Serpents in the Cold (24 page)

_________________________

Carney Hospital, Boston

THEY CHANGED HIS
bandaging before they checked him out, and Maggie handed him sixty Benzedrine wrapped in a towel, which he placed in the canvas duffel bag Lynne had brought from home on the night he'd been admitted. With his bag he limped to the elevator, waving away a nurse who was insisting that Maggie bring him down in a wheelchair, and rode to Lynne's ward on the second floor. She wasn't at the nurses' station but he knew where she was.

The hospital pool was fogged by moisture and heat, and he had trouble breathing. Empty wheelchairs crouched in the shadowy corners gleaming. Lights were set into niches under the lip of the pool, casting strange undulating reflections onto the tiled walls and ceiling. Cal stood at the edge of the pool, feeling sweat gathering between his shoulder blades and on his eyelids and his upper lip. He removed his hat to wipe the sweat at his temple.

Lynne, in a black bathing suit and a white goose-pimpled bathing cap, was floating on her back with her eyes closed, her knees flexed slightly and parted, arms outspread. Water lapped over her breasts and stomach. The pool lights shimmering beneath her created a corona of luminescence around her body, darkening and blurring her features so that at first he felt that he did not know her, that it wasn't really his Lynne at all but someone other, and he felt ashamed and guilty for his intrusion. Lynne rolled onto her front and did a lap of freestyle. He watched her long, lean legs pumping and the muscles of her bottom tensing with each kick. On the return, she turned onto her back and began to swim with strong backstrokes toward him. She turned and completed another lap and then another.

She reached the wall and paused there, treading water for a moment, and then, grasping the sides of the metal ladder, pulled herself up out of the water. When she stepped from the ladder, he found himself standing closer than he had expected. She stared up at him for a moment, wide-eyed and startled, and then stepped back. “Jesus, Cal, how long have you been there?”

Even in the thick, moist heat of the room he could feel the watery chill emanating from her flesh. He shrugged, pawed at his hat. “Not long.”

She pulled off her bathing cap and shook her hair, stepped past him, and bent to pick up her towel. She toweled her front, the insides of her thighs, turned her back to him to adjust the crotch of the swimsuit and cover herself more fully, as if he were a stranger and not her husband.

She pulled on a white terry cloth robe that lay stretched across the chair and sat, lifting her legs up beneath her onto the chair. In the distance came the sound of an ambulance siren. She sighed. “What are you doing here?”

“That guy in room three thirty-seven,” Cal sighed, gesturing toward the door suggesting the third-floor room, as he lowered himself onto the chair next to her. “They say he's the Butcher—the one who killed Sheila and all those women.”

Lynne paused in wringing her hair with the towel. “But you don't believe it?”

“I don't know.”

“Why can't you let it go? Just look at what happened to him.”

“You didn't see what was done to Sheila.”

“No, I didn't, and I wouldn't want to. Most normal people wouldn't.”

“But I do, that's what you're saying?”

“Sometimes you seem to thrive on it.”

Cal lay back on the chair and grunted, touched his ribs tenderly.

“I'm asking you to do something for me for a change. Will you please let this whole Sheila thing go?”

Cal stared at the water, the slightly undulating surface and the shimmering lights it cast upon the walls. He felt like he was in a dream and falling, and that if only he could have a drink, he'd wake up and everything would be still around him again.

“Would you? Would you do that for me?” she repeated.

“I can't,” he said.

“You can't?”

“No, I don't think I can.”

“We once talked of getting out of Boston, and of having children. You used to talk about us getting a small cottage in Truro. You said that the Cape, facing the Atlantic, was the best place, the only place in the world to raise a child.”

“Yeah, except in the winter.”

“You didn't care about the winter then.”

“You're right. I didn't.”

Lynne shook her head. “I don't know what you care about, but it's not the important things anymore.”

Their voices traveled out over the water and struck faint echoes from the walls. She was studying him. She began to speak and then paused, tried to follow what his eyes were looking at. “We're still young,” she said. “If we tried…if you wanted to try.”

“You're young, Lynne.” He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe we try, maybe we give it a go.”

She gazed into his face and he could see her not believing him. She sniffed, and laughed, and buried her face in the towel, and held it there for a long moment, and he wondered if she might be crying.

The reflections off the pool, calmer now that the water had stilled, moved in dreamy helixes on the glass wall and ceiling, reminding him of mortar shells exploding above the tree line, raining showers of burning metal as colorful as fireworks seen through the blurry gaze of concussion.

Distantly, in some other part of the hospital, an intercom sounded and a doctor's name was called, a clock struck a single, silver note, and an instant later from farther off came another chime, and yet another, farther off still, and then the silence settled again. The glass was bright and opaque although the room had grown dark around them. The pool shimmered green in the center of the darkness. Lynne stood and, taking her robe off, walked through the lights toward the locker rooms without turning back, without any further acknowledgment that he was there.

AT FITZGERALD'S RINK
over at Neponset, Cal stood against the boards and watched the skaters gliding across the ice. He stared at the couples there embracing, arms around each other, pulling each other close, clutching at each other as they stumbled and slipped, laughing. A few couples looked at him, startled by the sight of him: heavy stained gauze plastered across his nose, eyes still red from the blood that had pooled in them, and when he tried to smile at them his face felt lopsided, as if the nerve endings had been somehow severed. He wondered if they would heal at all.

When the cold got too much he took a bus down to Carson Beach. Inside the L Street Bathhouse it was warm and smelled of sweat and urine. A young welterweight was jumping rope; a couple of older boxers worked the heavy bags. Joe Castiglione, the manager of the bathhouse, pushed a mop and bucket across the stone floor, paused and frowned when he saw Cal.

“Jesus, what the fuck happened to you?”

Cal waved him away. “Never mind me, what have you got on the cards?”

“Nothing that would cure what you got, not enough to cure a hangover.”

Cal laughed, felt his ribs pressing like splinters into his lungs.

They spoke for a bit about the upcoming fight in March between Jersey Joe Walcott and Ezzard Charles, Joe, leaning on his mop handle, telling him of the next great in the back room who'd whup both of them soon enough.

Passing through the gym Cal nodded and said hello to those he knew, and a few veterans of the war who'd found a place to lose themselves—a phantasmagoria of worn-out, mangled faces: busted cheeks and scarred necks, bloated, pockmarked noses, stooped shoulders, split brows, flop ears, and weary, stupefied eyes, as much a result of the war as of boxing, and of the city and the larger yet no less forgiving world beyond. Stepping into the back room Cal was glad to suddenly enter the realm of the young. Even the effect of light and the smell of sweat seemed different here, somehow less desperate. Cal watched the young boxers as they stepped in and out of the ring and at the ring's center as they stumbled and tripped and sometimes danced and strutted beneath the caged lights.

Recognizing Cal, one of the young men in the ring took his mouthpiece out and called to him, asked about the other fella's face and if he'd gone a couple with Rocky Marciano and his entire corner, hollered for him to get in the ring and spar, to show them what he had, wondering if the old man still had anything left in him, and his trainer and others in the room called out also, echoing the young man. Cal grinned and waved them away.

Back outside he stared at the sea, sharp-looking whitecaps shearing the tops of the gray Atlantic, feeling the pleasant stinging warmth of the sun against his face and hands. He could feel pain beginning to build like a wave, and popping some more bennies, he tried to ignore it, turned his head toward the sea wind. He grabbed a grilled cheese at the Farragut House on P Street, walked up to Old Colony Ave, and caught a bus to Uphams Corner, saw a movie he didn't care for at the Strand, rode the streetcar to the end of the line and then back, and finally walked to Mickey Doolin's at the corner of Savin and Franklin Street, where he sat and waited the two hours for Lynne's night shift to end. He reclined his head between the seatback and the cold window and closed his eyes and waited for the clock to chime the hour so that he could be moving again, and then restless as if something were gnawing at him, he went to the pay phone at the back of the bar and waited for the switchboard operator. The clock ticked over the bar and the operator finally came on the line and he asked for the address of McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome.

_________________________

Louisburg Square, Beacon Hill

THE OFFICES OF
McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome were in a three-story redbrick Greek Revival in the city's charmed Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Cal paused before the weathered steps on which fresh salt was drying and regarded the black-shuttered windows, the silent cobblestone streets, narrow as alleys, and the small private park with its frozen statues and fountain, placed exclusively in isolation, away from the rest of the city and just the way the people living here wanted it. Cal's bandaged hands rested upon the elaborate black iron railing. The roof's copper flashing was weathered to a rich green hue, and above that on the slate rooftop, snow so perfectly white it looked as if it were part of some Hollywood set.

In the vestibule he stamped snow from his feet and paused, breathing in the warmth and the rich smells of wax and pine and mahogany, of brass and metal polish. A thick red carpet ran the length of the hall and his footsteps moved softly over it. Interior double parlors to the right were shrouded in darkness, broken by a brief flickering amid the shadows—the sound of wood crackling in a fire.

To his left an ornate staircase wound its way upward to other offices from which came the sound of opening and closing doors and voices in conversation, rising and falling and muted like the hiss of waves upon a shore yet distant. The hallway opened into a large reception area, where a receptionist sat at a shiny polished wood desk before the wide double doors to McAllister's offices.

She was turned away from him and he could see the angle of her face, sharp and rodent-like, although he could tell she fancied herself a beauty. Her hair was dyed a cobalt black, so black it shimmered blue in the light; she'd applied red lipstick beyond the thin line of her lips to make her mouth appear pouty and full. As he approached, she was looking at herself in a compact. He could hear the hiss of nylon against nylon as she crossed her legs and rubbed them against each other.

He raised a hand as he passed. “Committeeman O'Brien from the Eleventh Ward for Mr. McAllister,” he called out. “We've got a ten thirty time arranged at Franklin Park.” Her hands dropped, but the compact remained opened. Her blowsy mouth opened in surprise. “You can't,” she managed, and Cal pointed to his teeth, made a scrubbing motion that had her picking up her compact again, and then the doorknobs to McAllister's offices were turning in his hands. He locked the door behind him and a moment later he heard her heels clattering on the tile, and then she was tugging at the doors, calling for him to leave the office at once.

The room was empty and done up in much the same manner as the entranceway: burnished mahogany wood paneling and plush red carpets, a large desk behind which hung an ornate gilt-framed painting of a group of stags crossing a great plain, a single door to his right, which perhaps led to other offices or back out into the hall. He eyed the desk quickly: framed pictures of children splashing in the surf at some small beach—he could see a rocky coastline jutting out into the water and as it curved to the sea a house sitting at its end, the North Shore perhaps or, farther, Maine—another of a woman who he assumed was the wife in an elegant wide-brimmed bonnet, holding its top as if it might be swept away by the wind; a large daily planner, two blue half-unrolled architectural plans, various forms dealing with city planning and building codes, a stack of letters with the firm's name stamped in formal print that caught Cal's attention.

The intercom on the desk suddenly buzzed, its light flashing. After a moment it stopped. Cal leaned farther over the desk, risked lifting the letters, fanned them out. There was one addressed to Michael Foley, with a Gloucester address. He held it to the light so that it became almost translucent. There was a check inside, on yellow stock, and nothing else; as he turned it, he could almost make out a name and the amount.

The sound of a man clearing his throat came from a door to his right, followed by a hacking of phlegm and then the flushing of a toilet. A belt buckle jangled. Footsteps sounded on tile. Cal placed the letters back on the desktop and sat in a chair before the desk.

The door opened and McAllister stood there looking at him, hand on the doorknob.

“Who are you and what are you doing in my office?”

“I told your secretary we had an appointment.”

“Then you lied, and I shall have to ask you to leave.” He stepped into the room and the door shut behind him. He was a tall man, well over six feet, and lean, thinning white hair combed to the side. Cal half expected him to move as an old man might, but there seemed to be nothing old about him. Looking at Cal and drying his hands on a paper towel, McAllister strode to his desk, dropped the crumpled paper into a wastebasket. His lips tightened in consideration, but he remained silent, waiting for Cal to speak.

Cal imagined that this was what he looked like in board meetings and how he intimidated everyone else in the room. He felt an urge to speak and to offer an explanation for his intrusion; the man's silence seemed to demand it.

The intercom buzzed on his desk again and McAllister finally broke eye contact. He sat and then clicked the speaker button. “Yes?” he said.

“Mr. McAllister, I'm so sorry but a gentleman who said he was from the Eleventh Ward and had a time scheduled with you…”

“Yes, yes, I know. Thank you, Susan.” He clicked the speaker off and turned his attention toward Cal. “You're the one from the banquet,” he said. “What do you want?”

“You've got plans in at City Hall to tear down all of Scollay and all of the West End.”

“You were at Congressman Foley's Senate dinner. He sees great things for Boston, and it begins with its revitalization, with tearing down the old, but what I have to ask is what concern is it of yours? I thought you were looking for the killer of Foley's old fling.”

Cal stared at him. He knew more than Cal had suspected.

McAllister smiled. “Congressman Foley told me of their relationship very early on.”

“Did you know her?”

“Did I know her? There were times when the congressman brought her to a dinner or an event and we shared the same table, but that was the extent of it.”

“So, you know she had a name as well.”

“I think it hardly matters now, does it?” McAllister turned his attention to the appointment calendar on his desk, took up a pen, and wrote something there. Without looking up he said, “Are you done, or should I call the police?”

Cal could feel the anger rising in him; McAllister was doing a good job of pushing all of his buttons, and he tried to turn the conversation. As long as McAllister was letting him speak, he wanted to see if he could push back.

“The properties on which your plans are built haven't been bought and you're already tearing down buildings. Nobody has sold a damn thing to you—”

McAllister finally looked up at him. “The buildings we've torn down were already condemned by the city. No personal property has been touched—yet. Congressman Foley made all this very clear at the dinner.”

“Like shit he did. Not one person in that ballroom knows what you've got planned for those neighborhoods.”

“I can assure you they do. It shows how little you know.”

“You're not from around here,” Cal said matter-of-factly.

McAllister eyed him and then dismissed him.

“The moment I first laid eyes on you and your friend I knew you were trouble. The world is full of people like you, Mr. O'Brien, trying to get a free buck wherever you can and reap the rewards from what others have worked hard to accomplish. Men like you were born to tear things down, because that's all you are capable of doing. I don't know what your relationship is with Congressman Foley and neither do I care. As you say, there are millions of dollars riding on this project, on the revitalization and development of this fine city, and trust me, nothing, especially not you or your threats, will stop that from happening.”

“No?”

McAllister smiled and shook his head. “This is tiresome. You really don't have any idea what you're doing and who you're fucking with.”

“Is that what you said to Foley's ‘fling,' Sheila Anderson?”

“Go back to your sacred neighborhood, Mr. O'Brien. Call your councilman, call City Hall, call the mayor for all it matters. I think you've wasted enough of my time.”

“You must have been shook up to hear about Foley and this woman, to hear about how she was threatening to blow their affair out of the water, to splash it all across the newspapers. What would have happened to all those investors then, all those political promises, all those federal dollars, all those tax breaks? A scandal like that and Foley's chances for Senate are gone. What would your investors think then, after everything you've promised them?”

Snow was knocking against the tall sash windows, small drifts accumulating beyond each chevroned frame. The world outside was white and without sound. The haloed globes of light from the old gaslights on Beacon Hill seemed to float upon the cloudy glass. Cal measured his breathing and worked to calm his pulse.

“Before you leave, Mr. O'Brien, I want us to understand each other perfectly. McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome is one of the biggest developers in the United States. I built this company from the ground up and made it what it is. So that you know, I've never had a problem getting my hands dirty, if that is what it takes. I know all about you and your connections, how you're related to every piece of shit that has ever crawled out of a Boston sewer. If you wish to pursue this, no one will help you. By the time I am done, no one will admit to knowing you, do you understand?”

McAllister smiled, thin-lipped.

“Good-bye, Mr. O'Brien. We won't be seeing each other again.”

Cal stared at McAllister unmoved, and then he smiled back, baring his teeth. He tongued some tobacco there, spat it to the carpet. McAllister went to take a cigarette from the case and Cal lunged, grabbed the hand, and yanked McAllister so that he was bowed over the desk. He grasped his head and drove it facedown into the wood. McAllister's head bounced as if it were on a spring, and Cal drove it down again and held it. McAllister, his face turned sideways toward the wall, sputtered and spewed rheum and blood.

“You think you know me. That's your first mistake.”

Cal held his hand there, atop his head, and pressed so that McAllister gasped. He whispered in his face, “How do you know Bobby Renza?”

Through broken teeth McAllister sputtered, “His uncle—” and blood filled his mouth and Cal waited for him to spit. “He's the contractor for our redevelopment.”

“Why him?”

When McAllister remained quiet, Cal pushed steadily down on his head and repeated the question. When he spoke, Cal knew he'd broken his nose and lost a few teeth, and the swelling was making it difficult to understand him.

“Foley, it was Foley, so he could be with the girl.”

“With Sheila?”

McAllister's eyes opened and closed. When Cal let up on his head, he moved it slightly as if in a nod.

“Even though she was with Renza?”

“Yes.”

“How did it happen?”

“At one of Rizzo's restaurants in the North End. Everybody was there. Renza was with Sheila. Foley got all hot for her and asked Rizzo who she was. Rizzo told his nephew that she needed to go with Foley, smooth out the deal…” McAllister began to cough more blood. Cal twisted the man's neck harder. “He needed Sheila to make Foley happy.”

“You're telling me Renza pimped out his own girl so his uncle could land your bullshit contract?”

“Yes.”

“What's your relation to Foley? How are you two connected?”

Cal had to push on McAllister's head again. His anger had faded and now he took relish in it. Across the tabletop a thick film of blood pooled.

“I knew his family,” McAllister said finally.

“Bullshit. You didn't know the Foleys.”

“Foley's mother worked for my parents. When the Foleys were children, they spent the summers in a house owned by my parents.”

“You're lying.”

The secretary was banging on the door now. He let go of McAllister's head but then for good measure grabbed it and slammed his face down against the tabletop once more.

“Call the police if you want,” he said, and walked to the door.