Gone, Baby, Gone (8 page)

Poole leaned back in his chair, slapped the crumbs from his hands. “And what was that?”

“Did you or did you not believe Helene’s story?” Angie asked.

“Not entirely,” Broussard said. “According to the polygraph, she was with Dottie, but maybe not in Dottie’s apartment. She’s sticking to the lie, though.”

“Where was she?” Poole said.

“According to Big Dave, she was in the Filmore.”

Poole and Broussard looked at each other, then back at us.

“So,” Broussard said slowly, “she did bullshit us.”

“Didn’t want to spoil her fifteen seconds,” Poole said.

“Her fifteen seconds?” I asked.

“In the spotlight,” Poole said. “Used to be minutes; these days it’s seconds.” He sighed. “On the TV, playing her role as the grieving mother in the pretty blue dress. You remember that Brazilian woman in Allston, her little boy went missing about eight months back?”

“And was never found.” Angie nodded.

“Right. The point is, though, that mother—she was dark-skinned, she didn’t dress well, she always looked sorta stoned on camera? After a while, the general public really didn’t give a shit about her missing boy because they disliked the mother so much.”

“But Helene McCready,” Broussard said, “she’s white. And she fixes herself up, she looks good on camera. Maybe she doesn’t come across as the brightest bulb in the box, but she’s likable.”

“No, she’s not,” Angie said.

“Oh, in person?” Broussard shook his head. “In person, she’s about as likable as a case of crabs. But on camera? When she’s speaking for all of fifteen seconds? The lens loves her, the public loves her. She leaves her kid alone for almost four hours, there’s some outrage, but mostly people are saying, ‘Cut her some slack. We all make mistakes.’”

“And she’s probably never been loved in her life like that,” Poole said. “And as soon as Amanda is found, or let’s say something happens to knock the case off the front page—and that something always happens—then Helene goes back to being who she was. But for now, what I’m saying, she’s grabbing her fifteen seconds.”

“And that’s all you think her lying about her whereabouts amounts to?” I said.

“Probably,” Broussard said. He wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin, pushed his plate away. “Don’t get us wrong. We’re going over to her brother’s place in a few minutes, and we’re going to tear her a new asshole for lying to us. And if there is more to it, we’ll find out.” He tipped his hand toward us. “Thanks to you two.”

“How long have you been on this case?” Poole asked.

Angie looked at her watch. “Since late last night.”

“And you already uncovered something we missed?” Poole chuckled. “You two might be as capable as we’ve heard.”

Angie batted her eyelashes. “Gee, gosh.”

Broussard smiled. “I hang out with Oscar Lee sometimes. We both came up through the Housing Police about a million years ago. After Gerry Glynn got put down in that playground a couple years back, I asked Oscar about you two. Want to know what he said?”

I shrugged. “Knowing Oscar, it was probably profane.”

Broussard nodded. “He said you two were major fuckups in most aspects of your lives.”

“Sounds like Oscar,” Angie said.

“But he also said once you both got it into your heads that you were going to close a case, not even God himself could call you off.”

“That Oscar,” I said, “he’s a peach.”

“So now you’re on the same case we are.” Poole folded his napkin delicately and placed it on top of his plate.

“That bother you?” Angie said.

Poole looked at Broussard. Broussard shrugged.

“It doesn’t bother us in principle,” Poole said.

“But,” Broussard said, “there should be some ground rules.”

“Such as?”

“Such as…” Poole removed a pack of cigarettes. He pulled off the cellophane slowly, then removed the tinfoil and pulled out an unfiltered Camel. He sniffed it, inhaling the tobacco scent deep into his nostrils as he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Then he leaned forward and ground the unlit cigarette into the ashtray until it snapped in half. He placed the pack back in his pocket.

Broussard smiled at us, his left eyebrow cocked.

Poole noticed us staring at him. “I beg your pardon. I quit.”

“When?” Angie said.

“Two years ago. But I still need the rituals.” He smiled. “Rituals are important.”

Angie reached into her purse. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Oh, God, would you?” Poole said.

He watched Angie light her cigarette; then his head shifted slightly and his eyes cleared and found mine, seemed capable of gaining entrance to the core of my brain or my soul with a blink.

“Ground rules,” he said. “We can’t have any press leaks. You’re friends with Richie Colgan of the
Trib
.”

I nodded.

“Colgan’s no friend of the police,” Broussard said.

Angie said, “It’s not his job to be a friend. It’s his job to be a reporter.”

“And I have no argument with that,” Poole said. “But I can’t have anyone in the press knowing anything we don’t want him to regarding this investigation. Agreed?”

I looked at Angie. She studied Poole through her cigarette smoke. Eventually, she nodded. I said, “Agreed.”

“Magic!” Poole said with a Scottish accent.

“Where did you get this guy?” Angie asked Broussard.

“They pay me an extra hundred a week to work with him. Hazardous duty pay.”

Poole leaned into the current of Angie’s cigarette smoke, sniffed it. “Second,” he said. “You two are unorthodox. That’s fine. But we can’t have you associated with this case and find out you’re exposing firearms and threatening information out of people, à la Mr. Big Dave Strand.”

Angie said, “Big Dave Strand was about to rape me, Sergeant Raftopoulos.”

“I understand,” Poole said.

“No, you don’t,” Angie said. “You have no idea.”

Poole nodded. “I apologize. However, you assure us that what happened to Big Dave this afternoon was an aberration? One that won’t be repeated?”

“We do,” Angie said.

“Well, I’ll take you at your word. How do you feel about our terms so far?”

“If we’re going to agree not to leak to the press, which, believe me, will strain our relationship with Richie Colgan, then you have to keep us in the loop. If we think you’re treating us like you treat the press, Colgan gets a phone call.”

Broussard nodded. “I don’t see a problem with that. Poole?”

Poole shrugged, his eyes on me.

Angie said, “I find it hard to believe a four-year-old could vanish so completely on a warm night without anyone seeing her.”

Broussard turned his wedding ring in half revolutions around his finger. “So do I.”

“So what have you got?” Angie said. “Three days, you must have something we didn’t read about in the papers.”

“We have twelve confessions,” Broussard said, “ranging from ‘I took the girl and ate her’ to ‘I took the girl and sold her to the Moonies,’ who apparently pay top dollar.” He gave us a rueful smile. “None of the twelve confessions check out. We got psychics who say she’s in Connecticut; she’s in California; no, she’s still in the state but in a wooded region. We’ve interrogated Lionel and Beatrice McCready, and their alibis are airtight. We’ve checked the sewers. We’ve interviewed every neighbor on that street inside their houses, not just to see what they might have heard or saw that night but to check their homes casually for any evidence of the girl. We now know which neighbor does coke, which has a drinking problem, which beats his wife, and which beats her husband, but we haven’t found anything to tie any of them to Amanda McCready’s disappearance.”

“Zero,” I said. “You really have nothing.”

Broussard turned his head slowly, looked at Poole.

After about a minute of staring across the table at us, his tongue rolling around and pushing against his lower lip, Poole reached into the battered attaché case on the seat beside him and removed a few glossy photographs. He handed the first one across the table to us.

It was a black-and-white close-up of a man in his late fifties with a face that looked as if the skin had been pulled back hard against the bone, bunched up, and clipped by a metal clamp at the back of his skull. His pale eyes bulged from their sockets, and his tiny mouth all but disappeared under the shadow of his curved talon of a nose. His sunken cheeks were so puckered, he could have been sucking on a lemon. Ten or twelve strands of silver hair were finger-combed across the exposed flesh at the top of his pointy head.

“Ever seen him?” Broussard asked.

We shook our heads.

“Name’s Leon Trett. Convicted child molester. He’s taken three falls. The first got him sentenced to a psych ward, the last two to the pen. He finished his last bit about two and a half years ago, walked out of Bridgewater, and disappeared.”

Poole handed us a second photo, this one a full-length color shot of a gigantic woman with the shoulders of a bank vault and the wide girth and shaggy brown mane of a Saint Bernard standing upright.

“Good God,” Angie said.

“Roberta Trett,” Poole said. “The lovely missus of the aforementioned Leon. That picture was taken ten years ago, so she could have changed some, but I doubt she’s shrunk. Roberta has a renowned green thumb. She usually supports herself and her dear heart, Leon, as a florist. Two and a half years ago, she quit her job and moved out of her apartment in Roslindale, and no one has seen either of them since.”

“But…” Angie said.

Poole handed the third and final photograph across the table. It was a mug shot of a small toffee-skinned man with a lazy right eye and scrunched, confused features. He peered into the lens as if he were looking for it in a dark room, his face a knot of helpless anger and agitated bewilderment.

“Corwin Earle,” Poole said. “Also a convicted pedophile. Released one week ago from Bridgewater. Whereabouts unknown.”

“But he’s connected to the Tretts,” I said.

Broussard nodded. “Bunked with Leon in Bridgewater. After Leon rotated back to the world, Corwin Earle’s roommate was a Dorchester mugger named Bobby Minton, who in between stomping the shit out of Corwin for being a baby-raper was privy to the retard’s musings. Corwin, according to Bobby Minton, had a favorite fantasy: When he was released from prison, he was going to look up his old bunkmate Leon and his wonderful wife, Roberta, and they were going to live together as one big happy family. But Corwin wasn’t going to show up on the door without a gift. Bad form, I guess. And, according to Bobby Minton, the gift wasn’t going to be a bottle of Cutty for Leon and a dozen roses for Roberta. It was going to be a kid. Young, Bobby told us. Corwin and Leon like ’em young. No older than nine.”

“This Bobby Minton call you?” Angie said.

Poole nodded. “As soon as he heard about Amanda McCready’s disappearance. Mr. Minton, it seems, had consistently taunted Corwin Earle with vivid stories about what the good people of Dorchester do to baby-rapers. How Corwin wouldn’t be able to walk ten yards down Dorchester Avenue without getting his penis chopped off and stuffed in his mouth. Mr. Minton thinks Corwin Earle specifically chose Dorchester in which to pick up his homecoming present for the Tretts because he wanted to spit in Mr. Minton’s face.”

“And where’s Corwin Earle now?” I asked.

“Gone. Vanished. We’ve staked out his parents’ home in Marshfield, but so far, nothing. He left the pen in a taxi, took it to a strip club in Stoughton, and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”

“And this Bobby Minton’s phone call or whatever—that’s all you have to tie Earle and the Tretts to Amanda?”

“Pretty thin, huh?” Broussard said. “I told you we don’t have much. Chances are, Earle doesn’t have the balls for a straight kidnapping in an unknown neighborhood. Nothing in his sheet points toward it. The kids he molested were kids at a summer camp where he worked seven years ago. No violence, no forced captivity. He was probably just talking big for his cell mate.”

“What about the Tretts?” Angie said.

“Well, Roberta’s clean. The only felony she’s ever been convicted of was as an accessory-after-the-fact in a liquor store stickup in Lynn back in the late seventies. She did a year, completed her probation, and hasn’t spent so much as a night in county jail since.”

“But Leon?”

“Leon.” Broussard raised his eyebrows at Poole and whistled. “Leon’s bad, bad, bad. Convicted three times, accused twenty. Most cases were dropped when the victims refused to testify. And I don’t know if you know the logic regarding baby-rapers, but it’s the same for rats and roaches: You see one, there’s another hundred nearby. You catch a freak molesting a kid, you can bet there’s another thirty he’s never been bagged for if he’s halfway intelligent. So Leon, by our conservative estimates, has probably raped a good fifty kids. And he was living in Randolph and later in Holbrook when kids disappeared for good, so the feds and local cops have him at the head of their lists of suspects for those kids’ murders. Let you in on another aspect of Leon’s character—last time he was busted, Kingston P.D. found a shitload of automatic weapons buried near his house.”

“Did he take a fall for them?” Angie asked.

Broussard shook his head. “He was smart enough to bury them on his next-door neighbor’s property. Kingston P.D. knew the shit was his—his house was filled with NRA newsletters, gun manuals,
The Turner Diaries
, all the usual well-armed paranoid’s paraphernalia—but they couldn’t prove it. Very little sticks to Leon. He’s very careful, and he knows how to drop out of sight.”

“Apparently.” Angie said, with a bitter edge.

Poole put a hand lightly on hers. “Keep the photos. Study them. And have your eyes open for any of the three. I doubt they’re involved—nothing points to it besides a convict’s theory—but they are the most prominent child-rapers in the area these days.”

Angie smiled at Poole’s hand. “Okay.”

Broussard lifted his silk tie and picked at some lint. “Who was Helene McCready with at the Filmore Sunday night?”

“Dottie Mahew,” Angie said.

“That all?”

Neither Angie nor I spoke for a moment.