Whisper Death (2 page)

Ronnie Schantz had never seen McGuire cry. She could never imagine him crying. It would be like seeing Ollie chasing their baby son across the lawn, both of them laughing at the delight of it all. She had witnessed such a scene once. She knew it had happened. But now it was unimaginable, like McGuire crying.

And he didn't cry. He blinked perhaps more often than he should. But there were no visible tears.

“No, I didn't come back for Janet,” he said finally. “That would be useless.” He shrugged. “I just came back. Tell me what's new,” he said, sitting upright and attentive. “What's been happening up here?”

Ronnie Schantz rose and walked to the counter where she retrieved the coffee carafe. “Lots of things.” She filled his cup as she spoke. “Kavander's dead, you hear about that? Just after the new year. Heart attack. Found him lying across his desk in the middle of the morning. Then Bernie Lipson retired on a disability pension. Bleeding ulcers. Can you imagine that? Bernie was always the coolest and calmest of the bunch and he gets an ulcer. Sadowsky's recovering from a car accident. Happened on the Arborway when he was answering an emergency call. A truck cut in front of him. Both his legs fractured, ribs broken, internal things messed up . . .” She filled her cup and sat back in the chair. “Even when he gets out of hospital for good, he won't be up to much. That's what Ollie thinks.”

She rested her head on her hand. “But you haven't heard the killer yet, Joe. You haven't heard the loony move of all time.” She paused for effect. “Guess who replaced Kavander as captain?”

McGuire raised his eyebrows, waiting for the punch line.

“Fat Eddie Vance!”

McGuire said quietly, “Fat Eddie is running homicide?”

“The whole floor. Sitting behind Kavander's old desk like a bowl of mashed potatoes. Which is probably why people are bailing out of Berkeley Street by the dozen. Bernie, Lou Cummings has gone. A bunch of them.”

McGuire shook his head. “That takes care of any chance to get my job back.” He looked through the kitchen window at the darkness of Massachusetts Bay and recalled the evenings he had spent staring out his cabin window from atop the only hill on Green Turtle Cay at water that was warmer, softer, clearer.

He had loved the island from the day of his arrival with Janet Parsons the previous Thanksgiving weekend. Loved the view, the warmth, the isolation, the lilt of the Bahamian speech that floated across the small harbour from the brightly coloured houses strung along the shore like beads on a necklace.

He loved it so much that he had refused to return to Boston with Janet and had telephoned Kavander after just three days to submit his resignation. “Take a leave of absence,” Kavander barked at him. “It'll do us both good having your ass far away from here for a couple of weeks. But I'm not accepting a resignation over the telephone.”

McGuire laughed. It was over. To prove it, he negotiated and signed a six-month lease on the cabin and began the process of transferring his savings from Boston to a Bahamian bank. When the owner of the Green Turtle Bar, an ebullient, red-faced Australian who found everything in life amusing, offered McGuire the weekend bartending shift, McGuire accepted with enthusiasm. His earnings would cover the rent on his cabin. With a careful eye on his savings, McGuire could spend the rest of his life on Green Turtle Cay. It was all McGuire would need.

But it wasn't enough for Janet Parsons. The only woman alive who understood him, who could soothe his periodic bouts of rolling anger and soften the hard edges of his soul, refused to stay with him in a lifestyle he thought he could love.

He carried her bags to the ferry on the day she departed and waved confidently from the dock as the craft swept its way towards Abaco. “You'll be back!” he called as she looked at him sadly. Each watched the other until they were swallowed by distance, Janet Parsons riding warm water toward the sun, McGuire rooted in the cool shade of the hill.

All morning, while making arrangements by long-distance telephone to sublet his apartment and place his belongings in long-term storage, McGuire would glance up at the sound of aircraft rising from the airport across the strait on Abaco Cay and squint his eyes against the glare from the water, following its route west to the Florida coast. “That's her plane,” he would tell himself silently. Then, a few moments later when another took its place in the air: “No, she's probably on that one.”

And for several weeks, each arrival of the ferry drew him to the window of his cabin or the dockside restaurant where he tended bar, and he would scan the arriving passengers. Once, he saw Janet's slim silhouette in one of the long, loose skirts she favoured, and he struck a nonchalant pose near the end of the bar waiting for her to enter. But the figure belonged to a schoolteacher from Virginia who was staying at Treasure Cay on a Christmas vacation. They talked at the bar, walked in the sand at sunset, and he awoke the next morning to find her standing nude at his cabin window, describing the view of the harbour at dawn in badly-phrased poetic language that embarrassed him.

Over the weeks and months, other women became enraptured by the notion of a romantic encounter with a mysterious man living alone atop a hill on a remote Caribbean island. They would beg him to tell stories of his career as a detective, lying next to him, resting against his shoulder, their eyes studying his, perhaps a finger tracing the scar across his upper lip. And afterwards, saying their goodbyes in the bar or on the ferry dock, they would promise to write. Few did. He answered none.

Then a week ago he woke in the middle of the night, puzzled and obsessed with the awareness that he was living the only life he would ever live. He felt no icy sense of mortality or existential doom, but a sudden, clear perception of one chance, one opportunity, one series of choices leading to other future and unknown choices, all of the choices growing more narrow day by day like the neck of a funnel.

The thought nagged at him through that day and the next. He felt as though he had neglected something important but had no idea what it was. He knew only that it was elsewhere. Back in Boston, perhaps, in the gentle green of a New England summer. Back where he had spent more than twenty years cursing police work.

Yes, and back where Janet Parsons waited.

“It's time,” he told himself. And he began making plans to return.

“He's awake.”

McGuire brought himself back to Boston. “Who?” he blurted.

“Ollie.” Ronnie Schantz was smiling at him. “Who else? Where were you just then?”

“Nowhere important,” McGuire replied, and he stood to follow her into Ollie's room.

Barely a year earlier Ollie Schantz, the man expected to replace Jack Kavander as head of Boston Homicide, had entered Kavander's office at Berkeley Street Police Headquarters without knocking and said, “This is the first day I'm eligible for early retirement.”

Kavander grinned at him around a toothpick. “So, you're feeling old?” he asked.

“No,” Ollie replied. “I'm not feeling anything. Most of all, I don't feel like working. So I'm gone. Make out my retirement forms, Jack. From now on I'll scratch myself on my own time.”

No one believed him. Not Kavander, who promised to process Ollie's pension application, regarding it as an empty gesture. And not Joe McGuire, the other half of the best homicide team in the city's history, to whom Ollie Schantz never fully explained his decision. “You're really going?” McGuire demanded when he realized it wasn't a joke.

“Already gone,” Ollie answered. “My mind's in New Brunswick chasing salmon. Body's all set to join it.”

But a few months later, Ollie's body lay paralyzed except for limited movement in its right arm, his puppet strings cut by a vertebra that had snapped and slashed through his spinal cord when Ollie fell backwards, striking his neck against the gunwale of his boat.

Now McGuire looked down at the pale and shrunken form of Ollie Schantz in the small room overlooking the sea, where he was destined to live out his days.

“Didn't figure on you coming back,” Ollie grinned. His right hand moved awkwardly across the sheet to grip McGuire's. “Thought you were going to stay up to your elbows in rum swizzles and widows on vacation. What brought you back? Run out of rum? Or widows?”

“Ran out of choices,” McGuire said. “I wasn't making any choices any more. I missed it.”

“Gotta be able to make choices. A man's first obligation is to amuse himself.”

“You getting to be a philosopher, lying here with nothing else to do?”

“That's how philosophers are made, Joseph. They've got nothing else to do.” Ollie's voice softened. “You going back to Berkeley Street?”

“Thought I might. Until I heard Fat Eddie took over Kavander's job. How the hell did that happen? Fat Eddie's a joke. Everybody knows it. How could the commissioner tap him for captain?”

“Because Fat Eddie knows how to step on a guy's toes without spoiling his shoeshine. Which is not a talent you ever had, Joseph.”

“You mean I've never been political.”

“I mean Fat Eddie would tell a guy he's open minded when you'd tell him he had a hole in his head. That's the difference. Anyway, what do you really want to do?”

McGuire looked out the window next to Ollie's bed. “Keep busy for a while. At something worth doing.”

“Go see Fat Eddie tomorrow and ask to get back on board.”

McGuire snorted at the idea. “Vance still remembers how I screwed him, sending evidence to the press and making it look like he did it.”

“Never was any proof. Besides, he's got his own problems, I hear. Stuck with a lot of dull pencils. Kind of thing you could help with. As far as that other stuff goes, nothing like having a guy who screwed you right under your thumb. And hey, you wanted choices, didn't you? Make the first one. Give him a call.”

“I won't beg,” McGuire muttered. “Goddamn it Ollie, I'm not going to beg that son of a bitch for my job back.”

“You won't have to,” Ollie replied. “Trust me.”

Captain Edward Henry Vance was beating a rhythm on his desk with the tip of a pen and staring into space. He had the distracted look of a man who was either pondering a complex problem or suffering from indigestion.

Except for a standard issue calendar and telephone, his desk was clear. It was a personal rule of Fat Eddie Vance's that even small signs of disorder ultimately lead to chaos. There would be no disorder within the ranks of the Boston Police Department, Homicide Division. And there would be no disorder on the desk of its new captain. Vance promised as much to the police commissioner on the day of his appointment.

“Organization,” the commissioner had said over lunch in his private anteroom. “That's your principal concern, Vance. Everything else is already in place. The talent. The systems. The support. All you have to do is impose order and you'll succeed.”

Fat Eddie Vance had not risen from police cadet to detective captain by improvising, but by performing to the orchestrations of his superiors, note for note, beat for beat. If the commissioner said organization was Vance's mandate, then by God Vance would impose organization everywhere. Lines of authority would be established. Paperwork would be processed efficiently. Clutter would be banished.

But clutter was not the source of Fat Eddie's discomfort this summer morning as he unconsciously beat out a cymbal-riding rhythm with his pen. The uneasiness was caused by former Lieutenant Joseph Peter McGuire, who had called an hour earlier and asked to meet with Fat Eddie. Vance had consulted his empty desk calendar and told McGuire he could squeeze in a short session at eleven a.m.

He wants to come back, Fat Eddie smiled in silence. He thinks I'll reinstate him. After all that happened, he thinks he'll walk in here and become a hero again. Well, we'll see about
that
.

Fat Eddie's pen ceased its desktop tattoo. On the other hand . . .

He leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling. Over the previous six months, the Homicide Division had lost five top detectives, three to retirement and two for medical reasons. Vance's first move in his new position had been to fill the vacancies with promotions. But full detective status for the new staff was several months away, maybe a year. Meanwhile, two more detectives were becoming eligible for retirement. Eddie Vance expected them to take it. Some people, he acknowledged, just weren't able to function within a tightly structured organization.

The staff problem was of serious concern not only for the protection of the good citizens of Boston, but for the protection of Fat Eddie Vance's position and power. Fewer staff meant reduced budget allocations, a lower profile at police commission meetings and ultimately less opportunity for Fat Eddie to reach his full potential.

Bringing an experienced detective on board would relieve some of the staffing problems and help Vance in his reorganization plans.

Especially a detective like McGuire.

Or, he mused, maybe in spite of one like McGuire.

Fat Eddie's admiration for Joe McGuire was similar to that of a tone-deaf music lover's awe for a gifted musician. There was no getting around it: McGuire was the best intuitive cop Fat Eddie had known. And Eddie Vance, for all of his talents real and imagined, had never claimed to possess intuition in any quantity.

McGuire's intuition, in combination with Ollie Schantz's plodding methodical technique, had once made them the most efficient homicide investigation team in Boston history. Now Schantz lay virtually paralyzed in Revere Beach. And McGuire had returned from somewhere . . . Bermuda? Barbados? One of those places where people do nothing but waste time . . . looking, as he had put it on the telephone to Fat Eddie, “for something to fill the time.”

Fat Eddie snorted. “Fill the time.” As though it were some sort of recreational club, instead of a major metropolitan police force dealing with the most vicious of crimes.

Yet Fat Eddie needed McGuire. He needed McGuire's intuition on a force supremely equipped with procedures but woefully lacking in instincts. He needed McGuire's experience to provide stability for younger interim detectives still trying to grasp the scope and mechanics of their profession. And he needed McGuire's name back on his staff roster to help boost the division's status. It wouldn't be that difficult, Vance mused. Kavander, as promised, had refused McGuire's resignation, choosing instead to place him on indefinite unpaid leave of absence.

“He's a pain in the ass,” Kavander had grumbled to Vance, explaining why he had kept McGuire's name on the roster. “But nobody works harder on a case. Just because I want him out of my sight doesn't mean I want him off my staff.”

Now it was Captain Edward Vance's opportunity to restore McGuire to active duty, if he chose to do it. But McGuire would pay a price. And the price would be total submission to Vance's authority.

“Brought him in from the cold,” Fat Eddie would tell the commissioner. “Taking a chance on him, of course. Have to keep him under control, right outside my door. Way I see it, you can't buy experience like that. Just have to make him toe the line from an organizational standpoint. Give him as little activity in the field as possible until he's proven he can still do the job. I'll oversee him closely, help transfer some of his experience to the younger staff. He's a resource, is what he is. A resource worth tapping.”

That was how Fat Eddie would explain it to the commissioner.

That was how he explained it to himself.

Fat Eddie's secretary announced McGuire's arrival, and the police captain stood as the door swung open and McGuire entered.

Something's missing, Vance said to himself, watching McGuire cross the carpet to his desk. The swagger. He doesn't swagger when he walks any more.

“You look well-tanned,” Fat Eddie said when McGuire was seated. “Pretty well rested too. You lose some weight?” He frowned as soon as he spoke the words. Weight was a concern of Captain Vance's. It had been a concern since his adolescence. He knew he was Fat Eddie to the rest of the department. He had been Fat Eddie as a constable, as an acting detective and as a full lieutenant. There was no doubt that he was still Fat Eddie the Division Captain, just as his predecessor had been Jack the Bear.

McGuire will pick up on that, Fat Eddie thought as he sat down again. Here comes a sarcastic comment about my weight. You never give McGuire an opening like that, not even when you're captain and he's looking for a favour.

“A few pounds,” McGuire nodded in a voice softer than Fat Eddie remembered. “Lost it eating fish and taking long walks.”

Fat Eddie shifted uneasily in his chair. He didn't bite. No cracks about my weight. What's he up to? “Where are you staying?” Vance asked.

“With Ollie Schantz and his wife for a few days. Until I can find an apartment.” McGuire looked around Fat Eddie's office, cataloguing the changes the new captain had made.

He's different, Fat Eddie observed. Lost his arrogance. Is that good? It was McGuire's arrogance, or maybe his anger, his intensity, that drove him, Fat Eddie believed. “How is Ollie?” Fat Eddie asked. Paralyzed, he expected McGuire to answer. How the hell do you think he'd be with his neck snapped?

“Okay,” McGuire replied softly. “Ollie's doing okay.”

Fat Eddie blinked, then turned to open the top drawer of his desk, retrieving McGuire's file and opening it in front of him. He studied the sheets of paper slowly as he spoke, absorbing the list of commendations and reprimands acquired during McGuire's twenty-year career.

“Joe, I have to tell you this is really difficult. I mean, you walk out of here six months ago on a short vacation, then call us from Barbados to say we can, uh, stuff the job, you're never coming back. . . .”

“The Bahamas.”

“What?”

“The Bahamas. That's where I was. Not Barbados.”

“Wherever. The point is, it's just not that easy. I mean, we can't have everybody deciding to throw away their careers one day and come back the next.”

McGuire smiled. “You're right,” he said, standing up. “Sorry to trouble you.”

Fat Eddie blinked again. “Wait a minute,” he blurted. “I didn't say it was impossible. Officially, you're still on an unpaid leave of absence. I just meant your expectations shouldn't be too high.”

“They're not.” McGuire remained standing, hands in his pockets and eyebrows raised.

“There's paperwork to be done.”

“Always is.”

“You can't be issued a weapon until you're checked out again, had your licence restored, spent time on the firing range and waited for the approval to come through.”

“Won't need one right away.”

“I'll have to submit this to the commissioner's office as an extraordinary request.”

“You know best.”

“You've lost seniority. Which means your salary level will drop to regular detective status.”

“That'll be enough.”

“But I might be able to list you as acting lieutenant.”

“Sounds okay.”

McGuire stood waiting while Fat Eddie rolled his pen between his fingers. “Maybe we can work something out,” Fat Eddie said lamely.

“Do whatever you can.”

“How about Monday? I'll get everything prepared, have an interim badge issued. Can you be here Monday, ready to get back into harness?”

“Monday's fine.” McGuire smiled and nodded. “Monday is terrific.”

Fat Eddie watched his office door close silently behind McGuire, then leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. “I handled that rather well,” he told the ceiling.

They met for lunch in Hutch's. McGuire stood and smiled uneasily as Janet Parsons entered the Boylston Street restaurant.

She offered her hand and McGuire squeezed it before sitting again, feeling awkward, like an actor on stage in a play he didn't know.

She wore a pale, silky blouse over a dark, tapered skirt. Her long hair had been trimmed to a length that barely reached her shoulders, and it swung in time with her dangling gold earrings.

He had always loved her eyes.

“You've changed your hair,” McGuire said.

Janet Parsons nodded. “It's easier to take care of this way. I don't have time to spend fussing with it. Things have been so busy . . . do you know we're getting by with eight fewer detectives than we had a year ago? It's crazy. Ralph and I, we're juggling six cases right now, most of them potential first-degrees too.” She straightened the silverware in front of her, aligning it with the paper placemat that declared “Hutch's, Home of The World's Finest Chowder.”

“Ralph?” McGuire asked, forcing a weak smile.

“Ralph Innes.” She folded her hands and rested her chin on them, looking at McGuire and speaking directly, holding back nothing. “He and I are working together now. Things have changed, Joe.”

“I'll bet Ralph hasn't.”

“Even Ralph. He's grown up a lot. He's not the clown he used to be. I always thought it was just an act anyway. When you get him alone, he can be a serious kind of guy.”

McGuire wanted to ask how often Janet and Ralph had been alone, how often Ralph had shown his serious and sensitive side. Instead, he waved a waiter over and ordered Dubonnet for Janet and a Kronenbourg for himself, to be followed by chowder and sourdough bread.

“You're curious, aren't you?” she asked when the waiter left.

“About what?”

“About Ralph and me. You want to know if we're more than working partners. Come on, admit it, Joe.”

McGuire shrugged. “It's none of my business.”

“You're right. But I'll tell you anyway. Yes, we've dated. We still do, now and then. When we can keep it private and not have everybody know. At work, it's strictly business.” She sighed and looked away. “Ralph's more serious about it than I am. I just want to get on with my job, which doesn't leave a lot of time for . . .” She hesitated, then gestured with her hands helplessly. “Social things,” she finished.

McGuire looked away, his eyes avoiding hers. “You and Ralph.” He shook his head in wonder. “I just can't see it. He's always been such an animal with women, and you . . .” McGuire shrugged. “Hell, and he's even . . .”

“Younger than me,” Janet said, finishing his thought. “Haven't you heard? Older women with younger men are fashionable these days.” She was almost smirking at him until she saw the look on his face. “Look.” Janet reached across the table to rest her hand on McGuire's arm. “You didn't really expect me to live like a nun up here, did you? Because there's no way you were living like a monk down in the Bahamas.”

“You're right,” McGuire agreed. “But I didn't expect you to become involved with Ralph Innes either. What's the attraction?”

“Hey, he's a good-looking guy.”

“You need more than that.”

“Sure I do.” Janet withdrew her hand. “In some ways I'm almost a mother to him. Don't you dare laugh at that,” she warned as a smile began to play across McGuire's face. “I'm only five years older than him. But he's got that little boy thing about him that's . . .” She shrugged. “You have to be a woman to understand.”

“He brings out some maternal instinct in you.”

“Maybe. He's the kind of man who needs . . . I don't know, not taking care of . . .”

“You want to protect him.”

“More than that. It's as though I'm responsible for his happiness.”

“You were responsible for a hell of a lot of mine too.”

“Really?”

“You know it.”

“I guessed it. You could have admitted it to me. No, wait a minute. I can't imagine you admitting anything like that. That's not your style.”

They sat in silence, waiting for the tension to dissipate.

“I always thought you would come back,” McGuire said finally, resting his arms on the table and leaning toward her. “You kept saying how much you loved it down there and how you hated the idea of returning to Boston. Then, when I called Kavander and resigned, you changed your tune. Things were different. You began looking for reasons why it wouldn't work. We'd get bored, you said. First we'd get bored with the island. Then we'd get bored with each other. But I always believed you'd come back. After a few days of winter up here, you'd like the idea all over again.”