“Not enough,” Don Higgins said, jutting out his bottom lip like a small boy pouting. “Not nearly enough. I thought you’d have more for me.”
Fat Eddie Vance rolled a yellow pencil between his fingers and blinked at the prosecuting attorney across the pristine top of his desk. Tim Fox sat next to Higgins, his arms folded. He had not spoken a word since entering the captain’s office ten minutes earlier. Phil Donovan leaned against the wall next to the window, staring out at a weak early morning sun obscured by high clouds, working hard at looking bored.
“It’s borderline, I admit,” Fat Eddie said as Higgins returned the various police reports to his briefcase. “But there’s a link between them, McGuire and the victim. He can’t account for his whereabouts—”
“Neither can we,” Higgins said. “Everything I heard about threats against the victim, including one made within hours of the murder, sounded solid enough.” He turned to Fox. “But there’s nothing from the interrogation, nothing from forensics that moves the case forward.” Higgins shrugged. “You haven’t given me anything new.”
“She said somebody might do her,” Donovan said. “She told her landlord she was afraid of somebody heavy. What’s that worth?”
“Nothing on its own,” Higgins replied. “You’ll have to give me more than that. Or we take another route, maybe a just cause restraining order, incarceration for his own protection, something to stick with for a few days until a lawyer files a habeas corpus.” He jutted his bottom lip out again. “Faced with a habeas, I can’t see any judge agreeing to extend a charge against McGuire based on what’s here.”
Vance swung his eyes to Tim Fox. “What do you think?”
“I got a fax an hour ago,” Fox said. He reached for an inside pocket of his sports jacket and withdrew three sheets of paper. “Bahamas Police, Nassau.”
Higgins shifted sideways in his chair, watching Fox intently. Fat Eddie Vance rested several of his chins on one hand, his elbow on the desk. Phil Donovan muttered something under his breath and turned back to the window.
“McGuire was deported from the Bahamas as an undesirable alien in July,” Fox said, handing the report to Vance. “That was after he spent a week in the hospital recovering from a beating.”
“What in God’s name happened to the man?” Higgins asked with concern.
“He got himself involved with some rich guy’s wife is what happened,” Fox said, watching Vance as the captain read the Bahamian police report. “She was living on their yacht while her husband was back home making his next hundred million. One of the crew members called his boss in Chicago, told him about McGuire cutting the man’s grass and the husband flew down with some muscle. They got McGuire on board and put the boots to him, apparently. Bruised all over, cracked ribs . . .” Fox shrugged and spread his hands. “They threw him overboard, the water revived him, some people in a boat saw him thrashing around and pulled him out.”
“And what happened to the husband?” Higgins asked.
“What happened? The husband got McGuire deported, that’s what happened. You’ve got money and influence, you can get that kind of thing done down there. And this guy has it. They never laid a hand on him. The next month the same guy, the Chicago millionaire, signs a deal with the government for some resort development in the outer islands. He’s called a hero, a few palms get greased, it’s all a tax write-off.” Fox grinned coldly. “By the way, a couple of weeks after McGuire left the island the wife got drunk one night, fell overboard and drowned. Way of the world, right?”
“What else?” Fat Eddie asked, handing the report back to Fox. “Anything on this Lorenzo woman?”
Vance glanced at Donovan, who shook his head. “No appointment book, no telephone directory. Gone.”
“Bank records?” Fat Eddie said. “You got her bank records?”
Fox nodded. “She was doing all right financially. Over thirty thousand in cash, another hundred and fifty or so in investments, blue-chip stocks. Lots of good jewelry, none of it touched. Drove a nice little BMW, all paid for.”
“What was up on that shelf that interests you guys so much?” Vance asked.
“Still don’t know,” Fox said. “Or what was in the file cabinet either. But it wasn’t forced. Unlocked, key still there, her prints on it.”
“How about the other men on the answering machine tape?” Vance looked back and forth between Fox and Donovan. “You identified their voices?”
“We think one’s a photographer, client of hers,” Donovan said. “The other might be her ex-husband, runs some plumbing or hardware outfit. There’s a boyfriend too. I’m talking to the husband today, check him out.”
“What’ve you done about her landlord saying she feared for her life?” Fat Eddie asked. “She ever report it?”
Fox shrugged. “Nothing in the records about it. She told her landlord the police couldn’t help her.”
Fat Eddie raised his eyebrows and pulled at his mustache, lost in some private thought.
Higgins was on his feet. “McGuire’s getting a court-appointed lawyer this morning,” he said. “Whoever it is, they’ll make a motion for release.” He shook his head. “I can’t oppose it.”
Vance’s telephone rang. He nodded at Higgins, picked up the receiver and barked his name into the mouthpiece. “Who?” he said, then turned to Fox. “It’s McGuire’s ex-wife, the victim’s sister, came in from Florida last night. She wants to talk to you.”
“I’ll take it at my desk,” Fox said, standing.
Vance nodded, a Buddha serene on the surface, his indigestion simmering like a stew within, but his mind fastened on something else for a change.
They took McGuire from his cell after breakfast. The guards clumped down the concrete corridor in heavy black boots with soles thick as watermelon rind. McGuire shuffled unsteadily between them, his feet flip-flopping in his sneakers with no laces.
They led him to a room with gray plaster walls that were cracked and peeling and gray metal furniture that was dented and bent. Harvey Hoffman, McGuire’s appointed lawyer, lifted his head from the stack of legal documents he had been reading and nodded to McGuire, who sat facing him in the only other chair in the room. The guards retreated to the corridor, leaving the prisoner with his counselor.
“You okay?” Hoffman asked McGuire through his massive gray beard. The lawyer’s bald head shone in the glare of the single overhead fluorescent light fixture. It was just after nine in the morning but already Hoffman looked as though he had run a marathon in his three-piece suit. Running any distance would have been a remarkable feat for this man, who carried his nearly three hundred pounds like an armful of inflated balloons, folds of it spilling out here and there. A pair of delicate gold-rimmed half-frame spectacles spanned his broad face. His salt-and-pepper beard sprouted untrimmed and untamed from the lower half of his face like shrubbery.
“I’m all right,” McGuire said.
Over the years McGuire and Hoffman had encountered each other in various Suffolk County courtrooms, earning a grudging respect for each other, like sparring partners who know nothing of the other man’s life except the sight of him crouching, jabbing and darting away.
“This is a crappy move, what they did,” Hoffman said, suppressing a belch. He reached up and began unbuttoning his vest. “They couldn’t even stick a charge of threatening on you. Can’t threaten an answering machine.” He chose a sheaf of papers from the stack and slapped it with the back of his hand. “Nothing in here, in your statement, constitutes a felony, not even sufficient grounds for suspicion.” He removed his glasses. “Only reason you’re here is that Eddie Vance doesn’t like you very much, does he?”
McGuire smiled.
“Well, I’ve already talked to Higgins’s office, told them I’d be filing a writ to get you in front of a judge and out of here. Word is, they won’t fight it.” He twisted his body and glanced around the room, the exertion causing him to wheeze. “Shouldn’t even be here, short-term. Could’ve kept you downtown, in the courthouse holding cells. Didn’t you raise hell about being sent here? Didn’t you say this was a breach of your rights?”
“No,” McGuire said.
“Why not?”
“Didn’t give a damn.”
Hoffman watched his client intently for several seconds before leaning as far forward as his girth would permit and asking, “You sure you’re all right?”
McGuire looked at the man as though he didn’t understand the question. He was still staring at Hoffman when a knock at the door caused the lawyer to raise his head and motion one of the guards into the room. The guard handed Hoffman a note, studying McGuire’s face as though imprinting it on his consciousness for a future test of his memory, before leaving and closing the door behind him.
“You’re out of here,” Hoffman said after glancing at the note. “But they’re only going halfway. They’ve got some charges pending on other stuff and demanding you’re not to leave the state without informing Berkeley Street.” He tossed the note in front of McGuire who looked at it curiously. “I’ll get that lifted this afternoon. It’s another crappy move, got Eddie Vance’s prints all over it.” He stood up and gestured to the guard through the window. “I’ve got a couple other clients to see,” the lawyer said. “Take about an hour which’ll give you time to gather your belongings. You want a ride downtown?”
McGuire said yes and when the guard entered the room again he shuffled away, leaving Hoffman frowning and shaking his head, comparing the subdued man he had just met with the explosive homicide cop he once dreaded tangling with in a courtroom or jail corridor, a man with the same name and face but with something else in his eyes, something this man, this new McGuire, was lacking.
“I hope you don’t mind meeting me here. But I just didn’t like the idea of setting foot in Berkeley Street again.”
The woman facing Tim Fox in the corner booth of the Gainsborough Pub was perhaps thirty-five years old, maybe younger. She wore a camel-coloured cashmere sweater and brown tweed skirt. Her silken hair framed a startlingly expressive face, one that leaped between extremes of joy and sadness, rarely pausing between the two. Her eyes were large and dark and when her lips parted in a smile, deep dimples formed in her cheeks, soft-edged like craters in meringue. Her name was Michelle Lorenzo. It had once been Micki McGuire.
“Don’t blame you,” Fox smiled. “When I walk out of Berkeley for the last time, I don’t ever plan to go in again.” A waiter brought him coffee. Micki’s sat cold and untouched in front of her. “How long were you and Joe married?” Fox asked.
There it was, the quick smile, the dimples. “Nearly five years. Plus a year and a half we lived together before that.” Her hands, small and delicate, toyed with a coffee spoon as she spoke, and the smile faded. “He was so intense. It took me a long time to get used to it, how intense he was about things that mattered to him. I’d almost forgotten about it. Then I saw him earlier this year. I’d written to him, care of Berkeley Street. Just to see how he was doing, what he was up to. They sent the letter to Ollie Schantz and his wife who passed it on to Joe, over in the Bahamas.”
She sat back in the booth, toying with the coffee spoon.
“I’d been involved in . . .” She halted again, looked across the almost deserted restaurant and started over. “I was working for an air conditioning company, they did repairs, installations.” Then she added, like an afterthought, “Before that, I’d met some rough people, hung out with them for a while. It’s not something I’m proud of. And when I found myself all alone I kept thinking about Joe so I wrote him . . .”
She reached to pat the back of her hair. “Anyway, I came out of work one day and there he was waiting for me, sitting in some car he’d rented.” A smile that stayed this time, glowing with the memory of him. “He looked good. He looked really good. He’d lost some weight, had a great tan, smiled and laughed a lot. We had dinner and, um . . .” A shrug. “Went down to the Keys that weekend, stayed in a motel on the gulf side. It was nice. It was really nice.” Still smiling. But crying now too. “And then, just like that, when Sunday came he took me back to Coconut Grove and caught a plane to Nassau. I haven’t seen him since.”
“He’s changed,” Tim Fox said. He told her about the Bahamian police report, McGuire’s near-fatal beating on the yacht, the hospital stay, the deportation and the tiny room over the strip club whose patrons came to do more than just look at the young women.
She listened with her mouth partially open and her eyes darting back and forth. “That doesn’t sound like Joe,” she said. “God, that’s not Joe, that’s somebody else.”
“Like I said, he’s changed.”
Micki stared down at her coffee before lifting the cup to her lips. “You don’t really think he killed Heather,” she said in a low voice.
Fox shook his head. “But some people would like to.”
She set the cup down without drinking from it and said, her head lowered, her eyes avoiding Fox’s, “Some people will be happy to know my sister is dead too. Happy and worried at the same time.”
Fox sat back, folded his arms and raised his eyebrows, urging her silently to continue.
She flashed her smile at him in embarrassment. “I know what my sister’s been up to for the past couple of years,” she said. “She didn’t make all of her money from being a photographer’s agent. Not by a long shot.”