Free Tight Lines by William G. Tapply Page A

obscuring the porch that appeared to completely encircle it.
    I parked on the street and sat in my car, smoking a cigarette and waiting for nine o’clock to arrive. I hate to be early. I also hate to be late. I like to get to my appointments just a few minutes ahead of time and then wait. I don’t always make it, but it’s how I like to do it.
    Floodlights under the high eaves illuminated the driveway along the side of the house. The doctor had instructed me to go around to the back. At precisely nine I got out of my car, stomped on my cigarette butt, and followed the driveway around the house.
    I climbed the wide steps onto the back porch and found two doors there, side by side, under a bright overhead light. One of the doors was heavy and solid-looking with no windows. In the center of it was a small brass plate on which “Dr. Warren McAllister” was etched in fancy lettering. The other door had a window in it with a curtain drawn across from the inside. Beside each door was a bell. Over the doctor’s bell was a neatly hand-lettered sign that said “Ring and then come in.”
    I pressed the bell beside Dr. Warren’s door, but I decided to wait rather than enter, and a minute or so later the door opened.
    “Mr. Coyne?” he said.
    He was a couple inches taller than my six feet, angular and a little stoop shouldered, with a bushy thatch of silvery hair that flopped over the tops of his ears. His eyes were deep-set and sharp blue. His face was seamed with what are called wrinkles on women, but on men are known as “character lines.” I guessed he was in his late fifties.
    He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket, with earth colors predominating, a blue oxford shirt that matched his eyes, a dark green tie, and tan trousers. He held a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses in one hand.
    He extended the other hand to me. I shook it and said, “Dr. McAllister. I appreciate your seeing me.”
    “No problem, Mr. Coyne. Glad you could make it. Well, why don’t you come on up.” He turned and I followed him up a flight of stairs that corkscrewed its way to the third floor. At the top was another door that opened into a small sitting room, the place where his patients waited until their fifty-minute hour session began, I assumed. It was furnished with an oxblood leather sofa and two matching easy chairs, a coffee table stacked with New Yorker and Yankee magazines, an aluminum coffee urn, and a large, densely populated tropical fish tank. Several cheerfully amateurish watercolors in cheap frames adorned the walls.
    McAllister paused inside the waiting room for me to catch up. Then he said, “We can talk in my office, if you don’t mind.”
    “Fine,” I said.
    He pulled open a door and we entered a room nearly as big as my entire apartment. I noticed that there was another door, this one opening into the office. A double check on his patients’ privacy, I deduced.
    The floors were wide pine planks, with several braided rugs scattered about. Large windows on two walls looked out into the treetops. The other two walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. A wood stove stood in one corner. Two comfortable-looking armchairs sat facing each other in front of the wood stove. A big wooden desk, its top littered with papers and books, crouched under one of the windows. In another quadrant of the room was an upholstered chaise. A straight-backed chair sat by its head.
    McAllister waved his hand. “Here’s where I work,” he said. “We can sit over here, if you want.”
    He led me to the two armchairs by the stove. I took one. He sat across from me. He fitted his glasses onto his face, leaving them low on his nose so that he looked at me over the top of them. “About Mary Ellen Ames,” he said. “I’m sure it’s redundant for me to reiterate the constraints that we’ll have to place on this conversation. You must deal with matters of confidentiality now and then.”
    I nodded. “Happens a lot. I place a lot of value