by Robert White
I was lucky. I’ll admit it. A belligerent drunk like O’Reilly could have had me jugged for assault. Jack, an ex-jarhead who did two hitches in the Marines and fought at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, had another saying he’d apply to dicey situations for a cop in East Cleveland, “If you kick a tiger in the ass, make sure you have a plan for his teeth.”
It’s a rule of mine never to push all my chips on the table just to see what happens, yet in the span of a single day in one man’s house and another man’s office, my own client no less, I had risked my license with two men who clearly didn’t have much affection for me. Trouble is, I had too many years’ experience interrogating street-wise shitbirds, normally incapable of firing two brain cells in sequence unless it concerned their own illegal profit, not to mention the assorted human debris of America’s streets today: the homeless, the distressed, the witless, the violent, the doped up and the out-and-out deranged. All this hopeless human scrap vomited up from an urban hellhole blunted, if I may say so, what used to be a fine precision in my interrogation skills. I could play a street thug like a harp, but I lost my touch with regular people. Micah always said I’d go too far someday and I’d be ringing up one of those lawyers I despised. I wondered if Reg would recuse himself if he saw me standing in front of him at an arraignment hearing.
O’Reilly had started me on a snipe hunt with his crappy poem. Too much time had passed. For some reason, maybe I didn’t know myself, I wanted this girl found, and I wanted it to be my case. I had myself convinced that I had a really good shot at bringing her home.
Call it luck but I had his signature on my contract now. Binding or not, I wanted to rub his nose in it and make him understand that there was no forgiveness. He made a young girl suffer; she was his responsibility, her flesh his to protect, and he squandered a priceless gift. I had to think about this because I was stuck in traffic on Dead Man’s Curve for an hour. The entire Memorial Shoreway back to the MLK turnoff was one long stream of cars. My Tom-Tom informed me there was an eighteen-wheeler that didn’t negotiate the 35 m.p.h. curve in the slick drizzle coming off the lake and spilled a cargo of frozen turkeys all over the highway. I thought of O’Reilly as I last saw him on the floor, past the blubbering, teary-eyed whiskey stage I had found him in and locked into some cold place where the truth was staring back at him.
Tough tittie, I thought. Every good existentialist has to learn to shore up a fragment against life’s ruins.
With a name and an address in my notepad tucked into a pocket, O’Reilly’s deposit converted to some badly needed traveler’s checks, to Boston I was going. My case was finally kicked into gear.
Why, then, if I had exactly what I wanted, was there a taste of ashes in my mouth?
I hate Boston in April. Boston can’t live up to its promise. Some things I do like: certain piano bars on Fisherman’s Wharf, the smell of pizza in the late afternoon off the esplanade near Copley Square. I like the déjà vu feeling from meeting a glut of Kevins or Seans and Bridget Colleens in a city of indomitable Irishry. When it’s winter or summer, though, everyone seems hell-bent on ramming ebullience down your throat or ripping all the silver linings out of every cloud. Maybe it’s the soggy wind, an Atlantic Santa Ana, off Boston Harbor that causes the compass of my temperament to yaw from serenity toward prickly sensitivity. Changeable people, changeable weather. Too many false springs before the temperature soars and the humidity drowns you in prickly sweat. Apparently my existentialist angst is triggered by fluctuations in barometric pressure in the way some people react to lack of sunlight. Boston is practically an island.
Another reason I don’t like Boston is that it’s a prevision of the end of America, the cultural sink that, like a black hole, is going to suck down everything east of the Rockies into its hungry maw. LA is that other cultural sinkhole, a noisy smug capital of the Fourth World that’ll take care of whatever’s left. Boston is a seething rat cage where the rats are never at rest. I add to my catalog of dislikes the cutthroat traffic east and west of the HoneyFitz Expressway all the way to Charlesbank Playground. Toss in Beacon Hill snobbery, Harvard (“Ismell-excrement”) elitism, the Kennedys and their toadies and you’ll understand why nothing good has ever happened to me in Boston.
Two years ago I was in Boston for a convention to check out the latest in eavesdropping gadgetry and yawn-inspiring lectures at the Westin on Forensic Accounting as an Investigative Tool, when I witnessed two teen males meeting on a street corner. Like rival baboons, they were from different worlds. One was a street punk, all black clothes and unlaced high tops; the other a prep-school type with clean-cut, razor-creased trousers and a gray blazer with some logo that bore a creepy resemblance to the SS’s lightning runes. They were enemies, leaders of their gangs, but they shook hands and ended whatever rivalry their two misfit groups had in the middle of a windswept Boston afternoon. The rich kid and the urban punk: friends, allies. The top and bottom of society combining forces at last—and why not? In the language of political correctness, both are equally morally challenged.
Normally in cities on cases I like to take a room in some downtown flophouse. I felt like sticking it to O’Reilly so I drove my rental SUV straight to the Marriott. I was in Boston less than an hour before I learned that Annaliese was somewhere in the city. I phoned the number O’Reilly had given me for his father, and I got the old man on the tenth ring. It took awhile to sell myself to the old man, but he eventually gave me permission to drop by. He and his wife lived in Roxbury which, if the sky weren’t shrouded in a pewter drizzle blowing in from the Atlantic, I might have been able to see from my room on the twelfth floor of the Marriott.
The father, like most second-generation Irish-Americans, measured success in smaller increments than his children. He had gotten from East Boston to Roxbury, just ahead of the hordes of blacks and Hispanics, a crosstown trek that took him a lifetime of making furniture for others. The house was a yellow Cape Cod on Kendall.
O’Reilly’s secretary told me to look for a park and a high school. The old man had glasses with tape over the bridge, wore red suspenders and a starched white shirt. He had a washed-out look and deep lines at each corner of his mouth that made him look like a giant marionette. The house was too warm and a faint urine smell wafted about. After we settled ourselves a bit, dispensed with the watery coffee, I asked him point blank:
“Mister O’Reilly, your son wants me to find Annaliese. Can you tell me where she is?”
“I don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her in a year, maybe a year and a half.”
The tone of his voice was emphatic. He wanted to get something said, so I asked him, “Was everything all right between you and your granddaughter?”
“She isn’t my granddaughter.”
“I understand that.”
“My son was betrayed by his wife. There was no marriage. Not a real marriage based on love and trust in the eyes of God.”
God’s eyes. Oh shit, here we go.
“God can use a pair of glasses then, Mister O’Reilly, because I saw your son’s wife not too long ago, and it seems to me she is the one who ought to feel betrayed.”
His face darkened. Like father, like son. “That hoor betrayed my son.”
“Do you know where Annaliese is right now?”
“No. And I don’t care where she is, if you want the truth. She and her boyfriend.” He spat out the word.
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes, a darkie sonofabitch. Blacker than Toby’s ass, this moolie, and she brings him into my own house.”
Blacks and whites are the worst at identifying someone from the other race. “What was his name?”
“I dunno. Just a damn nigger.”
I could hear the click-clack of something approaching from the kitchen. His wife was pushing a walker in front of her, huffing in at a snail’s pace, and began giving him hell for his language, but all that did was prompt a vein to throb in the center of his forehead. He sent a volley of obscenity her way th
at silenced her. I watched her plant the walker in front of her and shift her large body to it and then do it twice more until she was able to walk back in the direction she had come from, a slow-motion parody of a three-corner turn. Neither the old man nor I said anything as she made her slow way stiffly and noisily back to the kitchen.
Then, as if electrocuted, his head snapped back to me on a stick of neck so fast it made a lock of his thin white hair flutter on the top of his head.
“I don’t know where she is, and I don’t give two fucks.”
Micah made me read Dante’s Inferno in the early years of our marriage when she thought there was hope for my education. I remember laughing at some of the punishments meted out in a few circles like the ones pelted in a burning rain or buried under the ice looking up at the hordes of passing souls overhead. Some with their heads on backwards or buried upside down so their feet stick up. The ones entombed in excrement actually made me laugh out loud in bed and Micah gave me an elbow in my ribs for disrespecting a classic—or some such nonsense. But I always thought Dante might have made a good homicide investigator; after all, he knew the black hearts of people just like me. On my way out the door of the House of O’Reilly, I wondered where the old man would best spend eternity if Dante got to make the call.
You always hope it’s going to be easy. It never is. I gave myself one week before I had to get back to Jefferson-on-the-Lake and salvage what little summer business I could count on. My cell phone rolled over my office calls and so far nothing but a few telemarketers, a bank manager wanting “urgently to meet over my mortgage default” and a couple possible clients. One caller wanted me to find his daughter’s missing pooch, which should tell you something about the state of my financial affairs because I actually thought of calling him back.
I spent two days on the phone in my hotel room calling employment bureaus, real estate offices, and clinics, and I must have spoken to dozens of young women with receptionists’ voices. I was claiming to be the father of Annaliese O’Reilly and said I was “hoping to pay some of that rascal’s overdue bills, ha-ha.” Sensing a sympathetic ear now and then, I would spiel on about “my daughter, that girl, ha-ha, being a little bubblehead with money, you know . . .”
Some went into their databases for me but none came up with a single female named Annaliese.
All I did was rack up zeroes; she never checked into Boston State Hospital or any other in the metro area, no ER’s anywhere in the last 90 days, or had ever scheduled a pelvic exam, or used a dentist’s services. I planned to widen the arc a little tomorrow with the same routine to cover those places in South and East Boston. State detox centers were on my list too, but I had no story good enough to get past HIPPA.
Just then, however, I needed an hour in the weight room to take out the kinks, get a massage, shower, dinner downstairs, before hitting the streets. Between 7:00 p.m. and the early hours of the morning, I planned to check out the nudie bars in the Combat Zone. It would figure Annaliese might be working a job similar to the one she held at the Jefferson Courthouse, but my intuition, and maybe Brenda’s photo too, was telling me otherwise: attractive young girls, footloose in the big city, often wind up in places like Detroit’s Cass Corridor or Boston’s Combat Zone. Two or three years in that steaming sewer is about average; few of them survive the drugs, booze, beatings from their pimps, run-ins with the cops. I’ve chalked their bodies in rowhouses all over Cleveland’s west side. One year in Cleveland we had eleven of them, all strawberry girls, dead in vacant lots, alleys, and crack houses. All between 15- and 35-years-old. Skirts hiked up, most pantyless, no wounds, ligature marks, or petechiae—the pinprick bleeding in the whites of the eyeballs, a sign of manual strangulation. Every one of them posted and coming back with cocaine in the bloodstream, semen in body orifices. The crime beat writer for the Plain Dealer speculated a serial killer. A cardiologist was quoted on cocaine-induced heart attacks and the possibility of death from the simple exertion of sex for sale as if their young, worn-out bodies would simply cave in. The death certificates usually said heart attack or “insult to the brain” but nobody ever solved these cases and they’re all by now transferred to the Justice Center quietly sitting on shelves and forgotten by everybody.
When I got back from my bar-hopping rounds, swathed in a neon mist of icy drizzle, I returned empty-handed and bloated from a dozen soda waters with twists of lemon or lime, throat-sore from talking to braindead slugs, bouncers, and bartenders—anybody I could get to look at her photo.
I took a shower to wash off the sleaze and stink. I ordered a soft-core porn film and lay on the bed reviewing what few notes I scribbled from these itinerant conversations. Nothing stood out. My mind drifted away from Annaliese and her father and grandfather. What’s a dysfunctional family today anyhow? How would life, even a shabby, unproductive one like mine, mean anything? I watched the sexual mimicry on the HD screen with its indifferent coupling, the sound track off by a split-second. They would alternate moans in time to the thrusting. I hit the mute button, tossed my notepad onto the night table, and took out a deck of cards for a game of solitaire. After a while I knew I was going to win, but it didn’t mean anything more than the pair simulating sex on the TV. I went into the bathroom to urinate for the third time, wondering if my prostate was swollen or if I ought to switch to something else to drink while I’m showing photos and buying rounds for deadbeats. Liver, kidneys, pancreas—I had hurt them all in some scrap or dustup over the years. Payback time.
The porn film had ended when I returned to the bed, so I flipped to a movie channel and settled on Schindler’s List. It was at the part where Eamon, the Krakow commandant, had been shooting some Jews from his balcony with a high-powered rifle and scope. His fish-belly-white skin glowed sickly in the dawn light. His stomach sagged over his pants and the rifle was rested across his back with one hand dangling from the butt and the other from the barrel. From behind, he looked like a dissipated Christ. The camera took the scope’s eye-view for the next sequence and it followed some inmates at their tasks about the work camp; then it settled on a woman who was hunched on the steps of a barracks. Her brains were blown out of her head and she jerked backward. It bothered me that her head, like Kennedy’s, did not snap reflexively in the direction of the shot. The muzzle power of a rifle slug cleaving through the meat of a brain inside a packed skull leaves no room to expand. Spielberg should have spent a few bucks on a technical advisor.
I turned off the set. I opened all the drapes and looked out over as much of the city below as I could see. The wind was trying to pop the rivets out of the Marriott. I stretched out on the bed and felt the ache of all six muscles around my dead eye, phantom pains that reminded me of the worst beating in my life. Before I fell into the black hole sucking me down, I vowed once more that, even though I had been born in a hotel room, I was not going to die in one.
On my next round of the city’s clubs and night spots, I greeted and spoke to dozens of bartenders and their clientele including the lushes, barflies, slumming businessmen, drifters, and college kids. No one remembered ever seeing Annaliese.
I showed them her skirt-blouse photo, but I kept the other two handy. If at any time I had the right feel while working the crowd, I might have to show the bathroom-surprise photo. Brenda reluctantly gave me the third photo, and I promised her I would return it in tiny pieces once I had found Annaliese. Invading people’s privacy is a conditioned reflex of every cop and investigator, so my squeamishness irked me.
I ordered pots of coffee to my room every couple hours, made calls all morning and took a break at noon for something to eat. I walked around the mall and let my mind drift. At one o’clock I went back to my room and made more calls. I even called O’Reilly’s father and attempted to make peace with him, maybe jog his memory a little, but he hung up on me.
By three o’clock I was incapable of speech, of fashioning one slick story. For lack of a better plan, I was going to include corner markets and neighborhood tavern
s in working-class districts of East Boston. I had no hunch. It was just to do something as I worked my way toward Logan and the end of the allotted time I had given to the job. There were more bars in the Combat Zone, and a few bartenders had exchanged a little information for the twenty I displayed beneath the wet circumference of a shot glass of Bushmill’s or Four Roses. It was not to drink, but to relax the house before I made my switch to club soda. I asked which bars in particular seemed to attract young girls. About six topless bars were mentioned, and I had them written down.
