Authors: William G. Tapply
“My head?”
“No concussion.” She placed a soft hand on my forehead. “You’re going to be fine, Mr. Coyne.”
She drifted out of my vision. I felt cool hands on me. Then the prick of a needle and a long, slow journey down a smooth slide into a black, dreamless sleep.
I woke up staring at the feet of two beds. They looked miles away. I closed one eye, and one of the beds disappeared. An animal in my stomach kicked once, and I managed to mumble, “Aw, shit,” before I puked all over my chest. I found that I still couldn’t move my head.
Almost instantaneously a woman in white materialized beside me. She frowned sympathetically and shook her head. “Demerol will do that,” she said. She wiped my face with a damp cloth, stripped the blankets off me, and managed to replace them without moving me.
“I’m terribly thirsty,” I croaked.
“Sorry. No water. We’ve got you on an IV. Water will upset your stomach.”
“Please.”
She smiled. She was dark and slim and quick-moving. She had a very long nose, which had once been broken. Her eyes were soft hazel and slightly uptilted at the corners. “No,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Am I paralyzed? I can’t move.”
“You’re in traction. You have a cervical injury.”
“My neck’s broken?”
“No. You’ll be fine. The discs up here”—she touched the back of her own neck—“were damaged. You’ll have to wear a collar for a while after you get out of traction. You’ll probably have discomfort in your left arm and shoulder. Your vertebrae are pinching the nerves. That’s all. The doctor will explain it all to you.”
“My head?”
She touched my face and smoothed back my hair. “No fracture. No concussion. You were very lucky.”
“Do you know what happened to me?”
She shrugged. “Nobody seems to know.”
“There was a car…”
She patted my shoulder. “Just relax, Mr. Coyne. You’re going to be fine. I’ve added a drip to your IV…”
I drifted into and out of sleep for what seemed like a long time. It was interrupted once by a very young male doctor who seemed more interested in examining a clipboard than me. He shone a penlight into my pupils, took my pulse, made notes onto the clipboard, and disappeared without ever speaking to me.
Later Charlie McDevitt came by. “Looks like the truck won,” he said.
“Charlie, I feel absolutely shitty.”
“They say you’re okay.”
“What do they know about it?”
He pulled up a chair beside me. “I thought of bringing you flowers. I thought of bringing you booze. I didn’t bring you anything.”
“All I want is an ice cube to suck on.”
“Sorry, pal.”
I fell asleep while he was talking to me.
The next time I opened my eyes, Charlie was chatting with Becca Katz down there about a hundred yards away at the foot of my bed. She was laughing. I figured Charlie had told her something intimate and embarrassing about me. After a minute my eyes focused and they didn’t seem so far away.
“Hi,” I said.
Becca came over. She bent and kissed me softly. “Ugh,” she said. “Your lips are all chapped.”
“All the better to eat you with, my dear.”
She glanced over her shoulder to Charlie. “I think he’s fine.”
She sat gingerly on the foot of my bed. Charlie took the chair beside me. “What happened?” he said.
“Hit-and-run, I guess. I was on my way to the elevator. I remember hearing a car coming at me. I guess it got me.”
“Nope,” said Charlie. “The doctors say there’s no evidence that you were hit. They figure you threw yourself out of the way and landed on your head. Damn awkward of you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to remember it. “I heard glass break. I figured it was me and the headlight colliding.”
“That was that big clunker of a briefcase you were carrying. It was smashed all to hell. Papers scattered all over the place.”
“Then he got out of the car,” I said, remembering, “I heard the door open and him walking toward me. Then a car started up somewhere else in the garage. It must’ve panicked him. He got back into his car and drove away. He was probably going to search my pockets. Or maybe—”
“Or maybe finish you off,” said Charlie.
“Do you have to be so candid?” said Becca.
“Hayden,” I said. “Same as Les. He probably thought he got me anyway. The car hitting the briefcase. He must’ve figured it was me.”
“The same man who came to my house and hit me,” said Becca. “He was after that film. I told him you had it. He figured, in the briefcase—”
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself. Anyway, he didn’t get anything. Gloria has it. It’s all still there.”
“He probably assumes he killed you, which serves his purpose just as well,” said Charlie.
“Do you have to talk like that?” said Becca.
“So what do you figure he thinks is on that film?” said Charlie.
“There’s nothing incriminating on it,” I said.
“He doesn’t know that,” she said.
“All those pictures that didn’t come out. Whatever they would’ve showed. That’s what he’s worried about.” Becca’s cheek was puffy and discolored. “How do
you
feel?” I said to her.
She smiled crookedly. “I’m fine. Ugly, but fine.”
“I missed our date with Kerrigan today,” I said.
“That was yesterday, actually.” She reached down and squeezed my foot through the blankets. “I went. I took care of it all by myself. I came in to see you yesterday. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“You called me Gloria. You asked for your sons. I called her and told her what happened. She was here last evening, along with both boys. They seem to be fine young men. And I liked Gloria. I’m not sure she liked me.”
“They were here?”
“Sure. We all had an interesting visit.”
“What was I doing?”
“Sleeping. Moaning and groaning. Licking your lips. You have not been scintillating company.”
“I don’t remember any of that. Gloria and the boys being here.”
“They’ve kept you pretty doped up. Anyway, you took quite a whack to the head,” said Charlie. “Hopefully, you got some sense knocked into it.”
“What worries me is what got knocked out of it.”
The next time I woke up, my nurse was there fussing with my bedclothes.
“Hi, beautiful,” I said.
“How are we feeling?”
“What day is it now?”
“Sunday.”
I shut my eyes to calculate. Thursday night I had gone to Becca’s. That was when she had been assaulted. Friday morning was when I had been run down. I had lain in the hospital all day Friday and all day Saturday. My memory of most of it was nil. “I’ve lost nearly three days out of my life.”
“You’re lucky, at that,” she said. “Come on. We’re going to dangle.”
She moved behind me and fussed with the contraption that held my head immobile. Then she gently lifted my shoulders and strapped a soft collar around my neck. “Move slowly, now. I want you to sit up and turn around.”
I obeyed. She was strong and confident as she helped me pivot around so that my legs hung over the side of the bed. I was momentarily dizzy. But she steadied me until it went away.
She helped me to stand. I leaned on her and shuffled a few steps. Then she steered me back to the bed. I found myself drenched in perspiration. I lay back on my pillow, exhausted.
“That was excellent, Brady. This afternoon we’ll take a little walk.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Miss Perini.”
“Miss?”
“Or Miz, if you prefer.”
“But not Missus.”
She smiled and shook her head.
“You’re very beautiful.”
She grinned. “Don’t go getting any ideas.”
“I’m feeling a little better.”
“Yes. Horniness is usually a sign of that.”
“Do you have a first name?”
“Of course I do.”
“Will you tell me?”
“If you promise to call me Miss Perini in front of the doctors. Some of them are very stuffy that way.”
“I promise.”
“Denise. Dee to my friends.”
I closed my eyes. “Thanks for everything, Dee.”
“Don’t go to sleep. There’s someone waiting to see you.”
“Maybe just a quick nap.”
“No. I’ve brought you some ginger ale to sip. I’ve removed your IV. This noon you can eat.”
“I’m not that hungry. But, yes, thirsty.”
She gave me a glass with a bent straw. The ginger ale was warm and stale. It tasted great.
Dee Perini left the room. A minute later she returned, followed by a stocky woman with short, dark hair and a cute little uptilted nose. I stared at her, trying to sort out old data that seemed to have been misfiled in my brain.
“You,” I said after a minute. “I know who you are.”
She smiled. “I doubt it, Mr. Coyne.”
“No, I recognize you.”
“I’m Sharon Bell. I assure you we’ve never met.”
I shook my head slowly. I found it painful so I stopped. “The pictures. You and Hayden. You’re Derek Hayden’s lover, for Christ’s sake.”
She smiled again. “No, I’m not Derek Hayden’s lover.”
“But the pictures…”
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” she said. “Are you feeling well enough to talk? I was here yesterday but they said you were in no condition.”
“Sure. Absolutely. Let’s talk.”
Dee Perini, who had been standing beside Sharon Bell, said, “Please try not to take too long.” To me she said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so. How does chicken broth sound to you?”
“Nothing I love better than chicken broth.”
Dee left and Sharon Bell took the chair beside me. “Let me get right to it,” she said. I tried to nod. The collar made it difficult. “I am a special investigator with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Coyne. That may surprise you.”
“Yes.”
“About two months ago, we put together some numbers that caused us to begin asking questions about American Investments. I won’t bore you with technicalities, but the upshot of it was that there seemed to be large sums of money moving in and out of their accounts that we couldn’t account for. Dummy accounts. Action in foreign banks. Nonexistent investors. Profits we couldn’t locate. The addition and subtraction didn’t work.”
“What did you suspect?”
She shrugged. “Insider trading, possibly. Or laundering dirty money. Or some sort of scam. Using investors’ funds as up-front money for something turning over big profits. Big, unreported, illegal profits, profits on which taxes were not paid. Oh, it was very sophisticated, and the data were tucked away in several dozen places, any one of which wouldn’t really raise an eyebrow. We crunched a lot of numbers in our computers before we were confident enough to begin our investigation. And we started with no workable hypothesis.”
“Are you some kind of undercover agent?”
She laughed. “No, not really. I operate in a very straightforward way, usually. I go in, armed with the equivalent of a subpoena, and seize records. In this case, however, because the evidence was so sketchy, I did it a little differently. Based on some preliminary snooping around, I decided to approach one of the partners. Derek Hayden. I went to the office one day. He wasn’t in. I wrote him a note and clipped my card to it. Invited him to lunch. He showed up.”
“I’m beginning to get the picture,” I said.
She nodded. “I was prepared to lie a little, to offer veiled threats, to hint at bargaining and negotiation. You see, the way I figured it, the main man was the other partner, Arthur Concannon. Hayden wasn’t lily-white, or course. But as I see it, he’s sort of a gofer, a broker, an up-front man. The brains, the real crook, is Concannon. I said all this to Hayden, once I realized he would cave in easily.”
“So that’s what all those clandestine meetings were about.”
“Yes. He agreed to feed me information.”
“So you could get the goods on Concannon.”
“Right. I guaranteed him immunity, which is what we often have to do. I met with him several times. Frankly, he didn’t give me much. Not enough to move on. The last time I saw him, he was visibly upset. Claimed that Concannon was on to us. He was frightened.”
It all made abundant good sense to me. Concannon was the one who hired Les, using some woman who looked like Farah Fawcett to pose as Hayden’s wife. Les got photos of Hayden and Sharon Bell. He thought they were having an affair, but in fact Hayden was slipping the SEC agent the goods on Concannon. First Les told Concannon’s lady friend, posing as Hayden’s wife, that Hayden was not fooling around. And he told Hayden that he had been hired to follow him. Then Les visited with me, and I persuaded him to come clean with his client. So he told the mystery woman that Hayden was, after all, engaged in an illicit relationship. Gave her the photos to prove it. She took them to Concannon.
The rest was fuzzy, but I figured it this way: Concannon decided he had to get rid of Hayden. Poor Les happened to be tailing Hayden at the time, armed with his long-lens camera. Maybe he actually tried to photograph Concannon murdering Hayden. None of those pictures came out. All he got was Hayden standing beside Concannon’s car. But Concannon didn’t know that. Concannon saw Les, followed him home, and ran him down. Then I visited him in his office, asking questions about Hayden. Concannon remembered Les’s camera and appeared at Becca’s house, clad in a ski mask. She told him I had the film. So he followed me home, or was waiting in my parking garage for me. Ran me down, too, interpreting the solid impact of his headlight against Les’s briefcase as the splitting of my skull.
“Did you try to call Les’s office?” I said to Sharon.
She nodded. “Yes. Many, many times. That was you who answered, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. How did you get on to Les?”
“Hayden told me about it. He said he bought the photos and that Katz burned the negatives. I asked him if he looked at the negatives, and he turned white. The man was very frightened.”
“With good reason,” I observed.
“Anyway,” she said, “the next time I saw him was the night before he disappeared. The night before Katz was killed.” She looked at me. “I’ve been doing some sleuthing since then. I’ve talked with the Somerville police, for example.”
“Thus making the connection between Les’s death and Hayden’s,” I said. “Concannon murdered both of them.”