by Gerry Boyle
When I came through the door into the newsroom, Charlene was coming down the aisle. I didn’t slow down and she got out of the way. Halfway across the room, I spotted Albert’s head beyond his partition. When I turned the corner, he was easing himself into his chair.
“McMorrow,” he said, startled. “What’s this I hear about—”
“I won’t be filing a story today.”
“Well, I heard you were mixed up in some crazy thing and I’d already decided that—”
“I’m not filing because I’m quitting,” I said.
I stood in front of his desk. He stood too.
“I didn’t think it’d work out,” Albert said. “You’re just too much of a loose cannon, McMorrow.”
“I’m not a loose cannon. The problem is that your paper is muzzled. The place has sold out, if it ever had anything to sell.”
“Hey, wait a minute there—”
“And that story today on Donna Marchant was an abomination. I’d love to see if Archambault could actually produce any of these alleged sources. But the worst thing is, here you have this poor young woman who was killed, her daughter left with no mother at all, she was trying to get away from this abusive son of a bitch, and you do a story saying what a slut she was? What the hell is that?”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you, McMorrow.”
“And you can’t. Because there’s no way to explain it. Except as lazy, slipshod, fourth-rate journalism.”
“Well, I’m sorry we can’t all be the New York Times,” Albert said. “But you listen to me, Mr. Hotshot—”
“You could try to be the New York Times,” I said. “You just choose not to. This paper is a cowardly bully.”
I turned on my heel and got around the corner of the partition before I realized I still had the laptop under my arm. I turned on my heel again, walked back to Albert’s office, where he still was standing. Albert reached for the phone, as if to call Security. I dropped the computer on his desk and left again.
It would have been a better exit the first time.
21
I sat in the car on Main Street, my heart still pounding. I now had only one assignment, and it wasn’t to cover the courts. It was to do Donna Marchant justice. Of some sort.
As I sat there, I considered exactly what it was that was wrong. It was like the whole thing had been trivialized. Donna had been stamped as trash. Jeff had been stamped a murderer, but not a real murderer. To be a real murderer, you have to take a life of consequence. Donna’s life had been dismissed, written off. They might lock Jeff up for twenty years, but that wasn’t enough if they didn’t treat Donna with respect.
Feeling as if I’d just been cut loose, I started the car and drove up Main Street, onto Elm, took a left at a tire garage, and then down onto a street of big apartment blocks with wooden porches clinging to their fronts. On this glorious June day, feral kids were clinging to the porches. Mom was in front of the tube and Dad was on the run, dodging child support.
In this trough of domestic bliss was nestled The Mansion, Jeff’s favorite haunt. The bar was on the first floor. Rooms for drugs and drunks and girls were conveniently located upstairs. A full-service resort, only forty-five minutes from Camden.
I pulled the Olds over in front of the apartment block next to the bar. A couple of guys were leaning against the wall next to the building’s front door. One was thin like a cadaver, with a mangy beard. The other was heavier, with an eye patch and a Bud can half-wrapped in a paper bag.
The Pirates of Penzance.
“How ya doing?” I said.
The skinny one grunted.
I headed up the sidewalk. A barefoot toddler in diapers and a dirty white T-shirt scurried around the corner and came running toward me. I waited for the vigilant parent to follow. And waited some more. The kid disappeared, unattended, around the other corner of the building. I walked up to the open front door of The Mansion and went in.
It was one thirty and the bar was half full. I’d long ago learned that morning or early afternoon was the best time to visit places like this. The fighters hadn’t shown up yet, or if they had, they were still moving slowly. In a place like The Mansion, that half-second advantage could save you your teeth.
I took an empty stool at the bar. The bartender, a woman with muscles on her arms and tattoos on her muscles, looked away from the television long enough to catch my eye.
“Bud,” I said.
Tea was not on the menu.
The Bud was a longneck, thumped wordlessly on the scarred wooden bar. There were no glasses. The television show was an old sitcom, but nobody seemed to care. Nobody asked how I’d hurt my face.
I sipped the beer and it went down surprisingly easy. After three or four sips, I looked around.
To my left were a couple of young guys in jeans and dark T-shirts.
They were together, maybe laborers who had gotten off early and didn’t want to go home. Beyond them was an old mummy of a man sitting in front of a shot and a beer. If he was still here at four, he wouldn’t be sitting. In a year, he wouldn’t be sitting anywhere.
On my right were three or four regulars, guys in their thirties. They talked to the bartender and, still staring at the television, she murmured unintelligible responses that apparently sufficed. These four were tougher than the others, leaner and stronger. Even sitting down, they had that hair-trigger stance, that tension that erupts into violence without warning.
I glanced at them. They glanced back. I was glad I hadn’t worn oxford cloth and khakis.
When there was an inch left in my beer, the bartender lifted her head in my direction. I nodded and finished the last gulp. The second beer hit the bar before the empty.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yup,” the bartender said.
I drank the second beer more slowly, and the four guys drank slowly too. One of them got up and went to the jukebox and plunked in a coin. The machine clicked and then the music blared, a barrage of heavy metal. The bartender turned up the television.
The music man sat down at the other end of the three, closer to me. I nodded to him and he nodded back. He was trying to make me. A drug cop? A liquor-enforcement cop? A guy looking to buy coke? A guy looking for a girl?
“How ya doing?” I said.
“Good,” he said. “How ’bout yourself?”
“Fine.”
“Been in here before?”
“Not during the day,” I said.
“Extra thirsty today?”
He looked at me. The other three listened. The bartender, eyes on the TV, didn’t miss a word.
“Hoping to meet up with somebody.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s that?”
I lifted my beer and sipped. They waited.
“Jeff Tanner,” I said. “You seen him?”
His face, taut and mustached with dark, narrow-set eyes, showed nothing.
“Friend of yours?”
I shrugged.
“Not really. I just need to talk to him.”
“Why’s that?”
“We knew this girl,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? Who’s that?”
“Donna Marchant.”
This time his eyes flickered. The bartender turned slowly around to see me. The other three watched intently.
“The girl who got killed,” I said. “You knew her?”
“I knew her,” the bartender said. “What are you? A cop?”
“Nope. I just knew her a little.”
“So what are you?” the bartender pressed.
“A friend of Donna’s.”
“So why you looking for Jeff?” the guy said.
“To talk,” I said.
I realized that no one else in the bar was talking. Even the mummified man had turned to watch and listen.
“What do you want to talk to him about?” the bartender said.
“Donna,” I said.
“What about her?” she said.
I took a sip of beer. T
he guy on my right was watching intently, like a stalking animal.
“I want to know if he killed her,” I said.
“You think he’s gonna tell you?” the guy blurted.
“He doesn’t have to. I’ll know by his eyes.”
I looked at him and I didn’t flinch. He looked back, not blinking. He understood.
“What if he says he did?” the guy said, more softly.
“I don’t know. Play it by ear.”
He thought for a moment.
“I know who you are,” he said suddenly.
The rest of the bar watched and waited.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re the guy who smashed his mouth all up. Ain’tcha? He said his old lady was hooking up with some guy. From the newspaper or something. That you?”
I nodded.
“And you cut his mouth all up. Hit him with something.”
I shrugged.
“He had a pipe.”
“Yeah, you’re the guy.”
He got up from the stool slowly, his arms uncoiling from the bar. I sat still as he moved toward me. If he took me off the stool, I was done. I lifted my beer to my mouth, then put it back on the bar. He leaned close.
“Don’t worry. He was no buddy of mine,” the guy said. “But I ain’t seen him. When I saw him all cut to shit, you know what I did?”
I shrugged. Waited. He let the silence hang.
“I laughed,” he said.
In a different mood, at a different moment, he could take my head right off my shoulders. I tried to hold back a sigh of relief.
“So you think he took off?” I said.
“No, he’s around. Old Jeffy wouldn’t go too far. He’s got a bit of a habit, you know?”
He put his finger to the side of his nose.
“And he’s a sleaze. Kind of guy, somebody scores and there he is, sniffs it out. Always short on cash but long on nose. No. I laughed when I saw him all cut up. He didn’t like it, but what was he gonna do? Take a swing at me?”
He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like a steel clamp. The question was rhetorical.
I grinned slightly. He gave my shoulder a pat and nodded to the bartender. She put another Bud down in front of me.
“That’s for giving me a good laugh, my friend,” the guy said.
“Anytime,” I said.
“Hey, what’d you do to your face?”
“A little cut,” I said.
“Wrong end of that one?”
“Something like that,” I said.
He smiled, turned away, and turned back.
“Hey, let me know what you find out?” he said.
I nodded, and felt a rivulet of sweat running down my back. He went back to his friends and their conversation, but I felt as if all the eyes were still on me. The bartender lit a cigarette and watched the television. I finished my beer and started on my freebie. The bartender turned away from the bar and lifted a case of empties off the floor. As she started for the back of the room, she caught my eye. I waited a respectable length of time and followed, going into the men’s room first.
When I came out, she was waiting in the dimly lit hall.
“Foxy’s,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Foxy’s. The porn place. If you’re looking for Tanner.”
“He goes there?” I asked.
“His nose isn’t the only habit he has,” she said.
“Okay.”
“And if anybody asks, I never saw you. I knew Donna and she was a sweetheart. I’d kill him myself if I thought I could get away with it.”
“I’m not planning on killing anybody.”
“Well, that son of a bitch used her bad. It’s about time he got it back. I swear, I’d do it if I could.”
I looked into her eyes, big and black and brimming with hate and vengeance. And I believed her.
She went back to the bar. I counted to twenty and followed. The gang was all there except the mummified man, who was napping, his shrunken head on his arms and his withered arms on the bar. I put down a ten-dollar bill and headed for the door. My newfound friend gave me a farewell salute.
“You’ll know by his eyes, man,” the big guy said. “I like that.”
It had been such a fun-filled day: Leaman, Albert, making new friends in the bar. A visit to a porn shop? Why stop when I was on a roll?
Foxy’s was in the north end of town, in a back-street building that had been a working-class tenement. I’d driven by the place before, seen the guys disappear sheepishly through the door to do whatever it was they did behind the blacked-out windows and then other guys sheepishly come back out.
It seemed a strange compulsion. But it seemed stranger still on a radiant June day like this.
When I pulled up in front of the building, there were two cars in the lot and two more across the street. As I walked toward the door, it opened and a fortyish balding guy came out, squinting into the glare. He looked down at the ground as we passed, and I pushed the door open and slipped inside.
The door opened into a dimly lit room, with humming fluorescent lights in the ceiling and dirty rust-colored carpet on the floor. The walls were covered with movie packages that showed naked men and women frozen in grotesque parodies of passion. It was like an X-rated wax museum, but as I moved slowly across the room, something behind me stirred.
“Can I help you find anything?” a voice said.
I turned. There was a counter to the left of the door and a chubby kid behind the counter.
“Yeah, the way out,” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“Just looking around,” I said.
“Go right ahead,” he said. “Those are our for-sale movies, the ones on the wall behind you. The rental movies are through that door. But the for-sale movies are a better buy. Almost the same price. Never been viewed.”
He said it as if they might contain some kind of revelation, sleazy Dead Sea scrolls. I didn’t think so.
I walked into the next room and it was more of the same. I scanned the walls, wondering who these people were, whether their parents knew what they did for a living. My daughter, she’s an actress. Out in California.
I went back to the first room and the kid behind the counter looked up and smiled helpfully, giving my bandage only a fleeting glance. Nice job, I thought. A few years of this and you’ll have one hell of a résumé.
There was a curtained doorway next to his counter, a display case of movies with numbers.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The viewing booths,” he said. “Tokens are a quarter. Actually, you can use quarters or tokens. What they do is basically give you a minute and a half.”
I pulled the curtain aside and looked down a dank, dark hallway. There were booths along one side, lined up like confessionals in a sewer. From somewhere in there came the sound of someone shrieking. I figured it was only a movie, but I wasn’t sure.
“We buy back unused tokens,” the kid said as I closed the curtain.
“That’s okay,” I said. “What I’m really wondering is if you know a friend of mine.”
“Our clients are confidential.”
“Oh, I know. But I’d really like to see this guy. I’ve been away for a few years and he moves so much, I can’t find where he’s living.”
The kid looked at me.
“You a cop?”
“Nope. And this guy, I know he comes in here a lot. I’ve heard he’s a very regular customer. Heck of a good guy. I’m sure you know him.”
The kid waited. He was listening.
“His name’s Jeff Tanner.”
“You want to leave him a message, if an individual by that name comes in, I could give it to him,” he said.
I smiled.
“I’m sort of hard to get ahold of. What I was hoping was to find out where he lived so I could just pop in and see him. How ’bout it? I’m gonna find him anyway. You can make some money on the situation,
or I can give it to somebody else.”
I took my wallet out of my back pocket and two twenties out of the wallet. I put one on the counter. The kid looked at it and sniffed. I put down the other.
“Confidential, of course,” I said.
“One more,” the kid said.
I dropped it on the other two. He scooped them up and slipped out of his chair and went to a computer terminal. Tapped a few keys and stared at the screen. As I waited, a balding guy brushed through the curtain and yanked the door open and left. The kid was scribbling on a piece of paper, which he then slid across the counter to me. I stuck it in my pocket.
“I never saw you,” he said.
“How many addresses do you have?”
“Two,” he said.
“Both of them on here?”
“No.”
“Give me both. I’d also love to know if regular customers come here at a certain time of day, certain day of the week.”
“One more,” the kid said.
I put it down and he scooped it up.
“Usually weekdays. Between five and six.”
“Thursdays?”
“Most days.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” the kid said.
I went to the door and started to open it, and the glare of the afternoon sun flooded in.
“So who is it who’s looking for him?” the kid said, back in his chair.
“His minister,” I said. “He’s strayed from the flock.”
Both addresses were within walking distance, which may have been coincidence but I doubted it. Jeff liked his women subservient and one-dimensional. With Donna gone, he probably had gone back to his last girlfriend, who was inflatable with soft skin of genuine vinyl.
I left the car at Foxy’s and walked. It was a nice day for a stroll, even on this tattered boulevard. I walked up the block, past the beat-up tenements, the tiny yards scuffed smooth by kids and cars and dog chains. A couple of mutts barked, but without conviction. A little girl with jelly on her face watched me from a porch and then scurried inside the open, screenless door. Another fifty yards up the street, a school bus pulled up, its brakes screeching. The door slammed open and five or six kids tumbled down the steps and onto the street. The girls were a little older than Donna’s Adrianna and they were carrying jump ropes, coiled like lariats. The boys had baseball gloves. One of them turned back as the bus pulled away and gave one of his schoolmates the finger.
