Whisper Death

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “I’m no doctor,” McGuire replied. He stretched his arms along the back of the bench and leaned back, watching the sky change to a glorious blue. “Nothing I could do.”

  “He was your partner.”

  McGuire nodded. “And I thought he was going to die. I didn’t want to be trapped there when the news came. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to handle it on my own if I had to.”

  Bonnar shoved his sunglasses to his forehead and studied McGuire as though he were a rare animal, unfamiliar and unseen until now. Birds sang in the greenery behind them. A breeze stirred the palm trees across the way. McGuire watched a low cloud approach the sun, the only blemish on the face of a perfect sky.

  “I got the goods on you, McGuire,” Bonnar said after several moments. He leaned forward, resting an elbow on his uplifted knee. “After you left yesterday I asked for your records from Boston. You’re a real cowboy, aren’t you? When you’re not getting your ass kissed for being a smart cop, you’re getting it kicked for being a jerk. You have a habit of running like a lone wolf, you and that guy who used to be your partner. ’Course, it wasn’t much of a partnership, way it looks to me. First chance your partner gets, he grabs his pension and drops you like a bad habit.”

  “Where were you?” McGuire’s voice was quiet. Curious, not demanding. He was still studying the sky.

  “When?”

  “Last night. When the shooting started. Where the hell were you?”

  Bonnar withdrew his foot from the bench. He rolled his shoulders forward and leaned in to McGuire as though prepared to seize him. “Do you want to tell me what you’re insinuating?” he hissed. “Or do you want me to guess for myself?”

  McGuire turned to face the other man. “Somebody scared the hell out of Crawford,” McGuire said. “You knew where we were taking him. And what we planned to do. So who did you tell? Did you get somebody to wait for us behind the bushes? It wouldn’t be you. It would be somebody who owes you something. Or maybe you owe them something. Like the two federal guys who interviewed him. So who was it, Bonnar?”

  McGuire watched the other man’s jaw tighten like a vice and his eyes narrow.

  “You son of a bitch,” Bonnar said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You move out of here now. Just get the hell off police property. And if I see you anywhere around here again, I’ll charge you with trespassing and slander and impersonating a police officer and anything else I can think of.” His voice erupted into a shout. “Get out of here! Now!”

  “How bad?” Fat Eddie asked.

  McGuire leaned against the headboard of his motel bed, the telephone at his ear. “Pretty bad. But he’ll come through. Ralph’s tough.”

  “How long will you be down there?”

  “Two, three days,” McGuire lied. Outside he could hear doors slamming and vehicles arriving and departing. Police cars, identification experts, photographers, cops doing their job. “Unless they get lucky and somebody turns up. But I can’t see it.”

  “Was it a hit?”

  “Could be. Whoever did it was very smooth or very lucky.”

  Fat Eddie sighed. Now he was two detectives short. “Who’s directing things down there?”

  “Guy named Bonnar,” McGuire replied. “He’s okay,” he added. Let’s not have Fat Eddie worrying about teamwork, McGuire told himself silently.

  “You’re there just for the preliminaries, right?” Eddie Vance asked. “That’s all they need you for? After all the statements are in, they’re on their own. Is that how it’s going to work?”

  “Something like that,” McGuire assured him.

  “And you’re back here when? By Friday?”

  “That’s the way it looks, Eddie. Listen, you need any paperwork from me? Or something from Bonnar?” A calculated bluff.

  “No, just keep me posted. And let me know if there’s any change in Innes’s condition.”

  “Sure. Sure thing.”

  The telephone jerked him awake less than five minutes later.

  “How is he?” No hello, no formalities. Only the strained voice of Janet Parsons.

  “He’ll pull through.” McGuire rubbed the side of his head. He had to get some sleep.

  “What happened?”

  His voice was weary. “Janet, you already know. We were escorting a prisoner into our room for interrogation and we were ambushed.”

  “And you didn’t do a thing.”

  “I couldn’t do anything, Janet. I’m not armed, for God’s sake!”

  He listened to her breathe over the line from Boston. “Fat Eddie won’t let me come down there to see him,” she said finally.

  “What could you do if you were here?”

  “At least as much as you did.”

  McGuire shook his head sadly and hung up.

  When he awoke at noon, he lay without moving and confronted the events of the previous evening.

  He had hidden from death behind another man’s body.

  Of all the preconceptions the world had of Joseph Peter McGuire, the street kid from a lower-working-class neighbourhood in Worcester, none fathomed the depths of his moral sense. Though he never analyzed it, never defined its limits and exceptions, McGuire nevertheless nurtured an absolute sense of right and wrong. He had a massive capacity for moral outrage, and it seethed constantly within him.

  It was McGuire’s moral sense that had been the foundation of his decision to become a police officer. And it was McGuire’s anger at inequity and hypocrisy, his extreme response to moral grievances, that also fuelled the antisocial side of his behaviour and powered his personality.

  Thus, McGuire could use the self-serving machinations of Eddie Vance to his own advantage in locating a young killer of priests, as he had done a year earlier. The murderer had been found, the case had been closed. And Fat Eddie had suffered only a mere hiccup in his rise to captain. More important, a moral debt had been paid.

  And McGuire could ride his moral outrage against the entire Boston police organization, slashing his way through files of unsolved crimes, decrying sloppy procedures that excused incompetence and enabled murderers to walk free.

  What then, McGuire pondered, is the moral position of a man who cowers behind the body of another human being to protect himself from gunfire?

  McGuire didn’t know.

  Nor could anyone tell him.

  There would be answers and redemption only when McGuire determined who had shot at them from the shrubbery and silenced Bunker Crawford forever.

  McGuire didn’t believe that Crawford had murdered a man on his own doorstep in a fit of insanity. It was an act of desperation, like Crawford’s flight to Las Vegas and his arrival in Palm Springs. He came here for a reason, McGuire assured himself. His murder proved it.

  McGuire would find that reason. On his own if necessary. And he had three, perhaps four days to do it.

  He began by calling the best analytical mind he knew.

  “I heard,” Ollie Schantz said through his speaker phone. “Hell of a thing. You okay?”

  “Not a scratch,” McGuire replied. “I had a shield. My prisoner’s body.”

  “Any port in a storm. Besides, sounds like he was a dead man from the first shot. Might as well stop four bullets as one.” Ollie paused. “What d’ya think, Joe?”

  “They wanted Crawford, not me or Ralph. We were just in the way.”

  “Ideas?”

  “Only some I don’t like.” McGuire explained how Bonnar and his staff had known where he and Innes were taking Crawford. “And he let a couple of federal guys interview the prisoner. Without recording their names or having a local officer present. He even let the Feds take away a videotape of their interview. What the hell kind of operation is that?”

  Ollie Schantz ignored the question. “You check Crawford out on the federal files?” he asked.

  “Didn�
�t have a chance. But I tried to run a search on Amos, the guy he shot in his doorway. Had Matt Kennedy do it. Matt came up against all kinds of security blocks. Said he’d never seen anything like it for a lousy postal inspector.”

  McGuire heard Ollie Schantz grunt through the wire. He pictured his former partner in his Revere Beach home, watching the late afternoon sun kicking diamonds from the waves of Massachusetts Bay.

  “Let me give Matt a call, see what he can match on Crawford and this Amos guy for you. I’ll call you back later if I get anything.” His voice dropped. “Ralph going to be all right?”

  “He’ll be all right,” McGuire said. “But he won’t be the same.”

  “You’re welcome to go in, but there’s nothing to learn.” The ward physician at Palm Springs Memorial Hospital glanced briefly at McGuire’s badge and returned his eyes to his clipboard. “He’s heavily sedated and progressing as well as can be expected,” the doctor said.

  “I’d like to see him,” McGuire said. “I’m his partner.”

  The doctor angled his head toward Ralph’s room and walked briskly away.

  McGuire showed his badge to the two Palm Springs officers flanking the door. One nodded and led McGuire into the room.

  Ralph lay among electronic apparatus that was more alive than the patient it monitored. A jagged green line traced his heartbeat across a small black screen. Gauges moved in response to his blood pressure. Red lights blinked, fluids dripped, circuits hummed, Ralph breathed.

  McGuire watched him for several minutes, the Palm Springs cop behind him clearing his throat and shuffling his feet impatiently.

  McGuire nodded and left.

  Via Linda curled up a gentle rise at the western end of Vista Chino. For the first hundred yards, the scrubby desert on either side of the road was broken by small gullies carved into the hills by rainwater. But where Via Linda turned into itself to form a cul-de-sac, three low houses sat amid separate green oases.

  McGuire parked in the shade of a cluster of immense Royal Palms and marvelled at the power of money to shape desert wasteland. Money, not nature, had imported the Royal Palms and positioned them precisely to complement the lines of each house. Money created the irrigation system, filled it with fresh water and provided brown-skinned gardeners to regulate its operation. When the residents and the vast amount of wealth they represented were gone, nature would assert itself again, restoring the lush grass to dry rocky gullies and first withering, then toppling the Royal Palms.

  The three houses facing McGuire were low, ranch-style designs. Two were Southern Californian interpretations of Mexican villas, with tiled roofs and rough stucco exterior. The third, on McGuire’s left, was brick construction, painted cobalt blue. He approached the blue house, its low stone wall topped by cast iron fencing flanking a heavy security gate. A small plaque near the gate declared “Warning—Armed Response!” followed by the name of a security company. McGuire pressed a button below a two-way speaker.

  A woman said “Yes?” and McGuire introduced himself. There was no reply for several seconds until a man’s voice throbbed through the speaker. “Who is this?” it demanded.

  “Lieutenant McGuire, Boston Police Department. I’d like to ask some questions about the incident out here a few nights ago. And what happened last night on Palm Canyon Drive.”

  “I already talked to some officers this morning. Local men. Told them everything I know.”

  “I’m sure you did. I just need a couple of answers. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes.”

  “Stand in front of the gate where I can see you,” the man’s voice ordered.

  McGuire ambled to the centre of the filigreed gate. Through the bars he could see a cobblestone walk leading to a pair of heavy, carved oak doors. The walk curved through a courtyard filled with tropical flowers and shrubs, creating a flourishing parkland secure from strangers.

  Silently, the gates slid aside and McGuire approached the house.

  “Do you have some identification?” The man’s voice called from behind one of the oak doors, now partially opened.

  McGuire withdrew his ID folder and held it in front of him as he advanced.

  Through the opening in the door, a dough-faced man squinted at the badge and photo card. “Guess it’s okay,” he said almost doubtfully. The door swung open wider. “Come on in.”

  McGuire entered a massive foyer with garish, abstract paintings hanging on textured white walls, each precisely lit by a concealed ceiling fixture. A rough bronze sculpture of a dying bull, lances protruding from its shoulders and bronze blood coursing its way down its back, grimaced from a marble pedestal against a wall. A dark-skinned woman in a maid’s uniform stood watching from an open doorway.

  “I’m Don Mercer,” the dough-faced man said, thrusting a hand at McGuire. His face creased into a smile that quickly faded. “Say, that was one of your guys who was shot last night over on Palm Canyon, wasn’t it? I saw it on the news. Terrible thing. He going to be all right?”

  McGuire said he hoped so.

  “We don’t have much crime like that here in the valley. Back in Los Angeles it’s an everyday event, but people in the valley, they’re here to avoid that kind of thing. Want a drink?”

  Moments later they were seated on damask-covered rattan furniture in an atrium at the rear of the house, the glass walls and ceiling darkly tinted against the heat of the desert sun. McGuire watched a team of gardeners working in a flower bed at the base of a rock-strewn hill, devoid of vegetation, which rose just beyond the rear garden wall. The maid entered with two vodka tonics on a tray and departed silently.

  “This guy, this Crawford character, he was on drugs I’ll bet.” Mercer sampled his drink and set it aside. “That’s what I told the police when they arrived. He had to be. He was just going nuts, climbing over Mrs. Vargas’s fence like that, screaming all the while.”

  Mercer didn’t meet McGuire’s expectations of a wealthy Palm Springs resident. His cotton T-shirt was wrinkled and stained, worn over a pair of loose-fitting jogging trousers. Like his face, which was fleshy and beginning to sag, his body was round, soft and shapeless. Most surprising was Mercer’s personality: boyish and enthusiastic, as though he were surprised to find himself playing the role of a prosperous businessman, and enjoying it immensely.

  “What was he screaming?” McGuire asked. He settled back in his chair and sipped the drink. Why couldn’t he live this way? he asked himself. Why should he endure frigid New England winters drinking warm beer from cans?

  “Couldn’t figure it out. Gibberish,” Mercer replied. “Just a lot of crazy stuff. Guy was a loony.”

  “A loony with a gun.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard first. The shots. But he didn’t hit anything. He was just firing the damn pistol into the air. Then he vaulted over Glynnis Vargas’s wall and hurled the gun through her window. I’d hit my security alarm by then and my guys arrived in minutes. You know, I already told all this to the Palm Springs police. Didn’t they pass it on to you?”

  McGuire assured him he was just checking facts.

  This seemed to satisfy Mercer. “How’s your drink?” he asked. McGuire said one was enough, although it wasn’t. He would have enjoyed another, sitting in the silence of the sun-drenched room with a cold vodka tonic and nowhere to go.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Mercer?” he asked.

  Mercer grinned, pleased with the question. “Play golf, chase women and clip bond coupons,” he said. He tipped his glass almost vertically to drain its contents and smacked his lips. “Manage to drink a bit too. Made my money in a chain of health clinics. HMOs. Health Maintenance Organizations. Signed contracts with companies all through the valley to provide medical services for their employees. Cheaper than standard medical insurance.” He turned to shout down the corridor: “Maria, another drink,” then looked back at McGuire. “Three years ago, if
you worked for a company with HMO coverage in the San Fernando Valley, the odds were one in four that your doctor worked at one of my clinics. Until my divorce. My wife . . . ex-wife now . . . got the house in Bel Air and half my assets. I got this place and the other half. Had a choice of buying her out and keeping the business, or saying the hell with it, sell it for a capital gain and take early retirement. I said the hell with it. Now the biggest decisions I make all day are whether I drive the Mercedes or the Porsche to the golf club and which widow I invite over for dinner.” He tilted his head, indicating the house next door. “I tell you, I ever make a hit with Glynnis Vargas, I just might find myself married all over again.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Mercer leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head, and stared through the tinted glass roof of the atrium at a tinted sky. “Sexy. Mysterious. Cultured. Gorgeous. Rich. Hell, if she were deaf and dumb and a nymphomaniac, she’d be the answer to every man’s prayer, wouldn’t she?”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Since she moved here. About a year ago. She’s a bit of an artsy type, you know? Brought a lot of stuff with her, her own chauffeur . . .”

  “From where?” McGuire interrupted.

  “Brazil. She was married to some wealthy guy in Rio. Owned a jewellery company, I heard. Anyway, she gave a lot of things to the museum when she settled here and they made a big splash about it. Appointed her a special patron, named a gallery after her, threw a party.” Mercer gave McGuire a sly grin. “That’s about the time I started getting interested in art.”

  “I’d like to talk to her,” McGuire said.

  Mercer raised his eyebrows and his soft face creased into a pulpy mass. “I have an idea,” he said as though plotting a conspiracy. “Why don’t I take you over and introduce you? I love excuses to see Glynnis in the afternoon.” He reached for the telephone.