Serpents in the Cold (13 page)

JUST AFTER DAWN
and they were at Kelly's Rose, sitting at the bar and staring out beyond the window at the ashen gray streets. The gray dissipated like a veil being pulled back and the sun crept between the buildings and over the low rooftops, spearing the Scollay alleyways with an unforgiving light. Christy Black had come down from his room above the bar and shaken Peter Kopachek awake from a cot in the storage closet where he'd spent the night, and Peter was now slouched at the counter with a drink in his hand, sputtering as he drank.

Christy had turned on the bare minimum of lights, an ancient low-hanging candelabra in a small booth in the rear of the room, so that the place was thick with shadow. The smell of burning coffee grounds wafted from the small grill behind the bar where Christy was reheating yesterday's brew. A few regulars hunched at the bar eyed Cal and Dante warily, but when Cal looked at them, they went back to their drinks. They were shadows themselves, and if Cal and Dante hadn't already known who they were, they would have had to squint in the grainy light to properly make out their battered features: the cleft lip; the bulbous, vein-cracked nose; the watery, vacant stare. The radio was turned on, sound spitting and whining high as its tubes warmed, until Christy reached up and moved the dial to the morning news, and then Cal stood, holding the stool for support until the blood had worked its way back into his leg, and went to the phone booth at the rear of the room.

He stepped into the booth and swung the door shut behind him. The booth was cramped and stank of old tobacco and beer. A fan thumped into life when he closed the door and whirred loudly above his head. After depositing a nickel, he dialed the precinct and asked for Owen, not expecting him to be at his desk yet, but the desk sergeant patched him through and Owen picked up the phone and he told him what had happened.

“You're fucking nuts,” said the voice. “What are you two morons playing at? You know something we don't know, you fucking tell us. You two keep this up and Giordano's going to make your life hell. Fuck! I should send a car around right now and arrest the two of you and just be fucking done with it.”

Cal chewed on his tongue as he waited for Owen to finish at the other end of the line.

“Look, what the fuck do you care as long as you have the trailer, and now you have three more bodies to go along with Sheila's and the others, and you know that Blackie Foley's the killer. Tell them some fucking hobo found them and called it in.” He made sure Owen knew how to find the trailer, and then even as Owen continued to talk, Cal hung up on him. He picked up the receiver and slammed it down again and then twice more. He leaned his head against the pay phone for a moment, wishing he'd handled things better with Owen, sighed, and pulled back the door, and the light and fan went off. Screw him, he thought. Let him work it out, the bastard.

At the bar Dante had already ordered him another drink and he tossed it back gratefully as he stood. “How'd it go?” Dante asked.

Cal shrugged, lowered himself wearily onto the stool. “Could've gone better. What he does next is up to him.”

He ordered them another round. The radio played; men spoke in fragments of words; pedestrians and cars sounded beyond the glass, yet for Cal and Dante the world had gone silent. The regulars of Kelly's Rose shuffled and trudged through the amorphous shadows and glinting fragments of meager light in the barroom, as lost as Dante and Cal with their heads lowered over the bar, helpless before all of the things that haunted their separate imaginations.

_________________________

Savin Hill, Dorchester

MOST AFTERNOONS IN
the warmer months Cal sat on the porch of the triple-decker and watched the neighborhood move through its day. He'd sit there until it became dark while he wondered what he'd do next, if he'd do anything at all. Often, when Lynne came home, she'd come to the screen door and stare at him, the amber light of the kitchen a trembling corona about her black shape, and after a moment—or it might have been hours—she'd call out, “Cal, honey, why don't you come in now?” but when he turned and looked toward her, all he could see was darkness. The doctors up at the VA couldn't find an answer for it, told him it's what happens to all soldiers who have experienced combat and that hopefully things would change with time. Back at the war hospital in Verdun before they'd shipped him stateside, he used to hear the doctors talking among themselves in French, calling the shell-shocked American soldiers cowards.

This rare winter evening with the temperature holding steady at just above freezing, he finished his dinner and then brought a cup of coffee outside as Lynne washed the dishes. Every so often her shadow came across the porch as she passed before the slant of amber light cast from the kitchen and it reminded him that she was there. He sat in his heavy wool pants, wrapped in a winter overcoat and a quilt, stared blankly over Savin Hill's Malibu Beach to the distant traffic moving along the highway and Morrissey Boulevard, and farther, out across the halogen-lit arch bridge toward Tenean Beach, entrenched like a foul, long-gutted clamshell beyond the gray Boston Gas tanks, where they'd found Sheila's frozen, mutilated body.

He waited to hear some word from Dante and dusk emptied into night and with it came a deep cold. The bells of Saint Kevin's sounded the evening novenas and the traffic on the Avenue seemed to still. The moon came soon enough, trembling yellow through a haze of ice. He watched as the wind swept across the frozen water and rattled the bare branches of trees along the street and made him pull his coat tighter about him, and he wondered if it wasn't for Lynne, how he might just allow himself to freeze to death.

LYNNE CAME OUT
onto the front porch wearing her hooded wool sweater, the one he'd bought her three Christmases before. She looked at him for a moment and then followed his eyes to the city beyond, blinking through the hazy clouds that formed around its lights at night. “What are you looking at?” she asked. “The view doesn't change, y'know.”

He hadn't told her about the bodies they'd discovered in the trailer or of their chasing Blackie through Boston, hadn't mentioned Blackie telling Dante that he'd watched her on the Avenue, and he knew he wouldn't. When he didn't respond, she adjusted the quilt about him, pulled it up his torso. “It's freezing, Cal. You'll catch your death out here.”

“Don't worry, I'm fine.”

“Okay.”

He gestured to the lights of other houses. “I used to sit on my parents' porch and look out at the windows across the way and try to imagine the people there, and the lives they lived. When I was young—”

“When you were an altar boy?” She laughed, and he couldn't help but grin.

“And you were lifting your skirt on the Avenue and pulling down your underwear for the Mulligans and Shays, a nickel a look.”

“Cal!” Lynne slapped his shoulder hard. “I never charged a nickel. Never less than a dime for a look-see.”

They both laughed with that and he reached for her, pulled her onto his lap, and she curled up her legs and leaned against his shoulder. He stroked her hair, and they kissed. The weight and warmth of her felt good, reassuring. For a moment he enjoyed the silence and the sense of her close to him. A boat was passing out into the bay, shimmering and white in the dark; at the drawbridge the staggered headlights of waiting cars. He said, “Blackie Foley paid Dante and Claudia a visit the other day.”

“The gangster? Why?”

“Wanted to scare him, shake him up a bit.”

“Are they okay?”

“Yeah, they're fine.”

“What'd he owe this time?”

“Not much. He's not deep in to them, not like before.”

“But you still bailed him out again, right?”

He remained silent, and she said, “How are they holding up? This whole Sheila thing—I know it must be hard on them. I know it's hard on you.”

“They're doing okay. At least they have each other.”

“I should go around and see Claudia. It's been so long.”

“That'd be nice. I think she'd like that.”

He looked at her, and then to her surprise reached out and placed his fingers on her cheek and traced the curve of her jaw. He watched her eyes looking at him. For a brief moment he felt an incredible, heartbreaking love and tenderness as if he were touching her after a great absence. A rush of grief came upon him, but he forced it back and smiled even though it felt unnatural. He clasped his hand over hers and held it there.

“You make sure to be careful when you're coming home,” he said. “Okay? Maybe ask Katie Ryan to ride the bus with you. She works the same shift, doesn't she?”

“Don't tell me you're worried about Blackie?”

“That's all in the past.”

“Yeah, but I can tell it's bothering you.”

“No, not at all.” Cal shook his head. “Just want you to be safe. Crazy things happening these days.”

“Like the Butcher?”

“Yeah, the Butcher.”

“Don't worry about me, I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can. I'm not worried.”

She shook her head. “You silly bugger.” She looked out over Neponset, Dorchester Bay, the peninsula, the islands, all sweeping back to the city. He watched her for a moment, trying to figure out what she was thinking.

“You never did like it here, did you, Lynne?”

She shrugged. “Like, dislike, I don't know. It's where I was born and raised. It's home, for what it's worth.”

“It's home, but you could leave it if you had to.”

“Yes, I could leave this. I'd leave it for just about anywhere as long as you were with me.” She reached down and squeezed his hand, held on, looked into his eyes with conviction and just a little longing. Did she want him to agree, to say the same thing? After a moment she looked away.

“Sheila wouldn't have died just anywhere, you know. It had to be here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If she was from any other place, she wouldn't be dead now.”

“Lynne—”

“That's what I believe. You don't have to agree. It's just…what I believe. This city will kill you, too, and you'll let it, Cal. You'll never leave, not for me, not for anything.”

That's not true,
he wanted to say.
I'd do anything for you, I'd leave this place for you,
but he remained silent, a numbness growing inside him as he watched the glittering windows of other homes. He envisioned himself as a young boy staring out at the dark, across to the windows of his neighbors, knowing that there was warmth there within those lighted rooms, and with a tremulous sense of longing, knowing that it was something he could never be a part of.

LATER IN BED,
after she had fallen asleep, he stared blankly toward the ceiling. He sensed her beside him, her breathing sounding the depths of the darkness they lay within. Wind rattled the windowpanes, moaned in the eaves. Something skittered on the roof, and the doorway in the kitchen sighed as the furnace kicked in and the house warmed.

He remembered his second year on the police force, after the war, and one of his worst cases. They'd traced the murdered body of a four-year-old boy to a house in Mattapan where the parents had kept their four children, one boy and three girls, in cages in the basement; for years they'd raped and physically abused them, kept them alive on dog food and water. The place stank of excrement and piss. There was also the smell of the oldest girl's menses. She'd been raised that way since she was eight. When they found her she was eighteen, her body deformed by malnutrition and confinement, by beatings, and by the straps that bound her on a daily basis until they were done with her. The neighbors had nothing but nice things to say about the people—they attended the local Unitarian church, gave to all the best causes, including the Patrolmen's Association.

The children had no teeth left; they'd rotted away, and when they found the children curled up in the cages, their pale, naked buttocks showed the marks of a whip and a razor blade and were caked with shit. As he and a beat cop were letting them out of their cages and another detective called for a wagon and an ambulance, the father came banging down the stairs brandishing a butcher's blade. He was naked and his pale, mealy-colored cock erect. Cal shot him twice in the gut before he'd taken one foot off the bottom step and he dropped like a ton weight. Cal let him howl in pain, curled up in a fetal position, his entrails bleeding out, while they attended to the children. He was still breathing as they bundled the children beneath blankets and guided them up the stairs, and Cal had stared at the father's bowed back, falling and rising slowly, at his hairy, lumpy backside, and suddenly, enraged, had kicked him repeatedly, driven his boot up into his testicles, imagining the man screaming although he was well beyond that. He wouldn't have regretted it had the man died, but he had lived and been electrocuted a year later at Charlestown State Prison.

He thought of the evil in the world, places he'd seen where God had been absent, and sometimes he wondered why he still had faith at all, why he still believed. He turned and looked at Lynne sleeping, caught briefly in the radiance of a passing car's headlights—and suddenly seeming hard and beautiful and incredibly vulnerable all at the same time.