“Because I thought, he’s a priest who would understand.”
“Is that the whole truth of it?”
She rested her elbow on the table, her hand, scrubbed clean and without the nail polish, at her cheek so that briefly he was reminded of the hand of the dying man—just in the sensitive use of it. “I’m pretty well educated, Father. I read a lot. There’s a bar I used to go with Dan to. Now I go alone when he goes off on his own, promoting some scheme or other, God knows. I sit there and talk with people I’ve got a feeling for, people who can’t get where they want to go. I mean they want to be writers, they’re taking polls on the telephone. They’re painters…” She made a gesture as though to brush the hair away from her face, forgetting that she had fastened it at the back. “I forgot what I started to say.”
“Why you came to me in the first place.”
“Because you’re a musician.”
McMahon felt both stunned and humbled.
“Oh, that isn’t the whole truth either. Who knows the whole truth about anything, about anybody including yourself? Myself, I mean. I told you the first time I came to see you that I loved Dan, that I wanted him. I know, you don’t want to hear that again.” Her eyes had caught his in flight.
“You are wrong,” he said. She was not wrong: he could feel himself tensing against the repetition of futile intimacies, but he said what he thought was now necessary. “If that’s the way you can get at the problem, tell it again.”
“No, I won’t. I won’t talk about Dan. I think I know now what I was doing here though I didn’t mean to at first, I was trying to get you going. But that was because I needed to know if I could. Can you understand that?”
“I think so,” he said quietly.
“You’re a funny one, you know. I got the idea you liked it.”
“That was an unwarranted assumption,” he said and stared her down. Many a female he had stared down, but most of them were adolescent schoolgirls and easily frightened out of—or into—their fantasies.
“The man I was with is dead,” she said flatly.
McMahon let the words rest in silence. He had expected them. What silenced him within himself was that both he and Priscilla Phelan had talked these few minutes as though the death had not occurred.
“The police came. I went with them and identified him as the person I’d rented a back room to. I gave them my extra key. Do I have to tell them, Father? They’ll be asking. About me and him, I mean.”
“You will have to judge its relevance.”
“It’s not only me—it might hurt Dan.”
He refrained from saying that she should have thought of that earlier. “In what way? Does your husband know of the relationship?”
“I’m not sure, Father. He could have been guessing. When I stopped trying to do what you told me to do…”
“Helping him make love to you,” McMahon said out.
She nodded. “When I stopped all that—when I just lay there like a whore last night, that turned him on.” She broke then, open as even she had never been and spewed out the bitterness. “When I didn’t want him he was like a bull. Christ, Father! What’s the matter with us?”
“Something I don’t think I’m capable of healing,” McMahon said. “Maybe, just maybe, it will heal itself—your marriage, given a chance now. It’s much too simple for me to say. And I could have been wrong in counseling you the way I did. By trying to provoke his manhood, you may have been taking it away from him.”
“It sure is simple that way, Father. But what’s inside me isn’t simple any more. It’s closed up like this.” She clenched her fist.
“Time, time,” he said, “and prayer. That’s the greatest opener I know.”
“Maybe for you. For me it’s like sucking my thumb. Or something else I won’t go into now. It makes me forget for a while, but it doesn’t settle anything.”
“You said Dan suspected the affair you were having with this man.”
She smiled a little and sounded almost wistful. “You make it sound so important.”
“Wasn’t it important to you at the time?”
“No, Father. I’m sorry, but I’m trying to tell you the truth. You want even sin to be romantic.”
“Especially sin,” he snapped to cover his chagrin that she should mock him.
“It wasn’t love. It was just plain sex. I seduced him. You won’t have any trouble believing that, will you? You know, most of the tenants in my building don’t buy this business of going to the priest every time somebody gets into somebody else’s bed. They talk about it on the stoop, in the kitchen. It’s the way they are. Maybe that’s why I can’t live with them.
“Last night after Dan got through proving himself, he got up and dressed again. He said to me, ‘Now you got something new to tell your friends.’ ‘I don’t tell them anything,’ I said. ‘That’s not the message I get from them.’ ‘Then they’re lying,’ I said. ‘Are they, Pris? About the bearded gentleman in the back room? Who is he? What is he?’ ‘He’s a man,’ I shouted and Dan said, ‘So now you have two men, lucky girl.’ He went out then, Father, and I haven’t seen him since.”
“Have you told any of this to the police?” McMahon said after a moment.
“Not much, except about Dan not being home. They’ll start asking. It was mostly Gus they wanted to know about.”
“Your husband has been away overnight before, hasn’t he? If a job took him out of town?”
“Yes, but he’s not on one now.”
McMahon yielded then to an impulse he had been trying to repress. “Tell me something about the man—Muller.”
“He was murdered this morning in that condemned building on the other side of Tenth Avenue.”
“I know. I was with him when he died. Carlos Morales came and got me.”
She thought about that. “Now I understand. Carlos…He loved kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got some of his own somewhere. He’d make nice babies with the right woman. A gentle person…but with it.” She was silent for a moment, her eyes thoughtful. McMahon waited. He knew quite a lot about her, some things she wanted him to know and some he had learned by inadvertence. He knew that she was thirty-two, the daughter of a broken marriage who had spent her childhood and adolescence in a convent boarding school, and then, when her father died, her mother had brought her home to live with her in the tenement building she now owned herself: a clash of environments if he had ever known one. She and Phelan had been married when she was nineteen and pregnant for the first and last time. The child had been stillborn.
“It’s funny, Father,” she went on finally, “but I can’t talk about him that way, me, the big talker.”
“But you said it wasn’t important,” he chided gently.
“I guess it was just that I didn’t want it to be important. I liked him a lot. I don’t even think Gus Muller was his right name. Gust—I always forgot the ‘t’ and he liked it. We met in the Duminy Bar I told you about on Ninth Avenue. He needed a room cheap and a job he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on. So we settled on him painting the apartment.” She looked at her hands where she had clasped them tightly on the table. “I slept with him that night. That sounds pretty raw, doesn’t it, Father?”
“Since you say it yourself,” he murmured. “What else? What did he do before he started drifting?”
She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. ‘I am who you think I am. That’s all you need to know. And when we’re together, it’s all I need to know.’ And the funny thing is, he was right. I didn’t care who he was. We were like two people cut loose in space, only I wasn’t afraid.”
“And yet you came to me Wednesday night and pretended you were still trying to help your husband.”
“I wasn’t pretending. I’d made up my mind—for Dan’s sake—to keep on trying even if I didn’t care any more.”
“Have you any idea what Muller was doing in the building where he died?”
“No. I used to hear him go out very early
in the morning—dawn. He’d work for me in the afternoons—and other places. He’d come home sometimes walking along with Carlos or carrying him on his shoulders. Home…a shirt, a razor, a toothbrush, and a pair of clean shorts hung up to dry on the back of the chair.”
“If the women gossiped to your husband they will to the police too, you know.”
“No. You’re wrong about that too, Father. They wouldn’t tell the police the time of day. It’s up to me what I tell them. Me and Dan.”
It was she who was wrong: one of her neighbors had already told the police that Phelan did not like Muller.
“They’re bound to ask questions,” he said, “the man living in your house.”
“It’s a back room, separate. Its own door. The john’s in the hall.”
They were both avoiding the real question. Phelan’s capacity for violence. McMahon made up his mind he would not be the one to bring it into the open. “You ought to go home and wait for your husband.”
“What if he doesn’t come home? The police will want to know why.”
“Could you tell them why?”
“No, but…”
“I’d just leave it at no, Mrs. Phelan.”
“I will, but they won’t, Father. Dan has an assault record. He cut up a man with a bottle once.”
“Over you?”
“Hell, no,” she said bitterly. “Over a dog that lifted his leg on Dan’s shoe.”
4
AT FIVE MINUTES PAST five McMahon approached the precinct headquarters. He noticed that one of the two white globes that hung on either side of the entrance had been smashed. It was odd, the association, but he thought of the words, “Love Power,” scratched on the sidewalk outside the doomed building. Not so odd. One was as sure a sign of the times as the other. He also saw Carlos and his mother before they saw him. Mrs. Morales gave the boy a push out the door ahead of her, but then, seeing the priest on the steps, she caught her son’s curly head and hugged him against her. Carlos responded as limply to affection as he did to abuse.
“He’s a good boy, Father, but sometimes I don’t know what to do with him.” When she spoke the gold of her teeth glittered.
The priest ruffled the boy’s hair with his hand.
“His brother, he is the bad one.” She jerked her head toward the station, which indicated that the older boy was in now with the police. “He hates the police. Why? They have a job to do like everybody else. He would like them to beat him, that’s how much he hates them. He was the same with his father. I do not understand. If you speak to him, Father, tell him, please, to be more polite?” The pleading of her voice was as ancient as motherhood.
“I will,” McMahon said. What he did not say was that Pedrito Morales had little more regard for priests than he did for the police. Or his own father. But she knew that too. The conversation was its own kind of ritual, not entirely false, but the forms barely holding together.
At the bottom of the steps she turned and called after him: “Father, he was a good man, Mr. Muller. Everybody wants he should have a nice funeral. You know?” By the rubbing together of her fingers she suggested money. “Come to my house, Father. The people liked him. They will all give something.” That, he felt, was genuine.
He asked for Brogan at the desk. The sergeant directed him to a room on the second floor. He went up by way of a staircase, the color and smell of which put him in mind of a cheap hotel. The windows were wire-meshed on the outside, sealing in the dirt of generations. He met Brogan and Lieutenant Traynor coming out of the room with Pedrito, a tall, skinny boy of eighteen, sallow and sullen, with a mop of black hair and a scraggle of beard.
The best he could do for him at the moment was to acknowledge an acquaintanceship. “Hello, Pedrito.”
The boy nodded curtly.
“Keep your nose clean, young fellow. We’ll be watching you,” Traynor said.
“Cochinos,” Pedrito snarled. Pigs. But by then he had reached the stairs.
“Makes you want to love them, doesn’t it?” Traynor said. He went on down the hall.
Brogan led the priest into the interrogation room where an officer was removing the tape from a recorder. They waited until he had left the room.
“So you had to bring Carlos in anyway,” McMahon said.
“Sí,” Brogan said. He searched a folder for the statements he wanted.
McMahon was not to be put off. “Why?”
Brogan shrugged. “The lieutenant didn’t like it, not the way the kid told it to us. The doorknobs were what really put him in a flap.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, Father, let me put it this way: he questioned the boy on whether Muller had molested him.”
McMahon’s temper snapped. “Balls.”
“Exactly.”
“Christ Jesus help us,” McMahon said, but he already knew he was being unreasonable. The luring of a child to an abandoned building: it could be construed that way. Even the monsignor’s first question was whether the man was a pervert.
Brogan half-sat on the desk. He indicated the chair to the priest. “What is it that bugs you, Father? You know yourself that a kid like Carlos, there’s nothing he’s going to learn from us he didn’t know from the street already.”
McMahon sat down and took in hand his own typed statement. What Brogan said was true: trying to shield the innocence of a child in Carlos’ environment was almost as impossible as the restoration of virginity. He read the statement and signed it.
“But you’re right,” Brogan said. “That wasn’t Muller’s trouble.”
“What was?”
Brogan shrugged. “Mrs. Phelan? Or vice versa. I have a notion she was hot for him. There’s gossip in the building. Even we can get to it. She picked him up in a bar, nestled him down in her back room. Like charity begins at home. Where was Phelan through all this? Where is Phelan?”
And what’s his problem? McMahon kept the thought to himself, but he suspected Brogan was doing the same thing. He asked, “Is Pedrito in the clear?”
“As far as the homicide, he has to be. He works on a machine assembly line. Twenty witnesses to where he was from six A.M. to three this afternoon. And he wasn’t a chum of the victim. That was Carlos’ idea. To a kid, I guess, everybody over fifteen is the same age, especially if they come to his birthday party. They all drank wine that night and it was then Muller got the idea of building a house of doors for the youngster. Pedrito went with him. If he gets into no worse trouble than swiping doors, I’ll settle.”
McMahon said, “Why are you a cop, Brogan?”
The young detective colored. “To stay out of the draft. I’ll take my law and order straight, Father.”
The priest was not sure why, but he felt a kind of respect for Brogan saying it.
“Phelan has an assault record, by the way,” Brogan added.
“Was he at the birthday party too?”
“No, but Mrs. Phelan was.”
“It makes you wonder why there was gossip, if she’s so popular with her tenants,” McMahon said, “and they’re not notoriously cooperative with the police, are they?”
“It’s pretty simple, Father—it’s not the infidelity, if that’s what it is. Homicide is something you can get put away for a long time. They don’t like Phelan.”
That had to be it, McMahon realized. Priscilla Phelan had not calculated the relative values of her Spanish-speaking friends. “Do you want me to go over Carlos’ story?”
“It won’t be necessary, unless you want to see it. You can go over to the house if you want to—I’ll fix it up—if you want to see his things. There’s not much there. He was traveling light, wherever he came from. A sign painter by his identification.”
McMahon shook his head: he did not want to go near the Phelan apartment.
Brogan tapped his statement with a pencil. “I just thought by this you might be interested.”
“I am,” McMahon said. “He got to me and I’m not sure why. Was it his courage? He w
as ready to die, but it was as though that was because he wanted to live, to live right up to and over the threshold. And he said he would like to know me. That always sets a man up, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does, Father.”
“There was more to him than what he left in that room, I feel pretty sure of that.”
“Then have a look at his things.”
“No. That’s your business. But you’re right. I’d like to know.”
“I’ll keep in touch with you, Father. Thanks for coming in.”
It was a good time of day, McMahon thought, reaching the street. Next to dawn he loved it the best, the last hours of the sun when its heat was spent but a golden haze hung over the city. The youngsters were playing stickball, and great fat women leaned out their windows watching for their men to come home from work. There were flags in the windows of almost half the apartments. No college deferments here. Brogan was not a young man whose insight should be underestimated: he would not say to many people in this neighborhood that he joined the force to avoid the army.
Crossing Ninth Avenue he decided to walk downtown a few blocks to Ferguson and Kelly’s funeral parlor. It was no new thing to him, trying to arbitrate the costs of a funeral: he generally did well until the family arrived to select the casket. This part of town, where the street markets commenced, was predominantly Italian. Sausages and cheeses hung in the windows over stacked canisters of olive oil, two-quart tins of tomatoes. The produce was all outdoors. The people were noisy and friendly and a priest was accepted as one of themselves, neither feared nor revered. It was a strange place for Ferguson and Kelly, but as he thought about it, he could not name an Italian in the undertaking business. That they left to the morbid Irish. But obviously in Italy Italians buried Italians. Could the circumstance here be the dominance of the Irish in the church? Since Muller was not a Catholic, or so he assumed, he would have to see Ferguson, a man he took to be of Scotch-Irish antecedence. He would rather have negotiated with Kelly. As he opened the door setting off the muted chimes, he wished he had telephoned. A typical McMahonism: taking the steps first and weighing the consequences only when he had no choice but to live up to them.
Where the Dark Streets Go Page 3
