Mystic River (12 page)

“Mike. Until then?”

Michael sighed. “Until then, I concentrate on the basics.”

Dave smiled and tossed the ball above him, caught it without watching it fall. “It was a nice rip, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Dude, that thing was heading for the Point. Heading
uptown
.”

“Heading
uptown
,” Michael said, and let ripple another of his mother’s laughs.

“Who’s heading uptown?”

They both turned to see Celeste standing on the back porch, hair tied back and barefoot, one of Dave’s shirts hanging untucked over faded jeans.

“Hey, Ma.”

“Hey, cutie. You going uptown with your father?”

Michael looked at Dave. It was their private joke suddenly, and he snickered. “Nah, Ma.”

“Dave?”

“The ball he just hit, honey. The ball was going uptown.”

“Ah. The
ball
.”

“Killed it, Ma. Dad knocked it down only ’cause he’s so tall.”

Dave could feel her watching him even when her eyes were on Michael. Watching and waiting and wanting to ask him something. He remembered her hoarse voice in his ear last night, as she rose off the kitchen floor to grab his neck and pull her lips to his ear and say, “I am you now. You are me.”

Dave hadn’t known what the hell she was talking about, but he liked the sound of it, and the hoarseness in her vocal cords had pushed him that much closer to climax.

Now, though, he had the feeling it was just one more attempt by Celeste to climb inside his head, poke around, and it pissed him off. Because once they got in there, they didn’t like what they saw and they ran from it.

“So what’s up, honey?”

“Oh, nothing.” She wrapped her arms around herself, even though the day was warming up pretty fast. “Hey, Mike, did you eat?”

“Not yet.”

Celeste frowned at Dave, like it was the crime of the century Michael hit a few balls before he got a sugar high from that crimson cereal he ate.

“Your bowl’s full and milk’s on the table.”

“Good. I’m starving.” Michael dropped the bat, and Dave
felt a betrayal in the way he flipped the bat and hurried to the stairs. You were starving? And, what, I taped your mouth up so you couldn’t tell me? Fuck.

Michael trotted past his mother and then hit the stairs leading up to the third floor like they’d disappear if he didn’t reach the top fast enough.

“Skipping breakfast, Dave?”

“Sleeping till noon, Celeste?”

“It’s ten-fifteen,” Celeste said, and Dave could feel all the goodwill they’d pumped back into their marriage with last night’s kitchen lunacy turn to smoke and drift off into the yards beyond theirs.

He forced himself to smile. You made the smile real enough, no one could get past it. “So what’s doing, hon?”

Celeste came down into the yard, her bare feet a light brown on the grass. “What happened to the knife?”

“What?”

“The knife,” she whispered, looking back over her shoulder at McAllister’s bedroom window. “The one the mugger had. Where’d it go, Dave?”

Dave tossed the ball in the air, caught it behind his back. “It’s gone.”

“Gone?” She pursed her lips and looked down at the grass. “I mean, shit, Dave.”

“Shit what, honey?”

“Gone where?”

“Gone.”

“You’re sure.”

Dave was sure. He smiled, looked in her eyes. “Positive.”

“Your blood’s on it, though. Your DNA, Dave. Is it so ‘gone’ that it’ll
never
be found?”

Dave didn’t have an answer for that one, so he just stared at his wife until she changed the subject.

“You check the paper this morning?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You see anything?”

“About what?”

Celeste hissed: “About
what
?”

“Oh…oh. Yeah.” Dave shook his head. “No, there was nothing. No mention of it. ’Member, honey, it was late.”

“It was late. Come on. Metro pages? They’re always the last to go in, everyone waiting for the police blotters.”

“You work for a newspaper, do you?”

“This isn’t a joke, Dave.”

“No, honey, it’s not. I’m just saying there’s nothing in the morning paper. That’s all. Why? I don’t know. We’ll watch the noon news, see what’s there.”

Celeste looked back down at the grass, nodded to herself several times. “We going to see anything, Dave?”

Dave stepped back from her.

“I mean about some black guy found beat half to death in a parking lot outside…where was it?”

“The, ah, Last Drop.”

“The—ah—Last Drop?”

“Yeah, Celeste.”

“Oh, okay, Dave,” she said. “Sure.”

And she left him. She gave him her back and walked up the stairs to the porch, walked inside, and Dave listened to the soft footfalls of her bare feet as she climbed the staircase.

That’s what they did. They left you. Maybe not physically all the time. But emotionally, mentally? They were never there when you needed them. It had been the same with his mother. That morning after the police had brought him home, his mother had cooked him breakfast, her back to him, humming “Old MacDonald,” and occasionally turning to look back over her shoulder at him to toss him a nervous smile, as if he were a boarder she wasn’t sure about.

She’d placed the plate of runny eggs and black bacon and undercooked, soggy toast down in front of him and asked him if he wanted orange juice.

“Ma,” he said, “who were those guys? Why did they—?”

“Davey,” she said, “you want orange juice? I didn’t hear.”

“Sure. Look, Ma, I don’t know why they took—”

“There you go.” Placing the juice in front of him. “Eat
your breakfast and I’m going to…” She waved her hands at the kitchen, no idea what the fuck she was going to do. “I’m going to…wash your clothes. Okay? And, then, Davey? We’ll go see a movie. How’s that sound?”

Dave looked at his mother, looked for something that was waiting for him to open his mouth and tell her, tell her about that car and the house in the woods, and the smell of the big one’s aftershave. Instead he saw a bright, hard gaiety, the look she got sometimes as she was preparing to go out on Friday nights, trying to find just the right thing to wear, desperate with hope.

Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming “Old MacDonald” all the way down the hall.

Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it, too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because nothing bad ever happened, and nobody had any secrets because secrets were for bad people, people who didn’t eat their eggs, people who climbed in cars that smelled of apples with strange men and disappeared for four days, only to come back home to find everyone they’d known had disappeared, too, been replaced with smiley-faced look-alikes who’d do just about anything but listen to you. Just about anything but that.

T
HE FIRST THING
Jimmy saw as he neared the Roseclair Street entrance to Pen Park was a K-9 van parked down on Sydney Street, its back doors open, two cops struggling with six German shepherds on long leather leashes. He’d walked up Roseclair from the church, trying hard not to trot, and reached a small crowd of onlookers by the overpass that stretched above Sydney. They stood at the base of the incline where Roseclair began its rise under the expressway and then over the Pen Channel, losing its name on the other side and becoming Valenz Boulevard as it left Buckingham and entered Shawmut.

Back where the crowd had gathered, you could stand at the top of a fifteen-foot retaining wall of poured concrete that served as Sydney’s dead end and look down on the last street running north-south in the East Bucky Flats, a rusting guardrail pressed against your kneecaps. Just a few yards east of the overlook, the guardrail gave way to a purple limestone stairwell. As kids, they’d sometimes bring dates there, and sit in the shadows passing forty-ounce bottles of Miller back and forth and watching the images flicker across the white screen of Hurley’s Drive-in. Sometimes, Dave Boyle would come with them, not because anyone particularly liked Dave, but because he’d seen just about every damn
movie ever made, and sometimes, if they were stoned, they’d have Dave rattle off the lines as they watched the silent screen, Dave getting into it so much at times that he even changed his vocal inflections to fit the various characters. Then Dave suddenly got good at baseball, went off to Don Bosco to become a jock superstar, and they couldn’t keep him around just for laughs anymore.

Jimmy had no clue why all this was flooding back to him suddenly, or why he stood frozen by the guardrail, eyes gaping down at Sydney, except that it had something to do with those dogs, the way they pranced nervously in place after they’d hopped from the van and pawed the asphalt. One of their handlers raised a walkie-talkie to his lips as a helicopter appeared in the sky over downtown and headed for them like a fat bee, growing fatter every time Jimmy blinked.

A baby of a cop stood blocking the purple stairwell and a bit farther up Roseclair, two cruisers and a few more boys in blue stood guard in front of the access road leading into the park.

The dogs never barked. Jimmy turned his head back as he realized that’s what had been bugging him since he’d first seen them. Even though their twenty-four paws jittered back and forth on the asphalt, it was a tight, concentric jittering, like soldiers marching in place, and Jimmy felt a terrible efficiency in their black snouts and lean flanks, had an image of their eyes as hot coals.

The rest of Sydney looked like the waiting room to a riot. Cops filled the street and walked methodically through the weeds leading into the park. From up here, Jimmy had a partial view of the park itself, and he could see them in there, too, blue uniforms and earth-tone sport coats moving across the grass, peering off the edge into the Pen, calling out to one another.

Back down on Sydney, they gathered around something just on the far side of the K-9 van and several plainclothes detectives leaned against unmarked cars parked on the other side of the street, sipping coffee, but none of them bullshit
ting the way cops usually did, cracking each other up with war stories from recent shifts. Jimmy could feel pure tension—in the dogs, in the silent cops leaning against their cars, in the helicopter, no longer a bee now and roaring as it swept above Sydney, riding low, and disappeared in Pen Park on the other side of the imported trees and drive-in screen.

“Hey, Jimmy.” Ed Deveau, opening a package of M&M’s with his teeth, nudged Jimmy with his elbow.

“What’s up, Ed?”

Deveau shrugged. “That copter’s the second one gone in. The first one kept doing passes over my house ’bout a half an hour ago, I says to the wife, ‘Honey, we move to Watts, no one told me?’” He poured some M&M’s into his mouth and shrugged again. “So, I come down to see what the fuss is about.”

“What’d you hear?”

Deveau slid the flat of his hand over the air in front of them. “Nothing. They’re locked up tighter than my mother’s purse. But they’re serious, Jimmy. I mean, shit, they got Sydney blocked off from every possible angle—cops and sawhorses on Crescent, Harborview, Sudan, Romsey, all the way down to Dunboy, what I hear. People live on the street can’t get out, they’re fucking pissed. I hear they got boats running up and down the Pen, and Boo Bear Durkin called, said he saw frogmen going in from his window.” Deveau pointed. “I mean, look at that shit there.”

Jimmy followed Deveau’s finger and watched three cops pull a wino out of one of the scorched three-decker shells on the far side of Sydney, the wino not liking it much, struggling until one of the cops chucked him face first down the rest of the charred stairs, Jimmy still half-back at that word Ed had said:
frogmen
. They didn’t send frogmen into a body of water if they were looking for something good, something alive.

“They ain’t playing.” Deveau whistled, then looked at Jimmy’s clothes. “Why you all decked?”

“Nadine’s First Communion.” Jimmy watched a cop pick the wino up, say something into his ear before manhandling him to an olive sedan with the siren stuck cockeyed to the edge of the roof above the driver’s door.

“Hey, congratulations,” Deveau said.

Jimmy smiled his thanks.

“So, the hell you doing here then?”

Deveau looked back up Roseclair toward Saint Cecilia’s, and Jimmy suddenly felt ridiculous. What the hell
was
he doing here in his silk tie and six-hundred-dollar suit, scuffing his shoes in the weeds that sprouted up from under the guardrail?

Katie, he remembered.

But that still seemed ridiculous. Katie’d blown off her half sister’s First Communion to sleep off a drunk or listen to some more pillow talk from her latest guy. Shit. Why
would
she come to church if she wasn’t dragged? Until Katie’s own baptism, Jimmy himself hadn’t been inside a church for a solid decade. And even after that, it hadn’t been until he’d met Annabeth that he’d started going regular again. So what if he’d walked out of the church, seen the cruisers banging the turn onto Roseclair, and had felt a—what, premonition?—of dread? It had only been because he’d been worried about Katie—and pissed at her, too—and so she’d been on his mind as he watched some cops lead-foot it toward the Pen.

But now? Now he felt dumb. Dumb and overdressed and really fucking silly for telling Annabeth to take the girls to Chuck E. Cheese’s, he’d meet her there, Annabeth looking into his face with a mix of exasperation, confusion, and anger held barely in check.

Jimmy turned to Deveau. “Just curious like everyone else, I guess.” He clapped Deveau’s shoulder. “Outta here, though, Ed,” he said, and down on Sydney, one cop tossed a set of car keys to another and the second cop hopped in the K-9 van.

“Awright, Jimmy. You take care.”

“You, too,” Jimmy said slowly, still watching the street as the K-9 van backed up and stopped to shift gears and cut the wheels to the right, and Jimmy felt that mean certainty again.

You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes—beyond logic—and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes—to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.

Jimmy felt that mean certainty drive nails through his shoes and plant him in place even though he wanted more than anything to run, run as fast as he ever had, do anything but stand there and watch that van pull out into the street. The nails found his chest, a fat, cold grouping of them as if shot from a cannon, and he wanted to shut his eyes but they were nailed, too, nailed wide open, as the van reached the middle of the street and Jimmy stared at the car it had been blocking, the car everyone was gathered around, dusting with brushes, photographing, peering inside, passing bagged items out to cops standing in the street and on the sidewalk.

Katie’s car.

Not just the same model. Not one that looked like it. Her car. Right down to the dent on the right front bumper and the missing glass over the right headlight.

“Jesus, Jimmy. Jimmy? Jimmy! Look at me. You all right?”

Jimmy looked up at Ed Deveau, not sure how he’d ended up here, on his knees, the heels of his hands pressed to the ground, round Irish faces looking down at him.

“Jimmy?” Deveau offered him a hand. “You okay?”

Jimmy looked at the hand and had no idea how to answer that. Frogmen, he thought. In the Pen.

W
HITEY FOUND
S
EAN
in the woods a hundred yards past the ravine. They’d lost the blood trail and any evidence of footprints in the more open areas of the park, last night’s rain having wiped clean anything that nature didn’t cover.

“We got dogs sniffing something over by the old drive-in screen. You wanna take a walk over?”

Sean nodded, but then his walkie-talkie bleated.

“Trooper Devine.”

“We got a guy out front here—”

“Which front?”

“The Sydney Street side, Trooper.”

“Go ahead.”

“Guy claims he’s the father of the missing girl.”

“The fuck’s he doing on-scene?” Sean felt his face fill with blood, get hot and red.

“Slipped through, Trooper. What can I say?”

“Well, push him back. You got a psychologist on-scene yet?”

“En route.”

Sean closed his eyes. Everyone was en route, like they were all sitting in the same fucking traffic jam.

“So, keep the father calm till the shrink’s on-scene. You know the drill.”

“Yeah, but he’s asking for you, Trooper.”

“Me.”

“Said he knows you. Said someone told him you were here.”

“No, no, no. Look—”

“He’s got some guys with him.”

“Guys?”

“Bunch of scary-looking dudes. Half of ’em are like semi-midget, and all of ’em look alike.”

The Savage brothers. Shit.

“I’m on my way,” Sean said.

A
NY SECOND NOW
, and Val Savage was going to get himself arrested. Chuck, too, maybe, the Savage blood—rarely
down—up as all hell now, the brothers shouting at the cops, the cops looking like they’d be going knuckles-’n’-night-sticks any second.

Jimmy stood with Kevin Savage, one of the saner ones, a few yards from the crime scene tape where Val and Chuck were pointing with their fingers, saying, That’s our niece in there, you dumb fucking prick pieces of shit.

Jimmy felt a controlled hysteria, a barely suppressed need to erupt that left him numb and just a little addled. Okay, so that was her car there, ten feet away. And, yes, no one had seen her since last night. And that
was
blood he’d glimpsed on the driver’s seat back. So, yeah, it didn’t look good. But there was a full battalion of cops searching in there now, and no body bags had come out yet. So there was that.

Jimmy watched an older cop light a cigarette and he wanted to pull it from his mouth, shove the burning coal deep into the veins of his nose, say, Get the fuck back in there and look for my daughter.

He counted back from ten, a trick he’d learned in Deer Island, counting slow, seeing the numbers appear, floating and gray in the darkness of his brain. Screaming would get him barred from the scene. Any outward show of grief or anxiety or the electric fear surging through his blood would result in the same thing. And then the Savages would go nuclear, and they’d all spend this day in a cell instead of on the street where his daughter was last seen.

“Val,” he called.

Val Savage pulled his hand back over the crime scene tape and his finger out of the stony cop’s face, looked back at Jimmy.

Jimmy shook his head. “Ease up.”

Val charged back toward him. “They’re fucking stonewalling us, Jim. They’re holding us back.”

“They’re doing their job,” Jimmy said.

“Their fucking
job
, Jim? All due respect, the doughnut shop’s the other direction.”

“You want to help me here?” Jimmy said as Chuck sidled up beside his brother, almost twice as tall, but half as dangerous, which was still more dangerous than most of the population.

“Sure,” Chuck said. “Tell us what to do.”

“Val?” Jimmy said.

“
What?
” Val’s eyes spinning, fury pouring out of him like an odor.

“Do you want to help?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanna help, Jimmy. Jesus fuck, you know?”

“I know,” Jimmy said, hearing a rise in his voice that he tried to swallow against. “I fucking know, Val. That’s my daughter in there. You hear what
I’m
saying?”

Kevin put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and Val took a step back, looked down at his feet for a bit.

“Sorry, Jimmy. Awright, man? I’m just freaking. I mean, shit.”

Jimmy got the calm back in his voice, forced his brain to work. “You and Kevin, Val? You go down the street to Drew Pigeon’s house. You tell him what’s going on.”

“Drew Pigeon? Why?”

“I’m telling you why, Val. You talk to his daughter Eve and Diane Cestra, too, if she’s still there. You ask them when they last saw Katie. What time, Val, exactly. You find out if they were drinking, if Katie had plans to meet anyone, and who she was dating. Can you do that, Val?” Jimmy asked, looking at Kevin, the one who’d hopefully keep Val in check.

Kevin nodded. “We got it, Jim.”

“Val?”

Val looked over his shoulder at the weeds leading into the park, then back at Jimmy, his small head bobbing. “Yeah, yeah.”

“These girls are friends. You don’t have to get hard on them, but get those answers. Right?”

“Right,” Kevin said, letting Jimmy know he’d keep it con
tained. He clapped his older brother’s shoulder. “Come on, Val. Let’s do it.”

Jimmy watched them walk up Sydney, felt Chuck beside him, jumpy, ready to kill someone.

“How you holding up?”

“Shit,” Chuck said, “I’m fine. You I’m worried about.”