Solitary Dancer (14 page)

“You know how many guys I've had up here in the last five, six months? You know how many I've invited home with me?”

“No idea.”

“One, that's all. Well, one plus you. No, two. Okay, two guys and you, that's only three in, what'd I say, four, five months? What I'm sayin' is, I'm no slut, Joe. No cheap lay. I gotta care about the guy before I let him into my bedroom, you hear what I'm sayin'?”

“You want me out of here, Billie, I'm going.”

Billie rolled onto her back and folded her arms across her chest. “I mean, hell, Joe, you gotta see my point. Six times a day I get up on that goddamn stage and show my crotch to a bunch of guys I ain't never seen before and hope to hell I never see again and I know I'm turnin' them on. I
know
it. They're all picturin' themselves with me in bed. I take
care
of this body, Joe, you see that? I'm not stuffin' myself with grease, I don't smoke too much, I do fifty sit-ups a day. Guys appreciate it, right?”

“I appreciate it, Billie.” McGuire sounded weary, ready to roll over and sleep.

“Yeah, well, your cock doesn't.”

As soon as she said it, Billie felt like a shit and she reached across to stroke his face with her hand.

“I'm sorry,” she said. Then, “It's the drugs, isn't it? The drugs can do that, can't they?”

“Probably,” McGuire said.

“So drop 'em.”

“I get pain. Too much pain. Migraines, they feel like.”

“And you start throwin' up, right?”

“The pain gets that bad, yeah, I do.”

“And you get the shakes, you sweat like a pig, your ears start to ring.”

McGuire turned his head slowly to look into Billie's eyes.

“You're wired, you dumb shit,” Billie told him. “You're fuckin' fried.”

“I'm not a junkie.”

“Yeah, and these melons on my chest aren't tits either, I just got a couple a swollen glands. Who're you kiddin'? You got so many chemicals in your system, no wonder your dick's in a coma. Same thing happened to Gene, my boyfriend, when he was usin'. It's all connected, McGuire. You want drugs, you forget about screwin'. You wanta get it on, you better cut back on the chemistry. Hell, every basket case on the street knows that except you.”

“I'm not taking that much,” McGuire said lamely.

Billie erupted into a long rattling sarcastic laugh that descended into a racking coughing fit until she rose from the bed and walked to the bathroom, tears in her eyes, McGuire turning his head to avoid the sight of her nakedness.

Bedford Investments Incorporated said the sign on the twin walnut slab doors as Tim Fox pushed through them to enter a dimly lit reception area finished in deep reds and gray tweeds. The woman behind the reception desk looked up at him brightly until he showed her his detective badge, slid a card across to her and asked to see Mr. DeMontford.

“He's out of town,” she replied. “I don't expect him back until tomorrow.”

“Where is he?” Fox demanded.

“Florida.”

“You know his hotel?”

“Yes, but he won't be there right now. He's in meetings all afternoon.”

Fox pointed at his card. “You call him, you tell him I want to talk to him. Either he calls me or I'll send somebody to find him.”

The woman bit her lip. “Will he know what this is about?”

“Damn right.” Fox flashed her his warmest smile and left.

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.