Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  Wait for Morton, McGuire told himself. Wait for him.

  “Why did you shoot Blake?” McGuire asked. He moved a step away, watching Gilroy swing the muzzle of the rifle spasmodically to follow him.

  “Son of a bitch couldn’t stand it.” Gilroy was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, burning up excess adrenalin. “First Cora starts talking, couple of months ago, saying there’s something she knows, or thinks she knows, that she wants to tell people about, you and maybe Morton. Then tonight Ellie comes back from the church and Blake and I are here, he’s panicking, thinks you and Morton are figuring out what went on, he’s ready to plea bargain and I’m trying to keep him from shooting off his mouth. His bitch of a wife comes in, she’s worked it out, who was there that night, what happened. She’s been bugging Blake about it since Cora’s funeral and now she’s ready to tell everything to Morton. Thirty years later, she’s ready to ruin my life. His too, her husband’s. She’d have taken everything Stevenson had, his business, the house, all of it. She’d get it when he went to jail, taking me with him. Then she . . . then she tells me what she . . . she and Bunny’ve been up to for a year, she’s laughing at me, laughing at me, McGuire! She’s ruining my life and she’s laughing at me, says . . . says when Blake and me are in jail, Bunny . . . Bunny’d be free to screw welders from here to Boston. Blake here, he’s crying and begging her not to. Well, I wouldn’t beg the bitch. She’s bragging in the kitchen, saying all she knows, and he’s crying like a fucking baby, pleading with her, and I go to the car, get this peashooter out of the trunk, come in through the back door and she sees me and turns and runs down the hall. I miss with the first shot, get one up her ass and she’s still running and screaming, another in her back and she drops, screeching like an owl in heat, crawling for the door. Took one in the back of the head to shut her up. For good. I come back out in the kitchen and fat-ass Stevenson here is doing his Carl Lewis imitation running out the back door, except it’s like watching an elephant with diarrhea dancing in front of a pay toilet, his legs’re moving but he’s still in one place. I catch up with him, pass him, turn around and do it. One shot at the belt and I’m out of bullets. And he sits down, right there in the chair, like he’s waiting to tee off at the club while I go . . .” Gilroy faltered again. “While I go get some ammunition, look for . . .” Gilroy’s face shattered, but his hands kept their grip on the rifle.

  “Looking for your wife?” McGuire asked.

  “She was . . .” Gilroy shook his head.

  Morton, McGuire shouted in silence. Where the hell are you, Morton?

  “It was you, not Blake, who went into Cynthia Sanders’s house that night,” McGuire said. “What happened? Did Terry go to bed with her first while you guys waited outside?”

  “In the car,” Gilroy said. “He left us, Blake and me, in the car with a barrel of stinking clams. Terry brings two glasses and a bottle of Southern Comfort out to us, stole it from her bar. Then goes back inside. Half an hour later Terry comes out and he says ‘Next,’ like he’s selling movie tickets or something. The three of us, we go upstairs, Terry’s all ready to watch. Drunk as I am, I’m ready, take the booze into the bedroom with me, she’s as drunk as I am but when she sees the three of us she starts screaming, telling us to get out. What, Terry’s good enough for her but I’m not? I grab her, Christ, what a body, and she goes for the telephone. Terry and I, we try to calm her down. Terry hits her and she really starts screaming so I . . .” He shrugged. “Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck it all anyway.”

  “You blamed it on Sonny Tate.”

  “Could’ve been him. Should’ve been him. Fuckin’ short-ass loser. Terry and Blake go back to his house, Terry’s. Me, I still wanta get laid so I show up at the party. Had the clams, what the hell. Next day I call in a tip, anon . . . anonymous. I say Sonny Tate did it. Still don’t know where he was that night, why Hindmarsh didn’t nail him.”

  “Now what?” McGuire asked. “You killed Ellie, you shot Blake. Now what the hell do you do?”

  “What?” Gilroy was almost dancing now, the energy, the fear driving him like an engine, talking in rapid-fire patter.

  McGuire watched Gilroy, saw the effect like amphetamine on a man tottering between sanity and dementia, between wanting to live and pleading to die.

  “What?” Gilroy repeated. “You think I’m afraid? You think I give a shit, McGuire? About you? About lard-ass here? I’ll show you what I think, how worried I am.” Still holding the rifle at waist level he swung it toward Stevenson and fired, shattering the wood next to Blake’s head. Stevenson whimpered, tried to rise from the chair, whimpered again and stared down into his lap.

  “I’m the guy always in control,” Gilroy said. “All my life, the cool guy, the insurance man, nothing riles me. Always planning ahead, looking down the road, that’s what I’ve done all my life. Staying cool, staying close to this prick and his bitchy wife because of what he knew. Sucking up to Cora because she knew. She knew about Terry and she knew about Blake but she didn’t know who else was there. Who did it. Didn’t know about me. Terry and fat-ass here tried to convince her it was Tate. But Cora wouldn’t buy it. Hell, no. She was always afraid. . . .” A sudden shift in weight, the back of his hand across his mouth again. “She was afraid her precious fucking Terry did it. When Terry died a hero she wanted to preserve his good memory. All that shit.” He spat on the ground. “Then she gets sick and starts asking more questions about it. Asking questions all the goddamn time. Still didn’t know I was there. Knew about Blake, not about me. But she was getting close. I should’ve done her years ago, McGuire. Couple of times I thought about it. Push her down the stairs. Old lady takes a tumble, happens every day.”

  “Think about something, Gilroy.” McGuire raised his hands to his hips, a casual stance. Moving them closer to his gun.

  “Think about what?”

  “About living. About staying alive. You put the gun down, you stay alive.”

  “You don’t know shit, do you, McGuire?” Gilroy sneered. “You think I plan to stick around and see the sun come up? The hell I do. I finish what I started here, go clean up the mess of . . .” Another falter, another near-crumbling of his face, before Gilroy continued. “Go do what I gotta do and to hell with it all.” He raised the rifle, sighting down it at Blake Stevenson whose head was still lowered, his eyes still closed. “Hell with it all,” he repeated calmly.

  “Think about it, Gilroy!” McGuire shouted.

  The rifle cracked again and the crown of Blake’s skull shattered. His mouth opened to release a torrent of blood and his body rose as though to stand before falling back into the chair, every limb quivering before he fell to one side.

  At the rifle shot McGuire jerked the revolver from the small of his back. For a heartbeat or two, Mike Gilroy remained staring at his friend’s body, unaware that McGuire was crouching, the gun in both hands. When Gilroy swung the rifle toward McGuire to find the Smith & Wesson aimed at his chest he looked first puzzled, then amused. The boyish smile, the adolescent face, shone through the menacing expression.

  “Don’t,” McGuire said aloud but Gilroy sighted down the barrel at him and McGuire’s instincts spoke louder than his caution and he fired once, twice. He watched the other man stumble backwards with each shot, like a toddler in a harness being jerked out of harm’s way until, his hands still clenching the rifle, he dropped to his knees in a prayerful posture and looked back at McGuire, his eyes unblinking, before releasing the weapon and falling forward.

  McGuire slipped the revolver into his jacket pocket and ran to Gilroy. He knelt beside the dying man and rolled him on his back, exposing two sucking chest wounds. Gilroy stared back at him as though the two were strangers, each wondering how they had arrived at this place, in this time, together.

  The darkness was suddenly painted in stripes of red and blue, the colours sweeping the trees from left to right, and McGuire heard the police v
ehicles arrive, their tires crunching on the gravel surface.

  “Hang in there,” McGuire said gruffly. “You might just make it. Hang on.”

  More flashing red lights, the slamming of doors and shouts of “Freeze!” from behind him.

  “Too soon,” Gilroy whispered. “Too soon.” He closed his eyes and there was only the sound of the chest wounds pulling in air and expelling blood, the sound oddly sexual and obscene.

  McGuire stood up.

  “I said freeze!” the voice shouted behind him.

  The sucking noises from Gilroy’s chest ceased abruptly and McGuire glanced sadly down at the open eyes and their thousand-mile stare before turning slowly around until the lights from the house caught his face and revealed it to the police officers and ambulance attendants.

  “Damn it, Morton,” he said in a tired voice. “Don’t ever yell ‘Freeze!’ like that again. Reminds me of movies.” He rested his hands on his hips and walked past Gilroy’s body and the bloodied remains of Blake Stevenson to a rotting tree stump, where he sat down, his energy spent, his emotions dissolved.

  He lowered his face into his hands, his elbows on his knees. “And what took you so goddamn long anyway?”

  “I’m having dinner with my wife, trying not to second-guess myself about giving you the gun,” Morton was saying.

  They were in the Stevensons’ living room, McGuire slouched on a French Provincial sofa covered in a tapestry floral print, Morton pacing back and forth in front of an oak trestle table, touching the wood surface with his fingertips each time he passed. In the hall, two state police forensic officers were examining Ellie’s body, taking photographs and measurements, making small talk. The Smith & Wesson Police Special Morton had loaned to McGuire was tagged and in a plastic bag, property of the state attorney-general’s office.

  “And I get a call,” Morton continued, “somebody’s out on Main Street with a rifle, ducking in and out of bars, then tear-assing his car down Mill Pond Road, screaming like a madman.”

  “You know who it was?” McGuire rubbed his eyes.

  “They said it was Mike Gilroy but I thought, hell, that’s a joke. Quiet little Mike? Must be somebody looks like him.”

  “When’d you clue in?”

  “I’m out by Crow’s Pond, because that’s where his car was last seen, and I’m thinking, geez, it sounds like Gilroy’s car, gold Volvo station wagon, but they’re common as sea gulls out here. Could be anybody. Then Smitty calls from the office. One, he says Bunny Gilroy’s there, hysterical because her husband’s looking for her, wants to kill her. Two, he says you called and there’s a homicide out here on Oyster Pond Road. I think, what is this? Is this quiet little Compton or am I in some TV show, waiting for a break so they can run a tampon commercial?”

  Morton stopped at the trestle table and leaned against it, facing McGuire. “Do you have any goddamn idea,” he asked slowly, “just what in hell this was all about?”

  McGuire nodded. “Nothing new,” he said. “The same old crap in a different location. Different names, different faces.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  McGuire finished dictating his statement to Morton and the state police investigators after midnight and drove slowly into town and through deserted streets.

  He turned onto Mill Pond Road where St. Luke’s Church shone white in the darkness atop its gentle grassy rise, where Willoughby had read Cora’s sermon aloud in his droning voice, where Ellie Stevenson, alerted to the true meaning of the sermon, coerced Jerome Harper to give her the key to Willoughby’s office so she could steal Willoughby’s copy.

  Swinging off Mill Pond Road to Miner’s Lane, McGuire glanced again at the old baseball diamond and remembered Terry Godwin, how he had insisted on serving in a war his mother condemned, how he had behaved recklessly, foolishly, arrogantly, like all heroes who crave recognition. Something had changed him. Just as Cora’s suspicions of what happened that July evening thirty years ago must have changed her attitude toward her son.

  Could she have gone to the police with what she suspected? Reveal that her son had been involved in the death of Cynthia Sanders and ruin his reputation in a small town that would find forgiveness so difficult to bestow?

  How far could a mother go to save or betray a son?

  As far as June Leedale had?

  He passed the blackened ruins of Cora’s house where Mike Gilroy had stood among the trees and fired at McGuire through the open window, thinking McGuire was about to discover the truth. Then, with McGuire in the hospital and the house unguarded, Gilroy returned to burn it down.

  McGuire swung the car into the Leedales’ driveway.

  Almost before he shut off the engine, June and Parker Leedale were at the open door of their house, beckoning him inside.

  June Leedale welcomed McGuire with a hug, clinging to him, while her husband watched solemnly before stepping forward to shake McGuire’s hand and guide him into the living room where Bunny Gilroy sat huddled in a corner of the sofa, wrapped in an afghan and shivering violently. Her hair was disheveled and her layers of make-up were streaked with tears.

  “How about a coffee?” Parker Leedale asked.

  McGuire nodded. June Leedale said, “I’ll get it,” and walked briskly off to the kitchen.

  McGuire kept his eyes on Bunny Gilroy as he approached her. “You heard?” he asked, standing over her.

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes.

  “Smitty called from the police station,” Parker Leedale said, standing near the front door. “Dr. Hayward dropped by and gave her a sedative. She wouldn’t go to the hospital.”

  “I didn’t have any choice,” McGuire said to Bunny Gilroy. He felt he had to explain. “Mike didn’t give me any choice.”

  She nodded again and chewed on her bottom lip.

  June Leedale returned from the kitchen and handed McGuire a mug of black coffee. He took it from her, smiled his thanks and knelt to look directly into Bunny Gilroy’s eyes. “You really drove him over the edge,” McGuire said.

  She looked directly at him for the first time and raised her chin defiantly. “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “Where were you the other night?” McGuire said. “The night I was shot. The night you never showed up for dinner.”

  “That’s none of your business either.”

  “Visiting a man in Falmouth maybe?”

  She avoided his eyes, turning her head abruptly away and folding her arms. Her face began to crumble, the tears welling up in her eyes behind the closed lids and flooding her cheeks.

  “You told Morton you were with Mike that night,” McGuire said. “You gave him an alibi.”

  The words tumbled out between sobs, her voice high-pitched in sadness and fear. “He made me. He said he would kill me if I didn’t. The next day . . . the next day when I heard what happened to you I begged Ellie to let me stay with her and Blake until I could arrange something else. Because he would kill me. Mike would’ve killed me.”

  “For what you did?”

  “For what I knew.” She looked up at McGuire. “Mike killed Cora. With . . . with something he got from Blake. Tranquilizers. He replaced all of Cora’s medication, the capsules, with Blake’s tranquilizers. Last week, when Cora had us over for a visit. He went to her bathroom. . . . Sometimes Cora, sometimes she’d ask Mike about stuff from so long ago, about that woman who died. She made Mike nervous. He wouldn’t tell me why, he was just nervous about talking to her and she sensed it. Cora, she never liked Blake and Ellie. Wouldn’t let them in the house. After. . . . The night you were shot I knew it was Mike and I told Ellie what I knew, about Mike saying once that he’d like to kill Cora, he and Blake, and she confronted Blake . . .” She turned away again.

  McGuire stared at her, not thinking of this woman or her dead husband or the other bodies back on Oyster Pond Road or even his aunt who had dream
ed and laughed and raged against the world. He thought of betrayals and the ripples they create, the calm they disturb, the echoes that shatter the peace of so many lives for so many years.

  Bunny mumbled something into a handkerchief. “What’s that?” McGuire asked.

  “I said . . . that I really loved him. I really loved Mike.”

  “Too bad you didn’t hate him,” McGuire said. “You might not have screwed him up so much.”

  McGuire woke in the Leedales’ guest room to the aroma of fresh coffee from the kitchen. He rose, showered, dressed and entered the living room where the fireplace roared a welcome.

  “It’s turned cooler,” June Leedale said, entering the living room from the kitchen with a coffee carafe and two mugs in her hand. “And they’re saying more rain is on the way. Maybe snow. Indian summer’s over. You can smell winter in the air.” She was wearing a print blouse with lace trim over a long denim skirt, the blouse cut deeply in front.

  McGuire grunted and sat in one of the wing chairs facing the fire, taking comfort in the dancing of the flames, the crackling of the logs and the faint whiff of wood smoke drifting through the room.

  “Parker’s gone to the office early,” June Leedale said, setting the mugs on a lamp table and filling them from the carafe. “He has some things to do.”

  “Like firing the receptionist?” McGuire asked.

  She nodded and sat in the chair facing him.

  “I told him I would explain everything later. About where I’ve been going in the afternoons.”

  “Everything?” McGuire raised the mug to his lips.

  She nodded. “I have to. It’s worth the risk.”

  “The truth shall set you free.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “Which reminds me. Reverend Willoughby asked if you would drop by today. He has something for you.”

  “Another copy of Cora’s sermon, probably.” McGuire sipped the coffee.

  “And Parker says he’ll mail the money for Cora’s car and the insurance cheque to you. The one Mike had. If that’s all right. He was Mike’s attorney, he’ll be settling everything.”