“What about him?”
“Workin’ solo now. Got himself a gun, sounds like a Beretta.”
“He’s been ID’d?”
Sleeman nodded. “The gold tooth. He’s back hittin’ tourists down around the market. Don’t want cameras, just cash these days. Feedin’ a habit, probably. Little bastard’s getting cockier than ever. Herded some couple from Jersey into an alley behind the clam house down there last night. He’s copping a feel from the woman with his free hand while her husband’s digging for his cash and traveler’s checks.” Sleeman shook his head. “If I get him alone without the Beretta, I’ll turn his ass pink with my boot, I’m tellin’ ya.” His mood changed. His face brightened as though power had been restored somewhere behind his eyes. “So you’re still shuckin’ for those lawyers, are ya?”
“Only been a week,” McGuire said.
“Which is a week longer’n I figured you’d last.” Sleeman leaned back in his chair. “You don’t have a reputation for playing kissy-face with too many mouthpieces, you know.”
“Always helps to see the other side. Anyway, they’re not into criminal very much. The closest most of them get to a courtroom is for child custody or a civil suit.”
Sleeman leaned forward, his eyes on McGuire. “Don’t you get bored? Don’t you wish, just once, you were out on the street lookin’ for a nab, or you had some snivelin’ piece of crap in the IR, feedin’ you all the stuff you’ve been lookin’ for on his buddies?”
McGuire shook his head. He probed the bowl of tomato sauce with his fork, searching for errant mussels.
“I know what it is.” Sleeman’s face creased into a grin. “It’s the broads, right? Big lawyers like them guys, they got women stacked in the office like cordwood, right? So how many’ve you banged so far?”
“None.” McGuire lowered the fork and raised his beer glass. “Not a one.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“What, you becomin’ a monk?”
“Truth is . . .” McGuire drained his beer glass. “The truth is, I miss being married.”
Sleeman blinked and looked through McGuire, as though the other man had vanished. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He nodded his head and sat back in his chair. “I can see that. I miss it too. I also miss root-canal work and feeding my balls to a pack of Rottweilers. What, you nuts? Miss bein’ married? Hell, you’ve been single for how many years? What’s to miss?”
McGuire shrugged. I’ve always missed it, he wanted to say. The best times of being married were better than the best times of being single. Instead, he said: “I need some information on a guy.”
“Got a record?”
McGuire passed a sheet of paper across the table. In point form, he had written as much about Ross Myers as Flanigan had communicated to him.
“Whaddaya need?” Sleeman asked.
“Whatever you’ve got.”
“Nothin’ on paper, right? I get caught handin’ you paper, my ass is in a sling.”
“Could use a mug shot.”
“C’mon, Joe. I just told you. Nothin’ on paper.”
“Just read me whatever’s on file then.”
Sleeman grinned and tucked the paper into his hip pocket. “You’re gonna owe me.”
“How does two bottles of Glenfiddich sound?”
“Sounds good. Probably taste better.” Sleeman drained his glass.
The waitress returned and removed the plates from in front of McGuire and Sleeman. “How’re you boys doin’?” she said. “Anything else you need?”
Sleeman’s eyes traced the line of her body from her bosom down to the hem of her skirt and up again. “Well,” he said, licking his lips, “tell you the truth, I could use a little pussy.”
She leaned towards him. “So could I, sugar,” she said. “Mine’s as big as your hat.” And Sleeman threw back his head and roared with laughter. The waitress gave McGuire a wink and swivel-hipped away, while McGuire smiled and reminded himself he never had this much fun working with lawyers, never would.
Chapter Five
“You don’t want a fax or nothin’, do ya?”
It was barely an hour later, long enough for McGuire to return to his office, make a pot of coffee, and find a reason to stroll upstairs past Lorna Robbins’s desk and smile at her. His telephone was ringing when he returned. Sleeman began speaking, keeping his voice low so that McGuire had to press the telephone receiver tightly against his ear to catch his words. “Only if you got a photo,” McGuire said. He grabbed a pencil and sat with it poised above a yellow lined notepad.
“No photos, Joe, like I told ya. Gotta sign mug shots out now, you hear about that? Anyway, this guy Myers is some kind of dancer. Got more moves than Fred Astaire. Found himself charged with a bunch of stuff three years ago. Fraud, embezzlement, minor assault, tax evasion. They nailed him on one reduced charge, bit of a deal they cut with him.”
“What’d he get?”
“Six months. Served the whole time.”
“He give an address?”
Sleeman snorted. “Yeah. The Seaview Motel in Fall River. Bit of a come-down from Marlborough Street, right? Anyway, Myers likes to live well. He was drivin’ a Caddie Seville back in ’99, belonged to a bunch of clubs in Miami, had a condo there, owned a couple of racehorses.”
“Liked to play them, I hear.”
“That’s what brought him down.”
“Married?”
“Divorced.”
“Kids?”
“None shown. That’s gonna take a fair bit of diggin’, you want stuff like that.”
“Probably two more bottles of Glenfiddich, too.”
“Funny you should mention it.”
“You still drop into Zoot’s the odd night after work?”
“The odd night.”
“Herbie Stone still tending bar in there?”
“Never misses a beat.”
“Maybe Herbie’ll have a little gift for you, you drop in tonight.”
“Yeah? Now won’t that be nice of old Herbie.”
McGuire hung up and was refilling the coffeemaker when Richard Pinnington tapped lightly on the door and entered. “You want some good news?” he asked, his tanned face split with a wide grin.
“Long as it doesn’t cost me.”
Pinnington’s grin vanished and he gestured at the coffeemaker. “You know, you could get one of the girls to do that for you.”
McGuire poured the water into the top of the machine. “I like to do things myself.” He turned on the machine and looked at Pinnington. “What’s the good news?”
“I just had lunch with Russell. He left on the shuttle to New York, but he wanted me to tell you about the material you gathered on that back-injury case.”
“Guy who hurt himself in a brawl?”
“Pee-Wee had an after-hours chat with counsel from the other side, a kind of off-the-record pre-discovery session. Let him see your report and gave him the name of the other guy in the brawl and his brother. Counsel for the plaintiff made noises about backing off, once he looked into things. He’s probably advising their client that he doesn’t have a case, and that he might even risk charges of attempted fraud. Meanwhile, our client’s impressed all to hell by our efficiency. Your efficiency, I mean. Congratulations.”
McGuire nodded.
“You know, you might have earned your entire month’s income with that one project. Our client was facing a three-million-dollar settlement without it.”
“Three million dollars to a guy who gets beat up in a bar fight and tries to do a con job on some insurance company.” McGuire shook his head.
“Well, you struck a blow for ethics.” Pinnington folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “So. Are you working on anything else, or do you plan to take the rest of the month off?”
McGuire gestured at a scattering of file folders on his desk. “Too busy. I’m looking at some guy who disappeared with a business plan, tracking a missing person for Orin Flanigan . . .”
“Orin gets into some heartbreakers, doesn’t he? Abused kids, all the trash left over from divorces. But he’s damn good. Sometimes, though, I get the feeling that he finds it hard to separate himself from the cases.” Pinnington pushed himself from the door and checked his watch. “You want to get together for lunch some time? Maybe a drink in my office after hours, a little parachute to let you down easy at the end of the day?”
McGuire said sure.
McGuire wasted the rest of the afternoon, leaving at four to purchase the Scotch for Sleeman and driving down Boylston to Zoot’s, where he left the brown-paper sack with Herbie Stone. Stone had been a prison guard at Worcester until he and three other guards were taken hostage in a riot six years earlier. Neither Herbie nor the other guards were harmed, but for two nights and a day they watched as the inmates tortured and killed three prisoners, two of them child molesters and the third a suspected informer. The rioters used a blowtorch, screwdrivers, and their bare hands, and the screams of the victims etched themselves into Herbie Stone’s memory, leaving scars he would never lose. Now he managed Zoot’s, a dimly lit hangout for cops, with a sound system that played quiet jazz. There, the major drama of the day wasn’t hearing someone scream as his testicles were burned to carbon, but running out of Triple See for frozen margaritas that Herbie claimed were the best north of the Rio Grande.
McGuire had a beer in Zoot’s, nodding to the few cops whose faces he recognized. Then he walked down Boylston to a restaurant and devoured bacon and eggs, because he felt like eating bacon and eggs. As he ate he watched the other patrons, especially women his age or younger. He thought about Lorna Robbins and her little-girl smile, her giggles, her full bosom. He wondered if he would enjoy an evening with her, perhaps dinner, perhaps more. He knew she would accept his invitation for the same reason he would offer it. Out of loneliness. Out of a need to escape the feeling of waste, of irretrievable loss, for at least one night of their lives.
He read the paper, paid his bill, walked back to Zoot’s to discover Wally Sleeman had already picked up his Scotch, then drove to Revere Beach.
He parked the car and strode up the walk to the front door, finding the interior of the house darkened and quiet. Behind him he heard another car arrive, and he turned to see Ronnie close the car door.
She watched the vehicle leave before she headed up the walk and discovered McGuire. “Hi,” she said, trying to hide her surprise at his presence. “I’ve got something to show you,” and he stood aside as she entered the house, carrying a large flat package under her arm. She set it on the kitchen table. “Look what I did today!”
Her fingers tore at the brown paper wrapping, and she withdrew a watercolour landscape set in a simple pine frame. Executed with simple, strong brushstrokes, the painting showed a farm field in spring, the bare ground seen through receding snow in brown furrows, and the sun shining, weak but with promise.
McGuire was impressed.
“I never tried this before, leaving white for snow like that, and just putting a blush of blue on it. See the blue? It’s so faint, yet it’s so strong like that, giving shadows and all.” She held the picture in her hands at arm’s length, her eyes glowing with pride. “Carl was so pleased with it, he insisted on taking it to his gallery and framing it himself. That’s why I’m late.”
“Carl?”
“My teacher. I told you about him. God, he has talent! I painted it from a picture he took in Vermont last year.”
She set the painting on a kitchen chair and stepped back to study it as though never having seen it before. “Do you like it?” she asked. “I know I’m fishing for compliments. But I never thought I could do anything this good.” She turned to McGuire. “Do you like it? Really?”
McGuire said he did.
She shrugged out of her coat and glanced at the clock. “I’d better tend to Ollie.” She turned and began walking down the hall. At the mirror she paused to study her reflection and tuck an errant lock of hair into place.
McGuire watched her, glanced at the picture, looked up to see Ronnie entering Ollie’s room, and turned back to the picture again.
Chapter Six
McGuire never knew how they did it, how they located people who could elude FBI computers, Internal Revenue bloodhounds, and neighbourhood police precincts. But the handful of skip tracers working in any big city have their means, and most share a contempt for police procedures and computers.
He remembered Shoelace O’Sullivan, a gaunt Irishman who operated out of a former barbershop in Chelsea, and who traded tips with the cops in return for access to data, the same kind of information McGuire obtained from Sleeman. McGuire and Ollie Schantz visited O’Sullivan in his office one morning more than ten years ago. The Irishman looked twenty years older than his age and reclined in an old barber’s chair, making notes on scraps of paper and nodding while they spoke. When the previous tenant died, O’Sullivan had taken over the lease on the barbershop, and the landlord assumed O’Sullivan was a barber himself. O’Sullivan set up an office without removing any of the previous tenant’s implements. He arranged his library of ancient telephone books, city directories, and other sources in stacks on the floor and on glass shelves that once held clippers and shaving equipment, everywhere at hand. He changed nothing except the window glass, which he painted in opaque white. O’Sullivan even left the bottles of hair tonic, coloured red and green like fruit drinks, on the shelves beneath the mirrors, and the Swedish straight razors in the drawers.
“I’ll be callin’ you on the weekend if I’m findin’ anythin’,” O’Sullivan told McGuire and Schantz when they requested information on a drug dealer who had dropped from sight three years earlier, and whose wife’s skeletal remains had been located in a woods near Braintree.
The telephone rang that Friday afternoon.
“You’ll be lookin’ at twenty-three hundred Beverly Boulevard in Braintree,” O’Sullivan told Schantz. “Row M, room nineteen.” Then he hung up. Shoelace never said a word more than necessary, and seemed to enjoy adding an element of mystery to his comments. McGuire called it Gaelic poetics. Ollie dismissed it as Irish bullshit.
“What is it, an institution?” McGuire asked as he and Schantz drove to Braintree.
It was a cemetery. Row M, plot 19 held the remains of the man Schantz and McGuire had been searching for, buried by his family beneath a stone with his actual name carved into the granite, not the pseudonym he had used as a drug dealer in Boston.
“How the hell’d he do that?” McGuire wondered after they obtained positive identification. “How’s O’Sullivan find this stuff out?”
But Shoelace O’Sullivan performed his magic for the wrong client somewhere along the way. A year later he was discovered slumped in his barber’s chair, his throat slit from ear to ear with one of the straight razors he acquired with the business along with the barber’s chair, mirrors, and hair tonic.
Which left Libby Waxman among the few remaining of her profession, living among Boston’s most densely populated gay community.
McGuire climbed the stairs to Libby’s apartment above Darling Decadence, a store specializing in old examples of nostalgic bad taste sold at outrageous prices.
The peephole cover in Libby’s door swung aside when McGuire knocked, and one world-weary eye looked back at him for a moment before its owner gave a long bronchial sigh, the peephole closed, and he heard three deadlocks being slid aside.
Libby was already walking down the hall back to her parlour when McGuire entered. He followed her through an aroma of stale cigarette smoke, garlic, and grease to a small dark room, where she was lighting a fresh Marlboro and coaxing an overweight gray Persian out of her Barcalounger.
“Didn’t think you’d r
emember me,” McGuire said. He stood looking for a place to sit among the stacks of telephone books, magazines, newspapers, and three-ring binders.
“Hell, McGuire.” Libby’s voice had the coarseness of a dry transmission trying to shift into reverse while moving forward: “Just ’cause you don’t come see me for years doesn’t mean you’re forgotten.”
Legend had it that Libby had been Boston’s last brothel madam, operating an elegant house down near Cherry Street during the fifties. It was while keeping tabs on the patrons of her business, politicians and outlaws alike, that she foresaw a career, a new line of work she would need when the cycle turned and the city’s moralists cast a cold eye on bawdy houses. Which is precisely what happened. A week after City Hall vowed to wipe out Boston’s brothels, so the story went, Libby called the commissioner’s office and told him she was willing to turn over her diary to him, a book that contained the names of over a thousand clients, including his own, if he would help her launch a new business venture.
The commissioner invited her downtown for a chat.
In his office, she told him her new business would be as a skip tracer, tracking missing people down paths that no law-enforcement official could follow.
“It’s a legit business,” Libby pointed out.
“It certainly is,” the commissioner agreed. Libby’s diary sat on the desk between them.
“Of course, I’ll have a better chance of making good if I get some unofficial co-operation from you guys when I need it,” Libby said.
“You certainly will,” the commissioner said.
The story was true.
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