A Drink Before the War Page 2

  I tried to think of a response. Something to do with roots, and knowing where you belong. In the end, I told the truth: “My apartment’s rent-controlled.”

  He seemed to like that.

  2

  The old neighborhood is the Edward Everett Square section of Dorchester. It’s a little less than five miles from the center of Boston proper, which means, on a good day, it takes only half an hour to reach by car.

  My office is the bell tower of St. Bartholomew’s Church. I’ve never found out what happened to the bell that used to be there, and the nuns who teach at the parochial school next door won’t tell me. The older ones plain don’t answer me, and the younger ones seem to find my curiosity amusing. Sister Helen told me once it had been “miracled away.” Her words. Sister Joyce, who grew up with me, always says it was “misplaced,” and gives me the sort of wicked smile that nuns aren’t supposed to be capable of giving. I’m a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum.

  The day after I got my investigator’s license, the church pastor, Father Drummond, asked me if I’d mind providing some security for the place. Some unfaithfuls were breaking in to steal chalices and candlesticks again, and in Pastor Drummond’s words: “This shit better stop.” He offered me three meals a day in the rectory, my very first case, and the thanks of God if I set up in the belfry and waited for the next break-in. I told him I didn’t come that cheap. I demanded use of the belfry until I found office space of my own. For a priest, he gave in pretty easy. When I saw the state of the room—unused for nine years—I knew why.

  Angie and I managed to fit two desks in there. Two chairs too. When we realized there was no room for a file cabinet, I hauled all the old files back to my place. We splurged on a personal computer, put as much as we could on diskettes, and stowed a few current files in our desks. Impresses the clients almost enough to make them ignore the room. Almost.

  Angie was sitting behind her desk when I reached the top step. She was busy investigating the latest Ann Landers column, so I stepped in quietly. She didn’t notice me at first—Ann must have been dealing with a real headcase—so I took the opportunity to watch her in a rare moment of repose.

  She had her feet propped up on the desk, a pair of black suede Peter Pan boots covering them, the cuffs of her charcoal jeans tucked into the boots. I followed her long legs up to a loose white cotton T-shirt. The rest of her was hidden behind the newspaper except for a partial view of rich, thick hair, the color of rainswept tar, that fell to her olive arms. Behind that newsprint was a slim neck that trembled when she pretended not to be laughing at one of my jokes, an unyielding jaw with a near-microscopic brown beauty mark on the left side, an aristocratic nose that didn’t fit her personality at all, and eyes the color of melting caramel. Eyes you’d dive into without a look back.

  I didn’t get a chance to see them, though. She put the paper down and looked at me through a pair of black Wayfarers. I doubted she’d be taking them off any time soon.

  “Hey, Skid,” she said, reaching for a cigarette from the pack on her desk.

  Angie is the only person who calls me “Skid.” Probably because she’s the only person who was in my father’s car with me the night I wrapped it around a light pole in Lower Mills thirteen years ago.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” I said and slid into my chair. I don’t think I’m the only one who calls her gorgeous, but it’s force of habit. Or statement of fact. Take your pick. I nodded at the sunglasses. “Fun time last night?”

  She shrugged and looked out the window. “Phil was drinking.”

  Phil is Angie’s husband. Phil is an asshole.

  I said as much.

  “Yeah, well…” She lifted a corner of the curtain, flapped it back and forth in her hand. “What’re you gonna do, right?”

  “What I did before,” I said. “Be only too happy to.”

  She bent her head so the sunglasses slipped down to the slight bump at the bridge of her nose, revealing a dark discoloration that ran from the corner of her left eye to her temple. “And after you’re finished,” she said, “he’ll come home again, make this look like a love tap.” She pushed the sunglasses back up over her eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong.” Her voice was bright, but hard like winter sunlight. I hate that voice.

  “Have it your way,” I said.

  “Will do.”

  Angie and Phil and I grew up together. Angie and I, best friends. Angie and Phil, best lovers. It goes that way sometimes. Not often in my experience, thank God, but sometimes. A few years ago, Angie came to the office with the sunglasses and two eight balls where her eyes should have been. She also had a nice collection of bruises on her arms and neck and an inch-tall bump on the back of her head. My face must have betrayed my intentions, because the first words out of her mouth were, “Patrick, be sensible.” Not like it was the first time, and it wasn’t. It was the worst time though, so when I found Phil in Jimmy’s Pub in Uphams Corner, we had a few sensible drinks, played a sensible game of pool or two, and shortly after I’d broached the subject and he responded with a “Whyn’t you fucking mind your own business, Patrick?” I beat him to within an inch of his life with a sensible pool stick.

  I felt pretty pleased with myself for a few days there. It’s possible, though I don’t remember, that I engaged in a few fantasies of Angie and myself in some state of domestic bliss. Then Phil got out of the hospital and Angie didn’t come to work for a week. When she did, she moved very precisely and gasped every time she sat down or stood up. He’d left the face alone, but her body was black.

  She didn’t talk to me for two weeks. A long time, two weeks.

  I looked at her now as she stared out the window. Not for the first time, I wondered why a woman like this—a woman who took shit from absolutely nobody, a woman who’d pumped two rounds into a hard case named Bobby Royce when he resisted our kind efforts to return him to his bail bondsman—allowed her husband to treat her like an Everlast bag. Bobby Royce never got up, and I’d often wondered when Phil’s time would come. But so far it hadn’t.

  And I could hear the answer to my question in the soft, tired voice she adopted when she talked about him. She loved him, plain and simple. Some part of him that I certainly can’t see anymore must still show itself to her in their private moments, some goodness he possesses that shines like the grail in her eyes. That has to be it, because nothing else about their relationship makes any sense to me or anyone else who knows her.

  She opened the window and flicked her cigarette out. City girl to the core. I waited for a summer schooler to scream or a nun to come hauling ass up the staircase, the wrath of God in her eyes, a burning cigarette butt in her hand. Neither happened. Angie turned from the open window, and the cool summer breeze creased the room with the smell of exhaust fumes and freedom and the lilac petals which littered the schoolyard.

  “So,” she said, leaning back in the chair, “we employed again?”

  “We’re employed again.”

  “Ya-hoo,” she said. “Nice suit, by the way.”

  “Makes you want to jump my bones on the spot, doesn’t it?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Uh, no.”

  “Don’t know where I’ve been. That it?”

  She shook her head again. “I know exactly where you’ve been, Skid, which is most of the problem.”

  “Bitch,” I said.

  “Slut.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “What’s the case?”

  I pulled the information about Jenna Angeline from my inside breast pocket and tossed it on her desk. “Simple find-and-a-phone-call.”

  She perused the pages. “Why’s anyone care if a middle-aged cleaning lady disappears?”

  “Seems some documents disappeared with her. Statehouse documents.”

  “Pertaining to?”

  I shrugged. “You know these politicians. Everything is as secret as Los Alamos until it hits the floor.”

  “How do they know she took them?”

  “Look a
t the picture.”

  “Ah,” she said, nodding, “she’s black.”

  “Evidence enough to most people.”

  “Even the resident senate liberal?”

  “The resident senate liberal is just another racist from Southie when he ain’t residing in the House.”

  I told her about the meeting, about Mulkern and his lapdog, Paulson, about the Stepford wife employees at the Ritz.

  “And Representative James Vurnan—what was he like in the company of such Masters of State?”

  “You ever see that cartoon with the big dog and the little dog, where the little dog keeps panting away, jumping up and down, asking the big dog, ‘Where we going, Butch? Where we going, Butch?’”

  “Yes.”

  “Like that,” I said.

  She chewed on a pencil, then began tapping it against her front teeth. “So, you gave me the fly-on-the-wall account. What really happened?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “You trust them?”

  “Hell no.”

  “So there’s more to this than meets the eye, Detective?”

  I shrugged. “They’re elected officials. The day they tell the whole truth is the day hookers put out for free.”

  She smiled. “As always, your analogies are splendid. You’re just a product of good breeding, you are.” Her smile widened as she watched me, the pencil tapping against her left front tooth, the slightly chipped one. “So, what’s the rest of the story?”

  I loosened my tie enough to pull it over my head. “You got me.”

  “Some detective,” she said.

  3

  Jenna Angeline, like me, was born and raised in Dorchester. The casual visitor to the city might think this would serve as a nice common denominator between Jenna and myself, a bond—however minimal—forged by location: two people who started out of their separate chutes at identical hash marks. But the casual visitor would be wrong. Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester and my Dorchester have about as much in common as Atlanta, Georgia, and Russian Georgia.

  The Dorchester I grew up in was working class traditional, the neighborhoods, more often than not, delineated by the Catholic churches they surrounded. The men were foremen, crew chiefs, probation officers, telephone repairmen, or, like my father, firemen. The women were housewives who sometimes had part-time jobs themselves, sometimes even had education degrees from state colleges. We were all Irish, Polish, or close enough to pass. We were all white. And when the federal desegregation of public schools began in 1974, most of the men worked overtime and most of the women went to full time and most of the kids went to private Catholic high schools.

  This Dorchester has changed, of course. Divorce—practically unheard of in my parents’ generation—is commonplace in mine, and I know a lot fewer of my neighbors than I used to. But we still have access to the union jobs, we usually know a state rep who can get us into civil service. To some extent, we’re connected.

  Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester is poor. The neighborhoods, more often than not, are delineated by the public parks and community centers they surround. The men are dockworkers and hospital orderlies, in some cases postal clerks, a few firemen. The women are the orderlies, the cashiers, the cleaning women, the department store clerks. They are nurses, too, and cops, and civil service clerks, but chances are, if they’ve reached that kind of pinnacle, they don’t live in Dorchester anymore. They’ve moved to Dedham or Framingham or Brockton.

  In my Dorchester, you stay because of community and tradition, because you’ve built a comfortable, if somewhat poor, existence where little ever changes. A hamlet.

  In Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester, you stay because you don’t have any choice.

  Nowhere is it harder to try and explain the differences between these two Dorchesters—White Dorchester and Black Dorchester—than in White Dorchester. This is particularly true in my neighborhood, because we’re one of the boundary neighborhoods. The moment you pass through Edward Everett Square heading south, east, or west, you’re in Black Dorchester. So, people around here have a lot of trouble accepting the differences as anything other than black and white. A guy I grew up with once put it about as plainly as you’ll ever hear it: “Hey, Patrick,” he said, “enough of this bullshit. I grew up in Dorchester. I grew up poor. No one ever gave me nothing. My old man left when I was a kid just like a lotta the niggers in the ’Bury. No one begged me to learn how to read or get a job or be something. Nobody gave me affirmative action to help me out either, that’s for damn sure. And I didn’t pick up an Uzi, join a gang, and start doing drive-bys. So spare me this shit. They got no excuse.”

  People from White Dorchester always call Black Dorchester “the ’Bury.” Short for Roxbury, the section of Boston that begins where Black Dorchester ends, where they load dead young black kids into meat wagons on the average of eight a weekend sometimes. Black Dorchester gives up its young on a pretty regular basis too, and those in White Dorchester refuse to call it anything but the ’Bury. Somebody just forgot to change it on the maps.

  There’s truth to what my friend said, however narrow it is, and the truth scares me. When I drive through my neighborhood, I see poor, but I don’t see poverty.

  Driving into Jenna’s neighborhood, I saw a lot of poverty. I saw a big, ugly scar of a neighborhood with several boarded-up storefronts. I saw one that hadn’t been boarded up yet, but was just as closed. The front window was blown out and bullet holes pocked the walls in jagged patterns of lethal acne. The inside was scorched and gutted and the fiberglass sign overhead that once said delicatessen in Vietnamese was shattered. The deli business wasn’t what it once was in this neighborhood, but the crack business seemed to be doing just fine.

  I turned off Blue Hill Avenue up a rutted hill that looked like it hadn’t been paved since the Kennedy administration. The sun was setting, blood red, behind an overgrown yard of rotting weeds at the top of the hill. A group of laconic black kids crossed the street in front of me, taking their time, staring into my car. There were four of them, and one had a broomstick in his hand. He turned his head to look at me and whacked the stick off the street with a harsh snap. One of his buddies, bouncing a tennis ball in front of him, laughed and pointed an admonishing finger at my windshield. They passed over the sidewalk and cut through a rotted brown pathway between two three-deckers. I continued on up the hill, and something primal reassured me that my gun was hanging heavily from the holster on my left shoulder.

  My gun is, as Angie would say, “not a fuck-around thing.” It’s a .44 magnum automatic—an “automag,” they call it gleefully in Soldier of Fortune and like publications—and I didn’t purchase it out of penis envy or Eastwood envy or because I wanted to own the goddamned biggest gun on the block. I bought it for one simple reason: I’m a lousy shot. I need to know that if I ever have to use it, I hit what I’m aiming at and I hit it hard enough to knock it down and keep it there. Shoot some people in the arm with a .32 and they just get angry. Shoot them in the same place with the automag and they ask for a priest.

  I’ve fired it twice. Once when a brain-dead sociopath who was only slightly bigger than Rhode Island wanted me to prove how tough I was. He’d jumped out of his car and was six feet away from me and coming on fast, when I fired a round that went straight through his engine block. He stared at his Cordoba like I’d just shot his dog and almost wept. But the steam pouring out of the torn metal on his hood convinced him that there were things out there that were tougher than the two of us.

  The other time was Bobby Royce. He had his hands on Angie’s neck at the time, and I blew a chunk out of his leg. Tell you something about Bobby Royce: he got back up. He raised his gun toward me and still had it pointed that way even after Angie’s two rounds had picked him up and drilled him against a hydrant and the light had left his eyes. Bobby Royce, going into rigor with his gun pointed at me, flat dead eyes not much different than they’d been when he was breathing.

  I was wearing a pearl gray, unstructured
linen jacket when I stepped out of my car in front of Jenna’s last-known address. It was oversized and concealed the gun entirely. The group of teenagers sitting on the cars in front of Jenna’s house was definitely fooled. As I crossed the street toward them, one of them said, “Hey, Five-O, where’s your backup?”

  The girl beside him giggled. “Under his coat, Jerome.”

  There were nine of them. Half of them sat on the trunk of a faded blue Chevy Malibu with a bright yellow Denver boot strapped to the front tire because the owner hadn’t paid his parking tickets. The rest of them sat on the hood of the car behind the Malibu, a puke green Granada. Two kids slipped off the cars and walked quickly up the street, heads down, hands rubbing their foreheads.

  I stopped by the cars. “Jenna around?”

  Jerome laughed. He was lean and hard, but held himself loosely in his purple tank top, white shorts, and black Air Jordans. He said, “‘Jenna around?’” in a high-pitched falsetto. “Like he and Jenna old friends.” The rest of them laughed. “No, man, Jenna’s gone for the day.” He looked at me and rubbed his chin. “I’m, like, her service, though. Why don’t you leave your message with me?”

  The other kids cracked up at “service.”

  I liked it too, but I was supposed to act like I was in control. I said, “Like have my agent call her agent?”

  Jerome looked at me, deadpan. “Yeah, man, like that. Whatever you say.”

  More laughter. Lots more.

  That’s me, Patrick Kenzie, got a real way with youth. I walked between the two cars, hard to do when no one moves to the side for you, but I managed. “Thanks for your help, Jerome.”

  “Hey, man, don’t mention it. Just part of the wonderfulness of me.”

  I started up the front steps of Jenna’s three-decker. “I’ll put in a good word for you with Jenna when I see her.”

  “Damn white of you too,” Jerome said as I opened the door into the hallway.

  Jenna lived on the third floor. I trudged up the steps, smelling the familiar smells of all inner-city three-deckers—chipped, sunbaked wood, old paint, kitty litter, wood and linoleum that had soaked up decades of melting snow and dirt from wet boots, spilled beers and sodas, the ashes of a thousand discarded cigarettes. I was careful not to touch the railing; it looked like it could easily crumble away from the banisters.