by Gerry Boyle
“Like I said. Fancy name for everything.”
“Right.”
He looked at me closely again.
“You look familiar. You been on TV for busts or something?”
“Maybe.”
“Wait a minute. I know who—”
There was a scurrying noise behind him, then something whipped past his feet. A white cat scurried down the hall.
“Oh, Jesus,” the old man said. “You get back here.”
I stepped aside. He hobbled down the hall on his bowed legs, shorts flapping. The cat turned the corner and I walked into the apartment. Trotted through the living room and into the kitchen. On the counter there was a stack of papers: bills, flyers. No envelope.
I ran back to the living room, leaned into the bedroom. The bed was unmade, the room was dank. There were toilet articles on top of a bureau, dirty clothes in a mound on the floor. I stepped in. Stepped out. Turned and saw a manila envelope. But I could hear the man coming, scolding the cat.
I ran to the table, picked up the envelope. It was behind my back when he reappeared, the cat squirming in his arms. I was standing just inside the door.
“They’ll eat ’em, you know, these goddamn Orientals,” he said.
He walked past me to the bedroom, slung the cat in, and closed the door. He turned and looked at the table where the envelope had been. When he looked up, I was going out the door.
“Hey, you son of a bitch,” McLaughlin said. “What the hell you think you’re doing?”
I took the stairs at a trot, down and out onto the sidewalk and up the block, away from the car. At the corner I turned and kept walking, looking for a place to stop.
And there was a storefront with blacked-out windows. The stenciled sign on the metal door, sisters. The door was propped open by a plastic pail. I stood in the doorway and tore the envelope open, and inside it was another envelope, slightly smaller. I slid it out and opened that one, too.
The papers seemed to be identical to the documents in the package at the hotel. Same memos. Same clips. Until I reached the bottom of the stack.
There was an extra page. It was from the New York City Department of Corrections. A petition for the parole of George Drague, 26 Manida Street, Bronx, N.Y. Drague was to be released May 15, 1989. His contact was Marie Drague (Mother). In tiny handwriting at the bottom of the page were the words: No objection. D. Conroy.
I stuffed the papers back in the envelope and stepped inside.
It was an oversized cafe, with a bar on the left and a dance floor at the rear. There was a bulletin board inside the door with notices and names and gay leaflets. The place was empty and the chairs were upside down on the tables and there was music playing—a woman singing and playing acoustic guitar. I called out, “Hello,” and a woman appeared, way in the back. She said, “We’re closed.”
I didn’t leave. She started toward me.
She was a stocky woman with small, round glasses, a bead in her nose, and a T-shirt that read duke tennis. She was holding a broom, and as she got closer, she clenched it with both hands like a weapon.
“Are you Linda?” I said.
She hung on to the broom, looked at my face, waited to answer.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Jack McMorrow. I’m a friend of—”
“I know who you are. His buddy from Maine.”
“The TV?”
“Yeah. And the newspapers.”
“I imagine you’ve been following this.”
Linda didn’t answer.
“Because Butch said you were a good friend of his.”
“It’s all relative,” she said. “But I guess I was fond of him.”
“Was?”
She looked at me more closely.
“Kind of hard to like someone who does that, don’t you think?”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
She didn’t answer but her eyebrows raised skeptically.
“Do you have a minute?”
“Is this for some story?”
“No. For my own edification.”
She frowned and then looked down at the floor.
“Hey, if you don’t mind a little dirt. But you’re used to it. You’re a reporter.”
She turned her back to me and started sweeping the floor along the wall, herding cigarette butts and clots of dirt in front of her. I followed.
“So Butch came in here quite a bit?”
“I guess.”
“Every day.”
“Not every. Most days. Early, around five.”
“Did he know people?”
“Some. I mean, the regulars. He kind of stood out.”
“An older man . . .”
“In a lesbian bar, yeah. First time he came here it was early, and he was the only one here, you know, and then the place slowly filled up.”
I smiled. She kept sweeping.
“It took him a while to get it, but when he did, he was funny about it. He was pretty funny, sometimes.”
“Did he talk much?”
“Some. I mean, he didn’t get on a soapbox or anything. He’d watch the TV. Usually we have sports on early. He’d drink his Irish whiskey. We have nachos and light food, microwave kind of stuff, and usually he’d eat something.”
“Did he talk about the city?”
“What, like war stories? Cop stuff?”
“Yeah.”
Linda looked at me and didn’t answer. And then her expression changed, as though she had made some sort of decision.
“Okay,” she said. “At first, not at all.”
“And after that?”
The long pause again.
“I don’t know why I should talk to you,” she said.
“I don’t know why you shouldn’t.”
I waited. She considered me a few moments more.
And then started in.
“Okay, but I don’t want to be in the newspaper.”
“I couldn’t put you there if I wanted to.”
“I suppose. So what was the question?”
“Did he talk about his job. City Hall?”
“Uh, not really. I mean, if we were watching the news and there was some crime thing on, sometimes he’d say, like, ‘Hey, there’s old Joe Smith. I worked with him.’ Or he’d tell you about some murder case he’d worked on. One time these moron guys walked in and thought they were gonna give people a hard time and old Butch got right in their faces with his police ID and told them to take off, and they did. It was nice of him. I mean, he didn’t have a gun or anything and there were four of them. We called him ‘Columbo.’”
She swept, working her way toward the bar. I followed.
“But he didn’t talk about his wife?”
Linda stopped sweeping and turned to me.
“To me he did. Not to the general public.”
“Did he seem very bitter about it?”
She turned to me, broom in hand, and stared.
“You’re his friend, right?”
“Since we were little kids.”
“ ’Cause I don’t know if I should be talking about Butch’s personal life like this to just anybody.”
“I’m not just anybody. Not to Butch.”
She turned back to the floor.
“Well, wouldn’t you be bitter? If they let the guy go who killed your wife? And you being a cop? And some people saying it was your fault?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“So Butch, he was angry. And he was bitter. And he was sad and lonely. Hey, this is New York, right? Join the club.”
She swept the dust and butts into a pile and left that pile and started to sweep again.
“How angry did he seem?”
“You mean, did he threaten to kill Johnny Fiore? No. Did I think something was wrong inside him? Yeah.”
“Why?”
She stopped.
“Hey, I’ll tell you just what I told the detectives. Something was simmering inside the man. I could see it when he was quiet, when he wasn’t telling a
story or whatever. He’d just sit there and you could see the wheels turning.”
“Did you ask him what he was thinking?”
“You mean, did I ask him if he was homicidal? No. Did I ask him if he was okay? Yeah. He always would snap out of it and put on his happy face. Make some joke. But I knew.”
We were near the restroom. Linda continued in. I hesitated, then followed. She pushed open the door of the first stall.
“So were you surprised, shocked, to hear what he’d been arrested for?”
Linda swept around the toilet. She snapped an empty roll out of the toilet paper dispenser and then looked back at me.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Hey, I wasn’t. I mean, a guy in his situation, mad at the system, he isn’t gonna kill just anybody. If he’s going to do it, it’s going to be somebody big.”
“Like Fiore?”
“Or somebody else high up. The mayor wouldn’t have been my first choice.”
“Why not?”
Linda didn’t answer. Instead, she stepped out of the stall, left the restroom, and strode away. She went behind the bar and bent down, and when she came up, she was holding a white paper napkin. She put it on top of the bar. I looked at it and then back up at her.
“So?”
“Look.”
I leaned closer, then looked back at her.
“No. Closer. Really look.”
She reached behind her and turned on lights that illuminated the wooden surface of the bar. I picked up the napkin. I could make out letters.
“With a spoon or a fork or a toothpick or whatever,” Linda said, “he’d sit there and sort of doodle.”
I read the napkin and handed it back to her. Suddenly I felt very tired, a little sick, like I’d rummaged through someone’s drawers and found something dirty.
“Did you give this to the police?”
“Not that one, a different one,” Linda said. “But I saved a bunch of ’em over the past couple of months, and they all say the same thing.”
She held the napkin up to the light, but I’d already seen it. At a certain angle, you could see the words plainly:
Kill/Sully
“I figured it would be somebody named Sullivan,” Linda said. “Maybe some cop.”
39
“Sure there’s Sullivans,” Donatelli said. “There’s even a bunch of Officer O’Malleys. We talked to all the Sullivans and nobody had a beef with Casey. We can’t find any Sullivans in his life anywhere else, either. We looked.”
He spoke away from the phone and I waited. The naked woman on the mirror swung in the breeze. Donatelli came back.
“McMorrow, no offense, but this is just more peripheral bullshit. I don’t need bar napkins. I got a guy with the deceased’s blood on his hands. It’s over. I know you guys gotta fill space, but that’s the way it is. Short and sweet.”
I shook my head.
“No, it isn’t. You’ve got Christina Mansell.”
“Maybe she pissed off some dope dealer.”
“You’ve got all these threats.”
“Alleged threats.”
“Don’t give me that ‘alleged’ crap. You’re taking the easy way out.”
“Come here and say that. A bunch of very tired police officers will tear you limb from limb. Hey, I’ve been home six hours in three days.”
“I haven’t been home at all.”
“So don’t fraternize with assassins.”
“It’s too late,” I said.
“You got that right, McMorrow. You’re finally gettin’ real.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“Casey did it, McMorrow. Accept it and move on.”
I thought about that.
Butch did it. I knew him. Leave him to rot and go home? Leave the questions unanswered? Leave all of it behind? Run back to Roxanne with this always haunting me?
Right there in the car, I shook my head. The naked woman on the mirror did, too, swinging back and forth.
If I ran, I couldn’t ever really get away from it. Not in Prosperity. Not in Portland. Not for a waking moment, or a sleeping one, either.
“Make your life a lot easier,” Donatelli said.
“No, it won’t,” I said, and I hung up, checked the mirror, and cut across traffic.
Hunt’s Point was a jut of land just below where the Bronx and East rivers mixed, like blood spilled into a tub. Ships came here with produce that was unloaded, packed into trailers, and trucked to supermarkets near you. The trailers were kept in sprawling lots ringed with razor wire strung with windblown trash, like ragged wash hung on a jagged clothesline.
It was a little after one and the day seemed years long. My conversation with McLaughlin in the Village that morning was buried under Linda in the bar, Donatelli on the phone, hours of mulling it all over.
But the time for mulling was over.
So I drove down Hunt’s Point Avenue, where everything was still under the pale gray sky. I remembered coming here at night with a photographer. The story was about the prostitutes who serviced the truckers. The women were desperate, drug-addicted ghouls who, when they weren’t plying their trade in sleeper cabs, stood in clusters in the rubble-strewn lots. Now the prostitutes were gone, probably moved along in a Fiore sweep. The lots were fenced off.
The point seemed even more desolate, like a village after a massacre.
I drove in a circle and turned off the main drag into the warren of narrow streets behind the asphalt plain. I was searching for Manida, but there were no street signs. Finally I pulled over at a little one-aisle bodega and the man behind the counter directed me. I got back in the Camaro and took two lefts and a right, like a coursing hound on the track of George Drague.
On both sides of Manida there were respectable Victorian-style tenements. Several of them had windows and doors fortified by ornate steel gratings. The bars were painted white and red and made the houses look like gingerbread jails.
Number 26 was one of those.
Its bars were white turning to rust. The patch of grass was shaggy and brown. There was a dented black Monte Carlo parked out front, but the shades in the windows of the house were drawn. The treeless street baked in the heat and nothing stirred.
I drove by once, then turned onto the next block and drove slower, locating the rear of number 26 through the fences. There were bars on the back windows, too. I circled back and parked out front.
Took a notebook off the seat. Turned it so the reporter’s label showed. Took a deep breath and then paused. And then I got out and, like someone seeking asylum, stood and banged on the steel grate.
No one answered.
I tried the next house. Nothing. The one after that. Still nothing. Three houses down, a curtain stirred behind the bars, but nobody came to the door. At the fourth I knocked and waited, sweating in the midday sun.
And the door opened.
It was a woman, short and stout, wearing what used to be called a housecoat.
“I already found the Lord, if that’s what you’re selling,” she said.
“Well, not exactly. I’m looking for a man named George Drague.”
She fell back a step.
“I’m a reporter,” I said quickly.
That stopped her retreat. She looked at me curiously and I waited for the moment of recognition. It didn’t come. Perhaps she got her news from the radio.
“What’d Georgie do now?”
“What’d he do?”
“Yeah. He kill somebody or something?”
I smiled.
“I hope not. Would he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what Georgie would do now. I haven’t talked to him since he was a little boy.”
“You’ve lived here a long time?”
“Fifty-two years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Went by quick. What’d Georgie do?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need to talk to him.”
; “What paper?”
“The Times.”
Her eyes widened. She brushed at her thin white hair, as though I might suddenly take her picture.
“So he musta done something terrible, bring the New York Times all the way up here.”
“Has he done things like that before?”
“I don’t know. He goes to jail. He comes back. It was his mother’s house, and then his sister lived there.”
“Does she still?”
“No, she left. She couldn’t stand him either.”
“Georgie still around?”
“If he is, he’s hiding in the cellar. Some guys come looking for him last night. They come back this morning, four o’clock. I saw the car. Tough guys. Or maybe cops, but they didn’t act like cops. I figure Georgie got the wrong people mad this time. Pushed it too far.”
“But you haven’t seen him?”
“Not for a couple days. Georgie’s scum, but he ain’t stupid. Probably hiding.”
“Where’s he go when he isn’t hiding?”
“When he ain’t hiding?”
“Yeah. Where’s he hang out?”
“I guess you don’t know Georgie. If you did, you’d know.”
I waited. She savored her moment.
“Hootchie-kootchie joints. Been that way since he was a kid.”
The woman leaned forward confidentially.
“Thinks with his thingie, you know what I’m saying? Sad for his mother. She was a very religious person. We prayed together, you know.”
“Really,” I said. “That’s interesting. Now, any hootchie-kootchie joints in particular?”
“How do I know? You think I know one from another?”
“No. I just thought you might have heard.”
“Booze and drugs and loose women. You find a place that has those things, you find Georgie. You know he was raised Catholic? Drague’s French. Grandparents from Canada. His father stayed here after the war, worked the docks. Now, he was a son of a bitch. Name was Albert, but they called him Bert. Meanest—”
“So is there any place around here he might hang out?”
“You’re asking me? I don’t know. I stay here. My niece does my shopping, takes me to the doctor. I got my Bible. I got my radio. I mind my own business. I can’t keep track of Georgie Drague and his running around.”
“Of course you can’t,” I said.
“But I’ve seen him in the car place. Talking to the other good-for-nothings. My husband, he worked his whole life on the docks. Never missed a day, forty-eight years. Not like these lazy bums.”