Where the Dark Streets Go (2 page)

Brogan was a well-mannered young detective brought up with a proper respect for the clergy. He asked every question as though it might encroach on the privacy of the confessional. Not so Lieutenant Traynor. When he climbed into the car with them Brogan proposed to read him the priest’s statement.

Traynor said, “I don’t think it would tire Father McMahon to go over it again. Would it, Father?” His smile was quick to come and go, a weapon of sorts. He was a man of around McMahon’s age, forty, lean and scrubbed-looking, with slate-gray eyes. The name was an old one in the parish records.

When McMahon had told the story again, Traynor asked: “Did he come for you, or would any priest have done?”

“Any priest. I happened to be the one at hand.” It crossed his mind that the dialogue between the dying man and either of the other two curates would have been quite different. To say nothing of how the monsignor would have dealt with the situation.

“You’ve never seen him around the neighborhood?”

“Not to my knowledge, but he would have looked different under other circumstances.”

“A beard is a beard,” Traynor said.

“I got the impression the boy knew him.”

“What other impression did you get, Father?”

McMahon hesitated. They were numerous, but he would have to sort them out, to think about them.

“Did he know his killer, for example?”

“He might have.”

“Did you ask him?”

“It’s there in the notes,” McMahon said, pointing to the report book in Brogan’s hands. “I asked him if he wanted to tell me what happened to him.”

“You were real delicate with him, Father. Because he wasn’t a Catholic?”

McMahon felt the prickle of temper. “I’d have been as delicate with a Catholic.”

“And him on the point of death?”

Both the questions and answers were wrong, almost the reverse, McMahon thought, of what either of them wanted to say.

“He did not want my advice,” he said, trying to end the matter.

Traynor grunted. “There’s a girl’s name in there some place. No message for her?”

“Lieutenant, I have told as closely as I remember what was said. He gave me no sense of urgency on his behalf, no message, no regret, none of the things we feel should concern a man who knows he is about to die.”

“Then why do you suppose he sent the child for you?”

“I’m not sure he did. It may have been Carlos’ own idea.”

“Then what was the kid doing there?”

“We’ll have to ask him that.”

Traynor thought about it, his eyes meanwhile sharp to the coming and going of his men. An unmarked car sirened its way alongside them. “The glamour boys,” Traynor grumbled, and opened the door to get out. It was only later that McMahon learned he meant the Homicide Division. To Brogan he said: “Pick the youngster up,” and then to McMahon: “Puerto Rican?”

“Yes.”

“Black or white?”

“White.” McMahon did not say it, but Carlos’ sisters looked Negroid.

“I grew up in this neighborhood,” Traynor said. “But it was a different place then. St. Peter’s church. Is that your parish, Father?”

“Yes.”

“Give my respects to Monsignor Casey. Does the kid speak English?”

“He can manage pretty well when he tries,” the priest said.

“Most of them can. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it?”

McMahon did not think so but he refrained from saying it. Traynor shook hands with the men Brogan then identified to the priest as Homicide. He and McMahon got out the other side of the car.

“I could use your help with the youngster, Father.”

To avoid the following eyes of the curious, McMahon walked the detective to Tenth Avenue. He pointed out the building where Carlos lived, the stoop now deserted. The detective made a note of the address. “It’s only a hunch where we’re going,” the priest said, “but we’ll find him one place or another.”

“Do you speak Spanish, Father?”

“Well, I don’t suppose a Spaniard would call it that.”

Brogan grinned. “I’d have the same trouble with an Englishman.”

“You don’t live in the parish, do you, Brogan?”

“No, Father. In Chelsea, what’s left of that. My old man is a longshoreman. Same as Traynor’s, only his father’s a big
macher
in the union.”

“A good English word,” McMahon said.

The boy did not come out of his shelter until McMahon leaned down and drew aside the canvas flap which had been tacked on the dirty green doors. The canvas itself was smeared with paint. No child of Carlos’ age could have put the play fort together. He came out on all fours when he saw it was the priest.

“This is a friend of mine, Detective Brogan. Carlos Morales.”

Brogan stuck out his hand but the child did not take it. Brogan admired the fort, but still won no favor. The boy looked only at the ground.

“Did your friend build it for you?” McMahon asked.

“
Sí,
Father. Him and my brother.”

“Are they friends?”

“
Sí.
”

Brogan reached for his report book and then thought the better of it.

“When did they build it?”

“For my saint’s day.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

The boy shrugged.

“What do you call him?”

“
Amigo
.”

McMahon and Brogan exchanged glances. The detective shrugged.

“Do you know where he lives?” the priest asked.

“In my house.”

McMahon put the next question as carefully as he could. “Did you often visit him in the place you took me this morning?”

“Never.” Finally the boy looked up at him. “I just go to the steps and call him. He comes down and gives me doorknobs. Would you like to see, Father?”

“I would.”

While the boy went into the shelter, Brogan said, “You’re doing fine, Father. We’ll put it together afterwards.”

Carlos hauled out a dogfood carton in which were a dozen or so doorknobs that had once been white but were now painted, some with faces, some like psychedelic Easter eggs.

“Oh, man,” McMahon said, “aren’t they something.”

“Beautiful,” Brogan said.

The boy grinned. “Every day when I come from school, he gives me one. If I say what I learned in school.”

“Carlos only goes to school in the morning,” McMahon explained to Brogan, which in no way explained why he was not in school that morning.

“This week I start afternoons, Father.”

“So you went early to see your friend?”

Brogan shook his head. He did not like the prompting.

The boy said, “Yes, Father. Only he did not come when I call. I call again. Then he call me. ‘I am hurt, Carlos,’ and he tell me to come in the basement. I want to run away, but he say, ‘Please, Carlos.’ So I go in. He was like this.” The boy humped over, hugging his hands to his chest. “He say, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ but I am afraid when I see the blood. And when he fall down and don’t talk any more I come for you.”

“Carlos, do you remember the first time you ever saw the man, the first time?”

“
Sí,
Father. He was painting Mrs. Phelan’s door. He let me paint too.”

Brogan asked his first question: “Did you see anyone else in the building where your friend was hurt?”

The boy glanced at the priest.

“Tell him,” McMahon said.

“No.”

“Not ever?”

The boy shook his head.

“You’re a good boy, Carlos,” the priest said. “Better put your doorknobs away now.”

About to go into the hut, the boy saw the crowd for the first time. He looked up at the priest.

“I’ll wait for you,” McMahon said. Then to Brogan: “I’ll have to tell him.”

“Thanks a lot, Father. It may not sit with Traynor, but if you’ll come round to the station this afternoon, we’ll try it on him. Do you know this Mrs. Phelan he mentioned?”

“She owns the buildings I pointed out to you. She lives on the first floor.” He knew Mrs. Phelan very well, but he was not going to say that to the detective.

“Is there a Mr. Phelan?”

“Yes,” the priest said tersely.

“Okay, Father,” Brogan said after waiting purposely for the priest to go on. “I guess I can find out for myself what that’s all about.”

McMahon watched the detective take a short cut across the field. “Come, Carlos,” he said. “I’ll walk you home.”

“J
OSEPH? FATHER MCMAHON, YOU’RE
late for luncheon.”

He had hoped to get by the dining-room door without being seen, but the old man was watching for him. He sat like a family scion at the head of his table, and although there were only the two of them present, Father Purdy, the youngest priest of the four attached to the parish, sat in his own place, two chairs down, on the monsignor’s left.

“I’ll be right in,” McMahon said. “I have to clean up a bit.”

Miss Lalor, the housekeeper, poked her head out of the kitchen. “Will I set your soup, Father?”

“Not till he’s at the table,” the monsignor answered for him. “There’s nothing worse than a slop of cold soup.”

“He’ll be in a hurry, Monsignor.”

McMahon left them to settle the service of his lunch between them. They had been bickering for over twenty years. Monsignor Casey had brought her from Ireland after the war. That too was a matter on which they contended: whether she should have come or stayed in Galway and married a man with a mule and a garden. She was, by Father McMahon’s lights, one of those women destined from the cradle to become a caretaker of priests. She was also one of the best cooks in the archdiocese—the hallway was sweet with the fragrance of her Friday pudding—but since St. Peter’s was becoming more and more a poor parish, it was the monsignor’s tart pleasure to end most of their arguments by saying it was time he gave her over to someone who could keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. Their relationship was something McMahon sometimes thought about: the naturalness of it, the unnatural made natural somewhere in Ireland generations ago.

Whatever stain it was he had picked up on the basement floor was not going to come out of his clothes with spot remover. He had to change into his other suit. Paint or tar or blood. He sniffed at it: the smell was not strong enough to overcome Miss Lalor’s sugar and spice. He was indeed late, he noticed by the clock on top of the piano. So he took another moment and gathered the music on which he had been working the night before, the score to Rachmaninoff’s
The Bells
. He had arranged it himself for female voices. It was something the high-school girls could really swing on.

He ran down the steps and laid his briefcase on the hall table. He remembered then the half-written sermon he had left on the study desk and went to the front of the house to get it.
Do you believe what you wrote in that sermon?
I try to write what I believe.
Or is it the other way around? A
devil’s advocate could not have attacked more succinctly. He wanted to think about that and about the dead man. Instead he sat down and made a note on brotherhood, the thought that had come into his mind when he recognized the running child. It no longer seemed very original.

Miss Lalor came to the study door. “Father, he’s getting into a temper.”

“I’m coming.” He would as soon have gone without lunch and gained himself a few minutes for thought, but he followed her down the hall and paused only long enough to stuff the sermon into his briefcase.

“Was he a hippie, do you think?” The monsignor loved the word for some reason although he had little use for its designate.

“An old one then,” McMahon said. “The police will soon know.”

“They’re the worst kind. It’s a short step from the East Village to the Bowery.”

“No, I don’t think he was that kind.”

“A pervert maybe?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The child, the child.” The old man was as impatient with the cream jug, pouring the cream with a splash over his pudding.

“It was a healthy relationship, I’m sure.”

“Healthy. Never mind was it healthy. Was it moral?”

“That’s what I meant,” McMahon said.

“Then why don’t you say it? I can’t stand these quibbling words you young fellows come up with nowadays.”

McMahon ate in silence. Father Purdy folded his napkin and asked if he might be excused.

“We haven’t upset you?” the monsignor said with an almost mocking tolerance he assumed toward the young priest. Purdy was earnest and easily put down. In his year among them he had not come to understand that the old man’s brusqueness was his style and a carefully cultivated one. Purdy flushed when anything harsh or intimate was said in his presence and McMahon suspected that his show of naïveté was a style with him also. His own lack of patience with the boy priest, as he called him, was sometimes close to contempt.

“I have a Christian Doctrine class at one, Monsignor,” Purdy said. Which, since the class was actually described as Ecumenism in the new curriculum, did not ingratiate him with McMahon, however the old-fashioned words might please the monsignor.

“Lieutenant Traynor asked to be remembered to you,” McMahon said when Purdy had left the table.

“Is that Mike Traynor’s son? A lieutenant? I thought he’d go up in a hurry, but not that much of a hurry.” The old man sat back in his chair and dabbed his whole face with his napkin. His normally pink complexion always went florid by the end of the meal. “I baptized him…No, I suppose not. It’s his confirmation I’m remembering. There was the question of the sponsor, one of the labor men his father wanted. I think he was a Communist. An ex-Communist, that was it.” He laughed to himself then, remembering. “I can see Mike now, those shaggy brows of his going up.” He mimicked the brogue as though he had not a trace of one himself. “‘Father Casey, half our executive are ex-Communists. It was the mixed marriage of the ’thirties.’”

Miss Lalor brought McMahon his pudding.

“Would you put it aside for me and I’ll have it later, Miss Lalor. My singing girls will be waiting for me.”

She returned to the kitchen, throwing a shoulder block on the swinging door.

Monsignor Casey said: “Is there a tune to it, whatever you’re teaching them now, Joseph?”

“Oh, a lively tune, Monsignor,” he said and blessed himself and left the table. The question was rote as was his answer, but he never failed to rankle under it, which he supposed was a lack of humility in himself. That the monsignor was proud of the St. Peter’s Girls’ Choir, he knew. It had some little fame in the archdiocese. The girls had sung for the Holy Father during his visit to New York and every year they gave several interfaith benefit concerts. McMahon was fairly sure that it was his work with them that forestalled his transfer to a larger parish or to one of his own, the latter an assignment he truly did not want.