Void in Hearts (14 page)

The fourth frame showed Hayden, if that’s who it was, entering the car.

The fifth was of the automobile itself. It was in a different position from the previous frames, suggesting it was pulling away from the curb.

“Do you have a magnifying glass?” I said to Gloria.

“Sure.” She handed it to me. I examined each photograph. I concluded that, unlike the previous set of shots Gloria had developed and printed for me, these offered no clues as to location. The backgrounds were composed of blurry shapes and spots of white. One of the photos showed the man in fairly sharp profile, deepening my conviction that it was Derek Hayden.

The last photo, even less well focused than the previous four, interested me the most. It showed the license plate from the rear, dimly illuminated by the light over it.

“See if you can read that number,” I said, pointing at the license.

Gloria took the glass from me. “One, five—the third digit is either a two or a zero. Let’s see. That’s a seven, zero, and either a four or an eight.” She handed the glass to me. “You try.”

I had written down the numbers as Gloria read them to me. I pushed the pencil and paper at her. “You write what I say, now,” I told her.

I studied it through the glass. I was less certain about a couple more digits than Gloria had been, so we looked together and finally agreed on four of them. The last one, which Gloria thought was either a four or an eight, looked like a blob to me no matter what she said.

“What kind of car is it?” she said.

I shrugged. “Squarish. Midsize. It’s just part of a shape. If I can trace the license number, I won’t need to know the make of the car.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Charlie.”

“How is old Charlie?”

“He still can’t beat me at golf. That pisses him off. Otherwise, he’s fine.”

She glanced at her wristwatch. “Well,” she said.

I nodded. “You’ve got a date. You’d just as soon I wasn’t here when he arrived.”

“He’s not coming here. I’m meeting him.”

“How very twentieth-century of you.”

“Sometimes I even call him on the phone.”

“What would your mother say?”

“The same thing she said when she found out you and I were sleeping together in New Haven.”

“She said, as I recall,” I said, “ ‘just as long as you plan to marry the young man.’ ”

She grinned. “Which, in this case, I am not planning to do. So I’m not telling her.”

“Perhaps I’ll give her an anonymous phone call.”

She punched my shoulder. “Don’t you dare.”

Gloria and I exchanged pecks on the cheek at the door, and I walked out to my car. I had the photographs in an envelope under my arm.

As I backed out of the driveway, I saw Gloria standing behind the storm door. She had her hand raised, her palm pressed flat against the glass.

I called Charlie McDevitt on Monday morning. When he came on the line, he said, “You still hanging on to that stick of dynamite?”

“One in each hand,” I said. “The fuses are burning down.”

“You want to talk about it?” I detected sincere concern in his voice.

“Charlie, you are a good guy, no matter what everybody says. I appreciate you. But I can handle it.”

He chuckled. “Right, counselor.”

“Anyway, I need a favor.”

“Another
favor, you mean.”

“Right. I stand corrected. Can you use your considerable clout with the Registry of Motor Vehicles to trace a license for me?”

“Nobody, my friend, has considerable clout with the Registry. They are collectively the most arrogant collection of sons and daughters of birches—”

“Shit,” I said. “You mean—?”

“I mean, I’ll use my considerable clout with the state police, if it’s all the same to you.”

“It’s all the same. Here’s the number.” I read him the digits Gloria and I had interpreted from the photograph. “One, five, something, seven, zero, something.”

“What the hell are those ‘somethings’?”

“The first something could be a two or a zero. Something that looks round. The terminal something might be eight. Or four. Or three.”

Charlie’s sigh hissed in my ear. “My clout may be considerable,” he said. “But it ain’t unlimited.”

“Can’t they just ask their computers?”

“Sure. But a six-digit plate with two unknowns gives the possibility of one hundred different numbers.”

“You are quick, mathematically.”

“I am quick in several respects, some of them unfortunate.”

“A list of a hundred would help me.”

“Brady, you already owe me one lunch.”

“We can upgrade that one. Or we can make it two.”

“I’ll give it serious thought. I’ll call you when I’ve got something for you.”

It was Tuesday afternoon before he got back to me. “Their computers were down for a while,” he said. “And they seem to have strange priorities over there. Murders, shit like that, they like to work on. My friend was more than a little aggravated when he realized there were two unknowns in that license number. Now it turns out I’ve gotta buy him a lunch.”

“Hey, I’ll take you both to lunch. Place of your choosing.”

“Just so you understand.”

“I understand.”

“He sent a cop over with the printout. Two solid pages, single-spaced. Eighty-seven numbers, with names and addresses. I guess the other thirteen possibilities aren’t in use.”

“I’ll be right over.”

I grabbed my coat and went out to stand beside Julie, who was on the telephone. She glanced up at me, scowled her automatic disapproval, which seems to be the one predictable response I can instantly arouse in a woman, and then returned to her conversation. It consisted mostly of her listening and injecting a “certainly” or “of course” here and there into the available spaces. When she hung up, she said, “That was Mr. Barth. Complaining about having to go to another meeting with his wife. He wants you to take care of it.”

“How’d you leave it? He’s really got to be there.”

She grinned. “Oh, he’ll be there. He’s really hung up on those arrowheads.”

“Did you leave him smiling?”

“Of course.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I agreed with him.”

“On what?”

“He said he guessed you weren’t competent to handle it by yourself.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Now where are you off to?”

“Gotta go see Charlie McDevitt. Why don’t you hang out the Gone Fishin’ sign and go home?”

“Somebody’s got to watch the shop, Brady. What’s up with Mr. McDevitt? You two poring over brochures about fishing for Arctic char in Newfoundland?”

“It happens to be business,” I sniffed.

It took me at least ten frigid minutes to persuade a cab to stop for me and another several to persuade the hack to understand my destination. He was swarthy and full-bearded, and all he said to me was, “Yah?” along with a number of incoherent mutterings, and he said them in a distinctly foreign accent. Something Middle Eastern, I guessed. Boylston Street was jammed. Charles Street was a mess. It took nearly half an hour to get to Charlie’s office. I paid the cabbie, and when I waved away the change he tried to give me, he said something that sounded like, “Gubba malloon.” His broad, yellow-toothed grin told me he was pleased and would love to drive me someplace else.

Charlie is a demonstrative Irishman. He hugged me when I entered his office and offered me a shot of Old Rubber Boot. I accepted. He slid the computer printout to me while he went to the cabinet where he hid his booze. By the time he returned to his chair at the desk with a bottle and measured out two glasses of amber liquid, I had scanned the list.

I accepted the glass from him. “Thanks, anyway,” I said.

“No help?”

I folded the printout and shoved it into my pocket. Then I tilted back my head and downed the shot of bourbon. I held my glass to Charlie. He took it and poured in another two fingers. This I decided to sip.

“That,” he said, “does not excuse you from your obligation, you know.”

“Lunch for you and your pal over on Commonwealth Avenue.”

“We were thinking the Café Budapest.”

“Whatever. That’s a nice place.”

“Expensive. We wanted something expensive. My pal has this attitude toward lawyers.”

I shrugged. “It’s our cross.”

Charlie leaned toward me. “You’re really hung up on this lady, huh?”

I shook my head. “That’s not it. I just thought I had a handle on what happened to Les Katz. But none of the facts seems to fit.”

He nodded. “You do tend to go off chasing windmills, friend.”

“I’m aware of that. The thing is, these windmills don’t even turn out to be windmills. Nothing but mirage and illusion. It’s discouraging.”

“In that case,” said Charlie, “there’s only one thing to do.”

“And what is that?”

He lifted the bottle. “Have another.”

T
HURSDAY NIGHT. THE ELEVEN
o’clock news was all good, if one is willing to discount continued strife in the Middle East and layoffs at the Framingham General Motors plant. The blizzard that paralyzed Chicago didn’t strike me as bad news at all, nor did Larry Bird’s backache or a caustic review of Robert Redford’s recent film.

I flicked off the television, stretched and yawned, and was on my way to brush my teeth when the phone rang.

I detoured to the bedroom, flopped on my bed, and picked up the receiver. “Coyne,” I said.

I heard labored breathing.

“Hello?” I said. “Who is this?”

“Oh, Brady…” The voice sounded far away.

“Becca? Is that you?”

“Yes. Oh, God…”

“Hey, take it easy. What’s the matter?”

“I told him. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry. But I told him.”

“Who? You told who what? Becca, what is going on?”

“Brady, please…”

“Do you want me to come over?”

She was crying softly.

“Becca?”

“Yes. Please come. Oh, please.”

“I’m on my way.”

I pulled up in front of her house twenty minutes later, having violated about a dozen traffic regulations along the way. The light was on over her front door. I jabbed at the bell and instantly heard the upstairs door creak. A moment later Becca unlocked the door that opened onto the porch where I stood. She wore a big bulky robe with the collar turned up around her ears. I bent to kiss her, but she drew away from me and averted her face. She turned and trudged up the stairs into her apartment. She moved painfully. I followed her.

She led me into her living room. A small table had been knocked over and the rug was mussed up. The sofa had been shoved backward.

Becca sat on the sofa, her head dipped into her hands. She began to cry.

I sat beside her and put my arm across her shoulders. “What can I get you?”

“Just hold me for a minute.”

So I did. She turned to me and burrowed her face into my chest. She rested her hands lightly on my hips. She kept her body bent away from contact with me. I stroked her back and said nothing. After a few minutes she shuddered and lifted her face to look at me.

“My God, Becca! What happened?”

Her left cheekbone was puffed out so that her eye was nearly closed. It was angry red. By tomorrow it would be the color of a ripe eggplant. I touched it with my forefinger and she jerked back. “It hurts,” she said.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?”

She shook her head. “No. He only had to hit me once and I told him everything. I’m so sorry, Brady.”

“Sit here. I’ll be right back.”

I went into her kitchen and dumped out a tray of ice cubes into a towel. I found a half-full bottle of chablis in the refrigerator and poured two glasses. I took the ice and the wine into the living room. I put the glasses on the coffee table and made a cumbersome compress of the ice cubes wrapped in the towel. This I placed gently against her bruised cheek. “Hold this here. It’ll deaden the pain and keep the swelling down.”

She obeyed. Then I handed her the wine.

She smiled lopsidedly from behind the bulky ice pack and sipped from the glass.

“Now,” I said, “do you think you can talk about it?”

She nodded. “I’ll try. It’s not so much the pain. But I was so frightened. I thought he was going to kill me. He threatened to kill me. I—I wet my pants. I was humiliated and frightened at the same time. I would have done anything he said. I—I did what he said.”

“Start from the beginning, Becca.”

“Okay. I had been out shopping. I came home—it was, I don’t know, maybe eight-thirty or nine o’clock. I had two big bags of groceries. I was sort of balancing them on my hip, you know, trying to find my key in my purse. Finally I put the bags down—oh, this isn’t part of it. Anyway, I got the door open and I was bending down for the bags and—and that’s when he grabbed me. I don’t know where he came from, but he was there, right behind me, and his hand was on my mouth. It was so strong and tight I couldn’t yell or anything. He shoved me inside and half carried me up the stairs. When we got inside he whispered into my ear, he said, ‘If you scream I’ll kill you.’ He was very strong. I nodded my head. He moved his hand away from my mouth and grabbed my throat. He was waiting to see if I’d scream. I was so frightened—it was like I was paralyzed—I don’t think I
could
have screamed.”

She paused, sipped her wine, and removed the ice pack from her cheek. “It’s numb now. It feels better,” she said. I leaned toward her and kissed the ugly bruise and she tried to smile. Only one side of her face seemed to be operational.

“Anyhow,” she continued, staring down at her wineglass, which she held in both hands between her knees, “he sort of half carried me into the living room—here—and shoved me at the sofa. I landed on the floor. It was the first chance I had to see him. But he was wearing this ski mask. It looked like one of those hideous African tribal masks. All weird colors and a big mouth that looked like death.”

“What else do you remember about him?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “I was so scared…”

“Try.”

“He seemed so big. But he was probably average height. I don’t know. He had on a heavy coat. Dark color. Wool or something like that. He seemed—bulky. Heavy. Muscular. But maybe not. It’s so hard. His voice was muffled behind the mask. It was deep.” She shrugged. “He was a man. I guess that’s about all I’m sure of.”