Mystic River

  Whitey shot a glance Sean’s way.

  Sean said, “Jim, no one means to offend anyone here. Let’s just let it pass, get back to the point.”

  “The point,” Jimmy said.

  “Outside of that look Katie gave you,” Sean said, “was there anything else out of the ordinary you can remember?”

  Jimmy took his convict-in-the-yard stare off Whitey and drank some coffee. “No. Nothing. Wait—this kid, Brendan Harris—But, no, that was this morning.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s just a kid from the neighborhood. He came in today and asked if Katie was around like he’d been expecting to see her. But they barely knew each other. It was just a little strange. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Whitey wrote the kid’s name down anyway.

  “Could she have been dating him maybe?” Sean said.

  “No.”

  Annabeth said, “You never know, Jim…”

  “I know,” Jimmy said. “She wouldn’t date that kid.”

  “No?” Sean said.

  “No.”

  “Why you so sure?”

  “Hey, Sean, what the fuck? You’re going to grill me?”

  “I’m not grilling you, Jim. I’m just asking how you could be so sure your daughter wasn’t seeing this Brendan Harris kid.”

  Jimmy blew air out of his mouth and up at the ceiling. “A father knows. Okay?”

  Sean decided to let it ride for now. He tossed it back to Whitey with a nod.

  Whitey said, “Well, what about that? Who was she seeing?”

  “No one at the moment,” Annabeth said. “Far as we knew.”

  “How about ex-boyfriends? Anyone who might be holding a grudge? Guy she dumped or something?”

  Annabeth and Jimmy looked at each other and Sean could feel it between them—a suspect.

  “Bobby O’Donnell,” Annabeth said eventually.

  Whitey placed his pen on his report pad, stared across the table at them. “We talking about the same Bobby O’Donnell?”

  Jimmy said, “I dunno. Coke dealer and pimp? About twenty-seven?”

  “That’s the guy,” Whitey said. “We got him pegged for a lot of shit went down in your neighborhood the past two years.”

  “And yet you haven’t charged him with anything.”

  “Well, first off, Mr. Marcus, I’m State Police. If this crime hadn’t happened in Pen Park, I wouldn’t even be here. East Bucky is, for the most part, under City jurisdiction, and I can’t speak for the City cops.”

  Annabeth said, “I’ll tell that to my friend Connie. Bobby and his friends blew up her flower shop.”

  “Why?” Sean asked.

  “Because she wouldn’t pay him,” Annabeth said.

  “Pay him to do what?”

  “Not blow up her fucking flower shop,” Annabeth said, and took another sip of coffee, Sean thinking it again—this woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.

  “So your daughter,” Whitey said, “was dating him.”

  Annabeth nodded. “Not for long. A few months, yeah, Jim? It ended back in November.”

  “How’d Bobby take it?” Whitey asked.

  The Marcuses exchanged glances again, and then Jimmy said, “There was a beef one night. He came to the house with his guard dog, Roman Fallow.”

  “And?”

  “And we made it clear they should leave.”

  “Who’s we?”

  Annabeth said, “Several of my brothers live in the apartment above us and the apartment below. They’re protective of Katie.”

  “The Savages,” Sean told Whitey.

  Whitey placed his pen on the pad again and pressed his index and thumb tips against the skin at the corners of his eyes. “The Savage brothers.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “All due respect, ma’am, I’m a bit worried this could shape up into something ugly.” Whitey kept his head down, kneading the back of his neck now. “I mean absolutely no offense here, but—”

  “That’s usually what someone says before they’re about to say something offensive.”

  Whitey looked up at her with a surprised smile. “Your brothers, you must know, have some reputations themselves.”

  Annabeth met Whitey’s smile with a hard one of her own. “I know what they are, Sergeant Powers. You don’t have to dance around it.”

  “A friend of mine in Major Crimes told me a few months back that O’Donnell was making noise about moving into loan-sharking and heroin. Both of which, I’m told, are exclusively Savage territory.”

  “Not in the Flats.”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “Not in the Flats,” Jimmy said, his hand on his wife’s. “Means they don’t do that shit in their own neighborhood.”

  “Just someone else’s,” Whitey said, and let that lie on the table for a bit. “In either case, that would leave a vacuum in the Flats. Right? An exploitable vacuum. Which, if my info is correct, is what Bobby O’Donnell has been planning to exploit.”

  “And?” Jimmy said, rising up a bit in his seat.

  “And?”

  “And what does this have to do with my daughter, Sergeant?”

  “Everything,” Whitey said, his arms spreading wide. “Everything, Mr. Marcus, because all either side needed was one little excuse to go to war. And now they have it.”

  Jimmy shook his head, a bitter grin twitching at the edges of his mouth.

  “Oh, you don’t think so, Mr. Marcus?”

  Jimmy raised his head. “I think my neighborhood, Sergeant, is going to disappear soon. And crime’s going to go with it. And it won’t be because of the Savages or the O’Donnells or you guys bucking up against them. It’ll be because interest rates are low and property taxes are getting high and everyone wants to move back to the city because the restaurants in the suburbs suck. And these people moving in, they aren’t the kind that need heroin or six bars per block or ten-dollar blow jobs. Their lives are fine. They like their jobs. They got futures and IRAs and nice German cars. So when they move in—and they’re coming—crime and half the neighborhood will move out. So I wouldn’t worry much about Bobby O’Donnell and my brothers-in-law going to war, Sergeant. War for what?”

  “For the right now,” Whitey said.

  Jimmy said, “You honestly think O’Donnell killed my daughter?”

  “I think the Savages might consider him a suspect. And I think someone needs to talk them out of that kind of thinking until we’ve had time to do our jobs.”

  Jimmy and Annabeth sat on the other side of the table, Sean trying to read their faces but getting nothing back.

  “Jimmy,” Sean said, “without distractions, we can close this case fast.”

  “Yeah?” Jimmy said. “I got your word on that, Sean?”

  “You do. And close it clean, too, so nothing comes back on us in court.”

  “How long?”

  “What?”

  “How long would you say it’ll take you to put her killer in jail?”

  Whitey held up a hand. “Wait a second—are you bargaining with us, Mr. Marcus?”

  “Bargaining?” Jimmy’s face had that convict’s deadness to it again.

  “Yeah,” Whitey said. “Because I’m perceiving—”

  “You’re perceiving?”

  “—an aspect of threat to this conversation.”

  “Really?” All innocence now, but the eyes still dead.

  “Like you’re giving us a deadline,” Whitey said.

  “Trooper Devine pledged that he’d find my daughter’s killer. I’m just asking in what sort of time frame he thinks this will happen.”

  “Trooper Devine,” Whitey said, “is not in charge of this investigation. I am. And we will depth-charge whoever did this, Mr. and Mrs. Marcus. What I don’t need is anyone getting it in their head that our fear of a war between the Savage and O’Donnell crews can be used as some sort of leverage against us. I think that, I’ll arrest them all on public nuisance charges and los
e the paperwork until this is over.”

  A couple of janitors walked past them, trays in hand, the soggy food on top letting off a gray steam. Sean felt the air in the place grow staler, the night close in around them.

  “So, okay,” Jimmy said with a bright smile.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Find her killer. I won’t stand in your way.” He turned to his wife as he stood and offered her his hand. “Honey?”

  Whitey said, “Mr. Marcus.”

  Jimmy looked down at him as his wife took his hand and stood.

  “There’ll be a trooper downstairs to drive you home,” Whitey said, and reached into his wallet. “If you think of anything, give us a call.”

  Jimmy took Whitey’s card and placed it in his back pocket.

  Now that she was standing, Annabeth looked a lot less steady, like her legs were filled with liquid. She squeezed her husband’s hand and her own whitened.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to Sean and Whitey.

  Sean could see the ravages of the day finding her face and body now, beginning to drape her. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she’d look like when she was much older—a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she’d never asked for.

  Sean had no idea where the words came from. He wasn’t even aware he was speaking until he heard the sound of his voice enter the cold cafeteria:

  “We’ll speak for her, Mrs. Marcus. If that’s okay, we’ll do that.”

  Annabeth’s face crinkled momentarily, and then she sucked at the air and nodded several times, wavering slightly against her husband.

  “Yes, Mr. Devine, that’s okay. That’s fine.”

  DRIVING BACK across the city, Whitey said, “What’s this car business?”

  Sean said, “What?”

  “Marcus said you guys almost got in some car when you were kids.”

  “We…” Sean reached up by the dashboard and adjusted the side-view mirror until he could see the stream of headlights glowing behind them, fuzzy yellow dots bouncing slightly in the night, shimmying. “We, shit, well, there was this car. Me and Jimmy and a kid named Dave Boyle were playing out in front of my house. We were, like, eleven. And anyway, this car came up the street and took Dave away.”

  “An abduction?”

  Sean nodded, keeping his eyes on those shimmying yellow lights. “Guys pretended to be cops. They convinced Dave to get in the car. Jimmy and me didn’t. They had Dave four days. He managed to escape. Lives in the Flats now.”

  “They catch the guys?”

  “One died, the other got busted about a year later, went the noose route in his cell.”

  “Man,” Whitey said, “I wish there was an island, you know? Like in that old Steve McQueen movie where he was supposed to be French and everyone had an accent but him? He’s just Steve McQueen with a French name. Jumps off the cliff at the end with the raft made of coconuts? You ever see that?”

  “No.”

  “Good movie. But, like, if they had an island just for baby-rapers and chicken hawks? Just airlift food in a few times a week, fill the water with mines. No one gets off. First-time offenders, fuck you, you get life on the island. Sorry, fellas, just can’t risk you getting out and poisoning someone else. ’Cause it’s a transmittable disease, you know? You get it ’cause someone did it to you. And you go and pass it on. Like leprosy. I figure we put ’em all on this island, less chance they can pass it on. Each generation, we have fewer and fewer of them. A few hundred years, we turn the island into Club Med or something. Kids hear about these freaks the way they hear about ghosts now, as something we’ve, I dunno, evolved beyond.”

  Sean said, “Shit, Sarge, what’re you, deep all of a sudden?”

  Whitey grinned and turned onto the expressway ramp.

  “Your buddy Marcus,” he said. “Moment I laid eyes on him, I knew he’d done time. They never lose that tension, you know? In their shoulders mostly. Spend two years watching your own back, every second of every day, the tension’s gotta settle somewhere.”

  “He just lost his daughter, man. Maybe that’s what settled in his shoulders.”

  Whitey shook his head. “No. That’s in his stomach right now. You see how he kept grimacing? That’s the loss sitting in his stomach, turning it to acid. Seen it a million times. The shoulders, though, that’s prison.”

  Sean turned from the rearview, watched the lights on the other side of the highway for a bit. They came in their direction like bullet eyes, streaked past them like hazy ribbons, blurring into one another. He felt the city girded all around them, with its high-rises and tenements and office towers and parking garages, arenas and nightclubs and churches, and he knew that if one of those lights went out, it wouldn’t make any difference. And if a new light came on, no one would notice. And yet, they pulsed and glowed and shimmied and flared and stared at you, just like now—staring in at his and Whitey’s own lights as they blipped past on the expressway, just one more set of red and yellow lights streaking along amid a current of red and yellow lights that blipped, blipped, blipped through an unremarkable Sunday dusk.

  Toward where?

  Toward the extinguished lights, dummy. Toward the shattered glass.

  AFTER MIDNIGHT, once Annabeth and the girls had finally gone to sleep and Annabeth’s cousin Celeste, who’d come by as soon as she’d heard, had started dozing on the couch, Jimmy went downstairs and sat on the front porch of the three-decker he shared with the Savage brothers.

  He brought Sean’s glove with him and he slipped it over his hand even though he couldn’t get his thumb in there and the heel of the glove stopped in the middle of his palm. He sat looking out at the four lanes of Buckingham Avenue and tossed a ball into the webbing, the soft thwack of leather against leather calming something in him.

  Jimmy had always liked sitting out here at night. The storefronts across the avenue were closed and mostly dark. At night, a hush fell over an area where commercial business was conducted during the day, and it was a hush unlike any other. The noise that normally ruled the daytime wasn’t gone, it was merely sucked up, as if into a pair of lungs, and then held, waiting to be expelled. He trusted that hush, warmed to it, because it promised the return of the noise, even as it held it captive. Jimmy couldn’t imagine living somewhere rural, where the hush was the noise, where silence was delicate and shattered upon touch.

  But he did like this hush, this rumbling stillness. Up until now, the evening had seemed so noisy, so violent with voices and the weeping of his wife and daughters. Sean Devine had sent over two detectives, Brackett and Rosenthal, to search Katie’s room with embarrassed eyes cast downward, whispering to Jimmy their apologies as they searched drawers and under the bed and mattress, Jimmy wishing they’d just speed it up, stop fucking talking to him. In the end, they didn’t find anything unusual outside of seven hundred dollars in new bills in Katie’s sock drawer. They’d shown it to Jimmy along with her bank book—stamped “Closed”—the final withdrawal having been made Friday afternoon.

  Jimmy had no answer for them. It was a surprise to him. But given all the other surprises of the day, it had very little effect. It just added to the general numbness.

  “We can kill him.”

  Val stepped out onto the porch and handed Jimmy a beer. He sat down beside him, his feet bare on the steps.

  “O’Donnell?”

  Val nodded. “I’d like to. You know, Jim?”

  “You think he killed Katie.”

  Val nodded. “Or had someone else do it. Don’t you? Her girlfriends sure thought so. They say Roman rolled up on them in a bar, threatened Katie.”

  “Threatened?”

  “Well, gave her some shit anyway, like she was still O’Donnell’s girl. Come on, Jimmy, it had to be Bobby.”

  Jimmy said, “I don’t know that for sure yet.”

  “What’ll you do when you do know?”

  Jimmy put the baseball glove on the step below him and opened his beer. He took a long, s
low drink from it. “I don’t know that, either.”

  14

  AIN’T EVER GOING TO FEEL THAT AGAIN

  THEY WENT at it all night and into the morning—Sean, Whitey Powers, Souza and Connolly, two other members of the State Homicide Unit, Brackett and Rosenthal, plus a legion of troopers and CSS techs, photographers and medical examiners—everyone banging at the case like a steel box. They’d scraped every leaf in the park for evidence. They’d filled notebooks with diagrams and field reports. The troopers had conducted the house-to-house Q & A’s of every house within walking distance of the park, filled a van with vagrants from the park and the burned-out shells on Sydney. They searched through the backpack they’d found in Katie Marcus’s car and come up with the usual shit before finding a brochure for Las Vegas and a list of Vegas hotels on lined yellow paper.

  Whitey showed the brochure to Sean and whistled. “What we in the biz call a clue. Let’s go talk to the friends.”

  Eve Pigeon and Diane Cestra, maybe the last two decent people to see Katie Marcus alive according to her father, looked like they’d taken whacks to the back of their heads from the same shovel. Whitey and Sean worked them softly between the almost constant buckets of tears that streamed down their faces. The girls provided them with a timeline of Katie Marcus’s actions on her last night alive and gave them the names of the bars they’d gone to along with approximate times of arrival and departure, but when it came to the personal stuff, both Sean and Whitey felt they were holding back, exchanging looks before they’d answer, getting vague where before they’d been definite:

  “She dating anybody?”

  “Nobody, like, regular.”

  “How about casually?”

  “Well…”

  “Yeah?”

  “She didn’t keep us real current on that kinda thing.”

  “Diane, Eve, come on. Your best friend since kindergarten, and she don’t tell you who she’s dating?”

  “She was private like that.”

  “Yeah, private. That was Katie, sir.”