Where the Dark Streets Go (8 page)

“It is so, and it was to not pretend to anything, that was how he wanted to live.”

“You wonder what his talent was like,” the priest mused. “I have a feeling it was valuable.”

“Beware of feelings, Father. They are the biggest liars in us. They make truth what we want it to be.” He looked to the front of the shop as the door opened again, and flung his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “Look what this one is bringing me. An accordion. He will want a fortune for it, ivory and mother-of-pearl. And if he cannot redeem it, where will I find a street singer?”

McMahon said, “I must go. There will be a memorial tonight in the building where he lived. No funeral until the police are good and ready. I’ve promised to say a few prayers. You would be welcome, Mr. Rosenberg.” He wrote the address on a card the pawnbroker gave him.

“Will you play Bach and Mahler?”

“If there’s anything to play it on, I might.”

“He would like it better than the prayers. And to tell you the truth, Father, I would too.”

But Rosenberg did not go to the Morales apartment, and Father McMahon did not play Bach or Mahler. A visit to the stoop of 987 in the daytime was quite different from going up those steps at nine-thirty on a warm Saturday night. The sound of an electric guitar twanged through the building, and somewhere a Calypso singer was tuned in at top volume, and above it all, a cacophony of voices, one pitched higher than another.

A dim light shone in the windows of the Phelan apartment, but there was no light at all in the vestibule. He had to follow the voices. The ceiling bulbs in the hallway were caged in wire mesh. He began a slow, reluctant ascent. The smell of disinfectant was so strong it hurt his nostrils, yet it could not quite kill the undersmell of the communal bathroom on each floor. Behind a closed door a child was crying. He could just hear it through the raucous din, the loneliest of sounds, and one that angered him. A gang of teenagers thundered down the steps. He backed against the wall to let them pass, the girls rattling and sparkling with cheap jewelry, scented with heavy perfume, the boys with glossy hair and clattering, highly shined boots. He recognized Anita and called out after her.

“Upstairs, Father. Everybody.”

On the second flight of stairs a fat grandmother was lumbering up, one painful step at a time, and at every pause she shouted a gutter invective, not for what was going on, but because it was going on without her.

A man leaned over the banister and baited her.

“Bastard!” She shook her fist at him.

He and another came down the steps and between them hauled her up. On the last step he groped her fat buttocks and goosed her. She shrieked and swung her arm around on him, almost tumbling them all down the stairs.

And among these people in so short a time, McMahon thought, Muller had found a welcome. He was far less confident of his own and he had been in the parish for eleven years.

But the women made way for him, pushing their men to the side, black men and brown and sallow-white, almost as varied as the colors of their shirts. Mrs. Morales shouted the two crowded rooms into silence. Someone turned off the record player, the last few notes wilting away. The guitarist was in another part of the building and someone closed the door on him. It helped a little. As Mrs. Morales led McMahon toward the inner room, he noticed Dan Phelan sitting in a corner, a glass in both hands, his eyes on the glass and his face as taut as the fingers around the glass. His wife sat on the arm of his chair. She was made up with her old flair, defiance in every feature.

A sideboard was spread with food in the second room, but it was not toward it that Carlos’ mother drew him. It was toward a small round table where a candle burned alongside a shoebox. A chill ran down the priest’s back when he saw what was in the box: a waxen colored doll laid out as in a coffin, a doll clothed as a man and made from child to man by the crude gluing on of a black beard. When his first shock was spent, McMahon realized that it was probably Anita who had given a swatch of her hair to the making of the beard. The unpliable hands of the doll were crossed over a bunch of violets.

Out of the corner of his eye the priest saw Mrs. Morales make the sign of the cross and he sensed rather than saw the others who had pressed into the room after him do the same. He lifted his eyes to the picture which hung on the wall behind the table, the placid, bearded, long-haired Christ with his forefinger touching the flaming heart. It was a picture familiar to him from childhood on, but in that instant, as alien as the shrouded doll.

He bent his head and prayed silently, but for himself.

The people were waiting to hear his words, but when, after a moment, he raised his head, they assumed his silent prayer appropriate and said their amens.

“You like it, Father,
sí
?” Mrs. Morales said of the boxed figure, her gold teeth shining as she smiled.

“Beautiful,” he said, and turned away determined not to look again at the picture of the Sacred Heart. Yet the words ran through his mind: Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in thee.

“Please, Father, take something to eat. The stuffed crabs I make myself.”

“Have a drink, Father. We brought the whisky, and I’ll have one with you.” It was Phelan who spoke, having come up beside him, bottle in hand. He had a deep voice for so slight a man. McMahon tried to suppress the thought, but it came again, the wife’s telling, ‘Like a bull, Father.’

“Thank you,” McMahon said. “I will have a drink.”

Mrs. Morales gave him a glass, wiping it first with her apron.

When he held out his glass, two of the younger men present held theirs out to Phelan, too, and Pedrito Morales came up with his. Phelan poured without a word, generously, but with his lips clamped tight. He quarter-filled his own glass before setting the bottle on the table. Everyone held his glass, waiting. McMahon finally lifted his toward the effigy and said, “Peace be with him.”

The men all drank. Pedrito coughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Irish piss,” he said.

Phelan threw the contents of his glass in the boy’s face. It all happened with flashing instancy: Pedrito flung his own glass over his shoulder and started for Phelan; Phelan, with one step backward, drew a knife from his pocket and switched the blade. McMahon was a few seconds reacting, for the last person in the room he expected to carry a knife was Phelan. He leaped between the men and ordered Phelan in the name of God to put it away. Phelan stood his ground and made jerky little stabs with the knife, trying to motion the priest out of his way. Behind McMahon, the men were derisive, their mockery the filth of two languages, and the women more contemptuous than the men.

Priscilla Phelan came up behind her husband and locked her arms around his neck, pulling his head back. McMahon caught his arm and twisted it until he let go the knife. The priest put his foot on the blade. It was not necessary. No one wanted it. Muller had been killed with a knife. McMahon picked it up, flicked the blade closed and put the knife in his own pocket.

Phelan had gone limp. He stood in a slouch, his eyes wild with hatred. His wife gave him a push toward the door. He pulled himself up straight then and walked with the controlled, exaggerated dignity of the drunk which McMahon knew well. At the door he spat and went out.

Priscilla Phelan tossed her red hair back over her shoulders. “This is my house, you bastards! You tell the police about this and out you go, every mother-selling one of you.”

Mrs. Morales was scolding the instigators, the rilers among the crowd. The fat grandmother sat and rocked herself with pleasure. She clapped her hands. McMahon kept catching flashes of faces, of gestures, bare arms and laughing mouths, a girl draped over a chair, her legs fanning the air. And noise, noise, noise. Mrs. Phelan went out, her hips swaggering, and the men whistled and hooted, and one of them pranced a few steps as if to follow, stopped, and gave a roundhouse sweep of his arm, his thumb in the air. The Calypso music went on again. It was all over. And it wasn’t that the party resumed, the explosion was part of the party, the language a kind of vernacular, and the noise was a way of life. No one apologized to the priest. Someone brought him his drink where he had put it down on the table when Phelan drew the knife. Mrs. Morales brought him a plate with two stuffed crabs and some pastries.

“Where is Carlos?” he asked her.

“In bed,” she said. She indicated the door to a room off the parlor.

The boy could not have slept through that noise. “May I look in on him?”

She shrugged. It was up to him.

McMahon ate a few bites of the food and went to the bedroom door. He opened it, expecting to see the youngster wide-eyed and staring out at him as when he and Brogan had found him in the hut. Instead, he saw four bundled shapes beneath a blanket, children huddled together like puppies in a box, and all of them sound asleep.

The door to the Phelan apartment was open when he went down the stairs a few minutes later. She would be watching for him, and in any case, he wanted to get rid of the knife in his pocket. She called out to him to come in and then closed the door behind him.

Phelan stood, his back to them, and stared out the window. There was an Irish look to the apartment, which was merely to say McMahon felt a familiarity there not present for him in the rest of the building: it was the curtains, perhaps, just the curtains that made the difference, full, window-length, and white.

McMahon laid the knife on the side table on top of a copy of the
Daily News
.

“Dan’s in real trouble now, Father. The police picked him up in a bar last night, and he can’t even remember where he’d been in the morning.”

He could remember, McMahon thought, but he was not telling. Protecting a man, perhaps. The police would have suspected that, picking him up where they had. He pointed to the knife. “Where did that come from?”

“It’s been in the house for years,” she said. “But why in the name of God he had to take it up there with him tonight, I don’t know.”

Phelan turned from the window. “Don’t you, Priscilla? I think you do.” He was about to sit down. “Would you like a drink, Father? There’s another bottle, I think.”

McMahon shook his head. “No, thanks.”

Phelan slumped into the chair and shaded his eyes with his hand. A gentle hand, McMahon would have said.

“Do you know what I think, Father?” Mrs. Phelan said. “I think he wants to be charged with the murder. Big shot! He wants to be a big shot to a houseful of freaks.”

Phelan was shaking his head.

McMahon thought: it’s being a freak in a houseful of big shots that’s killing the man. He sat down on the couch near Phelan. “If I spoke to a doctor, Dan, would you go and see him?”

Phelan took his hand away from his eyes. A sad smile twisted at the corners of his mouth. “A psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t need a doctor. I told you that yesterday, Father. He’s all right now.”

Phelan looked from one to the other of them, and then at his own hands which he put palms together, the shape of prayer. No man ever showed more eloquently his sense of betrayal. McMahon got up. Twice, by inadvertence—or by some destiny that was tracking himself as well—McMahon had betrayed him. “Come and see me if you want to, Dan. Or call the rectory and we can meet somewhere else.”

“In the jail maybe,” his wife said, “if he keeps this up.”

McMahon said nothing until she had followed him into the hallway. “Do you want to kill him or save him? I don’t want the answer, but you’d better find it for yourself, Mrs. Phelan.”

“Father…” She put her hands to her ears.

The electric guitar, the Calypso singer, and now someone on the drums.

“All I want is peace. Really, that’s all I want.”

“We could all say the same thing,” McMahon said. “But where is it?”

“Thank you, Father,” she said after him as he went down the steps.

For what? But he nodded and went on. A priest expected thanks, always thanks and only thanks, and a glass of whisky on the house. He was about to cross the street mid-block when he heard her scream, and he knew what it was the instant he heard it, and he felt that somewhere in his soul he had expected that also. After all, he had given the man back the knife. He ran the half block to the police call box where he had reported the death of Muller.

P
HELAN HAD BOTCHED HIS
attempted suicide. He might die of the wound he had attempted to inflict on his own heart, but not if the surgical team at St. Jude’s hospital could prevent it. He was in surgery for three hours, a nightmare of time McMahon spent with Mrs. Phelan and the police, one of whom called the priest’s attention to the fact that for Muller to have lived long enough to talk with him, that job also had been botched. The consensus seemed to be—although no one said so in so many words—Phelan did not know much about anatomy. Then, to make matters worse, sitting in the small office provided by the night supervisor, Priscilla Phelan broke down and confessed to the police her affair with Muller.

Traynor said, “So you are unfaithful to him; you were unfaithful to a homosexual.”

“He’s not.”

Traynor turned his cold gray eyes on McMahon. “Father?”

“I have nothing to say.” Then: “Mrs. Phelan ought to know she has right of counsel before talking to you.”

“I’m sure she was so informed,” Traynor said with the quiet sarcasm that was always in his voice. He turned to the detective who had answered the first call. “Tonelli?”

“Yes, sir. I told her that.”

Priscilla Phelan’s eyes darted from one to the other of the detectives. “What are you trying to say to me?”

“You didn’t know
that
about your husband?” Traynor said.

McMahon intervened. “Do you know it for a fact, lieutenant? Or do you know only that the man was picked up in a bar frequented by homosexuals?”

“You will make an excellent witness, Father. Or even counsel, you seem so well equipped.”

Mrs. Phelan pounded her fists on her knees. “Give it to me straight, officer. What is it you’re trying to tell me about Dan?”