Solitary Dancer (16 page)

When they finished, Fox noted it was almost six o'clock; he slapped Orwin on the back, arranged to meet him at eight the next morning and trotted three floors up the stairs to Homicide. A scattering of detectives were still bent over paperwork at their desks, leaning back in their chairs with telephone receivers at their ears or huddled in knots of two and three, plastic coffee cups in their hands and intense expressions on their faces.

At his desk Fox dialed his home telephone and while it rang he punched his electronic mail code into the keyboard of his computer terminal. The messages began scrolling past just as Adelaide Fox, Tim's wife of four years, answered the telephone. Tim began to explain that he would be home within an hour, then paused and leaned closer to the terminal.

“Hold on a minute,” he said to Adelaide, and read the message on the screen again, the one from Brookmyer, the text preceded by the case number for the Lorenzo murder:

Re: 892–774/Lorenzo—Subject of inquiry, H. DeMontford, under restricted access code, reference 1415–94. Not to be contacted without notification of Felony Team Green. Cross-reference between two files reveals common subject you may wish to pursue, one Joseph P. McGuire, former BPD officer, last known official address, 217 Medford Street, Revere Beach, MA.

His wife was talking to him, something about Cecilia's teacher, but Fox wasn't listening, he was digesting the text in front of him, absorbing all that it meant and what it might lead to.

Team Green was code for undercover officers whose activities were isolated from other departments for a number of reasons—including the possibility that their work could reveal the involvement of police officers in the crimes being investigated. Fox could obtain access to the DeMontford file in Team Green by citing the Lorenzo murder investigation, but that could only be arranged through Fat Eddie, who had departed for home an hour earlier.

What's McGuire up to? Fox asked himself.

“Is that okay?” Adelaide was asking him, and Tim said, “What?”

“Is it okay if Cecilia stays with your mother?” she repeated. “Are you listening to me?”

“No, I wasn't,” Fox confessed. “Look, I may not make it there before eight after all. Give Cissy a goodnight kiss for me and I'll pick up some of those pink jelly beans she likes, slip 'em to her for breakfast tomorrow.”

“You're spoiling the heck out of her,” his wife said, and Fox told her, “Yeah, but it worked for you, didn't it?”

When he hung up, he called Ollie Schantz in Revere Beach at McGuire's last known address. Ronnie Schantz told him she hadn't seen McGuire since the previous day but she'd heard about him saving the poor girl being beaten to death in his room and Ollie wanted to talk to him about it, hear all the details. Fox told her he would pass on the message. The file on MaryLou's beating provided him with Billie's address and telephone number, but after counting seven rings he hung up, snatched his Burberry from the armchair where he had tossed it and rode the elevator down to the basement garage, staring fixedly at the floor and frowning.

The Gypsy's moaning had long ago ceased and when Django awoke the light beyond the window had faded. He rose and stretched, his belly empty, his mind free of the spiders that had been whirling in his head, and slipped into his long leather coat.

He tapped lightly on the door of the adjacent room before opening it. The Gypsy was curled in the only chair in the room, wrapped in a blanket from the bed, a cigarette in her hand and her tired eyes fixed on the television screen.

“Where Grizz?” Django asked, and the Gypsy shrugged her shoulders. “I'm goin' to the Bird,” Django said and she nodded her head.

Django turned to leave before looking back at her. “Hey, Gyps,” he said. “You all right?”

He hadn't noticed the tears at first but there they were, making her cheeks shine.

She didn't answer, kept staring at some dumb game show on the TV, running her teeth across her bottom lip over and over, like she was skinning it, cleaning it.

Django reached out a hand to touch her but she pulled away like his hand was a shaft of hot metal, like she was an animal fearing a whipping, and Django told himself to stay back, fool, leave it alone.

“Keep cool, Gyps,” Django said and gave her a smile, but now her head and eyes were in motion, swinging wildly from side to side, scanning the room like someone following the flight of a frenzied bat.

The detritus of the previous night's police investigation remained scattered on the ground behind the club, lengths of yellow plastic tape marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, an empty photographic film box, plastic coffee cups and gauze bandage wrappers.

Tim Fox glanced up at McGuire's room. No light shone from within but the door was ajar, and he began to climb the steps, one by one, avoiding the bird droppings and the puddle of congealed blood on the landing where the man who had beaten MaryLou had landed face down with McGuire on his back.

Django saw the lights of the Flamingo ahead, the scene different from last night, everybody gone, things back to normal. He remembered McGuire, the Jolt in a fog from those pills but still sharp enough, still mean enough to handle that creep who'd been doing MaryLou. Damn, Jolt's a bad cat, Django told himself. Get a man like him on your side 'n you can ride anything out. Hell, between Jolt and Grizzly, Django'd never have to fear anybody on the street again.

Gotta tell him that, Django thought. Gotta let him know he's still my man, he's the meanest, explain to him how it ain't me, how Grizzly said we be dry for a while and Jolt shouldn't take it serious like.

Don't wanta upset Jolt. No sir.

He turned down the alleyway, moving through the darkness lightly and without sound, like a bird.

From inside the club Fox heard the thump-thump of music urging another young woman to strut across the stage while men watched, the girl holding a hand on her waist and beaming her one smile, the only one she owned.

At the top of the stairs the heel of Fox's loafer caught in a strip of the metal strapping that formed the landing; Fox stumbled forward against the open door and into McGuire's darkened room, feeling clumsy and silly but keeping his balance, lifting his head just as a figure burst from McGuire's small bathroom and fired once, the sound of the shot like a cannon's roar and the muzzle flash like a fleeting dawn in Fox's eyes.

They came for McGuire at ten o'clock, using Billie's key to get into the apartment and clumping down the hall to the bedroom, four uniformed cops, their police specials out and held in a two-handed grip, moving them from side to side. McGuire lifted his head lazily from the pillow when they entered the room, thinking maybe he was in the midst of some codeine nightmare, until two of them yanked the covers from him and two others prodded him naked from the bed and ordered him to lie face down on the floor while the others stood in their balanced stance, their revolvers aimed at his head.

“What's going on?” McGuire managed to say as they cuffed him, his hands behind his back. None of them spoke but one wrapped him in a blanket before they half-carried, half-dragged him outside where a crowd had gathered on the street, drawn by the sight of three cruisers with gumball lights on their roofs scattering red and blue flashes across the walls of the other buildings.

The codeine hangover was so heavy that even sitting with his hands cuffed painfully behind his back and being bounced from side to side in the rear of the cruiser, McGuire managed to sleep through most of the trip to Berkeley Street.

When they arrived he was conscious enough to stumble down the corridor from the basement parking garage, suspended between two of the uniformed cops, to the interrogation room where Fat Eddie, Orwin, Phil Donovan and Zelinka, the Internal Affairs investigator, were waiting. Zelinka was dressed in a dark suit, crisp shirt and patterned tie. Donovan was in sweatshirt and jeans while Fat Eddie, looking as uncomfortable as McGuire had ever seen him, shifted his weight nervously from side to side in a far corner. Vance was wearing a knit golf shirt whose fabric stretched across his stomach and casual slacks. Two uniformed police officers stood in the opposite corner from Vance, their hands behind their backs.

They set McGuire on the folding chair in the middle of the room, snapped the cuffs off and, at a curt nod from Fat Eddie, left the room, closing the door behind them.

“The hell is this?” McGuire said, looking from Vance to Donovan to Zelinka. The blanket had fallen from his shoulders and McGuire pulled at one corner to conceal his nakedness. “Feel like a goddamn Roman.”

“Would you like some coffee?” Fat Eddie Vance said, clipping his words and speaking in the deep voice that always made McGuire think he was talking from the bottom of his balls.

“Yeah.” McGuire nodded. “Yeah, coffee would be good.”

At a nod from Vance one of the uniforms left the room. McGuire lowered his head and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Where's the weapon?”

It was Donovan, staring at McGuire with his hard Irish eyes, his arms folded across his chest.

McGuire looked up. “Me? You talking to me?”

“That woman's room, the one you're living with,” Fat Eddie said. “It's being searched for evidence.”

“I'm not living with her,” McGuire said. “Somebody tell me what this is all about.”

“He died an hour ago,” Donovan said.

“Who?” Jesus, his head hurt.

“Tim Fox.”

McGuire raised his eyes to meet Donovan's. “Timmy?” Vance, Donovan, Zelinka and the remaining uniformed officer were staring back at McGuire. “Timmy?” McGuire repeated. “Jesus. What happened?”

Donovan exhaled noisily, dropped his hands and turned his back on McGuire.

“Tell us where you've been for the last four hours,” Vance said.

“Been?” McGuire lowered his head and studied the floor. Tim Fox dead? Timmy was one of the best, Timmy was the kind of stand-up guy McGuire admired, Timmy didn't have an enemy in the department . . .

The door opened but no one looked up as the uniformed officer entered the room carrying a plastic cup of black coffee and a paper sack stuffed with McGuire's clothing. He crossed to the center of the room, placed the coffee cup in McGuire's trembling hands, set the clothing at McGuire's feet and retreated to a far corner.

McGuire raised the cup to his lips with both hands. The heat of the liquid scalded his tongue but his head began to clear and as it did the first rays of rising agony burned on the rim of his skull. “What happened to him?” he said, staring at the floor where his bare toes peeked out from under the hem of the blanket.

“You tell us, asshole—” Donovan began.

McGuire threw the coffee in an overhand arc and dove out of the chair at Donovan, the blanket slipping from his body, a demented, naked man weary of the pain and the humiliation, driven by fury from his private crevice of darkness into the light again.

“Are you perhaps feeling better?”

McGuire nodded in response to Rudy Zelinka. He was back in the interrogation room, showered and dressed, and he raised a hand to touch the bandage above his right eyebrow that covered the gash suffered when Orwin and the two uniforms wrestled him away from Donovan an hour earlier. He had consumed two cups of coffee since then with the awareness that, to a meperidine addict, caffeine not only stimulated consciousness but encouraged the pain to burn more fiercely and sear his nerve endings.

“I didn't do it,” McGuire said.

“You and Doitch are beginning to make a believer of me,” Zelinka said. He threw McGuire a tight smile. “Do you have any idea how many pills you took today?”

McGuire shook his head.

“There was an empty container of codeine on the floor of the bathroom in that apartment. Your woman friend says there were at least a dozen in it this morning.”

“That many, huh?” McGuire looked around the perimeter of the room where Donovan was stroking a fresh bandage set across the bridge of his nose, his sweatshirt stained with blood. Fat Eddie sat in a folding chair and stared at the opposite wall.

“You are a serious addict,” Zelinka said.

“No, I'm not,” McGuire replied.

“If you weren't, Doitch says you should be dead by now.”

“Just keep that red-haired son of a bitch away from me,” McGuire said, tilting his head toward Donovan.

“Would you like him to leave?”

“I would like him to take out his goddamn liver with a chain saw.”

Zelinka looked up at Donovan. “Would you mind excusing us for a few minutes?” he asked pleasantly.

Donovan glanced at Fat Eddie, who nodded once, and Donovan was out the door in four long strides.

“Tell me what happened,” McGuire said, stroking his temples with the tips of his fingers. “To Timmy. Tell me what happened.”

“Someone shot him as he entered your room. The shooter was inside. One to the chest. It severed the aortic artery, exited through his back. The detective choked to death on his own blood. The killer stepped over him on the way out.”

“Weapon?”

“We don't know. We haven't found the bullet yet. Doitch thinks it's a thirty-eight.”

“Who found him?”

“An old Oriental woman called it in. Lives in a tenement next to the Flamingo. Says she didn't see it happen. She finished her dinner, sat down by her window, saw Fox's feet extending through the door to your room, and called her daughter, who called us.”

“What was Timmy doing at my place?”

“We were hoping you could tell us that,” Fat Eddie said.

“No idea.” A cleaver in his skull. That's what the pain had begun to feel like.

“Your name came up on a Felony Team Green code. Would you like to say something about it?” Zelinka said.

“Undercover? I'm not doing anything undercover.” McGuire's neck grew damp and the room began to turn.

“You're cross-indexed on a Team Green file with a man named DeMontford.”

“Never heard of him.” The pain was a living thing now, creeping through the breach between skin and skull.

Zelinka studied McGuire as though pondering a puzzle. Then he said, “Would you like to come out of this clean?”

“Clean?” McGuire lowered his head.

Zelinka knelt in front of McGuire trying to catch his eye. “I don't think you've been in any shape to hit a barn door with a snow shovel lately, let alone shoot a man through the heart from twenty feet. But you've become something of a shit magnet, McGuire. Your sister-in-law's found dead with a recording of you threatening her on her answering machine. Which makes you a suspect. Then you rescue a young prostitute from a serial killer and turn his face into hamburger, so for a while you're a hero. The next night one of the best cops in the city is shot dead on the doorstep of your room, and you're a murder suspect again. And through it all, you know what else you've been?”

McGuire was unable to sit still. Adrenaline flowed through him like a river in flood and his skin grew damp with sweat.

“You know what you've been?” Zelinka demanded, thinking McGuire hadn't heard.

“I know what I'm going to be,” McGuire said weakly.

“What?” Zelinka said just as McGuire leaned from the waist and vomited all over Zelinka's brand new honey-coloured suede oxfords.

“Cold turkey it,” Mel Doitch advised McGuire. The others had left, leaving McGuire alone with the overweight medical examiner. “Your best way. Drink liquids and eat light because you'll throw up a lot. Stay in a dark room. Give yourself two, three days, maybe a week. You want it badly enough, you can do it.”

Ronnie Schantz drove down to Berkeley Street, bringing with her some clothing that McGuire had left from last summer. She clucked her tongue at the sight of him but said nothing except to ask if he was okay when he lowered his head between his knees. McGuire said, “Sure.” Then she drove him in silence back to the small white frame house on Medford Street in Revere Beach.

It was after midnight when McGuire stretched out naked between the crisp white sheets of the guest room bed, a plastic bucket on the floor beside him, a container of orange juice on the night table. He lay there like a moth in a web while the entire menagerie of his nightmares battered against the inner walls of his head.

In the beginning, McGuire told himself, it wasn't his doing, he never sought it out, it was all due to lack of energy, an inability to care about anything, anything at all, and that made it passive and easier to accept.

Once he had believed in the wisdom of seizing life and shaking it until it did his bidding. By taking charge he would avoid being a victim, a goal that reflected his view of people as either victims or perpetrators, winners or losers, spectators or participants.

But over the years McGuire committed the unforgivable yet very human error of telling lies, rarely to others but often to himself. During the disintegration of his two marriages, the abandonment of his career in police work and his slide into barbiturate addiction, he assigned his destiny to others while telling himself it was all his choice, his decision. One of his decisions was to coast through the latter half of his life.

Coasting. He turned the word over and over in his mind, feeling the gyros in his head spin and his stomach turn and jerk like a wild horse being broken on the perimeter of a wheel. He was weary of pedaling uphill, of rising against the gravity of his own environment, lifting himself from the sullen violence of his parents' house to prominence as one of the most decorated police officers in Boston's history.

Two years ago he had grown tired and wanted only to coast for a while.

He closed his eyes and began to construct peaceful images in his mind. He visualized Micki lying on her side with him, her back to him, both of them naked, his arm slung over her body and his hand cupping one breast, the two of them fitted together like spoons in their bed, and the line he could see stretching straight and unbending toward the horizon, that was their life together.

Hours later the image appeared as a dream, both of them sleeping in this same darkened room, their backs to the door, and while they slept the door opened and someone entered the room to lay on the bed next to him, someone unknown and threatening. McGuire felt the bed sag beneath him from the weight of the visitor and he woke to discover he was in fact lying on his side in this room with no light. But there was no Micki pressed against him and he was torn between a sense of immediate loss and a fear that in fact someone
was
on the bed behind him. He listened to his own heart beating and tried to grasp the pain radiating from his brain stem and failed, and cautiously he rolled onto his back to confirm he was alone and safe in the small guest room of Ollie and Ronnie's house.

He lay trembling with resonating fear and nausea and when he grew sick to his stomach, the sound of his retching echoed loud and obscene in the small quiet house. Ronnie tapped at the door and asked if he was all right and McGuire assured her he was before drifting blessedly back to sleep again, free for a time of the pain.

He dreamed of his parents' home, the home of his childhood, set against the embankment leading down to railroad tracks which hummed like twin sets of steel strands that began in the shunting yard a half mile away and ended somewhere west of the passenger terminal. The metallic clash of boxcars and grunting diesel locomotives dominated the neighbourhood, soothing in their immutable logic, their sense of ordered assembly, of defining a place for every element of a journey. For years as a child McGuire envied railroad workers for the logic of all that they did, the defined destinations, the fixed schedule of arrivals and departures, the imposed imperatives of their lives.

At the edge of the shunting yards several blocks away, a steel bridge carried streetcars across the expanse of the embankment, the railroad tracks like a river sunk beneath the level of the city, and when the streetcars crossed the bridge on late summer nights the unyielding sound of metal upon metal, steel wheels on steel tracks set in steel foundations, spoke to McGuire of escape and deliverance all through his childhood.

Now in his dream he heard the streetcars, the sound drifting in through the windows of the house, open to catch the cooling summer night air, and he felt the presence of his parents again, his father distant and brooding, his mother silent and curiously inert. Both were long dead and little mourned by McGuire, but in his dream he tried to rise and go to them and bury himself between them, seeking and dispensing love. He drifted up and out of the dream, waking with his cheeks wet and a sob poised to erupt in his chest. He swallowed the emotion, unaware of its origin and its intent, then he closed his eyes and imagined himself with Micki once more, safe in the knowledge that sleep would arrive before he would take her, naked to him, even in his imagination.