Solitary Dancer Read online

  “The hell you think you’re doin’?” the voice from the machine said. “I said no. I told you no, goddamn it. So stop bugging me or . . . or I’m coming over there and I’ll rip off your face if you don’t . . . stop it. Just stop . . .” A long pause as though the caller were collecting his strength. “You watch your ass, Heather,” the man said, close to the receiver. “You got it . . . whatever it is, you’ve got it coming to you.”

  “Hey, now there’s . . .” Donovan began, and Tim Fox, his eyes on the machine, said “Shut the fuck up for a minute,” waiting for the woman with the halting, prerecorded delivery to speak.

  “Eleven. Fifty. Three. P. M. Thursday.”

  “Maybe we’ve got us a time now,” Donovan said quietly.

  Fox’s eyes were still on the answering machine.

  “We might have us more than that,” he said.

  He looked up and avoided Donovan’s eyes to stare out the window, his expression one of excitement tinged with sorrow. “I know that voice,” Fox said in a near-whisper.

  Donovan watched, waiting for him to continue.

  “He’s a cop. Or used to be.”

  Tim Fox breathed deeply, exhaled slowly and covered his eyes with one hand.

  “Jesus,” he said sadly, and shook his head.

  Chapter Two

  Fat Eddie Vance had gas. Not uncomfortable transient indigestion but chronic gut-wrenching, intestine-twisting, bowel-roaring flatulence that rumbled through his digestive tract like the bottom octave of a church organ.

  Nothing he tried, not low-fibre diets or chalky antacid liquid swallowed directly from the bottle, prevented it. The root cause of his ailment, had Fat Eddie been honest enough to admit the truth, was the tension generated by his position as captain of detectives, Homicide Division.

  “The problem, Mr. Vance,” his doctor had advised Fat Eddie a week earlier, “is that you’re dealing with too much pressure on your job and you’re compounding the problem by refusing to admit it.” The doctor had lowered his head and peered at Fat Eddie over the top of his glasses.

  Fat Eddie hated it when the doctor did that. He hated it when anyone did it. The gesture reminded him of his mother who would stare at him over her glasses and demand to know if Teddy had completed his chores, if Teddy had finished his homework and if Teddy had banished evil thoughts from his mind that could lead to self-abuse.

  “Just remember,” the doctor said, his head still bent, his eyes still fastened on Fat Eddie’s from over the glasses’ frame. “You can fool yourself, but you can’t fool your stomach.”

  On this morning, Fat Eddie didn’t want to fool his stomach. He wanted to pierce it with an open pressure valve and deflate it like a balloon. Instead, he crossed his legs, settled himself deeper into his leather chair, placed the tips of his fingers together beneath his chin and spoke to Tim Fox who had just burst into Fat Eddie’s office.

  “What’ve you got, Fox?” Fat Eddie asked in his deep, hollow voice.

  “A just cause to haul somebody in on suspicion, murder one,” Tim Fox replied. The black detective was wearing his crisply pressed beige Burberry over a gray-brown suit with subtle maroon pin striping, the deep red tone of the worsted fabric echoed in the colour of his tasselled loafers and the pattern of his silk tie.

  Fat Eddie paused for a moment to admire the detective’s lean, fashionable appearance. Where do black people get that sense of style? he wondered.

  “So do it,” Fat Eddie replied. He shifted his weight from one buttock cheek to the other and winced as a small dagger-like pain sliced through his bowels. He wanted Fox out of his office. He wanted everyone out of hearing range.

  “Listen to something first,” Fox said. The detective withdrew a portable tape cassette player from a pocket of his topcoat and set it on Fat Eddie’s desk. “This is the tape from the answering machine at the scene of that woman’s murder on Newbury this morning. You heard about it yet?”

  “Of course I heard about it,” Fat Eddie said. He placed his hands on the arms of his chair, lifted his weight, lowered it again. “Tell me anyway.”

  Tim Fox smiled dryly and tilted his head.

  Fat Eddie hated that gesture almost as much as he hated people staring over the tops of their eyeglasses at him. It meant he had been caught in a lie. Or a half truth.

  “Victim’s name is . . .” Fox removed his notebook from an inner jacket pocket and flipped through the pages. “Heather Arlene Lorenzo, age thirty-eight, separated from second husband, residing at 206A Newbury Street, occupation photographer’s agent . . .”

  “So get to the point.” Fat Eddie unfastened his belt buckle. A sound like a Kenworth truck downshifting on a distant freeway rumbled from his gut. God, what was going on inside him? “I’ll read all that in the summary.”

  “She was beaten to death with a blunt instrument,” Fox said, returning the book to his jacket pocket. “And stabbed once, deeply, in the gut, right here.” Fox touched his navel.

  Fat Eddie blinked. What would happen, he wondered, if someone punctured his navel right now?

  “Doitch figures maybe a fractured skull, for sure a broken jaw. Have the autopsy done this afternoon. Looks like she was knocked out and left for dead, came to, crawled ten feet to a doorway, passed out again and bled to death.”

  “Why are you telling me now?” Fat Eddie asked. He waved a pink hand at the portable tape player on his desk. “And what’s it got to do with this?”

  Fox reached out and pressed Play. “Listen.”

  Fat Eddie folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. Something large and furry seemed to be crawling laterally through his abdomen.

  From the machine, the effeminate male German voice made its appeal for more time. Fat Eddie blinked impassively.

  “One of the photographers she represented,” Tim Fox said while the machine’s voice announced the day and time of the message. “We think.”

  The second man’s voice, lurching between pleas and anger, rumbled from the machine. Fat Eddie raised his eyebrows at the brutal, abrupt sign-off.

  “We don’t know who that was. But listen to this,” Tim Fox instructed over the machine’s voice. “See if you recognize this one.”

  “You know who this is, you bitch.”

  Vance jerked his head up as though a bird had flown into the room. He listened to the man’s voice shape angry words whose endings were rounded and slurred, the vowels shaking, the whole effect somehow gelatinous and unstable.

  “Is that . . . ?” Fat Eddie asked in a near-whisper.

  “Sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?” Fox shut off the tape player.

  “Any other calls?”

  Fox shook his head. During the playing of the tape his excitement had vanished and now he bit his bottom lip in concentration and avoided Fat Eddie’s eyes.

  Fat Eddie said, “I hear he’s a drunk, living down in the old Combat Zone.”

  “Got a room over the Flamingo Club,” Fox said. He slid the tape player from Fat Eddie’s desk and dropped it into his coat pocket. “Strip joint off Tremont. Full of hookers.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised. Guy was a good cop once, but . . .”

  Fox was staring over Vance’s shoulder, out the window onto Berkeley Street. “Well, I’m surprised. You might’ve had problems with him but he was the best, him and Ollie. Those two guys taught me more about this job than anyone else.”

  “Flaws,” Fat Eddie said, studying his fingernails. “Man was full of flaws, full of anger. When he didn’t have this job to channel it through, he fell apart.”

  “I want to find him, talk to him,” Fox said. “But I want to do it alone. I don’t want whistles and I sure as hell don’t want Donovan with me.”

  “He’s your partner.”

  “Joe was my buddy.”

  “Well, sounds like your buddy’s now a suspect in a first-d
egree.” Fat Eddie lifted a pencil from his desk and waved it in the air as he spoke. “So far he’s your best one, I’d say.”

  “I can’t believe he would do anything like this.” Tim Fox turned and began walking toward the door.

  “You can’t?” Fat Eddie sneered. “You don’t think he could kill anybody? Maybe you just didn’t know him very well, Fox. Not as well as some people.”

  Fox closed the door behind him.

  “Not as well as some people,” Vance repeated, dropping a hand to his side, trying to rub the pain that was burning through his bowels.

  The slimeball from Cambridge, the one with the beard who said he was a professor at Harvard, kept trying to stroke Billie’s thigh; the third time he touched her she leaned over, close to him, a gesture she thought might be a mistake when she saw his eyes grow wide in reaction to her breasts dangling so close to his face. Billie said, “Look over there.”

  “Over where?” said the beard, grinning at her chest.

  “Over at that son of a bitch, looks like a portable shithouse, standing behind the bar,” Billie hissed. “Name’s Dewey. Look at him, asshole.” She gripped an inch of flesh on the guy’s cheek and twisted his head so he faced the bar where Dewey stood watching the front door, his shaved head gleaming in the lights over the bar, a Bud in his hand, you can barely see the bottle his hand’s so big.

  “What about him?” the beard asked.

  “I give the word to Dewey that you keep touching me and he’ll come over here, pick you up, carry you outside and drop you tits-up on a fucking fire hydrant,” Billie said.

  The beard nodded, folded his arms and sat back while Billie finished dancing naked on the stool in front of him but her heart wasn’t in it. When she finished the beard gave her a two-dollar tip and asked what her real name was. “Nancy Reagan,” she said, and shrugged into her robe, jammed the two bucks in the same pocket where she kept her cigarettes and lighter, and headed for the front door, needing a smoke and some fresh air, cold as it was.

  Sugarman, the owner, liked it when the girls took their breaks outside, standing in the doorway pulling on a Marlboro where the perverts going by on Laveche Street could see them, maybe with one long leg extended, red polish on the toenails, the guys knowing they had nothing on under their robes.

  “Take your breaks there, the front door,” Sugarman would say. “Brings the suckers in. Flash ’em a little thigh, casual like. Get ’em in for a beer, let ’em look at some pussy.”

  Billie opened the door on a gray early afternoon. She lit a Marlboro and French-inhaled, releasing the smoke in thick clouds from her mouth, pulling it up through her nostrils and deep into her lungs. She stood staring down the street toward Tremont. From inside the club, Mick Jagger’s voice thundered through the speakers over the dance floor where Terri was just beginning her act, reaching behind her, unfastening the gold lamé halter top.

  An electrician’s delivery van drove by, the young mustached driver lowering his window and making a sucking noise at her. When she gave him the finger, he smiled, honked his horn, accelerated away toward Tremont.

  “How you doin’?”

  Billie turned to see a cool black dude who’d come up behind her. He was wearing one of those expensive raincoats made in England, nice pin-striped suit, tab-collar shirt, loafers with those little tassels on them.

  “I’m doing okay,” Billie said. She stepped aside. “You wanta go inside, see some good-looking girls?”

  He smiled. Nice white even teeth. Lots of them. “Not today. Looking for an old friend of mine.”

  Billie took a last drag on her cigarette. “What’s his name?”

  “McGuire. Joe McGuire.”

  “Never hearda him.” She dropped the butt on the sidewalk, stretched a long leg out to crush it with a rhinestone-strapped stiletto-heeled shoe. The black guy was looking. She felt him watching her leg, admiring it.

  “Guy’s about fifty, dark hair gettin’ gray,” he said when she straightened again, her arms folded across her chest. “Got a scar here,” and he traced a line with his fingertip diagonally from the corner of his nose to his upper lip.

  “Never saw him either.” She looked up and down the street, avoiding his eyes. “Listen, I gotta go to work, okay?”

  The black guy reached out, grabbed her wrist, squeezed tightly. “How many times’ve you been busted?” he said, still smiling. Showing his teeth mostly, not smiling with his eyes.

  “For what?” Jesus, if Dewey came out now . . .

  “For anything. Hooking, snorting, public indecency, picking your nose, I don’t care.”

  “None of your fucking business.” Hell, first the bearded asshole said he was a professor, now this.

  “You want to add another one or you want to tell me where McGuire is? Your choice.”

  People going by were watching. Stuff like this could hurt business, guys don’t want to come into a place where there’s trouble. “He’s gone. Goes out in the morning, sometimes you don’t see him for days even.”

  “Where’s his room?”

  “Around the back. Up the fire escape.”

  “You see him go out this morning?” The cop relaxed his hold on her wrist.

  “One of the girls did. I think she’s got a thing for him.”

  “Where does he go?”

  Billie shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Milt Sugarman still own this place?” He released her wrist.

  “Yeah, but he’s not here. Gone to Mexico with one of the girls. Acapulco, some place like that.”

  “When’s he back?”

  She rubbed her wrist where he had held her, gave him a sly grin. Good looking stud, wasn’t he? She wondered how seriously he took the gold wedding band on his finger. “Next Wednesday or when he’s tired a fuckin’ his eyes out, whichever happens first.” She took a step back into the club, glanced at the stage. Terri was showing her ass to the thin early crowd, bending over, touching her toes. “You comin’ in?”

  The black guy didn’t answer at first, just leaned back to look around the building to where the fire escape came down to the alley. “Some other time maybe,” he said.

  “My name’s Billie, you want to ask for me,” she said. She pulled the robe tighter across her chest. The cold had made her nipples hard and they poked against the fabric.

  “Sure.” He flashed her a smile, put his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. “Maybe I will.”

  “Son of a bitch is pullin’ a number on me.”

  Phil Donovan hitched his trousers a little higher over his narrow hips and tightened his belt a notch.

  Fat Eddie Vance watched silently, holding a pencil by its ends, twirling it slowly.

  “He sends me for errands, he tells me nothin’. Thinks I’m still a whistle.” Donovan waved his arms in angry gestures, looked around and collapsed into a chair in front of the captain’s desk.

  “He is the senior partner,” Vance said.

  “Okay, okay, but we’re both lieutenants. I’m acting, I know that, but when it gets final and I’m full louie I’m definitely not takin’ his shit anymore.”

  Fat Eddie sighed. He opened the top drawer of his desk where a dozen pencils identical to the one in his hand lay waiting, their points sharpened, all facing in the same direction, like bullets in an ammo belt. “I can’t give you a transfer yet. You know that. It would disrupt all the other teams.” He added the pencil he had been holding to his cache and closed the drawer.

  “I know, I know,” Donovan muttered. “Just tell Fox to keep his black ass out of my way, that’s all. He leaves me to write up the report on my own and now I gotta go down, watch Doitch do the broad’s autopsy while he’s out suckin’ back a beer or something.”

  Vance raised his eyebrows. “He didn’t tell you where he was going?”

  “Not a goddamn word.”

&
nbsp; Fat Eddie frowned. “He’s gone to talk to McGuire. If he can find him.”

  Donovan snapped his head around, the anger about to overflow again. “His old buddy? On his own? What’s he doin’, talkin’ to a number one suspect and not tellin’ me?”

  Fat Eddie leaned back in his chair. “Did you finish writing your investigation report?”

  Donovan nodded, staring off in the distance.

  “And did Doitch specifically ask you to be present for a review of the autopsy findings?”

  “Naw, that was Fox’s idea.”

  “Then you needn’t go. There’s no regulation that says the investigating detectives have to be present for the autopsy, unless there are special circumstances.” Vance opened another desk drawer and removed an unopened bottle of Maalox, keeping it from Donovan’s view.

  “So what do I do? Sit around here tryin’ to guess what model of Louisville Slugger the guy used on her?”

  “You’ve got a solid suspect, haven’t you?”

  Donovan looked back at Vance, his blue Irish eyes narrowing.

  “Put a bulletin out on McGuire if Fox hasn’t done it yet,” Vance said. “If Fox finds McGuire on his own, fine. If not, maybe when he gets back, he’ll find him here. Either way, you’re getting somewhere.”

  “That’s comin’ right from you, huh?”

  “You just heard it.”

  Donovan stood up. “Tim’ll be pissed,” he said. His freckled face was creased with a grin.

  “He’ll get over it. Besides, Tim has problems being a team player. I’ve been meaning to mention it to him. Maybe this will make my point.”

  “Actually, I thought about doin’ that, puttin’ out a metro call,” Donovan said, reaching the door in three strides. “Didn’t want to, you know, upset things too much. But this way . . . hell, you agree it’s a good idea, right?”

  Vance nodded. Right. One hand twisted the cap on the bottle. The point of a dagger traced its way along his lower digestive track. When Donovan closed the door, Vance tilted his head back and drank deeply.

  The fire escape was crusted with layers of bird droppings accumulated over the years. As he climbed, Tim Fox wrapped his beige Burberry tightly around his body to keep the fabric from becoming soiled. He leaned slightly forward so that if he lost his step he wouldn’t fall backward.