Once outside, she did not walk the streets; she crept. Close to walls, in the shadows, hugging dark doorways as she held herself together tightly, as she held inside the seeping black knowledge of who and what she was. Mother. No longer a mother. Wife. Not-wife.
She stole past neon-lit bars that spilled pools of light and noise onto the wet sidewalks so that she had to step around them. These were the same bars she used to work in, used to sit and drink in with Gina, the two of them laughing with their heads thrown back, while her kids slept locked in a room with a plate of stale cookies, a toy rabbit for comfort.
She took her shame and her grief, held them close, and crept in the dark so that normal people, clean people, wouldn’t have to see them.
She saw lighted rooms, glimpsed in the detail of a film still from the sidewalk. The silhouette of a guy leaning over a table in semi-darkness. Two women sitting side by side playing a piano, faces shining, mouths open. A girl talking on the telephone, leaning against the wall, the cord wrapped around her splayed fingers, her face serious.
Ruth looked at each snapshot of a life: at the warm, bright kitchens of strangers, at the tangled phone cord of someone else’s drama. Her heart recognized these as different stories, different rooms, and longed to set down its own burdens while she watched these stories play out. Just for a little while.
When she was tired of walking, she sought out the dark corners of bars and watched men like the ones she used to wait on: men who sat hunched over a single glass, who used a raised finger to keep the bottle coming. Men who knew the names of every other man like them in the bar, but who rarely spoke. She was like those men now.
There was a place she went to once, when things were very bad. A dank black archway under a rail bridge, a dim place where men lived and died. They wore filthy mismatched gloves and coats tied with twine, and they huddled around a metal garbage can where a fire burned. She wrapped her scarf around her bright hair and stood in the shadows, needing the closeness of others who were just as wretched.
Somewhere back in the darkness, on a piece of wood nailed to a sheet of corrugated metal, someone had painted a picture of a girl. From her lank unstyled hair and her red lips, Ruth thought at first that she was young, but as she moved closer, she saw the darkness around the girl’s eyes. She looked at Ruth with something approaching pity, and Ruth turned and fled.
The day after his encounter with Bette, Pete went down to McGuire’s and found Devlin and Horowitz in a corner booth. As he walked toward them, he thought about what he’d learned in the New York Public Library. He looked at Horowitz and thought about the lies he must have had to tell. Wondered how he’d reconciled himself to being that kind of man.
As he reached the booth, they noticed him and stopped talking.
Devlin said, “You want something?”
“I need to talk to you. You want a drink?”
They exchanged a glance, and then Horowitz leaned forward. “Wonicke, this . . . this ain’t right. You ain’t working no more. You can’t just come down here and . . .”
“I’m not looking for information. I got something to tell you.”
To Devlin: “I’ve been talking to someone about Lou Gallagher.”
And to Horowitz: “He’s one of Mrs. Malone’s boyfriends.”
Devlin took a handful of peanuts from the dish on the table, threw them into his mouth.
“And?”
Pete slipped into the booth opposite them.
“This woman told me he got rid of their kid. Newborn. He told her he’d had it adopted, but she never signed anything, and she was told there’s no record. Baby just disappeared.”
He leaned forward.
“Look, he got rid of her kid because it was in the way. If he did that to one woman, got rid of a child, you don’t think he could do it again? You don’t think he’d be capable of getting rid of two? Maybe the Malone kids were in the way of his relationship with the mother? Maybe they were . . .”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Devlin tipped his head on one side. “You got any proof of this? What’s this woman’s name? Where can I find her? She never came forward at the time—or if she did, nothing stuck. Gallagher’s squeaky-clean.”
“She’s . . . she doesn’t have a fixed address.”
“She a bum?”
“No, she’s a . . . well, she’s . . .”
“She’s a whore? Jesus, Wonicke. Come on! I’d be laughed right outta the DA’s office!”
He took a mouthful of soda and said, “Listen, kid, I know you’re caught up in this. You spent a lot of time on it, you’re invested. I get that. But there ain’t no big complicated story for you here. I know the Malone woman did it. She’s as guilty as sin. Yeah, we know she had help. Someone helped her get the kids out of the apartment, kept them quiet. Someone helped her hide the bodies. And maybe this Gallagher was the guy who helped her.