Haunted Hearts (4 page)

“Some of them don't seem so sure of themselves,” McGuire said. “One of them, anyway,” and he told Ollie about Orin Flanigan's visit that afternoon.

“Doesn't sound like anything he needs to keep so secret,” Ollie said.

“I get a feeling it's unofficial. Like he doesn't want his partners to know about it.”

“He's a partner?” When McGuire nodded, Ollie said: “What's he got to be worried about, then? Unless he's breaking some kind of lawyer ethics. Whatever the hell they are.” He waved away another spoonful of food and Ronnie began gathering the utensils together. “So, you gonna ask Wally Sleeman to help you, get you some dirt on this guy you're lookin' for?”

McGuire nodded. “Probably cost me some Scotch. Which reminds me. Remember that skip tracer from years ago? Woman lived over on Huntington?”

“Libby.” Ollie grinned. “Old Libby Waxman. Christ, what a character. Haven't thought about her in years. Talked to her, lemme see, lemme see . . .” His eyes scanned the ceiling. Ronnie stood up, the plates and utensils in her hands, and left without a word. “It was when those two guys, couple of hustlers, took off more'n a year before . . . remember that guy they found down near the fens, head caved in . . . ?”

McGuire was half-listening. He was concerned about Ronnie, the look on her face when she left the room.

“Still call him Fat Eddie, and I catch hell for it.”

Wally Sleeman leaned back and scanned the other lunch-hour diners at Hutch's, his small eyes flitting from one to another, pausing long enough to determine if the face was familiar, female, or threatening. Familiar faces warranted a lifting of Sleeman's heavy hand—the one not clutching the bottle of Moosehead—in greeting. Unattached women received a brisk up-and-down sweep of Sleeman's gaze and, if they stirred something in Sleeman's hormones, a lifting of his eyebrows.

Anyone who represented a threat, based on a recollection from a mug sheet or an arrest Sleeman made years earlier, earned a swivel of Sleeman's massive body, a motion that reminded McGuire of a freighter in Boston Harbor being positioned for berthing. Sleeman's eyes would fix on his target until he would nod and mutter, “Robbery with assault” or “B and E, theft over five” or simply, “scum-sucking lowlife.” No one Sleeman observed in Hutch's this day appeared to be threatening. He rested two thigh-sized forearms on the table and expelled a long, reluctant sigh.

“Eddie's lost that much weight?” McGuire asked. He felt good, hanging around a tough old cop, maybe two years from retirement, to whom the term “political correctness” meant wiping your feet before entering the White House.

“Not that much. He's lost some, but the son of a bitch ain't never gonna be anorexic.” Sleeman smiled over McGuire's shoulder at the blowzy waitress approaching with crab cakes and fries for Sleeman, mussels and salad for McGuire. “Now here's a vision of loveliness,” Sleeman said when the woman arrived at their table. She had hair the colour of carrots, a smallish turned-up nose that gave her a perpetually adolescent look, and a mouth that was too wide but slid into a smile with ease.

“You talkin' about me or the crab cakes?” she said. She was close enough to forty to behave as though she were younger, and far enough beyond it to accept the fact.

“Crab cakes I can get anywhere,” Sleeman said, his eyes moving over her body. “Somebody nice as you, I'd have to go to Vegas for.”

“They keep him tied up at night?” she asked McGuire.

McGuire smiled. The mussels looked good, the shells set in a garlicky tomato sauce, but he eyed Sleeman's French fries with envy.

“Hey, you into that stuff, sweetie?” Sleeman grinned at the waitress. “You wanta tie me up, say the word. Hell, I got some perversions you never thought of yet.”

She struck a pose, one hand on a hip, and tilted her head. “Honey,” she said, “trust me. You're a perversion I ain't thought of yet.”

Sleeman laughed and seized his fork as though it were a sword, his body rocking with laughter. “Jesus, I love women,” he said, and began spearing his fries.

“Wally Sleeman, right?”

McGuire and Sleeman looked up at a tall, slender man with oversized glasses and a heavy chin standing next to their table.

“Yeah,” Sleeman said. He turned back to his lunch. “That's me. Who're you?”

“Name's Morgan. Rick Morgan.” He extended a hand towards Sleeman, who glanced sideways at it before slicing his crab cakes.

“I remember, you played for the Bruins back in the sixties,” Morgan said. He withdrew the rejected hand. “Right? Am I right?”

“You're right.” Sleeman lowered his fork and lifted his dinner napkin to his mouth, wiping his lips as he spoke. “You remember that far back, do ya?” he said.

“Hey, I remember you knocking Bobby Hull on his butt one night at the Gardens,” Morgan said, his face creasing into a smile. He looked over at McGuire. “Right on his butt. Bobby Hull himself. When he tries to go around Sleeman, Sleeman gives him a hip check and Hull's sliding into the boards.”

McGuire smiled and opened a mussel.

Sleeman reached for the Moosehead. “Yeah, and ten minutes later, when the ref's not looking, Hull gets me in a corner and rams the end of his stick into the back of my head like a sledgehammer.” Sleeman grinned at the memory and lifted the bottle to his lips.

“You were my favourite player back then, next to Bobby Orr,” Morgan said, leaning on the table.

Sleeman lowered the bottle and stared off in the distance, his eyes narrowing. Anyone else might have thought he had spotted a face from a wanted poster, but when McGuire heard Morgan's words and saw the look on Sleeman's face, he knew better.

“Next to Bobby Orr himself,” Morgan babbled on. “I mean, nobody's been better than Orr, right? As a player, I mean. Am I right? Am I right?”

“He was okay,” Sleeman said. His mood had grown black.

“Okay?” Morgan grinned in disbelief. “Just ‘Okay'? I never saw anybody skate like that. But I guess you should know, playing with him and all, right? Am I right?”

“I never played with him,” Sleeman said. He returned to attacking the crab cakes as though they were predators that would leap from his plate if he didn't dissect them first.

“Really?” Morgan looked around, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. “Is that right? You never played with Orr? You sure about that? You never played with Bobby Orr?”

Sleeman dropped his fork to his plate and stared briefly across at McGuire, who watched the man's heavy forearms grow tense. “I'll tell you what,
Dick
,” he said, turning his head to Morgan. “I play with myself every day in the shower more than I ever played with Orr, okay? Okay?”

Morgan looked from Sleeman to McGuire and back again. “Sorry if I disturbed you,” he said. “Just trying to be friendly.”

He pulled himself up to his full height, took a deep breath, and walked back to the table he was sharing with three other men near the front of the restaurant.

“Asshole,” Sleeman said.

Mention Bobby Orr in the presence of older Boston hockey fans and you got a quiet nodding of the head, a smile maybe, and the launch of a dozen stories from people who saw Orr glide across the ice as though he had Roman candles on his skate blades. There were other stories from people who never saw him play in the flesh but wanted to believe they did. But not from Wally Sleeman.

Sleeman would duck his head and roll his sloping shoulders, the ones that once bulldozed their way against an opposition center coming across the blue line a dozen times a game, but now just continued their slope down to a heavy chest and a heavier belly. Then he'd look away, across the bar, maybe, and mutter, “Not bad, but overrated.”

If the conversation took place on Berkeley Street in Robbery Division, a rookie suit who was a whistle a few months ago would laugh and say, “What, you kiddin'?” and recall how Orr was probably the greatest defenseman in the history of the game, scored more goals than any other player in his position, we'll never see another guy like him, not in our lifetime.

“Guess who got bumped off the team to make way for Orr when he came up from the juniors in sixty-five?” people who knew Wally Sleeman's story would say, when Sleeman was out of hearing range. “Guess who was supposed to get his break the next year, set to go like gangbusters, the year Orr comes up and this guy, this poor unlucky bastard, gets crowded out and traded to Toronto where he dies, the poor bastard dies? Guess who that was?”

That's what happened to Wally Sleeman, getting his big break the same year Orr arrived to tear up the NHL. Sleeman was an eighteen-year-old with lots of promise, that's what he had been told all his life since he was a kid in Providence. Then he's the extra defenseman who shows up in camp the same year Orr does. Sleeman spent a year in Toronto, a year of throwing his elbows around like they were scythes and he was ass-deep in hay. Sleeman picked up so many penalties that the Leafs sent him down to the minors. One morning he woke up in a motel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his nose broken and his eye closed from a fight in the previous night's game, and said “The hell with it.” He turned in his equipment and went back to New England, where he had grown up dreaming of playing for the Bruins. Now he was just some guy who once came this close to an NHL career, and that's when Wally Sleeman got himself a job on the police force.

“So anyway, ya can't call him Fat Eddie any more, right? Even if he was the same old lardass.”

After the interruption by Morgan, Sleeman had resumed carving his way through the crab cakes with his fork, his elbows sticking out like a bird's wings, the same way he would set them going into a corner, chasing a hockey puck. His pink scalp shone through the few remaining hairs on his head. “I mean, these days you can't say somebody's fat, you can't say somebody's crippled, even if they got no legs and they're pushin' themselves across the street on a skateboard, right? So we can't call him Fat Eddie anymore.” He filled his mouth with a slab of crab cake the size of a playing card.

McGuire pried open another mussel, avoiding the sight of the half-chewed crab cake in Sleeman's mouth. “So now he's just Eddie?”

“Naw.” Sleeman leaned back in his chair and looked around the room again, this time as though searching for something he had never seen before, or something he saw once and never wanted to encounter again. “See, him and Donovan are buddies now.”

“Phil Donovan and Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Sleeman's hand seized the bottle of beer and brought it to his mouth. “Eddie's always bitchin' about how things ain't bein' run tight enough, and Donovan's always agreein' with him, kissin' Eddie's ass before turnin' around and kickin' everybody else's. The two of 'em are a pair.” He inhaled a mouthful of Moosehead. “We call 'em Snit and Snot.”

“How're you getting on with DeLisle?”

Frank DeLisle was a straight-up cop, who bolstered his street experience with academic credentials, and indicated with a silent glare or a cautious word that he expected everyone to act as if they harboured ambitions to become police commissioner. DeLisle avoided profanity; he added new photographs of his family to the wall behind his desk on Berkeley Street each month; and he refused to accept any excuse for deviating from the Police Procedural Manual.

“DeLisle's ass is so tight,” Ollie Schantz observed to McGuire one day, “the guy could eat coal and shit diamonds.”

“Frank's okay I guess, when he's not preachin',” Sleeman said. He finished the last crab cake. “He's always tellin' me to dress better, eat better. Even said I should either take out a better class of women or try to get back with my wife. So I say to him, ‘Make up your mind, Frank. You want me to mix with a better class of women, or you want me to get back with the wife?'” He drained his beer and scanned the restaurant again. From their table in the corner, Richard Morgan and his friends were gesturing towards Sleeman, their faces expressing disapproval. Sleeman smiled and waved one hand, its middle finger extended vertically. “You hear about that black kid, the one who came at you on the Common?”

“What about him?”

“Workin' solo now. Got himself a gun, sounds like a Beretta.”

“He's been ID'd?”

Sleeman nodded. “The gold tooth. He's back hittin' tourists down around the market. Don't want cameras, just cash these days. Feedin' a habit, probably. Little bastard's getting cockier than ever. Herded some couple from Jersey into an alley behind the clam house down there last night. He's copping a feel from the woman with his free hand while her husband's digging for his cash and traveler's checks.” Sleeman shook his head. “If I get him alone without the Beretta, I'll turn his ass pink with my boot, I'm tellin' ya.” His mood changed. His face brightened as though power had been restored somewhere behind his eyes. “So you're still shuckin' for those lawyers, are ya?”

“Only been a week,” McGuire said.

“Which is a week longer'n I figured you'd last.” Sleeman leaned back in his chair. “You don't have a reputation for playing kissy-face with too many mouthpieces, you know.”

“Always helps to see the other side. Anyway, they're not into criminal very much. The closest most of them get to a courtroom is for child custody or a civil suit.”

Sleeman leaned forward, his eyes on McGuire. “Don't you get bored? Don't you wish, just once, you were out on the street lookin' for a nab, or you had some snivelin' piece of crap in the IR, feedin' you all the stuff you've been lookin' for on his buddies?”

McGuire shook his head. He probed the bowl of tomato sauce with his fork, searching for errant mussels.

“I know what it is.” Sleeman's face creased into a grin. “It's the broads, right? Big lawyers like them guys, they got women stacked in the office like cordwood, right? So how many've you banged so far?”

“None.” McGuire lowered the fork and raised his beer glass. “Not a one.”

“Bullshit.”

“It's true.”

“What, you becomin' a monk?”

“Truth is . . .” McGuire drained his beer glass. “The truth is, I miss being married.”

Sleeman blinked and looked through McGuire, as though the other man had vanished. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He nodded his head and sat back in his chair. “I can see that. I miss it too. I also miss root-canal work and feeding my balls to a pack of Rottweilers. What, you nuts? Miss bein' married? Hell, you've been single for how many years? What's to miss?”

McGuire shrugged. I've always missed it, he wanted to say. The best times of being married were better than the best times of being single. Instead, he said: “I need some information on a guy.”

“Got a record?”

McGuire passed a sheet of paper across the table. In point form, he had written as much about Ross Myers as Flanigan had communicated to him.

“Whaddaya need?” Sleeman asked.

“Whatever you've got.”

“Nothin' on paper, right? I get caught handin' you paper, my ass is in a sling.”

“Could use a mug shot.”