Maybe it was the way Tate’s background meshed so tightly with McGuire’s own. A crude working-class father who carried the weight of bitterness home with him each night. To a numbed mother, devoid of hope or humour. McGuire escaped it by becoming a cop and searching for a moral footing. Tate pursued wealth and the power it promised. Both of them chose to abandon their roots. Which gave them at least that much in common. Along with precious little regard for Blake Stevenson.
“Is that why you left the Cape after finishing high school?” McGuire asked. “Because you didn’t fit in?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Mike, Parker, Blake, Terry, they were all going on to college. I didn’t have the marks or the money so I had to carve another path. Started out legal. Or as legal as advertising can be. Drifted into illegal. Ended up here.”
“You were talking about Cynthia Sanders,” McGuire said gently.
“What was I saying?”
“Something about her sex drive.”
“Yeah. Strong as mine. Back then.” He breathed deeply and winced, and for the first time McGuire sensed the pain racking Tate’s body. “I didn’t kill her.”
“You told me that.”
“Coroner believed me, I hear. I didn’t hang around for the verdict.”
“Inconclusive. Could have been murder. Could have been an accident.”
“They said she was drunk, right?” Tate had crossed a threshold in the past few minutes. Whether driven by pain or boredom, McGuire couldn’t tell. But he knew the other man was losing his focus and growing weaker.
“She was drunk,” McGuire agreed. “There was semen in her vagina. And two glasses with different sets of fingerprints in the room.”
Tate swung his head to the side, locking his eyes on McGuire. “I hadn’t heard that,” he said, his deep voice growing coarse with—what? Pain? Congestion? Fatigue?
“I assume they weren’t yours,” McGuire said.
“No, not mine. They fingerprinted me. They cleared me.”
“But it wasn’t just the fingerprints, was it?” McGuire said. “You had an alibi. You were somewhere else that night. And somebody confirmed it for you, right?”
Tate nodded. He was distracted. His thoughts, his inner vision, were somewhere else.
“Who was it?” McGuire asked. “Who lived on Sea View Avenue and gave you an alibi?”
Another smile creased Tate’s face, this one different from the others. This one had a sad edge, as though Tate were recalling someone he once loved, someone long dead. “Didn’t it say in the coroner’s report?” Tate asked.
“There was no name. An address and a code number. That’s all.”
“Hindmarsh.” Tate barely whispered the name.
“Who?”
“Hindmarsh. The guy who handled the case. Small-time cop. Could barely write a traffic ticket.”
“So he blew it, the investigation. Hindmarsh blew it.”
“Maybe.”
“What made your alibi so solid?” McGuire asked. “Where were you that night? Who told Hindmarsh you weren’t with Cynthia Sanders? And why did they get a code number only Hindmarsh understood?”
“He still alive? Hindmarsh?”
McGuire shook his head.
Tate grunted, as though in approval. Then his body stiffened and he winced in pain.
“What can I do for you?” McGuire asked, standing and approaching the bed.
Tate’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut and he spoke through clenched teeth. “You can get the hell out of here. Because . . . because I’m going to have to call somebody in a minute. Give me a shot. I need one bad.”
“Where the hell were you that night?” McGuire asked.
“I wasn’t there. That’s what I’m telling you now, that’s what they knew back then. Hindmarsh, he knew.”
“Then tell me who you think did it,” McGuire said. He was looking at the telephone next to Tate’s bed. “Tell me who you think murdered Cynthia Sanders.”
Tate head shook from side to side. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “Can’t prove a thing.” He exhaled noisily and a wave of pain seemed to flow from his body with his breath. “But I can tell you who was with her that night.”
McGuire leaned over the man. The same mixture of aromas that had risen from Stanley, the astringency of antiseptics and the cloying smell of dying body tissues, flooded his nostrils. “Who was it? Tell me, Sonny. And I’ll get out of here.”
It took several heartbeats for Tate’s eyes to focus on McGuire’s. “Your cousin. Terry. Terry Godwin. He was with her.”
“Terry’s dead,” McGuire said, reaching for the telephone. “Killed in Vietnam.”
Tate’s eyes closed and his head moved up and down, the motion barely perceptive.
“How do you know it was Terry?”
“He asked me about her. I was heading for the lighthouse that night, the night it happened. Just walking down Main Street, heading for the lighthouse to join the party out on the sandbar. Terry stopped me, driving his mother’s car. Said he’d heard I was getting some regular poontang from a rich widow. Son of a bitch was jealous. Kind of deal he should have had. Terry needed the best of everything. So I told him no, I wasn’t. Not anymore. I’d told her that same day that I was going to Boston, look for a job. Besides, old Cynthia, she was getting a little too demanding, little kinky even. Wanted me to tie her up, stuff that didn’t interest me. And, um,” his eyes swung away, searching for the words on the ceiling. “It was bothering me, what I was doing. Don’t know why, but it bothered me. Guilt, maybe.”
“You think Terry went to her house.”
“That’s what I think. No proof, but that’s what I think.”
“Did you tell the police that?”
Tate lowered his eyelids and moved his head from side to side. “Never asked me. Never asked me who I thought might’ve done it. All I wanted to do was convince them I wasn’t there. Wasn’t interested in fingering anybody else.”
“If Terry was there or if he knew about it and he’s dead, then who shot me last week? Who set fire to his mother’s house? Who tried so hard to cover up for a guy who’s been dead more than twenty years?”
“Don’t know,” Tate muttered.
McGuire reached for the telephone. “Can I get an out line on this thing?” he asked.
“It’s a separate line,” Tate said. “Private line. Doesn’t go through the switchboard.”
“What’s the number here?” Tate told him and McGuire punched the buttons on the telephone, took a deep breath and assumed a role he had played for years. The only role he had ever played with conviction.
“Yeah, it’s Officer Flynn down at police headquarters,” McGuire said. “Gimme security.” A pause. “Well, it’s a security matter,” he explained to someone on the other end of the line. Someone a floor above him. “Got a white male here in custody, charged with assault and battery of a citizen down on South Main Street few minutes ago. Matches a description we have of an A and B suspect at your place, Heather House. Anyway, you wanta send some security staff down here, quick as you can, give us an ID? I’m going off duty in ten minutes. Stick around if I have to, but you understand . . . . Positive ID, that’s what we’re looking for . . . . It’s Flynn, as in Errol. Yeah, right downtown. Park in front, you won’t get a ticket, that’s a promise.”
McGuire hung up the telephone to discover Tate watching him with undisguised amusement.
“Jee-zus, that’s good. Damn good,” he said.
McGuire was scribbling Tate’s private telephone number on a piece of paper. “Can I call you here?” he asked. “Tomorrow?”
Tate nodded.
“Hang in there,” McGuire said, touching the other man’s arm gently. “Give me a minute to get down the stairs.” He walked to the window and looked down to the front of the building just as four men trotted out
and clambered into a gray Buick. He recognized the bull shoulders of one of them, the man named Dwight.
“Take the exit at the end of the hall,” Tate said, his voice growing hoarse and reedy. “You’ll come out on the other side of the nurse’s station. There are some steps down to South Main Street. Hardly ever used.”
McGuire stood and walked to the door. The exit was two doors away, the hall deserted. He looked back into the room. “Thanks,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”
Tate stared back at him blankly.
A minute later McGuire was outside in the mild air, his mind racing through the information he had acquired, a rat tearing through a maze.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Kinda dangerous, spending time around sick people.” Schantz smiled up at McGuire Without humour. His right hand beat a nervous rhythm on the bed sheet. “First you get yourself shot and in a hospital, then you go to an AIDS hospice, now you’re hangin’ around here. Pretty soon, you’ll start thinkin’ being sick is normal, something stupid like that.”
McGuire moved his left shoulder in a circle. There was no pain, only a vague tightness as though something beneath the skin was knotted. “Tate’s a bright, talkative guy,” he said. “Maybe not a model citizen, but he’s no punk either. Took a lot of nerve to go through what he did in Ocala.”
“Keepin’ his mouth shut?” Ollie snorted. “That took nerve?” He was unimpressed with McGuire’s assessment. “Good news is, it got him a few million dollars. Bad news is, it got him AIDS. Win some, lose some.” His face softened. “But it’s hardly a draw, I guess.”
McGuire stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. Outside the window next to Ollie’s bed the night was dark and windy. The murmur of the waves crashing on Revere Beach sounded like the entire world was an inverted seashell, echoing the ocean’s roar. “What I mean is, I don’t think he’s a killer.”
“Aw, Joseph, Joseph.” Ollie’s eyes swung up to meet McGuire’s. “You see him today, he’s a stand-up guy who ran a line of bad luck like a bowling ball down a gutter. But we’re talkin’ thirty years. Hey, thirty years ago anybody—the mayor, the commissioner, the bishop, any of ’em-could’ve been a pervert, a puppy kicker, whatever. Since then they might’ve seen the light, got religion, made it onto the pope’s short list for sainthood. How you gonna tell?”
“Some things don’t change,” McGuire replied. “Thing is, with Tate . . . I kind of liked the guy.”
“You liked the guy? He does five to ten on a DEA and you want to go pick out furniture with him?” Ollie’s expression was somewhere between his familiar dry smile and a caustic sneer. “Jesus, Joseph, what’s happening with you?”
“I don’t think he did it.”
“He tried to finger your cousin.”
“He said Terry was there.”
“No big deal,” Ollie sneered. “Prime suspect says, ‘I wasn’t there but this guy, died a war hero twenty-odd years ago, he was there, maybe he’s the perp.’ Pile of horse manure, sounds to me.”
“Terry wasn’t perfect.”
“More than your buddy Tate was.”
“Terry could have done it.” It was the first time McGuire admitted it.
“Done what?”
“Killed her. Assaulted her, whatever. See, Terry had an edge. Terry had a drive to be noticed.” McGuire stroked his chin and pondered the words he had just spoken aloud. “Trouble is, if there was any proof in Cora’s house that Terry was there the night the Sanders woman died, who’d want to get rid of it? Get rid of me?”
“So who did it? Your cousin’s ghost?”
McGuire turned back to Ollie. “Two people. There were two sets of prints in the woman’s house, remember?”
“One could’ve been your cousin’s, if you wanna believe Tate.”
“And the other?”
“Might have been Tate’s. After all, he knew Terry was there. So he says.”
McGuire sat down again. “No, they weren’t Tate’s. Not if you believe the files. Besides, it doesn’t figure. It wasn’t Tate who shot me. He’s in no condition to leave his bed.”
“Gotta admit, Tate’s got connections. Anybody who can earn a few million for keepin’ his mouth zipped has a few more friends than your average Trappist monk.”
“Wasn’t a professional hit,” McGuire said. “Not on me. Not a chance of it.” Then, almost to himself, “Why did Hindmarsh drop him?”
“What’s that?” Ollie’s limited reserve of energy was failing. Soon Ronnie would enter with his evening medication. She would offer a soothing stroke of Ollie’s forehead and a smile to McGuire, asking him to leave while she cared for her husband. Cleaning and dressing him like a baby.
McGuire hated the image. It haunted him to think of his former partner, almost his alter ego, the strongest man emotionally, intellectually and morally McGuire had ever known, unable to provide the most basic care for himself.
McGuire shook the picture from his mind. “What the hell was Tate’s alibi?” he said. “Why was it so good that the investigating cop wrote it off and didn’t even identify the alibi source?”
“Cop, even a small-time one, can’t hide somethin’ like that forever. Somebody would have challenged him on it.”
McGuire nodded. “The coroner, anybody, would have questioned it. Hindmarsh would have had to explain why. . . .” He stopped. Something from Tate’s conversation was nagging at him again.
Ronnie’s footsteps sounded in the hall.
“You thought about the code?” McGuire asked.
“Thought about it. That’s all.”
“I’m heading back to Compton,” McGuire said, rising from the chair. “I’ll call when I get there.”
Ronnie entered the room, warming it with her smile. She was carrying a tray bearing three blue capsules, a glass of red liquid, two wet cloths and a heavy towel.
“I’ll be gone first thing in the morning,” McGuire said, heading for the door.
“Take some muffins with you when you go,” she said, setting the tray down next to Ollie’s bed. “Otherwise you won’t have any breakfast.”
By dawn, the wind had cleared the sky of clouds and McGuire drove on the leading edge of the morning rush-hour traffic through a still-slumbering city, the sun shining like a jewel on the rim of the sea.
It’s rising like that right now in the Bahamas, he thought. His romance with Barbara, so intense and so inevitable, seemed even more distant, more unreachable, than the warm Caribbean itself on this cool New England fall morning.
June Leedale was drying her hands on a tea towel when she answered the front door. At the sight of McGuire her face widened with a smile and once again McGuire saw the beauty of the young girl shine through the years.
“How are you?” she asked, holding the door wide for McGuire to enter, and they paused awkwardly for a moment, each waiting for the other to offer a welcoming hug.
But neither did. McGuire stepped inside the cozy home with its colonial decor. “I’m feeling better,” he said. “I’m doing without the sling.”
“So I noticed.” June Leedale’s hand rested gently on his back. “Will you be staying with us again?” she asked. “You know you’re more than welcome.”
“No, but I’d like to talk to you if I can. For a few minutes.”
“I have to go in to the office this morning. . . .” She held her hands at her waist, clenching them into fists and releasing them. “I’m sorry about the other evening. Parker and I had a . . . a dispute, I guess. . . .”
“None of my business,” McGuire said.
“How are your friends in Boston?” June Leedale took a blue cardigan sweater from a hook fastened to the back of a door. “That’s where you were, wasn’t it? Visiting friends in Boston?”
“Yes.” McGuire lowered himself into a wooden chair. “Any calls for me?”
She brou
ght her hand to her mouth. “Oh my goodness, yes, there were. A couple.”
McGuire waited patiently.
“Bert, down at the garage, called yesterday. He heard what happened to you, tracked you down here. Anyway, he says he’ll give you four thousand dollars for Cora’s Saab. And you got a call from Reverend Willoughby. He tried to reach you the night before last too, but you were sleeping so I didn’t disturb you.”
“What would he want with me?”
“I really have no idea.” She was shrugging into the cardigan. “Anyway, his number is over there beside the telephone.” She nodded toward the rear wall of the kitchen, then raised her arm to look at her wristwatch. “I have to go in to the office and do some work for Parker. Do you think it’s going to rain? I’d like to walk, just for some exercise.”
“I think the rain has gone,” McGuire said.
She took her purse from the kitchen counter. “I’ll tell Parker you’re here,” she said, sweeping past McGuire. “Maybe we’ll plan something for dinner. I think he’s taken a bit of a liking to you. He’ll be pleased to know you’ve returned. I’ll be back about three. There’s a spare front door key on the mantel. . . .”
“I won’t need it,” McGuire smiled.
She stared at him with open affection. “You’re looking better,” she said. “I’m glad.” Then she was gone, her short, quick footsteps beating a rhythm first on the flagstone walk, then on the shoulder of the road.
The sound had barely faded when the telephone on the wall rang, startling McGuire in the sudden silence of the empty house. He stared at it, undecided whether to answer, then rose to seize the receiver on the fourth ring.
“Where’d I bring you from, the john?” Ollie Schantz’s voice was gruff but excited, and McGuire knew instantly that the other man had important information for him.
“Not quite,” McGuire answered. “What’s up?”
“What’s up? Not your IQ, Joseph. Got this code figured out for you.”
“So what is it?”
A long intake of breath. “Way I figure, it’s a date. Tenth day, third month, forty-sixth year. That’s what I’m bettin’ anyway. When’d all this stuff take place, the murder, the interview?”
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