Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  I suppose, McGuire reflected as he rose to return up the hill to the main entrance, you could choose worse scenery to stare at while waiting to die.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Are you a friend of Mr. Tate’s?”

  The man at the reception counter was perhaps thirty years old, with close-cropped black hair and thick-rimmed spectacles. He wore a white lab coat over a blue shirt and striped tie, with several ballpoint pens stuffed into the pocket of the coat. While speaking he peered over McGuire’s shoulder toward the entrance, as though willing someone else to pass through the door. Someone more palatable, perhaps, than this tired-looking and badly dressed middle-aged man standing in front of him.

  “I’m a friend of friends,” McGuire replied.

  Two heavyset men in white sweatshirts and loose-fitting white trousers stood watching McGuire warily from behind the reception desk. A set of swinging doors to McGuire’s left led into the new wing of Heather House. To the right, behind the reception desk, an elaborately carved oak door carried a small plastic sign: Chapel.

  “I’m sorry,” the man in glasses said. He reached for one of the pens in his lab coat pocket. “Admittance is restricted to immediate family members and an approved list of acquaintances.” The first tinge of a smile. “You are neither, I’m afraid.” His other hand rose to finger a small gold stud in the lobe of one ear.

  I didn’t come this far to be turned away by a smarmy punk, McGuire told himself.

  But he nodded anyway. After leaving the building, he stood on the edge of the slope leading down to the church on North Main Street. Then he nodded again, this time to himself, and trotted briskly down the steps.

  The young man strapped in his wheelchair was still clinging to the hand of his mother when McGuire approached them. The father, drowning in humiliation and failure, had left to wander among the gravestones near the church at the foot of the hill. Traffic had grown heavier and the noise from the diesel trucks and buses along North Main Street was almost tangible, shattering the delicate sense of sanctuary surrounding Heather House and the ancient cemetery.

  “Jamie?” McGuire called out, striding toward the woman and her ailing son. “You’re Jamie, right?”

  The woman looked up, startled. Her son, with a slow painful movement, turned his head to stare at McGuire without expression.

  “His name’s not Jamie,” the woman replied. The corners of her mouth drooped and her pale blue eyes were milky and slow moving; instead of darting, they drifted. Toward McGuire. Back to her son. Down the hill where her husband had reached the church and was leaning against a corner of the church, drawing on a freshly lit cigarette.

  “I’m sorry,” McGuire said, resting one hand on the wheelchair. “I’ve got a list here.” With his right hand, he removed Sister Sophia’s note from his pocket. He shrugged, wincing at the pain from his shoulder. “First day here. Transferred from Providence Central. Sorry, son,” he said, bending to look into the eyes of the younger man. He avoided the plum marks, forced his eyes from the running sores. “Your name is . . . ?”

  The young man looked at him without comprehension or fear.

  “It’s Evan,” the woman said. “Evan Stanley Sanford.”

  “Yep, he’s here.” McGuire folded the note and replaced it in his pocket. He seized the rubber grips of the wheelchair. “Just need him for a couple of minutes, Mrs. Sanford,” McGuire said, wheeling the younger man toward the double doors. “Quick blood test and we’ll have him back with you in a jiffy. How you doin’, Evan?” he asked, looking down at the man.

  “My name is Stanley,” the patient replied. His voice was raspy and weak, so weak that it seemed to take vast amounts of energy for him to speak. “Nobody ever calls me Evan.”

  The double steel doors swung open and McGuire pushed the wheelchair into the hallway.

  The interior looked like any small hospital or over-sized clinic with marble floors, fluorescent overhead lights, pale green walls and gray metal doors. But in every other aspect—sound, aroma and a palpable atmosphere, a feeling of surrender and release—Heather House was unique.

  From the far end of the hall drifted the cries of a sobbing man, crying out not from pain but from the anguish of someone acknowledging that all is lost and he is utterly alone.

  McGuire bent to speak in Stanley’s ear. “Listen to me,” he whispered. “There’s a friend in here I have to see. A very close friend. Very close. You understand?”

  The younger man’s head moved up and down.

  “But they won’t let me in. That guy on the desk with the heavy glasses . . .”

  “Dalgliesh,” Stanley said. “He’s a prick.”

  “Yeah, I know. Sonny told me about him.”

  Stanley turned to look back at McGuire. In the harsh green fluorescent light, the marks of his disease appeared inhuman and alien, as though transplanted to the young man’s body from another species. A mandrill, perhaps. A tropical ape. Something almost but not quite, not ever, human.

  “Sonny Tate?” Stanley asked.

  McGuire nodded. “Yeah, Sonny. It’s important for me to see him. I want to tell him . . .” McGuire paused for effect. “Something.”

  Stanley’s head moved in understanding. “He’s upstairs. Room 207. He never has visitors.”

  “I know,” McGuire lied. “Can you cover for me? If I leave you here in the hall, will that give me ten, fifteen, minutes before Dalgliesh tracks me down?”

  “Sure,” Stanley said. He smiled, and McGuire saw the once-healthy young man behind the diseased facade. Somewhat short of movie star handsome, the young man’s face boasted wide-set shining eyes and a gentle sweep to his chin. His hair, sparse from the devastating treatments endured by his body, retained a natural wave. “Leave me in the corner over there,” Stanley said, raising a thin arm. “I’ll make up a story.”

  “Thank you, Stanley.” McGuire patted him lightly on the shoulder. “I really appreciate it.”

  “I used to be a dancer.” Stanley blurted out the words, then looked quickly away.

  Talk to him, McGuire thought. He willed himself to stare back at Stanley’s ravaged face. “I can see that,” he lied.

  “I, uh . . .” Stanley laughed, embarrassed. “I toured with A Chorus Line. Ten years ago. Out of New York.”

  “Good times?” McGuire looked up to see an orderly rounding the corner at the far end of the corridor, walking toward them on soft-soled shoes. “You had some good times?”

  “Yes,” Stanley said wistfully. “Wonderful times.”

  The orderly slowed his pace and frowned at McGuire, his hands hanging at his sides, opening and closing. He outweighed McGuire by about fifty pounds and was at least ten years younger. His face looked as though it had never been creased by a smile and his black hair grew in thatches, like hay stubble.

  “You know this guy?” McGuire asked, stepping closer to the wheelchair again.

  Stanley looked up. “Dwight. Another prick.”

  “Anybody else around?” McGuire asked. The orderly was ten, maybe twelve paces away. The corridor was deserted.

  “Break time,” Stanley replied. “They’re all having coffee downstairs.”

  “The hell you doing?” Dwight’s deep voice sounded like large stones tumbling down a metal chute. He approached warily, his thick fingers flexing, his hands making fists and opening, again and again, like semaphores.

  “My friend Stanley here saw a rat in the closet,” McGuire said. Stanley’s ravaged face twisted to look back at McGuire with a hint of a smile.

  “No rats here,” Dwight responded. He paused a few paces away, his head swiveling to scan the area, assess the situation. “None of your business if there was.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, because I already killed the son of a gun myself,” McGuire said. “It’s in there.” He nodded toward a barred door in which a key projected from the l
ock.

  “The drug dispensary?” Dwight’s head swung from McGuire to Stanley and back to the door. “You threw a dead rat in the drug dispensary? What are you, nuts? And what the hell’re you doing on this floor without a visitor’s pass? I’m calling security.”

  “You should see this rat first.” McGuire left Stanley’s wheelchair and walked to the door of the dispensary. “Word gets out that you’ve got rats the size of skateboards in this place, reporters’ll be swarming through here like a lost hive of bees.” He turned the key and swung the door wide.

  “I said we ain’t got no rats,” Dwight barked. “And you’re on your way outta here.”

  McGuire ducked into the small dark room. At the rear stood several locked metal cabinets with indecipherable drug names stenciled on each drawer. To one side of the door hung a number of devices suspended from hooks: heavy cotton straitjackets, frayed blue hospital gowns and strong canvas restraining straps like the ones holding Stanley’s ravaged body upright in his wheelchair.

  “Hey, Dwight,” McGuire called out. “Get in here and see this thing. It’s okay, he’s dead.”

  “The only thing I want to see is your ass. . . .” Dwight began, rounding the corner and entering the dispensary closet.

  From within the storage room, McGuire’s right hand shot out to seize a hank of Dwight’s hair and jerk him forward. The orderly’s first instinct was to pull back and, as he did, McGuire released his hold on the hair, dropped his hand and delivered a punch to the man’s chest. Dwight flew against the wall where the restraining devices hung and collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath. McGuire closed the door, locked it and dropped the key in his pocket.

  “Thanks, Stanley,” McGuire said as the younger man watched with amusement.

  “Who are you?” Stanley asked. “Really?”

  “Just a friend. Where’s Sonny?” McGuire demanded.

  “Next floor up. Take the elevator.”

  McGuire nodded, smiled and entered the elevator.

  Room 207 was midway along the eastern wall of the new wing. The door was closed, the corridor deserted. McGuire twisted the knob slowly, stepped quickly inside and closed the door behind him.

  He turned to see a haggard face watching him from across the room, in a bed next to a window overlooking North Main Street. The man wore maroon pajamas of a silky material with white piping at the collar. Like Stanley’s, his skin was loose and leathery, broken with open sores and scarred with plum spots. His hair was thick, matted and gray, and beneath his sparse growth of white beard the skin of the man’s neck was heavily creased. But the eyes were alive, darting, challenging, absorbing McGuire’s sudden entrance.

  “Sonny.” McGuire spoke the name in recognition. “Sonny Tate.”

  The man continued to watch as McGuire swept the room with his eyes. Although it appeared to be identical in size and proportion to other rooms in the building, Sonny’s had been furnished with a singular elegance. The walls were painted deep hunter green. Two oak-framed easy chairs were grouped near the bed, their upholstery pattern reflecting the same shade of green as the walls. The upholstery material was repeated in the heavy, stylish draperies framing the window. An elaborate oak cabinet held a Revox stereo system with remote control tuner, CD player and amplifier, and the duet from The Pearl Fishermen played softly through large floor-mounted speakers.

  A television set was suspended from the ceiling, wired to a VCR positioned next to Sonny Tate’s bed. Within reach of the gray-haired man were a stack of videocassettes and a wall-mounted telephone.

  Hanging on a wall facing the bed, where the patient would see them first thing in the morning upon waking and last thing at night before lapsing into sleep, was a montage of framed photographs: A young man at the helm of a yacht speeding across Biscayne Bay in Florida; the same man about to parachute from the open door of an aircraft in flight; two intensely beautiful young women standing on either side of the man, their arms around him, their smiles wide and unforced, their breasts bare in the light of a tropical sun. And more. McGuire counted almost twenty photographs in all. A hedonistic life captured on film, then framed and presented to the dying man for his recollection. And his mourning.

  The man in the bed watched McGuire carefully without speaking.

  McGuire walked past him to a window and looked down at the ground level plaza where orderlies and nurses stood in small groups, talking and gesturing. Among them McGuire recognized Dalgliesh, the man in glasses from the front desk.

  He pulled the draperies closed and turned to the bed. “My name’s McGuire,” he said quickly. “I’m Terry Godwin’s cousin. From Compton. You remember Terry?”

  A smile, natural and unforced and broad. “Sure. Old pretty-boy high-pockets himself,” Sonny Tate said in a surprisingly deep voice. “Tried to be John Wayne and wound up as a Big Mac. What’re you doing here?”

  “I want to talk to you about something. Or somebody.” McGuire walked back to the window and peeked out between the draperies again. The staff were drifting back into the building. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he added.

  “No shit,” Sonny Tate responded. “Neither am I.” And the smile grew wider.

  McGuire returned to stand near the bed. “The security staff will come flying through here looking for me. I need to talk to you before they find me. It’s important.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I told you. Terry Godwin’s cousin. I met some of your old school buddies. Parker Leedale, Mike Gilroy—”

  “They know I’m here?”

  “Nobody knows. Nobody needs to know.”

  Tate continued to smile, and a glimmer of recognition shone weakly in his eyes. “You’re a cop,” he said.

  “Used to be. I don’t have any official capacity here.” McGuire drew closer to Tate’s bed. Mixed aromas of antiseptic, blood and the fecundity of rotting body tissues wafted up to him, and he suppressed a gag reflex. “Somebody shot me a few nights ago,” McGuire hissed. “While I was in the hospital they torched Cora Godwin’s place, Terry’s mother’s house. Burned it to the ground. It’s all connected with a woman you knew thirty years ago, named Cynthia Sanders.”

  “You think I killed her.” A statement of fact, delivered without emotion.

  “No, I don’t. But I think you know who did.”

  Sonny Tate seemed to retreat back in time, erasing the lines of age and suffering on his face, softening the effects of the sores and scars, of the disease that was killing Sonny Tate from within, millions of viral organisms gone mad, like warriors trapped within a Trojan horse.

  “Maybe I do,” Sonny Tate said finally. “What I want to know is,” and he forced himself into a sitting position, breathing heavily from the exertion. “What I want to know is . . . what took you guys so long?”

  Sonny Tate pushed a button on a small elegantly finished intercom unit beside the bed. Almost immediately, a woman’s voice sounded clearly, almost intimately, through the speaker: “Yes, Mr. Tate?”

  “Something wrong out there?” Tate demanded in his baritone voice. In the background, the lovely duet of the two pearl fishermen swearing eternal friendship to each other was soaring to its finale.

  “An unauthorized visitor, Mr. Tate. Someone assaulted Dwight. We think he may still be in the building.”

  “God, let’s hope so,” Tate said. “If you catch him, throw him in with some of those queens on the first floor. Anyway, he’s not in here and my door is closed. See that it’s kept that way while I watch East of Eden.”

  The voice was quick and obedient. “Yes, Mr. Tate.”

  Tate replaced the receiver and smiled up at McGuire. “You’re an interesting guy. We, uh, we don’t get too many people around here who aren’t former flower arrangers or limp-wristed old woman types. They all like to lift their hands to their foreheads and cry like babies over . . . over their fate.” A skelet
al hand reached up to stroke his beard. “So I don’t mix with anybody here very much. You like cognac? What’d you say your name was?” He folded his hands in front of him, his thin arms suspended like bare tree branches from his shoulders.

  “McGuire.”

  “Yeah, right. McGuire.” He stared ahead of him at the wall of photographs. “So you want to talk, McGuire? Why the hell not? Let’s talk. You seem to be an intelligent man. For a cop.” He waved one arm at the wall behind McGuire. “There’s some forty-year-old cognac in the cabinet under the stereo system. You want to bring it over here, along with a couple of glasses? Terry Godwin, huh? Now wasn’t he one insufferable son of a bitch?”

  McGuire poured an inch of cognac into each of two small crystal tumblers, returned to the bed and handed one to Sonny Tate, who wrapped both hands around the glass, their bones and tendons standing like ridges against the pale skin. Tate brought the drink to his nose and inhaled deeply before sampling the drink.

  “How long have you got?” McGuire asked softly.

  Tate swung his eyes toward McGuire briefly. “A month. Six months. Maybe more. I don’t know.” He tilted his head back and drank half the honey-coloured liquid, closing his eyes and holding it in his mouth, grimacing as the alcohol flowed down his throat. “They’ve had me on interferon, AZT, bunch of other stuff, for a year now. Slows things down, that’s about all.”

  McGuire sat in one of the easy chairs near the bed where he could look directly into Tate’s face. “You come here from Louisburg Square?”

  Tate nodded. “You were there?” he asked, smiling into his glass.

  “I met Sister Sophia.”

  “And she told you where I was.”

  “Only after I lied a little.”

  “You must have lied a lot. A hell of a lot.”

  McGuire looked back at Tate in silence, waiting for him to continue.

  “They call this a hospice,” Tate said, closing his eyes. “I call it a necrotorium.” Tate lifted his head and stared out the window to the marble dome of the state house shining in the sun. The sky above it was dotted with small white clouds drifting east. Traffic moved past on Main Street, the drivers anxious to reach their destinations, the noise insulated from the rooms of the hospices, the panorama like a silent movie, distant in time and place.