A Drink Before the War Read Free Page A

her eyes, a burning cigarette butt in her hand. Neither happened. Angie turned from the open window, and the cool summer breeze creased the room with the smell of exhaust fumes and freedom and the lilac petals which littered the schoolyard.
    â€œSo,” she said, leaning back in the chair, “we employed again?”
    â€œWe’re employed again.”
    â€œYa-hoo,” she said. “Nice suit, by the way.”
    â€œMakes you want to jump my bones on the spot, doesn’t it?”
    She shook her head slowly. “Uh, no.”
    â€œDon’t know where I’ve been. That it?”
    She shook her head again. “I know exactly where you’ve been, Skid, which is most of the problem.”
    â€œBitch,” I said.
    â€œSlut.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “What’s the case?”
    I pulled the information about Jenna Angeline from my inside breast pocket and tossed it on her desk. “Simple find-and-a-phone-call.”
    She perused the pages. “Why’s anyone care if a middle-aged cleaning lady disappears?”
    â€œSeems some documents disappeared with her. Statehouse documents.”
    â€œPertaining to?”
    I shrugged. “You know these politicians. Everything is as secret as Los Alamos until it hits the floor.”
    â€œHow do they know she took them?”
    â€œLook at the picture.”
    â€œAh,” she said, nodding, “she’s black.”
    â€œEvidence enough to most people.”
    â€œEven the resident senate liberal?”
    â€œThe resident senate liberal is just another racist from Southie when he ain’t residing in the House.”
    I told her about the meeting, about Mulkern and his lapdog, Paulson, about the Stepford wife employees at the Ritz.
    â€œAnd Representative James Vurnan—what was he like in the company of such Masters of State?”
    â€œYou ever see that cartoon with the big dog and the little dog, where the little dog keeps panting away, jumping up and down, asking the big dog, ‘Where we going, Butch? Where we going, Butch?’”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œLike that,” I said.
    She chewed on a pencil, then began tapping it againsther front teeth. “So, you gave me the fly-on-the-wall account. What really happened?”
    â€œThat’s about it.”
    â€œYou trust them?”
    â€œHell no.”
    â€œSo there’s more to this than meets the eye, Detective?”
    I shrugged. “They’re elected officials. The day they tell the whole truth is the day hookers put out for free.”
    She smiled. “As always, your analogies are splendid. You’re just a product of good breeding, you are.” Her smile widened as she watched me, the pencil tapping against her left front tooth, the slightly chipped one. “So, what’s the rest of the story?”
    I loosened my tie enough to pull it over my head. “You got me.”
    â€œSome detective,” she said.

3
    Jenna Angeline, like me, was born and raised in Dorchester. The casual visitor to the city might think this would serve as a nice common denominator between Jenna and myself, a bond—however minimal—forged by location: two people who started out of their separate chutes at identical hash marks. But the casual visitor would be wrong. Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester and my Dorchester have about as much in common as Atlanta, Georgia, and Russian Georgia.
    The Dorchester I grew up in was working class traditional, the neighborhoods, more often than not, delineated by the Catholic churches they surrounded. The men were foremen, crew chiefs, probation officers, telephone repairmen, or, like my father, firemen. The women were housewives who sometimes had part-time jobs themselves, sometimes even had education degrees from state colleges. We were all Irish, Polish, or close enough to pass. We were all white. And when the federal desegregation of public schools began in 1974, most of the