Dancer in the Flames (32 page)

Not so, Boots Littlewood. For as long as he could remember, he’d battled to stay on the right side of the odds. Burglars, thieves, rapists, killers. They were enough for him. He didn’t need to slay dragons. He didn’t want to be a hero.

Twenty minutes later, the door opened to admit Farrell Monaghan from the Detectives’ Benevolent Association, Boots’s free lawyer. Boots laid down the weight bar.

‘Congratulations,’ Monaghan said through stained teeth, ‘you’re a hero.’

Gladys Kohl, he continued, had not only confirmed Detective Littlewood’s account, she’d also claimed that her brother forced the Kohl family to admit him on the night before. Then she’d led the investigators to Rick’s bedroom where they discovered five kilos of Afghani heroin in an army duffel bag.

Boots thanked Monaghan for the information, then sent him packing. If Mike Shaw decided to screw Detective Littlewood, no DBA lawyer could stop him. Boots wondered if Shaw and Polanco had known about the heroin all along, if Jill had known. The taint from that dope would eventually rise through the ranks to engulf Michael Shaw’s rivals.

Inspector Najaz showed up at noon. ‘You’re being promoted,’ he announced, ‘to detective, second grade. Congratulations.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Plus, you get the next two weeks off.’ Najaz winked. ‘To recover from the shock.’

Boots wanted to tell Najaz that he felt fine, but with the adrenalin having fled his body, the only thing he really felt was limp.

‘What about Corcoran?’

‘You leave Corcoran to us, Boots. We have a warrant for his arrest. We’ll find him.’

‘Does that mean Jill no longer needs my help?’

‘Did she ever?’ Najaz laid a fatherly paw on Detective Littlewood’s shoulder. ‘For the record, the Chief thanks you for protecting his niece this morning. But what I think is that you were more likely protecting yourself.’

And that was exactly right. Driven by the certainty that he was the slowest gun in the room, Boots had decided to counter his disadvantage by shooting first. Or, at least, that’s the way he remembered the decision-making process, the way he wanted to remember it.

At three o’clock, shielded by a posse of uniformed officers, Boots was rushed to his car, then chauffeur-driven to his father’s house in Greenpoint. The hope was to avoid the cameras, but the strategy backfired. When Boots saw his face on the evening news, he looked like a cringing perp.

‘If you’re supposed to be a hero,’ Libby asked, ‘why were you hiding?’

‘The bosses – Shaw and his underlings – wanted to make sure I didn’t speak to the reporters.’

Boots was already irritated by the penetrating glances, from Libby, from Andy, from Joaquin. What were they searching for? Signs of an imminent collapse? At seven o’clock, he went for a walk. Big mistake. Word had spread through the neighborhood. Now he was a fucking celebrity. For just a moment, he thought Jenicka Balicki was going to ask him to autograph her babushka.

He ended up at Mount Carmel’s rectory, no surprise, in a room with Leo Gubetti, who uncorked a bottle of wine. This was a social visit, not a confession.

‘I’m tryin’ to feel something for this dope-smuggling jerk,’ he told the priest, ‘but I can’t get there. Even his sister hates him.’

‘You still seem upset.’

‘Not about Rick Bauer.’

‘Then what?’

‘Something Jill Kelly said right afterward. She told me that I’d crossed a line and I wouldn’t find my way back, not in the short term.’

‘And you believe she was right?’

Boots shook his head. ‘God forgive me, Leo, but I can’t help thinkin’ that next time it’ll be easier.’

Later on, with the bottle drained, Boots finally gave voice to his real concerns, which were not for himself. ‘Mack Corcoran,’ he told the priest, ‘is living proof that the eyes are not the windows of the soul. His are completely flat, like mirrors. Flat and empty. That’s because he hasn’t got a soul and there’s nothing to look at.’

‘Everyone has a soul.’ The words were meant to provoke and Gubetti wasn’t disappointed when Boots snorted in contempt. When it came to evil, cops were self-proclaimed experts. You couldn’t argue with them.

‘I’ve seen eyes like his before, Leo, seen them many a time. The men who own those eyes are beyond redemption.’

‘That’s blasphemy.’

Boots thought it over for a moment, then said, ‘Mike Shaw’s playin’ his own game. Jill, too. And me, I’m like a blind man tryin’ to cross Park Avenue without a guide dog. Cars are comin’ at me from every direction. I don’t know whether to jump, dodge or crawl. I don’t even know who’s more dangerous – Shaw, Corcoran or Jill Kelly.’

Jill called at eleven o’clock that night. ‘Hey, Boots, what are ya doin’?’

‘Waitin’ to hear your voice,’ Boots admitted.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

‘I figured you were out lookin’ for Corcoran.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s a problem, Boots. But it’s a problem for tomorrow. In the meantime, I was wondering if you wanted to play a game.’

‘Sure, what game do you have in mind?’

‘Enemy Combatant.’

‘And who would that be, the enemy combatant?’

‘That would be you.’

‘And you’d be . . .’

‘The interrogator.’

Boots sighed. ‘I’ll bring the hood,’ he said.

A
s it turned out, Boots and Jill did not play Enemy Combatant, or any other game. When Boots came through the door, he reached out to stroke Jill’s cheek with the backs of his fingers and that was the end of that, the two of them doing everything at once, their own private orgy, unapologetic, taking with both hands, gimme, gimme, gimme. At one point, Boots held Jill against the wall, her feet off the ground, pinning her arms against her sides, but she continued to grind into him, lithe and slippery, no quarter asked or given.

Innocent as insects was how Boots explained it to himself, but then, afterward, Jill rose up to bestow that tender kiss once deemed unimaginable.

Boots was lying on the rug, his back beginning to itch, staring up into Jill Kelly’s eyes. In the dimly lit room, they were the color of visible light at the coldest end of the spectrum. Any darker and you couldn’t see them. Yet he felt somehow scorched when she finally glanced away.

‘Are you going to help me find Corcoran?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Lines.’

‘What?’

Boots answered her question with one of his own. ‘Do you draw lines? Anywhere? The reason I ask is because it seems to me that you put a citizen’s life at risk this morning. And I think you did it on purpose.’

‘Rick’s sister? That’s who you’re talking about?’

‘Yeah, Gladys Kohl.’

Jill hesitated, then grinned. ‘I wanted to find out what you’d do,’ she finally admitted. ‘Plus, I never liked Gladys to begin with.’

Boots had nothing to add. He got up and led Jill into the shower, let her scrub the rug fibers off his back, then watched her shampoo her hair, fascinated by the rise and fall of her breasts. When she spoke, he failed to catch the words over the rush of the water.

‘Gladys set me up.’

‘What?’

‘Gladys set me up.’ Jill turned to rinse the back of her head. ‘Max Kohl is a lawyer who’s about to be disbarred after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion. The Kohls have two mortgages on their Bayside property, both in arrears, and the banks are threatening to foreclose. Their only child, Adam, won’t be starting college in the fall because they can’t pay his tuition. Bottom line, Gladys knew her brother was in the house, she knew why, she expected to profit, she set me up. All I did was exploit a flaw in someone else’s tactics.’

There was nothing to do the following morning but go home. Jill Kelly was on a set course. Better not to ask questions, better not to invite the lie. Still, she surprised him. When he kissed her at the door, she pressed the side of her face against his chest. Suddenly, Boots imagined Jill at the kitchen table, late at night, pouring over a case file, going on that way year after year. Jill had made a big concession, explaining herself. Perhaps she was making another now. Or maybe she only wanted him to locate Corcoran. That would be even more flattering, Jill assuming that he could find the man. But she didn’t ask for his help, didn’t even say goodbye. She let him walk through the door and closed it behind him.

At home, he found his answering machine jammed with messages from reporters. Their enterprise impressed him. They knew very well that he couldn’t speak to them without permission from his superiors, but they were trying anyway. Well, at least he’d had the foresight to buy his cellphone minutes in bulk instead of signing with a big company. Boots’s home number was unlisted, but a dozen reporters had gotten it. They’d have his cellphone number too if it appeared on any registry.

Boots headed to the weight room at the Six-Four after lunch. By then, he’d had enough of Libby and his father and their maddening solicitude. He couldn’t sit still, either, not without Rick Bauer’s silhouette popping up.

At twenty-five, Rick had seemed a boy, handsome and fit, his dirty-blond hair long enough to violate regulations. Never mind that he was a drug smuggler, that he tried to murder Jill Kelly, that he had the conscience of a cockroach. Boots Littlewood had flipped Rick Bauer’s switch, from on to off, lights out, see you in hell. There was no way around the facts.

The weight room was crowded when Boots arrived. O’Malley and Velikov were present; Antoine Crudup, too. But there were no sympathetic looks, no penetrating glances from this crew. Boots needed their company and he needed room. They gave him both.

He started slowly, with the stretching exercises he usually avoided, but once he got going found that he couldn’t stop. He wanted a cigarette, too. This would get better, he told himself, but then couldn’t decide which ‘this’ he was talking about – Rick Bauer, Jill Kelly or just the nicotine. He wanted to be with Jill, sitting next to her while she filled the car with smoke.

The room gradually thinned as the four o’clock shift change drew near. Only Velikov approached Boots, and he waited until O’Malley was in the shower.

‘You OK, Boots?’

‘No, I’m fucked.’

The Bulgarian nodded slowly, then patted Boots on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ he advised, ‘one time I shot this asshole, I took a whole week to get over it.’

An hour later, Boots climbed to the squad room two floors above and had a civilian tech print out the photograph on Mack Corcoran’s driver’s license. As he watched the tech’s fingers whip across the computer’s keyboard, he suddenly put his own finger on a small item bobbing at the edge of his awareness. Last night, in the shower, Jill had rattled off an up-to-date list of the Kohl family’s misfortunes. How did she know?

Boots made it through the weekend before he broke down and called Tommy Galligan on Monday morning. He escorted his father to church and watched the Yankees beat Kansas City, one of those games where the Bombers scored early and often.

The players seemed to grow younger as the innings piled up, kids again. Boots knew that everybody on the field had been a superstar in Little League and high school, back when the game was still fun, when you believed your talent would carry you to the Hall of Fame, believed it with all your heart. When you lived in a world free of doubt.

Those days were long gone, even for superstars like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. Now, when the boys of summer stepped into the batter’s box, their expressions were grim, each turn at the plate another challenge, the fans ready to jump down your throat whenever you failed. And you failed a lot, the greatest hitters who ever played the game unable to get on base more than four of every ten trips to the plate. For the average player, professional baseball was about futility.

After dinner, still restless, Boots headed off to Silky’s, a bar named after the racehorse Silky Sullivan, who’d once come from forty lengths back to win a stakes race. Inside, except for a stamped-tin ceiling, Silky’s was all wood: bar, floor, walls and booths. Cheaply framed photos covered every vertical surface, most of race horses in full flight. Silky’s had been owned and operated by several generations of the Peck family. One and all, they fancied themselves horsemen, the Pecks, though the horses owned by the family were cheap claimers who finished up the track with astonishing regularity.

Frankie Drago was sitting in a booth at the end of the room when Boots walked in, across from an up-and-coming gangster named Sam Golibek. Boots nodded to Frankie, then went to the bar and ordered a Jack Daniels, neat. Silky’s was a neighborhood joint, still undiscovered by the swelling population of young professionals. Most of the other patrons knew him, knew also that an attempt had been made on his life and that he’d killed a man. They knew about his role in liberating Vinnie Palermo as well. That was made apparent when Sam Golibek approached him.

Golibek reminded Boots of Rick Bauer. He was young, handsome and prepared to do violence. ‘What you did for Vinnie,’ he said, ‘it was the right thing.’

A rare moment of camaraderie between warriors from opposing camps – that was undoubtedly Golibek’s intention. Call him a romantic, but he was totally unprepared for the flame that shot up into Boots’s eyes, or the flush that rose into his cheeks, or the words that dropped from his mouth, one at a time, heavy as stones.

‘If I’m still lookin’ at your face ten seconds from now, you repulsive mutt, I’m gonna slam your nose through the back of your fuckin’ head.’

B
oots did not sleep well that night and was not in a good mood when he approached the door to Galligan’s offices. Nor was his disposition improved by finding the door locked, or by the hour-long wait before Galligan popped out of the elevator at eleven o’clock.

‘Hey, Boots.’ Galligan’s watery eyes swam behind his wire-rimmed glasses like fish in an aquarium. If he was any higher, he wouldn’t be able to walk. ‘I was gonna call you.’

‘And that’s it? You don’t even say you’re sorry?’

Galligan unlocked the door, slithered inside, threw a light switch. ‘Sorry about what?’

‘About me havin’ to stand in the hall for an hour. You’re supposed to be running a business.’