Gone, Baby, Gone

  “Little Amanda?” Angie said, and shook her head. “What is she supposed to be at four, humongous Amanda? Mature Amanda?”

  “—anyone who has any information on this little girl—”

  Amanda’s photograph filled the screen.

  “—please call the number listed below.”

  The number for the Crimes Against Children squad flashed below Amanda’s photo for a few moments, and then they cut back to the studio. In place of MISSING CHILD in the pop-up box, they’d inserted the live feed, and a smaller Gert Broderick fondled her microphone and looked into the camera with a blank, vaguely confused look on her blank, vaguely confused face as Helene continued to go ballistic on the porch and Beatrice joined Lionel and tried to hold her in place.

  “Gert,” Tanya said, “have you been able to talk to the mother at all?”

  Gert’s sudden tight smile covered an annoyed spark that crossed her blank eyes like smoke. “No, Tanya. As of yet, the police have not allowed us past that caution tape you see behind me, so, again, we have yet to confirm if Helene McCready is in fact the hysterical woman you see on the porch behind me.”

  “Tragic,” Gordon said, as Helene lunged into Lionel again and wailed so sharply that Gert’s shoulders tensed.

  “Tragic,” Tanya agreed, as Amanda’s face and the phone number for Crimes Against Children filled the screen for another half second.

  “In another breaking story,” Gordon said as they cut back to him, “a home invasion in Lowell has left at least two people dead and a third wounded by gunfire. For that story we go to Martha Torsney in Lowell. Martha?”

  They cut to Martha, and a slash of snow burst across the screen for a split second before being replaced momentarily by a black screen and we settled in to watch the rest of the tape, confident Gordon and Tanya would be there to tell us how to feel about the events transpiring before us, fill in the emotional blanks.

  Eight tapes and ninety minutes later, we’d come up with nothing except stiff bodies and an even more depressingly jaded view of broadcast journalism than we’d had before. Except for the camera angles, nothing distinguished one report from another. As the search for Amanda dragged on, the newscasts showed numbingly similar footage of Helene’s house, Helene herself being interviewed, Broussard or Poole giving statements, neighbors pounding the pavements with flyers, cops leaning over car hoods shining flashlights over maps of the neighborhood or reining in their search dogs. And all the reports were followed by the same pithy, rankly maudlin commentary, the same studied sadness and head-shaking morality in the eyes and jaws and foreheads of the newscasters. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program….

  “Well,” Angie said, and stretched so hard I heard the vertebrae in her back crack like walnuts hit with a cleaver, “outside of seeing a bunch of people we know from the neighborhood on TV, what have we accomplished this morning?”

  I sat forward, cracking my own neck. Pretty soon we’d have a band. “Not much. I did see Lauren Smythe. Always thought she’d moved.” I shrugged. “Guess she was just avoiding me.”

  “Is that the one who attacked you with a knife?”

  “Scissors,” I said. “And I prefer to think it was foreplay. She just wasn’t very good at it.”

  She whacked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Let’s see. I saw April Norton and Susan Siersma, who I haven’t seen since high school and Billy Boran and Mike O’Connor, who’s lost a lotta hair, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “Lost a lotta weight, too.”

  “Who notices? He’s bald.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re more shallow than I am.”

  She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Who else did we see?”

  “Danielle Genter,” I said. “Babs Kerins. Friggin’ Chris Mullen was everywhere.”

  “I noticed that too. In the early stuff.”

  I sipped some cold coffee. “Huh?”

  “In the early stuff. He was always hanging around the periphery in the early parts of every tape, never the later stuff.”

  I yawned. “He’s a periphery guy, ol’ Chris.” I picked up her empty coffee cup, hung it off my finger beside my own. “More?”

  She shook her head.

  I went into the kitchen, put her cup in the sink, poured myself a fresh cup. Angie came in as I opened the refrigerator and removed the cream.

  “When’s the last time you saw Chris Mullen in the neighborhood?”

  I closed the door, looked at her. “When’s the last time you saw half the people we saw watching those tapes?”

  She shook her head. “Forget about everyone else. I mean, they’ve been here. Chris? He moved uptown. Got himself a place in Devonshire Towers around, like, ’eighty-seven.”

  I shrugged. “Again—so?”

  “So what’s Chris Mullen do for work?”

  I put the cream carton down on the counter beside my cup. “He works for Cheese Olamon.”

  “Who happens to be in prison.”

  “Big surprise.”

  “For?”

  “What?”

  “What is Cheese in prison for?”

  I picked up the cream carton again. “What else?” I turned in the kitchen as I heard my words, let the carton dangle by my thigh. “Drug dealing,” I said slowly.

  “You are so goddamned right.”

  9

  Amanda McCready wasn’t smiling. She stared at me with still, empty eyes, her ash-blond hair falling limply around her face, as if it had been plastered to the sides of her head with a wet palm. She had her mother’s tremulous chin, too square and too small for her oval face, and the sallow crevices under her cheeks hinted of questionable nutrition.

  She wasn’t frowning, nor did she appear to be angry or sad. She was just there, as if she had no hierarchy of responses to stimuli. Getting her photograph taken had been no different from eating or dressing or watching TV or taking a walk with her mother. Every experience in her young life, it seemed, had existed along a flat line, no ups, no downs, no anythings.

  Her photograph lay slightly off-center on a white sheet of legal-sized paper. Below the photograph were her vital statistics. Directly below those were the words—IF YOU SEE AMANDA, PLEASE CALL—and below that were Lionel and Beatrice’s names and their phone number. Following that was the number of the CAC squad, with Lieutenant Jack Doyle listed as the contact person. Under that number was 911. And at the bottom of the list was Helene’s name and number.

  The stack of flyers sat on the kitchen counter in Lionel’s house, where he’d left them after he’d come home this morning. Lionel had been out all night plastering them to streetlight poles and subway station support beams, across temporary walls at construction sites and boarded-up buildings. He had covered downtown Boston and Cambridge, while Beatrice and three dozen neighbors had divided up the rest of the greater metro area. By dawn, they’d put Amanda’s face in every legal and illegal spot they could find in a twenty-mile radius of Boston.

  Beatrice was in the living room when we entered, going through her morning routine of contacting all police and press assigned to the case and asking for progress reports. After that, she’d call the hospitals again. Next she’d call any businesses that had refused to put up a flyer of Amanda in their break rooms or cafeterias and ask them to explain why.

  I had no idea when, or if, she’d sleep.

  Helene was in the kitchen with us. She sat at the table and ate a bowl of Apple Jacks and nursed a hangover. Lionel and Beatrice, possibly sensing something in the simultaneous arrival of Angie and myself with Poole and Broussard, followed us into the kitchen, Lionel’s hair still wet from the shower, dots of moisture speckling his UPS uniform, Beatrice’s small face carrying a war refugee’s weariness.

  “Cheese Olamon,” Helene said slowly.

  “Cheese Olamon,” Angie said. “Yes.”

  Helene scratched her neck where a small vein pulsed like a beetle trapped under the flesh. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t kn
ow what?” Broussard said.

  “I mean, the name sounds sorta familiar.” Helene looked up at me and fingered a tear in the plastic tabletop.

  “Sorta familiar?” Poole said. “Sorta familiar, Miss McCready? Can I quote you on that?”

  “What?” Helene ran a hand through her thin hair. “What? I said it sounded familiar.”

  “A name like Cheese Olamon,” Angie said, “doesn’t sound any kind of way. You’re either acquainted with it or you’re not.”

  “I’m thinking.” Helene touched her nose lightly, then pulled back the hand and stared at the fingers.

  A chair scraped as Poole dragged it across the floor, set it down in front of Helene, sat in it.

  “Yes or no, Miss McCready. Yes or no.”

  “Yes or no what?”

  Broussard sighed loudly and fingered his wedding band, tapped his foot on the floor.

  “Do you know Mr. Cheese Olamon?” Poole’s whisper sounded drenched in gravel and glass.

  “I don’t—”

  “Helene!” Angie’s voice was so sharp even I started.

  Helene looked up at her, and the beetle in her throat lapsed into a seizure under her skin. She tried to hold Angie’s gaze for about a tenth of a second, and then she dropped her head. Her hair fell over her face, and a tiny rasping noise came from behind it as she crossed one bare foot on top of the other and clenched the muscles in her calves.

  “I knew Cheese,” she said. “A bit.”

  “A little bit or a lot of bit?” Broussard pulled out a stick of gum, and the sound of the foil wrapper as he removed it was like teeth on my spine.

  Helene shrugged. “I knew him.”

  For the first time since we’d come into their kitchen, Beatrice and Lionel moved from their places against the wall, Beatrice over to the oven between Broussard and me, Lionel to a seat in the corner on the other side of the table from his sister. Beatrice lifted a cast-iron kettle off the burner and placed it under the faucet.

  “Who’s Cheese Olamon?” Lionel reached out and took his sister’s right hand from her face. “Helene? Who’s Cheese Olamon?”

  Beatrice turned her head to me. “He’s a drug dealer or something, isn’t he?”

  She’d spoken so softly that over the running water no one but Broussard and I had heard her.

  I held out my hands and shrugged.

  Beatrice turned back to the faucet.

  “Helene?” Lionel said again, and there was a high, uneven pitch to his voice.

  “He’s just a guy, Lionel.” Helene’s voice was tired and flat and seemed to come from a million years away.

  Lionel looked at the rest of us.

  Both Angie and I looked away.

  “Cheese Olamon,” Remy Broussard said, and cleared his throat, “is, among other things, a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.”

  “What else is he?” Lionel had a child’s broken curiosity in his face.

  “What?”

  “You said ‘among other things.’ What other things?”

  Beatrice turned from the faucet, placed the kettle on the burner, and ignited the flame underneath. “Helene, why don’t you answer your brother’s question?”

  Helene’s hair remained in her face and her voice a million years away. “Why don’t you go suck a nigger’s dick, Bea?”

  Lionel’s fist hit the table so hard, a fissure rippled through the cheap covering like a stream through a canyon.

  Helene’s head snapped back and the hair flew off her face.

  “You listen to me.” Lionel pointed a quaking finger an inch from his sister’s nose. “You don’t insult my wife, and you don’t make racist remarks in my kitchen.”

  “Lionel—”

  “In my kitchen!” He hit the table again. “Helene!”

  It wasn’t a voice I’d heard before. Lionel had raised his voice that first time in our office, and that voice I was familiar with. But this was something else. Thunder. A thing that loosened cement and launched tremors through oak.

  “Who,” Lionel said, and his free hand gripped the corner of the table, “is Cheese Olamon?”

  “He is a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.” Poole searched his pockets, came up with a pack of cigarettes. “And a pornographer. And a pimp.” He removed a cigarette from the pack, placed it upright on the table, leaned in to sniff from the top. “Also a tax evader, if you can believe that.”

  Lionel, who’d apparently never seen Poole’s tobacco ritual before, seemed momentarily transfixed by it. Then he blinked and turned his attention back to Helene.

  “You associate with a pimp?”

  “I—”

  “A pornographer, Helene?”

  Helene turned away from him, rested her right arm on the table, and looked out at the kitchen without meeting the eyes of any of its occupants.

  “What’d you do for him?” Broussard said.

  “Muling occasionally.” Helene lit a cigarette, cupped the match in her hand, and shook it out with the same motion she’d use to chalk a pool cue.

  “Muling,” Poole said.

  She nodded.

  “From where to where?” Angie asked.

  “Here to Providence. Here to Philly. It depended on the supply.” She shrugged. “Depended on the demand.”

  “And for that you got what?” Broussard said.

  “Some cash. Some stash.” Another shrug.

  “Heroin?” Lionel said.

  She turned her head, looked at him, her cigarette dangling from between her fingers, her body loose and puddling. “Yeah, Lionel. Sometimes. Sometimes coke, sometimes Ex, and sometimes”—she shook her head, turned it back toward the rest of the room—“whatever the fuck.”

  “Track marks,” Beatrice said. “We would have seen track marks.”

  Poole patted Helene’s knee. “She snorted it.” He flared his nostrils, slid them over his cigarette. “Didn’t you?”

  Helene nodded. “Less addictive that way.”

  Poole smiled. “Of course it is.”

  Helene removed his hand from her knee and stood up, crossed to the refrigerator, and pulled out a can of Miller. She opened it with a hard snap and the beer foamed to the top and she slurped it up into her mouth.

  I looked at the clock: ten-thirty in the morning.

  Broussard called two CAC detectives and told them to locate and begin immediate surveillance of Chris Mullen. In addition to the original detectives searching for Amanda, and the two who’d been assigned to locate Ray Likanski, the entire CAC division was now clocking overtime on one case.

  “This is strictly need-to-know,” he said into the phone. “That means only I need to know what you’re doing for the time being. Clear?”

  When he hung up, we followed Helene and her morning beer onto Lionel and Beatrice’s back porch. Flat cobalt clouds drifted overhead and the morning turned sluggish and gray, gave the air a moist thickness, a promise of afternoon rain.

  The beer seemed to give Helene a concentration she usually lacked. She leaned against the porch rail and met our eyes without fear or self-pity and answered our questions about Cheese Olamon and his right-hand man, Chris Mullen.

  “How long have you known Mr. Olamon?” Poole asked.

  She shrugged. “Ten, maybe twelve years. From around the neighborhood.”

  “Chris Mullen?”

  “’Bout the same.”

  “Where did your association begin?”

  Helene lowered her beer. “What?”

  “Where did you meet this Cheese guy?” Beatrice said.

  “The Filmore.” She took a slug off the beer can.

  “When did you start working for him?” Angie asked.

  Another shrug. “I did some small stuff over the years. ’Bout four years ago I needed more money to take care of Amanda—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Lionel said.

  She glanced at him, then back at Poole and Broussard. “—so he sent me on a few buys. Hardly ever big stuff.”

  “Hardly ever,” Poole said. r />
  She blinked, then nodded quickly.

  Poole turned his head, his tongue pushing against the inside of his lower lip. Broussard met his eyes and pulled another stick of gum from his pocket.

  Poole chuckled softly. “Miss McCready, do you know what squad Detective Broussard and I worked for before we were asked to join Crimes Against Children?”

  Helene grimaced. “I care?”

  Broussard popped the gum in his mouth. “No reason you should, really. But just for the record—”

  “Narcotics,” Poole said.

  “CAC is pretty small, not much in the way of camaraderie,” Broussard said, “so we still hang out mostly with narcs.”

  “Keep abreast of things,” Poole said.

  Helene squinted at Poole, tried to figure out where this was going.

  “You said you ran dope through the Philadelphia corridor,” Broussard said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who to?”

  She shook her head.

  “Miss McCready,” Poole said, “we’re not here on a narco bust. Give us a name so we can confirm whether you really muled for Cheese Ol—”

  “Rick Lembo.”

  “Ricky the Dick,” Broussard said, and smiled.

  “Where did the deals go down?”

  “The Ramada by the airport.”

  Poole nodded at Broussard.

  “You do any New Hampshire runs?”

  Helene took a hit off the beer and shook her head.

  “No?” Broussard raised his eyebrows. “Nothing up Nashua way, no quick sales to the biker gangs?”

  Again Helene shook her head. “No. Not me.”

  “How much you hit Cheese for, Miss McCready?”

  “Excuse me?” Helene said.

  “The Cheese violates his parole three months ago. He takes a ten-to-twelve fall.” Broussard spit his gum over the railing. “How much you take off him when you heard he got dropped?”

  “Nothing.” Helene’s eyes stayed on her bare feet.

  “Bullshit.”

  Poole stepped over to Helene and gently took the beer can from her hand. He leaned over the railing and tipped the can, poured the contents into the driveway behind the house.

  “Miss McCready,” he said, “word I’ve heard on the proverbial street the past few months is that Cheese Olamon sent a goody bag up to some bikers in a Nashua motel just before his arrest. The goody bag was recovered in a raid, but not the money. Since the bikers—hale fellows all—had yet to partake of the contents of the bag, speculation among our northern law enforcement friends was that the deal had gone down only moments before the raid. Further speculation led many to believe that the mule walked off with the money. Which, according to current urban lore, was news to the members of Cheese Olamon’s camp.”