“Yes, because—”
“Because you knew what he would find at the back of that shelf, didn’t you? You knew he would find a brassiere belonging to the victim because you had put it there, hidden under some of Mr. Wilmer’s possessions.”
“That’s a lie!” McGuire responded.
“Because it was all you had to connect Mr. Wilmer to the murder and without it, you had no evidence—”
The pain, the fatigue, the anger all coalesced into an explosion as McGuire leaped to his feet to seize Rosen by the lapel of his jacket with one hand and grip the lawyer’s neck with the other, watching Rosen recoil in fear, hearing the judge thump his gavel over and over like a low drumroll, seeing the bailiffs charging at both of them, knowing he had broken the code and betrayed the ritual and not caring any more, not caring at all.
Chapter Three
From atop the fireplace mantel, the face in the photograph shone out at the world, filled with innocence and more than a little beauty. The hair was lustrous and black, the skin pale and smooth, the chin firm and finely boned.
But the eyes owned the face. Large and clear, they laughed back at the world even while their expression suggested something deeper, something wistful, perhaps: a Gaelic sense of tragedy.
Thirty years after the photo was taken, only the eyes, as clear and blue as ever, remained unchanged. The coal of her hair had changed to snow, the skin had weathered, the chin had grown heavy. But the eyes were still focused on the laughing side of life.
She had been christened Veronica Louise Hennessy, but from the day of her birth she was known simply as Ronnie. Two weeks before her twenty-first birthday and six months after meeting an off-duty policeman on the day-ferry to Provincetown, she became Ronnie Schantz.
Along with her Gaelic eyes, she inherited a streak of fatalism. When Ollie Schantz, Boston Police Constable First Class, caught her as she stumbled down the ferry steps, the gears of fate had begun to mesh. They had spent the afternoon together, Ronnie so lost in Ollie’s quiet strength and maturity that she forgot about the girlfriends who had accompanied her on the day’s outing to Provincetown. There had never been, she knew, a day that had shone so warm and so dear on the fingertip of Cape Cod. She and Ollie sat on the pier and watched the gulls soar, nibbled on fried dams, tossed food to a solemn-looking pelican, talked incessantly on the shore and held hands in silence together on the ferry back to Boston.
Only fate could have brought them together like that.
But fate had shown her the other side of laughter as well. Fate had tugged little Jordie, their beloved Jordie, onto North Shore Road on the first warm day of his sixth spring, tiny legs churning until he froze at his mother’s belated scream and the sight of the MTA bus bearing down upon him.
In the space of a heartbeat the world turned to reveal its other side, its darker side, its unfair side.
Through the years since, she refused to feel bitter about the death of her only child. It took strength to smile at young children playing among the leaves of autumn or the flowers of spring. But she did. And doing so over the span of all the years gave her something no one and no other twist of fate could ever steal from her. It gave her dignity.
It had been two months since the doctor at Mass General patiently explained the injury to her husband’s fifth cervical vertebra, how the brittle bone edge had sliced through much of the upper part of his spinal column, severing nerves as cleanly, as quickly as . . . as a young boy can flee his mother’s distracted attention to dash away between parked cars on a warm spring afternoon.
“One nerve is only partially damaged,” the surgeon explained to her. He seemed young, far too young to be entrusted with the life of her Ollie, but she nodded and tried to smile. “We have attempted to repair it. If it works, he should have some use of his right hand, perhaps some movement in the arm as well.” He paused, staring at her, waiting for her courage to dissolve into helpless tears. When it didn’t, he said, “I wish I could promise more. But I can’t.”
She reached out and touched his hand, as though he were the one who needed strength and she was dispensing it. But she said nothing. Only her eyes spoke, smiling and thanking him for his honesty.
Those same eyes smiled back at McGuire when Ronnie opened the door of her home in Revere Beach on that blustery November evening.
They reached and hugged each other without a word of greeting. Then, his hands on her shoulders, he held her at arm’s length and studied her.
“How are you?” he asked gently.
“Tattered around the edges but holding together.” She reached her hands to his and gripped them tightly. “It’s been a bad day for Ollie. None of his days are good any more. Some are bad. The others are worse. But at least he’s off the respirator, breathing on his own. Times like these, you cling to all the good news that comes your way, I guess. And that was good news.”
She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Maybe you can make him laugh, Joe. I can’t. Nobody has come to see him from the department since he came home from the hospital. They were almost his family. It’s like his whole family has forgotten about him.”
She tried a smile, with only partial success. “You used to make him laugh. I remember, he would come home and drink his tea in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator and telling me about some funny thing you had said or done that day, standing there and laughing about it all over again . . .”
Her eyes blinked quickly and she brought her hands to their corners.
“I’m sorry, Joe,” she said through her fingers. “No, it’s all right,” turning away as he reached for her. When she lowered her hands, her eyes were steady and shining. “I’ve started baking again. Can you tell?”
McGuire nodded. “Smells like what? Cake of some kind?”
“Lemon chiffon. Just took it out of the oven.” She guided him down the hall, her hand on his elbow. “Go see him and I’ll bring some in with coffee.”
When they brought her husband home from the hospital, his head fixed rigidly in a stainless steel device clamped between his shoulders and his skull, Ronnie had prepared the den for his comfort. A motorized adjustable bed sat beside a window looking out on Massachusetts Bay. With a touch of the control from his good hand, Ollie could elevate the bed enough to see sunlight dancing off the water and gulls riding thermals in the sky. Another touch and the bed would glide back to a horizontal position for sleep and for Ollie to read the three words Ronnie had written with a broad felt-tip pen on the ceiling directly above his head: I Love You!
A remote control television set hung from the ceiling, angled towards the bed. Beside him on a night table was Ollie’s police scanner-radio, equipped with a remote switch that responded to the same light touch as the motorized bed.
McGuire entered the room to see his former partner sitting upright, staring out the window at the black water. The scanner crackled with the chatter of police patrols located all along the shore from Lynn to Weymouth.
“They got a floater in Quincy Bay,” Ollie said in a flat voice as McGuire lowered himself onto the hard-backed chair next to the bed. “Off Moon Island. White male Caucasian.”
“How are you doing?” McGuire asked.
Ollie ignored the greeting. “First thing you do with a floater is, you leave it on its back,” he said after a long pause. “Don’t want to drain the lungs. Leave them for Mel Doitch to check. You got to watch all that stuff until Doitch arrives. Let him figure it out. What he finds in the lungs, that’s important. Salt water, fresh water, no water, how much water, it all tells that fat-assed Slav something.”
“Mel’s okay,” McGuire offered.
“Mel spends too much time around corpses is Mel’s problem. He talks like ’em, he smells like ’em. He keeps stuffing his face with kielbasa and cabbage rolls, he’ll look like that floater you and me checked down near Carson Beach couple of years ago.”
McGuire began to speak but Ollie continued, neither his voice nor his eyes wavering.
“Remember that poor sucker? Time we found him he was so grey and bloated you wanted to paint ‘Goodyear’ on him and fly him over the Orange Bowl.”
A smile darted across Ollie’s face, then dissipated quickly somewhere behind his eyes.
“You get that floater on Moon Island assigned to you, make damn sure the whistle who answered the call didn’t turn the poor bastard on his stomach. And remember to check his shoes . . .” Ollie’s voice faltered and his eyes blinked quickly. They flew from the bay towards McGuire and back to the window. “You can . . . you can tell a lot . . . from a floater’s shoes.”
Ronnie entered with a mug of coffee and a slice of cake. Placing it carefully on the small desk beside McGuire’s chair, she smiled at his whispered thanks and left as silently as she had entered.
“I won’t get the case.” McGuire sampled the cake, light and tart with the clean scent of fresh lemons. He set it aside and stood up, his hands in his pockets.
“What, you too busy with old stuff?” Ollie asked from the window.
“No, it’s Kavander. He’s pissed at me.”
“He’s pissed at the world, you know that. He’s always been meaner than a constipated crocodile. Me, I always thought he kind of liked you.”
“Not after today.”
Ollie’s eyes clicked in McGuire’s direction.
“I grabbed a defence attorney in court,” McGuire explained. “Tried to beat the crap out of him from the witness stand. Right now, the attorney’s probably sipping Chivas and scribbling out assault charges. Worse, there’s a chance his client could walk from a rape and murder one.”
“The Hope murder?”
McGuire nodded. He scooped another large helping of cake.
“Who’d you beat up on?”
“Marv Rosen.”
Ollie grunted. “Can’t blame you. Son of a bitch is the kind of guy who’d piss on your shoes and say it’s raining. Who was the judge?”
“Scaife.”
“So, you gonna tell me what happened or you gonna stand there and do your imitation of a tree stump?”
McGuire smiled and sat down again. Between samplings of the cake and sips of coffee, he recited the day’s events, including the pain of his hangover and his absolute belief in Wilmer’s guilt.
“You plant the bra?” Ollie asked when he finished.
McGuire tilted his head. “What the hell, Ollie—”
“Just asking.”
“I saw it there. On the first visit.”
“When you guys were talking to the landlady.”
McGuire nodded. “But I couldn’t seize it. Couldn’t even touch it legally. Should have had a blanket warrant, search and arrest. Did you know it takes two signatures for one of them now? I would have wasted at least an hour lining up another judge and I wanted to be there early in the morning. Thought I would catch the little bastard in bed. So I just went with simple arrest on suspicion. Figured we’d come back after laying a charge, do a total search.”
“And you saw the bra but couldn’t touch it so you went back for the blanket warrant.”
“I stopped at the girl’s apartment to check things out.”
“Women tend to wear the same brand of underwear.”
“Same brand, same bra size. She had three others.”
“Still not a clincher.”
“Blood on the one in the closet. It was her type. Semen stains on it match his blood type.” McGuire shrugged and spread his arms. “Witness sees him enter the apartment on the day of the murder. Hell, it’s a tight case.”
“And Rosen played statistics.”
“Said half the women in Boston had her blood type, half the men had his.” McGuire stood up again and stared out the window at the darkened water. “I’ve never lost my cool like that, Ollie. I’ve had worse handling by lawyers on the stand before and I was able to laugh it off. Now here I am with Rosen threatening a civil suit, Judge Scaife thinking about contempt of court, and Kavander wanting me in his office tomorrow, first thing.”
Ollie Schantz smiled weakly. “Joseph, you get yourself in more trouble than a hound with the shits in a swimming pool.”
McGuire drained the rest of his coffee. “I keep thinking about the old days. You and me standing in drizzles on surveillance. Tossing drunks out of bars on Dorchester. Never thought I would but I miss those days. Things aren’t the same.”
“Nothing’s the same, goddamn it!” It was more a hoarse whisper than a shout, all that the older man could manage from his weakened body, but it snapped McGuire’s attention back to the bed, where Ollie’s face had flushed and the strain around his eyes intensified. “Nothing’s ever the same. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again!”
“Hey, I know that. I’m a big boy. But lately, I’ve been thinking—”
“Of checking out, right?” Ollie interrupted. “You’ll tell Kavander to shove it and you take a hike. Then what’ll you do? Open a book store? Go up to Vermont and tap maple trees?”
“Wait a goddamn minute.”
“No, you won’t do that, McGuire. You’d figure you’re still a cop so you’d get a job with some piss-ass police outfit in the Berkshires. Tough Boston cop winds up directing tourists through town. Hell of a way to end a career like yours.”
“You think it’s fun getting my ass bitten by Kavander?”
“No, it’s not.” Ollie shifted his eyes back to the window. A navigation light on Bass Point across the bay winked back at the pace of a sleeping heartbeat. “No, it’s not,” Ollie repeated softly.
“Kavander could hang me for this.”
“He won’t,” Ollie replied. “He would rather you hung yourself. Kavander’s all shit and no flies. He doesn’t want to leave himself open for making a bad decision. Guy like you, all those commendations. . . . ’Course, if you want to walk, he’ll open the door for you.” He swung his eyes back to McGuire. “Don’t you give him a chance to say you walked away just because he’s uglier than you are. You remember what I used to say about ugly guys?”
In spite of himself, McGuire grinned broadly. “Yeah. Never get into a fight with somebody uglier than you because the other guy’s got nothing to lose.”
“Damn right. You leave Berkeley Street, you leave because you want to, not because of Kavander.”
McGuire glanced at his watch. “Speaking of leaving . . .”
“Yeah, I know. I know.”
“I’ll drop in tomorrow. Keep you posted on what’s happening.”
“Only if you’ve got the time.” Ollie’s eyes swung back to the light across the bay.
“Thank you, Joe,” Ronnie said to McGuire at the door. “He really appreciated you coming. I could tell by the sound of his voice.” She stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. “That’s the happiest I’ve seen him since he came home.”
Chapter Four
“Jack the Bear” they called him, for his disposition and his oversized, shaggy appearance.
Jacques Charles Kavander stood six-foot four and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. His mother, Marie, a volatile and fiercely proud Québécoise, had been working as a cook in a Maine lumber camp when she first tangled with Charlie Kavander, a cutting crew foreman with massive arms and a constant snarl. Their marriage produced dozens of physical battles, three charges of disturbing the peace, and one son. Over the years they were separated only long enough for Marie to storm out the door and ride a bus back to her family in Rivière-du-Loup where she would call Charlie, demanding that he drive up and bring her home immediately. Which he always did without fail.
When Jacques was sixteen years old, his father sat watching him chop wood, approached him and rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’re going to be a big guy,” he said. “Big mean guys like you and me, there are two th
ings we can do. We can stay here, work in the lumber camps, ducking trees and axes, getting drunk every Saturday night. Or we can become cops. I think you should be a cop. It’s safer.”
His son shook his head. “I’m going to do both,” he said. “I’m going to work with you in the bush and save my money for college. Then I’ll be a cop. But not a dumb one.”
He obtained his degree in criminology, graduating cum laude and with more than passing interest from two professional football teams, whose entreaties he ignored. In over twenty years as a Boston beat cop and detective, Jack Kavander drew his service revolver only once although he was shot at on three different occasions. On one occasion he had been hit, and with a 38-calibre bullet buried in his thigh had launched himself at his assailant with such ferocity that the man, a parole violator caught ransacking a warehouse, turned to flee just as Jack the Bear’s massive hand clamped on his shoulder.
Later, Kavander and the fugitive both rode in the same ambulance to the hospital. Kavander was released several days before the other man, who was treated for several broken ribs, a broken jaw, a severely sprained arm and mild concussion suffered from falling downstairs while attempting to escape custody. Or so it was recorded in the official files.
Now nearing sixty, Kavander still carried his massive frame ironing-board erect. His hair was white and closecropped, the limp from the bullet wound grew more noticeable every year, and his voice had acquired the rasp and growl of an idling diesel.
Kavander’s appointment as Captain of Detectives ten years earlier had at first elated the Boston police force. “He’s one of us,” the officers nodded to each other. “A cop’s cop. He knows what it’s like out on the street.” But the optimism soon grew jaded. Within months, Jack the Bear began his conversion from top cop to common bureaucrat, distancing himself from the everyday concerns of police officers and placing emphasis on procedures.
And Leave Her Lay Dying Page 3