A Drink Before the War

  I turned into the top hallway and reached Jenna’s door, or what was left of it. Something had imploded the wood by the knob, and the knob itself lay in a pile of splinters on the floor. A quick glance at the corridor in front of me revealed a thin stretch of dark green linoleum littered with broken chair legs, a shattered drawer, some shredded clothing, pillow stuffing, pieces of a small transistor radio.

  I pulled my gun, inched inside, checking each doorway with my eyes and gun in tandem. The house had that certain stillness that only comes when nothing living remains inside, but I’d been fooled by that stillness before, and I have a rewired jaw to prove it.

  It took me ten minutes of laborious, stiff-necked searching to decide the place actually was empty. By this time, my skin was covered in sweat, my back ached, and the muscles in my hands and arms felt about as pliable as Sheetrock.

  I let the gun hang loosely from my hand as I went more casually through the apartment, rechecking the rooms, looking at things in more detail. Nothing jumped from the bedroom and danced in front of me with a neon sign overhead that said CLUE!!! Not in the bathroom either. Kitchen and living room were equally uncooperative. All I knew was that someone had been looking for something and delicacy had not been a primary concern. Nothing that was breakable was unbroken, nothing slitable unslit.

  I stepped into the corridor and heard a sound to my right. I spun and stared down the fat barrel at Jerome. He crouched, hands in front of his face. “Ho! Ho! Ho, ho, ho, ho! Don’t fucking shoot!”

  “Jesus,” I said, a hard wave of exhausted relief curling over my razor-blade adrenaline.

  “God damn!” Jerome straightened up, brushed at his tank top for some reason, smoothed the cuffs of his shorts. “The fuck you carrying that thing for? I ain’t seen no elephants ’round here since I don’t know when.”

  I shrugged. “What’re you doing up here?”

  “Hey, I live in this neighborhood, white bread. Seems to me, you the one needs the excuse. And put that fucking thing away.”

  I slid the gun back into my holster. “What happened here, Jerome?”

  “You got me,” Jerome said, walking inside, looking at the mess like he’d seen it a hundred times before. “Old Jenna ain’t been around in over a week. This was done over the weekend.” He guessed my next question. “And no, man, no one saw anything.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said.

  “Oh, like people in your neighborhood, they just up and volunteer information to the police all the time too, I bet.”

  I smiled. “Not on their best days.”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked at the mess again. “This got to be about Roland. Got to be.”

  “Who’s Roland?”

  He chuckled at that one, looked at me. “Yeah, right.”

  “No, I’m serious. Who’s Roland?”

  He turned and walked out. “Go home, white bread.”

  I followed him down the stairs. “Who’s Roland, Jerome?”

  He shook his head the whole way down to the bottom floor. When he reached the porch, where his friends had reassembled on the steps, he jerked his thumb behind him at me as I came through the doorway. “He asking who Roland is.”

  His friends laughed. I had to be the funniest white man they’d seen in days.

  Most of them stood up as I came out on the porch. The girl said, “You want to know who Roland is?”

  I walked halfway down the steps. “I want to know who Roland is.”

  One of the bigger guys stabbed my shoulder with his index finger. “Roland your worst fucking nightmare.”

  The girl said, “Worse than your wife.”

  They all laughed and I walked down the steps and cut between the blue Malibu and the green Granada.

  “Stay away from Roland,” Jerome said. “What kill elephants, don’t so much as faze Roland. Cause he ain’t human.”

  I stopped, turned back, my hand resting on the Malibu. “Then what is he?”

  Jerome shrugged, folded his arms across his chest. “He just plain bad. Bad as it gets.”

  4

  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.

  5

  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.