Mystic River (25 page)

“Celeste,” he said in that smoky, amber voice of his, “I think you’re scared.”

Celeste felt like her heart was clenched in a dirty hand.

“I think you’re scared and I think you know something. I want you to understand that I’m on your side. I’m on Dave’s side, too. But I’m on your side more because, like I said, you’re scared.”

“I’m not scared,” she managed, and opened the driver’s door.

“Yes, you are,” Sean said, and stepped back from the car as she got in it and drove off down the avenue.

W
HEN
S
EAN
got back up to the apartment, he found Jimmy in the hallway, talking on a cordless phone.

Jimmy said, “Yeah, I’ll remember the photographs. Thank you,” and hung up. He looked at Sean. “Reed’s Funeral Home,” he said. “They picked up her body from the medical examiner’s office, said I can come down with her effects.” He shrugged. “You know, finalize the service details, that sort of thing.”

Sean nodded.

“You get your report pad?”

Sean patted his pocket. “Right here.”

Jimmy tapped the cordless against his thigh several times. “So, I guess I better get down to Reed’s.”

“You look like you could use some sleep, man.”

“No, I’m all right.”

“Okay.”

As Sean went to pass him, Jimmy said, “I was wondering if I could ask you a favor.”

Sean stopped. “Sure.”

“Dave’ll probably be leaving soon to take Michael home. I don’t know what your schedule’s like, but I was kind of hoping maybe you’d keep Annabeth company for a bit. Just so she’s not alone, you know? Celeste will probably be back,
so it won’t be long. I mean, Val and his brothers took the girls out to a movie, so there’s no one in the house, and I know Annabeth doesn’t want to come down to the funeral home yet, so I just, I dunno, I figured…”

Sean said, “I don’t think it’ll be a problem. I gotta check with my sarge, but our official shift was over a couple hours ago. Let me talk to him. Okay?”

“I appreciate it.”

“Sure.” Sean started walking back toward the kitchen and then he stopped, looked back at Jimmy. “Actually, Jim, I need to ask you something.”

“Go ahead,” Jimmy said, getting that wary con’s look of his.

Sean came back down the hallway. “We got a couple of reports that you had a problem with that kid you mentioned this morning, that Brendan Harris.”

Jimmy shrugged. “Not problems, really. I just don’t care for the kid.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Jimmy put the cordless in his front pocket. “Some people just rub you wrong. You know?”

Sean stepped in close, put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “He was dating Katie, Jim. They were planning to elope.”

“Bullshit,” Jimmy said, his eyes on the floor.

“We found brochures for Vegas in her backpack, Jim. We made a few calls and found reservations under both their names with TWA. Brendan Harris confirmed it.”

Jimmy shrugged off Sean’s hand. “He kill my daughter?”

“No.”

“You’re a hundred percent positive.”

“Close to it. He passed a poly with flying colors, man. Plus, the boy don’t strike me as the type. He seemed like he really loved your daughter.”

“Fuck,” Jimmy said.

Sean leaned against the wall and waited, giving Jimmy time to take it all in.

“Elope?” Jimmy said after a while.

“Yeah. Jim, according to Brendan Harris and both of Katie’s girlfriends, you were dead set against them ever dating. What I don’t understand is why. Kid didn’t strike me as a problem kid. You know? Maybe a bit dim, I dunno. But he seemed decent, nice really. I’m confused.”

“You’re confused?” Jimmy chuckled. “I just found out my daughter—who is, you know, dead—was planning to elope, Sean.”

“I know,” Sean said, lowering his voice to nearly a whisper in hopes Jimmy would follow suit, the man about as agitated as Sean had seen him since yesterday afternoon by the drive-in screen. “I’m just curious, man—why were you so adamant that your daughter never see the kid?”

Jimmy leaned against the wall beside Sean and took a few long breaths, let them out slow. “I knew his father. They called him ‘Just Ray.’”

“What, he was a judge?”

Jimmy shook his head. “There were so many guys named Ray around at the time—you know, Crazy Ray Bucheck and Psycho Ray Dorian and Ray the Woodchuck Lane—that Ray Harris got stuck with ‘Just Ray’ because all the cool nicknames had been taken.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I never liked the guy much and then he cut out on his wife when she was pregnant with that mute kid she’s got now and Brendan only six, so I dunno, I just thought, ‘The acorn don’t fall far from the tree’ and shit, and I didn’t want him seeing my daughter.”

Sean nodded, though he didn’t buy it. Something about the way Jimmy had said he’d never liked the guy much—there was a small hitch in his voice, and Sean had heard enough bullshit stories in his time to recognize one no matter how logical it may have sounded.

“That’s it, huh?” Sean said. “That’s the only reason?”

“That’s it,” Jimmy said, and pushed himself off the wall, started back up the hallway.

“I
THINK IT’S
a good idea,” Whitey said as he stood outside the house with Sean. “Stick close to the family for a bit, see if you can pick up any more. What’d you say to Boyle’s wife, by the way?”

“I told her she looked scared.”

“She vouch for his alibi?”

Sean shook his head. “Said she was asleep.”

“But you think she was afraid?”

Sean looked back up at the windows fronting the street. He gestured to Whitey and tilted his head up the street, and Whitey followed him to the corner.

“She heard us talking about the car.”

“Fuck,” Whitey said. “She tells the husband, he might skip.”

“And go where? He’s an only child, mother deceased, low income, and he ain’t got much in the way of friends. Ain’t like he’s going to blow the country, try living in Uruguay.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s not a flight risk.”

“Sarge,” Sean said, “we got
nothing
to charge him with.”

Whitey took a step back, looked at Sean in the glow of the street lamp above them. “You going native on me, Supercop?”

“I just don’t see him for this, man. Lack of motive, for one.”

“His alibi’s shit, Devine. His stories are so full of holes, they were a boat, they’d be sitting on the ocean floor. You said the wife was scared. Not annoyed. Scared.”

“Okay, yeah. She was definitely holding something back.”

“So, you think she really was asleep when he came home?”

Sean saw Dave when they were little kids, getting in that car, weeping. He saw him dark and far away in the backseat as the car turned the corner. He wanted to bang his head against the wall behind him and knock the images right the fuck out.

“No. I think she knows when he came home. And now that she overheard us, she knows he was at the Last Drop that night. So, maybe, she had all these things in her head
about that night that didn’t jibe, and now she’s putting all the pieces together.”

“And those pieces are scaring the shit out of her?”

“Maybe. I dunno.” Sean kicked at a piece of loose stone at the base of a building. “I feel like…”

“What?”

“I feel like we got all these parts banging around near each other, but they don’t fit. I feel like we’re missing something.”

“You really don’t think Boyle did it?”

“I’m not ruling him out. I’m not. I’d buy him for it, if for one second I could imagine a motive.”

Whitey stepped back and lifted his heel, rested it against the light pole. He looked at Sean the way Sean had seen him look at a witness he wasn’t sure would hold up in court.

“Okay,” he said, “lack of motive’s bothering me, too. But not much, Sean. Not much. I think there’s something out there that could tie him to this. Otherwise, why the fuck’s he lying to us?”

“Come on,” Sean said. “That’s the job. People lie to us for no other reason but to see what it feels like. That block surrounding the Last Drop? There’s some serious street trade there at night—you got regular hookers, transvestites, friggin’ kids all working that circuit. Maybe Dave was just getting a hummer in his car, doesn’t want the wife to find out. Maybe he has a lady on the side. Who knows? But nothing, so far, connects him to within a mile of murdering Katherine Marcus.”

“Nothing but a bunch of his lies and my feeling the guy’s dirty.”

“Your feeling,” Sean said.

“Sean,” Whitey said, and started ticking off points on his fingers, “the guy lied to us about when he left McGills. He lied to us about when he got home. He was parked outside the Last Drop when the victim left. He was at
two
of the same bars as she was, yet he’s trying to cover that up. He’s got a badly bruised fist and a bullshit story about how it got that way. He knew the victim, which as we’ve already
agreed, our suspect did, too. He fits the profile—to a fucking T—of your average thrill killer; he’s white, mid-thirties, marginally employed, and, guessing by what you told me yesterday, he was sexually abused as a kid. You kidding me? On paper, this guy should be in jail already.”

“You just said it yourself, though—he’s a past victim of sexual abuse, and yet Katherine Marcus wasn’t sexually assaulted. That don’t make sense, Sarge.”

“Maybe he just whacked off over her.”

“There was no semen at the scene.”

“It rained.”

“Not where her body was found. In the random thrill kill, sexual emission is part of the equation, like, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time. Where is it in this case?”

Whitey lowered his head and drummed the sides of the light pole with his palms. “You were friends with the victim’s father
and
a potential suspect when you were—”

“Oh, come
on
.”

“—kids. That compromises you. Don’t tell me it don’t. You’re a fucking liability here.”

“I’m a—?” Sean lowered his voice and brought his hand back down from his chest. “Look,” he said, “I’m just in disagreement with you over the profile of the suspect. I’m not saying that if we zero in on Dave Boyle for more than just a few inconsistencies, I won’t be right there with you to bust him. You know I will be. But if you go to the DA right now with what you got, what’s he going to do?”

Whitey’s palms drummed a little harder against the pole.

“Really,” Sean said. “What’s he going to do?”

Whitey raised his arms above his head and let out a shuddering yawn. He met Sean’s eyes and gave him a weary frown. “Point taken. But”—he held up a finger—“
but
, you clubhouse fucking lawyer, you, I’m going to find the stick she was beat with, or the gun, or some bloody clothes. I don’t know what exactly, but I’m going to find something. And when I find it, I’m going to drop your friend.”

“He ain’t my friend,” Sean said. “Turns out you’re right? I’ll have my cuffs off my hip faster than yours.”

Whitey came off the pole and stepped up to Sean. “Don’t compromise yourself on this, Devine. You do that, you’ll compromise me, and I’ll bury you. I’m talking a transfer to the goddamn Berkshires, pulling radar-gun details from a fucking snowmobile.”

Sean ran both hands up his face and through his hair, trying to rub the weariness out of him. “Ballistics should be back by now,” he said.

Whitey stepped back from him. “Yeah, that’s where I’m going. Lab work on the prints should be in the computer, too. I’m going to run them, hope we get lucky. You got your cell?”

Sean patted his pocket. “Yeah.”

“I’ll call you later.” Whitey turned away from Sean and headed down Crescent for the cruiser, Sean feeling washed in the man’s disappointment, that probationary period suddenly seeming a lot more real than it had this morning.

He headed back up Buckingham toward Jimmy’s as Dave walked down the front steps with Michael.

“Heading home?”

Dave stopped. “Yeah. I can’t believe Celeste never came back with the car.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Sean said.

“Oh, yeah,” Dave said. “I just gotta walk is all.”

Sean laughed. “What’s it, five blocks?”

Dave smiled. “Almost six, man, you look at it close.”

“Better get going,” Sean said, “while there’s still a little light left. Take it easy, Mike.”

“Bye,” Michael said.

“Take care,” Dave said, and they left Sean by the stairs, Dave’s steps just a bit spongy from the beers he’d been knocking back in Jimmy’s place, Sean thinking, If you did do it, Dave, you better cut that shit out right away. You’re going to need every brain cell you got if Whitey and I come gunning for you. Every goddamn one.

T
HE
P
EN
C
HANNEL
was silver at this time of night, the sun set but some light still left in the sky. The treetops in the park had turned black, though, and the drive-in screen was just a hard shadow from over here. Celeste sat in her car on the Shawmut side, looking down at the channel and the park and then East Bucky rising like landfill behind it. The Flats was almost completely obscured by the park except for stray steeples and the taller rooftops. The homes in the Point, though, rose above the Flats and looked down on it all from paved and rolling hills.

Celeste couldn’t even remember driving over here. She’d dropped off the dress with one of Bruce Reed’s sons, the kid decked out in funereal black, but his cheeks so clean-shaven and his eyes so young that he looked more like he was heading out for the prom. She’d left the funeral home and the next thing she knew she was pulling into the back of the long-closed Isaak Ironworks, driving past the empty shells of hangar-sized buildings and pulling to the end of the lot, her bumper touching the rotted pilings and her eyes following the sluggish current of the Pen as it lapped toward the harbor locks.

Ever since she’d overheard the two policemen talking about Dave’s car—
their
car, the one she sat in right now—she’d felt drunk. But not a good drunk, all loose and easy with a soft buzz. No, she felt like she’d been drinking the cheap stuff all night, had come home and passed out, then woken up, still fuzzy-brained and thick-tongued, but rancid with the poison now, dull and dense and incapable of concentration.

“You’re scared,” the cop had said, cutting to the core of her so completely that her only response was pure, belligerent denial. “No, I’m not.” As if she were a child. No, I’m not. Yes, you are. No, I’m not. Yes, you are. I know you are, but what am I? Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

She was scared. She was terrified. She felt turned to pudding by the fear.

She’d talk to him, she told herself. He was still Dave, after all. A good father. A man who’d never raised a hand to her or shown a propensity for violence in all the years she’d known him. Never so much as kicked a door or punched a wall. She was sure she could still talk to him.