Marv Rosen leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. Two men sat flanking him. All three watched McGuire from across a long rosewood table inlaid with an ornate geometric pattern.
“Hello, McGuire,” Rosen said with his singsong delivery. “Sorry about the surprise, but there was no time to have invitations printed.”
McGuire glanced from the lawyer to the other two men. One was Rosen’s young assistant, who stared at McGuire with a bored expression while pulling at errant hairs in his enormous moustache.
“You already know Ivor here,” Rosen said. “He was a witness to our courtroom drama.” The assistant allowed himself a small smile, his fingers still worrying his moustache. “This other gentleman is Mr. Lorne Marshall, who has been retained by me.” Marshall, on Rosen’s left, looked blankly at McGuire through thick horn-rimmed glasses. “Mr. Marshall is a private surveillance officer,” Rosen added.
“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Rosen,” McGuire spat. He turned to grasp the knob of the door behind him. It resisted his attempt to twist it open.
“My friend Raymond likes his privacy,” Rosen smiled. “Actually, he’s a little embarrassed at all of this, but he owed me a favour. Professional courtesy. One of my contacts told me you were working on a case involving a client of Raymond’s. Knowing your complete thoroughness and utter dedication to detail, I suspected you would contact him eventually and when you did—” He shrugged. “There’s a door behind us here which exits directly to the outside corridor, so you can leave any time you wish. See? No coercion at all.”
“I don’t talk to scum,” McGuire said quietly, “unless I’m arresting them.”
Rosen waved away the insult, still smiling. “Please, McGuire, pay attention, will you? I’m not asking you to talk to me at all. I’m just asking you to listen for a few moments. That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Listening? Don’t forget, you can leave any time at all.” He angled his head in the direction of the door behind him. “Just walk out and be on your way. Or you can invest maybe two minutes in hearing what I and my colleagues have to say.” He held out a hand, indicating a chair across the table from him. “Won’t you sit down? There’s coffee in the carafe on the side table over there.”
McGuire folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “Go ahead and talk, Rosen,” he said.
Rosen shrugged, widened his eyes and rolled them at his assistant. “Whatever you say, Lieutenant.” He turned to the balding, dark-skinned man on his left. “Lorne? You want to read your report?”
Marshall cleared his throat, passed one hand across his mouth and lifted a sheet of paper from the desk. He began speaking in a scratchy, nasal voice with a distinctive cockney accent. Not a voice McGuire would want to hear on a regular basis. Not a voice he wanted to hear now.
“On November twenty-second, the subject departed Hutch’s Bar and Grill, having consumed two bottles of beer in the presence of what appeared to be a contingent of fellow law enforcement officers. He drove directly to his residence, arriving at approximately eight thirty-five p.m., where he was joined by a woman subsequently identified as Homicide Detective Janet Parsons at eight forty-three p.m.”
McGuire closed his eyes briefly before fixing them on Marshall again.
“Mrs. Parsons, who at the time was residing with her husband on Bartlett Crescent in Brookline, was observed leaving the premises at ten-fifteen p.m. On the following evening, Wednesday, November twenty-third—”
“Shove it, Marshall.” McGuire had heard enough.
Marshall turned to Rosen, who nodded. The lawyer placed his elbows on the table and his hands under his chin. He studied McGuire in silence before speaking. “You know the procedure, McGuire. Incidentally, we have photographs. Taken from the apartment of one of your neighbours. Or, I should say, several of your neighbours. A group of students sharing some rooms directly across Commonwealth Avenue from you. Infrared prints through your bedroom window. Very revealing. We didn’t show them to Max Parsons—who, by the way, is a very broken man. But we did pass along your telephone number and suggested he call it the next time his wife said she’d be late arriving home from work. Sloppy stuff, McGuire. Should be more aware of surveillance techniques these days. Oh, and we also have some transcripts of telephone conversations. Which,” Rosen added quickly as McGuire began to speak, “are not admissible in a court of law, but that’s beside the point.”
“You tapped my telephone?” McGuire said in a low, threatening voice.
“Not physically, McGuire,” Rosen smiled. “You know very well that’s not necessary any more. Just the usual radio pickup from a van on the street. Besides, I can have the transcripts destroyed and both of my colleagues here will swear I made no reference to the matter. In fact, as Raymond Robinson will attest if necessary, you stumbled into our meeting here in this room while exiting his office after a routine interrogation.” He smiled and blinked several times. “Like I said, McGuire, the door is open any time you want to leave.”
McGuire breathed deeply, forcing himself to stay calm. “What do you want?” he asked, speaking each word distinctly.
“Obviously, your resignation,” Rosen replied. “There are a few local scandal-sheet reporters who would be very excited about your activities over the past few days. They could spin it into a series: ‘Affairs between members of Boston’s elite detective unit breaking up marriages.’ ‘Award-winning cop has love nest on fringe of Back Bay area.’ So it’s very simple and very persuasive, McGuire. You simply throw in the towel and I drop all charges against you, the department and the city of Boston. And don’t kid yourself, McGuire. There’s more than one heavyweight cop downtown who would be pleased to hear that you’re leaving and taking my lawsuits with you. Jack Kavander and some others will be happy. I’ll be happy. And even you’ll be happy, McGuire. Because I’ll destroy all my material. I won’t send it to Max Parsons. And I won’t send it to the media either.” He extended his hands, palms up. “It’s what you call a win-win situation, right?”
“It’s what I call extortion.” McGuire took a step towards the table. In reflex, the other three men simultaneously leaned away from him. “If I resign from the force—”
“Nobody has to know why,” Rosen interrupted, his infuriating smile growing wider. “Just a quiet walk away from duty, that’s all it is.”
“And Arthur Wilmer? What the hell does his retrial turn into? The jury will know that you and I are already responsible for one mistrial. And you’d be sure to ask me on the stand about my resigning from the force. No jury in the world would buy my testimony completely. You know it, I know it, Don Higgins knows it. In fact, Higgins probably wouldn’t even waste the taxpayers’ money on another trial. And you would have another acquittal on your slimy record.”
“My client is innocent—” Rosen protested.
“Your client is an animal that should be shot and pissed on!” McGuire shouted. He lowered his voice and rested his hands on the table, leaning even closer to the three men who sat frozen by the glare in his eyes. “And I’ll risk everything I have,” McGuire hissed, “to see that he is caged for the rest of his miserable life!” He straightened up and began walking quickly towards the far end of the table.
Rosen pursed his lips and shook his head sadly. “McGuire, you are the agent of your own misfortune.”
Rounding the end of the table, McGuire seized the metal coffee carafe from the sideboard and, in the same motion he would have used to toss a sidearm curveball, flung it through the air in the direction of the three men, who ducked to avoid its path. The carafe struck the polished surface of the table in front of them and careened away to collide with an elaborately framed Victorian-era print on the wall at the other end of the room. The impact knocked the picture and its heavy, ornate frame to the floor with a clatter of splintered wood and shattered glass.
The three men leaped to their feet, dripping coffee. “Jesus Christ!” Rosen’s assistant muttered while Rosen quietly withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and brushed at the coffee on his suit jacket.
McGuire smiled and nodded politely before leaving the room, closing the door gently behind him. He paused, took a deep breath, and realized that, for the first time in several days, he felt good about himself.
“We ain’t open.”
The frowzy waitress looked up as McGuire entered Pour Richards. She stood behind one of the small tables in the dining area, a cigarette dangling from her lips, filling a salt shaker from a large container.
“Don’t try to seduce me, Shirley,” McGuire joked. “Today I’m a man of steel.”
“Any rusty parts?” The whisky voice came from somewhere behind the bar. McGuire stepped between two stools and leaned across to see Marlene Richards kneeling on the floor, stacking glasses on a lower shelf. She looked up and grinned. “How about that, McGuire? I didn’t even know who I was talking to. You suppose that’s how I got my reputation as a tart?”
McGuire smiled back and swung his legs astride a stool. “How’s chances of getting a coffee?” he asked.
“Not as good as they are of getting a frog beer. Shirl and I finished the first pot and the lunch coffee isn’t ready yet.” Marlene stood up and reached for McGuire’s hands, clasping them in her own. “Hey, sweetie. Your hands are freezing. What’s the matter, don’t you have anybody to tie a string on your mittens and hang them through your sleeves? And what’ve you been up to? You look too smug for your own good.”
“I just threw a pot of coffee at a lawyer,” McGuire grinned.
“My hero!” Marlene cried. Dropping his hands, she squeezed his cheeks and pulled him towards her, planting a wet kiss on his lips. “Did you hit him, or just fire it across his bow?” Before McGuire could respond, she turned away and went back to preparing the bar for the lunch crowd. “Did I give you my lawyer test?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Okay, here goes.” She turned back to face him and thrust one hip against the counter behind the bar. “You’re lost in the desert and you come walking over a sand dune. In front of you are an honest lawyer, a dishonest lawyer and a unicorn. Which one do you ask directions from?”
McGuire shrugged. “Beats me.”
“The dishonest lawyer. You want to know why?”
“Desperately.”
“Because the other two are figments of your imagination.” She erupted in laughter so loud that the waitress dropped the shaker she had been filling, spilling the salt across the table.
“I need to use a phone,” McGuire said. “Couple of local calls.”
“No problem.” Marlene reached under the counter and retrieved an extension phone. “I’ll go back and check on the coffee. Give you some privacy.”
McGuire flipped through his notebook and dialled Fleckstone’s number. The producer barked his name at the other end, the voice hard-edged and impatient.
“It’s McGuire. Homicide.”
“Yeah, what’s up?” In the background, McGuire could hear several voices in urgent conversation until Fleckstone said “Just a minute” and then, dropping the receiver, “Hey, shut the fuck up!” The background noise disappeared and Fleckstone returned to ask what McGuire wanted.
“You said Andrew Cornell made an appointment to see you,” McGuire said.
“Yeah. Wanted a screen test, drop off his comp sheet. I already told you that.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“What, when he called me? Or when he was coming over to see me?”
“When he was coming over.”
There was a long pause. Then: “Okay, I’m in a mixing studio right now,” Fleckstone said finally, “and I’ll have to check my book to be a hundred percent sure. But I’m pretty certain he was coming in on the Monday after Jennifer died.”
“And he never showed.”
“I told you that too.”
“But when did he call, all excited about his sister? How many days before that?”
Another pause. “I don’t know. Probably the Thursday before. Yeah, because I remember saying ‘Hell, come on over today. Or tomorrow.’ And I can hear that funny voice of his saying he’d rather make it Monday.”
“What was so funny about his voice?”
“He had this kind of lisp. And a southern accent. But I know accents. Used to be married to a dialogue coach and I’ve got a good ear anyway. If I hear a cracker order a beer, I can tell you what part of any state he’s from and give you a town within three counties, too. But I had trouble with that guy’s.”
McGuire scribbled “Accent?” in his notebook and thanked Fleckstone, who hung up without replying.
“Tell me more about Andy Cornell,” McGuire said when Marlene returned and slid a cup of coffee in front of him.
“Like what?” she asked, resuming her position against the back counter.
“Did he have an accent?”
“Accent?” She studied the ceiling. “I don’t remember any accent. You mean like New England?”
“Southern.”
“Southern?” she snorted. “Hell, no. He was no peckerwood. I would have remembered that.”
McGuire frowned. His eyes ran down the notes he had made during their first meeting. “You told me you could see something in their eyes, his and Jennifer’s.”
“I said I could tell they were brother and sister and they were both horny. Had the same look in their eyes. Funny thing, though. Hers were blue and his were brown. Deep sexy brown.” She shrugged. “I guess that could happen in the same family.” She pushed away from the counter and leaned against the bar, smiling at McGuire. “You staying for lunch? We’ve got shepherd’s pie with mushroom gravy. Warm the old bod on a day like this.”
McGuire pocketed his notebook and slid off the stool. “Better not,” he said, returning her smile. “I’ve got a car to dig out.”
“So go back and see your lawyer friend,” Marlene shouted as he headed for the door. “Those guys really know how to use a shovel!”
The DC-10 dropped out of the clouds directly overhead as McGuire stepped from his car. Its engines, on low throttle, idled with a shrill whistle that pierced his ears, and he glared up at the craft’s steel belly to watch it descend into Logan Airport.
He stepped carefully through the fresh snow in the gutter and stamped his feet on the shovelled walkway leading to the house. At the door he rang the bell and heard the Labrador bellow inside. A woman’s voice spoke soothingly to the animal before the inner door swung open.
Frances O’Neil stood behind the outer storm door, an expectant smile frozen on her face. The smile began to dissolve, then reappeared, weaker and without conviction.
“May I come in for a few moments?” McGuire asked pleasantly.
She nodded, unfastened the inner lock and opened the door for him.
He stepped into a warm corridor which ended at a closed door. Behind the door the dog cried and snuffled.
To McGuire’s right, at the far end of a large living room, logs burned silently in a plain brick fireplace. The room was filled with undistinguished furniture, much of it covered in vinyl, arranged haphazardly on thick broadloom carpeting. Below one of the two picture windows facing the street sat a large antique steamer trunk overflowing with colourful plush and plastic toys.
“Would you like to sit down here?” Frances O’Neil asked, leading the way into the room. The next sentences emerged in a torrent of words, falling over each other as she walked ahead of him. “I can make a pot of tea. I’m not a coffee drinker. Marlene was always trying to get me to drink coffee, but . . . Mona, that’s my sister, she and Kelly have gone to see Robert, that’s her husband, for lunch in the city. So I made a fire, because I love fires on days like this, just sitting here with a book and with Jabs for company. Jabs, that’s the dog . . .”
She turned to see McGuire watching her carefully, standing beside the sofa.
Her hands flew across her face and fluttered frantically like birds tethered on a string. Squeezing her eyes shut, she stammered, “What am I doing? I didn’t even take your coat. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
McGuire shrugged out of his topcoat and handed it to her as she brushed by, returning to the corridor. “Hush!” she called to the dog behind the door.
He entered the room and sat on the sofa, facing the fire. The mantel was crowded with photographs of Kelly. In most of them, the little girl and Frances smiled back at the camera together. McGuire counted only three in which the girl was pictured with her stern-faced parents, the mother with her hair always freshly set, the father, balding, with his eyes challenging the camera from behind steel-rimmed glasses.
“Are you sure you don’t want tea?” Frances asked when she returned. McGuire assured her he didn’t.
She crossed the room and sat on a low bench near the fire, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped tightly around her calves. Her blouse complimented her long, loosely-fitted skirt; she had applied just enough mascara to flatter her eyes and just enough lipstick to define her thin mouth. A gold chain lay around her neck and gold hoop earrings swung with each move of her head.
Not beautiful, McGuire thought as he studied her, but not unattractive, either. The kind of woman who could sit alone in a bar and not get a second look from men until after midnight.
She stared into the fire and said, in a small sad voice, “Why did you return?”
“To ask a few questions. About Jennifer Cornell. And about Andy, her brother.”
“Andrew? Andrew’s gone, isn’t he? Can’t you people believe that he’s never coming back?”
“Miss O’Neil,” McGuire began.
“Frances,” she said, turning to look at him abruptly. “Please call me Frances.”
“Frances,” McGuire smiled. “It appears you were the last person to see Andy Cornell. Did he walk you home the evening his sister was murdered?”
“Actually, I walked Andrew home. He invited me back to his . . . back to Jennifer’s apartment. He said he wanted company. Just company to walk home. It was such a lovely night, I remember. Warm and soft. You only get nights like that in June, don’t you? Later on, in August, the nights can get, I don’t know, heavy. But in June they’re soft and romantic.”
“What did you talk about?”
She looked back at the fire and smiled. “So many things. Andrew was interested in so many things. Books and music. And movies and plays. I told him I thought the most beautiful movie ever made was A Place in the Sun because it had the two most beautiful people in it, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. I had a mad, passionate crush on Montgomery Clift when I was a kid. I thought he was the most gorgeous man in the world. I told Andrew he reminded me of Montgomery Clift. Not in looks so much. Andrew wasn’t as dark and swarthy as Montgomery Clift. But in his sensitivity. His eyes, his voice, the way he carried himself.”
Briefly, she bowed her head, and then raised it again, her eyes flooded with tears.
“And he stopped and took my head in his hands and looked at me and said, ‘I love you for saying that.’ I thought he was going to kiss me. I was sure he would, but we just kept walking, up Westland Street and across the bridge, the stone bridge over the Fens.”
She bent to rest her forehead on her knees.
“What happened then?” McGuire asked gently.
“When?”
“After you crossed the bridge.”
She looked up and studied McGuire before replying in a stronger voice. “He saw the light on in his . . . in Jennifer’s apartment. He said he would love to invite me up for coffee and talk about movies and books and things. But he said Jennifer was home, and Jennifer wouldn’t like it. He said she was a very jealous, possessive woman. And she was. I knew that. So I asked him . . .” She swallowed, looked away, regained her strength and began again. “I asked him to come home with me. I had never done that before. Asked a man home, I mean. I just had this small apartment in Cambridge, it was nothing much. But he said no, he couldn’t do that, he had to go to Jennifer.”
“And that’s the last time you saw him?”
She nodded silently.
“He went into Jennifer’s apartment house?”
Another nod.
“Did you actually see him enter?”
“Mr. McGuire, I stood on Park Drive and I watched him go in the door and I stayed there for the longest time waiting for him to come out. But he never came.”
“So you went home.”
“I walked. Across the Harvard Bridge all the way to Prospect Street.”
“What did Andy do for a living? Did he tell you?”
She rubbed the fingertips of her hands together as she spoke. “He never said. He just told me he had travelled a lot, here and there, and that he was ready to settle down. He said he liked Boston, he had never been here before.”
“Did he tell you about his limp? Did he explain it?”
“He joked about it. Said it was from a car accident. I didn’t ask for details.”
“There’s no record of Jennifer ever having a brother. Nothing at all.”
“Yes she did. It was Andrew.”
“But there’s no proof.”
“You never saw them together like I did.” She looked away and wiped her eyes. “She was so proud. So proud.”
He waited until she turned to face him again, an embarrassed smile on her lips.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What else would you like to know?”
“I understand he had an accent.”
“He had several.” Her smile grew broader. “He liked to practise them. When we walked home that night he talked in a Georgia accent and a Texas accent, just joking, making fun of them. And he did a Boston accent, a broad one, like the Kennedys.”
McGuire frowned. The picture of Andrew Cornell was becoming more clouded with every revelation about him. “Where were you the morning Jennifer was found dead?” he asked, trying another tack.
She shrugged. “In bed. Exhausted.”
“What did you think about when you heard the news?”
Frances brought her hands to her face and her shoulders heaved. Standing up, she walked to the window and gazed out at the snowy landscape. “I knew Andrew was gone. I knew I would never see him again.”
“Do you think he was responsible for Jennifer’s death?”
She replied without hesitating. “Oh, yes. Andrew was responsible. That I’m sure of.”
“Why would he kill his sister?”
Turning from the window, her face was calm again. “I don’t know,” she replied. “You’ll have to ask somebody else. I can’t answer that.”
“Where is Andrew now?”
Sparks flew as a log shifted and dropped into the embers. Frances looked towards the fire. “Probably dead.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. A feeling.” She smoothed her skirt. “That’s the logical explanation, isn’t it?”
“It’s one,” McGuire replied. “He could be anywhere. In fact, when I was here last time you just said he had gone away. Now you suggest he’s dead. Why?”
“Because I want to believe it.” She lifted her head—a teacher’s pose of strength and authority. “Maybe it’s wrong to hope that someone is dead. I’m sorry if it is, but that’s the way I feel.” She walked quickly towards the kitchen door. “I’m making some tea, Mr. McGuire. Are you sure you won’t have some before heading out in the snow?”
Her legs crossed, she dangled one shoe from her toes, swinging it back and forth as she spoke.
“There was just Mona and me,” she said in a voice that was relaxed and reedy. “Mona is two years older. When you come from a family like ours, you either get hard and aggressive or you get . . . like me, I guess. I withdrew into my own little dream world where everything was sweet and romantic and everybody was nice to everybody else. Nobody was cruel. Mona, she became tough. No one ever dominated her. No one ever will.”
She drained the tea from her cup and set it aside. McGuire had long since finished his and he sat back on the sofa, listening to her tale of two young girls being terrorized by a tyrant father as they grew up in South Boston.
He liked the delicacy of her, the slenderness of her arms and body. McGuire had known women with an inner beauty whose appeal defied physical measure alone, and women whose outer beauty was so obvious it made cosmetics superfluous. Frances O’Neil’s beauty was neither inner nor obvious. It was frail, like a green bud in early spring, ready to burst into full flower or wither in the next killing frost.
“So Mona became an executive secretary. And I became a teacher. Then I worked as a librarian for a few years.” She smiled at the memory. “I loved being surrounded by books. Loved having all those characters and ideas lingering between the covers. I could visit them whenever I wanted. It was a wonderful time for me.”
“And then?”
She smiled and stood up, kicking off both shoes before walking to set her empty cup on a side table. He realized for the first time she wore no brassiere. Her feet were tiny and bare; nail polish flashed like costume jewellery from her toes.
In McGuire’s eyes she suddenly seemed attractive, sexy, enticing, as she stretched languidly, her arms above her head, in the soft light of the picture window, in a warm room with a dying fire on a cold day.
She walked back to the fireplace and knelt to add a log.
“I only had one boyfriend in high school. And there was a nice man I dated when I was teaching,” she said after seating herself once again on the low bench by the fire. “They were both quiet, gentlemen. Perhaps I should have married one of them. But I didn’t.”
Her hands fluttered in front of her face. “I’ve always been a nervous, withdrawn person. But I’m getting better. I was always so afraid of becoming too involved. Too deeply involved. Being a librarian helped. I was distanced from people. I could take refuge in books.”
She stood and walked back to the window. Again, McGuire was struck by her grace and delicacy.
“One day a businessman came in and asked me to help him find some reference books he needed,” she said, without turning from the window. “He was in advertising. He was going to make a speech and I helped him find what he needed. We spent an hour together. He came back a week later to say his speech had been a big success and he wanted to take me to lunch, just to thank me for all the work I had done.”
She turned to face McGuire, raising one hand to brush away a lock of hair from her forehead.
“Do you want to guess the rest?” she asked.
“I don’t have to,” McGuire replied. “How long did it last?”
“Almost three years. During the last year, his daughter started coming into the branch every Saturday. She was perhaps nine, ten years old. I recognized her from the photographs he had shown me. And I saw her name and address on her library card. He would talk about her all the time. He worshipped her. One day, when he hadn’t called me for over a week, I did a terrible thing. I went to this sweet little girl and said I knew her name and to please tell her daddy to call me at the library.” She returned from the window and sat on the bench again, staring at the fire.
“When he called, he was furious. He said terrible things about me. Things I couldn’t believe a man would say to a woman who did nothing wrong except love him too much. He told me his family was the most precious thing in the world to him and I had almost destroyed it for him. I cried for days. Finally the chief librarian said I would have to leave. Due to my emotional state. And because someone had complained about me.”
“The man’s wife,” McGuire added.
She nodded. “So,” she said, smiling and opening her arms, “that ended one career and began another. At Pour Richards. That was my sister’s idea. She told me I had to get out among people. She said one bad affair shouldn’t make me a hermit. And working there was fun for a while.”
“Until Andy Cornell?”
“He was part of it. I just . . . When I left, my sister told me I could be her live-in babysitter. I earn my room and board and forty dollars a week. And I get so much love from Kelly. She seems everything to me. Sometimes it frightens me because I know she won’t always be a child. She won’t always need me.”
McGuire stood up. “I have to go, Miss O’Neil.” He thanked her for the tea.
She walked him to the door, held his coat for him, and touched his elbow absent-mindedly. “I’ve never told anyone about the man at the library,” she said. “Except my sister. I’m sorry if I bored you.”
“You know what I think?” he said, turning to look at her. “I think you’re too good a person to spend your life regretting a guy like that.”
The tears began again and she bit her bottom lip. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying that.” Then, with a whisper of desperation in her voice: “Will you be back?”
“I might.” He handed her his card. “If you think of anything else, call me.”
“You already gave me one,” she said accepting it. “But I’d love another.” She reached to touch his upper lip with her finger. “How did you get that scar?”
“Shaving.”
She smiled broadly enough to wrinkle her nose, making her look several years younger. “Impossible.”
“I use a very large blade.”
“You’re an interesting man.”
“Only on the outside.”
The dog began scratching at the kitchen door, crying for attention. McGuire stepped into the chill of the day and the inhuman roar of another 727 on its way to the airport, its landing-gear extended and the sound of its engines piercing the afternoon calm.
Driving back to the city, he tried to assemble pieces of the puzzle of Jennifer Cornell’s murder in his head. No matter how he arranged them, the gaping hole that always remained in the picture was named Andrew Cornell.
He hesitated at Bennington, began to turn left into the city, then jerked the wheel right towards the ocean and Revere Beach Parkway.
“Would you mind waiting in the living room?” Ronnie said at the door, avoiding McGuire’s eyes. “It’s dinner time. He’s not comfortable having you watch me feed him.”
McGuire sat quietly in the small, tidy living room. A game show played itself out on the television set, the contestants locked together in frenzied greed. Atop the television console, from within a sterling silver frame, the face of a small boy shone into the room. His hair was carefully combed into a shiny pompadour and he wore a printed cotton top with matching short pants. He was laughing at something above and behind the camera, his rosebud mouth spread in an expression of glee. He would always be laughing. He would always be five years old and alive.
“Coffee?”
McGuire twisted in the chair to see Ronnie beaming at him.
“He’s happy you’re here,” she said. “He won’t show it—you know Ollie—but he wants to talk to you.”
She poured coffee for him in the kitchen and he entered Ollie’s room, sipping from an earthenware mug.
“How you doing?” Ollie lay propped up in his bed, his right hand squeezing the tennis ball at the same steady tempo.
“First we kill all the lawyers,” McGuire said as he lowered himself into his usual chair. “You?”
“You have to ask?” The large head studied McGuire, the eyes narrowed to slits. “So tell me what happened today.”
For the next half hour McGuire traced the events of the day, beginning with his request for information from Ralph Innes.
“You’d better talk to Jack,” Ollie offered when McGuire mentioned Ralph’s warning. “Get him calmed down. Otherwise you’ll get your ass pulled into the wringer.”
His eyes widened as McGuire described Rosen’s ambush in Robinson’s meeting room and the demand for McGuire’s resignation.
“Rosen’s about as smooth as stucco toilet paper, but he’s not dumb,” Ollie said quietly. “Bet the farm on this, Joseph. Somebody over at Berkeley Street knows what he’s up to and gave him the nod. Maybe not Kavander, but somebody above him. They know about it. Otherwise, Rosen wouldn’t pull a number like that on you.”
“Goddamn it, Ollie!” McGuire exploded. “I resign now and they’ll put this Cornell case back in the grey files. Not only that, but Wilmer will walk for good. You know how testimony is useless from a cop who just resigned from the force. It’s worth nothing. Less than nothing. Rosen would cut me to pieces in front of the jury. We’d have two killers still walking around out there and nobody would give a damn.”
“Except the city gets rid of a trouble-making cop and out from under a lawsuit.” Ollie turned his head to face McGuire. “Joe, I remember when Kavander talked to me the day I left. He said he’d bet my pension that you wouldn’t last six months without me to keep you reined in.”
“And what did you tell him, Ollie?”
“I told him he might be right.” Ollie lowered his voice. “I also told him that if it was true, he would lose the best damn investigating cop on the force. Now, what else have you got?”
McGuire reviewed Andrew Cornell’s appointment to meet Fleckstone on the day after his sister was found murdered, and his apparent familiarity with southern accents. He talked about visiting Frances O’Neil and her description of the missing brother.
“It all comes back to the brother, whoever he is,” McGuire said when he had finished.
Instead of answering, Ollie studied him, then rolled his head to look out the window at the darkened sea.
McGuire looked at his watch. “I’ll call Ralph Innes, see what he came up with.”
Ronnie was seated in the kitchen, the evening newspaper spread in front of her. “I need to use the phone,” McGuire said, adding quickly, “No, it’s okay, stay there,” when she rose to leave.
“We’re having an extension installed in Ollie’s room tomorrow,” she said. “A speaker phone. That way, he doesn’t have to use the receiver.” Her face clouded. “After that, all he’ll need is somebody to call him.”
McGuire dialled Berkeley Street, asked for Ralph Innes and opened his notebook while waiting to be connected.
“Innes here,” the detective answered.
“Ralph, it’s Joe. You got anything for me?”
“Yeah, yeah.” The other man sounded distracted. “Let me get to a different phone, okay?”
McGuire nodded when Ronnie lifted the coffee pot in his direction. She poured a cup and set it in front of him.
“Joe?” Innes came back on the line. His voice was softer, almost a whisper. “Had to get to another phone. Listen, where you calling from? Kavander’s been riding everybody’s ass looking for you.”
“I’m at a friend’s,” McGuire replied. “Just tell me what you got and I’ll get back to Kavander later.”
“Okay. And listen, Joe, Jesus, I’m really sorry for all those things I said.”
“About what?”
“Not what. Who. Sweet . . . Janet. I didn’t know about you two. Why didn’t you say something instead of letting me talk about her like that in front of you?”
“How the hell did you find out?” McGuire asked.
“A guy in ID heard Kavander bitching about it to somebody in the commissioner’s office. Her husband called the commissioner himself and spent ten minutes blubbering about how you ruined his life. Kavander said that was all he needed, a citizen complaining about a cop screwing his wife behind his back. Hell, you know how word spreads around here. Anyway, Joe, I’m sorry for all those cracks. Just making jokes, you know?”
McGuire felt more tired than he could remember. All day long he had managed to keep memories of Janet from his mind. With difficulty. And with sorrow. He didn’t want them intruding now. “Forget it, Ralph. It’s over anyway. I was never comfortable being involved with a married woman. Never could be. So what did you discover?”
Innes spoke to someone at his end of the line, then returned to the receiver. “I have to make this fast,” he said. “Just got a call in from Washington Avenue. Sounds like a double and suicide. Anyway, here’s what I’ve got. Found a Cartier pawned on Dorchester, June nineteenth. Guy got sixteen hundred cash for it.”
“Name?”
“One Henry Reich, Park Drive.”
“Son of a bitch!” McGuire began scribbling in his notebook.
“That’s the bozo you wanted to know about, right? Apartment superintendent? Fell downstairs carrying a case of booze? I interviewed him, second time around on the case, with Fat Eddie.”
“What was he like?”
“Kind of arrogant, as I recall. Wouldn’t offer us a thing. Acted like it was his big chance to be a pain in the ass to the cops.”
“What’s on his death report?”
“Accidental. Yeah, this is the guy. Age sixty-four. Weight one-eighty. Blood alcohol level was point-one-six. Old bugger was pickled like a kosher dill.”
“When did it happen?”
McGuire could hear pages being turned. “July fifth. About eleven at night. No witnesses, body discovered by the wife.”
“Okay, I know that part. How about Jennifer Cornell’s bank records?”
More pages being turned. Then: “She made cash deposits of over three thousand dollars each on May twenty-third, twenty-fifth, twenty-ninth and thirtieth, and June second. These were in addition to regular salary deposits made by her employer. Then she withdrew almost five grand in cash on June third.”
“Which, I’ll bet, is what the Cartier was worth.”
“Something like that.”
“Anything else in the bank records?”
“Nothing special.”
“How about her mother?”
“Ah, yes. Suzanne Alice Cornell.” Innes read from his notes. “Died end of May, nineteen eighty-three, San Antonio, Texas, aged fifty, cause of death massive internal injuries suffered when the car in which she was a passenger collided with another vehicle on Culebra Road.”
“She the driver?”
“No, her husband was. One Ernest Edward Snyder. Charged with D.W.I. Spent thirty days in the slammer and another year with his licence lifted.”
“Who else was in the car?”
“Can’t tell. All I got was a reading from the woman’s death certificate and some info over the phone on her husband. Circumstances, that’s all I asked for.”
“Where is her husband? He still alive?”
“Guy on the desk down there, his name is Maydelle by the way, said he thought so. Old Ernie Snyder was no stranger to the boys in San Anton’, apparently.”
“They have any children?”
“Who? Ernie and Suzanne? No, nothing here.”
“All right, thanks Ralph. You gave me plenty to work on.”
“Ernie had a kid. Got something on him.”
McGuire continued scribbling in his notebook, the telephone receiver wedged between his ear and shoulder. “Can’t be worth much.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s interesting. See, this was his second marriage. Ernest Edward Snyder had a son from a previous marriage, born nineteen fifty-three. Guy would be in his mid-thirties now. Anyway, want to guess what his name was?”