Solitary Dancer

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  It was Donovan, staring at McGuire with his hard Irish eyes, his arms folded across his chest.

  McGuire looked up. “Me? You talking to me?”

  “That woman’s room, the one you’re living with,” Fat Eddie said. “It’s being searched for evidence.”

  “I’m not living with her,” McGuire said. “Somebody tell me what this is all about.”

  “He died an hour ago,” Donovan said.

  “Who?” Jesus, his head hurt.

  “Tim Fox.”

  McGuire raised his eyes to meet Donovan’s. “Timmy?” Vance, Donovan, Zelinka and the remaining uniformed officer were staring back at McGuire. “Timmy?” McGuire repeated. “Jesus. What happened?”

  Donovan exhaled noisily, dropped his hands and turned his back on McGuire.

  “Tell us where you’ve been for the last four hours,” Vance said.

  “Been?” McGuire lowered his head and studied the floor. Tim Fox dead? Timmy was one of the best, Timmy was the kind of stand-up guy McGuire admired, Timmy didn’t have an enemy in the department . . .

  The door opened but no one looked up as the uniformed officer entered the room carrying a plastic cup of black coffee and a paper sack stuffed with McGuire’s clothing. He crossed to the center of the room, placed the coffee cup in McGuire’s trembling hands, set the clothing at McGuire’s feet and retreated to a far corner.

  McGuire raised the cup to his lips with both hands. The heat of the liquid scalded his tongue but his head began to clear and as it did the first rays of rising agony burned on the rim of his skull. “What happened to him?” he said, staring at the floor where his bare toes peeked out from under the hem of the blanket.

  “You tell us, asshole—” Donovan began.

  McGuire threw the coffee in an overhand arc and dove out of the chair at Donovan, the blanket slipping from his body, a demented, naked man weary of the pain and the humiliation, driven by fury from his private crevice of darkness into the light again.

  “Are you perhaps feeling better?”

  McGuire nodded in response to Rudy Zelinka. He was back in the interrogation room, showered and dressed, and he raised a hand to touch the bandage above his right eyebrow that covered the gash suffered when Orwin and the two uniforms wrestled him away from Donovan an hour earlier. He had consumed two cups of coffee since then with the awareness that, to a meperidine addict, caffeine not only stimulated consciousness but encouraged the pain to burn more fiercely and sear his nerve endings.

  “I didn’t do it,” McGuire said.

  “You and Doitch are beginning to make a believer of me,” Zelinka said. He threw McGuire a tight smile. “Do you have any idea how many pills you took today?”

  McGuire shook his head.

  “There was an empty container of codeine on the floor of the bathroom in that apartment. Your woman friend says there were at least a dozen in it this morning.”

  “That many, huh?” McGuire looked around the perimeter of the room where Donovan was stroking a fresh bandage set across the bridge of his nose, his sweatshirt stained with blood. Fat Eddie sat in a folding chair and stared at the opposite wall.

  “You are a serious addict,” Zelinka said.

  “No, I’m not,” McGuire replied.

  “If you weren’t, Doitch says you should be dead by now.”

  “Just keep that red-haired son of a bitch away from me,” McGuire said, tilting his head toward Donovan.

  “Would you like him to leave?”

  “I would like him to take out his goddamn liver with a chain saw.”

  Zelinka looked up at Donovan. “Would you mind excusing us for a few minutes?” he asked pleasantly.

  Donovan glanced at Fat Eddie, who nodded once, and Donovan was out the door in four long strides.

  “Tell me what happened,” McGuire said, stroking his temples with the tips of his fingers. “To Timmy. Tell me what happened.”

  “Someone shot him as he entered your room. The shooter was inside. One to the chest. It severed the aortic artery, exited through his back. The detective choked to death on his own blood. The killer stepped over him on the way out.”

  “Weapon?”

  “We don’t know. We haven’t found the bullet yet. Doitch thinks it’s a thirty-eight.”

  “Who found him?”

  “An old Oriental woman called it in. Lives in a tenement next to the Flamingo. Says she didn’t see it happen. She finished her dinner, sat down by her window, saw Fox’s feet extending through the door to your room, and called her daughter, who called us.”

  “What was Timmy doing at my place?”

  “We were hoping you could tell us that,” Fat Eddie said.

  “No idea.” A cleaver in his skull. That’s what the pain had begun to feel like.

  “Your name came up on a Felony Team Green code. Would you like to say something about it?” Zelinka said.

  “Undercover? I’m not doing anything undercover.” McGuire’s neck grew damp and the room began to turn.

  “You’re cross-indexed on a Team Green file with a man named DeMontford.”

  “Never heard of him.” The pain was a living thing now, creeping through the breach between skin and skull.

  Zelinka studied McGuire as though pondering a puzzle. Then he said, “Would you like to come out of this clean?”

  “Clean?” McGuire lowered his head.

  Zelinka knelt in front of McGuire trying to catch his eye. “I don’t think you’ve been in any shape to hit a barn door with a snow shovel lately, let alone shoot a man through the heart from twenty feet. But you’ve become something of a shit magnet, McGuire. Your sister-in-law’s found dead with a recording of you threatening her on her answering machine. Which makes you a suspect. Then you rescue a young prostitute from a serial killer and turn his face into hamburger, so for a while you’re a hero. The next night one of the best cops in the city is shot dead on the doorstep of your room, and you’re a murder suspect again. And through it all, you know what else you’ve been?”

  McGuire was unable to sit still. Adrenaline flowed through him like a river in flood and his skin grew damp with sweat.

  “You know what you’ve been?” Zelinka demanded, thinking McGuire hadn’t heard.

  “I know what I’m going to be,” McGuire said weakly.

  “What?” Zelinka said just as McGuire leaned from the waist and vomited all over Zelinka’s brand new honey-coloured suede oxfords.

  “Cold turkey it,” Mel Doitch advised McGuire. The others had left, leaving McGuire alone with the overweight medical examiner. “Your best way. Drink liquids and eat light because you’ll throw up a lot. Stay in a dark room. Give yourself two, three days, maybe a week. You want it badly enough, you can do it.”

  Ronnie Schantz drove down to Berkeley Street, bringing with her some clothing that McGuire had left from last summer. She clucked her tongue at the sight of him but said nothing except to ask if he was okay when he lowered his head between his knees. McGuire said, “Sure.” Then she drove him in silence back to the small white frame house on Medford Street in Revere Beach.

  It was after midnight when McGuire stretched out naked between the crisp white sheets of the guest room bed, a plastic bucket on the floor beside him, a container of orange juice on the night table. He lay there like a moth in a web while the entire menagerie of his nightmares battered against the inner walls of his head.

  In the beginning, McGuire told himself, it wasn’t his doing, he never sought it out, it was all due to lack of energy, an inability to care about anything, anything at all, and that made it passive and easier to accept.

  Once he had believed in the wisdom of seizing life and shaking it until it did his bidding. By taking charge he would avoid being a victim, a goal that reflected his view of people as either victims or perpetrators, winners or losers, spectators or part
icipants.

  But over the years McGuire committed the unforgivable yet very human error of telling lies, rarely to others but often to himself. During the disintegration of his two marriages, the abandonment of his career in police work and his slide into barbiturate addiction, he assigned his destiny to others while telling himself it was all his choice, his decision. One of his decisions was to coast through the latter half of his life.

  Coasting. He turned the word over and over in his mind, feeling the gyros in his head spin and his stomach turn and jerk like a wild horse being broken on the perimeter of a wheel. He was weary of pedaling uphill, of rising against the gravity of his own environment, lifting himself from the sullen violence of his parents’ house to prominence as one of the most decorated police officers in Boston’s history.

  Two years ago he had grown tired and wanted only to coast for a while.

  He closed his eyes and began to construct peaceful images in his mind. He visualized Micki lying on her side with him, her back to him, both of them naked, his arm slung over her body and his hand cupping one breast, the two of them fitted together like spoons in their bed, and the line he could see stretching straight and unbending toward the horizon, that was their life together.

  Hours later the image appeared as a dream, both of them sleeping in this same darkened room, their backs to the door, and while they slept the door opened and someone entered the room to lay on the bed next to him, someone unknown and threatening. McGuire felt the bed sag beneath him from the weight of the visitor and he woke to discover he was in fact lying on his side in this room with no light. But there was no Micki pressed against him and he was torn between a sense of immediate loss and a fear that in fact someone was on the bed behind him. He listened to his own heart beating and tried to grasp the pain radiating from his brain stem and failed, and cautiously he rolled onto his back to confirm he was alone and safe in the small guest room of Ollie and Ronnie’s house.

  He lay trembling with resonating fear and nausea and when he grew sick to his stomach, the sound of his retching echoed loud and obscene in the small quiet house. Ronnie tapped at the door and asked if he was all right and McGuire assured her he was before drifting blessedly back to sleep again, free for a time of the pain.

  He dreamed of his parents’ home, the home of his childhood, set against the embankment leading down to railroad tracks which hummed like twin sets of steel strands that began in the shunting yard a half mile away and ended somewhere west of the passenger terminal. The metallic clash of boxcars and grunting diesel locomotives dominated the neighbourhood, soothing in their immutable logic, their sense of ordered assembly, of defining a place for every element of a journey. For years as a child McGuire envied railroad workers for the logic of all that they did, the defined destinations, the fixed schedule of arrivals and departures, the imposed imperatives of their lives.

  At the edge of the shunting yards several blocks away, a steel bridge carried streetcars across the expanse of the embankment, the railroad tracks like a river sunk beneath the level of the city, and when the streetcars crossed the bridge on late summer nights the unyielding sound of metal upon metal, steel wheels on steel tracks set in steel foundations, spoke to McGuire of escape and deliverance all through his childhood.

  Now in his dream he heard the streetcars, the sound drifting in through the windows of the house, open to catch the cooling summer night air, and he felt the presence of his parents again, his father distant and brooding, his mother silent and curiously inert. Both were long dead and little mourned by McGuire, but in his dream he tried to rise and go to them and bury himself between them, seeking and dispensing love. He drifted up and out of the dream, waking with his cheeks wet and a sob poised to erupt in his chest. He swallowed the emotion, unaware of its origin and its intent, then he closed his eyes and imagined himself with Micki once more, safe in the knowledge that sleep would arrive before he would take her, naked to him, even in his imagination.

  He woke several hours later, his memory flooded with a clear recollection of the railroad tracks again and an incident from his childhood.

  Word had swept the neighbourhood one Sunday morning that some boys had lain a dead dog across a rail beneath the Pearl Street bridge ahead of a late-night train. McGuire, nine years old, had run to the bridge and stacked three pieces of two-by-four and stood on them to peer over the railing.

  The beagle lay on the tracks, its head and front paws on the gravel bed and the rest of the body between the rails, severed like a frankfurter divided by a kitchen knife. McGuire remembered the dog’s brown eyebrows and white tail, and saw that its eyes were closed, the entire scene, viewed from twenty feet overhead, strangely calm and surreal.

  The image haunted him still. Not the gore or the stunning reality. But how immaculate it all appeared. How easily acceptable the horror was.

  He lay there perspiring and shaking, probing for the reserve of anger that had once fueled his resolve, a reservoir of strength that had been there to meet his need but had dissipated some time in his past. The hell with it, he told himself, the hell with it, the hell with it, and he rose from the bed, fell to his knees and rose again at the sound of footsteps outside his door.

  “Joe?” Ronnie called. “Are you all right?”

  He fell against the door, turned the knob and opened it, the glare from the overhead light in the hall shining off his body.

  “My God, Joe, put some clothes on,” Ronnie said, her eyes darting from the sight of him.

  “I need some,” McGuire said. He stretched out a hand, touched Ronnie’s chenille robe until she pulled away, her head still turned.

  “Joe, go back to bed . . .”

  “Just two or three, Ronnie. Just a couple to get me through the night . . .”

  “No,” she said, and spun away. “I don’t have any, and even if I had—”

  “There’s an all-night drugstore down the street . . .”

  “Joe, don’t even ask me—”

  “Goddamn it, you don’t know what it’s like!”

  At the sound of his anguish she stopped, breathed deeply and turned to stare at him, her eyes locked on his. “You go back in there and you wait until it’s over,” she said. “And that’s that. Or you leave here now and you never come back to bother Ollie and me again. Never. And for God’s sake, put some clothes on. You’re embarrassing both of us.”

  “All right,” he said. “Fuck you both. I’m . . . I’ll get out, get the hell out of here.”

  He closed the door, angry at her refusal. But the anger opened another door and he stumbled back to the bed, determined to wait it out, to overcome the tyranny of the narcotic.

  From the corner of the room he thought he heard a snuffling sound. In the shadows, he was sure he could see them, waited two small pigs and perhaps a dog, a sad beagle. “Where’s the horse?” he asked. He grinned to himself and began to laugh, except the tears kept flowing and the laughter hung in his throat like a bone.

  McGuire woke to a gray dawn. Ronnie entered the room and steadied him with a hand at his back while he sat up and sipped from a glass of juice before curling on his side again.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “About what?” Ronnie asked, fluffing his pillow.

  “About last night.”

  “A bad dream,” she said. “We both had the same bad dream.” She paused at the doorway and permitted herself a sly smile. “But a little bit of mine was actually kind of fun.”

  When he lay back, shivers racked his body and his skin acquired a sheen of perspiration. Within an hour he vomited the juice into the bucket, leaning over the edge of the bed and retching uncontrollably. He was enveloped in a rankness that seeped from within him, rising through layers of perspiration, an aroma as warm and cloying and greasy as chicken soup.

  The bed was an airship and a vault, and when he closed his eyes he felt himself simultaneously
rising weightless and sinking within the folds of the bedclothes, held down like a small animal in a snare. The nausea rose within him again and he opened his eyes to steady himself. The room ceased its spinning but small articles began to move: the cornice molding slithered along the wall, the heavy oak-framed picture glided slowly to the floor and his clothing, tossed casually across the back of a rocking chair, rolled itself into a ball.

  The rest of the day passed in short spells of sleep and violent spasms of sickness. In the evening Ronnie persuaded him to swallow a few spoonfuls of broth which McGuire managed to keep down until some time in the middle of the night when he awoke from a dream of Timmy Fox and Janet Parsons and McGuire together in Green Turtle Cay. He remembered nothing of the dream except the location and the people who had been there with him. When he fell asleep again he imagined himself walking on a floor constructed of writhing gray snakes whose bodies moved within a glassy slime and he felt himself sliding among them, knowing that to fall was to never rise.

  He woke in the fading dusk light. His skin was dry and he shivered uncontrollably, feeling his body quiver as though driven by some unknown, ungoverned engine within him.

  “Don’t need to know why.” Grizzly leaned against the door frame and stared past Django down the alley beyond the fire blazing in the steel drum. “Just need to do. You axed to do it, you do it, hear?”

  Django stood shifting his weight lightly from one foot to the other. His hands were in the pockets of his long leather coat and his tweed hat sat on the rear of his head, its brim up, the effect like a laughing cat with its head thrown back. “Don’t know where to find the Jolt,” Django said. “Ain’t seen him since the black dude got it right there on Jolt’s doorstep behind the Bird.”

  “You find him, he finds you, no difference,” Grizzly said. He hunched his shoulders and tilted his head, the gray beard beneath his chin thick and pliable and impenetrable like a sponge, and he stared down his wide flat nose at Django. “You put him where I can get him, all that matters. He find you when he need you.”