Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “He has my address.” McGuire stared into the fire. New England winters were a bitch but the comfort of a roaring fire in a quiet room made them almost worth it.

  “Bunny finally collapsed after you went to bed. She’s asleep in the spare room upstairs. Her sister’s driving down this morning from Portsmouth to pick her up.” She withdrew an embroidered kerchief from a pocket of her skirt and folded it as she spoke. “I have to go out for a little while.” She stared at the small square of fabric. “But I’ll be back for lunch, if you’re still here,” she added quickly.

  McGuire drained his coffee mug and set it on the side table. “I’m leaving now,” he said, standing up. “For Boston.”

  “And back to the Bahamas?”

  “No. Not for a while.”

  June Leedale returned the kerchief to her pocket and stood. “Parker wants to go away this winter for a vacation. Maybe if we do, maybe we’ll come down and visit you on that little island you live on.”

  “I’d like that,” McGuire answered. “Tell your husband I’d like it.”

  At the door they stood together awkwardly, watching the rain. June Leedale offered an umbrella but McGuire declined. He turned to her and smiled. “You’re the best of them, you know,” he said to her. “You’re the only one with any goddamn ethics.”

  She hugged him tightly, then held him at arm’s length, her eyes shining. “Please be careful,” she said, and he nodded, stepping out the door and trotting across the lawn to the car.

  She was still standing at the entrance, watching him silently, as he backed out of the driveway and drove away, returning his wave with a small gesture of her hand.

  Reverend Willoughby sat in his small, cluttered office wearing a heavy fisherman’s knit sweater over black trousers. With his unshaven face and dour expression, he looked more like a trawler captain in search of a crew than a man of the cloth.

  He leaned forward, his hands resting on the top of his desk, his head bent low so that he stared out at McGuire from beneath thick eyebrows dense and curly like a wild horse’s mane. “Mrs. Godwin had made veiled enquiries to me about many things,” he said. “The nature of guilt, a mother’s love for her son, the need for each of us to see that justice is done no matter what the consequences may be.” He shrugged. “I had no idea what she was getting at, and she was certainly not the kind of woman who would tolerate a response borrowed from the scriptures.”

  He spread his hands in an expression of helplessness and shrugged his shoulders.

  “It was clear to me that she was discussing some crime and that she was not the guilty party. So I finally suggested that a woman her age had earned the right to live out her life without fear of others making value judgments. And that if justice had been forced to wait a number of years, as she suggested, then it could wait a few years more if necessary.”

  He leaned back in his chair.

  “That satisfied her,” he added. “A few weeks later she arrived with her sermon. The one I read at her service. She was worried. In spite of Ivan Hayward’s assurances, she felt she had little time remaining to her. She asked me to read the sermon aloud at her service and she named seven people to attend it. You were at the top of the list.”

  Willoughby reached for a battered briefcase on the floor beside him and lifted it to his desk.

  “That was just last month.” He opened the briefcase and withdrew three sheets of paper. “I glanced at it when she first gave it to me, and it seemed harmless enough at the time. Confused, perhaps. A lot of gibberish even. But then, I’m used to indulging elderly people whose focus is on rationalizing their life, orchestrating its final performance. So I put it away without much more than a glance at the words.”

  Holding the papers just beyond McGuire’s reach and lowering his voice, he said, “But when I read this aloud at her service, I knew she was hinting at much more than we were aware.” He handed the sheets across to McGuire. “So I made several copies. One for my file here, the one that Mrs. Stevenson obtained. One for Bob Morton, who never got around to reading it, I fear. And this one. I wanted to discuss it with you in the hospital. I couldn’t believe it would have anything to do with the terrible thing that happened to you. Evidently, I was wrong.”

  McGuire took the sermon from the other man. “What are you going to do about Harper?” he said.

  “See that he is transferred to some other location,” Willoughby answered. “And watched. Closely.” He rose to stand behind his desk. “I have a few things to tend to,” he said, extending his hand to McGuire and rising to his feet, “as a result of last night’s tragic events. If I don’t happen to see you before you leave, well, Godspeed, Mr. McGuire. Kindly close the door behind you when you leave.”

  McGuire shook the minister’s hand before settling in one of the old oak armchairs where he began absorbing Cora Godwin’s sermon with new insight.

  The present proceedings of life are not to be performed in private. For they are neither filled with passion nor satiated with sin. It is, after all, the bookends of our lives which we seek to most conceal. The conception of new life through the consummation of love. And the termination of an existing life. By events. By time. By strangers. By friends. These are not public acts. But they may in fact be private sins.

  For the essence of truth is more often found in sin than virtue, and while virtue begs reality and proof, sins ask to be judged in shadows where reality fades and is lost. And so not in reality but in parables do we often speak when we consider sin. For the truth may be obscure in tales often told and in tales concealed, hidden within the unbending folds of love.

  Forgive me if I have concealed within the folds of a love unbending the truth of sins and the falsehoods of virtue. There are lessons to be learned even thirty years hence. Justice delayed may yet be justice delivered, no matter how tardily.

  And I ask some of you gathered here today to pursue delayed truth in the tale of three wise young men and one innocent black sheep, their paths crossing, footprints in sand, confused in alarms of trouble and flight, fleeing from the arms of the martyred Magdalene and pointing in fury at the dark one, the black sheep, wishing to enwrap him in their own guilt.

  All of the wise young men were known to me and of them one was loved dearly and another trusted. It is the third I fear, for his face is forever in shadow. And it is the Samaritan I seek, for his honesty, if he has retained it, will doubtless shine into the crevices where we have so long sought to conceal the truth.

  And where is the Samaritan? He will return, I am sure. He may be among you now, hearing my words. And sometimes cruelly, always honestly, he will distinguish between who you wish to be and who you really are. For what we perceive and what we wish to be are never one and the same, and only through the eyes of truth can justice be finally perceived.

  One wise young man, a vessel for my love, has long since been taken from me. Another remains, banished from my life yet moving among you daily. As does the third. I fear for their innocence, although it has long ago been lost, I am certain.

  I beg you all to see that justice is done, however tardily, and forgive me my sins.

  McGuire sat back, staring at the stained ceiling of Willoughby’s office and hearing the hiss of car tires on the wet pavement outside. Sonny Tate, the innocent black sheep. And he, Joe McGuire, a good Samaritan.

  You could have been a hell of a lot more direct, Cora.

  McGuire stood up, balled the sheets together, and tossed them into Willoughby’s waste basket.

  And a hell of a lot less poetic.

  But then, that wouldn’t have been Cora, would it?

  “You’ll come back if there’s an inquiry, right?”

  Bob Morton’s eyes were heavy and sunk in deep shadows, and he tried and failed to suppress a yawn. He had managed to capture two hours’ sleep on a cot in the back room of the Compton police station since last seeing McGuire. Tha
t, plus a shower and a quart of black coffee, was all that kept him awake and reasonably coherent. Outside his office, the small police station was crowded with state police investigators, reporters and local politicians, and the buzz of their conversations leaked through the glass panels.

  “Sure,” McGuire nodded.

  “The hell you will,” Morton stretched his hands over his head and said through a yawn, “but I don’t give a damn. Your statement’s so tight, it’d take a team of Philadelphia lawyers a year to find anything worth grabbing on to. We seized the Valium in the Stevensons’ medicine chest. Won’t tell us anything we don’t already know but it’s one more piece in the puzzle. I’ll be a month pulling everything together between all the bodies, old and new.”

  “I want to use your phone,” McGuire said.

  “Sure, go ahead. Personal call?”

  “Not really. But it’s long distance. To Providence. Can you pick up the costs for me?”

  “Hell, these guys,” and Morton swept a hand toward the crowd of strangers in the outer office, “have been calling every state in the union all morning. I guess they’re charging it to the right people, but who knows? Nobody’s gonna double-check a bill to Rhode Island, way I see it. Go ahead.” He stood up and walked unsteadily to the door. “I’m gonna take a whiz, find another cup of coffee and see what the state yo-yos are up to.”

  McGuire rummaged through his wallet before finding the crumpled scrap of paper with Sonny Tate’s private telephone number on it.

  After five rings, a weak voice answered.

  “Sonny?” McGuire asked.

  A long pause, measured in several ragged breaths. “Yeah?”

  “It’s McGuire. I came by to see you, couple of days ago.”

  More laboured breathing. Then, “I remember, I remember. . . .”

  “How’re you doing?”

  “How do I sound?”

  “Not good.”

  “Jee-zus, you are some detective, aren’t you?”

  “We know who killed Cynthia Sanders. It was Mike Gilroy.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the truth. He and Terry and Blake Stevenson all went up to her place that night. She had sex with Terry and when Blake and Gilroy came to take Terry’s place she tried to fight them off. Terry and Gilroy did it. Stevenson, he would have been convicted too, if it had ever come to trial.”

  McGuire waited for a response and, when he heard none, he continued. “Mike’s dead, Sonny. He killed Blake and Ellie, and I had to shoot him. Last night. It’s all settled. I wanted you to know that. Case closed.”

  “Thanks,” Tate responded. “I guess.”

  “Take it easy,” McGuire added, prepared to say goodbye, but Sonny’s voice broke in.

  “How much . . .” he began. “Just how much digging did you do, McGuire?”

  “Some. What else do you need to know?”

  “How’s, uh, how’s Parker Leedale? And June?”

  “They’re fine. A little shook up, like everybody else in town. But they’re okay. Why do you ask?”

  The rattle of a dry laugh. “Don’t shit me, McGuire. You know, don’t you? You know where I was that night. Who I was with. You did that much digging, you had to find out.”

  “Yeah, I know,” McGuire said. “But nobody else does.”

  “She tell you about . . . She had a baby boy.”

  “She never told me about that,” McGuire lied.

  A long pause. Then, “Don’t say anything, okay? About the kid.”

  “I won’t. None of my business.”

  “Could’ve been different,” Tate said. “Always wondered about it. If I’d gone for something else, climbing the middle-class ladder. House on a hill, all that stuff. Might’ve been different if I’d hung around, married little June. She was something special.”

  “She still is,” McGuire said. “She still is.”

  The rain began to fall cold and steady from a low gray sky. McGuire arranged with Bert the mechanic to leave his rental car in Boston, and Bert promised to pick it up and return it to Compton for an outrageous fee.

  Before leaving the police station McGuire tried to reach Ivan Hayward by telephone, but the doctor was on hospital duty in Hyannis. McGuire left a message of goodbye.

  If traffic was light he could reach Boston by noon. In the small house on Revere Beach he would recite the events of the past two days to Ollie, who would smile and comment caustically on McGuire’s work, and Ronnie would insist on McGuire staying overnight before setting off tomorrow for Green Turtle Cay.

  He pictured his cabin atop the low rise facing the harbour, and he looked forward to sipping Scotch and listening to jazz on his stereo system, the waves crashing below on Ocean Beach, the sound like whispers through his open window.

  Fewer cars than normal were on the road, and he was soon approaching Hyannis.

  Just a drive by, he told himself. Just a last look to round out things, to close the kind of loop Willoughby could write a sermon about. The death of one human being and the simultaneous conception of another. The meshing of fates, the dispelling of souls, the completion of circles, over and over again.

  He almost swung the car into the cemetery but braked abruptly at the sight of the battered red Honda a hundred feet ahead. He looked to his left at the top of the rise and saw the familiar figure of June Leedale crouched beneath her umbrella, facing the tombstone that marked the grave of David Elwood. Her lips were moving and her eyes were closed, a mother speaking to her dead son, explaining how it was and asking forgiveness. A small glass jar of freshly cut flowers sat in front of her at the foot of the marker.

  He would have driven on except for the sight of a brown Audi parked ahead of him on the same side of the road. The driver’s eyes were on June Leedale, and McGuire waited and watched silently until the door of the Audi opened and Parker Leedale stepped out, crossed the road and began to ascend the low rise of the cemetery.

  Parker approached his wife, her back to him, her mouth shaping words of explanation and forgiveness. When he bent to touch her gently on one shoulder she turned to him and sprang to her feet, her eyes wide, and she dropped the umbrella and stumbled backwards, away from him, away from his outstretched hand.

  McGuire saw only the back of Parker Leedale, saw the shoulders hunched and the knees unsteady, and he watched while June Leedale spilled a torrent of words to her husband until she stepped toward him and her husband’s arms encircled her and tightened and they rested their heads on each other’s shoulders, crying and speaking words unheard by McGuire, who drove away leaving them clinging to one another in rain that would soon turn to snow.

  About the Author

  John Lawrence Reynolds is the author of more than two dozen works of fiction and non-fiction. He has previously written six mystery novels—most recently, Beach Strip—and is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award (for The Man Who Murdered God and Gypsy Sins). His many non-fiction books include Leaving Home, Free Rider (winner of the National Business Book Award), The Naked Investor and Bubbles, Bankers & Bailouts. Shadow People, his bestselling book on secret societies, has been published in sixteen countries. A former president of the Crime Writers of Canada, he lives in Burlington, Ontario. Visit him online at johnlawrencereynolds.com.

  Copyright

  Gypsy Sins © 1993 John Lawrence Reynolds

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; EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN: 9781443443692

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  Originally published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in hardcover in 1993. This HarperCollins Publishers Ltd ePub edition: 2015.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are use fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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