And Leave Her Lay Dying (7 page)

“I care, Jack,” McGuire said. “The real trouble is that nobody else cares that Fat Eddie is blowing half the cases assigned to him. I'm looking at one now, a woman who drowned in the Fens last summer. There are leads everywhere, including an APB for her brother that was never followed up, and Fat Eddie writes ‘NETGO' on it, leaves it in the drawer—”

“Writes what on it?” asked Higgins.

“NETGO,” Kavander said, staring down at his lap. “Nothing else to go on.” He was a different Kavander now, sullen and quiet. “Joe, you want to work on that one, you go ahead. I'm just telling you you're on your own. You don't show up here until I give you the word, and you work with whatever you already have.” His eyes snapped up and met McGuire's. “That's the deal. You either make the most of it or you book passage out of town, I don't care. I just don't want people around here tripping over you until Rosen's off our back.”

“Why?” McGuire asked quietly.

The word detonated another explosion in the police captain. “There's no ‘Why?' There's only ‘Do it.'” Kavander slapped his hand on the desk. “You're a fucking loose cannon, McGuire. You've been that way since Ollie Schantz retired, flying around, bouncing off things.” He shook his head li though to erase his mood and force himself to grow calm again. “You ever play football in college, McGuire?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Never went. After I graduated from high school, my old man told me I already had twice as much education as he did and I'd better get a job and start paying board.”

“What did you play in high school?”

“Usually dead.”

Kavander smirked. McGuire knew the captain had been an all-star guard at Boston College, a bruising blocker who remembered every opposition player he had ever knocked down. “I could tell you didn't play team sports. Because you've never been a team player around here, McGuire. You're a solo artist, you never learned how to put the team's interests ahead of your own.”

Higgins glanced at his watch. “They're waiting for us downstairs,” he interrupted, straightening the crease in his rousers. “The TV crews were setting up when I came in. We should get going.”

Kavander placed his elbows on the desk. Holding his head in his hands, he stared at a typed sheet of paper in front of him. “Joe, listen to me,” he said without looking up. His voice was low, his tone avuncular. “Trust me. I'm doing you a favour. Just lay low for a few weeks. It'll do us both good. That's all I'm asking. Just a few weeks, all right?”

When McGuire didn't reply immediately, Kavander swept the sheet of paper from his desk and rose from his chair. “Let's go,” he said, walking briskly to the door. “And for Christ's sake, McGuire, try to keep your cool.”

No weather is as unwelcome in New England as November rain. After scouring the North Atlantic, the cold air sweeps ashore and chills the land with its dampness. Too late in the year to nurture life and too early to soften the landscape as snow, the rain is suitable only for a grey world where Indian summer and all of its colours have faded and fled.

When the rains begin falling after sunset, they drive New Englanders deeper within the caverns of their minds where their thoughts focus on the pleasures of dry warmth and their souls weigh the dubious prospect of another sunrise.

That evening, a grey November rain deluged New England and the frame houses lining the streets of Revere Beach. Inside the white house on the hill with its view of the Sound, McGuire basked in the warmth of a fire, the aroma of fresh­baked pastry and the comfort of quiet conversation.

He sat back in his chair, a glass of Scotch in his hand, describing the morning's press conference and Kavander's insistence on McGuire's absence from the Berkeley Street headquarters building.

Ollie Schantz lay propped in a sitting position. The fingers of his right hand tightened and relaxed around a tennis ball as he spoke. “Kavander doesn't want you away from Berkeley Street,” Ollie said as McGuire sipped his Ballantyne's on ice.

“He says it's his choice.”

Ollie grunted. “Jack's not the wind, he's the weathervane. Somebody else doesn't want you there. Somebody higher. Commissioner's office, maybe.”

“Whoever it is, I'm not going.”

“Not going where?”

“Out of town.” McGuire turned and stared out the window where the raindrops gathered on the glass and migrated downwards, seeking the sea. He felt old and defeated, more useless than his former partner lying paralyzed beside him. He grimaced in a bitter imitation of a smile. “It's your classic decline and fall of civilization as we know it, Ollie. You're here, I'm on the street, Fat Eddie Vance is golden, and the guys in the pinstripes are calling the shots.”

“Fat Eddie's the only guy I ever met, can't get out of his own way.” Ollie turned his head to follow McGuire's gaze through the window. The light across the water was obscured by the cold rain. “You say you've got one of his cases?”

“You want to hear about it?”

“I keep telling you I'm not going anywhere.”

McGuire drained his glass and set it aside. For the next half-hour he recited the details of Jennifer Cornell's murder. Ollie, his eyes turned away from McGuire and searching for the offshore light, interrupted several times to ask questions. Only when McGuire finished did Ollie roll his head on the pillow to study him.

“So you've got this Cornell woman, she's working on Newbury Street.”

“In a pricey dress shop.”

“In a dress shop by day and at night, when she's not trying to hustle parts as an actress, she's hanging out in this bar.”

“Pour Richards.”

“Whatever, on Mass Avenue.”

“She's a regular there.”

“No husband, no boyfriend, nothing steady.”

“Picks up a guy every now and then.”

“She's got a history of dropping a few beans out of her basket,” Ollie recalled from McGuire's briefing. “Spends some time in a shrink haven upstate. Report says she was a borderline psychotic, manic depressive tendencies. Gets straightened out, comes back to Boston, when?”

“Five years ago.”

“Gets settled in and one day her brother shows up.”

“Andrew.”

“Andrew, her brother. He starts hanging out in this bar too. He's smooth, good dresser, good conversation, everybody likes him, everybody thinks she's a bitch.”

“Yeah, she could be a real ball-breaker. That's what comes out of the interviews.”

“And after she croaks they find this TV producer's name in her book and some guy, a regular in the bar, who's got the hots for her.”

“Something about her employer too. Woman who owned the dress shop where she worked was really pissed at her.”

“And she and her brother are living together.”

“That's what the neighbours say.”

“Two weeks after her brother shows up, she's found dead in the Fens and there's no sign of her brother, what's his name?”

“Andrew.” McGuire consulted his notes. “Not a trace. Nothing in her apartment, no clothes, no ID. A second set of fresh prints, probably his. They were checked out and zilch came back. And there's nothing on the guy. They checked with Maine records for information and came up empty. Birth records, neighbours, none of them say Jennifer Cornell ever had a brother. Of any age.”

“Any next of kin at all?”

“Not that we can find. Jennifer was born out of wedlock. Father unknown. Mother married a guy from San Antonio fifteen years ago. Died in a traffic accident there, nineteen eighty-three.”

“Bernie Lipson starts the case, goes nowhere, and Fat Eddie takes it over.”

“Yeah,” McGuire snorted. “Sits on it for a month, loses a bunch of reports and writes it NETGO. A real Sam Spade.”

Ollie breathed noisily for a moment, his eyes on McGuire. “What's out of sync, Joe?” he asked finally.

McGuire grinned. How many times over their years of working together had Ollie looked at him while sitting in an unmarked car, or walking down Boylston Street on their way to a lunch of clams and beer, or gnawing on pizza in South Boston, tossing details of a case back and forth like a couple of Celtics working a two-man press? Ollie would ask “What's out of sync?” and McGuire would review the case for him, Ollie nodding and saying “There's a hiccup” or “Gotta stare that one down” or “That's hotter than a two­dollar pistol.” Schantz and McGuire: together they had more closed files, more tight-assed homicide convictions than any two people who ever walked the floors at Berkeley Street. God
damn
, McGuire thought in silence, there were damn few grey files when they worked together, and there was none of that NETGO crap written on
their
cases.

“Have we got us a job, partner?” McGuire asked.

Ollie Schantz managed a smile in return. “Looks like we might. Go over all that stuff again. Let's see who's dragging his dick around the parade ground.” McGuire watched Ollie's weak right hand making dimples in the tennis ball. The rain was still falling cold and steady on the roof, the offshore light still flashing somewhere in the mist.

They had one. They had a murder for Ollie.

In the early days of Boston's history, the area called The Fens was nothing more than ill-smelling marshes extending along the banks of the Muddy River on the settlement's western border. But in the mid-nineteenth century, as the city's social leaders began fleeing the squalor of the waterfront neighbourhoods and moving west, they found the mosquito-breeding Fens intolerable and converted them from putrid marshlands to formal gardens, draining the wide swamp to create picturesque waterways.

Arbours and bridges were constructed at vast expense, and by the end of the century flowers bloomed in the glades below the level of the avenues. Warm Sunday afternoons would find all of social Boston promenading along the Commonwealth Mall and down the sandy paths which wound through the Fens.

Over the years, the inner city continued to spread; after World War Two it grew to engulf the Back Bay area, and Boston's wealthy families resumed their westward flight. Their abandoned brownstone mansions were transformed into apartments and rooming houses, and soon the nearby Fens became a weedy haven for addicts and muggers.

In recent years, the pattern began to come full circle. Many Back Bay mansions were restored to their original elegance as condominiums for young well-to-do urban couples. But the Fens were unchanged. The gardens remained overgrown and the formal plantings were as wild as a Maine meadow.

On a warm day in June, a visitor to the Fens would still find rustic charm in the greenery bordering the river, and in the small flocks of ducks and geese feeding in the sluggish water. But on a chilly November afternoon, when the overnight rain had turned first to sleet and later to the season's first snow, the Fens were uninviting, cold and sad.

McGuire stood on the stone bridge crossing the Fens at Agassiz Street and stared down at the water's edge, where Jennifer Cornell had been murdered five months earlier. A dirt pathway led from an old tangled rose garden through dead grass, tracing the shoreline of the river.

He felt the flurries settle on his neck and the dampness seep through the soles of his shoes, and decided there was nothing to be gained by walking that pathway in November. He looked up and beyond the bridge to the apartment building at 2281 Park Drive.

“He's dead,” the old woman told him, looking through the crack of her apartment door, open only as far as the chain-lock would allow. “Died last July. I told him, I said ‘You start drinking again, you'll kill yourself,' but he never listened. Never listened to me in forty-three years.”

Her face was a road map of creases. She wore a shapeless print dress and her long wispy hair was tied loosely behind her head, hanging down her back like the hide stripped from some long-dead animal.

McGuire showed his badge. “Mrs. Reich, I wonder if I can speak with you about Jennifer Cornell,” he began.

“Who?” The woman's voice erupted, loud and piercing.

“Jennifer Cornell. She lived here. She was murdered over in the Fens last summer.”

“Oh, that bitch!” The woman looked away in disgust but made no gesture to remove the restraining chain from her door. “She was another one.”

“May I come in and talk to you about her?” McGuire asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “We have reopened the investigation.”

“He already told you people everything.”

“Who did?”

“That dummy. My husband. He did all the talking. Even identified the body.”

“Yes, I know. But there may be a few other facts—”

“He ran the damn building, I didn't. Do now. Didn't then.”

“But you knew her? Jennifer Cornell?”

“Yeah, I knew her. The bitch.”

McGuire's mouth broadened in a smile that failed to warm his face. “Then why don't we talk about her, Mrs. Reich,” he said, the words snapping like dry twigs, “before I charge you with obstructing justice? Or maybe just call some friends at the fire department and ask them to do a thorough evaluation of your fire prevention procedures, room by room?”

She stared at McGuire, then muttered something under her breath before sliding the chain aside.

McGuire entered to see her walking away to a worn armchair set beside a window. The room smelled of staleness but was surprisingly clean.

Mrs. Reich—the police records listed her first name as Amanda—collapsed in the armchair and sat staring out the window at the dull sky. McGuire remained standing. Amanda. Such a romantic name, he thought.

“Do you remember any details about the morning Jennifer Cornell was found dead?” McGuire asked.

“Hell, yes,” the woman growled. “Cops all over the place, coming and going. Came here asking if we knew anybody looked like her. I knew it was her but I wasn't going over there. So I had to find him. He was off getting the garbage ready for pickup the next day. He never liked cops. Hardly told them anything. Then the cops had to get a key to her apartment. The cops, they must have talked to everybody twice. Tramping in and out of here. Screwed up everything that day.”

“Did you hear anything unusual the night she was murdered?”

“No. Just heard her brother going upstairs, maybe two in the morning.”

“How did you know it was him?”

“He had a limp. Stairs go right over our bedroom. Can hear everybody. I think I heard her go out later but I'm not sure.”

McGuire scanned the room, cluttered with cheap souvenirs and old photographs. Amanda Reich continued to stare blankly out the window at the sky. He walked around the room, touching the worn furniture, glancing at the sad stains on the wallpaper. “Tell me about Jennifer Cornell,” he said finally. “What kind of person was she?”

“I told you. A bitch.”

“What else? Was she punctual? Tidy? Did she have lots of friends?”

The woman's body shook in a small spasm of laughter. “She took a man upstairs every now and then. Nobody could stand her for more than one night, way I see it. One time we nearly had to call the cops. Three in the morning and she's throwing stuff—glasses, books, I don't know what all—at this guy going down the stairs. And screaming at him. Woman had a mouth like a backed-up toilet.”

“Do you know who this man was?”

“Some guy. Drove one of them expensive German cars.”

“Mercedes?”

“The other one.”

“BMW?”

“I guess.”

“Do you remember the colour?”

“White. I remember it was white. Had one of them funny things on the back. Whattaya call it?”

“A spoiler?”

“Something like that. Looked like a race car. Parked it right in front of here. Didn't give a damn if he got a ticket. Some people have money to throw away.”

McGuire settled himself on an arm of the sofa and smiled. She knows everything, he realized. She listens and she watches and she knows everything that goes on around here. “How many days before the murder did this happen?” he asked.

She kept her eyes on the window but her aggressive mood had mellowed to something more passive. Acceptance, perhaps. Or sadness. “Two, maybe three weeks,” she replied.

“And what was this man saying to her when she was screaming at him. Do you remember?”

“Something about her being lousy. And that she was through. ‘You're through! You're through!' he kept yelling at her.”

“Any idea what that meant?”

She shook her head. “That dummy, he went—”

“Who?” McGuire interrupted.

“My husband,” she snapped. “He went out in the hall and told them to shut up or he'd call the cops. She went back in her room and slammed the door. Guy with the car, he just went out and drove away. Last I seen of him.”

“How about her brother?” McGuire asked. “Wasn't he staying here for the last two weeks before she died?”

For the first time since McGuire entered the room, she turned to face him. “Him, he was a weird one,” she said. “Scared me. Passed him on the stairs once and damn near jumped out of my skin.”

“Why?”

She studied her hands. “Don't know. Something about him wasn't right.”

“Can you describe him for me?”

She looked out the window again. “About your height. Maybe thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old. Good build. Had a moustache.”

“You said something about him wasn't right. What did you mean by that?”

At first, McGuire thought she hadn't heard him, or was ignoring him. Then she said, “He looked familiar. Like I'd seen him somewhere before in the newspapers or on the TV or something. Reminded me of somebody famous. And he always avoided me. Once I was on the stairs and he came out of her room and saw me and went right back in again, and I heard them arguing through the door.” Her chest heaved and she lowered her head. “Besides. Maybe it's because of what happened after.”

“After what?”

“After the bitch died. That's when he started his drinking again.”

McGuire was confused. “Who?”

“That dummy. My husband. Hadn't touched a drop in ten years. Dried himself out. Then, after the bitch was killed, he started drinking again. He'd come home, he could hardly stand up, and I'd say ‘You'll kill yourself, you keep this up.' He'd laugh and tell me I didn't know nothing. He said ‘I got everything figured out about that Cornell woman and her brother.' I asked him what, and he just laughed at me. Then I found out he wasn't drinking alone. He was running around with somebody.”

“Who?”

She paused, swallowed once, and blinked at the sky. “I don't know. He said it was Andy.”

“Jennifer's brother?”

She nodded.

“He disappeared when Jennifer Cornell died.”

“I guess so,” she said. “I never saw him again anyway.”

“And your husband would go drinking with him.”

“Bullshit.” She blinked again, several times, and McGuire realized she was crying. “He was drinking with some woman. I figured it out. I could smell her on him. What the hell do you do with a man, after forty-three years, he sneaks away and goes drinking with some woman? I tell you what you do. You say ‘Piss on him!' So one night I'm in bed alone and he's late, he's out with her I know, and I hear a crash, hell of a noise. I get up and get dressed and there he is at the bottom of the cellar steps. Broke his fool neck trying to carry a case of whisky down the stairs.”

McGuire stood up. “A whole case?”

“Twelve bottles of rye. All of them broken and him lying there with his neck . . .” She lowered her head and hid her face in her hands.

McGuire waited, listening to traffic noises from the street and muffled footsteps from the apartment above them. “Do you remember what happened the morning Miss Cornell was found dead?” he asked gently. “I mean, before the police arrived?”

Lifting her head, she frowned at her fingernails. “Nothing.”

“Where was your husband that night?”

“He was here. In bed with me. Then he got up, maybe about four o'clock. I asked him what the hell's wrong and he said he heard somebody on the fire escape. Thought maybe there were kids back there or them drug addicts from the Fens, they like to sit out there on the fire escape steps. They're crazies. Should lock them all up. So he got up and looked and came back in about ten minutes. I asked him what it was and he said nothing. Told me to go back to sleep. So I did, and then I got up in the morning and told him to move his ass out of bed, he had chores to do.”

“What time would that be?”

“I get up six-thirty every morning. Always have. Him, he'd have his fat ass in bed until seven. Sleep all day if I'd let him.”

“Did he ever explain who was on the fire escape?”

“Not to me he didn't. Told the cops he thought it was her brother, sneaking out the back way.”

“Where did your husband get the money for the whisky?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Never had enough money to buy me anything. I never saw none of it. Whatever he had, he spent on the woman.”

“Who was the woman?”

She exploded in fury, turning on him. “How the hell should I know? I never cared. He could do whatever the hell he wanted, far as I was concerned. He could have ten women, the dummy, I wouldn't care.”

McGuire waited until she had calmed down. “And you never saw Andrew Cornell or the man in the BMW again?”

She had returned her gaze to the window, her chin on her hand, fingertips in her mouth. She shook her head.

McGuire pulled a card from his wallet and left it on a side table. “Please call me at one of the numbers on my card if you think of anything else,” he said. Then he added, “I'm sorry about your husband.”

“Why the hell should you feel sorry about a dummy like him?” she mumbled from the window. “Good riddance to the son of a bitch. That's what I say. Same thing to you. Good riddance. Just get the hell out and mind your own business.”

He closed the door behind him, leaving her by the window, blinking up at the sky.

The snow had turned to sleet again as McGuire walked to the rear of the building.

Each apartment opened to a wooden landing and fire escape leading to an alleyway running parallel with the street. He stared up at the second-floor rear apartment for several minutes. It told him nothing, so he walked back to the Agassiz Street bridge with his shoulders hunched against the wind, glancing briefly down at the site of Jennifer Cornell's murder as he crossed the Fens. The light had faded, turning the world to a still deeper shade of grey. At the end of Westland Street he walked north to Massachusetts, losing himself in the crowds of office workers rushing to the subway.

Another block and he was across the street from the rustic barn-board façade of Pour Richards. He dodged a bus, cursed at a cab that sprayed him with slush, and ducked into the warmth of the bar.

Inside, McGuire stood in the doorway while his eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light. To his left were tables with mismatched chairs. The bar itself ran along the right wall, extending into blackness at the rear of the room where a rock singer screamed from a hidden jukebox.