“Gotta do something.”
McGuire tossed the morning paper aside and stared out the window next to Ollie’s bed, at the ocean visible beyond the shore road.
“Yeah, but lawyers?” Ollie was propped up in bed, the remote control in his hand. Two heads were conversing on the television screen.
“You go where the money is. My pension’s barely covering food and my rent here, and don’t give me that crap about not needing to pay my way. My car needs a transmission overhaul. Or maybe just a kick in the ass, if you knew where to kick a Chrysler.” McGuire had purchased the ten-year-old hardtop when he was working as a part-time security guard. The job lasted less than a month. It ended the day McGuire suggested that his supervisor’s brains were located immediately behind his testicles.
“You really wanta work with a bunch of lawyers? Can’t Frankie DeLisle, Wally Sleeman, one of those guys, find something for you to do, help ’em clean up the city?”
“I can’t work with DeLisle. Couldn’t when I was at Berkeley and sure as hell can’t now. Sleeman’s a lot of fun, but he’s not the brightest cop I ever met.”
“Yeah, well.” Ollie moved his head in the semblance of a nod. “Wally’s the kinda guy, he’s gotta get naked to count to twenty-one.” His eyes swung to McGuire’s, a smile playing on his face when he saw McGuire grinning. “But Christ, Joseph. How you gonna work with a bunch of ambulance chasers?”
“It’s Zimmerman, Wheatley and Pratt. They’re mostly corporate, civil law, divorce lawyers, family law . . .”
“Come on.” Ollie managed to turn his head far enough to follow McGuire’s gaze through the window. “You’re tellin’ me you’re not gonna run with hounds, you’re just gonna trot with dachshunds. Dogs are dogs.”
“What am I supposed to do the rest of my life? Stay here as your gardener, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, helping Ronnie with the groceries . . .”
“You’re talkin’ about stuff I used to do.” Ollie said it without anger or self-pity. Ollie had a way of stating obvious facts in an obvious manner.
“Okay, so I’m making like a husband around here.” McGuire realized what he had said, what he was implying.
Ollie’s eyes remained on the water. “You doin’ that too?”
“Aw, for Christ’s sakes, Ollie.” McGuire stood up, his hands in his pockets.
“Listen, it can happen.” Ollie’s voice was free of rancor. “You don’t think I know Ronnie’s still a good-lookin’ woman? Remember old Dave Sadowsky? He was always findin’ reasons to drop by when I wasn’t here, tellin’ Ronnie what a honey she was, how she could do better’n me. Till I told him one day, he ever tried to lay a finger on her I’d make him do a pole vault on a friggin’ twelve-gauge.” Ollie grinned at the memory, but his eyes avoided McGuire’s.
“I don’t believe you can even think . . .”
“I hear you two out in the kitchen, late at night. I hear Ronnie laugh. You make her laugh, Joseph. One of the sexiest things a man can do for a woman is make her laugh. We spend all those years, us guys, tryin’ to dress the right way, drink the right brand of Scotch, lift weights and do sit-ups, all that stuff, and most women are just lookin’ for a guy with a sense of humour.”
“Ollie, I am not sleeping with Ronnie . . .”
Ollie’s head moved in an arc until his eyes locked on McGuire’s. “I’d understand if you did,” he said. “See, that’s the point. I’d understand.”
Zimmerman, Wheatley and Pratt occupied two floors of a downtown bank tower, the office a gaudy display of post-modern architectural hubris in cinnamon-coloured marble. “An excess of good taste,” was how one critic described the atrium lobby, with its brushed brass accents and crystal light fixtures.
Stepping from the elevator and walking to the law firm’s fifteenth-floor reception desk, McGuire entered a world of Edwardian elegance. The walls were wainscoted in dark oak beneath flocked wall coverings in shades of deep reds and hunter greens. Next to the reception desk, a wide staircase spiraled down to the firm’s fourteenth-floor library and the steno pools, accounting, records-keeping, all the engine-room mechanics that permitted the legal professionals to function on the floor above them.
McGuire was wearing a blue Oxford button-down shirt and blue cotton slacks, plus his trademark tweed sports jacket, custom-made for him by a Charlestown tailor who had owed him a favour. The tailor had done a superb job, adding leather trim on the buttonholes, Mandarin silk lining, and other details. McGuire had seen the same fabric on a jacket in a Brooks Brothers window. Without the custom tailoring and detailing, the Brooks Brothers version was priced at $800. The tailor had charged McGuire only for materials.
McGuire had done the tailor a very large favour.
McGuire owned three of the jackets, one brown, one blue, one gray. He wore them year-round with jeans or with tailored slacks, in rain and snow, on all but the hottest, most humid, summer days. He suspected he would be buried in one of them. They looked both expensive and defiantly unfashionable. They suited him even now, in the rarified climate of one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms.
“Mr. Pinnington has been expecting you,” the receptionist smiled when McGuire announced his name. A minute later Richard Pinnington, senior partner, was walking across the Axminster from somewhere beyond the reception area, his hand extended, and his patrician face beaming a smile at McGuire.
“It’s a matter of having access to a special kind of talent.”
Richard Pinnington leaned forward, his eyes on McGuire. They were seated in matching wing chairs covered in green leather with brass upholstery studs. The leather was soft and yielding, and the aroma of the tannery still rose from its buttery surface. Between them, a silver tea service and two ornate bone-china teacups rested on a low, glass-topped oak table. Pinnington’s office, encompassing as much square footage as the entire ground floor of Ollie and Ronnie’s house, stretched to a bank of windows overlooking the Atlantic.
Pinnington was in his early sixties and he carried his age, like his upper-class bearing, in a manner that members of a privileged class often do: with elegance and grace. His hair, thinning but still wavy, was pewter-gray, a colour repeated throughout the man’s wardrobe. His Egyptian cotton shirt sported a subtle gray stripe, his maroon tie was flecked in an amorphous gray pattern, and his blue suit had an undertone of gray.
McGuire suppressed a rare feeling of inadequacy in Pinnington’s presence.
“You’re not that involved in criminal law,” McGuire said, settling back in the chair facing Pinnington. “Why call on a cop who spent his career on the street?”
“Well, you’re absolutely right.” Pinnington sat back, mimicking McGuire’s posture. “We are not specifically a criminal-law firm. Just two criminal lawyers on staff. But things are becoming so complex for us that we need . . .” Pinnington looked for the phrase in the air beyond McGuire’s shoulder. “We need a radar detector, a sonar device is maybe a good way of putting it, that can alert us to potential criminal activity.”
“On the part of your clients?”
“Perhaps. More likely, of course, on the part of our adversaries. Also, we often make use of certain criminal investigative techniques in our civil cases.”
“Such as?”
Pinnington shrugged. “People who can locate lost individuals for us. Assembly of evidence in perhaps a more effective manner than civil lawyers can muster. And there are borderline cases where civil and criminal law seem to be overlapping at a faster rate every day. Child-custody cases, for example. That’s become a big part in our practice. Abduction is a serious criminal offense. Assuming wide interpretations of custody laws is a civil matter. See my point?”
McGuire nodded.
“Business espionage is another concern. We can become involved in corporate civil law and discover the possibility of criminal activity by employees or officers.”
“These are hardly my field.”
“No, they’re not. But we can use your perception, your instincts. I have a colleague who practices criminal law. Marv Rosen. I think you know him. Anyway, he’s our criminal-law counsel.”
McGuire knew Rosen, would never forget the ferret-faced lawyer. He had physically attacked Rosen in a courtroom years earlier, a foolish move that cost McGuire a demotion and two weeks’ income. “He tried to charge me with assault once,” McGuire said. “He dropped it in exchange for an apology, and told everybody I’d given him the best PR he’d ever received.”
Pinnington smiled. “Marv still talks about it. It’s his best dinner-party story. I’ve heard it over and over. Now, I’m not saying Marv would enjoy sharing a slow boat to China with you, but he has a keen respect for your intuitive abilities.” Pinnington leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “One of the many things you don’t learn at law school is how to hone your intuition. But the more I practice law, the more I value that . . .” He hesitated, then found the word. “. . . skill. So I decided a few weeks ago I could either try to inject it into each of our partners and staff, or I could consider buying it on the open market, so to speak.”
“Which is me.”
“Which is you.”
“What are you offering?”
“Five thousand dollars’ monthly retainer, plus itemized expenses. It’s flat, whether you work eighty hours a week or none. And your workload could vary that much. Let’s assume a firm three-month contract to start. After that, we’ll review your hours and make adjustments to the fee if necessary. Maybe reassess the whole arrangement. This is an experiment for us. For you as well, I suspect.”
“How does it work?” Pinnington was offering an income equal to McGuire’s best years as a homicide detective. Fix the Chrysler’s transmission? Hell, he’d dump it for something a little flashier and a lot more reliable.
“Each lawyer has the right to draw upon your skills as he or she sees fit. Partners take precedence over non-partners. Senior partners have ultimate prerogative on your time. Any conflicts among staff regarding your availability will be resolved by me. You track your hours per case, and they’re pro-rated against the docket by the lawyer who contracted your services. We’ll make a small office available down on the fourteenth floor. It’s not spectacular, but it gives you a telephone and a desk. As I said, after three months we review everything.”
“Do I have to wear a tie, dress like a lawyer?”
“Not unless you want to. Wear a tie, I mean.”
“Will I be testifying in court?”
“We will do our best to avoid that eventuality.”
McGuire nodded. “Sounds okay.”
Pinnington almost leaped to his feet, his pleasure mixed with impatience to move on to other things. “Sounds like we have a deal. When can you get started?”
“What time is it now?”
“Unspectacular” was hardly the appropriate word for a windowless space that, a few days earlier, had functioned as a combination document-storage area and passageway, and was now to serve as McGuire’s office. He entered it through an unmarked door from the word-processing area, where several women sat at computers and printers, preparing long documents for the lawyers who occupied the offices above them. Another unmarked door exited to a hallway leading to the fourteenth-floor elevator foyer.
“It’s so we can keep people apart,” said Pinnington’s secretary. Her name was Woodson. “Mrs. Woodson,” was how Pinnington had introduced her to McGuire, never referring to her first name, which McGuire soon learned was Connie.
Pinnington had asked Connie Woodson to escort McGuire to his new office and introduce him to key staff members. She was warm and pleasant, and her eyes reflected a hidden humour, a sense that she found the world amusing in a manner that she was unable to share with others.
“We used to bring people through here while their adversaries, or anyone else we didn’t want them to meet, waited in Reception upstairs,” Connie Woodson explained. “But Mr. Pinnington has made other arrangements.”
“It’s perfect,” McGuire said. And it was. He could come and go through the hall door without being seen. He had a small metal desk, a swivel chair, two metal side chairs, a telephone, a water cooler, and two filing cabinets set beneath a dusty black-and-white photograph of Cambridge that appeared to date back to the 1920s. An equally dusty coffeemaker sat atop one of the filing cabinets. “That work?” McGuire asked, and Connie Woodson nodded.
“Mr. Pinnington said I am to provide you with anything you need,” she said. “If it’s urgent or I can’t look after it myself, I’ll get the message to him. I’m preparing a memo to the full staff about your presence and duties. Would you like to see it before it’s distributed?”
“No,” McGuire said, testing the swivel chair. “Whatever you and Pinnington want to say about things will be fine with me.”
She beamed with relief. McGuire’s attitude was clearly different from the lawyers, who believed that any document that had been drafted fewer than three times was likely libelous or erroneous. “The key to the hall door is hanging there, over your desk,” she said. She led him out through the word-processing area. “Mr. Pinnington is very pleased that you have joined us.”
She escorted McGuire through the offices, introducing him to partners and lawyers and various department heads, who handed him their business cards and greeted him with responses ranging from undisguised impatience to fawning praise. Two partners booked appointments with McGuire for later that day. One wanted to discuss a wrongful-dismissal suit in which the fired employee departed with a copy of the firm’s long-term strategic marketing plan. The other told McGuire of an employee who may have suffered his back injury in a barroom brawl instead of at his place of employment, as he claimed in a three-million-dollar lawsuit. A third lawyer, an unsmiling fair-haired man barely half his age, peppered McGuire with questions about his background and abilities until McGuire cut him off, suggesting he check with Pinnington about his credentials. The younger man, stunned for a moment by McGuire’s impertinence, said he would.
One lawyer studied McGuire intently and posed questions to him about his experience in tracing criminals on the run and dealing with dangerous individuals face to face, while Connie Woodson stood nearby, smiling and shifting her weight impatiently, anxious to continue escorting McGuire through the partners’ area.
The lawyer’s name was Orin Flanigan, and McGuire judged him to be between fifty and sixty. His head was bald, save for a fringe of fading red hair, the colour of sandblasted brick houses. He dressed like the other partners in well-fitted suits in subdued colours, and his body shape confessed to years of rich meals and expensive wine, but instead of shrewdness, his eyes reflected distant but still-remembered pain. “I would like to chat with you some time,” the lawyer said.
“What about?” McGuire said.
McGuire’s words appeared to surprise Flanigan, as though he were unprepared to be questioned by anyone. “Nothing in particular,” Flanigan said.
“What does he do?” McGuire asked Connie Woodson as she led him along the corridor towards the next introduction.
“He’s in family law. He specializes in child-custody cases. Mr. Pinnington believes he is the best in his profession.”
McGuire’s instincts told him that Orin Flanigan would be calling on him for some service, probably something furtive and risky. So he wasn’t surprised when the lawyer made a pretense of stopping by McGuire’s office the following morning, inviting McGuire to join him for lunch at The Four Seasons.
They walked the three blocks together, Flanigan asking questions about McGuire’s background, where he was born, where he went to school, what hobbies McGuire had. “Hobbies,” McGuire said, “are things people do when the stuff they’re being paid to do isn’t what they want to do. When I was a cop, I was doing what I wanted to do. So I didn’t need any hobbies.”
“That’s some people’s definition of success, you know,” Flanigan said. They had reached Boylston Street. The Four Seasons was a block away. “Doing what you want to do.”
Inside the hotel dining room, Flanigan was greeted with exaggerated pleasure by the maître d’, who led the lawyer and McGuire to a corner table. “I always sit here whenever I come for lunch,” Flanigan said when they were settled. “Always order the same thing, too. A glass of California Merlot, whatever the soup of the day is, and a rare roast-beef sandwich on rye bread, black coffee to follow. What do you think of a man who is so set in his ways?”
“That’s he’s probably satisfied with himself,” McGuire said.
“You’re being diplomatic.”
“Maybe I’m being a little envious, too.” McGuire looked up from the menu, and around the paneled dining room.
“Of course, you can be doing what you want to do and perhaps not feel successful after all.” Flanigan was calling the maître d’ over. “The New York strip steak is very good, I understand,” he said to McGuire.
McGuire ordered it, and a Heineken.
“You didn’t say if you have any children,” Flanigan said when the waiter left.
“I don’t.”
“Do you regret that?”
“Sometimes.”
Flanigan watched him, as though waiting for more. “The things that happen to children,” he said after the waiter had brought their drinks, “are the most egregious of all the sins of a society. Any society.”
“You make your living correcting them.”
“I make my living dealing with them. Correcting them is often out of the question.” He sampled his wine and set the glass aside. “They can haunt you, you know. You can say you’re just dealing with the legal aspects of things, and I try. But after thirty-odd years, some stuff still haunts you.”
McGuire asked the lawyer if he had any children.
“Not any more,” the lawyer said.
To someone else, McGuire might have pressed the issue. What did that mean, “not any more”? That the children were grown? They were estranged? The expression on Flanigan’s face said the issue was painful. McGuire found himself liking this man, who appeared embarrassed by his own success, yet locked within its trappings.
“You ever been to England?” Flanigan said, and McGuire said he hadn’t. “My wife and I go every summer for our vacation,” Flanigan said, and for the rest of the lunch Flanigan described public footpaths across the Cotswolds, tiny stone churches on high hills overlooking the sea, and thatch-roofed pubs in Devon and Cornwall.
After lunch, outside the hotel, the lawyer checked his watch and said he was meeting someone down by Quincy Market. He asked if McGuire would excuse him, and they shook hands there in the sunshine on Boylston Street. Flanigan’s handshake was firm and he looked McGuire in the eye and smiled, as though McGuire had provided him with some important information, as though it had been McGuire who had hosted the lunch and picked up the check and played the benefactor, instead of Flanigan.
Later, when Orin Flanigan’s body was undergoing an autopsy, McGuire would tell himself that he had expected it, had known that any man who openly expressed such deep human concern and empathy could not help but face the consequences.