Solitary Dancer

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  It was Micki.

  “I’ve called every day,” she said. “Ronnie told me what you were doing, all on your own. I told her it’s just like you to do that, quit a habit like that on your own. . . .”

  “Where are you?” McGuire said.

  “At Heather’s. I’ll be staying here another day or so. It’s creepy but I couldn’t stand the tourist home anymore. The guy who runs it kept coming up to visit me in my room. And I didn’t feel like going back to Florida. Not yet, anyway.” Her voice began to crack. “My God, wasn’t that terrible about Tim Fox? I couldn’t believe it . . . and some people are saying it was you, that you did it.”

  “You’re really staying at Heather’s? Must be tough.”

  “You mean do I get the shivers?” She gave a short laugh, a release. “Yeah, a bit, I guess. But she’s got so many locks on the door plus the security system. And the guy who owns the art gallery downstairs, I’m pretty sure he’s gay but he’s really nice and comes up to see me now and then.”

  Heather’s locks, McGuire reminded himself. Lots of security and none of it damaged. “Do you want to meet some place?” he asked. “Drinks maybe? Dinner, I don’t know . . .”

  “That’d be great,” she said. “Dinner would be terrific. Any place special?”

  “You choose it,” McGuire said. “I’ll meet you there, at Heather’s apartment. About six, something like that.” Then he added, “I, uh, I don’t have a lot of money . . .”

  “Good,” she said. “Then you’ll let me pay for a change.”

  The day was bright and unnaturally warm for November. The sun shone through bare branches of trees flanking the Paul Revere Mall behind the Old North Church, casting filigree shadows onto the brickwork forming the plaza. Italian mothers crossed the Mall pushing baby carriages with one hand and using the other hand to cling to a toddler or gesture at an elderly woman walking with her, the older women all wearing black skirts, sweaters, heavy stockings and bandannas, widow’s apparel.

  McGuire watched them all, unmoving, unsmiling, feeling shudders race through his body. Take two, three pills, he was thinking. That many will get me through the day. Just taper them off, cut the dosage in half today, in half again tomorrow. . . . Why not? Why the hell not?

  In the middle of the Mall, Paul Revere watched McGuire from astride his bronze horse. The animal seemed ready to rear up at some unseen danger in front of it, the sculptor’s unsubtle method of suggesting the horse was as sprightly and ferocious as its rider.

  On benches or from their positions near the wall of the church, knots of Italian men watched the women solemnly, nodding their heads and smiling before leaning toward each other again to resume their conversations.

  Sitting next to McGuire on the stone bench facing the Revere statue, his legs crossed, Dan Scrignoli licked a lime gelato and watched the scene with approval. In his heavy dark-patterned sweater over gold woollen slacks and brown Clark’s desert boots, he looked more like a Harvard liberal arts professor than a street-wise cop. Flecks of gray in his thick, curly hair were highlighted by the sun and his face creased into a smile as he studied the people in the plaza, commenting on them one by one.

  “See the guy over there in the green windbreaker?” he said, leaning toward McGuire and pointing with his gelato cone. “Name’s Poliziani, Mico Poliziani. How tall’s he? Maybe five-one, five-two? Nice harmless old guy, likes to sip espresso, play a little dominoes with the boys. Son of a gun’s a Bronze Star winner, Korean War. Back in 1950 he got left behind when the Chinese attacked and the Eighth Army panicked and retreated. Everybody took off and left the little dago lugging his Browning machine gun. Mico took a hit in the leg and when nobody went back to help him he rolled down into a gully, set up his Browning and started picking off the Chinese. One of our recon planes flew over and saw him there, bodies all around him, and sent a rescue team in to pull him out. He’s wounded three times, nearly out of ammunition, and they counted ten, fifteen dead men all around him, Mico still aiming with the Browning.”

  Scrignoli shook his head and bit into his gelato. “They gave other guys Medals of Honour for less than that and what’s old Mico get? A Bronze Star. You know why?” He looked at McGuire. “You wanna know why?”

  “Because he didn’t have blue eyes and his name ends in a vowel,” McGuire said. He leaned back against the bench, his arms stretched across the top, and felt the sun warm and cleanse him. Why not? Just a couple of pills, just for the headache. Why not?

  “Damn right,” Scrignoli said, still staring across the mall. “Mico looked like a rat, smelled like a garlic patch and knew maybe thirty, forty words of English. So he gets a Bronze Star from some two-bit colonel and goes back to being a tailor over there on Commercial Street and if it wasn’t for people like the Italian-American Club, the Christopher Columbus Society, all of them, nobody’d know about it. Nobody still knows about it except people here in the North End and everybody thinks we’re all Mafia, Cosa Nostra types, running cribs of whores and pumping dope into the blacks.” He waved the gelato cone in front of his face. “Aw, hell, I get on my soapbox too much now and then. Sorry about that.” He looked at McGuire. “You okay? Can I get you something?”

  McGuire turned his head slowly to face Scrignoli. “What happened to Timmy?” he asked.

  Scrignoli looked away and stared down at his gelato as though he had never seen it before and had no idea how it had arrived in his hand. “Shit,” he said softly, then turned from McGuire and flung the cone into a concrete trash container. He lowered his head into his hands and stared at the cracked concrete between his feet. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah.” McGuire waited for him to continue.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Scrignoli said. “Nobody knows what happened.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  Scrignoli turned his head to look at McGuire. “You got anything in your room somebody might need?” he asked. “Really bad?”

  “Like what?”

  Scrignoli shrugged. “I don’t know. But maybe that’s what Timmy was there for.”

  “Or maybe somebody thought Timmy was me. We’re about the same size.”

  “Yeah,” Scrignoli said. “Against the light like that, how could anybody tell who was coming through the door?”

  McGuire nodded, lost in thought. Finally, “It’s got something to do with Heather Lorenzo, hasn’t it?” He rubbed his temples, where the roots of the pain were.

  “What, Timmy gettin’ it?” Scrignoli sat upright, looking at McGuire. His eyes were wet and he was blinking as he spoke. “You think they’re connected? How the hell’s that work?”

  “Timmy was working on it, far as I know. He wasn’t paying me any social call. He had nothing to do with the son of a bitch I worked over the night before, the one killing the girl in my room. Timmy was there to talk to me. And all he had to talk to me about was Heather’s murder.”

  “What’d he want?” Scrignoli asked in a near-whisper.

  “I don’t know.” McGuire leaned back again, staring up through the bare branches at the contrails of an aircraft flying far overhead, the white stream behind it like a gash across the sky, bleeding ice crystals. You don’t need the pills, he assured himself. I’m free, he thought. But his stomach began to churn and the pain began to flow, jagged and moving like a chasm in spring ice along the circumference of his skull.

  “See, if we could find out what he wanted, we’d be somewhere, wouldn’t we?” Scrignoli was saying.

  McGuire lowered his head and nodded, watching the old Italian men near the wall of the church, their eyelids creased and their mustaches drooping, speaking to each other in the language they had first learned sixty, seventy, eighty years ago. “Where was your guy when this happened?” McGuire asked.

  “Guy?” Scrignoli said. “What guy?”

  “The one you turned. The one Heather
was blackmailing.”

  “The broker? You want to know where he was? How should I know where he was?”

  “You checked?”

  Scrignoli grinned and passed his hand in front of his face. “Listen, I can tell you something. My man had nothing to do with this thing. Nothing at all. He doesn’t even know you’re alive, McGuire. He doesn’t even know the Flamingo exists, for Christ’s sake. Look, this guy never goes south of the Common unless his chauffeur takes a shortcut to the airport.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “What?” Scrignoli watching McGuire, still grinning.

  “The broker. You never mentioned his name.”

  “Hell, McGuire, this is a Team Green case, I told you.”

  “Was she seeing a cop?”

  “Who? Was who seeing a cop?”

  “Heather Lorenzo.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “She was afraid of somebody important, somebody who could hurt her. Could have been a cop. Maybe my voice on her answering machine started the rumour, who knows?” The pain was a living thing and its offspring were in McGuire’s stomach, kicking against the walls.

  Scrignoli shifted his body. “News to me, she was doin’ it with a cop. News to me. But I did hear that tape with your voice on it. You were really pissed at her, weren’t you? What got your balls in such a knot?”

  “I’m not sure. I took a lot of pills that night and drank some wine. Stuff used to do strange things to my head. I’d be awake, I’d be talking, moving around, and the next day there’d be nothing in my memory. Damn.” He felt the perspiration on his forehead, exquisitely cool and foreboding. “S’cuse me a minute.” He walked to a trash barrel, leaned over it and vomited.

  When he collapsed on the bench again, his hands shaking and his eyes unfocused, Scrignoli touched his arm gently. “Bad, huh?” he asked, and McGuire nodded. “You’re a tough son of a gun,” Scrignoli said. “You’ll make it.”

  McGuire nodded again. “Damn right,” he said weakly. Jesus, only a couple of pills. Why not? Why not? Why not?

  Scrignoli leaned toward him. “You ever remember, you let me know, okay? It could be important.”

  “Remember what?” The shivers were passing and the slight breeze was drying his skin.

  “What this Lorenzo woman said to you. To piss you off so much.”

  “You involved in the case? Heather’s murder?”

  “I’m on the fringes, me and my broker partner. With Timmy dead, they’re lookin’ for connections allover. So I gotta be careful, right?”

  “Too careful to tell me.”

  “I need time to think about it, is what I mean.”

  “Who’s DeMontford?”

  Scrignoli’s head snapped around. “Where’d you hear that name?”

  “That’s him, isn’t it? Zelinka asked me if I knew him. Said I was cross-indexed with him on a Team Green file. That must’ve been your file, Danny. So what am I doing on it?”

  Scrignoli exhaled slowly. “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Timmy asked Brookmyer to do a search on my guy. I don’t know where Timmy got DeMontford’s name but he did. Anyway, Brookmyer got access to Team Green files through I.A. codes and the stupid son of a bitch came up with your name.”

  “There’s a link between me and DeMontford?”

  “The computer thinks so.”

  “I don’t even know the guy.”

  Scrignoli shrugged. “You think somebody’s trying to fuck you over?”

  “From the beginning.” McGuire watched two gray-haired Italian men playing checkers across the square. “How’d DeMontford’s name turn up at all?” he asked.

  “Telephone records. They did a goddamn cross-search of Heather Lorenzo’s calls and made the connection. She tried to reach him that night at an apartment he keeps downtown and got the answering machine. Didn’t leave a message but the record was there.”

  “So your cover’s blown.”

  Scrignoli nodded. “My cover’s blown. But I’m still keeping it in the Team Green code. Limited access, I.A. and undercover only.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it before now?”

  “Wanted to know how much you knew. How much the guys on Berkeley have been spilling, jerkoffs like Donovan and Fat Eddie.”

  “You could ask them yourself.”

  “You know damn well I couldn’t. Soon as I mention a name, they’d be off and running. Without Team Green protection, Donovan’ll be crashing in on my guy and the whole outhouse hits the fan.”

  “So Fat Eddie, Donovan, none of them know about DeMontford?”

  “Not yet. Not unless you or Zelinka tells him. Or somebody else accesses the file, goes fishing for DeMontford.”

  “But Timmy knew.”

  “Yeah. From the stuff Brookmyer gave him.”

  “Brookmyer tell Vance, anybody else?”

  “He checked with me. Told him I’d look after it, investigate the connection.”

  “And?”

  Scrignoli exhaled slowly. “Harley DeMontford was in Palm Beach making a speech to the American Investors’ Society at the exact moment Tim Fox got shot. Two, maybe three thousand people sat there and watched him. TV cameras covered it. The Wall Street Journal reported it. You can look it up.”

  “So Brookmyer’s not chasing that one.”

  “Not anymore. Doesn’t go anywhere.”

  McGuire absorbed it all for a moment, took a new tack. “Why wouldn’t you use a code for DeMontford? “

  Scrignoli sighed, smiled and looked away. “Don’t need one for Green Files. There’s supposed to be restricted access.”

  “And Vance, Donovan, none of them know anything about the link, about Heather and DeMontford?”

  “Only Timmy.” Scrignoli shrugged.

  “You gonna tell them?”

  “Not unless I have to.”

  “You’re concealing information about a murder investigation.”

  “No, I’m not. Zelinka’s the connection. I’m covering my ass that way.”

  McGuire nodded. Something had begun to turn in his mind. Cogs engaging, facts falling into place.

  “Whattaya think of Donovan?” Scrignoli asked. He was sitting back again, staring across the square, working a thumbnail between his teeth.

  “He tries too hard.”

  “Heard you belted him one. Heard he’s ready to charge you with assault.”

  “Hasn’t yet.”

  “He can be a mean and stupid bastard, can’t he?”

  “What’re you trying to say?”

  “The guy’s an animal is all.”

  “You got more on your mind.”

  Scrignoli shrugged and turned away.

  “What’s the time?” McGuire asked.

  Scrignoli checked his watch. “One thirty. You got somewhere else to go?” He stood up and scanned the Mall, nodding and waving to people he knew.

  “Drop me off at the Common,” McGuire said. “I need to think.”

  “Zelinka shouldn’t’ve said anything about DeMontford to you,” Scrignoli said.

  “He’s involved in Timmy’s murder. He’ll do whatever it takes, Danny. You know that.”

  “But they’re not connected, Timmy and him. No way at all.”

  “Yes, they are,” McGuire said, standing up. “One way or another they are. And I’m it.”

  “You think Brookmyer or Zelinka’ll tell Donovan or Fat Eddie about DeMontford? Or the Lorenzo thing? After I told him there’s no way he could be involved, he was with me that whole night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t have yet, could he? Or they’d be on my guy like flies, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “You know what I figure?” Scrignoli leaned for
ward to catch McGuire’s eye, his brow furrowed. “I figure Zelinka’s fingered Donovan somehow. He’s got me telling him DeMontford’s not it and if Vance goes after DeMontford and blows it, we screw up two cases. And he’s already got something on Donovan. What d’ya think?”

  McGuire shrugged. “Zelinka . . .” He hesitated, thought better of it. “Zelinka’s a strange guy. Anybody in I.A.’s gotta be a little strange. So who knows what he’s thinking?”

  “Yeah,” Scrignoli nodded. “Who knows?”

  McGuire smiled to himself and he stood there and stretched his arms above his head in the morning sunshine. The realization that he hadn’t thought about the pills, Django’s candy, for several moments elated him, like a man who had been climbing a mountain for several days and finally had a handhold on its peak.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rudy Zelinka looked out his third-floor office window at the gray stone Romanesque courthouse across the square and fingered a round, hard peppermint before sliding it into his mouth.

  Zelinka and his staff of two middle-aged secretaries represented the entire Internal Affairs branch of the Boston Police Department, a staff that had once numbered ten people. But the potent combination of budget cuts and complaints from the Boston Police Officers’ Benevolent Society about I.A.’s “heavy-handed activities and open intimidation” eventually diminished the department’s size and power.

  Before joining I.A. when it was at the height of its powers, Rudy Zelinka had been a competent if unspectacular detective on the Burglary squad, working out of Berkeley Street. One day, while making an arrest in a Chelsea tenement, he found himself sympathizing with the suspect, a black man who hugged each of his five hysterical children and sobbing wife one by one while Zelinka and two uniformed officers stood by, one of the cops, handcuffs dangling loosely from his hand, suppressing a grin. The other cop kept his revolver drawn, and Zelinka stood shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other.

  The black man, whose name Zelinka would always remember as Hollingsworth, was sentenced to three to five years in jail and died six months later in Deer Island prison, caught up in a riot. A week later, six police officers, led by the cop with the handcuffs and the cynical grin, were implicated in a shakedown scheme, extorting money from drug runners on Dorchester Avenue, and the next day Zelinka applied for a position in I.A.