Voices in the Dark Read online

  “Something for you to remember,” Sergeant Avery warned, working wisdom into his round face. “No good deed goes unpunished. That’s what the chief says.”

  May said, “Screw the chief.”

  • • •

  In facing chairs in her sitting room, Regina Smith listened to Harley Bodine talk in low and measured tones. He was in his dark lawyer’s suit, his back stiff, his legs crossed. His movements were formal. “Kate and I don’t fuck enough,” he said. “That’s one of the problems.”

  The crudity did not disturb her, merely surprised her, though the look she returned was impersonal, almost as if he were a tradesman. “Whose fault is that?” she asked.

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  “That sounds too casual.”

  “It’s not something I can talk about with her.”

  “There’s the real problem.”

  His face, monotonous in its grimness, looked used up. “We’ve never been truly open with each other. My fault, no doubt.”

  She could readily believe that, for people invariably summed him up as a tightass. Phoebe Yarbrough had speculated that his butt was a hairline fracture.

  “I’m not easy to get along with,” he added.

  She could well imagine him as one person at the office, another in the privacy of his home, and a third here. His work world, like her husband’s, was high up in one of those verticals of concrete and glass, in a suite of dark mahogany, stainless steel, rich carpeting, and abstract art. She had heard that he could wither an underling with a look.

  “I don’t know how to get close,” he said. “The sexual act is only an illusion of closeness. No one can truly get into another person. We die strangers, one to the other.” He flicked an ash into the dish she had provided. “Thanks for letting me smoke.”

  She had served iced tea. His was gone. “Would you like another?”

  He shook his head. “Does Ira know I’ve been taking up your time?”

  “I’ve mentioned it.”

  “Good, I wouldn’t want him to think …”

  They sat through a few moments of dead silence, which was broken by approaching voices. He stubbed out his cigarette, and Regina, relieved that her daughter was wearing something over the bikini, said, “You remember Patricia?”

  Rising, Bodine had obvious trouble reconciling the memory of a child of ten or twelve with an adolescent of burgeoning maturity. The girl was lovely, lovely, like her mother. Same glossy black hair, same dark and indifferent eyes lacking only the mysterious cast in one. He lightly shook her hand. “You’ve grown.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” she said.

  “And of course you know Ira’s son,” Regina broke in. “Anthony. Though he prefers Tony.”

  The boy, wearing a T-shirt and swim trunks, had the torso of a greyhound. Bodine shook his hand with vigor and feeling and said, “You knew Glen, didn’t you, Tony?”

  “Yes, sir. He was in some of my classes.”

  “All you boys who came to the funeral, I appreciate it. You were one of those he looked up to.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, sir.” The boy looked embarrassed. “More like the other way around. His grades were far above mine.”

  “All the same, I know he admired you.”

  Patricia leaned over her mother, said something, and left. Tony stayed because Bodine’s eyes held him. Each stood tall, and the air in the room seemed to tighten around them. Regina sat motionless in her chair. Bodine said, “I’m going to ask you something I shouldn’t, Tony, but maybe you can appreciate my state of mind. Do you think Glen took his own life?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think he’d have done that.”

  Bodine went silent, as if something infernal were picking at him. Regina spoke. “Why do you say that, Anthony?”

  “It’s what I feel.”

  Bodine spoke. “That’s all?”

  “I know he was sick and all, sir, but he never made much of it. Just the opposite. He said he was going to become a doctor.”

  “I know,” said Bodine. “He had his heart set on Harvard Medical School.”

  The boy slung back his hair, which he wore long. His handsome face was a slant of light. “Wasn’t it an accident, sir?”

  “That’s my problem, Tony. You see, I don’t know what it was.”

  The boy left. A travesty of a smile seemed to detach itself from Bodine’s face as he busied himself with private thoughts. Regina noticed that his eyes were red-rimmed. “I should be going,” he said but stood rooted. “I should be working things out on my own.”

  “Shouldn’t you be doing that with Kate? Give her a chance, Harley.”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t trust her anymore.”

  Regina now had other things to do and rose from her chair. With a gentle but firm grip on his elbow, she took him from the room and guided him over an expanse of gleaming hardwood and then of dense carpeting. He moved with a heavy gait and some reluctance. At the front door he turned to her.

  “I told you Kate’s been seeing someone. He’s not one of us. He’s a townie.”

  “Then it can’t be serious,” she said, wondering who in the world among the locals would interest Kate, from whom she had expected better taste.

  Bodine said, “Do you remember the man who came to the Gunners’ party to tell me Glen was dead?”

  “You’re joking. Not the — ”

  “Yes,” he said. “The police chief.”

  • • •

  Racked with a fear that Dudley was lying somewhere dead, Mary Williams roamed the Public Garden in the hope of glimpsing him alive and well. She approached a man sleeping on the grass and then veered away. The heave of the sun hurt her eyes, and she almost stumbled into a great bed of marigolds that her fancy took for heaps of gold coin unloaded from a pirate’s ship. Blazing begonias her mind made into the hemorrhage of battle. On the walkway a vagrant held out a raddled hand, but she was too distraught to grease it. When two children ran in front of her, she nearly tripped over them. She had to get out of there. Too much pressed upon.

  On Arlington Street she remembered that Dudley sometimes spent hours in train stations and airline terminals, a pretender among travelers. On Boylston Street she hailed a taxi that had jousted too long in Boston traffic. Its front was jagged, its windshield cracked, and its trunk sprung. It looked savage. She climbed in anyway.

  The taxi crept through Chinatown, where hot street air wafted in on her and Asian faces paid her passing attention. Chatter from the sidewalk reached in like a hand and took hold of her. Plaster-doll children with rolling eyes raced across the narrow street, but the driver was careful. Several minutes later, angling out of traffic, he pulled up at South Station. She spoke to him in an appealing voice through the opening in the clear panel that separated them. He was a middle-aged black man with warm brown eyes, who did not mind waiting.

  “As long as you can pay the fare, ma’am.”

  Inside the great stone station her footsteps echoed over old marble. Nerve-worn, uncertain, she avoided undesirables loitering near the entrance to the public toilets and scanned the concourse. Men on benches goggled at her. Walking fast, she surveyed concession stands and gave a fleeting glance into a pizzeria. Two elderly women quailed at the raucous sounds of youths near the gateway to Track 4. That was when she fled.

  “Logan Airport,” she said, settling herself back into the taxi. Then she changed her mind and gave another destination, much closer. The driver looked at her.

  “That’s where you want to go?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  He eased into traffic, fell behind the reek of a slow-moving bus, and, much to her relief, escaped it with a quick turn at the first intersection. Without comment, he drove to the city morgue, the facade gray and granite. Twisting his neck, he said, “This is it. This what you want?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m looking for somebody.”

  His expression was sympathetic. “Somebody you hope i
sn’t there?”

  “Yes,” she said, climbing out.

  Inside the building, instinct showed her the way. Sculpted sphinxes flanked a stairwell, which she descended into a chill that made her think of polar snow. A passageway delivered her into an office where the furniture seemed to have been frozen into rigidity, like pieces in a museum. A man with a quiet, relaxed face and hair shaded zinc and nickel stood ready to help, though appointments were customary, some authorization mandatory.

  “Do you have any unidentified …” Her voice failed, then half returned. “I have a friend who …”

  “Are you up to it?” he asked, and she nodded. He took her into a long, lurid room of white tile and naked plumbing, where the taint of mold laced a greater chill. Her gaze swept banks of compartment doors, one of which was open, a vacant body tray visible. “Male or female?” the man asked.

  She shivered as she spoke. “Male.”

  “White, black, or yellow?”

  “White,” she said. “Very white.”

  “Then you don’t need to look,” he said.

  When she stepped out of the building, the heat came at her like a blast. The city sun drenched her. The driver turned to look at her as she pushed herself into the back of the taxi. She did not close the door right and slammed it the second time. “He’s alive,” she said.

  “He’s alive in there?”

  “He’s alive somewhere,” she said. Instead of relief, she felt strain, which told on her. Her color was high, her hands trembled. “One more stop,” she said and told him where.

  He drove her without enthusiasm into South Boston, past fireplugs around which youths tended to gather, past a window display of dinette furniture, then through a preponderance of four-decker houses, where whoops of children could be heard from the alleys. When a man on a corner made a hawking-to-spit sound, she swiftly turned her head.

  “My friend,” she said, “he lived here for a while when he was a boy.” She didn’t know exactly where. It might have been this tenement house or that one, for they lacked definition, as if anything could be going on inside, or nothing. Pointing, she said, “It could’ve been there.”

  The driver kept his eyes straight ahead and drove all the way to the ocean edge, Day Boulevard, L Street Beach. He parked near the beach, swimming temporarily prohibited because of a high coliform count. Nobody was in the water, but people were on the sand, many women and children, a few young men, and scattered elderly persons. The driver kept the motor running and turned in his seat. His face was toil-worn, the skin burlap. “I think you’d better pay me now,” he said.

  “I won’t run away. Come with me if you like.”

  “This is not my neighborhood.”

  “Then I won’t be long,” she promised.

  She removed her sandals on the sidewalk and plowed into the heated sand, a yellow grit that stung her feet. The sky over the ocean gave her bigger feelings of things, along with a sense of the brink, the stepping off to anywhere. Her steps were scissor-like, her trespass onto the beach duly noted. The faces were Irish and struck a note. Where had she seen them before? Then she realized she had seen them everywhere.

  A man with a face blown big with good cheer gave her the once-over. His tight trunks had a boastful pouch, as if holding all his belongings. Beachwear gave the women shapes that were overly honest. One stood explosive in pink, and another lay gummed in stretch nylon that look irremovable. Wandering among them, she felt like Cinderella, the feeling reinforced by the blemish on her cheek, soot from a chimney.

  At the ocean’s edge, where a passing gull screeched like a wronged woman, she let all the pain from Dudley’s absence come to bear, which hours earlier might have driven her to her knees. Dangling her sandals from one hand, she stepped back when spume from a broken wave touched her toes. Turning, she came face to face with squalling children whose mothers screamed at them not to go into the water. One child did.

  She would have retrieved the girl herself, but a mother reared up from a towel and charged forth, straps flying, breasts bolting a useless harness. The flesh was milk brought to a boil. The child, yanked by the arm as if it had no socket, stumbled on the wet sand. Punishment was swift, the second slap reverberating louder than the first. Each left a rose on the skin.

  Trying to remain frigid and detached, she could watch no more and scurried away with the memory of another child nearly the twin of that one, the same flaxen hair and frail face and maybe even the same ruffled bathing suit. A child preserved in her sketch pad, eyes wondrously big, marvelously expressive. Midway up the beach her legs lost speed, and she paused to slip her sandals back on.

  As she climbed into the taxi she noted a canteen truck across the street. Her driver, finishing a Fudgicle, tossed the stick out his window. “I took a chance,” he said.

  “I don’t know your name. What is it?”

  “It’s a simple name, the kind you forget. John.”

  “Mine’s Mary.”

  “Yes,” he said, peering at her in the rearview. “You look like a nice old-fashioned girl. Where to now, ma’am?”

  “Take me home, John. Beacon Street.”

  Traffic was rough, at times impossible, but no annoyance to her. Her eyes were closed. When the taxi finally pulled up at her brownstone, she rendered the fare with grace, the tip with generosity. She took two steps on the sidewalk and swerved back.

  “Do you have a family, John?”

  He leaned across the seat. “Children and grandchildren, ma’am. My wife works in an office building on State Street. She’s a cleaning lady, night work. Those buildings never sleep.”

  “I’m a painter, John. An artist.” She hesitated. “I think you’d make a fine model.”

  “I probably would, but I don’t need to go looking for trouble, do I?”

  “I’d be willing to — ”

  “Thank you all the same, ma’am, but this isn’t my neighborhood either.”

  Soldier was waiting for her at the top of the stoop. He stood at parade rest, with the sun shooting rays at him. He said, “What the hell was that all about?”

  She smiled wanly. “Dudley’s alive.”

  Malcolm Crandall, who functioned as both town clerk and tax collector, left the town hall by the front door and went around the side to the police station. Meg O’Brien was on the phone and paid him no attention, which irked him, especially since the call sounded personal. He placed a buttock on the corner of her desk to force her to look at him. They did not particularly like each other. When she got off the phone, she said, “What’s your problem, Malcolm?”

  “It’s my plumbing,” Crandall said in an ugly voice. “I can’t remember the last time I had a happy piss.”

  “Spare the details. What do you want?”

  He shrugged. He was heavy-set, gruff, ill-tempered, and usually in a pucker. Nipples showed through his drip-dry shirt. When he was much younger, military age, a sucker punch had disfigured his nose. With a disparaging glance at the chief’s vacant office, he said, “I see he isn’t in. Must be banging somebody. Anybody we know?”

  A movement in Meg’s pony face perceptibly quickened. Her loyalty was ironbound. “Why don’t you ask him yourself, if you’ve got the guts?”

  “That guy you locked up, is he arrested or just living off the town?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I pay taxes as well as collect ’em. Let me take a look at him. Might be somebody I know.”

  He didn’t wait for permission, for the phone was ringing and she was reaching for it. Nor did he need to be told the way. He tramped the passageway to the end and peered through the bars, pleased with nothing he saw and outraged over what the prisoner was reading. His voice was controlled.

  “They give you everything, huh? Even dirty magazines.”

  Startled, Dudley quickly smiled. “I don’t have a TV.”

  Crandall felt a throb. The little prick wanted hotel amenities.

  Dudley said, “I like to watch the soaps.” />
  A fag to boot, a stinking flower, enough to make Crandall want to retch. “How about a boy? Would you like a little boy in there with you?”

  “No, thank you,” Dudley said equably, sitting on the cot with his back to the wall. “But I see where you’re coming from.”

  “You got no idea. Weren’t bars between us, I’d smear the floor with you, wipe you up with a rag.”

  “I’ve been beaten up before. People like you.”

  “If it was people like me, you wouldn’t be walkin’.”

  That said, Crandall passed a hand over his flat hair and would have stomped off if the creep had not mocked him with another smile. Abruptly he gripped the bars, and the door jumped open. When he stepped into the cell, the moment was electric, power he hadn’t felt in years.

  “Smile again,” he snarled. “Let’s see those dimples.”

  Dudley sheltered his head in his arms and raised his knees protectively, displaying the ability to accept immediately what was irrevocable. The blows never came, for a voice barked at Crandall. It was Meg’s, which would not have stopped him, but another voice did. It was Chief Morgan’s.

  “You’ve got no business here, Malcolm.”

  The chief’s presence pulled Crandall from a state half reverie and half rage. Calming the motion in his face, he aimed a finger at Dudley, whose head was still buried. “Another time,” he said.

  • • •

  From his office Chief Morgan said, “We’ve got to get a lock for that door.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for years,” Meg O’Brien replied from her desk. An hour later she was still at the desk because Bertha Skagg, her relief, had called in sick. With a glance at the wall clock, she shouted, “Somebody’s got to get him something to eat.”

  Morgan, who had been on the phone, came out of his office. “Nothing on the prints,” he said. “Our friend’s still a zero.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Get rid of him. In the morning I’ll drive him to Andover and dump him off at a bus stop with a couple of bucks.”