Dancer in the Flames (27 page)

The administration’s scheme had undeniable benefits. For example, the heavy industry along the East River, most of it long abandoned, would be replaced by a multi-use esplanade. Though old enough to remember the days when Domino Sugar and the Schaefer Brewery supported hundreds of neighborhood families, the priest did not object to the esplanade, which would include a good bit of park land. Domino and Schaefer had been closed for decades. They weren’t coming back, nor were dozens of other businesses fronting the river. Leaving the infrastructure to rust and crumble wasn’t to anybody’s advantage. No, the problem, for Gubetti, was that the city’s plan would allow private developers to line the area behind the esplanade with high-rise, high-end residential towers. Ten thousand apartments would be constructed, ten thousand apartments selling for a million dollars and up. The beginning of the end for working-class Greenpoint and Williamsburg.

‘The system,’ Leo announced over a dessert of miniature cannolis, espresso and anisette, ‘has abandoned us. Our elected representatives welcome us into their offices. They smile, smile, smile, and they ask for our votes. Yet their plans somehow ignore every suggestion we make. I tell you, these politicians and the men who run them have sold their souls to a false god. The marketplace cannot substitute for conscience. Efficiency does not make a callous act virtuous.’

Boots enjoyed the sermon, though he didn’t contribute. Going all the way back to his childhood, he could not remember a time when some group wasn’t ‘taking over the neighborhood’. Blacks, Puerto Ricans, hippies, yuppies, liberal judges, conservative judges – and now the filthy rich. For Boots, forty years of Armageddon was enough.

After dinner, Boots nominated himself and Leo Gubetti to clean up. He waited until he and the priest were alone, then got right to the point, taking a manila envelope from the top of the refrigerator.

‘There’s a statement from an eyewitness and a DVD in here. If I’m not around to do it myself, I want you to make copies of both. Send one set to Vinnie’s lawyer, spread the rest between as many reporters as you can.’

‘I thought you said you were safe?’

‘Call it a sin of omission, but I only claimed that Jill Kelly was the target on Saturday afternoon.’

‘Ah.’ Gubetti flashed his tiny monkish smile. ‘So, then, what you’re now saying, if I understand correctly, is that any future peril in which you find yourself will be entirely of your own making.’

Boots handed Gubetti a towel. ‘I’ll wash, you dry,’ he said.

Four hours later, at eleven o’clock, when Jill finally called, Boots felt as if he’d been yanked into another dimension. There was his family world – the wine, the liqueur, plates of food passed around the table, the priest’s sermon, the Yankees who were in the tenth inning of a scoreless game. And then there was the Crazy Jill Kelly world, into which he was instantly sucked when he heard her voice. Reality times ten.

‘Boots?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Home.’

‘Home?’

‘That’s right. It turned out, the other day, they were after you, not me.’ Boots drank in Jill’s laughter; he absorbed it. ‘What’s funny?’

‘You never stop surprising me, Boots. So, are you up for a visit? I’m ten minutes away.’

‘Yes, Jill, I’m definitely up.’ Boots tone was more-or-less resigned.

‘Then why don’t you describe, in loving detail, the various perverted acts I’ll be made to perform once you have me in your power?’

‘Any other time, I wouldn’t hesitate, but right now you need to keep your eyes on the rear-view mirror. This is no joke. Corcoran’s going to kill you if he can.’

Boots finally looked up to see that the game was over. The Yankees had lost in eleven innings, one–nothing, stranding fourteen runners in the process. He picked up the remote and shut the set down, the Yankees’ travails instantly behind him. Only that morning, he’d decided to pick up a can of whipped cream on the way back from Astoria, then forgotten about it. Now he didn’t have time to run out.

Jill Kelly marched through the door wearing an off-white pants suit over a matching blouse sheer enough to hint at the black bra beneath. She put a finger to Boots’s lips and said, ‘Tell me later.’

What they made could not be called love, not by any dictionary definition of the word. Jill was strong and tall, and Boots was forced to use his own strength against her, to lock her hands above her head while she contained him with her hips and thighs. They were both sweating by the time he changed the terms of the debate, rolling on to his back, pulling her astride him. He watched her shake out her wet hair, thinking it was her show now, unsurprised when she made the most of the opportunity. Jill began to ride him, her travel at first only an inch or two, then lengthening slowly until he was barely inside her, finally plunging down to unleash a wave of sensation that spasmed through his body. Jill’s eyes had turned inward by then – what they looked at, Boots could not imagine. She was flushed, from her scalp to her shoulders, and her mouth hung open, her tongue visible on her lips. When Boots took her breasts in his hands, she folded her own hands over his and pressed down hard, her eyes suddenly opening as she said his name, just once, before she exploded into orgasm.

‘Boots.’

E
ncouraged by Jill, Boots managed to postpone the inevitable through a quick shower, which they took together, then a second, slower odyssey, this one more deliberate. But time marches on, and flesh fails. Suddenly, they were lying beside each other, their shoulders and knees touching, and the inevitable could no longer be postponed.

‘How do you know,’ Jill began, ‘that I was the target on Saturday?’

Boots felt the ground shift, a fissure open. This was going to be very bad. If not for her leaving her gun in the other room, there was even a chance that he’d come out dead. He laid his hand on her thigh just above her knee.

‘I had a long conversation with Maytag LeGuin.’

The story that followed was true in every respect, though it left out a number of details. Velikov and O’Malley became hired help, Madeline Gobard’s existence was never mentioned, Chris Parker’s hideaway was reduced to ‘somewhere private’. On the other hand, Boots described the scene at LeGuin’s Forest Hills apartment in detail; Malcolm Sutcliffe’s wound, Isabella Amarando and her family, how easily they could be exploited. Finally, he turned to his conversations with Shaw and Inspector Najaz.

‘When they got around to asking me what I wanted,’ he concluded, ‘I told them straight out. The murder charges against Vinnie Palermo have to be dropped.’

‘Did you threaten them?’

‘Your uncle asked me that identical question, asked me twice: was I threatening him?’

‘What’d you answer?’

‘That I hoped with all my heart that I wouldn’t have to prove Vinnie innocent by arresting Parker’s actual killer.’

‘And who would that be?’

‘That would be you, Jill. You executed Chris Parker. Lenny Olmeda, too.’

Jill lit a cigarette, forcing Boots to go in search of an ashtray. He finally settled on a chipped saucer which he carried into the bedroom. Jill took the saucer and laid it between them on the bed.

‘How’d you find LeGuin?’ she asked.

‘I traced him through the plate number on the van.’

‘Ah, I remember. That’s the plate number you told me you didn’t get.’ Jill took a drag on the cigarette, releasing the smoke in a thin line. She watched the smoke until it splashed against the ceiling, then said, ‘Does that mean you knew all along? Knew that I was Killer Jill, not Crazy Jill?’

Boots drew a breath. ‘Chris Parker recorded your sexual encounter, yours and a couple of dozen others. I know this because I found a DVD when I searched his house. You were on it.’

Jill flicked the ash at the end of her cigarette into the saucer. ‘So what? I was in a cop bar on a Saturday night when Chris walked in. We had a couple of drinks, Chris wasn’t bad-looking, I was in the mood. If he turned out to be pervert, it’s not my problem.’

Boots ignored the entire statement. He had to get it out there, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Instead, he spoke about his search of Chris Parker’s house. The temptation, he explained, had been irresistible, what with Parker’s connections to Maurice Selman and Maytag LeGuin, and the house being empty. He’d been hoping, even expecting, to prove that Chris Parker’s murder was related to his corruption. That would be enough to get Vinnie off the hook. Instead, he’d found the DVD.

‘Did you get off?’ Jill asked when Boots finally ground to a halt. ‘Watching me perform?’

‘What I did was destroy every disc in that apartment, and the computer’s hard drive, too. I can’t say that Parker didn’t brag to his pals, but at least there’s no physical evidence.’

‘Evidence of what?’

‘Evidence of why you waited six years to take your revenge.’

Jill’s thoughts whirled through her mind, autumn leaves on a windy day, dancing just out of reach. For now, she could only watch them. The problem was Boots Littlewood. It’d been so long since she’d wanted a man for more than sex; she didn’t trust her emotions. Nor, for that matter, did she trust Boots. Maybe, as things now stood, he wasn’t prepared to reveal ‘Parker’s actual killer’, but there were no future guarantees. Boots was obsessed with Vinnie Palermo. If pushed to the wall, she didn’t know what he’d do. Most likely, he didn’t know, either.

‘The six years,’ Boots continued, ‘that’s what threw me off.’ He sat up, then leaned against the headboard. ‘If you were out for revenge, why wait so long? The answer is obvious now that I know you were intimate with Parker. You had to wait because you didn’t know the identities of the men who killed your father and . . .’

Boots hesitated for a few seconds, his courage almost failing him again. Finally, he said, ‘The men who killed your father, then raped you.’

A shudder tore through Jill’s body. Suddenly, she wanted to dress, to cover her nakedness, but it seemed to her that any move she made would be an admission of some obscure and undefined guilt. Unable to remain still, much less frame a response, she finally pulled herself to her knees, then punched Boots in the mouth.

Boots saw the punch coming, but didn’t try to block it, or even move out of the way. The blow hurt him and he had to take a moment to clear his head.

‘Besides yourself, there were three witnesses to your father’s murder.’ Boots swiped at a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. ‘Two of them heard a pair of gunshots around six thirty, but took no action. The third saw two men, one of whom possibly wore a ski mask, drive away at seven o’clock. Since each of the witnesses was firm about the time, I simply assumed that what the last witness saw was unrelated to the case. How else to account for that missing half-hour?’

Jill sat back on her heels. ‘Is there a point here?’ she asked.

‘In the case file – Chris Parker’s – there’s a photo of his body lying on an autopsy table. I don’t remember why I looked at it. I’d reviewed the ME’s report by then and knew the cause of death. But I did look, Jill, and what I noticed was a very long, very deep scar on Parker’s hip. You saw that scar when he raped you six years ago. You saw it again in his bedroom shortly before you killed him.’

So, there it was, her secret, out in the open, and now her freedom was on the line. Although Jill Kelly did not fear death, incarceration was another matter.

‘Assuming you’re not lying,’ she said, ‘when you said you destroyed the DVDs and the hard drive, you knew you were destroying evidence in the murders of two cops. Is that right?’

‘Yeah, I knew.’

‘Why’d you do it?’

Jill was entirely unprepared when Boots took her by the shoulders and pressed his mouth to hers. Though she found the taste of his blood intoxicating, she neither resisted nor surrendered. She was sure Boots felt that he’d undressed her completely, that her soul was now as exposed as her body. Wrong again, but she appreciated the gesture enough to set him straight.

When Boots released her, she rose to her feet. ‘Don’t worry, Boots, I’m not going for my gun. I’m looking for a bathrobe.’

‘Are you cold?’

Jill leaned over to grind out her cigarette. ‘Just naked,’ she said.

Boots watched Jill struggle with an oversized flannel bathrobe, one that fit him loosely. For Jill, it was like wrapping herself in a kimono. Meanwhile, he was feeling more and more naked himself.

‘Let me see if I’ve got the whole picture.’ Jill sat down in a rocking chair, his mother’s rocking chair, carried from Ireland and passed down to Boots as an heirloom. ‘We start with Jill Kelly, young and innocent, a student at Fordham University, filled with the hopes and dreams appropriate to young women of her age and station. Then, in a space of thirty minutes, the youth, the innocence, the hopes and the dreams come crashing down – she is raped within sight of her father’s body. Shamed and humiliated as she is by her defilement, she can’t bring herself to speak the unspeakable, not to the street cops who appear first, or to the hardened detectives who follow. So she clutches her secret to her heart and holds her tongue. Months pass, then years. She quits school, becomes a cop, her great secret all the while corrupting her heart and her soul until she’s fully transformed. Until she becomes Crazy Jill Kelly.’

Jill smiled. ‘Have I got it right? Is that the sequence you imagine, Boots?’

Unable to produce a verbal response, Boots reached down to draw the sheet to his waist. Jill’s laughter ran straight down into his heart.

‘What I knew,’ she continued, ‘even while it was happening, even while Parker slammed into me, was that the brand of justice offered by the state just wasn’t gonna be good enough. That’s why I kept the rape to myself. Now, I’m not saying that I wasn’t humiliated, or that I wasn’t ashamed. I just knew that pointing out my assailant in a courtroom wouldn’t cleanse me of shame and humiliation, that what rape victims usually find in a courtroom is more shame and more humiliation.’

Boots watched Jill light another cigarette. ‘Cleansed by blood,’ he said, ‘that was option number two, right?’ He gave her a chance to reply. When she didn’t, he said, ‘Well, did it work? Are you cleansed?’