“No, not the same thing. Not even close.” She brushed by him to stand near the window, staring out at the night. “Do you know what people call me, what they’ve been calling me since he came back home strapped in his bed?”
McGuire watched her, waiting.
“They call me a heroine, a saint, all of that crap. They say it to my face and smile like I’m supposed to feel good about it. Well, nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be a saint. Nobody ever gave me a choice in the matter. And I’m sick of it.” She began to cry. “I’m sick of it. And what I want, what I needed most of all, was my own hero, not somebody who lies in bed like a baby all day, but somebody who can hold me. Somebody I don’t have to be a saint with.”
“Okay,” McGuire said. “Okay, okay. But is there any room for, I don’t know, honesty here?”
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “No, as a matter of fact, this isn’t the time for honesty. Not right now. Not yet.” She smoothed her skirt and stared down at her hands. “I’m sorry. I know you’re doing this because you care for Ollie.”
“So do you.”
“That’s what’s killing me.” She walked to him and kissed him on the cheek, and before he could react she swept by him and up the stairs, leaving him alone in the near darkness to wonder why, in spite of the many times he felt totally in control of a situation, in total mastery of every event, there were so many others in which he was helpless and confused, like a man on a raft with no land in sight.
The next morning in his office he was filling the coffeemaker when Lorna entered without knocking. She wore a plaid shirt-waist dress that made her look more suburban somehow, less like a downtown woman.
“How’re you doing?” McGuire said.
“Not very good.” She walked to the corner of his desk and began tracing circles on it with a forefinger.
“What’s the matter?” The coffeemaker began to gurgle obediently.
“I missed you last night.”
“I had something to do. And I wouldn’t have been very good company anyway.”
“Are you still thinking about that kid, and those two men he killed?”
McGuire nodded. “And other things.”
“I thought you might call. I mean, we can talk about it, if it makes you feel better.”
“Sorry. How about dinner tonight?”
Her face brightened, but there was something else, something holding her back. “I guess you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?”
“About Orin. Nobody knows where he is.” She walked to stand beside him and stare into the glass coffee pot. “He was supposed to come back by yesterday. His wife’s frantic and everybody’s going nuts upstairs . . .”
Behind her, McGuire’s door opened. Richard Pinnington entered wearing a midnight-blue suit and a puzzled expression. “Lorna,” he said. He flashed a smile that pulled the corners of his mouth apart.
She smiled at McGuire, then brushed past the other man, closing the door behind her.
“She tell you about Orin?” Pinnington said. His eyes swept McGuire’s office as though taking inventory.
“Something about him missing.” McGuire back sat in his chair.
“It’s not like Orin,” Pinnington said. “Not like him at all.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and studied his shoes as he spoke. “Situation like this, even with a man like Orin, you get worried, concerned.”
“It could be nothing,” McGuire said. “A weekend fling with some woman . . .”
Pinnington looked at McGuire sharply. “What makes you say that?”
McGuire shrugged. He was thinking of the blond-haired woman. He hadn’t seen her since Flanigan left.
“Orin’s wife’s frantic,” Pinnington said. “He hasn’t called since he left. Lorna doesn’t know where he went. Just said it had something to do with a client. Whatever he’s doing, he appears to be doing it on his own. There’s nothing in his files, nothing on his calendar, that fits his work for the firm.” He shot his eyes towards McGuire. “You were doing something for him, weren’t you? Some project?”
McGuire opened a drawer of his desk, removed Flanigan’s memo, and handed it to Pinnington.
“What did you learn?” Pinnington asked when he finished reading.
McGuire told him about the search for Myers and the trip to Annapolis.
“You gave him nothing in writing?”
“He didn’t want anything in writing. Just where this guy was and what he was doing.”
“I’ll keep this.”
McGuire nodded.
Pinnington paused at the door. “Lorna’s a nice girl, isn’t she?” Pinnington was of a generation that referred to any woman without either a husband or a university degree as a girl, regardless of her age.
McGuire agreed.
“Some firms, you know, have policies against romantic relationships developing among the staff . . .”
“You want me to stop seeing her?” McGuire said.
Pinnington smiled. “No, just thought I’d mention it.” He waved Flanigan’s memo. “Compared to this, it’s a minor concern to me. Quite minor.”
McGuire worked through the rest of the morning, calling contacts on the street and flipping through the statements, provided by Barry Cassidy, which described his client’s suspicion of fraud. At noon, Lorna brought him a cheese Danish and a bottle of sparkling fruit juice. “Pasta again tonight?” she asked, and McGuire nodded. “Still no word from Orin,” she said. “I’m so worried, Joe.”
McGuire asked if the police had been called.
“Uh-huh. By his wife. But she doesn’t think they’re taking it seriously.”
“They won’t, for about a week,” McGuire said. “Or until somebody comes up with something.”
“Like what?”
McGuire shrugged. “Missing money. An abandoned car. A body.”
“You can’t be serious.” Her eyes flooded with tears. “Nobody would want to hurt Orin!”
“Maybe Orin isn’t hurt,” McGuire said. “Maybe Orin’s in Switzerland, making up a code name for his brand-new bank account.”
“Not Orin. You don’t know Orin. He told me . . .” She withdrew a tissue from the pocket of her dress and used it to dab at her eyes. “He told me one day that the biggest disappointment in his life, next to his daughter’s murder, was that he couldn’t make things right as often as he wanted. He said he became a lawyer because he thought lawyers could do that, make things right, and he said after thirty years he finally had to admit they don’t do those things. Sometimes they even make them worse.”
“Sounds as if he was ready to quit his profession.”
“He gets so frustrated, watching bad things happen to innocent people. The day after he met you, he said maybe he should have become a police officer. Maybe he could have made more of a difference that way.”
“If he thinks that,” McGuire said, “he’s a damn fool.”
She paused at the door. “I have to get back upstairs. Mister Pinnington’s coming over to check Orin’s files, go over his accounts. I’ll probably be stuck at my desk the rest of the day. Can I get a ride home?”
“Sure. We’ll pick up a bottle of wine on the way.”
By two o’clock, McGuire could find no evidence of criminal activity in Cassidy’s case, as seen from a police officer’s point of view. Bad management on the part of the client’s customer, perhaps. Poor judgment in a few decisions. Maybe even sloppy bookkeeping. But nothing that would persuade a prosecuting attorney to consider criminal charges.
He also realized he didn’t have a complete set of files. A few were missing, and some names on documents and correspondence had been blacked out with heavy ink. When McGuire called Cassidy to inquire about the files, the lawyer assured him that the missing documents were irrelevant. When McGuire called again an hour later, asking
about the blacked-out names, Cassidy told him it was a matter of client confidentiality and demanded to know when McGuire would have his report completed.
McGuire said “Probably tomorrow,” and Cassidy snapped “Good!” and hung up. McGuire sat back in his chair, sweeping his anger at Cassidy from his mind and permitting himself to dwell on Ronnie’s infidelity.
We are all, McGuire had read somewhere years earlier, responsible for our own happiness. Depend on yourself for your joy, your satisfaction, your ability to avoid the darker sides of your soul, those that emerge at four in the morning and occupy the empty side of your bed. That’s what he believed it meant. How could he judge Ronnie for doing whatever it took to pursue her idea of happiness? How could he expect anyone to understand the things he had done in pursuit of the same thing?
He was pondering that idea when Richard Pinnington entered without knocking. Pinnington was holding Flanigan’s memo to McGuire and a legal-sized file folder, and his smile was thin, nervous, and forced.
“Sorry to trouble you again.” Pinnington closed the door behind him. “There’s something about this memo Orin gave you.”
“What’s that?” McGuire leaned back in his chair, his arms folded.
“Orin wanted you to charge your time and expenses to this docket, right?” He held a sheet of paper for McGuire to inspect.
“Yeah, and I did. It came to about a thousand dollars.”
Pinnington opened the file folder. McGuire noticed his receipts clipped to the inside. “One thousand and fourteen fifty-five,” he said, peering over his glasses. “Plus four hundred dollars to Libby somebody.”
“Skip tracer.”
“Nearly a hundred dollars in incidental expenses?”
“Four bottles of good Scotch to a guy on Berkeley Street, did some digging for me. You want his name?”
“Definitely not.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“And six hundred dollars of your time.”
“Two and a half days. What’s the problem?”
Pinnington closed the file folder and stared at it. “The problem is, Orin charged all of this to a docket that doesn’t make sense. A client in Brookline. Wealthy family, five kids. A particularly messy divorce made more difficult due to all the assets involved. We’re acting on behalf of the husband for shared custody rights, overseeing transfer of assets, setting up of trusts, all of that. The wife wants to move back to Canada, where some of the assets are held. Nothing too unusual, except that it’s complex and we’ll probably be involved for a year, maybe more . . .”
“And there’s a chunk of money missing.”
Pinnington shook his head. “No, not as far as we can tell. Everything’s on the up-and-up, every penny accounted for. It’s just that Orin gave you this docket for your services and expenses. But there is nothing in this case that even remotely concerns an individual named Myers. No reason for Orin to get you involved in this at all.”
“Unless Orin was burying expenses.”
Pinnington nodded.
“In a case so big and complicated that a couple of grand could sneak past in the billing and nobody would question it.”
Pinnington stared back at McGuire. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
McGuire shook his head. “You?”
Pinnington looked away, deciding whether to answer. “Orin’s a bit of a softy, you know. Never learned to keep his emotions out of things somehow. It makes him a good lawyer in some ways, of course. He can be brilliant in the courtroom, wearing his client’s heart on his sleeve, and sometimes even his own. But he has paid for it, emotionally.”
“Anything I can do?”
Another tight, cool smile. “You could always find Orin, I guess.”
“Talked to the police yet?”
“Orin’s wife has, of course, but we have to, uh . . .”
“Keep this quiet in case your clients find out.”
“To this point, there’s nothing for them to discover. Nothing to be concerned about. But yes, we are waiting to evaluate the situation.” Pinnington frowned, turned away, then looked back as though having made a difficult decision. “You know a woman named Susan Schaeffer?” he asked. “In her mid-thirties? Kind of blond hair?”
McGuire nodded. “Orin’s friend. She comes up to visit him. I’ve seen her a couple of times.”
“Lorna says she’s been there every day at noon for three weeks or more, whenever Orin’s not in court.”
McGuire nodded again. “Well, there you are.”
“Where are we?”
“Orin’s gone middle-age crazy. Right now, they’re probably naked in a hammock together down in . . .”
“Who?”
“Orin and the Schaeffer woman.” Even as he spoke the words, McGuire admitted to himself he was envious, perhaps a little jealous.
Pinnington shook his head. “This Schaeffer person isn’t with Orin. She was in here today. She sat outside Orin’s office for an hour, crying,” he said. “Kept asking about Orin, where he was, if we had heard anything. She didn’t believe us when we said we knew nothing. Lorna finally had to ask her to leave.”
“They’re tracing his telephone calls,” Lorna said when she got into McGuire’s car after work that evening.
McGuire swung onto State Street and stared at the line of cars ahead of him, all enveloped in a light gray rain. Sometimes Boston was nothing more than a badly designed parking lot. Maybe McGuire didn’t need a car at all. Maybe if he just moved downtown . . . He caught himself thinking of Ronnie again, wondering where she would be sleeping tonight, wondering how long it would take Ollie to discover and what he would do. What could he do? McGuire asked himself. Nothing except lie there and feel the pain.
The windshield wipers swept back and forth, and the heater made a sound that was something between a purr and a clatter. Lorna stared out her side window. An opening in the traffic appeared ahead of them, and McGuire lurched the car forward, swung towards the curb lane, and drove a precious fifty feet before encountering the next segment of the traffic morass.
“And his credit cards,” Lorna said in a dull voice. She might have been reciting a mantra. “They’re looking at his credit-card statements. Dick Pinnington says the police are coming by tomorrow. They’re finally taking it seriously, him missing, I mean . . .”
“Well, middle-aged professional guy goes missing,” McGuire started to explain, “and the first thing you think of . . .”
“There she is.” Lorna gestured out the window.
McGuire followed her gaze to see Susan Schaeffer standing in the doorway of a clothing shop, out of the rain. She wore a shapeless fawn-coloured raincoat, her hands thrust in the pockets, and she was scanning the windows of the office buildings and passing cars as though searching for a familiar face. Lorna lowered her side window.
“Ask her if she needs a ride,” McGuire said.
“You need a ride?” Lorna called.
At the sight of Lorna, the other woman smiled. It was part joy at recognition of a familiar face, part nervousness, but something in McGuire responded to the light it generated and the sense, once again, that Susan Schaeffer was an immensely attractive woman whose beauty was muted by the weight of despair.
“You sure?” Lorna called out.
The woman mouthed “Thank you,” then set out, her hands still in her pockets, her head down as though searching for crevices in the sidewalk that might swallow her from sight.
“I hear you had to ask her to leave today.” McGuire moved the car ahead another few feet.
“She’s a mess. I’ve never seen a woman such a mess.” Lorna’s left hand crept towards McGuire and rested on his thigh.
“What’s the real story about her?”
“I really don’t know. She first showed up five or six weeks ago. She had an appointment with Orin, a regular
one. Then she started coming by every day that Orin was there. Usually, they would go out together for lunch. At first she was happy, a lot happier then now, that’s for sure. You know, kind of a nervous happiness.”
“Flanigan ever say anything about her?”
“Just introduced us. Said she was a friend.”
“That’s all?”
“A little more but . . . One day, he walked her down the corridor when she left, and when he came back he looked really sad. I said, ‘Anything wrong, Mr. Flanigan?’ And he looked at me in a kind of funny way and said, ‘She’s an innocent.’”
“She’s innocent?”
“No, she’s an innocent. That’s how he put it. ‘She’s an innocent.’”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I. But Orin likes her. I think she looks a little bit like his daughter. Did you see that picture of Orin’s daughter on his side desk? Don’t you think they look similar?”
“Now that you mention it,” McGuire said, swinging the car into an open lane, “she does.”
At Lorna’s apartment she ordered Chinese food, and they ate from containers, watching the television news together in her cluttered living room. The hunt for Freeman Hayhurst rated only a passing mention; there was nothing new to report. McGuire declined a glass of wine and read the newspaper, while Lorna stretched out on the sofa to watch a game show. When he looked up half an hour later she was sleeping, her head resting against the arm of the sofa and her mouth slightly open, snoring gently with a sound that reminded McGuire of the heater fan in his car. He stared at her for several minutes, curious at his own reaction. No longer an object of lust and tenderness to him, she was simply another lonely middle-aged woman in his life.
“I’m a transfer stop,” a woman once told McGuire. She had been shrugging into her coat, avoiding his eyes as she spoke, “and you’re riding to the end of the line, right?” She said goodbye without looking back at him and, while he would think of her fondly whenever she invaded his memory, he didn’t miss her. He missed so few of them.
He carried Lorna to her bed, where he lay beside her. She smiled, her eyes still closed, and snuggled against him, touching her lips to his cheek. He thought about undressing her, but closed his eyes instead. When he woke it was after three o’clock. Rising in the darkness and covering her with a quilt from a rocking chair in the corner, he let himself out of the apartment, closing the door behind him and listening for the lock to click into place.
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