Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  McGuire recalled the afternoon in the church in Harvard Yard, when she reacted to the organist’s curse with a sudden smile. He wanted to see that smile again.

  “Do you want to hear more?” she asked him. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

  “Sure.”

  “Because this is the hardest part of all to talk about.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A few months after she had moved into the downtown apartment, Myers suggested she might want to find another job. He gave many reasons. She was far too qualified for the work he was asking her to do. He was looking for ways to reduce overhead. She should gain wider experience.

  He told her she had a wonderful mind for figures, and that her future lay in finance, probably banking or investment. One day he pulled her into his office from the hall and told her he had heard the Pinehurst Savings and Loan branch a block away was looking for someone in the securities department. When she protested she knew nothing about the business, he handed her a letter he had drafted, praising her ability as a student and identifying her as a top graduate of the Back Bay School of Business, specializing in financial management. He had already made an appointment for her to meet the manager that afternoon.

  The S&L manager was impressed by Myers’s recommendation, and Susan was hired immediately. To her surprise she enjoyed the work and the staff, and especially the customer contact. Soon many of the S&L’s customers began asking for her, seeking her out because of her warmth, and her genuine concern about them. Many of the customers were older people, at or near retirement, searching for ways to maximize their investments.

  A week later, Myers moved his business account there.

  Soon after, Myers and his wife separated, and he and Susan moved to Marlborough Street in the most luxurious area of the Back Bay, a two-level condominium in an elegant brownstone. Myers took a new interest in Susan’s children, and insisted on furnishing a guest room for them in the condominium. He took the children with him on weekend vacation trips, spur-of-the-moment long weekends in Florida or the Bahamas, where he bought them expensive gifts.

  “You have to understand what I had given up for this man,” Susan said. They were on Boylston Street now. “My home, my children, so much of my happiness, in a way. And he could be charming. He knew how to combine romanticism with a kind of danger, I guess. I had been a sheltered little girl, and then a sheltered wife. When it all blew up in my face, I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.”

  “So you let some tough guy fool you with his gentle side.”

  “It wasn’t just that. I started feeling as if I had fewer choices to make. I would stay with Ross until I could decide where to go, what to do. That’s what I kept telling myself.”

  He became more manic, wilder in his moods. He brought her breakfast in bed some mornings, and wouldn’t be seen until the early hours of the following day. He began lying to her and she began lying to herself, accepting his apologies and believing his promises to marry her.

  He would surprise her with gifts for her and the children, when they were with her. But as his apparent generosity increased, his dark side grew blacker. Once, in a fit of rage, he slapped her so hard she was knocked across the bed and collapsed in a heap on the floor, crying and holding her face, while he stood over her and berated her, calling her a cheap slut and a terrible mother, telling her that Thomas should have shot her after all, then lifting her in his arms and setting her on the bed, soothing her, bringing a cold cloth for her bruised face and assuring her that he loved her, he needed her, but there was just so much pressure in his life.

  “He was controlling you,” McGuire said. He was looking ahead, scanning the street as he always did.

  “Totally. It was pathological. That’s not my word. That’s what the prison psychologist called it. I . . . What’s wrong?”

  McGuire had pulled to the curb and was staring through the windshield. Susan followed the line of his sight. There were few pedestrians. The air had grown cool and damp. The retail shops were closed and darkened. A man and woman were approaching, locked in conversation. Against the display wall of a menswear shop, next to a darkened service alley, a street beggar stood, wrapped in a blanket, smiling at the approaching couple.

  “Is something wrong?” Susan said.

  McGuire eased the car ahead, moving slowly, looking at the beggar as though willing the man to meet his gaze. He accelerated suddenly, swiveling his head from side to side. “Do you see a cop?” he said. They were moving down Boylston Street again. The traffic was light, and at the next corner McGuire swung right.

  “Why do you want a policeman?” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “We need a cop,” McGuire said. At the intersection he swung right again, down a deserted residential street. McGuire swore and the Chrysler accelerated again. “Keep your head down and hang on,” he told Susan.

  “What are you doing?” One hand gripped the door handle, and she reached the other for the dashboard to steady herself. “What’s wrong?”

  They were almost at the next intersection. “Tell me if you see a telephone booth. Or a cop.” He turned right, heading back to Boylston again. “I might have to let you out at the corner.”

  “Don’t let me out,” she said. “I’m staying here. I want to see what it is that’s turning you into a madman.”

  McGuire glanced over at her. In spite of himself, he grinned at her face, the resolve in her expression.

  McGuire braked to a stop, looked along the sidewalk, and accelerated again. The Chrysler swung onto Boylston, the rear of the car fishtailing with the sharp turn and the car’s speed. “Get under the dashboard,” he said.

  She did as he ordered, keeping her head just high enough to see what he was about to do. The street beggar was gone, leaving his blanket on the sidewalk like a shed skin. The man and woman who had been locked in heated conversation were nowhere to be seen.

  McGuire swung the car into the darkened alley. He opened the door on his side of the car and shouted, his voice echoing between the brick walls, “Hayhurst!” and switched the headlights to high beams. In their sudden glare, a woman ran to huddle against the wall on the passenger side. A man stumbled towards her, away from the same street beggar who had been on the sidewalk in front of the menswear shop. The woman was frantic, panic-stricken. The man with whom she had been in such animated discussion two minutes earlier fell to his knees and began crawling towards her. The beggar stood with one hand raised to his eyes, protecting them from the glare of McGuire’s headlights. In his other hand, he held a small black pistol.

  “Stay down,” McGuire shouted, and he accelerated the car, keeping it to the left, on the side of the alley where Hayhurst stood, and away from the two tourists.

  Hayhurst shot once towards the oncoming car. He turned to run, extending his hand back and blindly shooting at the car a second time. Then, with McGuire approaching, he flattened himself against the wall, arms outstretched, to let it pass. McGuire pressed the driver’s side door open until it connected with the brick wall and dragged against it in a shower of sparks. The car’s speed was almost thirty miles an hour when the door collided with Hayhurst, who screamed loudly enough to be heard above the sound of the car’s motor. The force of the impact drove the door back against McGuire’s shoulder, and he winced before braking to a stop and looking over at Susan. “You all right?” he asked, and she nodded, her cheek pressed against the glove compartment.

  He squeezed out between the battered door of the car and the brick wall and trotted back to Hayhurst, who was rolling from side to side on the concrete alley, spewing foul words and phrases. One side of his face was bloodied, and one leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. McGuire ignored him until he located the Beretta. He moved the gun further away from Hayhurst’s reach with his foot and returned to kneel next to him. Hayhurst was grimacing as he spoke. In the light of the car’s headlights, reflecte
d from the walls of the alley, McGuire saw the gold incisor tooth. “You are one sorry bad-ass,” he said.

  Behind him he heard the man who had been scrambling away from Hayhurst shouting for police at the top of his lungs, trotting towards Boylston Street. Across the alley, Susan was assisting the woman to her feet, looking from her to McGuire and back again, as though trying to connect the two images, or simply to convince herself that it was all real, that she really had made some sort of metaphysical leap from the quiet security of McGuire’s car to a violent street episode.

  “We could make a hell of a team.”

  McGuire handed Susan a coffee from the machine on the Criminal Investigations floor at Berkeley Street police headquarters.

  She took it in both shaking hands. “No, thank you,” she said. “I want to get out of here.”

  “We will. Soon.”

  She was looking around, studying the faces of everyone she saw. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “If it matters, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day with me.” McGuire sat next to her. “If I had seen a cop around, if I carried a cellphone. . . .”

  “Buy a cellphone,” she said.

  “He might have killed them, you know.” The man and wife, McGuire had learned, were from upstate New York. They had been arguing because the woman felt her husband was flirting with a waitress at the restaurant they had just left. Now they were seated, holding hands and leaning towards each other, at Wally Sleeman’s desk, providing him with a statement. “Even if I’d called right away, he could have shot them both and been gone.” An hour had passed since the Boston police arrived at the alley, brought by the husband’s shouts and reports of gunfire. They found McGuire standing over the injured Hayhurst and watching his car’s radiator leaking its contents onto the ground.

  “What if that man, that Hayhurst character, had stayed in the middle of the alley, instead of trying to get out of your way?” she asked. “What would you have done then? Run him down with the car?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re serious? You would have killed him.”

  McGuire looked away.

  She stood up and walked to a window. When he followed her, she turned away, avoiding his eyes. “You don’t have children, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I could tell. Something happens when you have children. A woman I knew told me that. She thinks it only happens to women, and maybe she’s right. She worked as a nurse in the trauma ward of a hospital for three years. She loved it. People would arrive with broken bones, gunshot wounds, limbs torn off, and she would be right in there, ignoring the blood and gore, and the screams. She said it was the biggest rush she ever had, working the night shift in the trauma ward. Then she took a year off to have a baby, and when she returned she couldn’t do it anymore. She was horrified by it all. She kept seeing these people as babies, like her own, I suppose, and she couldn’t bear being in the same room with them.” She turned to look at McGuire. “I hate what happened tonight, all the violence and intensity. Hate it. I want nothing more . . .” She caught her breath, and began again. “I want nothing more than to hug my babies, my children. That’s what Orin Flanigan said he would help me do, if he could. Find my husband and my children. I was so horrified tonight, and I looked at you and realized that you loved it. You’ve been so sweet to me, nicer than anyone else besides Orin. And then I see that side of you.”

  “I did it for over twenty years,” McGuire said. “It all came back, I guess.”

  She looked at him, saying nothing, then began scanning the faces of detectives and police officers as they passed.

  “Joe.” Wally Sleeman was walking towards him, carrying a clipboard and pen. “Need your statement now.”

  “What do you hear about Hayhurst?” McGuire said. “How’s he doing?”

  “Who cares?” Sleeman said. “Broken leg, cracked ribs, possible cracked pelvis. Cuts, abrasions, contusions. Listen, you could have backed over that son of a bitch a couple times and nobody would have complained. How the hell’d you spot him, anyway?”

  “Just keep scanning the faces until something clicks. Who ever saw a street beggar with a gold tooth?”

  “Never thought he’d be out in the open, working Boylston. We had everybody checking crack houses down along Atlantic Street, in that area. We were getting leads he was back on his home turf, and that’s where Frank sent everybody. Nobody’s checking street people. Face it, you got lucky.” Sleeman was watching Susan. “I’m taking your date back to my desk for his statement, ma’am,” Sleeman said to her. “Won’t be five, ten minutes, then I’ll need to talk to you, okay?”

  Susan smiled and nodded.

  “Nice,” Sleeman said when they reached his desk. “Gettin’ friendly with her?”

  McGuire said he hoped to.

  “More luck,” Sleeman said. “The way I see it, McGuire, you’re so lucky that the day it rains gold, you’ll be carrying a fucking tuba.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You know you can’t have your car back, even if that piece of crap could still run,” Sleeman told McGuire. It was almost eleven o’clock. Sleeman was reviewing the statements McGuire and Susan had signed. “Not until we nail things down, couple of days maybe.”

  “If you can’t put a new transmission in it, forget about giving it back,” McGuire said.

  “You want me to run you guys somewhere?” Sleeman looked at McGuire. “You going back to Revere Beach?”

  “We’ll take a cab,” McGuire said.

  “I gotta walk you out, this time of the night. I’ll get you out the back way. We got all the media squirrels downstairs in front, waitin’ for me to come down, do my dog-and-pony show. You guys want interviews? They’ve been yellin’ for interviews.”

  McGuire shook his head, and Susan said “God, no.”

  Sleeman led them down the corridor towards the elevators, McGuire holding Susan’s hand as they walked. “You know one of the best parts of this?” Sleeman said. “Frankie tight-ass took a couple days off to go down to the Cape for a break. He’s the lead guy, the one who bragged that he’d bring Hayhurst in all by himself. He’ll be banging his head against the wall when he hears about this. You make the collar and you’re not even carrying a badge, and I get to make the announcement to the media squirrels.” Sleeman laughed as though he had just heard an especially rude and funny story.

  “Let’s find a quiet place for coffee,” McGuire said to Susan when they were outside.

  “I can’t talk now. How can I talk about me after what just happened?” Susan squeezed his hand. “I’m still shaking.”

  “You’ll be shaking more later, when you have time to think about it. That’s what happens.”

  They chose a rear booth in the first restaurant they encountered. Both ordered black coffee.

  “Something else was bothering you back there on Berkeley Street,” McGuire said. “You kept looking around as though you were expecting to see somebody you knew.”

  She nodded.

  “Who? The cop who arrested you?”

  “No. Somebody else.”

  McGuire waited. When she didn’t speak, he reached across to touch her hand. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should wait for some other time to finish your story.”

  She shook her head and managed a smile. “If I don’t get through it tonight, I might never get the courage to tell you again.” She looked at the clock at the front of the restaurant. “I have to be checked in by midnight. Tomorrow’s my first day without bed check. I can start looking for a place to stay.”

  “I’ll help you,” McGuire said. He smiled tightly. “We’ll fill up our day. You go looking for an apartment, and I’ll start shopping for a car.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, what happened tonight?” she asked him. “You almost witness a murder, you get shot at, you nearly kill a man, and you act l
ike . . . like some guy who’s just finished his shift driving a bus or something.”

  “It’ll bother me later,” McGuire said. “When I’m alone and start thinking about it, yeah, I’ll get the shakes a little, wonder if I could have handled things differently. Right now, I want to concentrate on you. I want to hear what happened between you and Ross Myers, and how Orin Flanigan got involved. You can finish telling me about it, or you can sit there wondering how close Hayhurst’s bullet came to you. Believe me, thinking about that stuff does no good at all.” He reached across to squeeze her hand again. “Tell me about you. I want to know.”

  She sipped her coffee and stared down into it as she spoke. “I had only been working at the S&L for a few weeks when Ross started pressuring me to do things, things I could never imagine myself doing.”

  It began with a $20,000 check, postdated two weeks later. Someone had given him the check as an investment in his company, Myers explained. He couldn’t wait two weeks. He needed the money immediately, and he asked her to credit his account until the check could be cashed, telling her it would be covered anyway, so no one would be the wiser. She resisted that request and another, upset and disturbed that he could ask her.

  A week later, he asked Susan to deposit a $30,000 check for him. Automatically, she told him she couldn’t do it, but he laughed and threw her the check and told her to look at it. It was genuine, a cashier’s check. He said there would be more like them and she could relax, everything was fine now, everything was genuine.

  He broke through her resistance one Friday morning when he said another cashier’s check would be coming for the same amount on Monday, but he needed two months’ rent on the business-school office that day in order to extend the lease. A travel agency wanted the space, and if the money wasn’t in the landlord’s hands by noon, he would lose the lease and the business. All he needed was a weekend float. The money would be deposited on Monday, and everything would be fine. The business was turning around, perhaps they could sell the condo and buy a house up near Cape Ann, where she always wanted to live, where the children could visit.