Solitary Dancer Read online

  They took McGuire from his cell after breakfast. The guards clumped down the concrete corridor in heavy black boots with soles thick as watermelon rind. McGuire shuffled unsteadily between them, his feet flip-flopping in his sneakers with no laces.

  They led him to a room with gray plaster walls that were cracked and peeling and gray metal furniture that was dented and bent. Harvey Hoffman, McGuire’s appointed lawyer, lifted his head from the stack of legal documents he had been reading and nodded to McGuire, who sat facing him in the only other chair in the room. The guards retreated to the corridor, leaving the prisoner with his counselor.

  “You okay?” Hoffman asked McGuire through his massive gray beard. The lawyer’s bald head shone in the glare of the single overhead fluorescent light fixture. It was just after nine in the morning but already Hoffman looked as though he had run a marathon in his three-piece suit. Running any distance would have been a remarkable feat for this man, who carried his nearly three hundred pounds like an armful of inflated balloons, folds of it spilling out here and there. A pair of delicate gold-rimmed half-frame spectacles spanned his broad face. His salt-and-pepper beard sprouted untrimmed and untamed from the lower half of his face like shrubbery.

  “I’m all right,” McGuire said.

  Over the years McGuire and Hoffman had encountered each other in various Suffolk County courtrooms, earning a grudging respect for each other, like sparring partners who know nothing of the other man’s life except the sight of him crouching, jabbing and darting away.

  “This is a crappy move, what they did,” Hoffman said, suppressing a belch. He reached up and began unbuttoning his vest. “They couldn’t even stick a charge of threatening on you. Can’t threaten an answering machine.” He chose a sheaf of papers from the stack and slapped it with the back of his hand. “Nothing in here, in your statement, constitutes a felony, not even sufficient grounds for suspicion.” He removed his glasses. “Only reason you’re here is that Eddie Vance doesn’t like you very much, does he?”

  McGuire smiled.

  “Well, I’ve already talked to Higgins’s office, told them I’d be filing a writ to get you in front of a judge and out of here. Word is, they won’t fight it.” He twisted his body and glanced around the room, the exertion causing him to wheeze. “Shouldn’t even be here, short-term. Could’ve kept you downtown, in the courthouse holding cells. Didn’t you raise hell about being sent here? Didn’t you say this was a breach of your rights?”

  “No,” McGuire said.

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t give a damn.”

  Hoffman watched his client intently for several seconds before leaning as far forward as his girth would permit and asking, “You sure you’re all right?”

  McGuire looked at the man as though he didn’t understand the question. He was still staring at Hoffman when a knock at the door caused the lawyer to raise his head and motion one of the guards into the room. The guard handed Hoffman a note, studying McGuire’s face as though imprinting it on his consciousness for a future test of his memory, before leaving and closing the door behind him.

  “You’re out of here,” Hoffman said after glancing at the note. “But they’re only going halfway. They’ve got some charges pending on other stuff and demanding you’re not to leave the state without informing Berkeley Street.” He tossed the note in front of McGuire who looked at it curiously. “I’ll get that lifted this afternoon. It’s another crappy move, got Eddie Vance’s prints all over it.” He stood up and gestured to the guard through the window. “I’ve got a couple other clients to see,” the lawyer said. “Take about an hour which’ll give you time to gather your belongings. You want a ride downtown?”

  McGuire said yes and when the guard entered the room again he shuffled away, leaving Hoffman frowning and shaking his head, comparing the subdued man he had just met with the explosive homicide cop he once dreaded tangling with in a courtroom or jail corridor, a man with the same name and face but with something else in his eyes, something this man, this new McGuire, was lacking.

  “I hope you don’t mind meeting me here. But I just didn’t like the idea of setting foot in Berkeley Street again.”

  The woman facing Tim Fox in the corner booth of the Gainsborough Pub was perhaps thirty-five years old, maybe younger. She wore a camel-coloured cashmere sweater and brown tweed skirt. Her silken hair framed a startlingly expressive face, one that leaped between extremes of joy and sadness, rarely pausing between the two. Her eyes were large and dark and when her lips parted in a smile, deep dimples formed in her cheeks, soft-edged like craters in meringue. Her name was Michelle Lorenzo. It had once been Micki McGuire.

  “Don’t blame you,” Fox smiled. “When I walk out of Berkeley for the last time, I don’t ever plan to go in again.” A waiter brought him coffee. Micki’s sat cold and untouched in front of her. “How long were you and Joe married?” Fox asked.

  There it was, the quick smile, the dimples. “Nearly five years. Plus a year and a half we lived together before that.” Her hands, small and delicate, toyed with a coffee spoon as she spoke, and the smile faded. “He was so intense. It took me a long time to get used to it, how intense he was about things that mattered to him. I’d almost forgotten about it. Then I saw him earlier this year. I’d written to him, care of Berkeley Street. Just to see how he was doing, what he was up to. They sent the letter to Ollie Schantz and his wife who passed it on to Joe, over in the Bahamas.”

  She sat back in the booth, toying with the coffee spoon.

  “I’d been involved in . . .” She halted again, looked across the almost deserted restaurant and started over. “I was working for an air conditioning company, they did repairs, installations.” Then she added, like an afterthought, “Before that, I’d met some rough people, hung out with them for a while. It’s not something I’m proud of. And when I found myself all alone I kept thinking about Joe so I wrote him . . .”

  She reached to pat the back of her hair. “Anyway, I came out of work one day and there he was waiting for me, sitting in some car he’d rented.” A smile that stayed this time, glowing with the memory of him. “He looked good. He looked really good. He’d lost some weight, had a great tan, smiled and laughed a lot. We had dinner and, um . . .” A shrug. “Went down to the Keys that weekend, stayed in a motel on the gulf side. It was nice. It was really nice.” Still smiling. But crying now too. “And then, just like that, when Sunday came he took me back to Coconut Grove and caught a plane to Nassau. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “He’s changed,” Tim Fox said. He told her about the Bahamian police report, McGuire’s near-fatal beating on the yacht, the hospital stay, the deportation and the tiny room over the strip club whose patrons came to do more than just look at the young women.

  She listened with her mouth partially open and her eyes darting back and forth. “That doesn’t sound like Joe,” she said. “God, that’s not Joe, that’s somebody else.”

  “Like I said, he’s changed.”

  Micki stared down at her coffee before lifting the cup to her lips. “You don’t really think he killed Heather,” she said in a low voice.

  Fox shook his head. “But some people would like to.”

  She set the cup down without drinking from it and said, her head lowered, her eyes avoiding Fox’s, “Some people will be happy to know my sister is dead too. Happy and worried at the same time.”

  Fox sat back, folded his arms and raised his eyebrows, urging her silently to continue.

  She flashed her smile at him in embarrassment. “I know what my sister’s been up to for the past couple of years,” she said. “She didn’t make all of her money from being a photographer’s agent. Not by a long shot.”

  Chapter Five

  Grizzly tossed a handful of old shingles on the fire blazing inside the rusting forty-gallon drum. When the black smoke and flames roared out Grizzly laughed and held his hand
s, large and brown like catcher’s mitts, in front of him to feel the heat.

  “Cops don’t like it,” the Gypsy muttered, wrapping her arms around her for warmth, huddled inside Grizzly’s stained gray parka with the raccoon fur trim on the hood. Strands of her greasy black hair spilled out from around the fur trim, hair as dark and shining as her eyes. “Makes too much smoke. Might come by, just to raise hell.”

  Grizzly laughed again and rubbed his hands together. He was wearing a blue kerchief tied tightly around his head, a denim shirt open nearly to his navel, and brown army surplus pants. “We’ll tell ’em we jus’ sendin’ smoke signals to your brothers ’cross the way. Maybe that’s First Amendment rights.” He looked across the flames at Django. “You figure that’s maybe what it is?”

  Django nodded and smiled, shifting his weight to one side and then the other, doing a shuffle around the blazing fire in the steel drum, sliding his feet in his white Reebok high-cuts. Django’s black leather trench coat hung open and moved with his motion. A tweed pork-pie hat managed to remain propped at a sharp angle well back atop his small head. His eyes closed, he did a sideways step around the drum, staying near its warmth that softened the damp chill of the gray air.

  Out on Washington Street at the end of the alley, a black Mercedes slowed to a stop. Its driver, an overweight balding man with an unruly salt-and-pepper beard, stared open-mouthed down the lane at the sight of Grizzly and the Gypsy, and Django prancing and stepping lightly around the fire that blazed in the steel drum, his head back, his eyes closed.

  “Hey,” Grizzly said softly.

  The Mercedes’ passenger door opened and a dark-eyed man wearing only a dirty and faded sweatshirt emerged. He was nodding in response to something the driver of the car was saying but he was watching Django intently.

  Django’s back was to the car. “Hear you, Grizz.”

  The man in the sweatshirt waited for the Mercedes to pull away. Then, with his hands thrust deeply in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the wind, he walked unsteadily down the alley. The Mercedes drove off with a sound like a sigh.

  “You got a customer.” Grizzly stood motionless, watching the man approach. The Gypsy scampered toward the unpainted wooden shed set against the rear wall of the building housing Tremont Adult Novelties and began fishing in her pockets for cigarettes.

  Django swivelled his small head to look down the alley. “It’s the Jolt, come back to life,” he called, extending his arms to welcome McGuire. “Hey, how you doin’?”

  McGuire halted a few paces away. He nodded at Grizzly and glanced at the Gypsy. “I got twenty,” he said, giving Django the crisp bill Hoffman had just handed McGuire in the warmth of the Mercedes.

  “An’ I got some D’s for you,” Django moved away from McGuire, his left arm extended. “Django’s got some D’s for his man, ain’t he, Grizz?”

  Grizzly smiled through the flames and smoke belching from the rusting drum. He motioned to the Gypsy who was taking long drags on her Camel Light and watching McGuire from the corner of her eye. She moved crabwise from the safety of the building wall to stand behind Grizzly, who reached into a pocket of the parka and withdrew a brown bottle the size of a coffee mug. In a quick, practised motion he removed the cap, shook ten small pills into his hand, replaced the cap and slid the bottle back into the parka. Then he was around the blazing metal drum, his hand extended to McGuire but his head and eyes in motion, looking everywhere.

  McGuire counted the Demerol and said, “I used to get twice this much.” Not waiting for a reply, he picked two of the tiny pills from his palm, placed them in his mouth and swallowed them dry.

  “Supply and demand, Jolt,” Django said. “Supply and demand.”

  McGuire approached the fire and its oily warmth. Soon, he told himself. Soon.

  “Hey, you hear the word, Jolt? Lady Day, she thinkin’ a you, missin’ you all a time.” Django nodded, smiling. “I tell her I see you, she gonna be glowin’ again. She thinkin’, worryin’, wonderin’ when you comin’ back. Word is, you were kinda mean to a sweetie over on Newbury, one of your upward climbin’ angora-style ladies.”

  “Tell Billie not to worry about me,” McGuire said.

  “Oh, Billie not worried,” Django laughed. “She not worried, no darlin’.” A long cackle, rising in pitch. “She egg-sight-ed, Jolt. She hear you get rough, she near to fallin’ in love with you!” and he laughed again.

  McGuire turned from the fire and walked away, down the lane, back to Tremont.

  “Shouldn’t,” said the Gypsy from the other side of the burning steel drum. “Shouldn’t do business with no cops.”

  “Ex,” Grizzly corrected her. “He be an ex-cop.”

  “Cops are cops,” the Gypsy said. “Dogs are dogs, shit is shit, cops are cops.”

  “He something special though, Gyps.” Django twisted his shoulders from side to side and watched McGuire cross Washington on his way to the Flamingo. “Jolt special. And soon Jolt be special and happy. Happier’n he be now, for sure. Soon he be real again. The man be real,” and Django turned to face the fire, closing his eyes, warming his body and moving it in rhythm, always in rhythm.

  It was five blocks from Grizzly’s back alley place of business to the Flamingo and the knife through McGuire’s head, the one that blurred his vision and tilted the world around him like a slowing down spinning top, carved its way deeper into his skull with every step he took.

  Reaching the base of the fire escape, he ignored the heavy crust of bird droppings that had repelled Tim Fox two mornings ago and gripped the railing to pull himself up step by step to his room, shouldering the door open and walking unsteadily past the bed.

  In the ancient wicker wastebasket next to the toilet he counted five condom wrappers. He dumped them into a plastic garbage bag beneath the sink and washed the guano from his hands. Then, soaking a small towel in cold water and wringing it almost dry, he walked back to the single bed, pulled from the shelf the only hardcover book he owned, a battered copy of Wild Animals I Have Known, removed the five ten-dollar bills left between its pages and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he sat on the hard backed chair, holding the cloth against his forehead, its cool dampness almost erotic in the pleasure it gave him.

  When he opened his eyes a few moments later, there was a horse in the room. Small and dapple-gray, standing patiently in the corner. McGuire didn’t look at the animal directly, knowing to do so would make it disappear.

  “Hello, horse,” he smiled. He rose, steadied himself against the wall, took two steps to the bed and lay upon it, placing the wet cloth across his face and feeling the room turn slowly beneath him.

  It was on the horizon of his mind and approaching slowly, the warm cloud of numbness he craved.

  When you do not wish to feel, you go numb. On your own, if capable. On the wings of a drug, if necessary.

  Waiting for the full effect of the painkiller, he numbered the missing pieces of his life, beginning with the music he loved, the quiet jazz that had once served as the foundation of his sanity and the inspiration of his youth. Gentle rhythms and melodic improvisation, masking passion and intensity. That was the power of it, the way the passion and intensity remained concealed beneath the surface. Without passion and intensity and control, the music was nothing. Miles, Desmond, Zoot, Coltrane, all their intense melodies and phrases had once flown like lovers to McGuire’s soul and made his head nod, his eyes burn, his smile arise like a dawn sun. They were gone, the music and the musicians, and he missed them.

  And Gloria. He missed Gloria, his first wife, dead four years. You’ll be commissioner some day, she told McGuire soon after they were married and he said, No, don’t be silly, I don’t want that, and she said, Then please figure out what you want because until you do you’ll never be truly happy and you’ll make everyone who is a part of your life miserable.

  He lay there, feeling his eye
s grow damp, for perhaps thirty minutes until he heard two sets of footsteps climbing the fire escape, one heavy, one light. A girl from the club he figured, freelancing between shifts, leading a nervous morning customer on his way toward thirty minutes of fulfilled fantasy.

  McGuire opened his eyes and the simple action drained weight from his body. Something had happened to his face and he realized he was smiling. The knot at the back of his neck had unravelled and the taut wire rope that had been his spine had fallen away. He watched as he extended his arms above his head, seeing the fingers spread, feeling the damp cloth slide from his face when he sat upright.

  In the tunnels, moving through the runnels of his mind, the warmth of the medication advanced like a gently rising tide.

  He looked around the room. The horse was gone. Once he had seen a small black pig snuffling in the bathroom. And there had been snakes and roads the size of footstools. His hallucinations were often animals; animals were easy to accept, animals were fine. It was the others, the flayed corpses and staring naked women, that upset him the most when they appeared, daring him to look at them and vanishing from his sight but somehow never his presence when he did.

  He was hungry, ready for a bowl of noodles and shrimp from a Vietnamese restaurant on Lincoln.

  Voices were approaching his door, speaking softly, and he visualized them, the girl leading the way, the john nervous, maybe expecting a mugging and a knife in the ribs, then his wallet extracted and his body tossed from the landing to the alley below.

  Shadows on the dusty window. McGuire rose to his feet, staggered slightly, walked to the door and swung it open before they could knock.

  “How you doing?” Tim Fox, in his Burberry coat and small hound’s-tooth check suit, smiled back at McGuire, then stood aside. “Brought somebody you know.”

  She said nothing at first. She simply pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at him, her hands clasped in front of her.