Haunted Hearts Read Online Free

McGuire grinning. “But Christ, Joseph. How you gonna work with a bunch of ambulance chasers?”
    â€œIt’s Zimmerman, Wheatley and Pratt. They’re mostly corporate, civil law, divorce lawyers, family law . . .”
    â€œCome on.” Ollie managed to turn his head far enough to follow McGuire’s gaze through the window. “You’re tellin’ me you’re not gonna run with hounds, you’re just gonna trot with dachshunds. Dogs are dogs.”
    â€œWhat am I supposed to do the rest of my life? Stay here as your gardener, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, helping Ronnie with the groceries . . .”
    â€œYou’re talkin’ about stuff I used to do.” Ollie said it without anger or self-pity. Ollie had a way of stating obvious facts in an obvious manner.
    â€œOkay, so I’m making like a husband around here.” McGuire realized what he had said, what he was implying.
    Ollie’s eyes remained on the water. “You doin’ that too?”
    â€œAw, for Christ’s sakes, Ollie.” McGuire stood up, his hands in his pockets.
    â€œListen, it can happen.” Ollie’s voice was free of rancor. “You don’t think I know Ronnie’s still a good-lookin’ woman? Remember old Dave Sadowsky? He was always findin’ reasons to drop by when I wasn’t here, tellin’ Ronnie what a honey she was, how she could do better’n me. Till I told him one day, he ever tried to lay a finger on her I’d make him do a pole vault on a friggin’ twelve-gauge.” Ollie grinned at the memory, but his eyes avoided McGuire’s.
    â€œI don’t believe you can even
think
. . .”
    â€œI hear you two out in the kitchen, late at night. I hear Ronnie laugh. You make her laugh, Joseph. One of the sexiest things a man can do for a woman is make her laugh. We spend all those years, us guys, tryin’ to dress the right way, drink the right brand of Scotch, lift weights and do sit-ups, all that stuff, and most women are just lookin’ for a guy with a sense of humour.”
    â€œOllie, I am not sleeping with Ronnie . . .”
    Ollie’s head moved in an arc until his eyes locked on McGuire’s. “I’d understand if you did,” he said. “See, that’s the point. I’d understand.”
    Zimmerman, Wheatley and Pratt occupied two floors of a downtown bank tower, the office a gaudy display of post-modern architectural hubris in cinnamon-coloured marble. “An excess of good taste,” was how one critic described the atrium lobby, with its brushed brass accents and crystal light fixtures.
    Stepping from the elevator and walking to the law firm’s fifteenth-floor reception desk, McGuire entered a world of Edwardian elegance. The walls were wainscoted in dark oak beneath flocked wall coverings in shades of deep reds and hunter greens. Next to the reception desk, a wide staircase spiraled down to the firm’s fourteenth-floor library and the steno pools, accounting, records-keeping, all the engine-room mechanics that permitted the legal professionals to function on the floor above them.
    McGuire was wearing a blue Oxford button-down shirt and blue cotton slacks, plus his trademark tweed sports jacket, custom-made for him by a Charlestown tailor who had owed him a favour. The tailor had done a superb job, adding leather trim on the buttonholes, Mandarin silk lining, and other details. McGuire had seen the same fabric on a jacket in a Brooks Brothers window. Without the custom tailoring and detailing, the Brooks Brothers version was priced at $800. The tailor had charged McGuire only for materials.
    McGuire had done the tailor a very large favour.
    McGuire owned three of the jackets, one brown, one blue, one gray. He wore them year-round with jeans or with tailored slacks, in rain and snow, on all but the hottest, most humid, summer days. He suspected he would be buried in one of them. They