Gone, Baby, Gone (9 page)

“Remember,” Broussard said, “full disclosure.”

“Skinny Ray Likanski,” I said.

Broussard turned to Poole. “Tell me more about this guy, partner.”

“The rascal,” Poole said. “And to think we had His Skinniness in our hands not an hour ago.” He shook his head. “Well, that’s a miss.”

“How so?” I said.

“Skinny Ray’s a professional lowlife. Learned from his daddy. He probably knows we’re looking for him, so he’s gone. Least for a while. Probably the only reason he told us you two were waving weapons around in the Filmore was so we’d leave him be, give him time to get out of Dodge. The Likanskis got relatives in Allegheny, Rem. Maybe you could—”

“I’ll call the P.D. down there,” Broussard said. “Can we skip-trace him?”

Poole shook his head. “He hasn’t taken a fall in five years. No outstandings. No parole officer. He’s clean.” Poole tapped the table with his index. “He’ll surface eventually. Disease always does.”

“We done?” Broussard asked, as the waitress approached.

Poole paid the check, and the four of us walked out into the darkening afternoon.

“If you were betting men,” Angie said, “what would you bet happened to Amanda McCready?”

Broussard took out another stick of gum, popped it in his mouth, and chewed slowly. Poole straightened his tie and studied his reflection in the passenger window of his car.

“I’d say,” Poole said, “that nothing good can come when a four-year-old has been missing for eighty-plus hours.”

“Detective Broussard?” Angie said.

“I’d say she’s dead, Ms. Gennaro.” He walked around the car to the driver’s door and opened it. “It’s a nasty world out there, and it’s never been nice to children.”

6

The Astros were playing the Orioles in a sunset game at Savin Hill Park, and both teams seemed to be having some problems with their mechanics. When a slugger for the Astros hit one down the third-base line, the Orioles’ third baseman failed to field it because he was more interested in tugging at a weed by his feet. So the Astros’ base runner picked up the ball and ran toward home with it. Just before he reached the plate, he threw the ball in the general direction of the pitcher, who picked it up and threw it toward first. The first baseman caught the ball, but instead of tagging a runner, he turned and threw it into the outfield. The centerfielder and the right fielder met at the ball and tackled each other. The left fielder waved to his mom.

The North Dorchester T-ball league for ages four through six met once a week down at Savin Hill Park and played on the smaller of two fields, which was separated from the Southeast Expressway by about fifty yards and a chain-link fence. Savin Hill overlooks the expressway and a small bay known as Malibu Beach, and it’s here that the Dorchester Yacht Club moors its boats. I’ve lived in this neighborhood my entire life and have never seen an actual yacht drop anchor anywhere near here, but maybe I’m always looking on the wrong days.

When I was between four and six, we played baseball because they didn’t have T-ball back then. We had coaches, and parents who screamed and demanded concentration, kids who’d already been taught how to lay down bunts and dive under the second baseman’s tag, fathers who tested us from the mound with fast balls and curves. We had seven-inning games and bitter rivalries with other parishes, and by the time we entered Little League at seven or eight, the teams from St. Bart’s, St. William’s, and St. Anthony’s in North Dorchester were justifiably feared.

As I stood by the bleachers with Angie and watched about thirty small boys and girls run around like spastics and miss balls because they’d pulled their hats over their eyes or were busy staring up at the setting sun, I was pretty certain that the method used when I was their age better prepared a child for the rigors of the actual sport of baseball, but the T-ball kids seemed to be having a lot more fun.

In the first place, there were no outs that I could see. The entire lineup of each team hit through a rotation. Once all fifteen or so kids had hit (and they all hit; there was no such thing as a strikeout), they switched bats for gloves with the other team. Nobody kept score. If one child was actually alert enough to both catch the ball and tag out the runner, both kids were congratulated profusely by the base coach and then the runner stayed on base. A few parents yelled, “Pick up the ball for God’s sake, Andrea,” or “Run, Eddie, run! No, no—that way. That way!” But for the most part, the parents and coaches clapped for every hit that dribbled more than four feet, for every ball fielded and thrown back somewhere in the same zip code as the park, for every successful run from first base to third, even if the kid ran over the pitcher’s mound to get there.

Amanda McCready had played in this league. Signed up and brought to the games by Lionel and Beatrice, she’d been an Oriole, and her coach told us she usually played second base and could catch the ball pretty well when she wasn’t transfixed by the bird on her shirt.

“She missed a few that way.” Sonya Garabedian smiled and shook her head. “She’d be right out there where Aaron is now, and she’d be tugging at her shirt, staring at the bird, talking to it every now and then. And if a ball came her way—well, it would just have to wait until she was done looking at the pretty bird.”

The boy standing at the tee, a round and rather large kid for his age, smashed the ball into deep left, and all the outfielders and most of the infielders ran after it. As he rounded second base, the big boy decided, What the heck, he was going to try and field it too, and he ran into the outfield to join the party as the kids tackled and rolled and bounced off one another like bumper cars.

“That’s something you’d never see Amanda do,” Sonya Garabedian said.

“Hit a home run?” Angie said.

Sonya shook her head. “Well, that too. But, no, you see that pig pile out there? If we don’t get somebody to stop it, they’ll start playing King of the Mountain and forget why they came in the first place.”

As two parents walked out on the field toward the melee and kids somersaulted off the pile like circus performers, Sonya pointed to a small girl with red hair who was playing third base. She was probably five and smaller than almost anyone on either team. Her team shirt hung to her shins. She looked at the party going onto the outfield as more kids ran toward it, and then she bent to her knees and began digging in the dirt with a rock.

“That’s Kerry,” Sonya said. “No matter what happens—if an elephant walks out onto the field and starts letting all the kids play with its trunk—Kerry won’t join in. It simply wouldn’t occur to her.”

“She’s that shy?” I said.

“That’s part of it.” She nodded. “But more than that, she simply doesn’t respond to what other children predictably respond to. She’s never really sad, but she’s never really happy either. You understand?”

Kerry looked up from the dirt for a moment, her freckled face squinting as the dying sun bounced off the pitcher’s stop, and then she went back to digging.

“Amanda is like Kerry in that way,” Sonya said. “She doesn’t respond much to immediate stimulation.”

“She’s introverted,” Angie said.

“Partially, but not in a way that makes you think there’s all that much going on behind her eyes. It’s not that she’s locked in her own little world, it’s that she doesn’t see much that interests her in this world either.” She turned her face and looked up at me, and there was something sad and hard in the set of her jaw, the flatness of her gaze. “You’ve met Helene?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you think?”

I shrugged.

She smiled. “She makes people shrug, doesn’t she?”

“Did she come to games?” Angie asked.

“Once,” Sonya said. “Once, and she was drunk. She was with Dottie Mahew and they were both half in the bag, and they were very loud. I think Amanda was embarrassed. She kept asking me when the game would be over.” She shook her head. “Kids this age, they don’t grasp time the way we do. They just notice if it seems long or short. That day, the game must have seemed real long to Amanda.”

More parents and coaches had gone out to the field now, as had most of the Astros. Several kids were still bouncing in the original pile, but just as many had broken up into separate groups, playing tag, throwing their gloves at one another, or just rolling around on the grass like seals.

“Miss Garabedian, did you ever notice strangers lurking around the games?” Angie showed her the pictures of Corwin Earle, Leon, and Roberta Trett.

She looked at them, blinked at the size of Roberta, but eventually shook her head.

“See that big guy out there by the pile?” She pointed at a tall thick guy in his early forties with a bristly crew cut. “That’s Matthew Hoagland. He’s a professional bodybuilder, former Mr. Massachusetts a couple years in a row. A very sweet guy. And he loves his kids. Last year, we had a mangy-looking guy come by the field and watch the game for a few minutes, and none of us liked his eyes. So Matt made him leave. I have no idea what he said to the guy, but the guy turned white and left in a hurry. No one’s come back since. Maybe that type of…person has a network and spreads the word or whatever. I wouldn’t know. But no strangers come to these games.” She looked at us. “Until you two, that is.”

I touched my hair. “How’s my mange?”

She chuckled. “A few of us recognized you, Mr. Kenzie. We remember how you saved that child in the playground. You can baby-sit for any of us any time you want.”

Angie nudged me. “Our hero.”

“Shut up,” I said.

It took another ten minutes for order to be restored in the outfield and play, such as it was, to resume.

During that time, Sonya Garabedian introduced us to some of the parents who’d remained in the bleachers. A few of them knew Helene and Amanda, and we spent the rest of the game talking with them. What emerged from our conversations—other than further reinforcement of our perception of Helene McCready as a creature committed to self-interest—was a fuller portrait of Amanda.

Contrary to Helene’s depiction of some mythic sitcom moppet who lived only to smile and smile, the people we spoke to usually mentioned how little Amanda smiled, how she was generally listless and far too quiet for a four-year-old.

“My Jessica?” Frances Neagly said. “From the time she was two until she was five, she bounced off walls. And the questions! Everything was, ‘Mommy, why don’t animals talk like we do? How come I have toes? How come some water’s cold and some water’s hot?’” Frances gave us a tired smile. “I mean, it was constant. Every mother I know talks about how exasperating a four-year-old can be. They’re four, right? The world surprises them every ten seconds.”

“But Amanda?” Angie said.

Frances Neagly leaned back and looked around the park as the shadows deepened and crept across the children in the field, seemed to shrink them. “I baby-sat her a few times. Never by arrangement. Helene would drop by, say, ‘Could you just watch her a sec?’ And six or seven hours later she’d come pick her up. I mean, whatta you gonna do, say no?” She lit a cigarette. “Amanda was so quiet. Never a problem. Not once. But, really, who expects that from a four-year-old? She’d just sit wherever you left her and stare at the walls or the TV or whatever. She didn’t investigate my kids’ toys or pull the cat’s tail or anything. She’d just sit there, like a lump, and she never asked when her mother was coming back to get her.”

“Is she mentally handicapped?” I said. “Autistic, maybe?”

She shook her head. “No. If you talked to her, she responded fine. She always seemed a little surprised, but she’d be sweet, speak very well for her age. No, she’s a smart kid. She just isn’t a very excitable one.”

“And that seemed unnatural,” Angie said.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. You know what it is? I think she was used to being ignored.” A pigeon swooped in low over the pitcher’s mound, and some kid threw his glove at it and missed. Frances smiled weakly at us. “And I think that sucks.”

She turned away from us as her daughter came up to the plate, a bat held awkwardly in her hands as she considered the ball and tee in front of her.

“Hit it out of the park, honey,” Frances called. “You can do it.”

Her daughter turned and looked at her. She smiled. Then she shook her head several times and threw the bat onto the field.

7

After the game, we stopped in the Ashmont Grille for a meal and a beer, and Angie had what I can only describe as a delayed-stress reaction to what had happened in the Filmore Tap.

The Ashmont Grille served the sort of food my mom used to make—meat loaf and potato and lots of gravy—and the waitresses all acted like moms, too. If you didn’t clean your plate, they asked you if the starving children in China would waste food. I always half expected to be told I couldn’t leave the table until I’d eaten every last bite.

If that were the case, Angie would have been there until next week, the way she picked at her chicken Marsala. For someone so petite and slim, Angie can out-eat truck drivers fresh off the road. But tonight, she swirled the linguine on her fork, then seemed to forget about it. She’d drop the fork on the plate, sip some beer, and stare off into space as if she were Helene McCready looking for a television set.

By the time she’d reached her fourth bite, my meal was gone. Angie took this as an indication that dinner was over and pushed her plate into the center of the table.

“You can never know people,” she said, her eyes on the table. “Can you? Understand them. It’s not possible. You can’t…fathom what makes them do the things they do, think the way they do. If it’s not the way you think, it never makes sense. Does it?” She looked up at me and her eyes were red and wet.

“You talking about Helene?”

“Helene”—she cleared her throat—“Helene, and Big Dave, and those guys in the bar, and whoever took Amanda. They don’t make sense. They don’t…” A tear fell to her cheek and she wiped at it with the back of her hand. “Shit.”

I took her hand and she chewed the inside of her mouth, and looked up at the ceiling fan above her.