Red Cat

23

Mike Metz was wrong about Thomas Vickers: he did call back, or rather his frail-sounding secretary did it for him. It was hideously early on Monday, and I was wrapped in a dream, and in a tangle of blankets, and in Clare’s long legs. She elbowed me awake and I groped for the telephone.

“Mr. March?” the parchment voice said. “I’m calling from Mr. Vickers’s office.” I croaked something back at her, I’m not sure what. “Mr. Vickers would like to see you here, this afternoon at three,” she said. There was no Are you available? and not the slightest thought that I would decline. And I didn’t. She gave me the address, on Broadway south of Wall, and rang off.

I looked at the clock: too early to call Mike. I propped myself on my elbow and looked outside. Ridged fangs of ice hung from the tops of my windows and shook in the wind that shook the glass. The sky was a thin, clear blue. Something- a gull- blew sideways across it, east to west and gone. A chill ran through me. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. Dust motes swam, and the last pieces of my dream tumbled past. Something with Holly- her icon’s face and kohl eyes and thousand-yard stare, and behind her the shadowed figure of a man, Bluto, maybe. And then it vanished, spinning away, faster than the gull.

When we finally rose, hours later, Clare moved quickly, showering, dressing, breakfasting, and slipping on her coat, all before I’d shaved. I asked her where she was going, and even to me the question sounded odd.

Clare smirked. “To see my lawyer,” she said, and she turned up the collar of her long black coat.

I nodded. “Is he a good one?”

“Jay’s the best,” she said. “Not that there’s much for him to do. The pre-nup leaves nothing to the imagination.”

“And that’s a positive thing?”

“It is to me,” she said, and her grin turned chilly.

After she left, I showered and shaved and sat at my laptop with a slice of toast. It took an hour and a half of typing, calling, navigating mazes of telephone menus, and waiting on bad-music hold, for me to find the guy who’d been Jamie Coyle’s parole officer. He was in the Division of Parole office in New Rochelle, and his name was Paul Darrow. He had a rich Bronx baritone, and what sounded like a nasty head cold.

“Don’t tell me Jamie got himself jammed up again. For chrissakes, he was one of my success stories- one of the few.”

“I don’t know if he’s jammed up, but I came across his name in a case, and I’m trying to find the guy, or at least find out a little more about him.”

Darrow coughed and snorted, and somebody spoke to him in Spanish. “I got six customers waiting here already, March, so it’s not a real good time.”

“When is?”

He laughed. “Next month maybe, or how about next year?”

I chuckled along with him to be polite, and eventually he consulted his calendar and found a slice of it that he could spare. “I got a meeting down in the city this afternoon, if you want to grab a coffee before.”

“Fine,” I said, and we agreed on a time and place.

I ate more toast and flicked on the news. The storm stories had already begun to fade, coming in fourth behind oil prices, cabinet appointments, and the arrest of a popular action-movie star for exposing himself to the nanny. There was no mention of the Williamsburg Mermaid, not on TV or in the papers. David’s luck was holding.

I called Mike Metz to tell him about the meeting with Vickers, and he was quiet for a bit, while the gears turned.

“You touched some kind of nerve,” he said.

“And maybe not surprisingly. If Vickers’s client really was one of Holly’s costars, he might’ve seen the picture in the papers and recognized the tattoo, and he might find himself in the same kind of leaky boat my brother is in.”

“In which case, we need to be very careful around Tommy.”

“We? You’re coming along.”

“I figure you can always use a little help being careful. And besides, it’ll be good to see that bastard again.”

“You hear any more about the autopsy?”

“Not yet, and I’m assuming the storm slowed things down a littlewhich is good news for us. Have you spoken to your brother yet?”

“No.”

“But you will?”

“I will,” I said, without enthusiasm.

I went for a run instead.

I met Paul Darrow at a diner on West Thirty-second Street, not far from the Division of Parole’s Manhattan office. The last of the lunch crowd was paying up and the windows were fogged and dripping. The air was heavy with bacon and burnt coffee and, underneath, some kind of cleaning fluid. The booths were gray vinyl, liberally taped.

Darrow was a bald, barrel-shaped black man of about fifty, with a drooping face, a gray mustache, and wary, watery eyes. I knew him by his sneeze. He wore a sagging jacket of hairy gray tweed, a white shirt gone beige, and a shiny striped tie. His coat and hat sat next to him in the booth, and he was hunched over a teacup, breathing the steam. I slid into the seat across.

He looked up and looked me over. “March?” I nodded. “I didn’t wait for you.” I shrugged and flagged down a waitress and ordered a ginger ale. Darrow sipped at his tea. “You worked that Danes thing, a couple of years ago,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “And that other thing, upstate.” The point being: I looked you up.

I nodded. “What can you tell me about Jamie Coyle?”

Darrow shrugged. “What’s to say? He’s a big, tough kid who, if you looked at him on paper, you’d think, Back inside in a year- two years tops, but who somehow managed to turn it around. Unless you calling me up means something different.”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure it means anything. I’m looking for his girlfriend, so I’d like to talk to him. I can’t seem to find him, though.”

Darrow nodded. “His girlfriend, the artist?”

“You know her?”

“He talked about her- a lot. He was real serious about her.”

“Real serious how?”

“Serious like how she changed his life, and turned his whole world around.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me he was saved by the love of a good woman?”

Darrow smiled and sneezed and blew his nose. When he was done, he shook his head. “I’m saying that’s how Jamie tells it. To me, it sounded like the girl was pretty, and smart, and had money and some class, and that she wanted more from life than pumping out four kids and riding them on the bus on the weekends to see their daddy in the joint. I don’t know that Jamie’s met too many girls like that before, or ever. She lives in a different world, and he sees maybe how he can live there too. For his sake, I hope he’s right. But as for turning his life around, truth is he mostly did that himself, up in Coxsackie.”

“A lot of good time?”

“Yeah. He had trouble to start- that place is no tennis camp, and him being a white boy and all- but he didn’t hurt anybody too bad, or get hurt himself, and he went through a lot of the anger management courses, counseling and stuff, and did a lot of college work. He was halfway to a degree by the time he got out. Said he wanted to finish.”

“Smart kid?”

“Smarter than he looks, and especially smart when he watches his temper. He’s not afraid to work, either; he’s ambitious in his own way.”

“He have problems with the temper?”

“He used to, but it looked like he had it beat.”

“What do you know about his plea?”

“He went for Assault Two.”

“Which sounded light, given what he did to that guy.”

“What I read, the guy was a real piece of shit.”

“Is that why Coyle went off on him?”

Darrow blew his nose again. “I couldn’t tell you why Jamie did what he did. But the file says he provided information that took a piece of shit off the street, and that’s why he got a deal.”

I nodded. And now, the $64,000 question. “You know where I can find him?”

“You try his job?”

“What job is that?”

“He works maintenance at a condo complex in Tarrytown. His uncle is the super, and Jamie has an apartment there, in the basement.”

“I didn’t know about that gig. I’d heard that he was working in the city somewhere…at some club.”

Darrow went still, and his eyes went suddenly hard. “What club?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I didn’t get the name.”

Darrow smacked his hand on the table, and made the mugs jump. “Fuckin’ Jamie,” he said. “He bitched about wanting extra money for school, but I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to lie.”

“Did he do that often?”

Irritation creased Darrow’s heavy face. “This is the first time I know about,” he said. “The caseloads we get- there’s only so much you can check- only so many hours in the day. What are we supposed to do, live in their fucking pockets?”

I drank my soda and nodded. “You said before that Jamie was ambitious. Ambitious how?”

“He was always working a plan- not always the same one, mind you, but Jamie was always shooting for something. Make some money, finish school. Make some money, open a restaurant. Make some money, buy some property.”

“The money part was consistent.”

He shrugged. “Kid lives in the real world.”

I picked up the check, and Darrow and I walked out together. The light was already long and the wind felt like steel on my face. Darrow shivered and sneezed.

There was no oblique way to ask it, so I just asked. “Is Jamie a dangerous guy?”

Darrow turned to me. “Dangerous to who?”

“To anyone.”

“You know enough to know that’s a bullshit question. You, me, that old guy at the cash register in there- you push the right buttons with anyone, get them scared enough, angry enough, back ’em up against a wall, they’re dangerous.”

“And Jamie no more so than anybody else?”

“I wouldn’t have recommended him for discharge otherwise,” Darrow said. He pulled out a handkerchief, ran it under his nose, and squinted at me again. “On the other hand, I didn’t know shit about his moonlighting.”