Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “You find anything else about those people who owned the house on Sea View?” McGuire watched a vintage Mercedes approach and pull onto the shoulder of the road.

  “One of the older families around here.” Morton glanced absently back at the German car to watch Blake Stevenson heave his heavy body from behind the wheel, his eyes wide in shock and surprise. “Rader, Ryder, something like that.”

  “My God, what happened?” Blake Stevenson walked toward McGuire and Morton, extending an arm toward the ruins. “This is terrible. Are you all right?” he asked, looking with concern at McGuire.

  McGuire nodded. “I was safe. In a hospital.”

  “What the devil is going on around here?” Stevenson looked at Morton. “You must have some idea who did this. This is a tragedy and an outrage. Shootings, fires . . . I can’t remember anything like this happening in Compton for years.”

  Morton ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck. “We’re following up leads,” he said, and McGuire snorted at the comment, a remark he had used so often to placate the press, the captain, the commissioner. There were no leads. There was nothing to follow.

  “Parker says you’re staying with him and June,” Blake Stevenson said to McGuire. “That true?”

  McGuire nodded. “For tonight.”

  “If you need anything, I expect you’ll let me know,” Stevenson said. “This is terrible, just terrible. . . .” He turned to the smoldering wreckage and thrust his hands in his pockets, his head shaking from side to side.

  “Looks like you’ve got some more company,” Morton said, watching a gold Volvo station wagon approach to park behind the Mercedes. “I’ll be on my way.”

  “Stick around if you can,” McGuire said. “I want everybody to see you with me. In the house.”

  Morton shrugged and looked at his watch. “Sure, if you like.”

  Mike Gilroy emerged from the Volvo, a clipboard in his hand. “Jesus, what a mess,” he said as he approached McGuire and the others. “You ever see anything like this, Blake?”

  Blake Stevenson shook his head solemnly.

  “I’m sorry about this, Joe.” Gilroy stood looking at the ruins. “The good news is, Cora carried a healthy policy on the place. And she kept up the premiums. Let’s see if the Leedales can give us some place to sit down and talk about it.”

  McGuire walked across the road and, in spite of his will, he caught himself thinking of Barbara again, picturing her on a beach at dusk, walking barefoot in the sand with her husband.

  “With contents and all, it pans out to just over a hundred and ten thousand.” Mike Gilroy handed McGuire a sheet of paper headed Gilroy & Associates, Insurance Agents.

  McGuire and Gilroy were side by side on the sofa in the Leedale living room, across from Blake Stevenson who sat in an upholstered chair near the fireplace, watching and listening intently. Bob Morton stood nearby, hands in his pockets. June Leedale, after serving tea, withdrew to the kitchen. McGuire could hear the small noises of cutlery, dishes and cupboard doors being handled.

  “With arson, there’s always a few hurdles before the company issues the cheque,” Gilroy added. “But Bob and I can work together, get the forms ready, clear you of any suspicion. Could have the money sooner’n you think.”

  McGuire assured Gilroy he was in no rush. The telephone rang in the kitchen and June Leedale answered it, her voice speaking softly in the background.

  “Sam Hannaford’s still interested in the place,” Gilroy went on, “as a building site. Figures he’s looking at maybe fifty thousand dollars for the lot. You might give him a call.”

  “I might,” McGuire nodded.

  “Joe, this is so unusual here.” Blake Stevenson leaned forward in his chair, his eyes fastening on McGuire’s and his deep textured voice speaking almost as though he didn’t want the others to hear his words. “This town has the lowest crime rate on the Cape. Isn’t that right, Bob?” His eyes shot past McGuire to Morton, who was lifting a cup of tea to his lips, pinky finger extended.

  “’S’what I hear.” Morton nodded in agreement and sipped his tea noisily, making a sound like a small drain being emptied.

  “Mark my words,” Stevenson continued, fixing his eyes on McGuire again, “we’ll find whoever did these things and see that he’s brought to justice. I think this is simply outrageous.” He looked up and scanned the eyes of the other two men, seeking their agreement.

  “We?” Mike Gilroy grinned. He had tucked the insurance documents back into their file folder. “What, Blake? We’re all going to ride herd through town like a posse behind Sheriff Morton here?”

  “I meant ‘we’ as a community,” Stevenson replied stiffly. “That’s what we have to do in a situation like this. Act as a community. Right, Bob?”

  Morton nodded. “Can always use civilian help. Tips, that kind of thing,” he said.

  Blake Stevenson smiled his approval. “I’d better be on my way,” he said and rose stiffly from the chair.

  Mike Gilroy slid his papers back into his briefcase. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, following Stevenson through the door.

  Morton’s eyes swung to McGuire. “No need for me to hang around any longer, is there?” he asked.

  “Guess not,” McGuire agreed.

  As Morton drove away, McGuire stared through the bay window at the rubble across the road that once had been Cora’s pride and legacy. Now both she and the house were gone.

  The evening newspaper arrived, tossed against the front door by a young boy on a bicycle. McGuire retrieved it and sat in the chair by the window, reading about the fire—“Arson Suspected in Late Night Blaze” screamed the front-page headline—and of Bob Morton’s continuing efforts to solve the wounding of “a once-prominent Boston homicide detective.”

  He finished the newspaper and checked his watch. It was almost seven o’clock and there was still no sign of Parker Leedale.

  June Leedale came downstairs holding several tissues in her hand. Her eyes were red from crying and when McGuire asked if he could help with something she waved him away.

  McGuire walked back to the guest room, slid the dead bolts in place on both doors, pulled a Frank Yerby novel from the bookcase, lay back on the bed and began reading. He felt fatigued, his head still buoyant from the effects of the drugs, and the plodding story line of the Yerby book made his eyelids heavy. He heard the front door open and close. The Leedales’ voices drifted back to his ears in urgent conversation, the words unintelligible but the tension evident. The voices ceased, there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and a door slammed somewhere on the second floor.

  “Joe?” Parker Leedale’s voice was followed by polite tapping on the door. “You awake?”

  McGuire rose to unlock and open the door. Parker Leedale had removed his suit jacket and pulled his tie aside. He grinned in embarrassment. “Had a little domestic problem, June and me,” he said. His breath smelled of alcohol. “Hope it didn’t disturb you.”

  McGuire shook his head in silence.

  Leedale swung his eyes from McGuire. “I, uh, thought I might go downtown, get a steak maybe at the Pines, nice little restaurant over near the lighthouse. Care to join me?”

  “I’m calling it a day,” McGuire said. “I’ll be on my way to Boston first thing in the morning. Thanks anyway.”

  Another embarrassed smile. “Sure,” Leedale said. “How long’ll you be there?”

  McGuire said he didn’t know.

  “How’s the shoulder? The wound?”

  “Getting better.”

  “See you when you get back?” Leedale asked.

  McGuire nodded and watched the other man turn and walk toward the darkened living room before closing and locking the door again.

  Within minutes of undressing and sliding beneath the sheets, he was sleeping soundly.

  Chapter Nineteen

>   The sound of rain on the roof roused McGuire from a sleep of ceaseless dreams, night visions of people McGuire barely knew, doing things McGuire couldn’t understand. The dawn was grey and menacing. The house was silent.

  He lay with his arm across his eyes. His last dream before he awoke had been of a fellow cop from his Boston days, a tough sergeant who had died a decade ago. In the dream the sergeant recited numbers to McGuire and demanded an explanation of their meaning while a woman who looked like Barbara but said her name was Cynthia enclosed him within her naked body. She urged him to make love to her while knots of people stood watching from the perimeter of the room. McGuire knew them, the spectators, voyeurs whose faces were hidden from sight, and they laughed at his reticence, his pleas for Barbara to find somewhere else, somewhere private.

  Then he was in a cemetery at night, and one by one the tombstones tumbled, their foundations swept away by time and water, until only one remained standing. McGuire approached it but he could not read the inscription, could not discern who was buried beneath it, and he sensed someone approaching from behind, their footsteps light and quick and incessant like . . .

  Like rain.

  He rose from the bed and walked to the window.

  The perfect autumn weather had ended with a heavy grayness. Already the brilliance of the oak and maple and beech leaves had begun to fade to the inevitable brown of death and litter.

  He showered and dressed before scribbling a note to June Leedale—it never occurred to him to address her husband—thanking her for her hospitality and promising to return in a few days. Before signing his name he added Ollie and Ronnie Schantz’s telephone number. Then he placed the note on the pillow, slid the bolt aside on the door leading to the interior of the house and left by the door to the garden.

  His rented car started easily and he soon adjusted to driving with his one good hand. Traffic was light and he drove slowly through the rain along Highway 28, tracing the route June Leedale had taken the day he had followed her from the florist shop to the cemetery.

  Approaching the exit to Hyannis he slowed momentarily at the road leading to the graveyard, then accelerated again, rejecting the idea of visiting the site alone on a cool and rainy autumn morning. Or ever again, he promised himself. It’s her private business. It has nothing to do with me.

  He arrived at the white frame house on Revere Beach two hours later, the rain much lighter now, descending like a benediction.

  Ronnie Schantz watched him approach the house from behind her screen door. She wore a pink chenille robe and her face shone at the sight of him. She hugged him and welcomed him inside, clicking her tongue in dismay over the sling around his arm and the strain she saw in his face, lines that had not been there just a few days earlier.

  Soon he was seated next to Ollie’s bed, his ex-partner grinning up at him, laughing and chatting in a voice interrupted with painful wheezing and cloaked in an abiding loneliness.

  “Well, hell, Joseph.” Ollie’s right hand, the only limb still responsive to his commands, flopped on the bed sheet in an exaggerated gesture. “Didn’t I tell you? Standin’ around, mindin’ your own business, that’s when you’re likely to get it. Damn good thing it was a peashooter twenty-two, ’stead of a deer slug.”

  “This was bad enough,” McGuire said. “And it wasn’t aimed at my shoulder. It was aimed at my head.”

  Ollie grunted. “How the hell you make an enemy like that so fast down there?”

  “By digging into Cora’s death. And her past.”

  “And somebody torches the house. Not for weenies, I bet, ’less it was gonna be yours.”

  “Everything gone,” McGuire nodded sadly. “Cora cremated, and they never found enough of Terry to send home.”

  The two men sat silently for a moment, lost in their own thoughts, until Ollie barked, “Suspicions?”

  “What?” McGuire blinked and rose from his memories of his aunt.

  “You keep sittin’ around like a wart on the pope’s ass, somebody’ll do you again,” Ollie snapped. “You gonna tie on some boots and run the son of a bitch down or you gonna mail your gonads back to that woman in the Bahamas, you with ’em? You know anything or don’t you?”

  McGuire smiled and avoided Ollie’s eyes. “Somebody slipped a tranquilizer into Cora’s prescription bottle. Replaced her potassium capsules with a drug that clicked off her heart. I think they did it because Cora was ready to reveal something she knew about a woman who died thirty years ago. The town coroner, the investigating cop, they botched it and maybe Cora knew things they didn’t. Anyway, digging around, I made somebody pretty desperate.”

  “Desperate,” Ollie grunted. “Now there’s the word. Who gets desperate enough to shoot a man, aim for his head with a two-bit rifle like that, then torch the house couple of days later?”

  “Somebody involved in murder. Somebody with a lot to hide.”

  “Or protect.”

  “Same thing.”

  “The hell.” Ollie’s face grew murky, like the overcast sky beyond his bedroom window. “Not quite the same thing, Joseph. Close, but not the same. You can reveal one thing and still protect another.” His eyes swung to the window. “What’d you learn down there? What’d you pick up that was bad enough for somebody to tell you to drop the damn thing by puttin’ a bullet in your thick skull? And what’s this about a woman dead thirty years?”

  “You want to hear about it?” McGuire asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  “Hey,” Ollie said, his eyes narrowing and a smile creasing his face, “does a whore want out of church when the preacher starts talking damnation?”

  Ronnie entered the room with a mug of coffee for McGuire. He thanked her and began reciting details of the death of Cynthia Sanders to Ollie Schantz, who listened with the concentration of a musician studying a difficult music score for the first time.

  “Scandal.”

  Ollie Schantz spoke the word as though replying to a question on a TV game show, his eyes closed.

  “You mean a young widow, good social status, taking some high school stud up to her bedroom?” McGuire said.

  “That too.”

  “You think a small town cop would hide a murder because the perp was, I don’t know, somebody important?”

  Ollie’s eyes snapped open and he stared upwards, speaking to the ceiling. “Maybe, but not likely. You say the coroner’s report was complete?”

  “All except the verdict.”

  “So, if it was a cover, the coroner had to be in on it.”

  “Or?”

  “Or, if it wasn’t a cover, then this guy, this kid she was boinking in her bed, what’s his name?”

  “Tate. Sonny Tate. Real name was Charles.”

  “Must’ve had good reason for the cop to leave him be. He from the same social class as the victim?”

  McGuire shook his head. “Other side of the tracks. Father was dead, been a truck driver. Mother was a waitress or something.”

  “Kind of kid a local cop wouldn’t hesitate to nail, small town like that.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty upscale.”

  “Whazzat?” Ollie’s eyes met McGuire’s.

  “Compton. It’s an upscale place. Old money, old families. Nobody wants anything to change there, nobody wants outsiders moving in unless they bring money, join the country club, all of that stuff.”

  Ollie acted as though he hadn’t heard. His head and expression remained frozen in place. Only his eyes were alive, darting here and there. And his mind, too, McGuire knew. Ollie was making connections and assumptions, accepting this one as a thesis, discarding that one as implausible.

  “What happened to this Tate character?” he asked McGuire. “You say he left town?”

  “Came to Boston, went into advertising, took off for New York, got to be a heavy on Madison Avenue. That all blew up about ten years
ago and he wound up in Florida, running grass and hash in from the islands. The DEA nailed him and he served time in a federal Gray Bar Hotel. Couple of years. Not heard from since. So his old buddies tell me.”

  “Well, shit.”

  McGuire waited for the other man to continue.

  “If he’s an ex-con, he’s in the system.” Ollie’s eyes and one good hand directed McGuire to the computer in the corner of the room. Installed by Captain Jack Kavander to tie Ollie in to the police network and employ arguably the finest analytical mind ever to serve the cause of justice on behalf of Boston citizens, the computer had sat almost silent since the death of Kavander and the appointment of Fat Eddie Vance as captain.

  Vance had risen to a level significantly higher than his own incompetence, which he proved by canceling the arrangement, dispensing with Ollie’s experience in tackling unsolved homicides. The computer was scheduled to be removed at some future date. For now, it lingered in the corner, its screen dimmed, its linkages to local, state and federal police departments unbroken but unused.

  “I don’t know how to work the damn thing anymore,” McGuire said. “No passwords, none of that stuff.”

  “Should see the way Ronnie plays it,” Ollie said, his hand groping for a button to summon his wife. “like Oscar Peterson on a Steinway.” He slapped the button with his palm and a string of chimes echoed back from the kitchen, followed by an instant patter of feet on the bare hardwood floor of the hall. “Used to have a buzzer,” Ollie said. “She hated it. Likes the chimes instead. What the hell.”

  Ronnie entered, drying her hands on a tea towel.

  “Man here needs some dirt on a convicted felon,” Ollie said to his wife. “Think you can track him down on your silicon slave there in the corner?”

  “Sentenced five to ten years for trafficking, conspiracy to traffic, possession of controlled substances,” Ronnie Schantz read from the computer screen a few moments later. “In Ocala. Served three years, paroled, received permission to relocate to Boston. No further record.”