Authors: John Lawrence Reynolds
Haunted Hearts
A Joe McGuire Mystery
John Lawrence Reynolds
To the memory of Dolly Gagnon.
If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill.
âJohn Fowles
McGuire saw them first and he signaled to DeLisle, who sat back on the bench and spoke into the lapel of his leather jacket. Sleeman, who had been jogging towards the bandshell, did a slow U-turn when DeLisle's voice barked, “Okay, two up,” through Sleeman's headphones, and he ran on the spot watching McGuire, who stood on the slight rise beneath the elm tree maybe a hundred feet away. Hetherington heard DeLisle's voice too, through the earphone hidden in her long, red hair, and she stopped pushing the baby carriage to lean forward and reach inside, as though adjusting the blanket.
They were in their teens, one white and gangly, the other black and grinning so everybody could see his gold incisor tooth.
The woman they approached was older, perhaps thirty. She wore tight designer jeans and a short suede coat, a little glitzy maybe, but with Newbury Street class. She sat on a bench below and to the left of McGuire. Her eyes closed, her chin raised, she was spending her lunch break trying to retain her tan in the September sun, a magazine on her lap.
The white guy stopped in front of her and spoke. Her eyes opened, first in anger then in fright, while the black kid grinned and sat next to her as though they were buddies.
Neither touched her, and neither spoke in a voice loud enough for others to hear. When the woman heard their words, her face creased and burned red. The white guy snatched the magazine from her, holding it open for his friend to see. Something on the page made them laugh in false hysterics. When the woman reached for it, the white guy skipped away and tossed it to his buddy, who jumped up and taunted her until the woman gave up and walked in quick, short steps towards Boylston.
“Leave her,” DeLisle said into his lapel. Sleeman began jogging towards McGuire. Hetherington opened her purse, pulled out her compact, and checked her makeup.
The two young men tossed the magazine in a trash can, and the black youth, still grinning, looked up and saw McGuire standing there with the Nikon around his neck, wearing a Red Sox souvenir T-shirt. The hoodlum's expression told McGuire all he needed to know.
“I'll do the T-shirt, but forget Bermuda shorts,” McGuire had told DeLisle.
DeLisle said okay, but McGuire would have to wear sunglasses and new sneakers too, and McGuire grunted and nodded. “And carry this with you,” DeLisle added. He handed McGuire a worn Boston tourist guidebook.
“Let 'em see the camera,” Sleeman told McGuire. “That's what they'll go after. Camera like that'll get 'em three, four hundred, easy.”
McGuire aimed the camera at DeLisle and snapped a frame.
“Don't screw around, okay?” the detective said. He looked annoyed. “You promise me that? You won't screw around? You got a reputation for screwing around, you know.”
So, McGuire became a tourist in his own city. He rode the Beantown Trolley, stared up at the Hancock Building, and ate greasy fries from a paper plate while watching the swan boats in the lagoon. Joseph P. McGuire, twice-decorated and once-disgraced cop, was now a hundred-dollar-a-day decoy, a cog in the machinery to cut Boston's wave of tourist muggings.
The black guy grunted at his buddy, and both of them looked at McGuire, who raised the Nikon to his eye and aimed it towards Beacon Hill.
The muggers separated. The white kid, straight black hair tied in a ponytail and wearing an oversized army jacket, torn jeans, and hiker boots, continued along the walk below McGuire's line of sight, scanning for cops, for anything suspicious. The other climbed the slope in a flanking move towards McGuire. He wore a gray, hooded sweatshirt over tight black jeans and high-cut black Nikes.
McGuire zoomed the lens out and sighted through the camera with one eye, using his other eye to watch the muggers approach. To McGuire, they weren't a threat, just two punks who needed their asses kicked, ten years too late.
They circled, approaching from either side. When the one with the ponytail was in position, he walked towards McGuire, hands deep in his jacket pockets. The other materialized from behind. They stood that way for a moment, two street hoods beside an ex-cop posing as an overweight tourist.
“Nice camera, man.”
McGuire turned to see the black kid showing his tooth, smiling. McGuire said nothing. “Don't talk too much,” DeLisle had warned him. “Tourists don't want to talk, they just want to save their butts.”
McGuire turned away and sighted the Nikon across the Common again. The camera's auto-focus system made a soft purr.
“You see my man, next to you?” the black guy said after McGuire had taken a picture.
McGuire lowered the camera. What he saw in the black youth's face, the cockiness, the dedication to his task of intimidating people, tripped something in McGuire. He wondered what they had whispered to the woman. He forgot everything DeLisle had told him.
“Hey, man. Take a look at my buddy,” the black kid said to McGuire again. He was still smiling. “You see him there?”
McGuire turned to his right. The white guy was smiling back at him, his thin lips closed, his small eyes squeezed almost shut. A large red pimple blossomed to one side of his nose.
“Ugly fucker, isn't he?” McGuire said, and he raised the Nikon to his eye again.
The white guy's smile faded, and he licked the corner of his mouth. “What'd you say?” he asked.
“Man's got a gun pointed at you,” the black kid said, but his voice had lost its edge. Tourists don't call muggers ugly fuckers. Tourists start to shake and their eyes shift away, looking for cops to rescue them and their Japanese toys.
“What'd you call me?” the white kid said.
“How big?” McGuire asked. He released the shutter and shot a frame of DeLisle stretching his arms above his head, like a businessman who'd had enough relaxation for one day and was ready for a walk to the doughnut shop.
“What's how big?” the black kid said.
“He call me ugly?” the white guy asked, looking across McGuire to his buddy.
“How big's his gun?” McGuire said.
“Big enough to blow your head off,” the white guy said, keeping his hand inside his jacket.
“Just gimme the camera, man, and we walk away,” the black kid muttered. He looked around. This wasn't in the script, this wasn't the way the others had gone.
“What'd you say to that woman?”
“Give him the camera, man,” the white guy growled.
“Let's go, Tard,” said the black kid, and he began to back away, but McGuire's hand shot out to grip his arm.
“You like terrorizing women?” McGuire said. Below the rise, DeLisle broke into a trot towards him, Sleeman jogging behind. Hetherington parked the baby carriage and waved frantically at a uniformed cop posted near the tourist information booth on Boylston Street.
“Gimme the camera,” Tard said, reaching for it.
The black guy twisted out of McGuire's grasp. He had lost his cocky expression. “He's a cop, man.”
Tard's brain took a few milliseconds to process this unexpected information, which was enough time for McGuire to pull the hand holding the camera in a short arc across his body, then reverse its direction to swing it at Tard, the side of the zoom lens connecting with Tard's nose in the vicinity of the pimple.
“Jesus!” the kid said, and he twisted away. He dropped to one knee and pulled his hand from inside jacket pocket, and McGuire was looking into the muzzle of a nickel-plated .38 revolver shaking like it was alive. Blood drizzled from the kid's nose and down his narrow chin. He looked ten years younger now, not a street tough but a punished child torn between crying for help and lashing out, unsure of the choice to make.
“Drop it or you're dead!” DeLisle screamed from his crouched firing stance at the bottom of the rise, the gun in his hands not shaking but pointing at the white kid's chest, while Sleeman chased the black kid back towards Boylston.
The kid looked into DeLisle's Glock 9mm, back at McGuire, then down at his feet. He dropped to his knees and released the revolver.
“Son of bitch,” said McGuire. He walked away, shaking his head. “Didn't think he had a gun.”
“I don't believe it.”
Frank DeLisle crumpled the coffee cup into a ball and tossed it at the wastebasket. He missed.
McGuire shrugged. “Hey, I'm the one who should be pissed. You told me these kids never show a weapon. I could be lying on a slab right now, and you'd be standing over me, still bitching. Why didn't you tell me he was carrying?”
“Who knew?” said DeLisle. “Real tourists just give them their cameras and their wallets, and then they stand there with that nice warm feeling you get when you're peeing your pants. You're the only goof who ever asked to see the gun.”
“What the hell'd you hit him for?” Sleeman stood scratching his leg under his jogging suit. “Frank told you, just hand over the camera, give us the sign, and we're on him.”
McGuire stared back at Sleeman. “They upset that woman. She was sitting there minding her own business and they scared the hell out of her. They needed somebody to show them a little muscle. You convict them, they get six months, a year at the most, and they come out like graduates, knowing more tricks. That's all they'll get, you know that.”
“McGuire, how long were you in homicide?” DeLisle said. He sounded weary, as though he were the one who had chased the black kid.
McGuire swept his hand through his hair. “Nearly twenty years.”
“Some people think you and Schantz helped drive Kavander to an early grave, breaking all his rules . . .”
“Ollie and me? Break rules?” McGuire's grin widened. “Where'd you hear that stuff?”
Several years earlier, Boston Police Captain Jack Kavander had collapsed at his desk, victim of a massive heart attack. Rumors persisted that he died clutching a memo in his hand, the most recent report on McGuire's success at circumventing the directives of his overweight homicide captain. It was a fanciful idea, nothing more; at the time of Kavander's death, McGuire had already resigned from the force and was working as a part-time security guard at a Revere Beach warehouse.
Frank DeLisle sat in his torn swivel chair, swung his feet onto the corner of his desk, and bit his thumbnail. Well, he'd been warned about this.
“You're going to
what
?” Eddie Vance had said to DeLisle. The captain's head jerked up as though somebody had pulled a string in his neck. He used to be Fat Eddie Vance, but the erasure of thirty pounds from his girth, and a directive from the commissioner that he would tolerate no nicknames representing race, gender, sexual preference, or “inappropriate physical descriptions,” had abbreviated it to Eddie.
“Use McGuire as a decoy,” DeLisle had answered. DeLisle thought it was a damn good idea. “I've got three people and a memo from Commissioner Gunn, says I gotta make enough arrests by the end of the month to get some ink in town and stories on the wire.”
The summer had broken records for tourism in Boston. More visitors than ever had trekked Boston streets, slept in Boston hotel rooms, devoured meals in Boston restaurants, and left imprints of their credit cards in Boston retail shops.
But crimes against tourists had soared just as dramatically. An average five tourists daily were mugged during July and August. Three had been shot, four stabbed, and one perished under the wheels of a bus when he bolted from the Common across Boylston in panic, pursued by two young muggers.
“North Miami?” cried the headlines in the
Globe
one August Sunday, and police Commissioner George Gunn vowed to clear the city of predatory criminals.
“All we'll do is sweep 'em south so they go back to mugging poor people in Dorchester,” muttered DeLisle when the commissioner fingered him to lead Operation Safe Haven.
“Tourists bring more money into the city than Dorchester pays in taxes,” Commissioner Gunn said.
“Can't do it with three guys. Not if I use one for a decoy. Most of these guys operate in pairs. Can't make a nab until they're away from the victim, and if they split . . .”
“You've got two plus you,” the commissioner cut him off. “That's it. Find a way to make it work.”
“Have I got an operations budget? Can I get a freelance, something like that?”
“Whatever's approved for special operations, take the maximum.”
“That's five hundred a week.”
“Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone with twenty dollars' worth of junk,” Gunn smiled. He was wearing his police uniform, getting ready for a charity luncheon at the Four Seasons.
DeLisle stared back in disbelief, as though the commissioner had just revealed he was actually a woman in drag.
“You really want McGuire?” Eddie Vance had asked yet again.
DeLisle had been thinking about it, what a good idea it seemed to be. He needed somebody who wouldn't panic, somebody who knew procedures and rules of evidence, somebody out-of-shape and middle-aged, who looked like a dentist from Des Moines, maybe. Somebody the creeps on the street wouldn't finger as a cop right away.
McGuire was perfect. Still a legend for being maybe the best homicide cop on the force, he'd been retired for over three years now, living with his former partner Ollie Schantz and Ronnie, Schantz's wife, up in Revere Beach. McGuire had put on a little weight, lost a little hair, didn't walk with that cockiness he used to have, but he knew procedures for evidence, knew how to avoid an entrapment plea.
“Why not?” DeLisle said. “Hundred dollars a day to walk around downtown, eating hot dogs, reading guidebooks. What can go wrong?”
Then Eddie Vance did a rare thing, something few people on Berkeley Street could recall, something DeLisle had never seen him do, had never pictured him doing.
Eddie Vance laughed. He laughed so hard he had to sit down, and when he couldn't stop laughing he stood up again and headed for the men's john.
