Where the Dark Streets Go (12 page)

“Neither had I,” Nim said, “but I lived with him for over a year.”

Wallenstein did not say anything for a few seconds, but he looked at her in a way McMahon did not like, almost as though he was fantasying himself in that position. Then he said, “And whom did you think you were living with, Miss Lavery?”

“Stuart Robinson.”

Wallenstein repeated the name. “That seems familiar. Perhaps I’ve seen his work. Why
did
you come to me?”

“He was at the opening of the Tchelitchew exhibit at the Burns Gallery.”

“Ah, now I see. But my dear girl, so were a hundred or so other people.”

“I wish I had gone,” Nim said. “Maybe things would have turned out differently if I’d found him.”

“Not if he hadn’t wanted it,” McMahon said.

“Poor fool, he,” Wallenstein said, again with that look at the girl which made McMahon want to hit him. An irrational reaction, he knew. Was it the having of money that made the man arrogant in such a manner? Or the fact of Nim’s having frankly admitted to living with a man?

“Did you admire him as an artist, Miss Lavery?”

“Yes,” Nim said unhesitatingly, which seemed strange to McMahon, knowing that she had never seen Muller’s work.

“I should like to see him,” Wallenstein said. “But perhaps I have. How extraordinary that an artist should change his name. His technique, his medium, his philosophy, I can understand. I paint, myself, you see, and I am as jealous of my name as I am of my mistress.”

McMahon said, almost before he knew he was going to say it: “Mr. Wallenstein, would you go to the city morgue with me in the morning? It’s possible you would know him under yet another name.”

“Yes, of course, if it’s that important to you.” No hesitation, and McMahon had expected it somehow. In fact, part of his intention was to discomfit the man. “Then we won’t take any more of your time now. You’ve been very kind, sir.” He got to his feet.

“Won’t you have a drink? It is that time of day.”

“It’s past that time for me,” McMahon said. “What hour may I call you in the morning?”

“After eight. Any time after eight will be fine.”

When they reached the street, Nim said: “My God, the way you got me out of there, you’d have thought it was a house of prostitution.”

“That was my very feeling.”

Nim grinned. “He’s an odd one, isn’t he? Aren’t you glad we came?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just money. I spend half my life talking about it, trying to coax it out of penny banks and working people’s pockets. I didn’t like the man and that’s a fact.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know why!” he exploded.

“Because he’s decadent? I rather liked that. I like the filthy rich. It’s the in-betweens that turn me off.”

“Then go back and have a drink with him. He’d be delighted.”

“Thank you very much. You’ve been very kind, sir. I won’t take any more of your time.” Having given him back his words to Wallenstein, she turned and ran for the bus that was pulling up at the corner of Greenwich Avenue. She boarded it without looking back.

McMahon walked to Eighth Avenue and then north, thinking at every tavern he passed that he needed a drink, and aware of that craven thing in him that made him watch for those with Irish names where a priest would never be allowed to put a cent on the bar. He realized then that he was in mufti. He needed a drink, but he needed more to remember that he was a priest.

T
HAT THE MORTAL REMAINS
of a man should be pulled out on a tray like a slab of beef from a freezer chilled McMahon to his very bones. He felt Brogan’s hand go tight on his arm to steady him. Wallenstein had gone paper pale too. McMahon stared at the tag, then the covering: the words “winding sheet” came to him, and he thought of Lazarus rising from the dead at the bidding of Christ. Thus he got through the self-imposed ordeal. Brogan had said he could wait outside, but he chose to accompany them. He had thought at first he did it to give Wallenstein moral support, but there was also a measure of self-mortification in the act.

When he had arranged with Brogan that Wallenstein should see if he could identify the victim, McMahon had told his first lie of commission: he told of the exhibit at the Burns Gallery where Muller signed his name to the visitors’ book, but he attributed the discovery to himself, not Nim, whose name had not yet come into the investigation. “Remember the art books at the pawnshop? It was just a hunch.”

“Sometimes they pay off. Bring him down, Father,” Brogan had said.

“I thought at first I knew him,” Wallenstein said when they left the morgue.

“Who did you think he was?” Brogan asked.

“A painter I studied with some years ago—at the Art Students League. But the nose—it wasn’t the same, and I remember that chap’s nose. I don’t remember
his
name now. I would if I heard it of course.”

They went into a small cell-like office within the building. A smell McMahon associated with embalming fluid stayed with him. He was glad to see Wallenstein light a cigarette.

“It would be in the school records,” Brogan suggested.

“Yes, but I assure you, he is not the same man.”

“As well as the names of others in the class,” the detective went on doggedly. “How many?”

“Twenty or so.”

“And how many people signed in at this gallery affair last week?”

“About a hundred. Ah, I see—cross-checking the names in case I’m mistaken. That is clever.”

“That’s how they train us, Mr. Wallenstein,” Brogan said. He didn’t like him either, McMahon thought, but Brogan’s next question, put with the same aloofness, surprised the priest. It also told him Brogan’s slant: “Have you ever come across a man named Phelan?”

“Phelan or Fallon? I knew a Steve Fallon at one time.”

“What business was he in?”

“Interior design,” Wallenstein said, his voice like ice. The tenor of the detective’s questioning had come across to him too. He looked at his watch, a gesture Brogan ignored.

Brogan said: “Would you have any objection to telling us where you were last Friday morning from—say dawn till noon?”

“It is none of your damned business, if I may say so, sir. Three days a week, including Fridays, I rise at eight, my housekeeper brings me breakfast at eight-thirty and by nine o’clock I am in my studio on the top floor of the house I live in. Two days a week I go to Wall Street—Wallenstein and Warren. I have not varied that routine in five years.”

“I’ve heard of Wallenstein and Warren,” Brogan said with a sheepish attempt at a smile. “I’ve got my routine too, and the men at the top like me to stick to it.” He got up and held out his hand. “No hard feelings, Mr. Wallenstein?”

Wallenstein shook the hand. McMahon noticed that afterwards Brogan flexed his fingers.

To McMahon, Brogan said: “Thanks, Father. Keep in touch.”

The priest and Wallenstein walked to the parking lot in silence. Wallenstein had picked him up at the rectory and insisted on driving him back there. Before he turned the key in the ignition, Wallenstein sat a moment playing his fingers over the steering wheel, meticulously clean fingers, such as McMahon would not have expected in an artist. In a banker, yes, however. “A curious thing about the police,” Wallenstein said, “they’re human like the rest of us, but they don’t mind our knowing it. They would have no place in a civilized society.” He glanced at McMahon. “Tell me about this Lavery girl. She has the most striking face I’ve seen in a long while.”

McMahon was nonplused at the directness of the man. Civilization, no doubt. He was caught in a civilized trap, and one to which his own vulnerability was hinge. Certainly he was not going to comment on Nim’s beauty. “She came to me thinking that Muller might have been the man she knew.”

“So you said. One might wonder why she did not go to the police.”

“Very civilized,” McMahon said curtly.

Wallenstein smiled. “Would you mind giving me her address, Father McMahon?”

“I don’t think that’s my place,” he said, but saying it, and remembering Nim’s and his last exchange, he realized that he might be assuming something that it was truly not his place to assume. Nim might want a liaison with Wallenstein. It was himself who did not want it for her.

“Perhaps then you might arrange a meeting among the three of us? You would go to dinner with me, let us say. I should like to see her painting. That’s a twist, isn’t it? But I am right in supposing her to be a painter, am I not?”

“Yes.”

“It is very difficult for a woman to get a decent gallery. That’s gauche of me. And I’ve not seen her work. But her recognizing that Kandinsky on my wall—it’s never been exhibited, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” McMahon said almost sullenly. He forced himself to throw off his petulance. Then it occurred to him that he would need a fairly strong pretext for contacting Nim again himself, and he knew that he wanted to. “When?”

“I’m free tonight if it can be arranged,” Wallenstein said.

“I’m not.” He had to chair a meeting for the school funding committee at six, and he had not yet prepared the agenda. But how he longed to foreshorten those meetings. “At least not until after seven,” he amended.

“That’s fine with me. I assume you can contact Miss Lavery?”

“I’ll try.”

Wallenstein turned on the car motor. He gave McMahon his card. “Leave the message with whoever answers and I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

McMahon sent Nim a telegram when he got back to the rectory. Then he put her, Wallenstein, Muller, the whole affair firmly out of his mind and concentrated on his parish duties. But in the afternoon, he managed his promised visit to Phelan.

He had been transferred to a semiprivate room. A detective McMahon had not seen before was on duty. The occupant of the other bed was a dark Puerto Rican, one leg in traction. Phelan’s eyes were closed. So were the detective’s. McMahon visited first with the patient in traction and his voluble family who were trying vainly to keep their voices lowered. The man had fallen down an elevator shaft. That much McMahon was able to understand. He promised to tell Father Gonzales to stop by on his next rounds.

The detective opened his eyes when he heard McMahon’s voice. McMahon laid his hand on Phelan’s wrist. “Dan, are you awake?”

Phelan opened his eyes and McMahon waited for the detective to leave them alone. Phelan followed the man’s departure until he was out of sight. “You’d think they’d have to go to the bathroom once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

“How do you feel?”

“Thoughtful. I guess that’s the word. I’ve been lying here trying to figure out what it’s all about, my marriage, my life that’s been handed back to me in a glass tube.”

McMahon pulled up the chair the detective had been sitting in. But he put his foot on it, the newspaper under his shoe. He wanted to be able to see the man while he talked.

“I wonder what else they could give me in a glass tube?” Phelan said with grim humor.

“A lot of your trouble’s up here,” McMahon said, pointing to his head. “That’s where to work on it.”

Phelan glanced at him and away. “Priscilla told you all about us. I keep forgetting that. I guess I want to.”

“She told me the problem, yes. But she wants to find the solution to it. She loves you.”

“Enough to give me up, do you think? To let me go?” This time Phelan looked at him.

“You’d rather do that than try to fix the problem?”

“It would be better for both of us. She needs somebody like…him. I’m thirty-one years old, Father. I got as far as two years at City College. I had a scholarship to St. Victor’s Seminary in Pennsylvania. My mother wanted me to be a priest so badly she turned me off it.”

“How badly did you want it?”

“Quite a lot. But I was scared—this thing, you know. I was scared of getting kicked out, I guess.”

“And now you want your wife to kick you out.”

“That’s about it.”

“What do you do for a living, Dan?”

“I’m a grip—a movie stagehand when I work. And when I don’t work, I’m a stagehand at home. You know what I’d like, Father? Another chance at St. Victor’s. Look, if God gave me another crack at life, why not at the seminary? It wouldn’t be the first time the church annulled a marriage on those grounds.”

“That wouldn’t solve your problem, Dan, and now you’ve added a history to it with this mess.”

“Look, Father, this mess has castrated me. No problem—except Priscilla.”

“When you’re up and around again, you may feel differently. Mind now, I’m not saying you should stay married. That’s something we don’t have to meet for a while. I’ll make a bargain with you: promise me you’ll see a doctor I’ve got in mind, and I’ll make inquiries about St. Victor’s. If there’s any chance, the doctor’s word would go a long way in your favor.”

“Let me think about it,” Phelan said.

“I’ll think about it too,” McMahon said.

“Priscilla doesn’t need me. She’s got the house and some other real estate.”

“She needs you.”

“How?”

“Let me ask you a question, Dan: why did you marry her?”

Phelan stared at the chart at the bottom of his bed. “Mother love.”

“All right. There’s lots of reasons people marry. For her it could have been vice versa.”

“But for her it’s not enough. She wants another kid so she’d have two of us.” He pounded his fist on the bed. “For Christ’s sake, Father, get me out of it!”

What God has bound together, let no man put asunder. McMahon said, “Take it easy, Dan. I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

N
IM WAS WATCHING FOR
them from the window high above. When McMahon stepped from the car she called out to him and waved. The children of the street gathered around Wallenstein’s black Jaguar and examined it with awe: a horse would scarcely have given them more pleasure. Wallenstein kept a tight smile going, more teeth than heart, McMahon thought. One youngster, seeing the priest go up the steps, jerked his thumb at the car. “
Agente funerario
.”

He waited at the top step. The hall door was propped open. Nim came swinging down the stairs, a blur at first of yellow and red. She slowed down and became a picture. Which was not her intention. She was shy of the man who waited there. “Good evening, Father McMahon.” He had come dressed as a cleric, fortified in the armor of God.