Thin Air

"Got no way of knowing, pal. Whyn't you go ask him?"

"Probably will," I said.

"You better ask nice, state cop or no."

"I'm not a state cop."

"You said…"

"I said I used to work for the Middlesex DA. I don't anymore. I'm private."

"Private? A fucking shoofly? Get the fuck out of here before I bust you for impersonating a police officer."

"Or vice versa," I said.

"Beat it," he said.

I took his advice, and as I went out the door I looked back and smiled a friendly smile and said "Skol." and closed the door behind me.

The fat cop at the desk was still sweating as I passed him.

"How is he?" he said.

"Gassed," I said.

The cop nodded.

"He wasn't a bad cop, once," the cop said.

"He's a bad cop now," I said.

The fat cop shrugged.

"His brother's a City Councilman," he said.

Chapter 12

San Juan Hill, when I found it, made you think maybe God liked cinema noir. The streets were narrow and the three-deckers crowded down against them. The buildings were uniformly stoop-shouldered and out of plumb, as if age and sequential squalor had sapped the strength from the wooden framing. The buildings were immediately on the sidewalk, there were no yards. There was no grass or trees, no shrubs, not even weeds, pushing up through the asphalt. Between each building was a hot-topped driveway, some with new cars parked there, some with rusting hulks that had been parked there since San Juan Hill was Galway Bay. The graffiti was intense, and brilliant; an angry, aggressive plaint of garish color on almost every surface. Somebody see me! Anybody! A swarm of young kids on mountain bikes flashed out of an alley and swooped by me. One of them scraped something, probably a 20d nail head, along the length of my car as he passed. I thought about shooting him, decided it could be construed as overreaction, and chose instead to ignore it in a dignified ma

Near the center of San Juan Hill stood an ugly pile of angular gray stones which had blackened with time. It was a Roman Catholic church with a wide wooden door painted red. The door and most of the church walls were ornamented with graffiti. There was a sign out front that identified the church as St. Sebastian's, and listed the scheduled masses. The sign was covered with graffiti. I parked out front of the church. In San Juan Hill you could park anywhere.

Inside the church, in the back, there were three old women wearing black shawls over their heads. I had read somewhere that the Catholic church no longer required women to cover their heads when entering, but these did not look like women who would jump onto every new fad that came along. The women were saying the rosary, their lips moving silently, fingering the beads softly, sliding them along as they said the prayers. Down front a solitary old man in a black suit with no tie and his white shirt buttoned to the neck was sitting in the first pew. He didn't show any signs of prayer. He wasn't sleeping. He simply sat gazing straight ahead.

As I walked down the aisle of the church, a middleaged priest in a black cassock came out of the sacristy and met me near the altar rail.

"May I help you?" he said softly.

He was a modest-sized guy, wiry and trim with white hair and a red face.

"Is there someplace we can talk, Father?"

The priest nodded.

"Perhaps we can step out onto the front steps," he said, "so as not to disturb the worshipers."

We walked back up the central aisle in the dim, candle-smelling church, and out into the thin early spring brightness. At the foot of the church stairs my car sat at the curb, a long scratch gleaming newly along the entire passenger side. The priest looked at it.

"Your car?" he said.

"Yes."

"Welcome to San Juan Hill," the priest said. "Children on bicycles?"

"Yes."

"They like to do that," the priest said. "They particularly like to surround Anglo women, and when the car stops to beat them."

"Because they like to?"

"Because they like to."

"Sure," I said. "I'm looking for a young man named Luis Deleon. He might be here in San Juan Hill."

"Why are you looking for him?"

"As a means to an end," I said. "There's a woman missing, I'm looking for her. I'm told she once had a relationship with Deleon."

"Is this an Anglo woman?"

"Yes."

"You would not bother to look for a Latin woman."

"I look for anyone I'm hired to look for."

"You are not a policeman then?"

"No. I'm a private detective."

"And you have a gun," the priest said, "under your coat."

"You're very observant, Father."

"I have seen a lot of guns, my friend," the priest said.

"Yes, I imagine you have," I said.

The priest looked out over the gray and graffiti landscape of Proctor. Somewhere a car squealed its tires as it went at high speed around a corner. In the asphalt and chain-link playground across from the church, three kids sat against the wall smoking, and drinking from a wine bottle in a paper sack. A huge dirty gray cat, slouched so low that its belly dragged, padded out of the alley next to the church carrying a dead rat.

"Not what I imagined when I left the seminary thirty years ago," the priest said. "Bright, fresh-scrubbed children gazing up at me, learning the word of God. Green lawn in front of the church, bean suppers in the basement, young couples getting married, solemn funerals for prosperous old people who had died quietly in their sleep."

The priest looked at me.

"I was supposed to live a life of reverence," he said. "I was supposed to visit suburban hospitals, where the staff knew and admired me, and give communion to people in flowery bed linens, with bows in their hair."

"The ways of the Lord are often dark, but never pleasant, Father."

"Who said that?"

"Besides me? A guy named Reich, I think."