Solitary Dancer (29 page)

“Jesus,” McGuire said. He thought of Heather, remembered her intensity, her drive to seize every advantage, gain every benefit offered to her. Then he smiled in dark admiration. “That'd be her style. Blackmail DeMontford for the pictures. Then blackmail Danny for taking a payoff from DeMontford.”

“Remember, we have no proof that she slept with him,” Zelinka said. “Danny, I mean. But that's not important.”

“She puts the squeeze on both, DeMontford and Scrignoli get together, each tells the other what she's doing to him and they work out the idea.”

“One provides an alibi for the other,” Zelinka said.

McGuire drained his coffee, set the cup aside and rubbed his eyes as he spoke. “One of them gets into Heather's apartment, maybe promising another pay-off, then he lets the second one in and they take turns chasing her through her apartment, beating her with baseball bats. Probably toying with her, letting her think she's getting away, making a break for the office or for the door, but there's always one of them there, herding her like a couple of collie dogs.”

He sat in silence for a minute. “You really had him early like you said, didn't you? You had Scrignoli down.”

“A little. Just a little perhaps.”

“That's why you got in this. As an I.A. man.”

“I had some help.”

“From who?”

“Captain Vance.”

“Fat Eddie? Fat Eddie knew about this?”

“He did more than gain access to the computer. It was the captain's idea to float the rumour. About Heather's involvement with a police officer. To see what might happen. Although I must tell you, he said starting the rumour was the kind of thing you would do. He felt it was underhanded but effective. Said you and Ollie Schantz would start unfounded rumours like runaway trains and watch to see who jumped from the path.”

“Fat Eddie?” McGuire said again. He shook his head and smiled, then looked up at the clock. It was almost one o'clock. “What do you figure Danny's doing now?”

“Running.” Zelinka sat in a chair too small for the bulk of his large body, like a parent in his child's kindergarten class. “Sleeping. Maybe dead.” He swiveled his head toward the door behind McGuire. “Something come up, Captain?”

McGuire turned to see Fat Eddie Vance watching him with sleepy curiosity. Vance's eyelids were half closed, his face was puffy and his shoulders sagged. He reminded McGuire of an overweight dog just awakened for dinner and pondering whether it would be worth the effort to move.

“Joe,” Vance said, nodding at McGuire. He lowered himself into the chair next to Zelinka, passed a hand over his eyes and said, “We just received a call from a lawyer representing DeMontford. He told us he'll be accompanying his client here in the morning, nine o'clock, to discuss DeMontford's possible involvement in Heather Lorenzo's murder.”

“He'll try to cop a plea,” Zelinka said.

Vance yawned and nodded.

“And throw Danny to the dogs,” McGuire said. “Turn on him to save his ass.”

“One more off the slate,” Vance said. “Nothing on Scrignoli?”

“Nothing we've heard,” Zelinka said.

Vance nodded again and stood up.

“Hey, Eddie,” McGuire said.

The captain turned to look at McGuire.

“You lost some weight?”

“A little.” Vance frowned, watching McGuire carefully.

“Looks good,” McGuire said. “You're really looking good these days.”

“Thanks.” The captain glanced at Zelinka and smiled, almost shyly, before shuffling away to his office.

Zelinka drove McGuire to Heather's apartment, promising to call the moment he heard anything about Scrignoli.

As soon as McGuire entered the third-floor foyer, even before he saw the note on the small kitchen table, he knew she was gone.

He walked to the cabinet in the office area, poured three fingers of J&B into a glass tumbler, walked back to the kitchen, sat at the table, ran his hand through his hair and drank half the Scotch. Then he picked up the note.

Joe:

I wrote you like this once before, didn't I? Maybe I'm getting good at it. That was a joke by the way. Not very funny, is it? Anyway, I guess this doesn't make a lot of sense but I got so scared and I don't know why because I was having so much fun and it felt so good to be with you again. So why should it scare me? But it did anyway. I tried to tell you why last night and this morning, but I don't think I made much sense.

Maybe I can take you just in small doses. I hope you understand and if you do maybe you can explain it someday. I've got a seven o'clock flight to West Palm in the morning. It was all I could get, so I'm staying at a motel near the airport. Please don't call me. Some men are coming for the furniture tomorrow. I sold them everything, I don't want a bit of it. I promise to let you know when I'm settled. I'll call or write Ollie and Ronnie. They love you, Joe. Just in case you hadn't noticed.

Micki

P.S. So do I.

“Hell of a way to show it,” McGuire said aloud. He drank the rest of the Scotch, walked to the outer office and lay on a floral-patterned settee, recalling all the motels he knew near the airport, wondering which one she had chosen and why.

It seemed only a moment after he closed his eyes. He opened them at the sound of what? A telephone? Gray light seeped through the windows off Newbury Street, another cold goddamn November dawn.

The telephone rang again. McGuire sat upright and lowered his head while the room settled around him, then he stumbled to the kitchen.

“I am starting to feel like some kind of immoral chauffeur,” Zelinka said in his ear. “Picking you up from your evil assignations.”

“What's going on?” McGuire asked. He saw Micki's note on the table where he had left it a few hours ago and he snatched it up and stuffed it in his pocket.

“They located Scrignoli's car on Hull Street. No sign of him. Do you care to join me and the rest of the tired posse?”

McGuire nodded. Speak, you dumb bastard, he told himself. “Yeah,” he said. “When'll you be here?”

“When?” Zelinka said. “I am downstairs now. Let's go.”

“We know a little more,” Zelinka said after pulling away from the curb. “About Dan Scrignoli.”

“How much more?” McGuire looked at the clock on the car's dashboard. It wasn't yet seven. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a garbage pail.

“He cultivated some contacts among narcotics dealers.” Zelinka glanced across at McGuire who was leaning his head against the window glass. “Among them was the man everyone seems to know as Grizzly.”

McGuire stared straight ahead. “Danny was working with Grizzly?”

“Passively.”

“What, he'd pass the word along when the pressure was on, when a roundup was coming?”

“It appears that way. Danny, of course, never handled narcotics himself.”

McGuire nodded. “And you can bet it wasn't a one-way street.”

Zelinka glanced briefly at McGuire.

“Grizzly would tell Danny what he needed to know,” McGuire said. “What was happening on the street, who he was dealing with maybe.” McGuire remembered the meperidine pills on his food tray in the jail. “He would've told Danny what Django told Donovan. The same thing Donovan probably told Billie. About Django seeing Danny leaving my place the night Tim Fox was shot.”

Zelinka grunted and wheeled the car onto Commercial Street.

And about me, McGuire realized. He would have told Heather about me and Django and the pills he sold me. That's how she knew.

“What about Django?” McGuire asked. “Anybody seen him?” Ahead two cruisers blocked Hull Street, the gumball lights on their roof flashing red and blue. A police officer, his hand raised, began walking toward the car before recognizing Zelinka and waving him through.

“I have heard nothing.” Zelinka pulled to the curb. “There may be nothing here except his car,” he said to McGuire, nodding at Scrignoli's Buick. “But the engine was still warm when it was located half an hour ago.”

“You been to sleep yet?” McGuire said, opening the door.

Zelinka smiled and shrugged. “Soon, maybe.”

Three more police vehicles and two detective cars were parked at angles on the narrow street which abutted Copps Hill Burying Ground, the pre-revolutionary cemetery whose ancient gravestones still bear the scars of bullets fired by British soldiers using the markers for target practice.

Phil Donovan stood in the middle of the street writing in a wire-bound notebook. Knots of police officers were knocking on doors of the old brick houses facing the burial ground, rousing the residents from sleep or breakfast to ask questions. Some neighbours stood watching the activity from their windows, dressing gowns and bathrobes gathered about them, absorbing the street drama.

McGuire walked through the scene. Donovan nodded curtly at him before barking commands to a newly arrived group of police officers. Zelinka was conferring with Brookmyer and another ID specialist seated in a blue sedan next to Dan Scrignoli's Buick.

He's not here, McGuire realized. Not in any of these houses, not on any of these streets.

He turned on his heel, brushed between two cops and walked south through the dull morning air down the hill toward the Old North Church. He skirted the building and entered Unity Street where the Paul Revere Mall stretched behind the church down to Hanover Street.

A white-haired man was crossing the tiled plaza, walking a golden retriever on a long leash. They were about to pass a younger man who sat on a concrete bench set against the east wall holding his head in his hands. The dog paused to sniff the man's shoes and wag its tail in greeting as he passed but when the man on the bench failed to respond, the dog found other things to interest him, encouraged by a tug on the leash from his white-haired owner who looked back at the man on the bench with a sad expression before nodding to McGuire as he and the dog continued their early morning walk.

McGuire approached the bench, halting a few feet away to scan the plaza, empty except for the seated man and a knot of pigeons scratching for food beneath the concrete benches. A police car sped down Hanover Street at the opposite end of the Mall. When it disappeared from view, McGuire said, “How you doing, Danny?”

Dan Scrignoli raised his face to meet McGuire's. His eyes were red-rimmed and a facial muscle twitched with an irregular rhythm, pulling one corner of his mouth aside like a stuttering half-smile. He was wearing a black leather bomber jacket over worn corduroy trousers and scuffed tennis shoes.

“Hey, Joe.” He smiled, turned his head away. His voice was weak, reedy. “I been better, you know?”

“They found your car on Hull Street.” McGuire raised a foot and rested it on the bench. “Donovan's got twenty, maybe thirty guys up there, rousing the neighbours. Figures you're inside with a buddy, maybe went in through a window or something.”

Scrignoli bit down hard on his lower lip and nodded, staring across the plaza at the pigeons. “They're gonna be pissed,” he said. “The neighbours. Bunch of cops peeking in their closets and stuff. Early in the morning.”

“DeMontford's showing up at Berkeley Street with his lawyer in a couple of hours,” McGuire said.

“He . . .” Scrignoli cleared his throat and began again. “He told me. Called me last night. After he heard about . . .” He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Billie?”

Scrignoli nodded. “That was too much. Too much for him.”

“Heather I can understand,” McGuire said. “You, me, a dozen other guys, maybe we all could've done what you and DeMontford did to her. And Timmy was an accident, right?”

Scrignoli nodded again, avoiding McGuire's eyes.

“But why Billie? Goddamn it, Danny, why Billie?”

Scrignoli's shoulders heaved and he lowered his head. “I lost it, Joe.” He breathed deeply and raised his head again, tears glistening on his face. “After . . . after DeMontford, what . . . what we did to Heather that night, we were . . . we were standing around a barbecue pit at some abandoned farm near Rockland . . .”

“Burning the overalls and baseball bats.”

“Yeah. And the pictures and stuff we took out of her files. Threw the camera and other stuff into the pond there.” Scrignoli cleared his throat. “And it hit us, you know? I mean it felt
good
bashing her at the time, it was so fucking
easy
because God, she was such a bitch, Joe, she was ready to ruin everybody and everything, me, DeMontford, our careers. . . . I showed up first and she laughed at me, she told us she'd love to see us on our asses. And then I let DeMontford in and in a couple minutes it was over and I remember thinking Jesus, we
did
it, we actually
killed
her, and I got the shakes. I couldn't believe we
did
it. And then Timmy, Christ, I almost died when I saw it was Timmy. . . .”

“You thought it was me.”

“I didn't think at all. That's the point. I had the gun in my hand, a stupid thing to do, but I figured if anybody found me going through your stuff, I'd either bluff my way out or maybe just fire one in the air, scare their asses down the steps, I don't know. . . .”

McGuire waited for him to continue. On Hanover Street a police car cruised past. McGuire watched as its brake lights flashed red and the driver suddenly shifted into reverse, providing him with a clear view of the Mall.

Scrignoli smiled coldly. “DeMontford, he was happy when he heard about Timmy. Timmy'd called his office, Timmy'd found something on him. I kill Timmy and DeMontford's in Florida somewhere when it happens, smelling like a rose.”

“What were you doing in my place anyway?” McGuire said.

“I had somebody feeding me, on the street. . . .”

“Grizzly.”

“Yeah.”

“And Django.”