Mystic River

  “Why you want to go back there?” his father said eventually.

  “You know that Jimmy Marcus’s daughter was murdered?”

  His father looked at him. “That girl in Pen Park?”

  Sean nodded.

  “I saw the name,” his father said, “figured it might be a relative, but his daughter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s your age. He has a nineteen-year-old daughter?”

  “Jimmy had her when he was, I dunno, seventeen or so, a couple years before he got sent up to Deer Island.”

  “Aww Jesus,” his father said. “That poor son of a bitch. His old man still in prison?”

  Sean said, “He died, Dad.”

  Sean could see that the answer hurt his father, rocked him back to the kitchen on Gannon Street, he and Jimmy’s father working on those soft Saturday afternoon beer buzzes as their sons played in the backyard, the thunder of their laughter exploding into the air.

  “Shit,” his father said. “He die on the outside at least?”

  Sean considered lying, but he was already shaking his head. “Inside. Walpole. Cirrhosis.”

  “When?”

  “Not long after you moved. Six years ago, maybe seven.”

  His father’s mouth widened around a silent “seven.” He sipped his beer and the liver spots on the back of his hands seemed more pronounced in the yellow light hanging above them. “It’s so easy to lose track. To lose time.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  His father grimaced. It was his only response to sympathy or compliments. “Why? You didn’t do it. Hell, Tim did himself in when he killed Sonny Todd.”

  “Over a pool game. Right?”

  His father shrugged. “They were both drunk. Who knows anymore? They were drunk and they both had big mouths and bad tempers. Tim’s temper was just a lot worse than Sonny Todd’s.” His father sipped some more beer. “So, what’s Dave Boyle’s disappearance have to do with—what was her name, was it Katherine? Katherine Marcus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what does the one have to do with the other?”

  “I’m not saying they do.”

  “You’re not saying they don’t.”

  Sean smiled in spite of himself. Give him a hardened gangbanger in the box any day, some guy trying to lawyer up who knew the system better than most judges, because Sean would crack him. But take one of these old-timers, these hard-as-nails, mistrustful bastards from his father’s generation—working stiffs with a lot of pride and no respect for any state or municipal office—and you could bang at them all night, and if they didn’t want to tell you anything, you’d still be there in the morning with nothing but the same unanswered questions.

  “Hey, Dad, let’s not worry about any connections just yet.”

  “Why not?”

  Sean held up a hand. “Okay? Just humor me.”

  “Oh, sure, it’s what’s keeping me alive, the chance I might get to humor my own son.”

  Sean felt his hand tighten around the handle of his glass mug. “I looked up the case file on Dave’s abduction. The investigating officer is dead. No one else remembers the case, and it’s still listed as unsolved.”

  “So?”

  “So, I remember you coming into my room maybe a year after Dave came home and saying, ‘It’s over. They got the guys.’”

  His father shrugged. “They got one of them.”

  “So, why didn’t—?”

  “In Albany,” his father said. “I saw the picture in the paper. The guy had confessed to a couple molestations in New York and claimed he’d done a few more in Massachusetts and Vermont. The guy hung himself in his cell before he could get to the particulars. But I recognized the guy’s face from the sketch the cop drew in our kitchen.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded. “Hundred percent. The investigating detective—his name was, ah—”

  “Flynn,” Sean said.

  His father nodded. “Mike Flynn. Right. I’d kept in contact with him, you know, a bit. So I called him after I saw the picture in the paper, and he said, yeah, it was the same guy. Dave had confirmed it.”

  “Which one?”

  “Huh?”

  “Which guy?”

  “Oh. The, ah, how’d you describe him? ‘The greasy one who looked sleepy.’”

  Sean’s child’s words seemed strange coming out of his father’s mouth and across the table at him. “The passenger.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And his partner?” Sean said.

  His father shook his head. “Died in a car crash. Or so the other one said. That’s as far as I know, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in what I know. Hell, you had to tell me Tim Marcus was dead.”

  Sean drained what remained in his mug, pointed at his father’s empty glass. “Another?”

  His father considered the glass for a bit. “What the hell. Sure.”

  When Sean came back from the bar with fresh beers, his father was watching Jeopardy! run silently on one of the TV screens above the bar. As Sean sat down, his father said, “Who is Robert Oppenheimer?” to the TV.

  “Without the volume,” Sean said, “how do you know if you got it right?”

  “Because I do,” his father said, and poured his beer into his mug, frowning at the stupidity of Sean’s question. “You guys do that a lot. I’ll never understand it.”

  “Do what? What guys?”

  His father gestured at him with the beer mug. “Guys your age. You ask a lot of questions without thinking the answer might be obvious if you just gave it some friggin’ thought.”

  “Oh,” Sean said. “Okay.”

  “Like this Dave Boyle stuff,” his father said. “What does it matter what happened twenty-five years ago to Dave? You know what happened. He disappeared for four days with two child molesters. What happened was exactly what you’d think would happen. But here you come dredging it back up again because…” His father took a drink. “Hell, I don’t know why.”

  His father gave him a befuddled smile and Sean matched it with his own.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You telling me that nothing ever happened in your past that you don’t think about, turn over in your head a lot?”

  His father sighed. “That’s not the point.”

  “Sure, it is.”

  “No, it isn’t. Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain’t special. But your whole generation, you’re scab pickers. You just can’t leave well enough alone. You have evidence linking Dave to Katherine Marcus’s death?”

  Sean laughed. The old man had come around his flank, pushing Sean’s buttons with the “your generation” slurs while all the time what he wanted to know was if Dave was involved in Katie’s death.

  “Let’s say there are a couple of circumstantial things which make Dave look like someone we’d like to keep an eye on.”

  “You call that an answer?”

  “You call that a question?”

  His father’s terrific smile broke across his face then and erased a good fifteen years from his face, Sean remembering how that smile could spread through the whole house when he was young, lighting everything up.

  “So you were bugging me about Dave because you’re wondering if what those guys did to him could turn him into a guy who’d kill a young girl.”

  Sean shrugged. “Something like that.”

  His father gave that some thought as he stirred the peanuts in the bowl between them and sipped some more beer. “I don’t think so.”

  Sean chuckled. “You know him that well, do you?”

  “No. I just remember him as a kid. He didn’t have that kind of thing in him.”

  “Lot of nice kids grow up to be adults who do shit you wouldn’t believe.”

  His father cocked an eyebrow at him. “You trying to tell me about human nature?”

  Sean shook his head. “Just police work.”

  His father leaned back in his chair
, considered Sean with the tug of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Come on. Enlighten me.”

  Sean felt his face redden a bit. “Hey, no, I’m just—”

  “Please.”

  Sean felt foolish. It was amazing how fast his father could do that, make him feel as if what would pass as a normal set of observations with most of the people Sean knew was, in his father’s eyes, the boy Sean trying to act grown up and merely succeeding at sounding pompous instead.

  “Give me a little credit. I think I know a bit about people and crime. It’s, you know, my job.”

  “So you think Dave could have butchered a nineteen-year-old girl, Sean? Dave, who you used to play with in the backyard. That kid?”

  “I think anyone’s capable of anything.”

  “So, I could have done it.” His father put a hand to his chest. “Or your mother.”

  “No.”

  “Better check our alibis.”

  “I didn’t say that. Jesus.”

  “Sure you did. You said anyone was capable of anything.”

  “Within reason.”

  “Oh,” his father said loudly. “Well, I didn’t hear that part.”

  He was doing it again—wrapping Sean up in knots, playing him like Sean played suspects in the box. No wonder Sean was so good at interrogation. He’d learned from a master.

  They sat in silence for a bit, and eventually his father said, “Hey, maybe you’re right.”

  Sean looked at him, waited for the punch line.

  “Maybe Dave could have done what you think. I dunno. I’m just remembering the kid. I don’t know the man.”

  Sean tried to see himself through his father’s eyes then. He wondered if that’s what his father saw—the kid, not the man—when he looked at his son. Probably hard to do otherwise.

  He remembered the way his uncles used to talk about his father, the youngest brother in a family of twelve who’d emigrated from Ireland when his father was five. The “old Bill,” they’d say, referring to the Bill Devine who’d existed before Sean was born. The “scrapper.” Only now could Sean hear their voices and feel the hint of patronization an older generation feels for a younger, most of Sean’s uncles having a good twelve or fifteen years on their baby brother.

  They were all dead now. All eleven of his father’s brothers and sisters. And here was the baby of the family, closing in on seventy-five, and holed up here in the suburbs by a golf course he’d never use. The last one left, and yet still the youngest, always the youngest, squaring off at all times against even the whiff of condescension from anyone, particularly his son. Blocking out the whole world, if he had to, before he’d endure that, or even the perception of it. Because all those who’d had the right to behave that way toward him had long since passed from the earth.

  His father glanced at Sean’s beer and tossed some singles onto the table for a tip.

  “You about done?” he said.

  THEY WALKED BACK across Route 28 and up the entrance road with its yellow speed bumps and sprinkler spray.

  “You know what your mother likes?” his father said.

  “What?”

  “When you write to her. You know, a card every now and then for no good reason. She says you send funny cards and she likes the way you write. She keeps them in the bedroom in a drawer. Has ones going back to when you were in college.”

  “Okay.”

  “Every now and then, you know? Drop one in the mail.”

  “Sure.”

  They reached Sean’s car and his father looked up at the dark windows of his duplex.

  “She gone to bed?” Sean asked.

  His father nodded. “She’s driving Mrs. Coughlin to physical therapy in the morning.” His father reached out abruptly and shook Sean’s hand. “Good seeing you.”

  “You, too.”

  “She coming back?”

  Sean didn’t have to ask who “she” was.

  “I dunno. I really don’t.”

  His father looked at him under the pale yellow street lamp above them, and for a moment, Sean could see that it pierced something in him, knowing his son was hurting, knowing he’d been abandoned, damaged, and that that did something permanent to you, spooned something out of you that you’d never get back.

  “Well,” his father said, “you look good. Like you’re taking care of yourself. You drinking too much, anything like that?”

  Sean shook his head. “I just work a lot.”

  “Work’s good,” his father said.

  “Yeah,” Sean said, and felt something bitter and abandoned rise up in his throat.

  “So…”

  “So.”

  His father clapped a hand on his shoulder. “So, okay then. Don’t forget to call your mother Sunday,” he said, and left Sean by the car, walked toward his front door with the stride of a man twenty years younger.

  “Take care,” Sean said, and his father raised his hand in confirmation.

  Sean used the remote to unlock the car, and he was reaching for the door handle when he heard his father say, “Hey.”

  “Yeah?” He looked back and saw his father standing by the front door, his upper half dissolved in a soft darkness.

  “You were right not to get in that car that day. Remember that.”

  Sean leaned against his car, his palms on the roof, and tried to make out his father’s face in the dark.

  “We should have protected Dave, though.”

  “You were kids,” his father said. “You couldn’t have known. And even if you could have, Sean…”

  Sean let that sink in. He drummed his hands on the roof and peered into the dark for his father’s eyes. “That’s what I tell myself.”

  “Well?”

  He shrugged. “I still think we should have known. Somehow. Don’t you think?”

  For a good minute, neither of them said anything, and Sean could hear crickets amid the hiss of the lawn sprinklers.

  “Good night, Sean,” his father said through the hiss.

  “’Night,” Sean said, and waited until his father had gone inside before he climbed into his car and headed home.

  21

  GOBLINS

  DAVE WAS SITTING in the living room when Celeste came home. He sat on the corner of the cracked leather couch with two columns of empty beer cans rising up beside the arm of the chair and a fresh one in his hand, the remote control resting on his thigh. He watched a movie where everyone, it seemed, was screaming.

  Celeste took her coat off in the hall and watched the light flicker off Dave’s face, heard the screams grow louder and more panicked, intermingled with Hollywood sound effects of tables shattering and what could only be the squishing of body parts.

  “What are you watching?” she said.

  “Some vampire movie,” Dave said, his eyes on the screen as he raised the Bud to his lips. “The head vampire’s killing everyone at this party the vampire slayers were having. They work for the Vatican.”

  “Who?”

  “The vampire slayers. Oooh, shit,” Dave said, “he just tore that guy’s head clean off.”

  Celeste stepped into the living room, looked at the screen as a guy in black flew across the room and grabbed a terrified woman by the face and snapped her neck.

  “Jesus, Dave.”

  “No, it’s cool, ’cause now James Woods is pissed.”

  “Who’s James Woods?”

  “The lead vampire slayer. He’s a bad-ass.”

  She saw him now—James Woods in a leather jacket and tight jeans as he picked up some sort of crossbow and started to point it at the vampire. But the vampire was too quick. He swatted James Woods all the way across the room like he was a moth, and then another guy came running into the room, firing an automatic pistol at the vampire. It didn’t seem to do much good, but then they were suddenly running past the vampire, as if he’d forgotten where they were.

  “Is that a Baldwin brother?” Celeste said. She sat on the arm of the couch, up by where it met
the back, and leaned her head against the wall.

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. I lose track.”

  She watched them run across a motel room strewn with more corpses than Celeste would have thought could fit in such a small space, and her husband said, “Man, the Vatican’s going to have to train a whole new team of slayers.”

  “Why’s the Vatican care about vampires again?”

  Dave smiled and looked up at her with his boyish face and beautiful eyes. “They’re a big problem, honey. Notorious chalice thieves.”

  “Chalice thieves?” she said, and felt an urge to reach down and run her hand through his hair, the whole horrible day dropping away in this silly discussion. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yeah. Big problem,” Dave said, and drained his beer as James Woods and the Baldwin brother and some drugged-up-looking girl raced down an empty road in a pickup truck, the vampire flying after them now. “Where you been?”

  “I dropped off the dress at Reed’s.”

  “Hours ago,” Dave said.

  “And then I just felt like I needed to sit somewhere and think. You know?”

  “Think,” Dave said. “Sure.” He got up off the couch and walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge. “You want one?”

  She didn’t, really, but she said, “Yeah, okay.”

  Dave came back into the room and handed her the beer. She could often tell what kind of mood he was in by whether he’d opened the can for her. The can had been opened, but she wasn’t sure if this was good or bad. She was having trouble gauging him.

  “So, what’d you think about?” He popped the tab on his own can and it was an even louder sound than the screeching tires on the TV as the pickup truck flipped over.

  “Oh, you know.”

  “Not really, Celeste, no.”

  “Things,” she said, and took a sip of the beer. “The day, Katie being dead, poor Jimmy and Annabeth, those things.”

  “Those things,” Dave said. “You know what I was thinking about as I was walking back home with Michael, Celeste? I was thinking how embarrassing it must have been for him to hear his mother just drove off and didn’t tell anyone where she was going or when she was coming back. I was thinking about that a lot.”