Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “I mean, no one said anything to you,” Annabeth had said early into their vigil outside the park. “Right?”

  “No one said anything.” Jimmy stroked her hand, knowing that just the fact that they’d been allowed within these police barriers was all the confirmation they needed.

  And yet that microbe of hope refused to die without a body to look down at and say, “Yes, that’s her. That’s Katie. That’s my daughter.”

  Jimmy watched the cops standing up by the wrought-iron arch that curved over the entrance to the park. The arch was all that remained of the penitentiary that had stood on these grounds before the park, before the drive-in, before any of them standing here today had been born. The town had sprung up around the Penitentiary, instead of the other way around. The jailers had settled in the Point while the families of the convicts nestled down in the Flats. Incorporation into the city began when the jailers got older, started running for office.

  The walkie-talkie of the trooper closest to the arch squawked, and he raised it to his lips.

  Annabeth’s hand tightened around Jimmy’s with such force the bones in his hand ground against one another.

  “This is Powers. We’re coming out.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Marcus out there?”

  The trooper glanced at Jimmy and dropped his eyes. “Affirmative.”

  “Okay. Out.”

  Annabeth said, “Oh, Jesus, Jimmy. Oh, Jesus.”

  Jimmy heard a screech of tires and saw several cars and vans pull up outside the barrier on Roseclair. The vans had satellite dishes on their roofs and Jimmy watched as groups of reporters and cameramen jumped out onto the street, jostling one another, raising cameras, unspooling microphone cables.

  “Get them out of here!” the trooper up by the arch screamed. “Now! Move ’em out.”

  The troopers by the front barrier converged on the reporters and the shouting started.

  The trooper by the arch spoke into his walkie-talkie: “This is Dugay. Sergeant Powers?”

  “Powers.”

  “We got a blockage out here. The press.”

  “Clear them.”

  “Working on it, Sergeant.”

  Up the entrance road about twenty yards past the arch, Jimmy could see a Statie cruiser round the bend and suddenly stop. He could see a guy behind the wheel, a walkie-talkie raised to his lips, Sean Devine sitting beside him. The edge of another car’s grille stopped behind the cruiser, and Jimmy felt his mouth dry up.

  “Get them back, Dugay. I don’t care if you have to shoot their Columbine-fucker asses. You move those lice back.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Dugay and three other troopers jogged past Jimmy and Annabeth, Dugay shouting as he went, finger pointed: “You are violating a closed crime scene. Return to your vehicles immediately. You have no clearance for this area. Return to your vehicles now.”

  Annabeth said, “Oh shit,” and Jimmy felt the blast of the helicopter before he heard it. He looked up as it flew overhead, then back over at the cruiser idling up the road. He could see the driver yelling into his walkie-talkie and then he heard the sirens, a cacophony of them, and suddenly navy-and-silver cruisers came tear-assing from every end of Roseclair, and the reporters started scrambling back into their vehicles and the helicopter banked sharply and cut back into the park.

  “Jimmy,” Annabeth said in the saddest voice Jimmy had ever heard come out of her. “Jimmy, please. Please.”

  “Please what, honey?” Jimmy held her. “What?”

  “Oh, please, Jimmy. No. No.”

  It was the noise—the sirens and screeching tires and yelling voices and echoing rotor blades. The noise was Katie, dead, screaming in their ears, and Annabeth was crumpling under it in Jimmy’s arms.

  Dugay ran past them again and moved the sawhorses under the arch, and before Jimmy realized it had even moved, the cruiser was slamming to a stop beside him and a white van tore around it on the right and blew out onto Roseclair, took a hard left. Jimmy could see the words SUFFOLK COUNTY CORONER on the side of the van, and he felt all the joints in his body—his ankles, shoulders, knees, and hips—turn brittle and then liquefy.

  “Jimmy.”

  Jimmy looked down at Sean Devine. Sean stared up at him through the open window of the passenger door.

  “Jimmy, come on. Please. Get in.”

  Sean got out of the car and opened the rear door as the helicopter returned, higher this time, but still chopping the air close enough to Jimmy that he could feel it in his hair.

  “Mrs. Marcus,” Sean said. “Jimmy, man. Get in the car.”

  “Is she dead?” Annabeth said, and the words entered Jimmy and turned acidic.

  “Please, Mrs. Marcus. If you could get in the car.”

  A phalanx of cruisers had formed a double escort line on Roseclair and their sirens raged.

  Annabeth screamed over the noise, “Is my daughter—?”

  Jimmy moved her because he couldn’t hear that word again. He pulled her through the noise and they climbed in the back of the car and Sean shut the door and climbed up front and the cop behind the wheel hit the gas and the sirens at the same time. They streaked across the entrance road and joined the escort cars and moved en masse out onto Roseclair, an army of vehicles with screaming engines and screaming sirens screaming through the wind toward the expressway, screaming and screaming.

  SHE LAY on a metal table.

  Her eyes were closed and she was missing a shoe.

  Her skin was a black-purple, a shade Jimmy had never seen before.

  He could smell her perfume, just a hint of it through the reek of formaldehyde that permeated this cold, cold room.

  Sean put a hand against the small of Jimmy’s back, and Jimmy spoke, barely feeling the words, certain that at this moment he was as dead as the body below him:

  “Yeah, that’s her,” he said.

  “That’s Katie,” he said.

  “That’s my daughter.”

  13

  LIGHTS

  “THERE’S A CAFETERIA UPSTAIRS,” Sean said to Jimmy. “Why don’t we go have some coffee?”

  Jimmy remained standing over his daughter’s body. A sheet covered it again, and Jimmy lifted the upper corner of the sheet and looked down at his daughter’s face as if peering at her from the top of a well and wanting to dive in after her. “They got a cafeteria in the same building as a morgue?”

  “Yeah. It’s a big building.”

  “Seems weird,” Jimmy said, his voice stripped of color. “You think when the pathologists go in there, everybody else sits on the other side of the room?”

  Sean wondered if this was an early stage of shock. “I dunno, Jim.”

  “Mr. Marcus,” Whitey said, “we were hoping to ask you a few questions. I know this is a hard time, but…”

  Jimmy lowered the sheet back over his daughter’s face, his lips moving, but no sounds leaving his mouth. He looked over at Whitey as if he were surprised to find him in the room, pen poised over his report pad. He turned his head, looked at Sean.

  “You ever think,” Jimmy said, “how the most minor decision can change the entire direction of your life?”

  Sean held his eyes. “How so?”

  Jimmy’s face was pale and blank, the eyes turned up as if he were trying to remember where he’d left his car keys.

  “I heard once that Hitler’s mother almost aborted him but bailed at the last minute. I heard he left Vienna because he couldn’t sell his paintings. He sells a painting, though, Sean? Or his mother actually aborts? The world’s a way different place. You know? Or, like, say you miss your bus one morning, so you buy that second cup of coffee, buy a scratch ticket while you’re at it. The scratch ticket hits. Suddenly you don’t have to take the bus anymore. You drive to work in a Lincoln. But you get in a car crash and die. All because you missed your bus one day.”

  Sean looked at Whitey. Whitey shrugged.

  “No,” Jimmy said, “don
’t do that. Don’t look at him like I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not in shock.”

  “Okay, Jim.”

  “I’m just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. Say it rained in Dallas and so Kennedy didn’t ride in a convertible. Stalin stayed in the seminary. Say you and me, Sean, say we got in that car with Dave Boyle.”

  “What?” Whitey said. “What car?”

  Sean held up a hand to him and said to Jimmy, “I’m losing you here.”

  “You are? If we got in that car, life would have been a very different thing. My first wife, Marita, Katie’s mother? She was so beautiful. She was regal. You know the way some Latin women can be? Gorgeous. And she knew it. If a guy wanted to approach her, he better have some big fucking balls on him. And I did. I was King Shit at sixteen. I was fearless. And I did approach her, and I did ask her out. And a year later—Christ, I was seventeen, a fucking child—we got married and she was carrying Katie.”

  Jimmy walked around his daughter’s body in slow, steady circles.

  “Here’s the thing, Sean—if we’d gotten in that car, been driven off to God knows where and had God knows what done to us by two ass-fucking freaks for four days when we were, what, eleven?—I don’t think I’d have been so ballsy at sixteen. I think I would have been a basket case, you know, stoked on Ritalin or whatever. I know I never would have had what it took to ask out a woman as haughty-gorgeous as Marita. And so we never would have had Katie. And Katie, then, never would have been murdered. But she was. All because we didn’t get in that car, Sean. You see what I’m saying?”

  Jimmy looked at Sean like he was waiting for a confirmation, but a confirmation of what Sean didn’t have a clue. He looked as if he needed to be absolved—absolved of not getting in that car as a boy, absolved of fathering a child who would be murdered.

  Sometimes during a jog, Sean found himself back on Gannon Street, standing on the spot in the middle of the street where he and Jimmy and Dave Boyle had rolled around fighting, then looked up to see that car waiting for them. Sometimes Sean could still smell the odor of apples that had wafted from the car. And if he turned his head real quick, he could see Dave Boyle in the backseat of that car as it reached the corner, looking back at them, trapped and receding from view.

  It had occurred to Sean once—on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical—that maybe they had gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they’d become if they ever escaped and grew up.

  The thing about that idea was that even though Sean would have expected it to be the first casualty of a night’s drinking, it had remained lodged in his brain like a stone in the sole of his shoe.

  And so occasionally he found himself on Gannon Street in front of his old house, catching glimpses of the receding Dave Boyle out of the corner of his eye, the odor of apples filling his nostrils, thinking, No. Come back.

  He met Jimmy’s plaintive glare. He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell him that he had also thought about what would have happened if they’d climbed in that car. That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window. He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door. He wanted to tell him he hadn’t truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character.

  But they were in a morgue with Jimmy’s daughter lying on a steel table in between them and Whitey’s pen poised over paper, so all Sean said to the plea in Jimmy’s face was: “Come on, Jim. Let’s go get that coffee.”

  ANNABETH MARCUS, in Sean’s opinion, was one tough goddamned woman. She sat in a cold, late-Sunday, municipal cafeteria with its warmed-over, cellophane-’n’-steam smell, seven stories above a morgue, talking about her stepdaughter with cold, municipal men, and Sean could tell it was killing her, yet she refused to crack. Her eyes were red, but Sean knew after a few minutes that she wouldn’t weep. Not in front of them. No fucking way.

  As they talked, she had to stop for breath a few times. Her throat would close up in midsentence, as if a fist wormed its way through her chest, pressing against her organs. She’d place a hand on her chest and open her mouth a little wider and wait until she’d gotten enough oxygen to continue.

  “She came home from working at the store at four-thirty on Saturday.”

  “What store was that, Mrs. Marcus?”

  She pointed at Jimmy. “My husband owns Cottage Market.”

  “On the corner of East Cottage and Bucky Ave.?” Whitey said. “Best damn coffee in the city.”

  Annabeth said, “She came in and hopped in the shower. She came out and we had dinner—wait, no, she didn’t eat. She sat with us, talked to the girls, but she didn’t eat. She said she was having dinner with Eve and Diane.”

  “The girls she went out with,” Whitey said to Jimmy.

  Jimmy nodded.

  “So, she didn’t eat…” Whitey said.

  Annabeth said, “But she hung out with the girls, our girls, her sisters. And they talked about the parade next week and Nadine’s First Communion. And then she was on the phone in her room for a bit, and then, about eight, she left.”

  “Do you know who she talked to on the phone?”

  Annabeth shook her head.

  “The phone in her room,” Whitey said. “Private line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you have any objections if we subpoenaed the phone company records to that line?”

  Annabeth looked at Jimmy and Jimmy said, “No. No objections.”

  “So she left at eight. As far as you know to meet with her friends, Eve and Diane?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were still at the store at this time, Mr. Marcus?”

  “Yeah. I did swing shift on Saturday. Twelve to eight.”

  Whitey flipped a page in his notebook and gave them both a small smile. “I know this is tough, but you’re doing great.”

  Annabeth nodded and turned to her husband. “I called Kevin.”

  “Yeah? You talk to the girls?”

  “I talked to Sara. I just told her we’d be home soon. I didn’t tell her anything else.”

  “She ask about Katie?”

  Annabeth nodded.

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I just told her we’d be home soon,” Annabeth said, and Sean heard a small crack in her voice on “soon.”

  She and Jimmy looked back at Whitey and he gave them another small, calming smile.

  “I want to assure you—and this comes down all the way from the big office in City Hall—that this case is top priority. And we won’t make mistakes. Trooper Devine here was assigned because he’s a friend of the family and our boss knows that that’ll make him work it that much harder. He’s going to be with me every step of the way, and we will find the man responsible for harming your daughter.”

  Annabeth gave Sean a quizzical look. “Friend of the family? I don’t know you.”

  Whitey scowled, thrown off his game.

  Sean said, “Your husband and I were friends, Mrs. Marcus.”

  “Long time ago,” Jimmy said.

  “Our fathers worked together.”

  Annabeth nodded, still a bit confused.

  Whitey said, “Mr. Marcus, you spent a good part of Saturday with your daughter at the store. Correct?”

  “I did and I didn’t,” Jimmy said. “I was mostly in back. Katie worked the registers up front.”

  “But do you remember anything out of the ordinary? Was she acting odd? Tense? Fearful? Did she have a confrontation with
a customer maybe?”

  “Not while I was there. I’ll give you the number of the guy who worked with her in the morning. Maybe something happened before I got in that he remembers.”

  “Appreciate that, sir. But while you were there?”

  “She was herself. She was happy. Maybe a little…”

  “What?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Sir, the littlest thing is something right now.”

  Annabeth leaned forward. “Jimmy?”

  Jimmy gave them all an embarrassed grimace. “It’s nothing. It was…I look up from my desk at one point and she’s standing in the doorway. Just standing there, sipping a Coke through a straw, and looking at me.”

  “Looking at you.”

  “Yeah. And for a second, she looked like she did this one time when she was five and I was going to leave her in the car for just a sec while I ran into the drugstore. That time, right, she burst out crying because I’d just gotten back from prison and her mother had just died and I think, back then, she thought that every time you left her, even for a second, you weren’t going to come back. So she’d get this look, right? I mean, whether she ended up crying or not, she’d get this look on her face like she was preparing herself to never see you again.” Jimmy cleared his throat and let out a long sigh that widened his eyes. “Anyway, I hadn’t seen that look in a few years, maybe seven or eight, but for a few seconds on Saturday, that’s how she was looking at me.”

  “Like she was preparing herself to never see you again.”

  “Yeah.” Jimmy watched Whitey write that in his report pad. “Hey, don’t make too much of it. It was just a look.”

  “I’m not making anything out of it, Mr. Marcus, I promise. It’s just info. That’s what I do—I collect pieces of info until two or three pieces fit together. You say you were in prison?”

  Annabeth said, “Jesus,” very softly, and shook her head.

  Jimmy leaned back in his chair. “Here we go.”

  “I’m just asking,” Whitey said.

  “You’d do the same if I’d said I worked at Sears fifteen years ago, right?” Jimmy chuckled. “I did time for a robbery. Two years at Deer Island. You write that in your notebook. That piece of information going to help you catch the guy who killed my daughter, Sergeant? I mean, I’m just asking.”