by Gerry Boyle
After ten minutes, I eased my head out past the edge of the confessional, just far enough to look down the church toward the door. At some point, preferably before the seven o’clock Mass the next morning, I was going to have to make a break for it. It was 12:20. I had lots of time. Then again, maybe I should just stay and go to Communion.
Leaning back against the church wall, I looked around. It was a magnificent church, but a little frayed at the edges. There were brown water stains on the ceiling, one big one that ran down the wall opposite me, next to one of the Stations of the Cross. The station was a faded fresco of Jesus carrying his cross. It was too far away to read the writing, but it looked like Jesus was being harassed by the centurions and the cowardly rabble. I leaned out and looked up, to my right, and saw Jesus limp and pale and wounded on the hands and feet. The lettering said Jésus est mis au tombeau.
The bastards.
I looked down the church toward the door. There was no sound, no movement. Above the door was a choir loft, railed with ornately carved oak. Above the loft was an organ, and above the organ was a round stained-glass window, twenty feet across, glowing deep rose in the afternoon sun. Above the round window were smaller windows in pink and blue and purple.
There were worse places to be cornered.
If that was the case.
I supposed that the three of them could have jogged back to the apartment. While I leaned against a confessional in an empty cathedral, they were watching reruns of I Love Lucy. When I went back to pick up my truck, they’d wave from the window.
Or they could be waiting outside . . . but for how long? Guys like that usually didn’t have a lot of patience. That was how they got to be guys like that. Prisons were full of guys who couldn’t sit still in class.
But how long could I stand still? I leaned back again. This wasn’t what I had planned, but then, I hadn’t planned much. Come down here and knock on doors and see what happened. I could write a story that said the trail of Bobby Mullaney ended in a backyard in Lewiston. I’d write around my ignominious flight. In any event, my report to Melanie Mullaney was going to be short and sweet.
It was 12:31. I told myself I’d give it five more minutes and then see if there was a door somewhere beyond the sanctuary. If I could get out without being arrested for burglarizing the sacristy, then I could figure out how to get my truck. Maybe take a cab so I’d have a witness in case—
Steps.
At the door.
The one that was locked. On this side.
I weighed bolting for the back of the church, but then there were more footsteps. The other end of the church.
The footsteps behind the door were closer. Someone coming upstairs. The footsteps at the back of the church had stopped. I didn’t look because my head would hang out there like a flag. Then the door rattled and I slipped to my left and pushed past the red curtains. Inside, it was dark. I heard the door open.
There were two narrow strips of light at each side of the curtain. I peered through one and heard steps, then saw a man walk along the altar rail. From the rear, I could only see that he was tall and narrow, wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair was tied in a short ponytail. When he reached the center aisle, he didn’t genuflect.
I watched as he looked at the altar, then turned. He looked young. Early twenties. As he got closer, I could see that he was smiling. Maybe smirking. When he was ten or so pews from the front, he sat down.
“You wanted Paco, here he is, man,” he called. “At your service.”
I watched.
“Hey, man, you want to talk. Got some questions. This is, like, your chance, man. Me and you. My friends’ll stay outside. I’ll just sit here and pray or something.”
I didn’t answer. Paco put his arms on the back of the pew, looked straight ahead.
“Okay. You don’t want to talk, fine. I thought you, like, really wanted to talk to me. Hey, I’ll count to ten, man. Then I’m outta here. You can get your truck anytime. Like, no hard feelings.”
He paused.
“One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . Halfway there, man. Six . . . seven . . .”
I pushed through the curtain.
We sat side by side. If there was anyone at the back door, I didn’t see him. It was just the two of us, and whoever else inhabits such a place.
“Nice church,” Paco said. “But the friggin’ roof leaks. They oughta do something about that.”
“You come here often?”
“Right. I sing in the choir. So what is it?”
“I’m looking for Bobby Mullaney. And a guy named Coyote.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Jack McMorrow. I’m a reporter. I’m doing a story on Mullaney and his friends in Maine. Marijuana people. Legalization and all that. Then Mullaney and Coyote didn’t come home. Mullaney’s wife, her name is Melanie, I got to know her a little. She asked me to see if anybody down here had seen them. She didn’t feel like she could call the cops.”
“No doubt. How’d you get my name?”
“The wife gave it to me. Bobby told her he was coming down here to meet you.”
Paco looked toward the altar. He looked younger than I’d thought. Not long from high school, assuming he’d ever gone.
“Why the friggin’ hell would I want to talk to you?” he said.
“Because I asked so nicely.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Because your buddies came at me with a pipe.”
“That right?”
“And maybe I should just go to the cops with the whole thing.”
“What if you’re a cop already?”
“If I was a cop, you think your boys would have chased me down the street with a pipe? Cops stick together. Even drug cops wouldn’t let me get my head broken. Where do you pick your friends, anyway? If I was DEA they’d be sitting in the Androscoggin jail.”
Paco didn’t answer. The church was as still as ever. Maybe it was time for somebody to check on the priest.
“Let me see your wallet.”
“My wallet?”
“Hand it over. I’ll give it back.”
I looked at him. Slowly reached for the right hip pocket of my jeans and pulled the wallet out. Handed it to him. Paco flipped through it. Looked at the photos on my driver’s license and Times ID. Glanced at me. Glanced back at the photos. I considered him. He seemed pretty smart. Pretty cocky, at least on his square foot of turf.
Paco handed me my wallet.
“What if I still don’t believe you?”
“What if I walk past the altar and start screaming for somebody to call 911? At this point, it doesn’t matter to me. What if I tell the cops everything I know? They’ll hassle you for months. Or you can just tell me the little bit I need to know so I can go back to Melanie Mullaney and tell her something. Your choice.”
“What if you, like, don’t make it out of here?”
“What if I do?” I said.
Paco scratched his earlobe, which was scarred where an earring had been ripped off. He had long thin fingers. A tattoo of a skull on the front of his right hand.
“Open your shirt up,” he said.
I hesitated, then unbuttoned it. Four buttons. Paco reached over and slid his hand across my chest, under both arms.
“Lean forward.”
He slid his hand across my back, first at the shoulder blades, then lower, then across my waist. Then he felt the tops of my thighs and, matter-of-factly, my groin.
I didn’t flinch. He sat back.
“You can button your shirt again,” Paco said.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Yeah, right.”
He took a deep breath. The pews were hard. The church was peaceful.
“I’m gonna tell you what I heard,” Paco said. “General talk about nobody in particular. I’m gonna tell you this and then I’m gonna walk out of here and I’m never gonna see you again.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I
heard this guy you’re talking about came down here looking for another guy. The other guy owed the first guy, your guy, money.”
He wet his lips. Continued.
“But the other guy owed him this much money before, like for a lot longer. And this guy you’re looking for never got too worried about it.”
Paco looked at me and smiled.
“That’s what I heard.”
“On the street,” I said.
“Right. So your guy gets all friggin’ wound up about it. I mean, he’s right out of his tree. I heard this. I mean, is he friggin’ crazy? Doing bad drugs, doing crack and Jack? He shakes this other guy down. Way too hard, you know?”
He gave me the look again.
“You heard.”
“Right. I have no firsthand knowledge of any of this.”
“Right.”
“So,” Paco said, “I heard this guy really pushed. This laid-back hippie guy came on, like, real hard. And the guy he was pushing told him he didn’t have the money, that the money was like the product. It was in the pipeline. Still in the pipeline.”
“The product went down the pipeline but the money hadn’t come back yet?”
“Right. That’s what I heard.”
“On the street.”
“Right. I mean, these things take time. This is retail. A retail business. There’s, like, this collection aspect to this. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“So what happened then?”
Paco fingered his phantom earring again. His jacket smelled like a saddle. Or maybe it was his jeans.
“So I heard that this guy pushed real hard. Like he wanted to talk to the manager, you know? You go in a store or a restaurant and the meat ain’t cooked or something and the chump behind the counter don’t give you any answers, so you say, ‘Listen, shithead. Let me talk to the manager.’ You know what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“So he went to talk to the manager?”
“He wanted to,” Paco said. “But he got lucky, I guess.”
“How’s that?”
He smiled. He had smoker’s teeth.
“The manager happened to be in town. When he heard that the guy wanted to talk to him, he came right over. When he heard how wound up the guy was over this thing, he wanted to talk to him. The manager, I mean.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Seemed screwy.”
“What seemed screwy?”
“Getting all bent like that. And when somebody’s acting screwy, sometimes there’s a reason, you know what I’m saying?”
“Like he’s been turned,” I said.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know that, either. I ain’t heard nothin’.”
“Was a guy named Coyote in on all this?”
“Not that I heard. I heard the first guy was alone.”
“Where’d they go? The guy and the manager?”
“They left. I heard.”
“This manager from around here?”
Paco shook his head.
“I heard out-of-state.”
“Which one?”
He looked away.
“South,” he said.
“Mass.?”
Paco shrugged.
“Where in Mass.?”
He smiled, still looking away.
“When I was a kid, they used to make me sing in school, you know? To punish me. Make me stand in front of the class and sing. This old bitch. She’s probably dead. But it didn’t bother me, ’cause I liked to sing. I used to get right down. I remember the song, even. ‘Down in the Valley.’ ”
He sang it, and when he paused, the last note floated there in the air for a moment.
Paco turned to me.
“Had to pull me back to my desk. I wouldn’t stop singing. ‘Down in the Valley.’ ”
I got it. Valley, Mass. Another mill town, a lot like this one.
We sat there in the stillness. Suddenly I felt oddly like a priest. A confessor. Maybe it was the setting. The red velvet curtains.
“Why are you telling me this much? Of what you’ve heard, I mean.”
Paco looked up at the altar, at the statuary that rose to the high ceiling, staring empty-eyed figures stacked atop each other like dolls on a toy store shelf.
“ ’Cause if I’m right about you, you’ll be my witness. If I’m wrong about you, that’s not so bad, either, if things went the way they could’ve.”
“And what way’s that?” I asked him.
Paco started to stand, then paused, still looking away from me, straight ahead.
“ ’Cause I don’t want nobody’s blood on my friggin’ hands.”
I looked down at the scrapes on mine.
“Yeah, well,” Paco said. “If you’re who you say you are, sorry about that.”
I got up, too.
“Tell your buddies, next time they should just say, ‘No comment.’ ”
15
The phone was in the glass-lined hallway at the Windham McDonald’s. It was a little after two and I’d come directly from Poplar Street, where I’d found my truck right where I’d left it and my welcoming committee nowhere to be seen. I’d driven fast down Lisbon Street and out of town, my conversation with Paco playing over and over in my head, and then I’d realized there was no real reason to rush because Roxanne didn’t get home for three or four hours.
I had time to kill. Which was exactly what I figured had happened to Bobby Mullaney.
The restaurant was mostly empty. The hallway smelled like french fries but it was quiet. I dialed the Mullaneys’ number, back in the woods in Florence. It rang three times, four times, and as my hopes lifted, Melanie answered and brought them crashing back down.
“Hi, Jack,” she said. “Find out anything?”
“Yeah,” I said, bracing myself. “I found Paco.”
“And?”
“Well, he said Bobby was here.”
“Was?”
“He left with another guy. From Massachusetts.”
Melanie didn’t say anything but I could hear her exhale, something between a gasp and a sigh.
“Paco said Bobby was mad about the late payment. Wanted the money. The next guy in the pipeline happened to be in Lewiston.”
“Where is he from?” Melanie said quietly.
“Who?”
“The next guy.”
“I think Valley. He didn’t say that, but—”
“Oh, my God,” Melanie moaned, “Oh, my God.”
I felt my teeth clench.
“Oh, my God, they’ll kill him. Oh, my God, they’ve probably already . . . Oh, my God.”
“Who?”
“They’re killers. Down there, they’re all killers. They’ll just kill him. You don’t know. Oh, my God, he’s gone. Oh, my Bobby, oh my baby.”
Melanie sobbed. An old couple squeezed by me and went into the restaurant. I covered the receiver as the door hissed shut.
“Oh God, oh God . . .”
“Well, maybe not,” I began. “This guy Paco could be full of it. We don’t know that it’s true, even what he said.”
She coughed.
“Well, he wouldn’t just make it up, would he? Do you think he was making it up?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your gut?”
I hesitated.
“Tell me, Jack.”
“That he’s telling the truth. Or close to it, as far as—”
Melanie interrupted with a guttural moan that feathered upward into something like a bird’s cry, like one of the keening sounds a crow makes. It seemed out of character, coming from her, but then I’d only seen her hard shell. And underneath every hard shell, somewhere, was soft underbelly.
“Hey, but that doesn’t mean that something’s happened to him. He’s from there, right? And Paco said there was no sign of Coyote.”
“The bastard probably coughed him up,” Melanie cried. “The bastard probabl
y set him up. Oh, my God, I can’t believe this. I told him. This is gonna lead to trouble. There’s no safe way to do this, not even up here. I told him and he said, ‘Mel, stop nagging. It’s just a little pot.’ Goddamn pot, goddamn pot, goddamn-it-all-to-hell pot.”
I waited for her to stop yelling and lapse back into crying. She did.
“Listen, I’ll make some calls down there. Maybe he got busted or something in Massachusetts. Maybe they haven’t given him a phone call. I don’t know. It could be anything. Maybe’s he’s sick in a hospital. Maybe he was in a car accident. It could be anything. Really, I’m not just saying that. I really think you’re getting upset about something that might not have happened.”
“Oh, you don’t know those people, you don’t know how they are; they just kill you, like it’s nothing, like it’s nothing, no big deal, nothing.”
“But wouldn’t Bobby know that?”
“Oh, Bobby, he’s so cocky.”
She sobbed. The old couple came back out and stopped in front of me. The man looked in his bag and told his wife he was going back for ketchup. The wife looked at me and backed up against the wall.
“He’s not afraid,” Melanie was saying. “He thinks everything’s fine, and I told him it wasn’t. I told him, I said, ‘Don’t do this. Stay up here. Don’t get involved with those people again.’ I told him that and now, oh, my God . . .”
“Maybe it’s time to go to the police,” I said. “Speaking of which, you know the DEA was working your road Tuesday?”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
The old woman looked at me and turned and went back inside.
“Oh, no,” Melanie said. “I can’t go to them. And tell them? Tell them all of it?”
“Yeah.”
“They’d kill me.”
“Melanie, I don’t think it’s like that. This Paco guy was a lightweight. I mean, compared to what you’re talking about. And some of his buddies went after me and they weren’t much better. They couldn’t find Florence if you drove them to the town line.”
I heard her sigh.
“Jack, this is what Bobby told me. He told me the Valley guys were setting up in Lewiston for crack. Too many cops in Massachusetts. The people who actually do the dealing are Dominicans. The ones with the money are Colombians.”