Maybe I can take you just in small doses. I hope you understand and if you do maybe you can explain it someday. I’ve got a seven o’clock flight to West Palm in the morning. It was all I could get, so I’m staying at a motel near the airport. Please don’t call me. Some men are coming for the furniture tomorrow. I sold them everything, I don’t want a bit of it. I promise to let you know when I’m settled. I’ll call or write Ollie and Ronnie. They love you, Joe. Just in case you hadn’t noticed.
Micki
P.S. So do I.
“Hell of a way to show it,” McGuire said aloud. He drank the rest of the Scotch, walked to the outer office and lay on a floral-patterned settee, recalling all the motels he knew near the airport, wondering which one she had chosen and why.
It seemed only a moment after he closed his eyes. He opened them at the sound of what? A telephone? Gray light seeped through the windows off Newbury Street, another cold goddamn November dawn.
The telephone rang again. McGuire sat upright and lowered his head while the room settled around him, then he stumbled to the kitchen.
“I am starting to feel like some kind of immoral chauffeur,” Zelinka said in his ear. “Picking you up from your evil assignations.”
“What’s going on?” McGuire asked. He saw Micki’s note on the table where he had left it a few hours ago and he snatched it up and stuffed it in his pocket.
“They located Scrignoli’s car on Hull Street. No sign of him. Do you care to join me and the rest of the tired posse?”
McGuire nodded. Speak, you dumb bastard, he told himself. “Yeah,” he said. “When’ll you be here?”
“When?” Zelinka said. “I am downstairs now. Let’s go.”
“We know a little more,” Zelinka said after pulling away from the curb. “About Dan Scrignoli.”
“How much more?” McGuire looked at the clock on the car’s dashboard. It wasn’t yet seven. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a garbage pail.
“He cultivated some contacts among narcotics dealers.” Zelinka glanced across at McGuire who was leaning his head against the window glass. “Among them was the man everyone seems to know as Grizzly.”
McGuire stared straight ahead. “Danny was working with Grizzly?”
“Passively.”
“What, he’d pass the word along when the pressure was on, when a roundup was coming?”
“It appears that way. Danny, of course, never handled narcotics himself.”
McGuire nodded. “And you can bet it wasn’t a one-way street.”
Zelinka glanced briefly at McGuire.
“Grizzly would tell Danny what he needed to know,” McGuire said. “What was happening on the street, who he was dealing with maybe.” McGuire remembered the meperidine pills on his food tray in the jail. “He would’ve told Danny what Django told Donovan. The same thing Donovan probably told Billie. About Django seeing Danny leaving my place the night Tim Fox was shot.”
Zelinka grunted and wheeled the car onto Commercial Street.
And about me, McGuire realized. He would have told Heather about me and Django and the pills he sold me. That’s how she knew.
“What about Django?” McGuire asked. “Anybody seen him?” Ahead two cruisers blocked Hull Street, the gumball lights on their roof flashing red and blue. A police officer, his hand raised, began walking toward the car before recognizing Zelinka and waving him through.
“I have heard nothing.” Zelinka pulled to the curb. “There may be nothing here except his car,” he said to McGuire, nodding at Scrignoli’s Buick. “But the engine was still warm when it was located half an hour ago.”
“You been to sleep yet?” McGuire said, opening the door.
Zelinka smiled and shrugged. “Soon, maybe.”
Three more police vehicles and two detective cars were parked at angles on the narrow street which abutted Copps Hill Burying Ground, the pre-revolutionary cemetery whose ancient gravestones still bear the scars of bullets fired by British soldiers using the markers for target practice.
Phil Donovan stood in the middle of the street writing in a wire-bound notebook. Knots of police officers were knocking on doors of the old brick houses facing the burial ground, rousing the residents from sleep or breakfast to ask questions. Some neighbours stood watching the activity from their windows, dressing gowns and bathrobes gathered about them, absorbing the street drama.
McGuire walked through the scene. Donovan nodded curtly at him before barking commands to a newly arrived group of police officers. Zelinka was conferring with Brookmyer and another ID specialist seated in a blue sedan next to Dan Scrignoli’s Buick.
He’s not here, McGuire realized. Not in any of these houses, not on any of these streets.
He turned on his heel, brushed between two cops and walked south through the dull morning air down the hill toward the Old North Church. He skirted the building and entered Unity Street where the Paul Revere Mall stretched behind the church down to Hanover Street.
A white-haired man was crossing the tiled plaza, walking a golden retriever on a long leash. They were about to pass a younger man who sat on a concrete bench set against the east wall holding his head in his hands. The dog paused to sniff the man’s shoes and wag its tail in greeting as he passed but when the man on the bench failed to respond, the dog found other things to interest him, encouraged by a tug on the leash from his white-haired owner who looked back at the man on the bench with a sad expression before nodding to McGuire as he and the dog continued their early morning walk.
McGuire approached the bench, halting a few feet away to scan the plaza, empty except for the seated man and a knot of pigeons scratching for food beneath the concrete benches. A police car sped down Hanover Street at the opposite end of the Mall. When it disappeared from view, McGuire said, “How you doing, Danny?”
Dan Scrignoli raised his face to meet McGuire’s. His eyes were red-rimmed and a facial muscle twitched with an irregular rhythm, pulling one corner of his mouth aside like a stuttering half-smile. He was wearing a black leather bomber jacket over worn corduroy trousers and scuffed tennis shoes.
“Hey, Joe.” He smiled, turned his head away. His voice was weak, reedy. “I been better, you know?”
“They found your car on Hull Street.” McGuire raised a foot and rested it on the bench. “Donovan’s got twenty, maybe thirty guys up there, rousing the neighbours. Figures you’re inside with a buddy, maybe went in through a window or something.”
Scrignoli bit down hard on his lower lip and nodded, staring across the plaza at the pigeons. “They’re gonna be pissed,” he said. “The neighbours. Bunch of cops peeking in their closets and stuff. Early in the morning.”
“DeMontford’s showing up at Berkeley Street with his lawyer in a couple of hours,” McGuire said.
“He . . .” Scrignoli cleared his throat and began again. “He told me. Called me last night. After he heard about . . .” He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Billie?”
Scrignoli nodded. “That was too much. Too much for him.”
“Heather I can understand,” McGuire said. “You, me, a dozen other guys, maybe we all could’ve done what you and DeMontford did to her. And Timmy was an accident, right?”
Scrignoli nodded again, avoiding McGuire’s eyes.
“But why Billie? Goddamn it, Danny, why Billie?”
Scrignoli’s shoulders heaved and he lowered his head. “I lost it, Joe.” He breathed deeply and raised his head again, tears glistening on his face. “After . . . after DeMontford, what . . . what we did to Heather that night, we were . . . we were standing around a barbecue pit at some abandoned farm near Rockland . . .”
“Burning the overalls and baseball bats.”
“Yeah. And the pictures and stuff we took out of her files. Threw the camera and other stuff into the pond there.” Scrignoli cl
eared his throat. “And it hit us, you know? I mean it felt good bashing her at the time, it was so fucking easy because God, she was such a bitch, Joe, she was ready to ruin everybody and everything, me, DeMontford, our careers. . . . I showed up first and she laughed at me, she told us she’d love to see us on our asses. And then I let DeMontford in and in a couple minutes it was over and I remember thinking Jesus, we did it, we actually killed her, and I got the shakes. I couldn’t believe we did it. And then Timmy, Christ, I almost died when I saw it was Timmy. . . .”
“You thought it was me.”
“I didn’t think at all. That’s the point. I had the gun in my hand, a stupid thing to do, but I figured if anybody found me going through your stuff, I’d either bluff my way out or maybe just fire one in the air, scare their asses down the steps, I don’t know. . . .”
McGuire waited for him to continue. On Hanover Street a police car cruised past. McGuire watched as its brake lights flashed red and the driver suddenly shifted into reverse, providing him with a clear view of the Mall.
Scrignoli smiled coldly. “DeMontford, he was happy when he heard about Timmy. Timmy’d called his office, Timmy’d found something on him. I kill Timmy and DeMontford’s in Florida somewhere when it happens, smelling like a rose.”
“What were you doing in my place anyway?” McGuire said.
“I had somebody feeding me, on the street. . . .”
“Grizzly.”
“Yeah.”
“And Django.”
He shook his head. “I just dealt with Grizzly. And the guy who ran the Flamingo, Dewey. They . . . they told me Django had given you something from Heather, when they heard she was dead. They thought you did it, like everybody did. I figured maybe it was something that might connect me with her. DeMontford, him and I, we talked it over, he called me from Florida when he got the message that Tim wanted to talk to him, and he thought it’d be a good idea to check your place out. I wanted Grizzly or Dewey, one of them, to score your place but they wouldn’t touch it, and then that night, after you beat up on the guy who was killing that hooker, I heard . . . well, I heard you were back on the pills, outta circulation for a while. . . .”
He cleared his throat, swallowed hard and wiped his eyes dry. “I’m in there, I’m lookin’ in your bathroom and there’s somebody on the steps. I figure if it’s you I bluff, if it’s not I show the gun. I talked to enough witnesses, you show ’em a gun and that’s all they remember, they never remember your face. Then this guy looks like he’s chargin’ through the door at me and it’s Timmy and he’s only stumbling, kinda fallin’ forward but I don’t know it’s Timmy, not yet, and it’s a reflex, Joe, it’s a goddamn reflex and I . . . I shoot him. Jesus, Joe . . .”
McGuire saw the cop step out of his car, standing on Hanover Street, watching them over the roof of the cruiser, speaking into his radio.
“What happened to Billie?” McGuire asked.
“Django. It all had to do with Django.”
“He saw you leave. When you shot Timmy.”
Scrignoli nodded. “Grizzly told me Django’d confessed to him that he told Donovan he saw me, recognized me. Grizzly passed the word along . . .”
“Where’s Django?”
A shrug. “Grizzly said he’d look after everything for me.” Scrignoli smiled, embarrassed. “He said not to worry about you, what you’d do. He’d take care of you, pay back what he owed me. I’m, uh, I’m glad he didn’t get to you. If that means anything . . .”
“Grizzly’s dead.”
Scrignoli looked at McGuire as though he had been told it would rain later that day, started to speak, then shrugged again as though it didn’t matter. “I’m sorry about Billie,” Scrignoli said. “I lost it, Joe.” Scrignoli was shaking his head. “I lost it with her. I wanted to know what Donovan knew, how much he told her. She wouldn’t tell me anything and I started to choke her and . . . I just lost it.”
McGuire heard the squeal of brakes on the street behind the Old North Church, then the slamming of several car doors and a series of quick, cautious steps approaching.
“You know . . .” Scrignoli hadn’t seen the cop on Hanover Street, didn’t respond now to the sounds from behind the church. He smiled, staring across the plaza at the pigeons. “You . . . you were the guy I always wanted to be. I got out of the academy and I watched you working, even before you and Ollie were a team, I decided you were the best kind of cop. When I came to see you on Nashua Street, I just wanted to find out if you’d be fallin’ with the charge, you know? Because that’s what I’d heard, you’d be takin’ it and that was too bad for you but real, real good for us, right? And then, Jesus, Joe, you looked so bad, I felt so goddamn sorry for you, I got some Demerol slipped on your tray and I . . .”
“You carrying?” McGuire snapped.
“What?” Scrignoli seemed to be waking from a dream.
“Are you armed, for Christ’s sake?” McGuire hissed.
“Oh, Jesus.” Scrignoli looked down toward Hanover Street for the first time. A second cruiser had joined the first and was angled across the road, three uniformed officers poised behind it, their guns aimed down the Mall at McGuire and Scrignoli.
“Put your weapon on the ground and your hands over—” McGuire began.
“Yeah, yeah.” Scrignoli spoke like a man in a trance, dropping his head again and reaching inside his jacket.
“Hold it, asshole!” Donovan’s voice cut the air from behind McGuire.
Without turning, McGuire waved a hand in Donovan’s direction, a gesture of dismissal, more concerned about the police officers at the other end of the Mallon Hanover Street.
“Listen, Joe . . .” Scrignoli began, his hand half out of his jacket, gripping the pistol, when his words were cut off by a sudden exhalation of air, like a man punched in the stomach, and the crack of three quick shots from Donovan’s gun.
McGuire reached out to catch Scrignoli as he fell forward off the bench, his face contorted in shock and surprise.
“Get away from him!” Donovan screamed. McGuire knelt to catch Scrignoli and, holding him by the shoulders, lowered him gently to the ground. Another shot cut the air like a whip-crack and the ground beyond the bench exploded with the impact of the bullet.
McGuire was still gripping Scrignoli, trying to avoid the volcano of blood erupting from his abdomen, staring into the other man’s eyes, watching them grow dull and distant. Footsteps clattered behind him, a knot of men running toward him. He heard more footsteps from the direction of Hanover Street and then Donovan’s voice near his ear, screaming at him again.
“Move!” Donovan shouted like a man on the edge of control. “Now, goddamn it!”
McGuire lowered Scrignoli to the pavement, rose slowly and turned to face Donovan who was standing ten feet away, red-faced in his firing stance, feet set wide apart, his Police Special thirty-eight in a two-handed grip, arms extended. “He was giving me his gun, Phil,” McGuire said.
“He was preparing to use his weapon.” Donovan angled his head toward Scrignoli, who was rolling from side to side in agony. Two police officers broke from the group, knelt next to the wounded man and began loosening his jacket.
“You gonna call an ambulance?” McGuire asked. Behind Donovan he saw Zelinka approaching, speaking rapidly into a hand-held radio.
“You’re under arrest.” Donovan kept his gun aimed at McGuire.
“Are you gonna call an ambulance?” McGuire said again.
“I said you’re under arrest.”
“And you’re a pathetic prick.” McGuire turned his back and began walking away.
“McGuire!” Donovan screamed.
Zelinka approached Donovan from behind, positioned himself directly in front of the detective and raised one large hand to gently push Donovan’s gun aside. He stared into the younger man’s eyes with a solemn, weary expression until Donovan l
owered the gun and glanced down at Scrignoli. “Get him an ambulance,” Donovan snapped, and Zelinka said, “There is already one on the way.”
Zelinka exhaled, a long, noisy sigh. He shook his head in sorrow and resignation, and watched McGuire round the corner alone onto Hanover Street, his shoulders hunched, his head down. Above the Mall the flock of pigeons that had exploded into flight at the sound of the shots whirled in panic, around and around.
About the Author
John Lawrence Reynolds is the author of more than two dozen works of fiction and non-fiction. He has previously written six mystery novels—most recently, Beach Strip—and is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award (for The Man Who Murdered God and Gypsy Sins). His many non-fiction books include Leaving Home, Free Rider (winner of the National Business Book Award), The Naked Investor and Bubbles, Bankers & Bailouts. Shadow People, his bestselling book on secret societies, has been published in sixteen countries. A former president of the Crime Writers of Canada, he lives in Burlington, Ontario. Visit him online at johnlawrencereynolds.com.
Copyright
Solitary Dancer © 1994 John Lawrence Reynolds
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN: 9781443443708
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in hardcover in 1994. This HarperCollins Publishers Ltd ePub edition: 2015.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are use fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Solitary Dancer Page 29
