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ON THE SIDEWALK, a sudden harsh wind pulled at him, stirring the frustration in him and making him feel like he’d just stepped out of the confessional booth with even more sins clawing at his back. Sheila and Congressman Foley—the politician type that Moody had mentioned. He reminded himself not to take it for truth, for Miss Grubb was just a misfit on a soapbox, that’s all she was. A bitter crank.
He tried clearing his mind, but everything faded into the emptiness he understood so well, and all he could do was take those familiar well-worn steps back in time and think of Margo waiting for him to score, her lying on their bed and suddenly alert like a cat ready to be fed when he opened the door, and them exchanging looks, the kind only a junkie would understand, and her clapping her hands like a child. “I can always count on my man, the love of my life.”
He tried to pull himself out of the past, watched the wind carry debris through the Theater District. Anger coursed through his veins like broken glass, and he wished that the desperation that followed him wherever he went would subside and break for just a moment. He needed a reprieve, a way to let it go. He moved in against the shelter of the building, lit a cigarette, and the cold air bit at the exposed skin of his face and his hands so that he felt he could barely breathe. Scarletti was the Butcher, had killed Sheila and the other women, but how did Blackie figure in; or was it, like Owen said, just a coincidence? And Renza, the flash-in-the-pan crooner dating Sheila—where did he figure in to her life before she was killed? Dante imagined the photo shop he had worked at, a front for selling dirty fuck pictures to smut magazines, and he saw Bobby behind the camera, framing Sheila’s large breasts, her wide-spread legs, her vacant stare. He thought of the picture he’d found at the Somerville apartment, the one inscribed “My Only Pin-Up, Mario.” A ripe fucking mess, he thought—and now Sheila linked up with the would-be senator from Massachusetts, Michael Foley, who’d grown up with him and Cal, and who was brother to Blackie Foley. Just a fucking no-good mess.
Sheila’s life had been wrapped in all manner of deceits that even he couldn’t have guessed at, but did any of it have anything to do with her murder? Her death could truly have been the random act of a psychopath.
He knew he had to do something other than stand out in the cold, thinking about all the men, all the relationships that Sheila had been in. He turned away from the wind, felt an aimless panic pull at him, one that only a visit to Karl could help quiet.
Taxis passed him by, and the urge to wave one down persisted, but he realized he had only a dollar to his name. That wouldn’t cover the ride to Cambridge, and if he managed to get there, Karl would only laugh in his face—“I told you you’d be back”—and laugh even harder when Dante asked if he could score and pay him back later.
He walked up to a phone booth, opened the door. Its rusted hinges creaked loudly, and he stepped inside. The wired glass around him was cracked weblike, and the cloying stench of piss and beer overpowered his senses. He felt he should call Cal, let him know how fucked up things were getting. He rifled through his pants pockets, and then the pockets of his coat. There wasn’t any change, just the dollar bill he’d crumpled earlier. He picked up the receiver, and the silence of a dead line pressed against his ear. He slammed the receiver against the box and kicked at the bottom panel of glass until it too cracked in a fractured web.