A Drink Before the War (3 page)

Shortly after I
got back to the office, we ordered out for some Chinese and went over the day.

Angie had done the paper trail while I followed the physical one. I told her what my trail had brought us, added the names “Jerome” and “Roland” to the first page of our file, entered it into the computer. I also wrote “Break-in” and “Motive?” and underlined the latter.

The Chinese food arrived and we went to work clogging our arteries and forcing our hearts to work double time. Angie told me the results of the paper trail between mouthfuls of pork fried rice and chow mein. The day after Jenna disappeared, Jim Vurnan had gone to the restaurants and shops around Beacon Street and the State House to see if she'd been in recently. He didn't find her, but in a deli on Somerset he got a copy of one of her credit-card receipts from the owner. Jenna had paid for a ham on rye and a Coke with a Visa. Angie had taken the receipt and using the tried-and-true “Hi, I'm (Insert target's name) and I seem to have misplaced my credit card” method, she found that Jenna carried the Visa only, had a spotty credit history (one run-in with a collection agency back in '81), and had last used her card on June 19, the first day she didn't show up to work, at the Bank of Boston on the corner of Clarendon and St. James for a cash advance of two hundred dollars. Angie had then called the Bank of Boston claiming to be a representative of American Express. Mrs. Angeline
had applied for a credit card and would they mind verifying her account?

What account?

She got the same response at every bank she tried. Jenna Angeline had no bank account. Which is fine, as far as I'm concerned, but it makes a person harder to find.

I started to ask Angie if she'd missed any banks, but she held up her hand, managed a “Not finished yet,” around some spare rib. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and swallowed. Then she downed a gulp of beer and said, “'Member Billy Hawkins?”

“Of course.” Billy would be doing a dime in Walpole Penitentiary if we hadn't found his alibi.

“Well, Billy works for Western Union now, out of one of those Check Cashing Express places.” She sat back, pleased.

“Well?”

“Well what?” She was enjoying herself.

I picked up a greasy spare rib and cocked my arm.

She held up her hands. “OK, OK. Billy's going to run a check for us, find out if she's used any of their offices. She can't have survived on two hundred dollars since the nineteenth. Not in this city anyway.”

“And when's Billy going to get back to us?”

“He couldn't do anything today. He said his boss would be suspicious if he hung around for too long after the end of his shift, and his shift ended five minutes after I called. He'll have to do it tomorrow. Said he'll call us by noon.”

I nodded. Behind Angie the dark sky was streaked with four fingers of scarlet and the slight breeze blew the thinnest wisps of her hair from behind her ear onto her cheekbone. Van Morrison was singing about “crazy love” on the boom box behind me, and we sat in the cramped office, staring at each other in the afterglow of the heavy Chinese food and the humid day and the satisfaction of knowing where our next paycheck was coming from. She smiled, a slightly embarrassed one, but didn't look away, and began
tapping that pencil lightly against the chipped tooth again.

I let the stillness settle between us for a good five minutes before I said, “Come home with me.”

She shook her head, still smiling, and swiveled the chair slightly.

“Come on. We'll watch a little TV, chat about old times—”

“There's a bed in this story somewhere. I know it.”

“Only as a place to sleep. We'll lie down and…talk.”

She laughed. “Uh-huh. And what about all those lovely young things who tend to camp out on your doorstep and tie up your phone?”

“Who?” I asked innocently.

“Who,” she said. “Donna, Beth, Kelly, that chick with the ass, Lauren—”

“That
chick with the ass
, excuse me?”

“You know the one. The Italian girl. The one who goes”—her voice rose about two octaves—“‘Oooooh, Patrick, can we take a bubble bath now? Hee!' That one.”

“Gina.”

She nodded. “Gi-na. That's the one.”

“I'll give them all up for one night with—”

“I know that, Patrick. I hope you don't think that's something to be proud of.”

“Well, gee, Mom…”

She smiled. “Patrick, the major reason you think you're in love with me is because you've never seen me naked—”

“In—”

“In thirteen years,” she said hurriedly, “and we both agreed that was forgotten. Besides, thirteen years is a lifetime to you where a woman is concerned.”

“You say it like it's a bad thing.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “So,” she said, “what's on tomorrow's agenda?”

I shrugged, drank some beer from the can. Summer was definitely here; it tasted like tea. Van had finished singing
about “crazy love,” and was heading “into the mystic.” I said, “I guess we wait for Billy to call, call him at noon if he doesn't.”

“Sounds almost like a plan.” She drained her beer, made a face at the can. “Any more cold ones?” I reached into my wastebasket, which was doubling as a cooler, tossed a can to her. She cracked it, took a sip. “What do we do when we find Mrs. Angeline?”

“Haven't a clue. Play it by ear.”

“You're such a professional at this.”

I nodded. “That's why they let me carry a gun.”

She saw him before I did. His shadow fell across the floor, crept up the right side of her face. Phil. The Asshole.

I hadn't seen him since I hospitalized him three years ago. He looked better than he had then—lying on the floor holding his ribs, coughing blood onto a sawdust floor—but he still looked like an asshole. He had a hell of a scar beside his left eye, compliments of that sensible pool stick. I'm not sure, but I think I beamed when I noticed.

He wouldn't look at me. He looked at her. “I've been downstairs honking for the last ten minutes, hon'. You didn't hear me?”

“It was pretty noisy outside, and…” She pointed at the boom box, but Phil chose not to look at it because that would have meant looking at me.

He said, “Ready to go?”

She nodded and stood. She drained the beer in one long swallow. That didn't seem to make Phil's day. Probably made it worse when she flipped the can airborne in my direction and I tapped it into the wastebasket.

“Two points,” she said, coming around the desk. “See you tomorrow, Skid.”

“See you,” I said, as she took Phil's hand and started walking out the door.

Just before they reached the door, Phil turned, her hand in his, and looked at me. He smiled.

I blew him a kiss.

I heard them work their way down the narrow, winding steps. Van had stopped singing and the quiet that replaced him felt thick and decayed. I sat in Angie's chair, saw them below me. Phil was getting in the car, Angie standing at the passenger door, holding the handle. Her head was down and I got the feeling she was making a conscious effort not to look back up at the window. Phil opened her door from the inside, and a moment after she got in, they pulled out into traffic.

I looked at my boom box, at the cassettes scattered around it. I considered taking Van out and putting in some Dire Straits. Or maybe some Stones. No. Jane's Addiction perhaps. Springsteen? Something really different, then. Ladysmith-Black-Mambazo or The Chieftains. I considered them all. I considered what would best fit my mood. I considered picking up the boom box and hurling it across the room at the exact spot where Phil had turned, Angie's hand in his, and smiled.

But I didn't. It'd pass.

Everything did. Sooner or later.

I left the
church a few minutes later. Nothing left to keep me. I walked through the empty schoolyard, kicked a can in front of me as I went. I passed through the opening in the short wrought-iron fence that lined the yard and crossed the avenue to my apartment. I live directly across from the church in a blue-and-white three-decker that somehow missed the scourge of aluminum siding that overtook all its neighbors. My landlord is an old Hungarian farmer whose last name I couldn't pronounce with a year of practice. He spends all day fussing about in the yard, and he's said maybe a total of two hundred and fifty words to me in the five years I've lived there. The words are usually the same and there are three of them: “Where's my rent?” He's a mean old bastard, but he's unfriendly.

I let myself into my second-floor apartment and tossed the bills that awaited me on a pile on the coffee table with their relatives. There were no women camped by my door, inside or out, but there were seven messages on my answering machine.

Three were from Gina of the Bubble Bath. Each of her messages was backed by the grunts and moans emanating from the aerobics studio where she worked. Nothing like a little summer sweat to get the wheels of passion turning.

One was from my sister, Erin, long distance from Seattle. “Staying out of trouble, kid?” My sister. I'll have my teeth in a glass and a face like a prune, and she'll still be calling me “kid.” Another was from Bubba Rogowski, wondering
if I wanted to have a beer, shoot some pool. Bubba sounded drunk, which meant someone would bleed tonight. I nixed the invitation as a matter of course. Someone, I think it was Lauren, called to make nasty promises concerning a pair of rusty scissors and my genitalia. I was trying to recall our last date to decide if my behavior warranted such extreme measures, when Mulkern's voice drifted into the room and I forgot all about Lauren.

“Pat, lad, it's Sterling Mulkern. I assume you're out earning your money, which is grand, but I wonder if you had the time to read today's
Trib?
That dear boy, Colgan, was at my throat again. Ah, the boy would have accused your own father of setting fires just so he could put them out. A real Peck's bad boy, that Richie Colgan. I wonder, Pat, if you might have a word with him, ask him to lighten up a bit on an old man for a time? Just a thought. We've a table for lunch at the Copley, Saturday at one. Don't forget.” The recording ended with a dial tone, then the cassette began rewinding.

I stared at the small machine. He wondered if I might have a word with Richie Colgan. Just a thought. Toss in the memory of my father for good measure. The hero fireman. The beloved city councilor. My father.

Everyone knows Richie Colgan and I are friends. It's half the reason people are a little more suspicious of me than used to be the case. We met when we were both majoring in Space Invaders with a Pub Etiquette minor at the Happy Harbor Campus of UMass/Boston. Now Richie's the
Trib
's top columnist, a vicious bastard if he thinks you're one of the three great evils—an elitist, a bigot, or a hypocrite. Since Sterling Mulkern is an embodiment of all three, Richie orders him for lunch once or twice a week.

Everyone loved Richie Colgan—until they ran his picture over his byline. A good Irish name. A good Irish boy. Going after the corrupt, fat party bosses in city hall and the Statehouse. Then they ran his picture and everyone saw that his skin was blacker than Kurtz's heart, and suddenly
he was a “troublemaker.” But he sells papers, and his favorite target has always been Sterling Mulkern. Among the monikers he's given the Senator there's “Santa's Evil Twin,” “Siphoner Sterling,” “Three-Lunch Mulkern,” and “Hypo the Hippo.” Boston's not a town for the sensitive pol.

And now, Mulkern wanted me to “have a word with him.” In for a penny, in for a pound. Next time I saw Mulkern, I decided, I'd give him the “Your money rents, it doesn't buy” speech and tell him to leave my hero father out of it while I was at it.

My father, Edgar Kenzie, had his fifteen minutes of local fame almost twenty years ago. He'd made the front page of both dailies; the photo even hit the wires and ended up on the back pages of the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. The photographer damn near won a Pulitzer.

It was a hell of a photograph. My father, swathed in the black and yellow of the BFD, an oxygen tank strapped to his back, climbing
up
a ten story building on a rope of sheets. A woman had come down those sheets a few minutes earlier. Well, halfway down. She'd lost her grip and died on impact. The building was an old nineteenth-century factory that someone had converted into tenements, made of red brick and cheap wood that could have been tissue and gasoline as far as the fire was concerned.

The woman had left her kids inside, telling them, in a moment of panic, to follow her down, instead of the other way around. The kids saw what happened to her and stopped moving, just stood in the black window and looked at their broken doll mother as smoke poured out of the room behind them. The window faced a parking lot and firemen were waiting for a tow truck to get the cars out so they could back a ladder in. My father grabbed an oxygen tank without a word, walked up to the sheets and started climbing. A window on the fifth floor blew out into his chest, and there's another photo, slightly out of focus, of him flapping in the air as shards of glass explode off his
heavy black coat. He reached the tenth floor eventually and grabbed the kids—a four-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl—and went back down again. No big deal, he'd say with a shrug.

When he retired five years later, people still remembered him, and I don't think he ever paid for another drink in his life. He ran for city council on Sterling Mulkern's suggestion and lived a good life of graft and large homes until cancer settled into his lungs like smoke in a closet and ate him and the money away.

At home, the Hero was a different story. He made sure his dinner was waiting with a slap. Made sure the homework got done with a slap. Made sure everything went like clockwork with a slap. And if that didn't work, a belt, or a punch or two, or once, an old washboard. Whatever it took to keep Edgar Kenzie's world in order.

I never knew, probably never will, if it was the job that did this to him—if he was just reacting in the only way he knew how to all those blackened bodies he'd found, scorched into final fetal positions in hot closets or under smoking beds—or if he was simply born mean. My sister claims she doesn't remember what he was like before I came along, but she's also claimed, on occasion, that there were never days when he beat us so badly we had to miss school again. My mother followed the Hero to the grave by six months, so I never got to ask her either. But I doubt she would have told me. Irish parents have never been known for speaking ill of their spouses to their children.

I sat back on the couch in my apartment, thinking about the Hero once again, telling myself this was the last time. That ghost was gone. But I was lying and I knew it. The Hero woke me up at night. The Hero hid in waiting—in shadows, in alleys, in the antiseptic hallways of my dreams, in the chamber of my gun. Just as in life, he'd do whatever he damn well pleased.

I stood and walked past the window to the phone. Outside, something sudden moved in the schoolyard across the
street. The local punks had shown up to lurk in the shadows, sit in the deep stone window seats and smoke a little reefer, drink a few beers. Why not. When I was a local punk, I'd done the same thing. Me, Phil, Bubba, Angie, Waldo, Hale, everybody.

I dialed Richie's direct line at the
Trib
, hoping to catch him working late as usual. His voice came across the line midway through the first ring. “City desk. Hold.” A Muzak version of
The Magnificent Seven
theme syruped its way over the line.

Then I got one of those what's-wrong-with-this-picture answers without ever consciously having asked myself the question. There was no music coming from the schoolyard. No matter how much it announces their position, young punks don't go anywhere without their boom boxes. It's bad form.

I looked past the slit in the curtains down into the schoolyard. No more sudden movement. No movement at all. No glowing cigarette butts or clinking glass bottles. I looked hard at the area where I'd seen it. The school was shaped like an E without the middle dash. The two end dashes jutted out a good six feet farther than the middle section. In those corners, deep shadows formed in the ninety-degree pockets. The movement had come from the pocket on my right.

I kept hoping for a match. In the movies, when someone's following the detective, the idiot always lights a match so the hero can make him. Then I realized how ridiculously cloak-and-dagger this shit was. For all I knew, I'd seen a cat.

I kept watching anyway.

“City desk,” Richie said.

“You said that already.”

“Meestah Kenzie,” Richie said. “How goes it?”

“It goes well,” I said. “Hear you pissed off Mulkern again today.”

“Reason to go on living,” Richie said. “Hippos who masquerade as whales will be harpooned.”

I was willing to bet he had that written on a three-by-five card, taped above his desk. “What's the most important bill coming to floor this session?”

“The most important bill—” he repeated, thinking about it. “No question—the street terrorism bill.”

In the schoolyard, something moved. “The street terrorism bill?”

“Yeah. It labels all gang members ‘street terrorists,' means you can throw them in jail simply because they're gang members. In simplest terms—”

“Use small words so I'll be sure to understand.”

“Of course. In simplest terms, gangs would be considered paramilitary groups with interests that are in direct conflict with those of the state. Treat them like an invading army. Anyone caught wearing colors, wearing Raiders baseball caps even, is committing treason. Goes straight to jail, no passing Go.”

“Will it pass?”

“Possibly. Good possibility, actually, when you consider how desperate everyone is to get rid of the gangs.”

“And?”

“And, it'll get struck down within six months in a courtroom. It's one thing to say, ‘We should declare martial law and get these fuckers off the streets, civil rights be damned.' It's another to actually do it, get that much closer to fascism, turn Roxbury and Dorchester into another South Central, helicopters and shit flying overhead day and night. Why the interest?”

I tried to put Mulkern or Paulson or Vurnan with this and it didn't fit. Mulkern, the house liberal, would never publicly stand behind something like this. But Mulkern, the pragmatist, would never take a public stand in favor of the gangs either. He'd simply take a vacation the week the bill came to floor.

“When's it coming to floor?” I asked.

“Next Monday, the third of July.”

“There's nothing else coming up you can think of?”

“Not really, no. They got a mandatory seven bill for child molesters will probably sail through.”

I knew about that one. Seven years mandatory prison time for anyone convicted of child molestation. No parole possibility. The only problem I had with it was that it wasn't called the mandatory life bill, and that there wasn't a provision that ensured that those convicted would be forced to enter mainstream population, and get back a little of what they gave.

Again Richie said, “Why the interest, Patrick?”

I considered Sterling Mulkern's message: Talk to Richie Colgan. Sell out. For the briefest moment, I considered telling Richie about it. Teach Mulkern to ask me to help him soothe his ruffled feathers. But I knew Richie would have no choice but to put it in his next column, in bold print, and professionally speaking, crossing Mulkern like that would be the same as cutting my wrists in a bathtub.

“Working on a case,” I told Richie. “Very hush-hush at the moment.”

“Tell me about it sometime,” he said.

“Sometime.”

“Good enough.” Richie doesn't press me and I don't press him. We accept the word no from each other, which is one reason for the friendship. He said, “How's your partner?”

“Still mouthwatering.”

“Still not coming across for you?” He chuckled.

“She's married,” I said.

“Don't matter. You've had married before. Must drive you nuts, Patrick, a beautiful woman like that around you every day, and nary a single desire to touch your dick in her whole luscious being. Damn, but that's got to hurt.” He laughed.

Richie's under the impression that he's a real hoot sometimes.

I said, “Yeah, well, I got to run.” Something moved again in the black pocket of the schoolyard. “How about a couple of beers soon?”

“Bring Angie?” I thought I could hear him panting.

“I'll see if she's in the mood.”

“Deal. I'll send over a few file reports on those bills.”

“
Gracias
.”

He hung up and I sat back and looked through the slit in the curtains. I was familiar with the shadows now, and I could see a large shape sitting within them. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, I couldn't tell, but something was there. I thought about calling Bubba; he was good for times like these when you weren't sure what you were walking into. But he'd called me from a bar. Not a good sign. Even if I could track him down, he'd just want to kill the trouble, not investigate it. Bubba has to be used sparingly, with great care. Like nitro.

I decided to press Harold into service.

Harold is a six-foot stuffed panda bear that I won at the Marshfield Fair a few years back. I tried to give him to Angie at the time; I'd won him for her, after all. But she gave me that look she'd give me if I lit up a cigarette during sex, the withering one. Why she didn't want a six-foot stuffed panda in bright yellow rubber shorts adorning her apartment is beyond me, but since I couldn't find a trash barrel big enough to take him, I welcomed him into my home.