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.”
24
Mike Metz was waiting in the lobby of Tommy Vickers’s building when I arrived. He was leaning on a column and tapping on his BlackBerry; his face was still pink from the cold, and full of concentration. We signed in at security, which did not quite entail a cavity search, and rode alone to the twenty-seventh floor. On the way, I talked about my meeting with Darrow. He drew a finger along his chin as the elevator crawled upward.
“Coyle’s a mixed bag, I guess,” he said when I was through. “He’s gotten over his anger issues, except for knocking you around, and he was a model parolee, except for lying to his PO. And he was apparently very serious about Holly, maybe enough to get seriously mad at her, or seriously violent.”
I watched the numbers change and thought about what Krug had told me- about how happy Holly had been- and what Lia said: “Look, he’s a good guy.”
“Everyone’s a mixed bag,” I said. “I’m not sure quite what to make of Coyle.” Mike looked at me, one narrow brow raised. The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. We stepped into an empty corridor.
“Your job is to develop alternative theories,” he said, “and this guy qualifies. Let the police sort out just how good a theory he is.”
Vickers’s office was at the end of the hall, a dark wooden door with shiny brass hardware and a brass plate that read “TEV Consulting.” We went in, into a good-sized waiting room done up in Hollywood corporate: teak
