Solitary Dancer

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  Careful, fool, Django told himself, remembering. Careful, careful. There be some doors you don’t ever want to open, some alleys you don’t ever want to walk down, not again, not ever.

  Django’s eyelids quivered and he lifted his left hand, the one they had broken under the wheel of the truck and held in the fire, and lay the crippled hand across his eyes and felt the scar tissue, like corrugated paper, against the skin of his face.

  “Uhn, uhn, uhn.” The Gypsy was singing on the bed with Grizzly, and Django’s eyes began to sting and he remembered, ignoring his own warning.

  “Dealin’ on the street,” Django told Elsie over the pay telephone, long distance back to Buffalo, and Elsie said, “Hush, you don’t know who listenin’.” Elsie was worried, but she was happy when Django sent her the first thousand later that week and then the next thousand a week later, sending it back for Elsie to spend on clothes for the boys and to put food in their bellies and save the rest in a bank account, using the money to keep the boys healthy, keep the dream alive.

  He was working strange turf there on Dorchester, other people’s turf in a strange city, but you had to take risks, that’s what business is about. His brother-in-law Percy sent the coke in from Buffalo, bus shipments marked Books and Clothing and Personal Affex, Percy never much of a speller, but that was good, that was okay. Django was living in a room on Mass Avenue, cooking the coke into crack and dealing it along the river, selling to college kids and white suburban guys in their Buicks and Jap minivans so they could take some back to the wife or girlfriend in Newton or Waltham, try some of this here nigger sin. But most of it he sold to black dudes who needed the stuff, they’d rip off whoever, whatever was around to get a boost, a bit of that good crack, smoke it out of an empty Pepsi can, that’s what they lived for, that’s what life was all about, that’s all life was about.

  Two different times the competition warned him, couple of heavy black brothers in Raiders jackets, pulling up to the curb in a beat-up Ford, calling him over, telling him they knew all about his rat’s-ass tenement back in Buffalo, telling him he don’t get the cream if he ain’t on the team, and Django’d nod and smile and dance away for a day or two.

  But he had to go back to the same place, no choice about it. Regular customers, they came by and if Django wasn’t there they got spooked or went somewhere else and stayed there because you needed loyalty in the business and Django was loyal, yes indeed.

  The third time the brothers came around they arrived in a dump truck, three of them this time, where’d a bunch of young black dudes get a truck like that? Django never knew. One put a gun to Django’s head, big mother of a gun, the end of the barrel in his ear, another one of the brothers gripped his hair and yanked his head back, the third twisted Django’s arm up between his shoulder blades until Django screamed and when they started dragging him he ran with them, anything to cut the pain, ran with them to the truck and through the open door. They flung him to the floor where he lay while two of them kicked him all the way to the bridge where Dorchester crossed the channel, taking the last exit and turning into a dead-end lane.

  “Told ya, motherfucker,” one kept saying. “Told ya.”

  They tossed him from the truck and jumped on him before he could crawl away and he was flat on his back, one of the brothers standing on his forearm, a second pulling a gray container, looked like a coffee thermos, out from behind the seat of the truck. The third dude stayed behind the wheel and started backing the truck up, swinging it closer to Django lying there, until the dual wheels crushed Django’s hand against the pavement with a sound like popping corn, pop pop pop, like that, and the truck rumbled on and stopped ten feet away.

  “Shoulda done the other,” said the dude with the gray container that wasn’t a thermos bottle but a propane torch, because now there was a quiet blue flame hissing from a brass tube on the end of the container. “Shoulda done his right one.”

  They played the flame across Django’s shattered hand, back and forth, and they watched Django writhe and scream with no expression on their faces, none at all, until the propane was exhausted and the flame died. One of the dudes said, “Shit,” and shook tile container before throwing it away where it clattered against a brick wall and landed at the feet of Grizzly who’d been standing there watching it all from a doorway, the Gypsy behind him.

  The guy in the truck recognized Grizzly who held his hand out to the side and the Gypsy drew an ass-kicking Colt from a pocket of her parka and placed it in Grizzly’s hand. In one motion, his eyes never leaving the kid in the truck, Grizzly raised the Colt to shoulder level and it jerked in his hand and a copper-jacketed forty-five splashed tile dude’s brains all over the inside of the cab before anybody could react.

  “You boys’re too far from home,” Grizzly said, and he fired again, this time into one of the other dude’s knees, and his howls of pain echoed off the warehouse walls over and over. “Warned you to keep your asses clear a me. Warned you what I’d do, you pull this shit around me.”

  The third dude was already gone, snap, like that, running like hell out onto Dorchester because he knew Grizzly, knew the man’s rep, knew he was right, the man was right, you didn’t go into Grizzly’s area unless he knew you were coming, gave you the okay word. But that’s what they planned to do, that’s what they’d been told to do, take this dumb little mother from Buffalo and dump him on Grizzly’s turf, and if he lives, you let him walk around town, let everybody know what happens when you don’t get on the team.

  That’s how you played the game, the game had rules, everybody knew that. Django broke the rules and he paid, and then the dudes in the truck, they broke Grizzly’s rules and they paid. But a week later, a week after Grizzly and the Gypsy took Django to their place and wrapped his hand up and waited for it to heal, Elsie paid and Elsie didn’t break any rules, Elsie had been four hundred miles away, but Elsie paid anyway. They made her pay and made her little boys watch and the guys who did it, friends of the dudes in the dump truck, they took pictures of it all and sent them to Grizzly who showed them to Django, the Gypsy taking them out of an inside pocket because these pictures were bad and Grizzly never carried anything bad on him, never. Another one of Grizzly’s rules.

  “Word come with the pictures,” Grizzly said. “You okay here, it’s over, account’s been settled, hear me? This shit started ’fore you came along, between me an’ them, you just got yourself sucked in. But you don’t go back to Buffalo, understand? And you don’t go back on the river, not your turf. You go back, either place, it starts again and this time they maybe get your little boys.” Grizzly put a big paw on Django’s shoulder. “Give you a chance,” Grizzly said. “Me and the Gypsy could use a buddy, a partner. No crack, understand. You handle pills and such, lotta action happening there. Little bit a bread in it for you, little taste now and then, and protection. Specially protection.”

  Django had nodded, staring dry-eyed at the dirty bandages on his hand, the pus oozing through, the fingers twisted like a chicken’s claw, and he avoided looking at the pictures of what was left of Elsie.

  Alive, he told himself. You be alive, the boys be alive. That counts. That counts, damn it. You a little different, a little crazy maybe. He knew that, he knew he had to go a little crazy now to save himself, keep himself from living those few minutes with the brothers and the dump truck over and over in his mind, keep himself from thinking of Elsie being raped and cut open while the boys watched and screamed. He would celebrate the fact that he survived by dancing through life, one way or another he told himself. He would let whatever music that entered his mind carry him above all he had suffered, and he would dance to it.

  Django closed his eyes and rolled onto his right side, his scarred and crippled left hand against his chest, and willed himself to sleep.

  Gerry Orwin was an experienced cop who never played the political game or tried to raise his profile in the department, which was why he had not mov
ed past sergeant after ten years as a full detective. That was how Tim Fox assessed it, and he was quietly satisfied to have Orwin as a partner.

  They began their review at Orwin’s desk in the new open-concept office arrangement that Fat Eddie had installed a year earlier and that every detective hated because there was never any privacy. When Fox suggested they retreat to the basement lounge for coffee he and Orwin gathered the file summaries and spent two hours in the small, harshly lit room, Fox pointing out key details on the Lorenzo murder, autopsy report and interviews along with three other investigations that were still open on his docket. Orwin nodded his balding head and filled several pages of yellow notepaper with neat and tidy handwriting.

  When they finished, Fox noted it was almost six o’clock; he slapped Orwin on the back, arranged to meet him at eight the next morning and trotted three floors up the stairs to Homicide. A scattering of detectives were still bent over paperwork at their desks, leaning back in their chairs with telephone receivers at their ears or huddled in knots of two and three, plastic coffee cups in their hands and intense expressions on their faces.

  At his desk Fox dialed his home telephone and while it rang he punched his electronic mail code into the keyboard of his computer terminal. The messages began scrolling past just as Adelaide Fox, Tim’s wife of four years, answered the telephone. Tim began to explain that he would be home within an hour, then paused and leaned closer to the terminal.

  “Hold on a minute,” he said to Adelaide, and read the message on the screen again, the one from Brookmyer, the text preceded by the case number for the Lorenzo murder:

  Re: 892–774/Lorenzo—Subject of inquiry, H. DeMontford, under restricted access code, reference 1415–94. Not to be contacted without notification of Felony Team Green. Cross-reference between two files reveals common subject you may wish to pursue, one Joseph P. McGuire, former BPD officer, last known official address, 217 Medford Street, Revere Beach, MA.

  His wife was talking to him, something about Cecilia’s teacher, but Fox wasn’t listening, he was digesting the text in front of him, absorbing all that it meant and what it might lead to.

  Team Green was code for undercover officers whose activities were isolated from other departments for a number of reasons—including the possibility that their work could reveal the involvement of police officers in the crimes being investigated. Fox could obtain access to the DeMontford file in Team Green by citing the Lorenzo murder investigation, but that could only be arranged through Fat Eddie, who had departed for home an hour earlier.

  What’s McGuire up to? Fox asked himself.

  “Is that okay?” Adelaide was asking him, and Tim said, “What?”

  “Is it okay if Cecilia stays with your mother?” she repeated. “Are you listening to me?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Fox confessed. “Look, I may not make it there before eight after all. Give Cissy a goodnight kiss for me and I’ll pick up some of those pink jelly beans she likes, slip ’em to her for breakfast tomorrow.”

  “You’re spoiling the heck out of her,” his wife said, and Fox told her, “Yeah, but it worked for you, didn’t it?”

  When he hung up, he called Ollie Schantz in Revere Beach at McGuire’s last known address. Ronnie Schantz told him she hadn’t seen McGuire since the previous day but she’d heard about him saving the poor girl being beaten to death in his room and Ollie wanted to talk to him about it, hear all the details. Fox told her he would pass on the message. The file on MaryLou’s beating provided him with Billie’s address and telephone number, but after counting seven rings he hung up, snatched his Burberry from the armchair where he had tossed it and rode the elevator down to the basement garage, staring fixedly at the floor and frowning.

  The Gypsy’s moaning had long ago ceased and when Django awoke the light beyond the window had faded. He rose and stretched, his belly empty, his mind free of the spiders that had been whirling in his head, and slipped into his long leather coat.

  He tapped lightly on the door of the adjacent room before opening it. The Gypsy was curled in the only chair in the room, wrapped in a blanket from the bed, a cigarette in her hand and her tired eyes fixed on the television screen.

  “Where Grizz?” Django asked, and the Gypsy shrugged her shoulders. “I’m goin’ to the Bird,” Django said and she nodded her head.

  Django turned to leave before looking back at her. “Hey, Gyps,” he said. “You all right?”

  He hadn’t noticed the tears at first but there they were, making her cheeks shine.

  She didn’t answer, kept staring at some dumb game show on the TV, running her teeth across her bottom lip over and over, like she was skinning it, cleaning it.

  Django reached out a hand to touch her but she pulled away like his hand was a shaft of hot metal, like she was an animal fearing a whipping, and Django told himself to stay back, fool, leave it alone.

  “Keep cool, Gyps,” Django said and gave her a smile, but now her head and eyes were in motion, swinging wildly from side to side, scanning the room like someone following the flight of a frenzied bat.

  The detritus of the previous night’s police investigation remained scattered on the ground behind the club, lengths of yellow plastic tape marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, an empty photographic film box, plastic coffee cups and gauze bandage wrappers.

  Tim Fox glanced up at McGuire’s room. No light shone from within but the door was ajar, and he began to climb the steps, one by one, avoiding the bird droppings and the puddle of congealed blood on the landing where the man who had beaten MaryLou had landed face down with McGuire on his back.

  Django saw the lights of the Flamingo ahead, the scene different from last night, everybody gone, things back to normal. He remembered McGuire, the Jolt in a fog from those pills but still sharp enough, still mean enough to handle that creep who’d been doing MaryLou. Damn, Jolt’s a bad cat, Django told himself. Get a man like him on your side ’n you can ride anything out. Hell, between Jolt and Grizzly, Django’d never have to fear anybody on the street again.

  Gotta tell him that, Django thought. Gotta let him know he’s still my man, he’s the meanest, explain to him how it ain’t me, how Grizzly said we be dry for a while and Jolt shouldn’t take it serious like.

  Don’t wanta upset Jolt. No sir.

  He turned down the alleyway, moving through the darkness lightly and without sound, like a bird.

  From inside the club Fox heard the thump-thump of music urging another young woman to strut across the stage while men watched, the girl holding a hand on her waist and beaming her one smile, the only one she owned.

  At the top of the stairs the heel of Fox’s loafer caught in a strip of the metal strapping that formed the landing; Fox stumbled forward against the open door and into McGuire’s darkened room, feeling clumsy and silly but keeping his balance, lifting his head just as a figure burst from McGuire’s small bathroom and fired once, the sound of the shot like a cannon’s roar and the muzzle flash like a fleeting dawn in Fox’s eyes.

  Chapter Eleven

  They came for McGuire at ten o’clock, using Billie’s key to get into the apartment and clumping down the hall to the bedroom, four uniformed cops, their police specials out and held in a two-handed grip, moving them from side to side. McGuire lifted his head lazily from the pillow when they entered the room, thinking maybe he was in the midst of some codeine nightmare, until two of them yanked the covers from him and two others prodded him naked from the bed and ordered him to lie face down on the floor while the others stood in their balanced stance, their revolvers aimed at his head.

  “What’s going on?” McGuire managed to say as they cuffed him, his hands behind his back. None of them spoke but one wrapped him in a blanket before they half-carried, half-dragged him outside where a crowd had gathered on the street, drawn by the sight of three cruisers with gumball lights on their roofs scattering red and blue flashes across th
e walls of the other buildings.

  The codeine hangover was so heavy that even sitting with his hands cuffed painfully behind his back and being bounced from side to side in the rear of the cruiser, McGuire managed to sleep through most of the trip to Berkeley Street.

  When they arrived he was conscious enough to stumble down the corridor from the basement parking garage, suspended between two of the uniformed cops, to the interrogation room where Fat Eddie, Orwin, Phil Donovan and Zelinka, the Internal Affairs investigator, were waiting. Zelinka was dressed in a dark suit, crisp shirt and patterned tie. Donovan was in sweatshirt and jeans while Fat Eddie, looking as uncomfortable as McGuire had ever seen him, shifted his weight nervously from side to side in a far corner. Vance was wearing a knit golf shirt whose fabric stretched across his stomach and casual slacks. Two uniformed police officers stood in the opposite corner from Vance, their hands behind their backs.

  They set McGuire on the folding chair in the middle of the room, snapped the cuffs off and, at a curt nod from Fat Eddie, left the room, closing the door behind them.

  “The hell is this?” McGuire said, looking from Vance to Donovan to Zelinka. The blanket had fallen from his shoulders and McGuire pulled at one corner to conceal his nakedness. “Feel like a goddamn Roman.”

  “Would you like some coffee?” Fat Eddie Vance said, clipping his words and speaking in the deep voice that always made McGuire think he was talking from the bottom of his balls.

  “Yeah.” McGuire nodded. “Yeah, coffee would be good.”

  At a nod from Vance one of the uniforms left the room. McGuire lowered his head and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Where’s the weapon?”