Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  SINCE IT was closing in on noon—well, eleven, actually, but that was noon somewhere—most of the people dropping by the house now brought booze instead of coffee and meats instead of pastries. When the fridge filled, Jimmy and Theo Savage went searching for more coolers and ice upstairs in the third-floor Savage apartment—the one Val shared with Chuck, Kevin, and Nick’s wife, Elaine, who dressed in black, either because she considered herself a widow until Nick came back from prison or, as some people said, because she just liked black.

  Theo and Jimmy found two coolers in the pantry beside the dryer and several bags of ice in the freezer. They filled the coolers, tossed the plastic bags in the trash, and were cutting back through the kitchen when Theo said, “Hey, hold up a sec, eh, Jim.”

  Jimmy looked at his father-in-law.

  Theo nodded at a chair. “Take a load off.”

  Jimmy did. He placed the cooler beside the chair and sat down, waited for Theo to get to the point. Theo Savage had raised seven kids in this very apartment, a small three-bedroom with sloping floors and noisy pipes. Theo once told Jimmy that he figured this meant he didn’t have to apologize to anyone for anything for the rest of his life. “Seven kids,” he’d said to Jimmy, “no more’n two years apart between any of ’em, all screaming their lungs out in that shitty apartment. People’d talk about the joys of childhood, right? I’d come home from work into all that noise and go, ‘Fucking show me.’ I didn’t get no joy. Got a lot of headaches, though. Ton of those.”

  Jimmy knew from Annabeth that when her father came home to those headaches, he usually only stuck around long enough to eat his dinner and go back out again. And Theo had told Jimmy that he’d never lost much sleep when it came to child rearing. He’d had mostly boys, and boys were simple in Theo’s opinion—you fed them, taught them how to fight and play ball, and they were pretty much good to go. Any coddling they needed, they’d get from their mother, come to the old man when they needed money for a car or someone to post bail. It was the daughters you spoiled, he told Jimmy.

  “Is that what he called it?” Annabeth said when Jimmy mentioned it.

  Jimmy wouldn’t have cared what kind of parent Theo had been if Theo didn’t take every opportunity to weigh in on Jimmy and Annabeth’s deficiencies as parents, tell them with a smile that no offense, mind you, but he wouldn’t let a kid get away with that.

  Jimmy usually just nodded and said thanks and ignored him.

  Now Jimmy could see that wise-old-man gleam in Theo’s eyes as Theo sat down in the chair across from him and looked down at the floor. He gave a rueful smile to the clamor of feet and voices from the apartment below. “Seems like you only see your family and friends at weddings and wakes. Don’t it, Jim?”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said, still trying to shake the feeling he’d had since four o’clock yesterday that his true self hovered above his body, treading air with slightly frantic strokes, trying to figure a way back in through his own skin before he got tired from all that flapping and sank like a stone to the black core of the earth.

  Theo put his hands on his knees and looked at Jimmy until Jimmy raised his head and met his eyes. “How you handling this so far?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “It hasn’t totally sunk in yet.”

  “Gonna hurt like hell when it does, Jim.”

  “I imagine.”

  “Like hell. I can guarantee you that.”

  Jimmy shrugged again and felt an inkling of some kind of emotion—was it anger?—bubble up from the pit of his stomach. This was what he needed right now: a pep talk on pain from Theo Savage. Shit.

  Theo leaned forward. “When my Janey died? Bless her soul, Jim, I was no good for six months. One day she was here, my beautiful wife, and the next day? Gone.” He snapped his thick fingers. “God gained an angel that day, and I lost a saint. But my kids were all grown by then, thank Christ. I mean, I could afford to grieve for six months. I had that luxury. But you, though, you don’t.”

  Theo leaned back in his chair and Jimmy felt that bubbling sensation again. Janey Savage had died ten years ago, and Theo had climbed into a bottle for a lot more than six months. More like two years. It was the same bottle he’d been renting for most of his life, he just took out a mortgage after Janey passed away. When she’d been alive, Theo had paid Janey about as much attention as week-old bread.

  Jimmy tolerated Theo because he had to—he was his wife’s father, after all. From the outside looking in, they probably seemed like friends. Maybe Theo thought they were. And age had mellowed Theo to the point that he openly loved his daughter and spoiled his grandkids. But it was one thing not to judge a guy for past sins. It was another thing to take advice from him.

  “So, you see what I’m saying?” Theo said. “You make sure you don’t let your grief become an indulgence, Jim, and, you know, pull you away from your domestic responsibilities.”

  “My domestic responsibilities,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah. You know, you gotta take care of my daughter, those little girls. They got to be your priority now.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jimmy said. “You figured that might slip my mind, Theo?”

  “Ain’t saying it would, Jim. Saying it could. That’s all.”

  Jimmy studied Theo’s left kneecap, pictured it exploding in a puff of red. “Theo.”

  “Yeah, Jim.”

  Jimmy saw the other kneecap blow up and shifted to the elbows. “You think we could have waited on this conversation?”

  “No time like the present.” Theo let loose his boom of a laugh, but there was a warning to it.

  “Tomorrow, say.” Jimmy’s gaze left Theo’s elbows and rose to his eyes. “I mean, tomorrow would have been all right. Wouldn’t it, Theo?”

  “What I say about the present, Jimmy?” Theo was getting annoyed. He was a big man with a violent temper and Jimmy knew that scared some people, that Theo could see the fear in faces on the street, that he’d grown accustomed to it and confused it with respect. “Hey, the way I look at it, there’s no good time to have this conversation. Am I right? So I figured I’d just get it out of the way. ASAP, as it were.”

  “Oh, sure,” Jimmy said. “Hey, like you said, no time like the present. Right?”

  “Right. Good kid.” Theo patted Jimmy’s knee and stood up. “You’ll get through this, Jimmy. You’ll move on. You’ll carry the pain, but you’ll move on. ’Cause you’re a man. I said to Annabeth—your wedding night?—I said, ‘Honey, you got yourself a real old-school man there. The perfect guy, I said. A champ. A guy who—’”

  “Like they put her in a bag,” Jimmy said.

  “What’s that?” Theo looked down at him.

  “That’s what Katie looked like when I identified her in the morgue last night. Like someone had put her in a bag and beaten the bag with pipes.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t let it—”

  “Couldn’t even tell what race she was, Theo. Coulda been black, coulda been Puerto Rican like her mother. Coulda been Arab. She didn’t look white, though.” Jimmy looked at his hands, clasped together between his knees, and noticed stains on the kitchen floor, a brown one by his left foot, mustard by the table leg. “Janey died in her sleep, Theo. All due respect and shit, but there you go. She went to bed, never woke up. Peaceful.”

  “You don’t need to talk about Janey. All right?”

  “My daughter, though? She was murdered. There’s a bit of a difference.”

  For a moment, the kitchen was silent—buzzing with silence, really, the way only an empty apartment can when the one below is filled with people—and Jimmy wondered if Theo would be dumb enough to keep talking. Come on, Theo, say something stupid. I’m in that kind of mood, like I need to take this bubbling inside of me and push it on somebody.

  Theo said, “Look, I understand,” and Jimmy let loose a sigh through his nostrils. “I do. But, Jim, you don’t have to get all—”

  “What?” Jimmy said. “I don’t have to get all what? Someone put a gun to my daughter’s flesh and ble
w the back of her head out, and you want to make sure I got my—my what?—my grief priorities straight? Please, tell me. Do I got that part right? You want to stand here and play fucking grand patriarch?”

  Theo looked down at his shoes and breathed heavily through his nostrils, both fists clenched and flexing. “I don’t think I deserve that.”

  Jimmy stood and placed his chair back against the kitchen table. He lifted a cooler off the floor. He looked at the door. He said, “Can we go back down now, Theo?”

  “Sure,” Theo said. He left his chair where it was and lifted the other cooler off the floor. He said, “Okay, okay. Bad idea, me trying to talk to you this morning of all mornings. You’re not ready yet. But—”

  “Theo? Just leave it. Just don’t talk. How about that? Okay?”

  Jimmy hefted the cooler and started back downstairs. He wondered if maybe he’d hurt Theo’s feelings, then decided he really didn’t give a shit if he had. Fuck him. Right about now they’d be starting the autopsy on Katie. Jimmy could still smell her crib, but down in the medical examiner’s office, they were laying out the scalpels and chest spreaders, powering up their bone saws.

  LATER, AFTER it had thinned out a bit, Jimmy went out onto the back porch and sat under the flapping clothes that had been hanging from the lines stretched across the porch since Saturday afternoon. He sat there with the sun warming him and a pair of Nadine’s denim overalls swaying back and forth through his hair. Annabeth and the girls had cried all last night, filled the apartment with their weeping, and Jimmy had figured he’d join them any second. But he hadn’t. He had screamed on that slope when he saw the look in Sean Devine’s eyes that told him his daughter was dead. Screamed himself hoarse. But outside of that, he hadn’t been able to feel anything. So he sat on the porch now and willed the tears to come.

  He tortured himself with snapshots of Katie as a baby, Katie on the other side of that scarred table at Deer Island, Katie crying herself to sleep in his arms six months after he’d gotten out of jail, asking him when her mommy was coming back. He saw little Katie squealing in the tub and eight-year-old Katie riding her bike back from school. He saw Katie smiling and Katie pouting and Katie scrunching her face up in anger and scrunching it up again in confusion as he helped her with long division at the kitchen table. He saw an older Katie sitting on the swing set out back with Diane and Eve, lazing away a summer day, the three of them gawky with preadolescence and braces and legs growing longer and faster than the rest of them could catch up with. He saw Katie lying on her stomach on her bed with Sara and Nadine crawling all over her. He saw her in her junior prom dress. He saw her sitting beside him in his Grand Marquis, chin trembling, as she pulled away from the curb the first day he’d taught her to drive. He saw her screaming and petulant and in his face through her teen years, and yet those images he often found more endearing than the cute, sunshiny ones.

  He saw her and saw her and saw her and yet he couldn’t cry.

  It’ll come, a calm voice whispered inside of him. You’re just in shock.

  But the shock’s wearing off, he answered the voice in his head. Has been since Theo started fucking with me downstairs.

  And once it wears off, you’ll feel something.

  I feel something already.

  That’s grief, the voice said. That’s sorrow.

  It’s not grief. It’s not sorrow. It’s rage.

  You’ll feel some of that, too. But you’ll get past it.

  I don’t want to get past it.

  16

  GOOD TO SEE YOU, TOO

  DAVE WAS WALKING Michael back from school when they turned the corner and saw Sean Devine and another guy leaning against the trunk of a black sedan parked in front of the Boyles’ place. The black sedan had state government plates and enough antennae attached to the trunk to shoot transmissions to Venus, and Dave could tell just by looking at Sean’s companion from fifteen yards away that, like Sean, the guy was a cop. He had that cop tilt to his chin, jutting up and out a bit, and a cop’s way of leaning back on his heels and yet seeming set to lunge forward. And if that didn’t give it away, the jarhead haircut on a guy in his mid-forties coupled with gold-rimmed aviator shades was definitely a tip-off.

  Dave’s hand tightened around Michael’s, and his chest felt as if someone had dunked a knife in ice water and then placed the flat of the blade against his lungs. He almost stopped, his feet trying to plant themselves to the sidewalk, but something pushed him forward, and he hoped he looked normal, fluid. Sean’s head swiveled in his direction, the eyes blithe and empty at first, then narrowing in recognition as they met Dave’s.

  Both men smiled at the same time, Dave giving it the full wattage and Sean’s pretty wide, too, Dave surprised to see what might have been actual pleasure in Sean’s face.

  “Dave Boyle,” Sean said, coming off the car with his hand extended, “what’s it been?”

  Dave shook the hand and got another small jolt of surprise when Sean clapped him on the shoulder.

  “That time up the Tap,” Dave said. “What, six years ago?”

  “Yeah. About that. You’re looking good, man.”

  “How you been, Sean?” And Dave could feel a warmth spread through him that his brain said he should run from.

  But why? There were so few of them left from the old days anymore. And it wasn’t just the old clichés—jail, drugs, or police forces—that had claimed them. The suburbs had taken just as many. Other states, too, the lure of fitting in with everyone else, becoming one big country of golf players and mall walkers and small-business owners with blond wives and big-screen TVs.

  No, there weren’t many of them left, and Dave felt a stirring of pride and happiness and odd sorrow as he gripped Sean’s hand and remembered that day on the subway platform when Jimmy had jumped down on the tracks and Saturdays, in general, had felt like Anything Is Possible Days.

  “I been good,” Sean said, and it sounded like he meant it, though Dave could see something small crack in his smile. “And who’s this?”

  Sean bent down by Michael.

  “This is my son,” Dave said. “Michael.”

  “Hey, Michael. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Sean, an old, old buddy of your dad.”

  Dave watched Sean’s voice light something in Michael. Sean definitely had some kind of voice, like the guy who did the voice-overs for all the movie coming attractions, and Michael brightened at the sound of it, seeing a legend, perhaps, of his father and this tall, confident stranger as kids who’d played in these same streets and dreamed similar dreams to Michael’s and those of his friends.

  “Nice to meet you,” Michael said.

  “Pleasure, Michael.” Sean shook Michael’s hand and then rose up to face Dave. “Good-looking boy, Dave. How’s Celeste?”

  “Great, great.” Dave tried to recall the name of the woman Sean had married and could remember only that he’d met her in college. Laura? Erin?

  “Tell her I said hi, will you?”

  “Sure. You still with the Staties?” Dave squinted as the sun broke from behind a cloud and bounced hard off the shiny black trunk of the government sedan.

  “Yeah,” Sean said. “Actually, this here is Sergeant Powers, Dave. My boss. State Police Homicide.”

  Dave shook Sergeant Powers’s hand, that word hanging between them. Homicide.

  “How you doing?”

  “Good, Mr. Boyle. Yourself?”

  “Okay.”

  “Dave,” Sean said, “you got a minute, we’d love to ask you a couple quick questions.”

  “Uh, sure. What’s up?”

  “We maybe go inside, Mr. Boyle?” Sergeant Powers tilted his head in the direction of Dave’s front door.

  “Yeah, sure.” Dave took Michael’s hand again. “Follow me, guys.”

  Heading up the stairs past McAllister’s place, Sean said, “I hear rents are rising even here.”

  “Even here,” Dave said. “Trying to turn
us into the Point, an antique shop on every fifth corner.”

  “The Point, yeah,” Sean said with a dry chuckle. “’Member my father’s house? Cut it into condos.”

  “No shit?” Dave said. “That was a beautiful house.”

  “’Course he sold it before the market got hot.”

  “And now it’s condos?” Dave said, his voice loud in the narrow stairwell. He shook his head. “The yuppies who bought it probably get per unit what your old man sold the whole place for.”

  “’Bout the size of it,” Sean said. “What’re you gonna do, right?”

  “I dunno, man, but I almost think there’s gotta be a way to stop them. Send them back to wherever they grow them and their goddamn cell phones. Friend of mine said the other day, Sean? He said, ‘What this neighborhood needs is a good fucking crime wave.’” Dave laughed. “I mean, that’d send property values back to where they belong. Rents, too. Right?”

  Sergeant Powers said, “Girls keep getting murdered in Pen Park, Mr. Boyle, you might get your wish.”

  “Oh, it’s not my wish or nothing,” Dave said.

  Sergeant Powers said, “Sure.”

  “You said the f-word, Dad,” Michael said.

  “Sorry, Mike. Won’t happen again.” He winked over his shoulder at Sean as they opened the door to the apartment.

  “Your wife home, Mr. Boyle?” Sergeant Powers said as they entered.

  “Huh? No. No, she’s not. Hey, Mike, you go do your homework now. Okay? We gotta get over to Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Annabeth’s soon.”

  “Come on. I—”

  “Mike,” Dave said, and looked down at his son. “Just go upstairs. Me and the guys gotta talk.”

  Michael got that look of abandonment little kids got when they were brushed off from adult conversations, and he walked toward the stairs, his shoulders drooping and his feet dragging like he had blocks of ice tied to his ankles. He sighed his mother’s sigh and then began to climb the stairs.