McGuire lay back with his eyes closed, listening to the pelting of water against the plastic curtain surrounding the tub as Billie took her shower.
Of all McGuire’s qualities ascribed over the years by friends and enemies alike, weakness had never been among them. He had been praised and condemned for his stubbornness, lauded and criticized for his inability to compromise, admired and rejected for his refusal to play politics with colleagues. Depending on the source, McGuire was brave, foolish, tragic, heroic, perceptive, intuitive, bullheaded and any of a hundred other contrasting and contradictory qualities.
But never weak.
Which was how he felt now.
There were reasons, he told himself. There were always reasons. And he began to number them now, reclining on Billie’s bed with his eyes closed.
He began with the realization that he had never stopped loving Gloria, his first wife; awareness of this fact had crept within his marrow during the long vigil by her deathbed in a lonely room at Mass General.
Janet Parsons’ rejection of him a year later, after they both escaped to Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas, had left him questioning his assumptions of independence and self-reliance. Ignoring McGuire’s pleas to stay, she had returned to Boston alone. McGuire had loved Janet, something he never admitted to her. He justified his aloofness by telling himself that love, like happiness, resonated loudest in memory. Janet, the first woman to make detective sergeant and now married to Ralph Innes, loving and nursing him through the physical and psychological trauma of being wounded in a fusillade of shots on a soft evening in California three years ago.
McGuire was there that night in Palm Springs. He heard the shots fired, heard Ralph’s screams of agony as the bullets carved through his abdomen. That was all McGuire had done. Listened. Absorbed. Survived. It’s all I could have done, McGuire assured himself again and again, even now, years later. I was unarmed, handcuffed to a corpse.
And it was true. But there was no escape from the shame and sense of failure the memory generated in McGuire, and it gnawed at him like a rodent.
What had he felt for Micki, his second wife? Little, until recently. Years before, after leaving Gloria, McGuire had reached for Micki with perhaps the most common and forgivable of motives: a lonely confused man stumbling into middle age, seeking to boost his ego with the casual giddiness and slim beauty of a much younger woman. Micki had been a narcotic for McGuire, a prescribed cure for an incurable affliction caused by time and healed only by love or death, whichever arrived first.
But the healing process was incomplete, with nasty side effects, eruptions of rancor and fevers of jealousy until Micki left him and McGuire teetered for several days on the fulcrum between despair that she had abandoned him and satisfaction that he had finally driven her away.
And now when McGuire held back the rising tide of pain with Django’s drugs, he acknowledged the deeper currents that drove his addiction, the sluggish flows of despair and solitude that ran through his soul, the dark side of him he had tried to deny throughout his life.
It was only when emerging from the depths of sedation that McGuire surrendered to this deeper blackness of his being, and encountering it was reason enough to sink again into oblivion. Because he knew the source of his despair was also the source of his abiding anger, and the knowledge that these twin forces powered his psyche, sweeping tenderness and compassion aside, had begun to frighten him in recent years. There was a time when they had been enjoined with an almost intrusive intuition, and the combination produced a superb police detective, a crossbreed of a man with narrow and incisive talents who, like a natural athlete, could demonstrate his abilities again and again but could never explain them, never teach them to another in step-by-step detail, not once, not ever.
Now McGuire’s intuition, his most powerful and positive quality, was blunted by drugs whose effects were like mind music that enabled him to dance to Django’s tune, permitted him to trace a weaving, stumbling walk through each day, a frolic performed with a crooked smile on his face and a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. Anger and despair were held at bay by the same chemical cocktail until they would explode unbidden and unbridled, as they had the previous night when he discovered the man beating MaryLou with a rubber hose and rode him like a sled down the stairs, gliding on the bird shit, releasing all that had been pent up within him in an eruption of fury and justice.
The shower noises ceased. McGuire closed his eyes again.
“How ya doin’?”
He opened them to see Billie standing naked in the open bathroom door, rubbing her wet hair with a neon-pink towel.
“I’m okay.” McGuire lay his forearm across his eyes. “I’m okay.”
“Listen, I gotta go downtown, pick up a few things, then I’m goin’ to the club. I got a one o’clock start.” Billie reached for a white terrycloth robe and slipped into it. “Dewey wants me to, I might work a double shift, I dunno. You gonna drop by later’n see me?”
“Maybe.” He watched clusters of stars erupt behind his eyes and he listened to the panpipes ringing in his ears, sustained notes played unbidden in the blackness of his mind, the sound echoing as though reaching him from deep within a thick forest.
“Do whatcha want. Just make sure the door’s locked before you go, okay?”
McGuire said okay and he remained motionless, not opening his eyes, not making any movement at all, even when Billie, fully dressed in tight white jeans, pink sweater and waist-length coyote fur coat bent to kiss him lightly on the cheek. He heard her walk to the door and leave and he counted to twenty before rising from the bed and walking purposefully to the medicine cabinet. He chose three vials of pills, stumbled once on his way to the kitchen where he poured himself a large glass of orange juice from the refrigerator and retreated to the bed again. Then he tuned Billie’s clock radio to a jazz station in Cambridge, fluffed the pillows behind him, swallowed four capsules of meperidine and lay back with his eyes closed.
The world would make another revolution on its axis and McGuire would refuse to record or acknowledge it.
To avoid sensations of feeling—pain, concern, sorrow, affection—you first become numb.
Numbness was no longer an absence of sensation to McGuire. It was a chosen response, a comfort zone, a refuge.
Tim Fox glanced up the street at the gray van where an ID man was preparing to videotape mourners arriving for Heather Lorenzo’s funeral. Then he entered the funeral chapel and slid along a pew next to two grim-faced men who nodded to him in silence.
One of the men was from Internal Affairs and the other from ID. The Internal Affairs man had a thick black mustache squared-off like a formal bow tie tucked beneath his nose and a Hungarian name Tim Fox could never pronounce correctly. The ID man was a bearded computer nerd named Brookmyer. Fox, Brookmyer and the Hungarian together represented one third of the mourners.
At the front of the small chapel sat Micki Lorenzo, staring straight ahead at a point somewhere above her sister’s coffin. A row behind her were the photographer Posner and his assistant Jill, who was hissing something at Posner, her face contorted in anger. Gregory Weiner, Heather’s landlord, sat against the far wall, studying his fingernails. In the corner of a pew furthest from the coffin, Stana Tomasevich sat watching the others.
The sound system was playing a creaky pre-taped version of a Bach organ prelude. Brookmyer glanced sideways at the black detective, used his pinky finger to push his black-rimmed glasses up to the bridge of his nose and nodded again.
“Won’t get much out of this,” Fox said, looking from Brookmyer to the Hungarian, whose name Fox recalled was Zelinka. “Aren’t enough people here to fill the hearse.”
Brookmyer nodded again.
“All we’ll wind up with is a bunch of snapshots,” Fox said, glancing around. He was wasting his time.
Zelinka leaned across Brookmyer and spoke to Fox. “I happened to see Eddie Vance before coming over here. He wants to speak to you, something about your new partner. Asked me to tell you.”
Fox sat back in the pew and scowled.
“You got anything?”
It was Brookmyer, looking straight ahead at the coffin as he spoke.
“What, on the victim?” Tim Fox asked, and Brookmyer nodded. Zelinka remained bent from the waist, staring across Brookmyer at Fox with sad brown eyes.
Fox reached for his wallet, withdrew the business card Steve Peterson had given him and passed it to Zelinka. “You recognize him?” he asked the I.A. man. Brookmyer looked at the card with interest before the Hungarian took it from Fox’s hands.
“I know it, the man’s name,” Zelinka said. “Not the company, just the name.”
“Where? You remember where? On a case, something active, what?”
The Hungarian shrugged.
“I can do a global search when I get back,” Brookmyer said. He withdrew a pen and small notepad from an inside jacket pocket and wrote Harley DeMontford. “Let you know then.”
Fox nodded and extended his hand to retrieve the card from Zelinka. “Do that for me, okay?” he said to Brookmyer. “Leave something in my electronic mail at Berkeley if I’m not back.”
A minister whom Fox considered far too young to be wearing religious vestments stepped onto the platform from behind a purple curtain, a prayer book in his hand, and he stood in front of the microphone, smiling uncertainly. “We are gathered here today, friends of our departed sister Heather . . .” he began, and Tim Fox folded his arms and stared at the ceiling.
Micki Lorenzo approached Fox’s car outside the funeral home just as he was about to start the engine. She wore a two-piece dark blue knit suit with a black shoulder bag and she bent from the waist to speak to him.
“Joe hasn’t called me at all,” she said. “I thought he would. He was with Ollie and Ronnie yesterday but he never went back last night, and I heard he was in some sort of fight at the place where he lives now.”
“He saved a girl’s life,” Tim Fox said. “Caught a pervert beating a hooker to death with a rubber hose. Nearly killed the guy.” He smiled. “Joe’s feeling better. Better’n the guy whose voice box he nearly crushed anyway. Joe’s probably hiding for a while, trying to stay out of the limelight.”
“That’s just like him, isn’t it? Always wants to be the hero, then doesn’t know how to handle it.” Miki’s mood changed, became sober. “I’d like to see him, talk to him.”
“Where you staying?”
“I was in a tourist home over on Marlborough. But I might move into Heather’s now that it’s cleaned up . . .” She withdrew a thin black pen from her purse and scribbled a telephone number on the back of a pharmacy receipt. “If you see Joe or if you’re talking to him, would you have him call me? I can’t go to that place where he lives, not by myself anyway. . . .”
“I’ll tell him,” Tim Fox said.
“Are you coming to the cemetery?” she asked him.
Fox shook his head and smiled.
“You were only here because it’s your case, weren’t you?” she said. “And those two over there, the ones who sat with you. That’s the only reason they came.”
“That’s right.” Fox started the car.
“I’ll bet . . .” Micki hesitated and began again. “I’ll bet if all the men Heather loved over the past three, four years, I’ll bet if they’d come to her funeral the place would’ve been so crowded, you couldn’t get a seat.”
“Loved?” Tim Fox asked, his eyebrows arched.
“You know what I mean,” Micki said. “God, even her ex-husbands and her other clients didn’t come. None of them.”
“Was she that bad?” Tim Fox asked.
“I guess she was,” Micki said, and walked back toward the hearse, her head down, her slim ankles teetering slightly on her high-heeled shoes.
The meperidine dose was temporary death, a drifting into blackness which promised no dreams and no awareness until McGuire felt himself rising upward again, with sudden and unbidden release, into the light. It was a return journey made with a sense of regret, and McGuire believed that if there were any benefit to be derived from addiction, it was a dilution of the fear of dying.
McGuire squinted his eyes against the glare penetrating Billie’s bedroom window, then closed them again and listened to the sounds of a world intent on life and sensation. Traffic noises in the street, music from an apartment somewhere in the ancient tenement building, pigeons cooing to each other on a ledge beyond the curtains.
It was mid-afternoon but time was unimportant. McGuire remained motionless for several minutes before trying to rise and falling back to the bed. His second effort succeeded and he slid from the bed and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom. Fiorinal, he remembered. He had seen some Fiorinal in Billie’s medicine cabinet. Lovely stuff.
Baby food. Fat Eddie was living on baby food now. Yogurt and bananas, custard and tofu. No fiber, no meat, no taste.
He opened a drawer in his desk and removed the half-finished cup of peach yogurt left from lunch. God, two days of this and he was already hating the stuff, he’d give anything right now for a cheeseburger or even a strip of beef jerky.
But the maelstroms that once swept through his intestines had begun to dissipate and that was a relief. A massive relief. He lifted a spoonful of yogurt to his mouth and was about to force himself to taste it when someone knocked on his office door. Before Fat Eddie could respond and put away the yogurt, Tim Fox entered.
“You wanted to see me,” Fox said, striding toward Vance’s desk.
Again Fat Eddie was impressed with the black detective’s style. Fox was wearing a gray sharkskin suit over a maroon pin-striped shirt and paisley tie. Who the hell dresses him in the morning, Vance wondered, assuming that only a woman, and a cultured one at that, could choose a man’s wardrobe with such flair and elegance.
“What’s that you’re eating?” Fox asked, slouching in one of the chairs facing Vance’s desk.
Fat Eddie held the container up for the detective to see. “Yogurt,” he said. “Great stuff. Good for you, full of vitamins. I’m eating healthy now, cutting back on cholesterol and animal fats.” He sampled a spoonful. “This stuff is really good. I have more in the fridge. Want some?”
Tim Fox grinned. “Naw, I think I’ll stick to ribs and collard greens, thanks.”
Vance smiled, unsure of the black detective’s humor, then shrugged and set the yogurt and spoon back in the drawer of his desk. “I’m having a problem adjusting the staff list,” he said, stroking his mustache to remove droplets of yogurt. “There’s Stanton, you know him? Young guy, just got his detective status last year?”
Fox nodded, his face blank.
“Trouble is, Stanton’s got a trial next week so he’ll be unavailable for a while. Then there’s Orwin, used to work with Sergeant Parsons, but she’ll be taking a leave of absence for a few months—”
“Janet?” Tim Fox asked. “What’s up?”
Fat Eddie leaned across his desk and lowered his voice like a racetrack tout. “She’s pregnant.”
Fox smiled and tilted his head. “Hey Eddie,” he said. “It’s all right. Being pregnant is legal now, haven’t you heard?”
Vance sat back in his chair. “It’s Ralph Innes’s—” he began.
“Hell, I hope it is,” Fox laughed. “They’ve been together for a couple of years now.”
Fat Eddie nodded quickly. “Anyway, how do you feel about working with Orwin?”
“Better’n Donovan.”
“I have to deal with that, too. He’s pretty upset, Phil is. He felt he was making progress on this Lorenzo woman.”
“Bullshit.” Fox spat the word at Fat Eddie, then sat back in the chair. “He talked to the victim’s ex-husband two days ago and didn’t get a damn thing except the same old alibi. I saw the husband today and picked up a lead on the guy who was spooking her, the best connection we’ve got so far. Donovan missed it completely.”
“I asked Donovan to transfer all of his files to you.”
“I haven’t seen anything yet.”
“If you don’t have them by the end of the day, let me know. Meanwhile, fill Orwin in on what you’ve got on this Lorenzo thing and anything else that’s on your plate, bring him up to speed, start teaming with him tomorrow.” Fat Eddie removed the yogurt container from his desk drawer again. “Sure you won’t try some of this?”
The Gypsy’s voice was a drumbeat, a pinched, tight, rhythmic sound penetrating the wall behind Django’s head. “Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn,” over and over, a tattoo of pain or pleasure, Django could never tell.
Nearly an hour ago Grizzly had tossed Django half a bottle of that good Canadian whiskey, comes in a glass container shaped like a crown, ritzy stuff. Then Grizz went back into his room, the one next to Django’s in the Warrenton Hotel, where the Gypsy had been waiting with something shot up her arm and something else wrapped around her body, maybe black leather. Django had seen her in the black leather outfit once, sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for Grizzly, looking glum and crazy, pink flesh spilling out between a laced-up vest and trousers with no crotch, waiting for Grizz, a strange sight, strange, yes.
Word had it, Django’d heard Dewey or somebody say it, that the Gypsy was North American Indian, Mohawk or Iroquois, one of those northern tribes. Liked to sniff gasoline out of a glass jar, walked around the little Maine town carrying it with her like it was lunch. Got on a bus one day, higher’n two hawks flying kites, stuffed herself behind the rear seat and fell asleep. She woke up in the Greyhound maintenance yard and Grizzly spotted her on the street trying to figure out where the hell she was, how the hell she got there.
She was kind of pretty back then, nice dark eyes, skin the colour of faded chestnuts, long black shiny hair. In a month Grizzly owned her, had her doing everything he wanted her to do, doing things she couldn’t dream up herself, doing them with people she’d never met in her worst high-octane nightmares. Six months later she looked twice her age and if you stared into her eyes long enough, if the pupils were wide enough and their gaze steady, you could look over the rim of the hell that was her life and know somewhere beneath it, broken into cinders, were memories of a young girl from the north country who had once sat on logs over crystal ponds in the summer sun and watched tadpoles swim beneath her bare feet, who had cuddled in her mother’s lap on cold winter nights, hearing wolves howl and moose crash through the brush.
Grizzly, as he had done for Django and Garce and others, had given the Gypsy salvation and sanctuary, but at what cost? Now he extracted pleasure from her in the same manner as he extracted money from Django and the others, leaving enough for them to cling to his network, his protection, his demands of unquestioning obedience.
“We be dry,” Grizzly had told Django, and Django wondered again what Grizzly knew and how he knew it and where he learned it, but there was no asking Grizzly, never.
Django never asked because that was one of the rules, the ones that came with the deal, with everything that Django owed Grizzly from nearly two years ago. Day before Christmas it was, just a month after Django arrived in Boston, looking for a way to put some extra money together to send back to Buffalo, to Elsie and the two boys.
Careful, fool, Django told himself, remembering. Careful, careful. There be some doors you don’t ever want to open, some alleys you don’t ever want to walk down, not again, not ever.
Django’s eyelids quivered and he lifted his left hand, the one they had broken under the wheel of the truck and held in the fire, and lay the crippled hand across his eyes and felt the scar tissue, like corrugated paper, against the skin of his face.
“Uhn, uhn, uhn.” The Gypsy was singing on the bed with Grizzly, and Django’s eyes began to sting and he remembered, ignoring his own warning.
“Dealin’ on the street,” Django told Elsie over the pay telephone, long distance back to Buffalo, and Elsie said, “Hush, you don’t know who listenin’.” Elsie was worried, but she was happy when Django sent her the first thousand later that week and then the next thousand a week later, sending it back for Elsie to spend on clothes for the boys and to put food in their bellies and save the rest in a bank account, using the money to keep the boys healthy, keep the dream alive.
He was working strange turf there on Dorchester, other people’s turf in a strange city, but you had to take risks, that’s what business is about. His brother-in-law Percy sent the coke in from Buffalo, bus shipments marked Books and Clothing and Personal Affex, Percy never much of a speller, but that was good, that was okay. Django was living in a room on Mass Avenue, cooking the coke into crack and dealing it along the river, selling to college kids and white suburban guys in their Buicks and Jap minivans so they could take some back to the wife or girlfriend in Newton or Waltham, try some of this here nigger sin. But most of it he sold to black dudes who needed the stuff, they’d rip off whoever, whatever was around to get a boost, a bit of that good crack, smoke it out of an empty Pepsi can, that’s what they lived for, that’s what life was all about, that’s all life was about.
Two different times the competition warned him, couple of heavy black brothers in Raiders jackets, pulling up to the curb in a beat-up Ford, calling him over, telling him they knew all about his rat’s-ass tenement back in Buffalo, telling him he don’t get the cream if he ain’t on the team, and Django’d nod and smile and dance away for a day or two.
But he had to go back to the same place, no choice about it. Regular customers, they came by and if Django wasn’t there they got spooked or went somewhere else and stayed there because you needed loyalty in the business and Django was loyal, yes indeed.
The third time the brothers came around they arrived in a dump truck, three of them this time, where’d a bunch of young black dudes get a truck like that? Django never knew. One put a gun to Django’s head, big mother of a gun, the end of the barrel in his ear, another one of the brothers gripped his hair and yanked his head back, the third twisted Django’s arm up between his shoulder blades until Django screamed and when they started dragging him he ran with them, anything to cut the pain, ran with them to the truck and through the open door. They flung him to the floor where he lay while two of them kicked him all the way to the bridge where Dorchester crossed the channel, taking the last exit and turning into a dead-end lane.
“Told ya, motherfucker,” one kept saying. “Told ya.”
They tossed him from the truck and jumped on him before he could crawl away and he was flat on his back, one of the brothers standing on his forearm, a second pulling a gray container, looked like a coffee thermos, out from behind the seat of the truck. The third dude stayed behind the wheel and started backing the truck up, swinging it closer to Django lying there, until the dual wheels crushed Django’s hand against the pavement with a sound like popping corn, pop pop pop, like that, and the truck rumbled on and stopped ten feet away.
“Shoulda done the other,” said the dude with the gray container that wasn’t a thermos bottle but a propane torch, because now there was a quiet blue flame hissing from a brass tube on the end of the container. “Shoulda done his right one.”
They played the flame across Django’s shattered hand, back and forth, and they watched Django writhe and scream with no expression on their faces, none at all, until the propane was exhausted and the flame died. One of the dudes said, “Shit,” and shook tile container before throwing it away where it clattered against a brick wall and landed at the feet of Grizzly who’d been standing there watching it all from a doorway, the Gypsy behind him.
The guy in the truck recognized Grizzly who held his hand out to the side and the Gypsy drew an ass-kicking Colt from a pocket of her parka and placed it in Grizzly’s hand. In one motion, his eyes never leaving the kid in the truck, Grizzly raised the Colt to shoulder level and it jerked in his hand and a copper-jacketed forty-five splashed tile dude’s brains all over the inside of the cab before anybody could react.
“You boys’re too far from home,” Grizzly said, and he fired again, this time into one of the other dude’s knees, and his howls of pain echoed off the warehouse walls over and over. “Warned you to keep your asses clear a me. Warned you what I’d do, you pull this shit around me.”
The third dude was already gone, snap, like that, running like hell out onto Dorchester because he knew Grizzly, knew the man’s rep, knew he was right, the man was right, you didn’t go into Grizzly’s area unless he knew you were coming, gave you the okay word. But that’s what they planned to do, that’s what they’d been told to do, take this dumb little mother from Buffalo and dump him on Grizzly’s turf, and if he lives, you let him walk around town, let everybody know what happens when you don’t get on the team.
That’s how you played the game, the game had rules, everybody knew that. Django broke the rules and he paid, and then the dudes in the truck, they broke Grizzly’s rules and they paid. But a week later, a week after Grizzly and the Gypsy took Django to their place and wrapped his hand up and waited for it to heal, Elsie paid and Elsie didn’t break any rules, Elsie had been four hundred miles away, but Elsie paid anyway. They made her pay and made her little boys watch and the guys who did it, friends of the dudes in the dump truck, they took pictures of it all and sent them to Grizzly who showed them to Django, the Gypsy taking them out of an inside pocket because these pictures were bad and Grizzly never carried anything bad on him, never. Another one of Grizzly’s rules.
“Word come with the pictures,” Grizzly said. “You okay here, it’s over, account’s been settled, hear me? This shit started ’fore you came along, between me an’ them, you just got yourself sucked in. But you don’t go back to Buffalo, understand? And you don’t go back on the river, not your turf. You go back, either place, it starts again and this time they maybe get your little boys.” Grizzly put a big paw on Django’s shoulder. “Give you a chance,” Grizzly said. “Me and the Gypsy could use a buddy, a partner. No crack, understand. You handle pills and such, lotta action happening there. Little bit a bread in it for you, little taste now and then, and protection. Specially protection.”
Django had nodded, staring dry-eyed at the dirty bandages on his hand, the pus oozing through, the fingers twisted like a chicken’s claw, and he avoided looking at the pictures of what was left of Elsie.
Alive, he told himself. You be alive, the boys be alive. That counts. That counts, damn it. You a little different, a little crazy maybe. He knew that, he knew he had to go a little crazy now to save himself, keep himself from living those few minutes with the brothers and the dump truck over and over in his mind, keep himself from thinking of Elsie being raped and cut open while the boys watched and screamed. He would celebrate the fact that he survived by dancing through life, one way or another he told himself. He would let whatever music that entered his mind carry him above all he had suffered, and he would dance to it.
Django closed his eyes and rolled onto his right side, his scarred and crippled left hand against his chest, and willed himself to sleep.
Gerry Orwin was an experienced cop who never played the political game or tried to raise his profile in the department, which was why he had not moved past sergeant after ten years as a full detective. That was how Tim Fox assessed it, and he was quietly satisfied to have Orwin as a partner.
They began their review at Orwin’s desk in the new open-concept office arrangement that Fat Eddie had installed a year earlier and that every detective hated because there was never any privacy. When Fox suggested they retreat to the basement lounge for coffee he and Orwin gathered the file summaries and spent two hours in the small, harshly lit room, Fox pointing out key details on the Lorenzo murder, autopsy report and interviews along with three other investigations that were still open on his docket. Orwin nodded his balding head and filled several pages of yellow notepaper with neat and tidy handwriting.
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.