Coyne had parallel reputations in a number of categories, all of them bad. He was a cruel boss, an overly competitive softball player, an arrogant negotiator, and a strange, selfish, and violent lover. Stories regarding the last of these were usually told in the gossipy fashion of urban legends, and these stories were repeated often as the staff turned over, month by month. In fact, if the gathering at Martin’s included, on average, a dozen young women, three of them had probably slept with Sam Coyne (or performed an act other than intercourse most people would count as sex, or had started such an act and not completed it because of something he said or did, or had tried to stop but felt compelled to see it through because of alleged physical or psychological coercion on Coyne’s part). In most cases, these women never told their coworkers of their own involvement, but instead passed along embellished accounts of the events with the names of long-gone Ginsburg and Addams employees substituted for their own. Occasionally, one of the women would get drunk enough and fess up to a tryst with Coyne. Such a person would earn head-of-the-table honors at Martin’s and would be pressed for explicit details. At the very least, she’d be expected to comment on the most notorious Sam Coyne rumor of all, that the handsome young attorney who specialized in mergers and acquisitions had a cock like the grip on a tennis racket, and a woman in the know would always confirm this by contorting her mouth into a wide oval and holding her hands apart at an exaggerated length, and a soprano-pitched roar would go up from that corner of the bar and martinis would be ordered by the tray.
Some Sam Coyne stories had sober endings (and even more dubious attribution) and they drew a different reaction. There was Nancy, who had to cover her bruised arms and legs for an entire month; Jenny, who discovered the handcuffs and the crazy leather masks in his closet and also discovered that she was kind of into it; Carrie, who felt degraded kneeling in front of Coyne in a downtown parking garage while he pulled her hair and growled commands down at her like she was in some sort of perverse puppy school; and there were multiple stories of former Ginsburg and Addams employees, usually girls right out of schools in Missouri or Indiana, who’d been briefly imprisoned by Coyne in his car or his apartment and forced to perform on him while being verbally and physically abused. The women with tenure traded legends of raped paralegals paid to shut up and sexually harassed secretaries bullied into silence – “sexual harassment harassment,” they called it. Sam Coyne was handsome like a movie star, smart like a politician, mean like a jungle cat, and hung like a bell tower, and men with that combination, the Friday night cynics at Martin’s agreed, can get away with just about anything.
Sam knew the women talked about him. He heard them whispering sometimes in the break room, or caught the new ones searching his slacks surreptitiously for some topographical evidence of his infamous attribute. It didn’t bother him. He even worked it into his come-on when he found him-self drawn to a new girl, when he saw some darkness in her eyes, some clue in the way she dressed, some unexpected piercing, or the faint arc of a buried tattoo. “What do they say about me?” he’d ask in the late hours of overtime when one of the newbies volunteered to stay late and help him with copying or filing or whatever she could do. “Nothing,” the new girl would say, looking at him with her big eyelids at their apex and her mouth turned down in a determined attempt to appear naive. He’d say, “Half of it isn’t true, you know,” which would make her blush, betraying the fact that, yes, they did talk about him, and much of it was juicy and even shocking, and then he’d say, “Does that disappoint you?” and the girl would say, if she were mature beyond her years, “It depends on which half, ” and that’s when he knew he’d have her in his bed or on his desk or in the copy room or in his car (or on his car), depending on the mood and circumstances and whether or not this one would lose her nerve at the last minute, like too many of them did.
– 63 -
Davis met Justin in the forest preserve, on a narrow road between the dog park and the picnic area. No one drove this bit much except to fish a tiny stream about a quarter mile ahead, and in the middle of the day it seemed as safe a place as any for a secret and illegal midday conference between a man and a teenaged boy.
Through the open window of his SUV, Davis heard the spritzing of a bicycle tire on wet pavement, and catching Justin’s attention in the rearview mirror, he waved him around to the passenger side. Justin ditched his bike in the tall grass by the door, and when he climbed in, throwing his backpack on the floor mat, Davis offered him a Pepsi. Davis felt a little bit dirty: the two of them in the front seat, the bike on its side by the road, the kid’s pant cuffs wet from the ride, the Pepsi, which felt like some sort of lure. He considered how happy he’d been just a week ago and how bad he felt at this moment – how his stomach seemed like it would be knotted now for the foreseeable future – and told himself this was surely a mistake. But an overlapping thought assured him there was no choice here, really. He couldn’t conceive of a future in which he didn’t follow up on all the boy knew. He couldn’t tell Justin to forget it. He couldn’t ignore him. This wasn’t about options anymore, or right or wrong, or vengeance or justice or the word that used to get thrown around after AK’s death: closure. Davis knew that he and the boy had only one path beneath their feet and they would follow it until it stopped, and Davis would spend the remainder of his life in whatever place they ended up.
“I forgot to tell you,” Davis said. “You can’t tell anyone else about this. If this guy ‘Mr. Cash’ found out who you were, I think you might be in danger.”
“I thought of that,” Justin said, pausing to expunge a carbonated belch. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Can you remember anything else about this guy?”
Justin’s lips were severely chapped, and the skin around his mouth was red and irritated in a wide circle. It looked like he’d applied lipstick on a roller coaster. “Lived in the city. Looked like he worked out. Good-looking, of course.” Justin patted himself ironically on the chest, then stopped, recalling something new. “He drove a nice car. European, like a Porsche, or maybe a Beamer or Mercedes. It might have been a convertible.”
“He could be driving anything now,” Davis said. “Still, expensive car. He’s probably a professional. That’s something of a surprise.”
“What, you had this guy figured for a maniac? A psycho?”
“After what he did to my little girl? Yeah.” He realized too late the question was a trap.
“So how’d you expect I would turn out?” Justin said. “Did you figure I’d come up the same way?”
Davis sighed. “There are a lot of things that make a man’s character, Justin. Very little is predetermined.”
“Is that why you kept such close tabs on me? Why you were stalking me?” He seemed to be using the language of the lawsuit deliberately, to put Davis on edge. “ ’Cause you were worried?”
“A little bit.”
Davis hadn’t turned the radio off, only dialed the volume down to practically nothing. Justin turned it back up until a melody was recognizable – Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Davis noted to himself. Justin made a face and turned it to a top-forty station.
“So I was what?” Justin asked. “Some tool in your investigation? Like an artist’s sketch. Something like that?”
“I guess you could see it that way.”
“But if you had given my mother that Eric kid’s DNA like you were supposed to, she’d have had a different boy. Not just me in a different body but a different consciousness altogether. Another self. I wouldn’t exist at all.”
“I guess not. I really don’t know how it works, Justin.” Davis was staring down the road through the spotted windshield. A dog, its face low to the ground, following a scent, emerged from the woods and made a circle in the road. A woman in her twenties followed with an unattached leash folded in her hand and fired off a series of rhetorical doggie questions – What is it? What you got? Where you going? – before the pair headed down toward the stream.
“At night it gets quiet and I try to think, and then I also try to keep track of my thoughts,” Justin said. “It’s like if I can figure out what I was thinking just before the thought I’m having now, and how it’s connected to the thought before that and the thought before that and the thought before that, at the end of it I’ll be able to find the real me.” Davis noticed how different Justin appeared even just a few days removed from the meeting at his house. The breezy morning had swept his mess of hair into an unruly pile. He had as many pimples as before, but they seemed rearranged, melting away in some places and reappearing in others. He continued, “We’re not made up of our thoughts, you know, even though that’s the only way most of us can approach the question of identity. I am the one who makes the thoughts, and that’s who I’m looking for at night: the thinker, separated from his
