Solitary Dancer (21 page)

“So are you,” Zelinka said.

McGuire raised his eyes to the picture again. Timmy Fox was wearing a red golf shirt and casual slacks, walking toward the camera with his daughter hoisted on his shoulders. The little girl had her head thrown back and her tiny hands were gripping her father's hair. Tim's wife, in a yellow shirtwaist dress, walked beside them, looking proudly at her family and laughing freely.

Zelinka returned the picture to his desk drawer. “Please read the case summary,” he said. “And tell me your opinion, if you have one.” He showed McGuire his snowy teeth again. “I think we two sons of bitches would make a very good team, McGuire.”

“May I tell Mr. DeMontford who is calling, please?”

The receptionist's tone was wonderfully warm to McGuire who was leaning as far as he could into the open-air telephone booth, the wind sweeping across the Common at him as though on some vengeful mission.

“My name is McGuire,” he said. “I got your boss's name from Dan Scrignoli.”

“And is this regarding an investment situation, Mr. McGuire?”

“No,” McGuire said, forcing himself to smile, warming up his voice maybe to the warmth of the woman's. “It's regarding DeMontford's future as a free citizen.”

The receptionist went off the line. McGuire thought she had simply hung up on him but he waited, determined to count slowly to sixty and she returned at twenty-eight.

“I'm sorry, Mr. McGuire.” My, how the temperature of her voice had dropped. “But Mr. DeMontford has no idea what you are talking about and assumes that you have made some sort of error.”

“Tell DeMontford,” McGuire said in a voice supersaturated with caloric content, “that there
is
an investment involved after all and it involves the one he made with Heather Lorenzo.”

The woman assured McGuire that Mr. DeMontford would indeed receive the message.

McGuire hung up and stood grinning to himself for a moment. Jesus, it all comes back so easily, doesn't it, he thought.

Stepping out of the booth he heard the music for the first time, the sound of an entire band of musicians, drums and horns and keyboards and bass carried on the wind to him, the instruments prodding a gravelly voice singing an old Joe Turner blues McGuire remembered from his youth.

He looked over at the band shell on the Common but it was empty except for two black kids wearing baseball caps backwards on their heads and black Raiders jackets, staring sullenly off in the distance. He looked in the other direction, across Tremont and up three doors where a large black man sat behind three portable keyboards and two speakers the size of suitcases, all of it set in the doorway of a bankrupt music store. Three battered car batteries with elaborate wiring sat beside him powering the amplifiers, and the man's fingers flew from keyboard to keyboard, eliciting a flash of trumpets here, a wail of saxophones there, all riding over an electronic drum pattern and a walking bass line played by the man's foot as it skipped across an array of pedals beneath the stack of keyboards.

He sounds like the whole damn Basie band, McGuire thought, and stood there watching and listening. A compact boom microphone set at the level of the man's mouth captured his singing and McGuire realized from the heavy dark glasses and the musician's total intensity that he was blind. A plastic pail sat atop one speaker and McGuire walked across the street to hear the man's music more clearly and to read the words printed on the container in thick black letters: Blind Charlie Decker thanks you and God blesses you. Have a nice day.

Breakfast dishes in the sink,

Come on, baby, let's have a little drink,
Sit yourself here on my knee,
Whoa there, baby, you killin' me!
Mornin' noon and night,
Mornin' noon and night,
Love ya, pretty baby,
Mornin' noon and night . . .

A small crowd was gathering, pedestrians standing and smiling, each with a foot tapping, some shyly stepping forward to deposit money in Blind Charlie's plastic container while the black man's voice soared over lyrics as old as pain and as familiar as each onlooker's name.

Down in the barnyard pickin' up chips

Comes the moo cow swingin' her hips,
I get lonesome ever' day
'Cause my baby kinda walks that way.
Mornin' noon and night,
Mornin' noon and night,
Love ya, pretty baby,
Mornin' noon and night . . .

McGuire stepped forward and dropped a handful of coins in the pail. Instead of acknowledging the donation, Blind Charlie Decker swung into a blues riff that echoed across the Common and off the walls of the Park Street Church.

But McGuire felt blessed anyway.

Django was thinking maybe he should just go upstairs, knock on Billie's door, flash her a smile. Billie always liked him, she'd probably ask him in for a drink, tell him where the Jolt is.

Standing under a light across the street from Billie's apartment, he cradled his crippled hand in the other and twisted from side to side in rhythm.

Now why's Grizz want to do away with the Jolt? Django frowned at the thought, shook his head. What'd McGuire do, piss off Grizz so bad? Nothin', that's what. Ain't Grizz that's pissed, it's somebody else, somebody Grizz owes, tells Grizz, “You do the man, hear?” and Grizz'll do it, see that it's done. That's the way Grizz works. That's the way Grizz'll act if Django says he can't, says he won't finger the Jolt. Grizz'll demolish
me
. . . .

And then there she was, coming out of the front door of the apartment building looking good, dressed like she's got somewhere to go, some place
special
, maybe out to meet the Jolt . . .

And then there's some white dude behind her and he's talking to her now, a hand pressed against her back.

Jesus, Django thought. Guy looks like a cop. Billie's going out, looking good, with a cop. Django could spot a cop hiding in a herd of elephants. How you gonna talk to Billie, finger the Jolt, all a that, with a cop on her ass? The cop hears Django ask Billie about McGuire one day, the next day the Jolt turns up, him in one end of an alley and his guts at the other end, and Django's the guy they get after, Django's the one whose ass they haul down to Berkeley Street.

Billie's walking away now, her head down and her hands in her coat pockets, the cop trailing along, keeping up easy with her, tall red-haired guy, out for the night with Billie who maybe knows where the Jolt is.

Django remained across the street, walking a little behind Billie and Donovan, following and watching, wondering if maybe this is the time when it all comes down on his head like he always knew it would eventually.

“There's a guy coming around tomorrow, giving me a price for everything. The furniture and Heather's jewelry, I mean. The rest of it, her clothes and all, I'm giving to a charity.”

Micki pursed her lips together and studied her reflection in the mirror of her compact. An open makeup bag sat on the small kitchen table, its contents spilled out. “The good stuff, the antiques, I'm selling to what's-his-name downstairs, the antique guy, he's taking the good pieces. He'll probably screw me out of what it's really worth but I don't care.”

“You plan to take anything of Heather's with you?” McGuire asked. He was sitting across from her, an untouched cup of black instant coffee in front of him, watching Micki in fascination as she painted and prepared her face, watching her perform her practised application of foundation cream and rouge and eye shadow and liner the way he used to watch her in the good years of their marriage. She wore an old, pale blue silk blouse stained with makeup and buttoned low so he could see the lacy fringe of her brassiere. Her hair was pulled back with a simple elastic band. A sand-coloured mohair sweater lay across the back of a chair.

“Nothing.” She folded the compact closed and placed it in her purse. “There's nothing here I want.”

“It's a nice apartment.”

“It's okay. Actually, it's pretty nice. Sometimes I almost forget about . . . about what happened to Heather here.”

“Mind if I look around?”

She looked at him, then away for an instant and back again. “Will you tell me something? Honestly?”

“Sure.”

“Were you ever here? With Heather?”

“No. I was never here before. With anybody.”

“But you knew where she lived. How did you know that?”

“She told me.”

“Why?”

“I can't remember.”

Micki turned away and removed the elastic band from her hair. It cascaded onto her shoulders, catching the light and shining like crimped silk. “I think she was attracted to you in a way,” she said. “I think she was even a little jealous when we were married.”

“She was always jealous of you,” McGuire said, standing. “That was something you never fully understood, how much she envied you. Not for me, but for who you were. You were better than her. Prettier, nicer, more popular.”

Micki reached for her brush and began stroking her hair, her eyes avoiding McGuire's.

He crossed the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs and began climbing to the upper level of the apartment. The door at the summit stood ajar and he pushed it open silently. On the threshold a large square portion of broadloom, the carpet thick and crusty with Heather's dried blood, had been cut away and removed, exposing the hardwood floor beneath the spot where she had bled to death.

McGuire's eyes traced a path of freshly scrubbed carpeting from the patch of bare floor to the bathroom entrance, the trail marking Heather's journey as she crawled toward the door before losing consciousness. Other patches led across the rug from the bedroom into the upper office. McGuire followed the trail to Heather's telephone answering machine on the oak desk, its lights dead, the power cord removed.

He left the office, crossed the alcove again and entered Heather's bedroom. The sheets and blanket of Heather's bed had been pulled loosely up to the pillows by Micki. Heather's collection of vases stood on the high shelf near the ceiling where scatterings of fingerprint dust remained from Norm Cooper's forensic kit. McGuire stepped back far enough to examine the holes for the mounting screws with which Heather had fastened the motor-drive camera aimed at her bed. Tim Fox's report speculated that the camera was equipped with a timer, blinking every minute or so in near darkness illuminated by infrared light.

He sat on the edge of Heather's bed and glanced around. A compact stereo system, several fringed pillow shams, a telephone, a photo of a teenaged Heather delivering what seemed to be a high school valedictorian address, china figurines of small children with animals . . .

McGuire frowned, stood, walked out of the bedroom to the top of the stairs again.

There had been flecks of blood leading from the bedroom through the hallway and into the office.

He retraced the route into the office, visualizing the fleeing woman, already wounded by a blow or the thrust from a weapon.

There was more blood in the office, suggesting another vicious assault, and a return from there to the bathroom. . . .

McGuire lowered himself slowly onto a large leather sofa, his eyes flicking from the heavy oak desk to the doorway and back again.

She hadn't tried to flee downstairs. There was no blood on the door at the top of the stairs, no indication that she had even attempted to escape that way. Why not? Wouldn't that be the natural instinct?

He rose and returned to the alcove area in front of the bathroom, standing on the bare floor where a woman he once despised as much as he thought possible had died a week earlier.

Why not escape down the stairs? he wondered again.

Something nagged at him, standing there with the image of a mortally wounded Heather running in panic through the second floor of her apartment.

“Joe?”

McGuire turned and opened the door inward, looking down the stairs.

Micki was waiting, her makeup complete, her hair tied back with a golden ribbon. She had replaced the silk blouse with the mohair sweater worn over a tight camel's-hair skirt, and she stood looking up at him expectantly.

“I'm starving,” she said. “Can we go now?”

McGuire inhaled deeply, his eyes smiling down at her, marveling at the power of a woman's beauty, however contrived, however temporary, to ransom his resolve.

Donovan ignored the little black guy at first, didn't know it was Django, thought it could be just some street tough figuring he's cool, nothing to worry about.

Donovan was about to say something, come up with a wisecrack that'd make Billie laugh, walking with her arm through his, but he turned away to look across the street and behind, and there he was again, same little guy, matching their pace, walking with that funny bounce like he's getting ready to dance, do a number with his feet for spare change from the tourists or something.

Thing is, Donovan'd rather've just gone to bed with Billie soon's he arrived. Ten hours of chasing each other's tails in the Task Force room, three days of crap, and they still didn't know much more about Fox's murder than that somebody put a thirty-eight into his chest. It wears a guy down.

All day Donovan had thought about hiding his face against Billie's chest, all that nice smooth flesh. Then he shows up half an hour ago and she's dressed like they've been invited to the governor's mansion for tea, long blue velvet dress with some kind of frilly neckline, makes her look like a stripper getting set to teach a first grade class.

“Ever been to Jingles?” she asks him, and he says, “What, that little dive behind the Hilton?” She tells him, “It's not a dive, it's a nice quiet place where you can have some drinks and dance a bit. I wanta go dancing,” she says, and Donovan says, “Goddamn, I'm really tired,” and she pouts.

“Okay,” he says finally, “drinks, coupla dances, if it makes you happy, we'll do it.”

Things a guy's gotta do to get laid these days . . .

So here they are on Mass Avenue and some little black guy's tailin' 'em across the street, all the way from Billie's place.

Jingles was on the mezzanine level of a new office building, you rode up in a stainless steel elevator one floor. Inside, the place was dark and shiny, a lot of chrome and black leather, big darkened windows looking out on Boylston, and three guys playing some kind of jazz rock next to a glass dance floor lit from underneath. Some guy in a tuxedo with a little pencil-thin mustache met them at the door and showed them to a table next to the windows.

Billie turned her back to Donovan so he could remove her topcoat. Then she fluffed her hair and sat down, but as Donovan started to shrug out of his coat he paused with it half off his shoulders, looking through the window at the other side of the street. “Order me a beer,” he said, slipping into his coat again.

“A what?”

“A beer. Any kind.”

“Where you goin'?”

“Outside for a minute.”

Billie made a face and turned her head to look out the window. Traffic was light and three young kids in baseball caps were walking past on the street below, their shoulders hunched and their hands thrust in the pockets of their jeans. At a bus stop, a heavy black woman stood patiently, her eyes moving from side to side behind heavy-rimmed glasses. Billie watched Donovan emerge from the building, trot across Dalton and disappear around the corner, heading for the Sheraton. Then he was back again, this time keeping himself close to the buildings for the first few steps before breaking into a sprint just as a small black figure burst from behind a concrete pillar of the Hynes Convention Center across the street.

Django didn't know what was in the office building, ten maybe twelve stories of it. What's this cop want with Billie in an office, this time of night? The cold was getting to him, standing there, watching people come out of the Sheraton down the way and the Hilton across the street, flagging down cabs, heading out for a little fun, big dinner, few drinks maybe. He was thinking about the rooms in those hotels, how they must look, got your own bar fridge in there, got your cable TV with porno movies, flick the switch, got room service, send you up some steak and ribs, what you want to go outside for, night like this?

Then the cop was out the door alone now, heading for the Sheraton. Django watched him disappear from sight, wondering if Billie was alone now up in that office building, if maybe Django walked in the front door, looked around, he could figure where she might be. Or should he just stay where he's at, wait for Billie to show on her own?

He took some time thinking about that, about what he should do, and he decided maybe he'd go in the front door of the building, see what's happening. But he took one step out from behind the pillar and the man was on him, one big pink hand grabbing Django's shoulder, the other flashing a gold badge at him.

“What're you up to, asshole?”

Donovan spun Django around, taking a good look at his face, knowing him from somewhere, then shoved him face first against the locked door of the Hynes Convention Center.

“Nothin', darlin',” Django managed to say.

“Cut the crap.” Donovan slipped his badge back into his coat and used the hand to yank Django's arm up his back. “You've been on our ass for six blocks. You think I didn't spot you, you two-bit amateur? What's goin' on?”

“I'm lookin' out for her's all.”

“Lookin' out for who?”

“For Billie. She a friend a mine, you ask her. Ask her if she ain't a friend a Django's.”

Donovan released him and stood staring at Django who turned calmly around and smoothed the sleeves of his coat. “You hang around the Flamingo,” Donovan said.

“Used to.” Django examined the buttons on his coat and stepped deeper into the shadowy doorway, out of sight. “Don't no more. Bird's closed for good 'cause a what happened to MaryLou and the Afro cop.”

“You're a dealer.”

Django looked at him blankly. “Ain't never been convicted. Ain't never even been charged.”

“You supply McGuire, right?”

“I know the Jolt.” Django looked up and down the street. No percentage in being seen talking to the law, even this far from home ground. “Seen him in the Bird a few times, that's all.”

“Bullshit.”

“I gotta go, man.” Django thrust his hands into his pockets. “You tell Billie Django says hey an' I hope she's stayin' well, keepin' healthy, eatin' right.”

Donovan clamped a hand on the small man's shoulder. “Tell me what else you know about McGuire.”