Tight Lines (10 page)

“What exactly are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really. I’m sure she’ll turn up.”

“But?”

“Well, it might not be a bad idea to, um, file a missing persons.”

“She’s been missing for eleven years, Brady. I mean, the fact that she’s not there doesn’t mean she’s missing, does it? She’s somewhere. She’s just not where you’re looking. You file a missing persons thing when…” Her voice trailed off.

After a minute, I said, “Susan?”

“I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“There are some more people I can talk to,” I said.

“It’s just that since you and I talked, I’ve been hoping—looking forward to—to seeing her. It’s not just the will…”

“I understand,” I said softly.

“I don’t know how much time…”

“She’ll turn up. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. I just wanted to keep you posted.”

“Yes. Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll keep in touch, Susan.”

I hung up, took a deep breath, let it out slowly. There wasn’t much more I could really do. I took out my notebook and glanced at the notes I had taken. There was the bookstore, Head Start Books in Cambridge, where, according to Sherif Rahmanan, Mary Ellen used to work. Maybe she actually still worked there, or kept in touch with someone there. And there was a man named Sid Raiford, whom Dave Finn had mentioned and who, I assumed, was the same man described by the security guys at Mary Ellen’s building. Possibly one of the nameless men who had left messages on her answering machine, meaning he didn’t know where she was, either. There was Rahmanan himself, who had also tried to call her after telling me he had lost track of her. He obviously knew more than he told me at Hung Moon’s. He knew where Mary Ellen lived, for one thing. But it didn’t figure that he knew where she had gone.

Finn knew no more than I did. Dr. Warren McAllister wouldn’t tell me any more than he already had, regardless of what he knew.

Most likely Mary Ellen Ames, with all her freedom and all her money, had just taken off for a while. Sick of analysis, feeling pressured by Finn, lured by warm sun and sand beaches. A spontaneous getaway with a new lover, perhaps—there were plenty of explanations that made more sense than the vague uneasiness in my stomach warranted.

I called Horowitz anyway.

Horowitz was a state police detective I had worked with before. I once helped him solve a murder case that indirectly involved one of my clients. He owed me one.

A secretary put me through to him at his office at Ten-ten Commonwealth Avenue. “Yeah, Horowitz,” he said.

“It’s Brady Coyne.”

“Oh, yeah. How you doin’?”

“I’m fine. I need a favor.”

“Huh,” he said, half a laugh and half a grunt. “Figures.”

“I’m looking for a young woman.”

“Ain’t we all, pal.”

“Sure. Right. Listen. As near as I can figure, this particular one’s been missing for two weeks.”

“Missing?”

“Nobody knows where she is.”

“Like her husband, her parents?”

“She’s not married. Hasn’t seen her mother in eleven years. Since her father died.”

“She run away from school or what?”

“She’s about thirty. Not in school.”

“So she’s not showing up for work, then, is that it? Roommate, lover can’t find her?”

“Actually, I’m not sure she has a job. She lives alone.”

Horowitz cleared his throat. “Excuse me, counselor. But who says she’s missing?”

“Me, I guess.”

“Because you don’t know where she is.”

“Well, yes.”

“You think anybody looking for somebody can just come to the cops?”

“This is different.”

“Sure,” he said. “Any evidence that she might’ve been kidnapped or something?”

“No.”

“She retarded? A mental patient?”

“Not exactly. She’s being treated by a psychiatrist.”

“Like about three out of every five Americans, you mean.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about it,” I said lamely.

“On the basis of which you want to file a missing persons, is that it?”

“Listen, okay? Her name is Mary Ellen Ames. Her mother, my client, is dying of cancer. She’s got maybe a month, maybe a little more. She wants to reconcile with her daughter before she dies. I told her I’d try to find her. I can’t. I was wondering if you could help me out, for Christ’s sake. That’s all.”

“Because I owe you one, right?”

“I wasn’t even going to mention it.”

He sighed. “So what do you want me to do?”

“What can you do?”

“Well,” he said after a moment, “short of filing a formal missing persons, which doesn’t really sound called for here, I suppose I could put the word out, circulate her photo, description, the usual. Massachusetts, contiguous states. How’d that be? Would that make us even, get you offa my back?”

“That would be great.”

“Whyn’t you come on down, we’ll get the dope.”

“I’ll be there in an hour. And thanks.”

“Just so you remember we’re even, Coyne.”

It was a short cab ride over to Ten-ten. Horowitz gave me a styrofoam cup of muddy coffee and settled behind his desk. I took the straight-backed wooden chair beside him. He rolled a form into his typewriter. “Okay,” he said, his eyes fixed on the keys. “Name?”

“Ames, Mary Ellen.”

He used the index and middle fingers of his right hand for the keys and his left thumb for the space bar. He typed fast. He kept his eyes on the keyboard and asked me questions without looking up at me.

“Address?”

I gave him Mary Ellen’s Beacon Street number.

“Race?”

“White.”

“Age?”

“Thirty.”

“Hair?”

I removed her photo from my attaché case and looked at it. “Brown.”

“Eyes?”

“Blue.”

“Height?”

“I don’t know. Average, I suppose.”

He glanced up at me with his eyebrows arched.

“I’ve never seen her,” I said.

He shrugged. “Suppose you don’t know her weight, either.”

“No.”

“What about scars, tattoos, birthmarks, missing digits?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess you don’t know what she was wearing when she disappeared?”

“I don’t know when she disappeared, period. You were probably going to ask me that. I’m not even sure she
has
disappeared. She’s just—missing.”

He nodded. “Yeah, you explained that.” He looked back down at the form in his typewriter. “She have a car, do you know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“Guess we can look that up,” he muttered. “What about next of kin?”

“Her mother. Susan Ames. In Concord. But if you find her, I’m the one to inform, okay?”

“Sure,” he mumbled, still whacking the keys. “Um, if you were to go looking for her, where’d you go?”

I shrugged, more for my benefit than his, since he wasn’t looking at me. “To her place on Beacon Street. Where I already did go to look for her. She’s not there. Otherwise, I have no idea.”

He finished typing, sighed, and pushed himself back from his typewriter. “Hope you got a photo, at least.”

I handed him Mary Ellen’s high school graduation portrait. “This is about twelve years old,” I said. “It’s the most recent one her mother had.”

“Can I keep it for a while?”

“I guess so. Susan would probably like it back eventually.”

“I’ll fax it out, see what happens.” He yanked the form from his typewriter, clipped the photo to it, and put it into a wire basket on the corner of his desk. “You understand,” he said, “this probably ain’t gonna accomplish anything. Unless…” He peered at me.

I nodded. Unless they found a body, he meant.

He squinted at me. “That what you think, Coyne?”

I shook my head. “No reason whatsoever to think that, no.”

“But maybe we ought to check the Jane Does down at the morgue, huh?”

“Oh, boy,” I said.

“You wanna try to do this right?”

I shrugged. “It’d be good to eliminate them, I suppose.”

He picked up his phone and depressed a button. Then he said, “Bring me the Jane Doe files, huh, sweetheart?”

I lit a cigarette. Horowitz unwrapped a stick of Wrigley’s, folded it up, pushed it into his mouth, and began chomping on it. “Been fishing?” he mumbled around the wad of gum.

Horowitz, I knew, did not fish, nor did he think it was an interesting pursuit. “Not enough,” I answered.

He shrugged. “She should be in in a minute.”

I smoked and he chewed in silence for a few minutes. Then his secretary came in. She plunked a sheaf of manila folders down on his desk, flashed me a quick smile, and left.

One by one, Horowitz slid the eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs of dead women’s faces in front of me. There were a dozen or fifteen of them. It appeared to be an accurate random sample of the Greater Boston population of women—just the right proportions of black, Hispanic, and white; young, middle-aged, and old; attractive, average, and downright ugly. Some of the faces were bruised, lacerated, or swollen almost beyond recognition. Others appeared to be sleeping.

None of them remotely resembled the graduation picture of Mary Ellen Ames.

I shook my head at each of them.

When I handed the last photo back to Horowitz, I said, “Nope.”

“Good, I guess, huh?”

“I don’t assume she’s dead,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “if she’s not, I probably won’t be able to help you.”

O
N FRIDAYS DURING THE
best parts of the trout season I generally hang the “Gone Fishin’” sign on the office door at noon. Julie gets a head start on her weekend with Edward and Megan. I sneak out to the Swift River in Belchertown, or the Deerfield near Charlemont, to catch the afternoon mayfly hatch.

Sometimes I hang out the sign on Fridays even when I don’t go fishing. Hell, it’s my office, my law practice, my secretary. I’m supposed to be able to do what I want. I’m still working on not feeling guilty when I actually do what I want.

So at noon that Friday, the last one of September, I put up the sign, told Julie to switch on the answering machine, and sent her off. She did not argue. She wished me tight lines. I didn’t tell her I was meeting Gloria for lunch. Julie would read an entire romance novel into that.

I got to Marie’s a little early. Marie bear-hugged me, gave me her big gap-toothed grin, and led me to my table. A moment later a waitress put a carafe of the house red in front of me, compliments of Marie.

I’d sipped half an inch of my first glass when Gloria sat down across from me. She smiled quickly. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi, hon.” Her hair was shorter and straighter than it had been the last time I’d seen her. The gray streaks in it had disappeared. “You got a new do, huh?”

Her hand darted up and touched her head. “You don’t like it?”

I smiled. “I like it fine. It’s different.”

I poured some wine into her glass. She lifted it to her mouth and sipped quickly, in her characteristically nervous way. Maybe her nervous way was characteristic only when she was around me, I don’t know.

I assumed I knew her agenda, but I didn’t push it. We talked about the boys, ordered our lunches, exchanged business anecdotes. Gloria is a photographer who has, in recent years, landed some magazine assignments that have earned her a good reputation. No longer does she have to do weddings and bar mitzvahs and birthday parties. She told me she had been approached by a video company that needed someone to do the stills, and she was thinking of diversifying and taking on a full-time assistant. I thought, but didn’t say, that she’d come a long way since our divorce. Farther than I had.

After our coffee arrived, she leaned toward me. “Brady,” she said, “I’ve got some news.”

I smiled. Here it came. “Good news, I hope,” I said.

“I’m planning to put the house on the market.”

“How come?” She was going to move in with Richard. I already knew how come.

She leaned back. Her eyes went to the ceiling. “Wellesley is too far from the action. I don’t like working and living at the same place. If I take on an assistant, I’m going to need more work space. I’m looking at a studio in Harvard Square and a condo on Memorial Drive. Look. Joseph will be off to college in less than two years. I’ll need less space to live and more space to work. This makes sense, don’t you think?”

What about the dweeb lawyer, I was thinking.

I nodded. “Sounds good, I guess.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I thought before I talked to a realtor I’d give you a shot at it.”

“At what?”

“The house. You lived there a long time. You did a lot of work on that house. You loved that house.”

I hated that house, I thought. I hated painting and papering and lawn mowing and gutter cleaning and washer replacing and furniture moving. I hated the tension that crouched in every corner of every room of that house.

The house went to Gloria in the divorce settlement. It was the loss I regretted the least.

“Do I have to tell you now?” I temporized. I wondered when she was going to get around to telling me about Richard the lawyer.

She smiled and shook her head. “Of course not. I knew you’d need some time to think about it. I have a friend who’ll give us an appraisal, and I’d deduct the broker’s commission for you. We’ll do a private sale. You can do the legal work. It would be a good deal for both of us.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “This is kind of sudden.”

“Fine. Two weeks, say?”

“You’re in a hurry.”

She shrugged. “I want to get moving on it. The market’s soft.”

“I’ll let you know.”

She smiled. “Good.” She picked up her coffee cup and took a sip. End of subject.

And when we exchanged pecks on the cheek and parted outside Marie’s, she still had not mentioned her marriage plans. I sure as hell wasn’t going to raise the subject.

And I sure as hell wasn’t going to move back to a haunted house in the suburbs. Not that I was particularly enamored of my little apartment on the waterfront. But I liked the idea of renting. I liked my tenant-at-will lease. I liked the sense of transience it gave me, the irresponsibility, the absence of commitment. Some day I’d buy a ranch in Montana. In the meantime, I’d remain as unencumbered as possible.