Willoughby twisted his body from the window and the corners of his mouth rose in the man’s best imitation of a smile. “How nice to see you awake again,” he said.
“I’ll live,” McGuire assured him. “Besides, I don’t have any religion to speak of. You want to pray for me, go ahead. But I don’t think it’ll make any difference either way.”
The minister took long slow strides back to McGuire’s bed, his hands still clasped behind his back. “Then you won’t mind if I offer a few prayers on my own,” he said. “On approval, so to speak.”
“Do what you want, Reverend.” McGuire rested his forearm across his eyes. “Do whatever the hell you want.”
With a rustle of cloth, Willoughby seated himself beside the bed again.
“I would like to speak to you about . . .” the minister began. He paused to clear his throat. “There are some things, well, one thing only I suppose, that we must discuss. About your aunt, Mrs. Godwin.”
“What is it?” McGuire asked.
McGuire heard the door open and two, perhaps three pairs of muted footsteps crossed the floor on rubber soles. He opened his eyes to see Willoughby standing again, smiling his sad smile across McGuire’s bed at two nurses who had entered with a tray of instruments.
“Perhaps I should leave,” Willoughby said. “The ministry of the soul is suspended and makes way for ministrations to the body.” Willoughby looked from the nurses to McGuire and back to the nurses again, as though awaiting compliments for his word play. “I shall look forward to talking to you later,” he said to McGuire, who closed his eyes again and grunted.
Chapter Seventeen
“You’re a fast healer,” Ivan Hayward said. It was the following morning. McGuire had spent the night drifting in and out of a dreamless sleep. “Dr. McKenna says you can be up and around today. They’ll put your arm in a sling so you can rest the muscles.”
“Good,” McGuire said. “Then I can get the hell out of here tomorrow.” A nurse was changing his IV bottle. She had shoulder-length brown hair streaked with blond, and she smiled warmly at McGuire when she noticed him watching her.
“Better wait till the day after,” Hayward said.
“The hell,” McGuire complained.
When the nurse left the room, McGuire asked, “You look at that file on the Sanders woman?”
The doctor nodded soberly.
“And?”
A long sigh. “A lot of things can happen to an intoxicated person,” Hayward said. He thrust his hands in his pockets and stared out the window at the clear morning sky. “It’s not unusual, someone with an alcohol level as high as that woman’s was—”
“Bullshit,” McGuire said.
“—becoming disoriented, sliding out of bed, vomiting.”
“You don’t believe she was murdered?”
“It could have been an accident.”
“And Cora Godwin could have decided to slip some tranquilizers into her medicine bottle to help her sleep too. Come on, Hayward. . . . Jesus!” McGuire had tried to gesture with his left arm, and the sudden jolt of pain threw his head back on the pillow, wincing.
Hayward watched McGuire with a slight smile on his narrow face, his blue eyes shining. “Looks like you’d better restrict your arguments to verbal thrusts,” he purred in his lowlands accent. Then, taking a step closer to McGuire’s bedside, his voice became more concerned. “You could be correct. The suspicion would be in my mind, and I suppose it was in Jim Hunt’s mind, that this woman died in a struggle with someone. The strangulation with the telephone cord didn’t kill her. I expect it precipitated convulsions and regurgitation.” He shrugged.
“Either way, she’s dead.” McGuire was still breathing heavily from the impact of the sudden pain.
“The point is,” Hayward said, lowering his long, lanky frame into the bedside chair, “the police had nothing for the coroner to build on. No suspect, no motive—”
“Sexual assault’s a pretty good motive.”
“But there was no evidence of it. A small bruise on the side of her head which she might have suffered from falling against the night table. They found semen in her vagina but everything pointed to a consensual act.”
“So what you mean . . .” McGuire opened his eyes and willed himself to breathe deeply and slowly. “What you mean is, your buddy the coroner . . .”
“He wasn’t my buddy. Just a doctor who happened to be a friend.”
“Your friend the doctor, the coroner of the day, could be persuaded to agree to an accidental verdict—”
“In the absence of evidence to the contrary provided by the police? I’m sure he could. He was a doctor, McGuire. It’s up to people like you and Bob Morton to prove a criminal offense.”
“Blake Stevenson a patient of yours?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“He’s taking a lot of medication, including tranquilizers.”
“Perhaps he’s under a lot of pressure.”
“It was tranquilizers you found in Cora’s blood tests.”
“That’s true, but . . .”
McGuire’s door opened and the nurse entered, followed by Bob Morton in uniform. Morton nodded to both men and watched the nurse place a glass of orange juice on the tray beside McGuire. “Now there’s a reason I sometimes regret being a happily married man,” Morton said when the nurse left the room.
“What’s your witness code?” McGuire demanded.
“Our what?” Morton said.
“The code you use for witness protection. It’s in the file you showed Hayward, remember? Somebody provided Sonny Tate with an alibi good enough to throw the cop, Hindemith or whatever. . . .”
“Hindmarsh,” Hayward corrected him. “Roy Hindmarsh. He died nearly ten years ago.”
“Anyway,” McGuire continued, “he looked into Tate’s alibi, confirmed it and identified whoever provided his alibi with a code number. You see that?”
Morton nodded.
“So who the hell is it?” McGuire demanded. “What’s the big deal? Normally you confirm the alibi, make a note of the confirmation, witness name and stuff, in case somebody goes back over the same ground again looking for discrepancies, anything. So why use a code?”
“Can’t figure it out,” Morton said. “But speaking of alibis, I checked everybody you mentioned yesterday.”
“And?”
Morton looked uncomfortably over at Ivan Hayward.
“Oh, hell, he knows as much about this as you and I do,” McGuire said. “So where was everybody?”
Morton withdrew his ragged-edged spiral-bound notebook from a pocket and flipped through several pages. “Everyone was home,” he said, reading from his notes. “Parker Leedale was downstairs reading, his wife June was in bed. Ellie and Blake Stevenson were tidying up after a dinner party. The Gilroys were at home. Mr. Gilroy was working on a business presentation and his wife was . . .” Morton paused, brought the notebook closer and squinted his eyes. “Working out a new kitchen design or something. Planning some renovations, anyway.”
McGuire snorted in disbelief. “Any of them own a twenty-two bolt action?” he asked.
“None said they did.”
Hayward rose from his chair, a look of concern on his face. “I don’t want to appear obstructionist in any manner,” he began. The other two men watched him carefully, waiting for him to continue. “But please remember that, uh, you are dealing here with a small close-knit community.” He flashed his smile. “It’s taken me almost forty years to accept the fact.”
“What’s your point?” McGuire asked.
“Well, y’see,” Hayward said. “I hear you talk of the Gilroys and the Stevensons and the Leedales, and these are all old family people. Very strict in their thinking. Not perfect people, perhaps, but closely allied with, um, with everyone else . . .”
“And
you think we’d better be careful about being too suspicious?” McGuire said. “About casting any kind of shadow on their good names?”
“Something like that.” Hayward was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
“Even though you’ve been suspicious of Cora’s death from the start,” McGuire said.
“That’s true, that’s true,” Hayward admitted.
“You just think these people, the Leedales, Blake Stevenson and the others, aren’t capable of killing somebody.”
“I think what the doctor is saying,” Morton suggested, “is that we had better be a little careful with our investigation here. All of them, after all, were very upset about what happened to you. Blake Stevenson simply couldn’t believe it, and the Gilroys too, their reaction was, well, shock and concern.”
“Big deal,” McGuire said. Then to Hayward: “But a guy like Sonny Tate could have done it, right?”
“The young man whom the police spoke to?” Hayward said. “And cleared because he could prove he was somewhere else? I didn’t know him. He was from—”
“The other side of town,” McGuire finished the sentence. “Not one of the upstanding old families like the Leedales and Stevensons and . . .” And the Godwins, he realized.
“I simply didn’t know him,” Hayward said. He glanced at his watch. “I have patients to see, McGuire. Perhaps I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Maybe you should go easy on Dr. Hayward,” Morton said when the door had closed again. “He really is a good guy.”
“You contact Barbara Mayall for me?” McGuire snapped.
A shake of the head. “Not in her room. I left a message with my number and the hospital’s.”
“You find anything else at the house?”
“We’ve gone over the grounds three, four times. Not a thing. Also, Sam Hannaford wants us to take the police tape down soon as we can. Says he has a couple of prospects for your house.”
“Or maybe just some people want to see where a cop got shot.”
“Maybe. Anyway, unless you’ve got an objection, I’m releasing the place to him today. Says he’s got a key.”
McGuire nodded. “Get rid of the cop out in the hall too. I won’t need him.”
“You sure about that?”
“He’ll do a hell of a lot more good directing traffic out on Highway 28 than sitting on his ass in the corridor. Whoever tried to do me was an amateur. He’s not likely to pull something in a hospital.”
“How do you know it’s a he?” Morton grinned.
“I don’t.” McGuire was distracted by something Hayward had said, something that reverberated in his mind. “Thanks for coming out,” he said. “Talk to you later.”
“Listen,” Morton said at the door, “we’ve got probable cause now to dig into that Sanders file. I mean, if you’re convinced there’s a connection between it and you getting shot. I’ll make a copy of everything and bring it with me tomorrow. How’s that sound?”
McGuire nodded.
“Wait a minute,” McGuire said when Morton turned to go.
The police sergeant stood expectantly, waiting for McGuire to continue.
“Look into Gilroy and Stevenson,” he said. “See if there’s anything in their backgrounds we don’t know about.”
“What? Convictions, charges?”
“Yeah. Rumours too. How they made their money, anything at all.”
“Can do.”
When Morton left, McGuire lay back, feeling his shoulder throb and wondering where Barbara might be, why she had acted so strangely on the telephone, and why Hayward’s comment about Compton being a tight little community with old families and many ties disturbed him so much, gnawing at the fringe of his suspicions.
The afternoon passed with regular visits from the same young nurse to take McGuire’s blood pressure and body temperature. In the evening, she was replaced by an older woman who was brusque and uncommunicative. When McGuire asked for something to deaden the pain in his shoulder and help him sleep, she snapped, “Roll over,” and almost before McGuire was on his side she hiked his hospital gown over his hips and thrust a needle deep into one buttock, ignoring McGuire’s sudden curse except to say, “Relax and it won’t hurt so much.”
I’m getting the hell out of here as soon as I can, McGuire promised himself when she left and the first waves of pleasant lethargy began wafting through him.
McGuire’s sleep was a tranquil sea of blackness with no dreams or interruptions and he awoke with surprise to yet another brilliant morning. The door of his room was open and the reassuring sounds of conversation and foam-tread footsteps drifted in from the hall. The hospital was small, a compact two story building with twenty patient rooms, a small maternity wing and one operating room.
Sunshine, high in the sky and unhindered by clouds or trees, pierced the windows. He stared at its radiance through gray eyes that crinkled at the corners. The pain in his shoulder was now just a subtle discomfort, like the nag of an overworked muscle, and his head was growing blessedly clear of the cobweb effects of drugs.
“How are we feeling today?”
It was the nurse with the heart-shaped face and streaked hair. She entered carrying a tray of instruments, including a thermometer which she quickly inserted under his tongue before taking his wrist in her hand and studying her watch.
“I think I’m ready to get out of here,” McGuire said, watching her make notes on a clipboard.
The nurse smiled without comment. “If you like, I can arrange for you to sit outside in the sun after breakfast.”
She fluffed his pillow, changed the dressing on his wound and offered to feed him his meal of juice, scrambled eggs and a muffin that tasted of sawdust. He declined, but while he ate he projected himself ahead thirty years and saw the same offer being made to him in a nursing home, where he would spend his days with other elderly men whose horizons rarely extended beyond a game of checkers.
The image frightened him. The prospect of spending his final years alone and dependent on others grew into a genuine source of alarm, more painful to ponder than imminent sudden death at the hands of an unseen and unknown sniper. “I’ve decided I want to sit outside,” he said grumpily to the nurse when she arrived to remove his breakfast tray.
“Wonderful,” she exclaimed with apparently sincere enthusiasm. “I’ll have a wheelchair brought around.”
“No wheelchair,” he snapped. “I can walk.”
“Not around here,” she said firmly. “Not if you want to go outside.”
“Bullshit.”
An hour later McGuire was wrapped in a blanket and seated in a wheelchair, sheltered from the weak breeze by a high cedar hedge and feeling the life-source of the sun’s rays penetrating his skin with its warmth, when Morton arrived carrying a manila envelope.
“Hey, this looks like the life!” Morton said, pulling up a folding metal chair and settling himself alongside McGuire. “Nice warm day in the sun, good-looking nurses to bring you cold juice . . .”
“I’d prefer a warm beer,” McGuire grumbled. He was torn between enjoying the fresh outside air and dreading the possibility that this was his destiny. “What’s up?”
“Sam Hannaford’s got the key to your house, now that we’ve taken the seal off the doors.” Morton popped a stick of gum in his mouth and stared across the open area to a line of pines separating the hospital from Main Street.
“What’s that?” McGuire nodded at the envelope.
“Copies of the Sanders case.” Morton withdrew a sheaf of papers. “I read them again. Still don’t know what the code is. I checked everything in the records.” He placed the papers on McGuire’s lap. “No witness codes at all. State guys say they don’t use it either. Never have.”
“How about this place?” McGuire pointed to the address on the second witness report: 3144 Sea View Avenue.
Morton leaned over, read the address and shrugged. “Checked it out. Family’s lived there nearly twenty years. Bought it from some people named Ryder, man and a woman in their fifties. They moved away, nobody’s heard of them since.”
“What about her family, the victim’s family?” McGuire asked. “A chickenshit verdict like that, why wouldn’t the family demand something more solid?”
“Maybe she didn’t have any close family. Or maybe, if she did, they wanted the facts covered up. Who knows? Anyway, could be something in the newspaper archives about it. Nothing in our files, no appeals or representations.”
McGuire said, “Her body was turned over to her mother for burial in Boston. She had a brother, his name’s in the file, he was interviewed. So she had family.”
“Okay,” the young police officer suggested, “then maybe the family didn’t want a scandal. Maybe there were things about her they didn’t want discussed. Anyway, I’ve got something interesting on your friends Stevenson and Gilroy.”
He withdrew a folded piece of paper from the breast pocket of his shirt.
“Stevenson served two years with the army in Germany. Managed to avoid Vietnam. Has a degree in business from Boston College. Two convictions for DWI, the last one four years ago. Otherwise he’s clean, except the word’s around that he could be in financial trouble. Living a little beyond his means, looks like. Has a liking for the ponies too. There’s a bookie in Hyannis, the state boys leave him be. Word is, he’s an informer. Anyway, this bookie says Stevenson used to bet four, five thousand a month on the horses, NFL games, anything with odds. Slackened off lately. Seems his wife lowered the boom.”
He looked up at McGuire, his eyebrows raised. “You want to hear about Gilroy?”
McGuire nodded.
“Lived in Hartford after he got married. Worked for an insurance company. His first wife charged him four times with assault, then had the charges withdrawn on three of them. Fourth time he got three months’, probation.”
Morton passed his notes across to McGuire, who glanced at them before placing them in the envelope.
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