Death at Charity's Point (11 page)

“This is it,” he said.

“This is what?”

“What’s gonna revolutionize America’s morning rituals.”

“More computer stuff?”

“Nope. Better.” Frank put his mouth close to my ear. “Coffee bags,” he whispered, then stepped back to grin at me.

“Oh. Coffee bags.” I nodded vigorously.

“Sure. Like tea bags. Only with coffee in ’em. Better’n instant. Quicker’n perked. Listen, that can be our slogan, once we get production under way. Quicker’n instant, better’n perked. Nice ring to it, don’t you think? These—” he tapped the envelope—“are the manufacturing specs. Guard them with your life, Brady, my friend. With your life.”

I told Frank I surely would guard them with my life, that it was a helluva idea, and then I listened to him rave about the uses that America would make of coffee bags. Campers, sportsmen, housewives, harried executives late for the train—the market, according to Frank, was unlimited—as was his enthusiasm for the project.

It was the middle of the evening before I got away. I felt bloated and sleepy. Frank’s warnings of pirates rang in my ears. Route 3 cut straight and narrow through the sandy terrain of the Massachusetts south shore, and I fought to keep my eyelids propped open in the face of the headlights of big trucks in the opposite lanes.

It was nearly midnight when I pushed open the door of my waterfront apartment. The phone was ringing.

“It’s Florence,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’ve been working.”

“Humph,” she said, implying with that syllable that I had my nerve giving my attention to other clients. “I found something. You remember the books George had? All those things on radicals and hippies?”

I unbuttoned my shirt and was pushing my shoes off with my toes. “
Atlantic Monthly,
October ’71,” I said.

“Brady Coyne! How in the world…”

“Like I said. I’ve been working. So you found the copy of the article.”

“Well, yes. You seemed interested in George’s research, so I thought it might—you know—mean something. How did you know about it?”

“Percy told me.”

“Percy?”

“It’s not important, Florence.”

“So what should I do with it? The article?”

“I’ll come by for it. Okay?”

“It’s all marked up. Written on. Underlined, and some little abbreviations in the margins.”

“Okay. I’ll be out for it.”

“Do you think it means anything?”

“I don’t know, Florence.”

“I’m sorry. It’s late.” I heard her sigh. “I just don’t believe he killed himself.”

“No, Percy didn’t, either.”

“Who is this Percy?”

“Just a friend of George’s. I met him today. Nice guy. Thought a lot of George.” I yawned loudly. “’Scuse me. Gotta go. Good night, Florence.”

“Well, all right. Good night.”

I showered quickly, the hot needles of water driving the tension from my muscles. Then I crawled into my solitary bed.

I
PARKED AGAIN UNDER
the “Authorized Personnel Only” sign. I thought of that as my parking spot. When I stepped out of my car I glanced around. The bald-headed kid with his flock of adolescent sheep was nowhere to be seen. I had rather looked forward to another debate with him.

The girl at the desk outside Bartley Elliott’s office blinked myopically at me from behind thick, round glasses and said that Mr. Elliott was out of his office for the afternoon, could she help me? I told her I was trying to find one of the students, a Harvey Willard.

“Oh,” she said. “Harvey.” Her cheeks flushed.

“Yes. Do you know where he might be?”

“The track. He’s probably at practice. You’re not the guy from Duke.”

“No. I’m not from Duke.”

“U.C.L.A.? Harvey told me the U.C.L.A. guy’s supposed to be coming this week. You from there?”

“No,” I said. “I’m from Yale.”

“Oh, wow! That’s awesome. The Ivy League.”

The girl wore a scent that reminded me of Gloria’s bridge parties. I wondered what she looked like without her glasses.

I wandered out behind the cluster of brick buildings to the complex of playing fields where I had talked with Coach Warren Baker a couple of weeks earlier. The track team worked out at the opposite end from the baseball diamond, several Mike Schmidt home runs away.

Track practice seemed to be a pretty haphazard affair. I saw no one who looked like a coach. Three boys were jogging slowly around the outside of the quarter-mile cinder track. The way their hands were moving, I could tell they were intent on the stories they were telling each other. On the far side of the track two girls were working on the hurdles. There was a pole vaulting pit, a broad jump pit, and an area where half a dozen large boys and a couple of slim girls, all dressed in shorts and little sleeveless singlets, were taking turns putting the shot.

I approached a very skinny boy who was sitting on the grass at the edge of the track. He had one leg stretched straight in front of him, the other straight back, and he was bending forward and reaching for his toes with his fingers, bowing his head so that his chin touched his thigh. Marvelously limber. He was grunting, and the perspiration shone on his shoulders and the back of his neck.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Just a sec,” the boy panted. He bobbed his head a couple of times, then reversed the direction of his legs and repeated the process. Then he stood, legs spread, hands on hips, and bent sideways, left, then right, then left again.

“Okay,” he said. He picked up the sweatshirt that was lying beside him and toweled his face and arms with it. “You want me?”

“Not unless you’re Harvey Willard.”

The boy lifted his eyebrows. “That’s not even close. Nobody ever called me The Beast.”

“That what they call Willard?”

The boy smiled. He seemed very young, his smile very genuine. “That’s what the newspapers are calling him. The girls, too. It fits. Anyway, he’s over there.”

The boy pointed across the track to where I could see a cluster of young people talking to a giant of a kid. Then the large boy began running. He held a javelin cocked behind his right ear. When he released it, the balanced spear sailed in a majestic arc, landing far from where the young man hopped in his follow-through.

“That’s Willard,” said the skinny boy. “Throwing the jav.”

“He’s got a good arm.”

The kid looked at me as if I were crazy. “He’s like six inches from the state record.
Pretty
good arm. Where you from, anyway?”

“Yale,” I said.

“Want me to tell him you’re here?”

“Thanks.”

The boy loped away around the track, toward the group admiring Harvey Willard’s arm. I watched him as he spoke to Harvey, pointing in my direction as he talked. Then Harvey shrugged, picked up a sweatshirt from the ground, tossed it around his shoulders, and began to walk toward me. He took his time.

When he stood before me I understood why the sports writers called him The Beast. He was three or four inches taller than my six feet, and I estimated he weighed about two twenty-five, most of it massed in his shoulders and chest. The big-time football folks would bulk him up quickly, with weights and diet. He’d play at two hundred forty and not look too much different.

He greeted me with a big, practiced grin and an out-thrust snowshoe of a hand. He had been trained in the look-’em-in-the-eye-and-shake-firmly school. I returned his stare and answered his grip with a hard squeeze of my own.

“I’m Willard,” he said.

“I’m Coyne.”

“Yale, huh?” He looked me up and down.

I noticed that he had a little Band-Aid over his right eyebrow, and the top lid of his eye bore the greenish-yellow tint of a week-old shiner.

“Yes. Yale.”

His grin was really likeable. “I’m not Ivy League material, Mr. Coyne. Guy from Princeton told me that. I believe him. I don’t want to waste your time. I might major in business administration, something like that, but I’m not interested in killing myself, if you know what I mean. Hell, I’ll bet Yale doesn’t even have a P.E. major.” He smiled broadly to let me know he was joking.

I returned his smile. “I doubt it. Couldn’t tell you for sure. I’m not a scout. I’m an attorney.”

Willard cocked his head. “Yeah?”

“Yes. I represent the estate of your former teacher, George Gresham. Trying to clear up some things about his death. I hoped you might answer a couple of questions for me.”

“Me? What do I know about it?”

“Well, he
was
your teacher. And I found a copy of a paper you wrote for him among his things. It occurred to me that he must have thought highly of your work to save it. You see, we’re very interested in understanding Mr. Gresham’s frame of mind at the time of his death. I thought you might be able to help.”

I pulled Harvey’s paper from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to him. He took it and glanced at it.

“Oh, yeah. That stupid paper. So what about it?”

“Why would your teacher make a copy of it and keep it?”

“I didn’t know that he did. I got a lousy C on it.”

“This
is
your paper, isn’t it?”

“Yup.” He handed it back to me. “I was working on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Rewriting it. Like he said. Fixing up the spelling. Stuff like that.”

“What about the research? His comment here seems to suggest that you need to document your thesis better.”

Harvey reached for the paper and frowned at George Gresham’s comment on the front.

“Oh, yeah. Well, I really don’t have time for that. But I
was
working on it.”

“I see,” I said. “Mr. Gresham had a lot of books in his room that seemed to deal with the same subject as your paper. I thought perhaps you were working with him on it.”

Harvey wiped his forehead with his sweatshirt. He had enormous forearms. “Naw,” he said. “I was just going over the words and punctuation and stuff. Nearly had it done when he killed himself. Now I don’t know what to do with it, and I got that damn C, and I’ve got to get better than a C. Duke says if I don’t get better than a C in history I might have to go to prep school for a year. That means I’d be twenty-three before I got drafted, and that would cost me when I signed.” He peered earnestly at me. “Know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said. The boy had it all figured out.

“Anyhow,” he said, “that’s what that paper is all about. Can’t tell you why he kept it. One thing’s for sure. It wasn’t because I was his favorite student.”

“He didn’t like you?”

“Mister,” he said, “he hated me. Anyone can tell you that. I’m sorry he killed himself and all, but Mr. Gresham, he had it in for me. Ask anybody. He insulted me right in class.”

“He did?”

“Yes. Called me The Beast of Little Brain. You think that was called for?”

I smiled at George’s Winnie-the-Pooh allusion. “Doesn’t sound called for to me,” I said.

“Aw, he was all right, I guess. He just took history too seriously, that’s all. See, and now I’ve got this paper, and some new guy’s taking over Mr. Gresham’s classes, and I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, I really do need to get that grade up”

“Why don’t you explain it to the new guy? Give him your revision.”

“Yeah,” Harvey said doubtfully. “The thing is, I really need some help on it. Muffy would help me, only she…”

“Muffy?”

“My girl.
Maybe
my girl.” Harvey laughed and pointed to his eye. “Muffy’s a popular kid. I had this fight the other day. Kid was bothering her, so I laid him out.”

“He got in a good lick, looks like,” I said.

Harvey glowered at me. “You should have seen him. Anyway, turns out Muffy wanted to be bothered. That make any sense to you?”

“Women hardly ever make sense to me,” I said.

Harvey smiled. “Right. So anyway, right now Muffy isn’t speaking to me, and I doubt if she’ll help me with my paper.”

“Why not talk to your English teacher about it?”

He shrugged. I persisted. “Worth a try, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said with a frown. “I guess.”

I looked at his paper again. “What do all these marks mean?” He stood close to me and looked over my shoulder. “Like this. ‘Ag.’ What’s ‘Ag’ mean?”

“Agreement,” he said. “That means agreement. See, my sentence goes, ‘None of the women’s bodies were positively identified.’ The verb should be ‘was’ there. ‘None was.’ That’s agreement.” He looked at me. “Right?”

I shrugged. “Sounds good to me. What about this? ‘Ro.’ What’s that?”

“Run-on. A run-on sentence. Needs a period in the middle.” Harvey looked at me. “See, I do know this stuff. I just need a little help. Maybe I will talk to my English teacher. That’s not a bad idea.”

I flipped through his paper. Gresham’s interest in it still baffled me. “So, then, ‘Sp’ here means spelling. And ‘P’—what’s that? Punctuation?”

“Right. Lots of those little buggers, huh?”

“Seem to be,” I nodded. Something on the page caught my eye that I hadn’t noticed before. There was an “SP” notation beside a name that George had drawn a circle around. “What about this?” I said. Harvey leaned over my shoulder to look.

“Right. That’s spelling. When he writes it all in capitals and draws a circle around it, I guess that means he’s really mad about it. Dumb to misspell someone’s name, I suppose. See, that’s Carla Steinholtz, one of the women who was bombing post offices and stuff back there in the sixties. Real dumb, to misspell a name. I must’ve copied it wrong. It’s probably ‘ie’ or got no ‘t’ in it or something.”

Harvey backed a step or two away from me and began jogging in place and rolling his bulky shoulders like a prize fighter waiting for the bell to sound. I figured I’d worn out my welcome with him.

“Look, Harvey. I appreciate your time.”

“Hey, no sweat, Mr. Coyne. Always a pleasure talking with someone from the Ivies. Sorry I couldn’t help you out with Mr. Gresham, there. And real sorry about Yale. I’m pretty well set at Duke.”

I smiled. “That’s okay. I understand. And I did think your paper was interesting. You ought to work on it some more. Really.”

He toweled his hair with his balled-up sweatshirt. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably should. Probably won’t, though, to tell the truth. I don’t know. Maybe Muffy will come around. You know how women are.”