Mystic River (28 page)

“Yeah.”

“And his partner?” Sean said.

His father shook his head. “Died in a car crash. Or so the other one said. That’s as far as I know, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in what I know. Hell, you had to tell me Tim Marcus was dead.”

Sean drained what remained in his mug, pointed at his father’s empty glass. “Another?”

His father considered the glass for a bit. “What the hell. Sure.”

When Sean came back from the bar with fresh beers, his father was watching
Jeopardy!
run silently on one of the TV screens above the bar. As Sean sat down, his father said, “Who is Robert Oppenheimer?” to the TV.

“Without the volume,” Sean said, “how do you know if you got it right?”

“Because I do,” his father said, and poured his beer into his mug, frowning at the stupidity of Sean’s question. “You guys do that a lot. I’ll never understand it.”

“Do what? What guys?”

His father gestured at him with the beer mug. “Guys your age. You ask a lot of questions without thinking the answer might be obvious if you just gave it some friggin’ thought.”

“Oh,” Sean said. “Okay.”

“Like this Dave Boyle stuff,” his father said. “What does
it matter what happened twenty-five years ago to Dave? You know what happened. He disappeared for four days with two child molesters. What happened was exactly what you’d think would happen. But here you come dredging it back up again because…” His father took a drink. “Hell, I don’t know why.”

His father gave him a befuddled smile and Sean matched it with his own.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Yeah.”

“You telling me that nothing ever happened in your past that you don’t think about, turn over in your head a lot?”

His father sighed. “That’s not the point.”

“Sure, it is.”

“No, it isn’t. Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain’t special. But your whole generation, you’re scab pickers. You just can’t leave well enough alone. You have evidence linking Dave to Katherine Marcus’s death?”

Sean laughed. The old man had come around his flank, pushing Sean’s buttons with the “your generation” slurs while all the time what he wanted to know was if Dave was involved in Katie’s death.

“Let’s say there are a couple of circumstantial things which make Dave look like someone we’d like to keep an eye on.”

“You call that an answer?”

“You call that a question?”

His father’s terrific smile broke across his face then and erased a good fifteen years from his face, Sean remembering how that smile could spread through the whole house when he was young, lighting everything up.

“So you were bugging me about Dave because you’re wondering if what those guys did to him could turn him into a guy who’d kill a young girl.”

Sean shrugged. “Something like that.”

His father gave that some thought as he stirred the peanuts
in the bowl between them and sipped some more beer. “I don’t think so.”

Sean chuckled. “You know him that well, do you?”

“No. I just remember him as a kid. He didn’t have that kind of thing in him.”

“Lot of nice kids grow up to be adults who do shit you wouldn’t believe.”

His father cocked an eyebrow at him. “You trying to tell me about human nature?”

Sean shook his head. “Just police work.”

His father leaned back in his chair, considered Sean with the tug of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Come on. Enlighten me.”

Sean felt his face redden a bit. “Hey, no, I’m just—”

“Please.”

Sean felt foolish. It was amazing how fast his father could do that, make him feel as if what would pass as a normal set of observations with most of the people Sean knew was, in his father’s eyes, the boy Sean trying to act grown up and merely succeeding at sounding pompous instead.

“Give me a little credit. I think I know a bit about people and crime. It’s, you know, my job.”

“So you think Dave could have butchered a nineteen-year-old girl, Sean? Dave, who you used to play with in the backyard. That kid?”

“I think anyone’s capable of anything.”

“So, I could have done it.” His father put a hand to his chest. “Or your mother.”

“No.”

“Better check our alibis.”

“I didn’t say that. Jesus.”

“Sure you did. You said anyone was capable of anything.”

“Within reason.”

“Oh,” his father said loudly. “Well, I didn’t hear that part.”

He was doing it again—wrapping Sean up in knots, playing him like Sean played suspects in the box. No wonder
Sean was so good at interrogation. He’d learned from a master.

They sat in silence for a bit, and eventually his father said, “Hey, maybe you’re right.”

Sean looked at him, waited for the punch line.

“Maybe Dave could have done what you think. I dunno. I’m just remembering the kid. I don’t know the man.”

Sean tried to see himself through his father’s eyes then. He wondered if that’s what his father saw—the kid, not the man—when he looked at his son. Probably hard to do otherwise.

He remembered the way his uncles used to talk about his father, the youngest brother in a family of twelve who’d emigrated from Ireland when his father was five. The “old Bill,” they’d say, referring to the Bill Devine who’d existed before Sean was born. The “scrapper.” Only now could Sean hear their voices and feel the hint of patronization an older generation feels for a younger, most of Sean’s uncles having a good twelve or fifteen years on their baby brother.

They were all dead now. All eleven of his father’s brothers and sisters. And here was the baby of the family, closing in on seventy-five, and holed up here in the suburbs by a golf course he’d never use. The last one left, and yet still the youngest, always the youngest, squaring off at all times against even the whiff of condescension from anyone, particularly his son. Blocking out the whole world, if he had to, before he’d endure that, or even the perception of it. Because all those who’d had the right to behave that way toward him had long since passed from the earth.

His father glanced at Sean’s beer and tossed some singles onto the table for a tip.

“You about done?” he said.

T
HEY WALKED BACK
across Route 28 and up the entrance road with its yellow speed bumps and sprinkler spray.

“You know what your mother likes?” his father said.

“What?”

“When you write to her. You know, a card every now and then for no good reason. She says you send funny cards and she likes the way you write. She keeps them in the bedroom in a drawer. Has ones going back to when you were in college.”

“Okay.”

“Every now and then, you know? Drop one in the mail.”

“Sure.”

They reached Sean’s car and his father looked up at the dark windows of his duplex.

“She gone to bed?” Sean asked.

His father nodded. “She’s driving Mrs. Coughlin to physical therapy in the morning.” His father reached out abruptly and shook Sean’s hand. “Good seeing you.”

“You, too.”

“She coming back?”

Sean didn’t have to ask who “she” was.

“I dunno. I really don’t.”

His father looked at him under the pale yellow street lamp above them, and for a moment, Sean could see that it pierced something in him, knowing his son was hurting, knowing he’d been abandoned, damaged, and that that did something permanent to you, spooned something out of you that you’d never get back.

“Well,” his father said, “you look good. Like you’re taking care of yourself. You drinking too much, anything like that?”

Sean shook his head. “I just work a lot.”

“Work’s good,” his father said.

“Yeah,” Sean said, and felt something bitter and abandoned rise up in his throat.

“So…”

“So.”

His father clapped a hand on his shoulder. “So, okay then. Don’t forget to call your mother Sunday,” he said, and left Sean by the car, walked toward his front door with the stride of a man twenty years younger.

“Take care,” Sean said, and his father raised his hand in confirmation.

Sean used the remote to unlock the car, and he was reaching for the door handle when he heard his father say, “Hey.”

“Yeah?” He looked back and saw his father standing by the front door, his upper half dissolved in a soft darkness.

“You were right not to get in that car that day. Remember that.”

Sean leaned against his car, his palms on the roof, and tried to make out his father’s face in the dark.

“We should have protected Dave, though.”

“You were kids,” his father said. “You couldn’t have known. And even if you could have, Sean…”

Sean let that sink in. He drummed his hands on the roof and peered into the dark for his father’s eyes. “That’s what I tell myself.”

“Well?”

He shrugged. “I still think we
should
have known. Somehow. Don’t you think?”

For a good minute, neither of them said anything, and Sean could hear crickets amid the hiss of the lawn sprinklers.

“Good night, Sean,” his father said through the hiss.

“’Night,” Sean said, and waited until his father had gone inside before he climbed into his car and headed home.

D
AVE WAS SITTING
in the living room when Celeste came home. He sat on the corner of the cracked leather couch with two columns of empty beer cans rising up beside the arm of the chair and a fresh one in his hand, the remote control resting on his thigh. He watched a movie where everyone, it seemed, was screaming.

Celeste took her coat off in the hall and watched the light flicker off Dave’s face, heard the screams grow louder and more panicked, intermingled with Hollywood sound effects of tables shattering and what could only be the squishing of body parts.

“What are you watching?” she said.

“Some vampire movie,” Dave said, his eyes on the screen as he raised the Bud to his lips. “The head vampire’s killing everyone at this party the vampire slayers were having. They work for the Vatican.”

“Who?”

“The vampire slayers. Oooh, shit,” Dave said, “he just tore that guy’s head clean off.”

Celeste stepped into the living room, looked at the screen as a guy in black flew across the room and grabbed a terrified woman by the face and snapped her neck.

“Jesus, Dave.”

“No, it’s cool, ’cause now James Woods is pissed.”

“Who’s James Woods?”

“The lead vampire slayer. He’s a bad-ass.”

She saw him now—James Woods in a leather jacket and tight jeans as he picked up some sort of crossbow and started to point it at the vampire. But the vampire was too quick. He swatted James Woods all the way across the room like he was a moth, and then another guy came running into the room, firing an automatic pistol at the vampire. It didn’t seem to do much good, but then they were suddenly running past the vampire, as if he’d forgotten where they were.

“Is that a Baldwin brother?” Celeste said. She sat on the arm of the couch, up by where it met the back, and leaned her head against the wall.

“I think so, yeah.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know. I lose track.”

She watched them run across a motel room strewn with more corpses than Celeste would have thought could fit in such a small space, and her husband said, “Man, the Vatican’s going to have to train a whole new team of slayers.”

“Why’s the Vatican care about vampires again?”

Dave smiled and looked up at her with his boyish face and beautiful eyes. “They’re a big problem, honey. Notorious chalice thieves.”

“Chalice thieves?” she said, and felt an urge to reach down and run her hand through his hair, the whole horrible day dropping away in this silly discussion. “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah. Big problem,” Dave said, and drained his beer as James Woods and the Baldwin brother and some drugged-up-looking girl raced down an empty road in a pickup truck, the vampire flying after them now. “Where you been?”

“I dropped off the dress at Reed’s.”

“Hours ago,” Dave said.

“And then I just felt like I needed to sit somewhere and think. You know?”

“Think,” Dave said. “Sure.” He got up off the couch and walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge. “You want one?”

She didn’t, really, but she said, “Yeah, okay.”

Dave came back into the room and handed her the beer. She could often tell what kind of mood he was in by whether he’d opened the can for her. The can had been opened, but she wasn’t sure if this was good or bad. She was having trouble gauging him.

“So, what’d you think about?” He popped the tab on his own can and it was an even louder sound than the screeching tires on the TV as the pickup truck flipped over.

“Oh, you know.”

“Not really, Celeste, no.”

“Things,” she said, and took a sip of the beer. “The day, Katie being dead, poor Jimmy and Annabeth, those things.”

“Those things,” Dave said. “You know what I was thinking about as I was walking back home with Michael, Celeste? I was thinking how embarrassing it must have been for him to hear his mother just drove off and didn’t tell anyone where she was going or when she was coming back. I was thinking about that a lot.”

“I just told you, Dave.”

“Told me what?” He looked up at her and smiled again, but it wasn’t boyish this time. “Told me what, Celeste?”

“I just felt like thinking. I’m sorry I didn’t call. But it’s been a tough couple of days. I’m not myself.”

“Nobody’s themselves.”

“What?”

“Like this movie?” he said. “They don’t know who the real people are and who the vampires are. I’ve seen parts of this before, right, and that Baldwin brother there? He’s going to fall in love with that blond girl, even though he knows she’s been bitten. So she’s going to turn into a vampire, but he don’t care, right? Because he loves her. Yet she’s a bloodsucker. She’s going to suck his blood and turn
him
into the walking dead. I mean, that’s the whole thing about vampirism, Celeste—there’s something attractive about it. Even
if you know it’ll kill you and damn your soul for an eternity and you’ll have to spend all your time biting people in the neck, and hiding out from the sun and, you know, Vatican hit squads. Maybe one day you wake up and forget what it was to be human. Maybe that happens, and then it’s okay. You’ve been poisoned, but the poison ain’t all that bad once you learn how to live with it.” He propped his feet up on the coffee table, took a long drink from the can. “That’s my opinion anyway.”

Celeste remained very still, sitting up on the arm of the couch and looking down at her husband. “Dave, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Vampires, sweetie. Werewolves.”

“Werewolves? You’re not making any sense.”

“I’m not? You think I killed Katie, Celeste. That’s the kinda sense we’re making these days.”

“I don’t…Where did you come up with that?”

He picked at the beer tab with his fingernail. “You could barely look at me in Jimmy’s kitchen before you left. You’re holding her dress up like she’s still inside of it, and you couldn’t even look at me. I start thinking about it. I think, why would my own wife seem repulsed by me? And then it hits me—Sean. He said something to you, didn’t he? Him and that creepy fucking partner of his asked you questions.”

“No.”

“No? Bullshit.”

She didn’t like how calm he was. She could chalk some of that up to the beer, Dave having always been something of a mellow drunk, but there was an ugly air to his calm now, a sense of something coiled too tightly.

“David—”

“Oh, it’s ‘David.’”

“—I don’t think anything. I’m just confused.”

He tilted his head and looked back up at her. “Well, let’s talk it out then, honey. That’s the key to any good relationship—solid communication.”

She had $147 in her checking account and a five-hundred-dollar limit on her Visa, with about two-fifty already spent. Even if she could get Michael out of here, they wouldn’t get far. Two or three nights in a motel somewhere, and Dave would find them. He’d never been a stupid man. He could track them, she was sure.

The bag. She could hand over the trash bag to Sean Devine and he could find blood in the fabric of Dave’s clothes, she was sure. She’d heard all about the advances they’d been making in DNA technology. They’d find Katie’s blood on the clothes and arrest Dave.

“Come on,” Dave said. “Let’s talk, honey. Let’s hash this out. I’m serious. I want to, what’s it,
allay
your fears.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“You look it.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.” He brought his heels off the coffee table. “So tell me what’s, uh,
bothering
you, honey?”

“You’re drunk.”

He nodded. “I am. Don’t mean I can’t have a conversation, though.”

On the TV, the vampire was decapitating someone again, a priest this time.

Celeste said, “Sean didn’t ask me any questions. I overheard them talking when you went to get Annabeth’s cigarettes. I don’t know what you told them earlier, Dave, but they don’t believe your story. They know you were at the Last Drop around last call.”

“What else?”

“Someone saw our car in the parking lot around the time Katie left. And they don’t believe your story about how you bruised your hand.”

Dave held the hand out in front of him, flexed it. “That it?”

“That’s all I heard.”

“And that made you think what?”

She almost touched him again. For a moment, the threat
seemed to have left his body and been replaced by defeat. She could see it in his shoulders and in his back and she wanted to reach out and touch him, but she held back.

“Dave, just tell them about the mugger.”

“The mugger.”

“Yeah. So maybe you’d have to go to court. What’s the big deal? It’s a lot better than having a murder pinned on you.”

Now’s the time, she thought. Say you didn’t do it. Say you never saw Katie leave the Last Drop. Say it, Dave.

Instead he said, “I see how your mind’s working. I do. I come home with blood on me the same time Katie’s murdered. I must have killed her.”

It popped out of Celeste: “Well?”

Dave put down his beer then and started laughing. His feet came back up off the floor and he fell into the couch cushions and he laughed and laughed. He laughed like he was having a seizure of them, every gasp for breath turning into another giggling peal. He laughed so hard that tears sprang from his eyes, and his entire upper body shook. “I…I…I…I…” He couldn’t get it out. The laughter was too strong. It rolled over him and out of him again and the tears came hard now, pouring down his cheeks and into his open mouth, bubbling on his lips.

It was official: Celeste had never been more terrified in her life.

“Ha-ha-ha-Henry,” he said, the laughter finally trailing off into chuckles.

“What?”

“Henry,” he said. “Henry and George, Celeste. Those were their names. Isn’t that fucking hilarious? And George, lemme tell ya, he
was
curious. Henry, though, Henry was just flat-out mean.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Henry and George,” he said brightly. “I’m talking about Henry and George. They took me for a ride. A four-day ride. And they buried me in a cellar with this old ratty sleeping
bag on a stone floor, and, man, Celeste, did they have their fucking fun. No one came to help old Dave then. No one burst in to rescue Dave. Dave had to pretend it was happening to someone else. He had to get so fucking strong in his mind that he could
split
it in two. That’s what Dave did. Hell, Dave died. The kid who came out of that cellar, I don’t know who the fuck he was—well, he’s me, actually—but he’s sure as shit not Dave. Dave’s dead.”

Celeste couldn’t speak. In eight years, Dave had never talked about what everyone knew had happened to him. He’d told her he’d been playing with Sean and Jimmy and he’d been abducted and he’d escaped and that was all he was ever going to say. She’d never heard the names of the men. She’d never heard about the sleeping bag. She’d never heard any of this. It was as if, right at this moment, they were awakening from a dream life of their marriage and confronting against their wills all the rationalizations, half-lies, submerged wants, and hidden selves they’d built it on. Watching it crumble under the wrecking-ball truth that they’d never known each other, they’d merely hoped they would someday.

“The thing is, right?” Dave said. “The thing is, it’s like I was saying about the vampires, Celeste. It’s the same thing. The same goddamned thing.”

“What’s the same thing?” she whispered.

“It doesn’t come out. Once it’s in you, it stays.” He was looking at the coffee table again and she could feel him fading away on her.

She touched his arm. “Dave, what doesn’t come out? What’s the same thing?”

Dave looked at her hand like he was going to sink his teeth into it with a snarl, rip it off at the wrist. “I can’t trust my mind anymore, Celeste. I’m warning you. I can’t trust my mind.”

She removed her hand, and it tingled where it had touched his flesh.

Dave stood up, wavering. He cocked his head and looked
at her as if not sure who she was and how she’d gotten there on the edge of his couch. He looked over at the TV as James Woods fired that crossbow into someone’s chest, and Dave whispered, “Blow ’em all away, Slayer. Blow ’em all away.”

He turned back to Celeste, gave her a drunken grin. “I’m going to go out.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I’m going to go out and think.”

“Yeah,” Celeste said. “Sure.”

“If I can just get my head around this, I think it’ll be all okay. I just need to get my head around it.”

Celeste didn’t ask what “it” was.

“So, okay then,” he said, and walked to the front door. He opened the door and had crossed the threshold when she saw his hand curl around the wood and he leaned his head back in.

Just his head, tilted and staring at her, when he said, “Oh, I took care of the trash, by the way.”

“What?”

“The trash bag,” he said. “Where you put my clothes and stuff? I took it out earlier and threw it away.”

“Oh,” she said, and felt the need to vomit again.

“So, I’ll be seeing you.”

“Yeah,” she said as he ducked his head back out onto the landing. “I’ll see you.”

She listened to his footfalls until they reached the bottom landing. She heard the front door creak open and Dave step out onto the porch and descend the steps. She went over the stairs leading up to Michael’s room and she could hear him sleeping up there, his breathing deep. Then she went into the bathroom and threw up.

H
E COULDN’T FIND
where Celeste had parked the car. Sometimes, particularly during snowstorms, you might drive eight blocks before you found a parking space, so Celeste could have buried the car as far away as the Point for all
Dave knew, even though he noticed some empty spaces not far from the house. It was probably just as well. He was too hammered to drive in all likelihood. Maybe a good long walk would help him clear his head.

He walked up Crescent to Buckingham Avenue and took a left, wondering what the hell had been going through his head that he’d tried to explain things to Celeste. Christ, he’d even said those names—Henry and George. He’d mentioned werewolves, for crying out loud. Shit.

And now it was confirmed—the police suspected him. They’d be watching. No more thinking of Sean as an old long-lost friend. They were past that, and Dave could now remember what he hadn’t liked about Sean when they were kids: the sense of entitlement, the sense that he was always sure he was right, like most kids who were lucky enough—and that’s all it was, luck—to have both parents and a nice house and the newest clothes and athletic equipment.