Dancer in the Flames (28 page)

‘If by that you mean restored to something I never was, then the answer is no. But when I search my conscience, as I have a number of times, I can’t find an ounce of regret.’

J
ill crossed her legs and began to rock slowly, her eyes criss-crossing the room. At first, Boots suspected that she was looking for a bug of some kind, but she surprised him.

‘This room,’ she grinned, ‘it’s really you. The family photos on the bureau, the signed baseballs, the corduroy bedspread, the battered furniture. It’s oak, right?’

‘I don’t know. I bought the set from Teddy Marks before he went to prison. It was in better shape then.’

‘No cigarette burns?’

Boots looked down for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Are we done?’

‘No, Boots, we’re not.’ Jill began to rock a little faster as she organized her thoughts, her eyes turning inward. When she finally began to speak, her voice was more tentative, as though she’d never before conducted this particular review of the facts.

‘I joined the cops,’ she explained, ‘when it became obvious that my father’s case wouldn’t be closed with an arrest. My plan, before that, was to have a short conversation with whoever got charged. I wasn’t overly worried about the direction this conversation might take because I had five years of simulated combat experience behind me. But nobody was arrested, and Uncle Mike not only refused to let me see the case files, he made sure nobody else in the family did, either. Keep in mind, there are thirty-one Kellys on the job, ranking officers among them. Our ties to the NYPD go back a hundred years.’

Jill hesitated, closing her eyes briefly. Despite the bravado, she looked somehow older to Boots, and very tired.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.

Her eyes jumped open. ‘I didn’t unlock the door, Boots. You did.’

Chastened, Boots simply waited for her to begin speaking.

‘On the day I was promoted to detective, Uncle Mike finally gave me the case file. He told me it was complete and I bought the lie. Uncle Mike can be very persuasive. Did he play the kindly grampa for you, Walter Cronkite in a uniform?’

‘Yeah, he was good.’

‘As usual.’ Jill tugged on the sleeves of the robe as she folded her arms beneath her breasts. ‘Here’s a fact you can take to the bank: I received my gold shield only because of my connections. I’m possibly the worst detective in NYPD history. I have no patience and all that bullshit with hair and lint drives me crazy. But I worked hard. I reinterviewed anyone whose name appeared in the file, including Corcoran, Olmeda, Farrahan and Parker, and I spent fifteen months working on a list of violent offenders arrested by my father. I got nowhere, of course, absolutely nowhere. That’s because a piece of the puzzle, the only piece that mattered, had been withheld by kindly Uncle Mike. That piece, an IAB file, was given to me by a Kelly about six months ago, a cousin who grew up with my father. It seems that Patrick Kelly was already working for Internal Affairs when he was placed on the Lipstick Killer task force. Corcoran was dirty. Farrahan, Parker and Olmeda, too. My father’s job was to get the proof.

‘It’s still hard for me to describe the way I felt when I read that file. I had them, Boots. Finally. Call it rebirth, the phoenix rising. Call it whatever you want, but there was no going back. The only thing I needed to know after that was which one raped me. I wanted to begin with the worst offender in case I got caught right away, then climb the ladder of culpability.

‘Gut instinct, Boots. I chose Parker because of the way he stared at my breasts when I first interviewed him. Women get used to being eye-fucked by men. It’s just one of those things you can’t do anything about, like men being stronger. But Parker had the eyes of a true pig. His lust surrounded him like a force field.’

Jill slowed down long enough to smile. Boots’s eyes were pinned to hers, his gaze so penetrating it took all her will not to flinch.

‘I have to admit, Boots, that events took a very erotic turn when I stripped away Chris’s pants and saw that scar. Parker was lying on the bed, no doubt thinking, “I’m gonna fuck the bitch I raped six years ago.” I was standing a few feet away, thinking, “I’m gonna fuck the scumbag I intend to murder.” Now, what could be hotter than that?’

When Jill stopped abruptly, Boots released his breath. All along, he’d been hoping that Jill’s discovering Parker’s scar was an accident, the result of a chance meeting, a stirred memory. Not so.

‘You want to hear how I lured Parker to Berry Street? It’s a funny story, I promise you.’

Resigned, Boots simply said, ‘Yeah.’

‘After that night, I kept Parker at arm’s length. He was eager to go again, very eager, but I put him off without actually turning him down. Then, one night, I called him on his cellphone. I think I caught him at home, but I’m not sure. I told him that I had a long-term fantasy I wanted to act out. Can you guess the fantasy, Boots?’

‘You wanted to play the part of a hooker.’

‘Street whore is the way I put it to him, street whore turning a car trick. If he would drive to Berry Street and wait a couple of minutes, I’d come walking down the sidewalk, appropriately dressed, and we’d negotiate the cost of whatever services—’

‘Enough, Jill.’

‘Enough? What’s the matter, Boots, you squeamish? You want to go in the bathroom and vomit?’

Boots slid his feet over the edge of the bed and sat up. He reached out for Jill’s hand, but she pulled away.

‘Right on that corner, there’s a building, a converted warehouse with a recessed doorway that turns to the left. I was in there when Vinnie Palermo showed up. I couldn’t see him, but I heard a car alarm go off, then a door open and close. Chris arrived a moment later, before I could leave. I should have stayed put, what with a witness only a few yards away, and I knew it. But there were all those memories. Like the gunshots that killed my father, like Parker knocking me to the floor, like Parker ripping off my pants, then my panties, like Parker forcing my legs apart. Boots, once you start down that road, self-preservation becomes irrelevant. I was wearing a knit cap, a navy pea coat and black jeans. I tucked my hair under the cap, turned up my collar and stepped out behind Chris when he got out of the car. As you can imagine, I’d fantasized this scene many times in the past, and there’d always been a final exchange. You know, a few snappy lines, a little back and forth. But when the moment came, I found myself speechless. So I decided to send the rest of the boys a message. I put one round in Chris Parker’s back, then another in his head. Then I walked away.’

For his part, Boots was just glad to be done. He’d expected the worst, but he was still breathing air and Jill was sitting across from him. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t about to go anywhere. Boots wasn’t fooled by Jill’s bravado. Her eyes, when she told her story, had darkened almost to black, the light they projected no more than sparks in a night-time sky. Life had smacked her down. Her scars were as visible as his own.

As for Parker, Boots could not bring himself to care. Even as a boy, he’d recognized, as did all his friends, the difference between personal revenge and telling the teacher.

‘Do you think your uncle knew?’ he finally asked.

‘Knew what?’

‘Knew who killed your father, and why.’

Jill slid the rocker forward. ‘Knowing and proving aren’t the same thing. Except for street rumors, there was no evidence that Corcoran and the boys were even dirty. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure myself until I saw the scar on Parker’s hip.’

Boots nodded to himself. Corcoran’s rabbi, Eamon Gogarty, was highly placed. Michael Shaw would never start a war with Gogarty, not without the sort of rock-solid ammunition Pat Kelly had been trying to obtain at the time of his death. Suddenly, Boots realized that Michael Shaw was using him to accomplish what his brother-in-law couldn’t. Boots was now Shaw’s point man, like it or not.

‘Tell me about Olmeda,’ he said.

‘Olmeda was the one who held me down.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘He confessed.’

‘Right before you killed him?’

‘Right before.’

Boots smiled as he found himself imagining Father Gubetti hovering above them. Revenge is a crime in the State of New York. But is it a sin? Most likely, the priest would invoke Jesus instructing the faithful to love their enemies, a command that apparently fell on deaf ears. Boots Littlewood had never met a single man or woman who even liked their enemies. Not one.

‘Boots?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I asked you a question.’

‘I’m sorry, I drifted a bit.’

‘I asked you what you wanted. From me.’

Boots stared at Jill as he searched for an answer. She seemed astonishingly beautiful at that moment, beautiful beyond any dream of beauty. And though he knew it was utterly irrational, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been waiting all his life to meet her. Nevertheless, when he finally spoke, there was nothing of these sentiments to be found in his words.

‘I want to help you stay alive,’ he said, ‘so I can keep on fucking you.’

And not even Crazy Jill Kelly had an answer for that one.

E
arly the next morning, shortly after sunrise, Boots stood before the open window in his front room. Pushed by a cool breeze, a pair of lace curtains fluttered to either side of his face. The breeze carried the fragrance of the pink roses, many hundreds of them, blooming on a trellis in Fianna Walsh’s tiny yard. Fianna’s trellis was the wonder of Newell Street, a source of intense pride, an event that marked the passage into summer as surely as the rising temperatures. But Boots neither smelled nor even noticed Fianna’s roses. Nor did he hear the sudden blast of a fog horn out on the East River, or Ivan Pinetka’s blaring television. No, after carefully checking the vehicles parked by the curb, and the rooftops across the street, his thoughts had turned inward.

Reaching far back into his childhood, Boots had always been an optimist, a believer in solutions to life’s problems, major and minor. Not perfect solutions, of course – Boots wasn’t a fool. He merely thought that if you took this little piece and moved it this way, and that little piece and moved it that way, and another little piece and moved it another way, you eventually reached a door marked ‘Exit’. A door you were willing to open because what was on the other side didn’t scare the crap out of you.

But for all Boots knew, the dicks assigned to the Olmeda homicide had already collected the evidence needed to arrest Jill Kelly. Maybe they were searching for her right now. Maybe it was only a question of who’d find her first, the cops or the assassin hired by Mack Corcoran. And even if Michael Shaw protected Jill on the first count, and Corcoran was persuaded to accept a truce, the maze continued to twist back and forth, from one dead end to the next. Boots hadn’t changed his mind about Parker and Olmeda. With no sympathy for either man, he’d let God judge Detective Kelly. But that didn’t mean he could let her kill anybody else, now that he was personally involved. Unlike Ms Kelly, Boots lacked the mitigating factors necessary for a pass on the Fifth Commandment.

Boots laughed to himself.
Let
her? Last time he looked, Jill hadn’t asked for permission. Probably, she’d never asked for permission in her entire life. And that was the problem. You don’t catch comets when your fancy boots are anchored in concrete. No matter how it turned out, he’d eventually lose her.

Well, he decided, that would be his anchor. Fuck the concrete. He would lose her. To a hired killer’s bullet, to the State, if he turned her in to save Vinnie Palermo, if she put a round through his head in order to stop him. He would lose her even if murder charges against Vinnie were dropped and the possibility of happily-ever-after reared its alluring head. There was no exit at the end of this maze.

‘Boots, what are you doing up so early?’

Afraid that Jill had come directly from bed, eyes swollen with sleep, stark naked, Boots didn’t turn around. ‘We have to leave,’ he said. ‘We have to get out.’

‘Are you trying to get rid of me before your father wakes up?’

Jill’s tone was playful, echoing as it did her perfunctory eviction of Boots Littlewood from her mother’s home. Not so his reply.

‘I put my family in enough danger having you here at all. Now we have to leave.’

If Artie Farrahan was unhappy when Boots Littlewood stepped into his back yard, he was utterly dismayed when Jill Kelly followed. Artie was lying on a lounger, enjoying the early sun. He wore a canary-yellow swimsuit, small and tight, a choice of attire he instantly regretted. Jill was looking him up and down, contemptuous in the way only a beautiful woman can be. Farrahan grunted against the pain in his ribs as he raised himself to a sitting position, the inner tube of flab around his waist settling below his navel.

As Boots and Jill Kelly approached, Farrahan searched for something to say, some witty comment that would lift him to their level. Unfortunately, until he knew what they wanted, those words didn’t exist. Finally, he settled for ‘Hey, Boots.’

Boots sat down at a metal table with a folded umbrella in the middle. Without hesitation, he lifted a copy of the
New York Times
, exposing Farrahan’s Browning automatic. He winked at Farrahan, then put the newspaper down.

For the next moment, Boots and Artie measured each other’s battle scars – Boots’s eye and forehead, a pronounced depression in Farrahan’s left cheekbone.

‘You gonna need surgery?’ Boots asked.

‘Yeah, my sinuses don’t drain on that side. And you?’

‘It’s elective. Whether I wanna look good or not. I can see fine.’ Boots lowered his chin slightly. ‘So, whatta ya think, Artie? You think the eye gives me character?’

Jill Kelly watched this exchange from a chair to Boots’s left. She pronounced it typical male bullshit, and instantly boring. Men couldn’t be in the same room for two minutes before they started wagging their dicks. Meanwhile, the biggest dick in this room was snugged into the holster attached to her belt. It was all she could do not to execute Artie Farrahan on the spot.