by Gerry Boyle
I said I did know. I also knew the handcuffs hurt, and my triceps were cramping from having my arms behind my back. The cop pulled up to the back of the police station and stopped, then backed up and stopped and got out.
He opened the door and helped me out, too.
“So you know Bobby Mullaney?” I said, as soon as I got to my feet.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” the cop said. “I mean, the name sounds familiar. I’d have to check. But I can’t check now ’cause we gotta get you processed.”
Then he walked me to a door that hissed open, like the door to a supermarket. We went inside, into the same hall where Clair and I had spoken to the detective. It looked different with cuffs on.
“Maybe crystal meth, a few years ago,” the cop said, as we walked down the hall. “That’s what comes to the top of my brain. They had a few little labs here. Bikers mostly. These guys bikers?”
“More like hippies. But people change.”
“You think so?” the cop said, pushing open a door. “I don’t know. I think they change the looks, the wrapper, but they stay pretty much the same underneath. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what I think. Now, let me ask you something. When you write, do you write up, like, an outline, or do you just have the outline in your head?”
The room was small like a chapel and filled with metal folding chairs. I sat there alone with a surveillance camera peering at me and then the door opened and four of the hookers came in, but not the woman who had indicated that she’d seen Coyote, with her telltale El indio.
The four women sat down wearily in their short skirts and heels, like movie extras after a long shoot. Whatever little allure they might have had was washed away by the fluorescent lights.
I turned but none of them looked at me. Then the door opened again and a cop and my friend and her friend were led in. They sat down without acknowledging me. I got up and moved three seats over and sat down next to the woman who had said she’d seen Coyote. She was small and thin and hollow-eyed, but her legs were crossed primly, as if to preserve at least that much dignity. Her eyes were runny and so was her nose. She kept rubbing the side of her face.
“El indio,” I said. “Dónde el indio?”
She didn’t laugh at my Spanish, but she didn’t answer, either. Her foot jiggled nervously and her shoe slid off enough to show a hole in her black stocking.
“Dónde el indio?” I repeated.
My flasher friend looked over from two seats down. She shrugged and the thin woman blurted something to her in Spanish.
“She wants money,” my friend said.
“All I have is twenty,” I lied.
“That’s good.”
I looked around and took out my wallet again. I gave the hollow-eyed woman the bill and she shoved it in her shoe.
“So what else does she know?”
The hollow-eyed woman looked at my friend, not me. Spoke low and fast.
I caught the words él busca cadáver.
I waited.
“She says she heard he was looking for a body. The body.”
“Bobby Mullaney’s?”
A side door opened. A matronly woman cop came in and the women all pulled themselves to their feet and headed for the front of the room. Some dug in their clothing for cash. A bald man in a jacket and turtleneck came in and opened a blue plastic folder.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. “You know the drill. Let’s keep it orderly, and we can all go home early.”
The women put down cash and filled out a form. Then they moved over and were fingerprinted by the uniformed cop, who then stepped over and snapped a Polaroid on a tripod. The class picture: Valley High.
They went out the door, one by one, first my flasher friend and then the hollow-eyed woman.
Damn, I thought. I quickly stepped up and the bald guy looked at me.
“Soliciting. Class E misdemeanor. Where you from, Mr. McMorrow?
“Prosperity, Maine,” I said.
“What you doing down here?”
“Working on a story. I’m a reporter.”
“You got ID that says so?”
“Sort of.”
I dug out my wallet and my Times press card. My driver’s license and two credit cards. The bald guy looked at them.
“But you live in Maine?”
“I freelance.”
“Ever been picked up for this before?”
“Nope.”
“You make a habit of soliciting these fine ladies?”
“No. I was just trying to talk to them. Wrong place, wrong time, I guess.”
He looked at me.
“What are the chances of you coming back to appear in court?”
“Hundred percent,” I said.
“I’m gonna make your day, Mr. McMorrow. I’m gonna issue you a summons. It says you’ll be required to appear in Valley District Court on November seventeenth at nine a.m. If you don’t show, that means we put out a warrant for your arrest. You could go to jail. Let me tell you, it’d be a lot easier to just show up.”
“I know that.”
He slid the summons toward me. I hurriedly signed at the bottom and he took two of the three copies and handed the third to me. I thanked him. I’d thank him more if I caught up with the women.
“You can thank me by showing up in court.”
“I will.”
“And if I were you, I’d choose my company more carefully next time. Me, I tell you guys right out. I got no sympathy for johns myself. I figure you’re sort of an enabler. Like with booze. If there weren’t any johns, there wouldn’t be any hookers.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“And you know what else bothers me?”
I shook my head. Precious seconds went by.
“The johns have a choice, you know. They’re just horny and lazy and scumbags. These girls are desperate. Coked-out crackheads. Heroin addicts. They’ve got less choice.”
“I was just doing my job, asking questions. These are the people who might have the answers.”
“Did they?” the cop asked.
“I think so. One or two.”
“What’s your story about?”
“Marijuana. Mostly in Maine.”
“That right? Well, let me tell you something. You better watch your step down here. This isn’t Maine. Fifteen-year-old kid’ll blow you away and go have pizza. Not even think about it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“They’re like goddamn reptiles. They don’t blink when they look at you. No conscience. No nothing. You got that in Maine yet?”
“No,” I said. “Our kids just started wearing their baseball hats backward. Give us time.”
Clair was standing in the hallway inside the door.
“Against the law to talk to a prostitute?” he said, pushing the door open.
“Did they come out this way?”
“Three or four of ’em did. Got in a cab.”
“The skinny one?”
“Yup.”
“Let’s try to find them.”
“You a slow learner or what? You want to get picked up again?”
“No, I want to talk to that thin woman again. She said she saw Coyote. She called him el indio.”
“She didn’t see the other guy?”
“No, but she said she heard el indio was looking for a body.”
“Sure it wasn’t ‘buddy’?”
“No. It was Spanish. Cadáver.”
“Bobby’s?”
“That’d be my first guess,” I said. “Maybe he knows more of what they’re dealing with down here.”
“What are you going to tell the wife?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow?”
“Right. And besides, I don’t really know anything.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Clair said, unlocking the truck door. “If you want to bet that this Mullaney’ll turn up safe and sound and cocky, I’ll take that bet. And I�
��ll give you odds.”
“I’m about to start hedging,” I said, and swung up into the seat.
We cruised the downtown but didn’t see any prostitutes, at least not on the streets. I poked my head into one smoky barroom while Clair waited outside in the truck.
“It was all guys,” I reported, climbing back in.
“Friendly?”
“Cozy. I would have stayed if I’d been heavily armed.”
“No women?”
“A couple, but you wouldn’t want to fight ’em.”
So we crisscrossed the streets, working our way south. The main drag led to a bridge across the black murky river. On the other side was a housing project, with rectangular brick buildings and small trees broken off waist-high. We drove through and saw more of the little cars with black windows and fancy wheels. Clair’s big truck was from another culture, and when we pulled up to a light where a knot of kids stood on the corner, the kids turned and stared as if we were riding a float from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
I stared back at their baby faces and feral eyes.
“I was talking to an officer while I was waiting for you,” Clair said. “He said the new weapon of choice for these kids is a machete.”
“It is a jungle out there.”
“And a machete doesn’t violate the gun laws.”
“So they have to lop off a hand instead of blowing somebody away,” I said. “A small price to pay.”
I looked out at them. Their faces were without expression.
“There’s a hole in them somewhere,” I said. “That look.”
“You know where you see that? In places where kids grow up in wars.”
“What’s the war about here?”
“We’re fighting ourselves,” Clair said, putting the truck in gear as the light changed. “It’s coming apart from the inside. The core is starting to rot. No religion. No family. No rules. No hope.”
“Thank you, Pollyanna.”
Clair smiled.
“Don’t mention it.”
We doubled back over the bridge and through the downtown, where the sidewalks still were empty, save for a couple of street people in winter hats. They moved in their perpetual shuffle and we swung onto the road that took us across a canal and onto the street that led to the motel.
Like bunkmates at summer camp, I sat on the edge of my bed and Clair sat on his.
“Too bad about this soliciting thing,” he said.
I shrugged.
“No big deal. If I write this first-person, like for the Globe magazine, it’ll add to the spice.”
“Maybe you should’ve taken a swing at the cops. Spice it up with a night in jail.”
“I can always come back and do that later, if they don’t go for my query letter.”
“A hard-bitten journalist,” Clair said.
“Only on the outside,” I said.
Clair took off his shirt and yawned and stretched. He was muscular beyond his years.
“What do you think of this cadaver thing? Think she just wanted some money?”
“No. It was too spontaneous. I think she heard something. But you don’t know for sure that el indio is Coyote.”
“No. And why would Coyote be so sure Bobby was dead?” I said.
“He knows these people better than we do.”
“Why would he hang around? Just to bring back the body? If somebody you were with had been killed, wouldn’t you run?”
“Plains Indians would do anything to retrieve the bodies of fallen warriors,” Clair said.
“I don’t think he’s a Plains Indian. I think he’s Italian or Armenian or something.”
“Maybe he wants to make sure Bobby gets a proper burial, instead of going in some incinerator.”
“I’ve got to find that woman again.”
“I’m sure it’s the most sought after she’s been in years,” Clair said.
And then he said he was tired and, like a soldier who had gone without sleep in the past, conked right out.
I locked and chained the door, opened a warm beer from my bag, and sat on the bed to do my notes before the memories faded. I described everything and everybody. What the women looked like. What the cop said in the patrol car. What it was like to be picked up for soliciting. What the prostitutes looked like, sounded like, acted like. I wrote two pages describing this ruined little city. And I wrote what I’d learned about Bobby’s disappearance, which was that this city was dangerous beyond its size, that he was still gone, and his friend was asking if anybody had seen a body.
I sat there and considered how to phrase it to Melanie. Then I decided the best solution was to just call Roxanne instead. As I reached for the phone, it rang.
“Jack, it’s Melanie. Have you—well, have you found anything?”
Oh, no, I thought. I reached for my beer.
“Not really. Well, I have found something.”
“What?”
Her voice was expectant, as if she were clinging to hope.
“Well, I found a woman. A prostitute. She said she saw Coyote. Or overheard him or something. At least by my description. El indio, she called him.”
“She was Hispanic?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t—I didn’t get to ask her that.”
“But—”
“The police came and swept the street where these prostitutes were. She got away from me at the police station.”
“And you can’t find her?”
“I couldn’t tonight. I’ll try to track her down tomorrow, I guess.”
“What was he doing? Was Bobby with him?”
I took a long pull on the beer.
“No,” I said. “He—I’m not sure how to put this. She said—this woman, I mean . . . She said Coyote was . . . was looking for a body.”
There was silence.
And then a weary moan, a soft uttering.
“Oh, my God,” Melanie Mullaney said.
20
“Tell me again,” Melanie said.
I’d told her four or five times already, but I told her again. She wanted to know what street the woman was on, what she looked like, exactly what she said. After I’d told her everything I knew, two and three times over, we came back to the same point, which we left unsaid.
That it was likely that Coyote thought Bobby was dead. That he was looking for his body, or at least someone who knew where Bobby might have been dumped. Maybe there’d been a rumor. A guy hassled so-and-so and he was killed. Word was that he’d been left . . .
“I think you should come back,” Melanie said suddenly, “you’ve done enough. I appreciate it.”
“Well, I will. After I ask around some more. Tomorrow I thought I’d see if I could find the woman, see where she saw Coyote, if it was really him. If I get something pretty positive, I think I should go to the police here.”
“I can’t do time,” Melanie said. “If I’m inside, what would happen to Stephen?”
Inside, I thought. Is that the way they talk in Florence, Maine?
“You should come back. I should never have gotten you into this, but God, I didn’t know you’d go down there. What if you get hurt or something?”
“I won’t.”
“But you might. I know what it’s like down there. That’s why we left, and that was years ago. Now it’s like that times a hundred.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I have reporter’s immunity.”
“You’re gonna write about what you find down there?”
I paused.
“That was the deal. That was the deal we made.”
“Right,” Melanie said, as if she’d forgotten. “Well, I just don’t want you getting hurt. I’d feel responsible, you know? I think you should come back in the morning.”
“I’ll look around some more tomorrow. And I’ll call you.”
“Oh . . . Well, okay. I mean, take care now.”
And she hung up. I
did, too, and sat there.
Something had jarred me. Melanie had said she didn’t want me to get hurt. She’d said she hadn’t known I’d go down there. But how could she have known? When we’d talked, when I’d agreed to ask around, it had been to ask around Lewiston. Had she known then that the trail would lead to Valley? Was she more than a bystander to the marijuana deals?
I mulled it over some more, sitting there as Clair slept. I sipped the beer, which was even warmer. Then I made notes of that conversation with Melanie, before it slipped away. The notes ended with a question: What did Melanie know, and when did she know it?
Clair slept and I sat. When I finished that beer, I opened another one and sat some more. The questions whirled around inside my head. Did I really know these people? I’d known they probably weren’t exactly what they pretended to be, but had I misjudged even that? Were they something altogether different? Was there a layer to them I still hadn’t seen?
I sipped and thought and listened to Clair’s slow breathing. Then at eleven o’clock, I called Roxanne. Her answering machine clicked on and I winced, hoping she’d pick up, then sat up as I realized it was a different message.
“Hi,” Roxanne’s voice said. “J. M., if this is you, that matter we talked about needed some more observation. Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ll be back by one. Call me in the morning. Please.”
I put the phone down. She was tromping around Portland probably checking on those kids. Would she have a cop with her? One of her officer friends? A detective? She wouldn’t just wander around those apartment buildings by herself? I reached for the phone to call and leave her a message, saying to be careful. And then I realized it was a long ways away from one. I’d have to wait until morning, like she said.
I slid out of my jeans and lay back on the bed. It was a long time before I slept.
And then a rattle woke me.
It was gray light. Dawn. I looked to my right and saw Clair’s shadowy figure sitting up. He looked at me and put a finger to his lips. I heard a scraping sound outside. Then I heard the storm door squeak open. A whisper. Scraping at the doorjamb.
