Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “Must be universal,” Sergeant Powers said as he took a seat on the living room couch.

  “What’s that?”

  “That shoulder thing he’s doing. My kid used to do the same thing at his age when we’d send him up to bed.”

  Dave said, “Yeah?” and sat in the love seat on the other side of the coffee table.

  For a minute or so, Dave looked at Sean and Sergeant Powers, and Sean and Sergeant Powers looked back, everyone’s eyebrows raised and expectant.

  “You heard about Katie Marcus,” Sean said.

  “’Course,” Dave said. “I was up the house this morning. Celeste is still there. I mean, Jesus Christ, Sean, you know? It’s a fucking crime.”

  “You got that right,” Sergeant Powers said.

  “You get the guy?” Dave said. He rubbed his swollen right fist with his left palm, then noticed what he was doing. He leaned back and slid both hands in his pockets, trying to seem relaxed.

  “We’re working on it. Believe that, Mr. Boyle.”

  “How’s Jimmy holding up?” Sean asked.

  “Hard to tell.” Dave looked at Sean, happy to tear his eyes away from Sergeant Powers, something in the man’s face he didn’t like, the way the guy peered at you like he could see your lies, every one of them as far back as the first one you ever told in your goddamned life.

  “You know how Jimmy is,” Dave said.

  “Not really. Not anymore.”

  “Well, he still keeps it all in,” Dave said. “No way to tell what’s really going on up in that head of his.”

  Sean nodded. “The reason we came by, Dave…”

  “I saw her,” Dave said. “I don’t know if you knew that.”

  He looked at Sean and Sean opened his hands, waiting.

  “That night,” Dave went on, “I guess it was the night she died, I saw her at McGills.”

  Sean and the cop exchanged glances, and then Sean leaned forward, fixed Dave in a friendly gaze. “Well, yeah, Dave, that’s actually what brought us here. Your name showed up on a list of people were in McGills that night to the best of the bartender’s recollection. We hear Katie put on quite a show.”

  Dave nodded. “She and a friend did some dancing on the bar.”

  The cop said, “They were pretty drunk, huh?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?”

  “But it was a harmless kinda drunk. They were dancing, but they weren’t stripping or nothing. They were just, I dunno, nineteen. You know?”

  “Nineteen and getting served in a bar means the bar loses its liquor license for a while,” Sergeant Powers said.

  “You didn’t?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You never drank underage in a bar?”

  Sergeant Powers smiled, and the smile got into Dave’s skull the same way the man’s eyes did, as if every inch of the guy was peeping.

  “What time would you say you left McGills, Mr. Boyle?”

  Dave shrugged. “Maybe one or so?”

  Sergeant Powers wrote that down in a notebook perched atop his knee.

  Dave looked at Sean.

  Sean said, “Just crossing out t’s and dotting our i’s, Dave. You were hanging with Stanley Kemp, right? Stanley the Giant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s he doing, by the way? Heard his kid caught some kind of cancer.”

  “Leukemia,” Dave said. “Couple years back. He died. Four years old.”

  “Man,” Sean said, “that just sucks. Shit. You never know. It’s like one minute you’re cruising on all cylinders, the next, you turn a corner, catch some weird disease in the chest, die five months later. This world, man.”

  “This world,” Dave agreed. “Stan’s all right, though, considering. Got a good job with Edison. Still shoots hoop in the Park League every Tuesday and Thursday night.”

  “Still a terror under the boards?” Sean chuckled.

  Dave chuckled, too. “He do use those elbows of his.”

  “What time would you say the girls left the bar?” Sean said, his chuckle still trailing away.

  “I dunno,” Dave said. “The Sox game was winding down.”

  What was up with the way Sean slid that question in? He could have just asked it up front, but he’d tried to lull Dave with talk of Stanley the Giant. Hadn’t he? Or maybe he’d just asked the question as it had occurred to him. Dave couldn’t be certain either way. Was Dave a suspect? Was he actually a suspect in Katie’s death?

  “And that was a late game,” Sean was saying. “In California.”

  “Huh? Ten-thirty-five, yeah. So, I’d say the girls left maybe fifteen minutes before I did.”

  “So we’ll say twelve-forty-five,” the other cop said.

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Any idea where the girls went?”

  Dave shook his head. “Last I saw of them.”

  “Yeah?” Sergeant Powers’s pen hovered over the pad on his knee.

  Dave nodded. “Yeah.”

  Sergeant Powers scribbled in his pad, the pen scratching against the paper like a small claw.

  “Dave, you remember a guy throwing his keys at another guy?”

  “What?”

  “A guy,” Sean said, flipping through his own notebook, “name of, uh, Joe Crosby. His friends tried to take his car keys. He threw them at one of them. You know, all pissed off. You there for that?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Sounded like a funny story,” Sean said. “Guy’s trying not to give up his keys, he throws ’em anyway. Drunk’s logic, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “You didn’t notice anything unusual that night?”

  “How you mean?”

  “Say someone in the bar maybe wasn’t watching the girls in a real friendly manner? You’ve seen those guys—the ones look at young women with a kind of black hate, still pissed off they sat home the night of the prom and here it is fifteen years later and their lives still suck? Look at women like it’s all their fault. You know those guys?”

  “Met a few, sure.”

  “Any of those guys in the bar that night?”

  “Not that I saw. I mean, I was watching the game mostly. I didn’t even notice the girls, Sean, until they jumped up on the bar.”

  Sean nodded.

  “Good game,” Sergeant Powers said.

  “Well,” Dave said, “you had Pedro up there. Could have been a no-hitter, it wasn’t for that bloop in the eighth.”

  “Got that right. Man earns his pay, don’t he?”

  “Best there is in the game today.”

  Sergeant Powers turned to Sean and they both stood at the same time.

  “That’s it?” Dave said.

  “Yes, Mr. Boyle.” He shook Dave’s hand. “We appreciate your help, sir.”

  “No problem. Happy to.”

  “Oh, shit,” Sergeant Powers said. “I forgot to ask: Where’d you go after you left McGills, sir?”

  The word popped out of Dave’s mouth before he could stop it: “Here.”

  “Home?”

  “Yup.” Dave kept his gaze steady, his voice firm.

  Sergeant Powers flipped open his pad again. “Home by one-fifteen.” He looked up at Dave as he wrote. “Sound right?”

  “Roughly, sure.”

  “Okay then, Mr. Boyle. Thanks again.”

  Sergeant Powers made his way down the stairs, but Sean stopped at the door. “It was real good seeing you, Dave.”

  “You too,” Dave said, trying to remember what it was he hadn’t liked about Sean when they were kids. The answer wouldn’t come, though.

  “We should grab a beer sometime,” Sean said. “Soon.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Okay then. You take care, Dave.”

  They shook hands and Dave tried not to wince at the pressure on his swollen hand.

  “You, too, Sean.”

  Sean walked down the stairs as Dave stood at the top on the landing. Sean waved once over
his shoulder, and Dave waved back even though he knew Sean couldn’t see it.

  HE DECIDED to have a beer in the kitchen before heading back to Jimmy and Annabeth’s. He hoped Michael wouldn’t come running back down now that he’d heard Sean and the other cop leave, because Dave needed a few minutes’ peace, a little time to get his head right. He wasn’t entirely sure what had just transpired in the living room. Sean and the other cop had been asking him questions as if he were a witness or a suspect, and the lack of a firm tone to their questioning had left Dave uncertain as to the real reason they’d dropped by. And this uncertainty had left him with a bona fide motherfucker of a headache. Whenever Dave was unsure of a situation, whenever the ground seemed to be shifting and slick beneath his feet, his brain tended to split into two halves, as if cleaved by a carving knife. This gave him a headache and occasionally something worse.

  Because sometimes Dave was not Dave. He was the Boy. The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves. But not merely that. The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up. And that was a very different creature than simply Dave Boyle.

  The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up was an animal of the dusk that moved through wooded landscapes, silent and invisible. It lived in a world that others never saw, never faced, never knew or wanted to know existed—a world that ran like a dark current beside our own, a world of crickets and fireflies, unseen except as a microsecond’s flare in the corner of your eye, already vanished by the time your head turned toward it.

  This is the world Dave lived in a lot of the time. Not as Dave, but as the Boy. And the Boy had not grown up well. He’d gotten angrier, more paranoid, capable of things that the real Dave could never so much as imagine. Usually the Boy lived only in Dave’s dream world, feral and darting past stands of thick trees, giving up glimpses of himself only in flashes. And as long as he stayed in the forest of Dave’s dreams, he was harmless.

  Since childhood, though, Dave had suffered bouts of insomnia. They could slip up on him after months and months of restful sleep, and suddenly he’d be back in that agitated, jangling world of the constantly waking and the never quite asleep. A few days of this, and Dave would begin to see things out of the corner of his eye—mice mostly, zipping along floorboards and across desks, sometimes black flies darting around corners and into other rooms. The air in front of his face would pop unexpectedly with minute balls of heat lightning. People would turn rubbery. And the Boy would lift his leg over the threshold of the dream forest and into the waking world. Usually, Dave could control him, but sometimes the Boy scared him. The Boy yelled in his ears. The Boy had a way of laughing at inappropriate times. The Boy threatened to leer up through the mask that normally covered Dave’s face and show himself to the people on the other side.

  Dave hadn’t slept much in three days. He’d been lying awake every night watching his wife sleep, the Boy dancing through the sponge of his brain tissue, bolts of lightning popping in the air before his eyes.

  “I just need to get my head right,” he whispered, and took a sip of beer. I just need to get my head right and everything will turn out fine, he told himself as he heard Michael descend the stairs. I just need to hold it together long enough for everything to slow down and then I’ll catch a nice long sleep and the Boy will go back to his forest, people will stop looking rubbery, the mice will go back in their holes, and the black flies will follow them.

  WHEN DAVE got back to Jimmy and Annabeth’s house with Michael, it was past four. The house had thinned out and there was a sense of things gone stale—the half trays of doughnuts and cakes, the air in the living room where people had been smoking all day, Katie’s death. During the morning and early afternoon there’d been a quiet and communal air of both grief and love, but by the time Dave got back, it had turned into something colder, a kind of withdrawal maybe, the blood beginning to chafe with the restless scrape of chairs and the subdued good-byes called out from the hallway.

  According to Celeste, Jimmy had spent most of the late afternoon on the back porch. He’d come into the house a few times to check on Annabeth and accept a few more condolences on their loss, but then he’d worked his way out to the back porch again, sat there under the clothes that hung from the line and had long since dried and stiffened. Dave asked Annabeth if he could do anything, get her anything, but she shook her head halfway through his offer, and Dave knew it had been silly to ask. If Annabeth had truly needed something, there were at least ten people, maybe fifteen, she’d turn to before Dave, and he tried to remind himself why he was here and not get irked by this. In general, Dave had found, he was not the kind of person people turned to when they were in need. It was as if he weren’t even on this planet sometimes, and he knew, with a deep and resigned regret, that he’d be the kind of guy who would float through the rest of his life as someone who was rarely relied upon.

  He took a sense of that ghostliness out onto the porch with him. He approached Jimmy from behind as Jimmy sat under the flapping clothes in an old beach chair, his head cocked slightly as he heard Dave approach.

  “I bothering you, Jim?”

  “Dave.” Jimmy smiled as Dave came around the chair. “No, no, man. Have a seat.”

  Dave sat on a plastic milk crate in front of Jimmy. He could hear the apartment behind Jimmy as a hum of barely audible voices and clinking flatware, the hiss of life.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you all day,” Jimmy said. “How you doing?”

  “How you doing?” Dave said. “Shit.”

  Jimmy stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “You know people keep asking me that? I guess it’s to be expected.” He lowered his hands and shrugged. “It seems to shift, hour to hour. Right now? I’m doing okay. Could change, though. Probably will.” He shrugged again and looked at Dave. “What happened to your hand?”

  Dave looked at it. He’d had all day to come up with an explanation, he’d just kept forgetting to. “This? I was helping a buddy move a couch into his place, slammed it against the doorjamb squeezing the couch up a staircase.”

  Jimmy tilted his head and looked at the knuckles, the bruised flesh between the fingers. “Uh, okay.”

  Dave could tell he wasn’t sold, and he decided he’d need to come up with a better lie for the next person who asked.

  “One of those stupid things,” Dave said. “The ways you can manage to hurt yourself, right?”

  Jimmy was looking into his face now, the hand forgotten, and Jimmy’s features softening. He said, “It’s good to see you, man.”

  Dave almost said, Really?

  In the twenty-five years he’d known Jimmy, Dave could never remember a time he’d felt Jimmy was happy to see him. Sometimes, he’d felt Jimmy didn’t mind seeing him, but that wasn’t the same thing. Even after they’d rotated back into each other’s lives when they’d married women who were first cousins, Jimmy had never once given an indication he could remember when he and Dave had been anything but the most casual of acquaintances. After a while, Dave had begun to accept Jimmy’s version of their relationship as fact.

  They had never been friends. They had never played stickball and kick-the-can and 76 on Rester Street. They had never spent a year of Saturdays hanging with Sean Devine, playing war in the gravel pits off Harvest, jumping roof to roof from the industrial garages near Pope Park, watching Jaws together at the Charles, huddled down in their seats and screaming. They had never practiced skids on their bikes together or argued over who would be Starsky, who would be Hutch, and who would get stuck being Kolchak from The Night Stalker. They had never cracked up their sleds during the same kamikaze run down Somerset Hill in the first days after the ’75 blizzard. That car had never driven up Gannon Street, smelling of apples.

  Yet here was Jimmy Marcus, the day after his daughter was found dead, saying it was good to see you, Dave, and Dave—as he had two hours before with Sean—could feel that it was.

  “Good to see you, too, Jim.”

  “How are our girls holding u
p?” Jimmy said, and the playful smile almost reached his eyes.

  “They’re okay, I guess. Where are Nadine and Sara?”

  “With Theo. Hey, man, thank Celeste for me, would you? She’s been a godsend today.”

  “Jimmy, you don’t have to thank anyone, man. Whatever we can do, me and Celeste are happy to.”

  “I know that.” Jimmy reached across and squeezed Dave’s forearm. “Thank you.”

  At that moment, Dave would have lifted a house for Jimmy, held it up to his chest until Jimmy told him where to put it down.

  And he almost forgot why he’d come out here on the porch in the first place: He needed to tell Jimmy he’d seen Katie on Saturday night at McGills. He needed to get that information out or else he’d keep putting it off and by the time he finally did say something, Jimmy would wonder why he hadn’t told him sooner. He needed to speak before Jimmy heard about it from someone else.

  “Know who I saw today?”

  “Who?” Jimmy said.

  “Sean Devine,” Dave said. “Member him?”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said. “I still got his glove.”

  “What?”

  Jimmy waved it off with a shake of his hand. “He’s a cop now. He’s actually investigating Katie’s…Well, he’s working the case, I guess they call it.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “He dropped by my place.”

  “He did?” Jimmy said. “Huh. What was he doing at your place, Dave?”

  Dave tried to make it sound offhand, casual. “I was in McGills Saturday night. Katie was there. I showed up on a list of people who were in the place.”

  “Katie was there,” Jimmy said, his eyes staring off the porch and growing small. “You saw Katie Saturday night, Dave? My Katie?”

  “I mean, yeah, Jim, I was in the place and so was she. And then she left with her two friends and—”

  “Diane and Eve?”

  “Yeah, those girls she was always hanging with. They left and that was it.”

  “That was it,” Jimmy said, staring far away.

  “Well, I mean, as far as I saw of her. But, you know, I was on a list.”

  “You were on a list, right.” Jimmy smiled, but not at Dave, at something he must have seen in that far-off gaze of his. “You talk to her at all that night?”