Mystic River (8 page)

Pete stuck his head up from the deli counter and wiped his hands with the towel he’d been using to clean the prep table. He tossed a full box of surgical gloves up onto the counter and then came over behind the second cash register. He leaned in toward Jimmy and said, “Welcome to hell,” and the second group of Holy Rollers followed fast on the heels of the first.

Jimmy hadn’t worked a Sunday morning in nearly two years, and he’d forgotten what a zoo it could turn into. Pete was right. The blue-haired fanatics, who packed the seven o’clock mass at Saint Cecilia’s while normal people slept, took their biblical shopping fury into Jimmy’s store and decimated the pastry and doughnut trays, drained the coffee, stripped the dairy coolers to a shell, and reduced the newspaper stacks by half. They banged into display racks and stepped on the chip bags and plastic sleeves of peanuts that fell to their feet. They shouted out deli orders, Lotto orders, scratch ticket orders, and orders for Pall Malls and Chesterfields with a rabid indiscrimination as to their places in line. Then, as a sea of blue, white, and bald heads bobbed behind them, they dawdled at the counter to ask after Jimmy’s and Pete’s families while they fished for exact change down to the last lint-enfuzzed penny and took prolonged eons to lift their purchases off the counter and move out of the way for the raging clamor behind them.

Jimmy hadn’t seen anything resembling this kind of chaos since the last time he’d attended an Irish wedding with an open bar, and when he finally glanced up at the clock at eight-forty-five as the last of them went out through the door to the street, he could feel the sweat drenching the T-shirt under his sweatshirt, soaking into his skin. He looked at the
bomb that had exploded in the middle of his store and then over at Pete, and he felt a sudden flush of kinship and fraternity with him that made him think of the seven-fifteen crew of cops, nurses, and hookers, as if he and Pete had ascended to a new level of friendship just by surviving the eight o’clock Sunday blast of ravenous geriatrics.

Pete tossed him a tired grin. “Slows for about half an hour now. Mind if I step out back and grab a smoke?”

Jimmy laughed, feeling good now and swept by a sudden, odd pride at this little business he’d built into a neighborhood institution. “Fuck, Pete, smoke a whole pack.”

He’d tidied the aisles, restocked dairy, and was replenishing the doughnut and pastry trays when the bell clanged, and he looked over to see Brendan Harris and his little brother, Silent Ray, walk past the counter and head for the small square of aisles where the breads and detergents and cookies and teas were stocked. Jimmy busied himself with the cellophane wraps over the pastries and doughnuts, and wished he hadn’t give Pete the impression he could take a mini-vacation out back and that his ass would get back in here immediately.

He glanced over and noticed Brendan peering above the aisle tops at the cash registers, like he was either planning to stick the place up or hoping for a glimpse of someone. For one irrational second, Jimmy wondered if he’d have to fire Pete for dealing out of the store. But then he checked himself, remembered that Pete had looked him straight in the eyes and sworn he’d never jeopardize Jimmy’s life’s work by dealing pot in his place of business. Jimmy had known he was telling the truth because unless you were the Grand Wizard of All Liars, it was nearly impossible to lie to Jimmy when he looked in your eyes after asking you a direct question; he knew every tic and tell and eye movement, no matter how minor, that could give you away. Something he’d learned by watching his father make him drunken promises he never kept—you saw it enough, you recognized the ani
mal every time it chose to resurface. So Jimmy remembered Pete looking him dead in the eyes and swearing he’d never deal out of this place, and Jimmy knew it was true.

So then who was Brendan looking for? Could he be stupid enough to be considering a rip-off? Jimmy had known Brendan’s father, Just Ray Harris, so he knew a sizable chunk of dumb ran in the genes, but no one was so dumb as to try to rob a store on the East Bucky Flats/Point line with his thirteen-year-old mute brother in tow. Plus, if anyone got some brains in the family, Jimmy would begrudgingly admit it was Brendan. A shy kid, but good-looking as hell, and Jimmy had long ago learned the difference between someone who was quiet because he didn’t know the meanings of many words and someone who just stayed inside himself, watching, listening, taking it all in. Brendan had that quality; you sensed he understood people a little too well, and that the knowledge made him nervous.

He turned toward Jimmy and their eyes met, and the kid gave Jimmy a nervous, friendly smile, putting too much into it, as if he were overcompensating because there were other things on his mind.

Jimmy said, “Help you, Brendan?”

“Uh, no, Mr. Marcus, just picking up some, ah, some of that Irish tea my mom likes.”

“Barry’s?”

“That’s it, yeah.”

“Next aisle over.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Jimmy went back up behind the registers just as Pete came back in, carrying that stale reek of a hastily puffed cigarette all over him.

“What time’s Sal getting here again?” Jimmy said.

“Any time now, should be.” Pete leaned back against the sliding cigarette rack below the scratch ticket rolls and sighed. “He’s slow, Jimmy.”

“Sal?” Jimmy watched Brendan and Silent Ray communicate in sign language, standing in the middle of the center
aisle, Brendan clutching a box of Barry’s under his arm. “He’s in his late seventies, man.”

“I know
why
he’s slow,” Pete said. “I’m just saying. That was me and him at eight o’clock, ’stead of me and you, Jim? Man, we’d still be in the weeds.”

“Which is why I put him on slow shifts. Anyway, it wasn’t supposed to be me and you or you and Sal on this morning. It was supposed to be you and Katie.”

Brendan and Silent Ray had reached the counter and Jimmy saw something catch in Brendan’s face when he said his daughter’s name.

Pete came off the cigarette rack and said, “That it, Brendan?”

“I…I…I…” Brendan stammered, then looked at his little brother. “Ahm, I think so. Let me check with Ray.”

The hands went flying again, the two of them going so fast it would have been hard for Jimmy to keep up even if they were making sounds. Silent Ray’s face, though, was as stone dead as his hands were electric and alive. He’d always been an eerie little kid, in Jimmy’s opinion, more like the mother than the father, a blankness living in his face like an act of defiance. He’d mentioned it to Annabeth once and she’d accused him of being insensitive to the handicapped, but Jimmy didn’t think that was it—something lived in Ray’s dead face and silent mouth that you just wanted to beat out with a hammer.

They finished flinging their hands back and forth and Brendan bent over the candy rack and came back with a Coleman Chew-Chew bar, making Jimmy think about his father again, the stench of him that year he’d worked the candy plant.

“And a
Globe
, too,” Brendan said.

“Sure thing, kid,” Pete said, and rang it up.

“So’s, ah, I thought Katie worked Sundays.” Brendan handed Pete a ten-spot.

Pete raised his eyebrows as he punched the cash key and the door popped open against his belly. “You sweet on my man’s daughter, Brendan?”

Brendan wouldn’t look at Jimmy. “No, no, no.” He laughed, and it died as soon as it left his mouth. “I was just wondering, you know, because usually I see her here.”

“Her little sister’s having her First Communion today,” Jimmy said.

“Oh, Nadine?” Brendan looked at Jimmy, eyes too wide, smile too big.

“Nadine,” Jimmy said, curious as to how the name had come to Brendan so fast. “Yeah.”

“Well, tell her congrats from me and Ray.”

“Sure, Brendan.”

Brendan dropped his gaze to the counter and nodded several times as Pete bagged up the tea and candy bar. “So, yeah, okay, good seeing you guys. Come on, Ray.”

Ray hadn’t been looking at his brother when he spoke, but he moved anyway, and Jimmy remembered once again the thing that people usually forgot about Ray: he wasn’t deaf, just mute, few people around the neighborhood or otherwise, Jimmy was sure, having encountered one like that before.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Pete said when the brothers had gone, “I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why you hate that kid so bad?”

Jimmy shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s hate, man. It’s just…Come on, you don’t find that mute little fucker just a little spooky?”

“Oh,
him
?” Pete said. “Yeah. He’s a weird little shit, always staring like he sees something in your face he wants to pluck out. You know? But I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about Brendan. I mean, the kid seems nice enough. Shy but decent, you know? You notice how he uses sign language with his brother even though he don’t have to? Kinda like he just wants the kid to feel he ain’t alone. It’s nice. But, Jimmy, man, you look at him like you’re two steps from slicing off his nose, man, feeding it to him.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Straight up.”

Jimmy looked out over the Lotto machine, past the dusty window onto Buckingham Avenue lying gray and damp under the morning sky. He felt Brendan Harris’s shy goddamned smile in his blood, itching him.

“Jimmy? I was just playing with you. I didn’t mean nothing by—”

“Here comes Sal,” Jimmy said, and kept his eyes on the window, his head turned away from Pete as he watched the old man shuffle across the avenue toward them. “About fucking time, too.”

S
EAN
D
EVINE’S
S
UNDAY
—his first day back to work after a week’s suspension—started when he was yanked from a dream, ripped out of it by the beep of an alarm clock followed by the seizure-realization, like a baby popping from the womb, that he’d never be allowed to go back in. He couldn’t remember much of the specifics—just a few details, unconnected—and he had a sense that there hadn’t been much of a narrative flow in the first place. Still, the raw texture of it had sunk like razor points into the back of his skull, left him feeling skittish all morning.

His wife, Lauren, had been in it, and he could still smell her flesh. She’d had messy hair the color of wet sand, darker and longer than in life, and wore a damp white bathing suit. She was very tan and a light dusting of sand had speckled her bare ankles and the tops of her feet. She’d smelled of the sea and the sun, and she’d sat in Sean’s lap and kissed his nose, tickled his throat with long fingers. They were on the deck of a beach house, and Sean could hear the surf but couldn’t see any ocean. Where the ocean should have been was a blank TV screen the width of a football field. When he looked in the center, Sean could only make out his own reflection, not Lauren’s, as if he sat there holding air.

But it was flesh in his hands, warm flesh.

Next thing he remembered, he stood on the roof of the house, Lauren’s flesh replaced by a smooth metal weather vane. He gripped it, and below him, at the base of the house, a huge hole yawned up at him, an upended sailboat beached at the bottom. Then he was naked on the bed with a woman he’d never seen before, feeling her, sensing in some dream logic that Lauren was in another room of the house, watching them on video, and a seagull crashed through the window, glass spitting onto the bed like ice cubes, and Sean, fully clothed again, stood over it.

The seagull gasped. The seagull said, “My neck hurts,” and Sean woke up before he could say, “That’s because it’s broken.”

He woke up with the dream draining thickly from the back of his brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it clinging to the undersides of his eyelids and the upper layer of his tongue. He kept his eyes closed as the alarm clock kept beeping, hoping that it was merely a new dream, that he was still sleeping, that the beeping only beeped in his mind.

Eventually, he opened his eyes, the feel of the unknown woman’s hard body and the smell of the sea in Lauren’s flesh still clinging to his brain tissue, and he realized it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a movie, it wasn’t a sad, sad song.

It was these sheets, this bedroom, and this bed. It was the empty beer can on his windowsill, and this sun in his eyes and that alarm clock beep-beep-beeping on his bedside table. It was the faucet, dripping, he kept forgetting to fix. His life, all his.

He shut off the alarm, but didn’t get out of bed right away. He didn’t want to lift his head just yet because he didn’t want to know if he had a hangover. If he had a hangover, the first day back to work would seem twice as long, and the first day back after a suspension, with all the shit he’d have to eat and all the jokes he’d have to hear at his expense, was going to seem pretty damn long in the first place.

He lay there and heard the beeping from the street, the beeping from the cokeheads next door who kept their TV
loud from
Letterman
through
Sesame Street
, the beep of his ceiling fan, microwave, and smoke detectors, and the humming beep of the fridge. It beeped on the computers at work. It beeped on cell phones and PalmPilots and beeped from the kitchen and living room and beeped a constant beep-beep-beep on the street below and down at the station house and in the tenements of Faneuil Heights and the East Bucky Flats.

Everything beeped these days. Everything was fast and fluid and built to move. Everyone was getting along in this world, moving with it, growing up.

When the fuck did that start happening?

That’s all he wanted to know, really. When had the pace picked up, left him staring at everyone’s backs?

He closed his eyes.

When Lauren left.

That’s when.

B
RENDAN
H
ARRIS LOOKED
at the phone and willed it to ring. He looked at his watch. Two hours late. Not exactly a surprise, since time and Katie were never on what you’d call a first-name basis, but man, today of all days. Brendan just wanted to
go
. And where was she, if she wasn’t at work? The plan had been that she’d call Brendan during her shift at Cottage Market, go to her half sister’s First Communion, and then meet him afterward. But she hadn’t gone into work. And she hadn’t called.

He couldn’t call her. That had been one of the big downsides of their being together ever since the first night they’d hooked up. Katie was usually one of three places—at Bobby O’Donnell’s place in the early days of her and Brendan’s relationship, in the apartment she’d grown up in on Buckingham Avenue with her father, stepmother, and two half sisters, or in the apartment above where a shitload of her crazy uncles lived, two of whom, Nick and Val, were legends of psychosis and really, really bad impulse control.
And then there was her father, Jimmy Marcus, who hated Brendan deeply and for no logical reason that either Brendan or Katie could figure out. Still, Katie had been clear about it—over the years her father had made it his mandate: stay away from the Harrises; you ever bring one home, I disown you.

According to Katie, he was usually a rational guy, her father, but she told Brendan one night, tears dropping to his chest, “He’s nuts when it comes to you. Nuts. He’s drunk one night, right? I mean, hammered, and he starts going on about my mom, how much she loved me and everything, and then he says, he says, ‘The fucking Harrises, Katie, they’re scum.’”

Scum. The sound of the word caught in Brendan’s chest like a pile of phlegm.

“‘You stay away from them. Only thing in life I demand of you, Katie. Please.’”

“So how’d it happen?” Brendan said. “You ending up with me?”

She’d rolled over in his arms and smiled sadly at him. “You don’t know?”

Truth be told, Brendan didn’t have a clue. Katie was Everything. A Goddess. Brendan was just, well, Brendan.

“No, I don’t know.”

“You’re kind.”

“I am?”

She nodded. “I see you with Ray or your mother and even everyday people on the street, and you’re just so kind, Brendan.”

“A lotta people are kind.”

She shook her head. “A lot of people are nice. It’s not the same thing.”

And Brendan, thinking about it, had to admit that his whole life he’d never met anyone who didn’t like him—not in a popularity contest type of way, but in a basic “That Harris kid’s all right” type of way. He’d never had enemies, hadn’t been in a fight since grade school, and couldn’t re
member the last time he’d heard a harsh word directed his way. Maybe it was because he
was
kind. And maybe, like Katie said, that was rare. Or maybe he just wasn’t the type of guy who made people mad.

Well, except for Katie’s father. That was a mystery. And there was no denying it for what it was: hate.

Just half an hour ago, Brendan had felt it in Mr. Marcus’s corner store—that quiet, coiled hatred emanating from the man like a viral infection. He’d wilted under it. He’d stammered because of it. He couldn’t look at Ray the whole way home because of how that hatred had made him feel—unwashed, his hair filled with nits, teeth covered in grime. And the fact that it made no sense—Brendan had never done anything to Mr. Marcus, hell, barely knew the man—didn’t make it any easier. Brendan looked at Jimmy Marcus and saw a man looking back who wouldn’t stop to piss on him if he was on fire.

Brendan couldn’t call Katie at one of her two numbers and risk somebody on the other end having caller ID or star-69ing him, wondering what the hated Brendan Harris was doing calling their Katie. He’d almost done it a million times, but just the thought of Mr. Marcus or Bobby O’Donnell or one of those psycho Savage brothers answering the other end was enough to make him drop the phone from a sweaty hand back into the cradle.

Brendan didn’t know who to fear more. Mr. Marcus was just a regular guy, owner of the corner store Brendan had been going to for half his life, but there was something about the guy—more than just his obvious hatred for Brendan—that could unsettle people, a capacity for something, Brendan didn’t know what, but something, that made you lower your voice around the guy and try not to meet his eyes. Bobby O’Donnell was one of those guys nobody knew exactly what he did for a living but you’d cross a street to avoid him in either case, and as for the Savage brothers, they were a whole planetary system away from most people in terms of normal, acceptable behavior. The maddest, craziest, most
dyed-in-the-wool, lunatic motherfuckers to ever come out of the Flats, the Savage brothers had thousand-yard stares and tempers so hair-trigger you could fill a notebook the size of the Old Testament with all the things that could set them off. Their father, a sick chucklehead in his own right, had, along with their thin, sainted mother, popped the brothers out one after another, eleven months apart, like they were running a midnight assembly line for loose cannons. The brothers grew up crammed and mangy and irate in a bedroom the size of a Japanese radio beside the el tracks that used to hover over the Flats, blotting out the sun, before they got torn down when Brendan was a kid. The floors in the apartment sloped hard to the east, and the trains hammered past the brothers’ window twenty-one out of twenty-four hours each and every goddamned day, shaking the piece-of-shit three-decker so hard that most times the brothers fell out of bed and woke in the morning piled on top of one another, greeted the morning as irritable as waterfront rats, and pummeled the piss out of one another to clear the pile and start the day.

When they were kids, they had no individuality to the outside world. They were just the Savages, a brood, a pack, a collection of limbs and armpits and knees and tangled hair that seemed to move in a cloud of dust like the Tasmanian Devil. You saw the cloud coming your way, you stepped aside, hoped they’d find someone else to fuck up before they reached you, or simply whirl on by, lost in the obsession of their own grimy psychoses.

Hell, until Brendan had started dating Katie on the sly, he wasn’t positive just how many of them there actually were, and he’d grown up in the Flats. Katie laid it out for him, though: Nick was the oldest, gone from the neighborhood six years to serve ten minimum at Walpole; Val was the next and, according to Katie, the sweetest; then came Chuck, Kevin, Al (who usually got confused with Val), Gerard, just fresh from Walpole himself, and finally, Scott, the baby boy and mother’s favorite when she’d been alive, who was also
the only one with a college degree, and the only one who didn’t live at home in the first- and third-floor apartments the brothers had commandeered after they’d successfully scared the previous tenants to another state.

“I know they have this rep,” Katie said to Brendan, “but they’re really nice guys. Well, except for Scott. He’s kinda hard to warm up to.”

Scott. The “normal” one.

Brendan looked at his watch again, then over at the clock by his bed. He looked at the phone.

He looked at his bed where just the other night he’d fallen asleep with his eyes on the back of Katie’s neck, counting the fine blond hairs there, his arm draped over her hip so that his palm rested on her warm abdomen, the smell of her hair and perfume and a light sweat filling his nostrils.

He looked at the phone again.

Call, goddamnit. Call.

A
COUPLE
of kids found her car. They called it into 911 and the one who spoke into the phone sounded breathless, caught up in something beyond himself as the words spilled out:

“There’s like this car with blood in it and, ah, the door’s open, and, ah—”

The 911 operator broke in and said, “What’s the location of the car?”

“In the Flats,” the kid said. “By Pen Park. Me and my friend found it.”

“Is there a street address?”

“Sydney Street,” the kid expelled into the phone. “There’s blood in there and the door’s open.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“He wants to know her name,” the kid said to his friend. “Called me ‘son.’”

“Son?” the operator said. “I said your name. What’s
your
name?”

“We’re so fucking outta here, man,” the kid said. “Good luck.”

The kid hung up and the operator noted from his computer screen that the call had come in from a pay phone on the corner of Kilmer and Nauset in the East Bucky Flats, about half a mile from the Sydney Street entrance to Penitentiary Park. He relayed the information to Dispatch and Dispatch sent a unit out to Sydney Street.

One of the patrolmen called back and requested more units, a Crime Scene tech or two, and, oh yeah, maybe you want to send a couple Homicides down or somebody like that. Just an idea.

“Have you found a body, Thirty-three? Over.”

“Ah, negative, Dispatch.”

“Thirty-three, why the request for Homicide if there’s no body? Over.”

“Looks of this car, Dispatch? I kinda feel like we’re going to find one around here sooner or later.”

S
EAN STARTED HIS
first day back to work by parking on Crescent and walking around the blue sawhorses at the intersection with Sydney. The sawhorses were stamped with the label of the Boston Police Department, because they were first on-scene, but Sean guessed by what he’d heard on the scanners driving over here that this case would belong to State Police Homicide, his squad.

The car, as he understood it, had been found on Sydney Street, which was city jurisdiction, but the blood trail led into Penitentiary Park, which as part of reservation land fell under State jurisdiction. Sean walked down Crescent along the edge of the park, and the first thing he noticed was a Crime Scene Services van parked halfway down the block.

As he got closer, he saw his sergeant, Whitey Powers, standing a few feet away from a car with the driver’s door ajar. Souza and Connolly, who’d been bumped up to Homi
cide only last week, searched the weeds outside the park entrance, coffee cups in hand, and two patrol units and the Crime Scene Services van were parked along the gravel shoulder, the CSS crew going over the car and shooting dirty looks at Souza and Connolly for trampling possible evidence and leaving the lids off their Styrofoam cups.