Void in Hearts (12 page)

The question that continued to nag was this one: What had happened to Derek Hayden?

I
SKIPPED LUNCH AND
spent Saturday afternoon at my desk. I was working on a tricky separation agreement involving the division of a priceless collection of Indian artifacts the couple had accumulated during the twenty-two years of their marriage. Neither party wanted to split it. Neither would agree to selling it, either to a third party or to each other. Neither would consider a trade-off allowing the other to keep the whole thing.

My job was to get the whole thing for the husband. I talked to the wife’s lawyer. His job was to get the whole thing for her. We agreed that we needed to do something creative, so we made a date to get all the parties together to try once again to hammer it out. We speculated on how F. Lee Bailey would have handled it. We concluded that one of our clients would have to murder the other for us to achieve a breakthrough.

It was nearly five when I finally got home. I was building a bourbon old-fashioned when the phone rang. It was Becca Katz.

“I haven’t heard from you for a long time,” she said. It was neither a complaint nor an accusation, the way she said it. Nevertheless, I felt a sharp wince of guilt, as I had consciously been avoiding her since the evening we ended up in the bed she had previously shared with Les.

“I’ve been awfully busy,” I said. It sounded lame. “Anyhow, there’s been nothing much to report.” That was an outright lie. “Well,” I amended, “until just today, that is.”

“What have you learned?”

“I’m not sure. It’s complicated. Perhaps when I can sort it all out…”

“Brady, I’ve gathered together some of Les’s things. I was hoping…”

Her voice trailed off. I knew what I was supposed to say. “I’ll drop by sometime,” I said breezily. “Nothing that demands immediate attention, I trust.”

She was silent for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable. “Becca, look,” I said.

Her voice was soft. “Didn’t it mean anything to you?”

“It was—unexpected, I guess,” I said carefully. “I don’t normally, ah, jump into bed with bereaved widow ladies. It meant something, yes. It’s just that—”

“You’re feeling guilty.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“You don’t know what it meant to me, then. We never talked about it. You think it commits you.”

“Becca—”

“You’re worried that you took advantage of me, my grief, my—the fact that with Les—that I was vulnerable and didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Something like that, maybe.”

“Well, it’s all kind of true. It was unlike me. To do that. To let that happen. To
want
it to happen. But listen. I have no regrets. It was—it was therapeutic, okay? It helped me to start healing. I mean, death is hard. You want to affirm something, to feel something profound and good. Am I making too much of this? You don’t have to tell me I’m the love of your life. That’s not what I’m after.”

“A momentary stay against confusion,” I said, quoting Frost.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“It was the same for me, Becca. An affirmation. It wasn’t something that you did to me, or vice versa. It happened because we wanted it to. You just have to know that I’m not really available. I don’t mean to you. I mean generally, to anybody. It’s the way I am. It’s taken me a long time to learn that about myself. It makes me cautious.”

“I know that. You didn’t fool me. That was part of it. You were—you are safe that way.”

I lit a cigarette and sipped my old-fashioned. “Therefore, what?” I said.

“Therefore,” she said promptly, “I have four lamb chops and an appetite for only two of them.”

“There’s a problem.”

I heard her laugh softly. “You’ve got to forgive me. I’m not very good at this. Of course you’re busy. It’s Saturday night. Sometime when you have a chance, though, please drop by and pick up Les’s stuff.”

“That’s not what I was going to say, Becca.”

“Oh?”

“What I was going to say was that I like my lamb chops rare. Nothing irritates me more than overdone chops. I am very particular about rare lamb chops.”

“Boy, you really know how to put the pressure on a woman, Brady Coyne.”

“It’ll take me an hour, at least.”

“I’m waiting.”

I took my glass into the bathroom, stripped down, showered, shaved, and got dressed. I found myself humming a tune from
My Fair Lady.
Something about how regrettable it is that women can’t be more like men. Most of the words eluded my memory.

I arrived at Becca’s place a little before seven. I rang the doorbell and waited, clutching the claret that the guy at the liquor store promised me was “spunky.” I tried to imagine how Becca would look. I realized that I had trouble picturing her, this woman I had bedded a little more than a week earlier. I was able to see her eyes. The rest was a blur. And the eyes appeared to be crying.

I heard her clip-clop down the inside stairs. The door handle rattled and then opened. Becca smiled at me. She looked me up and down. Then she said, “Boy, that’s a relief.”

“What is?”

“That you wore your jeans. I had this panicky feeling you’d show up in a jacket and tie or something, and here I am…”

She twirled around. She was wearing blue jeans herself, with an orange turtleneck jersey. Both fit snugly. “You look terrific,” I said sincerely.

“Well, I put on these heels, which makes me feel like a lady of the night. Isn’t that what the Combat Zone hookers wear—tight pants and spike heels?”

“You don’t look like a lady of the night, Becca.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s disappointing.”

She took my hand and led me upstairs. The little dining table was spread with a blue cloth. A single candle burned in a simple pewter holder.

I gave her the wine. “I was promised this would complement, but never overpower, rare lamb chops.”

She put her hand on my cheek and tiptoed up to kiss me on the chin. I gave her an awkward one-armed hug. She stepped back and smiled. “This is uncomfortable for you, isn’t it?”

I shrugged and grinned.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “No demands. Why don’t you make yourself a drink and I’ll slide those chops under the broiler and toss the salad. I left Les’s papers in that big attaché case in the living room, if you want to look at them.”

I found the bottle of Early Times in the cabinet, diminished not a millimeter since I had last poured from it. Becca was working over a big wooden salad bowl, whistling and nipping at a glass of white wine.

As I left the room, she looked at me over her shoulder and smiled. She was acting very much like a woman who expected to be loved. The idea was becoming less and less unacceptable to me.

She had stuffed the square leather attaché case with an eclectic assortment of papers—insurance policies, automobile titles, records of bank accounts, old tax forms. Personal stuff as well as business stuff. I shuffled through them distractedly. There appeared to be no will, a complication that I could deal with.

When Becca called me to the table, I shoved all the documents back into the attaché case. I’d bring them to the office and turn them over to Julie, who would organize them, make some preliminary phone calls, and arrange a session with the good folks at probate.

The lamb chops were pink and moist and accented perfectly with a hint of garlic. The baby boiled potatoes were buttered and sprinkled with flakes of parsley. The green beans were fresh, cooked al dente. There were chunks of artichoke hearts and avocado in the salad. The claret wasn’t bad.

Becca told me she had been job-hunting. “The market for middle-aged English teachers who have been out of the classroom for ten years is pretty bearish,” she said. “I’ve put my name in for substitute work.”

“I can imagine nothing more depressing.”

She shook her head and frowned. “I’ve got to get out of this place,” she said. “Les never said I couldn’t work, but he didn’t encourage me, either. I kept planning to do something. It just never happened. Another one of those things that didn’t help my self-esteem.”

“I’ll bet you were a good teacher.”

“I enjoyed the kids and hated the bureaucracy. I was younger then. Now, I don’t know.”

“It’s not exactly like you’re over the hill, Becca.”

“In some ways, I have barely started to climb the hill, sir.”

I decided she intended something suggestive by that.

“So,” she said after a few moments of comfortable silence, “are you going to tell me about Les’s killer, or what?”

“Last night at this time, I knew who it was. I matched a picture with a name, found out where he worked. Now—I don’t know again.” I proceeded to fill her in on my detective work with Derek Hayden—the visit to his office, my journey to his farmhouse in Harvard, my encounter with Brenda Hayden, my discovery of Hayden’s Audi in the Alewife parking garage. Becca studied my face intently as I talked. When I finished, I shrugged and spread my hands. “So I feel as if I’m back at square one,” I said.

“The pictures, that reminds me,” she said. “I found Les’s camera. The one with the big lens that he used for his snooping.”

“Where was it?”

“In his car. It’s been parked right out front all this time, but when it snowed the other night I had to move it. The camera was on the floor on the passenger side. Amazing it didn’t get ripped off in this neighborhood.”

“As if Les had been taking pictures the night—”

“The night he got killed,” she finished for me. “I never thought of that. But it makes sense. He was out in his car. Working, unless he was shacked up with somebody. If he was working, that would explain the camera being in the car.”

“Why don’t you get it for me.”

She said, “Okay,” and got up from the table. She was back a minute later, carrying in both hands a Canon SLR thirty-five-millimeter camera with a lens about a foot long. The meter showed that twenty-four frames had been exposed. I rewound the film, opened up the camera, removed the little cylinder of film, and deposited it in my pants pocket. Then I handed the camera back to her.

“I can get this developed,” I said, thinking of Gloria with another confusion of emotions.

“You think he might’ve been taking pictures at night?”

I took out the cassette of Fuji film and looked at it. “It’s possible. This is a very fast film he was using. Twelve-hundred speed. It would certainly work indoors. Maybe even in city lights. We’ll see.”

Becca began to carry the dishes into the kitchen. I got up and helped her. When the table was cleared, she said, “Let’s just leave them in the sink. I’ll load up the dishwasher later. It’s time for a little brandy.”

I got the bottle and she found two round snifters. We toted them into the living room and placed them on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the sofa. She sat on the sofa. I sat beside her and poured a finger of brandy into each snifter. We lifted them, cupping them in the palms of our hands in the approved fashion. We sipped without the preliminary of a toast. Becca placed her glass on the table and turned to face me. “Ready?” she said.

Later I lay on my back staring up into the darkness of Becca’s bedroom. Her cheek rested on my shoulder. I could feel her warm breath on my chest and the gentle rise and fall of her breast as she breathed.

We lay in silence for a long time. I assumed she was sleeping. Then she whispered, “Brady?”

I twisted my head and kissed her hair. “I’m here.”

“I was thinking.”

“Dangerous, thinking. I order you to stop it instantly.”

She hitched herself up in the bed. I adjusted myself so that she could lean back against me. “No, really,” she said. “I was thinking about Les.”

“Terrific.”

She laughed softly. “Not like that, dummy. I was thinking about how he decided to become a detective, and what if things had been different. You know, how your mind sort of goes off in weird directions when you’re totally relaxed and half asleep?”

“Mmm,” I said.

“Did he ever tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“How he became a detective?”

“No. He never did.”

“It was at a bridge tournament. I’m surprised he never told you. He loved to tell the story.”

“We mostly just talked business, Becca.” I stroked her flank. I wanted her to stop talking. Instead she sat upright.

“He suspected this pair of cheating. I guess they were making some unusual leads or something, and Les figured there was no way they would do what they did unless they had found some illegal way to communicate. What I really think was that they beat Les and his partner, and he didn’t think they were that good. You know Les. He never lacked self-esteem.”

“For sure,” I said, declining to tell her that I really didn’t know Les that well.

“Anyway,” she continued, her hand resting idly on my leg, “he knew this pair was going to compete in another tournament the next week, so he spoke to the director and told him what he suspected. The director arranged it so Les could keep an eye on them. Everyone at those tournaments knew Les, so his hanging around didn’t arouse any suspicions. About halfway through the first day of the tournament, Les went to the director and said, ‘If East leads a heart, I can tell you how they’re doing it.’ I can still hear Les telling it. He could tell it better than me. Anyway, East did lead a heart. His partner had a void in hearts, so he trumped it, which set the contract. There was nothing in the bidding to suggest a heart lead. Do you understand bridge, Brady?”

“I play now and then. I have trouble keeping partners.”

“Because you’re not very good?”

“No. Because I’m too critical. It’s a character flaw. Bridge brings it out. Nothing else does. So I don’t play too often, and I don’t play with friends.”

Becca laughed quickly. “It’s a common malady,” she said. “There are lots of ways to cheat at bridge. Lots of people do it. In tournaments it’s harder. People’ve tried voice cues in their bidding, hesitations, subtle inflections. There are ways of holding the cards. Finger cues. Body language. Some of it really clever. But most opponents are very alert to stuff like this. Which is why there’s very little cheating. This pair had a new way. It turns out that West was wearing this diamond ring on his right pinkie. Whenever they were defending a hand, if he wanted a heart lead he’d turn the ring around so that the stone wasn’t showing. And, of course, not turning the ring around told his partner not to lead a heart. Information like that makes winners out of average players in tournament bridge. And Les was the only one to pick it up. He liked to say that nailing those two cheats was ten times the kick of playing bridge. After that, he gradually quit playing professionally and started hiring out as a sort of troubleshooter at the tournaments. He exposed a few more cheats, and one time he caught a woman who was stealing from the rooms of the hotel where the tournament was being held.”