Solitary Dancer

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “They’re scum.”

  “So how come you don’t like cops either? That’s what your father was.”

  “It was a job to him. Wasn’t his goddamn life.”

  “And that’s what stripping is to you?”

  She smiled at him coldly, “We prefer to call it exotic dancing.”

  “How’d you get into it anyway?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Most of those girls, they have some guy sweet-talk them into it. Won’t turn tricks for him but they’ll strip. You have an old man like that?”

  “I had a boyfriend with a habit.”

  “Let me guess. He was a friend of Dewey’s.”

  “No flies on you, are there?”

  “You ever want to get out of the racket?”

  “I think I’m out of it now.” One last pull on the cigarette and she stubbed it out in the ashtray. “There’s no way the Flamingo’s gonna open again. I hear they’re gonna tear it down, turn it into a parking lot.”

  “So what’ll you do?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe get a job as a waitress in a place like this. Give me a chance to meet some new men anyway.”

  “Woman like you shouldn’t have much trouble meeting men.”

  She smiled and tilted her head. “Yeah? And a guy like you wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”

  Donovan was trying to think of a reply when the waiter came back, asked if they were ready to order and Donovan told him to bring T-bones for both of them, medium rare, stack of fries, salad on the side.

  “So,” she said when the waiter left. “How come you don’t miss your wife?”

  McGuire woke in the dark, knowing the answer. Just a few, he told himself silently. “Just a few,” he said aloud. His hand opened and closed and he imagined someone dropping the pills into his palm. “Thank you,” he muttered, “Thank you, Django,” and he raised his hand to his mouth and opened it, licking his empty palm eagerly and squeezing his eyes to keep the tears in.

  She paused only a moment at her door, the key in the lock, but it was all Donovan needed, and when she asked, “You wanta come in for a coffee?” he kissed her, probing for her tongue with his, wondering when she parted her teeth if she might bite down on it, but she didn’t and the rest was familiar and exciting.

  On the sofa, Billie on her back and Donovan running one hand up the inside of her skirt, the flesh of her thigh feeling like a warm peeled fruit beneath his fingertips, she said, “This is crazy, this isn’t like me.” Donovan breathed into her ear, ran his tongue around its edge and bit the lobe.

  “My boyfriend,” she began, and held her breath as his hand moved higher, closer. “My boyfriend moved out . . . six months ago and you . . . you know how many guys I’ve had here since then, oh God! Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, oh Jesus! . . .”

  Stroking her wetness, the thin fabric of her panties soaked already and her hips rising and falling with each pass of his hand.

  “Two, that’s . . . that’s all. Okay, three, counting McGuire. Just three and you. I mean, I don’t do this all the time, see?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The interior of McGuire’s skull was a vacuum, a dark empty place where nothing moved and only pain resided. In the morning Ronnie brought fruit salad and tea, and at noon some soup. He was nauseated and dizzy the rest of the day but by evening he felt something settling within him like a precipitate, heavy drifts accumulating in static waves, flake by flake, and he recognized it as strength.

  He remembered Green Turtle Cay, his helplessness during the beating he suffered.

  He thought about the final night he’d spent with Patty, how she cried in fear of her husband and pleaded with McGuire to take her away, she would go anywhere with him, anywhere at all. McGuire refused, he never wanted to leave the Cay and, besides, Patty was just another in a long string of women, one who drank too much. He couldn’t believe her husband was an animal who would try to kill McGuire the following evening and succeed in murdering his wife two weeks later.

  For months he had thought of revenge.

  When he was finished with the pills, he would tell himself. When I no longer need the pills I will find him and I will find those two men and I will correct what they did to me and to Patty.

  Meaning what? he asked himself now. Meaning you will visit a city you don’t know and move among people you don’t know to break the bones of men who would prefer to see you dead?

  He remembered an Arab proverb: Choose your enemies carefully for they are the people you will most resemble.

  I’m sorry, Patty, he said silently. I’m very sorry, but I don’t think I’m capable of it. Of what I promised I would do.

  As if she gives a damn now, he added.

  Through the rest of the day he slept more soundly than he had in months, and when he awakened the following morning he showered and dressed himself in the worn corduroy trousers, button-down oxford shirt and crewneck sweater Ronnie had laid out for him. He walked unsteadily downstairs, following the aromatic trail of brewed coffee to the kitchen table where Ronnie looked up from her newspaper, rose to embrace him, then held his head in two hands and looked into his eyes.

  “Welcome back,” she said, and McGuire nodded.

  Fat Eddie had converted the third-floor squad room to a Task Force Center in which teams of detectives could assemble in their quest for the killer of Detective Tim Fox, centralizing everything. Centralizing things was a major part of Fat Eddie’s organizational strength. Extra telephone lines were installed, computers and desks were grouped together, and the room became a hive of round-the-clock activity.

  It didn’t help efficiency much. The cops bitched about the noise and the crowding, but mostly they grumbled about Fat Eddie bringing TV crews and reporters up on the elevator and walking them to the open door, showing how he had organized things, impressing everybody with his management style, his battlefield tactics.

  “There is nothing more heinous to a proud police department than the murder of a fellow officer,” Fat Eddie would say, like he was saying now, standing in the doorway ten feet from Donovan’s desk. An anchorwoman from one of the stations was holding a microphone in front of Fat Eddie, capturing every word, while some bearded grease ball aimed a camera into the room, panning it left past Orwin and toward Donovan. “As you can see, we have mobilized an entire task force of our leading investigative staff, dedicated to bringing the killer or killers to justice—”

  The phone on Donovan’s desk chirped and the camera quickened its move toward him, the cameraman zooming in on what could be a break in the case.

  “Thank you, Captain Vance,” the anchorwoman interrupted. “It looks like you may be getting another lead from a concerned public now.” She had straight shoulder-length hair and nice eyes. Donovan smiled up at her, knowing the camera was watching him, recording everything. Fat Eddie beamed.

  Donovan said his name into the telephone receiver, very casual-like.

  “Hi.”

  He recognized her smoky voice right away. “What’s up?” he asked, leaning forward and reaching for a pen.

  “Probably you,” Billie said. “Son of a gun, how do you stay hard so long?”

  “Sorry, I can’t discuss details,” Donovan said, keeping a straight face. “But if you care to be more specific . . .”

  “Specific?” Billie laughed. “What’s with specific? Is somebody watching you right now?”

  “We have total surveillance, yes.” The anchorwoman was biting her lower lip, leaning way into the room with the microphone, picking up every word. The cameraman was squatting, shooting up at Donovan, capturing the tough big city cop taking another important lead in the case, the cameraman making him look like a hero warrior, thinking this’ll be the lead on the evening news for sure.

  “Yeah, I know about surveillance,” Billie said, falling in w
ith the joke. “I was watching you this morning, propped up there against the headboard, working away. Can you get over here tonight lickety-split, so to speak?”

  “We’ll follow that up,” Donovan said. He was getting hard, thinking about it. “Would you repeat the address please?”

  “Sure. How about eight inches south of my navel?”

  “I know the location,” Donovan said. “We had a man in that vicinity all night long,” and Billie laughed so loud he pressed the receiver tighter against his ear in case somebody could hear.

  “Listen, I called my mother a couple of minutes ago,” she said. “She always asks me if I’ve met any new men, meaning am I ever gonna get married, okay? So I say yes and out of the blue she says, ‘Is he religious?’ ’cause she’s tired of hearing me talk about the lowlife I meet. What she means is, is the guy respectable enough she can tell everybody about him, see?”

  “Yes, that’s important to know,” Donovan said. The cameraman’s doing a duck walk toward him, camera hoisted on his shoulder, shooting up to fill the screen with Donovan’s face, bringing the talent and intensity of your police department right into the comfort of your living room, Boston. The anchorwoman is creeping behind him, whispering into the microphone to set the scene.

  “So I say to her,” Billie is saying, “Yeah, he’s religious, Ma. He yells ‘Jesus!’ just before he comes,” and Donovan can’t help it, he snorts into the receiver and turns his head from the camera, his shoulders shaking with laughter while the cameraman and anchorwoman raise their eyebrows at each other and Fat Eddie glares from the open doorway.

  “Haven’t got a thing.”

  Ollie Schantz looked back at McGuire from his bed, his body raised to a half-sitting, half-reclining position. McGuire sat next to him, scanning the morning newspaper, catching up on his life.

  “Talked to Stu Cauley yesterday,” Ollie went on. “Stu calls me couple a times a week. All they know is Timmy got it with a thirty-eight. It was either one hell of a lucky shot or one damn good one, depending on your point of view.”

  McGuire nodded and set the newspaper aside. “Where was everybody?” he asked.

  “Everybody?”

  “Donovan. Peterson, the victim’s ex-husband—”

  “Donovan? The cop? The hell’s he got to do with this?”

  “You think somebody meant to shoot Timmy?”

  Ollie blinked twice. “I know where you’re coming from,” he said. “Been thinking the same thing since I heard about it. Either they meant it for Timmy or they meant it for you.”

  “Different motives, different perps.”

  “Yeah, but Donovan? He’s got porridge for brains but hell, Joseph . . .”

  “Think about it, Ollie. Either somebody’s waiting for me to show up or they’re surprised in the act of doing something. Because nobody knew Timmy was going over to my place.”

  “One shot, Joe.”

  “Which tells us what?”

  “Either it’s all he needed . . .”

  “Or he shoots in panic, surprise maybe, then sees who he’s got and gets the hell out of there.”

  “You gonna do anything about it?”

  “About what?”

  Ollie’s right hand moved in a spastic, dismissive gesture and his voice became an angry bear’s bellow. “About some human shithouse killing one of your buddies on your own goddamn doorstep! You gonna leave it to Fat Eddie and those toe-suckers they got left over on Berkeley Street to screw everything up?”

  “Like hell,” McGuire said quietly.

  “The I.A. guy, what’s his name?”

  “Zelinka.”

  “That’s him. Been calling here couple times a day, wanting to know how you are. Had some surveillance teams cruising by too, nothin’ serious, just checkin’ up on your ass. Oh yeah, Danny Scrignoli and your ex-wife’ve been calling. Hell’s bells, Joseph, you’re gettin’ as popular as a bottle of bleach at a Klan convention.”

  “How’s Micki?” McGuire asked.

  “She could use a little pat on her head from you. Like everybody else, she can’t believe what happened to Timmy. Hell of a thing.”

  “What do I owe her, Ollie?”

  Ollie Schantz knew what McGuire meant. Ollie had been there when McGuire discovered Micki’s betrayals and from that day forward, Ollie and Ronnie became more protective of him, aware of something fragile within McGuire that he had managed to conceal through all of his adult life. “You spent six years with the woman,” Ollie said. “I remember, every time you looked at her, you got an expression on your face like a ten-year-old kid on a new bicycle. What you owe her’s got nothin’ to do with it. It’s what you feel about her that counts.”

  McGuire looked away, annoyed. “What did Zelinka and Scrignoli want?” he asked, still avoiding Ollie’s eyes.

  “Dan’s lookin’ out for the good of your health, far as I can tell. Zelinka, I figure, may be needin’ some freelance help.”

  McGuire frowned back at his former partner.

  “Something’s going down over on Berkeley,” Ollie said. “Fat Eddie’s spinning his wheels so fast he’s got smoke coming out his ass. Does interview sessions all day long on Timmy’s murder, talking about theories and suspects and the like. Truth is, he hasn’t got two ideas to rub together and everybody knows it. Zelinka’s the one who’ll put this all together but he has to move slowly, there’re trip wires all over the place.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Your sister-in-law. Used to be anyway. The dead one?”

  “Heather.”

  “Yeah, her. The word is, she might have been dealing poon-tang to a cop. She said she was scared of somebody heavy, and the rumour’s there.”

  “Sure as hell wasn’t me.”

  “Some people think it could be. Think she gave you reason to lay some tattoos on her with a baseball bat. Hell, you gave them reason enough, Joseph. It’s your voice on the tape.”

  “That was . . .”

  “What?”

  McGuire shook his head slowly. “She made me some kind of business offer. Wanted me to hold some money for her. Said her ex-husband was going to do it but she didn’t trust him.”

  “What made her trust you?”

  “She had something else.” McGuire rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “It comes back in little bits, the memory . . .”

  “Maybe you better try harder to remember. Anyway, Zelinka and Scrignoli, they’re buying the idea it’s not you she was talking about. Fat Eddie, bunch of others’re working on the theory that it was you somehow.”

  “Hell of a waste of effort, two separate investigations going on.”

  “If both were horses coming down the stretch, which one’d have your money on it?”

  “You mean you think I should help Zelinka?”

  “Might as well. Hang around this place too long, Ronnie’ll have you baking muffins and changing my diapers.”

  Within the next half hour the telephone rang three times and all three callers wanted to speak to McGuire.

  “Hear you went clean,” Dan Scrignoli said. “Hear you cold turkey’d it.”

  “I think so,” McGuire said. He was sitting at the kitchen table. Ronnie Schantz placed a plate of hermit cookies in front of him and he began to nibble one cautiously.

  “Jesus, you’re one helluva piece of work, McGuire.” Scrignoli dropped his voice. “You know what’s going on down here? You hear about Timmy, what they’re looking for?”

  “I heard.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Zelinka. He’s been talking to Ollie. Thinks I should help out, unofficially.”

  A long pause. Then: “You gonna?”

  “It’ll keep me off the streets.”

  “Let’s get together, pool what we know.”

  “I better talk to Zelinka first.”
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  “Okay, but we have to deal with this Heather Lorenzo thing. I’ll bring you up to speed on it, see where we go from here. Pick you up at Ollie’s in an hour.”

  McGuire was working on his second hermit cookie, urging his stomach to quietude as he swallowed, when Zelinka called.

  “We should talk.” The Hungarian’s voice was deep and gruff.

  “About what?” McGuire asked.

  “About trouble. Yours, mine, Captain Vance’s, everybody’s trouble.”

  “You want me to help,” McGuire said. A flat statement.

  “I want help from anybody at all. You’re nobody special. You’re just somebody who can assist me. Besides, I think I can trust you.”

  “I don’t have to get involved.”

  “In what? In these two murders? You’re right, McGuire. You don’t have to become involved. Just as I don’t have to become involved in preventing the prosecuting attorney from issuing a warrant for your arrest as a material witness in two homicides, including one of a highly regarded police detective. Who left a grieving widow and an orphaned young daughter.”

  “Timmy was a good guy.”

  “Here’s your chance to be one too. And stay out of Nashua Street.”

  “You don’t believe I had anything to do with any of that shit,” McGuire said.

  “No, and I don’t believe my eight-year-old boy will grow old and feeble and senile some day either because I will not be here to see it. But let us deal with reality, McGuire. Reality is, like it or not, that you are involved in these matters. You may try to avoid them, of course. But you cannot avoid the fact of your involvement.”

  McGuire sat upright in the chair. “Why’re you handling this thing on your own? You’re I.A. What’s this got to do with you?”

  He heard a long exhalation into the telephone before the Hungarian said, in a tired voice, “That is one of the things I want to talk to you about.”

  McGuire arranged to meet Zelinka at an office in the old courthouse near Government Center at two o’clock. He had just left the kitchen on his way to visit Ollie’s room when the telephone rang a third time. Ronnie called him back to the table, holding the receiver in her hand and averting her eyes from his.