Vulgar Boatman
Authors: William G. Tapply
A Brady Coyne Mystery
William G. Tapply
For Blaine Moores
For their help and support in the preparation of this manuscript, I wish to thank Rick Boyer, Charlotte Wade, Cindy Tapply, and Betsy Rapoport. Each has a singular expertise which I value. All are people I trust. I am blessed.
And the way led on to the waters of darkest Acheron.
A whirlpool thick with gray mud spits
and boils and belches forth its slime.
Here the Boatman keeps his watch on his dear waters,
Charon terrible in his filth: the scraggle of beard
all yellow-white and tangled: eyes like points of flame:
a stained cloak knotted hangs from bony shoulders.
It is he who pushes with the pole and watches the sails,
his cargoes of bodies fill the rusty hulk year after year.
Aged now himself, but the green old age of a god within him.
To him the crowds of eyeless dead flow like a gentle current:
matron ladies and their lords, bodies of
great-hearted heroes, boys and unwed girls,
the young burnt on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.
You know, you who have seen in early autumn forest,
the leaves in their numbers glide and fall, or in windstorm
rafts of birds in thousands, massed to flee
over winter-grey ocean to lands of sun.
How the dead beg and plead for passage,
stretching out their hands in longing for the further shore;
But he is the mournful captain who chooses these and those
and others he pushes and keeps away from the shore.
—Virgil, The Aeneid (Book VI)
translated by Michael M. Fiveash
W
HEN TOM BARON CALLED
me, he did not beat around the bush. This was unusual, since he had earned a reputation for excellence in misdirection and evasion during his current gubernatorial campaign.
“I gotta see you, Brady,” he said.
“Is this something political, Tom?”
“It’s not political. It’s personal. It’s something for my lawyer.”
“Because if this is political, I already told you. I want nothing to do with your campaign. I’m not even going to vote for you.”
“I told you. It’s personal.”
I lit a cigarette and swiveled around to look out my office window at the rooftops of Copley Square. The sky over Boston was clear and blue. Indian summer. The frost would soon be on the pumpkin. Next thing, it would be nipping at my nose. Or was it toes? Whatever, an attorney with well-ordered priorities should be casting dry flies to rising brown trout someplace like the Deerfield River on a day like this.
I rotated my chair again in an effort to put the temptations of the great out-of-doors behind me. A futile try.
“You there, Brady?” said Tom.
I sighed. “Yeah, Tom. I’m here. What do you want to talk about?”
“Not on the phone.”
“Why the hell not? My lines are secure, believe me. Your opponent got something on you, is that it? You want to bring suit against the Democratic party? Looking for the
Globe
to make a retraction? Hey, I loved that cartoon on the editorial page this morning. See it? They had you dressed in an animal skin. You looked a lot like Fred Flintstone, actually, and you were swinging around this big club at a bunch of dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were labeled ‘Big Government’ and ‘Drug Kingpins’ and ‘Welfare Moochers.’ It was beautiful.”
“I didn’t find it that funny,” said Tom primly. “But that’s not it. I told you it wasn’t political.”
“They’re doing a real number on you, pal.”
“Screw them. Hey, I really gotta see you. You still my attorney, or what?”
“Sure. I’m your attorney.”
“You still handle my personal stuff, right?”
“Yup.”
“And you make house calls.”
“I do. That is part of my charm.”
“That’s your main charm,” he said. “Look. We’re having one of our frank-and-bean fundraisers this evening in the old hometown. Why don’t you come to it, and we can get together afterwards?”
“You want me to pay twenty bucks for a plate of beans?”
“For you, Counselor, it’s on the house. I’ll throw in a speech for good measure.”
“You do that, I won’t know which gave me gas.”
“You’ll be there, then.”
“I’m a lawyer. It’s a tough job. But I’m a tough guy.”
“Terrific.”
“Look, Tom. What the hell is this all about, anyway?”
“Can’t tell you. See you tonight. Elks lodge in Windsor Harbor. Be there around six-thirty.”
Windsor Harbor, Massachusetts, Tom Baron’s hometown, was about an hour’s drive from my office in downtown Boston. I persuaded Sylvie Szabo to go with me. I thought she would find Tom Baron’s frank-and-bean dinner in the local Elks hall entertaining.
“Tom Baron,” I told her as we drove, “is trying to combat the Republican fat-cat image. He wants people to think he’s down-to-earth, old-fashioned, approachable, plain folks.”
“But Tom Baron
is
a fat-cat Republican,” observed Sylvie.
“True enough. But that isn’t important. What’s important is the image.”
“American politics is amusing,” said Sylvie.
“Well, I think you might find this evening amusing, anyway.”
“Should I vote for this Tom Baron?”
“If you believe in the great American Dream, you probably should. If you believe that any poor boy can make good, and that the only enemy of progress is big government and individual sloth, yes, Tom Baron is your man.”
Tom Baron, I went on to tell Sylvie, grew up in little Windsor Harbor on the Massachusetts North Shore in the days before it had been condoed and yuppified. Tom’s father had scratched a meager living out of a nine-hole golf course along the rocky seacoast. Tom had earned a degree in agronomy from UMass, paying for his tuition by mowing his father’s fairways and selling golf balls in the pro shop. When he graduated, he married his high school sweetheart and took over the club. He persuaded his worn-out parents to retire to Florida and within three years Tom turned developer. He carved up the hundred or so acres of fairway and rough into house lots, built expensive homes on them, and made his first few million. It was rumored that Tom had smoothed over any uneven spots by spreading around incentives among key members of the Windsor Harbor planning board, board of selectmen, and zoning board. This was never proven, although several of those officials ended up living in Tom’s development, having received favorable mortgage rates from the banks where Tom did his business.
“This,” Sylvie interrupted, “is the American way, no?”
“It is, yes.”
“So your Mr. Baron is a crook, then?”
“Being a crook is not necessarily the American way, Sylvie.”
“I am hopelessly confused,” said Sylvie, pretending to pout.
I exited Route 128 onto 1A and stopped at a red light. I leaned over and kissed the top of Sylvie’s head. “You are the least confused person I know,” I said into her hair. “But you do seem to have a lopsided way of looking at politics.”
“I lived in Hungary for fourteen years,” she said softly, her head bowed while I nuzzled the nape of her neck. “I see American politics differently from you. In America, the politicians care what the people think. That is not a bad thing.”
“Well, I’m not so sure it’s a good thing,” I murmured. The light changed and I put my BMW through its gears. We were into the countryside now, winding through apple orchards and pastures and woodlands painted crimson and gold. We crossed several little tidal creeks. The smell of salt air wafted in through the sunroof.
This was Baron country. After he’d made his fortune out of his father’s golf course, Tom had taken up buying and selling North Shore properties in a big way. I handled most of his contracts, cleared the deeds, researched the laws, and in general kept him on the proper side of the fine line.
What he managed to accomplish over martinis was his own business. At least, that’s the way I rationalized it. He was a tough, hardheaded businessman. He broke no laws. If he had, I would have defended him. And then I would have cut him loose, because if he broke a law it would have meant he had failed to follow my advice. But he never did. He was a good client. He also happened to pay me a lot of money.
He was also a pretty good guy and, as often seems to happen between me and my clients, we had become friends. When I was still married to Gloria, we’d take our sons, Billy and Joey, for Sunday afternoon picnics with Tom and Joanie and their boy, Buddy. Tom had a boat, and we’d cruise out to the Isle of Shoals or up into the mouth of the Merrimack. Sometimes we’d find the bluefish running, or maybe a school of mackerel, and the boys would haul them in.
Tom was also a helluva golfer, a talent he claimed was useful in his business activities. He gave me two strokes a side, and he usually beat me anyway.
After Gloria and I split, I steered clear of social get-togethers with Tom’s family. Joanie kept inviting me for dinner, and I kept finding excuses. I knew that Joanie and Gloria kept in touch, and I sensed that we would be awkward. There had always been a vague chemistry between Joanie and me, harmless enough when we were both married, but nothing I wanted to let loose after my divorce.
When Tom decided to heed the blandishments of the Republican party to run for governor, he asked me to serve on what he called his “brain trust.” I declined instantly. A man had to draw the line somewhere.
“Politics,” I told Tom gently when he asked me, “just isn’t my thing.”
A more accurate truth was that Tom Baron’s politics in particular wasn’t my thing.
His “just plain folks” campaign was the butt of jokes in what he referred to as the “liberal press,” which included both Boston newspapers. The small-town weeklies were generally kinder to him. The campaign was the brainchild of his campaign manager, Eddy Curry, who claimed to be a student of the American political scene. “It’s the old log cabin and hard cider theme,” he told me once. “Abe Lincoln splitting logs. JFK playing touch football with Bobby and Teddy, or at the helm of old Joe’s schooner, squinting saltily into the sun. Ike in hip boots trying to catch a trout. Right? We’ve gotta personalize our man, see. I mean, Tom is a wealthy fella. But we’ve gotta package him as a regular guy. One of the boys. Republicans like to hold their fundraisers at the Ritz or the Parker House, right? Five hundred, a thousand bucks a plate. Lobster, shad roe, shit like that. Black tie, right? Okay. So we tip it over. The Ritz? We line up the local Sons of Italy hall. K of C. Rotary. Elks. Go to the small towns. Let the press take its best shot. Most of the people don’t trust the press anyway. Lobster? Prime rib? We serve baked beans and franks and brown bread. Mother’s apple pie for dessert. And we wheel out old Tom, he tells a few jokes, lets the folks see that he ain’t any bigger than life, knock off a few homespun truths, two or three eternal verities. He’s glib enough. Handsome fella to boot. He’ll go over good. After the speech, we clear away the tables and bring out the jug band. Let Tom do a couple riffs on the bass fiddle. Tap a keg. Turkey in the straw. Hee-haw. Beat the Democrats at their own game. We’ll sell this sucker. Folks don’t wanna know that the twentieth goddamn century has arrived, never mind it’s practically over. They wanna think that if they work hard they’ll earn something for it, roughly what it’s worth, and when they earn it the government ain’t gonna take it away from them and then turn it over to shiftless minority types who’ll use it to buy the house next door and screw up their property values. The demographics are with us on this. The liberals have had their day in the old Bay State. Now it’s Tom Baron’s turn.”