Coincidence is utterly random. It unmasks a world of chaos, a world without sense or logic, an insecure, frightful world in which anything can happen to anybody at any time. By definition, there is no explanation for a coincidence.
The human drive to understand has produced religion and art and science. It has dragged us out of caves and into the computer age. When rational analysis doesn't give us answers to that primal “Why?” question, it drives us crazy.
I'm a rationalist. I don't believe in fate or astrologyâor God, for that matter. I believe in explanations. When I can't find them, I assume it's because I don't know enough, and I try to learn more.
When it stumps me, I feel jangled and spooked.
So I sat there on my balcony, sipping my Rebel Yell and smoking cigarettes and trying to understand what was going on in the quiet little town of Reddington, where until three weeks ago a big news story was the score of the high-school basketball game.
Then two young teenagers smashed through the guardrail into the river and died, the chief of police was murdered in a Framingham motel room, and an English professor at the local college, who had paid a week's rent on that room, disappeared.
The dead boy had torn up several hundred dollars and hidden the pieces in a secret compartment in the bottom of his steamer trunk.
One of the local cops was so spookedâor frightenedâthat she spilled her guts to a lawyer she'd barely met.
Coincidences?
I refused to believe it.
Explanation? Cause and effect?
I thought hard about it. But I had neither science nor art nor religion for it, and I came up with nothing.
I
t was nearly midnight when I downed what was left of the melted ice cubes in my glass. I snapped my cigarette butt off the balcony and watched it spark its way down to the water below. Then I went inside. I put the glass in the sink, turned out the lights, and went into my bedroom.
I glanced at my answering machine. No messages.
I flopped down on my bed, bunched the pillow up under my head, and picked up the telephone.
It rang five times before Evie's machine picked up. “Hi,” came that throaty voice of hers that never failed to make my stomach clench. “It's Evie. I can't come to the phone right now, but your call is important to me, so please leave a message and I'll get back to you, I promise.” Then came a series of beeps. Then her tape began to roll.
I held the phone against my ear for several seconds, listening to the almost subsonic static. Then I clicked the OFF button. Still in the bathtub, probably. Evie had the habit of falling asleep in the tub. Or maybe she was already in bed. She always turned off the ringer on her phone before going to sleep.
I'd call her in the morning.
T
he telephone woke me up. It took me a moment to identify the noise, another moment to shove myself up into a semi-sitting position in bed, and yet another to fumble for the damn phone. The clock on my bedside table read 7:10.
No one but Evie would call me at seven on a Saturday morning.
“Hi, honey,” I mumbled.
“Rise and shine, sweetheart.” It was a sarcastic, masculine growl.
“Christ,” I said. “Horowitz. What do you want?”
“I'm on my way over. I got coffee.”
“Wait a minuteâ”
But he'd disconnected.
I pulled on my jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of socks, went into the bathroom to splash water on my face, and by the time I got out to the living room, my intercom was buzzing.
I hit the button, and Horowitz thumped on my door a couple of minutes later. I opened it for him, and he brushed past me and headed for the kitchen, where he deposited two Dunkin' Donuts bags on the table.
He took two extra-large Styrofoam cups from one bag, pried off the tops, and pushed one toward me. “Black, right?”
“Right.”
He ripped open the other bag. “Muffins,” he said. “I got honey-bran, orange-cranberry-nut, and corn. Two of each. They're still warm.”
“What a delightful surprise,” I said. “This is awfully sweet.”
“Fuck you,” said Horowitz.
“Where's your partner?”
“I sent her home an hour ago, told her to get some sleep. You disappointed?”
“Choice between you and Marcia? Of course I'm disappointed.” I put a tub of margarine, two mugs, two plates, and a stack of paper napkins on the table, then sat across from him. “So what do you want?”
A big hunk of muffin bulged in his cheek. He needed a shave and his eyes looked red and piggy. He held up a hand while he chewed and swallowed. Then he took a sip from the big Dunkin' cup. “I want Professor Gold,” he said.
I poured my coffee into a mug and took a sip. “I don't know where he is.”
“I been on this since Thursday night,” he said. “Guy kills a cop, I get no sleep. How it always works. I need my fuckin' sleep. So what
do
you know?” He took another bite out of his muffin.
I told him about my talk with Sharon and about finding the ripped-up money in Brian's footlocker. I also told him that there might've been a witness to the accident.
“A witness, huh? Who told you that?”
“I can't tell you.”
He blew out a quick, cynical laugh. “Fuckin' lawyers. Anyways, what's that got to do with anything?”
“I don't know. I also heard that Sprague might've fooled around with the soccer moms in town.”
“Hmm,” he mumbled. “Suppose you can't tell me where you heard that one, either.”
I shook my head.
“So whaddya think, Coyne? Sprague was humping the professor's wife? That why he killed him?”
“No,” I said. “I don't think anybody was humping Sharon Gold except her husband.”
“I see it all the time,” said Horowitz. “It's our number-one murder motive, hands down. Sex and jealousy. She's a good-lookin' woman. I been checking up on the victim. Sprague was the kind of guy women like, the way I hear it. One of those sensitive type of guys, you know? Bachelor, nice place out there in the woods ⦔
I shrugged. “Even if Sharon Gold was involved with Sprague, which I'm sure she wasn't, Jake isn't the kind of guy to go shoot him.”
“What kind of guy he is don't mean shit,” said Horowitz.
“I know,” I said. “Maybe Jake held Sprague responsible for what happened to Brian ⦠.”
“Yeah,” said Horowitz. “That's good. But why? Why would he blame the chief? He ever say anything like that to you?”
“No. He told me he admired Sprague, considered him a friend. But maybe he got wind of that witness that Sprague didn't follow up on.”
“There's your motive for murder, right there.”
I shrugged. “Seems thin to me.”
“Combine it with Sprague humping his wife.”
“Sharon Gold wasn't humping anybody,” I said, though as I said it, a worm of doubt wiggled into my mind. How well did I really know Sharon?
“I've been trying to connect all the dots, Roger,” I said. “But I just don't see it.”
Horowitz flashed his Jack Nicholson smile. “Of course you don't. I don't either. If one if us did, we'd be getting somewhere. That's why I bought this nice breakfast for you. See if the two of us could put our heads together, connect up some of them dots.” He picked up a corn muffin, broke it in half, slapped on a big glob of margarine, and took a bite. “So,
okay. Let's try again. These two kids drive into the river and die. Might've been witnessed. Might've even been another car involved. But as far as we know, the chief doesn't pursue it. Turns out, the boy had a pile of ripped-up money hidden in his trunk. The father finds it, runs off to fucking Route Nine, rents a cruddy motel room for a week, and next thing we know, the chief of police is dead in that room, and the professor's flown the coop. The fact that we don't see the connections don't mean there aren't any.”
“I know,” I said. “I've been trying to see them.”
“We found Gold's car in the parking garage at Logan,” he said.
“That's progress, I guess. I assume you're checking with the airlines.”
He shrugged. “You know how tedious that is? Thousands of passengers every day.”
“So you're not checking?”
“Of course we're checking. So far, zippo.” He squinted at me. “My guess is he didn't fly anywhere. Left the car there to throw us off. Hopped in a cab or maybe had somebody pick him up.”
“You saying he had an accomplice?”
“Makes sense, don't it?”
“But who?”
Horowitz arched his eyebrows.
“No,” I said. “Not Sharon.”
“Why not?”
I shook my head. “It just doesn't make any sense.”
“Supposing the two of them blame Sprague for what happened to their son.”
I nodded. “Interesting. But why would they blame Sprague?”
“That witness.”
“I don't think so,” I said. “They liked Sprague. Everyone liked him. When I was with Sharon yesterday, it was clear that she was very upset about what happened to him.”
“Like maybe she
was
having a thing with him.”
“No, for Christ's sake,” I said. “Like any normal person would feel if a friend of theirs had been found shot to death in a motel room.”
“Maybe she was just scared and guilty,” he said. “Upset that way.
“I didn't read it like that at all.”
He took a gulp of coffee. “I'm probably gonna have to drag her in, give her a proper interrogation. We went easy on her yesterday.”
“She didn't exactly find you warm and sympathetic,” I said.
He grinned humorlessly. “She ain't seen nothing yet.”
“I doubt if you'll get anywhere playing the tough guy with her,” I said. “Unless you're interested in upsetting a woman whose son just got killed in a car crash and whose husband has disappeared.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you gotta upset them.”
“You'll do what you've got to do, Roger. It'd be nice if you could be a little sensitive to what she's trying to live with, though.”
He waved the concept of sensitivity away with the back of his hand. “I'm betting she knows more than she's letting on,” he said. “For starters, she's gotta have some idea where the professor would go.”
“I spent the whole afternoon and evening with her,” I said. “I don't think she knows anything.”
“Sounds like she's got you bamboozled.”
“I'm not above being bamboozled by pretty young women who are mourning the sudden death of their only son and the disappearance of their husband, all within a couple weeks. I admit it. But,” I said, “if you're planning to question Sharon Gold as a suspect, I promise you she'll have her lawyer with her.”
“That's fine with me,” he said. “Whatever. Some of my best friends are lawyers.” He grinned. “You better grab a muffin
before I eat âem all. Last thing I put in my stomach except for coffee was a fuckin' Big Mac last night sometime. I been burping ever since.”
I picked up the last corn muffin and took a bite. “You're sure Jake killed Sprague, huh?”
“He takes the room under a false name, pays cash, hangs the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and disappears after the deed. Sounds like a plan to me. Not a particularly sophisticated plan. But a plan.” Horowitz shrugged. “It adds up to the professor, don't you think? Means and opportunity up the wazoo. We're still a bit speculative in the motive department so far, that's all.”
“What about the gun?”
“It was a twenty-two. Long-rifle hollow points from about five feet away. Sprague was sitting right there in that chair where we found him when he got it. We figure the professor was sitting on the bed.”
“Any way to trace the gun?”
“Nope. We find it, ballistics can match it up with the slugs they dug out of Sprague's chest. Otherwise it's not much help. The wife said Gold didn't have any guns.”
“That's what she told me, too,” I said. “She said Jake hated guns.”
“Don't mean shit, of course.”
“Of course.”
Horowitz stood up and wandered over to the east-facing glass sliders. He stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, staring out at the harbor. “So whaddya think this homicide has got to do with that accident out there in Reddington?” he said, without turning to look at me.
“Damned if I know,” I said.
“Gotta be a connection,” he said.
I picked up my coffee mug and went over to stand beside him. The low-angled morning sun was streaming in on us, and puffy white clouds hung like balloons in the sky. It reminded me of the e. e. cummings poemâthe one where the goat-footed
balloonman is whistling far and wee and the world is mudlucious and puddle-wonderful.
“It's just-spring,” I said.
Horowitz turned and frowned at me. “Huh?”
I smiled. “A poem, that's all.”
“Fuckin' Ivy Leaguer,” he muttered.
We watched a tanker plow out toward the Mystic River Bridge and the gulls and terns wheel and swoop over the water.
“Jake called me from that motel,” I said.
“Yeah, you told me that.”
“He set up an appointment. Said he had something important to tell me.”
“And he broke the appointment, right? So what?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I'd like to know what he wanted to talk about.”
“Yeah,” said Horowitz. “Me, too. Tell you his plan, maybe.”
“You really think he had the whole thing planned out?”
“How the fuck do I know?” he muttered. “I'm just trying to make scenarios. You're supposed to shoot them down.”
“I don't see Jake Gold as a premeditated murderer,” I said.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “I've known him for almost twenty years. He's just not that kind of guy.”
Horowitz snorted. “Compelling.” He turned to me. “If he didn't premeditate it, what's he got a gun for? Why'd he call you?”
“We don't know he had a gun,” I said. “I wish I could tell you why he called me.”
Horowitz and I stood there looking down at the water and rehashing what we'd already talked about for another half hour or so. Neither of us came up with anything else.
My phone rang once, and I let the machine in my bedroom get it. Evie, probably. I'd call her as soon as Horowitz left.
Finally, a little after nine, he yawned and said, “We're goin' around in circles. I gotta go grab a nap.”
“Sixteen ounces of coffee,” I said. “You'll never sleep.”
“Wanna bet?”
After Horowitz left, I went into the bedroom. The light on my answering machine was not blinking. Evie hadn't bothered leaving a message. She knew I'd call her anyway.
Which I did. And got her machine. She was probably in the shower. This time I left her a message. “Hi, honey,” I said. “It's, um, nine-fifteen, and I'm here. It's the weekend. Time to play. Give me a call.”