Sleeman was unavailable to McGuire the next morning. At lunch, Lorna glowed with excitement, like a child with a new doll, and he admitted that her joy added to her attractiveness. “You look good,” he said. “No, you look great.”
“You look good too,” she said. “Maybe a little tense. Or nervous. Am I making you nervous?”
“It’s not you. And it’s not nerves. It’s Cassidy.”
She wrinkled her nose at the mention of his name and called him an arrogant snob.
McGuire agreed, but he knew it was more than Cassidy. He could handle bedbugs like Cassidy. He couldn’t handle what he suspected, what he believed he knew, about Ronnie Schantz. And he couldn’t eradicate the image of the woman who visited Orin Flanigan at noon hour, the woman whose eyes were those of a frightened animal when they met McGuire’s at the elevator. He wanted to know what was behind the fright in those eyes.
“Don’t let Cassidy get to you,” Lorna said during lunch. “He’s getting to you, isn’t he? I can see it.”
Damn it, I like this woman, McGuire admitted to himself. He liked the way Lorna gave him her total attention when he spoke. He liked the way she rested her hand on his when she did the talking. He liked the look of her, walking ahead of him as they left the restaurant, and the little-girl excitement that made her voice sound as though it were always teetering on the edge of laughter.
In his office, he placed another call to Sleeman, only to hear his voice mail again.
At three o’clock he called Lorna and told her he was going to Revere Beach.
“Have a nap,” she said. “Rest up.”
Ollie and Ronnie’s house smelled of coffee and furniture wax. He found Ronnie in the living room, wearing a pink jogging suit, a bandana knotted around her head. She looked up from polishing an oak end table. “I know I shouldn’t bother, but I was getting worried about you,” she said. Her voice was flat, distant, a little melancholy.
“That’s funny.” McGuire sank into an armchair. “I was getting worried about you.”
“Me?” Ronnie returned to polishing the furniture. “Nothing to worry about where I’m concerned.”
“What are you up to?” McGuire kept his voice low.
“I’m up to polishing the furniture.”
“Is Ollie sleeping?”
She nodded. “He didn’t have a very good night.”
“Did you?”
This time she stopped and turned to face him. “What’s on your mind?”
“Your painting class last night.”
“What about it?”
“You didn’t go.”
“Of course I did.”
“Without your painting kit.”
She began to speak, thought better of it, and turned away, biting her bottom lip. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Who is he?” McGuire asked.
“None of your business.”
“Does Ollie know?”
“Of course not.” Her sadness changed to sudden rage. “And don’t you tell him, damn it. Don’t you dare say a word to him.”
“Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Tell him?”
“Mind your own damn business.”
He watched her pour polish onto the wood with one hand and rub it savagely with the cloth in her other hand. Then he went upstairs to shower and change.
When he returned a half-hour later, she was in the same armchair McGuire had sat in, and she called his name as he passed the doorway to the living room. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wisps of hair had escaped from beneath her bandana. He stood watching her until she rose from the chair and seized him, pulling him towards her. “Please, don’t say anything to Ollie,” she whispered. “I just need a few weeks of life away from here. It’ll be over in a few weeks, okay? Okay?”
“It would kill him to know,” McGuire said.
She breathed deeply once, then pulled away. “It’s been killing me to stay here and nurse him for years,” she said. “Nobody seems to think about that, do they?”
The next day, McGuire lost himself during the daytime hours in the details of Cassidy’s assignment, and during the night in the delights of Lorna’s body. He reveled in the abandonment of it, their shared stage of sexual desire in which there was no longer either an intention of procreation or a pretense of romance. There was only an affirmation of life and a defiance of the force pulling them down a slope they were descending at the same speed.
In the morning, he drove her to the office and watched her wave goodbye from the sidewalk. Then he drove to Revere Beach. When he peeked into Ollie’s room, Ollie grinned at McGuire and winked. “Show me a picture of her at least, for Christ’s sake,” Ollie said. Ronnie bustled about, ignoring him, avoiding any kind of talk, any discussion. McGuire showered, changed, and returned downtown.
“Jesus, ain’t you heard?”
McGuire smiled at the sound of Sleeman’s voice through the telephone receiver. “Heard what?” McGuire said. His feet were on the desk. He was pulling at a thumbnail with his teeth.
“About Hayhurst.”
“Who’s that?”
“The piece of crap we let get away on the Common. The black kid with the gold tooth? He dropped two guys near Fenway the other night. Haven’t you been watching the news, reading the paper? I must’ve been interviewed by every grease ball reporter in town yesterday. Double homicide on a couple tourists, dark street, blood in the gutter. The stuff that dreams are made of, right? Anyway, I’m the lead dick, or I am until we nail the little bastard, and then DeLisle will get his hair styled and take over.”
McGuire dropped his feet from the desk and leaned his head on his hand. “Who’d he kill?”
“Two guys in town for a business conference. Salt of the earth, of course. You’d think they’d been fitted for angel wings. Both got kids, minivans, mortgages, and probably the flag tattooed on their chests. Christ, what a mess.”
“This kid Hayhurst, he’s out of control?”
“Totally. These guys were no threat to him. He just wanted to blast somebody.”
“We could have had him. On the Common that day. We could have had both of them.”
“Yeah, well.” Sleeman said nothing. “Hell, ten years and twenty pounds ago, I would’ve caught him on Boylston. It’s not all your fault.”
Most of it is, McGuire thought to himself. “Any leads?”
“Tard, the other guy, he might roll over on him. We’re danglin’ five-to-ten in front of him, might settle for half that if he tells us where Hayhurst hangs out. Listen, I gotta get back, see what’s come in. Anything you want, on that other stuff? Don’t know if I can get it for you, not right away. Call me in a couple days, I’ll see what I can do.”
Lorna entered McGuire’s office after lunch. She was wearing a ruffled poet’s blouse and tight skirt, and she locked the door behind her and sat on the corner of his desk. McGuire set aside the report he was preparing for Barry Cassidy.
“Orin’s not back today,” she said. “He said he would just be gone a day or two.”
“He didn’t call in?”
“No. And that’s not like him.”
“Maybe his plane was late or delayed or whatever.”
“Yeah, but it’s still not like him.” She moved closer to McGuire. “I’m seeing my mother tonight for dinner. Remember I told you?” she said.
McGuire said he remembered.
“You sure you don’t want to come and meet her?”
McGuire said he was sure.
“Okay, why don’t I give you a key and I could meet you back at my place.”
“Not tonight,” McGuire said. “I think I’ll stay at the beach and catch up on the rest of my life.”
“What’s wrong?” She leaned to touch him. “Is Cassidy still getting to you?”
“No, not Cassidy. You hear about two tourists shot near Fenway the other night?”
“I saw something about it in the paper.”
“I could’ve had the guy who did it.” He told her about the confrontation on the Common two weeks earlier. “I lost my cool.”
“Why blame yourself for what other people do? This kid, he’s a louse.”
McGuire nodded, told her she was right. And she was, he knew. But the knowledge of it, the guilt he felt for not living up to his own expectations, would hang over him for days. That was something else he knew as well.
He stopped at Zoot’s on the way home for a slowly savoured beer, telling himself he was waiting for the afternoon rush-hour traffic to dissipate.
It was almost seven-thirty when he entered the house in Revere Beach, and sensed she wasn’t there. Ollie was sleeping, while the television set glowed mutely above his bed. McGuire went into the kitchen, where he reheated and ate some leftovers, read the evening paper, and returned to Ollie’s room around nine o’clock.
Ollie was awake but groggy. “New medicine Ronnie got me, makes my head feel like I’m a Saturday-night fool on Sunday morning.” Ollie blinked back at McGuire, a sheepish grin on his face. “How long you been home?”
“Hour, hour and a half,” McGuire said.
“You stayin’ here tonight?”
McGuire nodded.
“Don’t have to, you know.” Ollie yawned. “Listen, Joseph, you got yourself a special woman, you go ahead, don’t worry about me. I got Ronnie here, she’s takin’ care of me like she always has.” He looked up at the television set, the program a rerun of an old detective series.
“Ronnie’s at her painting class?”
“Yeah. She tells me she’s workin’ on something special. Won’t say anything else. But I can tell she’s thinkin’ about it all the time.” He yawned again. “Ain’t she something? She’s good, ain’t she? You see those paintings she’s done? Ain’t she good?”
McGuire agreed she was good.
Ollie switched to the sports channel and together they watched a baseball game until Ollie fell asleep again. McGuire didn’t want to watch the news. He didn’t want a reminder of Freeman Hayhurst, or to see blood in the gutter.
Ronnie arrived home after midnight. McGuire was sitting in the living room, the lights extinguished, invisible in the corner chair until Ronnie flicked on the hall light and started at the sight of him.
“What are you doing in the dark all alone like that?” she said. She shrugged out of her coat, and McGuire noticed she was wearing a sweater and skirt combination, and a new gold chain around her neck.
“Waiting for you,” he said.
“Never did before.” She closed the hall door. With her back to him, she tucked the gold chain inside her sweater.
“You were never cheating on him before.”
She turned to face McGuire, staring at him as though he were a stranger in her home. “Is he sleeping?” she asked. Her voice was calm, her face a mask.
“Yeah, he’s sleeping.” McGuire tilted his head. “You putting something in his medication?”
“It’s a new formula.”
“Phenobarbital? Something like that? Knocks you out, leaves you with a bit of a hangover after? They used to give it to my mother when she’d get too excited in the nursing home.”
She walked into the room and sat across from McGuire. In the dim light from the hall she scanned the walls and furnishings, like an interior decorator critical of the client’s taste and impatient to begin her work. “Why don’t you just move in with your girlfriend?” she said. She avoided McGuire’s eyes.
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” McGuire said. “Just somebody I sleep with now and then. Kind of like you.”
“You could leave us alone to work this out, you know.”
“Work it out? You and Ollie? How can you work it out when that poor bastard in there doesn’t know there’s anything to work out?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll look after things.”
McGuire sat back in his chair. “You won’t work it out. You’ll just wait for it to burn out.”
She brought her hand to her head. “It won’t . . .” She closed her eyes.
“Won’t what?” McGuire was torn between anger at this woman for what she was doing to his closest friend, and sympathy for her and her life. She had watched her only son die beneath the wheels of a bus. She had altered her life when her husband was brought back from a fishing trip unable to move any part of his body lower than his neck and right arm. She had rescued McGuire from his addiction to Demerol and codeine after his world collapsed around him in the Bahamas and Florida. How much could he make demands of her now? Did she owe McGuire honesty? Did she owe her husband fidelity? Why should she owe anyone anything?
McGuire rose from his chair and crossed the room. He knelt by her side to touch her hand with his own. “Hey, I can understand,” he said softly. “Christ knows, I’ve fooled around enough in my day . . .”
She reacted as though he had set off an explosion within her. She gripped both arms of the chair and pulled herself up and away from him, a fury in her eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?” she said.
“I’m just saying . . .”
“How dare you compare what I’m going through with all your escapades, your whoring from here to the Bahamas. How dare you even mention them in the same breath!”
“The same thing drove us there, Ronnie.”
“No, not the same thing. Not even close.” She brushed by him to stand near the window, staring out at the night. “Do you know what people call me, what they’ve been calling me since he came back home strapped in his bed?”
McGuire watched her, waiting.
“They call me a heroine, a saint, all of that crap. They say it to my face and smile like I’m supposed to feel good about it. Well, nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be a saint. Nobody ever gave me a choice in the matter. And I’m sick of it.” She began to cry. “I’m sick of it. And what I want, what I needed most of all, was my own hero, not somebody who lies in bed like a baby all day, but somebody who can hold me. Somebody I don’t have to be a saint with.”
“Okay,” McGuire said. “Okay, okay. But is there any room for, I don’t know, honesty here?”
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “No, as a matter of fact, this isn’t the time for honesty. Not right now. Not yet.” She smoothed her skirt and stared down at her hands. “I’m sorry. I know you’re doing this because you care for Ollie.”
“So do you.”
“That’s what’s killing me.” She walked to him and kissed him on the cheek, and before he could react she swept by him and up the stairs, leaving him alone in the near darkness to wonder why, in spite of the many times he felt totally in control of a situation, in total mastery of every event, there were so many others in which he was helpless and confused, like a man on a raft with no land in sight.
The next morning in his office he was filling the coffeemaker when Lorna entered without knocking. She wore a plaid shirt-waist dress that made her look more suburban somehow, less like a downtown woman.
“How’re you doing?” McGuire said.
“Not very good.” She walked to the corner of his desk and began tracing circles on it with a forefinger.
“What’s the matter?” The coffeemaker began to gurgle obediently.
“I missed you last night.”
“I had something to do. And I wouldn’t have been very good company anyway.”
“Are you still thinking about that kid, and those two men he killed?”
McGuire nodded. “And other things.”
“I thought you might call. I mean, we can talk about it, if it makes you feel better.”
“Sorry. How about dinner tonight?”
Her face brightened, but there was something else, something holding her back. “I guess you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?”
“About Orin. Nobody knows where he is.” She walked to stand beside him and stare into the glass coffee pot. “He was supposed to come back by yesterday. His wife’s frantic and everybody’s going nuts upstairs . . .”
Behind her, McGuire’s door opened. Richard Pinnington entered wearing a midnight-blue suit and a puzzled expression. “Lorna,” he said. He flashed a smile that pulled the corners of his mouth apart.
She smiled at McGuire, then brushed past the other man, closing the door behind her.
“She tell you about Orin?” Pinnington said. His eyes swept McGuire’s office as though taking inventory.
“Something about him missing.” McGuire back sat in his chair.
“It’s not like Orin,” Pinnington said. “Not like him at all.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and studied his shoes as he spoke. “Situation like this, even with a man like Orin, you get worried, concerned.”
“It could be nothing,” McGuire said. “A weekend fling with some woman . . .”
Pinnington looked at McGuire sharply. “What makes you say that?”
McGuire shrugged. He was thinking of the blond-haired woman. He hadn’t seen her since Flanigan left.
“Orin’s wife’s frantic,” Pinnington said. “He hasn’t called since he left. Lorna doesn’t know where he went. Just said it had something to do with a client. Whatever he’s doing, he appears to be doing it on his own. There’s nothing in his files, nothing on his calendar, that fits his work for the firm.” He shot his eyes towards McGuire. “You were doing something for him, weren’t you? Some project?”
McGuire opened a drawer of his desk, removed Flanigan’s memo, and handed it to Pinnington.
“What did you learn?” Pinnington asked when he finished reading.
McGuire told him about the search for Myers and the trip to Annapolis.
“You gave him nothing in writing?”
“He didn’t want anything in writing. Just where this guy was and what he was doing.”
“I’ll keep this.”
McGuire nodded.
Pinnington paused at the door. “Lorna’s a nice girl, isn’t she?” Pinnington was of a generation that referred to any woman without either a husband or a university degree as a girl, regardless of her age.
McGuire agreed.
“Some firms, you know, have policies against romantic relationships developing among the staff . . .”
“You want me to stop seeing her?” McGuire said.
Pinnington smiled. “No, just thought I’d mention it.” He waved Flanigan’s memo. “Compared to this, it’s a minor concern to me. Quite minor.”
McGuire worked through the rest of the morning, calling contacts on the street and flipping through the statements, provided by Barry Cassidy, which described his client’s suspicion of fraud. At noon, Lorna brought him a cheese Danish and a bottle of sparkling fruit juice. “Pasta again tonight?” she asked, and McGuire nodded. “Still no word from Orin,” she said. “I’m so worried, Joe.”
McGuire asked if the police had been called.
“Uh-huh. By his wife. But she doesn’t think they’re taking it seriously.”
“They won’t, for about a week,” McGuire said. “Or until somebody comes up with something.”
“Like what?”
McGuire shrugged. “Missing money. An abandoned car. A body.”
“You can’t be serious.” Her eyes flooded with tears. “Nobody would want to hurt Orin!”
“Maybe Orin isn’t hurt,” McGuire said. “Maybe Orin’s in Switzerland, making up a code name for his brand-new bank account.”
“Not Orin. You don’t know Orin. He told me . . .” She withdrew a tissue from the pocket of her dress and used it to dab at her eyes. “He told me one day that the biggest disappointment in his life, next to his daughter’s murder, was that he couldn’t make things right as often as he wanted. He said he became a lawyer because he thought lawyers could do that, make things right, and he said after thirty years he finally had to admit they don’t do those things. Sometimes they even make them worse.”
“Sounds as if he was ready to quit his profession.”
“He gets so frustrated, watching bad things happen to innocent people. The day after he met you, he said maybe he should have become a police officer. Maybe he could have made more of a difference that way.”
“If he thinks that,” McGuire said, “he’s a damn fool.”
She paused at the door. “I have to get back upstairs. Mister Pinnington’s coming over to check Orin’s files, go over his accounts. I’ll probably be stuck at my desk the rest of the day. Can I get a ride home?”
“Sure. We’ll pick up a bottle of wine on the way.”
By two o’clock, McGuire could find no evidence of criminal activity in Cassidy’s case, as seen from a police officer’s point of view. Bad management on the part of the client’s customer, perhaps. Poor judgment in a few decisions. Maybe even sloppy bookkeeping. But nothing that would persuade a prosecuting attorney to consider criminal charges.
He also realized he didn’t have a complete set of files. A few were missing, and some names on documents and correspondence had been blacked out with heavy ink. When McGuire called Cassidy to inquire about the files, the lawyer assured him that the missing documents were irrelevant. When McGuire called again an hour later, asking about the blacked-out names, Cassidy told him it was a matter of client confidentiality and demanded to know when McGuire would have his report completed.
McGuire said “Probably tomorrow,” and Cassidy snapped “Good!” and hung up. McGuire sat back in his chair, sweeping his anger at Cassidy from his mind and permitting himself to dwell on Ronnie’s infidelity.
We are all, McGuire had read somewhere years earlier, responsible for our own happiness. Depend on yourself for your joy, your satisfaction, your ability to avoid the darker sides of your soul, those that emerge at four in the morning and occupy the empty side of your bed. That’s what he believed it meant. How could he judge Ronnie for doing whatever it took to pursue her idea of happiness? How could he expect anyone to understand the things he had done in pursuit of the same thing?
He was pondering that idea when Richard Pinnington entered without knocking. Pinnington was holding Flanigan’s memo to McGuire and a legal-sized file folder, and his smile was thin, nervous, and forced.
“Sorry to trouble you again.” Pinnington closed the door behind him. “There’s something about this memo Orin gave you.”
“What’s that?” McGuire leaned back in his chair, his arms folded.
“Orin wanted you to charge your time and expenses to this docket, right?” He held a sheet of paper for McGuire to inspect.
“Yeah, and I did. It came to about a thousand dollars.”
Pinnington opened the file folder. McGuire noticed his receipts clipped to the inside. “One thousand and fourteen fifty-five,” he said, peering over his glasses. “Plus four hundred dollars to Libby somebody.”
“Skip tracer.”
“Nearly a hundred dollars in incidental expenses?”
“Four bottles of good Scotch to a guy on Berkeley Street, did some digging for me. You want his name?”
“Definitely not.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“And six hundred dollars of your time.”
“Two and a half days. What’s the problem?”
Pinnington closed the file folder and stared at it. “The problem is, Orin charged all of this to a docket that doesn’t make sense. A client in Brookline. Wealthy family, five kids. A particularly messy divorce made more difficult due to all the assets involved. We’re acting on behalf of the husband for shared custody rights, overseeing transfer of assets, setting up of trusts, all of that. The wife wants to move back to Canada, where some of the assets are held. Nothing too unusual, except that it’s complex and we’ll probably be involved for a year, maybe more . . .”
“And there’s a chunk of money missing.”
Pinnington shook his head. “No, not as far as we can tell. Everything’s on the up-and-up, every penny accounted for. It’s just that Orin gave you this docket for your services and expenses. But there is nothing in this case that even remotely concerns an individual named Myers. No reason for Orin to get you involved in this at all.”
“Unless Orin was burying expenses.”
Pinnington nodded.
“In a case so big and complicated that a couple of grand could sneak past in the billing and nobody would question it.”
Pinnington stared back at McGuire. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
McGuire shook his head. “You?”
Pinnington looked away, deciding whether to answer. “Orin’s a bit of a softy, you know. Never learned to keep his emotions out of things somehow. It makes him a good lawyer in some ways, of course. He can be brilliant in the courtroom, wearing his client’s heart on his sleeve, and sometimes even his own. But he has paid for it, emotionally.”
“Anything I can do?”
Another tight, cool smile. “You could always find Orin, I guess.”
“Talked to the police yet?”
“Orin’s wife has, of course, but we have to, uh . . .”
“Keep this quiet in case your clients find out.”
“To this point, there’s nothing for them to discover. Nothing to be concerned about. But yes, we are waiting to evaluate the situation.” Pinnington frowned, turned away, then looked back as though having made a difficult decision. “You know a woman named Susan Schaeffer?” he asked. “In her mid-thirties? Kind of blond hair?”
McGuire nodded. “Orin’s friend. She comes up to visit him. I’ve seen her a couple of times.”
“Lorna says she’s been there every day at noon for three weeks or more, whenever Orin’s not in court.”
McGuire nodded again. “Well, there you are.”
“Where are we?”
“Orin’s gone middle-age crazy. Right now, they’re probably naked in a hammock together down in . . .”
“Who?”
“Orin and the Schaeffer woman.” Even as he spoke the words, McGuire admitted to himself he was envious, perhaps a little jealous.
Pinnington shook his head. “This Schaeffer person isn’t with Orin. She was in here today. She sat outside Orin’s office for an hour, crying,” he said. “Kept asking about Orin, where he was, if we had heard anything. She didn’t believe us when we said we knew nothing. Lorna finally had to ask her to leave.”
“They’re tracing his telephone calls,” Lorna said when she got into McGuire’s car after work that evening.
McGuire swung onto State Street and stared at the line of cars ahead of him, all enveloped in a light gray rain. Sometimes Boston was nothing more than a badly designed parking lot. Maybe McGuire didn’t need a car at all. Maybe if he just moved downtown . . . He caught himself thinking of Ronnie again, wondering where she would be sleeping tonight, wondering how long it would take Ollie to discover and what he would do. What could he do? McGuire asked himself. Nothing except lie there and feel the pain.
The windshield wipers swept back and forth, and the heater made a sound that was something between a purr and a clatter. Lorna stared out her side window. An opening in the traffic appeared ahead of them, and McGuire lurched the car forward, swung towards the curb lane, and drove a precious fifty feet before encountering the next segment of the traffic morass.
“And his credit cards,” Lorna said in a dull voice. She might have been reciting a mantra. “They’re looking at his credit-card statements. Dick Pinnington says the police are coming by tomorrow. They’re finally taking it seriously, him missing, I mean . . .”
“Well, middle-aged professional guy goes missing,” McGuire started to explain, “and the first thing you think of . . .”
“There she is.” Lorna gestured out the window.
McGuire followed her gaze to see Susan Schaeffer standing in the doorway of a clothing shop, out of the rain. She wore a shapeless fawn-coloured raincoat, her hands thrust in the pockets, and she was scanning the windows of the office buildings and passing cars as though searching for a familiar face. Lorna lowered her side window.
“Ask her if she needs a ride,” McGuire said.
“You need a ride?” Lorna called.
At the sight of Lorna, the other woman smiled. It was part joy at recognition of a familiar face, part nervousness, but something in McGuire responded to the light it generated and the sense, once again, that Susan Schaeffer was an immensely attractive woman whose beauty was muted by the weight of despair.
“You sure?” Lorna called out.
The woman mouthed “Thank you,” then set out, her hands still in her pockets, her head down as though searching for crevices in the sidewalk that might swallow her from sight.
“I hear you had to ask her to leave today.” McGuire moved the car ahead another few feet.
“She’s a mess. I’ve never seen a woman such a mess.” Lorna’s left hand crept towards McGuire and rested on his thigh.
“What’s the real story about her?”
“I really don’t know. She first showed up five or six weeks ago. She had an appointment with Orin, a regular one. Then she started coming by every day that Orin was there. Usually, they would go out together for lunch. At first she was happy, a lot happier then now, that’s for sure. You know, kind of a nervous happiness.”
“Flanigan ever say anything about her?”
“Just introduced us. Said she was a friend.”
“That’s all?”
“A little more but . . . One day, he walked her down the corridor when she left, and when he came back he looked really sad. I said, ‘Anything wrong, Mr. Flanigan?’ And he looked at me in a kind of funny way and said, ‘She’s an innocent.’”
“She’s innocent?”
“No, she’s an innocent. That’s how he put it. ‘She’s an innocent.’”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I. But Orin likes her. I think she looks a little bit like his daughter. Did you see that picture of Orin’s daughter on his side desk? Don’t you think they look similar?”
“Now that you mention it,” McGuire said, swinging the car into an open lane, “she does.”
At Lorna’s apartment she ordered Chinese food, and they ate from containers, watching the television news together in her cluttered living room. The hunt for Freeman Hayhurst rated only a passing mention; there was nothing new to report. McGuire declined a glass of wine and read the newspaper, while Lorna stretched out on the sofa to watch a game show. When he looked up half an hour later she was sleeping, her head resting against the arm of the sofa and her mouth slightly open, snoring gently with a sound that reminded McGuire of the heater fan in his car. He stared at her for several minutes, curious at his own reaction. No longer an object of lust and tenderness to him, she was simply another lonely middle-aged woman in his life.
“I’m a transfer stop,” a woman once told McGuire. She had been shrugging into her coat, avoiding his eyes as she spoke, “and you’re riding to the end of the line, right?” She said goodbye without looking back at him and, while he would think of her fondly whenever she invaded his memory, he didn’t miss her. He missed so few of them.
He carried Lorna to her bed, where he lay beside her. She smiled, her eyes still closed, and snuggled against him, touching her lips to his cheek. He thought about undressing her, but closed his eyes instead. When he woke it was after three o’clock. Rising in the darkness and covering her with a quilt from a rocking chair in the corner, he let himself out of the apartment, closing the door behind him and listening for the lock to click into place.
The Chrysler started easily, and he began driving into the night. He relaxed in the glow of the dashboard lights, feeling the steady throb of the engine and the way the car wallowed slightly beneath him.
The city belonged to him and anyone else prowling the streets before dawn. A southern breeze made the leaves dance on the tree branches, many of them flaring into shades of yellow and red, the colours shining in his headlights, and some of the leaves released themselves in the wind’s frenzy and sailed to the ground. He drove north out of the city and followed back roads through Everett and Malden and Melrose, the engine transferring all of its mechanical workings back to him in a muted clatter from beneath the hood. The transmission thumped periodically, friendly, like a cat that walks through a room and brushes your leg on the way.
He thought of Lorna and wondered why there wasn’t something more there, during his times with her, to make him happy and content, so that his mind wouldn’t wander to other women and other places. She was sensuous, she cared for him, and the hard carapace she wore as protection wasn’t nearly as scaly as those of other women her age he had encountered, women whose hopes were almost abandoned, buried beneath the wreckage of so many bad relationships.
Many of these women had shown McGuire their marriage photographs, displaying a frozen moment from a previous generation, with the women wearing lace and silly tiny hats, and the men in cummerbunds and bow ties. Stiff-necked parents gathered around the wedding party, and at the sight of these photographs he always felt a terrible sadness waft over him. It was his awareness of all the pain and betrayals awaiting the smiling faces in the photographs, all those unseen beasts in the jungle, that disturbed him. We start out so trusting, he would remind himself, so confident there is goodness in the world, that we cannot believe what it is already planning to do to us.
He had no idea where the photographs from either of his two marriages could be found now. He believed his first wife destroyed them all in a fury of anger and despair when they separated. His second wife had taken their photographs with her, like a bounty, when she fled to Florida, and he hadn’t thought about them, hadn’t missed them, in years.
Comments about marriage from men like Wally Sleeman disturbed him, for although McGuire had dated many women in his years alone, he always did so with the expectation that the relationship could lead to something permanent. It was why he never visited singles bars, why in recent years he preferred being alone—and admittedly lonely—over sharing his time with someone whose presence embarrassed him, or someone he was using as a transfer stop.
Marriage remained, and always would remain for McGuire, the most natural and logical goal of a relationship. I enjoy being married, he assured himself once, and, like someone at his shoulder whispering the truth in his ear, he admitted, I’m just not very good at it.
He thought about it with as much honesty as he could gather, driving alone towards the dawn. He thought about himself and about women in his life and how he had failed, in so many small measures, everyone who loved him, and that was the root of his sadness now.
He speculated on the fate of Orin Flanigan. The obvious answers didn’t work. He didn’t believe Flanigan was having a fling with the mysterious Schaeffer woman, nor had he apparently embezzled client funds. His actions were totally at odds with everything the man had stood for all his life. Where was he? McGuire wondered. Chasing Myers across the ocean to South Carolina? McGuire didn’t know. And I’m not being paid to know any more, he told himself. It’s somebody else’s job now, not mine.
He switched on the radio, tuning it to all-night talk shows hosted by gravel-voiced men who spoke calmly to near-hysterical callers who were concerned about space exploration, the power of the federal government, and the Red Sox infield.
He punched the scan button on the radio over and over until he heard a voice that sang with a level of passion and pain unmatched for fifty years, and he lost himself in almost an hour of uninterrupted Billie Holiday, broadcast from some distant New England station. Her voice rose and fell with the strength of the station’s signal, singing sad songs with titles like “There Is No Greater Love” and “You’re My Thrill.” As ancient and unfashionable as the music might be, the emotions it generated were as real and as fresh as the coffee he purchased from an all-night drive-in in Saugus.
At Swampscott the horizon began to bleed, and Billie Holiday’s voice was replaced by a young announcer, whose words suggested he had been born at least twenty years after Billie Holiday died, chained to a hospital bed by narcotics officers. The man began to chatter about rising and shining and forgetting all the blues sung by, who was that again? Oh yes, Billie Holiday. Because it was time for the six o’clock news, followed by Jumpin’ Jack Happy and the rest of the gang here at good old W-something-or-other. McGuire cursed, turned the radio off, and parked near King’s Beach, closing his eyes and facing east, where the sun was beginning its silent explosion up from the sea.