Where the Dark Streets Go

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Where’s Carlos?” McMahon asked.

  “Home. He wiggle…like the girls, you know at the end?” Mrs. Morales covered her good teeth in self-conscious laughter.

  “You liked that part, did you?”

  Mrs. Morales rolled her eyes and sidled away from them.

  “Now I know what it’s all about,” Nim said.

  “Did the piano come?”

  “It certainly did. Now that was a lot. Doors came off hinges. People came out I’d never seen before. Words came out I’d never heard before.”

  “Where did you put it?”

  “In the icebox,” Nim said, and he laughed, the ridiculous image somehow appropriate. “Against the wall to the kitchen,” she said then. “In winter it’s warmer there and not so damp.”

  People were leaving them alone now. “You ought to go,” Nim said.

  “We’re merely talking.”

  “I know, but they want you too.”

  “What about the Robinson woman?”

  “I called her. Very Park Avenue: ‘Oh, yes, darling. I knew him well. Do come and see me.’ Joe—Father,” she quickly amended, “I can’t go alone. I thought I could. She invited me for cocktails and I asked if I could bring a friend.”

  “When?”

  “Today—after five.”

  “Let’s go then,” McMahon said. “Free drinks for artists and the clergy. Why not?”

  “It was presumptuous of me,” Nim said.

  McMahon said, “No games. Remember?”

  Nim nodded.

  He looked at his watch. “Five-thirty in front of the Metropolitan Museum.”

  McMahon wore his sport jacket and slacks and his black sweater. He did not have much of a wardrobe altogether, and little need until now for more than he had. On impulse, he put on the beads the flower child had given him in the Village. He took them off again and put them in his pocket until he got out of the house.

  “Have a good time,” the monsignor said as he went through the hall. “You’ve earned it, Joseph.” When he had almost reached the door, the old man called him back to the office. “Are you planning to go up home this spring?”

  “I hadn’t thought much about it, Monsignor.”

  “Well, let me know. There’s other places you could go. Mind, I’m not trying to get rid of you, but sometimes I have the feeling, Joseph, you’d like to be rid of us for a while.”

  “It’s the spring, Monsignor, and I’m a little tired. That’s all.”

  “Suit yourself, suit yourself.” The old man went back to the ledger open on the desk. It was auditing time and McMahon understood the pastor’s clinging to his bed that morning. He wished the vacation had not been mentioned, the fantasies it started in his mind: a few days’ freedom and three dollars and eighty cents in his pocket. But then the monsignor always gave him a generous gift out of the concert money.

  Other guests were arriving at the Park Avenue address at the same time as Nim and McMahon, and within the building—what in the old days was called a town house—a very large party was in progress. The maid taking wraps suggested the elevator although a marble staircase ascended to where most of the people were: laughter and the cadence of many voices and the tinkling sound of expensive glass. Some of the guests wore evening clothes.

  “What have you got us into?” McMahon said, steering Nim toward the staircase.

  “I’ll say this for Stu: no rags to riches for him. No, man. Riches to rags. I’m scared. I don’t know why, but I’m scared.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” McMahon said. “Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Ugh,” Nim said.

  “No. Humperdinck.”

  Nim made a face, but they too were able to arrive smiling at the balcony beyond which was the great living room where, as Nim said, Mrs. Robinson was having a few friends in to cocktails. People were gathered in clusters in the soft, sparkling light of the chandeliers, all making the sounds of the very rich, McMahon thought. There was not a guffaw in the house. It was like walking onto a motion-picture set, not that he had ever done that either, but it was the unreality of the genuine thing, nature imitating art. A waiter came up to them with champagne.

  Nim took a glass, but McMahon said, “I wonder if I might have Scotch instead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Savoir-faire,” Nim murmured. “I wonder how we find our hostess.”

  “We may never find her,” McMahon said, “and you know, it has just occurred to me, you could make a way of life out of this, just walking in on parties with the invited guests.”

  “It’s been done,” Nim said. “Here comes somebody. Stay with me, Joe.”

  The woman came, dark-haired and tall, with a kind of angular poise to her gait. She was sleek in black silk, shoulders bare and bare-V’d to the navel with bell-legged trousers that swished as she walked. She put her glass in the hand with the cigarette and offered Nim her free one. “I’m Andrea Robinson,” she said.

  “Nim Lavery. And this is my friend, Joseph McMahon.”

  “You are nice,” the woman said, giving him her hand as well as her long-lashed eyes. “Are you a painter? Do I know you?”

  “Miss Lavery is the painter,” McMahon said.

  “And you don’t know me either,” Nim said, almost belligerently. Then, in retreat: “I thought we could talk—when you said to come today. I didn’t know…”

  “But we can talk, my dear. When you called it seemed like a voice from the dead. Which in a way it is, isn’t it? What I mean to say, I was always insisting that Tom come to things like this—my perversity, for he loathed them. I wanted the fact established that I had a world of my own, and he could not have cared less.”

  McMahon was disconcerted at the ease with which she slipped into intimacy. As though it were a negligée. He was glad to see the waiter return with a bottle of Chivas Regal, a glass with ice and a bottle of soda on the tray.

  “Just the ice,” McMahon said, and he let the man half-fill the glass with whisky.

  “When was it that you and he were friends?” the Robinson woman asked Nim.

  “Last year and the year before.”

  “Were they good years for him?”

  “I think so,” Nim said.

  The woman smiled, showing the lines in her face that were concealed most of the time. “I’m sure they were.” She touched Nim’s arm with her fingertips, and McMahon for the first time could see Muller-Chase’s attraction to her. “And were they good years for you?”

  “The best,” Nim said.

  “Then I’m glad for you—and I suppose for all his women, now that he is gone.”

  “There’s only one question really, Mrs. Robinson,” Nim said. “Do you know where his paintings are?”

  “I would have asked you the same thing. It’s eight years since I last saw him. His loft was as bare as the steppes of Asia, all of his canvases crated. I asked him where they were going. To the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. You do that, I said, and I’ll jump in after them. But you can jump in and out of things so easily, Andrea, he said, and I think I knew then that I would not see him any more.”

  “Did you?” McMahon asked.

  “Not ever. But I understand now I must have barely missed him at a gallery opening two weeks ago. Or did I see him and not recognize the beard? I have the feeling I did. And I can’t help wondering if seeing me, he didn’t duck out. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now and I’m glad. You can’t go home again. Maybe I wasn’t home to him, but I was something for a few years.” She became flippant again. “It’s like a French novel, isn’t it, mistresses comparing notes?”

  A tall man came up behind her, too young to be her husband, McMahon thought. Or too young to be a trustee of a university. He kissed the back of her neck. She whirled around, welcoming the touch even before she knew whose it was. “Chet, how nice that you could come.” To Nim and McMahon she said, “Darlings, do go in. I’ll come soon and introduce you.”

  She drifted from them, taking the y
oung man whom she had not introduced with her by the hand to greet more people emerging from the elevator.

  “Let’s go,” Nim said.

  “No. Let’s see it through,” McMahon said.

  “There isn’t anything to see through. Not that I want to look at any more. I’m not as brave as I thought I was.” She moved toward the stairs, but the newly arriving guests blocked her way.

  “Nim, are you afraid we might meet Wallenstein again?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t want him to think you’re chasing after him. You don’t want to have to remind him of his promise.”

  “It wasn’t a promise.”

  “It’s the only kind of promise these people make, you silly girl.”

  “It’s all so…decadent,” Nim said.

  “Don’t you remember—that’s what you liked about his house when we were there.”

  “But this is so much more. And I was hurt, her talking that way about Stu.” She looked up at McMahon. “You like it here, don’t you?”

  “I like the booze,” he said. His glass was almost empty.

  “It isn’t only that.”

  “And I want to know.”

  Nim finished her champagne and before she could find a place to put the glass a waiter came and replenished it. “I like this too,” she said, “but one shouldn’t get too fond of it.”

  “You sound like Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg.”

  They found a corner for themselves in the living room, a corner lined with books, leather-bound classics, uncut, McMahon suspected, and then contemplated himself for a moment, this habit of supporting his own morale by criticizing the mores of the rich.

  “You’re always surprising me, the things you know,” Nim said.

  “Like what?”

  “The Battle of Fredericksburg.”

  “I’m a kind of fraud,” he said, “making the most of bits and pieces. That I know, for example, because Lee actually said it of the Battle of Marye’s Heights where the Irish Brigade was decimated. Charge after charge—absolutely pointless. They had no hope of taking the Heights. Utter madness. That was when Lee is supposed to have said, ‘It’s fortunate that war’s so terrible. We might become too fond of it.’”

  McMahon had become aware while talking of a gray-bearded man edging his way toward them away from the group he had been with. “What Lee said was—if you’ll forgive the intrusion—‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’ I’m Jacob Burke. I’m a Civil War buff and I overheard. You don’t mind?”

  “No.” McMahon introduced himself and Nim.

  “What do you think Meagher had in mind? I’m pretty sure it was Meagher that led the charge.”

  “Thomas Francis Meagher,” McMahon said. “One of the Young Ireland émigrés of 1848. And I would think he had in mind proving that the Irish were not cowards. They’d had a rotten war record, as you know.”

  “Yes, yes, and they had reason—the inequity of the draft and all that. Not quite the same today, but something to the comparison. But you see, the question I ask: was it not simply that Meagher was a bad general? Pride, of course, but a bad field officer. And then I suggest, it’s what you’ve done with history—McMahon, you say—your inverted Irish pride that takes satisfaction in that debacle. The lost cause mystique, hopeless heroism.”

  “You may have something,” McMahon said. “The reason I happen to know the story: it’s a legend the old soldiers tell whenever the Sixty-Ninth Division gets together.”

  “It’s a great pity there are old soldiers left to perpetuate such legends,” Burke said. “That’s how they make young soldiers.” And with that he nodded formally and went back to his own group.

  “Now him I dig,” Nim said.

  “I’m sure there are others if we just charge in,” McMahon said.

  “Remember the Irish at Marye’s Heights.”

  If he got a little drunk it would be very easy, McMahon thought. But he did not want to do that. He wanted to know more about their hostess because the fact had emerged that she was the first person they had come on from Muller-Chase’s past who might have seen him within a week of his death. He thought about Rosenberg’s note on the Tchelitchew affair, Muller’s: a man should not run from the devil. He should open his arms.

  “Nim, can you see your friend Stu in this room?”

  “You’re psychic—or intuitive maybe. Something. That’s what I was trying to do right now. He’d be going around, his hands behind his back, making faces at all the portraits on the wall. Then he’d go off through the house looking for young people. There aren’t any.”

  “We haven’t looked through the house,” McMahon said.

  “I suppose we could,” Nim said tentatively.

  “Wait till I get a refill.” There was a circular bar in the middle of the room.

  When he returned, Nim said, “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “She could have seen him at the opening. Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Did she go to it to look for him? I might have, you know. Sometimes I think I wanted to, but I was too proud to look for him. She’d have known his hangup on Tchelitchew.”

  “Let’s just look and listen,” McMahon said.

  “Stop, look and listen,” Nim said. “Or maybe just look, listen and stop. Maybe that’s best.”

  McMahon said, “When I was going to high school I used to race a train to the crossing every morning. If I didn’t make it ahead of the train I was late for first class.”

  “If you hadn’t made it, I should think you’d’ve been late for the last class also,” she said.

  McMahon laughed.

  “Did you always want to be a priest?”

  “No. Just most of the time.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Upstate—near Albany.”

  “Family?”

  “Father and mother, both dead now. Two sisters—one in Boston married to a doctor. One a nun.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He worked on the New York Central, a conductor.”

  “Working class. I like that,” Nim said.

  “I think you’ve said that before—working class and the filthy rich.”

  “So today I have the best of two worlds.”

  On the steps they met Mrs. Robinson. “You’re not going so soon? We haven’t really talked at all.”

  What she meant, McMahon felt, was that she intended them to go now. He sensed a subtle imperative. He chanced then a gambit that implied an intimate knowledge of her circle. “I thought maybe Mr. Wallenstein might be here.”

  “I thought so too. Not even an RSVP, which isn’t like him. But it is really. Everything bores him.”

  “Except Tchelitchew,” McMahon said.

  Did she tense a little at the name? He could not be sure. “He must bore him too now, for Wally to sell off the drawings.”

  “Did Wallenstein know Chase?”

  This time her reaction was direct: “Are you a policeman, Mr. McMahon?”

  “Good God, no. But I’d better watch that. I sound like one, don’t I? I’m a musician.” He had said too much and carried the whole thing off badly and he knew it.

  “I don’t mind the police,” Mrs. Robinson said, “but I do like to see their identification.” She gathered the folds of her silken trousers. “It’s been so nice meeting you both.” She swept past them.

  “Let’s go,” Nim said.

  “I guess we’d better after that.”

  At the foot of the stairs they met someone McMahon had not expected to meet, Brogan, and another detective, giving their hats to the maid. Brogan arched his eyebrows and looked from McMahon to Nim and then back at the priest again. “It’s a small world.”

  “Isn’t it?” McMahon murmured.

  “Do you know Father McMahon? Detective Tomasino.” Brogan contracted his introduction.

  McMahon
had no choice but to introduce Nim to them both.

  “Miss Lavery,” Brogan said. “Mrs. Robinson told me on the phone that you’d be here. It’s just Father McMahon I didn’t expect.”

  It had had to come sooner or later, McMahon realized. So did Nim, for she said: “It was I who went to Father McMahon. I thought the man he found might have been someone I’d known.”

  “Father was a good one to go to,” Brogan said easily, “if you weren’t going to come to the police.” He intercepted the maid and asked her if there was a place they could talk by themselves.

  She led them to a room beneath the staircase, the library. “Will I bring you cocktails, sir?”

  “That’d be grand,” Brogan said, having caught the lilt in her voice. “Bourbon for me and my partner. Scotch for Father, and the young lady?”

  Nim shook her head.

  Brogan tried hard to play the comfortable host. “Sit down, sit down. That set the Irish lass back a bit, me calling you Father.”

  “If she’s never set back more,” McMahon said, “she’ll bear up under the shock.”

  “Why didn’t you come to the police, miss?”

  “I had nothing to tell you.”

  “You could’ve told us his name.”

  “I didn’t know his real name either. Not then.”

  Brogan turned to the priest. “Father, you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing here?”

  “We were trying to find out if Chase left any paintings. Just trying to find out.”

  “Did you?”

  “It begins to look as though he destroyed them all.”

  “If there ever were any. I have a feeling we’d know it by now after that piece in yesterday’s paper. I’m no great authority, but it seems to me if somebody paints a picture, he wants people to see it. For Christ’s sake, when I was a kid I took home every chimney I ever made smoke come out of. My mother’s still got one of them hanging in the kitchen.”

  Nim laughed. So did McMahon. Brogan was human again. To McMahon he said: “Is this the girl—the name you mentioned in your statement?”

  “Nim,” McMahon said.