Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “Not a chance. I hear he got himself a job selling yachts.”

  The man snorted. “Stealing them probably.”

  “How about a guy named Rollie Wade?”

  “How do you know Rollie?”

  “Met him here this morning. Know where I can find him?”

  “Rollie? I dunno. At home, I guess, or maybe out on the water somewhere.”

  “Rollie’s a good guy?”

  “Sure. Known Rollie for years.” The man looked at McGuire and frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Just a guy looking for Myers. I went to the yacht brokerage where he’s supposed to be working, but I was told he’s on his way to South Carolina, maybe Florida.”

  The man took a credit card from a waitress and began processing it. “Yeah, well if he’s smart he’ll stay there. He comes back here, I’ll have his ass kicked into the bay.”

  “What’d he do to you?”

  “Same thing he’s done to everybody else he meets. Scams, lies. The guy’s scum.”

  McGuire watched the man in silence for another moment, then thanked him and drove back to the motel room in the fading light.

  There was a flight to Boston in the morning. He planned to be on it.

  Ronnie was shopping when McGuire arrived in Revere Beach before noon on Saturday. Ollie was too drowsy from the medication he took for his kidney infection to talk, so McGuire read a book, walked on the beach, had a cheeseburger and beer in a sports bar, and returned home to find Ronnie watching an old movie she had rented. A gin and orange juice was gripped in one hand. She nodded to him and returned her attention to the screen, where Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn were having dinner aboard a tour boat cruising the Seine.

  “Charade,” McGuire said after watching the screen for a moment. “Audrey Hepburn’s rich husband was murdered and a bunch of people are trying to get their hands on his money, right?”

  “Yes,” Ronnie said.

  “Cary Grant, James Coburn, George Kennedy . . . and Walter Matthau.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good movie.”

  Ronnie said nothing. Henry Mancini’s music played in the background. Audrey Hepburn’s face was bathed in candlelight.

  McGuire looked down to see tears on Ronnie’s cheeks. “A bad time?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He knelt next to her. “Do you want to talk?”

  She shook her head. He touched her on the shoulder, then climbed the stairs to his room.

  He took a bath, read some of his book, changed his clothes, and came downstairs just after seven. “You ready for that talk?” he asked as he helped Ronnie put away clean dishes.

  She gave him one of her shining smiles. “What talk?” she asked. Then she stepped towards him and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re sweet. But I don’t need a talk now. Thanks anyway.”

  “I’m having dinner tonight,” he said. “And not with Wally Sleeman.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  In the car he looked back at the house to see Ronnie silhouetted in the window, waiting for him to leave.

  Chapter Eight

  Lorna’s apartment on Park Drive was near a Mexican restaurant McGuire recalled visiting with his first wife. The city was like that: scattered with monuments to McGuire’s past lives, a cemetery of memories.

  She greeted him dressed in a crimson silk blouse beneath a dark jacket and skirt. Her makeup was heavier than before, and her hair was swept back dramatically from her face. She reached to kiss him on the cheek before he helped put her coat on.

  In the car she asked how his trip had been and McGuire said it was disappointing, the man he had been sent to find was somewhere on the ocean, sailing a yacht to South Carolina. Lorna spoke of the weather, and of the difficulty of finding good shoes at a reasonable price. McGuire tried to remain interested and to avoid wondering how many times Ronnie had been drinking alone and seething with bitterness. He couldn’t remember her drinking alone before. He had difficulty remembering her bitter.

  Seated in the dining room, Lorna toyed with an oversized earring and looked up at the vaulted ceiling. “It hasn’t changed a bit.” She dropped her hand from her ear and smiled at McGuire. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

  To McGuire’s surprise he grew relaxed and began to enjoy himself. When she reached to touch his hand, he smiled at her and she tightened her grip.

  In recent years, McGuire had found himself performing small gestures and making provocative comments to women, gauging their impact in advance and surprised at their success, like a musician who grows astonished at his own abilities in the middle of a concert performance. He told himself it was not manipulative but simply a new awareness of a talent he had developed through his adult life, and now used with greater skill than before.

  “You are a woman’s man trying to be a man’s man,” a former lover once told him. He recalled three dinners with her and two nights in her bed, and she had described him that way on their second evening together. She did not know it would be their final evening together. Nor, McGuire honestly believed, did he. He remembered her as a pleasant, insightful, and realistic woman who regarded their sexual adventures as little more than a passage in their private lives, and he was grateful when she accepted its ending—more abrupt and perhaps colder than McGuire intended—with grace and resignation. “You know how to do everything a woman likes,” she told him on that last night together. “And I don’t mean in bed. You listen. You try to understand. You seem to feel what a woman tells you. Do you know how few men can do that?”

  When he was alone, McGuire missed the company of a woman as a companion, someone to provide strength where he was weak. Yet often he felt disappointed and guilty when he admitted to himself, usually very early in the relationship, that his attraction to some new woman would not grow into the permanent comfort he knew he was seeking, and had been seeking since he was a young man, that it was simply a diversion from some destination he was not certain he would ever reach.

  He could no longer identify the destination. As the years passed, he recognized that the only deep-seated and sustained fear he had ever experienced was the fear of growing old alone.

  Lorna ordered Dover sole and salad. McGuire chose scallops and rice. They shared a bottle of Portuguese wine, at Lorna’s suggestion. “It’s the only nice memory I have of a trip I took there,” she said. “I love to travel.” She lifted the glass to her lips, her eyes fixed on his. “You?”

  McGuire told her he enjoyed traveling, but as he got older he lost his enthusiasm for traveling alone.

  “I know,” she said. “I hate it too. And traveling with girlfriends just isn’t the same.”

  McGuire asked why she had bad memories of Portugal.

  She smiled and shrugged. “I went there with a man I was supposed to marry. The one who was going to run a bed and breakfast with me in Cape Ann.” She sipped her wine and looked around the room as though she had just entered it. “I’ve given up hope of getting married again,” she said. “I mean, there are so few men who are worth marrying.”

  McGuire had heard this observation before, from almost every woman he had dated in the past few years. “It’s a candy store out there,” Wally Sleeman had told him over a beer at Zoot’s one day. Sleeman and his wife of twenty-three years had separated six months earlier and Sleeman had shown no regret, no despondency at all. “Women our age these days, they’re gettin’ desperate. Things start hangin’ funny on ’em and they figure the next boink they get could be their last. So you treat ’em like a lady and they think you’re Prince Charles, for Christ’s sake. Buy ’em a good dinner, don’t stare too much at their tits, open the car door for ’em, and next thing you know they’re draggin’ you by the dick to the bedroom. What the hell’s a guy our age in this town wanta get married for? It’d be like buyin’ a cow when you’
re livin’ in a dairy.”

  In the car on the way back to her apartment, Lorna laughed at his comments on Boston traffic. He listened to her tales of office politics, and how difficult they were for her to handle. She invited him upstairs for a coffee. In the small, brass elevator, when their hands touched, she seized his and held on.

  Inside her small apartment he helped her off with her coat, and after she hung it in the closet she took his, then turned to him and said, “Thank you for a wonderful dinner and a splendid evening.” She stood on her toes to kiss him, and when the kiss continued he began to probe with his tongue until he felt her lips part and he told himself, yes, here we go, and no, I’ll be damned if I’ll feel anything but good tonight and tomorrow.

  “I don’t know if I want to,” she said when she pulled away, studying his face. “I mean, I want to but . . .”

  “You need to know if I would see you again,” McGuire said.

  “Something like that. See me, you know, as a person, as somebody to have dinner and spend time with. Not just as . . .”

  “I’m not like that,” McGuire said.

  She smiled. “I know you’re not. I could tell. But some men are . . .”

  “I’m not some men.”

  “You want a drink?” she asked. She looked up at him from the crook of his arm, where her head rested. It was an hour later.

  McGuire said no.

  “You gonna stay the night? You can if you want. I’ll make us an early breakfast. What do you like?”

  “Orange juice. Coffee. Toast.”

  “That’s easy.”

  “Scrambled eggs. Crisp bacon. Home fries.”

  “Okay.”

  “Smoked salmon. Eggs Benedict. Honeydew melon.”

  “Hey!” She began to laugh.

  “Chicken à la king. Hot croissants . . .”

  “Stop it!” Laughing, she pushed against him and raised herself above him, smiling before lowering herself again.

  “Is this a permanent job at Zimmerman?” she asked.

  McGuire listened to a pendulum clock strike midnight somewhere in the apartment. Beyond the bedroom window a tree branch waved across a streetlight, flashes of white shimmering on the wall. McGuire sank lower into the bed, enjoying the snugness, familiarizing himself with new surroundings, new views, new intimacies. He wondered if women knew the extent of the gift they offered by inviting a man into their bed. “I don’t know,” he replied to her question. “Why?”

  “Because Orin said you were kind of like a hired gun, and nobody was sure how long you’d be sticking around.”

  McGuire shifted his hips towards her. “I don’t know how long I’ll stay. As long as Pinnington wants me, I guess. How’s Orin to work with?”

  She snuggled against him. “Like I said, Orin’s a nice man. He can get a bit weird at times, but that’s only because he’s so old-fashioned and straight. Actually it’s kind of refreshing.”

  McGuire looked down at her. She was tracing circles on his chest with one finger. “How old-fashioned is he?”

  “Well, he’d be shocked to hear about us. You and me in bed together, I mean.” She laughed, her finger still drawing circles. “I’m kind of surprised myself, tell the truth. Anyway, Orin and Nancy, that’s his wife, they’ve been married thirty-five years. I know because Nancy came to meet him one night after work, couple of months ago, and they went out for dinner on their anniversary. Nancy is so sweet, a lovely woman. He calls her every day. He worries about her, she worries about him. She’ll call and ask me if he’s been working too hard, if he’s had lunch, stuff like that. Maybe it’s because of what happened to their daughter.”

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know all the details, but apparently she was in college, Boston University, doing well, until she dropped out to marry some truck driver or something. Broke Orin’s heart. He and Nancy, they couldn’t believe it, this guy could hardly put two words together and she drops out of college to marry him. She ruined her life, living with this guy out on Dorchester, and then one day, they were only married a few months but he’d already beat her up some, and he ups and kills her. Beat her so badly that she went into a coma and didn’t come out of it. That was nearly fifteen years ago. Orin and Nancy, they never got over it. Connie Woodson, Mister Pinnington’s secretary, she told me about it. You meet her?” She looked up at him.

  McGuire nodded.

  “Anyway, Connie said their daughter, Orin and Nancy’s, was their only child. Thing like that happens, it either wrecks the marriage or makes it stronger. Guess it made Orin’s stronger. And it’s kind of ironic, you know, because Orin’s specialty is custody stuff, making sure kids get to be with good parents, so it’s really bizarre that no matter how hard he and his wife tried, they couldn’t save their own kid, you know? Isn’t that ironic?”

  McGuire agreed it was.

  “You got any kids?”

  McGuire said no.

  “I tell you about mine?”

  “You said you had two.” The clock still ticked, the shadows of the branches still moved across the wall.

  “Boy and a girl. My son lives in Nevada, deals blackjack in a casino. Not Las Vegas, a small town in the north, you probably never heard of it. My daughter’s out on the Cape, works in a restaurant there. I wanted both of them to go to college and get a degree, something I never had a chance to get. They had their chance and they blew it. But I still love them. You can’t stop loving your flesh and blood just because they disappoint you, right?”

  “What makes you sure Flanigan’s so faithful to his wife?” McGuire said.

  “I told you. He loves her. You can see it when the two of them are together. But you know, all lawyers are a little weird, I think.”

  “Even Orin?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “He sounds like such a straight arrow to me. What makes him weird?”

  “Well.” She studied the ceiling as though looking for her next words. “I don’t need to know what you were doing down there in Annapolis. First thing you learn in a law firm is not to ask questions. But remember the woman waiting to see Orin when you and I went for lunch the other day?”

  McGuire remembered her. The delicate features. The wide eyes. The slender figure. “Yes,” he said.

  “I think she has something to do with your going there.”

  McGuire was not surprised. “She’s a client?”

  “I don’t know what she is. But she’s definitely some kind of strange. Orin gets different when she’s around. Kind of nervous. He rushes her in and out, never tells me anything about her. Doesn’t even have a file or a docket on her, not one that I know about anyway. All I know is her name’s Susan something. Schaeffer, Susan Schaeffer. She started showing up about a month ago. Comes in practically every noon hour to see him, except when he’s in court.”

  “She only shows up at noon?”

  “Uh-huh. Sometimes she brings lunch for her and Orin, in a paper bag.” Lorna tilted her head to look up at him. “Do you think she’s attractive?”

  “Never thought about it,” McGuire lied.

  “Well she is, but she’s just about the saddest person you’ll ever meet.”

  “Orin seemed glad to see her the other day.”

  “Yeah, like I say, it’s strange.” Lorna was concentrating on McGuire’s chest again, twirling the hairs with her finger. “One day last week, I came into his office, I didn’t even know they were in there, and the two of them were hugging each other and crying like babies.”

  “But you don’t think Orin’s fooling around.”

  “No, but maybe he wants to. Or maybe not. He told me once that she reminds him of his daughter, so maybe that’s all it is. Who knows?” She sat up and stretched her arms above her head. “Sure you don’t want that drink now?”

  He reached to touch her back, stroki
ng the skin with his fingertips, and she lowered her arms and turned to face him, cupping her breasts in her hands again as though lifting them to where they had been twenty years earlier, and the gesture both excited and saddened him.

  He woke in the morning to see her watching him. She was seated on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a cheap robe embroidered with oriental scenes: Mount Fuji, a golden pagoda, and thin men pulling laughing women in rickshaws. He had been dreaming of something. The aroma of coffee had been in his dreams, and now it was in his nostrils. He turned his head to see coffee steaming from two porcelain cups on a silver tray, flanked by glasses of orange juice and a plate of toast.

  “We’re all out of eggs Benedict,” she said.

  An hour later he kissed her at the door before walking through the gray morning to his car, waving at her as she stood at the apartment window, where she promised she would be watching him, and waving again as he drove past. He felt good about himself, and he looked forward to seeing her again, to feeling himself enclosed in her body.

  Ronnie was seated at the kitchen table, the Sunday paper opened in front of her, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee. But instead of reading the newspaper, she was staring straight ahead, through the window that faced north, her focus somewhere beyond Maine.

  “Hey,” McGuire said. He bent from the waist to smile into her eyes. “You okay?”

  She smiled and nodded. “Sure. And I can tell you are.”

  McGuire shrugged.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Who?” But he knew.

  “Your new girlfriend.”

  “She’s nice.” He wished he had a photograph.

  “She wear you out?” There was no humour in the question, no sense of teasing, nor even interest. It was designed to needle, to hurt perhaps.

  “What kind of question is that?” McGuire’s smile faded and he remembered the strong gin and orange juice, the surprise at her unaccustomed anger, and her tears that flowed because of scenes from a forty-year-old romantic movie.

  “Just wondering.” She folded her hands in front of her and he felt her relax, felt her genuine concern for him. “I’m happy for you,” she said. “Honest. You want some breakfast?”