“So what are you going to do?” McGuire demanded.
“Hold on a minute now.” Morton raised his hand, palm facing McGuire. “After that I talked to a guy with state police, handles homicides out of Hyannis. He said the same thing. Told me to send him a report, he’d get back to me on it.”
“Get back to you,” McGuire repeated. “Maybe some time before Christmas.”
Morton raised his eyebrows in a gesture of helplessness.
McGuire crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “Did you ever meet my aunt?”
“Can’t say I did. Like I say, I heard about her though.”
McGuire waited for him to continue.
“I get the feeling people around here don’t forget things easily.” Sitting forward, Morton clasped his hands loosely on the desk in front of him and looked down at them as he spoke. “Seems your Aunt Cora got kinda outspoken when her son died. Told a lot of people what she thought of the war, back before it got fashionable to be against it. Told a lot of politicians what she thought of them, too. I guess she put a few noses out of joint because, far as I could tell, she didn’t have a heck of a lot of close friends. Except the Leedales, according to Parker.”
“What do you know about Parker Leedale?” McGuire asked.
“Old family. Average lawyer. Bit of a stuffed shirt, but he’s okay I guess.” Morton flashed his small boy grin. “For a lawyer.”
“And Blake Stevenson?”
“Runs an investment counseling firm. Tries to turn a lot of old money around here into new money. Seems to do all right. Lives in a big house out on Oyster Pond Road, near Nickerson’s Neck. Wife’s the original ball-breaking bitch.”
“What does she do?”
“Teaches school. Nickerson Public, I think.”
“How about Mike Gilroy?”
“The insurance man, yeah.” Morton shrugged. “Don’t know him that well. Met him a couple of times at town meetings. Pleasant enough.”
“And his wife?”
Morton smiled with appreciation. “Nice,” he said, dragging the word out in one long syllable.
McGuire stood and frowned down at the worn canvas shoes on his feet.
“Why so much interest in those people?” Morton asked pleasantly.
“Because there’s something wrong with them.” Morton tilted his head, a smile frozen on his face.
“Not all of them,” McGuire added. “Just some.”
“What’s wrong?” Morton asked. “With some?”
McGuire shook his head and turned to leave.
“Listen, you won’t be doing any freelance stuff on me while you’re here, will you?” Morton began to follow McGuire out of his office. “On your aunt’s death, I mean. Because, you know, you can talk to anybody you like, but if you pick something up you’ll tell me, right?”
McGuire paused at the door leading through the counter. “Means and motive,” he said. “You need both to commit a murder, remember? So far all we’ve got is half the means in a lab report. Without a motive, unless it’s just a nutcase out to kill helpless old women, there’s no murder. For all we know, the lab made a mistake on the blood test.”
McGuire drove slowly back to Cora’s house, past St. Luke’s Church and beneath the canopy of fiery leaves on the maple and oak trees lining Mill Pond Road. At the house he almost had to force himself out of the gentle autumn air and inside to make two telephone calls, the first to Sam Hannaford and the second to Barbara.
“Well, I got a few things to do this morning, but I just may be passing by the place in, say, half an hour,” the real estate agent said, responding to McGuire’s query.
McGuire, amused at the agent’s attempt to hide his eagerness at obtaining the listing, said half an hour would be fine.
His second call was less successful.
“Who?” the Bahamian maid asked when McGuire told her his name. The line crackled and the maid’s voice carried an electronic echo.
McGuire repeated his name for her.
“Oh, yes, yes,” the maid said in her lilting accent. “She tried to call you earlier, ’bout an hour ago, I remember that.”
“Where is she now?”
“Gone for a walk, maybe on the beach.”
McGuire asked her to tell Barbara he had called, and he would try again in an hour. Then he went outside into the warm autumn morning to lie back on the same cot Cora had lain on when she died. He watched the day mature and waited for the real estate agent to arrive.
Chapter Ten
The white sedan slowed to a stop in front of the house before turning from Miner’s Lane and parking behind McGuire’s rented car in the driveway. A man in his mid-forties with a gap-toothed grin and an ill-fitting hairpiece emerged from the car. “You’re the lucky one, inheriting a house this nice,” the man said. He strode down the driveway to McGuire, who rose reluctantly from the cot. “Sam Hannaford, Hannaford Real Estate.” The agent thrust his hand toward McGuire. He wore a green sports jacket with the name of his franchised real estate company embroidered on the breast pocket, an open-collar white shirt and tan slacks. He carried a battered brown leather portfolio in one hand and, before setting off to skirt the perimeter of the house, he handed McGuire a business card.
“Name me a fair price for this place,” McGuire said, tucking the card in a pocket without glancing at it.
Hannaford looked annoyed at McGuire for moving too soon from small talk to business. He scratched his cheek and tilted his head up, inspecting the eaves. “Well, can’t tell you that right away,” he replied slowly. “Market’s down, see, and I haven’t been inside of the place. Not too familiar with it. Most people around here aren’t.” He glanced at McGuire with an almost apologetic expression. “Your, uh, your aunt wasn’t the most popular woman in town last few years, you know.” He took a few steps back and surveyed the house as though looking at it for the first time. “She needs a little upkeep,” he said doubtfully.
“You want to see the inside?” McGuire asked.
“She’s more impressive inside than she is out,” Hannaford said, coming downstairs to the kitchen where McGuire had made instant coffee for both of them. “What’s the locked room?” he asked.
“A bedroom,” McGuire replied. “Standard size.” He carried the coffee to the small pine table overlooking the garden.
“Well, you get people through the front door and we might see some action,” Hannaford said, sitting across from McGuire. He looked down into the coffee mug. “Say, you got any cream round here?”
“Afraid not,” McGuire said.
“No whitener?” Hannaford asked. “That powdered stuff?”
McGuire shook his head.
“That’s okay. I like it black anyway,” the agent lied. He opened the portfolio and withdrew a contract. “Market’s down a tad, you know that,” he said, flattening the contract on the tabletop and beginning to fill in the standard details. “And this isn’t the best time of year to be selling, see. This were spring, I could probably get you another five, ten percent. But then again, you’re probably wise to sell now. Get your money in the bank where it can do you some good . . .”
“How much?”
Hannaford glanced up at McGuire. “Six percent on the first fifty thousand, three percent on the balance, but that’s negotiable over—
“I’m not asking about your commission,” McGuire interrupted. “How much can I sell this for in a short time?”
The real estate agent sat back in the chair and raised the coffee cup to his lips. “How short?”
“A week.”
Hannaford sipped the coffee, then frowned down at the cup as though he had discovered something dead inside. “You’re kidding,” he said, placing the cup on the table, leaning back in the chair and crossing his legs.
“No.” McGuire took a long swallow from his cup. Hell, the coffee wasn
’t that bad. “I’m not. I don’t have much interest in the place and I don’t want to hang around here longer than necessary. I live in the Bahamas and I’d prefer not to handle things by long distance from there either. So give me a price that’ll scare up some legitimate offers in a week and maybe we can do something.”
“You talking to any other agents?” Hannaford arched his eyebrows.
“Not unless I get the feeling you’re ripping me off.”
A smile and a glance from side to side. “Now, see, I don’t understand what that means,” Hannaford said.
“It means you could quote a price low enough to get yourself a buddy who’ll buy it this week and flip it next week and the two of you split the profits,” McGuire said. “I wouldn’t like that. Not because I’m greedy, but because it wouldn’t be fair to my aunt. That’s what I want, Hannaford. Fairness and speed.”
Hannaford smiled again, but it was several degrees cooler. One hand reached for the coffee mug. He pulled it toward him but didn’t lift it to his lips. “I have a reputation for the highest integrity in this town, Mr. McGuire,” Hannaford said. “That comment was unnecessary.”
“Good,” McGuire said. “So give me a price. You know the neighbourhood, you know the market and now you know the house.”
The agent rolled his eyes to the ceiling, licked his finger and turned over a few loose sheets of paper in his portfolio before leaning back with his arms crossed over his ample stomach. “I’d list it at a hundred and eighty and expect to get, oh, a hundred and sixty-five,” he said slowly.
“I’ll accept anything firm and legitimate over a hundred and fifty,” McGuire said.
“Kinda low.”
“Then that makes it all the easier for you, doesn’t it?” McGuire smiled. “Now. Where do I sign on that thing?” he asked, gesturing at the contract.
From the front parlour window, McGuire watched the agent’s car drive away. Then he walked to the telephone.
“Not yet,” Barbara’s Bahamian maid said in reply to McGuire’s question. “But soon, I think.”
McGuire said he would try in another hour. He opened the telephone directory and located the address of the Hayward Family Clinic. Angrily, he swept the car keys from the kitchen counter.
“A mistake?”
Ivan Hayward turned from McGuire’s question to look out the multi-paned window of his inner office. “I suppose labs can make a wee mistake,” the doctor said doubtfully. He wore a white smock with a stethoscope stuffed in a pocket over gray flannel trousers. His face, lined yet curiously baby-pink in colour, reflected wisdom and experience, and his clear blue eyes were rich in compassion. “In fact, I know they can.” He looked back at McGuire, who sat on the tweed love seat facing the doctor’s desk. From one of the examining rooms beyond Hayward’s office came the sound of a small child crying. “But y’see, even without the lab report, I just felt something was wrong.”
“But not enough to ask the coroner for an autopsy,” McGuire said.
Hayward exhaled a long, sad breath. “No, or even talk to the police about it first. Maybe if I had . . .” He spread his hands.
“Any sense that she was losing it?”
“Losing it?”
“Her mind. Going senile maybe. Touch of Alzheimer’s.”
The doctor’s response was emphatic and he shook his head slowly and deliberately. “Cora Godwin was as bright as a penny, more aware and perceptive than some people twenty, thirty years younger than her. Why do you ask?”
“She wrote a crazy sermon. . . .”
“I heard it. Wouldn’t call it crazy.”
“Didn’t make a lot of sense to me or anybody else.”
“It didn’t have to.” Hayward leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “It was her last public statement, McGuire. It didn’t have to make sense to anybody but herself. If she wanted to get poetic and make allusions important to her, she could. I see patients with terminal diseases do it all the time.” He straightened up and gestured with a hand. “All their lives they’ve never written anything more important than a shopping list. Then they see the end coming and they feel a need to express themselves. It certainly doesn’t mean they’re losing their faculties. In your aunt’s case, far from it.”
“Could she have been suicidal?”
Hayward thrust out a bottom lip, weighing the idea. “When you’re eighty years old it’s easy to see yourself at the end of your road, I suppose. You have one bad day . . .”
“The woman with her when she died said Cora was in fine spirits.”
“June Leedale?” Hayward nodded. “Yes, I remember that. Another reason to be suspicious of suicide. And don’t forget, something was bothering her. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, wouldn’t tell anybody I expect. But they knew she wanted to get something off her chest, the Leedales and the Gilroys, maybe some others. What does Bob Morton think?”
“He thinks all we’ve got so far is suspicions.” McGuire stood up. “And so do I.”
After leaving Hayward’s clinic, McGuire ate lunch at a restaurant decorated with lobster traps and engravings of old sailing ships where he gnawed at a cold sandwich accompanied by a watery beer and returned to the house feeling more grumpy and alone than ever.
Ollie’s voice was weak and strained through the telephone receiver.
“So you got a possible, makin’ you jumpy as a whore in church,” the paralyzed man wheezed when McGuire finished describing Cora’s death. “The hell you gonna do with it?”
“That’s what I’m calling you for,” McGuire said. He was in the living room of Cora’s house, sitting back in a leather wing chair, his feet resting on a matching ottoman. A hickory-and-ash washstand served as a side table to hold the telephone. McGuire recalled both from his childhood and he slid the tips of his fingers along the line of brass upholstery tacks on the arm of the chair as he spoke. “You got any ideas?”
“You got any information?”
“Only what I just told you.”
“What you told me doesn’t amount to a pile of flea shit. Maybe you better head back to your desert island and that woman who’s put a grin in your jockstrap.”
“The doctor here is convinced somebody tampered with Cora’s pills.”
“Yeah, well, don’t put too much stock in doctors. Only thing doctors do is keep you amused while nature either cures you or kills you.”
“So what do you think I should do?” McGuire asked.
“Hell, you know what to do!” Ollie Schantz exploded. “She either died natural or she got some help. If it’s natural, you got nothin’ to do. If she got some help, it was either from a stranger or somebody she knew. If it’s a stranger, you still got nothin’ to do. If it’s somebody she knew, you either leave ’em be or poke ’em with a sharp stick, see if they yelp. You turkey turd, you forget everything I taught you on Berkeley Street?”
McGuire thanked Ollie for the advice, hung up and sat back in the chair again, a rare grin on his face.
Cheered the old bugger up, McGuire told himself. Probably made his day. He reached for the telephone again.
A few moments later McGuire’s grin faded and he felt the familiar mild panic of something slipping away, something necessary to his happiness.
“I’ve decided to go to Nassau,” Barbara was saying.
“Why there?” McGuire asked. “It’s crowded and noisy. . . .”
“I need some of that now,” Barbara replied. “Crowds, noise . . . Any idea when you’re coming back?”
“Couple of days. Maybe more.”
“I should be back here in a few days myself. If I’m not . . .”
“Barbara?”
“Yes?”
“Look, you still matter to me, okay? I mean, damn it, I’d rather be down there with you . . .”
“Then why aren’t you?”
“I’m asking for a c
ouple more days. Is that too much?”
Her voice dropped, its tone and strength receding like a view from a speeding train. “No, you’re right. It’s not too much.”
“Call me from Nassau,” McGuire said.
“Sure.”
He followed Miner’s Lane toward Stage Harbour, walking along the shoulder of the road with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped, his shoes kicking at loose stones.
There were fewer houses this far from the centre of town, and he passed several stands of pine trees and low scrub before ascending a low hill where the Atlantic rolled and shone a half mile away. At Stage Harbour, a quiet inlet protected from sea by an offshore sandbar, Miner’s Lane veered north and west, back toward town. Near a rusting swing bridge spanning a waterway that flowed into the harbour, McGuire sat on the face of a rock to count the waves and watch the late afternoon sun dance on the water.
One woman, alive and vibrant, was reaching for him from a thousand miles away, placing demands on him as women always did. Another, who once loved him in a way no other woman did or ever would again, was dead, possibly murdered. Could he abandon one for the other?
He rose, stretched and retraced his steps through the darkening day.
The telephone was ringing as McGuire entered the house and he strode quickly to it, expecting to hear Barbara’s voice.
“Whoa, bet you were sleeping or in the can maybe.” A man’s voice, the vowels flattened and the edges hard. “Sam Hannaford. How you doin’?”
McGuire said he was doing fine. He slumped into the chair next to the telephone. Maybe he should take the next available flight to Nassau.
“Listen, we just might have some early action here, ’nough to put a hitch in your get-along. But I need the survey of your property. Agent down near Hyannis might be interested. Talked to him about it just this afternoon and he called me back already. It’s the contacts, see, the contacts count in this business. Anyways, he wants to know if a survey’s been done, and if he can take a peek at it. I said, sure, we got a survey.”
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