Vulgar Boatman (24 page)

“What if she did?”

He held his hands up in front of him in a gesture of surrender. “Then I cannot be held responsible. A janitor, a secretary, a student gets into her office, looks in her top drawer. The codes would be worth a lot of money to the person who knew how to use them.”

“Who’d know how to use them?”

He smiled. “Anybody who has taken my course.”

“Then—”

“Then, if Ingrid has been indiscreet, we’ve got a helluva problem. Imagine trying to verify every transcript. If Alice Sylvester’s grade was changed, how many others?”

I nodded. “Supposing Ingrid Larsen did not write down the codes?”

“Look, Mr. Coyne. My codes are random numbers and words. Sometimes nonsense words. There is no pattern. It would take a skilled and patient hacker weeks to figure out one set of codes. Since I change them every week, there is only one explanation for this.”

“It’s Ingrid Larsen’s fault.”

He shrugged. “What else could it be?”

I smiled. “You.”

He grinned. “True. I didn’t think of that.”

“You can see why I would, though.”

“Well, frankly, what’s missing here is a reason. You lawyers would call it a motive, huh?”

“I can think of several,” I said.

He held up one finger. “Let me show you something, Mr. Coyne.”

He pushed himself back from his desk. Then he bent over and slid open the bottom drawer. He reached in, fumbled for something, and then pulled it out and showed it to me.

It was a large square automatic pistol. Gil Speer was aiming it at my chest.

“S
O,” I SAID.

Speer smiled. “So.”

“Well, aren’t you going to tell me to stick ’em up? Reach for the sky? You got me covered, pal.”

He lounged back in his chair. The gun didn’t waver. The bore was intimidating. “You pretty much have it figured out, don’t you?” he said.

“Pretty much. I figure you changed Alice’s grade. So she had something on you and you killed her. The rest of it’s a little fuzzy, but I can see the outlines of it.”

He nodded. “Let’s go for a ride, Mr. Coyne.”

“Aw, shucks. I was hoping we could play with your computers.”

He stood up. “Come on.” He gestured for me to go out the door I’d just entered. When I got to it I hesitated, and he said, “Open it. Slowly and carefully. Don’t try anything funny.”

“You get your dialogue from late-night movies?”

“Try not to be nervous.”

We went out to the parking lot. Speer ordered me to open the door on the passenger side of my BMW. He stood there by the open door and told me to slide behind the wheel. Then he climbed into the passenger seat beside me.

“Nice wheels,” he said. “Start it up.” I obeyed. “Now head on out the way you came in. And whether you think the expression is hackneyed or not, I advise you not to try anything foolish. I am perfectly prepared to shoot you. If you drive too fast, or too slow, or try to blink your lights or something, I will shoot your knee. It will hurt like hell.”

“I can imagine.”

“Take a left down here at the end of the driveway.”

I did as he instructed. “So why did you change the girl’s biology grade?” I said as we drove north on the road, away from the center of town.

“Let’s hear your guess.”

“Okay,” I said. “I figure it this way. She found out you were giving crack to high school kids. Probably heard it from Buddy Baron. So she went to you, threatened to tell. You asked her what her price was. You figured if she didn’t have a price, she would’ve just told, and not bothered going to you. Her price was changing that biology grade.”

“It was stupid of me,” said Speer.

“Which,” I said, “you soon realized. Your only out was to murder her. And since by then you figured Buddy knew about you, and would know that it was you who killed her, you had to murder him, too.”

“I didn’t murder Buddy,” he said. “Take a right up there past the streetlight.”

We turned down a narrow two-lane road that, if I was properly oriented, headed toward the ocean. There seemed to be very few houses along this road. It passed over a small saltwater creek, which looked as if it was at low tide. A vast marshland bordered it. It was illuminated brilliantly by the silver light of the full moon overhead.

“Slow down. It gets narrow and twisty up ahead. We wouldn’t want to have an accident.”

“I’m an excellent driver.”

“I meant, we wouldn’t want something happening to your knee.”

“Oh,” I said. “That kind of accident.”

We drove on for a few minutes. The marsh gave way to low piney hills. Then more marshland. “Were you screwing Alice Sylvester?” I said.

“Moi?”
said Speer. Then he laughed. “Sure. She was an absolutely stupendous piece of young flesh. Inventive, too. She did whatever I told her to do, and then found variations I’d never thought of. I can’t imagine where a child like her learned all that. I like to think I inspired her. But I know better. She was a natural, I guess. I felt terrible when she died.”

“When you killed her.”

“Whatever.”

“What happened?”

He laughed again. “I suppose you think my telling you will get you somewhere.”

“I’m just curious.”

“Sure you are.” He said nothing for a minute or two. Then I heard him chuckle. The whole conversation was quite amusing to him. It was, I figured, the locker-room syndrome. Guess who I screwed? Alice Sylvester puts out. Gee, gosh. No kidding, Gil. What a stud.

“She came to me,” he said in a softer voice, “all self-righteous and principled. Giving drugs to teenagers, Mr. Speer. How awful. What a naughty man. Really should just go right to the police. But… And I knew I had her. She wanted something. It wasn’t hard to get it out of her, because it’s what she wanted to say. She got this D from Mr. Tarlow. Totally unfair, but everybody knows he’s a creep. Never get into Mount Holyoke with that D. Suppose I changed that grade for you, my dear? Oh, can you do that, Mr. Speer? Sure I can, young lady. But it would be very dishonest. But isn’t giving drugs to kids dishonest, too? Well, I suppose it is. So I changed it, as you know. And we were even. She wouldn’t tell on me, because then she’d have that awful D in biology. I couldn’t tell on her, naturally, since I was the one breaking the rules, not to mention the law.”

“But that’s not where it ended,” I prompted when he lapsed into silence.

“No. It’s not. A few days—maybe a week—later she showed up in the computer room. It was late. I was getting ready to leave. I think she’d been lurking around, waiting to catch me alone, which isn’t easy to do. She wanted to try crack. She knew I could get it for her. Said she just wanted to see what it was like. I told her it was bad for her. Nice kid like her shouldn’t get mixed up with a bad drug. Told her to go ask her friends for some grass. She laughed. Said she knew all about grass. She came close to me. Put that soft little hand of hers on my cheek and said, ‘Aw, please, Mr. Speer.’ Look. I didn’t want to get that chick involved with crack.”

“I believe you,” I said. “It would make her unstable, unreliable. No telling what she’d do.”

He sighed. “Absolutely right. But then she put that soft little hand into my lap and rubbed her soft little body against me and said, ‘Come on, Gil,’ like that. Hey. What could I do? I gave her some crack.” He paused. Then he laughed quietly. “She was extremely grateful to me, Mr. Coyne. And she had some marvelously unique ways of expressing her gratitude.”

“I bet.”

“Yes. Marvelous.”

“So why did you kill her?”

“Slow down. There’s a little driveway coming up on the left. There. By that birch tree.”

“You want me to turn into that driveway?”

“Godammit, yes, I want you to turn into that driveway. Why’d you think I pointed it out to you? You think this is some kind of sightseeing tour? I killed her because she had started to become demanding as hell, and even a lovely piece of ass like her was beginning to get on my nerves. Crack does that. She was hooked bad. She was no longer reliable. I was pretty sure she had told Buddy Baron what was going on. I couldn’t take the chance she’d tell others as well.”

“But you screwed her that night before you killed her.” I eased into the driveway. It turned out to be several hundred yards long, just a pair of ruts winding through a grove of pine trees. Ahead I could see some light.

“Pull up here,” said Speer.

I stopped the car, turned off the ignition, and doused the lights. “Now what?” I said.

Speer just sat there. “Sure. Sure I screwed her. She had to screw for her hit of crack. That was our deal. Hell, I couldn’t keep up with her. She would’ve banged me ten times a day. That’s how bad she was hooked. The lass was insatiable. For the crack and for the cock. Want to hear something funny?”

“Right about now it would be welcome,” I said.

“She had already screwed somebody else that night. I wasn’t the first one.”

“That was Buddy,” I said.

“I was pretty sure it was. Anyway, we did it in the car, and afterwards I lit a pipe for her, and I waited for the rush to hit her, and when she was flying on that dope I strangled her. Believe me, it was painless for her.”

“Considerate of you,” I muttered.

“Oh, she was the best piece of ass I’ll ever have.”

“Explain to me now about Buddy Baron.”

“God, was she good.” Speer cleared his throat. “Baron? He knew. Alice let that slip. And then he got ahold of some evidence. Until today, I wasn’t sure what the evidence was. I thought it was more than just that report card. I kept records, of course. We computer types, you know. Compulsive that way. I could’ve been careless, or Buddy might’ve been a better hacker than I thought. If anyone got their hands on my records… Shit. All he had was that damn report card. Thing was, though, Buddy knew what it meant. Alice told him enough for him to figure it out. Kid was too smart for his own good.”

“So you sent those two goons to my house.”

“I don’t tell those goons what to do, Mr. Coyne. I’m just a peon.”

“They work for the guy who supplies you with dope, right?”

Speer turned to me in the darkened car and nodded. “Yes.”

“Who is it? Where are you getting this stuff?”

He laughed quickly through his nose. “I’m going to take you to meet him right now.” He opened his door and slid out of the car. He crouched by the open door, his gun on me. “Okay. Slowly, now, Mr. Coyne. Open the door and get out. Be very careful. From here I might miss your knee and hit you in the balls or something.”

I got out very carefully. Then I stood beside the car. Speer came around to my side. “Okay. We’re going up to the cottage now.”

The cottage, I saw by the bright moonlight when we got a little closer, stood on the edge of a saltwater creek. It appeared to be very isolated. There was a dark sedan parked in the shadows close to the little building. I couldn’t tell the make or model. Behind the cottage stretched the marsh, and beyond the marsh, judging by the flat horizon, lay the Atlantic Ocean.

Beside the cottage the path descended to the riverbank, where a long dock jutted out. It stood on tall pilings with the tide at low ebb. Moored by the dock was a big ocean-going sportfishing boat. It was, I guessed, a thirty-six or thirty-eight footer. Not as big as the boat that had been stolen from Frank Paradise, but a substantial seaworthy craft, nonetheless.

The cottage was no more than that—a single-story shingled structure with a low wooden deck that appeared to encircle it on all four sides.

As we approached the door, I could hear the murmur of voices inside. It took me an instant to realize that the voices came from a television set.

Speer went to the screen door. The inside door was open. I stood beside him while Speer pushed his face against the screen and rapped on the wooden frame.

“Hey, it’s me,” he yelled over the sound of the television.

From inside a man’s voice shouted, “That you, Speer?”

“Right,” he said. “It’s me, and—”

The blast from the shotgun lifted Gil Speer off his feet and slammed him backwards onto the ground beyond the deck.

The hole in the screen door was about the size and shape of a basketball. It would have been chest high on Gil Speer.

I may have stood rooted there for five seconds. No more than that. But during that brief time several thoughts presented themselves for my consideration.

I could crouch there and hide.

I could leap into the boat and speed away to safety.

I could pound on the door, present myself indignantly, and make a citizen’s arrest.

I did the one other thing that occurred to me.

I started to run like hell.

I jumped off the edge of the wood deck and stumbled to my knees as I landed awkwardly in the dark. I stared frantically around. I had an open area to cross, about the size of a baseball infield, and then I’d reach the tree-lined driveway. Adrenaline pumped. My mind focused only on escape. I pushed myself to my feet. My right knee protested. The old football injury. I could ignore it. I began to run.

The sudden blinding light stopped me in my tracks. I turned and squinted back at the cottage. From under the eaves shone half a dozen floodlights. I made out the silhouette of a figure standing on the deck. He was training a gun on me.

“Mr. Coyne, sir,” called a voice I recognized. It belonged to the fat man who called himself Mr. Curry. “Mr. Coyne, do come and join us inside.”

I quickly weighed my options. At twenty yards, the shotgun Mr. Curry had trained on me would not miss, no matter how cleverly I might feint and dart toward the protection of the darkened forest. It might not kill me. I took no solace from that.

I shrugged and limped up the steps. Mr. Curry said, “What a pleasant surprise, sir.”

I pulled open the mangled screen door. Mr. Curry followed me in.

I stopped abruptly and stared at the man who was sitting on the sofa, his legs crossed, a half-apologetic smile playing on his lips.

“Good evening, Mr. Coyne,” said Harry Cusick, the Windsor Harbor police chief.

“I feel kind of stupid,” I said.

“Oh, don’t feel stupid,” said Mr. Curry. “It’s better if me’n Harry, here, feel smart. Right, Harry?”