Serpents in the Cold (10 page)

When the front door closed, Dante knew he was alone again, and once he began to breathe right he climbed to his feet, rose up full of sharp pain. He moved through the hall into the kitchen.

Claudia sat with her head lowered over the table, black hair pooled on the Formica. Her cup of tea and the bottle were in pieces on the worn linoleum: shards of glass and ceramic in a puddle of whiskey.

“Claudia, I am the one who has an excuse to be this way. I lost something. You, you never lost a goddamn thing.”

She continued to sob with her face hidden. He wanted to step behind her, pull her hair back to make sure she saw him. “Lose what I have, Claudia, then you can act this way. There's no excuse for you. At least I've tried. And, shit, I've failed. But there's a big difference between the both of us, and you're probably never going to live enough to understand it. A fucking spinster with her head in the clouds, that's all you'll ever fucking be.”

He slammed the door to his bedroom, fell onto the unmade bed, and tried to fight back the tears, but they rose thick in his throat until he had to give in. He felt blood leaving his mouth, trickle and pool onto the fabric of the pillow. When there was nothing left he turned over in the bed, pulled his knees up to his chest, and let sleep take him.

_________________________

AN ICY RAIN
rolled down the office windows of Pilgrim Security. Cal had turned on the heat after a few days with the office left unoccupied, and now the room smelled of dust burning atop the radiators, stale cigarette smoke, and old moldy things. The radiators pinged and rattled, and the lower sections of the windows that looked out on the avenue were filmed with steam. Through the bleared glass they could see the vacant expanse that Scollay Square was becoming. It seemed that whenever he looked out the windows these days, the landscape of Scollay had changed yet again; sunlight glaring through the spaces where buildings had once been.

Dante dragged his hand across the stubble on his face, rubbed at his bruised jaw, put the phone back in its cradle, and with a pen drew a line across the final hospital listing on the pad before him.

“Nothing?” Cal was staring at a map of Boston amid the larger map of Massachusetts on the wall. His eyes had grown blurry and all he could see were the interstices of highways and roadways interspersed and conjoined like the entrails of a body all across the state. He thought of the trucks parked along Tenean Beach, their exhausts steaming the cold air, and just beyond them the heavy traffic moving along the highway. Someone had brought Sheila's body by truck, he knew it, and that someone was still traversing the highways out there.

He sipped from his coffee cup and swiveled his chair back to the desk. He fingered the few personal belongings the Boston police had retrieved: a simple gold-colored watch with a matching chain strap, its hands now forever stuck at eleven o'clock; one clover-shaped topaz-colored earring; and then there was the manila envelope containing the trinkets and the photographs that Dante had discovered at the boardinghouse, some personal belongings, including letters to Margo that she had never sent; and pay stubs from her job at the State House. He looked at the dance card from the Emporium Hotel and thought of the dead bum, Bernadette Murphy, from the Common. When he went to open it, a cocktail napkin, gilt edged and with the hotel's logo in scrolling script at its center, fell out. There was a handwritten number scrawled beneath the logo in pen: 8001.

“Dante, make another call, would you? The Emporium Hotel.”

“The Emporium? Sure.”

Dante asked the switchboard operator for the hotel and waited as she connected him.

“Ask the receptionist for room eight zero-zero one.” He held up the napkin so that Dante could see.

“What then?”

“Just see if anyone answers.”

Dante spoke to the person on the end of the line, was asked for his name, thanked the operator, and then put down the phone.

“It's a private listing,” he said. “No one's talking to anyone in room eight zero-zero one unless they've already got an in.”

“You ever been inside the Emporium?”

“Are you kidding? Have you?”

“No, way too rich for me, but it looks like Sheila had an invite.”

He stared at the chain on Sheila's watch. When he moved so that it twinkled beneath the fluorescent office lights, he could make out the hardened blood caught on its entwined strands, blood that had remained even after the rest had been washed clean by, he assumed, Fierro's assistant.

“Did Sheila still go to church?”

“You mean was she religious? Yeah, I think so.”

“Where?”

“Depends on where she was living, I guess.”

“In Cambridge, Somerville, or back in the old neighborhood?”

Dante looked up, bleary-eyed, harried. “I have no idea.”

Cal wondered if that was true or if he'd simply given up. Ever since he'd told Dante about Sheila's pregnancy, he'd gone quiet and retreated into himself, but perhaps there was more to it. They both lit up cigarettes, leaned back in their chairs. Smoke slowly filled the room. The dust had burned off the pipes, and as the day beyond the glass darkened, the room seemed to grow even warmer. Cal sniffled and wiped at his nose, hawked into a tissue, balled it up, tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

“She could have used an alias or else gone out of town,” Dante said.

“Why?”

Dante shrugged. “Maybe she was ashamed, didn't want anyone to find out.”

“Perhaps she wanted nothing to do with the father.” Cal rose and limped over to the kitchenette, poured some more coffee. “The church certainly wouldn't look with favor on a birth outside of wedlock. Where would a young unwed Catholic girl go if she were about to have a child, if she decided an abortion was out?”

“Maybe she put it up for adoption?”

“You knew her much better than me. Do you think she would abandon her child the way her mother did to her and Margo?”

“No.”

Cal sipped from his cup, grimaced, and drank some more. At his desk he retrieved his cigarette from the lip of the ashtray. “If she was a regular at Mass, someone would have noticed, people would've talked, so, yeah, maybe she goes away for a bit until the baby's born.”

As he exhaled smoke, he wound the chain around his hand, scratched at the hardened blood with his fingernail. Dante stared at him from across the table, watched as Cal worked at the fake-gold chain and small flakes of Sheila's blood crumbled down between his gnarled hands and spotted his white desk blotter.

Cal looked up. Dante's bruised face was impassive, unreadable. “What is it?”

Dante shifted in his seat, groaned as he reached into his coat pocket. “I was going to show you this.” He tossed the fold of bills across the table, where Cal picked them up and thumbed through each bill.

“What the fuck, Dante.”

“They were in the box too.”

Cal took one bill out, held it with both hands, and whistled as he raised it to his eyes. “This stinks to me. These shouldn't even be in circulation. How does she come by newly minted bills?”

Dante winced as he reached toward the table to grab another cigarette. “Of course it stinks. It all stinks. Somebody goes looking for Sheila, tears up her old place, kills an old guy for nothing. It all fucking stinks to me.”

Cal grabbed another of the bills, inspected its number. “Jesus Christ, these bills are from the same print run.” He reclined back in his chair, took in a deep breath.

“This is Brink's money,” he said.

“You can't be sure of that.”

“This is Brink's money and you know it. No wonder Blackie was at your place with Shaw.”

“Sheila wasn't in on that. Not her.”

“But she sure knew someone who was, and if Blackie thought the two of you were connected, we probably wouldn't be talking now. He was looking for someone else.”

Cal glanced over at him. “He scare you yesterday?”

“Who?”

“'Who?” he said. “Blackie fucking Foley, that's who.”

“Yeah. A little bit. He always did.”

“It's how the prick operates.”

“And what about you?”

Cal considered this, took a swig of his coffee. “No, I'm not scared of him.” And then he laughed wryly. “Did you know that my old man and the Foleys,” he said, “they used to be good friends.”

Dante looked at him. “For as long as I can remember, your old man and the Foleys had it in for each other. The whole neighborhood knew that. My mother used to say, ‘You see Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Foley on the street at the same time, you run the other way.'”

“I know, but back when they both worked the docks together they were friends. They used to come home after work on a Friday together, and have a few beers at the kitchen table even though they were already drunk. I was so small I can barely remember it, but I do.

“And then in the thirties, Foley ran for city council and tried to gangbust the unions, and it ended their friendship. I was with my father at a longshoremen's rally for Curley at the Sons of Erin, couldn't even see over the seat in front of me, when three different factions went at it. One of the agitators was Foley. He was trying to make a name for himself running as a councilman on Curley's card. My dad called him a lying rat bastard scab and then the shooting began. People were screaming and running. My father threw me beneath the chairs and lay over me, covering my body with his. He got a bullet in the leg—his calf—but I never knew at the time. He never said a word.”

“Your old man, he was a real tough guy.”

Cal nodded, and echoed hollowly, “Yeah, a real tough guy.”

“But that's not why you hate Blackie Foley.”

“You don't need much of a reason to hate Blackie Foley. He's a fucking psycho, always has been.”

Dante looked at him and waited. There wasn't going to be any good time to say it.

“He was asking for you.”

Cal glanced up.

“Blackie, he said he saw Lynne on Dot Ave.”

“Yeah?”

“He said you should be careful, that anything could happen to her.”

It took a moment for it to register, and then Dante saw clarity develop in Cal's eyes, his face become stony and impenetrable. “What else did he say?”

“Nothing. That was it.”

Cal reached for the manila envelope and one by one pulled out the pictures, spread them out upon his desk. His jaws worked relentlessly, and Dante had the sense he wasn't seeing the pictures at all.

“You okay?”

“I'm good.”

“If you want we can—”

“I'll take care of it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“He's a fucking animal.”

“He was just trying to get a rise out of you. Like when we were kids.”

“Well, it worked.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. I said I'll take care of it.”

Cal tried to concentrate, but the image of Blackie following Lynne on the streets of Dorchester held him in place. He saw his thugs, the Kinneallys, stepping from a side alley, and Blackie smiling as they pulled her into the shadows. Rage constricted his throat and he coughed to clear it, stood and got water from the tap, tried to drink it slowly even as his heart hammered in his chest. Dante was watching him.

“If he goes near Lynne, I'll kill him,” Cal said.

Dante had turned away, leaned back in his chair, the springs squealing, and watched ice sliding down the window. Cal lit a cigarette and took his time smoking it. He held up the fold of bank notes. “The only place this money is going is in the safe, and it's staying there. It's too dangerous to be caught with it.” He opened the small floor safe, put the money in a safe-deposit box, then slammed the door shut and spun the combination dial.

“You sure this is it? There were no love letters, mementos, nothing else besides the note on the back of the photo?”

Dante leaned forward in the chair. “Nothing else.”

“You're sure about that? I can't have you keeping things from me, Dante.”

“I know, I know. Don't fucking worry about it.”

Cal pressed him again. “Is there anything I should know about her, some secret life, some problems she had that you're not telling me?”

“What the fuck? Are you even listening to me? There's nothing else, nothing that I know. After Margo died, she wanted nothing to do with me. I haven't seen her since last summer. End of fucking story.”

Dante rose from the chair, went to make a new pot of coffee. He made a lot of noise emptying the old grounds and then rinsing the pot in the sink.

Cal looked at the photos on his desk and at the images of Sheila there, smudged by fingertips: Sheila smoking, her lips pursed over the end of a cigarette, and the hazily lit background of a bar or club; outdoors, on a Swan Boat in the Public Garden, with her eyes closed and face raised toward the sun; pictures of her smiling, and then openmouthed, mock-kissing the camera. A picture of Sheila leaning over a balustrade, gazing out at an intentionally unfocused background: a hazy dog track and the blurred shapes of speeding dogs streaming by. Another of her at the same dog track perhaps, sitting in a chair and intently watching the races. And then one of her with the greyhounds, head lowered to them and laughing as they licked her face—always Sheila thrown into sharp foreground focus and everything behind her blurred and amorphous. And then as he delved further into the stack of photos, Sheila nude or in various stages of undress, but with her face blurred and out of focus or else cropped entirely.

He fanned the pictures out as he would a deck of cards, moved the pictures about, trying to create some manner of order or pattern. But the longer he spent examining them, the more confused and light-headed he became. He sighed as he put the pictures back into their envelope. He didn't feel shame necessarily. It was as if he was not looking at Sheila at all. The woman in the pictures was suddenly a stranger to him.

“What do you think?” he asked, although he didn't want to interrupt the silence. It somehow felt sacrilegious, disrespectful to do so. He listened to the clock ticking on the wall—the second hand was broken—and began again. “Well, are these the shots of two lovers playing games and having some fun, or is this smut? Was she caught up in something bad?”

It took Dante a moment to speak. He separated the photographs, pushed the ones showing Sheila's face across the table. “The cropped ones, we know what they're for, but these,” and he tapped a picture, stared at her face taunting him with puckered, brightly painted lips, “no one else was supposed to see these but her and one other person, this Mario maybe.”

Cal considered this, pursed his lips. “This other person might know something that only Sheila knew too. This might be who Blackie was looking for.”