Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  “Scrambled, home fries, whole-wheat toast, and tea.”

  “My treat today,” Belle said. “You and Clair and your friend.”

  “Then I’ll have sausage, too,” I said.

  She looked at me, her cheeks rosy from the heat of the grill.

  “You break Billy’s other arm, steak and eggs on me.”

  We ate first, talked after. Belle refilled their coffees, brought me a second pot of tea. They listened as I told them about Slick and the Galway hotel, Sergeant Cook and their denials, their alibi.

  “Might be worth asking him ourselves,” Louis said.

  I pulled up the street view of the tenement on Intervale Street, held up my phone, told them about the sunglasses.

  “Six-eleven Intervale, number three,” I said.

  “Ground floor would be easier,” Clair said.

  “In a perfect world,” I said.

  “She lives there with him?” Louis said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They were fighting at the hotel. I guess another woman was texting him pictures of herself. The G-Block gang is based at a project a half mile away.”

  We paused as two older men sat at the next booth. They looked like farmers: ball caps, dark blue Dickies, ruddy faces. Belle came with coffee and one of them said, “How you doin’ today, dear?”

  Boston gangbangers and Prosperity, Maine. Drugs and guns: the common denominators.

  “Need to do some reconnaissance,” Clair said.

  “But not you,” Louis said to him.

  Clair nodded.

  “I stay,” he said. “If something went wrong up here, Billy and the boys, it wouldn’t be enough to have—”

  “Me alone?” I said.

  “No offense,” Clair said.

  “Not that you’re not capable,” Louis said. “For a reporter.”

  “Thanks—I think.”

  “The girl first,” Clair said. “Just talk to her. See if that leads to the boyfriend.”

  “Get there fast,” Louis said. “While she’s still pissed-off.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 8:10. Three hours to Boston.

  “Need a rental,” Louis said. “Can’t roll with a Maine pickup truck. In Iraq, the Special Forces guys drove old beat-up minivans. Blended right in.”

  That would add an hour, with a stop at the Portland Jetport for the car. Leave now, be in Dorchester by noon. I looked at Clair. He was gathering himself up, taking a last drink of coffee.

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Sure as shooting,” he said.

  We took Louis’s Jeep, the dog in his place in the backseat. Louis was quiet, his eyes fixed to the road as we sped south out of Waldo County. We drove seventy on the back roads, swerved left to sweep by slower cars and trucks. Coming into Augusta, Louis concentrated like a race-car driver as he passed on the left and right, slipped into spaces between cars, rode on their bumpers until they pulled over.

  “We’ll get there,” I said, as he wove his way through traffic on the approach to the interstate.

  “Once you know your mission, your job is to execute and get out,” Louis said. “We miss this lady by five minutes, we’re making it up from that point on.”

  “We’re making it up anyway.”

  “Not me,” Louis said. “Plan’s broken down into steps. Execute each step and we achieve our objective. We improvise when there’s a busted play. We don’t improvise to start off.”

  I didn’t answer. We merged onto the interstate and Louis hit the gas, the Jeep winding up to eighty. The dog got to his feet on the seat and Louis opened the back passenger window six inches. The dog stuck his nose out and sniffed.

  “He knows,” Louis said.

  “Knows what?” I said.

  “It’s almost time to rock and roll.”

  “What’s his job?”

  “Intimidation,” Louis said.

  We drove the thirty miles to Brunswick in twenty minutes, nobody speaking, the dog back on the seat. Just north of Freeport I said, “You don’t have to do any of this.”

  “Don’t have to do anything,” Louis said.

  I waited. Five miles. Ten miles, the Jeep eating up the miles, big tires whirring.

  “Thing is,” Louis said, as though there had been no pause in the conversation, “messed up as that war was, and they all are in their own way, it was the most alive I’d ever felt.”

  I looked at him, his dark brooding eyes still fixed on the road, one hand on the top of the wheel.

  “Connected to my squad like I’d never been connected to anybody before. Any day you could die, and some people did. But if you made it, it was like all of the crap was scraped away. The purpose of life was to survive, help your buddies make it, kill anybody who stood in the way of you living another day.”

  “Life stripped down to its core,” I said.

  “Because what is the purpose of it?” Louis said. “To make more money? Buy a bigger car? Lie on a beach someplace and stare at the water? Is that what we’re here for?”

  He didn’t expect a reply.

  “My grandfather, he was CEO of a company that makes wire. Still does. From tiny filaments to the copper wire inside big electrical cables. He made wire and he made money, a real lot of it, and he went to meetings about how to make more and better wire and more money, and meetings about more meetings.”

  “What did he do for fun?” I said.

  “I just told you.”

  “What about your grandmother?”

  “She waited for him to get home. And to retire.”

  We were north of Portland now, the traffic heavier, cars moving in a sixty-mile-an-hour procession, clouds building on the southern horizon like mountains. Louis looked lost in thought, or maybe he was done.

  “Your dad a lawyer, your grandfather a CEO. What did they all think when you joined up?”

  “Thought they’d failed. How’d a Longfellow turn out to be such a screw-up. Boarding school, where my dad and grandfather went. A couple years of bad grades in a fancy college. Because I couldn’t buy that any of it mattered. Why was I doing this? Was this all that life was? Another paper? Another exam? Get good grades so I could get a job, make money, go to meetings, buy a bigger house, a bigger car, wait to retire, retire and die? They said I was depressed, but I wasn’t.”

  “So, you enlisted?”

  “Me and the other square pegs.”

  “But you liked them.”

  “I loved them. I’d kill for them and them for me. And we did.”

  “Hard to match that in civilian life.”

  “Impossible,” Louis said. “But this comes close.”

  We parked the big-wheeled Jeep in the Portland Jetport lot and Louis and the dog waited as I walked across to the car rental lot. The young guy behind the counter had his hair flipped up in front and smelled like cologne. I told him we wanted an SUV, a big one, with privacy glass.

  He searched on his computer, typed a lot, finally looked up.

  “I have a Chevy Tahoe,” he said. “It’s got the privacy package. Like the Secret Service uses. Except we can’t get you the bulletproof glass.”

  The guy grinned.

  “Too bad,” I said.

  I didn’t grin back.

  The Tahoe was white with Florida plates, the windows blacked out. I parked by the Jeep and Louis loaded in an army duffel, which he’d packed. Then he went to the glove box of the Jeep and took out a small black rectangular thing, like a cell phone. A stun gun.

  He got in and said, “Cell phones off.”

  I looked at him.

  “Trace you by the towers.”

  I powered my phone off and drove, the dog sniffing the new seat, circling to get comfortable. Traffic was light south of the city and the truck was big and fast and quiet. Louis was quiet, too, all the way to Portsmouth. We looked out from the bridge, saw powerboats on the Piscataqua River, their wakes showing like contrails behind jets.

  I felt like I was worlds away from Prosperity, Maine,
but, oddly, not from Abram, murdered and defaced. It was like I was plunging headlong into a place where that sort of atrocity was conceivable, committed in the name of business or revenge.

  Coming down off the bridge, I said, “So tell me about this plan—the one with the steps.”

  Louis did.

  27

  Dorchester is south of the city center, where it hugs the shoreline along Route 1. With Louis reading directions off of his phone, I swung off at Columbia Road and continued south. It was mostly triple-deckers, with restaurants and hair salons, pharmacies and liquor stores sprinkled here and there. Intervale Street was one-way, the wrong way, so I went three streets down and took a right, backtracked, and took another right.

  Louis watched the rain, the wipers slapping. The street numbers climbed and Louis said, “Slow,” and we approached No. 611, rolled past.

  It was a three-decker with porches on the front, pale green with cream trim. The paint was peeling, and there was a sign on the post by the front door that said POSTED—NO TRESPASSING. The yard was overgrown and there was a drive to the side with a gated chain-link fence. At the back of the driveway two cars were parked, both small sedans. One looked like it had been there for months.

  No Toyota SUV.

  “Let’s go,” Louis said.

  I stopped the truck and backed up. Turned into the driveway and pulled through the gate. I parked to the side and we got out, the dog whining out the cracked windows at being left behind.

  The first-floor windows were covered with security bars. There was an entrance on the driveway side, one on the front porch. We walked to the side entrance, opened the metal door, and stepped in. There were two mailboxes, junk mail scattered on the floor beneath them. One box said FRANKLIN APT. 3. The staircase was to the rear, and we walked up to the second-floor landing and paused. There was a television on there, a game show in Spanish. We moved quickly but quietly up the next two flights and stopped.

  There was a sign that said TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES, and they had. There were work boots, Air Jordans, running shoes, and tall pink rubber boots you would wear in the rain. They were all neatly arranged. Fastidious. We moved to the door and listened. Heard another television, this one in English. A talk show.

  I looked at Louis. He nodded.

  I knocked. We waited.

  There were footsteps, a woman’s voice saying, “Who’s that?”

  I said, “My name’s Jack McMorrow. I’m from Maine. I’m looking to speak to Gucci.”

  No response, and then we heard a chain rattling and the door opened, the chain still on.

  A young black woman looked out. She was very pretty, hair straight and parted on the side. Wary but curious.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “I’m Jack McMorrow. This is Louis.”

  “What are you, cops?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re not cops. I’m a reporter.”

  She looked at me, then at Louis.

  “What’s he?”

  “My assistant,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I need to talk. To Slick.”

  “We aren’t together anymore,” Gucci said, and started to close the door. I held it open and said, “That’s okay. We don’t need to talk to you. But we need to see Slick.”

  “I have nothing to do with him,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought you were together, that you stayed with him in Galway, Maine.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m from there. Somebody told me.”

  She looked doubtful but I kept talking.

  “Things went south? While you were in Maine?” I said.

  She hesitated, looked closer. “You could say that. Is this for some story?”

  “No, just very deep background. Totally off the record, I absolutely promise. So where is Slick now?”

  A long pause, Gucci sizing me up—the situation, the possibility for revenge versus the risk of ratting him out.

  “He’s with her,” Gucci said.

  Yes, I thought.

  “If he wants to go with some piece of trash, that’s his problem, you know what I’m saying? I’m taking my boards for RN. As in registered nurse. And I’m Keisha in the hospital, not Gucci, by the way. That girl, she’s a crackhead. In a coupla years she’s gonna look like you hit her with an ugly stick. You seen those people. Before and after?”

  “Right. Does a number on you,” I said. “Can’t understand what he’s thinking, I have to say. A crackhead or you? Man, his mistake.”

  Gucci rolled her eyes.

  “But, listen, would you mind taking the chain down? Can we just talk?”

  She hesitated, then closed the door. The chain rattled and she opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. She was wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt that said MASS GENERAL 10K, 2014. Built like a ballet dancer and looked like Halle Berry. She could play the nurse in a movie.

  “So what do you want to know?” Gucci said.

  “I really need to talk to him. Did you guys come right back here?”

  “I did. Grabbed the bus in Portland. No offense, but Maine gave me the creeps. Nothing but woods, and at night it’s pitch-dark and cold, and that town, there’s, like, nothing open after nine o’clock, and people looking at me like maybe I’m Beyoncé, hard to tell because all black women look the same.”

  “Yeah, well, Maine’s not for everybody,” I said. “So Slick didn’t come back with you?”

  “Not with me. I didn’t want to be in the same car with that lying sack anymore. I told him, just let me off here. What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “AJ and Trigger.”

  She looked at me, then at Louis.

  “You sure you aren’t cops?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Well, okay, but like I told the real cops, I don’t know anything about those guys. Or him, really. Thought I did, but turned out I was wrong. You know he’s a smart guy, underneath the thug life. You sure this isn’t gonna end up in some story?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Why should I believe you?”

  She nodded toward Louis.

  “Or him?”

  “Because I don’t lie,” I said. “And he doesn’t either.”

  Gucci looked at us, from one to the other. Back again. She ended with her gaze locked on mine. Waited and then said, “Okay. First time we went out, he’s talking about poetry and history and all this, people like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, stuff from English class, you know? And he’s comparing them to Tupac and Akon, Lil Wayne. I said, ‘Your crew know about this, mister college professor?’ He said, ‘No, I’m telling you about my secret life, stuff goes on in my head.’ ”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “You know what Slick’s problem is?” she said.

  “No.”

  “He won’t buckle. Won’t bend for nobody, ever, not for a second. Not in school, not on the street, nowhere.”

  “Running drugs and guns isn’t bending?” I said.

  “For Slick, it’s looking out for your own. His crew. He says he’s got responsibilities.”

  Gucci shrugged. “But hey, turns out he thinks with his you-know-what, like most guys.”

  She paused.

  “You know what? You should just call her. That’s where he’ll be. With his hooker crackhead and her naked selfies.”

  “She disrespected you,” Louis said.

  Gucci looked at him, like she was surprised he could talk.

  “She was texting him pictures and she knew we were together. On a vacation. I mean, have some class.”

  “You hate him?” Louis said.

  “Oh, yeah. Cheat on me, you get some serious hate.”

  “Then shoot him a text,” Louis said. “Say you want to give him something back. A piece of jewelry or something.”

  “I’m not giving him shit,” Gucci said.

  “You won’t have to,” I said.

  Guc
ci crossed her arms over her chest.

  “You guys are cops.”

  “Nope.”

  I took out my old Times ID and held it up. Louis dug in his jeans and took out his wallet and fished out a tattered Marine Corps ID.

  “And now you work for him?” Gucci said, nodding toward me.

  “Sometimes,” Louis said. “If I like the story.”

  “Louis is a researcher,” I said.

  She looked at him. “What kinda research you want to do on Slick?”

  “Just ask him a few questions,” Louis said.

  She paused. Looked at both of us. Then reached to the back of her T-shirt, took a phone out of the waistband of her yoga pants.

  “Is he gonna even get here? To this apartment?” she said.

  “No,” Louis said.

  Gucci pondered it, then raised the phone, started to text, reading aloud as she tapped.

  “Hey. You want any of this shit you better get your sorry cheatin’ ass over here. I’m tossin’ it. Some homeless person gonna be wearing a twenty-four-carat gold chain from Neiman Marcus.”

  She pressed SEND.

  We watched while she stared at the phone and waited. Then the phone buzzed and she squinted at it and said, “Done.”

  “What’d he say?” Louis said.

  “I’m a crazy-ass bitch, and he’ll be right over.”

  “What’s he driving?” I said.

  “An X-Three. Silver. She rented it for him. Texted him a picture. Her on the hood of the car.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Payback’s a bitch,” Gucci said, and she shut the door. The chain rattled as she slipped it back into place.

  We sat in the truck at the curb in front of the next house up. The motor was running and the AC was on, the dog starting to pant. I was watching the mirror and Louis was watching the front.

  We’d been there fifteen minutes when Louis said, “We’re on.”

  The silver BMW was approaching, a guy at the wheel, black with a blue-and-white baseball cap, nobody else showing. We looked away as Slick passed, slowed, swung left between the gates and into the drive. Louis was out of the car, moving fast, a low sort of trot. I had the Tahoe in reverse, backed up, swung through the gates.