Mystic River (17 page)

“And yet you haven’t charged him with anything.”

“Well, first off, Mr. Marcus, I’m State Police. If this crime hadn’t happened in Pen Park, I wouldn’t even be here. East Bucky is, for the most part, under City jurisdiction, and I can’t speak for the City cops.”

Annabeth said, “I’ll tell that to my friend Connie. Bobby and his friends blew up her flower shop.”

“Why?” Sean asked.

“Because she wouldn’t pay him,” Annabeth said.

“Pay him to do what?”

“Not blow up her fucking flower shop,” Annabeth said, and took another sip of coffee, Sean thinking it again—this woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.

“So your daughter,” Whitey said, “was dating him.”

Annabeth nodded. “Not for long. A few months, yeah, Jim? It ended back in November.”

“How’d Bobby take it?” Whitey asked.

The Marcuses exchanged glances again, and then Jimmy said, “There was a beef one night. He came to the house with his guard dog, Roman Fallow.”

“And?”

“And we made it clear they should leave.”

“Who’s we?”

Annabeth said, “Several of my brothers live in the apartment above us and the apartment below. They’re protective of Katie.”

“The Savages,” Sean told Whitey.

Whitey placed his pen on the pad again and pressed his index and thumb tips against the skin at the corners of his eyes. “The Savage brothers.”

“Yes. Why?”

“All due respect, ma’am, I’m a bit worried this could shape up into something ugly.” Whitey kept his head down, kneading the back of his neck now. “I mean absolutely no offense here, but—”

“That’s usually what someone says before they’re about to say something offensive.”

Whitey looked up at her with a surprised smile. “Your brothers, you must know, have some reputations themselves.”

Annabeth met Whitey’s smile with a hard one of her own. “I know what they are, Sergeant Powers. You don’t have to dance around it.”

“A friend of mine in Major Crimes told me a few months back that O’Donnell was making noise about moving into loan-sharking and heroin. Both of which, I’m told, are exclusively Savage territory.”

“Not in the Flats.”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“Not in the Flats,” Jimmy said, his hand on his wife’s. “Means they don’t do that shit in their own neighborhood.”

“Just someone else’s,” Whitey said, and let that lie on the table for a bit. “In either case, that would leave a vacuum in the Flats. Right? An exploitable vacuum. Which, if my info is correct, is what Bobby O’Donnell has been planning to exploit.”

“And?” Jimmy said, rising up a bit in his seat.

“And?”

“And what does this have to do with my daughter, Sergeant?”

“Everything,” Whitey said, his arms spreading wide. “Everything, Mr. Marcus, because all either side needed was one little excuse to go to war. And now they have it.”

Jimmy shook his head, a bitter grin twitching at the edges of his mouth.

“Oh, you don’t think so, Mr. Marcus?”

Jimmy raised his head. “I think my neighborhood, Sergeant, is going to disappear soon. And crime’s going to
go with it. And it won’t be because of the Savages or the O’Donnells or you guys bucking up against them. It’ll be because interest rates are low and property taxes are getting high and everyone wants to move back to the city because the restaurants in the suburbs suck. And these people moving in, they aren’t the kind that need heroin or six bars per block or ten-dollar blow jobs. Their lives are fine. They like their jobs. They got futures and IRAs and nice German cars. So when they move in—and they’re coming—crime and half the neighborhood will move out. So I wouldn’t worry much about Bobby O’Donnell and my brothers-in-law going to war, Sergeant. War for what?”

“For the right now,” Whitey said.

Jimmy said, “You honestly think O’Donnell killed my daughter?”

“I think the Savages might consider him a suspect. And I think someone needs to talk them out of that kind of thinking until we’ve had time to do our jobs.”

Jimmy and Annabeth sat on the other side of the table, Sean trying to read their faces but getting nothing back.

“Jimmy,” Sean said, “without distractions, we can close this case fast.”

“Yeah?” Jimmy said. “I got your word on that, Sean?”

“You do. And close it clean, too, so nothing comes back on us in court.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long would you say it’ll take you to put her killer in jail?”

Whitey held up a hand. “Wait a second—are you bargaining with us, Mr. Marcus?”

“Bargaining?” Jimmy’s face had that convict’s deadness to it again.

“Yeah,” Whitey said. “Because I’m perceiving—”

“You’re
perceiving
?”

“—an aspect of threat to this conversation.”

“Really?” All innocence now, but the eyes still dead.

“Like you’re giving us a deadline,” Whitey said.

“Trooper Devine pledged that he’d find my daughter’s killer. I’m just asking in what sort of time frame he thinks this will happen.”

“Trooper Devine,” Whitey said, “is not in charge of this investigation. I am. And we will depth-charge whoever did this, Mr. and Mrs. Marcus. What I don’t need is anyone getting it in their head that our fear of a war between the Savage and O’Donnell crews can be used as some sort of leverage against us. I think that, I’ll arrest them all on public nuisance charges and lose the paperwork until this is over.”

A couple of janitors walked past them, trays in hand, the soggy food on top letting off a gray steam. Sean felt the air in the place grow staler, the night close in around them.

“So, okay,” Jimmy said with a bright smile.

“Okay, what?”

“Find her killer. I won’t stand in your way.” He turned to his wife as he stood and offered her his hand. “Honey?”

Whitey said, “Mr. Marcus.”

Jimmy looked down at him as his wife took his hand and stood.

“There’ll be a trooper downstairs to drive you home,” Whitey said, and reached into his wallet. “If you think of anything, give us a call.”

Jimmy took Whitey’s card and placed it in his back pocket.

Now that she was standing, Annabeth looked a lot less steady, like her legs were filled with liquid. She squeezed her husband’s hand and her own whitened.

“Thank you,” she whispered to Sean and Whitey.

Sean could see the ravages of the day finding her face and body now, beginning to drape her. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she’d look like when she was much older—a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she’d never asked for.

Sean had no idea where the words came from. He wasn’t
even aware he was speaking until he heard the sound of his voice enter the cold cafeteria:

“We’ll speak for her, Mrs. Marcus. If that’s okay, we’ll do that.”

Annabeth’s face crinkled momentarily, and then she sucked at the air and nodded several times, wavering slightly against her husband.

“Yes, Mr. Devine, that’s okay. That’s fine.”

D
RIVING BACK
across the city, Whitey said, “What’s this car business?”

Sean said, “What?”

“Marcus said you guys almost got in some car when you were kids.”

“We…” Sean reached up by the dashboard and adjusted the side-view mirror until he could see the stream of headlights glowing behind them, fuzzy yellow dots bouncing slightly in the night, shimmying. “We, shit, well, there was this car. Me and Jimmy and a kid named Dave Boyle were playing out in front of my house. We were, like, eleven. And anyway, this car came up the street and took Dave away.”

“An abduction?”

Sean nodded, keeping his eyes on those shimmying yellow lights. “Guys pretended to be cops. They convinced Dave to get in the car. Jimmy and me didn’t. They had Dave four days. He managed to escape. Lives in the Flats now.”

“They catch the guys?”

“One died, the other got busted about a year later, went the noose route in his cell.”

“Man,” Whitey said, “I wish there was an island, you know? Like in that old Steve McQueen movie where he was supposed to be French and everyone had an accent but him? He’s just Steve McQueen with a French name. Jumps off the cliff at the end with the raft made of coconuts? You ever see that?”

“No.”

“Good movie. But, like, if they had an island just for baby-rapers and chicken hawks? Just airlift food in a few times a week, fill the water with mines. No one gets off. First-time offenders, fuck you, you get life on the island. Sorry, fellas, just can’t risk you getting out and poisoning someone else. ’Cause it’s a transmittable disease, you know? You get it ’cause someone did it to you. And you go and pass it on. Like leprosy. I figure we put ’em all on this island, less chance they can pass it on. Each generation, we have fewer and fewer of them. A few hundred years, we turn the island into Club Med or something. Kids hear about these freaks the way they hear about ghosts now, as something we’ve, I dunno,
evolved
beyond.”

Sean said, “Shit, Sarge, what’re you, deep all of a sudden?”

Whitey grinned and turned onto the expressway ramp.

“Your buddy Marcus,” he said. “Moment I laid eyes on him, I knew he’d done time. They never lose that tension, you know? In their shoulders mostly. Spend two years watching your own back, every second of every day, the tension’s gotta settle somewhere.”

“He just lost his daughter, man. Maybe that’s what settled in his shoulders.”

Whitey shook his head. “No. That’s in his stomach right now. You see how he kept grimacing? That’s the loss sitting in his stomach, turning it to acid. Seen it a million times. The shoulders, though, that’s prison.”

Sean turned from the rearview, watched the lights on the other side of the highway for a bit. They came in their direction like bullet eyes, streaked past them like hazy ribbons, blurring into one another. He felt the city girded all around them, with its high-rises and tenements and office towers and parking garages, arenas and nightclubs and churches, and he knew that if one of those lights went out, it wouldn’t make any difference. And if a new light came on, no one would notice. And yet, they pulsed and glowed and shimmied and flared and stared at you, just like now—staring in
at his and Whitey’s own lights as they blipped past on the expressway, just one more set of red and yellow lights streaking along amid a current of red and yellow lights that blipped, blipped, blipped through an unremarkable Sunday dusk.

Toward where?

Toward the extinguished lights, dummy. Toward the shattered glass.

A
FTER MIDNIGHT
, once Annabeth and the girls had finally gone to sleep and Annabeth’s cousin Celeste, who’d come by as soon as she’d heard, had started dozing on the couch, Jimmy went downstairs and sat on the front porch of the three-decker he shared with the Savage brothers.

He brought Sean’s glove with him and he slipped it over his hand even though he couldn’t get his thumb in there and the heel of the glove stopped in the middle of his palm. He sat looking out at the four lanes of Buckingham Avenue and tossed a ball into the webbing, the soft thwack of leather against leather calming something in him.

Jimmy had always liked sitting out here at night. The storefronts across the avenue were closed and mostly dark. At night, a hush fell over an area where commercial business was conducted during the day, and it was a hush unlike any other. The noise that normally ruled the daytime wasn’t gone, it was merely sucked up, as if into a pair of lungs, and then held, waiting to be expelled. He trusted that hush, warmed to it, because it promised the return of the noise, even as it held it captive. Jimmy couldn’t imagine living somewhere rural, where the hush
was
the noise, where silence was delicate and shattered upon touch.

But he did like this hush, this rumbling stillness. Up until now, the evening had seemed so noisy, so violent with voices and the weeping of his wife and daughters. Sean Devine had sent over two detectives, Brackett and Rosenthal, to search Katie’s room with embarrassed eyes cast
downward, whispering to Jimmy their apologies as they searched drawers and under the bed and mattress, Jimmy wishing they’d just speed it up, stop fucking talking to him. In the end, they didn’t find anything unusual outside of seven hundred dollars in new bills in Katie’s sock drawer. They’d shown it to Jimmy along with her bank book—stamped “Closed”—the final withdrawal having been made Friday afternoon.

Jimmy had no answer for them. It was a surprise to him. But given all the other surprises of the day, it had very little effect. It just added to the general numbness.

“We can kill him.”

Val stepped out onto the porch and handed Jimmy a beer. He sat down beside him, his feet bare on the steps.

“O’Donnell?”

Val nodded. “I’d like to. You know, Jim?”

“You think he killed Katie.”

Val nodded. “Or had someone else do it. Don’t you? Her girlfriends sure thought so. They say Roman rolled up on them in a bar, threatened Katie.”

“Threatened?”

“Well, gave her some shit anyway, like she was still O’Donnell’s girl. Come
on
, Jimmy, it had to be Bobby.”

Jimmy said, “I don’t know that for sure yet.”

“What’ll you do when you do know?”

Jimmy put the baseball glove on the step below him and opened his beer. He took a long, slow drink from it. “I don’t know that, either.”

T
HEY WENT
at it all night and into the morning—Sean, Whitey Powers, Souza and Connolly, two other members of the State Homicide Unit, Brackett and Rosenthal, plus a legion of troopers and CSS techs, photographers and medical examiners—everyone banging at the case like a steel box. They’d scraped every leaf in the park for evidence. They’d filled notebooks with diagrams and field reports. The troopers had conducted the house-to-house Q & A’s of every house within walking distance of the park, filled a van with vagrants from the park and the burned-out shells on Sydney. They searched through the backpack they’d found in Katie Marcus’s car and come up with the usual shit before finding a brochure for Las Vegas and a list of Vegas hotels on lined yellow paper.

Whitey showed the brochure to Sean and whistled. “What we in the biz call a clue. Let’s go talk to the friends.”

Eve Pigeon and Diane Cestra, maybe the last two decent people to see Katie Marcus alive according to her father, looked like they’d taken whacks to the back of their heads from the same shovel. Whitey and Sean worked them softly between the almost constant buckets of tears that streamed down their faces. The girls provided them with a timeline of
Katie Marcus’s actions on her last night alive and gave them the names of the bars they’d gone to along with approximate times of arrival and departure, but when it came to the personal stuff, both Sean and Whitey felt they were holding back, exchanging looks before they’d answer, getting vague where before they’d been definite:

“She dating anybody?”

“Nobody, like, regular.”

“How about casually?”

“Well…”

“Yeah?”

“She didn’t keep us real current on that kinda thing.”

“Diane, Eve, come on. Your best friend since kindergarten, and she don’t tell you who she’s dating?”

“She was private like that.”

“Yeah, private. That was Katie, sir.”

Whitey tried another way in: “So there was nothing special about last night? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“No.”

“How about her planning to leave town?”

“What? No.”

“No? Diane, she had a knapsack in the back of her car. It had brochures for Vegas in it. She was, what, carrying them around for someone else?”

“Maybe. I dunno.”

Eve’s father had piped in then: “Honey, you know something could help, you start talking. This is Katie getting, Jesus, murdered here.”

Which had just brought on a fresh bucket of sobs, both girls going to hell then, beginning to wail and hug each other and shake, mouths wide and oval and slightly skewered in the pantomime of grief Sean had seen time and time again, the moment when, as Martin Friel called it, the levee broke and the permanence of the victim’s absence truly hit home. Times like that, there was nothing you could do but watch or leave.

They watched and waited.

Eve Pigeon did look a bit like a bird, Sean thought. Her face was very sharp, her nose very thin. It nearly worked for her, though. She had a grace about her that gave her thinness an air of the almost-aristocratic. Sean guessed she was the kind of woman who looked better in formal clothing than casual, and she emanated a decency and intelligence that Sean figured would attract only serious men, weed out the scammers and Romeos.

Diane, on the other hand, oozed a defeated sensuality. Sean spotted a faded bruise just behind her right eye, and she struck him as denser than Eve, more given to emotion and possibly laughter, too. A fading hope hung in both her eyes like matching flaws, a neediness that Sean knew rarely attracted any other kind of man but the predatory kind. Sean figured she’d be at the center of a few 911 domestic disturbance calls over the coming years, and that by the time the cops reached her door, that dying hope would be long gone from her eyes.

“Eve,” Whitey said gently when they’d finally stopped crying, “I need to know about Roman Fallow.”

Eve nodded as if she’d been expecting the question, but she didn’t say anything right away. She chewed the skin around her thumbnail and stared at some crumbs on the tabletop.

“That jerkoff hangs around Bobby O’Donnell?” her father said.

Whitey held up a hand to him, glanced over at Sean.

“Eve,” Sean said, knowing Eve was the one they had to get to. She’d be harder to crack than Diane, but she’d yield more in the way of pertinent detail.

She looked at him.

“There won’t be any reprisals, if that’s what’s worrying you. You tell us something about Roman Fallow or Bobby, and it stays with us. They’ll never know it came from you.”

Diane said, “What about when it goes to court? Huh? What about then?”

Whitey gave Sean a look that said: You’re on your own.

Sean concentrated on Eve. “Unless you saw Roman or Bobby pull Katie from her car—”

“No.”

“Then the DA wouldn’t force either of you to testify in open court, Eve, no. He’d
ask
a lot probably, but he wouldn’t force you.”

Eve said, “You don’t know them.”

“Bobby and Roman? Sure I do. I put Bobby away for nine months when I was working narcotics cases.” Sean reached out and laid his hand on the table about an inch from hers. “And he threatened me. But that’s all he and Roman are—talk.”

Eve gave Sean’s hand a bitter half-smile with pursed lips. “Bull…shit,” she said, dragging it out.

Her father said, “You don’t talk like that in this house.”

“Mr. Pigeon,” Whitey said.

“No,” Drew said. “My house, my rules. I won’t have my daughter talking like she—”

“It was Bobby,” Eve said, and Diane let out a small gasp, stared at her friend as if she’d lost her mind.

Sean saw Whitey’s eyebrows arch.

“What was Bobby?” Sean said.

“Who Katie was dating. Bobby, not Roman.”

“Jimmy know about this?” Drew asked his daughter.

Eve let go one of those sullen shrugs Sean had found endemic to kids her age, a slow twitch of the body that said it barely cared enough to make the effort.

“Eve,” Drew said. “Did he?”

“He knew and he didn’t,” Eve said. She sighed and leaned her head back, stared up at the ceiling with those dark eyes. “Her parents thought it was over because for a while
she
thought it was over. The only one who didn’t think it was over was Bobby. He wouldn’t accept it. He kept coming back. One night he held her off a third-floor landing.”

“You saw this?” Whitey said.

She shook her head. “Katie told me. He ran into her at a party six weeks, a month ago. He convinced her to come out
in the hall to talk to him. ’Cept it was a third-floor apartment, you know?” Eve wiped her face with the back of her hand, even though by the looks of her, she was all cried out at the moment. “Katie told me she kept trying to explain to him that they were broken up, but Bobby wouldn’t hear it, and finally he got so mad he grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her over the railing. He held her over the stairway. Three stories down, the psycho. And he said if she broke up with him he’d break
her
up. She was his girl until he said otherwise and if she didn’t like it, he’d drop her right fucking then.”

“Jesus,” Drew Pigeon said after a few moments’ silence. “You
know
these people?”

Whitey said, “So, Eve, what did Roman say to her in the bar Saturday night?”

Eve didn’t say anything for a bit.

Whitey said, “Why don’t you tell us, Diane?”

Diane looked like she needed a drink. “We told Val. That was enough.”

“Val?” Whitey said. “Val Savage?”

Diane said, “He was here this afternoon.”

“And you told him what Roman said, but you won’t tell us.”

“He’s her family,” Diane said, and crossed her arms across her chest, gave them her best “fuck you, cop” face.

“I’ll tell you,” Eve said. “Jesus. He said he’d heard we were drunk and making asses of ourselves and he didn’t like hearing that, and
Bobby
sure wouldn’t like hearing it and maybe we should go home.”

“So you left.”

“You ever talk to Roman?” she said. “He’s got a way of making his questions sound like threats.”

“And that was it,” Whitey said. “You didn’t see him follow you out of the bar or anything?”

She shook her head.

They looked at Diane.

Diane shrugged. “We were pretty drunk.”

“You had no more contact with him that night? Either of you?”

“Katie drove us to my house,” Eve said. “She dropped us off. That’s all we saw of her.” She bit down on the last word, clenching her face like a fist as she tilted her head back again and looked up, sucking air.

Sean said, “Who was she planning to go to Vegas with? Bobby?”

Eve stared up at the ceiling for a while, her breath gone liquid. “Not Bobby,” she said eventually.

“Who, Eve?” Sean said. “Who was she going to Vegas with?”

“Brendan.”

“Brendan Harris?” Whitey said.

“Brendan Harris,” she said. “Yeah.”

Whitey and Sean looked at each other.

“Just Ray’s kid?” Drew Pigeon said. “The one with the mute for a brother?”

Eve nodded and Drew turned to Sean and Whitey.

“Nice kid. Harmless.”

Sean nodded. Harmless. Sure.

“You got an address?” Whitey asked.

N
OBODY WAS HOME
at Brendan Harris’s address, so Sean called in, got two troopers to cover the place and call them when Harris returned.

They went to Mrs. Prior’s house next, and sat through tea and stale coffee cakes and
Touched by an Angel
turned up so loud Sean could hear Della Reese in his head for an hour afterward screaming “Amen” and talking about redemption.

Mrs. Prior said she’d looked out her window around 1:30
A.M
. the previous night, seen two kids playing in the street, little kids, out at a time like that, throwing cans at each other, fencing with hockey sticks, using foul language. She thought of saying something to them, but little old ladies had to be careful. Kids were crazy these days, shooting up
schools, wearing those baggy clothes, using all that foul language. Besides, the kids eventually chased each other away and down the street and then they were someone else’s problem, but the way they behaved today, I mean, is that any way to live?

“Officer Medeiros told us you heard a car around one-forty-five,” Whitey said.

Mrs. Prior watched Della explain God’s way to Roma Downey, Roma looking all solemn and dewy-eyed and filled to the brim with Jesus. Mrs. Prior nodded several times at the TV, then turned and looked back at Whitey and Sean.

“I heard a car hit something.”

“Hit what?”

“The way people drive today, it’s a blessing I don’t have a license anymore. I’d be afraid to drive these streets. Everyone’s just so mad.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sean said. “Did it sound like a car hitting another car?”

“Oh, no.”

“Hitting a person?” Whitey said.

“Good Lord, what would that sound like? I wouldn’t even want to know.”

“So it wasn’t a really, really loud sound,” Whitey said.

“Excuse me, dear?”

Whitey repeated himself, leaning in.

“No,” Mrs. Prior said. “It was more like a car hitting a rock or a curb. And then it stalled and then someone said, ‘Hi.’”

“Someone said, ‘Hi’?”

“Hi.” Mrs. Prior looked at Sean and nodded. “And then part of the car cracked.”

Sean and Whitey looked at each other.

Whitey said, “Cracked?”

Mrs. Prior nodded her little blue head. “When my Leo was alive, he snapped the axle on our Plymouth? It made such a noise! Crack!” Her eyes grew bright. “Crack!” she said. “Crack!”

“And that’s what you heard after someone said, ‘Hi.’”

She nodded. “Hi and crack!”

“And then you looked out your window and saw what?”

“Oh, no, no,” Mrs. Prior said. “I didn’t look out my window. I was in my dressing gown by then. I’d been in bed. I wasn’t looking out the window in my dressing gown. People could see.”

“But fifteen minutes before, you’d—”

“Young man, I wasn’t in my dressing gown fifteen minutes before. I’d just finished watching TV, a wonderful film with Glenn Ford. Oh, I wish I could remember the name.”

“So you turned off the TV…”

“And I saw those motherless children in the street, and then I went upstairs and changed into my dressing gown, and then, young sir, I kept my shades drawn.”

“The voice that said, ‘Hi,’” Whitey said. “Was it male or female?”

“Female, I think,” Mrs. Prior said. “It was a high voice. Not like either of yours,” she said brightly. “You two have fine masculine voices. Your mothers must be proud.”

Whitey said, “Oh, yes, ma’am. Like you wouldn’t believe.”

As they left the house, Sean said, “Crack!”

Whitey smiled. “She liked saying that, you know? Got some blood pumping in the old girl.”

“You thinking snapped axle or gunshot?”

“Gunshot,” Whitey said. “It’s the ‘Hi’ that’s throwing me.”

“Would suggest she knew the shooter, she says hi to him.”

“Would suggest. Wouldn’t guarantee.”

They worked the bars after that, coming away with nothing but boozy recollections of maybe seeing the girls in here, maybe not, and half-assed lists of possible patrons who’d been in at the approximate times.

By the time they got to McGills, Whitey was getting pissed.

“Two young chicks—and they were young, by the way, underage actually—hop up on this bar right here and dance, and you’re telling me you don’t recall that?”

The bartender was nodding halfway through Whitey’s question. “Oh, those girls. Okay, okay. I remember them. Sure. They must have had great IDs, Detective, because we carded ’em.”

“That’s ‘Sergeant,’” Whitey said. “You barely remembered they were here at first, but now you can remember carding them. You remember what time they left, maybe? Or is that selectively foggy?”

The bartender, a young guy with biceps so big they probably squeezed off the blood flow to his brain, said, “Left?”

“As in departed.”

“I don’t—”

“It was right before Crosby broke the clock,” a guy on the stool said.

Sean glanced over at the guy—an old-timer with the
Herald
spread out on the bar between a bottle of Bud and a shot of whiskey, cigarette curling down into the ashtray.