Willy smiled sympathetically. "Rosalie told me everyone calls you Loui. Is that okay? Could you tell me a little about Mary before she turned herself around? What she was up to, who she hung out with? Anything would help."
Louisa Obregon gave in finally and half turned on her heel. "Would you like to sit down in the living room? Sorry I was a little suspicious at first. I don't have a great history with cops, and they don't cut people like me a lot of slack."
Willy followed her into a small, cluttered, but pleasantly decorated room. The childish music they'd been listening to was coming from a next-door bedroom. "I'm an alcoholic, Loui, sober nine years now. I'm not most cops."
She glanced at him over her shoulder, observing the crippled arm. "I noticed that. Have a seat."
They settled down in opposite corners of a sofa, their legs crossed. Loui folded her hands in her lap and looked up at the ceiling briefly. "Okay: Mary before she turned things around…" She stopped, sighed, wiped under one eye, and faced him with a wan smile. "It's tough, you know? I've lost so many friends this way, to drugs, or AIDS, or that whole world. You try to go on, count yourself lucky, think back over that friendship, and make it less than it was. You try to make the hurt go away. But it doesn't really work. It all kind of piles up inside."
Willy nodded, but kept quiet, trusting Loui to get where he'd asked her to go in her own good time.
She did after taking a deep breath. "I don't know too much. We met when we were being treated at the ReCoop. But she told me things, kind of now and then. Maybe that'll help."
"Give it a shot," he encouraged her.
"Well, you know she was from Vermont, of course, somewhere way up north. She didn't talk much about that, but she did tell me her family and her had stopped talking, and that she'd had a shitty marriage to some guy who abused her. He was a drunk, too," she added brightly, little knowing the accuracy of the comparison. "It was after she got divorced that she came down here."
"Why?" Willy interjected quickly.
"Why come here? I don't know. Bright city lights? She said she wanted to get away, make something of herself. I don't know too much else."
"There wasn't a guy?"
Loui Obregon smiled sadly. "There's always a guy, right?"
Willy retreated slightly. "Well, I didn't mean-"
But she cut him off with a wave of her hand. "No, no. You're right. I meant it. There always is a guy with women like us. We're like sheep. Rosalie tells us that all the time. Tells us to stand up on our own two feet."
Her eyes lost their focus as she stared off across the room. "But, you know, it's hard. Sleeping alone, sometimes with just a kid in your life. You get lonely. You want someone to put your arms around."
Willy compressed his lips slightly, uncomfortable with where this was heading. Gunther was good with shit like this, and Willy could hold his own, but he hated it.
"What was the guy's name?" he asked.
She blinked once and looked at him. "His name? I don't know. I mean, there were a lot of them. I guess there were. She was a pretty lady. And fun, too."
"You met some of them?"
"Oh. Well. I met one…no, two men. I don't know if they were, you know, intimate or anything. After Mary started going to the Re-Coop, her life changed, see? So there was less of that. That's what I meant about Rosalie talking to us. It wasn't encouraged, like they say."
"You catch the names of these two men?"
But she shook her head. "No. It was something like Bill or Dave or Paul or something. Not a name to remember."
"How about Andy Liptak?" he asked, thinking back not only to his talk with Bob, but to how his brother's name fit the short, bland coterie she'd just recited. "He ever come up?"
"Not that I remember."
He tried steering her back on track, disappointed. "Okay. So, she's moved to the city to live her dream. She sees a lot of guys. What else? What does she do for a job?"
"Not much that I know. She said it was like back home, but worse: waitress jobs, counter work, taking shit from other people all day and getting paid pennies."
"Where was she living then?"
"Brooklyn, mostly. Beats me where, exactly. She said she liked Brooklyn best, and that's why she lived there, so that's how I know."
"How'd she get into drugs?"
Loui's laugh was short and hard. "How'd you get into booze? Life stinks, you look for some relief. One thing leads to another."
Willy was growing irritated with the vagueness of her answers. Not a patient man by nature, he had to fight the constant urge to hurry things along, as if tarrying over a subject, or with another person, might get him caught out in the open.
"Specifically, though, do you have any names you can give me?"
She shook her head, suddenly angry, sensing his restlessness. "Cops. You don't care about Mary or me or anybody else. It's all about who your contact is. Making a bust. You treat us just like the people selling us junk."
Willy fought back the urge to agree with her. "Loui," he said instead, laying on the sincerity, "I know what it's like to be where you are. That's what drives me nuts. You fought your way back just like I did. I just want to keep going-getting the bastards that're feeding off people like us. We all do what we can to hang on to something. You've got Teresa, Mary wanted to be a counselor. I go after the scumbags."
He paused, judging her reaction, pondering his actual motivations at the same time, as if standing outside himself and watching two strangers.
Loui apparently bought his line, because she confessed, "That's not how it works, at least not in this city. You know your own dealer, but you don't brag about him. They're like a secret you got to keep to yourself or it'll go away. And they do sometimes. If I got busted and they squeezed me for my supplier, if I had somebody else's name, I'd give them that, not my own guy. You protect your source, and you don't risk it by talking about it."
Willy couldn't argue the logic, but he was still getting nowhere. He decided to help himself out by changing subjects slightly, defusing his own tension. "The ReCoop. They find you or you find them?"
"Both, kind of. They have ads around and people refer you to them. I got told about them by my priest."
"Fancy place, though. Doesn't look like the standard city services fare. They charge you anything?"
"No, no. It's privately supported-some foundation."
Willy was surprised. "One foundation? What's it called?"
"Like the place itself: the Re-Coop Foundation."
"You ever met anyone from it?"
"No. You'd have to ask Rosalie. She's the only one who deals with them."
Willy scratched his head. "Aren't they swamped, though? An upscale free clinic in a pisshole area like this? What's the catch?"
She shrugged. "I only volunteer there a few hours a week, sort of to pay back, you know? I couldn't tell you. There is an interview process. I don't think a ton of people make it through that."
Willy couldn't repress a sneer. "Right, and then they probably brag about how good their numbers are, since they screen their patients from the start. What a scam."
Once again, Louisa Obregon's face darkened. "What do you know? I was real sick when I went there, and so was Mary. They helped us out. Who cares if they don't take everybody? They work real hard on everybody they do take. Would you want to run a place like that and have to deal with all the psychos and slashers just because you let everybody in? Then nobody would be saved. They're good people and you don't know what you're talking about."
Perhaps lured by the tone of her mother's voice, young Teresa appeared in the doorway.
"Mama?" she asked.
Loui rose from her seat and comforted the child with a hug and some murmured comments Willy couldn't hear. From where she was squatting, Loui looked over her shoulder. "You should leave now. I told you all I know."