Haunted Hearts (9 page)

“I'll read the memo later. Tell me in your own words. Off the top of your head.”

Cassidy made a strange movement, thrusting his chin forward and tilting his head at the same time. He breathed in, exhaled noisily, and began to speak. “Our client is a supplier of electronics parts. Their largest customer recently declared bankruptcy without any previous hint of trouble, while indebted to our client for almost three million dollars. Our client suspects criminal fraud, including the transfer of substantial sums of money out of the country. We would like to know a little more about the firm's actions, whether they appear to have engaged in criminal activity, that sort of thing.” The lawyer made the same unusual motion with his head again and stared at McGuire.

“That's it?” McGuire said.

“Those are essentially the facts. You spent a few years on the fraud squad, I believe? Before becoming a homicide detective?”

McGuire grunted and picked up the stack of paper from Cassidy's desk. “It took you this much paper to tell me about a two-bit possible fraud case?”

Cassidy flashed a mocking grin. “I have given you a comprehensive appraisal,” he said. “There is a good deal of work in that document.”

McGuire stood up, still holding the papers. “At three hundred bucks an hour, right?” he said. “When do you want an opinion?”

“First, I'll require an estimate of your time,” Cassidy said. Before McGuire could speak, he added, “And I expect daily summaries of your findings, plus a copy of a non-disclosure agreement . . .”

“A what?” McGuire said.

“. . . signed by you and notarized by a partner of the firm . . .”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute . . .”

“. . . as a condition of you accepting . . .”

“
Wait a goddamn minute!
” McGuire shouted.

Cassidy sat back, his well-manicured hands gripping the arms of the chair as though it were about to soar into flight.

“What's this non-disclosure crap?” McGuire said.

“It's my policy whenever I contract for services on behalf of clients.” Cassidy repeated the motion, stretching his neck and tilting his head, and McGuire recognized it as a nervous gesture.

“If I say something'll be kept confidential, that's all you need.”

“It's merely a formality.” Cassidy was attempting to look angry, but his eyes, shifting from side to side, revealed more unease than outrage.

“Well, to hell with formality,” McGuire said.

“Look, McGuire, if I have to talk to Pinnington . . .” Cassidy began.

McGuire tossed Cassidy's memo into the air and the sheets of paper fluttered down around the lawyer like oversized snowflakes. “When you're talking to him, be sure to say I threatened to roll your memo into a ball and make you eat the goddamn thing,” McGuire said.

“You're insane,” Cassidy said, rising from his chair. “You are certifiably crazy.”

No, McGuire answered silently, turning to leave the office. I've discovered that my best friend's wife is about to kill her husband. By sleeping with another man.

“You certainly put young Cassidy's shirt in a knot.”

Richard Pinnington was leaning against McGuire's doorframe, grinning down at him. It was half an hour later, and McGuire had just placed another call to Wally Sleeman, leaving a message on the detective's voice mail system.

“I don't appreciate being asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement,” McGuire said. He set aside the magazine he had been reading. “I consider it an insult.”

“Barry considers it prudent.” Pinnington's grin widened. “Do me a favour. Read the document he put together. Take the assignment. Get him off my back.”

“Don't you run this show?”

Pinnington nodded. “I try to. Trouble is, once I lay down the rules, the young hotshots wait around for me to break them so they can climb on their morality horse. I try saying Damn it, do as I say, not as I do, but that doesn't work very well these days. So just take the assignment, let him think he's a hero, and we'll all go with the flow, okay?” He turned to leave.

“Dick,” McGuire said.

Pinnington turned to stare at him.

“I'm not signing his non-disclosure form. I mean it.”

Pinnington raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “So I'll tell him you signed a blanket agreement with the firm, covers everything.”

“He'll ask you about it.”

“Probably. And I'll tell him to haul his ass back to work.” The smile resurfaced. “That's what you get to do when you run the show.”

Within a half hour, a copy of Cassidy's long-winded and badly written memo arrived on McGuire's desk with Richard Pinnington's business card attached by a paper clip.

That night, two middle-aged men left a Thai restaurant on Kenmore Square, near Fenway Park. They were old friends, in town for an industrial marketing meeting hosted by an energy-supply firm. They had dined on lemongrass chicken and noodles while trying to outdo each other with stories of each employer's downsizing plans. One, the taller and older man, was from Columbus. The other, shorter but with a trim, athletic body, had arrived that afternoon from Richmond.

It was almost midnight when they stood squinting into the darkness outside the restaurant. One suggested they find a cab, but the other said it was a fine night, so why not walk back, get some exercise? They would be sitting on their asses inside the hotel for the next two days. All they had to do was find Boylston Street and follow it back to their hotel. The two men turned down a street flanking Fenway Park.

Ahead of them, a black youth stepped out of an alley on Ipswich Street. The taller man from Columbus was explaining the economic advantages of peak-shaving high electric rates with supplementary power. The shorter man from Columbus wasn't listening. He saw the dark pistol in the youth's hand. He stopped and held an arm in front of his friend, who saw the pistol as well.

“Your wallets,” said Freeman Hayhurst. “Gimme your wallets.”

“All right, okay,” the taller man said. His wallet was inside his jacket. He withdrew it and handed it to Hayhurst.

The smaller man stood unmoving.

“Where's yours?” Hayhurst said.

The smaller man, from Richmond, remained motionless. He was memorizing Hayhurst's features, the tone of his voice, his size and age and weight. He would file it in his memory and play it back to the investigating officers. He would not let scum like this hopped-up black kid get away with terrorizing honest people walking the streets.

Hayhurst shot him twice, once in the neck, which opened a torrent of blood from a severed artery, and once in the chest.

The taller man stood frozen, unbelieving, while the body of the man from Richmond jerked in dying spasms at his feet. There had been no warning, no reason. This was a mistake, a joke. “Why?” he said, and Hayhurst shot him as well, three pulls of the trigger with the pistol barely an arm's length from the man's stomach.

Sleeman was unavailable to McGuire the next morning. At lunch, Lorna glowed with excitement, like a child with a new doll, and he admitted that her joy added to her attractiveness. “You look good,” he said. “No, you look great.”

“You look good too,” she said. “Maybe a little tense. Or nervous. Am I making you nervous?”

“It's not you. And it's not nerves. It's Cassidy.”

She wrinkled her nose at the mention of his name and called him an arrogant snob.

McGuire agreed, but he knew it was more than Cassidy. He could handle bedbugs like Cassidy. He couldn't handle what he suspected, what he believed he
knew
, about Ronnie Schantz. And he couldn't eradicate the image of the woman who visited Orin Flanigan at noon hour, the woman whose eyes were those of a frightened animal when they met McGuire's at the elevator. He wanted to know what was behind the fright in those eyes.

“Don't let Cassidy get to you,” Lorna said during lunch. “He's getting to you, isn't he? I can see it.”

Damn it, I like this woman, McGuire admitted to himself. He liked the way Lorna gave him her total attention when he spoke. He liked the way she rested her hand on his when she did the talking. He liked the look of her, walking ahead of him as they left the restaurant, and the little-girl excitement that made her voice sound as though it were always teetering on the edge of laughter.

In his office, he placed another call to Sleeman, only to hear his voice mail again.

At three o'clock he called Lorna and told her he was going to Revere Beach.

“Have a nap,” she said. “Rest up.”

Ollie and Ronnie's house smelled of coffee and furniture wax. He found Ronnie in the living room, wearing a pink jogging suit, a bandana knotted around her head. She looked up from polishing an oak end table. “I know I shouldn't bother, but I was getting worried about you,” she said. Her voice was flat, distant, a little melancholy.

“That's funny.” McGuire sank into an armchair. “I was getting worried about
you
.”

“Me?” Ronnie returned to polishing the furniture. “Nothing to worry about where I'm concerned.”

“What are you up to?” McGuire kept his voice low.

“I'm up to polishing the furniture.”

“Is Ollie sleeping?”

She nodded. “He didn't have a very good night.”

“Did you?”

This time she stopped and turned to face him. “What's on your mind?”

“Your painting class last night.”

“What about it?”

“You didn't go.”

“Of course I did.”

“Without your painting kit.”

She began to speak, thought better of it, and turned away, biting her bottom lip. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Who is he?” McGuire asked.

“None of your business.”

“Does Ollie know?”

“Of course not.” Her sadness changed to sudden rage. “And don't you tell him, damn it. Don't you dare say a word to him.”

“Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Tell him?”

“Mind your own damn business.”

He watched her pour polish onto the wood with one hand and rub it savagely with the cloth in her other hand. Then he went upstairs to shower and change.

When he returned a half-hour later, she was in the same armchair McGuire had sat in, and she called his name as he passed the doorway to the living room. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wisps of hair had escaped from beneath her bandana. He stood watching her until she rose from the chair and seized him, pulling him towards her. “Please, don't say anything to Ollie,” she whispered. “I just need a few weeks of life away from here. It'll be over in a few weeks, okay? Okay?”

“It would kill him to know,” McGuire said.

She breathed deeply once, then pulled away. “It's been killing me to stay here and nurse him for years,” she said. “Nobody seems to think about that, do they?”

The next day, McGuire lost himself during the daytime hours in the details of Cassidy's assignment, and during the night in the delights of Lorna's body. He reveled in the abandonment of it, their shared stage of sexual desire in which there was no longer either an intention of procreation or a pretense of romance. There was only an affirmation of life and a defiance of the force pulling them down a slope they were descending at the same speed.

In the morning, he drove her to the office and watched her wave goodbye from the sidewalk. Then he drove to Revere Beach. When he peeked into Ollie's room, Ollie grinned at McGuire and winked. “Show me a picture of her at least, for Christ's sake,” Ollie said. Ronnie bustled about, ignoring him, avoiding any kind of talk, any discussion. McGuire showered, changed, and returned downtown.

“Jesus, ain't you heard?”

McGuire smiled at the sound of Sleeman's voice through the telephone receiver. “Heard what?” McGuire said. His feet were on the desk. He was pulling at a thumbnail with his teeth.

“About Hayhurst.”

“Who's that?”

“The piece of crap we let get away on the Common. The black kid with the gold tooth? He dropped two guys near Fenway the other night. Haven't you been watching the news, reading the paper? I must've been interviewed by every grease ball reporter in town yesterday. Double homicide on a couple tourists, dark street, blood in the gutter. The stuff that dreams are made of, right? Anyway, I'm the lead dick, or I am until we nail the little bastard, and then DeLisle will get his hair styled and take over.”

McGuire dropped his feet from the desk and leaned his head on his hand. “Who'd he kill?”

“Two guys in town for a business conference. Salt of the earth, of course. You'd think they'd been fitted for angel wings. Both got kids, minivans, mortgages, and probably the flag tattooed on their chests. Christ, what a mess.”

“This kid Hayhurst, he's out of control?”

“Totally. These guys were no threat to him. He just wanted to blast somebody.”

“We could have had him. On the Common that day. We could have had both of them.”

“Yeah, well.” Sleeman said nothing. “Hell, ten years and twenty pounds ago, I would've caught him on Boylston. It's not all your fault.”

Most of it is, McGuire thought to himself. “Any leads?”

“Tard, the other guy, he might roll over on him. We're danglin' five-to-ten in front of him, might settle for half that if he tells us where Hayhurst hangs out. Listen, I gotta get back, see what's come in. Anything you want, on that other stuff? Don't know if I can get it for you, not right away. Call me in a couple days, I'll see what I can do.”

Lorna entered McGuire's office after lunch. She was wearing a ruffled poet's blouse and tight skirt, and she locked the door behind her and sat on the corner of his desk. McGuire set aside the report he was preparing for Barry Cassidy.

“Orin's not back today,” she said. “He said he would just be gone a day or two.”

“He didn't call in?”

“No. And that's not like him.”

“Maybe his plane was late or delayed or whatever.”

“Yeah, but it's still not like him.” She moved closer to McGuire. “I'm seeing my mother tonight for dinner. Remember I told you?” she said.

McGuire said he remembered.

“You sure you don't want to come and meet her?”

McGuire said he was sure.

“Okay, why don't I give you a key and I could meet you back at my place.”

“Not tonight,” McGuire said. “I think I'll stay at the beach and catch up on the rest of my life.”

“What's wrong?” She leaned to touch him. “Is Cassidy still getting to you?”

“No, not Cassidy. You hear about two tourists shot near Fenway the other night?”

“I saw something about it in the paper.”

“I could've had the guy who did it.” He told her about the confrontation on the Common two weeks earlier. “I lost my cool.”

“Why blame yourself for what other people do? This kid, he's a louse.”

McGuire nodded, told her she was right. And she was, he knew. But the knowledge of it, the guilt he felt for not living up to his own expectations, would hang over him for days. That was something else he knew as well.

He stopped at Zoot's on the way home for a slowly savoured beer, telling himself he was waiting for the afternoon rush-hour traffic to dissipate.

It was almost seven-thirty when he entered the house in Revere Beach, and sensed she wasn't there. Ollie was sleeping, while the television set glowed mutely above his bed. McGuire went into the kitchen, where he reheated and ate some leftovers, read the evening paper, and returned to Ollie's room around nine o'clock.

Ollie was awake but groggy. “New medicine Ronnie got me, makes my head feel like I'm a Saturday-night fool on Sunday morning.” Ollie blinked back at McGuire, a sheepish grin on his face. “How long you been home?”

“Hour, hour and a half,” McGuire said.

“You stayin' here tonight?”

McGuire nodded.

“Don't have to, you know.” Ollie yawned. “Listen, Joseph, you got yourself a special woman, you go ahead, don't worry about me. I got Ronnie here, she's takin' care of me like she always has.” He looked up at the television set, the program a rerun of an old detective series.

“Ronnie's at her painting class?”

“Yeah. She tells me she's workin' on something special. Won't say anything else. But I can tell she's thinkin' about it all the time.” He yawned again. “Ain't she something? She's good, ain't she? You see those paintings she's done? Ain't she good?”

McGuire agreed she was good.

Ollie switched to the sports channel and together they watched a baseball game until Ollie fell asleep again. McGuire didn't want to watch the news. He didn't want a reminder of Freeman Hayhurst, or to see blood in the gutter.

Ronnie arrived home after midnight. McGuire was sitting in the living room, the lights extinguished, invisible in the corner chair until Ronnie flicked on the hall light and started at the sight of him.

“What are you doing in the dark all alone like that?” she said. She shrugged out of her coat, and McGuire noticed she was wearing a sweater and skirt combination, and a new gold chain around her neck.

“Waiting for you,” he said.

“Never did before.” She closed the hall door. With her back to him, she tucked the gold chain inside her sweater.

“You were never cheating on him before.”

She turned to face McGuire, staring at him as though he were a stranger in her home. “Is he sleeping?” she asked. Her voice was calm, her face a mask.

“Yeah, he's sleeping.” McGuire tilted his head. “You putting something in his medication?”

“It's a new formula.”

“Phenobarbital? Something like that? Knocks you out, leaves you with a bit of a hangover after? They used to give it to my mother when she'd get too excited in the nursing home.”

She walked into the room and sat across from McGuire. In the dim light from the hall she scanned the walls and furnishings, like an interior decorator critical of the client's taste and impatient to begin her work. “Why don't you just move in with your girlfriend?” she said. She avoided McGuire's eyes.

“I don't have a girlfriend,” McGuire said. “Just somebody I sleep with now and then. Kind of like you.”

“You could leave us alone to work this out, you know.”

“Work it out? You and Ollie? How can you work it out when that poor bastard in there doesn't know there's anything to work out?”

“I'll do it. I'll look after things.”

McGuire sat back in his chair. “You won't work it out. You'll just wait for it to
burn
out.”

She brought her hand to her head. “It won't . . .” She closed her eyes.

“Won't what?” McGuire was torn between anger at this woman for what she was doing to his closest friend, and sympathy for her and her life. She had watched her only son die beneath the wheels of a bus. She had altered her life when her husband was brought back from a fishing trip unable to move any part of his body lower than his neck and right arm. She had rescued McGuire from his addiction to Demerol and codeine after his world collapsed around him in the Bahamas and Florida. How much could he make demands of her now? Did she owe McGuire honesty? Did she owe her husband fidelity? Why should she owe anyone anything?

McGuire rose from his chair and crossed the room. He knelt by her side to touch her hand with his own. “Hey, I can understand,” he said softly. “Christ knows, I've fooled around enough in my day . . .”

She reacted as though he had set off an explosion within her. She gripped both arms of the chair and pulled herself up and away from him, a fury in her eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?” she said.

“I'm just saying . . .”

“How dare you compare what I'm going through with all your escapades, your whoring from here to the Bahamas. How dare you even mention them in the same breath!”

“The same thing drove us there, Ronnie.”

“No, not the same thing. Not even close.” She brushed by him to stand near the window, staring out at the night. “Do you know what people call me, what they've been calling me since he came back home strapped in his bed?”

McGuire watched her, waiting.

“They call me a heroine, a saint, all of that crap. They say it to my face and smile like I'm supposed to feel good about it. Well, nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be a saint. Nobody ever gave me a choice in the matter.
And I'm sick of it
.” She began to cry. “I'm sick of it. And what I want, what I needed most of all, was my
own
hero, not somebody who lies in bed like a baby all day, but somebody who can hold me. Somebody I don't
have
to be a saint with.”