Solitary Dancer (23 page)

Grizzly ran other dealers, Django'd always known it. Grizz told Django he was the favourite of the Grizz. Hell, Grizz had saved Django's black ass, blowing away that dude right there in the alley, hadn't he? Took Django in, got the Gypsy to bandage his messed-up hand, gave Django a bit of action, some walking around money. Most of all, Grizz gave him protection, staying close under Grizzly's wing, yes.

Django had met a couple of them, guys who worked other neighbourhoods for Grizzly, but Grizzly made everybody keep their distance from the others, never liked getting them all together. Fact is, Grizz couldn't trust guys like them. They're liable to get together, figure out how much action Grizz is making off them, taking no risks, carrying nothing on his own self, even staying in three different places, three different addresses. Bunch of rooms in the wormy old Warrenton, paying Django's rent. And a place down on Dorchester, corner of a warehouse, just a john and a cot but Grizzly didn't need much more. And a little old house in the South End out on Albany, kitchen and all. The Gypsy liked that place best but it was too far from the action for the Grizz, he needed to be downtown, needed to see things happen.

Grizzly operated like a company sales manager, products and territories, everybody had their own. Django, he did the medicine, other side of Tremont, down among the gooks and the deadheads left over from the old Combat Zone. There was a Spanish guy, maybe a Cuban, tough little hood named Garcia but Grizzly always called him Garce, he worked the waterfront, selling mostly hash, good Moroccan shit, running it for Grizz, turning a profit.

And a skinny white-faced peckerwood, Drew something his name was, pumped crack and anything else the Boston University kids wanted, working out of Kenmore Square, never carrying, always arranging drops for kids he knew, keeping the risk down, feeding the Good Green back to Grizz.

It was Drew, last name Middleton, birthplace Knoxville, Tennessee, it was Drew Middleton who Grizz told to watch Django while Django was watching Billie, Django hoping she'd lead him to McGuire. It was Drew who timed his stroll across Dalton Street so he could pass Donovan just as the cop re-entered the dance club after nailing Django in the dark doorway of the Convention Center, Django talking a blue streak before hustling his ass back downtown.

What's Django doin' meetin' a cop up here, so far from home turf, Drew wondered. Drew never thought much a Django. Selling little white pills, that was pussy work.

Drew spiked Donovan as a cop, told Grizzly about it the night before, gave Grizzly all night to think about what he had to do, how he had to know what Django was up to, stupid dumb fuck talking to a cop when he's supposed to be nailing the Jolt.

Early in the morning, not a good time for him but business was business, Grizzly made a couple enquiries around, subtle stuff, till he got a call from the man he wanted, the man who made things go, and then he sent the word for Django to come around, Grizz had to talk with him right now, so haul ass. Sent the word with Drew and Garce and Dewey, let Dewey know about it, Dewey back on the street with the Bird gone, Dewey looking for some action of his own now but not thinking about working for Grizz, not forever, no sir. Dewey'd want to run his own show and there wasn't room for Grizz and Dewey together, but that was a problem Grizz'd deal with later.

Dewey, Garce, Drew, they'd get the message to Django, see that he got his little black ass back to Grizz, count on it.

Grizz climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Warrenton Hotel and stomped along the corridor to the four rooms at the end that he shared with the Gypsy and Django, the force of his footsteps shaking the old brass wall fixtures as he passed.

Inside the room the Gypsy was huddled naked on the floor in the corner, her legs drawn up, her chin resting on her bony knees, her eyes wild. “Get some leather on,” Grizzly said, and he peeled off his heavy coat, looking to kill some time searching for new perversions, his crotch jacked already just thinking about what he might have to do when Django showed up.

McGuire left Micki sleeping, curled like a child in the oversized bed where her sister had taken countless men, driven there by the frenzy of their own libidos. She had always hated getting up, she loved to stay warm in her bed, and so he left her there. He stepped into his trousers, put on his shirt and tip-toed from the room.

He shrugged into his jacket and descended the stairs, emerging in the late morning traffic on Newbury Street to find a newspaper, put himself in touch with the world again. At a newsstand on Boylston across from the Lenox, he bought a
Globe
from the newsdealer who sucked on a hand-rolled cigarette set in the middle of his mouth, the man shifting his weight from side to side, trying to warm himself with the motion. McGuire scanned the headlines and the sky and walked back to Newbury, feeling something close to affection for the people he passed, street people and Back Bay condominium residents, B.U. students and delivery people, all of them more driven by than engaged in their lives, rarely questioning themselves, and he envied them for it.

On his way to the apartment McGuire thought of Heather, picturing her face, its quick smile and dark eyes, and her compact body: square shoulders, deep chest, hips that flared from a taut waist and dancer's legs, the thighs strong, the calves delicately sculpted.

He had never known a woman so entranced with her own place in the world, so firmly fixed upon her own status and so driven toward some goal or objective visible only to her, her progress measured according to her own secret calibrations.

McGuire and Heather had shared nothing warmer than a truce, although more than once at parties and social events, Heather passed behind him and drew the fingertips of one hand across McGuire's buttocks, murmuring “Nice ass” from the corner of her mouth before breaking into that strange laughter she had, that way of finding every incident that touched her life either secretly humorous or sinister and dangerous.

In the beginning McGuire told himself the gulf between the two of them existed because they both loved Micki, and Heather, as the older sister, the protective sibling, would always be jealous of McGuire's influence over Micki, filling a role that had once been her own.

But Heather's view was different. “You know why we don't get along, gumshoe?” she once said to McGuire, a glass of wine in her hand and a laugh poised to explode from her mouth. “It's because we're too much alike.” And before McGuire could reply, there was the laughter and she added, “Of course, I'm also a hell of a lot smarter than you are.”

There had been a desperation about Heather, McGuire recalled, unfathomable in its source, and in combination with Heather's anger it would drive her to achieve any goal, no matter how outrageous. “What makes her so angry?” McGuire once asked Micki, and Micki said it was something that had happened to Heather when she was a child, something about an uncle who had sexually abused her, something the family never openly acknowledged or discussed.

“Heather told me once,” Micki said, “that when Mom heard about it, she blamed Heather for leading Uncle Jack on and Heather realized later that Mom had been jealous. Mom hadn't been angry about her husband's brother screwing her daughter, she was jealous.” Micki had smiled and shook her head and said, “Aren't some families totally messed up?”

It was Heather who detonated the explosion that destroyed McGuire's marriage by telling him of Micki's lover, revealing her long-term affair with a lawyer in Cambridge, and when McGuire awoke to the meaning of Micki's many lies and disappearances over recent weeks, it was Heather who had laughed and mocked him, who taunted him as a cuckold.

When Tim Fox and Micki told McGuire of Heather's crude blackmailing of her lovers, McGuire knew that Heather had gained more enjoyment from the dominance, from the fear her threats generated in the men she betrayed, and from the rush of power and danger than from the money it earned her.

McGuire climbed the stairs to the kitchen, made coffee and ascended the steep stairway to the fourth level. He crossed the alcove beyond the bedroom where Micki was still sleeping, and walked down the short hall to the office.

He remembered.

It had begun returning to him on the street, watching the people, envying them their concerns, their purposes. Now the memory was crystallizing, solidifying, the facts butting edge to edge like cellular growth.

Heather had sent a message to him with Django, a note on her personal lilac-coloured stationery, Django handing it to him furtively across a table in the Flamingo. He remembered that.

And before that, a week after their meeting in the Esplanade, she had found McGuire in the Public Garden, waiting for Django to appear. She proposed the idea then, the first time.

“Make yourself some money,” she told him. “You still have friends over on Berkeley Street, haven't you? All you have to do is tell me a few things about them, about one of them anyway. And maybe hold on to some stuff for me.”

He recalled how she was dressed: a fur coat swinging open over a flowered print dress, her neck ringed in heavy gold and large diamond earrings flashing fire in the low autumn sun.

In the most eloquent manner he could summon at the time, McGuire had told her to go away.

“Hey, if you won't do this for me,” she had said, “I'll find somebody who will.” And that quick cold smile. “But I'd rather get you to do it for me. And I will.”

And then the note delivered by Django, saying she knew how much McGuire relied on Django and what Django did, what he sold McGuire. “You do this for me, loser,” she had written. “Or I'll see that the guy delivering this gets his ass in jail and yours in the harbour. Call me tonight.”

Why me, McGuire had wondered, and the answer came back: Because she wants to humiliate you, because she despises you for rejecting her. And because, as an ex-cop, you know things she doesn't, you have access to something she needs.

He remembered the murder investigation summary Zelinka had given him and he withdrew it from his pocket, unfolded it and sat heavily in the chair at Heather's desk. Scanning its contents, thinking of all he had absorbed and pondered since Heather's death, he pictured Heather fleeing her attacker in the bedroom, running down the hall to this office, turning abruptly again for the door, seeking refuge in the bathroom . . .

And he knew.

He sat back in the chair and nodded his head.

He knew.

Garce found Django in a doughnut shop on Charles Street, there in a back booth, stretching a coffee, trying to stay cool, wasting the morning. “Grizz wanna talk,” Garce said, standing there over the booth, hands in his pockets, a crazy black beret on his head, black nylon windbreaker done to the neck.

“What for?” Django said. “Saw Grizz last night. Don't need to see the man now.”

“Hell you don't,” Garce said. He had an upper tooth missing in the front, a black hole in his mouth that made him look like some kid maybe fell off his skateboard or something. “Man says you come, you come.”

“He mad?”

“Grizz never get mad.” Garce stepped aside for Django to get out of the booth, staying close. “Grizz jus' get along. With evr'body. You know that.”

Django nodded and rose to follow Garce, feeling something inside him, something scratching and clawing, telling him not to go, just run but don't go, and he ignored it.

Grizz wouldn't hurt him. Even walking down the corridor to Grizz's room, Garce behind him now, Django kept telling himself there's nothing to worry about, just have a talk with Grizz, find out what's on the man's mind.

Standing outside Grizzly's room, Django didn't know what was going on inside from the sounds coming through the door. Grizz would put something across the Gypsy's mouth, maybe a leather strap to bite on, Django never knew. But now he could hear her moaning or screaming or whatever behind the door.

Took three knocks on the door by Garce before it opened and there's Grizz standing there, big belly hanging out over the pants he just pulled on, the Gypsy lying back on the bed, her face red and her hands flying in the air like bats or something, like she can't control them.

Grizz looked really pissed at first, then he smiled when he saw Django. “Need to talk, you 'n me,” he said. “Gimme couple minutes, go wait in your room.”

Garce had never been in Django's room before, Garce hardly ever came to the Warrenton, had his own place in Charlestown. But he came in now, followed Django in and leaned against the door frame like he's being cool while Django sat on his bed, saying here it comes, here it comes to himself, trying not to show the shakes.

Grizz opened the door maybe five minutes later and said, “We gotta talk, over inna alley. Let's go.”

They walked down the stairs and out onto Washington Street, crossing the road among Oriental families carrying food in plastic bags and gawking tourists looking for what was left of the Combat Zone. They went up the alley to the square formed by the back of the empty buildings, Tremont Adult Novelties and Shawmut Imports and others, Grizz leading the way, Garce behind Django, Django's mouth dry and his knees weak. In the middle sat the forty-gallon drum, all rusty, two feet of ashes in the bottom.

“You not sayin' much.” Grizzly slapped the side of the rusted drum as he passed, heading for the back door of Tremont Adult Novelties. “Garce, you ever see Django with his mouth not flappin'?”

“Sure ain't,” Garce said.

Grizz stopped near the back of the building, turned around, looked up at a sky as cold and gray as the broken concrete Django was staring down at. “Not like the way it was flappin' at that cop last night.” He looked at Django. “Like I hear.”

“That cop?” Django grinned, looked around, looked at Garce and Grizz, back and forth. “He a jive
turd
, Grizz.” Django shrugged. “Man jump me 'cause I was trackin' Lady Billie, jus' like you say, and he see me. No big deal, Grizz. I tell him I'm lookin' for cars to hot-wire, tha's all. Jus' lookin' for cars, Buick, Benz, somethin', but I was gonna lay off, yes sir, stay on my own turf . . .”