Where the Dark Streets Go (4 page)

“Yes, but he’s not on one now.”

McMahon yielded then to an impulse he had been trying to repress. “Tell me something about the man—Muller.”

“He was murdered this morning in that condemned building on the other side of Tenth Avenue.”

“I know. I was with him when he died. Carlos Morales came and got me.”

She thought about that. “Now I understand. Carlos…He loved kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got some of his own somewhere. He’d make nice babies with the right woman. A gentle person…but
with
it.” She was silent for a moment, her eyes thoughtful. McMahon waited. He knew quite a lot about her, some things she wanted him to know and some he had learned by inadvertence. He knew that she was thirty-two, the daughter of a broken marriage who had spent her childhood and adolescence in a convent boarding school, and then, when her father died, her mother had brought her home to live with her in the tenement building she now owned herself: a clash of environments if he had ever known one. She and Phelan had been married when she was nineteen and pregnant for the first and last time. The child had been stillborn.

“It’s funny, Father,” she went on finally, “but I can’t talk about him that way, me, the big talker.”

“But you said it wasn’t important,” he chided gently.

“I guess it was just that I didn’t want it to be important. I liked him a lot. I don’t even think Gus Muller was his right name. Gust—I always forgot the ‘t’ and he liked it. We met in the Duminy Bar I told you about on Ninth Avenue. He needed a room cheap and a job he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on. So we settled on him painting the apartment.” She looked at her hands where she had clasped them tightly on the table. “I slept with him that night. That sounds pretty raw, doesn’t it, Father?”

“Since you say it yourself,” he murmured. “What else? What did he do before he started drifting?”

She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. ‘I am who you think I am. That’s all you need to know. And when we’re together, it’s all I need to know.’ And the funny thing is, he was right. I didn’t care who he was. We were like two people cut loose in space, only I wasn’t afraid.”

“And yet you came to me Wednesday night and pretended you were still trying to help your husband.”

“I wasn’t pretending. I’d made up my mind—for Dan’s sake—to keep on trying even if I didn’t care any more.”

“Have you any idea what Muller was doing in the building where he died?”

“No. I used to hear him go out very early in the morning—dawn. He’d work for me in the afternoons—and other places. He’d come home sometimes walking along with Carlos or carrying him on his shoulders. Home…a shirt, a razor, a toothbrush, and a pair of clean shorts hung up to dry on the back of the chair.”

“If the women gossiped to your husband they will to the police too, you know.”

“No. You’re wrong about that too, Father. They wouldn’t tell the police the time of day. It’s up to me what I tell them. Me and Dan.”

It was she who was wrong: one of her neighbors had already told the police that Phelan did not like Muller.

“They’re bound to ask questions,” he said, “the man living in your house.”

“It’s a back room, separate. Its own door. The john’s in the hall.”

They were both avoiding the real question. Phelan’s capacity for violence. McMahon made up his mind he would not be the one to bring it into the open. “You ought to go home and wait for your husband.”

“What if he doesn’t come home? The police will want to know why.”

“Could you tell them why?”

“No, but…”

“I’d just leave it at no, Mrs. Phelan.”

“I will, but they won’t, Father. Dan has an assault record. He cut up a man with a bottle once.”

“Over you?”

“Hell, no,” she said bitterly. “Over a dog that lifted his leg on Dan’s shoe.”

A
T FIVE MINUTES PAST
five McMahon approached the precinct headquarters. He noticed that one of the two white globes that hung on either side of the entrance had been smashed. It was odd, the association, but he thought of the words, “Love Power,” scratched on the sidewalk outside the doomed building. Not so odd. One was as sure a sign of the times as the other. He also saw Carlos and his mother before they saw him. Mrs. Morales gave the boy a push out the door ahead of her, but then, seeing the priest on the steps, she caught her son’s curly head and hugged him against her. Carlos responded as limply to affection as he did to abuse.

“He’s a good boy, Father, but sometimes I don’t know what to do with him.” When she spoke the gold of her teeth glittered.

The priest ruffled the boy’s hair with his hand.

“His brother, he is the bad one.” She jerked her head toward the station, which indicated that the older boy was in now with the police. “He hates the police. Why? They have a job to do like everybody else. He would like them to beat him, that’s how much he hates them. He was the same with his father. I do not understand. If you speak to him, Father, tell him, please, to be more polite?” The pleading of her voice was as ancient as motherhood.

“I will,” McMahon said. What he did not say was that Pedrito Morales had little more regard for priests than he did for the police. Or his own father. But she knew that too. The conversation was its own kind of ritual, not entirely false, but the forms barely holding together.

At the bottom of the steps she turned and called after him: “Father, he was a good man, Mr. Muller. Everybody wants he should have a nice funeral. You know?” By the rubbing together of her fingers she suggested money. “Come to my house, Father. The people liked him. They will all give something.” That, he felt, was genuine.

He asked for Brogan at the desk. The sergeant directed him to a room on the second floor. He went up by way of a staircase, the color and smell of which put him in mind of a cheap hotel. The windows were wire-meshed on the outside, sealing in the dirt of generations. He met Brogan and Lieutenant Traynor coming out of the room with Pedrito, a tall, skinny boy of eighteen, sallow and sullen, with a mop of black hair and a scraggle of beard.

The best he could do for him at the moment was to acknowledge an acquaintanceship. “Hello, Pedrito.”

The boy nodded curtly.

“Keep your nose clean, young fellow. We’ll be watching you,” Traynor said.

“
Cochinos
,” Pedrito snarled. Pigs. But by then he had reached the stairs.

“Makes you want to love them, doesn’t it?” Traynor said. He went on down the hall.

Brogan led the priest into the interrogation room where an officer was removing the tape from a recorder. They waited until he had left the room.

“So you had to bring Carlos in anyway,” McMahon said.

“
Sí
,” Brogan said. He searched a folder for the statements he wanted.

McMahon was not to be put off. “Why?”

Brogan shrugged. “The lieutenant didn’t like it, not the way the kid told it to us. The doorknobs were what really put him in a flap.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, Father, let me put it this way: he questioned the boy on whether Muller had molested him.”

McMahon’s temper snapped. “Balls.”

“Exactly.”

“Christ Jesus help us,” McMahon said, but he already knew he was being unreasonable. The luring of a child to an abandoned building: it could be construed that way. Even the monsignor’s first question was whether the man was a pervert.

Brogan half-sat on the desk. He indicated the chair to the priest. “What is it that bugs you, Father? You know yourself that a kid like Carlos, there’s nothing he’s going to learn from us he didn’t know from the street already.”

McMahon sat down and took in hand his own typed statement. What Brogan said was true: trying to shield the innocence of a child in Carlos’ environment was almost as impossible as the restoration of virginity. He read the statement and signed it.

“But you’re right,” Brogan said. “That wasn’t Muller’s trouble.”

“What was?”

Brogan shrugged. “Mrs. Phelan? Or vice versa. I have a notion she was hot for him. There’s gossip in the building. Even we can get to it. She picked him up in a bar, nestled him down in her back room. Like charity begins at home. Where was Phelan through all this? Where
is
Phelan?”

And what’s his problem? McMahon kept the thought to himself, but he suspected Brogan was doing the same thing. He asked, “Is Pedrito in the clear?”

“As far as the homicide, he has to be. He works on a machine assembly line. Twenty witnesses to where he was from six
A.M.
to three this afternoon. And he wasn’t a chum of the victim. That was Carlos’ idea. To a kid, I guess, everybody over fifteen is the same age, especially if they come to his birthday party. They all drank wine that night and it was then Muller got the idea of building a house of doors for the youngster. Pedrito went with him. If he gets into no worse trouble than swiping doors, I’ll settle.”

McMahon said, “Why are you a cop, Brogan?”

The young detective colored. “To stay out of the draft. I’ll take my law and order straight, Father.”

The priest was not sure why, but he felt a kind of respect for Brogan saying it.

“Phelan has an assault record, by the way,” Brogan added.

“Was he at the birthday party too?”

“No, but Mrs. Phelan was.”

“It makes you wonder why there was gossip, if she’s so popular with her tenants,” McMahon said, “and they’re not notoriously cooperative with the police, are they?”

“It’s pretty simple, Father—it’s not the infidelity, if that’s what it is. Homicide is something you can get put away for a long time. They don’t like Phelan.”

That had to be it, McMahon realized. Priscilla Phelan had not calculated the relative values of her Spanish-speaking friends. “Do you want me to go over Carlos’ story?”

“It won’t be necessary, unless you want to see it. You can go over to the house if you want to—I’ll fix it up—if you want to see his things. There’s not much there. He was traveling light, wherever he came from. A sign painter by his identification.”

McMahon shook his head: he did not want to go near the Phelan apartment.

Brogan tapped his statement with a pencil. “I just thought by this you might be interested.”

“I am,” McMahon said. “He got to me and I’m not sure why. Was it his courage? He was ready to die, but it was as though that was because he wanted to live, to live right up to and over the threshold. And he said he would like to know me. That always sets a man up, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does, Father.”

“There was more to him than what he left in that room, I feel pretty sure of that.”

“Then have a look at his things.”

“No. That’s your business. But you’re right. I’d like to know.”

“I’ll keep in touch with you, Father. Thanks for coming in.”

It was a good time of day, McMahon thought, reaching the street. Next to dawn he loved it the best, the last hours of the sun when its heat was spent but a golden haze hung over the city. The youngsters were playing stickball, and great fat women leaned out their windows watching for their men to come home from work. There were flags in the windows of almost half the apartments. No college deferments here. Brogan was not a young man whose insight should be underestimated: he would not say to many people in this neighborhood that he joined the force to avoid the army.

Crossing Ninth Avenue he decided to walk downtown a few blocks to Ferguson and Kelly’s funeral parlor. It was no new thing to him, trying to arbitrate the costs of a funeral: he generally did well until the family arrived to select the casket. This part of town, where the street markets commenced, was predominantly Italian. Sausages and cheeses hung in the windows over stacked canisters of olive oil, two-quart tins of tomatoes. The produce was all outdoors. The people were noisy and friendly and a priest was accepted as one of themselves, neither feared nor revered. It was a strange place for Ferguson and Kelly, but as he thought about it, he could not name an Italian in the undertaking business. That they left to the morbid Irish. But obviously in Italy Italians buried Italians. Could the circumstance here be the dominance of the Irish in the church? Since Muller was not a Catholic, or so he assumed, he would have to see Ferguson, a man he took to be of Scotch-Irish antecedence. He would rather have negotiated with Kelly. As he opened the door setting off the muted chimes, he wished he had telephoned. A typical McMahonism: taking the steps first and weighing the consequences only when he had no choice but to live up to them.

A half hour later he headed uptown again, a set of if-or-and figures in his pocket and a stiff Scotch whisky in his stomach. The whisky roused in him a feeling of kinship with every man on the street, and he went over in his mind the lines of his sermon. They were not so bad after all, he decided, with even a touch of poetry to them. Long ago the monsignor had said to him, “Remember, you’re not addressing the sacred congregation in Rome. Simple truths are the most eloquent. Sincerity, that’s the key.” Which put him in mind of politicians and brought him round full circle to the banal again. Priests and politicians. He felt as restless as the birds scratching in the gutters. His spirits fell as low. He had not yet read his office of the day. That and music and his morning Mass were his refuge. All having little to do with the world around him. It was not that the world was too much with him, but that he was too much with the world. He wondered what Muller would have thought of that distinction.

The pawnbroker was closing the iron grill across his shop windows as McMahon approached. The grill gave the shop more distinction than the merchandise warranted, the grill and the three golden balls newly painted, and the sign, Gothic-lettered in fresh gold leaf—or so it appeared in the slanting rays of the sun:
A. ROSENBERG
.

McMahon thought at once of Muller, a sign painter, but he also thought of the curiosity of the Gothic lettering of the name. He was himself familiar with the typeface from liturgical books, but ninety-nine out of a hundred would have to puzzle the letters to get the name. Ninth Avenue Gothic. He greeted the pawnbroker. They knew each other by sight, and there was a placard in the window announcing the girls’ choir concert.