Solitary Dancer

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  McGuire was there that night in Palm Springs. He heard the shots fired, heard Ralph’s screams of agony as the bullets carved through his abdomen. That was all McGuire had done. Listened. Absorbed. Survived. It’s all I could have done, McGuire assured himself again and again, even now, years later. I was unarmed, handcuffed to a corpse.

  And it was true. But there was no escape from the shame and sense of failure the memory generated in McGuire, and it gnawed at him like a rodent.

  What had he felt for Micki, his second wife? Little, until recently. Years before, after leaving Gloria, McGuire had reached for Micki with perhaps the most common and forgivable of motives: a lonely confused man stumbling into middle age, seeking to boost his ego with the casual giddiness and slim beauty of a much younger woman. Micki had been a narcotic for McGuire, a prescribed cure for an incurable affliction caused by time and healed only by love or death, whichever arrived first.

  But the healing process was incomplete, with nasty side effects, eruptions of rancor and fevers of jealousy until Micki left him and McGuire teetered for several days on the fulcrum between despair that she had abandoned him and satisfaction that he had finally driven her away.

  And now when McGuire held back the rising tide of pain with Django’s drugs, he acknowledged the deeper currents that drove his addiction, the sluggish flows of despair and solitude that ran through his soul, the dark side of him he had tried to deny throughout his life.

  It was only when emerging from the depths of sedation that McGuire surrendered to this deeper blackness of his being, and encountering it was reason enough to sink again into oblivion. Because he knew the source of his despair was also the source of his abiding anger, and the knowledge that these twin forces powered his psyche, sweeping tenderness and compassion aside, had begun to frighten him in recent years. There was a time when they had been enjoined with an almost intrusive intuition, and the combination produced a superb police detective, a crossbreed of a man with narrow and incisive talents who, like a natural athlete, could demonstrate his abilities again and again but could never explain them, never teach them to another in step-by-step detail, not once, not ever.

  Now McGuire’s intuition, his most powerful and positive quality, was blunted by drugs whose effects were like mind music that enabled him to dance to Django’s tune, permitted him to trace a weaving, stumbling walk through each day, a frolic performed with a crooked smile on his face and a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. Anger and despair were held at bay by the same chemical cocktail until they would explode unbidden and unbridled, as they had the previous night when he discovered the man beating MaryLou with a rubber hose and rode him like a sled down the stairs, gliding on the bird shit, releasing all that had been pent up within him in an eruption of fury and justice.

  The shower noises ceased. McGuire closed his eyes again.

  “How ya doin’?”

  He opened them to see Billie standing naked in the open bathroom door, rubbing her wet hair with a neon-pink towel.

  “I’m okay.” McGuire lay his forearm across his eyes. “I’m okay.”

  “Listen, I gotta go downtown, pick up a few things, then I’m goin’ to the club. I got a one o’clock start.” Billie reached for a white terrycloth robe and slipped into it. “Dewey wants me to, I might work a double shift, I dunno. You gonna drop by later’n see me?”

  “Maybe.” He watched clusters of stars erupt behind his eyes and he listened to the panpipes ringing in his ears, sustained notes played unbidden in the blackness of his mind, the sound echoing as though reaching him from deep within a thick forest.

  “Do whatcha want. Just make sure the door’s locked before you go, okay?”

  McGuire said okay and he remained motionless, not opening his eyes, not making any movement at all, even when Billie, fully dressed in tight white jeans, pink sweater and waist-length coyote fur coat bent to kiss him lightly on the cheek. He heard her walk to the door and leave and he counted to twenty before rising from the bed and walking purposefully to the medicine cabinet. He chose three vials of pills, stumbled once on his way to the kitchen where he poured himself a large glass of orange juice from the refrigerator and retreated to the bed again. Then he tuned Billie’s clock radio to a jazz station in Cambridge, fluffed the pillows behind him, swallowed four capsules of meperidine and lay back with his eyes closed.

  The world would make another revolution on its axis and McGuire would refuse to record or acknowledge it.

  To avoid sensations of feeling—pain, concern, sorrow, affection—you first become numb.

  Numbness was no longer an absence of sensation to McGuire. It was a chosen response, a comfort zone, a refuge.

  Tim Fox glanced up the street at the gray van where an ID man was preparing to videotape mourners arriving for Heather Lorenzo’s funeral. Then he entered the funeral chapel and slid along a pew next to two grim-faced men who nodded to him in silence.

  One of the men was from Internal Affairs and the other from ID. The Internal Affairs man had a thick black mustache squared-off like a formal bow tie tucked beneath his nose and a Hungarian name Tim Fox could never pronounce correctly. The ID man was a bearded computer nerd named Brookmyer. Fox, Brookmyer and the Hungarian together represented one third of the mourners.

  At the front of the small chapel sat Micki Lorenzo, staring straight ahead at a point somewhere above her sister’s coffin. A row behind her were the photographer Posner and his assistant Jill, who was hissing something at Posner, her face contorted in anger. Gregory Weiner, Heather’s landlord, sat against the far wall, studying his fingernails. In the corner of a pew furthest from the coffin, Stana Tomasevich sat watching the others.

  The sound system was playing a creaky pre-taped version of a Bach organ prelude. Brookmyer glanced sideways at the black detective, used his pinky finger to push his black-rimmed glasses up to the bridge of his nose and nodded again.

  “Won’t get much out of this,” Fox said, looking from Brookmyer to the Hungarian, whose name Fox recalled was Zelinka. “Aren’t enough people here to fill the hearse.”

  Brookmyer nodded again.

  “All we’ll wind up with is a bunch of snapshots,” Fox said, glancing around. He was wasting his time.

  Zelinka leaned across Brookmyer and spoke to Fox. “I happened to see Eddie Vance before coming over here. He wants to speak to you, something about your new partner. Asked me to tell you.”

  Fox sat back in the pew and scowled.

  “You got anything?”

  It was Brookmyer, looking straight ahead at the coffin as he spoke.

  “What, on the victim?” Tim Fox asked, and Brookmyer nodded. Zelinka remained bent from the waist, staring across Brookmyer at Fox with sad brown eyes.

  Fox reached for his wallet, withdrew the business card Steve Peterson had given him and passed it to Zelinka. “You recognize him?” he asked the I.A. man. Brookmyer looked at the card with interest before the Hungarian took it from Fox’s hands.

  “I know it, the man’s name,” Zelinka said. “Not the company, just the name.”

  “Where? You remember where? On a case, something active, what?”

  The Hungarian shrugged.

  “I can do a global search when I get back,” Brookmyer said. He withdrew a pen and small notepad from an inside jacket pocket and wrote Harley DeMontford. “Let you know then.”

  Fox nodded and extended his hand to retrieve the card from Zelinka. “Do that for me, okay?” he said to Brookmyer. “Leave something in my electronic mail at Berkeley if I’m not back.”

  A minister whom Fox considered far too young to be wearing religious vestments stepped onto the platform from behind a purple curtain, a prayer book in his hand, and he stood in front of the microphone, smiling uncertainly. “We are gathered here today, friends of our departed sister Heather . . .” he began, and Tim Fox folded his arms and stared at the ceiling.<
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  Micki Lorenzo approached Fox’s car outside the funeral home just as he was about to start the engine. She wore a two-piece dark blue knit suit with a black shoulder bag and she bent from the waist to speak to him.

  “Joe hasn’t called me at all,” she said. “I thought he would. He was with Ollie and Ronnie yesterday but he never went back last night, and I heard he was in some sort of fight at the place where he lives now.”

  “He saved a girl’s life,” Tim Fox said. “Caught a pervert beating a hooker to death with a rubber hose. Nearly killed the guy.” He smiled. “Joe’s feeling better. Better’n the guy whose voice box he nearly crushed anyway. Joe’s probably hiding for a while, trying to stay out of the limelight.”

  “That’s just like him, isn’t it? Always wants to be the hero, then doesn’t know how to handle it.” Miki’s mood changed, became sober. “I’d like to see him, talk to him.”

  “Where you staying?”

  “I was in a tourist home over on Marlborough. But I might move into Heather’s now that it’s cleaned up . . .” She withdrew a thin black pen from her purse and scribbled a telephone number on the back of a pharmacy receipt. “If you see Joe or if you’re talking to him, would you have him call me? I can’t go to that place where he lives, not by myself anyway. . . .”

  “I’ll tell him,” Tim Fox said.

  “Are you coming to the cemetery?” she asked him.

  Fox shook his head and smiled.

  “You were only here because it’s your case, weren’t you?” she said. “And those two over there, the ones who sat with you. That’s the only reason they came.”

  “That’s right.” Fox started the car.

  “I’ll bet . . .” Micki hesitated and began again. “I’ll bet if all the men Heather loved over the past three, four years, I’ll bet if they’d come to her funeral the place would’ve been so crowded, you couldn’t get a seat.”

  “Loved?” Tim Fox asked, his eyebrows arched.

  “You know what I mean,” Micki said. “God, even her ex-husbands and her other clients didn’t come. None of them.”

  “Was she that bad?” Tim Fox asked.

  “I guess she was,” Micki said, and walked back toward the hearse, her head down, her slim ankles teetering slightly on her high-heeled shoes.

  The meperidine dose was temporary death, a drifting into blackness which promised no dreams and no awareness until McGuire felt himself rising upward again, with sudden and unbidden release, into the light. It was a return journey made with a sense of regret, and McGuire believed that if there were any benefit to be derived from addiction, it was a dilution of the fear of dying.

  McGuire squinted his eyes against the glare penetrating Billie’s bedroom window, then closed them again and listened to the sounds of a world intent on life and sensation. Traffic noises in the street, music from an apartment somewhere in the ancient tenement building, pigeons cooing to each other on a ledge beyond the curtains.

  It was mid-afternoon but time was unimportant. McGuire remained motionless for several minutes before trying to rise and falling back to the bed. His second effort succeeded and he slid from the bed and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom. Fiorinal, he remembered. He had seen some Fiorinal in Billie’s medicine cabinet. Lovely stuff.

  Baby food. Fat Eddie was living on baby food now. Yogurt and bananas, custard and tofu. No fiber, no meat, no taste.

  He opened a drawer in his desk and removed the half-finished cup of peach yogurt left from lunch. God, two days of this and he was already hating the stuff, he’d give anything right now for a cheeseburger or even a strip of beef jerky.

  But the maelstroms that once swept through his intestines had begun to dissipate and that was a relief. A massive relief. He lifted a spoonful of yogurt to his mouth and was about to force himself to taste it when someone knocked on his office door. Before Fat Eddie could respond and put away the yogurt, Tim Fox entered.

  “You wanted to see me,” Fox said, striding toward Vance’s desk.

  Again Fat Eddie was impressed with the black detective’s style. Fox was wearing a gray sharkskin suit over a maroon pin-striped shirt and paisley tie. Who the hell dresses him in the morning, Vance wondered, assuming that only a woman, and a cultured one at that, could choose a man’s wardrobe with such flair and elegance.

  “What’s that you’re eating?” Fox asked, slouching in one of the chairs facing Vance’s desk.

  Fat Eddie held the container up for the detective to see. “Yogurt,” he said. “Great stuff. Good for you, full of vitamins. I’m eating healthy now, cutting back on cholesterol and animal fats.” He sampled a spoonful. “This stuff is really good. I have more in the fridge. Want some?”

  Tim Fox grinned. “Naw, I think I’ll stick to ribs and collard greens, thanks.”

  Vance smiled, unsure of the black detective’s humor, then shrugged and set the yogurt and spoon back in the drawer of his desk. “I’m having a problem adjusting the staff list,” he said, stroking his mustache to remove droplets of yogurt. “There’s Stanton, you know him? Young guy, just got his detective status last year?”

  Fox nodded, his face blank.

  “Trouble is, Stanton’s got a trial next week so he’ll be unavailable for a while. Then there’s Orwin, used to work with Sergeant Parsons, but she’ll be taking a leave of absence for a few months—”

  “Janet?” Tim Fox asked. “What’s up?”

  Fat Eddie leaned across his desk and lowered his voice like a racetrack tout. “She’s pregnant.”

  Fox smiled and tilted his head. “Hey Eddie,” he said. “It’s all right. Being pregnant is legal now, haven’t you heard?”

  Vance sat back in his chair. “It’s Ralph Innes’s—” he began.

  “Hell, I hope it is,” Fox laughed. “They’ve been together for a couple of years now.”

  Fat Eddie nodded quickly. “Anyway, how do you feel about working with Orwin?”

  “Better’n Donovan.”

  “I have to deal with that, too. He’s pretty upset, Phil is. He felt he was making progress on this Lorenzo woman.”

  “Bullshit.” Fox spat the word at Fat Eddie, then sat back in the chair. “He talked to the victim’s ex-husband two days ago and didn’t get a damn thing except the same old alibi. I saw the husband today and picked up a lead on the guy who was spooking her, the best connection we’ve got so far. Donovan missed it completely.”

  “I asked Donovan to transfer all of his files to you.”

  “I haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “If you don’t have them by the end of the day, let me know. Meanwhile, fill Orwin in on what you’ve got on this Lorenzo thing and anything else that’s on your plate, bring him up to speed, start teaming with him tomorrow.” Fat Eddie removed the yogurt container from his desk drawer again. “Sure you won’t try some of this?”

  The Gypsy’s voice was a drumbeat, a pinched, tight, rhythmic sound penetrating the wall behind Django’s head. “Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn,” over and over, a tattoo of pain or pleasure, Django could never tell.

  Nearly an hour ago Grizzly had tossed Django half a bottle of that good Canadian whiskey, comes in a glass container shaped like a crown, ritzy stuff. Then Grizz went back into his room, the one next to Django’s in the Warrenton Hotel, where the Gypsy had been waiting with something shot up her arm and something else wrapped around her body, maybe black leather. Django had seen her in the black leather outfit once, sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for Grizzly, looking glum and crazy, pink flesh spilling out between a laced-up vest and trousers with no crotch, waiting for Grizz, a strange sight, strange, yes.

  Word had it, Django’d heard Dewey or somebody say it, that the Gypsy was North American Indian, Mohawk or Iroquois, one of those northern tribes. Liked to sniff gasoline out of a glass jar, walked around the little Maine town carrying it with her like it was lun
ch. Got on a bus one day, higher’n two hawks flying kites, stuffed herself behind the rear seat and fell asleep. She woke up in the Greyhound maintenance yard and Grizzly spotted her on the street trying to figure out where the hell she was, how the hell she got there.

  She was kind of pretty back then, nice dark eyes, skin the colour of faded chestnuts, long black shiny hair. In a month Grizzly owned her, had her doing everything he wanted her to do, doing things she couldn’t dream up herself, doing them with people she’d never met in her worst high-octane nightmares. Six months later she looked twice her age and if you stared into her eyes long enough, if the pupils were wide enough and their gaze steady, you could look over the rim of the hell that was her life and know somewhere beneath it, broken into cinders, were memories of a young girl from the north country who had once sat on logs over crystal ponds in the summer sun and watched tadpoles swim beneath her bare feet, who had cuddled in her mother’s lap on cold winter nights, hearing wolves howl and moose crash through the brush.

  Grizzly, as he had done for Django and Garce and others, had given the Gypsy salvation and sanctuary, but at what cost? Now he extracted pleasure from her in the same manner as he extracted money from Django and the others, leaving enough for them to cling to his network, his protection, his demands of unquestioning obedience.

  “We be dry,” Grizzly had told Django, and Django wondered again what Grizzly knew and how he knew it and where he learned it, but there was no asking Grizzly, never.

  Django never asked because that was one of the rules, the ones that came with the deal, with everything that Django owed Grizzly from nearly two years ago. Day before Christmas it was, just a month after Django arrived in Boston, looking for a way to put some extra money together to send back to Buffalo, to Elsie and the two boys.