I don’t have much time to talk to you.”
They took seats in McGuire’s living room which, unlike DeMarco’s living room, was as neat as a pin and smelled of furniture polish. DeMarco couldn’t recall ever using furniture polish. McGuire was also as neat as a pin: pressed jeans, pressed long-sleeve shirt, and tennis shoes so white they looked as if they’d just come out of the box. He had curly dark hair, was short and slim, and had eyelashes long enough for a Maybelline commercial. He sat on the edge of his chair, bouncing a knee, giving DeMarco the impression he was nervous, although he couldn’t imagine why.
“How did you know Paul and I were friends?” McGuire asked.
DeMarco said Paul’s landlady had told him, and then explained-for what seemed like the ten-thousandth time-that he was trying to find out if Paul had a will and where it might be. To his relief, McGuire said that Paul did indeed have a will. When your career was watching people die as Paul’s had been, and when the people dying were sometimes quite young, you learned very quickly you weren’t immortal. And since his financial life had been pretty simple, Paul had used an online form and had named St. James Church in Falls Church as the beneficiary of all his worldly possessions. He had kept his will in a safe deposit box at his bank.
DeMarco felt like leaping to his feet and cheering. “Who was the executor of his will?” he asked.
“I was. Or at least I was when we broke up a year ago. I don’t know if he changed his will after that, but I would assume he did.”
DeMarco was willing to bet that Paul hadn’t changed his will-people tended to put off things like that-but decided it didn’t really matter. He was going to tell the pastor at St. James that Paul had left him four grand and, if he wanted the money, he could go through all the hassle of getting the state to give it to him. He was through screwing around with this whole mess.
It occurred to DeMarco later that he should have left right then-but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I’m curious about something, Mr. McGuire. The FBI thinks Paul was shot because he might have been involved in a drug deal. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” McGuire mumbled. “I have no idea why he was killed. Look, if there’s nothing else, I have to-”
Now that was wrong. No one who knew Paul believed he was dealing drugs. Everyone, in fact, was adamant he wouldn’t do something like that. So why wasn’t McGuire, the person who had possibly known him best, not equally adamant? And McGuire’s body language was off. He didn’t look DeMarco in the eye when he made the statement. He did what DeMarco called rabbit eyes: eyes darting away as if looking for a place to run to, a hole to crawl into. In DeMarco’s experience, rabbit eyes indicated a lie-a lie told by an incompetent liar-which made him wonder why McGuire was lying.
“Well, what do you think he could have been doing at the Iwo Jima Memorial at one in the morning?”
“I really don’t know,” McGuire said, but there it was again: the mumble, the rabbit eyes.
“Do you know something about Paul’s death, Mr. McGuire?”
“No. Why would I?”
McGuire didn’t say this calmly, however. He practically shrieked, Why would I? as if he was desperate for DeMarco to believe him, but then he added in a calmer voice, “We hadn’t seen each other in over a year.”
But DeMarco wasn’t buying it. “Mr. McGuire, Paul was my cousin,” he said. “He was your friend, your ex- lover. And he was murdered. Right now the FBI-”
“Oh, God, the FBI’s involved?”
Why in the hell would he say that?
“Yes,” DeMarco said, “and right now the Bureau thinks his death was drug related. But if you know it’s not-if you know what really happened-you need to tell the Bureau.”
McGuire held his hands palm outward at chest level, as if he was fending DeMarco off. If he hadn’t been sitting down, he would have backed away. “I’m not going to get involved in this,” he said. “And I want you to leave. Right now.”
“Are you leaving town because of what happened to Paul?”
“No, I’ve had this trip planned for months.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
DeMarco stared at McGuire for a long moment, then said, “Mr. McGuire, I’m a lawyer and an officer of the court.” DeMarco actually had no idea if he was an officer of any court; that was just an expression he’d heard on TV. “And I think you know something about Paul’s death and if you won’t tell me what you know, then I have a legal obligation to contact the FBI and tell them that I think you’re withholding information in a homicide investigation.”
“You can’t do that!” McGuire shouted. “You could get me killed.”
“Get you killed?” DeMarco said. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Please, just stay out of this. You could get killed too.”
“McGuire, I wanna know what you know. Now tell me.”
“Oh, God,” McGuire said.
“Come on. Spit it out. You can either talk to me or you can talk to the feds.”
McGuire didn’t respond immediately. He just sat there, looking down into his lap, shaking his head-but he wasn’t shaking his head as a sign he was refusing to talk. Instead, it was as if he couldn’t believe this was happening to him.
In a softer, less threatening tone, DeMarco said, “Anthony, please, tell me what you know. You owe it to Paul.”
McGuire finally raised his head and said, “Paul called me the day he was killed. He made a big deal about how he was calling from a pay phone, which I thought was strange, and he told me that a patient of his had told him something important.” McGuire then took a deep breath and said, “Paul said he thought this patient may have been killed. By the government.”
“By the government?”
“Yes. And he said he might be killed too because of what he knew.”
“Who was this patient?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
It had to be General Breed, DeMarco thought. “Did he tell you what this patient told him?”
“No. He said if he told me then I’d be in danger, too.”
“Then why’d he call you?”
“He said that if anything happened to him, I was to call a reporter at The Washington Post named Robert Hansen.”
“And tell Hansen what?” DeMarco asked.
“That Paul had hidden something at the church.”
“What church?”
“His church. St. James.”
“Did he tell you what he hid?”
“No.”
“Well, did he tell you where he hid it?”
“No. He just said to tell Hansen it was hidden at the church. And then I saw on the news that a reporter named Hansen had disappeared.”
“So then what did you do?”
“Nothing. I was afraid. I didn’t know who to call.”
“You didn’t do anything? You knew Paul might have been killed because of whatever this patient told him-and you just sat here?”
“He said the government killed his patient. The government, for Christ’s sake! Who the hell was I supposed to call?”
Gilbert made a copy of the DeMarco-McGuire recording. He stood up, poked his head over the top of his cubicle like a timid gopher peering out of its hole, and saw that Claire wasn’t in her office. He left a message on her answering machine and went to lunch.
