McGuire never knew how they did it, how they located people who could elude FBI computers, Internal Revenue bloodhounds, and neighbourhood police precincts. But the handful of skip tracers working in any big city have their means, and most share a contempt for police procedures and computers.
He remembered Shoelace O’Sullivan, a gaunt Irishman who operated out of a former barbershop in Chelsea, and who traded tips with the cops in return for access to data, the same kind of information McGuire obtained from Sleeman. McGuire and Ollie Schantz visited O’Sullivan in his office one morning more than ten years ago. The Irishman looked twenty years older than his age and reclined in an old barber’s chair, making notes on scraps of paper and nodding while they spoke. When the previous tenant died, O’Sullivan had taken over the lease on the barbershop, and the landlord assumed O’Sullivan was a barber himself. O’Sullivan set up an office without removing any of the previous tenant’s implements. He arranged his library of ancient telephone books, city directories, and other sources in stacks on the floor and on glass shelves that once held clippers and shaving equipment, everywhere at hand. He changed nothing except the window glass, which he painted in opaque white. O’Sullivan even left the bottles of hair tonic, coloured red and green like fruit drinks, on the shelves beneath the mirrors, and the Swedish straight razors in the drawers.
“I’ll be callin’ you on the weekend if I’m findin’ anythin’,” O’Sullivan told McGuire and Schantz when they requested information on a drug dealer who had dropped from sight three years earlier, and whose wife’s skeletal remains had been located in a woods near Braintree.
The telephone rang that Friday afternoon.
“You’ll be lookin’ at twenty-three hundred Beverly Boulevard in Braintree,” O’Sullivan told Schantz. “Row M, room nineteen.” Then he hung up. Shoelace never said a word more than necessary, and seemed to enjoy adding an element of mystery to his comments. McGuire called it Gaelic poetics. Ollie dismissed it as Irish bullshit.
“What is it, an institution?” McGuire asked as he and Schantz drove to Braintree.
It was a cemetery. Row M, plot 19 held the remains of the man Schantz and McGuire had been searching for, buried by his family beneath a stone with his actual name carved into the granite, not the pseudonym he had used as a drug dealer in Boston.
“How the hell’d he do that?” McGuire wondered after they obtained positive identification. “How’s O’Sullivan find this stuff out?”
But Shoelace O’Sullivan performed his magic for the wrong client somewhere along the way. A year later he was discovered slumped in his barber’s chair, his throat slit from ear to ear with one of the straight razors he acquired with the business along with the barber’s chair, mirrors, and hair tonic.
Which left Libby Waxman among the few remaining of her profession, living among Boston’s most densely populated gay community.
McGuire climbed the stairs to Libby’s apartment above Darling Decadence, a store specializing in old examples of nostalgic bad taste sold at outrageous prices.
The peephole cover in Libby’s door swung aside when McGuire knocked, and one world-weary eye looked back at him for a moment before its owner gave a long bronchial sigh, the peephole closed, and he heard three deadlocks being slid aside.
Libby was already walking down the hall back to her parlour when McGuire entered. He followed her through an aroma of stale cigarette smoke, garlic, and grease to a small dark room, where she was lighting a fresh Marlboro and coaxing an overweight gray Persian out of her Barcalounger.
“Didn’t think you’d remember me,” McGuire said. He stood looking for a place to sit among the stacks of telephone books, magazines, newspapers, and three-ring binders.
“Hell, McGuire.” Libby’s voice had the coarseness of a dry transmission trying to shift into reverse while moving forward: “Just ’cause you don’t come see me for years doesn’t mean you’re forgotten.”
Legend had it that Libby had been Boston’s last brothel madam, operating an elegant house down near Cherry Street during the fifties. It was while keeping tabs on the patrons of her business, politicians and outlaws alike, that she foresaw a career, a new line of work she would need when the cycle turned and the city’s moralists cast a cold eye on bawdy houses. Which is precisely what happened. A week after City Hall vowed to wipe out Boston’s brothels, so the story went, Libby called the commissioner’s office and told him she was willing to turn over her diary to him, a book that contained the names of over a thousand clients, including his own, if he would help her launch a new business venture.
The commissioner invited her downtown for a chat.
In his office, she told him her new business would be as a skip tracer, tracking missing people down paths that no law-enforcement official could follow.
“It’s a legit business,” Libby pointed out.
“It certainly is,” the commissioner agreed. Libby’s diary sat on the desk between them.
“Of course, I’ll have a better chance of making good if I get some unofficial co-operation from you guys when I need it,” Libby said.
“You certainly will,” the commissioner said.
The story was true.
“How long’s he been gone?” Libby asked McGuire. She was settled in the chair recently vacated by the cat. A tattered apricot-coloured chenille robe was wrapped around her shoulders. Her hair, the shade of a brass spittoon, had been freshly combed and styled. Folds of skin framed her eyes, and the lobes of her ears were oversized and waxy, like the drippings of well-used candles.
“About two years.” McGuire handed her a slip of paper with all the information he had on Ross Randolph Myers. He looked around. “You use computers?”
Libby made a sound like a warm beer being opened and shook her head. “Says he likes to gamble. Horses maybe?”
“Could be. He plays the horses, or used to. Owned one, I understand. You plan to start with bookies?”
“Don’t know. Maybe.” She was staring at the paper as though committing it to memory. “This could take a couple days. Two hundred a day, which is my basic rate. Doesn’t help he’s a border-jumper. Then again, I might get lucky.” Her face said she was already planning ways to obtain the information.
“Give me four hundred worth.” A grin flashed across McGuire’s face. “Didn’t you and Silky Pete have a thing going, ten years ago, maybe?”
“Silky Pete’s dead.”
“I know. I investigated his murder.”
“It was an accident.”
“Yeah, a Buick accidentally hit him while he was hanging around the docks at three in the morning. Silky took bets, did some loan sharking, right?”
“Silky was just like me, doin’ whatever it takes to keep the wolf from the door.” She looked up at McGuire with a watery eye. “What’re you up to these days? Freelancin’?”
McGuire stood and handed her his business card. “For a bunch of lawyers.”
Libby sniffed the air, then brought the business card close to her nose and nodded. “Figured it was either that or the litter box needed changin’.”
Barely an hour later, McGuire was back in his office draining his second cup of coffee when the telephone rang, and Libby began talking almost before McGuire finished saying his name. “You got a pencil?”
McGuire told her he did.
“Ross Randolph Myers is in Annapolis.”
“He likes the navy?”
“He likes horses, like you said. They got more brains’n him. Every time this guy looks at a nag he sees a jockey on its back and money on its nose. Annapolis is close to Pimlico.”
“Address?”
“Don’t know. He hangs out at a place called the Academy Bar and Grill.”
“How’d you get all this so soon?”
“What, you crazy?”
“I’m not goin’ into competition with you. Just curious.”
“Who keeps tabs on people better’n an ex-wife owed alimony?”
“A bookie.”
“A bookie who knows a guy that’s smart enough to tap an endless supply of scratch and dumb enough to bet the favourite to win all the time.”
“Thanks for this, Libby.”
“I don’t do it for thanks. You owe me a couple hundred, McGuire.”
When he hung up, McGuire called Flanigan’s extension, and Lorna Robbins answered.
“He has a busy day, but I’ll ask if he’ll see you,” she said. “How’s yours?”
“How’s my what?” McGuire said.
She giggled. “Your day. I heard Mr. Pinnington raving about you to a couple of partners this morning. He thinks you’re some kind of genius. For what it’s worth.”
“By the way,” McGuire said. “I haven’t forgotten about lunch.”
“Neither have I. Just a minute.” McGuire listened to thirty seconds of silence from the receiver before she returned. “Can you be here at ten minutes to twelve?” she said. “He can see you then. And how about today? For lunch, I mean. He’ll be finished with you at noon. That is, if you’re still interested.”
McGuire said he was.
At ten minutes to twelve he arrived at Lorna’s desk. She looked up at him, smiled, and bit her lip. “You keep your promises,” she said.
“I try to.”
“What a guy.” Lorna lifted her telephone receiver, entered a number, and tried to avoid looking at McGuire while she twirled locks of her hair between her fingers. “Mister McGuire’s here,” she said formally. “He’s waiting for you,” she said to McGuire, replacing the receiver. She placed her arms on the edge of her desk and leaned against them, watching McGuire as he entered Flanigan’s office.
Orin Flanigan fingered his tie with one hand, his eyes never wavering from McGuire’s. On the walnut credenza behind him sat a framed photograph of an attractive middle-aged woman with vaguely Slavic features, her dark hair frosted with gray, her smile poised for the photographer. Next to it he saw a portrait of a younger woman whose face echoed the same features. Wife and daughter, McGuire assumed.
“How did you do that?” Flanigan asked.
“Do what?” McGuire was slumped in a leather chair facing Flanigan’s desk. Through tinted windows, he could see aircraft lined up over the ocean, waiting to descend into Logan Airport.
“Locate someone with such little information.”
“He’s a gambler. Gamblers leave tracks.”
“How do you know it’s really him?”
“I don’t. But I’m sure it is.”
“How sure?”
McGuire took his eyes from the aircraft and stared at the lawyer. “What are you getting at?”
Flanigan stopped fingering his tie and removed his glasses. “Can you go down there and positively identify him?”
“Are you asking me to?”
“I’d like to know it’s him. I’d like to know where he lives, and I’d like to know where he’s employed. If anywhere. Charge your expenses to the docket number I gave you.”
“I could use a picture of him.”
“There are no pictures of him. None that I have.”
“If he’s got a record, there’ll be one on file.”
“You might try that, with your connections. You have a description of him. When could you leave?”
McGuire shrugged. “Tomorrow.” He stood up. “Do you want to tell me why you’re so interested in this guy?”
“I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“Is he considered dangerous?”
“Not to you.” Flanigan looked at his watch. “Let me know if there’s a problem.”
McGuire nodded and crossed the carpet to the office door, closing it behind him. In the anteroom outside Flanigan’s office, Lorna Robbins was stapling some legal documents together. Across from her, seated on the oversized leather sofa, a slender woman with streaked blond hair began to rise when the door opened, then sat back again when she saw it was McGuire, but McGuire was struck by the expression he saw in the instant before she turned away, as though the woman had been prepared to launch herself towards him before settling back on the sofa. A curious expression, as though she were about to be rescued. And a familiar appearance, around the eyes.
McGuire raised his eyebrows at Lorna, who glanced at him before turning away. He walked to her desk and bent to speak just as the door behind him opened. McGuire turned to see Flanigan gesturing to the woman on the couch, and she rose and entered Flanigan’s office in several brisk, short steps. The lawyer avoided McGuire’s eyes and quickly closed the door behind them.
Lorna Robbins leaned towards McGuire. “You know, staff members aren’t supposed to date each other. It’s against policy.”
“It’s not a date,” McGuire said. “It’s lunch.”
Lorna smiled. “Darn, I’d rather it was a date. I can always get another job.”
“Meet you downstairs in five minutes,” McGuire said, and Lorna bit her lip and nodded.
Looks like I’m going to Annapolis, McGuire told himself as he descended the stairs. He wondered if the slender woman with the streaked blond hair and the strange manner had something to do with it all. He remembered her eyes, the look of hope and pleading he saw there.
Lorna met him at the elevator, watching the other employees and saying very little to McGuire. As they left the building, he held the door for her and she glanced at him in mild surprise.
The restaurant was narrow, crowded, and dark. Seated at a table far to the rear, Lorna relaxed. She ordered pasta and salad, then looked directly at McGuire for the first time since leaving the office building. McGuire told the waiter he would have the same.
“Are you nervous about being seen with me?” he asked her. “Do they take the rule about not dating staff that seriously?”
“No.” She continued staring at him, one hand toying with her hair.
“Then why so tense?”
She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “A little frightened, I suppose.”
“Of what?”
She shrugged. “Are you seeing anybody?” she asked. “I mean, are you involved with anyone right now?”
“No,” McGuire said. “You?”
She shook her head. “I had a bad experience with a man last year. We were supposed to get married, move to Cape Ann, and open a bed and breakfast. We told my friends, my kids, I almost handed in my notice at the firm, and then . . .”
“He got cold feet.”
She smiled, without humour. “I don’t think his feet had anything to do with it. I think the only thing cold about him was in his chest.”
“He told some lies?”
“Not some. A lot.” Her hand went back to her hair and she teased it with her fingers.
“Hey.” McGuire reached across and touched her hand. “It’s only lunch.”
“I know. But I’ve been careful since then, you know?”
“It’s a good idea,” McGuire said. “Being careful.”
Their meal arrived and they busied themselves with the food, McGuire ordering a glass of wine for each of them. Lorna mentioned a book she had been reading that she thought McGuire might enjoy, an insider’s view of the life of a big-city detective. “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” she said.
“I won’t be in tomorrow,” McGuire said. “I’m going to Annapolis for Orin Flanigan.”
“You are?” She paused with her wine glass halfway to her lips. “He never said anything to me about it.”
“He made the decision in his office just as I was leaving. Probably fill you in when we get back.”
“Orin tells me everything,” she said, setting the glass down again and frowning at it. “Orin’s the most predictable person I’ve ever met.”
“Well, nobody could predict that the man he wanted me to find would be in Annapolis.”
“What man?”
“Somebody named Ross Myers. He’s a gambler. You know him?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Get Orin to fill you in when we get back.”
She seemed distracted through the rest of the meal, but by the time coffee arrived she had grown more open, almost mellow. McGuire made her laugh with stories from his police career. He enjoyed hearing her laughter. He always enjoyed making women laugh. It was an assurance that they were pleased with his company, the only one he trusted, and he told her other stories as they walked together back to the office, some of them a little racy, taking care to avoid offensive language and descriptions. He mentioned Fat Eddie Vance, who wasn’t fat any more but was probably the same ineffectual man, lost beyond the confines of police procedural manuals.
“I’ve known people like that,” she said. “They’re not just cops, you know.”
“Yeah, well,” McGuire said. “My buddy Ollie had a saying that nailed Eddie perfectly.”
“What was that?”
“It was a little crude.”
“Hey, I’m a big girl. Is it funny?”
McGuire nodded.
“I can take crude, if it’s funny.” They were at the entrance to the office building. She leaned towards him. “Tell me,” she said. “Come on.”
“Ollie used to say,” McGuire said, “that Eddie Vance couldn’t get laid in a woman’s prison with a fistful of pardons.”
Lorna laughed so loudly that she covered her mouth and leaned against the building wall, hiding her face from McGuire and passersby. “You have so many stories,” she said. “Have I heard them all?”
“I’ve got dozens more.”
“Promise to tell them to me?”
“The cleaner ones.”
“I want to hear them all.”
They walked through the revolving door and into the lower lobby. McGuire would be leaving the next day, a Friday. “Guess I’ll see you Monday.” she said.
“How about Saturday night,” he said. “Should I call you for dinner?”
“Is that a promise?”
He told her it was.
“Just a minute.” She stopped near the elevator and used a mascara pencil to scribble a telephone number on a slip of paper. “You don’t have to, you know,” she said, handing him the paper. “I won’t be disappointed if you don’t.” When he put it in his pocket she looked around and leaned towards him to whisper, “Yes I will,” and kissed his cheek.
“No can do.”
Sleeman’s words over the telephone meant he’d done enough for McGuire. Four bottles of good Scotch could only go so far.
Behind Sleeman’s voice, McGuire could hear the murmur of conversation and a telephone endlessly ringing. “He’s got a record, there’s a picture on file,” McGuire said.
“Told ya,” Sleeman said. He dropped his voice. “Verbals I’ll help you with, Joe. Copies are another thing. DeLisle’s on one of his moral housecleaning trips again. And everybody’s uptight over changes around here. Guys gettin’ transferred in and out, moved up and down. I mean, you gotta be careful. The toe you step on today might be attached to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.”
“So go get the mug shot and tell me what he looks like.”
“What, you want me to buff and cuff him too? Jesus, McGuire, we’re all up to our asses here trying to find that Hayhurst lowlife.”
“Who’s that?”
“The gold-tooth kid, the one with the Beretta, who tried to shake you down. I told you about him. He’s working solo now, and he’s wired all the time, probably doing crack by the bucket load. He’s one for the books. Been a bad-ass since grade school. He took two shots at a couple of old ladies, schoolteachers from Indiana, last night. He was so wired up he missed them both. One thing nobody around here wants is a couple of schoolteachers from little towns in Indiana getting their scrawny butts shot off by a hopped-up street hood, right? So now we got a task force and I’m heading it. DeLisle wants Hayhurst and his Beretta off the street, with or without his gold tooth, and I’m the guy supposed to do it.”
“Tell me what you know about Myers,” McGuire said. He leaned back in his chair, his feet on a corner of the desk.
“Married twice, no kids,” Sleeman answered. “Charged with assaulting one of his ex-wives, roughed up another guy who owed him money. Thinks he’s got muscle to use, I guess. Got himself probation on a weapons charge, too. Then he beat some heavy-duty embezzling charges that his partner took a three-year government vacation for, and did six months for income tax that the IRS said he didn’t pay, on money the court said he didn’t embezzle. Usual crock of shit.”
“So you’re not making a copy of his mug shot.”
“Sorry. Maybe your buddy Rosen’s got a picture of him. Myers and Rosen, they probably threw a big party when he beat the embezzlement charge, for which he was facing five to ten.”
“Rosen?” McGuire sat up in his chair.
“He was Myers’s lawyer.” Sleeman gave a dry laugh. “Hell, McGuire, you can always threaten to introduce your knuckles to his beak again, he doesn’t come through for you.”
McGuire muttered a goodbye to Sleeman and sat staring at the telephone. Then, as though his thoughts had flipped some switch within the instrument, it rang.
“I just wanted to thank you for lunch again,” Lorna said. McGuire could feel the closeness of her lips against the receiver and he pictured her a floor above him, maybe toying with her hair.
“Not necessary,” he said. “I enjoyed it.”
“Please don’t lose that telephone number.”
“I won’t.” He thought about Saturday night, about all the Saturday nights over the past several months he had spent in the house on Revere Beach, watching television with Ollie and Ronnie, and thinking of sand flowing in massive quantities through a narrow opening into darkness. “Look,” he said, hearing himself speak, almost eavesdropping on his own thoughts. “Why don’t we make it a sure thing? Is there some place you’d like to go for dinner? Somewhere you haven’t been in years?”
He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You know where I haven’t been in years and I’d love to go but it’s a little expensive?”
“Where?” McGuire asked. Where’s she want to go? he thought. The Four Seasons? That French restaurant in the Hilton? He tried to remember if he had paid his Visa bill that month.
“The Parker House restaurant,” she said. “You know it?”
McGuire knew it. Not his choice, perhaps, but more affordable than the others.
They agreed on dinner at eight. McGuire would pick her up at her apartment on Park Drive at seven-thirty. After hanging up, he booked a flight to Baltimore the following morning and reserved a car from Hertz. He made dinner reservations for Saturday night and read a stack of memos on his desk before leaving at three-thirty. He spent two hours in Zoot’s, listening to stories from off-duty cops while working his way through a cheeseburger and a couple of beers. He walked for several blocks through the mild autumn evening, strolling to Newbury Street and down to the Public Garden, then back again to a restaurant near Zoot’s where he stopped for coffee, wasting his time, measuring out his life in strolls and memories.
Ollie Schantz was watching a documentary on the erosion of America’s ocean beaches. “You’re a bird dog, are you?” he said when McGuire told him about his trip to Annapolis the following day.
“Guy’s cut most of his ties. The lawyer wants confirmation, that’s all.”
“What’s this lawyer do? Not criminal law?”
“Mostly child custody, child support, divorce stuff.”
“He won’t tell you what this is about?”
“Don’t need to know.”
“But you’d sure as hell like to.”
McGuire nodded.
The television screen showed another section of Virginia sliding into the sea. “What’s buzzin’ in your head about this?” Ollie said.
“The guy’s got a record, he’s a gambler, he likes to live high.” McGuire turned away, dredging up speculation that he hadn’t articulated until now. “Flanigan, he’s the lawyer, he’s got something else in mind.”
“This guy, the gambler.” Ollie’s eyes shifted from the television screen for the first time. “He have a record for rough stuff? May not appreciate you popping up between him and the tote board.”
“Couple of assaults, one on a wife. And got caught on a weapons charge.”
“Now you’re showing up, asking questions he won’t wanta answer. Better be careful.”
“I’ve been there before.”
“Yeah, but you ain’t been fifty before.”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“Just be careful, Joseph. Just be careful. You wanta send Ronnie in? I think I got a diaper needs changing.”
McGuire rose and met Ronnie coming from the kitchen, an uncharacteristic furrow between her eyes, drying her hands on a towel. “I heard him, I heard him,” she said, sweeping past McGuire.
On the kitchen table, the remnants of a lone ice cube floated in a half-finished glass of gin and orange juice. McGuire brought the glass to his nose. A very strong gin and orange juice.