Dancer in the Flames

by Stephen Solomita

  And Jill Kelly saying, ‘Shit.’

  Boots turned to find Jill in a shooter’s stance, the barrel of her Sig-Sauer pointing to the sky. ‘If it wasn’t for the old ladies,’ she explained, ‘I would’ve gotten the driver, too.’

  Across the road, Fianna Walsh and Jenicka Balicki bore identical expressions: mouths agape, eyes bulging, nostrils flared.

  Boots closed his eyes and silently repeated the numbers and letters on the Ford’s license plate. He didn’t want to write them down, not yet. From behind, he heard Jill on her cellphone, giving her uncle a heads-up. When she finished, she tapped Boots on the shoulder.

  ‘Look, you didn’t discharge your weapon, so there’s no reason you have to be here when the first units arrive.’

  Suddenly, Boots realized that his hand was resting on the grip of his automatic. He was relieved. At least he’d made it that far. He watched Jill holster her weapon. Her shoulders were relaxed and she held her head to one side, a quizzical smile on her lips. Only her blue eyes betrayed the turbulence just beneath the surface. They appeared to have shattered, each tiny shard reflecting its own light.

  ‘Spell it out, Jill,’ he said. ‘What did massa tell you?’

  ‘Massa?’

  ‘Sorry. Uncle Mike.’

  Jill laughed that same girlish laugh. ‘This is what I get for saving your life?’

  ‘Call it a good-faith beginning.’

  Sirens wailed in the distance, a pair at least. ‘Go upstairs,’ Jill said. ‘Let me handle the details. Later on, you’ll give a statement.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Don’t volunteer anything. If you’re asked, we were working a cold case.’

  ‘Your father’s murder?’

  ‘Yeah, my father’s murder.’ Jill smiled. ‘By the way, you didn’t happen to catch the plate number of that van, did you?’

  ‘Jill, I don’t even know if the van had a plate.’

  The first thing Boots did upon entering his apartment was write down the Windstar’s license plate number. The job turned out to be something of a challenge. His fingers began to tremble when he picked up the pen, slowly at first, then faster, until his entire hand was twitching. He had to draw the six characters one stroke at a time, willing his hand to move across the page. He was just finishing when his father opened the door and stepped inside.

  In no mood for a lecture, Boots looked up Craig O’Malley’s number, then jabbed at the keypad of his cellphone. It took three tries to get it right.

  ‘Sarge? It’s Boots.’

  ‘Boots, what’s doin’?’

  ‘What’s doing is that someone just tried to kill me.’ This wasn’t strictly true. Jill Kelly might well have been the target, Boots Littlewood the innocent bystander.

  ‘Tried to kill you?’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll hear all about it. This’ll make the papers for sure. But I need something in a hurry. I need you to run a plate for me before the assholes from IAB show up.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  Boots read off the six letters and numbers he’d written in his notebook, then waited impatiently until the information was retrieved. Finally, despite the shakes, he printed a name and address: Isabella Amarando, 212 Groton Street in Forest Hills.

  Boots put the phone away, then turned to his father. ‘I want you to pack a bag and stay with Libby until it’s over.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad, but men who fire shotguns from moving vehicles don’t hesitate to kill family members. It’s not a chance we need to take.’

  ‘And you’ll also be leavin’?’

  ‘As soon as the bosses are done with me. You understand, if you stay, you’ll be the only game in town.’

  Andy laid his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘I take your point, Irwin. But I want you to promise me that you’ll be careful this time. If I lost you …’

  Boots looked down at his trembling hands for a moment, then said, ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  At eleven o’clock, two investigators knocked on the door. Both were captains, one from the Chief of D’s office, one from Internal Affairs. They took Boots’s statement in thirty minutes, their manner so affable Boots felt himself part of some grand scheme. The show was now being run from police headquarters, also called the Puzzle Palace, not from Brooklyn North. Corcoran was locked out and Boots was included. Praise the Lord and pass the chicken.

  At one o’clock, after surrendering her weapon and being debriefed, Jill Kelly was summarily dismissed. She clung to the edges of the investigation for a short time, watching a flock of white-suited CSU cops perform a grid search. She didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but she found the effort somehow comforting. It was so well defined, so manifestly sane, crawling around with a pair of tweezers, looking for a piece of fluff. The only problem was how you’d explain it to the kids.

  Jill finally turned away when she was certain she was unobserved. She climbed the steps to Andy Littlewood’s front door, then the stairs to Boots Littlewood’s apartment. She wasn’t surprised to find the door unlocked and Boots standing just a few feet away. If his hands were as quick as his mind, he would’ve gotten off the first shot. Jill closed and locked the door behind her, then turned to face a pair of gray eyes as hard as granite. Boots was looking at her as though she was prey.

  Without conceding exactly who would devour whom, Jill gathered the lapels of her jacket and spread them apart to reveal her empty holster. She stood there for a few seconds, then said, ‘Look, Boots, the shooting board confiscated my weapon. I’m completely helpless.’

  Boots wrapped his fingers in Jill Kelly’s blouse and yanked her into his arms. Or perhaps she simply jumped into his arms the minute he touched her. The way she clung to him, like a monkey to a tree, he couldn’t be sure. Then his hands tightened over her buttocks, tightened hard, and his lips found the hollow in her throat. Her responding moan buckled his knees. He stumbled to the bedroom and laid her down on the bed. Quickly, despite his still-trembling fingers, he unbuttoned her blouse and stripped off her pants, leaving her in matching black bra and panties.

  For a moment, he could do no more than stare down at her. The sheet-smooth belly, the curve of her hips, the midnight-blue eyes that stared up at him as he shrugged out of his jacket and took off his shirt. The miracle was that some small part of his rational mind was still alert. Telling him that he was in it now, in the shit for sure, and there was no going back.

  As for Jill, she had only one moment, if not of fear, at least of apprehension. She was on the bed, naked, her legs apart, and Boots was dropping toward her, Godzilla with a hard-on. But then he was inside her and her legs were curled over his hips and they were moving together and none of it mattered. She was riding the Oblivion Express. If necessary, she would ride it all the way to hell.

  Boots distinctly remembered a former lover saying that if a man couldn’t make a woman sweat, what good was he? By that measure, Boots supposed that he was good enough. He was lying on his side, staring down at Jill Kelly’s slick breasts, his predictions come true. The bedding was in tatters and they’d yet to exchange a tender, post-coital kiss.

  ‘What are you thinking, Boots?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re looking for reassurance.’

  ‘Actually, I decided to have you the day you walked into Levine’s office. It really messed up my plans, you finding Vinnie Palermo so fast. I was still looking for an excuse to run into you when you got your ass kicked. After that, I decided to lay off, see what you’d do about it.’

  ‘And you liked that you saw?’

  ‘The scar? The droopy eyelid? How could I resist?’

  Boots ran his hand from Jill’s throat, over her breast and down to her thigh. Crazy Jill Kelly? How about Psycho Boots Littlewood? It’d been what, three minutes, and he was already stirring. The woman was as addictive as crack cocaine.

  ‘C’mon,’ she said, ‘tell me what you’re thinking.’


  ‘I’m thinking of Dante’s Inferno, of the words written over the gates of hell, which Brother Dominick drummed into the heads of all his tenth graders.’ Boots slid his hand down between her legs. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’

  Jill Kelly was still laughing when Boots covered her mouth with his own. Needless to say, his kiss was anything but tender.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Frankie Drago couldn’t believe his luck. Boots Littlewood standing in the doorway, a garment bag draped across his shoulder, a suitcase hanging from his left hand. Saying, ‘Frankie, I need a place to hang out.’

  ‘Sure, Boots. Abso-fuckin’-lutely. Come right in.’ Frankie stepped back to let Boots pass. ‘But one thing you might wanna think about. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.’

  Boots dropped his bag on the living-room floor. ‘You hear about what happened?’

  ‘Yeah, Jenicka phoned my mom a couple of hours ago. I heard your partner saved your life.’

  ‘Don’t go there, Frankie.’

  Drago grinned as he retrieved Boots’s luggage and led him down the hall to a bedroom at the back of the house. He gave Boots a chance to settle down, then said, ‘My lawyer got the autopsy report on Angie. Just like you said, she died instantly. Now I’m thinkin’ I could beat the charge altogether.’

  ‘Only if you have the balls to take it to trial.’ Boots sat on the edge of the bed. It was too soft. He tested a pillow. Also too soft, plus it was a feather pillow and he was allergic to feathers.

  ‘You got a point there,’ Drago conceded. ‘I got some big choices ahead of me.’

  ‘What’s the state offering?’

  ‘If I plead to second-degree manslaughter, I’ll get three years. If I go to trial and I’m convicted, it’ll be ten years before I get a parole hearing.’ Frankie shook his head in disgust. ‘It ain’t fair, Boots. Why should I be punished for exercisin’ my right to a trial? If three years is a reasonable punishment for what I did to Angie, why should I have to do an extra seven because I wanna plead innocent?’

  Boots was constantly amazed by how often people used the word fair, how they could bend it to fit whatever argument they happened to be making. In fact, the sharks who ran the system were being extremely kind to Frankie Drago because he’d thrown Vinnie Palermo into their feeding tank. Fair had nothing to do with it.

  ‘So,’ Boots said, ‘whatta ya hear from Vinnie?’

  ‘Vinnie?’

  ‘He hasn’t called? I’m surprised. You and him go way back. Plus, he was a guest in your home when he incriminated himself.’

  Drago folded his arms across his chest. God, he hated this man. ‘Yeah, Vinnie called.’

  ‘So, how’s he makin’ out?’

  ‘What can I say, Boots? Vinnie’s been inside before. He’s survivin’.’

  ‘What about you, Frankie? What are you doin’?’

  ‘For Vinnie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I been sendin’ money orders to his account, enough to keep him in candy bars and toothpaste. I can’t think of any other way to help him. The prosecutors already told my lawyer they wouldn’t need me to testify at his trial, so even if …’

  Frankie suddenly drew himself up. He was holding Boots Littlewood’s marker, not the other way around. ‘What about when you testify at Frankie Drago’s trial, Boots?’ he asked. ‘What are you gonna say then?’

  ‘That depends on the skills of your attorney. But I’ll tell ya this, whatever I say is gonna be the truth.’

  ‘Except for the part about not givin’ me a Miranda warning?’

  Boots looked past Frankie’s shoulder, into a dusty mirror on the far wall. No longer livid, the scar on his forehead was healing nicely. Not so his drooping eyelid. Sometimes, in the morning, it was as if he was peering beneath a drawn window shade.

  ‘Except for that, Frankie. Except for that.’

  Boots settled down in the living room after dinner, with Frankie Drago for company and a beer at his elbow. The Yankees were playing the Mets, Mike Pelfrey against CC Sabathia, a match-up that definitely favored the Yankees.

  ‘Frankie,’ he said as the Yanks took the field, ‘I’m gonna be goin’ out later. If you’ve got an extra set of house keys, I won’t have to wake you up at three o’clock in the morning.’

  Drago lit a cigarette. ‘Ya know, Boots, this is my house, not a … a headquarters.’

  ‘I hear ya, but I have to do this thing at night. There’s no other way.’

  The game was still close in the fifth inning when Pelfrey let Brett Gardner and Derek Jeter reach base with one out. That left him to face Alex Rodriguez. Almost against his will, Boots found himself drawn into the confrontation. These were men who did not like to lose, especially in front of a packed house with five million people watching on television. He could see it in Pelfrey’s eyes when he looked in for the sign, in A-Rod’s bat as he took his practice swings. He could see that they spoke with the same voice: Not thy will, but mine. When Gardner stole third on the first pitch, Boots knew that it didn’t matter. Nor did it matter when Jeter stole second on the eighth pitch. It didn’t matter until Pelfrey finally made a mistake on the tenth pitch, an arrow-straight, waist-high fastball over the outer half of the plate, the one A-Rod had begun praying for while he was still on-deck.

  Twenty seconds later, Rodriguez was standing on third base, accepting congratulations from Larry Bowa, the third base coach, while Pelfrey, who’d already exceeded his pitch count, was headed for the dugout. But the move came too late for the New York Mets. The floodgates were open now and the Yankees poured it on over the next two innings, opening an eight-run lead.

  Impatient when the game began, Boots found himself grateful now. He liked to see his options laid out clearly, like laundry on a line. Boots could remember his mother hanging laundry, especially in the spring when she threw open every window to ‘rid us of the smell of winter’. Boots suddenly wished he could rid himself of Jill Kelly, then instantly took it back. As his father might say, she was grand, her every move a dare. And she was right about saving his life, too. As Boots remembered it, the diameter of the shotgun’s muzzle was wide enough to cover his entire face.

  ‘Boots?’ Frankie asked when the last out was finally recorded shortly before eleven.

  ‘Yeah, Frankie?’

  ‘Suppose my lawyer asks you if it could’ve happened with Angie the way I said it happened when I spoke to that prosecutor. What’re you gonna say?’

  ‘Your statement to Thelma Blount isn’t admissible. If you recall, it was off the record.’

  ‘C’mon, Boots. Don’t bust balls.’

  Boots rose and stretched. ‘If I’m asked, I’ll say that I know you shoved Angie, I know that she fell back into the stairway, I know that she died when she hit her head on the basement floor. As to what was goin’ on in your mind when all this happened? I’m not a psychic.’

  Frankie Drago wasn’t satisfied. ‘But what if he asks you if you think it’s possible that Frankie Drago didn’t mean to kill his sister, or even hurt her.’

  ‘What will I say?’ Looking into Frankie’s eyes, Boots knew the question had little to do with the legal system. Frankie had yet to forgive himself – most likely he’d never be free of the guilt, no matter how many times he confessed to the priests at Mount Carmel. ‘First thing, your lawyer has to put the question more precisely. He has to ask me if there’s any physical evidence provin’ you intended to inflict death, or any major injury, upon Angie. And just for the record, that you deliberately killed your sister by pushin’ her down a flight of stairs never crossed my mind. It’s too stupid, even for you.’

  With his radar on full alert, Boots walked the several blocks to where he’d parked his car. The streetlights seemed brighter, the shadows deeper, the lights of oncoming cars blinding. He struggled to be aware of everything going on around him, the traffic, silhouettes in the windows, Ferdie Salise walking a poodle so old and fat its legs shook when it squatted
to pee. Boots heard airplanes passing overhead, helicopters running up and down the East River, doo-wop music from an apartment three stories above his head, the Platters doing their signature tune, ‘The Great Pretender’.

  Boots didn’t believe he could be traced to Frankie Drago’s, but his car was another matter. The buckshot meant for his body had slammed into the bricks a mere ten feet above his head. Relative to human flesh, brick is very hard, yet the chunk gouged from the face of the tenement was big enough to hold a grapefruit.

  When a meandering drive through the neighborhood failed to uncover a tail, Boots detoured over the Williamsburg Bridge, to a garage on Houston Street that catered to cabbies on a 24/7 basis. A flash of his badge and a twenty-dollar bill got his Chevy on a lift ten minutes after his arrival. Using a borrowed drop light, he checked the undercarriage, from front to rear, in search of a tracking device. His approach was as systematic and meticulous as all those white-suited cops Jill Kelly had watched earlier in the day. When he was satisfied, he had the car brought down, then inspected the trunk and the engine. Nothing.

  ‘So, what else can I do for you?’ the mechanic asked. ‘Maybe a quick oil change?’

  ‘Nope, I’m good to go.’

  Boots found himself with mixed feelings as he headed off to Anita Parker’s Staten Island home. He could operate without looking over his shoulder for oncoming bullets, at least for the present, and that was all to the good. But the scales had shifted. More and more, it seemed to him that Jill Kelly had been the primary target when that shotgun appeared in the van’s window. And what was he gonna do about that? Except jump into bed with her at the earliest opportunity. Greedy as any fat-cat CEO.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Within a minute of climbing through Anita Parker’s unlocked window, Boots was thoroughly tested. He was in the dining room, now emptied of its furniture, when the overhead light came on. This was a lucky break as it turned out, but at the time Boots felt his heart jump into his mouth, looking, maybe, to desert the sinking ship. Nevertheless, his head swiveled, to the right and the left, covering the empty room, and his gun was in his hand before he’d taken a breath.