Good Day to Die (18 page)

“We’re ready,” she announced without bothering to look at Razor Stewart.

I walked into the living room to find Dolly Dope standing with a battered gym bag in her hand. Her eyes were glued to the ragged carpet, her shoulders slumped, her back bent. I won’t deny that she was pitiful, but there are thousands of pitiful souls in New York. What was the point?

The point, I reminded myself for the fiftieth time, was to please Vanessa Bouton, and that’s exactly what I did. I played the part of the silent chauffeur on the drive from 147th Street to the Brooklyn rehab center Bouton had chosen. Bouton sat in the back, literally holding Dolly’s hand. It was a performance worthy of Mother Teresa.

Or, it would have been if Mother Teresa had been running the rehab center. The real director, a practical, no-nonsense woman named Lottie Douglas, didn’t spend more than ten minutes with Dolly before announcing that she’d have to detox before she could be admitted.

“We’re not equipped,” she insisted, “to deal with an addiction this severe. The law does not allow us to dispense drugs, and this woman is in no condition to go through cold turkey withdrawal. When she’s ready, I promise to make room for her. In the meantime, I suggest we get on the telephone and locate a proper setting.”

It sounded simple enough, but it ended up taking more than eight hours (even with Lottie Douglas pulling the strings) to find a clinic with a free bed that also accepted Medicaid. There’s an old Billie Holiday tune that sums it up nicely:
Them that’s got shall get. Them that’s not shall lose.

The clinic Douglas finally located was out in Bayshore on Long Island, and we made the drive in rush hour traffic. On the way, Mother Bouton managed to extract Dolly Dope’s life story. Me, I didn’t bother listening. And not only because Dolly’s history (her real name, by the way, was Lydia Singleton) had already been recounted by Razor Stewart. Somewhere along the way, I’d come up with an idea that could add weeks to our little investigation, and I was too busy mapping it out to worry about Dolly Dope’s childhood.

Thong’s last victim was a thirty-year-old transvestite named Reese Montgomery. It was his age that’d caught my attention. The original investigators hadn’t spent any more time on Montgomery’s personal history than on Rosario Rosa’s, but there was a hint in their reports that Montgomery who’d been pulled off the streets of Long Island City had once run with a much better crowd.

I was hoping that Montgomery had made that personal descent into hell common to many prostitutes, male or female. They begin by selling their youth, and they usually get enough compensation to live fairly well. To pretend, for instance, that it’s not really happening even
while
it’s happening. But little by little, the life wears them down. Drugs, time, disease, jail—the bloom is off the rose within a few years, and their pimps move them along (or outright sell them) to other pimps with less discriminating clientele.

The final stop is a stroll on the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Or on Delancey Street where, at six o’clock in the evening, whores service the Hasidim on their way back to Williamsburg. Or in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx where, at six o’clock in the morning, whores make mechanical love to exhausted long-distance truckers.

The point was that if Reese Montgomery had made that same journey, he’d undoubtedly left a trail of clients, some of them influential (or at least rich), behind him. Supposing Montgomery, finding himself at the end of the line, had decided that the patrons he’d known in his youth (who’d
stolen
his youth) owed him something besides an indifferent good-bye. Isn’t there at least the possibility that he, like a drowning man grasping at a straw, had decided to extort what was rightfully his in the first place? Had decided to extort it from the wrong john?

It sounded good to me, and I intended to bring it up to Bouton as soon as we were alone. Unfortunately, she began to speak even before I started the car.

“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” she accused. “You think I’m an idiot.”

“Stupid? Idiot? I don’t get it.” And I didn’t. As far as I could see, I’d been a good little worker, chauffeuring her about, handling Razor Stewart, not complaining.

“You think we wasted the whole day. You think Lydia Singleton isn’t worth the effort. You think I don’t know how to conduct an investigation.”

“Look, Captain, what I think is you just set the world’s record for saying the word ‘think.’ As for the rest of it, you’re a captain and I’m a detective. It’s not my job to make judgments.”

I glanced over to find Bouton with a clenched jaw and a narrowed mouth. She was angry, all right, but there was something else going on as well. Her eyes had drifted away. They were remote black shadows in her dark face. I remember wondering exactly what they were looking at and deciding it must be some childhood memory. Some long-dead relative, maybe even a sister or brother, who’d succumbed to the lure of the street.

Not that it mattered to me, one way or the other. My first objective, as I defined it at the time, was to avoid having to hear the sad story.

“I’ve been through your records, Means. You like to play the tough guy, but I know you’ve got a degree from John Jay College. In sociology.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever denied it.”

“You’ve
avoided
it.” She leaned back in the seat, relaxing a little.

“Look, Captain, I’m not trying to piss you off, but the degree doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Sure, I went to college. So do thousands of other cops. Everybody, from the youngest recruit to the thirty-year veteran, knows that school is a way up. I was young and ambitious. Plus, I was always good at schooling.”

“But why sociology, Means? It has to mean something, whether you want to admit it or not.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Captain. What happened was that I bounced from one department to another—from police science to criminology to psychology to history—looking for some discipline that wasn’t entirely bullshit. By the time I realized I’d never find it, I was a senior and I had to choose a major. I picked sociology because it was easier than the others. At least for me.”

“You’re telling me that you spent six years getting a degree and you learned nothing?”

“Nothing I didn’t know before I took my first class.”

“I feel sorry for you, Means. In fact, if I was you, I’d make a serious effort to find professional help.”

“Wouldn’t do any good, Captain. You been in shit as long as I have, there’s no getting rid of the stink.”

I
MANAGED, AFTER A
long, respectful silence, to bring up Reese Montgomery and his theoretical life history. Bouton listened, I’ll give her that much, but she didn’t jump at the bait. She remained at a distance throughout the long drive. At first, I assumed that she was angry because I was unable to share her enthusiasm for social work. After all, nobody likes having their hobby rejected, especially ranking officers who expect subservience from the hired help. But after a while it became obvious, even to me, that something was really bothering her. Her expression, eyes narrowed, mouth pursed, jaw rigid, became more and more fixed as she continued to stare through the windshield.

If we were in a movie, I remember thinking, this would be the poignant breakthrough scene. The one where the callous detective reaches out to pluck the traumatic memory from the psyche of the sad, sensitive captain. Where the two of them finally achieve a mutual understanding that transcends rank. Our hands would touch, our eyes meet; I’d lean forward, and her trembling mouth would rise to engulf my own.

Nude scene to follow. Nude scene with a twist. Sex by the side of a highway. The lovers’ moans punctuated by the coarse squawking of a police radio.

But, of course, we weren’t in a movie, and lacking a director, I remained my usual indifferent self, leaving her to stew in her own juices. I assumed that she’d come out of it, but even after we’d crossed the Triborough Bridge and hit the streets in search of Kennedy’s friends, she continued to sulk.

For my part, I simply refused to acknowledge her mood, almost dragging her from place to place. Maintaining what must have been an extremely irritating enthusiasm. I couldn’t forget the simple fact that as long as she held my career in her hands, friendship, or anything like it, was impossible. Not that I pined for contact.

Two hours later, Bouton surrendered to whatever was bothering her and called it a night. I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be rid of her, though I admit to feeling some contempt for her professional attitude. In any event, it was much too early for a dedicated insomniac to consider sleep, so I threw myself into a heavy workout. For months, I’d been trying to add a new move to my ragtag system of self-defense. (Or offense, depending on your point of view.) The move, an uppercut, required me to rotate my left shoulder into my opponent, drop my right, then run the heel of my hand up his chest and into his jaw.

The effect, assuming I could deliver the blow properly, would be devastating (mostly because it would take place out of the recipient’s line of sight), and I admit to entertaining visions of severed tongues and fractured jaws as I worked. The problem was that the combination took forever to complete, while dropping my right hand meant that I was exposing my own jaw to a left.

After an hour of practice, I made a decision never to begin a fight with the uppercut. There might be a place for it later on, especially if it came down to a wrestling match, but not early when my opponent was likely to be on his guard. Still, I continued to practice for another hour. First, I assumed a defensive posture, then visualized the move as a single motion, a long graceful curve, down and up, so fast it was never really visible. Then I did it, over and over and over. Smashing the heel of my hand into a short piece of padded plywood until my right arm was dead. Until I couldn’t raise my shoulder.

Then I switched to my left arm.

I didn’t allow myself to think about anything except what I was doing until I was finished and in the shower. I’d always seen my workouts as a kind of meditation. Inside them, I was purely focused; nothing I did was halfhearted. There was no equivocation, no “should I or shouldn’t I,” no questions of any kind.

I’d taken enough psychology courses to know that shrinks dismiss the validity of such behavior with a simple label: obsessive.

“Look, ma, he’s doin’ it
again.”

My favorite shrink, Ms. Brock of
American Psychology
fame, used the word “obsessive” in every third sentence. What I wondered, as I dried off, was whether she was obsessive enough to really put herself in the place of a beaten child. To actually feel what it’s like to be trapped in a world of unpredictable violence. A world that can (and does) flip from tranquil to deadly in an eyeblink. I doubted it. Knowing that if she had felt that insanity, she would not have used a word like “obsessive” to describe her reaction to it.

The truth, I decided, standing in front of the mirror, is that once the cards are dealt, you have to play your hand because it’s the only hand you have. If you’re strong, you eventually make peace with yourself. You react positively to those turning points which eventually define you.

Big Mike was my particular turning point. He was one of dear old mom’s lovers, a perpetually unemployed lumberjack who needed a place to stay. He was nice to me, in the beginning, but I was used to that. The uncles were always nice while they were trying to curry favor with Mom. Later, after it became clear that Mom, far from being protective, liked to use me for a punching bag, they usually turned mean. Big Mike didn’t take that route. Instead, he began by playing the part of big brother, teaching me how to use an axe and a chain saw efficiently, how to climb to the tops of the tallest trees.

I can’t say I responded enthusiastically; I was far too wary by then. But I did want to master the skills Big Mike was willing to teach, so I spent a lot of time with him. At first, things didn’t go badly; I didn’t find it strange when Big Mike ran his hand along my thigh as he boosted me into the lower branches of a tree. Or even when he suggested we skinny-dip in the creek.

But when he began to go further, to soap me up, to let his hand drift from my thigh to my butt, to press my crotch into his when he hugged me, his intentions became painfully obvious.

So, what to do? Should I “take arms against a sea of troubles” or let the scumbag fuck me in the ass? I don’t think I ever made a real decision, but there came a time when character took command. Big Mike and dear old mom went on a monumental bender; they began drinking in the early afternoon, finishing off two quarts of vodka by sunrise on the following morning. Mom passed out on the floor, her favorite spot, but Mike somehow managed to stagger into the yard and call my name.

“Roland, Roland. Where are you, Roland?”

Mike was staggering for two reasons. First, he was blind drunk, but second, and more important from my point of view, his trousers and underpants were down around his ankles.

I was too familiar with drunks to fear him at that moment. (At thirteen years old, I wasn’t about to be trapped by a staggering alcoholic.) Instead, I became more and more angry. I was tired of being kicked around, tired of being subject to a new father every month. The sight of Mike’s cock dangling in the breeze may have been the final straw, but it wasn’t the only straw. An individual piece of straw may not weigh very much, but when you’re at the bottom of the haystack, you either fight your way clear or you get crushed. There are no other possibilities.

Big Mike’s mating dance didn’t last very long. He stumbled over to the shed, managed to collapse into a sitting position with his back against the wall, and passed out. I watched him for a few minutes, until he was snoring away, then went to my room and got my .22.

Like I said, I didn’t have a plan of action as I crossed the yard; it wasn’t until I was a few feet away that I knew what I was going to do. And even then it wasn’t a real decision. I knew what was going to happen the way a psychic knows the future.