McGuire spent the balance of the morning wandering through the old town, among the restored Colonial houses and window-shopping in stores on Maryland Avenue. He returned to the harbour area at noon, ate oyster stew and sourdough bread at a dockside restaurant, retrieved his rental car, and drove back to State House Circle.
The Maryland State House sits on a hillock well back from the harbour, the proud old building perched like a red brick monument, surrounded by winding paths and small gardens extending down to the road, perhaps fifty feet below. Streets radiate out from State House Circle, leading to the harbour area, to the Naval Academy, and to upper-class residential areas.
McGuire circled the State House several times, following the paths, his hands in his pockets but his eyes alert. From one side of the hillock he could look down Maryland Avenue towards the Academy Bar, and he watched the building from afar for several minutes before returning to the highest point of the hillock. He chose a bench with a clear view to both sides and down the slope to the street.
He watched students from nearby St. John’s College wander past in their grungy attire, and naval cadets parade by in crisp whites with close-cropped hair like peach fuzz.
At two-thirty he stiffened at the sight of a maroon De Ville cruising slowly along State House Circle. It disappeared towards Maryland Avenue, and when the Cadillac didn’t immediately return, McGuire swung his attention to a blonde woman who walked past, looking too carefully at McGuire. He sent her, McGuire told himself. She’s checking me out.
Ten minutes later the De Ville was back, cruising from the direction of Maryland Avenue. It pulled to the curb in a no-stopping zone on State House Circle below McGuire.
After a moment or two, the driver’s door opened and a clean-shaven man emerged, his fairish hair little more than a coating of fuzz on his scalp. He wore a black-and-white-checked jacket and black trousers over a white shirt open at the neck, the collar outside his jacket. McGuire felt his pulse quicken and spiders explore the back of his neck.
Ross Myers closed the car door and looked around before circling the front of the car and smiling through the windshield at someone in the passenger seat. He looked up at McGuire and the smile grew broader as he began to ascend the path, his head constantly in motion, surveying everything and everyone around him.
Ten feet from McGuire, Myers stopped and slipped a hand into his jacket. McGuire swung his weight forward onto his feet, prepared to move if Myers were armed. Myers withdrew not a weapon, but a gold cigarette case. Still gazing everywhere but at McGuire, he removed a cigarette from the case and placed it in his mouth, dropped the case back into his jacket, slid his hand to an inside pocket, and pulled out a gold Dunhill lighter. He brought the lighter to the cigarette, inhaled deeply, threw his head back, and exhaled. Then his eyes met McGuire’s.
“What, you love this crummy town?” he said. “Can’t stay away?’
“You got it,” McGuire said.
“What’s this crap about Wachtman?” Myers’s eyes were moving again, here and there. When they settled for a moment on the Cadillac parked below them at the curb, McGuire followed their gaze to see the blonde woman smiling up at the two men from inside the car, her lemon-coloured hair falling in waves to her shoulders. The woman waved and Myers returned her greeting with a gesture of his hand. “You working for Wachtman now?” he said over his shoulder.
“What’re you afraid of?” McGuire asked.
Myers looked back at McGuire. “Afraid? Are you kidding me? Tell you one thing, I’m sure as hell not afraid of you. I asked around after you left. I remembered you from Boston. Big hero up there, weren’t you? Got your name in the papers, solving murders, playing the big shot. Then, when they kicked you off the force, you started popping pills, right? I got all the goods on you.” He brought the hand holding the cigarette to his mouth, speaking past it, and McGuire noticed a ruby ring on one pinkie finger.
“You’re afraid, Myers,” McGuire said. “You came here because you thought there might be a chance of getting out from under the debt with your bookie, right? You saw me from the street, sent your newest woman friend up to check things out. You came damn close to having your kneecaps removed by your bookie’s hired muscle. Is that why you’re letting your hair grow back, shaved your little beard off?” McGuire sat against the bench, his arms extended along its top. “I’d say you’re getting ready to get the hell out of town.”
Myers looked amused. “You gamble?”
“Never.”
“’Course you don’t. I can tell. Yeah, I had a little bad luck. But you ride that stuff out, every gambler knows that. You get a bad horse one day, you get a good one the next. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Christine Diamond a good horse?”
Myers looked away, tapping ash from the cigarette. “Yeah, Chrissie’s a good one. She sure fooled your ass, didn’t she? I went back, you know. Me and Eileen, after I called Chrissie from the bar and told her that you were some flunky out to borrow money from me. She said she’d blow you off, and then Eileen and I went back and finished what you interrupted, right there on the cloakroom floor. How’s that make you feel, jerk-off?”
“The blonde in your car, down there. Is she a good horse?”
“Go to hell.” Myers took a final drag on the cigarette and flicked the butt into the bushes.
“And Susan Schaeffer,” McGuire said, rising from the bench. “She a good horse?”
“Susan?” Myers examined the fingernails of one hand, sunlight catching small diamonds flanking the ruby of his pinkie ring. “How do you know Susan?”
“I knew Flanigan, too.”
“Never heard of him.” The response was too sudden. Myers dropped his hand and raised his head, finding something fascinating in the trees above and behind McGuire.
“Sure you have. You arrived to see if I could really help you settle with Wachtman. But you came up here to find out how much I know about Orin Flanigan’s murder.”
“I came for another look at a loser, that’s all.”
“Did Orin tell you about me? Before you killed him? Orin was here to get some revenge for Susan, maybe get enough on you to put your ass in jail. Maybe to do a favour for Christine Diamond too.”
“You seen her? Susan, you seen her around?”
“Yeah,” McGuire said.
“She must’ve just got out, right? How’s she look?”
McGuire took a step towards the other man. “She was just another good horse to you, right?”
“Naw.” Myers looked almost vulnerable. “She was okay.”
“You son of a bitch,” McGuire said. “You better get a faster car than that piece of chrome down there on the street. And some track shoes and whatever else you need to run with, Myers. Because I’ll stay on your ass until it’s in jail, or until I take a hot iron and brand you right across the forehead with a big A for asshole.”
“That’s why you’re here?” Myers looked at McGuire with new interest. “Because you got the hots for Susan?” He waved a hand in the air as though intent on catching a fly. “You got the wrong idea about women. You think a woman can do what I do?” Myers thrust his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned against a tree trunk, his stomach spilling over the edge of the waistband. “How many pimps did you bust as a cop? How many of them had two, three, more women peddling their asses on the street for them? I was never a pimp, never had to be. I just had women who wanted to do things to make me happy. If they want to believe all the stuff I lay on them, whose fault is that, huh? Whose fault is that?”
He pushed himself from the tree as though to walk away, then stopped and looked back at McGuire.
“You used to take dope, right? Prescription pills? Am I right?”
Behind Myers, at the foot of the hill, a gray Volvo pulled to a stop behind the Cadillac.
“You think dope’s an addiction?” Myers took a step towards McGuire, an index finger pointing like a weapon at McGuire. “You know what the biggest addiction of all is? I’ll tell you. It’s money. It’s being rich.” He rubbed his index finger and thumb together. “It’s having money, all the money you ever need. It’s going to a casino and dropping more money in one night than jerks like you make in a year, sometimes making more money than you make in a year, and not giving a damn about it, either way.”
McGuire saw the door of the gray Volvo open. A dark-haired woman stepped out wearing a buff-coloured trench coat and sunglasses.
“You get a taste of it, and you never want to go back.” Myers was unaware of the arrival of the Volvo behind and below him. “You get on a plane, and once you turn left instead of right, once you go first class, up front with the champagne, maybe sitting with a good-looking broad wearing mink and diamonds, there’s no way you fly economy, you know what I’m saying here?”
The woman in the trench coat looked up at McGuire and Myers, then walked past the Cadillac, glancing into the window as she passed.
“And you know something else, McGuire? Some of us, not you, you loser, but some of us, that’s how we get to live. That’s the only way we live, because there’s no way none of us is ready to break our asses paying off a mortgage or driving some rusted piece of crap the rest of our lives, watching our wives gettin’ older and uglier. No way.”
McGuire’s eyes shifted away from the base of the path, where the woman in the trench coat was approaching, and back to Myers. “I can prove you were in Weymouth, driving Flanigan’s car, a couple of days before his body was found. Not even Marv Rosen will save your ass from this one.”
“Bullshit.”
“The waitress at the bar told me. She picked you up and drove you back here, and she’ll testify against you.”
“The hell she will. Broad’s in love with me.”
“She’ll do it, Myers. Or face a charge of accessory in a first-degree murder.”
“You’re not even a cop any more. What do you care anyway?”
“I told you. The same reason Flanigan came here. Because of Susan. Because of what you did to her.”
“You schmuck.” Myers permitted himself a short laugh, and began to turn away, his eyes on McGuire. “You dumb schmuck.”
McGuire saw the reaction of Myers at the sight of the woman in the trench coat, her head up, her hands in her pockets, her attractive face creased with anger and moist with tears.
“One of your horses?” McGuire said. Christine Diamond had stopped a few feet below Myers, blocking his route back to the car. “Is this one of your good horses, Myers?”
The anger faded from Christine’s face. Her shoulders sagged and her chest began to heave with sobs so heavy that her words were fluid, hardly intelligible. “How could you?” she said to Myers.
“Hey, come on . . .” Myers began.
“It’s gone.” The woman’s voice rose to a shriek. “It’s gone, all of it. Everything Bert left for my babies, it’s all gone!”
“It’s not gone,” Myers said, but he was looking past her at the blonde woman who had stepped out of the Cadillac and stood watching from the base of the rise. “I gave you the papers, the certificates . . .”
“They’re forgeries! Every one of them . . .”
“Who told you that?” Myers was looking for another path, one that would permit him to escape the woman’s fury. He glanced behind him at McGuire, who had positioned himself to block his retreat in that direction. “Look, I got places to go,” Myers said. He turned back towards Christine Diamond.
“With that woman down there in your car? How much do you plan to get out of her?” She was trembling now, her sobs buried within her anger and rage.
McGuire moved to a location where he could read and memorize the license number of the Cadillac. Behind him, he heard Myers speak in a low voice, then Christine Diamond shout again, an explosion of rage and anger: “Don’t you have any heart at all? Don’t you?”
“What the hell are you doing?”
McGuire turned to see Christine Diamond holding the same small black automatic she had pointed at him back at her house. She was aiming it at Myers’s stomach and crying. The gun wavered from side to side as sentences tumbled from her mouth in fragments: “Everything’s gone . . . you lied and lied and lied . . . How could you?” and she fired.
Myers stepped back and watched the red stain on his white shirt grow and expand. He looked back at McGuire, an expression of fear on his face that transformed into something else, and McGuire pictured a small boy who had just been spanked.
Myers turned to flee, one hand at his stomach, the other flailing ahead of him as though pulling him forward and out of danger. From the bottom of the hill McGuire heard a wail, high and piercing, and he wondered for a moment as he scrambled back along the path how an ambulance could have arrived so quickly, until he recognized the sound not as a siren but as a woman’s voice, screaming in fear from beside the Cadillac.
Christine Diamond fired again. The bullet exploded on the ground near the bench where McGuire had waited for Myers. Its impact forced Myers to scramble to his right, away from it, and as he did, he stumbled forward onto his stomach.
Another shot struck Myers in the back and a second scream, lower in pitch and even heavier in anguish, escaped from Myers’s throat as McGuire reached Christine Diamond. He seized her wrist in his hand and pointed the gun at the ground, while her finger squeezed the trigger over and over until the little automatic was empty. She stared at McGuire, seeing him for the first time. “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care what happens to me now. Do you see?”
McGuire nodded and assured her that he saw.
Twenty feet away, Myers writhed on the ground, his body twisting like an impaled snake’s, and his voice a guttural cry of agony.
On the street below the hillock, as traffic stopped and pedestrians ran in all directions, some towards the shooting scene, others away from it in fear, the blonde woman shrieked and pounded the roof of the Cadillac, over and over.
The police first interviewed McGuire at the scene, where they discovered him seated on the bench, cradling Christine Diamond in his arms. Later, back in the state police office, they asked him all the usual questions.
When he finished answering their questions, he called Revere Beach and described the scene to Ollie and Susan, who begged him to return quickly, and he promised he would. When he hung up, two state officers announced that Myers had died on the operating-room table, and that Christine Diamond was being charged with first-degree murder.
“It won’t stick,” McGuire said. “A first-degree won’t stick.” They asked him to let them do their business, so McGuire nodded. “How much did he get away with? From her?”
“The woman says over four hundred thousand dollars,” one of the troopers said. “If you believe it.” He removed his trooper hat, revealing hair trimmed within a few millimeters of his skull. McGuire guessed the trooper’s age at twenty-two, twenty-three max.
“You don’t?” McGuire said.
“Her husband left it for her kids,” the trooper responded. “In trust. She couldn’t legally lay a hand on it.” He shrugged. “Hell, any damn fool can figure it out.”
“Obviously I’m not any damn fool,” McGuire said. “So explain it to me.”
The other trooper, older than the first but still yet to reach thirty years of age, spoke in a voice that said he was annoyed, either with McGuire’s obtuseness or his persistence. “The husband died last year. By the time the estate was settled and the bills paid off, all she had left was the house. So she had to go to work selling boats to support herself. Meanwhile, each of her kids got two hundred thousand dollars in trust that she could invest but she couldn’t touch, she was just a co-executor along with a lawyer. It’s pretty clear what happened. She teams up with this guy Myers, he gets some phony stock certificates printed, she tells the lawyer Myers is on the level, and they both get their hands on the money.”
“That’s what you think?” McGuire said. “That she was in on it? To get her hands on the money in the trust fund for her children?”
“She’s the one who took the documents to the lawyer,” the first trooper said, “as security for the loan. They were supposed to be worth six hundred thousand. She talked the lawyer into holding them and releasing the money.”
“She didn’t know they were phony,” McGuire said.
The older trooper snorted. “That’s what she’s saying.”
“You really think a woman, bright as she is, would fall for a story from a guy like that?” the younger trooper said. He bent from the waist towards McGuire, as though he didn’t want McGuire to miss a word. “You think she would trust him with that much money, all the cash she’s got in the world, that her husband left for the kids, without wanting to get her hands on some of it herself? You think a woman would do that and not know that he’s pissing it away on new cars and bookies and gifts for her and probably other women?”
McGuire lowered his face into his hands. My God, he thought to himself. They’re not only making them younger every day, they’re making them more stupid, too.
“Maybe she was just jealous,” one of the troopers was saying. “We’re looking into that. The victim, he was engaged to that woman who was waiting for him at the car.”
“The blonde woman,” McGuire said without looking up.
“They were leaving for the Bahamas tomorrow. Apparently he has some investments there. They were going to run a yacht charter or something.”
“You a betting man?” McGuire looked up and smiled at the trooper.
“No sir, I’m not.”
“Too bad,” McGuire said. “Because I’ll bet my ass against every dollar you can raise between here and Nassau that Myers has no investment money anywhere. There’s a better chance that he would launch a yacht charter in Las Vegas than in the Bahamas. A month from now that blonde woman, whoever she is, would find herself by the side of the road with nothing to her name but her underwear, if that.” He stood up. “Now, can I get the hell out of here? I’d like to get back to Boston, where cops are cynical about things, and have a right to be.”