Mystic River (34 page)

I will quit driving by parks and public swimming pools, Dave told himself as he drained his third beer. He held up the empty can. I will quit this, too.

But not today. Today he was already three beers in and, what the hell, Celeste didn’t look like she’d be coming home soon. Maybe tomorrow. That’d be good. Give them both some space, time to heal and repair. She’d come home to a new man, an improved Dave with no more secrets.

“Because secrets are poison,” he said aloud in the kitchen where he’d last made love to his wife. “Secrets are walls.” And then with a smile: “And I’m all out of beer.”

He felt good, jaunty almost, as he left the house to walk up to Eagle Liquors. It was a gorgeous day, the sun flooding the street. When they’d been kids, the el tracks used to run down here, splitting Crescent in the center and piling it with soot and blotting out the sky. It only added to the sense one got of the Flats as a place cloaked from the rest of the world, tucked under it like a banished tribe, free to live any way it chose as long as it did so in exile.

Once they’d removed the tracks, the Flats had risen into the light, and for a while they’d thought that was a good thing. So much less soot, so much more sun, skin looked healthier. But without the cloak, everyone could look in on them, appreciate their brick row houses and view of the Penitentiary Channel and proximity to downtown. Suddenly they weren’t an underground tribe. They were prime real estate.

Dave would have to think about how that had happened when he got back home, formulate a theory with his twelve-pack. Or he could find a cool bar, sit in the dark on a bright day and order a burger, chat with the bartender, see if the two of them together could figure out when the Flats had started slipping away, when the whole world had started revolving past them.

Maybe that’s what he’d do. Sure! Take a leather seat at a mahogany bar and while away the afternoon. He’d plan his future. He’d plan his family’s future. He’d figure out each and every way in which he could atone. It was amazing how friendly three beers could be after a long, hard day. They were taking Dave by the hand as he walked up the hill toward Buckingham Avenue. They were saying, Hey, ain’t it great to be us? Ain’t it just the flat-out balls to be turning a new leaf, shedding yourself of soiled secrets, ready to renew your vows to your loved ones and become the man you always knew you could be? Why, it’s just terrific.

And look who we have ahead of us, idling at the corner in his shiny sports car. He’s smiling at us. That’s Val Savage, smiling away, waving us over! Come on. Let’s go say hi.

“Dandy Dave Boyle,” Val said as Dave approached the car. “How they hanging, brother?”

“Always to the left,” Dave said, and squatted down by the car. He rested his elbows on the slot where the window had descended into the door and peered in at Val. “What’re you up to?”

Val shrugged. “Not much, man. Was looking for someone to grab a beer with, maybe a bite to eat.”

Dave couldn’t believe this. Here he’d been thinking the same thing. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You could go for a few pops, maybe a game of pool, right, Dave?”

“Sure.”

Dave was a bit surprised, actually. He got along with Jimmy and Val’s brother Kevin, even sometimes with Chuck, but he never remembered Val showing anything but complete apathy in his presence. It must be Katie, he figured. In death, she was bringing them all together. They were united in their loss, forging bonds through the sharing of tragedy.

“Hop in,” Val said. “We’ll hit a place I know across town. Good bar. A buddy of mine owns it.”

“Across town?” Dave looked back up the empty street
he’d just come down. “Well, I’ll have to get home at some point.”

“Sure, sure,” Val said. “I’ll take you back whenever you want. Come on. Hop in. We’ll have ourselves a boys’ night in the middle of the day.”

Dave smiled and took the smile with him as he walked around the front of Val’s car toward the passenger door. Boys’ night in the middle of the day. Exactly what was called for. Him and Val, hanging like old pals. And that was one of the great things about a place like the Flats, the thing he feared would be lost—the way old feelings and entire pasts could be laid to rest with time, as you aged, once you realized that everything
was
changing and the only things that remained the same were the people you’d grown up with and the place you’d come from. The neighborhood. May it live forever, Dave thought as he opened the door, if only in our minds.

W
HITEY AND
S
EAN
had a late lunch in Pat’s Diner, one highway exit down from the barracks. Pat’s had been around since World War II and had been a hangout for the Staties so long that Pat the Third liked to say his may have been the only family of restaurateurs to go three full generations without getting robbed.

Whitey swallowed a hunk of cheeseburger and chased it with his soda. “You don’t think for a second the kid did it, do you?”

Sean took a bite of his tuna sandwich. “I know he was lying to me. I think he knows something about that gun. And I think—just possibly now—that his old man’s still alive.”

Whitey dipped an onion ring in some tartar sauce. “The five hundred a month from New York?”

“Yeah. You know what that adds up to over the years? Almost eighty grand. Who’s going to send that if it ain’t the father?”

Whitey dabbed his lips with a napkin and then dove back into his cheeseburger, Sean wondering how the guy had managed to dodge a heart attack so far, eating and drinking the way he did, pulling seventy-hour weeks when a case sank its teeth into him.

“Let’s say he is alive,” Whitey said.

“Let’s.”

“What’s this, then—some grand mastermind plot to get back at Jimmy Marcus for something by wasting his daughter? What, we’re starring in a movie now?”

Sean chuckled. “Who would play you, you think?”

Whitey sucked his soda through a straw until it slurped against the ice. “I think about that a lot, you know. It could happen, we bust this case, Supercop. Phantom from New York kinda shit? You
know
we’d be up there on the big screen. And Brian Dennehy would be all over the chance to play me.”

Sean considered him. “That’s not entirely insane,” he said, wondering how he’d never seen it before. “You’re not as tall, Sarge, but you got the gut.”

Whitey nodded and pushed his plate away. “I’m thinking one of those
Friends
pussies could play you. You know, guys look like they spend an hour every morning clipping their nose hair and plucking their eyebrows, get pedicures once a week? Yeah, one of them would do just fine.”

“Jealous.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Whitey said. “This Ray Harris angle is such a curve. It’s got a probability quotient of, like, six.”

“Out of ten?”

“Out of a thousand. Backtrack, okay? Ray Harris rats out Jimmy Marcus. Marcus finds out, gets out of the stir, puts a hit on Ray. Harris, what, he gets away somehow, goes to New York, finds a steady enough job to send five bills home each and every month for the next thirteen years? Then one day he wakes up and goes, ‘Okay. Payback time,’ and gets on a bus, comes here, and smokes Katherine Marcus. And not just in the regular everyday kinda way, but he smokes her with extreme prejudice. That was psycho rage in that park. And then, old Ray—and I do mean old, he’s gotta be forty-five, humping through that park after her—he just gets on a bus and goes back to New York with his gun? Did you
check
New York?”

Sean nodded. “No matches on the social, no credit cards in his name, no employment history for a guy with his name
and age. NYPD and State have never arrested anyone matching his prints.”

“But you think he killed Katherine Marcus.”

Sean shook his head. “No. I mean, not for sure. I don’t even know if he’s alive. I’m just saying I think he
could be
. And it’s real likely that the murder weapon was his gun. And I think Brendan knows something, and he definitely has no one who can confirm that he was home in bed when Katie Marcus was murdered. So I’m hoping he spends enough time in that cell, he’ll tell us a few things.”

Whitey let out a burp that ripped the air.

“You’re a prince, Sarge.”

Whitey shrugged. “We don’t even know that Ray Harris held up that liquor store eighteen years ago. We don’t know if that was his gun. It’s all conjecture. It’s circumstantial at best. Never hold up in court. Hell, a good ADA wouldn’t even present it.”

“Yeah, but it feels right.”

“Feels.” He looked over Sean’s shoulder as the door behind Sean opened. “Oh, Jesus, the moron twins.”

Souza came around the side of their booth with Connolly a few steps behind.

“And you said it was nothing, Sarge.”

Whitey put a hand behind his ear, looked up at Souza. “What’s that, boy? My hearing, you know?”

“We ran the tow records from the parking lot of the Last Drop,” Souza said.

“That’s BPD jurisdiction,” Whitey said. “What I tell you about that?”

“We found a car ain’t been claimed yet, Sarge.”

“And?”

“We had the attendant go out to double-check it was still there. He came back on the phone, said the trunk’s leaking.”

“Leaking what?” Sean said.

“Don’t know, but he said it smelled awful ripe.”

T
HE
C
ADILLAC WAS
two-toned, a white hardtop over a midnight blue body. Whitey bent by the passenger window, his hands on either side of his eyes. “I’d say that’s a suspicious-looking brown smear by the driver’s door console.”

Connolly, standing by the trunk, said, “Jesus, you smell this shit? It’s reeking like friggin’ low tide at Wollaston.”

Whitey came around the back just as the tow lot attendant put the lock-puncher into Sean’s hand.

Sean stepped up beside Connolly, moving the man out of the way as he said, “Use your tie.”

“What?”

“Over your mouth and nose, man. Use your tie.”

“What are you using?”

Whitey pointed at his own shiny upper lip. “We put Vicks on during the ride over. Sorry, boys, all out.”

Sean positioned the rim at the end of the lock-punch. He slipped it over the Cadillac’s trunk lock and drove it home, felt the metal slide over metal and then catch, grip the entire lock cylinder.

“We in?” Whitey said. “First try and everything?”

“We’re in.” Sean pulled back hard, taking the lock cylinder with him, getting a glimpse of the hole he’d left behind before the latch clicked free and the trunk lid rose up and that low-tide smell was replaced by something worse, a combined stench of swamp gas and boiled meat left rotting in a pile of scrambled eggs.

“Jesus.” Connolly pressed his tie over his face and stepped back from the car.

Whitey said, “Monte Cristo sandwich, anyone?” and Connolly turned the shade of grass.

Souza was cool, though. He stepped up to the trunk, one hand pinching his nose, and said, “Where’s the guy’s face?”

“That’s his face,” Sean said.

The guy was curled in a fetal position, his head tilted back and to the side as if his neck were broken, the rest of his body curled in the opposite direction. His suit was top-shelf, his shoes, too, and Sean guessed his age at around fifty after
a glance at his hands and hairline. He noticed a hole in the back of the guy’s suit jacket, and he used a pen to lift the fabric away from his back. Sweat and heat yellowed the white shirt underneath, but Sean found a match for the hole in the jacket, halfway up the back, the shirt puckered into the flesh there.

“Got an exit wound, Sarge. Definite gunshot.” He peered into the trunk for a bit. “I can’t find the shell, though.”

Whitey turned to Connolly as the man started to sway. “Get in your car and head back to the parking lot of the Last Drop. Inform the BPD first thing. We don’t need a fucking turf war. Work your way out from where you found the majority of the blood in that parking lot. There’s a good chance there’s a bullet there somewhere, Trooper. You got me?”

Connolly nodded, gulping air.

Sean said, “Bullet entered the sternum through the lowest quadrant, almost dead center.”

Whitey said to Connolly, “Get CSS down there and as many troopers as you can without pissing off the BPD. You find that bullet, and you personally accompany it to the lab.”

Sean craned his head into the trunk and took a good look at the pulverized face. “Judging by the amount of gravel, someone rammed his face off the pavement until they couldn’t ram no more.”

Whitey put his hand on Connolly’s shoulder. “Tell BPD they’re going to need a full Homicide crew down here—techs, photographers, the on-call ADA, and the ME. Tell them Sergeant Powers requests someone who can give me a blood type on-scene. Go.”

Connolly was elated to just get the hell away from the smell. He ran to his cruiser, had it in gear and fishtailing out of the lot in under a minute.

Whitey shot a roll of film around the outside of the car and then nodded at Souza. Souza slid on a pair of surgical gloves and used a slim jim to pop the passenger door lock.

“You find any ID?” Whitey asked Sean.

Sean said, “Wallet in his back pocket. Take some shots while I get my gloves on.”

Whitey came around and photographed the body, then let the camera hang from the strap around his neck as he scribbled a crime-scene diagram in his report pad.

Sean pulled the wallet from the corpse’s back pocket and flipped it open as Souza called from the front of the car: “Registration’s in the name of August Larson of Three-two-three Sandy Pine Lane in Weston.”

Sean looked down at the driver’s license. “Same guy.”

Whitey looked over his shoulder. “He got an organ donor card in there, anything like that?”

Sean searched through credit cards and video club cards, a health club membership ID, AAA card, finally found a Tufts Health Plan ID. He held it up so Whitey could see it.

“Blood type, ‘A.’”

“Souza,” Whitey said. “Call Dispatch. Put out an APB on David Boyle, Fifteen Crescent Street, East Buckingham. White male, brown hair, blue eyes, five-foot-ten, a hundred-sixty-five pounds. Should be considered armed and dangerous.”

“Armed and dangerous?” Sean said. “I doubt it, Sarge.”

Whitey said, “Tell that to trunk boy here.”

BPD
HEADQUARTERS
was only eight blocks away from the tow lot, so five minutes after Connolly had left, a battalion of cruisers and unmarked cars came through the gates, followed by the City Medical Examiner’s van and a CSS truck. Sean took off his gloves and stepped back from the trunk as soon as he saw them. It was their show now. They wanted to ask Sean any questions, fine, but otherwise, he was out of it.

The first Homicide dick out of a tan Crown Vic was Burt Corrigan, a warhorse from Whitey’s generation with a similar history of blown relationships and bad diet. He shook
Whitey’s hand, the two of them Thursday night regulars at JJ Foley’s and members of the same dart league.

Burt said to Sean, “You ticket this car yet? Or you going to wait till after the funeral?”

“Good one,” Sean said. “Who writes them for you these days, Burt?”

Burt slapped his shoulder as he came around the back of the car. He looked in, took a sniff, and said, “Funky.”

Whitey stepped up to the trunk. “We think the murder took place in the parking lot of the Last Drop in East Bucky on early Sunday morning.”

Burt nodded. “Didn’t one of our forensic teams meet your guys out there Monday afternoon?”

Whitey nodded. “Same case. You sent guys over today?”

“Few minutes ago, yeah. Supposed to meet a Trooper Connolly and search for a bullet?”

“Yup.”

“You put a name out on the wires, too, right?”

“David Boyle,” Whitey said.

Burt looked in at the dead guy’s face. “We’ll need all your case notes, Whitey.”

“No problem. I’ll hang with you for a bit, see how it plays out.”

“You bathe today?”

“First thing.”

“All right then.” He looked over at Sean. “What about you?”

Sean said, “I got a guy in holding I want to talk to. This is yours now. I’ll take Souza back with me.”

Whitey nodded and walked with him toward their car. “We tie Boyle to this, might turn him on the Marcus murder. Get ourselves a twofer.”

Sean said, “A double homicide ten blocks apart?”

“Maybe she walked out of the bar and saw it.”

Sean shook his head. “Timeline’s all fucked-up. If Boyle killed that guy, he did it between one-thirty and one-fifty-
five. Then he’d have to drive ten blocks, find Katie Marcus just driving down the street at one-
forty
-five. I don’t buy it.”

Whitey leaned against the side of their car. “Yeah, I don’t either.”

“Plus, the hole coming out of that guy’s back? It was small. Too small for a thirty-eight, you ask me. Different guns, different doers.”

Whitey nodded, looking down at his shoes. “You’re going to take another run at the Harris kid?”

“Keeps coming back around to his father’s gun.”

“Maybe get a picture of the father? Have someone do an age-progression, float that around. See if someone’s seen him.”

Souza came around and opened the passenger door. “I’m with you, Sean?”

Sean nodded, turned back to Whitey. “It’s a little thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever we’re missing. It’s a minor detail. I figure it out, I’ll close this.”

Whitey smiled. “What’s the last open homicide you got on your plate, kid?”

The name popped off Sean’s tongue. “Eileen Fields, eight months cold.”

“They can’t all be dunkers,” Whitey said, and started walking back toward the Cadillac. “Know what I mean?”

B
RENDAN’S TIME
in the holding cell hadn’t been kind to him. He looked smaller and younger, but meaner, too, as if he’d seen things in there that he’d never wished to know existed. But Sean had been careful to have him tossed in an empty cell, away from the dregs and junkies, so he had no idea what could have been so horrible for him, unless he really couldn’t handle isolation.

“Where’s your father?” Sean said.

Brendan chewed a nail and shrugged. “New York.”

“Haven’t seen him?”

Brendan went to work on another nail. “Not since I was six.”

“Did you kill Katherine Marcus?”

Brendan dropped the finger from his mouth and stared at Sean.

“Answer me.”

“No.”

“Where’s your father’s gun?”

“I don’t know anything about my father having a gun.”

There was no blinking this time. He didn’t avert his eyes from Sean’s. He stared into Sean’s face with a kind of cruel and beaten fatigue that allowed Sean to sense a potential for violence in the kid for the first time since he’d met him.