Free Where the Dark Streets Go by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

roundhouse sweep of his arm, his thumb in the air. The Calypso music went on again. It was all over. And it wasn’t that the party resumed, the explosion was part of the party, the language a kind of vernacular, and the noise was a way of life. No one apologized to the priest. Someone brought him his drink where he had put it down on the table when Phelan drew the knife. Mrs. Morales brought him a plate with two stuffed crabs and some pastries.
    “Where is Carlos?” he asked her.
    “In bed,” she said. She indicated the door to a room off the parlor.
    The boy could not have slept through that noise. “May I look in on him?”
    She shrugged. It was up to him.
    McMahon ate a few bites of the food and went to the bedroom door. He opened it, expecting to see the youngster wide-eyed and staring out at him as when he and Brogan had found him in the hut. Instead, he saw four bundled shapes beneath a blanket, children huddled together like puppies in a box, and all of them sound asleep.
    The door to the Phelan apartment was open when he went down the stairs a few minutes later. She would be watching for him, and in any case, he wanted to get rid of the knife in his pocket. She called out to him to come in and then closed the door behind him.
    Phelan stood, his back to them, and stared out the window. There was an Irish look to the apartment, which was merely to say McMahon felt a familiarity there not present for him in the rest of the building: it was the curtains, perhaps, just the curtains that made the difference, full, window-length, and white.
    McMahon laid the knife on the side table on top of a copy of the Daily News .
    “Dan’s in real trouble now, Father. The police picked him up in a bar last night, and he can’t even remember where he’d been in the morning.”
    He could remember, McMahon thought, but he was not telling. Protecting a man, perhaps. The police would have suspected that, picking him up where they had. He pointed to the knife. “Where did that come from?”
    “It’s been in the house for years,” she said. “But why in the name of God he had to take it up there with him tonight, I don’t know.”
    Phelan turned from the window. “Don’t you, Priscilla? I think you do.” He was about to sit down. “Would you like a drink, Father? There’s another bottle, I think.”
    McMahon shook his head. “No, thanks.”
    Phelan slumped into the chair and shaded his eyes with his hand. A gentle hand, McMahon would have said.
    “Do you know what I think, Father?” Mrs. Phelan said. “I think he wants to be charged with the murder. Big shot! He wants to be a big shot to a houseful of freaks.”
    Phelan was shaking his head.
    McMahon thought: it’s being a freak in a houseful of big shots that’s killing the man. He sat down on the couch near Phelan. “If I spoke to a doctor, Dan, would you go and see him?”
    Phelan took his hand away from his eyes. A sad smile twisted at the corners of his mouth. “A psychiatrist?”
    “Yes.”
    “He doesn’t need a doctor. I told you that yesterday, Father. He’s all right now.”
    Phelan looked from one to the other of them, and then at his own hands which he put palms together, the shape of prayer. No man ever showed more eloquently his sense of betrayal. McMahon got up. Twice, by inadvertence—or by some destiny that was tracking himself as well—McMahon had betrayed him. “Come and see me if you want to, Dan. Or call the rectory and we can meet somewhere else.”
    “In the jail maybe,” his wife said, “if he keeps this up.”
    McMahon said nothing until she had followed him into the hallway. “Do you want to kill him or save him? I don’t want the answer, but you’d better find it for yourself, Mrs. Phelan.”
    “Father…” She put her hands to her ears.
    The electric guitar, the Calypso singer, and now someone on the drums.
    “All I want is peace. Really, that’s all I want.”
    “We could all say the same thing,” McMahon said. “But