Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “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.

  Chapter Seven

  McGuire’s flight out of Logan was at eight in the morning. On the way to the airport from Revere Beach his car coasted to a stop while the engine raced wildly. He pulled to the curb, shifted into neutral, then dropped the lever into drive. A faint, high-pitched sound leaked from somewhere near his right foot, like a kitten calling for its mother. It ended with a thump from the transmission, and the car began moving forward again.

  “Clunk,” McGuire mimicked the noise the transmission had just made. “Well, now I know your name, anyway.” He left the car in the airport parking garage without looking back at it, hoping someone would be foolish enough to steal it in his absence.

  At Baltimore Washington airport he picked up the keys to a new Ford, and set out for Annapolis. He was feeling more positive about his life than he had for months. The day was warm, and the air carried sea-smells from Chesapeake Bay. McGuire had passed through Annapolis several years earlier, and he recalled the old town’s colonial homes and busy harbour. In spite of the tourists and the dominating presence of the Naval Academy, the town remained in his mind as a tempting retreat, an enclave of taste and refinement. He remembered a basement jazz club at the Maryland Inn, and promised himself a dinner of crab cakes and beer and an hour or two of live jazz before returning to Boston.

  He found a parking meter on State House Circle and walked to Maryland Avenue, where a white wooden signboard with black lettering announced the Academy Bar and Grill.

  The door was locked. A menu displayed in a glass case told him the bar’s hours were 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. McGuire checked his watch; it was just past 10:30. He leaned to squint through the leaded window in the door, shielding his eyes with his hand. He could see several small tables, each with four captain’s chairs, set in a dark-paneled room. A long bar lined the left side of the room.

  He walked along Maryland Avenue to a side street, turned right, and found a service lane running behind the shops. A Budweiser truck was parked at the rear door of the bar, and McGuire passed a beer deliveryman leaving the rear of the building, wheeling an empty pushcart. The man nodded at McGuire, who smiled tightly and entered a storage area, where cases of beer were stacked almost to the ceiling. Another door led to a small food-storage and washing area. From there, McGuire could look into the kitchen on one side and the bar interior on the other. He waited for the deliveryman to drive away, then entered the darkened bar.

  A man’s nylon jacket was tossed over one of the high bar stools. Near it on the bar was a woman’s purse, made of cracked vinyl with peeling brass hinges. Two stemmed wine glasses, one empty, the other half-filled with tomato juice, sat further down the bar.

  On the floor, at the end of the bar nearest the street, he saw a woman’s shoe, a black high-heeled slingback. McGuire walked to the shoe and was looking down at it when he heard the sound.

  His first instinct was to seize a weapon, perhaps one of the bar stools. But instead he held his breath and tilted his head to one side, knowing the sound was familiar in one sense, foreign in another.

  He walked softly through the archway separating the bar from the dining room. At the back of the dining room, an open counter area fronted an empty cloakroom with bare wire hangers suspended from a worn metal pipe. The sounds came from the cloakroom, steady, rhythmic but unsynchronized, two voices and flesh speaking to themselves and each other.

  McGuire approached the counter and looked down at the floor. He saw the man’s bare back and legs, the trousers pulled down to his ankles, and the woman’s legs elevated and shaking like flames in the air. The woman’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut. The man’s mouth was groping for an exposed breast.

  McGuire turned and walked away, this time without any pretense of silence. He left the dining area, approached the bar, stood staring at his reflection in the mirror before thinking what the hell, and walked over to unlock the front door. Then, with a sweep of his hand, he tossed one of the wine glasses to the floor.

  The sounds from the cloakroom ceased, and he heard the rustle of frantic whispers.

  He knocked the other glass to the floor and sat on a bar stool, watching the mirror.

  It took perhaps a minute for the man to appear. He was taller and heavier than McGuire. His head was shaved and he wore a black goatee that looked dyed, a red golf shirt over gray cotton trousers, and leather deck shoes. A heavy gold chain sparkled around his neck, just beneath the swell of a slight double chin.

  “Hey, we’re not open yet, pal.” He was looking at McGuire in the mirror, his expression wary. One hand moved to his zipper to confirm his fly was closed.

  “Front door’s unlocked,” McGuire said. He glanced at the remains of the glasses. “Sorry about that. I get clumsy when I need a beer.”

  The other man walked to the front door, pulled it opened, cursed, slammed it shut, and set the lock again. He returned to the bar and sat in front of the woman’s purse, two stools from McGuire. He opened the purse, removed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, offered a cigarette to McGuire, who shook his head, lit one for himself, and inhaled a long breath of smoke before looking at McGuire again.

  “Three best things in the world, right?” he said, grinning. “A drink before and a cigarette after.” He took another puff on the cigarette. “So, you really want a beer?”

  “No.” McGuire swiveled in his chair, but before he could speak, a woman’s voice shouted from the rear of the dining room.

  “You mind bringing me my shoe?”

  The man with the cigarette hunched his shoulders and gave a small laugh. “Just a minute, we got company.”

  “Well, damn it . . .”

  “In a minute!” the man barked. He looked at McGuire. “Give ’em a little love, they think you’re their goddamn slave, right?”

  “I’m looking for somebody,” McGuire said.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man. Named Myers. Ross Randolph Myers.”

  The other man’s eyebrows moved up his forehead. “He owes you money, right?” He picked up the receipt left by the beer deliveryman and scanned it, then folded
and placed it behind the cash register.

  “Could be.”

  “Son of a gun’s always got people after him for money.”

  “I was told he hangs out here.”

  “Not any more. Like I said, he owes money.”

  “Know where I can find him?”

  The man placed the cigarette in his lips, tilted his head back, squinted his eyes, and looked at McGuire. “You a cop?”

  “No. You?”

  He stared at McGuire as though considering a reply, then turned away to face the mirror. “I can call somebody, might know where he is.”

  “That’d sure as hell be nice of you.”

  The man turned to look at McGuire as though he were surprised. “I’m a nice guy.” He extended a hand. “Name’s Wade, Rollie Wade. Yours?”

  McGuire ignored the hand. “Joe McGuire,” he said. “Just came down from Boston.”

  Wade nodded as though confirming a fact he already knew. “Wait here,” he said. He walked to the bar, picked up the telephone, and dialed a number. He began speaking in a low voice.

  McGuire strolled around the bar, examining the wooden frames on the booths, imagining it filled with students and professors each evening.

  “Got something for you.” Wade had hung up the telephone. “Sounds like he got himself a job over at Bay Ridge Yachts. You know where that is?”

  “No idea.”

  “You go through town, past the Marriott, across the lift bridge, and turn left. There’s a bunch of yacht brokerages in there, must be a dozen of ’em. He works for Bay Ridge. Now that’s the last I heard, okay? No guarantees. Sure you don’t want that beer?”

  McGuire thanked Wade, shook his head, and entered the dining room, moving towards the front door. From the corner of his eye he saw the woman duck behind the counter of the cloakroom, her wide eyes watching McGuire, one hand holding the side of her hair back, the other clutching a comb.

  After a few false turns, McGuire found the harbour, and the brown and boxy Marriott hotel. The harbour and slips were crowded with pleasure craft, most of them sailing vessels. Some of the boats were manned by tanned, fair-haired crewmembers wearing colourful shorts and tops. They were coiling lines, polishing hardware, or just doing their best to be seen aboard boats that cost more than the average American home.

  McGuire speculated briefly on the amount of money invested in the teak, fibreglass, aluminum, and canvas toys that moved through the harbour or floated in the hundreds of slips on its perimeter. Tens of thousands of dollars a year to stand or sit on a boat going nowhere. Like watching golf televised and elective celibacy, it was one of those activities some people chose that McGuire could never understand.

  He drove across the lift bridge and turned left to skirt the shoreline, scanning the brightly coloured wooden buildings. Bay Ridge Yacht Brokers was the seventh he counted, a large gray structure fronting the harbour, with a low brick office area along one side. McGuire parked his car next to a Volvo station wagon and entered.

  The walls of the brokerage were hung with framed colour photographs of yachts cutting their way through water of every shade of blue. A reception desk sat on a small carpeted area just inside the door. Three wooden desks, each with two upholstered chairs facing it, were located in the open office area. The office was empty except for a slim, dark-haired woman sitting at one of the desks, writing. She looked at him with eyes so shadowy they appeared black, set in a face with high cheekbones and a small, full-lipped mouth. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?” Her tone was cool, her smile careful and correct.

  “I’m looking for a man named Myers,” McGuire said, approaching her desk. “Ross Randolph Myers. I was told I could find him here.”

  “You could have yesterday,” the woman said. She resumed writing. “Mr. Myers is on his way to South Carolina, delivering a boat to a client.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “In about three days, maybe.”

  “Why maybe?”

  She stared at him like a parent deciding how to respond to an insolent child. “Because,” she spoke very slowly, measuring each syllable, “he may continue on to Fort Lauderdale to look at some boats for sale down there.”

  “And if he does?”

  “I wouldn’t expect him back for at least a week.” She continued staring at him, and McGuire noticed she was slightly cross-eyed. Her manner remained somewhere between aloof and irritated. “Who should I tell him called?”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice belied her words. “We cannot release personal information about our staff without their permission.”

  “But he lives around here? Somewhere in this vicinity?”

  “He works here. He shows up here every day when he’s not on a buying or selling trip. So I guess you can assume he lives in the area.”

  Lifting his eyes to the windows behind her, where several dozen boats were anchored, McGuire said: “What’s one of these toys cost?”

  She smiled without amusement. “Are you in the market?”

  “No, I’m just curious.”

  “If you have to ask . . .”

  “It means I just want to know,” McGuire interrupted. “That’s all.”

  “The cheapest thing out there is twenty thousand dollars,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust it in water deeper than a bathtub. If you want a real boat, you’ll have to spend at least fifty.”

  McGuire nodded. “And they’re all used.”

  She handed McGuire a sheet of paper. “Here are our most recent listings. If you see anything that interests you, perhaps I could have Mr. Myers call you. When he gets back.”

  “Do you have one of his business cards?” McGuire asked.

  “No, they’re on order. But you can have one of mine.” She handed him a card bearing her name in gilt lettering suspended over a colour photograph of a sailboat silhouetted against a setting sun. Mrs. Christine Diamond, Sales Administration.

  McGuire studied the list of boats for sale. The terms and descriptions meant nothing to him. The prices, most in six figures, were astonishing. He set the list back on her desk and pocketed the business card. “Thanks,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just stick to bungee jumping.”

  Outside, he started the car and glanced up to see the woman standing at the window watching him, her arms folded across her chest. McGuire smiled, waved in an exaggerated manner, and pulled away.

  He found three R. Myerses listed in the telephone book, and called them all. He reached two answering machines. One message was a woman’s voice; the other included the voices of two young children welcoming callers to the Myers Machine. The third call was answered by a human voice, an elderly woman who asked McGuire to repeat everything he said and told him she had never heard of anyone named Ross Randolph Myers.

  McGuire drove to the Annapolis police station. “I’m looking for someone named Ross Randolph Myers,” he told the duty officer. “Is that name known to you people? I hear he has a criminal record, and I thought he might be on your watch list.”

  The young officer grinned at him. “Watch list? Are you a police officer?”

  “Used to be,” McGuire smiled. “Doing a little private investigation. Just wondered if it rang a bell around here.”

  The cop leaned into a corridor and spoke to someone out of sight. “Don’t have anything on him,” he said when he turned back. “If he’s here, he’s keeping his nose clean.”

  McGuire nodded and left.

  He sat in the sun at a dockside café, watching yachts enter and leave the harbour. The weather in Annapolis was warm and the air was soft, summerlike. He pictured himself living aboard a yacht, and chose the one that might suit him best. It was a child’s game, like pressing your nose against a bicycle shop when you are six years old and you know that all the chrome and rubber and colour inside will never be your
s, not while you are young enough to be intoxicated by the sheer joy of owning it, but you look nevertheless, and you dream. He dreamed his way through two long beers.

  A Holiday Inn on the edge of town provided a room for the night, and after checking in, he drove to the jazz club in the basement of the Maryland Inn, where the crab cakes were bland but the trio, led by a middle-aged jazz guitarist, was hot. McGuire sat through two sets and three more bottles of beer.

  When he left the Maryland Inn he walked along State House Circle and entered the Academy Bar. Patrons were standing three deep along the bar area, and others, most of them St. John’s College students, were seated at every table. McGuire was standing in the doorway, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the light, when a waitress with shoulder-length brown hair scurried by, a tray of sandwiches on her shoulder. Their eyes locked for an instant, long enough for each to recognize the other, and the woman became so flustered she almost dropped the tray.

  McGuire was embarrassed at his voyeurism, his curiosity to see the woman as someone other than the pornographic actress she appeared to be a few hours ago, on the floor beneath the man with the shaved head. He edged his way through the crowd until he reached the cash register, where a man stood, alternately making change for the three waitresses and scanning the faces of the students, prepared to demand identification.

  “You run this place?” McGuire shouted at him above the talk, laughter, and atrocious music.

  “What?” The man tilted his head towards McGuire and looked at the floor, his mouth open.

  “I said, do you run this place?”

  The man straightened up. “Try to.”

  “You know a guy named Ross Myers?”

  “What about him?”

  “Know where he is?”

  “In jail, I hope. I ran the son of a bitch out of here.”

  “Was he a problem?”

  “Just your average class-A jerk. You’re not a buddy of his, are you?”