Whisper Death (4 page)

Fat Eddie looked from McGuire to Innes and back to McGuire again. The two men stood in front of his desk, McGuire closer and almost threatening, Innes a few steps behind. Fat Eddie's eyes seemed wider behind his glasses and the tip of his pen was beating his desk at a frantic tempo.

“I don't understand your problem, McGuire,” the homicide captain said calmly. “All you have to do is arrive in Palm Springs tomorrow, handle the necessary paperwork and return with the suspect. I haven't assigned you as an investigating officer. So aspects of the victim's life are simply not a factor here.”

“They are when Washington builds a stone wall around the victim,” McGuire replied. “If this Amos guy was such a wheel, why isn't this an FBI case? Or Secret Service? Why are they leaving us to chase our tails while they hold back information? And why doesn't the local post office know anything about Amos and his reasons for dropping in on Crawford? Ralph called and they said they'd never heard of him.”

Vance shook his head and tossed his pen on the desk. “Obviously Crawford was working deep cover out of Washington,” Vance said, leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “When things are nailed down for the trial, we'll get the information we need. Like I said, I don't understand the problem. You and Innes just go down and bring him back. Then we can talk about you joining the investigation team or working on something else. Until then, I don't see what's upsetting you.”

“Somebody is jerking us around, Eddie,” McGuire said. “And I don't like it.”

Vance leaned forward again, shaking his head from side to side. “McGuire, McGuire, McGuire,” he repeated sadly. “You were gone so long, I forgot your most indisputable quality.” He smiled tightly. “You just don't like much of anything, do you?”

McGuire tilted back in his chair, staring at the tips of his black loafers planted on the edge of Ralph Innes's battered metal desk. What am I, an errand boy? Sent across the country to pick up suspects, drop them off for others to handle? What next, fetching coffee and doughnuts? The hell . . .

His eyes were focused somewhere beyond the stained office walls and he thought again of his tendency to gravitate toward extremes, a realization that had seeped into his soul over years of hostility and love, both given and taken. He had no middle ground. He knew how to run, how to charge, how to kick out against all the unfairness and tragedies sent tumbling across his path by fate, by life, by however you described it. And he knew how to stop and rest, how to ease himself through a crack in the fence to green open space on the other side where he would lie in meadows and stare at the sky. He knew that. He had done that in the Bahamas.

But he knew no middle ground.

Was that where happiness was found? In the middle, between stop and go, between panic and lethargy? Between the quick and the dead?

He didn't know. He wondered if he would never know.

McGuire swung his feet from the desk, reached for the Crawford file and opened it in his lap. Why so damn little information? Lots of statements from residents of Crawford's apartment house. Full autopsy report on Amos. And virtually nothing else.

He examined the Victim Information form on Ross Amos again. A telephone number was scribbled in the bottom corner near NEXT OF KIN—CONTACT. The same notation, with different dates and times, had been made several times in the margin:
No
answer
.

The hell is this? McGuire walked to the open door of Innes's cubicle. The younger detective was bent over an open filing cabinet across the room.

“This your writing?” McGuire asked, holding the Victim Information form for Innes to see as he approached. “Down here? Next of kin contact?”

Innes leaned forward, squinted. “Yeah, that's me. No answer three days in a row.”

“So nobody talked to the victim's wife?”

“We put a request through local police and the Feds.” Innes straightened his body and leaned an elbow on the filing cabinet. “Then we heard Crawford was picked up in California and figured we'd shake all that stuff out later. Moved on to other things.”

“Jesus,” McGuire muttered, and he turned on his heel, shaking his head. “Doesn't anybody follow up things around here anymore?”

“Hey, we're busy Joe,” Innes replied weakly.

Back at Innes's desk McGuire dialled the home telephone number listed for the deceased Ross William Amos. A woman answered on the third ring. “Amos residence.” Her voice was warm and friendly, tinged with a Southern accent.

“I'm calling about Mr. Ross Amos,” McGuire said, a pencil poised above his note pad. “Is this Mrs. Amos?”

There was a pause, just a heartbeat or two longer than McGuire might have expected. Then, in a voice lower in pitch and less animated, the woman said, “This is Wendy Amos. May I ask who is calling, please?”

“Lieutenant Joe McGuire, Boston Police Department.” Actually, Acting Lieutenant, McGuire almost added. No official badge yet. No weapon either.

“Oh dear,” the woman said in a hesitant voice. “I do believe I told you folks everything I could about my husband.”

“No, you didn't. According to our records, this is the first time anyone from this office has been able to contact you.”

A pause. “I'm terribly sorry. I must have meant some local police officers. They spoke to me here. In my home.”

“Names?” McGuire reached for a pencil.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Do you have their names, Mrs. Amos? The officers who spoke to you?”

Something in her voice. A rueful smile? A tolerance perhaps? “I'm sorry, but I was so upset I didn't get their names.”

“But they were with the Morningside, Virginia, police department?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Mrs. Amos, do you know why your husband was in Boston on the day . . .” McGuire almost stumbled over the word “murdered,” a word he avoided using with members of a victim's family. I'm not as smooth at this as I used to be, he realized. “On the day he died?”

“No, I don't,” she responded. “My husband refrained from discussing his work with me. That's the agreement we had, Lieutenant . . . I'm sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

McGuire told her.

“Well, Lieutenant McGuire, surely you can understand how a man in my husband's line of work tries to avoid discussing his activities in detail with anyone. Even his wife.”

McGuire grunted. “What did your husband do before he joined the post office, Mrs. Amos?”

“Do?” It was an unexpected question. “Why, he was in the army. . . .”

“For how long?”

Another heartbeat pause. “Several years. That was before we were married. . . .”

“And did he join the postal service directly from the army?”

“Yes.” She pronounced it as a two-syllable word. Yay-us. “Yes, he did. . . .”

“What kind of work was he doing in the army, Mrs. Amos?” McGuire interrupted.

She laughed nervously. “Lieutenant McGuire, you don't barely give a body time to answer one question before you're galloping on to the next.”

McGuire apologized.

“Apology accepted. Now then. What did my husband do in the army? Why, he was a member of the military police, which provided him with the training to perform security work for the US Postal Service.”

“And where is he buried, please?”

“In Arlington National Cemetery.”

“And do you know the gravesite number?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Could I have the number of his burial plot, please. Details of that kind are missing from our file.”

Her voice tightened noticeably. “Lieutenant, would you kindly tell me what this is all about?”

“It's about your husband's death. Somebody is trying to hinder our investigation of it. I'm just trying to assemble as many facts as I can.” He waited for a reply. Then: “Mrs. Amos, if you would simply provide me with your late husband's gravesite number, I'm sure that will be all the information I'll need today.”

She cleared her throat. “Lieutenant McGuire, I will be pleased to provide any facts which will aid you in bringing my husband's killer to justice. I don't see how knowing where my husband is buried will assist . . . Lieutenant, you don't plan to disinter my husband's remains, do you? I'm sorry, but that would be so upsetting to me . . . and his . . . his family . . .” She sounded tearful. And unconvincing.

“You have my word, Mrs. Amos, that we intend to do no such thing.”

He waited while she collected herself on the other end of the line. “Well, I'll have to trust you on that, Lieutenant. By the way, I would like to have your badge number and the telephone number where you can be reached. As the wife of a security officer, I've learned to do these things.”

Except you should have asked them earlier, McGuire mused. He provided her with the numbers.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. I, uh . . . let me look for the gravesite number. Just a moment please.” There was a rustle of papers, a near-silent flurry of activity in the background. Then: “My husband, Ross William Amos, was buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery plot number two-one-one-three-seven, sector G.”

“Why?”

“I don't understand, Lieutenant.”

“Why was he buried in Arlington? He wasn't killed in active service. He'd been out of the army for several years, hadn't he?”

“My husband was awarded the Bronze Star for valour in Vietnam,” she replied indignantly. “This entitled him to a hero's burial in Arlington and that is precisely what he received.”

McGuire thanked her for her help.

“Any time,” she said. Her voice had lost its folksiness. “Any time at all.”

Over the ten years spent as partners, the team of Schantz and McGuire had achieved the highest arrest and conviction rate in the history of the Boston Police Department. Yet their success appeared to be at odds with the concept of teamwork. Neither man was efficient in preparing the complex and voluminous reports demanded by modern police procedure. And their social contact away from work had been virtually non-existent, shattering the myth of dedicated brothers-in-arms.

Only the more perceptive observers recognized the source of the magic created by their partnership. Among them had been the late Captain Jack Kavander.

“It's a chemical balance,” he explained once to the police commissioner, who wanted to know why other homicide teams failed to achieve the success of Schantz and McGuire. “It's like taking two chemicals off different shelves. You mix them together and you get a lot of fire and smoke and maybe a smell like rotten eggs. But what you end up with is something new, something really good. Something you can't produce any other way.”

Kavander explained that Schantz was analytical, McGuire intuitive. Schantz was outgoing, spreading his philosophies and views of life to all who would listen; McGuire was secretive, keeping his own counsel and daring those around him to read his inner thoughts. Schantz was stable and placid, McGuire restless and volatile.

“What one guy lacks, the other fills in,” Kavander continued. “Negative and positive, black and white, hot and cold. Put them together, you get something bigger than the sum of its parts.”

For the balance of the afternoon, as he finalized details of his trip to Palm Springs with Ralph Innes, McGuire felt all of his intuitive senses buzzing. At five o'clock he made copies of the documents in Bunker Crawford's file, slid them into a brown envelope and walked out of Berkeley Street Police Headquarters toward the subway station.

After finishing the pasta dinner prepared by Ronnie Schantz, McGuire sat alone in the living room and watched the evening news on television while Ronnie spoon-fed her husband. Finally she retreated to the kitchen, leaving McGuire a mug of coffee and plate of home-baked cookies on the table next to Ollie's bed.

“Things aren't hanging right,” McGuire grumbled. “There should be more information on the victim, this Amos character. What's the big deal about military records? And what's a postal security officer doing investigating a maintenance supervisor?”

Ollie Schantz turned his head to McGuire. “Now, don't go looking for ghosts in a dark room just because nobody's turned on the lights yet,” Ollie said. “Down in Washington, anybody who's not in bed is busy looking under somebody else's. Might not be anything to it at all. Besides, if you need more on the guy for the trial, let the D.A. subpoena it.”

“His wife bothers me.” McGuire bit into one of Ronnie Schantz's cookies.

“Joseph, everybody bothers you,” Ollie said, a grin spreading across his face.

“She had too many answers,” McGuire continued as though he hadn't heard. “Every time I had a question, she had an answer.”

“You know what I heard once?” Ollie Schantz swivelled his head to look at the ceiling. “I heard that any question that can be answered isn't worth asking.”

McGuire stared back at the older man. “I can't figure out if that's the smartest or the most useless thing you ever told me,” he said, a smile creasing his face.

“See?” Ollie's hand flopped across the bed and gestured painfully at McGuire. “Now there's a question worth asking right there!”

Later, McGuire lay in the darkened room that had belonged to Ollie and Ronnie's son, who had died under the wheels of a bus at five years of age.

McGuire recalled something Janet Parsons had said late that afternoon. Stopping at her office door, he had leaned in and suggested that Fat Eddie was gaining revenge by sending him to Palm Springs with Ralph Innes. “He knows about you and me,” McGuire said. “And he knows about you and Ralph. A little bit of turning the knife there, if you ask me.”

“Watch him, Joe,” she had cautioned.

McGuire laughed. “Fat Eddie? I can handle him.”