The Rat on Fire (13 page)

“Tuesday night,” Carbone said, “I drive past the joint and there is Billy’s cruiser, which shows you how bright he must be, and the next day I talk to my guy and I ask him what Billy had to say. And he tells me that him and Billy had a long chat and the bimbo was poutin’ in the powder room, and when she finally came out, she was still mad and Billy hugged her and gave her kissy-face and my guy heard Billy tell her, he was serving her drinks, it’d all be okay in a little while because pretty soon he was getting some money.”

“Which puts us,” Roscommon said, “right back in the woods with Dannaher and Proctor.”

“Exactly, Lieutenant,” Carbone said.

A
T
2:35
IN THE MORNING
, Leo Proctor took a right on Dorchester Avenue and drove the van south for about half a mile. He took a right and then another right, driving very carefully between the cars parked on both sides of the streets, and found a place in front of his yellow three-decker, the one with the white trim, at 41 Windsor Street. He did not hit anything when he parked the van, although he did stumble on the curb after he had locked it. He moved slowly up the front walk, swaying very slightly, unlocked the door on the left side of the front porch with only moonlight to assist him, replaced the keys in his left pants pocket carefully, opened the door, felt for the light, turned it on, entered, closed and snap-locked the door behind him and pushed the bolt shut above the snap lock.

“Son of a bitch,” he said softly.

Grasping the banisters tightly, Proctor went up the stairs silently, never putting the heels of his shoes on the treads. The stairs hooked sharply to the right, three steps from the top, and the banister ended on the right-hand side. Proctor held the left banister tightly and fished in his pockets for the keys with his right hand. Swaying again, he reached across his belly, patted his left pocket, said, “Shit,” and managed to get the keys out with his right hand. “Bitch probably bolted this one,” he said.

Proctor shook them loose, found the correct one, inserted it in the snap lock, turned it, leaned his right shoulder against the door and turned the knob. The door opened. “Bitch
didn’t
bolt it,” he said. “Son of a bitch. Must’ve gone to bed early. Nothing stupid on TV tonight.”

He went into the apartment as quietly as he could, using his left hand on the inside doorknob and his right hand
about a foot above it to close the door soundlessly. He did not release the snap lock with one twist, but turned it into place with his right hand. Then he slid home the bolt above it and the bolt below. He turned off the light in the stairwell with the inside switch.

It was hot and it was dark in the apartment. The only light came from the moon, and there was not much of that. The front room had three windows arranged in a bay that fronted on the porch, but the room to his right had only one window on the south, where the moon was descending, and the two southern windows of the kitchen ahead of him were blocked from the moon by the bulk of the three-decker next door. He did not switch on the light in the hallway, but crouched and ran his left hand along the waist-high molding while groping before him with his right hand at about knee height. “That bitch blocked that fuckin’ doorway with
another
chair again,” he whispered, “gonna go in there and kill the bitch. Won’t even wake her up first.”

There was no kitchen chair tipped across the kitchen doorway. Proctor said, “Ahh.” He straightened up and advanced slowly in the darkness, some moonlight available in the kitchen from the open door of his son Timmy’s room to the left. He padded fairly quickly around the kitchen table, found the white four-burner gas range with his left hand and the door to the hallway leading to the larger bedroom with his right. It was closed.

“Uh-
huh
,” he said. He stood there for a moment. “Hell with it,” he said. “She’s got a chair the other side of it, she’s got a chair the other side of it. She wants to wake up, I come home, lettah
wake
up. Serve the bitch right.”

He opened the door quietly, but not slowly. There was no chair. The door swung silently on the hinges that he regularly sprayed with silicone. He went down the hallway, his left hand on the chair rail, passing the second small bedroom and going on to the bathroom on the left. The bathroom
door was open and the light was off. He turned it on aggressively. There was no one in the room.

Proctor strode confidently into the bathroom, unzipped and relieved himself. He said, “Ahhh.” It took him a while. Then he removed his shirt and hung it on the hook on the inside of the door. He took his shoes off, leaning on the washstand to do it. He put his shoes under the washstand and stripped off his socks, dropping them into the laundry bag on the hook. He took off the brown suit pants and hung them over the shirt. In his union suit he stood before the mirror, blinking, for a moment. Then he sighed, relaxed his stomach muscles, shut off the light, opened the door, and turned left into the hallway.

He opened the bedroom door very slowly, waiting for the sound of it hitting a wooden chair. It swung silently and without interference. He padded into the room in the dark, seeing the outline of his edge of the bed and the night table with the doily next to it. By habit he believed that he could see the small glass lamp with the blue frilly shade and the little wind-up Westclox travel alarm clock with the cover on rollers. He closed the door and walked quietly but surely toward the bed. He tripped over the chair that had been tipped over on the rug. He stubbed his toes and yelled, “
Motherfucker
.”

The matching glass lamp with the matching blue shade on the other lace doily on her nightstand came on as though triggered by his obscenity. Cynthia Irwin Proctor sat up in bed, her hair in a satin bag, her face mottled from sleep, her eyes flaming and her mouth switched on with the lamp. “Ah
hah
, you miserable drunken son of a bitch,” she said. “
Fooled
you, didn’t I? Thinking you could sneak in on me in the middle of the night like some fucking cats? Is that what you think? Thought it’d be by the door, didn’t you? Yeah, well, I learned a few things from you, too, you shit. Where the hell’ve you been till this hour, you bastard? I
know
you’ve
been drinking. You smell like a fucking Budweiser brewery.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Well, you
look
like one of them Budweiser horses, you big fat old bag, tryin’ make a man break his leg inna middle of the night. Honest to God.”

“You’re drunk,” she said.

“Fuck you,” he said. He picked up the chair and threw it into the corner, where it crashed against the bureau.

“You
are
drunk,” she said. “You’re as drunk as a hoot owl.”

“I’d have to be,” he said. “No man in his right mind’d come home to a house like this if he was sober. Jesus, what the hell’re you doing here, anyway? Why the hell aren’t you down Atlantic City, or wherever the hell it is they’re holding the Fat Ladies’ Convention this year?”

“
You
oughta talk,” she said. “You got a stomach on you like a spare tire.”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s almost as big as half of your big fat ass.

Cynthia rose out of the covers and walked across the bed. She jumped on the floor with a crash, saying, “You lousy bastard. You never gave me a goddamned thing and you say things like that to me, you dirty
shit
.”

From the second-floor apartment there was a pounding as a mop handle was thudded against the second-floor ceiling. Muffled shouts accompanied the pounding.

Cynthia charged toward Leo with her fingernails outstretched. “… your fuckin’
eyes
out,” she panted. Leo waited until she was within his reach and backhanded her across the face with the side of his right fist. She sat down suddenly, with another crash, and remained on the floor with her legs spread out before her. Her tears interrupted her statement of further plans for him. The pounding and yelling from the floor below continued.

Proctor went to the window and opened it. He leaned out. Into the night air he screamed, “One more fuckin’ peep outta you tonight, Moran, and I will personally get up out of
bed and go down there and kick your fuckin’ teeth in. Then I will evict you. Now shut the hell up and see if you can get along with your old lady for a change, like us regular people.” He slammed the window shut as lights went on in the adjoining tenements.

Cynthia sat on the floor, weeping and mumbling about Leo. Leo stepped over her, walked around to her side of the bed, shut off her night-light, got into the bed on her side, rolled to his side and shut off his light. Then he deliberately sprawled out over most of the bed and soon began to snore, leaving her crying on the rug.

“W
ELL NOW
,” Proctor said to Dannaher, “I will tell you what I did. When you didn’t show up, you poor excuse for a human man.” They sat in the Scandinavian Pastry Shop, drinking coffee. Outside in the warm muggy night the rain came down in sheets and there were long tracks of vicious-looking lightning every so often in the sky, reflecting off the surface of the boulevard.

“I got tied up,” Dannaher said.

“You whine too much, Jimma,” Proctor said. “Anybody ever tell you that? You’re the kind of sorry son of a bitch that’s always whining and complaining and bitching and moaning about something that happened to you and it was supposedly not your fault. You got to transpire that stuff, Jimmy. You got to learn to act so’s people come around to thinking they can rely on you. You got me in a whole mess of trouble.”

“I was down at the Paper Moon with Clinker,” Dannaher said. “Clinker was all upset. He said he was figuring he’d have to go away again and he doesn’t want to do it. I couldn’t just stand up and leave the guy sittin’ there, like he didn’t have no friends this world. That wouldn’t’ve been right. You wouldn’t’ve done that to Clinker, would you?”

“The hell not?” Proctor said. “You did it to me. You could’ve called me the fuck up. You knew where I was, that you could get in touch with me, you needed to, there was something that was going on you couldn’t get away from. The goddamned hell’s the matter with you, is what I want to know. Danny down the Londonderry knows me good enough. I go in there enough, for Christ sake.”

“They don’t take no calls down the Londonderry, Leo,” Dannaher said. “They even got a sign up over the bar. I seen
it. It says the phone’s for people to call out on. They started taking calls for people, they would lose half their business the first night, guys find out people can find out where they are, just by calling up. They would have guys goin’ out the fuckin’
windows
, for Christ sake. If their wives weren’t coming down after them it’d be the cops or some sonbitch wanted to ring their chimes for them. They wouldn’t do that.”

“That fuckin’ sign, Jimmy,” Proctor said, “that fuckin’ sign is just a fuckin’ sign. It means if you don’t want any calls there, you don’t get any. And if it was my wife that called up and was looking for me, Danny would never even find out it was my wife because he would tell her the minute he answered the phone: ‘Londonderry. We don’t take no calls here.’ And that would do it. But like last night, I told him, I said, ‘Danny, all right? I am expecting this guy all night and he’s about an hour late, so if some guy calls up and he wants me, I am here.’ And Danny says, ‘Okay.’ And it was. But you, you asshole, you didn’t call me.

“So I sit there and I am drinking the Bally ale and I am naturally smelling like horse-piss as a result, and after a while I been there what seems like about a week and I am getting hungry again. So I get myself one of Danny’s belly-busters there, that a self-respecting dog would not eat, and I ate it, all them pieces of somebody’s old snow tires and that fuckin’ grease and those goddamned canned green peppers that taste like old green socks, in the fuckin’ roll that if you used it to beat a guy over the head with it, you would fuckin’ kill him, and then naturally I got to drink some more of that ale to settle my stomach and everything, and I stayed there until me and Danny was the last two guys in the joint and he wants to close up so he throws me out.”