Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “Doesn’t go beyond you and me?”

  “Not if you say so.”

  “I’ll send a note down this afternoon. And a docket number.” He relaxed, stood erect again, and smiled, then hid the smile. “You know the hardest, the most difficult part of what I do?”

  McGuire shook his head.

  “It’s knowing that people, people on the other side, think that I don’t have any feelings about their situation. It’s all adversarial, that’s the system, that’s how it works. But it’s not always true. You can win and still feel something for the loser, for the other side. Not everybody here feels that way, of course. I might be the only one who does. But the older I get, the more it eats away at me, sometimes seeing the other people, when they lose, become very emotional. I feel for them, some of them. There’s no right and wrong in law sometimes, only winners and losers.”

  “Is this one of those cases?”

  “Yes.” Flanigan paused at the door. He smiled back at McGuire. It was a smile of embarrassment. “That’s something else I’d appreciate if you didn’t share. What I said just now.”

  A note arrived that afternoon in a sealed brown envelope carried to McGuire by Flanigan’s secretary, a woman in her forties with large dark eyes and a mass of dense, curly black hair. McGuire remembered her from his tour of the office, when she had made a point of introducing herself and smiling at him.

  McGuire could not recall her name.

  “Lorna Robbins,” she said. “Mr. Flanigan’s secretary.” Her voice was high-pitched, with a singsong quality. She wore a flowered silk blouse whose buttons strained to contain her bosom, and she seemed in no hurry to leave. “How are you making out? Is there anything you need?”

  McGuire assured her there was nothing.

  “Well . . .” She straightened the bottom of her blouse where it disappeared in the waist of her skirt, and walked to the door. “I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other. If you’re working on whatever Orin gave you there.”

  McGuire turned the envelope over. The flap was sealed with heavy tape. “You don’t know what’s in here?” he asked, holding the envelope up.

  “No idea. Mr. Flanigan drafted it himself on his own computer.”

  “He does that often?”

  “Not while I’ve been here.”

  “How long’s that?”

  “Eight years next month. The last two with Mr. Flanigan.” She leaned against the door.

  “Is he a nervous guy?”

  “Mr. Flanigan’s a wonderful man, and a good lawyer. One of the best.”

  “He’s not nervous?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Maybe he’s intense.”

  “A little, I suppose.”

  McGuire grunted.

  “We all are. We carry a big workload upstairs, and some of our cases, Mr. Flanigan’s especially, they can get heartbreaking. The people, I mean. Mr. Flanigan, he gets wrapped up in his cases sometimes. I’ve seen him. It hurts him, some of these cases . . .”

  “I wasn’t prying . . .”

  “. . . and it’s hard on him sometimes . . .”

  “Trust me, Laura . . .”

  “Lorna. It’s Lorna.”

  “Lorna, I hear what you’re saying. I made a mistake, bringing it up.”

  “Okay . . . A lot of us, you know, executive assistants and secretaries, we’re a little nervous about having a police officer among us . . .”

  “I’m not on the police force anymore.”

  “. . . because, you know, it’s almost as though we’ve done something wrong.”

  She had a ripe sensuality that middle-aged women often acquired, one that McGuire was finding attractive. “Would you like to talk about what my job is, sometime?” McGuire smiled his warmest smile and tilted his head.

  Lorna Robbins bit her lower lip and nodded. “Over coffee maybe?”

  “I was thinking lunch.”

  She nodded again, this time more vigorously. “There’s a little place that just opened on Harbor Street . . .”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  McGuire waited several moments after the door closed before opening the envelope and removing a single sheet of plain bond paper. A five-digit number had been written in ink at the top. The rest of the correspondence was spaced with the degree of clarity and neatness only a word processor and desktop laser printer can produce.

  Due to the special nature of this case, it is imperative that you and I make direct contact at the outset. Charge your time and reasonable expenses, up to $1,000, to the docket number listed above. By the way, this is not a high priority. Work on it when you can.

  I want you to locate a man for me named Ross Randolph Myers, age about 45. His last known address is 387 Gloucester Street, apartment 3B, but he hasn’t lived there for two years. Mr. Myers once operated the Back Bay School of Business on Columbus Avenue, but it was placed in receivership about the time Mr. Myers vacated his condominium. Mr. Myers is about six feet tall, heavyset, has gray-blond hair, and no visible scars or blemishes. He is known as a heavy gambler, an activity that resulted, in part, in the collapse of his business and the seizure of his personal property. He served six months for tax evasion in 1999 and was released without restriction.

  I am interested solely in Mr. Myers’s current place of residence, which, if you determine it, I would appreciate hearing from you verbally. Please do not commit any of your information to paper.

  Cordially,

  O. Flanigan

  “That all you got?” Ollie asked that evening, between spoonfuls of casserole fed to him by Ronnie. “Some guy skippin’ out on child support?”

  McGuire told Ollie about the warehouse worker, and his visit to the South Boston bar.

  “Hell, any rookie whistle who’s lost his cherry in this town could’ve done the same thing,” Ollie said. “Lawyers, they don’t think about getting their asses dirty, sitting on a bar stool and listening to somebody who doesn’t say ‘whereas’ and never wore a sheepskin on their shoulders.”

  “Some of them don’t seem so sure of themselves,” McGuire said. “One of them, anyway,” and he told Ollie about Orin Flanigan’s visit that afternoon.

  “Doesn’t sound like anything he needs to keep so secret,” Ollie said.

  “I get a feeling it’s unofficial. Like he doesn’t want his partners to know about it.”

  “He’s a partner?” When McGuire nodded, Ollie said: “What’s he got to be worried about, then? Unless he’s breaking some kind of lawyer ethics. Whatever the hell they are.” He waved away another spoonful of food and Ronnie began gathering the utensils together. “So, you gonna ask Wally Sleeman to help you, get you some dirt on this guy you’re lookin’ for?”

  McGuire nodded. “Probably cost me some Scotch. Which reminds me. Remember that skip tracer from years ago? Woman lived over on Huntington?”

  “Libby.” Ollie grinned. “Old Libby Waxman. Christ, what a character. Haven’t thought about her in years. Talked to her, lemme see, lemme see . . .” His eyes scanned the ceiling. Ronnie stood up, the plates and utensils in her hands, and left without a word. “It was when those two guys, couple of hustlers, took off more’n a year before . . . remember that guy they found down near the fens, head caved in . . . ?”

  McGuire was half-listening. He was concerned about Ronnie, the look on her face when she left the room.

  Chapter Four

  “Still call him Fat Eddie, and I catch hell for it.”

  Wally Sleeman leaned back and scanned the other lunch-hour diners at Hutch’s, his small eyes flitting from one to another, pausing long enough to determine if the face was familiar, female, or threatening. Familiar faces warranted a lifting of Sleeman’s heavy hand—the one not clutching the bottle of Moosehead—in greeting. Unattached women received a brisk up-and-down sweep of Sleeman
’s gaze and, if they stirred something in Sleeman’s hormones, a lifting of his eyebrows.

  Anyone who represented a threat, based on a recollection from a mug sheet or an arrest Sleeman made years earlier, earned a swivel of Sleeman’s massive body, a motion that reminded McGuire of a freighter in Boston Harbor being positioned for berthing. Sleeman’s eyes would fix on his target until he would nod and mutter, “Robbery with assault” or “B and E, theft over five” or simply, “scum-sucking lowlife.” No one Sleeman observed in Hutch’s this day appeared to be threatening. He rested two thigh-sized forearms on the table and expelled a long, reluctant sigh.

  “Eddie’s lost that much weight?” McGuire asked. He felt good, hanging around a tough old cop, maybe two years from retirement, to whom the term “political correctness” meant wiping your feet before entering the White House.

  “Not that much. He’s lost some, but the son of a bitch ain’t never gonna be anorexic.” Sleeman smiled over McGuire’s shoulder at the blowzy waitress approaching with crab cakes and fries for Sleeman, mussels and salad for McGuire. “Now here’s a vision of loveliness,” Sleeman said when the woman arrived at their table. She had hair the colour of carrots, a smallish turned-up nose that gave her a perpetually adolescent look, and a mouth that was too wide but slid into a smile with ease.

  “You talkin’ about me or the crab cakes?” she said. She was close enough to forty to behave as though she were younger, and far enough beyond it to accept the fact.

  “Crab cakes I can get anywhere,” Sleeman said, his eyes moving over her body. “Somebody nice as you, I’d have to go to Vegas for.”

  “They keep him tied up at night?” she asked McGuire.

  McGuire smiled. The mussels looked good, the shells set in a garlicky tomato sauce, but he eyed Sleeman’s French fries with envy.

  “Hey, you into that stuff, sweetie?” Sleeman grinned at the waitress. “You wanta tie me up, say the word. Hell, I got some perversions you never thought of yet.”

  She struck a pose, one hand on a hip, and tilted her head. “Honey,” she said, “trust me. You’re a perversion I ain’t thought of yet.”

  Sleeman laughed and seized his fork as though it were a sword, his body rocking with laughter. “Jesus, I love women,” he said, and began spearing his fries.

  “Wally Sleeman, right?”

  McGuire and Sleeman looked up at a tall, slender man with oversized glasses and a heavy chin standing next to their table.

  “Yeah,” Sleeman said. He turned back to his lunch. “That’s me. Who’re you?”

  “Name’s Morgan. Rick Morgan.” He extended a hand towards Sleeman, who glanced sideways at it before slicing his crab cakes.

  “I remember, you played for the Bruins back in the sixties,” Morgan said. He withdrew the rejected hand. “Right? Am I right?”

  “You’re right.” Sleeman lowered his fork and lifted his dinner napkin to his mouth, wiping his lips as he spoke. “You remember that far back, do ya?” he said.

  “Hey, I remember you knocking Bobby Hull on his butt one night at the Gardens,” Morgan said, his face creasing into a smile. He looked over at McGuire. “Right on his butt. Bobby Hull himself. When he tries to go around Sleeman, Sleeman gives him a hip check and Hull’s sliding into the boards.”

  McGuire smiled and opened a mussel.

  Sleeman reached for the Moosehead. “Yeah, and ten minutes later, when the ref’s not looking, Hull gets me in a corner and rams the end of his stick into the back of my head like a sledgehammer.” Sleeman grinned at the memory and lifted the bottle to his lips.

  “You were my favourite player back then, next to Bobby Orr,” Morgan said, leaning on the table.

  Sleeman lowered the bottle and stared off in the distance, his eyes narrowing. Anyone else might have thought he had spotted a face from a wanted poster, but when McGuire heard Morgan’s words and saw the look on Sleeman’s face, he knew better.

  “Next to Bobby Orr himself,” Morgan babbled on. “I mean, nobody’s been better than Orr, right? As a player, I mean. Am I right? Am I right?”

  “He was okay,” Sleeman said. His mood had grown black.

  “Okay?” Morgan grinned in disbelief. “Just ‘Okay’? I never saw anybody skate like that. But I guess you should know, playing with him and all, right? Am I right?”

  “I never played with him,” Sleeman said. He returned to attacking the crab cakes as though they were predators that would leap from his plate if he didn’t dissect them first.

  “Really?” Morgan looked around, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. “Is that right? You never played with Orr? You sure about that? You never played with Bobby Orr?”

  Sleeman dropped his fork to his plate and stared briefly across at McGuire, who watched the man’s heavy forearms grow tense. “I’ll tell you what, Dick,” he said, turning his head to Morgan. “I play with myself every day in the shower more than I ever played with Orr, okay? Okay?”

  Morgan looked from Sleeman to McGuire and back again. “Sorry if I disturbed you,” he said. “Just trying to be friendly.”

  He pulled himself up to his full height, took a deep breath, and walked back to the table he was sharing with three other men near the front of the restaurant.

  “Asshole,” Sleeman said.

  Mention Bobby Orr in the presence of older Boston hockey fans and you got a quiet nodding of the head, a smile maybe, and the launch of a dozen stories from people who saw Orr glide across the ice as though he had Roman candles on his skate blades. There were other stories from people who never saw him play in the flesh but wanted to believe they did. But not from Wally Sleeman.

  Sleeman would duck his head and roll his sloping shoulders, the ones that once bulldozed their way against an opposition center coming across the blue line a dozen times a game, but now just continued their slope down to a heavy chest and a heavier belly. Then he’d look away, across the bar, maybe, and mutter, “Not bad, but overrated.”

  If the conversation took place on Berkeley Street in Robbery Division, a rookie suit who was a whistle a few months ago would laugh and say, “What, you kiddin’?” and recall how Orr was probably the greatest defenseman in the history of the game, scored more goals than any other player in his position, we’ll never see another guy like him, not in our lifetime.

  “Guess who got bumped off the team to make way for Orr when he came up from the juniors in sixty-five?” people who knew Wally Sleeman’s story would say, when Sleeman was out of hearing range. “Guess who was supposed to get his break the next year, set to go like gangbusters, the year Orr comes up and this guy, this poor unlucky bastard, gets crowded out and traded to Toronto where he dies, the poor bastard dies? Guess who that was?”

  That’s what happened to Wally Sleeman, getting his big break the same year Orr arrived to tear up the NHL. Sleeman was an eighteen-year-old with lots of promise, that’s what he had been told all his life since he was a kid in Providence. Then he’s the extra defenseman who shows up in camp the same year Orr does. Sleeman spent a year in Toronto, a year of throwing his elbows around like they were scythes and he was ass-deep in hay. Sleeman picked up so many penalties that the Leafs sent him down to the minors. One morning he woke up in a motel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his nose broken and his eye closed from a fight in the previous night’s game, and said “The hell with it.” He turned in his equipment and went back to New England, where he had grown up dreaming of playing for the Bruins. Now he was just some guy who once came this close to an NHL career, and that’s when Wally Sleeman got himself a job on the police force.

  “So anyway, ya can’t call him Fat Eddie any more, right? Even if he was the same old lardass.”

  After the interruption by Morgan, Sleeman had resumed carving his way through the crab cakes with his fork, his elbows sticking out like a bird’s wings, the same way he would set them going into a corner, chasing
a hockey puck. His pink scalp shone through the few remaining hairs on his head. “I mean, these days you can’t say somebody’s fat, you can’t say somebody’s crippled, even if they got no legs and they’re pushin’ themselves across the street on a skateboard, right? So we can’t call him Fat Eddie anymore.” He filled his mouth with a slab of crab cake the size of a playing card.

  McGuire pried open another mussel, avoiding the sight of the half-chewed crab cake in Sleeman’s mouth. “So now he’s just Eddie?”

  “Naw.” Sleeman leaned back in his chair and looked around the room again, this time as though searching for something he had never seen before, or something he saw once and never wanted to encounter again. “See, him and Donovan are buddies now.”

  “Phil Donovan and Eddie?”

  “Yeah.” Sleeman’s hand seized the bottle of beer and brought it to his mouth. “Eddie’s always bitchin’ about how things ain’t bein’ run tight enough, and Donovan’s always agreein’ with him, kissin’ Eddie’s ass before turnin’ around and kickin’ everybody else’s. The two of ’em are a pair.” He inhaled a mouthful of Moosehead. “We call ’em Snit and Snot.”

  “How’re you getting on with DeLisle?”

  Frank DeLisle was a straight-up cop, who bolstered his street experience with academic credentials, and indicated with a silent glare or a cautious word that he expected everyone to act as if they harboured ambitions to become police commissioner. DeLisle avoided profanity; he added new photographs of his family to the wall behind his desk on Berkeley Street each month; and he refused to accept any excuse for deviating from the Police Procedural Manual.

  “DeLisle’s ass is so tight,” Ollie Schantz observed to McGuire one day, “the guy could eat coal and shit diamonds.”

  “Frank’s okay I guess, when he’s not preachin’,” Sleeman said. He finished the last crab cake. “He’s always tellin’ me to dress better, eat better. Even said I should either take out a better class of women or try to get back with my wife. So I say to him, ‘Make up your mind, Frank. You want me to mix with a better class of women, or you want me to get back with the wife?’” He drained his beer and scanned the restaurant again. From their table in the corner, Richard Morgan and his friends were gesturing towards Sleeman, their faces expressing disapproval. Sleeman smiled and waved one hand, its middle finger extended vertically. “You hear about that black kid, the one who came at you on the Common?”