bad temper. He got in a few fights, boosted a few cars, and was generally one of the kids the local cops knew by name.”
“Doesn’t sound like a criminal mastermind, though.”
“No, not a mastermind.”
“What happened with the video store guy?”
“Ray Vessic? The usual thing that happens when a guy gets behind and doesn’t listen: somebody like Coyle comes around.”
“Yeah, but when they do, they usually leave the guy in good enough shape to pay- that’s the point of collection, after all. But that guy took a hell of a beating. I was surprised they let Coyle cop to Assault II.”
“He had a good lawyer- Jerry Lavin, rest his soul- and there were maybe some other things going on.”
“What other things?”
Losanto sighed wearily. “I heard it came up in Coyle’s plea negotiations. Apparently Vessic had a sideline going in the back of his store, something a little less mainstream than the latest teen screamer flick.”
“Porn?”
“The kid variety. He was selling the shit, ran chat rooms for the fans, and even made some films himself- all in all, a real prince. Coyle tipped the prosecutors to it, and Jerry even managed to sell them on the idea that finding out about the porn was the reason Coyle went off on Vessic. At the end of the day, it bought the kid the D felony deal.”
“Good lawyer and good luck for Coyle. You have much faith in the outrage story?”
Losanto snorted again. “Who knows? It makes a good tale, and Jerry, God bless him, was a creative guy, but I don’t know.” There was another crash at Losanto’s end, and more yelling. “And now I better get my ass in there, before I got outrage of my own to deal with.”
I put down the phone, pulled my laptop over, and transcribed my notes about Coyle. I read them over, and reread what I already had on him from Arrua, Krug, J.T., Lia, and Werner, and tried to square it all. And couldn’t quite do it. Scary, bad-tempered, and violent- I’d seen those qualities in Coyle firsthand, and they didn’t jibe with the gentle giant, protector of the weak whom Lia had described. And then there was Coyle’s relationship with Holly. According to Krug, Holly was happier than he’d ever seen her, while Werner’s spin was that she was scared and wanted out. I knew who I was inclined to believe, but still…Losanto’s story was interesting but ultimately inconclusive. And of course I still had no idea of where Coyle might be or what he wanted with Werner. I shook my head. Maybe Coyle’s PO…maybe tomorrow.
I pushed the laptop away and looked at my dim windows and wondered where Clare had gone. I got up and stretched and looked outside. The sky was drained of color and darkening at its eastern edge, and the cityscape was gray. I saw cars on the street, and more people, though none who looked like Clare returning. Lights were coming on in windows across the street and across town, scattered yellow pinpoints that only made the dusk seem colder.
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.
