The Neon Jungle

Chapter Fifteen

At eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning Paul Darmond looked up from the papers on his desk as Lieutenant Rowell came into his small office in the courthouse, walking with his bandy-legged strut. Rowell shoved a chair closer to the wall, sat in it, and tilted it back against the wall.

“How’s the soul-saving going, Preach?”

“Business as usual.”

“You sure get yourself around. I’ve been fighting the U.S. government. They tried to tell me they’d handle this one. I told them it was in my backyard, and anything going on in my backyard is my business.”

“You got those three kids?”

“On Monday. The Delaney girl. Fitzgerald. Derrain. One other boy and two more girls. And two pushers working the high school. A very pretty picture. Delaney, Fitzgerald, and Derrain had set up a deal in a crumb-bum hotel, with the Delaney girl turned pro for junk money, setting up the other two girls on the same pitch, and with the Fitzgerald boy and the Derrain boy fronting for them.”

“What was the home situation with the three names I gave you?”

Rowell shrugged. “The Delaney girl’s old lady is a dipso. The Fitzgerald kid’s people both work a night shift, sleep all day, live in a crummy apartment. Derrain’s people got dough and no sense. The woman isn’t his mother. There was a divorce in the picture. You know how it goes. All three families. The same yak. Not my baby. Not my sweet Ginny. Not my darling, my Bucky. There must be some mistake, Officer. My baby would never do such terrible things. I get it through their heads finally that there’s no mistake. Then they want a break for their precious babies. Take it easy on them, Officer. They didn’t realize what they were doing. It always follows the same pattern. So I have to make it clear I’m booking them for everything I can. That’s my job. It’s up to the judge, once they’ve had a cure at the county hospital, to be lenient if he wants to. I tossed that Fitz in a cell and broke him in four hours. He and Derrain mugged three guys in the last month, operating from Derrain’s car, with the Delaney girl acting as lookout. I talked to the school nurse. There’s some other little nests of users in the school. We’ll clean up what we can. You sneaked that Varaki girl out from under, Preach. I want to rattle a little information out of her, too.”

“She won’t be back for a while.”

“I can wait.”

“Let it lay, Andy. Once she’s straightened out I’ll get everything she knows and tell you if there’s any additional information worth working on.”

“We can talk about that later, Preach. I came in to talk about the Dover kid. It looks like that’s no place for him, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why the sudden concern?”

“I don’t like you putting a mess of bad eggs in one of my baskets. A tramp and two one-time losers and a junkie in one household. I don’t like it. It means trouble. I don’t like that Lockter. He’s too smooth. He’s working some kind of an angle. I can smell it. If he’s working an angle, Preach, putting that new kid in there is just giving him an assistant so he can work the angle a little better, whatever it is.”

“If you’re right, Dover wouldn’t go in with him.”

“God, you make me tired sometimes. A wrongo is a wrongo, no matter how you—”

“Not half as tired as you make me, Andy. Go ahead. Lean on Mr. Lockter. Out of the group I’ve got right now, I’d say he’s the poorest risk. I’ve never got to him.”

“My God, that’s something for you to say.”

“And I’d say the Dover boy is one of the best risks. He’s going to come out all right.”

“Unless he sees a chance too good to miss, you mean.”

“Someday, Andy, something is going to happen that’ll put you on my side of the fence.”

“Reform your kids, Preach. Don’t try to work on me. I’ve got enough troubles. Just make some other arrangements for Dover, will you?”

“Let’s let it ride, Andy.”

Rowell sighed, made a grotesque gesture of despair, and left.

Paul turned his attention back to his work, but he could not concentrate. It was as though Bonny stood close behind him, almost touching him, and he had only to turn the scarred and creaking swivel chair to be able to look up into the gray of her eyes and fold the slimness of her waist in his arms, the fresh clean fragrance of her in his nostrils.

He could isolate, pin down the exact moment when it had happened, there on the sun-spotted terrace with the brook sounds, with the look of her across from him, her head tilted a bit as she listened to something he was saying. She had listened with head tilted and then her gray eyes widened with a warm amusement, and her chin came up a bit and her round throat had been full of soft laughter, and in her amusement her glance had moved across his eyes, faltered, returned, focused then with a small narrowing look, almost of alarm, as her laughter faded. In that moment she had ceased to be the widow of Henry Varaki, ceased to be a person he could help in any way, and became to him a desirable woman, something of lilt and fragrance and need.

He remembered how he had talked to her, remembered his own ponderous, stuffy conversation. He thought of what she must think of him and he could not help flushing.

He got up from his desk and took the single stride to the dusty window and looked down at the June street below, at the paper-littered green of the courthouse lawn.

Betty had said once, “Paul, you have a knack of suffering about everything. You spend half your time thinking of what you should have done or should not have done, long after it’s finished and over and quite through.”

Now, Betty, you who understood me so well, you could explain to me why this is happening. It was never to happen again. You were enough for a lifetime. I want her. I want her so badly that now I think of how she stood there, throwing words at me the way a child would throw stones, telling me I could take her there by the gray stones. She has been badly hurt, by herself. Yet she has a great pride. She won’t accept pity. If she interprets my interest as charity, she will despise me. I know she has been used by many men. When I think of that, something turns over slowly inside me, like the first warning of nausea. Yet intellectually I can tell myself that it was not Bonny who was used. The men used her body, and her body was the device by which she was punishing herself for original sin. Somehow, some way, I must be able to tell her that it’s not pity, it’s not charity, it’s not lust. Nor is it the romantic love of adolescence. It’s a woman I want. I want her, mind, soul, body. Which is something you must understand, because it’s the way I wanted you. This is not lesser, or greater. It’s the same thing. I was not made to be alone.

In this year I have felt myself edging toward a funereal dryness, a crotchety exactitude. Now it’s time to come alive again, Betty.

He knew, standing there, that if he followed his impulse blindly it would take him to her to stand with blundering adoration in front of her, content to look upon her face. He half shrugged and smiled at himself and went back to his desk.

He phoned Dr. Foltz and asked about Teena.

“She’s a very disturbed child, Paul. The usual malnutrition. We’re giving her glucose until she can keep food on her stomach. We’re watching her carefully.”

“What’s the emotional response?”

“The usual thing. Sullen, bitter, rebellious, unresponsive. I got the lab reports on her yesterday. Outside of the addiction and being run down physically, she’s all right.”

“She was a very happy kid, Doctor.”

“She’s going to be a very unhappy kid for quite a while, particularly when the usual remorse sets in. Somebody will have to keep an eye on her pretty closely after she’s released.”

“I have somebody lined up, I think.”

“Good. I hate to see them slip back into addiction. If the first cure doesn’t take, it’s a fair gamble that no subsequent one will, either.”

“Let me know when she’ll be ready for the first visitor, will you, please?”

“Of course, Paul.”

Paul sat for a time with his hand resting on the dead phone in its cradle, and then he got up and went to lunch alone.