“What I did was not illegal. But it may not have been ethical either.” Ivan Hayward swung his Buick out of the church parking lot toward Main Street. McGuire slouched in the passenger seat, scowling and silent. “But I’m not a lawyer so I’ll leave that for others to decide.”
“What’d you do?” McGuire asked. They were driving east on Main Street, past shops and cafés whose colonial architecture reminded McGuire of Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Norman Rockwell.
Hayward breathed deeply, as though gaining strength to reply. “Well, I acted on my suspicions.”
“I made a career out of it.”
“Yes, so I understand.” Hayward turned and smiled at McGuire, his face lit with a warm inner glow. “Your aunt spoke of you and your work on many occasions. To anyone who cared to listen.”
McGuire shrugged off the compliment. “What makes you suspicious?”
“Well, y’see, I prescribed three medications for your aunt. One was digitalis for her heart condition, nothing unusual about it. Another was furosemide to prevent fluid from accumulating in her lungs. Furosemide has a diuretic effect.” Hayward glanced across at McGuire. “You know what a diuretic does?”
“Makes you pee a lot.”
“Yes, precisely.” Hayward pulled the car to a stop at a traffic light. A young couple crossed in front of them, the woman pushing a baby carriage in front of her. They were both stylishly dressed and they waved and flashed orthodontically perfect smiles at Hayward, who smiled in return and nodded his head. “I delivered that baby,” Hayward said with obvious pride, waving his hand and nodding again, and McGuire recalled how he’d wanted to live in Compton as a child, how much he envied the prosperity and respectability of its residents.
“So was the stuff you prescribed doing the job for Cora?” McGuire asked.
“Oh, sure, sure.” Hayward was still smiling at the couple as they reached the sidewalk. “The digitalis stabilized the fibrillations wonderfully and her lungs were quite clear.”
“What else was she taking?”
“Potassium capsules.” The light turned green and Hayward eased the car forward. “Potassium deficiency’s a common problem with patients who take a diuretic. I prescribed six capsules daily, two each at morning, afternoon and evening. Standard treatment and it worked like a charm for, aye, almost two years.”
“And they weren’t enough?” McGuire slouched against the passenger window and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What’re you telling me here?”
“I’m telling you that your aunt did not die in the way I might have expected her to.”
“She had a heart attack, right?”
Hayward shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“But she had a bad heart, you were treating her for that.”
“That’s true. . . .”
“Anybody can have a heart attack, any time.” Jesus, I’m talking myself out of a murder case, McGuire realized.
“Yes, but not always like this.”
“Not like what?”
Hayward exhaled slowly. “I examined your aunt on Friday afternoon, three days before she died. Given what I knew about her heart, I was looking for evidence of incipient heart failure. You and I, you see, we could be hit with an infarction or even arrest. . . .”
“A what?”
“Cardiac arrest.” Hayward slowed the car at the next intersection and turned onto a side street. “You were right, they can give no warning. But someone in your aunt’s condition would indeed have warning signs. A feeling of distress, discomfort, shortness of breath, fluid in the lungs. I would have expected to see them building in your aunt. But she’d never looked better, not since her first attack two years ago.”
“Still doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Hayward shook his head sadly. “Mr. McGuire, your aunt did not die of heart failure.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I took a blood sample from her body at the funeral home and had it analyzed. It’s not easy, by the way, taking blood from a corpse. The veins and arteries are collapsed so you can’t remove it from an arm vein, have to go into the jugular or femoral. . . . Anyway, by the time the results returned, Cora had been cremated. Here we are.”
Hayward pulled the car in front of a colonial-styled low-rise building whose cedar siding was faded to a shade of pewter from the salt air. Powder blue shutters framed each multi-paned window. Above the glass door a sign in gilt lettering read: Compton Police Department.
“Why didn’t you have the police hold the body?” McGuire asked. “You were suspicious enough.”
Hayward stopped the car and stared straight ahead through the windshield. “No, not totally suspicious. More like curious, I should think. Y’see, given your aunt’s illness, had her heart failed, I would expect a sudden violent reaction. Her heart would begin beating out of control, ventricular fibrillation it’s known as. It would be obvious she was in distress. But that’s not how she died. Not according to Mrs. Leedale, who was with her all the while. Cora simply went to sleep at a time when she didn’t normally take a nap. Now, millions of elderly people slip away like that quite normally. Your aunt might not have been an exception. But if I were to bet on how your aunt would pass away, knowing her history, I would have said ventricular fibrillation.”
“And that’s not what happened.”
“I don’t think so. Short of an autopsy, I can’t prove it.”
“What the hell did the blood test tell you?” McGuire asked.
“She had a lower than expected level of potassium, normal levels of her heart medication and substantial quantities of benzodiazepines.”
“The hell’s that?”
“Tranquilizer. Common, but powerful. Given your aunt’s age, the contents of two capsules was sufficient to repress her central nervous condition and kill her. Exactly as June Leedale described.”
“Tranquilizers,” McGuire repeated.
Hayward nodded.
“Which you didn’t prescribe.”
“Which I didn’t prescribe.”
McGuire squinted up at the sky. “Do you think maybe Cora was just tired and took them to commit suicide?”
“Do you?” Hayward stared at McGuire intently.
“No,” McGuire said after a long pause. “That wouldn’t be Cora’s way.”
“She was concerned about something recently, something in her personal life. That’s when she began talking about you recently. ‘There’s something I should tell my nephew,’ she said. I advised her to go ahead and tell you but she hesitated. It was bothering her terribly, whatever it was.”
“We used to be close,” McGuire said absently.
“There was something else.” Hayward lowered his voice as though the two men were in a crowded room instead of a parked car. “Y’see, yesterday I asked to see Cora’s medication, especially the potassium capsules. June Leedale swore she returned them to the upstairs bathroom medicine cabinet.” He shook his almost hairless head, partially in wonder, partially to underline his next words. “But they were gone. Not a sign of them anywhere. The other medications were there. But the potassium capsules were missing.”
“Can people overdose on potassium?”
Hayward shook his head. “The level in her blood was too low, almost nonexistent. She didn’t overdose on potassium. Someone replaced the contents of the capsules with benzodiazepine. Enough to slow her central nervous system. Enough to kill her.”
In contrast with its quaint architecture, the interior of the Compton police station was cold, gray, dimly lit and disorganized. Hayward and McGuire approached a scarred wooden counter where a young policewoman barely acknowledged Hayward’s presence before a man’s voice called a greeting through the open door of a glass-walled office.
The policewoman pressed a button and a door at the far end of the counter swung aside. A man in his mid-thirties, with curly black hair and beaming a wide smile, emerged from his office. He wore a pale blue shirt, plain blue tie, dark blue trousers and black Sam Brown belt. He nodded hello to Hayward but his eyes were on McGuire.
“Boy, this is something,” he said, approaching McGuire and extending a large pink hand. “Bob Morton, Compton Police.” Morton ushered both men into his office and closed the door behind him. “I bet you don’t remember me,” he said to McGuire, resting one buttock on the corner of his desk and folding his arms.
“You’re right,” McGuire replied. “I don’t.”
“I worked out of Berkeley Street before being transferred to Dorchester for a year. Used to see you downtown all the time, you and Lieutenant Schantz.”
“Boston?” McGuire asked. He lowered himself into a worn oak chair facing Morton’s desk. “You were a Boston cop?” Hayward stood in the corner and watched both men, a slight smile on his face.
“Four years. Worked with Stu Cauley. Heck of a character, Stu.”
McGuire nodded. “Good cop.”
“God, I remember all us young guys, we’d stand back and watch you and Ollie Schantz walk through Berkeley Street like you were, I don’t know, celebrities, I guess. I remember Cauley saying, ‘You ever get on a murder site those guys are handling, you watch your butt or they’ll chew it off!’”
“Stu say that?”
“Sure did. Told us to keep our asses covered and our eyes open. Said we could learn more from watching you two guys work one case than we could from a year with anybody else.”
“You ever show up on one? A case I was handling?”
“Priest killing, couple of years ago. The guy at St. Xavier? Shotgunned on the grounds?”
“I remember that,” McGuire nodded. “Ollie wasn’t with me. He’d already retired. So what’re you doing in this backwater?”
Morton bowed his head and smiled tightly. “It got to me. I saw two rough ones in one week, first cop on the scene each time. One was two young kids and their father. Double murder and suicide. I get there just before the mother does. It’s one of the kids’ birthdays and she comes in from the bakery with a cake in her hands. ‘Happy Birthday to Simon.’ Blue and white icing. Funny how you remember things like that. Two days later, I answer a nine-eleven off Washington Avenue. Guy’s holding his ex-girlfriend hostage. He’s got a sawed-off with the end of the barrel taped to her neck like it’s a cattle prod, pointed right under her chin, and he’s paranoid, on angel dust or some kind of shit. My partner and me, we talk to him for fifteen minutes waiting for the negotiating team to set up, but he knows what he’s going to do from the beginning. And his girl, she’s still a teenager, pretty young thing, she knew too. And I watch him do it. Pull the trigger just before my partner puts six in the bastard’s chest from his thirty-eight. That night I was so upset my wife said either we left Boston or she’d leave me.” He shrugged, the quick smile returning. “So here I am. I’m full sergeant here. Running the whole issue. Big fish in a small pond. And the first homicide case I get is your aunt. Crazy, huh?”
“You don’t even know you’ve got a homicide,” McGuire said. He angled his head toward the doctor. “You’ve got a non-prescribed drug in a blood sample you can’t use in court. And you can’t prove she didn’t take it herself. Maybe she was just tired of living.” As soon as the words left his mouth, McGuire knew he didn’t believe them.
“But there’s also the missing potassium capsules,” Morton said. “The ones that Mrs. Leedale says she returned to the medicine cabinet.”
“Easy to tamper with a capsule,” McGuire said, lost in thought. He looked sharply up at Morton. “What’ve you been doing?”
Morton spread his arms, a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t have a body, don’t have a motive, don’t have a suspect,” Morton said. “Like you say, all I’ve got is a lab report on a vial of blood, a suspicious doctor and a missing container of medicine. I understand you’re the woman’s only living relative. I hear that, I figure out who you are and I tell Doc Hayward here that you should know about it.” He leaned forward, his eyes on McGuire’s. “What would you do in my place?”
McGuire grunted, looked away, then back again. “Sounds like you’ve done everything you can with what you’ve got.” He stood up. “The Leedales are having some sort of get-together for Cora,” he said to Hayward. “You mind dropping me off there?”
Morton followed them across the small open area of the police station. “You plan on staying around for a while?” he asked.
“Only as long as I have to,” McGuire replied.
“Bet you can hardly wait to get your teeth into this one,” Morton said, resting his hand on McGuire’s shoulder. “I mean, might be nothing to it but I’ll get a file opened and we can talk about it if you want. You know, give me some ideas, make suggestions.”
“Don’t hang by your thumbs,” McGuire said. Then he turned and walked sullenly out the door.
Riding in Hayward’s car through the perfect autumn weather and immaculate Cape Cod scenery, McGuire sat stroking the scar on his upper lip, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the horizon.
He was telling himself he didn’t want to be here, there was nothing for him to accomplish here. He simply wanted to escape forever, away from murder investigations, away from memories pleasant and tragic, escape back to Barbara, betraying perhaps the only woman from his childhood to whom he owed love and esteem and, perhaps, a sense of retribution.