Read Where the Dark Streets Go Online
Authors: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Where the Dark Streets Go
“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —
The Denver Post
“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —
The Miami Herald
“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes,
Los Angeles Times
“A joyous and unqualified success.” —
The New York Times
on
Death of an Old Sinner
“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —
Daily Mirror
(London) on
Death of an Old Sinner
“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —
The New York Times
on
A Gentleman Called
“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —
Chicago Tribune
on
A Gentleman Called
“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —
The New Yorker
on
The Judas Cat
“A book to be long remembered.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
on
A Town of Masks
“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —
The New York Times
on
The Clay Hand
“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —
The New York Times
on
A Death in the Life
“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —
Library Journal
on
The Habit of Fear
“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and
Shock Wave
is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Shock Wave
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
1
F
ATHER MCMAHON WAS LEANING
out the window of the rectory study when he saw the boy in the distance. A little fellow, he was running with all his might in a crazy zigzag fashion, dodging cars and ashcans, a pile of junk and a cluster of women. When he came closer the priest recognized him, and at the moment he recognized him he realized he had found his way into Sunday’s sermon: brotherhood was a matter of getting close enough to recognize one another. Since for over an hour he had been at the desk sorting banalities like a curate his shoes to see which pair was the least run down, he sat on the window ledge, swung his legs out and dropped to the sidewalk below. It was spring and the slow rain of early morning had left the smell of earth behind it, earth and the river smell which told of the tide’s turning and provoked his memory of the sea’s edge and the sand’s whiteness, and himself the stranger running there in what once he had thought of as self-pursuit. Always he identified with runners.
He braced himself and spread his arms. “Hold it, Carlos. Slow down.”
The youngster crashed into him. When the priest had steadied him on his feet the boy caught his hand and pulled at him. “Come, Father, quick. My friend, the man, he is hurt very bad.”
“You can tell me on the way.” The priest set his pace by the boy’s, his long stride one to the boy’s three steps. “Did he send for a priest?”
“No, Father,
sí
.” Carlos often mixed yes and no as well as his languages. He was growing up bilingual in New York, or, as the monsignors said dryly of the rapidly increasing minority among his parishioners, semilingual.
“Are the police there, Carlos?” he asked as they approached Tenth Avenue.
“No, Father. Nobody.”
That, the priest thought, would be strange indeed in the crowded tenement where Carlos lived. But the boy led the way, racing against a change in the traffic light and the bursting surge of trucks and taxis. Down a block he ran, then west again to a building marked for demolition, the great white X’s scarring the windows. The whole long street, beyond and on both sides, was a desolation. The bulldozers had leveled the rubble to a prairie flatness. The boy led him down three steps and through a basement entry. How he had come to know the man was there, God only knew. The passageway was dank, bile-green, and piled with molding rubbish.
Carlos stopped at a half-open door. “In there, Father.”
The priest heard the man’s breathing before he saw him, the rattling sound of it all too familiar. The man lay, face down, on a heap of old clothes and bedding. The broken window overhead fronted on the street. McMahon glimpsed the top of a passing truck. He looked around for the boy to instruct him, but Carlos had vanished. He called out his name.
His own voice came faintly back, and then, as he approached the man and knelt beside him, he heard the child pass beneath the window. “Bring your mother, Carlos!” he called to him.
“If you can find your mother, Carlos,” the man said with a clarity the priest had not expected.
“Where are you hurt, my friend?”
“As deep as the knife could reach.” The man tried to raise his head. His breathing was easier. “Who are you?”
“A friend. I’m a priest.”
“Who? Not what.” The man rested his head on the back of his hand, the long fingers spread and glistening with spittle. In the gray light his gray face with its glaring eyes and dark beard resembled a medieval Christus.
“Joseph McMahon,” the priest said. “Shall I go for a doctor if you don’t want a priest?”
“It’s as late for one as the other, wouldn’t you say?”
“You are alive, man. It’s not that late.”
“Ah-h-h…” The sound trailed off. He tried to clear his throat of the rasp starting there again. “You’ve heard the noise of death in your business.”
“Too many times,” the priest said.
“I can’t get it out of my throat. Come down where I can see you. Turn your face to the light.” He lifted his free hand and let it fall in the patch of daylight out of which he then dragged it like something separately alive, a haunting hand, the priest thought, the long fingers squared at the tips. The man clutched it in against himself.
McMahon lay down on the cold cement, flat on his stomach, his face toward the window within a foot or so of the dying man’s. He could smell the taint of death. The whites of the man’s eyes shone as he tried to focus them on the priest’s face. “I think I would like to know you, Joseph McMahon.”
“Tell me what I can do to help you.”
“Get rid of the pain. Can you do that?”
“I would if I could, God knows.”
“Then talk to me. Talk to me of anything but death. What were you doing when the child came for you?”
It was like tunneling out of a dream, going back that little time ago when he had been sitting at the study desk. “I was trying to write a sermon.”
“Oh, God almighty. I’m glad I got you away from that.”
McMahon laughed. He could not help it, and he was glad, for he saw that it pleased the man. “I would like to know you too, my friend.”
“Is it so?”
“It is so.”
The eyes slid away from the priest’s face, staring past him. When he tried to speak the bloody spittle bubbled up to his lips. McMahon wiped it away with his own handkerchief. The man said, “Nim said once I’d shake hands with the devil.”
“Is that what I am to you?”
“No, no, I was only remembering. Do you believe in him, horns, tail and all?”
“I believe in evil, call it what you will.”
“So do I, friend. Oh, yes. So do I.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened to you?” the priest asked gently.
“No. And I don’t want you telling me what is going to happen to me.”
“I wouldn’t presume to.”
“Forgive me, but you are a priest. Do you believe what you wrote in that sermon?”
“I try to write what I believe.”
“Are you sure it’s not the other way around?”
McMahon had the feeling of dream again, the self-aware dream where you know you are dreaming and so let things go that you might otherwise hold back. “No. I am not sure.”
The man showed his teeth in a smile that became a grimace. He burrowed his face in his arm. His whole body shivered with every tearing breath. McMahon stroked the back of his head. He could think of no other comfort to offer, and he could not fortify even himself with prayer.
“You ought to tell me,” he tried again.
The man turned his head. “Why? So you could save his soul?”
“Just to take the knife away from him.”
“I think I’ve taken the knife…” He cradled his head again in the crook of his arm, the face buried. The shoulders grew still, the breathing stopped.
McMahon heard the scraping of his own shoes as he got to his knees. He knelt on, looking down at the remnant of mortality, an existence no longer, a man who had, the instant before, left off being himself to himself, being. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend his spirit. He commends his spirit. The priest lingered still and listened to the deep silence of the cellar, the deeper seeming because of the far noises of the city, the
ack-ack
of a pneumatic drill, the thump of the demolition sledge, the deep-throated horn of a docking liner. He got to his feet and went out.
The sunlight was a shock to his eyes. He looked down. The words “Love Power” were scrawled on the sidewalk.
At the first call box on Tenth Avenue he telephoned the police. Then, because he was so instructed, he started back toward the building to await their arrival. He found himself almost greedily aware of life on that little journey: oranges in a basket were like so many suns. He picked one up and turned it in his hand. The shopkeeper rushed out and urged him to have it. He shook his head and put it back carefully. Most people knew him, the women in doorways haloed in hair curlers sunning themselves and their infants, storekeepers and cart vendors, the walkers of dogs, even the dogs. They all knew a priest for a priest if not for a man. A strange thought that, wherever it came from. Then he remembered:
Who? Not what.
He asked among the women on the stoop of the walkup where Carlos lived if any of them had seen the boy. No one had.
“What did he do, Father?” Their eagerness to hear of mischief was implicit.
“Nothing, nothing. He is a good boy.”
“
Sí,
they are all good boys,” an old one said, wagging her head.
“His mother, she is not home so much,” another offered, trying to detain him with the suggestion of gossip.
McMahon walked on.
If you can find your mother, Carlos:
did that mean the dead man knew her? The police would gather and sift the gossip and shake out bits of truth. He heard the first siren as he turned the corner. Waiting, staring at the rubbled field, he caught sight of two doors leaned together like a tent with a tiny flag hoisted atop one end. That would be the first place to look for Carlos.
Detective Finley Brogan took McMahon’s statement while they sat in the back of a squad car outside the building. The whole area was being cordoned off, for the crowd came quickly at the siren’s wail. Technical trucks, a mobile generator, an ambulance, and car after car of police and detectives converged. Nor were they all investigative. Any incident could fuse the neighborhood, a mixture of blacks and whites, Puerto Rican, Italian and Irish. Volatile, combustible.