Tight Lines (24 page)

“Come on in,” I called. “I’m in the kitchen.”

Jack Sylvestro is a big, shambling, bearlike man whose diffident, almost apologetic manner belies his quick incisive mind. “Looks like I got you up, huh?” he said as we shook hands.

I nodded. “Coffee’ll be ready in a minute or two.”

He slouched into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “Me,” he said, “I been up all night.”

I sat across from him. “I’m not that perceptive this time of day,” I said, “but I’ll bet this isn’t a social call. And if it isn’t, that means it’s business. And that means bad news of some kind, because homicide cops hardly ever bring good news.”

He grinned wearily. “Aw, I was just in the neighborhood, figured I might scrounge a cup of coffee.”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s up, Jack?”

“What’s always up, my line of work. Young lady got herself killed.” He rolled his head on his shoulders. “How’s that coffee coming?”

“It’s ready.” I got up and poured two mugs full. I brought them back to the table. “I hesitate to ask,” I said, “but what does it have to do with me?”

He sipped some coffee and sighed. “Your business card was tacked on the wall beside her telephone. There was a message from you on her answering machine.” He shrugged.

“Oh, God,” I said. “Jill Costello?”

He nodded.

I blew out a long slow breath. “She’s been murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. I looked up at him. “Her husband?”

“Looks that way.”

“What can you tell me?”

“We got a call last night. Security guy in the building. Seems that folks were trying to get ahold of Mrs. Costello all day. She’s the super in the building. Supposed to be available on Saturdays. Finally someone got worried. Security guy had a key, went in, found her, called us. This was, I don’t know, maybe eleven, eleven-thirty last night. I been there ever since.”

“What happened?”

Sylvestro cocked his head and looked at me. “Where were you yesterday, Brady?”

“Me? Shit, I was right here all day. Staying out of the rain, trying to catch up on my paperwork. I was visiting a friend in Acton in the evening.”

“See anybody during the day? Talk to anybody?”

I shook my head. “Hey,” I said. “You think…?”

He smiled. “Nope. I’m just hoping to figure out when the lady was alive. When’d you talk to her last?”

“I saw her a week ago. She left a message on my machine a couple days ago. Sometime Thursday. I got her message in the evening, late. I called back Friday and left a message. Christ, Jack, what happened?”

He held his coffee mug in both hands near his mouth. “It was pretty neat and tidy, Brady. A single stab wound up under the rib cage into the heart. A filleting knife. From a set in her kitchen.”

“When did it happen?”

“Hard to figure. The ME guesses she’d been dead about twenty-four hours when we found her.”

“Meaning it happened Friday night?”

“Yeah, sometime Friday night, early Saturday. Look, were you her lawyer or something?”

I shrugged. “Sort of. She was in the middle of a divorce. I agreed to advise her.”

“Not your usual sort of client,” he said mildly.

I smiled. “You don’t miss much, do you? What happened was, I ran into her, we got talking, she told me her situation, and I agreed to—”

“Were you involved with her?”

“Me?” I shook my head. “No. She was lonely, unhappy, afraid of her husband. Christ, she could’ve been my daughter.” Anyway, I thought, I’m involved with Terri Fiori, whatever that means.

“How’d you say you ran into her?”

“I don’t think I did say. I was trying to contact a person who lived in the building.” I stopped. “It’s a long story. You want to hear it?”

“Yes. I think I better. I also want more coffee.”

I refilled our mugs and told Sylvestro all about my search for Mary Ellen Ames, her death, and my frustration with the case. I told him that Mary Ellen and Jill Costello had been “involved in a relationship.” That was the euphemism I chose. Sylvestro just nodded at my clichéd word choice. I also told him that John Francis Costello had tried to beat me up one evening when I came out of Jill’s apartment, that he had threatened me and, according to Jill, her, too.

Sylvestro listened without interrupting. When I finished, he said, “We’re holding the husband. It’s pretty clear-cut. Naturally, he says he didn’t do it, and he’s got a lawyer who’s gonna get him bailed out. Soon as the ME can pin down the time of death, we’ll have a better handle on it. The guy works at a restaurant in the evenings. But he’s off around midnight and not back until four in the afternoons, so it just depends. He admits he went over there on Friday night and banged on her door. Claims she didn’t answer, and he didn’t get in. Could be just covering his ass in case we come up with a witness who saw him there.” Sylvestro shrugged. “This fight you and him had, we’d probably want a deposition from you, okay?”

I shrugged. “Sure. It wasn’t a fight, though. He attacked me. I never had a chance to get a poke at him.”

“Yeah,” he said abstractedly, “too bad.”

“He said he’d kill both of us.”

Sylvestro peered at me for a moment. “Look,” he said.

“What?”

“Would you mind coming over there with me?”

“Where?”

“Her apartment.”

“I guess so. Why?”

“You’ve been there, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, you’re about the only person we can find who’s been inside. Maybe you’ll notice something.”

“Like what?”

“Shit, Brady, I don’t know. Something missing? Something out of place? Something that’s there now that wasn’t there before?”

“You’re a thorough man, Jack.”

He shrugged. “Something about this Costello guy doesn’t seem right,” he said quietly. “Nothing I can put my finger on.”

“You don’t think he did it?”

“Oh, I guess he probably did it, all right. Everything points to it. You know, when a wife dies, it’s almost always the husband. Especially in this situation.”

“Occam’s razor,” I said.

“Huh?”

I smiled. “The simple explanations are the best ones. The commonest things most commonly happen. Sure. Let me get dressed and we can go over.”

“Take your time,” he said. “I’m gonna have more of your coffee.”

We drove to Beacon Street in Sylvestro’s unmarked Ford LTD. He had a passkey, so we went directly in the front door, past the security desk, and down the stairs to Jill’s little basement apartment. A uniformed policeman was standing outside her door. Sylvestro nodded to him and he stepped aside to let us in.

I stood there inside the doorway and looked around. “What am I looking for?” I said to Sylvestro.

“I don’t know. Try to remember what it looked like when you were here. Try to see if anything’s different. Out of place, missing, whatever. Just, anything that strikes you, don’t judge it. Just tell me.”

A crude outline of a human body had been chalked onto the linoleum in the kitchen. That hadn’t been there before. I didn’t think I needed to tell Sylvestro that. And a dark blotch the size of a bath mat stained the area around that chalked sketch, and shards of broken glass glittered in the dried puddle. A wine bottle stood beside the sink.

“The wine,” I said. “The broken glass. How do you see it?”

“She was pouring them wine. The bottle was less than half full, so I’d guess she was getting them refills by the sink. When she turned to face him, that’s when he stabbed her. She dropped the glasses, they shattered, and then she slumped onto the floor. She died quick, the ME figures. And there wasn’t that much blood. Her heart didn’t have much of a chance to pump a lot of it out.”

“Looks like a lot to me,” I said.

He shrugged. “You should see it sometimes.”

I looked around the dining area. Her books and notebooks and yellow pads and pencils had been shoved to one side of the table, just the way she had done when I visited her, so that there’d be a place for us to put our elbows and drinks while we talked. I pointed that out to Sylvestro. He nodded.

In the corner of the living room was a small rolltop desk and beside it a two-drawer file cabinet. Neither appeared to have been rifled. Her sofa was opened into a bed and neatly made.

I stood there in the middle of the living-room area and looked around. Then I turned to Sylvestro. I shrugged. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“Take your time.”

“Except for the broken glass and the—the blood…”

“It’s hard. I want you to try to remember. I’m interested in knowing if something’s missing, or out of place.”

“I know. I’ve only been here a couple times. Always at night. We just sat in the kitchen. I haven’t even really been in this part of the place.”

“Go through it again.”

I did. Then I shrugged again. “Nothing.”

Sylvestro nodded. “Okay. Thanks for trying.”

“She was really afraid of him.”

“The husband?”

I nodded. “You figure he came in the private entrance?”

“Must have. There’s a security guy upstairs all the time. None of them saw anybody.”

“The husband knew about the side entrance,” I said. “That’s where he bushwhacked me.”

I wandered through the place again, ending up in the kitchen staring down at Jill’s outline on the floor. I looked up at Sylvestro and shrugged.

“Any thoughts at all, Brady?” he said. “I mean, aside from what you see—or don’t see—here?”

“Well, the obvious one. That Mary Ellen Ames, who lived upstairs, is dead. Maybe murdered, maybe not. And Jill Costello, who lived here, got murdered. Both of them young women, attractive, living alone in the same building.”

“What was the connection between them?”

“As far as I know, just what I told you.”

“They were—lovers,” said Sylvestro.

I nodded.

“That’s something, I guess,” he said. “Oh, well. I’ll take you home, Brady. Give it some thought. If you don’t mind, come by the station tomorrow morning so we can take a deposition, okay?”

“Sure.”

“In the meantime, give it some thought.”

“I will.”

“We’ll want to know all about your encounter with John Francis Costello, and anything the lady might’ve told you about him. And anything else that occurs to you. People she might’ve mentioned, problems in her life. You know.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

We left the apartment and went up to the lobby. We started for the front door. I stopped. “Jack, do me a favor.”

“What?” he said.

“Let me into Mary Ellen’s apartment.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just want to see it again.”

“Okay. Why not.”

We took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Sylvestro unlocked the door to 4-B. He went in first. I followed him. I switched on the light. It was exactly as it had been when Jill brought me there. I went over and stared at the bigger-than-life portrait of Charles Ames that hung in its place of honor over the piano. It showed the upper half of his body. His head was turned in three-quarter profile. He had a noble nose, wide-set eyes slightly downturned at the outside corners, a firm chin, and a head of steely hair combed straight back from a high forehead. He was wearing a brown three-piece suit. One fist was propped on his hip. In his other hand he was holding an open book. I put my face close to the painting. The artist had not bothered to make any of the words on the book legible.

I went back to where Sylvestro was standing by the doorway. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“That’s it?”

I nodded.

He frowned, then shrugged, and we left.

Sylvestro dropped me off in front of my apartment building. It was a few minutes after nine on a sun-drenched Sunday morning in late October.

“Have a good day,” he said as I slid out of the car.

“Don’t see how,” I said. “It didn’t start off that good.”

“I’m sorry about the girl.”

I nodded. “Yeah, me too. It’ll hit me later, probably.”

“Good idea to be with friends today, Brady.”

“You’re probably right. What about you?”

He smiled. “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said.

M
ONDAY MORNING I CALLED
Sylvestro from my apartment and then went to the station to give my deposition into a tape recorder. He and a young assistant district attorney took turns asking me a lot of questions and I answered them as fully and truthfully as I could. It took about two hours.

I got to the office a little after eleven. Julie greeted me coldly—her way of commenting on the unexcused tardiness of my arrival at work—until I piled all my completed paperwork upon her desk. Then she gave me a grudging smile. I went into my office, where a day’s worth of chores was waiting for me. I dug into it, grateful for it. The day passed and Julie never asked how my weekend had been, and I never told her.

On Tuesday I tried to call Susan Ames. Terri answered the phone.

“Hello, General,” I said, “it’s Brady.”

“Well, hi.” I thought I detected real warmth in her voice. “How are you?”

“All right. How’s Susan doing?”

“Not good. I guess she had a bad weekend. She’s staying in bed now. She’s allowing the doctor to keep her medicated. There’s a lot of pain. She mostly sleeps.”

“I should get out there to visit her.”

“She probably wouldn’t know you were there.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yes. Ever since she heard about Mary Ellen it’s been pretty much downhill. Downhill steep and fast.”

I sighed. “She was something when she was well.”

“I know. Full of energy and life.”

“Damn,” I muttered.

“I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

“Thanks.”

I followed Jack Sylvestro’s advice in my own way. I tried to help my clients. I tried to focus on their mundane legal problems, tried to keep in mind that, to my clients, their problems weren’t mundane at all. Solving them would make them happy. That was something I could do.

When I got back to my apartment on Tuesday, it was nearly seven. The message light on my answering machine was blinking. One message. I depressed the button.

“Hey, Mr. Coyne. It’s Finn, huh? Look, this time I really gotta talk to you. I think I got it. Mary Ellen, I mean. It’s like, uh, five o’clock maybe. I can’t keep—see, I’m here alla time, so just, if you can, come on out here. Big pain in the ass for you, I know, but—shit, anytime, really. Sooner the better. Can’t say much, these nice folks’ kitchen, you know. Come on. I’ll give you a beer, we can talk.”