Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “How does it work?” Pinnington was offering an income equal to McGuire’s best years as a homicide detective. Fix the Chrysler’s transmission? Hell, he’d dump it for something a little flashier and a lot more reliable.

  “Each lawyer has the right to draw upon your skills as he or she sees fit. Partners take precedence over non-partners. Senior partners have ultimate prerogative on your time. Any conflicts among staff regarding your availability will be resolved by me. You track your hours per case, and they’re pro-rated against the docket by the lawyer who contracted your services. We’ll make a small office available down on the fourteenth floor. It’s not spectacular, but it gives you a telephone and a desk. As I said, after three months we review everything.”

  “Do I have to wear a tie, dress like a lawyer?”

  “Not unless you want to. Wear a tie, I mean.”

  “Will I be testifying in court?”

  “We will do our best to avoid that eventuality.”

  McGuire nodded. “Sounds okay.”

  Pinnington almost leaped to his feet, his pleasure mixed with impatience to move on to other things. “Sounds like we have a deal. When can you get started?”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Unspectacular” was hardly the appropriate word for a windowless space that, a few days earlier, had functioned as a combination document-storage area and passageway, and was now to serve as McGuire’s office. He entered it through an unmarked door from the word-processing area, where several women sat at computers and printers, preparing long documents for the lawyers who occupied the offices above them. Another unmarked door exited to a hallway leading to the fourteenth-floor elevator foyer.

  “It’s so we can keep people apart,” said Pinnington’s secretary. Her name was Woodson. “Mrs. Woodson,” was how Pinnington had introduced her to McGuire, never referring to her first name, which McGuire soon learned was Connie.

  Pinnington had asked Connie Woodson to escort McGuire to his new office and introduce him to key staff members. She was warm and pleasant, and her eyes reflected a hidden humour, a sense that she found the world amusing in a manner that she was unable to share with others.

  “We used to bring people through here while their adversaries, or anyone else we didn’t want them to meet, waited in Reception upstairs,” Connie Woodson explained. “But Mr. Pinnington has made other arrangements.”

  “It’s perfect,” McGuire said. And it was. He could come and go through the hall door without being seen. He had a small metal desk, a swivel chair, two metal side chairs, a telephone, a water cooler, and two filing cabinets set beneath a dusty black-and-white photograph of Cambridge that appeared to date back to the 1920s. An equally dusty coffeemaker sat atop one of the filing cabinets. “That work?” McGuire asked, and Connie Woodson nodded.

  “Mr. Pinnington said I am to provide you with anything you need,” she said. “If it’s urgent or I can’t look after it myself, I’ll get the message to him. I’m preparing a memo to the full staff about your presence and duties. Would you like to see it before it’s distributed?”

  “No,” McGuire said, testing the swivel chair. “Whatever you and Pinnington want to say about things will be fine with me.”

  She beamed with relief. McGuire’s attitude was clearly different from the lawyers, who believed that any document that had been drafted fewer than three times was likely libelous or erroneous. “The key to the hall door is hanging there, over your desk,” she said. She led him out through the word-processing area. “Mr. Pinnington is very pleased that you have joined us.”

  She escorted McGuire through the offices, introducing him to partners and lawyers and various department heads, who handed him their business cards and greeted him with responses ranging from undisguised impatience to fawning praise. Two partners booked appointments with McGuire for later that day. One wanted to discuss a wrongful-dismissal suit in which the fired employee departed with a copy of the firm’s long-term strategic marketing plan. The other told McGuire of an employee who may have suffered his back injury in a barroom brawl instead of at his place of employment, as he claimed in a three-million-dollar lawsuit. A third lawyer, an unsmiling fair-haired man barely half his age, peppered McGuire with questions about his background and abilities until McGuire cut him off, suggesting he check with Pinnington about his credentials. The younger man, stunned for a moment by McGuire’s impertinence, said he would.

  One lawyer studied McGuire intently and posed questions to him about his experience in tracing criminals on the run and dealing with dangerous individuals face to face, while Connie Woodson stood nearby, smiling and shifting her weight impatiently, anxious to continue escorting McGuire through the partners’ area.

  The lawyer’s name was Orin Flanigan, and McGuire judged him to be between fifty and sixty. His head was bald, save for a fringe of fading red hair, the colour of sandblasted brick houses. He dressed like the other partners in well-fitted suits in subdued colours, and his body shape confessed to years of rich meals and expensive wine, but instead of shrewdness, his eyes reflected distant but still-remembered pain. “I would like to chat with you some time,” the lawyer said.

  “What about?” McGuire said.

  McGuire’s words appeared to surprise Flanigan, as though he were unprepared to be questioned by anyone. “Nothing in particular,” Flanigan said.

  “What does he do?” McGuire asked Connie Woodson as she led him along the corridor towards the next introduction.

  “He’s in family law. He specializes in child-custody cases. Mr. Pinnington believes he is the best in his profession.”

  McGuire’s instincts told him that Orin Flanigan would be calling on him for some service, probably something furtive and risky. So he wasn’t surprised when the lawyer made a pretense of stopping by McGuire’s office the following morning, inviting McGuire to join him for lunch at The Four Seasons.

  They walked the three blocks together, Flanigan asking questions about McGuire’s background, where he was born, where he went to school, what hobbies McGuire had. “Hobbies,” McGuire said, “are things people do when the stuff they’re being paid to do isn’t what they want to do. When I was a cop, I was doing what I wanted to do. So I didn’t need any hobbies.”

  “That’s some people’s definition of success, you know,” Flanigan said. They had reached Boylston Street. The Four Seasons was a block away. “Doing what you want to do.”

  Inside the hotel dining room, Flanigan was greeted with exaggerated pleasure by the maître d’, who led the lawyer and McGuire to a corner table. “I always sit here whenever I come for lunch,” Flanigan said when they were settled. “Always order the same thing, too. A glass of California Merlot, whatever the soup of the day is, and a rare roast-beef sandwich on rye bread, black coffee to follow. What do you think of a man who is so set in his ways?”

  “That’s he’s probably satisfied with himself,” McGuire said.

  “You’re being diplomatic.”

  “Maybe I’m being a little envious, too.” McGuire looked up from the menu, and around the paneled dining room.

  “Of course, you can be doing what you want to do and perhaps not feel successful after all.” Flanigan was calling the maître d’ over. “The New York strip steak is very good, I understand,” he said to McGuire.

  McGuire ordered it, and a Heineken.

  “You didn’t say if you have any children,” Flanigan said when the waiter left.

  “I don’t.”

  “Do you regret that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Flanigan watched him, as though waiting for more. “The things that happen to children,” he said after the waiter had brought their drinks, “are the most egregious of all the sins of a society. Any society.”

  “You make your living correcting them.”

  “I make my living dealing with them. Correcting them is
often out of the question.” He sampled his wine and set the glass aside. “They can haunt you, you know. You can say you’re just dealing with the legal aspects of things, and I try. But after thirty-odd years, some stuff still haunts you.”

  McGuire asked the lawyer if he had any children.

  “Not any more,” the lawyer said.

  To someone else, McGuire might have pressed the issue. What did that mean, “not any more”? That the children were grown? They were estranged? The expression on Flanigan’s face said the issue was painful. McGuire found himself liking this man, who appeared embarrassed by his own success, yet locked within its trappings.

  “You ever been to England?” Flanigan said, and McGuire said he hadn’t. “My wife and I go every summer for our vacation,” Flanigan said, and for the rest of the lunch Flanigan described public footpaths across the Cotswolds, tiny stone churches on high hills overlooking the sea, and thatch-roofed pubs in Devon and Cornwall.

  After lunch, outside the hotel, the lawyer checked his watch and said he was meeting someone down by Quincy Market. He asked if McGuire would excuse him, and they shook hands there in the sunshine on Boylston Street. Flanigan’s handshake was firm and he looked McGuire in the eye and smiled, as though McGuire had provided him with some important information, as though it had been McGuire who had hosted the lunch and picked up the check and played the benefactor, instead of Flanigan.

  Later, when Orin Flanigan’s body was undergoing an autopsy, McGuire would tell himself that he had expected it, had known that any man who openly expressed such deep human concern and empathy could not help but face the consequences.

  Chapter Three

  “They’re all gray suits and country-club drinkers,” McGuire said to Ollie Schantz two nights later. He was seated next to Ollie’s bed, balancing some warmed-up leftovers on a tray.

  “What’ve they got you doin’?” Ollie asked. He was staring out the window next to his bed, the one with the view of the ocean. It was a soft evening, warm and humid, unusual for a New England autumn. Ollie Schantz had been looking at this same scene from his same semi-reclining position for years. It was his only alternative to the television set suspended on the wall at the end of his bed.

  “Biggest thing is possible fraud,” McGuire said. “Guy in a warehouse says he was handling a shipment that was loaded the wrong way. It fell on him and wrenched his back. He’s looking for a pile of money from the insurance company, who’s our client.” He sampled some macaroni and cheese. “Where’s Ronnie?”

  “Out doing her Picasso thing,” Ollie said. “She’s working on a surprise for me, a picture of something or other. Gonna hang it right over there on the wall, so I can look at it.”

  “You’re gonna stare at a picture all day, it damn well better be good.”

  “It will, it will,” Ollie said. “There a ball game on tonight?” he asked, and McGuire reached for the remote control.

  An hour later, when McGuire saw that Ollie was sleeping, he turned off the television, dimmed the light, and climbed the stairs alone.

  The man with the injured back was demanding three million dollars in damages, plus full wages for five years, claiming he had been struck by a falling crate. The company’s insurer had retained Zimmerman, Wheatley and Pratt to fight the claim. Two doctors who examined the employee suggested the man, who was also sporting a broken nose, could not have injured himself the way he described. In front of a jury, however, the employee just might prove his case.

  “Can you get us any evidence on what really happened?” the lawyer handling the case asked McGuire. He was hefty and pink-cheeked, and he carried himself with the casual assurance of someone who possessed a nimble mind inside an awkward body. On the law firm’s list of partners he was shown as Fred Russell, but everyone called him Pee-Wee.

  “You play clarinet as a kid?” McGuire asked.

  “Dixieland,” Pee-Wee nodded. “You heard of Pee-Wee Russell?”

  “Hell of a clarinet player.”

  “I’m trying to have as much fun and make a damn sight more money than he did. How long will it take you to blow this guy’s story out of the water?”

  “You know where he lives?”

  “We even know where he drinks.”

  “In that case,” McGuire grinned, “I’ll have it for you in a day.”

  McGuire returned to Revere Beach and changed into worn jeans and a denim shirt. Then he bought a copy of the Boston Globe and drove to the South Boston tavern named in the warehouse worker’s file. He sat at the bar, ordered a fried-egg sandwich and a beer, and, after chatting with the bartender about the weather, about the Red Sox, and about the most recent political scandal at city hall, began turning the newspaper pages, claiming he was looking for a story on a barroom brawl he had witnessed the previous night.

  “I wouldn’t have your job,” McGuire told the bartender. “Never know when some nut’s ready to bonk you with a bottle these days, right?”

  The bartender said McGuire was sure as hell right, and when McGuire asked if the bartender ever got himself caught in the middle of one, the bartender told McGuire about some guy, a few weeks ago, who got into an argument with a truck driver over Ronald Reagan. “Reagan himself can’t remember what he did when he was down there, in the White House, right?” the bartender said, “and these two guys are goin’ to war over him. That’s his brother, the truck driver’s brother, over there in the corner.” The bartender raised his voice. “Tell him, tell this guy, about what your brother did to Sammy what’s his name, works over at the warehouse in Cambridge.”

  The truck driver’s brother described the argument that spilled into the street, and the punch that sent the warehouse worker sprawled across the hood of a Mazda and then onto the road, where the man screamed in pain, clutching his lower back and ignoring the blood flowing from his nose.

  McGuire asked the truck driver’s brother if they knew each other, he looked familiar. The brother said no, he didn’t think they had met before, and they traded names. “Maybe it’s your brother I know,” McGuire said, and the truck driver said that could be, people were sometimes getting him and Harry mixed up, because there was only a year between them, Harry being the younger. The brother said he lived three blocks over, same street as Harry the truck driver, they grew up in this neighbourhood and never moved out, not like the guys who hauled their ass to Braintree or some place near the Cape as soon as they got some money together.

  McGuire agreed. Who the hell would want to live any place else but Southie? Then he left the bar and sat in his car, writing notes, recording names and descriptions. Nobody in the bar would have talked so openly to an insurance investigator, or anybody who smacked of downtown. They talked to McGuire as though he were just another potato-eater, and Zimmerman, Wheatley and Pratt would subpoena the truck driver if necessary to make sure he repeated his story in court.

  Funny the way things turn out, McGuire thought as he drove away. If this had happened a few years earlier and the warehouse worker had hit the ground the wrong way, the truck driver might have found himself on the end of a second-degree murder charge, manslaughter at least, with McGuire reading him his rights. Then it would have been McGuire showing up in court, and the truck driver facing ten years in prison.

  “Hi there.”

  McGuire looked up from writing his report for Pee-Wee Russell. Orin Flanigan was leaning through the door from the word-processing area. He entered, closed the door behind him, and offered McGuire a pink, fleshy hand. “Mind if I sit down?” and he was seated before McGuire could reply.

  “What’s up?” McGuire asked.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking about our lunch the other day, what we talked about.” Flanigan seemed to have acquired a number of nervous mannerisms: stroking an eyebrow, scratching his nose, clicking the nails of a thumb and forefinger together, adjusting his glasses, so that a part of him was always in motion as h
e spoke.

  “We talked mostly about England,” McGuire said.

  “Yes, well . . .” Flanigan looked away, then back again. “You busy?”

  “Wrapping up a personal injury claim for Russell . . .”

  “Pee-Wee? He’s a good guy, got some good clients.” Flanigan scratched his wrist, adjusted his glasses, and pulled on his shirtsleeve to expose more cuff. “What else you got?”

  “You sound like you have something yourself. For me to do, I mean.”

  Flanigan’s smiled widened. “Oh, well, it’s not a big deal, not a big thing, one of those little bits and pieces of a case that you can spend a week on and never use in court, never even mention in discovery.”

  The lawyer stood up and brushed imaginary crumbs from his trousers. Standing erect and looking down at McGuire, he grew more impressive and intimidating, suited to his reputation as a lawyer who worked in the heated arena of child custody and family law. “It occurred to me that you might be able to come up with something without incurring a great deal of expense,” Flanigan said. His voice failed to match his posture. It remained uncertain and tentative.

  “What’s it involve?” McGuire sat back in his chair and studied Flanigan with new interest.

  “It’s a matter of finding somebody. Part of a custody case. Not a direct participant, but if we knew where he was, in case we need him, it would be an extra nail in the door, so to speak.” Flanigan bent from the waist and looked McGuire in the eye. “Is that part of your job description? Finding people who have dropped from sight?”

  “Part of it.”

  “Confidentially?”

  “Everything’s confidential.”