Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  Blake Stevenson stepped forward, his hand thrust out. “I seem to recall you,” the balding, overweight man said cheerfully. “Blake Stevenson. My wife, Ellie.”

  Ellie Stevenson raised her drink to her mouth. “You always make an entrance like that?” she asked McGuire with a laugh. “God, I thought Willoughby was gonna have a fit!” She sipped from her glass, her eyes locked on McGuire’s.

  Mike Gilroy introduced himself and his wife Bunny, and McGuire nodded pleasantly to both. He was asking himself how the hell he’d wound up here and why he wasn’t back on Green Turtle Cay sharing cold lobster and white wine with Barbara.

  “I’m Parker’s wife.”

  McGuire turned to face the woman who had spoken so hesitantly, identifying herself by using her husband’s name. June Leedale’s long brown hair, pulled back and tied with a kerchief, flashed highlights of red. Lines radiated from her eyes and there were brackets at the corners of her mouth, scars of time.

  “Can I get you a coffee?” she asked.

  McGuire said he’d rather have a drink, preferably Scotch.

  “Neat?” asked Parker Leedale from across the room. He had placed McGuire’s bag in a closet and was standing at an antique pine dry sink converted into a bar, a bottle of Chivas Regal in his hand.

  “On ice, if you have it,” McGuire told him.

  “What was Doc Hayward so curious about?” Blake Stevenson asked. He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, raising and lowering his bulky body on the toes of his heavy-soled brogues.

  “He was telling me about Cora’s death,” McGuire replied. “How her heart gave out.”

  “I still don’t know what happened to her pills,” June Leedale said. Her arms were folded across her chest.

  “What pills?” Bunny Gilroy asked. She was seated on the sofa facing the fireplace, her skirt riding just above her knees.

  “Her potassium capsules.” Parker Leedale walked toward McGuire, extending a small tumbler of Scotch and ice. “Hayward asked June for them and she couldn’t find them.” McGuire accepted the drink in silence, watching the faces of the others as they spoke in turn.

  “The hell he’d want with them anyway?” It was Ellie Stevenson. She seemed annoyed.

  “Covering his ass,” Mike Gilroy said. “You know what doctors are like. Probably ordered the wrong dosage for her and wanted to toss ’em away himself, avoid a malpractice suit.”

  “Hayward’s a good man,” Parker Leedale said, shaking his head doubtfully. “I can’t imagine him doing something like that.”

  “So what happened to the pills?” Bunny Gilroy asked, looking from Parker to June.

  “I guess they got lost in all the confusion when the ambulance arrived,” June Leedale said.

  “Are we gonna talk all day or are we gonna eat?” Ellie Stevenson said, punctuating her words with a laugh.

  As the others gathered around the dining table, McGuire carried his drink to the bay window where he leaned against a wall, the afternoon sun warming his back. He was thinking of his aunt and how she would have been amused at the tale of McGuire’s rented car breaking down on the canal bridge, causing a traffic jam extending halfway back to Boston. And of her favourite nephew flagging a ride to the church in an unmuffled truck driven by a retired Hell’s Angels member. She might even have laughed at the sight of her own memorial service: the empty church, the preacher spouting clichés like a coffee percolator, the organist managing to play a wrong note in every bar of music, the entire unnecessary and badly orchestrated event.

  Laughing at it would have been Cora’s style.

  McGuire’s smile faded as he watched the others in the room help themselves to the food and drinks arranged buffet-style on the table.

  If Hayward was correct—and McGuire’s instincts told him the doctor possessed enough wisdom and experience to trust his suspicions—someone could have murdered Cora by replacing the contents of the potassium capsules with another drug, one strong enough to kill her.

  Why? Who benefited from her death?

  Suspicions were cheap, McGuire reminded himself. It was facts he needed and Hayward had precious few of them.

  A car crunched its way along the oyster shell driveway. McGuire turned to see Reverend Willoughby and Jerome Harper arriving in the minister’s meticulously maintained gray Plymouth. The voices of Parker Leedale and Mike Gilroy echoed back from the kitchen where they were mixing punch in a large plastic bowl. They talked with the harmony of old friends enjoying their disagreements.

  “This thing’s not a punch bowl,” Mike Gilroy said. “It’s a damned goldfish bowl. We’re gonna have sardine-flavoured punch.”

  “Up your nose, Gilroy,” Parker Leedale said. “Pass the vodka.”

  From the second floor, where Blake Stevenson had gone to use the washroom, came the sound of a toilet flushing.

  If someone really did murder the woman who had been more of a mother to you than anyone else, McGuire asked himself, what the hell should you do about it? Shrug your shoulders and go back to your desert island? Say it’s not your job anymore? You, the ex-homicide cop?

  Once McGuire had been more than a cop. He and Ollie Schantz had been near-legends, achieving the highest arrest/conviction ratio of any team on the Boston homicide squad. But that was long ago, back when Ollie still had arms and legs that functioned normally instead of like a puppet’s limbs with its strings severed. Back when McGuire believed in himself and his job and in the idea that life wasn’t really a series of haphazard events but an extended, continuous reflection of each person’s values and commitments. Back when McGuire assumed that he was responsible for his own happiness, when people were free to shape their lives according to their own choices, good or bad, wise or foolish.

  He could no longer make himself believe those things. Just as Ollie Schantz could no longer make his limbs respond to the commands of their owner.

  In many ways, the two partners were united again. Not in their occupations but in their handicaps. Ollie Schantz paralyzed by a shattered neck vertebra, Joe McGuire impaired by a failure of his beliefs in himself and in his once well-honed sense of ultimate justice.

  Haphazard, McGuire thought again. It was as good a description of his life as anything else he could come up with. How do you prepare for haphazard events? You don’t. You survive them.

  McGuire watched Ellie Stevenson separate herself from the other women and walk toward him, a glass of rum and cola in her hand, the silky fabric of her dress measuring each stride with a sound like softly brushed cymbals.

  “You doing all right?” she asked, her broad mouth poised on the edge of a grin.

  McGuire nodded. “Doing fine,” he replied.

  “You get anything out of that sermon today?” Ellie Stevenson began toying with a pendant hanging from a fine gold chain at her throat. She smiled frequently as she spoke, her conversation often punctuated by bursts of laughter totally at odds with her words, as though she were responding to the comments of someone whispering in her ear. “Wasn’t that the most bizarre crap you ever heard? God, I think Willoughby’s losing it.”

  “I couldn’t figure it out.” McGuire smiled tightly. “But then I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.”

  Her smile grew wider. “Boy, we didn’t think you were going to make it here at all.” The hand spun the pendant.

  “Didn’t get the message until yesterday.” McGuire drained his drink.

  “I told June that.” Ellie smoothed the pendant against her skin, just below the hollow in her throat. Laughter again. “I said, what the hell, it takes half an hour to get a call through to Nantucket some days, and we’re talking about a guy on some sandbar in mañana land.” More laughter.

  McGuire’s eyes followed her hand to the soft shadow of her cleavage, visible at the unbuttoned neckline. Shifting his gaze away, he looked for somewhere to set his empty glass.
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br />   “Here, I’ll take that.” Ellie reached for the tumbler and moved sideways against McGuire, their bodies touching. “Here comes the bible thumper up the walk with Knuckles O’Toole, his favourite organ player, if you catch my drift.” McGuire could smell her perfume, heavy with jasmine and spices. “Damned if I’m playing hostess to a guy who wears gowns and talks with a lisp.” She exploded in laughter and rested a hand on McGuire’s shoulder.

  “Ellie?” It was June Leedale, removing deviled eggs one by one from an elaborate plastic container and arranging them on a large flowered china platter. “Would you let Reverend Willoughby and Jerome in, please?”

  “Shit,” Ellie spat in McGuire’s ear. “Caught again.” Another burst of laughter.

  McGuire watched Ellie Stevenson walk gracelessly to the door and swing it open to reveal the minister and the organist waiting patiently to enter. “Hello,” she said in a flat, sarcastic tone which she quickly tried to soften with one of her cold smiles. “Come in,” she added, and as the men entered she looked across at McGuire and covered her mouth to stifle her laughter.

  McGuire turned away while Parker and June Leedale welcomed their new guests. He didn’t like Ellie. Nor did he feel any warmth toward Parker Leedale. But he felt immediate sympathy for June Leedale, a woman immersed in a flood of concealed suffering.

  In truth, he longed to be back on the tiny island that had been his home for more than a year. He pictured the view from his cabin atop the hill where he could watch the waves of Ocean Beach. And, across the cay, the water of the harbour flat as glass, laughter drifting up to his cabin from unseen people in unseen locations among the banana trees and cane grass . . .

  “Deviled egg?”

  McGuire turned to find June Leedale holding the china tray crowded with deviled eggs in two hands, presenting them like an offering. He guessed she was in her mid-forties. McGuire was struck by her features again, her large brown eyes, thin mouth, delicate dimpled chin. An attractive face but not a strong one, an impression made more apparent by her manner of looking at the world indirectly from her eye’s corner, her face angled slightly away as though to avoid a direct blow. He wondered what tragedy had scarred her so deeply.

  He thanked her and took one of the eggs.

  “Cora spoke of you often,” June Leedale said, setting the tray on a restored cherrywood desk. “I think she has a scrapbook full of news clippings about you. You and the other detective.”

  “Ollie Schantz.” The egg tasted bland and felt soft and sensual in his mouth.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s him.” She stood with her hands crossed loosely in front of her, staring through the window behind McGuire at Cora’s house shining in the autumn afternoon sun. “I want you to know,” she continued, “that Cora never complained when you didn’t write or call. There are . . . Well, some people, like my husband, were a little upset because Cora would say ‘Joe’s the last of us, you know. And he’s the best. The last and the best.’ That’s how she described you. The last and the best. She always thought you would visit her the past few years. But she didn’t complain and I don’t think she was ever disappointed.” She blinked quickly and turned away, embarrassed at her tears.

  “You were obviously a good friend to her,” McGuire said gently. He wanted to thank her for her kindnesses to his aunt, to reassure this fragile woman. But instead of giving her strength, his words seemed to shatter her.

  June Leedale smothered a sob and brought a hand to her mouth. “She loved doing puzzles,” she said through her tears. “Solving them, making them up. Crossword puzzles and little word puzzles. God, her mind was so active to the very end. . . .” She dabbed at her nose with a tissue and looked around it at McGuire, smiling. “She said it was a McGuire trait. Solving puzzles. She said that’s what made you such a good detective.”

  “I spent a couple of summers here with her,” McGuire said. “Her and her husband and Terry. When I was eleven, twelve.”

  June Leedale nodded. “Parker told me. I knew Terry, we all . . . we all went to school together. I’m sorry I don’t remember you. Cora showed me some pictures of you as a little boy, playing on the beach in the summer when you stayed with them.”

  McGuire looked away and recalled Terry Godwin, Cora’s only child. They had been the same age, he and Terry. Same build, same colouring. They could have been brothers. But Terry Godwin was more outgoing, someone who craved to be in everyone’s sharp focus. It was Terry who sought and won the lead roles in school dramatics, Terry who talked easily to the prettiest girls, Terry who followed ROTC through boot camp to a full commission and eventually to a second and fatal tour of duty in Vietnam.

  “Not enough left of him to send home,” Cora blinked up at McGuire when he visited her after the MIA report arrived. “They say he’s missing. But he’s not missing. They know exactly where he is. They just can’t ship back an entire acre of that godforsaken country so we can bury him here.” And she had laughed, not the soft laughter of amusement but a dry, bitter laugh of anger. “He’s already buried, isn’t he?” Cora said, framing her own answer. “That’s the beauty of how Terry died, you know. That’s the wonder of modern warfare. One moment you’re alive and, a heartbeat later, you’re not only dead but you’re buried right there. And here. And there. And over there,” and she swept her arm in a circle as though she were sitting in the killing ground of a Vietnam rice field instead of her Cape Cod house with its floral-upholstered sofas and pine furniture and her brokenhearted husband upstairs, drinking bourbon alone in his dead son’s bedroom.

  And so, in many ways, McGuire became Cora’s child.

  “How long will you be staying here?” June Leedale asked, and McGuire realized she had been watching him.

  “Not long.” When he looked back at her she turned quickly away to stare through the window at Cora’s house again. “Your husband wants me there for the reading of the will tomorrow. Then I’ll decide what to do.”

  “She left everything to you. All her property, all the contents.”

  McGuire pursed his lips and shrugged.

  “I know I’m not supposed to say that but Parker drafted her will and I typed it up. It’s all yours and the ACLU’s. You get the house, the contents and her car. The ACLU gets her cash.” She turned away. “Please don’t tell Parker I said anything. About the will, I mean.”

  “Why did you tell me?”

  It was her turn to shrug. “I’m not very good at making conversation. And this is my . . . our house and you’re a guest. I felt I should talk to you. That’s the extent of my conversational abilities, I guess. Proves what I am. A lawyer’s wife who acts as his part-time secretary.”

  “How long have you been doing that?” McGuire asked. “Working as your husband’s secretary?” What’s wrong with this woman? he wondered.

  “Since we’ve been married. Twenty-six years. Last year we had our silver wedding anniversary.” She looked down and smoothed the front of her dress. “When I hear myself say that, I can’t believe it. When I hear my own age I can’t believe it. Would you like another drink?”

  “Yes,” McGuire said, lifting the tray of deviled eggs from the cherrywood desk. “I think that would be a very good idea.”

  He followed her across the room to where the others were sampling the food, sipping their drinks, talking with the easy familiarity of old friends.

  “You two looked like you were into something serious over there,” Parker Leedale said as McGuire set the tray on the table.

  “We were talking about Cora,” June Leedale replied. “And how much we’ll miss her.”

  “Miss her?” Ellie’s sharp voice from the other side of the table was like a cracking whip followed by a hollow laugh. “Who? Him?” She pointed a celery stick in McGuire’s direction. “He hasn’t seen her in years. How the hell’s he going to miss her?” She was standing between Mike Gilroy and her husband, Blake.

 
; McGuire smiled indulgently at Ellie Stevenson who rested a hand lightly on Mike Gilroy’s arm.

  “I’m just kidding,” Ellie said before others could respond.

  No, you’re not, McGuire replied in silence.

  At the far end of the table, Bunny Gilroy was ladling punch into small cups held by Reverend Willoughby and Jerome Harper, the organist. “Mike saves everything,” Bunny was saying to them.

  “Well, that’s not such a bad idea, holding on to remnants of our past,” Willoughby answered. “Personally, I have copies of every sermon I’ve delivered for the past thirty years.”

  “Is that a fact?” Jerome Harper said.

  “How long do you plan to be here?” someone behind McGuire asked in a deep baritone voice.

  McGuire turned to face Blake Stevenson. The overweight man’s thinning gray hair clung to an almost perfectly round head, framing a moon-shaped face dominated by coarse features. The heavy eyebrows, the broken nose, the massive mouth and puffy lips, the sturdy neck, all were in conflict with the modulated voice and careful diction which suggested refinement and culture. Or the pretense of both.

  “Not very long at all,” McGuire replied. He’s not asking how long I’ll be staying, he told himself. He’s asking how soon I’ll be leaving.

  “A week? Two weeks?” It was Mike Gilroy, popping a slice of quiche into his mouth. Gilroy carried himself easily and was constantly attentive to his wife Bunny who, having replenished the punch cups of the minister and the organist, approached her husband from behind and slipped her arm through his.

  “No idea.” McGuire was the centre of attention, the guest of honor. Even Reverend Willoughby and Jerome Harper were watching him now from the far end of the long table, holding their drinks with pinky fingers extended, sipping from them in the overly formal fashion of awkward guests at a party full of strangers. Willoughby caught McGuire’s eye and nodded, and when McGuire returned the gesture the minister edged past Jerome Harper and came around the end of the table.