Read The Man Who Murdered God for Free Online Page B

object. So I said . . . I said I wanted to go back to Boston to die, and they flew me up and here I am.” Her voice resumed its tragic pleading. “Joe, I’m so damned lonely and scared. You’ll come and see me, won’t you?”
    It was McGuire’s turn to sigh. “Sure,” he said. “Sure I will. Tonight for sure.”
    He placed the receiver gently back on its cradle. Looking up, he saw Lipson watching him intently.
    â€œTrouble?” his partner enquired.
    McGuire nodded. “I guess so. What else do you call it when an ex-wife wants you to come and help her die?”
    Dead ends. Tips from little old ladies, which revealed nothing except rampant paranoia and senility among the elderly. Anonymous telephone callers, whose first few words signal a cop’s experienced ear to hang up and go back to bending paper clips and staring out the window. Brief flurries of excitement, when a connection seemed to appear, then vanished. All part of every murder investigation in a big city. And the more sensational the killing, the greater the number of tips that led only to frustration.
    In the midst of making telephone calls, reviewing forensic reports and talking to acquaintances of Thomas Lynch, the memory of his ex-wife’s telephone call withdrew neatly, obediently, to the back of McGuire’s mind. Once, while listening to Lipson reciting details of a vacation trip the priest had taken the previous summer, McGuire recalled Gloria’s words, hearing them again in her shattered voice for the first time since she had called.
    Trying to visualize Gloria, McGuire would picture two different people. The first was a young woman wearing shirt-waist dresses, her hair in a long dark ponytail that swung like a pendulum as she walked. He saw her dancing at a house party, laughing at his jokes on the Common, riding with him to a picnic near Lexington, looking up at him wide-eyed from a bed in a Cape Cod motel, smiling through a flurry of confetti.
    The other face was an older woman’s, her hair straight and unbrushed, tears streaking her face, speaking to him in a dull voice from behind a cigarette, which remained poised near her mouth. A mouth that sagged from the pull of gravity and disillusionment.
    They were two different people to McGuire. Both named Gloria. Both of them his first wife. They had both died years ago in a dingy apartment in the Back Bay before the area became fashionable again. Now the Gloria who had replaced them was in a hospital ward for terminal cases, dying her own death.
    I’m responsible for the first death, McGuire admitted to himself. With all my lies and my screwing around, I killed the first Gloria, the one who smiled so easily. But not this one. This one they can hang on somebody else.
    In the evening he nodded good night to Lipson, gnawed savagely at a sandwich, bought flowers from a street vendor, walked to Mass General.
    The ward nurse directed him to Gloria’s room—two beds with a window facing the river. One bed was empty, neatly made and standing silent. In the other an old woman dozed, propped up on pillows, a plastic tube leading from her nose to a mechanical device that hummed with a droning indifference. Under his breath McGuire swore at the nurse for sending him to the wrong room.
    A second look at the woman before he left. A closer study of the cheeks, under awkward smears of make-up. And the hair, thin and greying, tied back from a face with etched lines not even sleep could conceal.
    McGuire leaned over to examine the chart at the foot of the woman’s bed. Mrs. Gloria Arnott. He shook his head and continued reading. His name was written next to hers. Address: Boston Police Department, Berkeley Street. A list of medications followed, and under Special Instructions he read, written in a neat feminine hand with a bold felt-tip pen,
NDP
,
NH
.
He recognized the code.
No Doctor Purple.
Forget about hitting the emergency button when she