4 Angel Among Us

by Chaz McGee

  Calvano was not going to thank her for doing Gonzales’s dirty work. Nor was he going to apologize for abandoning his duty. ‘Gonzales is a douche bag,’ he told Maggie. ‘I don’t care if he’s your godfather or not. I don’t trust him. And what he’s doing right now? There’s no excuse for it. It’s not right.’

  ‘Aldo is connected to both missing women,’ Maggie pointed out. ‘Would you rather we were still focusing on Danny Gallagher?’

  ‘It’s times like these when I wish I smoked,’ Calvano said. He stared longingly at a couple of streetwalkers who were eating chocolate sundaes and smoking cigarettes in defiance of town ordinances banning smoking in restaurants. He turned back to Maggie. ‘You know, Aldo Flores and Danny Gallagher aren’t the only people who had contact with both women. It doesn’t have to be a choice between the husband and some poor beaner, who has no idea what hit him and who only wants to find his wife and kid.’

  ‘Like who?’ Maggie asked, gently sliding Calvano’s coffee out of his reach. He had clearly had enough for the night.

  ‘Like Father Sojak,’ Calvano said reluctantly. ‘And we both know that Aldo helped his brother out at the Delmonte House. That means his wife took the bus to bring him lunch there. Which means there are people at that house who came in contact with both her and Arcelia Gallagher. For all we know, Enrique Romero is behind this all.’

  Maggie laughed. ‘Now you sound like Gonzales. Look, I don’t like Romero any more than you do. That Hollywood routine wears me out in about ten seconds. But he has no reason whatsoever to have anything to do with either woman. You’re just angry because he’s a lousy husband.’

  ‘I still say we’re not done out there,’ Calvano said stubbornly. ‘There are too many roads that lead to that house.’

  ‘I hear you,’ Maggie said. ‘It bothers me as well. But Gonzales wants us to focus on making a case against Aldo Flores.’

  ‘Then let him think that’s what we’re doing.’ Calvano said flatly. ‘But me? I want to find Arcelia Gallagher, not chase dead ends. And I’m telling you, there’s something that connects her to that house and it’s not just that exorcism she helped with or whatever the hell it was.’

  ‘OK,’ Maggie conceded. ‘I’ll make a deal with you. If you can still sleep after all that coffee, let’s each grab a few hours and then we’ll head out there again in the morning.’

  ‘For real?’ Calvano asked.

  Maggie nodded. ‘For real.’

  Because I was facing the plate glass window of the coffee shop, I saw Skip Bostwick approaching before anyone else did. I knew immediately it would not end well. Maggie’s ex was bopping down the street in that annoying way of his, in search of local color for his story. Or maybe he was looking for a hooker to erase the memory of Lindsey Stanford. Whatever he was up to, it had not taken him long to make Stanford happy and, judging from the spring in his step, he thought it had done him some good.

  Son of a bitch – he had been following Maggie. That’s what had brought him to this street. He kept peering into alleys and looking at the cars parked along the street, wondering where she had gone. I shot him the bird in a burst of solidarity with my living partners, but he probably wouldn’t have noticed had I been visible. The guy was that into himself. He spotted the brightly lit coffee shop from down the street and hurried toward it. I saw him recognize Maggie’s car parked a few doors down. Then he saw Maggie and Calvano, heads bent together over coffee, and I am sure he leapt right to the wrong conclusion. Like the jerk he was, he acted like he still owned her. He came inside looking for a fight.

  Some people are capable of opening a door and simply walking through it. Others have to fling it open with the bang to announce to the world that they are there. Naturally Skip Bostwick fell into this category. All eyes turned to him and not a single person in that coffee shop gave a crap that he was handsome. They were street people. They had been around enough to know an asshole when they saw one. I think everyone, down to the harried waitress, pegged him for what he really was within three seconds of seeing him.

  He was oblivious to the impression he made and sauntered over to Maggie and Calvano’s booth with his customary cockiness. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘What have we here? I guess you two are part of the very tiny city that never sleeps. Working on a new lead in the case?’

  With monumental effort, Maggie kept her cool. ‘Go away, Skip. You’re the last person on earth we would tell anything to.’

  Calvano entered the fray. ‘Skip?’ he asked. ‘What kind of name is that for a grown man?’

  ‘You tell me, Adrian,’ Skip shot back. ‘Yo, Adrian!’

  How mature. They were fighting over their names. The two little boys in Arcelia Gallagher’s class had shown more maturity than these two.

  Calvano stood up and, I had to admit, he could be very intimidating. I think it’s the combination of his prissy hygiene and the slightly crazy look he gets in his eyes that is one hundred percent Italian.

  The street whores appreciated Calvano way more than they admired ole Skippy’s fake good looks. They squealed in anticipation as the two men squared off. The waitress hurried over, took a closer look at them and decided to wait by the cash register until it was over.

  ‘Mano-a-mano!’ one of the prostitutes announced, making it apparent that she was a he.

  ‘Come on guys,’ Maggie pleaded. Her worst fear had just arrived. But she may as well have been spitting into the wind. There was only one way this was going to go down.

  ‘What’s it like working with my ex-wife?’ Bostwick asked Calvano. ‘You get off on how bossy she is?’

  There were a lot of things Calvano could have said in reply. But he decided to get right to the point. He landed one of the best right hooks I have ever seen – and we’re talking about many drunken nights at a bar staring bleary-eyed at televised fights – right in the center of Skip Bostwick’s nose. The man dropped like a rock as blood gushed out in rivers. Calvano pulled his fist back and stared at it, astonished. I’m not sure he had ever connected so thoroughly before.

  The coffee shop was dead quiet. Not a person moved. Even Maggie was speechless.

  I was euphoric. I was, in fact, dancing on the tabletop, although no one could appreciate it. Oh, how many times I had wanted to do what Calvano had just done – to haul off and slug someone who richly deserved it and let my fists do the talking. It felt good to see Skip Bostwick go down. And it was pure heaven to see him writhing on a dirty coffee shop floor.

  If Calvano agreed with me, he hid it well. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Maggie. ‘I didn’t know I could do that.’

  Skip Bostwick had begun to groan. He held his nose in both hands and rocked from side-to-side, mumbling something that sounded like ‘my node, my node’, as blood ran over his hands. Maggie gestured for the waitress to bring over some napkins. When she hurried over with a fistful of them, Maggie grabbed a handful and bent over Skip. She started to dab the blood from his face and then thought better of it. She ended up dropping the wad of paper on his chest. ‘Be a man and mop it up yourself,’ she said, sliding back into her booth. She had decided she was going to simply watch and see what unfolded next.

  If Bostwick had hoped for help for his injuries, he gave up the tactic quickly. Struggling to sit up, he glared at Maggie and Calvano, his hands cupped under his nose to catch the blood flowing from it. ‘I’m going to sue the shit out of both of you and the department,’ he told him. ‘That was assault. There were witnesses.’

  ‘Don’t look at us,’ one of the prostitutes told him. The others nodded their agreement. ‘You’re looking at Miss Hear No Evil, See No Evil and our little sister Speak No Evil.’ Amid a chorus of ‘uh-huhs’ she turned her back on Bostwick.

  Maggie had decided that she was backing her partner on this one. She leaned over until she was only a few inches from her ex-husband’s face and whispered to him, ‘So help me God, Skip, if you even so much as tell anyone how you got that, I will make sure that no one on the force e
ver talks to you again. And trust me, there are way more people who like me at this point. I will make sure that no one in this town gives you the slightest scrap of information to help you with your story. Walk away or your so-called career as a crime reporter is over before it starts.’

  Holy crap. I had never heard Maggie sound so mean before. She sounded like she was going to rip off his head and breathe fire down his neck. I think she meant every word of it.

  Calvano had watched the interchange without speaking. He raised a finger in the air and said to the waitress with exaggerated politeness, ‘Check, please.’

  The waitress approached warily, proffering the slip of paper. Without even looking at it, Calvano gave her a ten and told her to keep the change. That locked in her loyalty.

  As Calvano and Maggie scrambled from the booth and headed out the door, the waitress bent over Skip Bostwick and surveyed his injuries.

  ‘You’re gonna have to get up off the floor,’ she finally said, with a snap of her gum. ‘You’re in my way, you’re drippin’ blood on the floor and I’ve got customers to serve. If you want a booth, there’s a five dollar minimum.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Maggie had offered to drop Calvano off at home, but once she reached his apartment, neither one of them wanted to stop talking about Calvano’s punch.

  ‘Does your hand hurt?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Hell yeah, my hand hurts,’ Calvano complained. He examined his knuckles. ‘It’s none of my business, Gunn, but I just got to ask – how did you end up married to that guy?’

  The question bothered Maggie. For a moment, she did not answer. But when Calvano started to apologize for asking, she interrupted him. ‘No, it’s OK. It’s a fair question. I just hate admitting it when I make a mistake.’ She stared out the front of the windshield, deciding how to explain. Before long, night would give way to dawn. They had nearly worked through the night. ‘The best way to explain it is to say I was overcome by a temporary madness.’

  Calvano laughed. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard love described that way, but it fits.’

  ‘I’m not sure it was love exactly,’ Maggie admitted. ‘But the truth is even more pathetic. He was the guy that everyone wanted. We went through the Academy together. There was a huge class of women that year because of some new EEOC guidelines. Everyone was crazy over him. Skip wasn’t so full of himself back then. I’d known him since I was a kid, so I had the edge. Our fathers were friends from when they were both on the Wilmington force so we would visit their family a couple times a year and sometimes even share a beach house in the summer. Skip and I were just buddies growing up, but that year, when we started the Academy, everything changed.’

  She seemed ashamed of what she was about to say and Calvano gave her room to collect her thoughts. ‘I’m listening,’ was all he said.

  ‘Skip was still really insecure, I guess. I can’t think of any other reason why he would pay me so much attention. But he already knew me, and maybe all the other women coming after him as hard as they were scared him. I’m not sure. Trust me, I was no prize.’ She smiled. ‘I had the best times of any woman in the class and my scores on the range were off the charts, but that was the extent of my attraction.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Gunn,’ Calvano told her. ‘Never sell yourself short. It just opens the door for jerks like him to do the same thing.’

  Maggie smiled her gratitude. ‘He swept me off my feet. I admit it. He’d gone from being geeky the last time I saw him to being, well, you know what he looks like now. Television handsome. I fell for his outside. I didn’t understand his inside had changed, too. The kid I used to sit with on the dunes and talk to for hours at a time was gone. But we were already married when I realized he had turned out to be incredibly self-centered and ambitious. That the only person he would ever be capable of loving was himself.’ She shook her head, disgusted at herself. ‘Honestly, Adrian, I was so competitive. I know this sounds horrible, but I think I just married him so that the other women couldn’t. I’m not sure I ever felt that much for him. God knows, it was easy to walk away from him once I figured it out. I’m not sure I can feel a lot for someone. I’m not sure I have that left in me after days like this one.’

  Calvano was nodding his head. ‘I’ve gone out with women for even worse reasons, trust me. This job takes a lot out of you, Gunn. We can look for one million excuses not to fall in love and then, when we do, against all of our best intentions, we look for something else to call it. We’ve done a lot of dangerous things to get our shields, but sometimes I think letting ourselves have a private life feels like the most dangerous of all.’

  Maggie looked surprised. ‘That was pretty perceptive, Adrian. Have you been watching Oprah re-runs again?’

  The mood was broken. Calvano punched Maggie on the shoulder and climbed out of the car, leaning in for a final parting shot. ‘Do what I do, Gunn. Just go out with so many of them, no one ever has a chance to stick.’

  Maggie sat in the darkness for a moment before she pulled away. When she did, I knew that they would not talk of this conversation again.

  The next morning proved me right. She picked him up as if their talk the night before had never happened. A few hours of sleep had done them both good. Both Maggie and Calvano looked as if they might survive the week after all.

  They arrived at the station house before either Gonzales or the media showed, checked in with their other teams and left after Calvano looked in on Aldo Flores. He came away with the information that Aldo had indeed worked at the Delmonte House with Rodrigo and that Aldo’s wife had taken the bus out there several times at lunch. That meant anyone at the house could have had contact with both her and Arcelia Gallagher. Now they were on their way to the mansion again.

  Calvano was in a subdued mood after his visit with Aldo Flores. ‘That poor bastard. He has no idea what’s happening to him. I had to pull another prisoner over to translate and I’m not sure I got everything, but he pretty much thinks his world has collapsed around him. He’s convinced he’s going to be shipped to some deportation center next.’

  ‘I hate to tell you, but he probably is,’ Maggie said.

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair. The guy just wants a decent life.’

  ‘Tell that to your congressman,’ Maggie suggested. ‘And don’t count on Gonzales to back you on it.’

  ‘Yeah, what’s up with that?’ Calvano asked. ‘He hates Enrique Romero for being more important than him and he hates Aldo Flores for being less important than him. You think he’d be a little more sympathetic.’

  ‘Since when has the city mouse ever wanted to hang with the country mouse?’ Maggie asked. She pulled up in front of the gate of the Delmonte House, pressed a button and waited several centuries until the old butler buzzed them in. When she reached the top of the circular driveway in front of the mansion, she pulled to a halt. The three of us sat in the car, staring at the house. I know they were thinking about ghosts haunting the halls and wondering what freaky reception awaited them this time. I enjoyed the irony of being the ghost in the back seat, less than two feet away, worrying about the same thing. But I was also thinking of the unhappiness I had felt so acutely in the house on our prior visit – all the despair and the bleakness and that horrible moment when I had experienced the feeling of being attacked with a sword.

  Something very bad had happened in that house and moments of it still lingered. I wondered what it had to do with Arcelia Gallagher, if anything.

  ‘What’s our approach?’ Calvano asked Maggie. ‘You think Romero is back from Hollywood yet?’

  ‘You know what I think?’ Maggie said. ‘I think the husband is never coming back from Hollywood. I think he’s gotten as much good publicity from his marriage as he can and he’s going to run as far away as possible, as fast as he can, from the bad publicity that’s left.’

  Calvano thought it over. ‘So, let’s go after the butler?’ he suggested. ‘Let’s see what we can get out of him. The guy owes us a favor.
We were easy on him and we left his wife alone. Maybe he knows more than he’s telling?’

  Maggie nodded her approval. ‘That’s a good approach. Though I feel certain we won’t get anything from him that he isn’t fully prepared to give.’

  ‘Maybe the butler did it?’ Calvano suggested hopefully.

  ‘Not this one,’ Maggie said. ‘The only thing he’s hiding is his wife’s condition. And wouldn’t you rather live here than in some state-run nursing home?’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Calvano said. He checked his gun and climbed out of the car. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I wanted to say, but my thoughts were distracted by what I saw in an upper window staring down at us. It was a lopsided face with the right cheek off-kilter, where it had been augmented too far toward the hairline. The eyes were stretched so tight they did not look like they could close and the corners of the swollen lips drooped down, as if the mouth was melting. I realized with a start that the face belonged to the girl once called ‘the most beautiful person in the world.’ Dakota Wylie was watching us, her face bare of bandages, scarves and sunglasses, revealed for what it was. Ruined. She was staring down at Calvano.

  Maggie and Calvano were juggling cups of coffee and keys, too busy to notice what I had seen. They were also too busy to notice the amazing morning coalescing around us – but I could not ignore it. It was moments like these, when I see what others overlook, that I feel most alive. And I cannot seem to pass these moments by. Dew still gleamed on the new shoots of grass and the flowers were opening to the sun above. Birds flew from lawn to lawn in search of food for their young. The breeze sweeping in from the surrounding fields smelled of green.

  I turned my back on the mansion, with all of its unhappiness, and visited the edge of the lawn, unable to resist an immense bed of flowers rioting next to new roses that were just beginning to bud. I looked out over a sloping lawn surrounding a marble statue of a woman dressed in Grecian robes. She was looking pensively down at granite waters swirling about her feet. Her face reminded me of the missing woman, Arcelia Gallagher. It seemed so tranquil, yet also as if it were hiding a hint of sadness.