.”
“Right. I never knew where they were going until they got there. I had the feeling that she was running the show, making the arrangements. She’s done this before, you ask me. So there I am. The old lady, she’s gonna call me, find out what I got. What do I say? I think her old man’s messing around, all right! I can show her a picture of the alienator of her husband’s affections. But no evidence of anything. In other words, I haven’t earned my money.”
“For all you can tell, these are business meetings,” I said.
“Hell, Brady, I know they ain’t business meetings. I know exactly what they are. But these two’ve got me stumped. I admit it. Funny thing, though. I started thinking, this guy keeps meeting this lady, they’ve obviously got something going, and next thing I know I start to feel sorry for them. They’ve gotta sneak around, and this lady, she’s not all that attractive, so I begin to think they’re really in love or something. More than just, you know, good, healthy hormones run amok. They’ve got something nice, it seems to me, and who am I to interfere?”
“Come off it, Les.”
“No, really. I actually began to feel guilty.”
I shook my head slowly. “Why don’t you buy us another drink.”
“Capital idea.” He glanced over at the two Vietnamese waitresses and nodded. They discussed it for a moment and then one of them came toward us. Her skirt was so tight that she walked as if her feet were bound, little birdlike steps, one foot precisely in front of the other.
“Gennumun?” she said, an expectant smile on her rosebud lips.
“Another,” said Les, gesturing to our empty glasses. “Bourbon for my uncle. Coke for me.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder at her friend at the table across the room. They exchanged small shrugs before she tiptoed away.
“So,” resumed Les, examining the dead end of his cigar, “I thought about it for a while. Finally I realized what I had to do.”
“Les—”
“No, listen. My heart was in absolutely the right place. I call the guy up at his office. Tell him my name, my job, and ask him if he’d like to meet with me. He sounds very shook up. Naturally. So I meet him at this grungy bar in Chelsea, for God’s sake. His choice. We sit in a booth. He refuses a drink. I tell him, I say I’ve been following him for three weeks, I know what he’s doing. I’ve got photos of him and the lady. I tell him I got nothing really incriminating, but he probably still wouldn’t want his wife to see them. He agrees instantly. I tell him, who am I to butt into his life? He seems to agree with that, too. Then you know what he did?”
“He offered to buy the pictures from you,” I said.
Les sat back and placed both of his hands flat on the table. “How did you figure that out?”
“I think you left the little hints you might have let slip out of your narrative, Les. You did suggest to this man, in a very circuitous way, I’m sure, that if he had the photos, then you wouldn’t have them to show his wife. Am I right?”
“Well,” he said, his eyes slipping away from mine, “maybe I did. Not that I really intended to, understand, and not that I necessarily went there with that in my mind. I am not a devious man, Brady.”
“Ho, ho,” I said.
Les shrugged. “Anyway, he wanted the photos real bad. See, I said to myself, Les, I said, you give the wife these pictures, all it’s gonna do is make everybody unhappy. She can’t use them to divorce the guy and take him to the cleaners, because they’re just not explicit enough. So she gets nothing out of it. But she’s miserable, even so, and she makes things miserable for the poor guy. But if he gets the pictures—see, Brady, they just show the two of them getting out of a cab together, walking into a hotel, sitting beside each other on a park bench—if he has them, that way nobody gets hurt.”
The waitress brought our drinks and scurried back to her friend across the room. I removed the paper parasol from mine and sipped. Cheap bourbon. I put the drink down, lit a Winston, and studied Les.
“You’re thinking bad thoughts,” he said.
“It’s blackmail, Les. Legal opinion.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“Unethical. Illegal. Is that what you paid me ten bucks to tell you?”
“I do feel a lot better, telling you all this.”
“Convert, then. Priests don’t charge anything for hearing confessions. You going to tell me the rest of it?”
He frowned at his cigar. Then he smashed it into the ashtray. “The wife called me. That was how we had left it. She’d get in touch. Didn’t want me calling her.”
“What’d you tell her?”
He smiled apologetically and lifted his hands palms outward, as if it were self-evident. “I told her I had nothing on the man and as far as I could tell I wouldn’t be able to get anything. I told her to forget it. I told her I couldn’t help her. I told her our slate was clean. She had given me a retainer and expenses for the three weeks. Cash on the spot when she hired me. And that was that. End of story.”