Jerome Harper was shuffling some papers together as McGuire approached. The organist was pale and he smiled uncertainly.
“I’d like to borrow that key,” McGuire said.
“Key?” A nervous smile. Harper pulled a plaid scarf from the sleeve of his duffle coat. “What key is that?”
“The one Ellie Stevenson just gave back to you,” McGuire said. He extended his hand, palm up. “The one to Willoughby’s office.”
“Oh, you’ll have to ask Reverend Willoughby for that,” Harper said. He wrapped the scarf around his neck as though dressing a wound. “I can’t . . . I couldn’t let you have that. . . .”
“You let Ellie Stevenson have it.”
“That’s . . .” Harper shrugged into his coat. He seemed desperate to leave, like a man in a burning building. “I know Mrs. Stevenson and that was a . . . a favour. I mean, she’s a member, well almost a member, of the congregation.” He swept the music sheets into his hand. “I’m closing the church now and I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. . . .”
“Give me the key,” McGuire said. His voice was like cold-rolled steel.
“Oh no, no, I can’t,” Harper replied. He darted away to a switch panel on the far wall and began flicking the switches down, darkening the church. “Please . . . please talk to Reverend Willoughby about that. I’ve done enough . . . I shouldn’t be . . .” He stood at the far end of the altar, clutching his music to his chest, his eyes flooded with tears. “Please go now. Please leave.”
McGuire stared back for a moment and nodded in silence.
Leaving the church, he walked across the darkened parking lot to his car, still shaken by the bitterness in Ellie’s words, wondering how she had persuaded Harper to give her the key to Willoughby’s office.
He paused with his hand on the door, a black thought clouding his mind.
Smitty, the sergeant on duty at the Compton police station in Morton’s absence, stroked his nose with his thumb and index finger. His feet still rested on the corner of his desk, the magazine open in front of him, and when McGuire asked about Bob Morton’s whereabouts Smitty called across the room, “Gone for dinner.”
“You the only cop on duty tonight?”
“Yeah, I’m it.” The officer narrowed his eyes at McGuire. “You’re the homicide guy from Boston, got shot last week out on Mill Pond Road.”
“That’s me.” McGuire lifted the hinged portion of the counter and stepped into the office area. “What do you know about Jerome Harper?”
“Who?”
“The organist at St. Luke’s. Name’s Harper. What do you know about him?”
Smitty shrugged. “What’s to know?”
“You from around here?”
“Born and bred. Mile down the road.”
“How about Harper? Know where he’s from?”
“No idea.”
“You know about the FBI’s KD service?”
“Their what?” Smitty grinned.
McGuire nodded at the computer. “They call it something else, but to us it was always their KD file. Kid diddlers. Pederasts. Everybody convicted of sexual assault on children, cross-indexed by name, AKAs, occupation, they’re all in it. You got access?”
“Yeah, I got access,” Smitty said. He was watching McGuire warily.
“Do me a favour,” McGuire said. “Look him up.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you think you should know if you’ve got a guy like that living just down the street?”
“Yeah,” Smitty said. “Guess I should.”
“Martinsburg, West Virginia.” McGuire moved closer to the screen and Smitty shifted to his left as McGuire read the contents of the file aloud. “Five charges of molestation, two convictions. Six months in jail plus community work.”
“Pervert,” Smitty nodded.
“Likes Sunday School boys.” McGuire stood up, his hands on his hips. “I wonder how Ellie found out.”
“Who?” Smitty turned to look up at him.
“Thanks,” McGuire said.
McGuire sat at the Town House bar staring down at a half-finished beer in front of him, pondering the past. The near and the distant. His past and those of others.
Barbara and her green eyes. The sun burning its way out of the Caribbean at dawn. Ollie dying by degrees in his small house in Boston. Sonny Tate being destroyed from within, enduring a penalty whose severity bore no relation to his crime. Barbara and the comfort of her breasts, pulling him to her, hungry for him. The unending tragedy of June Leedale. The torture of David Elwood being rejected by his mother and never understanding why. Barbara and her husband, together in the sun on Nassau.
I called him, she told McGuire. I invited him back, and he came and I still love him.
Half an hour later McGuire remained angry, but he had grown calm. He finished the beer in one long swallow, tossed some money on the counter and asked the bartender for the most direct route to Oyster Pond Road.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Light shone from the ground floor windows of the Stevenson house and spilled through the front door, which was open to the cool night air. The glow spread across the terraced rock gardens separating the house from the lane where the annuals, killed by frost, stood dry and twisted. Their shadows moved ghostlike in the beams of McGuire’s headlights as he approached the house. He parked in front of the garage and stepped into the chill of the evening.
A familiar odour set the hairs on the back of his neck dancing and he drew the gun, drawing courage from its weight in his hand.
He circled the front door to avoid being silhouetted in the light shining from the hall, the gun held loosely at his side. The aroma that greeted him when he emerged from the car was stronger now, and he recognized it as cordite smoke. He knelt at the open door and peered around the edge, leading with the gun, controlling his breathing.
She was staring back at him from the floor where she had fallen, and the lights of the crystal chandelier directly above her reflected in the massive pool of fresh blood framing her body. She was stretched on her side with one knee pulled up as though in a running position. The blood had soaked through her flowered print blouse and the pool extended from her body across the width of the hall to a baseboard splashed with crimson, the flecks tracing a random pattern up the wall.
“Blake!” McGuire shouted down the hall. “Blake Stevenson. It’s McGuire. Come out and let’s deal with it.”
There was no reply.
McGuire entered the house crouching low in a duck walk to reach Ellie’s body. He groped for her wrist with his free hand, his eyes and his gun sweeping the hallway ahead of him. He felt warmth but no pulse. A trail of blood led down the hall toward the kitchen, a drizzle of fading life that followed Ellie as she fled death until the final bullet struck her in the neck and severed an artery and she tumbled forward. Still running. Still clenching her fists in fear.
McGuire shouted Blake Stevenson’s name again and continued moving down the hall in a crouch, tracing Ellie’s blood past the stairs to the second floor, past the darkened dining room on the right and the brightly lit living room on the left, its furniture upholstered in bland flowery prints.
In the kitchen an upset chair lay with its back on the floor, an inanimate object feigning death. On the table sat a heavy glass tumbler half full of whiskey, a newspaper opened at the business section, a dinner plate with a partially eaten serving of canned spaghetti, the tines of a fork buried in the red spaghetti sauce, and a cheap crystal bowl filled with grated parmesan cheese.
The rear door of the house leading from the kitchen was ajar. McGuire switched off the light, stared into the garden until his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and breathed deeply.
He reached for the telephone, dialed the operator, asked for the Compton police station, spoke a few words tersely into the receiver and hung up, all the
while looking out the window at the shadow that sat among shadows. Then, the gun still in his hand, he stepped through the open door.
“I just made a telephone call,” he shouted to the oversized figure sitting silently in the lawn chair, its back to the house. “We’ve got a few minutes if you want to talk. Or if you don’t, that’s okay too.”
McGuire descended the short flight of stairs and approached Blake Stevenson. His back was to McGuire and his eyes were fixed on a stand of pine trees at the rear of the property, staring into blackness, away from light and life.
Stevenson wore a white shirt open at the collar and dark slacks. Both hands rested on the arms of the wooden chair. His feet were clad in loafers and his entire body trembled. When he turned his head to look at McGuire his coarse features were drawn in fear and he opened his mouth as if to speak but no sound emerged.
McGuire leaned against a tree trunk several feet to the right and behind Stevenson. He lowered the revolver but kept it visible, letting Stevenson know he was armed. “Where’s the weapon?” McGuire asked.
Stevenson looked away, back at the pines again, and shook his massive head slowly from side to side. Again he opened his mouth without speaking.
“What, you got rid of it?”
Another wave shook his body and Stevenson closed his eyes.
McGuire had seen it before. A murderous rage, the bloody act, delayed shock, remorse. Husbands against wives, lovers against lovers.
“Ellie found a copy of the sermon Cora wrote, didn’t she?” he said. He folded his arms across his chest, the gun still in his hand. “The one Cora wrote to tell me about Cynthia Sanders. That her son Terry was involved. That you were involved. That you probably killed her. Pulling the telephone cord around her neck until she started to throw up and choke. Then you panicked, right? Just took off and left her there. That’s why Cora hated you so much. That’s why she would have nothing to do with you.”
Stevenson opened his eyes. His bottom lip quivered.
McGuire leaned from the waist, controlling his anger. “You know how Ellie got into Willoughby’s office?” he hissed. “You want to know how your wife got a key to the door? She blackmailed Harper. She found out he’s been hiding something in his past. That he likes to fondle little boys. Maybe he tried it with one of her students, maybe she found out about it when the kid told her. So she threatened Harper, made him give her the key to Willoughby’s office where she could look for his copy of Cora’s sermon. That’s the kind of woman your wife was, Stevenson. Made it a little easier to kill her maybe. Or maybe it was all your idea in the first place, blackmailing a pervert to save your ass.”
Headlights swept the darkness as a car entered the lane and pulled around the front of the house. McGuire heard the crunch of the tires on gravel, the opening and slamming shut of a car door. Morton had enough sense not to use his siren and flashers. Good for him.
“Just tell me one thing,” McGuire asked. He was tired, he was spent and later, back at the Town House tavern, he planned to be drunk. “How much did Terry Godwin have to do with it?”
The other man’s head moved from side to side sadly, resigned.
“But she did take Terry to bed, didn’t she? It was his semen they found in her, wasn’t it?”
McGuire heard footsteps echo through the house. When they stopped at the open kitchen door he called over his shoulder, “We’re down here.”
Blake Stevenson’s head ceased its sideways motion and he turned again to look back at McGuire, raising his sad eyes, saying nothing.
“I’ll bet it was Terry’s idea, wasn’t it?” McGuire continued. “He heard about Sonny Tate, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, banging a rich widow and driving her flashy convertible, and Terry couldn’t stand it, could he? Couldn’t stand being left out. So you and him, couple of good buddies, went to see her that night, right? What happened? She turn you down? She spread her legs for Terry, the good-looking stud, but she wouldn’t do it for you? That’s what pissed you off, right? Is that when you got rough with her?”
McGuire pushed himself away from the tree and replaced the gun in his trouser waistband at the small of his back. “What I’m really curious about is, how much did Cora know?” McGuire asked, taking a step toward the other man, prepared to help Morton secure his wrists with handcuffs. “Did she know all the details or just the general stuff?”
Stevenson was wetting his lips with his tongue. Footsteps were approaching from the direction of the house, a steady swish-swish through the uncut grass.
McGuire stepped closer to Stevenson and for the first time noticed the dried blood on the other man’s hands and brown speckles, like flakes of rust, on his white shirt sleeves.
“Just the general stuff,” said a voice behind him, and McGuire turned to look back at Mike Gilroy, a rifle in his hands, total rage in his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mike Gilroy’s face was a swarm of tics and spastic expressions, the corners of his mouth tightening and relaxing. His tongue tasted the night air like a lizard’s and his eyelids blinked furiously, the eyes themselves in nonstop motion: fixing themselves on McGuire, swerving to Stevenson, then flicking away to the blackness of the woods at the rear of the garden. He held the rifle in two hands at waist level, like a garden implement.
McGuire noted the weapon was a bolt-action twenty-two. “What are you going to do?” he said, concealing his shock and surprise.
“Do?” Gilroy’s voice was strained and when he spoke his words tumbled over each other. “Do whatever I gotta do. Like you have to. You’ll do what I tell you. Get the hell over there, near Stevenson.” Gilroy grinned and the small boy handsomeness flashed for a moment and was gone.
“Use your head, Gilroy,” McGuire said. He took a sideways step toward Stevenson, his eyes on Gilroy. “You’ll get one shot away, that’s all. There are two of us and—”
“Just took one to stop fat-ass here, didn’t it?” Gilroy sneered.
McGuire moved directly in front of Stevenson and saw the shiny dark stain on Blake’s trousers just at the belt line, the blood seeping through his trousers and pooling on the seat of the chair. It was not Ellie’s blood McGuire had seen on Blake’s hands but Blake’s own.
“Little twenty-two, low in the gut,” Gilroy said. He raised one hand, quickly wiping the back of his mouth. “Took more than that to stop Ellie. Didn’t it, Blake?”
A shudder swept over Stevenson, who raised a hand from the arm of the chair like a man gesturing to the bartender to stop pouring a drink, the glass was full enough and he wished to have no more. Then the hand lowered again.
“You know what . . . what she was doing, his wife, that bitch Ellie? You know what she was doing?” Gilroy glanced at McGuire, holding him within range of the rifle, but his words and his scorn were directed at Blake Stevenson. “She was . . . she knew a welder. Guy named Sam, lives near Falmouth. She knew him and . . . and Bun . . . Bunny knew, Bunny used to . . . Ellie would arrange their dates for Christ’s sake. The dates with this fucking welder so he could . . .” Gilroy drew the back of a hand across his mouth and the gesture seemed to call forth the other Mike, the quiet, controlled, friendly insurance man.
“So the two of them, my wife and the welder, could meet in motels in the afternoon.” Speaking sadly now, as though mourning a lost friend. “So there would be no record of telephone calls between my wife and her lover. That’s what Ellie did. That’s what his wife did.” Gilroy bit his lip like a small boy being punished and raised his head as tears flooded his eyes. Then the small boy vanished and the demented cuckolded husband returned.
“That’s the kind of bitch his wife was,” Gilroy snarled, and he stepped toward Blake Stevenson. “That’s the kind of bitch she was!” he screamed in fury.
Blake Stevenson lowered his eyelids and tears appeared.
“You shot me,” McGuire said calmly to Gilroy. “Thro
ugh the window of Cora’s house.”
Gilroy’s fury turned on McGuire. “I was in the house!” he shouted. “When you came back. From filling your gut here, at his expense,” and he waved a hand at Stevenson before returning it to the rifle. “Some detective you are.” The small boy grin appeared again on Gilroy’s face. “Some fucking detective you are. I’m in the kitchen, come in one of the windows near the pantry, looking for . . . for something and when I don’t find anything I figure it’s in Terry’s room but the goddamned door’s locked and I tell myself, no sweat, McGuire’ll be an hour anyway, talking to fat-ass here. Then you come in and I duck in the parlour, watch you help yourself to some juice, me standing there in the dark. Would’ve blown your head off from there, if I’d had the rifle with me. Then you go upstairs and I hear you unlock Terry’s room and I think, he’s getting whatever it is that old bitch has, he’s getting it up in Terry’s room, and I run through the woods and I get the rifle and I come back and, shit, there you are in the open window, see you right through the window, and I say, the hell, I’ll do it from outside. Don’t have to worry about getting out of the house if somebody hears the shot.”
“You burned down the house,” McGuire said.
“You were covered,” Gilroy sneered. “Covered good against fire. Old Cora, she had more insurance than she needed. Funny thing is, your cheque’s back at my office. I listed the arson as vandalism, got it approved right away. Shit, McGuire. You’re practically a rich man.” Gilroy laughed aloud.
“Cora trusted you.”
“Cora thought I was a sweetie. For a while. Cora told me I could drop in anytime. Didn’t want lard-ass here around though. Never liked that fat prick.”
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