And Leave Her Lay Dying (3 page)

“We had a witness—” McGuire began.

“Your honour, I must object,” Higgins called out.

“But not a witness to the murder!”

Thwack!—a slap from Judge Scaife's gavel. Rosen ignored it and jammed his fists against his hips.

“You had a lonely old woman sitting by her window who believed she saw—”

“Counsellor . . .” Scaife said in a voice he might use to caution a young and impetuous boy.

The hatchet cleaved deeper into McGuire's skull and he tried to shout down the pain. “She didn't
believe
it, damn it, she
testified
—”

Two strokes of Scaife's gavel failed to halt Rosen's momentum, and his words were derailed only momentarily by McGuire's interruption. “Who
believed
she saw Mr. Wilmer enter the building—”

THWACK! THWACK! The gavel pounded louder, the strokes stronger and closer together. “
Mr. Rosen, for God's sake, get to the point!
” the judge thundered. “It's on the record that Lieutenant McGuire and other officers entered the premises of the accused and they were authorized to do so. Now tell us why you are pursuing this line or I will direct you to discontinue cross-examination.”

McGuire glanced over at Higgins. The prosecuting attorney shrugged his shoulders and sat down slowly. Let Scaife handle it, his expression said. Let the judge do our blocking for us.

“My point is this, your honour.” Rosen strode back to centre stage again, where he spoke with equal attention to the judge and jury. “Lieutenant McGuire and his partner both confirmed the absence of Mr. Wilmer from his apartment. Considering the modest size of the room, this should have taken only seconds. Yet they remained in the room for at least fifteen minutes. My question is simple: Why?”

The judge sighed audibly. “Answer the question, Lieutenant.”

“We questioned the landlady,” McGuire replied. “Her answers are on the record—”

“Wrong, Lieutenant.” Rosen spoke in a weary voice as though dredging up a last reservoir of patience. “It wasn't ‘we.' Mrs. Hoskins has testified that your partner questioned her. My question, Lieutenant, is this: What were you doing during this time?”

“I was looking.”

“At what?”

“At the room. At the posters on the wall, the pornography on the bed—”

“And you touched nothing?”

“Nothing I didn't have to touch.”

Rosen turned away and studied the floor as he spoke. “Isn't it interesting, Lieutenant, that when Mr. Wilmer was arrested the following morning and you finally had a search warrant in hand, you directed your colleagues to one specific shelf in Mr. Wilmer's closet?”

The prosecuting attorney rose to his feet, calm and assured. “Your honour, there has been no testimony to this effect—”

“My client will testify—” Rosen snapped, spinning to face Higgins.

“Mr. Rosen—” Judge Scaife began in his pleasant voice.

Rosen's arm shot out in McGuire's direction, his finger extended. “—that when Lieutenant McGuire entered his premises and arrested him—”

Scaife banged his gavel with little enthusiasm. “Mr. Rosen, I cannot permit the introduction of evidence—”

“—and directed two officers—” Rosen roared on, his finger still pointing at McGuire but his words directed to the jury.

“Counsellor, I'm warning you!” The judge's voice rose in pitch and he banged his gavel while Higgins sputtered objections from the prosecution table.

“—
to one specific shelf for the only evidence
—”

“DAMN IT, COUNSELLOR, SHUT UP!”

The court bailiffs turned in surprise to stare first at the red-faced judge, then at each other. They raised their eyebrows and tightened their chins in unison; no question about it, Rosen had gone too far this time.

But the outburst worked. Rosen turned slowly to glare at McGuire and lower his arm to his side. The courtroom spectators remained frozen, the jury leaned forward in fascination, and prosecuting attorney Higgins stood with one hand raised.

Judge Scaife took a deep breath to regain his poise. He seemed on the brink of apologizing, then stood up quickly and looked at Rosen and Higgins in turn. “I want to see both of you in chambers,” he instructed, and exited quickly through a side door, followed by a frowning Higgins and a confident Rosen.

McGuire slumped in the witness chair with his eyes closed for several minutes before opening them to watch Arthur Trevor Wilmer clean his fingernails. The ritual, he told himself. The importance of the ritual cannot be ignored. We are following a ritual here, each of us knowing Wilmer belongs out of society, each of us forgetting the innocent victim whose life he took, because the ritual demands it. It's not truth or justice that counts, it's the ritual that must be followed. . . .

The door to Judge Scaife's chambers burst open and the judge entered the courtroom, grim-faced, followed by Higgins and Rosen.

Rosen won, McGuire realized. Look at him, he's practically strutting.

The judge scanned the courtroom, scowling back at every eye caught in his gaze. “Mr. Rosen has convinced me of the validity of his line of questioning and I have determined that it may continue, within limits.” He looked at McGuire and added, “I shall remind the Lieutenant that he is still under oath.”

Rosen smiled at Judge Scaife, then avoided McGuire's eyes as he spoke.

“Lieutenant, we were discussing your presence at the arrest of Mr. Wilmer. We have heard your colleague testify that he found a brassiere, which he claimed belonged to the murder victim, on a closet shelf in Mr. Wilmer's apartment.”

Rosen continued to scrutinize the floor as he walked towards McGuire.

“At that time, you were in possession of a second warrant to search the apartment in question, is that correct?”

“That's correct,” McGuire replied.

“And you arrived back at the apartment just as your partner was arresting Mr. Wilmer, is that correct?”

“I have testified to that, yes.”

“And you, along with two uniformed officers and two members of the Identification Bureau, were present, as I recall. At which time, in the presence of my client, you directed Sergeant Burns of the Identification Bureau to a specific drawer in Mr. Wilmer's closet by saying ‘Check the top drawer, Izzy,' did you not?”

McGuire shifted in the chair.

Jesus. He couldn't be suggesting . . . “I can't recall,” McGuire said, looking up at the courtroom ceiling. “We had a blanket search warrant that time.”

“Of course you did.” Rosen walked casually over to the witness chair and spoke directly to McGuire for the first time since leaving the judge's chambers. “You're very thorough in your application of search warrants, aren't you? Just as you were very thorough in your search of the victim's apartment, weren't you?”

McGuire glanced over at Higgins. What the hell's going on? he asked with his eyes, but the prosecuting attorney folded his arms across his chest and looked away.

Rosen was leaning closer. McGuire could smell peppermint on the lawyer's breath. “In fact, Lieutenant, you visited the victim's apartment at least three times after the initial discovery of her body, didn't you?”

Use her name, McGuire wanted to shout back at him. She wasn't a victim until that scumbag, your client, mutilated her. She was young and beautiful and a good person and her name was Diane Linda Hope and she had made the Dean's List at Boston College working towards a master's degree in psychology, use her name, damn it.

Without waiting for a reply, Rosen pressed on, his eyes growing wider as he spoke. “Another fact. After your first visit to Mr. Wilmer's apartment you visited the murder scene for the last time, didn't you? You met Sergeant Burns there and sent him on to Mr. Wilmer's apartment alone, saying you would meet him there shortly. Is that not correct, Lieutenant?”

It was correct. After Burns left, McGuire had stood in the victim's room staring at the floor where Diane Linda Hope had screamed silently into a knotted towel through a warm spring afternoon. McGuire had listened for the echoes of her screams, tried to feel the depths of her agony, tried to make them as real as the brown and crusted stains on the carpet at his feet.

“We're waiting, Lieutenant.”

McGuire blinked away the memory. “That is correct.”

“And you arrived at Mr. Wilmer's apartment from the scene of the murder, entered Mr. Wilmer's closet, and when Mr. Wilmer arrived a few moments later you instructed Sergeant Burns to examine a specific shelf, didn't you, Lieutenant?” Rosen leaned even closer as he spoke, so close McGuire could feel the other man's breath on his cheek.

“Yes, because—”

“Because you knew what he would find at the back of that shelf, didn't you? You knew he would find a brassiere belonging to the victim because you had put it there, hidden under some of Mr. Wilmer's possessions.”

“That's a lie!” McGuire responded.

“Because it was all you had to connect Mr. Wilmer to the murder and without it, you had no evidence—”

The pain, the fatigue, the anger all coalesced into an explosion as McGuire leaped to his feet to seize Rosen by the lapel of his jacket with one hand and grip the lawyer's neck with the other, watching Rosen recoil in fear, hearing the judge thump his gavel over and over like a low drumroll, seeing the bailiffs charging at both of them, knowing he had broken the code and betrayed the ritual and not caring any more, not caring at all.

From atop the fireplace mantel, the face in the photograph shone out at the world, filled with innocence and more than a little beauty. The hair was lustrous and black, the skin pale and smooth, the chin firm and finely boned.

But the eyes owned the face. Large and clear, they laughed back at the world even while their expression suggested something deeper, something wistful, perhaps: a Gaelic sense of tragedy.

Thirty years after the photo was taken, only the eyes, as clear and blue as ever, remained unchanged. The coal of her hair had changed to snow, the skin had weathered, the chin had grown heavy. But the eyes were still focused on the laughing side of life.

She had been christened Veronica Louise Hennessy, but from the day of her birth she was known simply as Ronnie. Two weeks before her twenty-first birthday and six months after meeting an off-duty policeman on the day-ferry to Provincetown, she became Ronnie Schantz.

Along with her Gaelic eyes, she inherited a streak of fatalism. When Ollie Schantz, Boston Police Constable First Class, caught her as she stumbled down the ferry steps, the gears of fate had begun to mesh. They had spent the afternoon together, Ronnie so lost in Ollie's quiet strength and maturity that she forgot about the girlfriends who had accompanied her on the day's outing to Provincetown. There had never been, she knew, a day that had shone so warm and so dear on the fingertip of Cape Cod. She and Ollie sat on the pier and watched the gulls soar, nibbled on fried dams, tossed food to a solemn-looking pelican, talked incessantly on the shore and held hands in silence together on the ferry back to Boston.

Only fate could have brought them together like that.

But fate had shown her the other side of laughter as well. Fate had tugged little Jordie, their beloved Jordie, onto North Shore Road on the first warm day of his sixth spring, tiny legs churning until he froze at his mother's belated scream and the sight of the MTA bus bearing down upon him.

In the space of a heartbeat the world turned to reveal its other side, its darker side, its unfair side.

Through the years since, she refused to feel bitter about the death of her only child. It took strength to smile at young children playing among the leaves of autumn or the flowers of spring. But she did. And doing so over the span of all the years gave her something no one and no other twist of fate could ever steal from her. It gave her dignity.

It had been two months since the doctor at Mass General patiently explained the injury to her husband's fifth cervical vertebra, how the brittle bone edge had sliced through much of the upper part of his spinal column, severing nerves as cleanly, as quickly as . . . as a young boy can flee his mother's distracted attention to dash away between parked cars on a warm spring afternoon.

“One nerve is only partially damaged,” the surgeon explained to her. He seemed young, far too young to be entrusted with the life of her Ollie, but she nodded and tried to smile. “We have attempted to repair it. If it works, he should have some use of his right hand, perhaps some movement in the arm as well.” He paused, staring at her, waiting for her courage to dissolve into helpless tears. When it didn't, he said, “I wish I could promise more. But I can't.”

She reached out and touched his hand, as though he were the one who needed strength and she was dispensing it. But she said nothing. Only her eyes spoke, smiling and thanking him for his honesty.

Those same eyes smiled back at McGuire when Ronnie opened the door of her home in Revere Beach on that blustery November evening.

They reached and hugged each other without a word of greeting. Then, his hands on her shoulders, he held her at arm's length and studied her.

“How are you?” he asked gently.

“Tattered around the edges but holding together.” She reached her hands to his and gripped them tightly. “It's been a bad day for Ollie. None of his days are good any more. Some are bad. The others are worse. But at least he's off the respirator, breathing on his own. Times like these, you cling to all the good news that comes your way, I guess. And that was good news.”

She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Maybe you can make him laugh, Joe. I can't. Nobody has come to see him from the department since he came home from the hospital. They were almost his family. It's like his whole family has forgotten about him.”

She tried a smile, with only partial success. “You used to make him laugh. I remember, he would come home and drink his tea in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator and telling me about some funny thing you had said or done that day, standing there and laughing about it all over again . . .”

Her eyes blinked quickly and she brought her hands to their corners.

“I'm sorry, Joe,” she said through her fingers. “No, it's all right,” turning away as he reached for her. When she lowered her hands, her eyes were steady and shining. “I've started baking again. Can you tell?”

McGuire nodded. “Smells like what? Cake of some kind?”

“Lemon chiffon. Just took it out of the oven.” She guided him down the hall, her hand on his elbow. “Go see him and I'll bring some in with coffee.”

When they brought her husband home from the hospital, his head fixed rigidly in a stainless steel device clamped between his shoulders and his skull, Ronnie had prepared the den for his comfort. A motorized adjustable bed sat beside a window looking out on Massachusetts Bay. With a touch of the control from his good hand, Ollie could elevate the bed enough to see sunlight dancing off the water and gulls riding thermals in the sky. Another touch and the bed would glide back to a horizontal position for sleep and for Ollie to read the three words Ronnie had written with a broad felt-tip pen on the ceiling directly above his head: I Love You!

A remote control television set hung from the ceiling, angled towards the bed. Beside him on a night table was Ollie's police scanner-radio, equipped with a remote switch that responded to the same light touch as the motorized bed.

McGuire entered the room to see his former partner sitting upright, staring out the window at the black water. The scanner crackled with the chatter of police patrols located all along the shore from Lynn to Weymouth.

“They got a floater in Quincy Bay,” Ollie said in a flat voice as McGuire lowered himself onto the hard-backed chair next to the bed. “Off Moon Island. White male Caucasian.”

“How are you doing?” McGuire asked.

Ollie ignored the greeting. “First thing you do with a floater is, you leave it on its back,” he said after a long pause. “Don't want to drain the lungs. Leave them for Mel Doitch to check. You got to watch all that stuff until Doitch arrives. Let him figure it out. What he finds in the lungs, that's important. Salt water, fresh water, no water, how much water, it all tells that fat-assed Slav something.”

“Mel's okay,” McGuire offered.

“Mel spends too much time around corpses is Mel's problem. He talks like 'em, he smells like 'em. He keeps stuffing his face with kielbasa and cabbage rolls, he'll look like that floater you and me checked down near Carson Beach couple of years ago.”

McGuire began to speak but Ollie continued, neither his voice nor his eyes wavering.

“Remember that poor sucker? Time we found him he was so grey and bloated you wanted to paint ‘Goodyear' on him and fly him over the Orange Bowl.”

A smile darted across Ollie's face, then dissipated quickly somewhere behind his eyes.

“You get that floater on Moon Island assigned to you, make damn sure the whistle who answered the call didn't turn the poor bastard on his stomach. And remember to check his shoes . . .” Ollie's voice faltered and his eyes blinked quickly. They flew from the bay towards McGuire and back to the window. “You can . . . you can tell a lot . . . from a floater's shoes.”

Ronnie entered with a mug of coffee and a slice of cake. Placing it carefully on the small desk beside McGuire's chair, she smiled at his whispered thanks and left as silently as she had entered.

“I won't get the case.” McGuire sampled the cake, light and tart with the clean scent of fresh lemons. He set it aside and stood up, his hands in his pockets.

“What, you too busy with old stuff?” Ollie asked from the window.

“No, it's Kavander. He's pissed at me.”

“He's pissed at the world, you know that. He's always been meaner than a constipated crocodile. Me, I always thought he kind of liked you.”

“Not after today.”

Ollie's eyes clicked in McGuire's direction.

“I grabbed a defence attorney in court,” McGuire explained. “Tried to beat the crap out of him from the witness stand. Right now, the attorney's probably sipping Chivas and scribbling out assault charges. Worse, there's a chance his client could walk from a rape and murder one.”

“The Hope murder?”

McGuire nodded. He scooped another large helping of cake.

“Who'd you beat up on?”

“Marv Rosen.”

Ollie grunted. “Can't blame you. Son of a bitch is the kind of guy who'd piss on your shoes and say it's raining. Who was the judge?”

“Scaife.”

“So, you gonna tell me what happened or you gonna stand there and do your imitation of a tree stump?”

McGuire smiled and sat down again. Between samplings of the cake and sips of coffee, he recited the day's events, including the pain of his hangover and his absolute belief in Wilmer's guilt.

“You plant the bra?” Ollie asked when he finished.

McGuire tilted his head. “What the hell, Ollie—”

“Just asking.”

“I saw it there. On the first visit.”

“When you guys were talking to the landlady.”

McGuire nodded. “But I couldn't seize it. Couldn't even touch it legally. Should have had a blanket warrant, search and arrest. Did you know it takes two signatures for one of them now? I would have wasted at least an hour lining up another judge and I wanted to be there early in the morning. Thought I would catch the little bastard in bed. So I just went with simple arrest on suspicion. Figured we'd come back after laying a charge, do a total search.”

“And you saw the bra but couldn't touch it so you went back for the blanket warrant.”

“I stopped at the girl's apartment to check things out.”

“Women tend to wear the same brand of underwear.”

“Same brand, same bra size. She had three others.”

“Still not a clincher.”

“Blood on the one in the closet. It was her type. Semen stains on it match his blood type.” McGuire shrugged and spread his arms. “Witness sees him enter the apartment on the day of the murder. Hell, it's a tight case.”

“And Rosen played statistics.”

“Said half the women in Boston had her blood type, half the men had his.” McGuire stood up again and stared out the window at the darkened water. “I've never lost my cool like that, Ollie. I've had worse handling by lawyers on the stand before and I was able to laugh it off. Now here I am with Rosen threatening a civil suit, Judge Scaife thinking about contempt of court, and Kavander wanting me in his office tomorrow, first thing.”

Ollie Schantz smiled weakly. “Joseph, you get yourself in more trouble than a hound with the shits in a swimming pool.”

McGuire drained the rest of his coffee. “I keep thinking about the old days. You and me standing in drizzles on surveillance. Tossing drunks out of bars on Dorchester. Never thought I would but I miss those days. Things aren't the same.”

“
Nothing's the same, goddamn it!
” It was more a hoarse whisper than a shout, all that the older man could manage from his weakened body, but it snapped McGuire's attention back to the bed, where Ollie's face had flushed and the strain around his eyes intensified. “Nothing's ever the same. Nothing's ever going to
be
the same again!”

“Hey, I know that. I'm a big boy. But lately, I've been thinking—”

“Of checking out, right?” Ollie interrupted. “You'll tell Kavander to shove it and you take a hike. Then what'll you do? Open a book store? Go up to Vermont and tap maple trees?”

“Wait a goddamn minute.”

“No, you won't do that, McGuire. You'd figure you're still a cop so you'd get a job with some piss-ass police outfit in the Berkshires. Tough Boston cop winds up directing tourists through town. Hell of a way to end a career like yours.”

“You think it's fun getting my ass bitten by Kavander?”

“No, it's not.” Ollie shifted his eyes back to the window. A navigation light on Bass Point across the bay winked back at the pace of a sleeping heartbeat. “No, it's not,” Ollie repeated softly.

“Kavander could hang me for this.”

“He won't,” Ollie replied. “He would rather you hung yourself. Kavander's all shit and no flies. He doesn't want to leave himself open for making a bad decision. Guy like you, all those commendations. . . . 'Course, if you want to walk, he'll open the door for you.” He swung his eyes back to McGuire. “Don't you give him a chance to say you walked away just because he's uglier than you are. You remember what I used to say about ugly guys?”

In spite of himself, McGuire grinned broadly. “Yeah. Never get into a fight with somebody uglier than you because the other guy's got nothing to lose.”

“Damn right. You leave Berkeley Street, you leave because you want to, not because of Kavander.”

McGuire glanced at his watch. “Speaking of leaving . . .”

“Yeah, I know. I know.”

“I'll drop in tomorrow. Keep you posted on what's happening.”

“Only if you've got the time.” Ollie's eyes swung back to the light across the bay.

“Thank you, Joe,” Ronnie said to McGuire at the door. “He really appreciated you coming. I could tell by the sound of his voice.” She stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. “That's the happiest I've seen him since he came home.”