Serpents in the Cold Page 4

  “I need your help. You knew her too.”

  Cal gripped Dante’s shoulder and squeezed. Desperation pulled at Dante’s mouth. “She was family, Cal. I wouldn’t ask you if I had a choice.”

  A worker pushing a gurney banged past them, whistling, and Cal dropped his hand. The whistling continued down the dimly lit hallway with the rattle of wheels reverberating off the stone walls.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Okay. But first, let’s get you home.”

  7

  _________________________

  Scollay Square, Downtown

  DANTE’S APARTMENT WAs on the third floor above the Scollay Grill and the offices of a dentist. He entered the narrow hallway. The odor of burnt hamburgers and steak and onions permeated the stairwell. Once he reached the second floor, he could smell bleach mixed with the faint metallic odor of a drill grinding into enamel. Passing by the door with a smoked-glass window—DR. FLINK—DENTISTRY—he could feel the two teeth loosened by Sully’s muscleman, a sharp pain that ran along his jaw and tapped against his eardrum.

  The door to his apartment wasn’t locked. His sister Claudia never left the apartment. He paused, the doorknob in his hand, and tried to take a deep breath, but his bruised ribs made him wheeze, and the acidic taste of vomit scratched at his throat. He entered the apartment and forced a smile as he took off his hat and dropped it on a hook of the coat rack. A bare yellow bulb hung from a cord in the entranceway, and under its fifty-watt glare he imagined his face must appear misshapen, hideously comic.

  Claudia sat in the rocking chair with a book on her lap. She didn’t look up when she spoke. “Did you see Cal? He was looking for you this morning.”

  She was three years younger than him, just turned thirty, and already had OLD MAID stamped on her forehead. She’d had a boyfriend once, but he’d never popped the question. Eventually he left her for another woman he’d met in Worcester, and since then she’d been a mess. She couldn’t even listen to or carry on a conversation without nervously coughing or wringing her hands. She took calming pills like they were mints, and sat, smoking cigarettes and half listening to the radio, in her rocking chair most of the day. When she did leave the apartment, she wandered the streets, a perpetual clockwork journey through familiar neighborhoods, staring blankly in storefronts or watching other people as they passed.

  “How was your day?”

  She kept her eyes on the book. “They shut off the phone again.”

  Dante unbuttoned his coat as he entered the living room.

  The light from the reading lamp exposed the swollen, bruise-colored flesh under her eyes. And not only that, but the lines above her lip, and thin streaks of a premature gray staining the black hair pulled and tied in the back. Such a pretty face still, Dante thought. She might yet turn it around.

  Claudia finally looked up at him and saw his face, closed the book, and placed it on the folding aluminum table beside her.

  “It’s no big deal. Got into it with a drunk at Kelly’s.”

  “For heaven’s sake, you look like death. You owe somebody money again.”

  “Please. Not now. I just need to rest.”

  “Can you eat? There’s some leftovers in the fridge.”

  He bent over and gently kissed her forehead. “I just need some rest. You should do the same. Those bags under your eyes could carry a week’s worth of groceries.”

  She gave him a weak smile and her voice softened some. “Really, Dante, what happened to you?”

  “Nothing. I’m okay.”

  Dante saw the midday Herald folded up on the couch.

  “You just get this?” he asked. He reached down and picked it up, glanced at the headlines. BOSTON BUTCHER STRIKES AGAIN. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN FOUND ON TENEAN BEACH. How quick the news got out; even before he could make sense of it all.

  “Isn’t it awful?” Claudia asked. “Been thinking about it all day, you know? Could be anybody killing these girls.”

  “You read too many of those damn crime novels, Claudia.”

  “Who do you think it was?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “The woman they found on Tenean.”

  “No idea.” He moved to the coffee table, grabbed the day’s mail—what looked to be a telephone bill from Bell, another from Bigelow Oil, and a letter from the landlord. What good would it do if he told Claudia that it was Sheila found on Tenean? He’d have to console her, and feed her bullshit about Sheila now being in a better place. He decided to wait until she read the papers tomorrow, once Sheila’s name was released to the public.

  Dante dropped the bills back on the table and went to his bedroom. “Good night,” he said, before closing the door.

  He took off his shirt and placed it on the wooden chair next to his record player. Several record covers were on the floor. He picked them up and put them back on the shelf with the rest of his collection. He powered up the player and dropped the needle.

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, Dante lit a cigarette and watched the tendrils of smoke pass up over his eyes in the dim light. The image of Sheila on the autopsy table returned in a close-up: the blue-and-purple-hued face, her black-stitched throat. Who would kill her like that? Where did that hate come from?

  He hadn’t seen her since the end of spring, or was it early summer? She ran through the clubs he had frequented, the Hi-Hat, Devereaux’s, Savoy Café, and sometimes the Roseland, but in all that time, not a sign of her, not even at the Rose when her favorite, Dizzy, played a string of sets last October.

  Sheila had had everything Margo hadn’t. The fiery hair and blue eyes, a voluptuous body. That outgoing, sugar-coated exterior and that laugh that carried through the room, warming even the most hardened of men. And she’d had conviction, too, something Margo could never hold on to. Upon Fierro’s dissecting table she’d been dead—beyond dead, even, for the brutality of her murder prevented him from seeing her in any other way—but now he imagined her unmarked and every part of her flushed with life.

  He tried to let the song from the player ease into his mind, but it wouldn’t take hold. He shut off the player without taking the needle off the record, and it slowly ground to a stop. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, and below it on the floor a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He lay on the bed. As his eyes fluttered, he glanced over at the bare wall to the right of the door. The three jagged holes from his fist stood out against the pale blue paint, a reminder of Margo’s dying the spring before. When he finally fell asleep, it was of Sheila that he dreamed, talking, whispering hotly in his ear something he could not quite make out, and then she was laughing, head thrown back and neck bared, so pale and vulnerable, and he had the sense that she was laughing at him.

  8

  _________________________

  Savin Hill, Dorchester

  CAL LAY WITH his head back upon his pillow and stared at the ceiling. The wind whipped unevenly along the street and sent hard scatterings of snow against the house and the windowpanes. Lynne was next to him, turned toward the wall, her bare back above the sheets bowed in a pale curve, and he could feel her warmth. He watched as the darkness outside lightened and leaked down through the curtains, and the ceiling with its fine web of fractured plaster became more visible. He sighed and pushed the sheets off him and, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep again, was about to move to the living room and have a cigarette when Lynne stirred beside him.

  “What’s wrong?” she murmured. It was still an hour or so before dawn, but she was on the day shift at the Carney for the next two weeks and was half-awake, listening to him, he guessed, with her eyes closed.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Go back to sleep. It’s still early yet.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Not long.”

  “Are you thinking about Dante?”

  He reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand and worked at prying one from the packet.

  “Yeah. I’m gonna head over there this mor
ning.”

  Lynne was silent and he waited for her to speak. She inhaled deeply and then sighed, pulled at the sheets and blankets, and covered her shoulders. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “That sounds like trouble,” she said.

  He nodded in the dark, exhaled cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “If you’d seen Sheila, what this guy did to her…”

  “I see enough at the hospital.”

  He waited, jaw clenched in the dark. “The cops have written this one off. He’s got nowhere else to go.”

  “Is he paying you?”

  “Is he paying me? For Christ’s sake.”

  “Don’t get mad, I’m only asking.”

  “Dante hasn’t got a pot to piss in, you know that.”

  “He’s in trouble again.”

  “Not so much. Nothing we can’t handle.”

  He sensed her about to say something and then she paused and said, “I’m sorry, I’m just tired is all. This must be terrible for him.”

  “Shhhhh,” he said after a moment and stroked her hip through the blanket. “You go back to sleep.”

  He waited until her breathing deepened and then got up from the bed, trod the cold linoleum to the kitchen, where the clock said it was a little after five thirty. He put on the coffee, and showered and shaved. He drank his coffee and watched through the window as the street brightened. When the sun was barely above the bay and the ice-packed cars along the street seemed to glow blue and silver and the lights in other houses across the street came on, he took the car’s battery off the kitchen table and carried it outside.

  9

  _________________________

  Scollay Square, Downtown

  AT THE SOUND of the door buzzer Dante came up out of sleep hard and fast, still in the panic of a terrible dream. His fingers covered in blood, poised above the piano keys. His knuckles were shattered: bone showed through ripped skin. In the dark, voices urged him to play on! Give us another song! and he continued, blood spattering across the keys. It took him a moment to realize where he was, and then the buzzer sounded again and he knew it was Cal and that he was waiting for him. He got up from the bed, and wormlike spots flashed and floated in his vision. He stood and had to wait for the dizziness to pass. He tongued his teeth and grimaced; the inside of his mouth seemed to be lined with sticky cotton. He stood shakily in the bathroom and urinated.

  When he was done, he put on his shirt and sweater and coat, rummaged in his bureau for a photograph of Sheila. There were several in the top drawer, ones of him with Margo and Sheila at their side, another of them all in the park, and he paused momentarily as he looked at the photo. Sheila in sunglasses and a light summer dress decorated in pastels. That had been taken on the Common. The sun was at her back, and it shimmered through the thin material and showed the outline of her body. If he hadn’t already torn the pictures so that only Sheila remained, his wife would have been standing to her right—she’d worn a blue dress that day—and holding the wicker basket with the remains of their picnic. He took that one and the one from his wedding and went out to the car.

  Cal’s gray Fleetline idled at the curb, white smoke steaming from its exhaust. Cal looked up and rolled down his window. Hatless, his black hair appeared unruly and disheveled, but Dante noticed the V of his coat, the press of his white shirt, the immaculate tight knot of his tie, his face gleaming from a fresh shave. Still, he looked tired and pale, and Dante imagined that he had barely slept.

  “We’ll go to where she died first,” Cal said.

  Dante sighed and his shoulders drooped unconsciously. He absently fingered the brim of his hat.

  “I thought you said the cops already have it under wraps.”

  “Most cops can’t even find their own dicks to piss.”

  Inside the car the air was warm and moist, like a wool coat warming on a radiator after the rain. On the dashboard Cal had coffee and doughnuts waiting. The steam from the coffee fogged the windows. Cal handed Dante a cup. “Here. You look like shit.”

  Dante took the coffee and pulled the photographs from his coat pocket. “So that we can show them around,” he said, and Cal glanced at them as he sipped his coffee.

  “That’s good.”

  He pressed on the accelerator and the car moved into the Square. He wrangled with the clutch, and they eased into a lane of traffic, moved through an intersection, and made their way onto the ramp bound for the South Shore. Occasional glimpses of the sea, iron blue and flat, whitecaps rippling across the surface, appeared through buildings to their left. Traffic was light, and within minutes Savin Hill rose up on their left and then the bay opened up before them and the gas tanks before Tenean Beach loomed stark and gray. Dante glanced over his shoulder. Cal’s hat sat neatly in the center of the backseat, next to a stack of maps and city ordinances and a police slicker. When he looked back, Cal was smiling grimly, squinting through the beads of rain streaking the windshield, the sheen of black road before them. After a moment he put on the indicator, downshifted, and turned the car toward the Neponset off-ramp. Dante patted down his coat for his pack of smokes and Cal pushed in the cigarette lighter.

  The outsized blank screen of the Neponset Drive-In rose up on their left and then fell away behind them as the ramp corkscrewed back to earth. They were passing beneath the Neponset overpass, and as Dante held the red coils of the lighter to his cigarette, the triple-deckers of Port Norfolk rose up before them. “This is where they found her?” he asked.

  Cal nodded grimly, rolled down the windows to clear the glass. The smell of the sea came in to them, and they could see the small spit of sand with its frothy gray shore and the city beyond: the beach of their childhood.

  10

  _________________________

  Tenean Beach, Dorchester

  CAL AND DANTE stood out as black silhouettes upon the frozen beach, looking as if they’d been cut from hard angles of metal, and stared at the white, untouched expanse of snow. Even the track of the coroner’s wagon and the familiar tread of cops’ boots had been covered by the previous night’s storm.

  Dante flicked his cigarette toward a clump of frozen seaweed but the wind returned it at his feet. “Hard to believe this is the same place we used to come as kids,” he said, turning to his left, where the small shuttered shower stalls and snack shack stood in stark relief against the ashen sky.

  “I’m going to check the bathrooms,” Dante said as he began his walk toward the building, his coat whipping off his legs. Cal watched him and tried to suppress his suspicion. He shook his head. “Don’t you go fucking up before we even get started.”

  THE FIRST DOOR that Dante checked was padlocked. The other, facing the ocean, appeared to be locked from the inside, but he stepped back and kicked it open. Cautiously, he stood before the darkness. It felt like looking into a mausoleum.

  His mother had taken him and Claudia here all the time, June to September. His family—and Cal’s, too—didn’t have the money to vacation on the Cape, on one of the islands, or up north on some quaint little lake. This was all they’d had.

  He turned and looked at the ocean and saw himself as a young boy swimming in the brownish harbor waves, all the way out to the piers where older boys dove in headfirst from twenty feet above. He saw his sister, all skin and bones, wearing a pink bathing cap. She was at the scummed shoreline with a stick, prodding a jellyfish that lay cooking in the sun. He saw his mother sitting cross-legged on a blanket, wearing that black bathing suit that was far too tight on her thick frame, accenting the rolls on her back and stomach, and him sitting next to her eating sandwiches hot from the sun. And then when the light of day began to soften, and the traffic of cars behind them became louder with the commute home, he remembered that sharp sense of melancholia as he watched families roll up their blankets and pack up their books and baskets and gather their children together, fearing that soon his mother would do the same. Thankfully, she always liked those moments at the end of the day when the beach was deserted and she
could have a clear view of the harbor without anybody getting in the way. He and his sister would play by themselves, chasing gulls or playing in the dirty sand until the sun dipped toward the horizon and their mother called out to them, telling them it was time to pack up and head home to Fields Corner, where later in the evening he had a piano lesson with Mrs. Gilchrist, an old widow with severe rheumatoid arthritis whose hands stank of camphor and eucalyptus, and who, when he made a mistake, pinched him hard in the soft part of his upper arm until he got it right. He could see his mother standing in the sunset, hands cupped around her mouth as she called out in Italian and then even louder in English. And him sprinting the length of the beach toward the small peninsula covered in tall grass as if it were an enchanted place instead of a dumping ground for the factories just off the bay.

  Dante blew into his hands and turned back around to face the darkness of the stalls. Now in winter, the place smelled of human feces mingled with cheap cigar. There had been people here, bums or kids perhaps—teenagers drinking and smoking, doing what teenagers did. He turned down the narrow hallway between the bathrooms and the locker rooms. Two windows were partially boarded up, the light forcing its way through the uneven plywood slats. He turned to the last window in the hallway and tore off a slat of wood that was nailed weakly to the window frame. It allowed in more light, enough for him to feel secure before opening the door to the men’s locker room.

  He called out to the darkness as the door creaked open, and stepped inside. There were two high windows, and he went to one and pried off its shutters also. This one was nailed more securely. He put his hat back on and used both hands until the daylight glimmered through. Several blankets were crumpled in among sheets of newspaper and soot-stained towels. He pulled at one of the blankets, and the fetid stench of human shit that wafted up made him wince. He pulled out his lighter, moved its flame around with a shaking hand until he saw something in a tin coffee can. Around it were a few empty beer cans, a wine bottle, a woman’s sweater, soiled underthings. He picked up the sweater—it was nothing Sheila would have worn. He grabbed the can, walked back into a square of daylight, and, trembling, emptied the contents of the can onto a wooden bench beneath the window.