“Are you a friend of Mr. Tate’s?”
The man at the reception counter was perhaps thirty years old, with close-cropped black hair and thick-rimmed spectacles. He wore a white lab coat over a blue shirt and striped tie, with several ballpoint pens stuffed into the pocket of the coat. While speaking he peered over McGuire’s shoulder toward the entrance, as though willing someone else to pass through the door. Someone more palatable, perhaps, than this tired-looking and badly dressed middle-aged man standing in front of him.
“I’m a friend of friends,” McGuire replied.
Two heavyset men in white sweatshirts and loose-fitting white trousers stood watching McGuire warily from behind the reception desk. A set of swinging doors to McGuire’s left led into the new wing of Heather House. To the right, behind the reception desk, an elaborately carved oak door carried a small plastic sign: Chapel.
“I’m sorry,” the man in glasses said. He reached for one of the pens in his lab coat pocket. “Admittance is restricted to immediate family members and an approved list of acquaintances.” The first tinge of a smile. “You are neither, I’m afraid.” His other hand rose to finger a small gold stud in the lobe of one ear.
I didn’t come this far to be turned away by a smarmy punk, McGuire told himself.
But he nodded anyway. After leaving the building, he stood on the edge of the slope leading down to the church on North Main Street. Then he nodded again, this time to himself, and trotted briskly down the steps.
The young man strapped in his wheelchair was still clinging to the hand of his mother when McGuire approached them. The father, drowning in humiliation and failure, had left to wander among the gravestones near the church at the foot of the hill. Traffic had grown heavier and the noise from the diesel trucks and buses along North Main Street was almost tangible, shattering the delicate sense of sanctuary surrounding Heather House and the ancient cemetery.
“Jamie?” McGuire called out, striding toward the woman and her ailing son. “You’re Jamie, right?”
The woman looked up, startled. Her son, with a slow painful movement, turned his head to stare at McGuire without expression.
“His name’s not Jamie,” the woman replied. The corners of her mouth drooped and her pale blue eyes were milky and slow moving; instead of darting, they drifted. Toward McGuire. Back to her son. Down the hill where her husband had reached the church and was leaning against a corner of the church, drawing on a freshly lit cigarette.
“I’m sorry,” McGuire said, resting one hand on the wheelchair. “I’ve got a list here.” With his right hand, he removed Sister Sophia’s note from his pocket. He shrugged, wincing at the pain from his shoulder. “First day here. Transferred from Providence Central. Sorry, son,” he said, bending to look into the eyes of the younger man. He avoided the plum marks, forced his eyes from the running sores. “Your name is . . . ?”
The young man looked at him without comprehension or fear.
“It’s Evan,” the woman said. “Evan Stanley Sanford.”
“Yep, he’s here.” McGuire folded the note and replaced it in his pocket. He seized the rubber grips of the wheelchair. “Just need him for a couple of minutes, Mrs. Sanford,” McGuire said, wheeling the younger man toward the double doors. “Quick blood test and we’ll have him back with you in a jiffy. How you doin’, Evan?” he asked, looking down at the man.
“My name is Stanley,” the patient replied. His voice was raspy and weak, so weak that it seemed to take vast amounts of energy for him to speak. “Nobody ever calls me Evan.”
The double steel doors swung open and McGuire pushed the wheelchair into the hallway.
The interior looked like any small hospital or over-sized clinic with marble floors, fluorescent overhead lights, pale green walls and gray metal doors. But in every other aspect—sound, aroma and a palpable atmosphere, a feeling of surrender and release—Heather House was unique.
From the far end of the hall drifted the cries of a sobbing man, crying out not from pain but from the anguish of someone acknowledging that all is lost and he is utterly alone.
McGuire bent to speak in Stanley’s ear. “Listen to me,” he whispered. “There’s a friend in here I have to see. A very close friend. Very close. You understand?”
The younger man’s head moved up and down.
“But they won’t let me in. That guy on the desk with the heavy glasses . . .”
“Dalgliesh,” Stanley said. “He’s a prick.”
“Yeah, I know. Sonny told me about him.”
Stanley turned to look back at McGuire. In the harsh green fluorescent light, the marks of his disease appeared inhuman and alien, as though transplanted to the young man’s body from another species. A mandrill, perhaps. A tropical ape. Something almost but not quite, not ever, human.
“Sonny Tate?” Stanley asked.
McGuire nodded. “Yeah, Sonny. It’s important for me to see him. I want to tell him . . .” McGuire paused for effect. “Something.”
Stanley’s head moved in understanding. “He’s upstairs. Room 207. He never has visitors.”
“I know,” McGuire lied. “Can you cover for me? If I leave you here in the hall, will that give me ten, fifteen, minutes before Dalgliesh tracks me down?”
“Sure,” Stanley said. He smiled, and McGuire saw the once-healthy young man behind the diseased facade. Somewhat short of movie star handsome, the young man’s face boasted wide-set shining eyes and a gentle sweep to his chin. His hair, sparse from the devastating treatments endured by his body, retained a natural wave. “Leave me in the corner over there,” Stanley said, raising a thin arm. “I’ll make up a story.”
“Thank you, Stanley.” McGuire patted him lightly on the shoulder. “I really appreciate it.”
“I used to be a dancer.” Stanley blurted out the words, then looked quickly away.
Talk to him, McGuire thought. He willed himself to stare back at Stanley’s ravaged face. “I can see that,” he lied.
“I, uh . . .” Stanley laughed, embarrassed. “I toured with A Chorus Line. Ten years ago. Out of New York.”
“Good times?” McGuire looked up to see an orderly rounding the corner at the far end of the corridor, walking toward them on soft-soled shoes. “You had some good times?”
“Yes,” Stanley said wistfully. “Wonderful times.”
The orderly slowed his pace and frowned at McGuire, his hands hanging at his sides, opening and closing. He outweighed McGuire by about fifty pounds and was at least ten years younger. His face looked as though it had never been creased by a smile and his black hair grew in thatches, like hay stubble.
“You know this guy?” McGuire asked, stepping closer to the wheelchair again.
Stanley looked up. “Dwight. Another prick.”
“Anybody else around?” McGuire asked. The orderly was ten, maybe twelve paces away. The corridor was deserted.
“Break time,” Stanley replied. “They’re all having coffee downstairs.”
“The hell you doing?” Dwight’s deep voice sounded like large stones tumbling down a metal chute. He approached warily, his thick fingers flexing, his hands making fists and opening, again and again, like semaphores.
“My friend Stanley here saw a rat in the closet,” McGuire said. Stanley’s ravaged face twisted to look back at McGuire with a hint of a smile.
“No rats here,” Dwight responded. He paused a few paces away, his head swiveling to scan the area, assess the situation. “None of your business if there was.”
“Well, that’s too bad, because I already killed the son of a gun myself,” McGuire said. “It’s in there.” He nodded toward a barred door in which a key projected from the lock.
“The drug dispensary?” Dwight’s head swung from McGuire to Stanley and back to the door. “You threw a dead rat in the drug dispensary? What are you, nuts? And what the hell’re you doing on this floor without a visitor’s pass? I’m calling security.”
“You should see this rat first.” McGuire left Stanley’s wheelchair and walked to the door of the dispensary. “Word gets out that you’ve got rats the size of skateboards in this place, reporters’ll be swarming through here like a lost hive of bees.” He turned the key and swung the door wide.
“I said we ain’t got no rats,” Dwight barked. “And you’re on your way outta here.”
McGuire ducked into the small dark room. At the rear stood several locked metal cabinets with indecipherable drug names stenciled on each drawer. To one side of the door hung a number of devices suspended from hooks: heavy cotton straitjackets, frayed blue hospital gowns and strong canvas restraining straps like the ones holding Stanley’s ravaged body upright in his wheelchair.
“Hey, Dwight,” McGuire called out. “Get in here and see this thing. It’s okay, he’s dead.”
“The only thing I want to see is your ass. . . .” Dwight began, rounding the corner and entering the dispensary closet.
From within the storage room, McGuire’s right hand shot out to seize a hank of Dwight’s hair and jerk him forward. The orderly’s first instinct was to pull back and, as he did, McGuire released his hold on the hair, dropped his hand and delivered a punch to the man’s chest. Dwight flew against the wall where the restraining devices hung and collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath. McGuire closed the door, locked it and dropped the key in his pocket.
“Thanks, Stanley,” McGuire said as the younger man watched with amusement.
“Who are you?” Stanley asked. “Really?”
“Just a friend. Where’s Sonny?” McGuire demanded.
“Next floor up. Take the elevator.”
McGuire nodded, smiled and entered the elevator.
Room 207 was midway along the eastern wall of the new wing. The door was closed, the corridor deserted. McGuire twisted the knob slowly, stepped quickly inside and closed the door behind him.
He turned to see a haggard face watching him from across the room, in a bed next to a window overlooking North Main Street. The man wore maroon pajamas of a silky material with white piping at the collar. Like Stanley’s, his skin was loose and leathery, broken with open sores and scarred with plum spots. His hair was thick, matted and gray, and beneath his sparse growth of white beard the skin of the man’s neck was heavily creased. But the eyes were alive, darting, challenging, absorbing McGuire’s sudden entrance.
“Sonny.” McGuire spoke the name in recognition. “Sonny Tate.”
The man continued to watch as McGuire swept the room with his eyes. Although it appeared to be identical in size and proportion to other rooms in the building, Sonny’s had been furnished with a singular elegance. The walls were painted deep hunter green. Two oak-framed easy chairs were grouped near the bed, their upholstery pattern reflecting the same shade of green as the walls. The upholstery material was repeated in the heavy, stylish draperies framing the window. An elaborate oak cabinet held a Revox stereo system with remote control tuner, CD player and amplifier, and the duet from The Pearl Fishermen played softly through large floor-mounted speakers.
A television set was suspended from the ceiling, wired to a VCR positioned next to Sonny Tate’s bed. Within reach of the gray-haired man were a stack of videocassettes and a wall-mounted telephone.
Hanging on a wall facing the bed, where the patient would see them first thing in the morning upon waking and last thing at night before lapsing into sleep, was a montage of framed photographs: A young man at the helm of a yacht speeding across Biscayne Bay in Florida; the same man about to parachute from the open door of an aircraft in flight; two intensely beautiful young women standing on either side of the man, their arms around him, their smiles wide and unforced, their breasts bare in the light of a tropical sun. And more. McGuire counted almost twenty photographs in all. A hedonistic life captured on film, then framed and presented to the dying man for his recollection. And his mourning.
The man in the bed watched McGuire carefully without speaking.
McGuire walked past him to a window and looked down at the ground level plaza where orderlies and nurses stood in small groups, talking and gesturing. Among them McGuire recognized Dalgliesh, the man in glasses from the front desk.
He pulled the draperies closed and turned to the bed. “My name’s McGuire,” he said quickly. “I’m Terry Godwin’s cousin. From Compton. You remember Terry?”
A smile, natural and unforced and broad. “Sure. Old pretty-boy high-pockets himself,” Sonny Tate said in a surprisingly deep voice. “Tried to be John Wayne and wound up as a Big Mac. What’re you doing here?”
“I want to talk to you about something. Or somebody.” McGuire walked back to the window and peeked out between the draperies again. The staff were drifting back into the building. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he added.
“No shit,” Sonny Tate responded. “Neither am I.” And the smile grew wider.
McGuire returned to stand near the bed. “The security staff will come flying through here looking for me. I need to talk to you before they find me. It’s important.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I told you. Terry Godwin’s cousin. I met some of your old school buddies. Parker Leedale, Mike Gilroy—”
“They know I’m here?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody needs to know.”
Tate continued to smile, and a glimmer of recognition shone weakly in his eyes. “You’re a cop,” he said.
“Used to be. I don’t have any official capacity here.” McGuire drew closer to Tate’s bed. Mixed aromas of antiseptic, blood and the fecundity of rotting body tissues wafted up to him, and he suppressed a gag reflex. “Somebody shot me a few nights ago,” McGuire hissed. “While I was in the hospital they torched Cora Godwin’s place, Terry’s mother’s house. Burned it to the ground. It’s all connected with a woman you knew thirty years ago, named Cynthia Sanders.”
“You think I killed her.” A statement of fact, delivered without emotion.
“No, I don’t. But I think you know who did.”
Sonny Tate seemed to retreat back in time, erasing the lines of age and suffering on his face, softening the effects of the sores and scars, of the disease that was killing Sonny Tate from within, millions of viral organisms gone mad, like warriors trapped within a Trojan horse.
“Maybe I do,” Sonny Tate said finally. “What I want to know is,” and he forced himself into a sitting position, breathing heavily from the exertion. “What I want to know is . . . what took you guys so long?”
Sonny Tate pushed a button on a small elegantly finished intercom unit beside the bed. Almost immediately, a woman’s voice sounded clearly, almost intimately, through the speaker: “Yes, Mr. Tate?”
“Something wrong out there?” Tate demanded in his baritone voice. In the background, the lovely duet of the two pearl fishermen swearing eternal friendship to each other was soaring to its finale.
“An unauthorized visitor, Mr. Tate. Someone assaulted Dwight. We think he may still be in the building.”
“God, let’s hope so,” Tate said. “If you catch him, throw him in with some of those queens on the first floor. Anyway, he’s not in here and my door is closed. See that it’s kept that way while I watch East of Eden.”
The voice was quick and obedient. “Yes, Mr. Tate.”
Tate replaced the receiver and smiled up at McGuire. “You’re an interesting guy. We, uh, we don’t get too many people around here who aren’t former flower arrangers or limp-wristed old woman types. They all like to lift their hands to their foreheads and cry like babies over . . . over their fate.” A skeletal hand reached up to stroke his beard. “So I don’t mix with anybody here very much. You like cognac? What’d you say your name was?” He folded his hands in front of him, his thin arms suspended like bare tree branches from his shoulders.
“McGuire.”
“Yeah, right. McGuire.” He stared ahead of him at the wall of photographs. “So you want to talk, McGuire? Why the hell not? Let’s talk. You seem to be an intelligent man. For a cop.” He waved one arm at the wall behind McGuire. “There’s some forty-year-old cognac in the cabinet under the stereo system. You want to bring it over here, along with a couple of glasses? Terry Godwin, huh? Now wasn’t he one insufferable son of a bitch?”
McGuire poured an inch of cognac into each of two small crystal tumblers, returned to the bed and handed one to Sonny Tate, who wrapped both hands around the glass, their bones and tendons standing like ridges against the pale skin. Tate brought the drink to his nose and inhaled deeply before sampling the drink.
“How long have you got?” McGuire asked softly.
Tate swung his eyes toward McGuire briefly. “A month. Six months. Maybe more. I don’t know.” He tilted his head back and drank half the honey-coloured liquid, closing his eyes and holding it in his mouth, grimacing as the alcohol flowed down his throat. “They’ve had me on interferon, AZT, bunch of other stuff, for a year now. Slows things down, that’s about all.”
McGuire sat in one of the easy chairs near the bed where he could look directly into Tate’s face. “You come here from Louisburg Square?”
Tate nodded. “You were there?” he asked, smiling into his glass.
“I met Sister Sophia.”
“And she told you where I was.”
“Only after I lied a little.”
“You must have lied a lot. A hell of a lot.”
McGuire looked back at Tate in silence, waiting for him to continue.
“They call this a hospice,” Tate said, closing his eyes. “I call it a necrotorium.” Tate lifted his head and stared out the window to the marble dome of the state house shining in the sun. The sky above it was dotted with small white clouds drifting east. Traffic moved past on Main Street, the drivers anxious to reach their destinations, the noise insulated from the rooms of the hospices, the panorama like a silent movie, distant in time and place.
McGuire began to speak, to ease the conversation back to Cape Cod and Terry Godwin and the death of Cynthia Sanders, but Tate raised one hand in a feeble gesture to silence him. “This is all part of the sentence, you know.”
“What sentence?”
“Mine. They gave me, the judge and the smug prosecutor in Miami, they gave me five to ten years.” His head swung to meet McGuire’s gaze again, his eyes looming large and brilliantly white in his graying face, reminding McGuire of peeled hard-boiled eggs. “You know about that stuff?” He dropped his voice and wagged his head from side to side, a mockery of someone concerned with decorum. “My shady past and criminal record?”
“That’s how I found you.” McGuire crossed his legs. “Your parole records show Louisburg Square as your address. Which you donated to the nuns.”
A cold smile. “Betting the long shot. The sisters say prayers for me three times a day. An easy choice. I give them the house, they pray for my soul, transfer me here in privacy and everybody treats me like a king. As opposed to a queen. Better off here than alone on Louisburg Square.” Tate shifted his body and McGuire thought he heard the grinding together of bone ends. “A week, two weeks ago, she wouldn’t have told you. Sister Sophia wouldn’t have said a thing. But now . . .” His tongue explored one sunken cheek. “Now she knows how close . . . And, um, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference, I guess.”
For a moment McGuire expected the other man to dissolve into tears but, after several deep breaths, Tate resumed speaking, his voice growing stronger.
“Five to ten years, sentence suspended if I tell them the name of my supplier. That’s what the son of a bitch gave me in Florida.”
“Naming your source would have been a death sentence,” McGuire said.
Tate nodded. “My lawyer passed the word to me. The deal, he got it from, um, some of my friends. Keep my mouth shut and there’d be a bonus when I got out. A few million. Listed as an inheritance from some relative in Europe. All the papers in place so the DEA couldn’t seize it as ill-gotten gains. The feds, they already took my house in Boca, my boat, my plane, everything. Said if I had a cache they didn’t know about waiting for me when I came out, they’d take that too. So my friends, my partners, we were all close in that thing, you know? Made each other a shit-pot full of money, partied a lot. It was more than business, these were my buddies.
“Anyway, my friends, they did a quickstep for me with this inheritance thing and my lawyer, he laid it all out. You keep your mouth shut, you come out a millionaire, might even be a place waiting for you, wherever you want. Switzerland, Bali, name it. I said Boston, somewhere on Beacon Hill, and he said okay. Other thing is, you open your mouth, you don’t come out at all. I mean, they were my buddies but they sure as hell weren’t going to risk spending thirty years to life on me being a genuine good shit. So they played it both ways. Positive and negative enforcement we used to call it in New York. Play the game, I eventually win. Screw up, and I definitely lose. I’d get put on the ghost chain. You know that term?”
McGuire nodded. He had heard the phrase from ex-cons and prison guards who traded convict jargon among themselves like baseball cards. The ghost chain. Prisoners who were selected to die in jail, for whatever transgression, were said to be on the ghost chain.
“You get on the ghost chain, you’re marked,” Tate continued. “If I talked, sooner or later I’d walk into a knife, leading with an eye maybe. Or have my limbs rearranged with a baseball bat.”
“Not a difficult choice to make.”
“Except for door number three.”
“When did you learn you were positive?”
“Four years ago. I’d just qualified for my first parole hearing. Had a physical the month before. The DEA sent somebody to the hearing, said I should stay inside until I gave them names. But my lawyer made them admit that I . . . I, uh . . .”
“You got AIDS in jail.”
“I was, uh . . .” Tate cleared his throat. “I’m not a homosexual.”
“Pretty hard to get a sexual disease from a woman in a men’s prison.”
“I was raped three times my first month there.” A torrent of words, like an effort to flush out the pain and humiliation. “Gang raped.” Then a shrug, conveying much, concealing nothing. “It happens.”
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside Tate’s room, quick and urgent, and low voices called to one another. “Did it happen often?” McGuire asked.
“Not after the third time.” The cold smile returned. “Never after the third time. Told my lawyer about it. Fingered the two leaders. They were street guys, they had no protection.”
“And?”
“My lawyer told my friends what happened to me. Gave ’em names, all the stuff they needed. The two street punks got themselves on their own ghost chain. One was pushed from the fifth floor catwalk outside his cell. The other woke up in the middle of the night to find his throat cut.”
“And you were nowhere around.”
“Never.” Tate managed a weak grin. “He who laughs, McGuire, lasts. I laughed. I lasted. For a while. Then comes delayed revenge in a blood vial.”
“Anything I can get you?”
His face darkened suddenly. “Don’t lay bullshit on a dying man. I know you won’t get me a goddamn thing unless it tells you something you want to know.” The sudden anger was palpable, so substantial that it could be measured and weighed, and it settled itself around Tate’s withered body again.
“Like who killed Cynthia Sanders. And maybe who shot me a few nights ago,” McGuire said.
“Maybe.”
More footsteps in the hall. “How long can we talk in here?” McGuire asked.
Tate raised his wrist. The diamonds circling the face of his gold Rolex played with the light from the window. “Dinner’s not for another hour. Highlight of my day.”
“Sonny,” McGuire began, but Tate interrupted him. The anger surfaced again, and he spoke with venom in his voice.
“You know, any time, any time at all, I could hit the button here and have your ass dragged out on the street.”
McGuire nodded.
“You want me to say it’s unfair, don’t you?” Tate demanded. “You expect to hear me say that what happened to me in Ocala was unfair.”
McGuire nodded again.
“Well, you’re goddamn right it was,” Tate said. He tilted his head up to stare at the ceiling and to stem an expected flood of tears. “You’re goddamn right.”
Let him talk, McGuire told himself. Let him deal with his problems. Then maybe he’ll deal with yours.
Tate blinked several times, lowered his head and looked at McGuire with an almost embarrassed expression. “You ever been to Africa?” he asked.
McGuire said no.
“Let me tell you something I think about in here. Stuff that runs through my head, helps me deal with it. See, I went . . . went to Africa ten, twelve years ago, I don’t know, when I was younger anyway. With a girl I picked up at a party. Nice girl. Good family. University of Florida, business major.” He looked down at his hands and McGuire knew he was losing himself in his own private thoughts, among the demons and angels of his life.
“Anyway,” Tate began again, “we went on safari. Kenya. Big pricey resort out on the savanna. Good food, good wine, hot showers, birds flying past, lions roaring in the afternoon, jackals cackling all night. And it was near a water hole. Where all the animals would come down in the morning to drink, crossing the savanna like pilgrims to get to it. Springboks and kudus and impalas and gazelles, herds of zebras and buffalo. They’d gather at the edge of the water hole while the sun was still low and the grass was heavy with dew. And there we would be, all us tourists, standing in a blind among them. You reached the blind through a tunnel leading back to the lodge. We would walk to the water hole at dawn, full of orange juice and coffee and banana cake, to stand in the blind and wait for the animals.”
“Sounds interesting,” McGuire said. He’s a dying man, McGuire told himself. Be patient. Then: But we are all dying . . .
“It was dull as hell,” Tate said dryly. “Three mornings of standing there, barely breathing, to watch these animals drink and piss and crap from a few feet away. Until,” Tate turned his head to face McGuire. “Until the fourth morning, the last day before we were to leave for Nairobi. That was the day the lions came to feed.”
Tate’s eyes shone and drifted away to a distant focus. “The guides in the lodge, they told us to watch for the lions feeding in the morning. That day we saw them for the first time, in thick grass beyond the water hole. Four or five females, couple of fat lazy males. One of the females, she looked older than the rest, there was something wrong with her jaw. It hung funny, it looked twisted. One of the guides said she’d had it broken by a zebra’s hoof and it hadn’t healed correctly. The zebras do that when they’re being chased down from behind by a lion, they kick back and sometimes they connect with their hooves. They can break a jaw that way. A lion gets its jaw broken too badly, it can’t feed anymore, so it dies a long slow death until the jackals show up to finish it off.” Tate glanced over at McGuire. “Am I boring you?”
McGuire shrugged, and before he could speak Tate said, “Too bad,” and grinned mischievously.
Sonny Tate shifted his position again. “Anyway, this female lion, the one with the bad jaw, she came out of the grass first. Went right for a gerenuk, it’s a long-necked gazelle, beautiful animal, all honey and ivory coloured. She picked out one of the gerenuks. I don’t know why, nobody knows what makes the lion target one healthy animal, choose it over the others.”
“Some people think the prey sends a signal,” McGuire said.
Tate nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard that. A kind of body language. Kill me, I’m ready to die. Something like that.” The flash of a smile. “Anyway, the animals scattered, all of them. The gerenuk took off, the lion behind it, the two of them tear-assing for the long grass. But the gazelle spotted the other lions ahead of it in the grass, and made a U-turn. Headed right for us, in the blind. Came right toward us, eyes bigger than saucers, tongue tasting the wind. Jesus, you’ve never seen such fright. Never.”
He paused and looked down at his hands. They were trembling slightly, like tree leaves in the morning.
“The lioness, she took the angle and caught the gazelle not ten feet away from us. One big paw clamped over the gazelle’s neck and she rode it down into the mud. Then she grabbed the gazelle’s neck in her jaw, searching for the jugular, looking for the kill.”
Tate began breathing faster and his fingers scrubbed the palms of his hands with excitement at the memory.
“But she couldn’t do it.” He looked at McGuire, wanting the other man to visualize the scene as clearly as he had seen it. “She had this loose jaw and she couldn’t bite through to the vein. She had to gnaw her way through. And while she’s doing this, her weight on this, this graceful long-legged gentle gazelle, the gerenuk is thrashing around and its legs are kicking out, kicking out, its little hooves hitting the lion on the side of the head, over and over.”
He licked his lips and turned away.
“So the lion, right there in front of us, the lion takes her free paw and she swipes at the gazelle’s legs, pinning the hooves to the ground, and then with the other paw she puts her weight on the upper part, her whole weight, five or six hundred pounds on those long graceful legs. And she breaks them. Like matchsticks, McGuire. It sounds like matchsticks and now the gazelle is lying there with the bones and sinews of its legs showing, with blood running and agony in its eyes, still as conscious as ever, and the lion goes back to gnawing for the jugular. Except there’s not so much urgency this time. Because the gazelle can’t kick, can’t fight back. Just lies there with its legs snapped, feeling the lion’s teeth searching for its vein.”
Tate lay back in his bed.
“The girl I was with, she screamed and threw up right there in the blind. Pissed off the guides, they had to clean up after her. The lion didn’t even look over when she screamed.” He breathed deeply, released it slowly. “Most amazing thing I ever saw.”
McGuire waited for Tate to continue. When he didn’t, McGuire asked, “What’s the point?”
Tate glanced at him, then away. “The point is, the lion did it totally without malice. It wasn’t anger or viciousness. It was something she had to do. Something normal. Something the goddamn gazelle had to accept.” A grunt, almost a laugh. “As if the poor son of a bitch had any choice.”
“That’s how you feel,” McGuire offered. “About what you’re going through.”
Tate nodded. He was somewhere beyond the room.
“How often have you told that story?” McGuire asked.
“A thousand times,” Tate muttered.
The intercom next to Tate’s bed made a noise like an electronic hiccup and Tate barked, “What?”
A woman’s voice asked if he was all right.
“I’m fine,” Tate responded. “Just leave me alone.”
“There’s a man in the building,” the woman replied. “He’s dangerous. He assaulted Dwight. We’re doing a room by room check.”
“Well, stay the hell out of my room,” Tate snapped. “Put a guard on the door to keep him out of here if you have to. But don’t come in. When I want somebody, I’ll buzz. Got it?”
The woman was appropriately servile. “Yes, Mr. Tate,” she said, and the intercom died.
“I can be a bit of a tyrant sometimes,” Tate said. “They know how much money they’re getting from me every month through the nuns. And how much more they’ll get when I’m gone. So they put up with my horseshit.”
“Any ideas on how I can get out of here?” McGuire asked.
A grin spread across Tate’s face. In spite of his sickness, Tate’s teeth were strong and white. “Not a one,” he said. “Any ideas on how I can get out?”
“Tell me about Cynthia Sanders,” McGuire said.
“What’s your hurry? You got more time than I have.” Tate held his empty glass at arm’s length. “Pour me another cognac first.”
“I was eighteen when I met her. She was twenty-eight. An older woman.” Sonny Tate stared into his glass of cognac, turning it in circles within his hands. “That’s a joke to guys like you and me now, isn’t it, McGuire? An older woman. Hell, twenty-eight. Her prime was still years away.”
McGuire sat back in his chair, a drink in his hand. Just how the hell am I going to get out of here? he wondered.
“She was, um, funny. Unusual. Maybe just scared. She could act like a little girl sometimes. When her husband died, I think she didn’t know what the hell to do, how to act. All the old farts on Nickerson’s Neck, especially the married ones, the guys from the golf club, they pounced on her. All of them were married, naturally. Just after a piece of widow’s ass. I think she saw herself coming up to thirty, she saw herself having one last chance maybe at young guys. Because we were safe. No jealous wives, no risk. A hard body, no gray hair, no wrinkles, no bald heads. She, um, she was a very healthy woman. Sexually. Very healthy.”
“I picked up most of this stuff,” McGuire interrupted. “From files. And from your buddies. Leedale, Gilroy, Stevenson.”
“How are those guys?” For the first time, Tate seemed genuinely interested in them. Relating his safari story, describing the lion’s unfeeling cruelty, had released something in him.
“They’re doing all right,” McGuire responded. “Leedale’s a lawyer. Not very happy, I think.”
“What’s bugging him? He was pretty relaxed when I knew him.”
McGuire shrugged. “His age, his marriage, I don’t know.”
“He and Junie still married?”
“Yeah, that’s his wife’s name. June. Nice woman. Slim, dark hair . . .”
“Junie Ryder.” A nod of the head and a smile. “You see her again, tell her I said hello. Tell her I was asking about her. How about the others?”
“Blake Stevenson seems a bit stiff.”
“Always was. Can’t stand the idea that he’s basically a mediocre bastard. Who’d he marry?”
“Someone named Ellie—”
A small eruption of laughter. “Ellie Boitch? You’re kidding. Dark hair, turned-up nose? Chunky body? He married her? Ellie Boitch. Or Ellie bitch, as we used to call her. And she’s with Stevenson now? Well there, McGuire.” Tate grinned and sipped his cognac. “There’s a bit of poetic justice for you.”
“Stevenson says he was a good friend of yours.”
“Stevenson says he doesn’t have shit for brains, too.” Tate licked his lips. “He was Terry’s buddy, not mine.”
“And Mike Gilroy . . .”
“Decent guy. Was when I knew him, anyway.”
“You’re a hero to them, you know,” McGuire offered.
Tate looked away and smiled. “Christ, that’s rich. When I was a kid, my old man driving a truck, my mother slinging scrambled eggs at a diner on the highway, I thought those guys had it all,” he said, avoiding McGuire’s eyes. “They had family up and down the Cape going back five, six generations. Their fathers played baseball with them on weekends, their mothers stayed home and baked pies. Me, I was from a bunch of losers and I was going to stay a loser unless I was different. Sometimes that’s all it takes, you know. Just being different.”
McGuire began to speak, began to explain that he had once felt that way about his cousin Terry, about the envy he felt for Terry’s respectable family. But he stopped and frowned at the floor. Something had sent his instincts buzzing. Something Tate had just said. About what? Families? Family names?
Maybe it was the way Tate’s background meshed so tightly with McGuire’s own. A crude working-class father who carried the weight of bitterness home with him each night. To a numbed mother, devoid of hope or humour. McGuire escaped it by becoming a cop and searching for a moral footing. Tate pursued wealth and the power it promised. Both of them chose to abandon their roots. Which gave them at least that much in common. Along with precious little regard for Blake Stevenson.
“Is that why you left the Cape after finishing high school?” McGuire asked. “Because you didn’t fit in?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Mike, Parker, Blake, Terry, they were all going on to college. I didn’t have the marks or the money so I had to carve another path. Started out legal. Or as legal as advertising can be. Drifted into illegal. Ended up here.”
“You were talking about Cynthia Sanders,” McGuire said gently.
“What was I saying?”
“Something about her sex drive.”
“Yeah. Strong as mine. Back then.” He breathed deeply and winced, and for the first time McGuire sensed the pain racking Tate’s body. “I didn’t kill her.”
“You told me that.”
“Coroner believed me, I hear. I didn’t hang around for the verdict.”
“Inconclusive. Could have been murder. Could have been an accident.”
“They said she was drunk, right?” Tate had crossed a threshold in the past few minutes. Whether driven by pain or boredom, McGuire couldn’t tell. But he knew the other man was losing his focus and growing weaker.
“She was drunk,” McGuire agreed. “There was semen in her vagina. And two glasses with different sets of fingerprints in the room.”
Tate swung his head to the side, locking his eyes on McGuire. “I hadn’t heard that,” he said, his deep voice growing coarse with—what? Pain? Congestion? Fatigue?
“I assume they weren’t yours,” McGuire said.
“No, not mine. They fingerprinted me. They cleared me.”
“But it wasn’t just the fingerprints, was it?” McGuire said. “You had an alibi. You were somewhere else that night. And somebody confirmed it for you, right?”
Tate nodded. He was distracted. His thoughts, his inner vision, were somewhere else.
“Who was it?” McGuire asked. “Who lived on Sea View Avenue and gave you an alibi?”
Another smile creased Tate’s face, this one different from the others. This one had a sad edge, as though Tate were recalling someone he once loved, someone long dead. “Didn’t it say in the coroner’s report?” Tate asked.
“There was no name. An address and a code number. That’s all.”
“Hindmarsh.” Tate barely whispered the name.
“Who?”
“Hindmarsh. The guy who handled the case. Small-time cop. Could barely write a traffic ticket.”
“So he blew it, the investigation. Hindmarsh blew it.”
“Maybe.”
“What made your alibi so solid?” McGuire asked. “Where were you that night? Who told Hindmarsh you weren’t with Cynthia Sanders? And why did they get a code number only Hindmarsh understood?”
“He still alive? Hindmarsh?”
McGuire shook his head.
Tate grunted, as though in approval. Then his body stiffened and he winced in pain.
“What can I do for you?” McGuire asked, standing and approaching the bed.
Tate’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut and he spoke through clenched teeth. “You can get the hell out of here. Because . . . because I’m going to have to call somebody in a minute. Give me a shot. I need one bad.”
“Where the hell were you that night?” McGuire asked.
“I wasn’t there. That’s what I’m telling you now, that’s what they knew back then. Hindmarsh, he knew.”
“Then tell me who you think did it,” McGuire said. He was looking at the telephone next to Tate’s bed. “Tell me who you think murdered Cynthia Sanders.”
Tate head shook from side to side. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “Can’t prove a thing.” He exhaled noisily and a wave of pain seemed to flow from his body with his breath. “But I can tell you who was with her that night.”
McGuire leaned over the man. The same mixture of aromas that had risen from Stanley, the astringency of antiseptics and the cloying smell of dying body tissues, flooded his nostrils. “Who was it? Tell me, Sonny. And I’ll get out of here.”
It took several heartbeats for Tate’s eyes to focus on McGuire’s. “Your cousin. Terry. Terry Godwin. He was with her.”
“Terry’s dead,” McGuire said, reaching for the telephone. “Killed in Vietnam.”
Tate’s eyes closed and his head moved up and down, the motion barely perceptive.
“How do you know it was Terry?”
“He asked me about her. I was heading for the lighthouse that night, the night it happened. Just walking down Main Street, heading for the lighthouse to join the party out on the sandbar. Terry stopped me, driving his mother’s car. Said he’d heard I was getting some regular poontang from a rich widow. Son of a bitch was jealous. Kind of deal he should have had. Terry needed the best of everything. So I told him no, I wasn’t. Not anymore. I’d told her that same day that I was going to Boston, look for a job. Besides, old Cynthia, she was getting a little too demanding, little kinky even. Wanted me to tie her up, stuff that didn’t interest me. And, um,” his eyes swung away, searching for the words on the ceiling. “It was bothering me, what I was doing. Don’t know why, but it bothered me. Guilt, maybe.”
“You think Terry went to her house.”
“That’s what I think. No proof, but that’s what I think.”
“Did you tell the police that?”
Tate lowered his eyelids and moved his head from side to side. “Never asked me. Never asked me who I thought might’ve done it. All I wanted to do was convince them I wasn’t there. Wasn’t interested in fingering anybody else.”
“If Terry was there or if he knew about it and he’s dead, then who shot me last week? Who set fire to his mother’s house? Who tried so hard to cover up for a guy who’s been dead more than twenty years?”
“Don’t know,” Tate muttered.
McGuire reached for the telephone. “Can I get an out line on this thing?” he asked.
“It’s a separate line,” Tate said. “Private line. Doesn’t go through the switchboard.”
“What’s the number here?” Tate told him and McGuire punched the buttons on the telephone, took a deep breath and assumed a role he had played for years. The only role he had ever played with conviction.
“Yeah, it’s Officer Flynn down at police headquarters,” McGuire said. “Gimme security.” A pause. “Well, it’s a security matter,” he explained to someone on the other end of the line. Someone a floor above him. “Got a white male here in custody, charged with assault and battery of a citizen down on South Main Street few minutes ago. Matches a description we have of an A and B suspect at your place, Heather House. Anyway, you wanta send some security staff down here, quick as you can, give us an ID? I’m going off duty in ten minutes. Stick around if I have to, but you understand . . . . Positive ID, that’s what we’re looking for . . . . It’s Flynn, as in Errol. Yeah, right downtown. Park in front, you won’t get a ticket, that’s a promise.”
McGuire hung up the telephone to discover Tate watching him with undisguised amusement.
“Jee-zus, that’s good. Damn good,” he said.
McGuire was scribbling Tate’s private telephone number on a piece of paper. “Can I call you here?” he asked. “Tomorrow?”
Tate nodded.
“Hang in there,” McGuire said, touching the other man’s arm gently. “Give me a minute to get down the stairs.” He walked to the window and looked down to the front of the building just as four men trotted out and clambered into a gray Buick. He recognized the bull shoulders of one of them, the man named Dwight.
“Take the exit at the end of the hall,” Tate said, his voice growing hoarse and reedy. “You’ll come out on the other side of the nurse’s station. There are some steps down to South Main Street. Hardly ever used.”
McGuire stood and walked to the door. The exit was two doors away, the hall deserted. He looked back into the room. “Thanks,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”
Tate stared back at him blankly.
A minute later McGuire was outside in the mild air, his mind racing through the information he had acquired, a rat tearing through a maze.