Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  She adjusted the volume and resisted the urge to rip the cheap knob off the piece-of-shit TV and went back to the ironing board. Dave had taken Michael out half an hour ago to shop for kneepads and a catcher’s mask, saying he’d catch the news on the radio, Celeste not even bothering to look at him to see if he was lying. Michael, small and slim as he was, had proven himself a talented catcher—a “prodigy,” his coach, Mr. Evans, had said, with a “ballistic missile” for an arm, a kid his age. Celeste thought of kids she’d known growing up who’d played the position—big kids, usually, with flattened noses and missing front teeth—and she’d voiced her fears to Dave.

  “These masks they make now, honey? They’re like friggin’ shark cages. Hit ’em with a truck, the truck breaks.”

  She’d taken a day to consider it and come back to Dave with her deal. Michael could play catcher or any other baseball position as long as he had the best equipment and, here was the clincher, never went out for organized football.

  Dave, never a football player himself, agreed after only ten minutes of perfunctory argument.

  So now they were out buying equipment so Michael could be a mirror of his old man, and Celeste stared at the TV, iron held stationary a few inches above a cotton shirt as a dog food commercial ended and the news returned.

  “Last night in Allston,” the newscaster said, and Celeste’s heart sank, “a BC sophomore was assaulted by two men outside this popular nightspot. Sources say the victim, Carey Whitaker, was beaten with a beer bottle and is listed in critical condition at…”

  She pretty much knew then, as small clumps of wet sand drizzled inside her chest, that she wasn’t going to see anything on the assault or murder of a man outside the Last Drop. And once they turned to weather with a promise of sports to follow, she knew beyond any doubt.

  By now, they would have found the man. If he’d died (“Honey, I may have killed a man”), the reporters would have picked up on it through sources at the precinct house, off the police blotter, or simply by monitoring the police radios.

  So maybe Dave had overestimated the fury of his violence against the mugger. Maybe the mugger—or whoever it had been—had simply crawled off somewhere to lick his wounds after Dave left. Maybe those hadn’t been pieces of brain she’d watched swirl down the drain last night. But all that blood? How could someone lose all that blood from his head and survive, never mind walk away?

  Once she’d ironed the last pair of pants and put everything away in either Michael’s closet or hers and Dave’s, she returned to the kitchen and stood in the center of it, not sure what to do next. Golf played on the TV now, the soft thwacks of the ball and the dry, muted cackles of applause temporarily calming something inside of her that had been itchy all morning. It went beyond her problems with Dave and the holes in his story, yet had something to do with that at the same time, something to do with last night and the sight of him coming through the bathroom door with blood on him, all that blood on his pants staining the tile, bubbling in his wound, turning pink as it swirled down the drain.

  The drain. That was it. That’s what she’d forgotten. Last night, she’d told Dave she would bleach out the inside of the drainpipe under the sink, eradicate the rest of the evidence. She went to it immediately, dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor and opened the cupboard underneath, stared in at the cleaning supplies and rags until she saw the lug wrench near the back. She reached back there, trying to ignore the phobia she had about reaching into the sink cupboard, an irrational feeling she always got that a rat lay waiting under the pile of rags, sniffing the air at the scent of her flesh, raising its snout from the rags now, whiskers twitching…

  She snatched the lug wrench out, then rattled it through the rags and cans of cleanser just to be sure, quite aware that her fear was silly, but determined nonetheless, because, hey, that’s why they called them phobias. She hated sticking her hand into low, dark places; Rosemary had been terrified of elevators; her father had hated heights; Dave broke out into cold sweats whenever he had to descend into the cellar.

  She placed a bucket under the drainpipe to catch any excess runoff. She lay on her back and reached up, loosened the trap plug with the wrench, and then twisted with her hand until it came free and water came with it, splashing down into the plastic bucket. She worried for a moment that it would overfill the bucket, but soon the flow diminished to a dribble and she watched as a dark clump of hair and small kernels of corn followed the last of the water into the bucket. The slip nut closest to the rear wall of the cupboard was next, and that took a while, the nut refusing to budge and Celeste getting to the point where she was pushing off the base of the cupboard with her foot and pulling back on the lug wrench with so much force she feared either the wrench or her wrist would snap in half. And then the nut turned, just a fraction of an inch, with a loud metallic screech, and Celeste repositioned the lug wrench and pulled back again, the nut turning twice as much this time, though still fighting her.

  A few minutes later she had the whole drainpipe on the kitchen floor in front of her. Her hair and shirt were damp with sweat, but she felt a sense of accomplishment that bordered on pure triumph, as if she’d fought something recalcitrant and indisputably male, muscle against muscle, and won. In the rag pile, she found a shirt Michael had grown out of, and she twisted it in her hands until she could thread it through the pipe. She worked it through the pipe several times until she was satisfied the pipe was clear of everything but old rust, and then she placed the shirt in a small plastic grocery bag. She took the pipe and a bottle of Clorox out onto the back porch and bleached the inside of the pipe, allowing the liquid to spill out the other end and into the dry, fuzzy soil of a potted plant that had died last summer and sat on the porch all winter waiting for them to throw it out.

  When she was done, she refitted the pipe, finding it much easier going back on than it had been coming off, and reattached the trap plug. She found the plastic trash bag she’d put Dave’s clothes into last night and added the bag with Michael’s tattered shirt to it, poured the contents of the plastic bucket through a strainer over the toilet, wiped the strainer clean with a paper towel, and threw the towel in the bag with the rest of it.

  So there it was: all the evidence.

  Or at least all the evidence she could do anything about. If Dave had lied to her—about the knife, about leaving his fingerprints anywhere, about witnesses to his—crime? self-defense?—then she couldn’t help him there. But she’d risen to the challenge here in her own home. She’d taken everything that had been thrown at her since he’d come home last night and she’d dealt with it. She’d conquered it. She felt giddy again, powerful, as vibrant and valid as she’d ever felt, and she knew with a sudden, refreshing certainty that she was still young and strong and she was most definitely not a disposable toaster or broken vacuum. She had lived through the deaths of both her parents and years of financial crises and her son’s pneumonia scare when he was six months old and she hadn’t grown weaker, as she’d thought, only wearier, yes, but that would change now that she’d remembered who she was. And she was—definitely—a woman who did not shrink from gauntlets, but stepped up to them, and said, Okay, bring it. Bring your worst. I will get back up. Every time. I will not shrivel and die. So watch out.

  She picked the green trash bag up off the floor and twisted it in her hands until it resembled a scrawny old man’s neck, then wrung it tight and tied it off in a knot at the top. She paused then, thinking it strange that it had reminded her of an old man’s neck. Where had that come from? And she noticed that the TV had gone blank. One moment Tiger Woods was stalking the green, the next the screen was black.

  Then a white line blipped up the screen, and Celeste knew that if this TV had blown a picture tube, too, it was going off the porch. Right now, fuck the consequences, it was going.

  But the white line gave way to the newsroom studio, and the anchorwoman, looking rushed and harried, said, “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a bre
aking story. Valerie Corapi is on the scene outside Penitentiary Park in East Buckingham, where police have launched a massive search for a missing woman. Valerie?”

  Celeste watched as the studio shot gave way to a helicopter shot—a jerky overhead view of Sydney Street and Penitentiary Park and what looked like an invading army of police milling around outside. She saw dozens of small figures, black as ants from the distance, walking through the park, and police boats on the channel. She saw a line of the antlike figures moving steadily toward the grove of trees that surrounded the old drive-in screen.

  The helicopter was buffeted by wind and the camera lens shifted, and for a moment Celeste was looking at the land on the other side of the channel, at Shawmut Boulevard and its stretch of industrial parks.

  “This is the scene here in East Buckingham right now where police arrived early this morning and commenced a large-scale search for a missing woman that continues now into the early afternoon. Unconfirmed sources have told News Four that the woman’s abandoned car showed signs of foul play. Now, this, Virginia, is—I don’t know if you can see it yet…”

  The helicopter camera turned away from the industrial parks on Shawmut in a nauseating one-eighty and pointed down at a dark blue car with its door open that sat on Sydney Street, looking somehow forlorn as police backed a tow truck up to it.

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “What you are looking at now is what I have been told is the missing woman’s car. Police found it this morning and immediately launched this search. Now, Virginia, no one will confirm either the name of the missing woman or the reasons for this rather large—as I’m sure you can see—police presence. However, sources close to News Four have confirmed that the search seems to be focusing on the old drive-in screen, which, as you know, is the site of local theater in the summer. But this is not a fake drama playing out for us here today. This is real. Virginia?” Celeste was trying to figure out what they’d just told her. She wasn’t sure she’d learned anything except that police had, in fact, descended upon her neighborhood like they were taking it over.

  The anchorwoman looked confused, too, as if she was being cued off camera in a language she didn’t understand. She said, “We’ll keep you posted on this…developing story as we learn more. Now we return you to your regularly scheduled program.”

  Celeste changed channels several times, but no other stations seemed to be covering the story yet, so she turned back to the golf and left the volume up.

  Someone was missing in the Flats. A woman’s car had been abandoned on Sydney. But police didn’t launch this kind of massive operation—and it was massive; she’d noticed both state and city police cruisers down on Sydney—unless they had evidence of something more than just a missing woman to go on. There had to be something about that car that suggested violence. What had the reporter said?

  Signs of foul play. That was it.

  Blood, she was sure. It had to be blood. Evidence. And she looked down at the bag still twisted in her hand and thought:

  Dave.

  11

  RED RAIN

  JIMMY STOOD on the civilian side of the yellow tape, facing a ragged line of cops, as Sean walked away through the weeds and into the park, not looking back once.

  “Mr. Marcus,” this one cop, Jefferts, said, “get you some coffee or something?” The cop looked at Jimmy’s forehead, Jimmy feeling a mild contempt and pity in the loose gaze and the way the cop used the side of his thumb to scratch his belly. Sean had introduced them, telling Jimmy this was Trooper Jefferts, a good man, and telling Jefferts that Jimmy was the father of the woman who, uh, owned the abandoned car. Get him anything he needs and hook him up with Talbot when she arrives, Jimmy figuring Talbot was either a shrink with a badge or some disheveled social worker with a mountain of student loans and a car that smelled of Burger King.

  He ignored Jefferts’s offer and walked back across the street to Chuck Savage.

  “What’s going on, Jim?”

  Jimmy shook his head, pretty sure he’d puke all over himself and Chuck, too, if he tried to put what he was feeling into words.

  “You got a cell phone?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Chuck scrambled his hands through his windbreaker. He put the phone in Jimmy’s open hand, and Jimmy dialed 411, got a recorded voice asking him what city and state, and he hesitated a second before throwing his voice out into the phone line, had an image of his words traveling through miles and miles of copper cable before dropping down a vortex into the soul of some gargantuan computer with red lights for eyes.

  “What listing?” the computer asked.

  “Chuck E. Cheese’s.” Jimmy felt a sudden wave of bitter terror at saying such a ridiculous name on the open street near his daughter’s empty car. He wanted to put the whole phone between his teeth and bite down, hear it crack.

  Once he’d gotten the number and dialed, he had to wait as they paged Annabeth. Whoever had answered the phone hadn’t put him on hold but merely placed the receiver down on a countertop, and Jimmy could hear the tinny echoes of his wife’s name: “Will an Annabeth Marcus please contact the hostess stand? Annabeth Marcus.” Jimmy could hear the peal of bells and eighty or ninety kids running around like maniacs and pulling one another’s hair, shrieking, mingled with desperate adult voices trying to climb above the din, and then his wife’s name was called again, echoing. Jimmy pictured her looking up at the sound, confused and frazzled, the whole Saint Cecilia’s First Communion squad fighting for pizza slices around her.

  Then he heard her voice, muffled and curious: “You called my name?”

  For a moment, Jimmy wanted to hang up. What would he tell her? What was the point of calling her with no hard facts, only the fears of his own crazed imagination? Wouldn’t it be better to leave her and the girls in the peace of ignorance for a little while longer?

  But he knew there was already too much wounding going on today as it was, and Annabeth would be wounded if he left her unaware while he pulled out his hair on Sydney Street by Katie’s car. She’d remember her bliss with the girls as unearned and, worse, as an assault, a false promise. And she’d hate Jimmy for it.

  He heard her muffled voice again: “This one?” and then the scrape of her lifting the phone off the counter. “Hello?”

  “Baby,” Jimmy managed before he had to clear his throat.

  “Jimmy?” A slight edge to her voice. “Where are you?”

  “I’m…Look…I’m on Sydney Street.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They found her car, Annabeth.”

  “Whose car?”

  “Katie’s.”

  “They? The police? They?”

  “Yeah. She’s…missing. In Pen Park somewhere.”

  “Oh, Jesus God. No, right? No. No, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy felt it fill him now—that dread, that awful certainty, the horror of thoughts he’d kept clenched behind a shelf in his brain.

  “We don’t know anything yet. But her car’s been here all night and the cops—”

  “Jesus Christ, Jimmy.”

  “—are searching the park for her. Tons of them. So…”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on Sydney. Look—”

  “On the fucking street? Why aren’t you in there?”

  “They won’t let me in.”

  “They? Who the fuck are they? Is she their daughter?”

  “No. Look, I—”

  You get in there. Jesus. She could be hurt. Lying in there somewhere, all cold and hurt.”

  “I know, but they—”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get in there, Jimmy. I mean, God, what’s wrong with you?”

  She hung up.

  Jimmy handed the phone back to Chuck, knowing that Annabeth was right. She was so completely right that it killed Jimmy to realize that he would regret his impotence of the last forty-five minutes for the rest of his life, never be able to think about it without cringing, trying to c
rawl away from it in his head. When had he become this thing—this man who’d say yes, sir, no, sir, right you are, sir, to fucking cops when his firstborn daughter was missing? When had that happened? When had he stood at a counter and handed his dick over in exchange for feeling like, what, an upright citizen?

  He turned to Chuck. “You still keep those bolt cutters under the spare in your trunk?”

  Chuck got a look on his face like he’d been caught doing something. “Guy’s gotta make a living, Jim.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Up the street, corner of Dawes.”

  Jimmy started walking and Chuck trotted up beside him. “We’re going to cut our way in?”

  Jimmy nodded and walked a little faster.

  WHEN SEAN REACHED the part of the jogging path that circled around the fence of the co-op garden, he nodded at some of the cops working the flowers and soil for clues, could see a tight anticipation in most of their faces that told him they’d already heard by now. There was an air saturating the entire park that he’d felt at a few other crime scenes over the years, one that carried an edge of fatalism, a dank acceptance of someone else’s doom.

  They’d known coming into the park that she was dead, yet some infinitesimal piece of all of them, Sean knew, had held out for otherwise. It was what you did—you came on-scene knowing the truth, and then spent as much time as you could hoping you were wrong. Sean had worked one case last year where a couple had reported their baby missing. A ton of media showed up because the couple was white and respectable, but Sean and every other cop knew the couple’s story was bullshit, knew the kid was dead even as they consoled the two assholes, cooed assurances to them that their baby was probably fine, ran down dumb-ass leads on suspicious ethnics seen in the area that morning, only to find the baby at dusk, stuffed in a vacuum cleaner bag and crammed in a crevice under the cellar stairs. Sean saw a rookie cry that day, the kid shaking as he leaned against his cruiser, but the rest of the cops looked irate yet unsurprised, as if they’d all spent the night dreaming the same shitty dream.