Remembering Sarah

by Chris Mooney

  Dr. T used one of the yellow bookmarks, flipped the magazine open and found the page. “The reporter asks your father if he’s talked with you since your daughter’s disappearance, and your father says: ‘Michael and I haven’t talked about much since the day he got married. That’s his choice. Some men need hate to get them through the day.’”

  She looked up for an answer. Mike stared at the diamond ring, three carats by the looks of it. Ring like that, she probably had a live-in nanny and a house in some place like Weston where she lived with her husband (probably a surgeon), dog (a Golden or Lab, depending on what was “in” in Weston at the time) and 2.5 kids (boys with names like Thad and Hunter). Her Harvard-bought observations and solutions might have been a big hit with the bored housewives looking for a sympathetic ear and a chemical vacation from the monotony of their nicely polished lives, but it meant jack shit when applied to enigmas like Lou Sullivan.

  “Any thoughts?”

  “Not really,” Mike said.

  “I believe your father gave this interview because he’s trying to reach out to you and possibly make amends.”

  Mike leaned forward and picked up his cup of coffee from the glass table. “My old man reaching out? All due respect, I think you’re the one who’s reaching here.”

  “The reason I’m pressing you on this is because I want to make sure you’re looking at your father the way he stands now and not through a leftover filter from your childhood.”

  “A filter from my childhood,” Mike repeated evenly.

  “Yes. We tend to view our parents by their roles and not as people. I’ve noticed that you especially tend to view people in either-or terms—good or bad, smart or dumb. I can certainly appreciate your feelings regarding your father, and I’m not trying to placate you by saying that I have an idea what it was like growing up with a father who was not only a thief but was also unpredictably violent.”

  Don’t forget murderer, Mike added privately.

  “That being said, there’s clearly another side to him, the one that raised you after your mother left, took you to sporting events. The side your mother loved at one point.”

  His eyes slid over to the wall clock. Forty minutes and then it was sayonara.

  “If he was willing to share his feelings in print,” Dr. T was saying, “then maybe he would be willing to open up and share the truth about your mother.”

  Mike thought about the pewter keychain in his front pocket, the keychain a circular disc containing an etching of St. Anthony holding the baby Jesus, the back an etching of a church in Paris, Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. The keychain had arrived in a package to Bill’s house a month after she left. Mike had read the letter so many times he could recite the words: The next time I write, I’ll have an address where you can write me. Soon you’ll be with me here in Paris. Have faith, Michael. Remember to have faith, no matter how bad it gets. And remember to keep this quiet. I don’t have to remind you what your father would do to me if he found out where I was hiding.

  The second letter never came, but four months later, in July, Lou had come home from a three-day business trip, called Mike out into the backyard and launched into a spiel about how his mother wasn’t coming home. Lou made the mistake of leaving his suitcase open. Mike walked by Lou’s bedroom, and when he saw the camera sitting on top of the opened suitcase, he went in, did a little investigating and found the envelope holding a passport and plane tickets to Paris. Only the tickets were under the name Thom Peterson—the name that ran under the slightly altered passport photo of Lou.

  “Look,” Mike said. “I know you’re gunning for some type of Oprah moment where I have, I dunno, some sort of emotional breakdown. That’s not going to happen.”

  “Are you aware that your voice changes when you talk about your father?”

  Thirty-five minutes left. He had to fill up the time somehow.

  “Cadillac Jack,” Mike said. “I’ve mentioned him a couple of times.”

  “He’s one of your father’s friends, a gangster who ran a garage.”

  “The garage was really a chop shop. He also ran a numbers joint out of there. Everyone thought Jack Scarlatta got the name because he had a thing for Caddies. He did, only it was because he could fit two, three bodies in the trunk, take them out to this quiet place in Quincy and pop them. You know what ‘getting popped’ means, right?”

  “Yes,” Dr. T said stiffly. “Unfortunately, my husband insists on watching The Sopranos.”

  “So you have an idea what I’m talking about. Cadillac Jack and my old man were good friends from high school. Went to Vietnam together, only Cadillac Jack came back first while Lou stayed over there for another year and served time in a bamboo jail as a P.O.W.—ironically enough, the only jail time my old man would ever serve. Lou came back, and Cadillac Jack was running the Mission Hill gang. My old man had a talent for cracking safes. There’s not a safe on the planet he can’t crack. The two of them had a great thing going until about five, six years ago when Cadillac Jack introduced Lou to this FBI agent named Bobby Stevens. You remember reading that in the papers?”

  “Robert Stevens was allegedly a corrupt FBI agent. I remember there was a big investigation.”

  “Now the thing you’ve got to understand about the Irish is that there’s nothing lower on this planet than a snitch. You don’t rat out your friends, and in Belham, you protect your own. You see someone get shot, when the cops come around asking questions, you keep your mouth shut. Now Cadillac Jack, he was playing this FBI agent—you know, dropping Stevens some tips in exchange for information on what Jack’s competitors were up to. Jack was feeding the FBI guy false leads. But in my old man’s eyes, it was only a matter of time until his best friend Jack ratted him out. You know what happened to him?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Neither do I. They never found his body.”

  “You’re suggesting your father killed him?”

  “The night before he disappeared, I heard the two of them arguing in the kitchen, my old man saying that they should go for a ride, get some fresh air and think this through. Jack never made it back home.”

  “Maybe he’s on the lam.”

  Mike sighed. “You remember the armored car heists from about five years ago? Three cars were hit in Charlestown and Boston? Happened about two weeks before my daughter disappeared? These guys walked away with close to two million.”

  “Vaguely.” She looked bored now. “Those stories generally don’t hold my interest.”

  “It was the old Mission Hill crew. Seven of them. A week later they found all seven bodies in the trunks of three different Caddys parked at Logan. They were poisoned with arsenic. Lou was in Florida laundering the money.”

  “That’s a lot of supposition.”

  “You’re right. I should have mentioned that point to the FBI agents who kept popping by the house.”

  “Your father is alive,” Dr. T said. “It’s my opinion that he will try and approach you in an attempt at reconciliation.”

  Jesus Christ, she just didn’t get it.

  “How you choose to deal with this, of course, is entirely up to you. I think it would be in your best interest to keep an open mind. I say this for two reasons. First, by opening a dialogue with your father, you may be able to shed some of the anger you still harbor. As you continue to be angry with him, you are, in fact, allowing him to hold power over you. Secondly, your father won’t be around forever. Good or bad, he’s your only link to the past. Maybe if you open up to him, he’ll open up to you.”

  Mike checked the wall clock, managed to suppress a smile. “Looks like our time’s about up.”

  “I’d like to talk about Jonah for a moment.”

  He felt the heat climb into his neck.

  “The article mentioned he was dying of pancreatic cancer.”

  Dying. The word pressed against his chest like concrete blocks.

  “You’re wondering if Jonah’s dying might suddenly prompt me to con
front him again?”

  “His impending death does carry a sense of urgency,” Dr. T said.

  “I’m sure the police are talking with him.”

  “As of today, you and I are finished with these sessions. You have another six weeks of probation. During that time, if you make contact with Jonah in any way, you’ll be in violation of your probation, and this time the judge will have no choice but to send you to jail. It’s not fair, but it’s the law. The same is true of your drinking. Are you still attending meetings?”

  “I work a lot.”

  “Still, you should make an effort to attend meetings.”

  “I’ve been sober for two years.”

  “I’m more concerned about when your probation period ends. You’ll need a support system in place to help you deal with your alcoholism.”

  The anger had seeped up through his neck and was now working behind his eyes like coils of hot wire. When this happened—and it happened often when he sat in this chair—he stared at a spot on the carpet and started the visualization exercise he learned in his anger-management course. The image he used to calm himself was a variation on that final scene in Misery where a hobbled James Caan stuffed the pages of his charred manuscript into the mouth of his deranged nurse, Kathy Bates, Caan screaming, That’s it, choke on it. Eat it till ya choke, you sick, twisted fuck. Only in Mike’s version, he stuffed one dollar bills down Dr. T’s throat 125 times, her hourly fee for this bullshit.

  “Something wrong?” Dr. T asked.

  “Just practicing one of those calming visualization exercises I learned in anger management.”

  “Really. And does it work?”

  “Yes,” Mike said. “It works amazingly well.”

  CHAPTER 7

  His parole officer suffered from a major case of little man’s complex and approached his job with a strict, by-the-book mentality. Thief, arsonist, rapist, murderer, drug user or pusher or the father of a missing girl who had beaten up the suspect believed by everyone to be responsible for his daughter’s disappearance—in Anthony Testa’s world you were all lumped together under the same label and fixed with the same level of contempt.

  Testa propped his worn leather briefcase on the bathroom counter and clicked open the locks. They were standing inside the rest room of a Mobil gas station right around the corner from the Boston Garden (Mike refused to call it the Fleet Center; a bank, Jesus). Mike was about to head out of the city when his cell phone rang and Testa told him to turn around.

  Testa handed him the cup and said, “You know the drill.”

  The terms of Mike’s probation required him to urinate in front of him; it was the only way to make sure the urine sample was, in fact, his. Mike unzipped his fly, and when he started to fill the cup, Testa slid his cell phone back up to his ear and returned to the conversation, his chest puffed out as he paced inside the bathroom, pausing occasionally to check out the condition of his gelled hair in the mirror.

  Inside Testa’s briefcase was today’s Globe. FIVE YEARS AND QUESTIONS STILL LINGER was the top headline; the story dominated the entire top half of the paper. The reporters hadn’t used the computer-enhanced pictures of what Sarah would look like now, at eleven. Next to Sarah’s smiling six-year-old face was a picture of Jonah dressed in a winter coat, holding onto his cane. The photographer had captured Jonah’s frailty, the death pallor of his skin.

  Sully, you’re one lucky son of a bitch.

  The voice of his lawyer, Jimmy Douchette. Nearly four years ago, on a cold afternoon in late March, Mike had been gutting a kitchen in Wayland when his phone rang and Douchette’s secretary was on the other end telling Mike to drop what he was doing and to get to the office ASAP. Less than an hour later, Mike stepped inside Douchette’s sixth floor office with its sweeping view of the Charles River and found the lawyer on the phone, Douchette coming up on sixty, with white, wispy hair and skin that looked like sun-dried leather.

  Criminal. That word a constant hum through Mike’s thoughts day and night. It didn’t matter that Jonah owned a jacket that was an exact match to the one described by the witness, the boy, Sammy Pinkerton. It didn’t matter that on the next morning, Saturday, when the storm broke around nine and the bloodhounds had followed Sarah’s scent through the trails to an old, weather-beaten Victorian, the boyhood home of Francis Jonah—only Jonah was going by the name of David Peters now. It didn’t matter that Jonah was a now-defrocked priest who made two other young girls with blond hair disappear. What mattered was evidence.

  Evidence, Mike learned, was the Holy Grail. No evidence = no case. The Belham detectives had come in with all their collective experience and forensic teams and examined every inch of Jonah’s house, his tool shed in the backyard, his van, and failed to come away with the two most important items: DNA and fiber evidence. That meant Francis Jonah could hold a press conference and play the part of victim, right down to asking the public to pray for the safe return of Sarah Sullivan—Jonah could, if he wanted to, stand at the top of the Hill and watch all the little girls sledding. Jonah was a free man and free men could do anything they wanted.

  Building a case takes time,Mr. Sullivan. You need to be patient, Mr. Sullivan. We’re doing everything we can, Mr. Sullivan.

  The police were good men, he supposed, but they didn’t understand. To them Sarah was just another file with a docket number and some notes. Sarah was his daughter, and to ask him to be patient while this asshole who knew what had happened went about his daily life—Mike couldn’t take another day of dragging that knowledge from one moment to the next and taking it to bed with him at night.

  That night Mike had been drunk, too drunk. He wasn’t denying that, but swear to Christ he went over there with the intention of talking to Jonah. Reasoning with him.

  Douchette hung up the phone. “That was Jonah’s lawyer.”

  Mike didn’t move. For the past three weeks, while Jonah lay in the hospital, recuperating from the attack that had left him with three broken ribs and a severe concussion, Mike had tried to wrap his brain around the concept of possibly spending five to eight years of his life inside a jail cell. Facing it now it still seemed more like a foreign concept that a reality—like he was being asked to pack up for a vacation to Mars.

  But he didn’t regret it. Even now, as he stood in his lawyer’s office, Mike didn’t have the urge to step back in time and rewrite history. About Jess, yes, he did have regrets. If he went to jail, she could cash out their retirement savings and pay down a big chunk of the mortgage but she would still have to get a job, probably back in her field, teaching, and that salary would barely cover the monthly expenses. In all likelihood, she would have to sell the house and then either get an apartment or move back in with her mother. As for his nighttime visit to Jonah, his only regret was that he hadn’t learned what the son of a bitch knew about Sarah.

  Douchette flipped open the folder. Mike’s breath caught in his throat, a feeling of dread wrapping itself around his skin.

  “Jonah’s decided to drop all charges,” Douchette said. “And he’s promised not to sue.”

  Mike exhaled.

  “As for the exact reasons, I couldn’t tell you. Jonah’s lawyer wouldn’t say, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it’s about spin control. Doing this shows everyone he has compassion. How many monsters out there have compassion, right?” Douchette shook his head. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Sully. But before you go ahead and thank me, you better listen to the terms of the deal.”

  Three years probation including a five week stay at an alcohol treatment program. After that came random drug testing—fail a test, get caught having so much as a single beer and he’d be riding the bus to Walpole to serve a minimum of five years. Six-hundred hours of community service at the head trauma unit at Mass General. Two months of anger management classes that met three nights a week; after that, twenty-four sessions of private therapy, $100 to $150 an hour, depending on the shrink. All of it paid out of Mike’s pocket. Jess did
end up going back to teaching. It was the only way to cover the bills.

  Mike placed the urine sample on the counter, and after he zipped up, he capped the sample with the plastic lid.

  Testa snapped his cell phone shut. “Still on that job in Newton?”

  “Still there.”

  “How long?”

  “End of the month,” Mike said. Part of his probation required proof of employment. That meant showing Testa check stubs, receipts—anything the P.O. wanted. Testa liked to examine everything. Nothing was going to slide by him. No sir, no way.

  “Breathalyzer’s next to the briefcase.”

  Mike washed his hands, and after he finished drying them with a paper towel, he picked up the portable breathalyzer, blew into it, and handed it back to Testa, who read the meter.

  “Clear. No booze.”

  “Imagine that,” Mike said. “Clean and sober at eight-thirty in the morning.”

  “Joke about it all you want, but a lot of alkies like to booze it up in the morning, figuring I won’t catch them.”

  Mike thought about correcting him, saying that even at his worst, he had never taken a drink in the morning or slipped behind the wheel when he was loaded—hungover, definitely, but never drunk. In Testa’s eyes, though, a drunk was a drunk and always would be a drunk, and Mike wasn’t about to justify himself to a midget with a terminal case of assholeitis.

  “We about done here?” Mike said. “Some of us don’t get paid by the hour.”

  “What time you kicking off work tonight?”

  “Around six.”

  “And after that?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “Well think about it now.”

  Mike reached into his jacket pocket and came back with an envelope that contained a copy of his next contract, another addition in Wellesley. “You want to spend your evening checking to see whether or not I’m drinking, go ahead and knock yourself out,” he said, and placed the envelope on top of his urine sample.