Mystic River

  “My father didn’t have a gun,” he said, but Sean could see something beginning to go to work in the kid’s brain.

  “No? Bullshit.” He slapped the desk hard enough to jerk the kid in his chair. “You say you loved Katie Marcus? Let me tell you what I love, Brendan. I love my clearance rate. I love my ability to put down cases in seventy-two hours. Now you are fucking lying to me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are, kid. You know your father was a thief?”

  “He was a subway—”

  “He was a fucking thief. He worked with Jimmy Marcus. Who was also a fucking thief. And now Jimmy’s daughter is killed with your father’s gun?”

  “My father didn’t have a gun.”

  “Fuck you!” Sean bellowed, and Connolly shot up in his chair, looked over at them. “You want to bullshit someone, kid? Bullshit your cell.”

  Sean took his keys from his belt and tossed them over his head at Connolly.

  “Lock this maggot up.”

  Brendan stood. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Sean watched Connolly step up behind the kid, tensing on the balls of his feet.

  “You got no alibi, Brendan, and you had a prior relationship with the victim, and she was shot with your father’s gun. Until I got better, I’ll take you. Have a rest, think about the statements you just made to me.”

  “You can’t lock me up.” Brendan looked behind him at Connolly. “You can’t.”

  Connolly looked back at Sean, wide-eyed, because the kid was right. Technically, they couldn’t lock him up unless they charged him. And they had nothing to charge him with, really. It was against the law in this state to charge anyone with suspicion.

  But Brendan didn’t know any of that, and Sean gave Connolly a look that said: Welcome to Homicide, new boy.

  Sean said, “You don’t tell me something right now, kid, I’m doing it.”

  Brendan opened his mouth, and Sean saw a dark knowledge pass through him like an electric eel. Then his mouth closed, and he shook his head.

  “Suspicion of capital murder,” Sean said to Connolly. “Jail his ass.”

  DAVE GOT BACK to his empty apartment in the midafternoon and went straight to the fridge for a beer. He hadn’t eaten anything and his stomach felt hollow and bubbling with air. Not the best conditions under which to throw back a beer, but Dave needed one. He needed to soften the edge in his head and take the crimps out of his neck, ease the wild-rat banging of his heart.

  The first one went down easy as he walked around the empty apartment. Celeste could have come home while he was gone and then went off to work, and he thought of calling Ozma’s to see if she was in there now, cutting heads and chatting with the ladies, flirting with Paolo, the gay guy who worked the same shifts as she did and flirted in that loose but not entirely harmless way gay men did. Or maybe he’d go down to Michael’s school, give him a big wave and a hug, then walk him back toward home, stop for chocolate milk on the way.

  But Michael wasn’t in school and Celeste wasn’t at work. Dave somehow knew that they were hiding from him, so he finished his second beer sitting at the kitchen table, feeling it work its way into his body, calming everything, turning the air in front of him a tad silver and a tad swirly.

  He should have told her. Right from the start, he should have told his wife what had really happened. He should have had faith in her. Not many wives stood by has-been high school ballplayers who’d been molested as children and couldn’t hold down a decent job. But Celeste had. Just the thought of her over the sink the other night, washing those clothes, saying she was taking care of the evidence, babe—Jesus, she was something. How could Dave have lost sight of that? How did you get to the point where you’d been around someone for so long that you couldn’t even see them?

  Dave got the third and last beer out of the fridge and walked around the apartment some more, his body filling with love for his wife and love for his son. He wanted to curl up against his wife’s naked body as she stroked his hair and tell her how much he’d missed her in that interrogation room with its cracked chair and its cold. Earlier, he’d thought he’d wanted human warmth, but the truth was he’d just wanted Celeste’s warmth. He wanted to wrap her body around his and make her smile and kiss her eyelids and caress her back and smother himself with her.

  It’s not too late, he’d tell her when she came home. My brain’s just been miswired recently, all jumbled up. This beer in my hand ain’t helping matters, I suppose, but I need it until I have you again. And then I’ll quit. I’ll quit drinking and I’ll take computer classes or something, get a good white-collar job. The National Guard offers tuition reimbursement, and I can do that. I can do one weekend a month and a few weeks in the summer for my family. For my family, I can do that standing on my head. It’ll help me get back into shape, lose the beer weight, clear my mind. And when I get that white-collar job, I’ll move us out of here, out of this whole neighborhood with its steadily rising rents and stadium deals and gentrification. Why fight it? They’ll push us out sooner or later. Push us out and make a Crate & Barrel world for themselves, discuss their summer homes at the cafés and in the aisles of the whole-food markets.

  We’ll go someplace good, though, he’d tell Celeste. We’ll go someplace clean where we can raise our son. We’ll start fresh. And I’ll tell you what happened, Celeste. It’s not pretty, but it’s not as bad as you think. I’ll tell you that I have some scary, perverse things in my head and maybe I need to see someone about them. I have wants that disgust me, but I’m trying, honey. I’m trying to be a good man. I’m trying to bury the Boy. Or at the very least, teach him something about compassion.

  Maybe that’s what the guy in the Cadillac had been looking for—a little compassion. But the Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves wasn’t about any fucking compassion Saturday night. He’d had that gun in his hand and he’d hit the guy in the Cadillac through his open window, Dave hearing bone crack as the red-haired kid scrambled up and out through the passenger door, stood there with his mouth agape as Dave hit the guy again and again. He’d reached in and pulled him out through the door by his hair, and the guy hadn’t been as helpless as he’d pretended. He’d been playing possum, and Dave only saw the knife as it sliced through his shirt and into his flesh. It was a switchblade, feebly swung, but sharp enough to cut Dave before he rammed his knee into the guy’s wrist, pinned his arm against the car door. When the knife fell to the pavement, Dave kicked it under the car.

  The red-haired kid looked scared, but excited too, and Dave, enraged beyond reason now, brought the butt of the gun down on top of the guy’s head so hard, he cracked the handle. The guy rolled onto his stomach, and Dave hopped on his back, feeling the wolf, hating this man, this freak, this fucking degenerate child molester, getting a good grip on the bastard’s hair and pulling his head up and then ramming it down into the pavement. Just ramming it, over and over again, pulverizing this guy, this Henry, this George, this, oh Jesus, this Dave, this Dave.

  Die, you motherfucker. Die, die, die.

  The red-haired kid ran off then, Dave turning his head and realizing the words were coming out of his mouth. “Die, die, die, die, die.” Dave watched the kid run off through the parking lot and he scrambled after him, his hands dripping with the guy’s blood. He wanted to tell the red-haired kid that he’d done this for him. He’d saved him. And he would protect him forever if that’s what he wanted.

  He stood in the alley behind the bar, out of breath, knowing the kid was long gone. He looked up at the night sky. He said, “Why?”

  Why put me here? Why give me this life? Why give me this disease, a disease that I despise, in particular, more than any other? Why scramble my brain with moments of beauty and tenderness and intermittent love for my child and my wife—glimpses, really, of a life that could have been mine if that car hadn’t rolled down Gannon Street and taken me to that basement? Why?

  Answer me, please. Oh, please, please, answer me.

&nbs
p; But, of course, there was nothing. Nothing but silence and the drip of gutters and the light rain turning stronger.

  He walked back out of the alley a few minutes later and found the man lying beside his car.

  Wow, Dave thought. I killed him.

  But then the guy rolled over onto his side, gasping like a fish. He had blond hair and a pillow for a belly on an otherwise slim frame. Dave tried to remember what his face had looked like before he’d plunged his hand through the open window and hit him with the gun. He remembered only that his lips had seemed too red and too wide.

  The guy’s face was gone now, though. It looked like it had been pressed against a jet engine, and Dave felt a wave of nausea as he watched this bloody thing suck at the air, heaving.

  The guy didn’t seem to be aware of Dave standing over him. He rolled onto his knees and started crawling. He crawled toward the trees behind the car. He crawled up the small embankment and put his hands on the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from the scrap metal company on the other side. Dave took off the flannel shirt he was wearing over his T-shirt. He wrapped it around the gun as he walked toward the faceless creature.

  The faceless creature reached up another rung in the fence, and then his energy left him. He fell back down and tilted to his right, ended up sitting against the fence, his legs splayed, his faceless face watching Dave come.

  “No,” he whispered. “No.”

  But Dave could tell he didn’t mean it. He was as exhausted with who he’d become as Dave was.

  The Boy knelt in front of the guy and placed the wrapped-up ball of flannel shirt against his torso, just above the abdomen, Dave floating above them now, watching.

  “Please,” the guy croaked.

  “Sssh,” Dave said, and the Boy pulled the trigger.

  The faceless creature’s body jerked hard enough to kick Dave in the armpit, and then the air left it with the whistle of a kettle.

  And the Boy said, Good.

  It was only once he’d manhandled the guy into the Honda’s trunk that Dave realized he should have used the guy’s Cadillac. He’d already rolled up its windows and shut off the engine and then wiped down the front seat and everything he’d touched with the flannel shirt. But what was the point of riding around in his Honda with the guy in the trunk, trying to find a place to dump him, when the answer was right in front of him?

  So Dave backed his car in beside the Caddy, his eyes on the side door of the bar, no one having come out for a while. He popped his trunk, then popped the Caddy’s trunk, and pulled the body from one car to the other. He shut the two trunks and wrapped the switchblade and his gun in the flannel shirt, tossed it on the Honda’s front seat, and got the hell out of there.

  He threw the shirt and knife and the gun off the Roseclair Street Bridge and into the Penitentiary Channel, realizing only later that as he’d been doing that, Katie Marcus was probably in the process of dying herself in the park below. And then he’d driven home, certain that any minute someone would find the car and the body in the trunk.

  He’d driven by the Last Drop late Sunday, and there was a car parked beside the Caddy, the lot otherwise empty. But he recognized the other car as belonging to Reggie Damone, one of the bartenders. The Caddy looked innocent, forgotten. Later that same day, he’d gone back, and felt like he was having a heart attack when he saw an empty slot where the Caddy used to be. He realized he couldn’t ask about it, even casually, like, “Hey, Reggie, you guys tow if a car’s in your lot too long?” and then he realized whatever had happened to it, there was nothing to connect it to him anymore.

  Nothing but the red-haired kid.

  But as time had passed, it occurred to him that even though the kid had been scared, he’d been pleased, too, excited. He was on Dave’s side. He wasn’t anything to worry about.

  And now the cops had nothing. They didn’t have a witness. They didn’t have the evidence from Dave’s car, not the kind they could use in court anyway. So Dave could relax. He could talk to Celeste and come clean and let the chips fall where they may, offer himself up to his wife and hope she’d accept him as flawed but trying to change. As a good man who’d done a bad thing for a good reason. As a man who was trying his damnedest to slay the vampire in his soul.

  I will quit driving by parks and public swimming pools, Dave told himself as he drained his third beer. He held up the empty can. I will quit this, too.

  But not today. Today he was already three beers in and, what the hell, Celeste didn’t look like she’d be coming home soon. Maybe tomorrow. That’d be good. Give them both some space, time to heal and repair. She’d come home to a new man, an improved Dave with no more secrets.

  “Because secrets are poison,” he said aloud in the kitchen where he’d last made love to his wife. “Secrets are walls.” And then with a smile: “And I’m all out of beer.”

  He felt good, jaunty almost, as he left the house to walk up to Eagle Liquors. It was a gorgeous day, the sun flooding the street. When they’d been kids, the el tracks used to run down here, splitting Crescent in the center and piling it with soot and blotting out the sky. It only added to the sense one got of the Flats as a place cloaked from the rest of the world, tucked under it like a banished tribe, free to live any way it chose as long as it did so in exile.

  Once they’d removed the tracks, the Flats had risen into the light, and for a while they’d thought that was a good thing. So much less soot, so much more sun, skin looked healthier. But without the cloak, everyone could look in on them, appreciate their brick row houses and view of the Penitentiary Channel and proximity to downtown. Suddenly they weren’t an underground tribe. They were prime real estate.

  Dave would have to think about how that had happened when he got back home, formulate a theory with his twelve-pack. Or he could find a cool bar, sit in the dark on a bright day and order a burger, chat with the bartender, see if the two of them together could figure out when the Flats had started slipping away, when the whole world had started revolving past them.

  Maybe that’s what he’d do. Sure! Take a leather seat at a mahogany bar and while away the afternoon. He’d plan his future. He’d plan his family’s future. He’d figure out each and every way in which he could atone. It was amazing how friendly three beers could be after a long, hard day. They were taking Dave by the hand as he walked up the hill toward Buckingham Avenue. They were saying, Hey, ain’t it great to be us? Ain’t it just the flat-out balls to be turning a new leaf, shedding yourself of soiled secrets, ready to renew your vows to your loved ones and become the man you always knew you could be? Why, it’s just terrific.

  And look who we have ahead of us, idling at the corner in his shiny sports car. He’s smiling at us. That’s Val Savage, smiling away, waving us over! Come on. Let’s go say hi.

  “Dandy Dave Boyle,” Val said as Dave approached the car. “How they hanging, brother?”

  “Always to the left,” Dave said, and squatted down by the car. He rested his elbows on the slot where the window had descended into the door and peered in at Val. “What’re you up to?”

  Val shrugged. “Not much, man. Was looking for someone to grab a beer with, maybe a bite to eat.”

  Dave couldn’t believe this. Here he’d been thinking the same thing. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You could go for a few pops, maybe a game of pool, right, Dave?”

  “Sure.”

  Dave was a bit surprised, actually. He got along with Jimmy and Val’s brother Kevin, even sometimes with Chuck, but he never remembered Val showing anything but complete apathy in his presence. It must be Katie, he figured. In death, she was bringing them all together. They were united in their loss, forging bonds through the sharing of tragedy.

  “Hop in,” Val said. “We’ll hit a place I know across town. Good bar. A buddy of mine owns it.”

  “Across town?” Dave looked back up the empty street he’d just come down. “Well, I’ll have to get home at some point.”

  “Su
re, sure,” Val said. “I’ll take you back whenever you want. Come on. Hop in. We’ll have ourselves a boys’ night in the middle of the day.”

  Dave smiled and took the smile with him as he walked around the front of Val’s car toward the passenger door. Boys’ night in the middle of the day. Exactly what was called for. Him and Val, hanging like old pals. And that was one of the great things about a place like the Flats, the thing he feared would be lost—the way old feelings and entire pasts could be laid to rest with time, as you aged, once you realized that everything was changing and the only things that remained the same were the people you’d grown up with and the place you’d come from. The neighborhood. May it live forever, Dave thought as he opened the door, if only in our minds.

  25

  TRUNK BOY

  WHITEY AND SEAN had a late lunch in Pat’s Diner, one highway exit down from the barracks. Pat’s had been around since World War II and had been a hangout for the Staties so long that Pat the Third liked to say his may have been the only family of restaurateurs to go three full generations without getting robbed.

  Whitey swallowed a hunk of cheeseburger and chased it with his soda. “You don’t think for a second the kid did it, do you?”

  Sean took a bite of his tuna sandwich. “I know he was lying to me. I think he knows something about that gun. And I think—just possibly now—that his old man’s still alive.”

  Whitey dipped an onion ring in some tartar sauce. “The five hundred a month from New York?”

  “Yeah. You know what that adds up to over the years? Almost eighty grand. Who’s going to send that if it ain’t the father?”

  Whitey dabbed his lips with a napkin and then dove back into his cheeseburger, Sean wondering how the guy had managed to dodge a heart attack so far, eating and drinking the way he did, pulling seventy-hour weeks when a case sank its teeth into him.

  “Let’s say he is alive,” Whitey said.