Goldilocks (7 page)

He believed she might have, but scarcely as much as he had missed her. She was too active, too driven, to moon over anybody, least of all a small-time lawyer content to strive for no more than a decent living and to keep the dark out of his soul. He had met her less than a year ago at an alumni function of Suffolk Law and had held on to her hand longer than was appropriate, forcing her to give him a second look. Their first date was dinner at Locke Ober’s. He wanted to impress her, which fell flat when the waiter addressed her by name. A more serious date was in Lawrence, Bishop’s, where he was proud to show her off and she relished the Arabic plate and said casually, “I know I’ll never marry again.” “That’s silly, how can you know that?” he shot back, and she replied promptly, “The same way you know you’ll never be president of the United States. Pass the salt, please.” In his house for the first time she was a confident creature moving through rooms as if the light always tilted toward her. Later, in his bedroom, at ease with her nakedness despite ridges left by the pinching parts of her underwear, she was a pink monument to health and beauty. Before slipping into the sheets, she placed something on the night table. He thought it was a book of matches she had taken from Bishop’s for a souvenir. It was a condom in a discreet and dainty package. “I’m sure you understand,” she said with a sigh. “We’ve reached a point in civilization where no one’s word is good enough.”

Now, rattling the ice in his drink and staring at the streaks in her blond hair, he said, “You could’ve phoned.”

“Yes, I meant to a couple of times,” she said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“That would have annoyed you.”

“It’s inconvenient only at the office,” she said with an aloof sort of compassion. “You could’ve called in the evening.”

“You take the phone off the hook.”

“Not all the time, only when I bring work home.” She looked him squarely in the face. “Tell me, Barney, are we arguing?”

“I hope not.”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

Certain rules guided their relationship, and he had nearly broken some with his possessive eyes and insinuating tone. Sipping, he watched several blackbirds fly low over the lawn, the sound of their wings like the unwrapping of a package.

She said, “About this Henry. Where did you get hold of him? Is he a client working off your fee?”

“It’s a long story not worth going into.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Neither does my secretary,” he said, drawing himself up some. “Tell me about the libel case.”

“No, not now. It would hurt my head.”

“Mine too, I would think. Your cases are more complicated.”

Her flawless face tightened. “I’m good, Barney, damn good, but they’ll never make me a senior partner. They’ll never give me one of the big offices, fresh flowers on my desk every day, private bar. That’s only for the good old boys.”

He smiled at her frankly, for she did not usually reveal her frustrations. She had graduated at the top of her class from Suffolk Law, a block of brick on Beacon Hill, and through dogged persistence had hooked on as an associate with Pullman & Gates, which normally drew only from Harvard and occasionally from Dartmouth. The raises in her salary had exceeded the rise in her status. He said, “Then why stay?”

“I like being with the best.” Her wandering eyes returned to him circuitously. “I like the smell of old money.”

“Then why are you bothering with me?”

“You’re reality.”

“No, I’m Barney Cole.”

“Same thing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and in the middle of the night I’m very sure.”

The shadows had lengthened, and mosquitoes were beginning to bite. She slapped her thigh and he the back of his neck. They finished off their drinks. “Shall we go in?” he asked.

He followed her, aware of her gait, the swing of her hips, the straightness of her back. There were times, in an attempt to make his life simple, he tried to regard her only within a sexual context, but his feelings ran too deep. Never during her absences had he found a way to shut her out of his mind for an appreciable time. When the absences extended more than a week, his house filled with shadows out of which the likeness of his wife or the figure of his father sometimes crept, though never close enough to touch and never with words clear enough to catch.

In the kitchen he said, “Hungry?”

“I’m not sure.” She opened the refrigerator and peered in for something to tempt her, but the selection was sparse. “You haven’t been doing any shopping,” she said over her shoulder. “That how you stay thin?”

“I’ve been eating out.”

“I’ll go to the market tomorrow,” she said with the air of a housewife manipulating a busy schedule. She opened the freezer compartment and tilted her head. “For now, how about a pizza?”

He nodded as the telephone rang. He thought it might be Mrs. Goss with a shy and needless question painfully rehearsed, or perhaps Edith Shea with a grim report on Daisy. It rang again, a jolt to the ear. He was closer but made no move.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” she asked, and he shook his head. She made a face. “You’ll wonder all night who it was.”

“No, I won’t.”

Each ring seemed to sting her. “It might be for me. They know I’m here.”

“They always know, don’t they? Which one is it this time?”

“Chandler,” she said.

He lifted the receiver and spoke. She was right, it was Chandler Gates, the sixty-year-old grandson of the firm’s cofounder and the one to whom she owed the most gratitude. Cole knew the voice, sugar on the tongue, from past calls, knew the vulpine face behind it from pictures in the Boston papers. “Here,” he said, dangling the receiver.

A breeze was blowing in, and he stepped directly into its path. She talked with her back to him, her voice cool and assured, and she turned and whispered, “It’s about the libel.” He half believed her, perhaps more than half. She placed her back to him again and said, “Yes, Chandler, I’m listening.”

He made his way to the sun room. The real estate agent, a fashionable woman with the air of a prima donna, had alternately called it a sun room and a plant room. At the time it had been full of both ingredients, dazzling his wife. He sank into a wicker chair with the wish that he had poured himself another Harvey’s. Insect sounds swirled through the screens. From time to time he rubbed the raw edge of his jaw where he had shaved too close that morning.

“It really was business,” she said, and he felt his senses reach out. She stood just inside the rounded doorway with her face shaded in the diminishing light. “The
Globe
is hanging tough on us.”

“That shouldn’t bother you,” he said.

“It doesn’t. A settlement would flatten the fee, a trial could swell it.”

“And give you a chance to shine. Do you have a good case?”

“Depends upon the purity of my client.” She scratched a knee. “Did you know I once interned at the
Globe
for three months?”

“No, you never mentioned it.”

“Summer job. I worked with the court reporter. That’s when Tom Winship was editor. The women in the newsroom called him Windshit, not to his face.”

Her shaded smile was ambiguous, and one of her hands was loosely clenched. He knew he was being prepared for something and waited with patience, his eye stretching out to an apple tree where the last of the sun was burning between the leaves.

“Barney, I have to go.”

“I thought that might be the case.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

She opened her fist, leaned forward, and carefully tossed something into his lap. He retrieved it from between his knees. It was a condom.

“Do you have time?” he asked.

“I’ll make time,” she said.

• • •

It was late in the evening. He switched off the late news and rang up the police station in Lawrence. “Captain Ryan there?”

“No, he’s not here,” the desk sergeant replied. “That you, Barney?”

“Yes.”

“Thought I recognized your voice. You wanna see Chick, try the dump.”

“I should’ve guessed,” said Cole. “It’s a starry night.”

“And there’s a moon,” the sergeant said. “Take your piece, have some fun.”

When his clients had been mostly criminals, high on whatever they could get their hands on, he had occasionally carried a small revolver against the ribs, though always with the fear it would go off by itself and maim him for life. But he knew how to use it, at least well enough to stand next to police officers at the dump and fire fast at rats. Midnight contests with revolvers barking, a blood sport with rats erupting. The cops were good, especially Ryan, who was the best.

Cole drove through quiet Andover streets, windows wide open for the breeze, as the night had grown sultry. He took a back way into Lawrence. The dump was at the far side of the city near the Merrimack River, an illegal landfill used by building contractors and others, reachable through the grounds of a derelict tannery and then over a rough road through scrub pine and swamp maple. He drove slowly, the lights of the Cutlass bobbing and sinking. The potholes were deep. The smell of the river, which was low, was stronger than that from the dump. He parked between two police cars, one unmarked, and climbed out.

“Over here, Barney.”

The voice came from a direction he had not expected, and he trod over gritty ground through intervals of shadow and moonlight. The moon was brilliant and gave Captain Ryan a silvery cast. Though clad in a custom suit from a Lawrence factory that cut cloth for Brooks Brothers, he was unmistakably a cop, from the staunch thrust of his jaw down to the sturdy tips of his shoes, which glittered like ink. His features were large and strenuous and his eyes deep-set. His wiry hair, which contained a clump of gray, charged out of his head. It was always on the rise, like the man himself. Commander of the early-night platoon, he fully intended to become chief.

“Aren’t you shooting?” Cole asked.

“I don’t have to prove myself,” he said, and jerked his thumb. “They do.”

Deeper into the dump, where anonymous objects lacked luster and definite shape, two young uniformed officers stood stark and still, one thin like a knife and the other somewhat stout. Each held a service revolver low against his leg. Cole guessed at a glance that they were rookies who did things for Ryan and liked to impress him.

Ryan’s voice shot through the humid air. “This is my buddy Barney. You ever need a lawyer, he’s the best.” The officers nodded and then turned away as if something in his tone had told them to. Dropping his voice, he said to Cole, “I tried to call you earlier, line was busy.”

“Sorry.”

“What’s the name of the guy again, the one you asked me to check on?”

“Witlo,” Cole said, “Henry Witlo. Were you able to come up with anything?”

“Sure. You ask me a favor, you get it. That’s the way it works with pals, right?”

They had known each other since childhood. Ryan had grown up in the same housing project as Daisy Shea, who was best man at Ryan’s wedding and godfather to Ryan’s first child, the mother a pretty raven-haired girl from Methuen, who was now totally gray and haggard, partly from bearing eight other children. Cole was godfather to the second.

They began walking toward the car. The towering pines, all their cluster at the top, seemed textured into the night sky, as if they had floated in like clouds to hover high. The ringing of peepers was shrill. Ryan stopped near his unmarked car and leaned a buttock against it. The radio was quiet now.

“I called the Chicopee PD. I got a friend there.” He patted himself down for his pocket notebook but could not find it. “It’s all right, I remember the essentials. This Witlo guy’s a bum. Works only when he has to, rest of the time lives off women.”

“Was he in the army?”

“Yeah. Vietnam. He plays that up.”

“Does he have a record?”

“Nothing much. Disorderly conduct, trespassing, malicious damage to property, crap like that. The older cops usually went easy on him. They knew his mother, if you know what I mean.”

“No.”

“She was a hot number. Cops used to pick her up to play with. Cop wasn’t considered a cop till Wanda Witlo did French on him.”

“Nice cops.”

“It happens.” Ryan grinned. “But not here. Not my boys.”

Cole’s head went to one side. “Is it true she was murdered?”

“If you want to call it that. She was found in a ditch, could’ve been hit by a car. That was some ten years ago.”

“Henry thinks a cop did it.”

“Who knows? More to the point, who cares?” Abruptly the radio crackled, and then the monotonous voice of the dispatcher cut through and directed a cruiser to a domestic disturbance on Newton Street, south side of the city. “I know the address,” Ryan said with ruthless satisfaction. “White woman living with a spic. One of these nights he’s going to slice her throat. Then he’s ours.”

Cole looked up at the stars. “Pretty world.”

“We see the worst, Barney. The best is for other people.” He stepped away from the car and called through a cupped hand to the young officers, “How’s it going, you guys?” There was no response.

“They must see something,” he said, his tough face pointed out. Then he swung it back to Cole. “Now let me ask you something. What the hell’s Witlo doing in Lawrence? Don’t we have enough bums?”

“He wants to better himself. Can’t deny a man that.”

“What’s he to you?”

“Nothing. It’s a favor to Louise.”

Something subtle changed in Ryan’s face, and his lips barely moved. “We talking Louise Leone?”

“It’s Baker now.”

“Yeah, I know. Only woman ever made me shit my pants. I’m not going to ask what Witlo is to her. I could guess, but I’m not going to. Don’t tell me anything, I mean that.”

Cole said, “We both owe her.”

“Don’t remind me.”

Shots rang out, rapid and then paced, and Cole and Ryan looked at each other. They retraced their steps through the moonlight and quietly approached the rookie officers, who were holding their smoking revolvers skyward. The stench of cordite was killing. The knifelike officer stared at Ryan, his long face divided by a tentative smile. The stout officer stood stiff and square, waiting for praise.