Tight Lines (25 page)

I doubted that Dave Finn had anything new to tell me. He was just a lonely man in need of company. He had lost his job and the woman he loved was dead and he was living alone in a cruddy trailer in the woods.

I decided to go see him anyway.

So I changed my clothes, gobbled a peanut butter sandwich over the kitchen sink, and around seven-thirty I was in my car headed for Finn’s trailer in Townsend. I hoped I’d find him reasonably sober.

There wasn’t much traffic, so I got to the turnoff by the lumberyard around eight-thirty. I found the turn past the duck pond, took the left after the third bungalow, and drove up the hill. I passed only one car on the country road, that one traveling too fast in the opposite direction.

When I pulled up in front of Finn’s trailer, the orange lights from the two small windows in front seemed unnaturally bright, and they appeared to be flickering strangely. When I got out of the car I smelled the smoke.

I ran to the door and ripped it open. Heat and smoke and the poisonous odor of burning plastic burst through the door at me with a force that staggered me backward. Finn’s tin box was an incinerator. I dropped to my hands and knees and crept back to the doorway. The heat was a powerful, almost physical force, but I forced myself to stick my head inside. I was able to see that the flame seemed to be coming from the kitchen area. That electric space heater had evidently either overheated or ignited something. I yelled, “Dave! Are you in there?”

I had to pull back. Opening the door had fed oxygen to the fire, and even as I watched, the flames rose against the wall and rolled across the ceiling in a fiery wave. I pulled my jacket up over my face, got down onto my stomach, and crept through the doorway. Now the fire was blazing. I squinted through the smoke and looked around the inside of the trailer. And I saw his leg through the smoky haze at the opposite end of the trailer from the kitchen. He was on his cot, in a half-sitting position. His back leaned against the wall and one leg dangled over the side. He was either asleep or he had passed out. “Dave!” I screamed. “Wake up! Hey! Wake up!”

He didn’t move. He was obviously unconscious. I was gagging on the smoke and vile fumes that were filling Finn’s tin box, and the heat was intensifying by the second. But I had to get Dave Finn out of there. I crawled all the way into the trailer. By keeping my face close to the floor, I found enough air to breathe. Even with my jacket pulled up over my mouth, my lungs burned and I hacked and gagged on the fumes I was inhaling. My throat felt as if a Brillo pad was stuck in it. I hitched myself to the cot. My eyes were watering so badly that I could barely see. The heat burned on my back as if my clothes were aflame. I squeezed Finn’s leg. “Wake up,” I wheezed. He didn’t stir. I yanked at his leg. “Dave,” I rasped. “Hey. Come on.” He didn’t respond. His leg moved limply in my grasp. I didn’t bother wasting any more of my precious breath yelling at him. I pulled on him until he flopped off the cot, and then I kept pulling on his leg as I crawled backward, dragging Dave Finn behind me.

I backed out of the door, then reached in and got both of his legs. I pulled him out onto the ground and dragged him away from the trailer. I crouched there on my hands and knees on the pine needles. I gasped for breath. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I coughed and gagged. Then my stomach bucked and flipped. I puked my peanut butter sandwich onto the ground and then kept trying to bring up more. It seemed as if I’d never stop retching.

The flames were now darting from every seam and orifice in the trailer. I managed to get myself under control enough to tow Finn farther away from that incinerator. It occurred to me that there was probably a propane tank mounted on the outside wall of the trailer that could explode.

I knelt beside Finn. He lay very still on the pine needles. He did not appear to have been burned. But he didn’t move. I put my face close to his. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I laid my ear against his chest. I detected no heartbeat. I slapped his face. “Come on!” I screamed. “Wake up! Breathe!”

I pounded on his chest, and listened again. Nothing.

I rolled him over and pressed on his back in my best imitation of CPR. After a few tries I listened again. No breathing. No heartbeat.

I wrestled him onto his back and tried mouth-to-mouth. I thumped his chest. I slapped his face. I yelled at him. I was only vaguely aware that the trailer had become a great ball of flame. The fire roared with the din of a powerful waterfall. Fireballs and embers shot into the sky. Needles on nearby pine trees burst into flame, sparked brightly, and died quickly. And I kept pounding on Dave Finn’s chest and trying to blow air into his lungs.

I don’t know how long I kept at it. I never heard the sirens and I didn’t notice when the trucks arrived. A man came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my chest. “That’s good work, buddy,” he said soothingly. “Come on, now. We’ll take it from here.”

He helped me to stand and wrestled me away from Finn. I collapsed on the ground. Then I began to cough and gag again, and when I puked this time the EMT held me and murmured to me the way my mother used to when I was a child. When I finished heaving and spasming, the EMT wiped my face with a soft cloth. “How we doing, pal?” he said.

“I’m all right,” I croaked. “How’s Finn? Is he okay?”

“We’re working on him. Want to try to stand up?”

“Sure.” I pushed myself to my hands and knees. Another wave of nausea came over me. I tried to vomit. Nothing came up. I hacked and gasped. Then I took several deep breaths. “I think I’m okay now,” I said.

He helped me onto my feet. The earth tipped and swirled under me. He guided me over to the ambulance and sat me on the ground so that my back was resting against the side of the vehicle. He reached through the open doors in back and came out with a plastic bottle. He handed it to me. “Just water. Sip it slowly.”

I took small mouthfuls. It was cool and it tingled almost painfully in my mouth. I forced myself to swallow tiny amounts of it. My throat felt as if it had swollen shut. While I was drinking, my EMT wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. He puffed it up and let it out, studying the dial. Then he took my pulse.

“Am I going to live?” I said.

“You’re fine, pal. I’m gonna check on your friend.”

He went over to where Finn was being worked on by two other EMTs. I sipped water and watched.

My EMT came back. I noticed for the first time that he was very young. It didn’t look as if he had even begun shaving. “How is he?” I said.

He shook his head. “It don’t look good. How’re you feeling now?”

“I’m okay.”

He squinted at me, then nodded. “Okay. Come on. Let’s move aside, then. We gotta get your friend to the hospital.”

The EMT helped me to stand up. My dizziness had passed. He looked at me. “All right?”

I nodded. “I’m fine. Really.”

He went over to Finn. In a minute he and his two partners came back to the ambulance. They had Dave Finn on a stretcher. One of them was holding a plastic bottle in the air. It had a tube that was connected to Finn’s arm. A plastic oxygen mask covered his mouth. They slid him into the back. One EMT climbed in behind him. The other two slammed shut the doors and went around to the front. A moment later the ambulance roared away.

A fire truck was pulled up close to the trailer. They seemed to have the fire just about extinguished. I sipped water and watched them work. A few minutes later I heard a siren, and then a police cruiser skidded to a stop in the road.

Two uniformed cops got out. One of them went over to talk with the firemen. The other approached me. “You a witness to this?” he said.

I nodded. “Sort of.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

I told him.

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “I came to visit my friend. Dave Finn. He was living in the trailer. When I got here, it was on fire. I dragged Dave out. I don’t know. Then the fire trucks arrived…”

“It was on fire when you got here?”

“Yes. He had one of those electric space heaters in there. When I got here, the fire was in that end. Where the kitchen is. It looked as if that space heater overheated or something. Finn—Dave—he drank a lot. He was on his cot.” I shrugged.

“Like he might’ve passed out before the fire started?”

I nodded.

“Kind of a warm night for a space heater,” he said.

I shrugged. “He had a lot on his mind.”

It sounded like a non sequitur when I said it, but the cop just nodded. He looked at me closely. “You all right?”

“I’m okay. The EMT checked me over.”

“Gonna be able to drive?”

“I think so.”

“You saved the guy, huh?”

“I don’t know. I got him out of there and tried to revive him, but…”

“You tried, anyhow.”

“Is he going to…?”

“I don’t know. You got a driver’s license?”

I reached into my hip pocket and took out my wallet. I handed it to the policeman.

“Take it out for me.”

I removed my license and handed it to him. He copied from it into his notebook, then gave it back to me. “Why’d you say you were here?” he said.

“I came to visit him. He lives here alone.”

“And the place was burning when you got here, right?”

“Yes. It was full of smoke and fumes. When I opened the door, I think it fed the fire.”

The cop nodded as if he wasn’t really listening. “Right. Sure.” The firemen were spraying foam inside the trailer. We watched them for a minute or two. Without turning to me, the cop said, “What can you tell me about this—Finn, that’s his name?”

“Yes. Dave Finn. He’s a Boston police officer. He’s under suspension right now, without pay. So he’s living here. I think the trailer belongs to a friend of his.”

He turned to look at me. “A cop, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Suspended? Why?”

“I’m really not sure.”

“And you?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Finn’s lawyer, is that it?”

“No. Just a friend. An acquaintance, really.”

The cop stared at me for a moment, frowned, and scribbled in his notebook. Then he slapped it shut and shoved it into his pocket. “Okay, Mr. Coyne. If you’re sure you’re okay, you can leave. We might want to talk to you later, okay?”

“Of course.”

I retraced my route slowly, down the sloping dirt road, past the bungalows and duck pond and barn with the silo. I turned east on Route 119 by the lumberyard. I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Groton for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach, but I no longer had the urge to puke.

And all the way home I kept trying to figure it out. Mary Ellen Ames, Jill Costello, and now Dave Finn. There had to be a connection.

“YOU LOOK AWFUL,” JULIE
told me the next morning.

“Gee, thanks. You look beautiful.”

“Are you sick, Brady?”

“I’m on the mend. Something I ate, I think.”

I fled into my office. For some reason, I didn’t want to tell Julie about my visit to Dave Finn. She’d ask a lot of questions that I was still asking myself, and I didn’t have any answers. And inevitably she’d end up shaking her head and telling me what most of my friends ended up telling me—that I should stop mucking around in other people’s affairs and stick to fine points of law. And she’d be right, of course. But I didn’t want to hear it.

I called the Townsend police. I wanted to know whether Dave Finn had made it. They wouldn’t tell me.

I tried to get some work done. It went slowly. I had trouble concentrating.

Horowitz showed up around noon. No surprise. Julie ushered him in. We shook hands and he smiled at me. “Well, well,” he said.

“What the hell is ‘well, well’ supposed to mean?”

“You do get around, Coyne.”

“Look,” I said. “I really don’t need a bunch of shit from you today, okay?”

“Lady X drowns up in New Hampshire,” he said, holding up his right fist and prying up the forefinger with his left hand. “Lady Y gets stabbed to death by her husband in her Beacon Street basement apartment.” He pulled off the adjacent finger so that two of them were extended from his fist. “And then Gentleman Z dies from inhaling noxious fumes in a trailer fire in Townsend.” Now he had three fingers sticking out. It looked like he was making the Boy Scout pledge. “These items come ticking out of my computer, and each time I see something. I see Brady Coyne’s name. And I say to myself, ‘My goodness, that man does get around.’”

I sat down on the sofa. “Finn died, huh?”

Horowitz sat beside me. “Yeah. I heard about what you did. He was probably dead when you got there. They said you gave it a helluva try, though.”

I let out a long breath. “Shit,” I muttered.

“Brady,” he said, “what the hell is going on?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m a great believer in coincidence. Happens all the time. Most things, they don’t make much sense. Things just happen. Randomness, that’s the best explanation for a lot of things. That’s how the world works much of the time. But, hell, we’ve got these three deaths. Nothing in common with each other. Different places, different causes, people from different walks of life.” He tapped my leg with the tip of his forefinger. “Except you. You’re the common thread. So what gives, huh?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out. Only place I can start is by thinking that Mary Ellen Ames did not die by accident. After that it gets confusing.”

“You think she was murdered, right?”

“Yes. So did Finn.”

“Why?”

“Why did Finn think that? I’m not sure. But I was going out there last night to find out. He called me earlier, left a message. Give me the impression he’d figured it out.”

“And the young lady, Miz Costello?”

I shrugged. “Well, of course, she knew Mary Ellen Ames. Lived in the same building. But I guess her husband killed her. Just a coincidence, I suppose.”

He nodded. “I talked with Jack Sylvestro. That’s what he thinks, too. Look, would you mind talking about all this?”

“With you? Now?”

He nodded.

I shrugged. “No. I guess not.”