Solitary Dancer

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “What do you need, Joe?”

  Tim Fox sat on the same metal chair Donovan had occupied, facing McGuire. Donovan had retreated to the far corner of the interrogation room where the young whistle had been slouching until Fox entered and told him to get the hell out and stay out of the observation room too, he and Donovan would handle this on their own.

  McGuire lifted his head to smile back at Fox. “I, uh . . .” he began in that low voice of his, the sound textured like a wet gravel road. “Nothing, Timmy,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m okay.”

  He wore a faded cotton sweater, once white but now the colour of dishwater, the frayed collar and cuffs of a blue oxford-cloth shirt visible beneath it. His denim jeans were oversized, the bottoms rolled above a tattered pair of Reeboks worn with no socks. A three-day growth of beard grew among the folds of a face as shrunken and bony as the rest of his body.

  McGuire looked perhaps twenty pounds lighter and twenty years older than the last time Fox had seen him, less than a year and a half earlier.

  “Donovan tell you about the woman on Newbury Street?” Fox asked.

  McGuire nodded.

  “We’ve got your voice on her answering machine tape, Joe,” Timmy said. “Threatening the murder victim.”

  “So I hear.”

  “What got you so pissed at her?”

  “Not sure.”

  “You on a drunk?”

  McGuire thought about it for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Not yesterday.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Beats the heck out of me.”

  “Where’d you wake up this morning?”

  “My place.”

  “The room over the Flamingo.”

  “Home sweet home.”

  “I was there.” Fox smiled. “You should lock your door.”

  “Nothing to steal. Besides,” McGuire grinned, “it’s never locked. Gets used when I’m not in.”

  “Girls from the club taking johns up there?”

  McGuire ran a hand through his hair, longish, growing gray, the curls tighter than ever. “Pays the rent. Keeps the kids off the streets.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Donovan muttered from the corner. McGuire looked at him without expression.

  “You don’t remember calling this Lorenzo woman?” Fox said.

  McGuire turned back to Fox, shook his head.

  “Can you remember why you were so angry with her?”

  Another shake.

  “How’d you know her?” Donovan called from the corner. “You bang her a few times maybe? Or were you just pimping for her?”

  Tim Fox glared across at Donovan.

  McGuire smiled and moved his lips.

  “What’s that?” Tim Fox asked, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes.

  “Used to be related,” McGuire said, loud enough this time for Fox to hear. He rubbed the back of his neck. “My ex-wife’s sister.”

  Fox straightened up. Donovan pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and began scribbling in it. “When was the last time you saw her?” Fox asked.

  McGuire shrugged. “Not for years. Until . . .” He frowned, staring down at his feet. “Until a week, maybe two weeks ago. I was, uh . . .” He pinched the bridge of his nose, stared up at the ceiling for a moment and nodded as though agreeing with himself. “I was over in the Esplanade one day. Just waiting, looking . . . looking for somebody. There were these women in fur coats and a photographer and a bunch of other people near the band shell and one of them kept looking at me, and then she came over and started talking to me. And I recognized her, I saw it was Heather. The photographer, he was one of her clients or whatever she called them, fashion photographers.”

  He sat back in the chair, raised his chin, spoke to the ceiling. “She, uh, she laughed at the way I looked, what I was doing. Said she knew who I was going to meet, what I wanted to see him for. Heard about me doing doing what I was doing. Thought it was funny . . .”

  “Who were you going to meet?” Fox asked.

  McGuire pondered the answer. “A friend. Just a friend.”

  “He got a name?” Donovan asked.

  “Django,” McGuire said. “Just Django. And, uh, she asked where I lived and I told her over the Flamingo, and she thought that was even funnier, and I was, uh . . . if I’d felt better I might have hit her then and there . . .” McGuire grinned at Fox. “Jesus, Timmy, I just handed you an incriminating statement then, didn’t I?”

  “Sure as shit did,” Donovan said from the corner. “Keep talkin’ like that, we’ll have your whole history nailed down.”

  McGuire shrugged. “My life is an open pamphlet.”

  “You didn’t hit her?” Tim Fox asked.

  “No. But I wanted to.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Guess I’m out of shape.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “Got up and walked away and she went back to the photographer and the models.”

  “Eddie Vance could use that statement to build a charge against you.”

  “Let him.”

  “You don’t seem worried about it.”

  “I’m not. Nothing Eddie can do’ll worry me.”

  Fox grinned. “Yeah, well, Fat Eddie’s his own worst enemy.”

  McGuire arched his eyebrows and smiled. “Not while I’m around.”

  There was a knock at the door and a uniformed sergeant leaned into the room. “Got a message for you guys,” he said, speaking to Fox and Donovan but unable to keep his eyes from the shrunken figure of McGuire.

  Tim Fox looked at Donovan and angled his head. Donovan sighed and followed the sergeant out of the room and into the hall. When the door closed Fox stood up, took a step closer to McGuire, leaned from the waist and asked, “So what happened to you, Joe?”

  McGuire sighed and allowed himself a smile. “I screwed up.”

  Fox shook his head sadly. “Last I heard you were down in the Bahamas mixing Martinis, living the good life. When we got the word about you, bunch of us up here, we figured you scored a big one, you lucked out.”

  “For awhile.” McGuire leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, avoiding the other man’s eyes. “For a while I did.”

  “And then?”

  “Told you. I screwed up.”

  “Lot of guys screw up, but they manage to land on their feet.”

  The door swung open abruptly and Donovan was standing there, a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “He’s charged,” Donovan said.

  Fox scowled at him. “What the fuck you talking about?”

  Donovan waved the paper back and forth as though taunting a bull. “Higgins got a briefing from Fat Eddie, says there’s enough to book him. All in here.”

  “Higgins still P.A.?” McGuire asked calmly, and Fox nodded.

  “It’s a bullshit decision,” Fox said, half to Donovan and half to McGuire.

  “Need your shoelaces and your belt,” Donovan said to McGuire as he entered the room, the sergeant and two whistles behind him.

  McGuire bent over and began untying his shoes, Tim Fox watching sadly, McGuire fumbling with the laces.

  McGuire was held on suspicion of the murder of Heather Arlene Lorenzo, age 38, resident of 206A Newbury Street, occupation: photographer’s agent. He was ordered held in custody pending further investigation. He endured a strip search, a fitting for a pair of oversized blue coveralls and being locked into handcuffs and shackles. The young driver of the police van that transported him and two sullen black men in their twenties to holding cells in the jail on Nashua Street called him Pops, and McGuire smiled and ducked his head without responding.

  Inside the brick walls of the jail reception area, McGuire emerged from the van and leaned unsteadily against the vehicle before retching vio
lently while the black men watched blankly and the van driver made a joke about prison food.

  He was photographed, fingerprinted and led down a narrow corridor to his cell, where he collapsed on the cot and listened to the slam of the cell door echo and decay.

  In the cell facing him were two men, a large red-headed man whose oft-broken nose drifted at an angle across his face and who spoke with a strangely sibilant lisp, and a smaller older man who constantly moved a cigarette butt from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both stared at McGuire for several moments, the larger man blankly, the other with suspicion, until the red-haired man said simply, “Cop,” and turned away to lie on his bunk.

  “Watch your ass, buddy,” the smaller one said to McGuire, who lay back with hands clasped behind his head. “’Cause it ain’t worth shit in here. Me, I’d be proud as hell to do a few months in seg, just to say I offed a fuckin’ cop. Wouldn’t I, Red?”

  The big man said, “Gimme a cigarette.”

  When McGuire’s food was brought to his cell he could eat none of it.

  “Good move, cop,” the small man in the opposite cell said. “They know you’re a cop, the trusties piss on your food. You know that? Ain’t that right, Red?”

  When McGuire finally fell asleep he began to dream of drifting in boats through pastureland where grazing cows would lift their heads in surprise as he passed by, and of his father, dead twenty years, watching him from behind a wooden fence, the bleached unpainted boards covered in writing McGuire could not read. He woke and lay rising and falling through clouds of pain and perspiration before closing his eyes.

  Almost immediately he began to dream again, visions of ice water flowing down his parched throat, tasting its freshness and cold salvation, and of walking woodenly along a city street toward a corner where flatbed trucks were passing slowly by in a convoy of sorts. The cargo shifted back and forth and side to side as the trucks passed, their movement propelled not by the motion of the vehicles but by some inner agony. At the intersection McGuire looked into the trucks and saw flayed bodies with amputated limbs, the skin and stubs of arms and legs cross-textured in blue and white, and as one truck passed another arrived to take its place and others stretched down the avenue of the city, their passage unending, their cargoes identical and agonizing and horrific.

  Someone began choking him, thrusting a weapon into his mouth to block his breathing. McGuire cried out at the sight of the trucks and their cargo and at the attack on him by someone unseen. There were cries in his ears, the cries of the mutilated men in the trucks and the cries of others, and McGuire woke to find his own hand in his mouth and a guard poking him with a broom handle. In the opposite cell the small dark man called out, “You don’t shut the fuck up, somebody’ll shove your dick in your ear,” while the big man with the red hair grinned across at McGuire and muttered something, and the small man laughed and lit a cigarette.

  In the morning McGuire lay on his bunk with his forearm across his eyes. The two men in the opposite cell were escorted away, and as they passed McGuire’s cell the small man hissed, “You’re gonna get it, cop,” and the other man said in his strange lisp, “Can’t stop it happening, buddy. Can’t stop what’s gonna happen to you.”

  Half an hour later, McGuire was still motionless when he heard footsteps tread the corridor toward his cell and halt just beyond the bars. He raised his arm from his eyes and looked across the few feet separating him from an olive-skinned compact man in a brown suede windbreaker, faded jeans and white sneakers who stood watching him with concern. “Mother of God, I didn’t believe it,” the man said.

  McGuire stared back at the man’s dark eyes and curly black hair, the body slim and taut.

  “Jesus, Joe, it’s me, Scrignoli.” The black-haired man shook his head and a nervous grin revealed white and shiny teeth in a handsome Italian face. “It’s been a while, but hell . . .”

  McGuire nodded and closed his eyes. “How you doin’?” he said. He remembered Scrignoli, an undercover cop, once Bernie Lipson’s partner before Bernie joined forces with McGuire to replace Ollie Schantz. Bernie’s retired and Ollie’s paralyzed, McGuire reminded himself. A generation gone and I’m in jail. McGuire pieced it together. Bernie retired. Kavander dead. Ollie crippled. Me in jail. On the whole, I’d rather be in Worcester. . . .

  What the hell was Scrignoli’s first name? The pain like a knife . . .

  “Bunch of us back on Berkeley, Stu Cauley and the others, we heard about it and couldn’t believe it.” Scrignoli spoke in the broad accents of North Boston, a scrod-and-spaghetti accent Ollie Schantz used to call it. “This is horseshit, Joe. This is Fat Eddie at his worst.”

  McGuire nodded his head again. What’s his name? Dave? Dominic? Something like that.

  “So I got elected to come over and make sure you’re okay, let you know we’re with you, we’re not gonna let nothin’ happen to you. I mean, even some of the guys here, some of the guards, the older ones, they’re wonderin’ what you’re doin’ in here. So I came just to let you know you’re gonna be all right, okay?”

  “Sure.” McGuire lay his forearm across his eyes again. Dell? Daryl? No, not Daryl. Maybe Darren . . .

  “Anything you need? Anything we can get you?”

  “Out,” McGuire said.

  “We’re workin’ on it. I mean, one of the guys’s been talking to Higgins and you know what? Even Higgins, even he’s not behind it a hundred percent, okay? He told the guy right up front, he said it’s not gonna stick, the charge. You’re outta here and you and me, the day you’re out, the two of us’ll go over to Hanover Street and suck up some clams, maybe pick up some broads.” Scrignoli’s voice dropped in volume and acquired a weight, a sense of everyone’s daily sadness. “My wife and I, we split last year. Don’t know if you heard.”

  Scrignoli’s wife, McGuire recalled. Her name was Sue, plump, blond hair . . . the hell’s his name . . . ?

  A long pause, then, “Anyhow, you got problems, I can see that. But you got friends too, Joe, and we all know this is a chickenshit thing of Fat Eddie’s, so hang in there, okay? Okay?”

  Danny. Yes. “Thanks, Danny.”

  “You’re all right,” Danny Scrignoli said, and his voice almost choked with emotion. “You’re gonna be all right,” and he slapped the bars with his hand, in anger or frustration, and walked quickly, almost silently, away.

  Listening to the details of McGuire’s transfer to Nashua Street from one of the cops who accompanied the prisoner, Tim Fox absorbed it all with sadness. McGuire was more than an ex-cop not only to Fox but to an entire generation of police officers who had managed to rise from street duty to detective status.

  Joe McGuire and Ollie Schantz had shown the way for a decade, working like guerrillas within an often incompetent system. Bending the rules to achieve success, they earned citations from the police commissioner in the morning and bought rounds of drinks for the duty cops that same afternoon, laughing at the pretentiousness of the award ceremony, knowing they had earned and deserved it but mocking it anyway, mocking everything except the reason they pinned on a badge each day: without daily encounters with the scum of life, without the silent trust handed to them to protect citizens who thanked them by sneering at their very existence, they would lack both identity and purpose.

  For Joe McGuire, it all ended the day Ollie Schantz became eligible for his pension and decided that his identity and purpose now lay along the banks of a salmon pond. He retired leaving McGuire alone and bitter to manage without him.

  Two weeks later, in one of those ironies of life that prompt some people to discover salvation in the Bible and others to seek it in a shotgun, the muzzle in their mouth, Ollie Schantz returned from his first fishing expedition almost totally paralyzed from the neck down. And soon after, McGuire escaped the complex politics and machinations of Fat Eddie Vance by retreating to the Bahamas for two years.

  What brough
t him back? Fox wondered. What screwed him up so badly? What happened to the old McGuire, the tough son of a bitch who carried his anger like a junkyard dog with a toothache?

  Fox didn’t know. But he knew something had to be done about Fat Eddie.

  He strode down the corridor to Vance’s office and burst in on the captain who quickly closed the top drawer of his desk and looked back at Fox, startled.

  “You’re interfering, Eddie,” Fox said, drawing deep breaths and glaring at the round pink face of the man who had once been his partner and was now his superior.

  Vance blinked and raised his eyebrows.

  “You don’t like the way I’m handling a case, okay, tell me,” Fox said. “But no more getting between me and Donovan, all right? Telling him to send out a P.Q. order while I’m still out there looking for the man. No more of that, okay?”

  Fat Eddie smiled, closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “What’s the deal?” Fox demanded. “I’m pissed and you think it’s funny?”

  “A little,” Vance said when he opened his eyes. “You know who you just reminded me of? When you came in right now, so self-righteous and angry? McGuire, that’s who. When he was still a cop, he’d be in here complaining all the time, to me, to Kavander, to everybody. McGuire acted like he carried all the rules and regulations around in his hip pocket and it was his duty to educate people about them. You sounded a lot like him just now.”

  “Thanks,” Tim Fox said, turning for the door. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Eddie.”

  “A compliment?” Vance called after him. “Are you nuts? Look where McGuire is now, Fox. You think being told you’re acting like him is a compliment?”

  Ten minutes later Fox told himself Fat Eddie wasn’t worth the spit it took to say his name and swung around in his chair to snatch Mel Doitch’s autopsy report from Donovan’s desk and scan the contents.

  Heather Arlene Lorenzo had been in excellent physical condition with no visible scars except for the two crescent-shaped surgery marks beneath her breasts, marking silicone implants. Her injuries had been inflicted by a cylindrical wooden weapon, swung with substantial strength. Small samples of the wood had been removed from body tissues that had absorbed the blows and they were currently being subjected to laboratory analysis. . . .