Remembering Sarah

by Chris Mooney

Mike turned around, walked into the bedroom and flicked on the light.

  The framed pictures were of Sarah.

  Four of them, all taken outside, all of them capturing Sarah at various ages: Sarah wearing a sundress and walking barefoot next to Fang, her hand on the dog’s back for support; Sarah smelling a dandelion; Sarah playing with Paula O’Malley at the jungle gym at the Hill; Sarah dressed in her pink snowsuit, holding Mike’s hand as they waited for their turn to go down the hill.

  The pictures looked familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Mike had never given his father any pictures—and neither had Jess. No way in hell. Mike was the designated family photographer, Jess having no patience with cameras, more concerned about keeping her hands free to catch Sarah in case she fell.

  Mike hadn’t taken these pictures. Lou had. Lou had been told to stay away and instead had watched Sarah through a camera lens and stolen these moments.

  There had to be more photos of Sarah, more rolls of film.

  Mike searched through Lou’s bureau drawers first. When he came up empty, he moved onto the nightstand drawers, the shoeboxes on a shelf in Lou’s closet and then finally under the bed. Nothing.

  Maybe the pictures were in the safe.

  Mike walked into his old bedroom and flicked on the light. The room was completely empty. So was the closet. He removed the Swiss Army knife from his front pocket, a Christmas gift from Bill’s kids last year, and after selecting the blade, got down on both knees and used the knife to pry up a corner section of the carpet. Once he got a strip, he grabbed it and gave it a good, hard yank.

  Lou had gone all out with the floor safe. Mike knew a thing or two about safes. A few years back, when Jess wanted to store some important documents inside the house instead of making trips to the safety deposit box, Mike had a guy from Trunco Safe in East Boston come out and run through all the different models and options. While Lou’s safe appeared to be a similar model—square, made of solid steel with a flush cover plate that was perfect for concealment under carpet—Mike was willing to bet Lou’s model had drill-proof plates and was built to provide protection against forced entry with something like a sledgehammer. The safe had been set in concrete, making it impossible to pull out unless you happened to have some serious heavy machinery.

  This safe hadn’t been here when he was a kid. It was also less than five years old. When Sarah disappeared, and before Jonah became a suspect, Merrick and crew had locked their sights on Lou and had ripped apart every square inch of this house, the thinking being that Sarah was kidnapped because of one of Lou’s past associations. Slow Ed had never mentioned anything about finding a safe full of cash—or pictures of Sarah for that matter.

  Mike worked the dial. The combination entered, he turned the hinge and heard the safe click open.

  Two rows, two stacks each of crumpled hundred dollar bills bound together by elastic. Mike grabbed one stack, counted through it. Ten grand—and that was just one stack. There’d be a hell of a lot more, depending on how deep the safe was. Five minutes later he knew.

  “Holy shit.”

  Half a million—in cash.

  Of course, a voice said. If he placed it in a bank, the government could come in and freeze the accounts.

  An insane thought flashed in Mike’s head: Donate it. Yeah, Lou, I found the money, only I got to thinking about how it would be better off in someone else’s hands. You know, give it to someone who really needed it. So I gave it to the ASPCA. They’re a group that works with lost and runaway dogs. No need to thank me, Lou. The look on your face is thanks enough. Priceless as that moment would be, if he did that, Lou would stick around and haunt him forever.

  At the bottom of the safe was an elastic-wrapped envelope. Mike reached inside, pulled out the envelope and removed the elastic.

  Pictures, but not of Sarah. The top picture, the colors slightly off and yellowed with age, was of people walking through a crowded alley of brick and white buildings filled with lights. At first Mike thought the place might have been Faneuil Hall in Boston. But this area was more enclosed and had a foreign feel to it.

  Like Paris.

  Mike studied the faces in the pictures. He didn’t recognize any of them. By the way people were dressed, it was either spring or summer. He turned the picture over and saw the developer’s date stamped on the back: July 16, 1976.

  July. The month Lou went to Paris. Next picture: a woman with frosted blond hair sitting at an outdoor table under a white awning covered with ivy, a pair of round black sunglasses covering her eyes as she read a newspaper. People sat around her, reading newspapers and books, talking, drinking coffee. Mike flipped to the next picture, a close-up of the same woman, only she had taken off her sunglasses and was smiling at the man now seated across from her. The man’s back was toward the camera, but the woman’s face was as plain as day.

  It was his mother.

  He flipped through the rest of the pictures. His mother was in every one of them, as was her companion, this unknown man who was a good deal taller than her and had a very sharp, hawk-like nose, long sideburns and thick, wavy black hair—a banker or investor of some sort given the suit. Hard to say. What was clear was how much his mother cared for him. In every picture she either held his hand or arm. In the last picture, the man had his arm wrapped around her shoulder as they walked down a crowded street, his mother’s wide smile turned away from him, his mother safe and happy, relieved to be back in Paris, lost in the streets of her birthplace and hometown.

  CHAPTER 35

  Mike had been expecting someone along the lines of the male version of Sam: a tall, conservatively dressed guy with a thin body shaped by early morning runs and afternoon squash matches, a guy who liked to kick back on the weekends with his pals Preston and Ashton on his sailboat docked near his summer home in Hyannis. Martin Weinstein, with his olive skin and thinning black hair combed straight back, the gold Rolex and pinkie ring, looked every inch the bada-bing crowd.

  “You’re wondering how a Jewish guy ended up looking like Tony Soprano, right?” Weinstein smiled, flashing his big, capped teeth. His weight clocked somewhere in the neighborhood of three bills, his body thick with hard fat. “My mother’s a hundred percent Italian, my old man’s a hundred percent Jewish. Me and my two younger brothers came out looking like her and got our father’s smarts. I marry an Italian woman and my two kids are as pale as Irishmen. The miracle of genetics, I tell you.”

  “Here’s the money you wanted,” Mike said and tossed the cash envelope to Weinstein. “I want to meet him alone.”

  “No BS, just like your old man. I like that. Come on. I’ll bring you to him.”

  Two guards—old grizzled hands with beer guts and jowls—told Mike to empty the contents of his jean pockets into a plastic bowl.

  “And your belt and shoelaces,” the guard said.

  Weinstein said, “Potential weapons. Don’t worry, you’ll get it all back.”

  After Mike handed everything over, the guard worked him over with a metal-detection wand, then asked him to take off his boots, examining the heels and insides thoroughly before handing them back.

  The guard nodded to his partner, and a buzzer sounded, the gate sliding back, clank-clank-clank-clank.

  A series of corridors and locked gates followed, locks releasing and then bolting home,Weinstein leading the way and Mike reviewing again how he was going to approach Lou.

  The prison guard saw Weinstein, nodded, and then took out his keys to unlock a door. Through the glass panel, Mike could see Lou sitting in a chair and dressed in his orange prison jumpsuit, his head bowed, studying the handcuffs secured around his wrists, the chain wrapped around his waist.

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Weinstein said, then leaned in closer with the peppermint reek of his breath mint. “And be nice, okay? Your father was up all night throwing up, the chills, the shakes—I’m talking the whole nine yards. They had to call in a doctor. Looks like a bad strain of the flu.”

 
Not the flu. The correct diagnosis is claustrophobia.

  The lawyer opened the door. The room was small, holding a desk and two chairs, and smelled of soap and shaving cream. Lou kept his head down as he spoke.

  “He give you the money, Martin?”

  “We’re good,” Weinstein said. “Lou, you need anything, I’ll be standing just outside the door.”

  Weinstein shut the door. Mike slid out the chair and sat down.

  “Start talking.”

  “About Jess or about the pictures you found inside the safe? You did find them, right?”

  “You know I did,” Mike said. “I also found pictures of Sarah on your bureau. When did you take them?”

  Lou’s eyes tightened at the mention of his granddaughter. “So what did Jess say about her weekend getaway?”

  “Who’s the guy in the pictures?”

  Lou looked up, grinning. In the fluorescent lighting, he looked withered, the skin under his eyes bruised from lack of sleep, his thin lips bloodless. Drops of perspiration ran down his forehead.

  “Didn’t have the balls to ask her, did you?”

  “We’re going to talk about Mom, and you’re going to start by telling me how you found out where she was hiding.”

  “Hiding,” Lou repeated. “Are you seriously that retarded?”

  “I swear to Christ, if you try and back out of—”

  “Arnold Mackey.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The O’Malley’s postman. Mackey was a regular at McCarthy’s every Friday night. One night he comes in and asks me why your mail is getting delivered to the O’Malley house. He sees I’m totally confused and then tells me about the package you got from Paris. We get to talking, I buy him a few beers, and I ask him to keep an eye out for any more mail with your name on it, tell him that if he hand-delivers it to me instead, I got two one hundred dollar bills with his name on them.”

  “So she sent a second package.”

  “More like a note. It was written on one of those heavy, expensive note cards. Then again, your mother always valued expensive things. Did I ever tell you how your mother almost bankrupted me? In the beginning money was tight but that didn’t stop your mother from treating herself to fancy dinners, nights on the town in Boston. When she bought things, she’d hide them around the house. You ever see her do anything like that?”

  “What did this letter say?”

  “Who’d she say that blue scarf of hers came from?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I thought you came for the truth, Michael. Or are you looking for me to verify your version of it?”

  “She said her father gave it to her.”

  Lou leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his flat stomach. “Her father was a waiter who could barely afford the groceries. Her mother died when Mary was four.”

  Mike searched his memory for stories his mother told him about her parents, something to verify it against what Lou was saying, prove he was lying. When he couldn’t come up with anything, he said, “Tell me what the letter said.”

  “I don’t remember her exact words, but it was something along the lines of how much she missed you, that she carried you in her thoughts—you know, all that happy horseshit.”

  “That’s it? That’s all she said?”

  “You mean did she say when she was coming home to get you? I do remember her mentioning an address but no phone number. I wonder why she wouldn’t leave you her phone number.” Lou wore his prizefighter’s smile, that lustful look of satisfaction when he knew he had you cornered. “I still have the note, you know.”

  Mike felt his pulse quicken.

  “Would you like to know where it is?” Lou asked.

  Lou giving him a choice: either back out now or go forward, you choose.

  “Go home, Michael.”

  “Where’s this note?”

  “It’s downstairs in the basement,” Lou said. “Top drawer of the Gerstner.”

  The Gerstner was a solid oak tool chest made by H. Gerstner and Sons. It was where Lou kept all his precision tools. Mike said, “So in this second letter, she included a return address. That’s how you found her.”

  Lou winked. “You got it.”

  “And once you had her address, you just hopped on a plane to Paris.”

  “Correct.”

  “With a fake passport.”

  “There was a misunderstanding between me and the authorities at the time. They believed I had something to do with the theft of certain electronics items from a warehouse in South Boston.”

  “Only you hate to fly because you’re claustrophobic.”

  “I don’t fly because I don’t trust planes.”

  “So why not call her? You had her address; you could have found her phone number. Why bother hopping on a plane?”

  “Boy needs his mother,” Lou said, Mike feeling the heat in Lou’s voice, words coming together and forming a fist.

  Why is he acting so confident?

  He’s setting you up.

  But for what?

  “You’ve always viewed your mother as a saint,” Lou said. “What about all the things I did? The ball games, the bikes and the car, your tuition at St. Stephen’s. When you and Bill started your business, I offered you money, even steered some clients your way. Anything you ever needed, you got.”

  “Including getting hit.”

  “You needed toughening up. Parochial school and all that church nonsense were making you soft. That’s the problem with your generation. You love to hoard every little hurt life throws at you and spend all your time whining about it. It’s no wonder we got so many faggots running around these days.” Lou shook his head, then leaned forward, his chains rattling. “You ever hear me bitch about my situation? About losing my brother to that shit war or spending over a year in that POW camp?”

  “Tell me what you did to her.”

  “I tried to talk her into coming home.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Did we get into it? Absolutely.” No apology, no remorse in either his face or tone. “Accidents happen, right? Like that night you went over to Jonah’s. I’m sure you didn’t go over there with the intention of beating the living shit out of him, but you heard him lie to your face and you just couldn’t contain yourself—or do I have it all wrong?”

  “Talk to your best friend Cadillac Jack recently?”

  “I didn’t hurt her. You don’t want to accept it, then that’s your problem.” Lou’s tone was calm—way too calm, Mike thought.

  “Who’s the guy in the pictures?”

  “Jean Paul Latiere.”

  Surprise bloomed on Mike’s face before he could hold it back.

  “Yes, I know who he is,” Lou said. “They grew up together. They were very, very close, those two—thick as thieves, you could say. Jean Paul and your mother were quite an item when they were young. Inseparable. Then your mother moved to the States. She was fifteen and hopelessly in love. She and Jean Paul kept in touch by mail, by phone—only Jean Paul had to do the majority of the calling since your mother’s father—your grandfather—wouldn’t have allowed phone calls to France. As Jean Paul got older, nineteen or so, he’d fly here and meet your mother. He could afford to do it. He was working at his father’s paper mill business when your mother left, you know, being groomed to take over the family business. Latiere Paper. Big company over there. And Jean Paul, he just loved to shower your mother with expensive gifts. Like her scarf. Expensive gifts popped up from time to time around the house.”

  Unconsciously Mike rubbed his forehead, found it slick and greasy.

  “Having a hard time believing your perfect saint of a mother could possibly be involved in something so seedy?”

  “If she was having an affair, I don’t blame her for it.”

  “An affair? She was in love with him the day we met.”

  “Then why’d she settle for you?”

  “Jean Paul’s family was very successful, very
rich. Prestigious background, lots of inventors and politicians—you know, all that pedigree nonsense that gets some panties wet. Nothing got your mother more excited than money. Problem was, Jean Paul’s old man wasn’t going to let him get involved with common-variety trash, even if that trash was someone as beautiful as your mother—got to think of the bloodlines, you know? Your mother was a lot like your wife—excuse me, your ex-wife. They both valued the finer things money could offer, only your mother wasn’t a patient woman. And I didn’t know she was still holding out hope for Jean Paul, even after we married. I always knew those pictures were bullshit.”

  “What pictures?”

  “Your mother kept photo albums of pictures of Jean Paul’s family. She must have showed them to you.”

  The photo albums she hid in boxes in the basement—the ones she packed up and took with her—Mike remembered how she would sit down alone in the basement and go through them, the few times he caught her there crying and she would bring him over, go through all the pictures with him and narrate the story of her family. Her family.

  “No,” Mike said. “She didn’t.”

  “He was around Belham a lot when I was away during the war. Even after I came home, Jean Paul came to Boston a lot. All those secret missions you two shared, surely you must have met him.”

  As Lou talked, Mike searched through his memories for the man he had seen in those pictures. The Frenchman’s face didn’t ring any bells. It was a long time ago.

  “I never met him,” Mike said.

  “Huh. Now I wonder why that is. Any ideas?”

  “So you knew about the affair?”

  “I had my suspicions.Fresh flowers every now and then—she said she bought them at the florist. Nice item like a silver picture frame or a nice pair of shoes pops up, a nice dress, your mother says she found them at Goodwill or some place like that. Your mother could be very persuasive with that soft gentle voice of hers—you know that better than anyone. Smoothest liar I ever met, your mother.Did you know she kept a post office box downtown? That’s where Jean Paul sent the gifts and money.”

  Mike tried picturing her getting dressed and made up and driving into Boston to meet this guy, this Jean Paul, at a place like the Four Seasons; but Mike couldn’t picture her beyond her frumpy clothing, her penny-pinching ways and dime-store makeup she used to cover her bruises. That image was fixed in his mind because it was true—and here was Lou trying to destroy it with his lies. To believe Lou would ever come clean about anything had been both stupid and foolish. Lou lied for a living, and he was lying now.