Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “You’re getting younger,” she said in mock anger. “How do you do that? You look younger now than the last time I saw you.”

  “And you’re getting prettier,” McGuire replied, kissing her lightly on the cheek.

  The cab pulled away, leaving them standing in the late afternoon sunshine, both hesitating because they knew what they would face inside the house.

  “His lungs, his kidneys and who knows what else,” Ronnie Schantz whispered over the lip of a coffee mug.

  They were in the kitchen, seated at the small white enameled table amid arrangements of dried flowers, ceramic jars filled with fragrant potpourri and framed pictures of young children holding deep conversations with quizzical lambs and puppies with enormous eyes. A plate of untouched hermit cookies sat between them.

  “The doctors say it’s common in paralyzed people. They could treat it better if Ollie were in a chronic care hospital, but . . .” She shrugged.

  “He won’t go,” McGuire finished.

  She nodded. “And I won’t force him. I’d rather have him dying here with me to care for him than somewhere downtown where I might get to drop in once or twice a week or whatever.” She set the coffee cup down and bowed her head, her hair a nest of spun snow. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, Joe. I’m upstairs tossing and turning and I just want to talk to somebody. So I’ll come downstairs, it’s four in the morning, and he’ll always be awake, waiting for me. He’ll know I was having a bad night and he’ll say, ‘What took you so long, sport?’ and I’ll make some coffee with a little bit of cognac in it and I let him sip it and we talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Anything at all. Old friends and world problems and how the sky gets that strange glow when the sun drops behind the horizon and whether the teenage kid next door is selling drugs and where we ate the best fried clams we ever tasted.”

  She blinked and turned away, holding up a hand to ward off McGuire as he reached for her. “No, I’m all right. I’m okay. These . . . these are what you get from a good marriage, Joe. Not a perfect one. There is no perfect marriage. But a good one. You store them up, little by little and day by day, and when all the mystery’s gone and the passion’s faded and you wonder what it would have been like to have spent your life with somebody else, you draw on these things. Each of you, you draw them out and exchange them with the other person and, if you’re lucky, you can say, ‘It was worth it.’”

  She looked across at McGuire, her eyes blinking furiously now, this woman who as a young mother had watched the wheels of a suburban bus crush her only child and who had greeted her paralyzed husband at the door of their home barely a year ago.

  Her expression told McGuire it had been worth it.

  Ronnie Schantz turned at a sound from down the hall. “I think he’s awake,” she said, standing and smoothing her apron. “Let’s go. He’ll be so happy to see you.”

  The room at the rear of the house had been planned as a den, with floor to ceiling bookshelves framing the view of Massachusetts Bay through an expansive window. But when Ollie arrived home after the fishing accident in New Brunswick, crippled in the heartbeat of time it took him to fall backwards and shatter a neck vertebra against the gunwale of his boat, the den was converted into Ollie’s permanent preserve. The walls were painted white, a motorized cot was positioned for the best view of the water and a police scanner and speaker telephone were located for Ollie to operate with the limited use of his right hand. In a corner sat a personal computer linked with the mainframe unit at Boston Police Headquarters.

  It had been almost six months since McGuire visited Ollie.

  McGuire tried to disguise his reaction to the sight of his former partner, the man’s body now shrunk to little more than parchment stretched between tired bones.

  “Joseph, you’re lookin’ terrific,” Ollie said in the hoarse rattle that was a mocking ghost of his once-powerful voice.

  “I told him he’s getting younger,” Ronnie added. “He’s found a way to turn the clock back.”

  “Lemme see, lemme see.” Ollie waved McGuire closer with a flicker of his good hand. The two men stared into each other’s eyes for a moment, McGuire grinning, Ollie frowning, before Ollie shifted his gaze back to his wife. “Son of a gun’s got himself a woman,” he said, as though announcing a scientific discovery. “See it in his eyes. Got a look in there you could pour over a waffle.”

  McGuire sat in Ollie’s bedside chair. “I met someone a few weeks ago,” he said. “She’s special.”

  Ollie replied with a grunt. Ronnie puttered with some items near the computer.

  “Still solving cases for Berkeley Street?” McGuire asked.

  Ollie closed his eyes and moved his head slightly from side to side.

  “Not much anymore,” Ronnie Schantz said. “Fat Eddie Vance doesn’t like to admit he and his crowd can’t do the job. So he rarely calls.”

  McGuire swore.

  “Go easy on Fat Eddie now,” Ollie said. “Gotta remember, he’s at that awkward age. Too old to be aborted and too young for euthanasia.”

  McGuire smiled while Ollie Schantz watched with approval. Ollie was one of the few people in the world who could make McGuire smile.

  “What’re you here for?” Ollie Schantz asked. “Didn’t come to show off your tan, I’ll bet.”

  “My aunt died Monday.” McGuire crossed his legs and rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingertips of the other. “She and I were the only survivors in the whole damn family. I’m here for her funeral tomorrow and the reading of the will.”

  “And you’re going back when?” Ronnie Schantz asked.

  “Two days. Three at the most.”

  “You’ll drop by before heading south again, won’t you?” It was more an order than a question from Ronnie.

  “Sure will,” McGuire smiled.

  “And you’re stayin’ here tonight?” Ollie asked.

  “That’s the plan.” He ducked his head and twisted to look at Ronnie. “Guess I forgot to ask.”

  “There was never any question,” Ronnie replied, standing. “I’ll get your room fixed up.”

  “You pretty close to this aunt of yours?” Ollie asked.

  “Cora?” McGuire nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I was. Didn’t stay close. Meant to, but . . .” He shrugged. “I spent a few summers with her and her husband and their son when I was a teenager. They had this house on the Cape, in Compton. Nice place. Terry, their son, was a few months older than me. He died in Vietnam trying to storm a mortar emplacement. That was Terry’s style. When her husband Earl died a few years later, Cora turned tough and uncompromising. She always had been but this just cemented it for her. She became a disturber, demonstrating against the war, carrying on at town meetings, refusing to pay her taxes. You don’t do those things in a place like Compton, and she lost a lot of friends over the years.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” Ollie asked.

  “Five, six years ago. Around the time Micki left me. I needed to talk to her.”

  No, he corrected himself silently. I needed to put my head in her lap and cry like a baby.

  “You drivin’ down tomorrow?”

  McGuire nodded. “Should be able to rent a car from some place on Shore Road.”

  “Stayin’ in her house while you’re up there?”

  Another nod.

  “Can hardly wait to get your gonads back to that woman you left in the Bahamas, you with ’em.”

  “No panic,” McGuire said. “I’ll stop in here for a visit before I go.”

  “Sure.” Ollie smiled, his oversized mouth stretching into a cold straight line. “Sure you will, Joseph. Maybe you’d better get some sleep now.”

  From the kitchen, McGuire placed a telephone call to Barbara’s villa on Treasure Cay but the Bahamian maid said she was sleeping and did not wish
to be disturbed until morning. McGuire asked the maid to tell Barbara he had called, to say he had arrived safely and would call again tomorrow. The maid promised she would.

  In the darkness of the spare room, McGuire took a very long time to fall asleep, in spite of his fatigue.

  Chapter Four

  “You missed a hell of a day, Cora.”

  Parker Leedale stood at the dormer window of his second floor bedroom with its view of Cora Godwin’s house across Miner’s Lane.

  “A hell of a day.”

  The weather had been more like August than October for almost a week: brisk, brilliant mornings that drifted through warm and gentle afternoons into evenings illuminated by a full moon that rose after sunset, all of it generated by a high pressure system sitting over Nantucket that was showing no inclination to move.

  The Cape was a celebration of colour as oak and maple leaves wafted down from trees through the calm air to speckle the grass with green and gold and crimson. On the day of Cora Godwin’s memorial service, the sky shone as clear and unblemished as the inside of a porcelain bowl.

  Parker Leedale, third-generation lawyer of the Leedales of Compton—and the last, since he and his wife June had no children—had passed his forty-eighth birthday two weeks before Cora Godwin’s death. “Not celebrated,” he corrected Mike Gilroy, his friend from high school days. “Damn it, when you get past forty, forty-five, you don’t celebrate these things anymore. You pass the damn things.”

  Gilroy laughed. “It’s just a number, Parker,” he teased.

  “Yeah, but it’s my number and I don’t like it,” Parker Leedale responded.

  Parker Leedale believed it was easy for Gilroy, almost a year younger than Parker Leedale, to laugh. To Leedale, growing older would be more acceptable if he were married to a woman like Bunny, Mike Gilroy’s second wife. Gilroy’s first wife had been a sad-eyed girl he met when she was working as a chambermaid in a Cape Cod guest house. They married in October, moved away to Hartford and raised two children, both girls, both narrow-faced, unhappy replicas of their mother. When the youngest girl finished high school they separated, and Mike left Hartford to return to Compton and open his own insurance office, funded by an inheritance. His daughters married boys who lived in distant states, young men with little promise who wore peaked caps over greasy hair that grew to their shoulders and drove tired pick-up trucks, and the daughters sent greeting cards to their father at Christmas and on his birthday.

  Within a year of leaving his wife and a week before his forty-second birthday, Mike married twenty-seven-year-old Bunny Miller who vowed to fight age “every step of the way” and who shopped in Boston for expensive clothes that hugged her full figure.

  Parker Leedale was fascinated by Bunny Gilroy from the first day he met her. He knew she used bleach on her blond shoulder-length hair and that she wore coloured contact lenses to deepen the blue of her eyes. It didn’t matter to Parker Leedale. He had never known, never expected to know, a woman more sensuous, more attractive than Bunny Gilroy, and on the rare occasions when he and his wife June made love, both withdrawing into their deep and private caves in search of fulfillment even as they became as physically close as any two humans can, Parker imagined the body beneath him was Bunny Gilroy’s and not June’s, not the same body he had made love to exclusively for twenty-five years.

  Well. Almost exclusively . . .

  “Are you ready yet?” June Leedale called up the stairwell from the living room.

  “In a minute.” Parker Leedale turned from the window to choose a tie.

  “Pardon?”

  “In a minute!” he shouted angrily.

  “Oh. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head in exasperation and chose a maroon tie with a pattern of mallard ducks in flight. Cora had always liked ducks.

  The Sagamore Bridge rises steeply from the Massachusetts mainland like a carnival ride, soaring over the canal that separates Cape Cod from the mainland. On summer weekends heavy traffic creeps across the bridge like an endless multi-wheeled insect, but during autumn midweek afternoons the flow is light and most of the vehicles are heavy trucks carrying foods and beverages and construction equipment.

  An oversized dump truck was crowding McGuire’s bumper when his rented car stalled just below the crest of the Sagamore Bridge. One moment McGuire was tapping his finger on the steering wheel in rhythm with the music on the radio, and in the next instant the engine sputtered and died.

  The disabled car quickly coasted to a stop on the incline and McGuire set the parking brake to prevent the vehicle from rolling backwards. A high-pitched squeal of worn brakes cut the air behind him, followed by a long blast on a horn and an even longer explosion of profanity.

  “It stalled,” McGuire said when he climbed out of the car and walked back to the Mack truck.

  “No shit.” The truck driver was a massive man with a bald head and untrimmed black beard. When he looked down to sneer at McGuire, he revealed an arrow tattooed on his scalp, pointing forward. He wore a tight black cotton top with the sleeves cut off, exposing several tattoos on his arms. One of the tattoos read: “Fuck ’em all and sleep till noon.”

  The truck driver reached for his CB. “Yeah, this is Toby Ten,” he barked into the microphone. “Got a breakdown inbound on the Sagamore Bridge, inside lane. Better get a hook on it before somebody gives the sumbitch a nudge over the side.” He waited while a voice crackled through the CB speaker inside the truck’s cab. “Green Ford,” he said. “The hell, dipstick, how many dead Fords you expect to find on the goddamn bridge?” There was another crackle before the trucker said, “Just being a good citizen, pal, that’s all I’m doin’.”

  The driver replaced his CB microphone and grinned at McGuire. “Smokey hates it when we get to be the good guys,” he said. The truck’s diesel engine roared and belched black smoke through its vertical exhaust pipe. “You wanta move your ass, buddy, so I can swing around you and get on with some business here?”

  “How far you going?” McGuire asked.

  “Eastham. Got a load of topsoil.”

  “That’s past Compton, isn’t it?”

  The trucker tilted his head. “Hell, yeah, but Compton’s still twenty miles outta my way.”

  “What’ll you charge to drop me off at Compton?”

  “Costs me two and a half bucks a mile to drive this dog.”

  “That sounds like fifty bucks to me.”

  “Well, ain’t that somethin’,” the trucker nodded. “That’s kinda what it sounded like to me too.”

  “I’ll get my stuff,” McGuire said, and he trotted back to his car while the vehicles lining up behind the truck sounded their horns and the trucker leaned out the window and ran through a list of obscenities that lasted until McGuire returned to climb into the passenger seat with his luggage and a dozen red roses purchased that morning in Revere Beach.

  “The hell, you lookin’ to get laid?” the trucker asked when he saw the roses.

  Mike Gilroy’s gold Volvo station wagon pulled off Miner’s Lane into the driveway just as Parker Leedale came downstairs into the living room, fastening the buttons on his blue blazer. He watched the couple emerge from the car and approach the house along the flagstone walk.

  Bunny Gilroy wore a gold cashmere sweater and brown skirt. A heavy gold necklace and matching gold earrings were her only jewelry. Her hair, the colour of pale lemons, shone in the sunlight as though lit from within.

  Mike Gilroy, laughing at something Bunny said when she left the car, wore a pinstriped blue suit, windowpane check shirt and knit tie. From inside the house, Parker Leedale watched Mike reach for his wife’s hand and squeeze it.

  Mike’s friends had been cool to Bunny when he first introduced her. She was far too young for him, they agreed. They had met in a Boylston Street bar in Boston, quiet little Mike just getting over a bad marriage made in haste, p
icking up a bleached blond floozy from some forgotten little town in Maine. This isn’t a woman you marry, they agreed among themselves. This is somebody you take away for a dirty weekend and forget about.

  But Bunny surprised them all. Her glamour and youth seemed to change Mike from a withdrawn, almost morose manager of his insurance agency into a man who appeared to enjoy life more than he ever had with his first wife. Even the wives of Mike’s oldest friends, who in the beginning had frowned at Bunny’s excessive makeup, grew charmed by her naturalness, her little-girl appeal. Whatever it was that Bunny Gilroy brought to their marriage, it seemed to agree with Mike. He had been happier over these past five years than his lifelong friends could remember.

  When Parker Leedale opened the front door, Bunny greeted him with a broad smile and when she hugged him he was aware of her breasts pressing against his chest. He shook hands with Mike, Little Mikey from their days in Compton Public School, as Bunny swept past him to hug June Leedale.

  Comments were exchanged about the wonderful weather and the Gilroys offered words of admiration for the buffet table June Leedale had prepared for the post-funeral gathering. Finally June glanced at her watch and said, “We should be going or we’ll be late.” She turned off the lights in the kitchen and checked the lock on the back door. “Blake and Ellie said they would meet us there. Maybe they’ve seen him.”

  “Seen who?” Mike Gilroy was standing near the front door, his hand on the small of his wife’s back.

  Bunny noticed Parker Leedale looking at her and she smiled at him. A friend’s smile. Your friend’s wife’s smile. A sister’s smile. Not the smile that says, Take me home with you. Parker turned away. “Come on, for Christ’s sake, June,” he said with an angry edge that surprised the others. “Let’s get going.”

  “Cora’s nephew.” June Leedale walked briskly from the kitchen to the front door, staring into her open purse. “We still haven’t had a reply.” She brushed past Parker as though he wasn’t there and smiled at Mike and Bunny near the front door. “Looks like it’s going to be a very small funeral.”