Where the Dark Streets Go Read Online Free PDF Page A

the truth. You want even sin to be romantic.”
    “Especially sin,” he snapped to cover his chagrin that she should mock him.
    “It wasn’t love. It was just plain sex. I seduced him. You won’t have any trouble believing that, will you? You know, most of the tenants in my building don’t buy this business of going to the priest every time somebody gets into somebody else’s bed. They talk about it on the stoop, in the kitchen. It’s the way they are. Maybe that’s why I can’t live with them.
    “Last night after Dan got through proving himself, he got up and dressed again. He said to me, ‘Now you got something new to tell your friends.’ ‘I don’t tell them anything,’ I said. ‘That’s not the message I get from them.’ ‘Then they’re lying,’ I said. ‘Are they, Pris? About the bearded gentleman in the back room? Who is he? What is he?’ ‘He’s a man,’ I shouted and Dan said, ‘So now you have two men, lucky girl.’ He went out then, Father, and I haven’t seen him since.”
    “Have you told any of this to the police?” McMahon said after a moment.
    “Not much, except about Dan not being home. They’ll start asking. It was mostly Gus they wanted to know about.”
    “Your husband has been away overnight before, hasn’t he? If a job took him out of town?”
    “Yes, but he’s not on one now.”
    McMahon yielded then to an impulse he had been trying to repress. “Tell me something about the man—Muller.”
    “He was murdered this morning in that condemned building on the other side of Tenth Avenue.”
    “I know. I was with him when he died. Carlos Morales came and got me.”
    She thought about that. “Now I understand. Carlos…He loved kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got some of his own somewhere. He’d make nice babies with the right woman. A gentle person…but with it.” She was silent for a moment, her eyes thoughtful. McMahon waited. He knew quite a lot about her, some things she wanted him to know and some he had learned by inadvertence. He knew that she was thirty-two, the daughter of a broken marriage who had spent her childhood and adolescence in a convent boarding school, and then, when her father died, her mother had brought her home to live with her in the tenement building she now owned herself: a clash of environments if he had ever known one. She and Phelan had been married when she was nineteen and pregnant for the first and last time. The child had been stillborn.
    “It’s funny, Father,” she went on finally, “but I can’t talk about him that way, me, the big talker.”
    “But you said it wasn’t important,” he chided gently.
    “I guess it was just that I didn’t want it to be important. I liked him a lot. I don’t even think Gus Muller was his right name. Gust—I always forgot the ‘t’ and he liked it. We met in the Duminy Bar I told you about on Ninth Avenue. He needed a room cheap and a job he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on. So we settled on him painting the apartment.” She looked at her hands where she had clasped them tightly on the table. “I slept with him that night. That sounds pretty raw, doesn’t it, Father?”
    “Since you say it yourself,” he murmured. “What else? What did he do before he started drifting?”
    She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. ‘I am who you think I am. That’s all you need to know. And when we’re together, it’s all I need to know.’ And the funny thing is, he was right. I didn’t care who he was. We were like two people cut loose in space, only I wasn’t afraid.”
    “And yet you came to me Wednesday night and pretended you were still trying to help your husband.”
    “I wasn’t pretending. I’d made up my mind—for Dan’s sake—to keep on trying even if I didn’t care any more.”
    “Have you any idea what Muller was doing in the building where he died?”
    “No. I used to hear him go out very early in the morning—dawn. He’d work for me in the