Gone, Baby, Gone (43 page)

Lionel and Ted Kenneally had arrived back late, close to five, and something broke in Lionel’s face as he saw us approach. When Ryerson flashed his badge and said, “Like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. McCready,” that broken thing in Lionel’s face broke even further.

He nodded several times, more to himself than to us, and said, “There’s a bar up the street. Why don’t we go there? I don’t want to do this at my home.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald was about as small as a bar could get without becoming a shoeshine stand. When we first walked in, a small area opened up on our left with a counter running along the only window and enough space for maybe four tables. Unfortunately they’d stuck a jukebox in there, too, so only two tables fit, and both were empty when the four of us entered. The bar itself could sit seven people, eight tops, and six tables took up the wall across from it. The room opened up a bit again in back, where two darts players tossed their missiles over a pool table wedged so close to the walls that from three of four possible sides, the shooter would have to use a short stick. Or a pencil.

As we sat down at a table in the center of the place, Lionel said, “Hurt your leg, Miss Gennaro?”

Angie said, “It’ll heal,” and fished in her bag for her cigarettes.

Lionel looked at me, and when I looked away, that constant sag in his shoulders deepened. The rocks that normally sat up there had been joined by cinder blocks.

Ryerson flipped a notepad open on the table, uncapped a pen. “I’m Special Agent Neal Ryerson, Mr. McCready. I’m with the Justice Department.”

Lionel said, “Sir?”

Ryerson gave him a quick flick of the eyes. “That’s right, Mr. McCready. Federal government. You have some explaining to do. Wouldn’t you say?”

“About what?” Lionel looked over his shoulder, then around the bar.

“Your niece,” I said. “Look, Lionel, bullshit time is over.”

He glanced to his right, toward the bar, as if someone there might be waiting to help him out.

“Mr. McCready,” Ryerson said, “we can spend half an hour playing No-I-Didn’t/Yes-You-Did, but that would be a waste of everyone’s time. We know you were involved in your niece’s disappearance and that you were working with Remy Broussard. He’s going to take a hard fall, by the way, hard as hard gets. You? I’m offering you a chance to clear the air, maybe get some leniency down the road.” He tapped the pen on the table to the cadence of a ticking clock. “But if you bullshit me, I’ll walk out of here and we’ll do it the rough way. And you’ll drop into prison for so long your grandkids will have driving licenses by the time you get out.”

The waitress approached and took our order of two Cokes, a mineral water for Ryerson, and a double scotch for Lionel.

While we waited for her return, no one spoke. Ryerson continued to use his pen like a metronome, tapping it steadily against the edge of the table, his level, dispassionate gaze locked on Lionel.

Lionel didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the coaster in front of him, but I don’t think he saw it; he was looking much deeper, much farther away than a table or this bar, his lips and chin picking up a sheen of sweat. I had the sense that what he saw at the end of his long inward gaze was the shoddy finale of his own unraveling, the waste of his life. He saw prison. He saw divorce papers delivered to his cell and letters to his son returned unopened. He saw decades stretching into decades in which he was alone with his shame, or his guilt, or merely the folly of a man who’d done a dumb thing society had stripped naked under klieg lights, exposed for public consumption. His picture would be in the paper, his name associated with kidnapping, his life the fodder for talk shows and tabloids and sneering jokes remembered long after the comics who’d told them were forgotten.

The waitress brought our drinks, and Lionel said, “Eleven years ago, I was in a bar downtown with some friends. A bachelor party came in. They were all real drunk. One of them was looking for a fight. He picked me. I hit him. Once. But he cracked his skull on the floor. Thing is, I didn’t hit him with my fist. I had a pool stick in my hand.”

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Actually, it was worse than that. The guy had been shoving me, and I’d said—I don’t remember saying it, but I guess I did—I’d said, ‘Back off or I’ll kill you.’”

“Attempted murder,” I said.

Another nod. “I go to trial. And it’s my friends’ words against this guy’s friends’ words. And I know I’m going to jail, because the guy I hit, he was a college student, and after I hit him, he claims he can’t study anymore, can’t concentrate. He’s got doctors claiming brain damage. I can tell by the way the judge looks at me that I’m done. But a guy who was in the bar that night, a stranger to both parties, testifies that it was the guy I hit who said he was going to kill
me
, and that he’d thrown the first punch, et cetera. I walk, because the stranger was a cop.”

“Broussard.”

He gave me a bitter smile and sipped his scotch. “Yeah. Broussard. And you know what? He lied up there on the stand. I might not be able to remember everything the guy I hit said, but I know for sure I hit him first. Don’t know why, really. He was bugging me, in my face, and I got angry.” He shrugged. “I was different then.”

“So Broussard lied and you walked, and you felt you owed him.”

He lifted his scotch glass, changed his mind, and set it back on the coaster. “I guess. He never brought it up, and we became friends over the years. We’d run into each other, he’d give me a call every now and then. It was only looking back that I realized he was keeping tabs on me. He’s like that. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good guy, but he’s always watching people, studying them, seeing if someday they’ll be useful to him.”

“Lotta cops like that,” Ryerson said, and drank some mineral water.

“You?”

Ryerson gave it some thought. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

Lionel took another sip of scotch, wiped his lips with the cocktail napkin. “Last July, my sister and Dottie took Amanda to the beach. It was a really hot day, no clouds, and Helene and Dottie meet some guys who, I dunno, had a bag of pot or whatever.” He looked away from us, took a long pull on the scotch, and his face and voice were haunted when he spoke again. “Amanda fell asleep on the beach, and they…they left her there, alone and unwatched, for hours. She roasted, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. She suffered deep burns to her back and legs, one stage less than third degree. One side of her face was so swollen it looked like she’d been attacked by bees. My fucking slut whore junkie douche-bag piece-of-shit waste of a sister allowed her daughter’s flesh to burn. They brought her home, and Helene calls me because Amanda, and I quote, ‘Is being a bitch.’ She wouldn’t stop crying. She was keeping Helene up. I go over there and my niece, this tiny four-year-old
baby
, is burned. She’s in pain. She’s screaming, it’s so bad. And you know what my sister had done for her?”

We waited while he gripped his scotch glass, lowered his head, took in a few shallow breaths.

He raised his head. “She’d put beer on Amanda’s burns. Beer. To cool her down. No aloe, no lidocaine, didn’t even think about a trip to the hospital. No. She put beer on her, sent her to bed, and had the TV turned way up so she wouldn’t have to listen to her.” He held a large fist up by his ear, as if prepared to strike the table, crack it in half. “I could have killed my sister that night. Instead, I took Amanda to the emergency room. I covered for Helene. I said she’d been exhausted and both she and Amanda had fallen asleep on the beach. I pleaded with the doctor, and I convinced her, finally, not to call Child Welfare and report it as a neglect case. I don’t know why, I just knew they’d take Amanda away. I just…” He swallowed. “I covered for Helene. Like I been covering my whole life. And that night I took Amanda back to my house and she slept with me and Beatrice. The doctor had given her something to help her sleep, but I stayed awake. I kept holding my hand over her back and feeling the heat coming off it. It was—this is the only way I can put it—it was like holding your hand over meat you just pulled from the oven. And I watched her sleep and I thought, This can’t go on. This has to end.”

“But, Lionel,” Angie said, “what if you had reported Helene to Chile Welfare? If you’d done it enough times, I’m sure you could have petitioned the courts to allow you and Beatrice to adopt Amanda.”

Lionel laughed, and Ryerson shook his head slowly at Angie.

“What?” she said.

Ryerson snipped the end of a cigar. “Miss Gennaro, unless the birth mother is a lesbian in states like Utah or Alabama, it is all but impossible to remove parental rights.” He lit the cigar and shook his head. “Let me amend that: It
is
impossible.”

“How can that be,” Angie said, “if the parent has proven herself consistently negligent?”

Another sad shake of the head from Ryerson. “This year in Washington, D.C., a birth mother was given full custody of a child she’s barely seen. The child has been living with foster parents since he was born. The birth mother is a convicted felon who gave birth to the child while she was on probation for murdering another of her children, who had reached the ripe old age of six weeks and was crying from hunger when the mother decided enough was enough and smothered her, tossed her in a trash bin, and went to a barbecue. Now this woman has two other kids, one of whom is being raised by the father’s parents, the other of whom is in foster care. All four kids were fathered by different men, and the mother, who served only a couple of years for killing her daughter, is now—responsibly, I’m sure—raising the child she took back from the loving foster parents who’d petitioned the courts for custody. This,” Ryerson said, “is a true story. Look it up.”

“That’s bullshit,” Angie said.

“No, it’s true,” Ryerson said.

“How can…?” Angie dropped her hands from the table, stared off into space.

“This is America,” Ryerson said, “where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young.”

Angie had the look of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, then slapped in the face as she’d doubled over.

Lionel rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Agent Ryerson is right, Miss Gennaro. There’s nothing you can do if an awful parent wants to hold on to her child.”

“That doesn’t get you off the hook, Mr. McCready.” Ryerson pointed his cigar at him. “Where’s your niece?”

Lionel stared into Ryerson’s cigar ash, then eventually shook his head.

Ryerson nodded and jotted something in his notebook. Then he reached behind his back, produced a set of handcuffs, and tossed them on the table.

Lionel pushed his chair back.

“Stay seated, Mr. McCready, or the next thing I put on the table is my gun.”

Lionel gripped the arms of the chair but didn’t move.

I said, “So you were angry at Helene about Amanda’s burns. What happened next?”

I met Ryerson’s eyes and he blinked softly, gave me a small nod. Going straight at the question of Amanda’s whereabouts wasn’t working. Lionel could just clam up, take the whole fall, and she’d stay gone. But if we could get him talking again….

“My UPS route,” he said eventually, “covers Broussard’s precinct. That’s how we stayed in touch so easily over the years. Anyway…”

The week after Amanda’s sunburn, Lionel and Broussard had gone out for a drink. Broussard had listened to Lionel pour out his concern for his niece, his hatred of his sister, his conviction that Amanda’s chances to grow up to be anything but a mirror of her mother were slipping away day by day.

Broussard had bought all the drinks. He’d been generous with them, too, and near the end of the night, when Lionel was drunk, he’d put his arm around him and said, “What if there were a solution?”

“There’s no solution,” Lionel had said. “The courts, the—”

“Fuck the courts,” Broussard had said. “Fuck everything you’ve considered. What if there were a way to guarantee Amanda a loving home and loving parents?”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is: No one can ever know what happened to her. Not her mother, not your wife, not your son. No one. She vanishes.”

And Broussard had snapped his fingers.

“
Poof
. Like she never existed.”

It took a few months for Lionel to go for it. In that time, he’d twice visited his sister’s house to find the door unlocked and Helene gone over to Dottie’s, her daughter sleeping alone in the apartment. In August, Helene dropped by a barbecue in Lionel and Beatrice’s backyard. She’d been driving around with Amanda in a friend’s car and she was fucked up on schnapps, so fucked up that while pushing Amanda and Matt on the swings, she accidentally pushed her daughter off the seat and fell across it herself. She lay there, laughing, as her daughter got up off the ground, wiped the dirt from her knees, checked herself for cuts.

Over the course of the summer, Amanda’s skin had blistered and scarred permanently in places because Helene occasionally forgot to apply the medicine prescribed by the emergency room doctor.

And then, in September, Helene talked about leaving the state.

“What?” I said. “I never heard this.”

Lionel shrugged. “Looking back, it was probably just another of her stupid ideas. She had a friend who’d moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, got a job at a T-shirt shop, told Helene how it was sunny all the time, drinks were flowing, no more snow, no more cold. Just sit on the beach and occasionally sell T-shirts. For a week or so, it was all Helene talked about. Most times, I’d have brushed it off. She was always talking about living somewhere else, just like she was sure she’d hit for the lottery someday. But this time, I dunno, I panicked. All I could think was: She’ll take Amanda. She’ll leave her alone on beaches and in unlocked apartments and she won’t have me or Beatrice around to pick up the slack. I just…I lost it. I called Broussard. I met the people who wanted to take care of Amanda.”

“And their names were?” Ryerson’s pen hovered over the pad.

Lionel ignored him. “They were great. Perfect. Beautiful home. Loved kids. Had already raised one perfectly, and now she’d moved out, they felt empty. They’re great with her,” he said quietly.