A Drink Before the War (24 page)

We tried to
have a conversation with Richie in the parking lot but it was like trying to talk to someone as he passed by on a jet. He was rocking forward on his feet and he kept interrupting to say, “Hold that thought, would you?” Then he'd whisper something into his handheld tape recorder. Probably wrote most of his column standing in the parking lot of the Hyatt Regency.

We said our good-nights and he bounced on the balls of his feet all the way to his car. We might have killed Socia, but Richie was going to bury Paulson.

We took a cab home; the still streets were littered with the residue of fireworks; the wind carried a bitter tang of gunpowder. The rush of burying Mulkern's whipping boy in front of him was already beginning to dissipate, leaking out of the cab onto those desolate streets, drifting off somewhere into the shadows that swept over us between the streetlights.

When we reached my place, Angie went straight to the fridge, took a bottle of zinfandel from the door. She took a glass too, though after watching her drink it, there didn't seem much point; the only way she could have gone through it any faster would have been intravenously. I took a couple of beers and we sat in the living room with the windows open, listening to the breeze blow a beer can down the avenue, tipping it against the asphalt, rolling it steadily toward the corner.

I knew that in a week or so, I'd look back on this with
pleasure, savor the look on Mulkern's face as he realized he'd just paid me a large sum of money to blow a hole in his life. Somehow I'd managed to pull off the rarest of feats—I'd made someone in the State House accountable. In a week or so, that would feel good. Not now though. Now we were facing something else entirely, the air heavy with the impending weight of our own consciences.

Angie was halfway through the bottle when she said, “What's going on?”

She stood up, the wine bottle hanging loosely between her index and middle fingers, tapping against her thigh.

I got up, not sure I was ready to face this yet. I got two more beers, came back. I said, “We killed someone.” It sounded simple.

“In cold blood.”

“In cold blood.” I opened one beer, placed the other on the floor beside the chair.

She drained her glass, poured some more. “He wasn't dangerous to us.”

“Not at that moment, no.”

“But we killed him anyway.”

“We killed him anyway,” I said. It was numbing and repetitious, this conversation, but I had the feeling we were each trying to say exactly what we'd done, no bullshit, no lies to come back and haunt us later.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because he repulsed us. Morally.” I drank some beer. It could have been water for all I tasted it.

“A lot of people morally repulse us,” she said. “We going to kill them too?”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“Not enough bullets.”

She said, “I don't want to joke about this. Not now.”

She was right. I said, “Sorry.”

She said, “In the exact same situation, we'd do it again.”

I thought of Socia holding up the photograph, running
his finger between his son's legs. I said, “Yes, we would.”

“He was a predator,” she said.

I nodded.

“He allowed his child to be molested for money, so we killed him.” She drank some more wine, not quite inhaling it anymore. She was standing in the middle of the floor, pivoting slowly on her left foot every now and then, the bottle swinging like a pendulum between her fingers.

I said, “That's about the size of it.”

She said, “Paulson did similar things. He molested that child, probably hundreds of others. We knew that. We didn't kill him.”

I said, “Killing Socia was an impulse. We didn't know we were going to do it when we met him.”

She laughed, a short harsh sound. “We didn't, huh? Why'd we take a silencer with us?”

I let the question fall between us, tried not to answer it. Eventually I said, “Maybe we did go there knowing we'd kill him given half an excuse. He deserved it.”

“So did Paulson. He's alive.”

“We'd go to jail if we killed Paulson. Nobody cared about Socia. They'll chalk it up to the gang war, be happy he's gone.”

“How convenient for us.”

I stood up, came across to her. I put my hands on her shoulders, stopped her lazy pivot. I said, “We killed Socia on impulse.” If I said it enough, maybe it'd become true. “We couldn't get to Paulson. He's too well insulated. But we took care of him.”

“In very civilized fashion.” She said “civilized” the way some people say “taxes.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So we took care of Socia according to the laws of the jungle, and we dispatched Paulson in accordance with the laws of civilization.”

“Exactly.”

She looked into my eyes and hers were swimming with
alcohol and exhaustion and ghosts. She said, “Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.”

Not much I could argue with there. A black pimp was dead and a white child molester was preparing a press release over a bottle of Chivas somewhere, each one as guilty as the other.

People like Paulson would always be able to hide behind power. They might face disgrace, they might even do six months in a federal country club and face public castigation, but they'd breathe. Paulson might actually come out of this OK. A few years back, a congressman who'd admitted to having sex with a fifteen-year-old boy was reelected. I guess, to some people, even statutory rape is relative.

And people like Socia could slip through for a while, maybe a long while. They'd kill and maim and make the lives of everyone around them ugly and bleak, but sooner or later, they usually ended up like Socia himself—brain leaking out under an expressway. They ended up on page thirteen of the Metro section and the cops shrugged and didn't work too hard to find their killers.

One disgraced, one dead. One breathing, one dead. One white, one dead.

I ran my hands through my hair, felt the grit and oil from the last day, smelled the trash and waste on my fingers. At that moment, I truly hated the world and everything in it.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

They tell us it's about race, and we believe them. And they call it a “democracy,” and we nod our heads, so pleased with ourselves. We blame the Socias, we occasion
ally sneer at the Paulsons, but we always vote for the Sterling Mulkerns. And in occasional moments of quasi-lucidity, we wonder why the Mulkerns of this world don't respect us.

They don't respect us because we are their molested children. They fuck us morning, noon, and night, but as long as they tuck us in with a kiss, as long as they whisper into our ears, “Daddy loves you, Daddy will take care of you,” we close our eyes and go to sleep, trading our bodies, our souls, for the comforting veneers of “civilization” and “security,” the false idols of our twentieth-century wet dream.

And it's our reliance on that dream that the Mulkerns, the Paulsons, the Socias, the Phils, the Heroes of this world depend upon. That's their dark knowledge. That's how they win.

I gave Angie a weak smile. “I'm tired,” I said.

“Me too.” She gave me her own weak smile. “Exhausted.” She walked to the couch, spread the sheet I'd left across it. She said, “We'll figure it out someday. Right?”

“Yeah. Someday,” I said, walking toward my bedroom. “Sure.”

The photograph we'd
given Richie showed Senator Paulson in all his glory. It showed very specifically what he got his sense of glory from. Roland's body took up a third of the frame and you got a good sense of his age, of the youth in the body under Paulson. No doubt about his sex. But unlike most of the other photographs, you couldn't see Roland's face, just his small ears and head. Socia was standing in the bedroom, watching with a bored expression on his face, smoking a cigarette.

The
Trib
ran the photo with appropriate softening and black bars over the places you'd imagine. Beside the photograph was another—one of Socia lying on his back in the gravel, his body looking like an inflatable doll someone had forgotten to inflate. His head was thrown back, the small pipe still in his hand. Over the photo it said: MAN IN PAULSON PIC KILLED GANGLAND-STYLE.

In addition to his column, Richie's byline ran over the Socia murder story too. He said the police had no suspects as of yet, that any fingerprints could have been obscured if the killer had had the sense to rub his hands in the gravel before he touched anything. The killer had. He mentioned that the Xerox of the Paulson photo had been discovered in Socia's bloody linen jacket. He mentioned Socia's common-law marriage to Jenna Angeline, the same Jenna Angeline who'd been a cleaning woman for, among others, Senators Paulson and Mulkern. They reran her death photograph too, the State House looming up behind her.

It was the biggest local scandal since the DA bungled the Charles Stuart case. Maybe bigger. We'd have to wait until it all came out in the wash.

One thing that wouldn't come out in the wash was Roland. I doubt Paulson knew the identity of the child he'd been with that day; over the ensuing years, I'm sure there were so many more. And if he did know, I doubted he'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Socia wasn't up to much public speaking these days, and Angie and I were unequivocally not involved.

Richie was one hell of a reporter. He tied Paulson to Socia and Socia to Jenna by the third paragraph, then noted that Paulson had gone on record in Friday's legislative session motioning for an extra day off, the precise day the street terrorism bill was scheduled to come to the floor. Richie never insinuated, he never accused. He just laid fact after fact down on everyone's breakfast table and let them draw their own conclusions.

I had my doubts about how many of them would get it, but I figured enough would figure it out.

Paulson was reportedly on vacation at the family home in Marblehead, but by the time I caught the morning news on TV, there were Devin and Oscar in front of the cameras in Marblehead. Oscar said, “Senator Paulson has one hour to turn himself in to the Marblehead Police Department or we're going in after him.”

Devin didn't say anything. He stood beside his partner, beaming, a cigar the size of a Boeing in his mouth.

The reporter said to Oscar, “Sergeant Lee, your partner looks rather pleased about this.”

Oscar said, “He's so happy he don't know whether to shit or—” and they cut to a commercial.

I flipped around, saw Sterling Mulkern on Channel Seven. he was coming up the State House steps, an army of people trotting beside him, Jim Vurnan trying to keep pace a few steps back. He sliced through the mass of microphones like an oar through a dead sea, a chant of “No
comment,” coming from his lips all the way through the front doors. I was kind of hoping he'd keep things lively, throw in a few “I don't recalls” to break up the monotony, but I guess pleasing me wasn't at the top of his “to do” list this morning.

Angie had been awake for a few minutes by this time, her face propped up on the arm of the couch where she'd slept, her eyes puffed with sleep, but alert. She said, “Sometimes, Skid, this job ain't half bad.”

I was sitting on the floor at the foot of the couch. I looked at her. “Does your hair always stand on end first thing in the morning?”

Not a smart thing to say when you're sitting near someone's foot. The next thing I said was, “Ouch.”

She got up, tossed the sheet over my head, and said, “Coffee?”

“I'd love some.” I pulled the sheet off my face.

“Make enough for the both of us then, would you?” She stumbled into the bathroom and turned the shower on.

On Channel Five, the two anchors were in early, promising to stay with me until all the facts were in. I wanted to tell them they'd be having pizzas delivered to the station for the next ten years if that's what they were waiting for, but I let it slide. They'd figure it out.

Ken Mitchum, on Channel Seven, said it was possibly the biggest scandal since the Curly years.

Channel Six was doing the Charles Stuart comparison by the time I caught up with them, paralleling the racial overtones that had tinged both cases. Ward was smiling as he reported this, but Ward always smiles. Laura, on the other hand, looked pissed off. Laura is black; I didn't blame her.

Angie came back out of the shower, newly dressed in a pair of my gray shorts and a white Polo sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was mine too, but damn if she didn't look better than me in it. She said, “Where's my coffee?”

“Same place as the bell. Let me know when you find the both of them.”

She frowned, brushing out her hair, head tilted to one side.

The photograph of Socia's corpse flashed on the screen. She stopped brushing for a moment. I said, “How do you feel?”

She nodded toward the TV. “Fine, as long as I don't think about it. Come on, let's get out of here.”

“And go where?”

“Well, I don't know about you, babe, but I want to spend some of that bonus money. And,” she said, straightening up, tossing her long hair behind her, “we have to visit Bubba.”

“Have you considered that he may be angry with us?”

She shrugged. “You got to die some time, right?”

I picked up a Nintendo Gameboy for Bubba, bought a bunch of Kill-the-Commie-Terrorist games to go with it. Angie bought him a Freddy Krueger doll and five issues of
Jugs
magazine.

There was a police guard at his door, but after making a few phone calls, he allowed us to go in. Bubba was reading a worn copy of
The Anarchist's Cookbook
when we entered, learning all sorts of new and nifty ways to build a hydrogen bomb in his backyard. He looked up at us, and for the single longest second of my life, I couldn't tell if he was angry or not.

He said, “'Bout time someone I liked showed up.”

I learned how to breathe again.

He was paler than I'd ever seen him and the whole left side of his chest and arm was in a cast, but take away the cast and I've seen people with a bad cold who looked less healthy. Angie bent over and kissed his forehead, then suddenly pulled his head to her chest and held it there for a moment, her eyes closed. “I was worried about you, you maniac.”

“What don't kill me only makes me bloody.”

Bubba. Deep as always.

He said, “A Freddie Krueger doll! Hot shit!” He looked at me. “What'd you bring me, homeboy?”

 

We left after a half hour or so. The doctors had initially thought he'd be in ICU for at least a week, but now they were saying he could be released in another two days. He'd face an indictment, of course, but he assured us, “What's a witness? Really. I never met one. They those people who always seem to get amnesia just before I'm supposed to go to trial?”

We walked down Charles Street into the Back Bay, Angie's credit card burning a hole in her pocket. Bonwit Teller never stood a chance. She hit the place like a cyclone and by the time we left, we were carrying half the first floor in paper bags.

I did a half hour's shopping at Eddie Bauer, another twenty minutes at the Banana Republic in Copley Place, my stomach beginning to churn in the atmosphere of four-story marble waterfalls and solid gold window frames and Neiman-Marcus displays of eighty-five-dollar argyle socks. If Donald Trump puked, Copley Place is probably what would hit the toilet.

We took the back entrance out of there, the best place to find a cab in the city in midafternoon. We were trying to figure out where we were going to eat lunch, when I saw Roland standing at the bottom of the escalator, his huge frame spread lazily across the exit way, one arm in a cast, one eye closed shut, the other looking steadily at us.

I reached under my untucked shirt, got a firm grip on the nine millimeter, cold against my stomach but warm in my hand.

Roland stepped back. “I want to talk.”

I kept my hand on my gun.

Angie said, “So talk.”

“Take a walk with me.” He turned and walked out through the revolving door.

I'm not quite sure why we followed him, but we did.
The sun was strong, the air warm but not too humid as we walked up Dartmouth, away from the staid hotels and the quaint shops, the yuppies sipping cappuccino amidst the illusion of civilization. We crossed Columbus Avenue and went down through the South End, the restored brownstones eventually giving way to the sorrier-looking ones, those that hadn't been touched by the frontier mentality of the fern-and-Perrier crowd yet. We kept going, none of us saying a word, farther down into Roxbury. As soon as we crossed over the border, Roland said, “Just want to speak to you a minute.”

I looked around me, saw nothing that gave me comfort, but somehow, I trusted him. Having checked inside the hollows of the sling that supported his arm and seeing no gun there, I had one concrete reason to feel this way. But that wasn't all of it. What I knew of Roland, he wasn't like his father. He didn't lull you into death with a few words and a hypnotist's inflection. He just came straight at you and sent you to your coffin.

Another thing I was realizing, for sure—the kid was huge. I'd never been this close to him when he'd been on his feet, and it was damn near awe-inspiring. He was closing in on six foot four or so and every inch of skin that covered his body was bunched tight with coiled muscle. I'm six feet even and I felt like a dwarf.

He stopped in a wornout field, a construction site waiting to happen, the next place big business would go to encroach and keep encroaching, pushing Roxbury west or east until it became another South End, another place to have a good drink and hear underground music. And its people would roll east or west too, while politicians cut ribbons and shook the hands of entrepreneurs and talked of progress, pointed to declining crime statistics in the area with pride, while ignoring the rising crime statistics in the areas where the displaced had settled. Roxbury would become a nice word again, Dedham or Randolph a bad one. And another neighborhood would dissolve.

Roland said, “You two killed Marion.”

We didn't say anything.

“You think it would…please me? That it? Keep me from your door?”

I said, “No. Didn't have much to do with you at the time, Roland. He pissed us off. Simple as that.”

He looked at me, then off beyond the lot. We weren't too far from the decrepit tenements where he'd chased us the night before. All around us were worn buildings and sparse fields of city growth. Not much more than a stone's throw from Beacon Hill.

He seemed to read my thoughts. He said, “That's right. We're sitting on your doorstep.”

I looked back, saw the skyline glittering above us in the midafternoon sun, close enough to kiss. I wondered what it must be like, living here, this close, knowing you'd never get to taste it. Not for free. A couple of miles and a world away.

I said, “Oh well.”

Roland said, “You can't keep doing this to us forever. Can't hold us back.”

I said, “Roland, ‘we' didn't create you. Don't try and put that off on the white man too. Your father and you made you what you are.”

“And what am I?” he said.

I shrugged. “A sixteen-year-old killing machine.”

“Damn right,” he said. “Damn right.” He spit on the ground to the left of my foot. He said, “But I wasn't always.”

I thought of the skinny boy in the photographs, tried to imagine what benevolent, possibly hopeful thoughts had run through his brain before someone had burned it out of him, overloaded the circuits until the good had to go just to make way for all the bad. I looked at the sixteen-year-old man in front of me, the massive, bulked-up stone with the bad eye and the arm in the cast. I couldn't, for the life of me, connect the two.

I said, “Yeah, well, we were all little boys once, Roland.” I looked at Angie. “Little girls too.”

Roland said, “The white man—”

Angie dropped her shopping bag and said, “Roland, we're not going to listen to this ‘white man' shit. We know all about the white man. We know he has the power and we know the black man doesn't. We know the way the world works and we know that way sucks. We know all that. We're not too pleased with ourselves either, but there you are. And maybe if you had some suggestions on how to change things for the better, we'd have something to talk about. But you kill people, Roland, and you sell crack. Don't expect violins.”

He smiled at her. It wasn't the warmest smile I'd ever seen—Roland has about as much warmth in him as a polar cap—but it wasn't completely cold either. He said, “Maybe. Maybe.” He scratched at the skin just above his cast with his free hand. “You kept…that thing out of the papers, so maybe you think I owe you.” He looked at us. “I don't. Don't owe nobody nothing, because I don't ask for nothing.” He rubbed the skin beside his bad eye. “But, then, I don't see much point in killing you no more either.”

I had to remind myself he was sixteen years old.

I said, “Roland, let me ask you something.”

He frowned, seemed bored suddenly. “Go ahead.”

“All this hate, all this anger in you—any of it go away when you found out your father was dead?”

He turned a cube of cinder block over with his foot and shrugged. “No. Maybe if I'd been able to pull the trigger myself, maybe then.”