Authors: William G. Tapply
“You thought Derek was having an affair. I remember that. So what’s different now?”
“I’ve learned some more things. Now I don’t think it happened that way. Now I think your husband’s partner, Arthur Concannon, may have killed my friend.”
Brenda Hayden smiled crookedly. “And Derek, too. Is that it?”
I nodded. “That’s how it looks.”
“So you came here to—what?—to prepare me for the possibility that my husband is dead?”
“Partly. But mostly to see if there was anything you could remember he might’ve said about Concannon—business deals, financial transactions he might’ve been worried about, something personal, maybe, something about the man he was afraid of. Or maybe a hint of mistrust.” I shrugged. “Anything you could think of.”
She stared at me for an instant before she allowed her eyes to shift away from my face. She studied something beyond my right shoulder for a long time before she spoke. “Arthur Concannon,” she said carefully, spacing out her words, “is my friend. Our friend. He and Derek are partners and friends. They are not in competition with each other. They are not enemies. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s a pretty speech, Brenda,” I said. “Just the right mixture of indignation and sincerity. But it took you too long to polish it. Tell me the truth.”
She snorted, a quick, harsh laugh. “And just who the hell do you think you are, barging into my house with accusations and suppositions and horrible ideas, telling me my husband has been murdered by his best friend and business partner? All this talk. I don’t know what any of it means. Goddamn it, anyway. Goddamn you.”
She pounded on the table with both of her clenched fists. Then the tears came, although the fury on her face did not diminish. She wiped her cheeks with quick, angry swipes of her wrists. “Oh, it pisses me off when a man makes me cry,” she said. “I see you sitting there, saying to yourself how you’re so tough, you can make a weak female person bawl. Listen, Mr. Lawyer. I am angry and I am frustrated and that’s why I’m crying, so don’t you try to take any credit for it.”
“Look, Brenda—”
“No. You look. Look for your jacket and look for the door and look for your God damn car and get the hell out of my house.”
I shrugged. I slipped into my jacket. I opened the back door, paused, and said, “Thanks for the coffee, anyway.”
I closed the door behind me quickly, before I could hear her retort.
I sat in my BMW for several minutes before I started it up, trying to sort out the impressions and random messages that were pecking at the outer fringes of what passed for my mind.
Brenda Hayden’s performance had been good but flawed. I didn’t know her well enough to be certain, but she struck me as a little off-center. Eccentric. Her reactions seemed too studied, her emotions too calculatedly hysterical.
On the other hand, she had been missing her husband for three weeks. I told her I thought he was dead. How else should she react?
I turned the key in the ignition and flicked on the headlights of my car. Before I backed out of the Hayden driveway, I jotted down the license number of Brenda Hayden’s brother’s Volvo.
What I especially wondered about, as I drove the unlit country roads of Harvard, Massachusetts, was this: Why had there been two sets of dirty dishes on Brenda Hayden’s kitchen table when I arrived? Would a woman be likely to brew a full pot of coffee for her own after-supper consumption?
And what was the significance of the five pieces of unmatched luggage I had seen lined up in the hallway that led into her living room?
W
HEN MY CLOCK RADIO
clicked on at four o’clock, I was already wide-eyed and waiting for it. The morning man announced the weather with more good cheer than seemed warranted—clear and cold in the morning, clouding over, with snow beginning in the afternoon. Accumulations of six to twelve inches in the Greater Boston area. Double that west of Route 495. Blowing and drifting.
The temperature in Kenmore Square was seven degrees. The sun would rise at six thirty-three.
I wanted to be there at least a half hour before that.
Before bed the night before I had laid out what I’d be needing—my faithful old red flannel long johns, wool pants, two pairs of wool socks, Herman Survivor boots, a heavy wool turtleneck sweater, ski mittens, and my insulated camouflage duck-hunting jumpsuit.
I tugged on the long johns and went into the kitchen. I filled my steel Stanley thermos with scalding water from the tap to heat it up while the coffee brewed. My Smith and Wesson .38 was loaded and waiting on the table. Sharon Bell would be gratified. There was also a box of cartridges and my 10X German binoculars.
I gobbled down two stale doughnuts and a big chunk of extra-sharp Vermont cheddar. A breakfast to stick to the ribs. Then I dumped the hot water out of the thermos and filled it with coffee. As an afterthought I added a hefty shot of bourbon. Then I finished dressing.
I tucked an unopened pack of Winstons into one pocket, the revolver and spare cartridges into another, slung the binoculars around my neck, and waddled out to the elevator. I hoped none of my neighbors would see me.
Less than an hour later I turned into a little side road about a mile from the Hayden farm in Harvard. I left my BMW parked against the plowed snowbank. I hoped it wouldn’t attract attention for the few hours I expected to be gone.
The woods that extended from the little roadway to the edge of the Hayden property were thickly overgrown and hilly, and in places the powdery snow, sheltered from the melting rays of the sun, came to my knees, so that even in the frigid predawn air I sweated copiously under my heavy clothing. I blessed my wool underwear, which possessed the miraculous quality of insulating and warming even when wet.
The setup was as I pictured it, based on my one daylight visit to Brenda Hayden. The thick woods ended abruptly halfway down a hillside, which stretched the rest of the way as an open field for about a hundred yards to the farmhouse. I could see the back door of the house, the barn, and the Volvo parked in the driveway. The far side of the house and barn were sheltered by a dense clump of spruces. In the distance, Mount Wachusett humped into the horizon, a gray-purple lump in the thin yellow light.
I hunkered down among a clump of pin oaks that still held most of their sere leaves, adjusting my back against the trunk of a larger oak so I had a clear view of the Hayden farmyard. I focused the binoculars so I could clearly read the license plate of the Volvo.
When I had arrived home the previous night after my visit with Brenda Hayden, I dug out the computer list of license numbers Charlie McDevitt had procured for me. The numbers I had copied down from the Volvo matched the registration of someone named Andrew Bayles, who lived at 129 Center Street in Ayer. Andy, brother of Brenda.
I wondered if Brenda herself had been driving the night Les Katz snapped the photos of Derek, the night Les had been run down and killed. Or if, for some reason, Arthur Concannon had been driving the Volvo.
I wondered who had eaten supper with Brenda before I got there. I wondered where she was planning to go, and for how long, with her five suitcases.
I felt edgy, the way I felt before a courtroom appearance, the same way I used to feel before a big ball game. I patted the Smith and Wesson, which hung heavily but comfortingly in my pocket. I’d objected to lugging the weapon on a well-thought-out abstract principle. I decided to carry it for a very practical reason.
I didn’t know what I expected to observe from my hillside blind. But whatever it was, I knew I wanted to see it. So I crouched on the edge of the woods and watched the sky brighten as the sun rose somewhere behind me. Spread before me was a scene Andrew Wyeth might have painted—a sleepy farmyard, a row of gaunt, leafless sugar maples, fields and meadows bumping away toward distant hills, woodlots bordered by stone walls, brushstrokes of burnt umber and ochre washed in the sharply angled yellow-orange light of the newly risen sun. A lone crow cruised and flapped overhead. Somewhere a dog barked once. The sky evolved imperceptibly from gray to cold, pale blue. Another bright winter’s day.
I poured a mug of coffee from the thermos and held it awkwardly in my mittened paw. The coffee scalded my tongue when I sipped it. The afterburn of the bourbon lit a small, welcome ember in my stomach.
The silver Mercedes pulled in behind the Volvo a few minutes after seven. I shifted my position to gain a better view and discovered my left arm aching and my neck stiff. The doctor had told me the disc damage in my neck was permanent. I still didn’t want to believe him.
A man in a navy blue topcoat and felt hat stepped out of the Mercedes. I trained my binoculars on him. It was Arthur Concannon, which didn’t surprise me. It was one of the scenarios I had played with after I began to suspect that Brenda Hayden was entertaining company. The oldest motive for murder in the world was lust for a friend’s wife.
Concannon chunked the car door shut, paused to blow into his cupped hands, and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and bent to help a woman slide out. Through the binoculars I could see that she wore spike heels and a calf-length green dress under her fur coat. She had a spectacular tumble of long blond hair—very much in the style of Farrah Fawcett.
This was the mystery woman, the one who had told Les Katz she was Derek Hayden’s wife when she hired him to spy on Hayden.
She turned to reach into the car for something, and in that instant I saw her face. Melanie Walther, in a wig.
She retrieved her purse and, holding on to Concannon’s arm, went to the back door of the Hayden farmhouse. After a minute the door opened and Concannon and Melanie Walther went inside.
I adjusted my back against the oak tree and tried to make sense out of what I had just observed. Okay, so Concannon was a friend of the Haydens and was disposed to comfort Brenda in her time of confusion over the disappearance of her husband. Nothing wrong with that. Perhaps their friendship had evolved into a relationship more intimate. Natural enough. No crime in that, either.
But why visit at seven in the morning? And why bring Melanie along in her Farrah Fawcett wig? And what about those suitcases?
I calculated quickly. It would take me fifteen minutes to tromp back to my car through the woods. If Concannon should begin to tote Brenda’s luggage out of the house and stack it in the trunk of his Mercedes, I’d have time to get back to my car and follow them. I suspected they’d head for Logan International Airport. It would satisfy my curiosity, if nothing else, to learn their destination. If I were clever, I might be able to persuade a ticket seller to tell me if they were flying on round-trip tickets, and if so, when they were expected to return.
I had no idea what good any of that information would do. But I would relate it to Sharon Bell. She’d know how to use it.
In spite of my clothing, my inability to move around was increasingly causing me to suffer from the cold. My toes were already numb. I made fists inside my mittens to try to restore circulation to my fingers.
I poured another mug of coffee and cradled its warmth in my bare hands as I sipped it. Nothing seemed to be happening below me. I decided to risk a cigarette, even though I knew it would contract the capillaries in my extremities and accelerate the effects of the cold. I had never been one to pay much attention to such details.
The smoke burned harshly in my lungs. I doused the butt in the snow, half smoked, and huddled there miserably. For all I knew, Concannon and Melanie were planning to spend a leisurely day visiting Brenda, in which case I had every reason to expect to end up as a piece of ice sculpture by the evening.
My coffee was gone and I was beginning to shiver inside my long johns when the black Lincoln pulled into the driveway. I checked my watch. Eight-thirty. I fumbled for the binoculars that hung around my neck. My hands obeyed reluctantly. They felt like hunks of wood.
When I focused on the face of the man who climbed out the passenger side of the Lincoln, a new warmth suffused my body.
He wore a gray topcoat that looked several sizes too large for him. He was bareheaded, revealing a dramatic thatch of snow-white hair. His deeply lined face, his grand beak of a nose, that big outsized head perched atop the emaciated body, the giant cigar clenched between his teeth—all belonged to Vincent Tremali of Providence, Rhode Island. That face, cigar and all, had snarled from the cover of
Time
magazine six months earlier. “Underworld Kingpin Takes the Fifth” was the lead story’s headline for that issue. Every afternoon for four weeks Vincent Tremali’s surprisingly deep, well-modulated voice had growled, “No comment” to the bevies of television reporters who accosted him, while behind the heavy doors of the Federal District Court a grand jury fumed in helpless frustration.
Their first prize witness failed to appear to give testimony, and while it was rumored that a man of his general description was seen lounging on the beach in St. Maarten at about that time, his identity was never confirmed.
The second prize witness was found in the basement of an abandoned warehouse in Holyoke, Massachusetts, tied to a chair, with a single bullet hole in the back of his neck.
The third, fourth, and fifth prize witnesses pleaded failed memory. Threats of contempt citations failed to stimulate them.
The sixth prize witness offered testimony that reddened the face of the prosecuting attorney. A subsequent perjury charge did not persuade the dapper young man to alter his view of the truth.
Observers reported that Vincent Tremali, when his turn finally came, was calm, almost regal in his aloof response to the badgering of federal prosecutors. He chose to exercise his constitutional rights as an American citizen. He sounded more like John Barrymore than Marlon Brando. And he continued to assert that right as the lawyers played a game of tag team with him for four weeks, bombarding him with questions about loan-sharking, prostitution, toxic waste contracts, numbers, dope, extortion, arson, and just about every other form of criminal activity imaginable.