Gone, Baby, Gone

  We shook our heads.

  “The picture tube was going on her TV. The color went in and out, and Helene didn’t like that. So she left her kid behind and went next door.”

  “For TV.”

  He nodded. “For TV.”

  “Wow,” Angie said.

  He looked at us steadily for a full minute, then hitched his pants and said, “Two of my best guys, Poole and Broussard, will contact you. They’ll be your liaisons. If you can help, I’m not going to stand in your way.” He rubbed his face with his hands again, shook his head. “Shit, I’m tired.”

  “When’s the last time you slept?” Angie said.

  “Beyond a catnap?” He chuckled softly. “Few days at least.”

  “You must have someone who relieves you,” Angie said.

  “Don’t want relief,” he said. “I want this child. And I want her in one piece. And I want her yesterday.”

  3

  Helene McCready was watching herself on TV when we entered Lionel’s house with Lionel and Beatrice.

  The on-screen Helene wore a light blue dress and matching jacket with the bulb of a white rose pinned to the lapel. Her hair flowed down to her shoulders. Her face carried just a hint of excessive makeup, hastily applied around the eyes perhaps.

  The real Helene McCready wore a pink T-shirt with the words BORN TO SHOP on the front and a pair of white sweatpants that had been shorn just above the knees. Her hair, tied in a loose ponytail, looked like it had been through so many dye jobs it had forgotten its original color and was stuck somewhere between platinum and greasy wheat.

  Another woman sat on the couch beside the real Helene McCready, about the same age but thicker and paler, dimples of cellulite pocking the white flesh under her upper arms as she raised a cigarette to her lips and leaned forward to concentrate on the TV.

  “Look, Dottie, look,” Helene said. “There’s Gregor and Head Sparks.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Dottie pointed at the screen as two men walked behind the reporter interviewing Helene. The men waved at the camera.

  “Look at ’em waving.” Helene smiled. “The punks.”

  “Smart-asses,” Dottie said.

  Helene raised a can of Miller to her lips with the same hand that held her cigarette, and the long ash curled down toward her chin as she drank.

  “Helene,” Lionel said.

  “One sec, one sec.” Helene waved her beer can at him, her eyes fixed on the screen. “This is the best part.”

  Beatrice caught our eyes and rolled her own.

  On TV, the reporter asked Helene who she thought could be responsible for the abduction of her child.

  “How do you answer a question like that?” the TV Helene said. “I mean, like, who would take my little girl? What’s the point? She never did nothing to nobody. She was just a little girl with a beautiful smile. That’s what she did all the time, she smiled.”

  “She did have a beautiful smile,” Dottie said.

  “Does,” Beatrice said.

  The women on the couch seemed not to have heard her.

  “Oh, it was,” Helene said. “It was perfect. Just perfect. Break your heart.” Helene’s voice cracked, and she put down her beer long enough to grab a Kleenex from a box on the coffee table.

  Dottie patted her knee and clucked. “There, there,” Dottie said. “There, there.”

  “Helene,” Lionel said.

  TV coverage of Helene had given way to footage of O.J. playing golf somewhere in Florida.

  “I still can’t believe he got away with it,” Helene said.

  Dottie turned to her. “I know,” she said, as if she’d been unburdened of a great secret.

  “If he wasn’t black,” Helene said, “he’d be in jail now.”

  “If he wasn’t black,” Dottie said, “he’d have gotten the chair.”

  “If he wasn’t black,” Angie said, “you two wouldn’t care.”

  They turned their heads and looked back at us. They seemed mildly surprised by the four people standing behind them, as if we’d suddenly appeared there like Magi.

  “What?” Dottie said, her brown eyes darting across our chests.

  “Helene,” Lionel said.

  Helene looked up into his face, her mascara smudged under puffy eyes. “Yeah?”

  “This is Patrick and Angie, the two detectives we talked about.”

  Helene gave us a limp wave with her sodden Kleenex. “Hi-ya.”

  “Hi,” Angie said.

  “Hi-ya,” I said.

  “I ’member you,” Dottie said to Angie. “You ’member me?”

  Angie smiled kindly and shook her head.

  “MRM High,” Dottie said. “I was, like, a freshman. You were a senior.”

  Angie gave it some thought, shook her head again.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dottie said. “I ’member you. Prom Queen. That’s what we called you.” She swigged some beer. “You still like that?”

  “Like what?” Angie said.

  “Like you think you’re better than everyone else.” She peered at Angie with eyes so tiny it was hard to tell if they were bleary or not. “That was you all over. Miss Perfect. Miss—”

  “Helene.” Angie turned her head to concentrate on Helene McCready. “We need to speak to you about Amanda.”

  But Helene had her eyes on me, her cigarette frozen a quarter inch from her lips. “You look like someone. Dottie, doesn’t he?”

  “What?” Dottie said.

  “Look like someone.” Helene took two quick hits from her cigarette.

  “Who?” Dottie stared at me now.

  “You know,” Helene said. “That guy. That guy on that show, you know the one.”

  “No,” Dottie said, and gave me a hesitant smile. “What show?”

  “That show,” Helene said. “You gotta know the one I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You gotta.”

  “What show?” Dottie turned her head to look at Helene. “What show?”

  Helene blinked at her and frowned. Then she looked back at me. “You look just like him,” she assured me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Beatrice leaned against the hallway doorjamb and closed her eyes.

  “Helene,” Lionel said, “Patrick and Angie have to talk to you about Amanda. Alone.”

  “What,” Dottie said, “I’m some kind of freak?”

  “No, Dottie,” Lionel said carefully. “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’m some kind of fucking loser, Lionel? Not good enough to be with my best friend when she needs me most?”

  “He’s not saying that,” Beatrice said in a tired voice, her eyes still closed.

  “Then again…” I said.

  Dottie screwed up her blotchy face, looked at me.

  “Helene,” Angie said hurriedly, “it would go a lot faster if we could just ask you some questions alone and be out of your hair.”

  Helene looked at Angie. Then at Lionel. Then at the TV. Finally she focused on the back of Dottie’s head.

  Dottie was still looking at me, confused, trying to decide if the confusion should mutate into anger or not.

  “Dottie,” Helene said, with the air of someone about to deliver a state address, “is my best friend. My best friend. That means something. You want to talk to me, you talk to her.”

  Dottie’s eyes left mine and she turned to look at her best friend, and Helene nudged her knee with her elbow.

  I glanced at Angie. We’ve been working together so long, I could sum up the look on Angie’s face in two words:

  Screw this.

  I met her eyes and nodded. Life was too short to spend another quarter second with either Helene or Dottie.

  I looked at Lionel and he shrugged, his body puddled with resignation.

  We would have walked out right then—in fact, we were starting to—but Beatrice opened her eyes and blocked our path and said, “Please.”

  “No,” Angie said quietly.

  “An ho
ur,” Beatrice said. “Just give us an hour. We’ll pay.”

  “It’s not the money,” Angie said.

  “Please,” Beatrice said. She looked past Angie, locked eyes with me. She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and her shoulders sagged.

  “One more hour,” I said. “That’s it.”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “Patrick, right?” Helene looked up at me. “That’s your name?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Think you could move a little to your left, Patrick?” Helene said. “You’re blocking the TV.”

  Half an hour later, we’d learned nothing new.

  Lionel, after a lot of wheedling, had convinced his sister to turn off the TV while we talked, but a lack of TV seemed only to further diminish Helene’s attention span. Several times during our conversation, her eyes darted past me to the blank screen as if hoping it would turn back on through divine intervention.

  Dottie, after all her bitching about sticking by her best friend, left the room as soon as we turned off the TV. We heard her knocking around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator for another beer, rattling through the cupboards for an ashtray.

  Lionel sat beside his sister on the couch, and Angie and I sat on the floor against the entertainment center. Beatrice took the end of the couch as far away from Helene as possible, stretched one leg out in front of her, held the other by the ankle between both hands.

  We asked Helene to tell us everything regarding the day of her daughter’s disappearance, asked if there’d been any sort of argument between the two of them, if Helene had angered anyone who’d have a reason to abduct her daughter as an act of vengeance.

  Helene’s voice bore what seemed a constant tone of exasperation as she explained that she never argued with her daughter. How could you argue with someone who smiled all the time? In between the smiling, it seemed, Amanda had only loved her mother and been loved by her, and they’d spent their time loving and smiling and smiling some more. Helene could think of no one she’d angered, and as she’d told the police, even if she had, who would abduct her child to get back at her? Children took work, Helene said. You had to feed them, she assured us. You had to tuck them in. You had to play with them sometimes.

  Hence, all that smiling.

  In the end, she told us nothing we hadn’t learned already from either news reports or Lionel and Beatrice.

  As for Helene herself—the more time I spent with her, the less I wanted to be in the same room. As we discussed her child’s disappearance, she let us in on the fact that she hated her life. She was lonely; there were no good men left; they needed to put a fence up around Mexico to keep out all those Mexicans who were apparently stealing jobs up here in Boston. She was sure there was a liberal agenda to corrupt every decent American but she couldn’t articulate what that agenda was, only that it affected her ability to be happy and it was determined to keep blacks on welfare. Sure, she was on welfare herself, but she’d been trying hard these last seven years to get off.

  She spoke of Amanda as one would speak of a stolen car or an errant pet—she seemed more annoyed than anything else. Her child had disappeared and, boy, had that fucked up her life.

  God, it appeared, had anointed Helene McCready Life’s Great Victim. The rest of us could step out of line now. The competition was over.

  “Helene,” I said, near the end of our conversation, “is there anything you could tell us that you might have forgotten to tell the police?”

  Helene looked at the remote control on the coffee table. “What?” she said.

  I repeated my question.

  “It’s hard,” she said. “You know?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Raising a kid.” She looked up at me and her dull eyes widened, as if she were about to impart great wisdom. “It’s hard. It’s not like in the commercials.”

  When we left the living room, Helene turned on the TV and Dottie swept past us, two beers in hand, as if she’d been given her cue.

  “She’s got some emotional problems,” Lionel told us, once we’d settled in the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” Beatrice said. “She’s a cunt.” She poured coffee into her mug.

  “Don’t say that word,” Lionel said. “For God’s sake.”

  Beatrice poured some coffee into Angie’s cup, looked at me.

  I held up my can of Coke.

  “Lionel,” Angie said, “your sister doesn’t seem too concerned that Amanda’s missing.”

  “Oh, she’s concerned,” Lionel said. “Last night? She cried all night. I think she’s just cried out at the moment. Trying to get a handle on her…grief. You know.”

  “Lionel,” I said, “with all due respect, I see self-pity. I don’t see grief.”

  “It’s there,” Lionel blinked, looked at his wife. “It’s there. Really.”

  Angie said, “I know I’ve said this before, but I really don’t see what we can do that the police aren’t already doing.”

  “I know.” Lionel sighed. “I know.”

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  “Sure,” he agreed.

  “If the police get completely stumped and pull off the case,” Angie said. “Maybe then.”

  “Yeah.” Lionel came off the wall and held out his hand. “Look, thanks for dropping by. Thanks for…everything.”

  “Any time.” I went to shake his hand.

  Beatrice’s voice, jagged but clear, stopped me. “She’s four.”

  I looked at her.

  “Four years old,” she said, her eyes on the ceiling. “And she’s out there somewhere. Maybe lost. Maybe worse.”

  “Honey,” Lionel said.

  Beatrice gave a small shake of her head. She looked at her drink, then tilted her head and slugged it back, her eyes closed. When it was empty, she tossed her mug on the table and bent over, her hands clasped together.

  “Mrs. McCready,” I said, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand.

  “Every second people aren’t trying to find her is a second she feels.” She raised her head and opened her eyes.

  “Honey,” Lionel said.

  “Don’t ‘honey’ me.” She looked at Angie. “Amanda is afraid. She is missing. And Lionel’s bitch sister sits out in my living room with her fat friend sucking down beers and watching herself on TV. And who speaks for Amanda? Huh?” She looked at her husband. She looked at Angie and me, her eyes red. She looked at the floor. “Who shows that little girl that someone gives a shit whether she lives or dies?”

  For a full minute, the only sound in that kitchen came from the hum of the refrigerator motor.

  Then, very softly, Angie said, “I guess we do.”

  I looked at her and raised my eyebrows. She shrugged.

  An odd hybrid of laugh and sob escaped Beatrice’s mouth, and she placed a fist to her lips and stared at Angie as tears filled her eyes but refused to fall.

  4

  The section of Dorchester Avenue that runs through my neighborhood used to have more Irish bars on it than any other street outside Dublin. When I was younger, my father used to participate in a marathon pub crawl to raise money for local charities. Two beers and one shot per bar, and the men would move onto the next one. They’d begin in Fields Corner, the next neighborhood over, and move north up the avenue. The idea was to see which man could remain standing long enough to cross the border into South Boston, less than two miles north.

  My father was a hell of a drinker, as were most of the men who signed up for the pub crawl, but in all the years of its existence, not one man ever made it to Southie.

  Most of those bars are gone now, replaced by Vietnamese restaurants and corner stores. Now known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this four-block section of the avenue is actually a lot more charming than many of my white neighbors seem to find it. You drive it early in the morning, and you often find old men leading fellow senior citizens in tai chi exercises along the sidewalks, see people wearing their native dress of dark silk pa
jamas and wide straw hats. I’ve heard about the alleged gangs, or tongs, working down here, but I’ve never encountered them; mostly I’ve seen young Vietnamese kids with spiked, gel-saturated hair and Gargoyle sunglasses, standing around trying to look cool, trying to look hard, and I find them no different than I was at their age.

  Of the old bars that have survived the latest flux of immigration into our neighborhood, the three that front the avenue itself are very good bars. The owners and their clientele have a laissez-faire attitude toward the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese treat them in kind. Neither culture seems particularly curious about the other, and that suits both just fine.

  The only other bar near the Ho Chi Minh Trail was off the avenue, at the end of a dirt road that was stunted when the town ran out of funds to complete it in the mid-forties. The alley that remained never saw the sunlight. A trucking company’s hangar-sized depot loomed over it from the south. A dense thicket of three-deckers blocked it from the north. At the end of this alley sat the Filmore Tap, as dusty and seemingly forgotten as the aborted road it sat on.

  Back in the days of the Dot Ave pub crawl, even men of my father’s ilk—brawlers and boozers all—didn’t go in the Filmore. It was stricken from the pub crawl map as if it didn’t exist, and in my entire life I never knew anyone who frequented the place on a regular basis.

  There’s a difference between a tough working-class bar and a sleazy white-trash bar, and the Filmore epitomized the latter. Fights in working-class bars break out frequently enough but usually involve fists, maybe a beer bottle over someone’s head at worst. Fights broke out in the Filmore about every second beer and usually involved switchblades. Something about the place attracted men who’d lost anything worth caring about a long, long time ago. They came in here to nurse their drug habits and their alcoholism and their hate. And while you wouldn’t think there were a lot of people clamoring to get in their club, they didn’t look kindly upon potential applicants.

  The bartender glanced at us as we came in from the sunlight Thursday afternoon and adjusted our eyes to the sallow dark green ambience of the place. Four guys huddled around the corner of the bar closest to the door, and they turned slowly, one by one, and looked at us.