Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “Katie? No, Jim. I was watching the game with Stanley the Giant. I just nodded hello, you know. Next time I looked up, she was gone.”

  Jimmy sat silently for a bit, sucking up air through his nostrils and nodding to himself a few times. Eventually, he looked at Dave and smiled a broken smile.

  “It’s nice.”

  “What?” Dave said.

  “Sitting out here. Just sitting. It’s nice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just to sit and look out at the neighborhood,” Jimmy said. “You’re on the go your whole life with work and kids and, shit, except when you’re sleeping, you hardly have any time to slow down. Today, right? An out-of-the-ordinary day if ever there was one, but still I have to deal with details. I gotta call Pete and Sal and make sure they cover the store. I gotta make sure the girls are clean and dressed when they wake up. I gotta watch out for my wife, see she’s holding up, you know?” He gave Dave a loopy smile and leaned forward, rocking a bit, his hands clenched into one big fist. “I gotta shake hands and accept condolences and find room in the fridge for all the food and beer and put up with my father-in-law, and then I got to call the medical examiner’s office, find out when they’ll be releasing my child’s body because I need to make arrangements with Reed’s Funeral Home and Father Vera at Saint Cecilia’s, find a caterer for the wake and a hall for after the funeral and—”

  “Jimmy,” Dave said, “we can do some of that.”

  But Jimmy just kept going like Dave wasn’t there.

  “—I can’t screw any of this up, can’t screw up one fucking detail, or she dies all over again and all anyone remembers of her life ten years from now is that her funeral was fucked up, and I can’t let that be what people remember—you know?—because Katie, man, one thing you could say about her since the time she was, like, six is that the girl was neat, she took care of her clothes, and so it’s okay, it’s almost nice, right, to come out here and just sit, just sit and look at the neighborhood and try and think of something about Katie that’ll make me cry, because, Dave, I swear, it’s starting to piss me off I haven’t cried yet for her, my own daughter, and I can’t fucking cry.”

  “Jim.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re crying now.”

  “No shit?”

  “Feel your face, man.”

  Jimmy reached up and touched the tears on his cheekbones. He took his hand away and looked at the wet fingers for a bit.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “You want me to leave you alone?”

  “No, Dave. No. Sit here for a bit if that’s cool.”

  “That’s cool, Jim. That’s cool.”

  17

  A LITTLE LOOK

  AN HOUR BEFORE their scheduled meeting at Martin Friel’s office, Sean and Whitey stopped off at Whitey’s place so he could change the shirt he’d spilled his lunch on.

  Whitey lived with his son, Terrance, in a white brick apartment building just south of the city limits. The apartment had wall-to-wall beige carpeting and off-white walls and the same dead-air smell as motel rooms and hospital corridors. The TV was on when they came in, ESPN playing at low volume even though the apartment was empty, and the various parts of a Sega game system were spread out on the carpet in front of a hulking black slab of an entertainment center. There was a lumpy futon couch across from the entertainment center, and, Sean guessed, McDonald’s wrappers in the wastebasket, a freezer stuffed with TV dinners.

  “Where’s Terry?” Sean said.

  “Hockey, I think,” Whitey said. “Could be baseball, though, this time a year, but hockey’s his big thing. At it year-round.”

  Sean had met Terry once. At fourteen, he’d been gargantuan, a huge block of a kid, and Sean could only imagine his size two years later, the fear he must put in other kids as he came smoking down the ice, top speed.

  Whitey had custody of Terry because his wife didn’t want it. She’d left them both a few years back for a civil liability attorney with a crack problem that would eventually get the guy disbarred and sued for embezzlement. She stayed with the guy, though, or so Sean had heard, and she and Whitey had remained close. Sometimes, to hear him talk about her, you’d have to remind yourself they were divorced.

  He did it now as he led Sean into the living room and looked down at the Sega system on the floor as he unbuttoned his shirt. “Suzanne says me and Terry got ourselves a real guy’s fantasy pad going here. Rolls her eyes, you know, but I get the feeling she’s a little jealous. Beer or something?”

  Sean remembered what Friel had said about Whitey’s drinking problem and imagined the look he’d get if he showed up for the meeting smelling like Altoids and Budweiser. Plus, knowing Whitey, it could be a test from him, too, everyone watching Sean these days.

  “Take a water,” he said. “Or a Coke.”

  “Good boy,” Whitey said, smiling as if he really had been testing Sean but Sean seeing the need in the man’s loose eyes, the way the tip of his tongue played against the corners of his mouth. “Two Cokes coming up.”

  Whitey came back out of the kitchen with the two sodas and handed one to Sean. He walked into a small bathroom just off the living room hallway, and Sean heard him strip off the shirt and run some water.

  “This whole thing is looking more random,” he called from the bathroom. “You getting that feeling?”

  “A bit,” Sean admitted.

  “Fallow and O’Donnell’s alibis look pretty solid.”

  “Don’t mean they couldn’t have hired it out,” Sean said.

  “I agree. You thinking that way, though?”

  “Not really. Seems too messy for a hit.”

  “Don’t rule it out, though.”

  “No, it don’t.”

  “We’ll need to take another run at the Harris kid, if only because he got no alibi, but, man, I don’t see him for this. The kid’s Jell-O, you know?”

  “Motive, though,” Sean said, “if, say, he had some building jealousy of O’Donnell, something like that.”

  Whitey came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel, his white belly emblazoned with a red snake of scar tissue that cut a smile through the flesh from the lower edge of one side of his rib cage to the other.

  “Yeah, but that kid?” He wandered back toward a rear bedroom.

  Sean stepped into the hall. “I don’t like him for it, either, but we gotta be sure.”

  “Well, the father, too, and her crazy fucking uncles, but I already got guys talking to the neighbors. I don’t see it playing that way, either.”

  Sean leaned against the wall, sipped from his Coke. “If this was random, Sarge, I mean, shit…”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” Whitey turned into the hallway, a fresh shirt over his shoulders. “The old lady, Prior,” he said as he started buttoning, “she didn’t hear a scream.”

  “Heard a gunshot.”

  “We say it was a gunshot. But, yeah, we’re probably right. But she didn’t hear a scream.”

  “Maybe the Marcus girl was too busy hitting the guy with her door and trying to run away.”

  “I’ll give you that. But when she first saw him? He’s coming toward her car?” Whitey passed Sean and turned into the kitchen.

  Sean came off the wall and followed him. “Which means she probably knew him. That’s why she said hi.”

  “Yeah.” Whitey nodded. “And why else would she stop the car in the first place?”

  “No,” Sean said.

  “No?” Whitey leaned against the counter, looked at Sean.

  “No,” Sean repeated. “That car was crashed, wheels turned into the curb.”

  “No skid marks, though.”

  Sean nodded. “She’s driving maybe fifteen miles an hour and something causes her to swerve into the curb.”

  “What?”

  “Fuck do I know? You’re the boss.”

  Whitey smiled and drained his Coke in one long swallow. He opened the fridge for another. “What makes someone swerve
without hitting the brakes?”

  “Something in the road,” Sean said.

  Whitey lifted his fresh Coke in acknowledgment. “But there was nothing in the road by the time we got there.”

  “That was the next morning.”

  “So a brick, something like that?”

  “Brick’s too small, don’t you think? That time a night?”

  “A cinder block.”

  “Okay.”

  “Something, though,” Whitey said.

  “Something,” Sean agreed.

  “She swerves, hits the curb, her foot comes off the clutch, and the car kicks out.”

  “At which point, the perp appears.”

  “Who she knows. And then, what, he just walks up and caps her?”

  “And she hits him with the door, and—”

  “You ever been hit with a car door?” Whitey lifted his collar and slid his tie around it, started working on the knot.

  “Missed out on the experience so far.”

  “It’s like a punch. If you’re standing real close, and a woman weighs one-ten pushes a shitty little Toyota door into you, it ain’t going to do much but annoy you. Karen Hughes said the shooter was maybe six inches away when he fired his first round. Six inches.”

  Sean could see his point. “Okay. But maybe she falls back and kicks the door. That would do the job.”

  “Door’s gotta be open, though. She can kick it all day if it’s still closed and it ain’t going to go nowhere. She had to open it, by hand, and shove off with her arm. So either the killer stepped back and caught the door when he wasn’t expecting it, or…”

  “He doesn’t weigh much.”

  Whitey closed his collar back over the tie. “Which brings me back to the footprints.”

  “The fucking footprints,” Sean said.

  “Yes!” Whitey yelled. “The fucking footprints.” He closed his top button, slid the knot up to his throat. “Sean, the doer’s chasing this woman through a park. She’s running full-out, he’s gotta be charging after her like a raped ape. I mean, he’s booking through that park. You telling me he’s not going to dig in at least once?”

  “It rained all night.”

  “But we found three of hers. Come on. Something’s screwy about that.”

  Sean leaned his head back against the cupboard behind him, tried to picture it—Katie Marcus, arms pinwheeling as she came down the dark slope toward the drive-in screen, skin scratched by bushes, hair soaked with rain and sweat, blood dribbling down her arm and chest. And the killer, dark and faceless in Sean’s mind, coming up over the rise a few seconds behind her, running, too, his ears pounding with bloodlust. A big man, though, in Sean’s mind, a freak of nature. And smart in a way, too. Smart enough to put something in the middle of the street and get Katie Marcus to bang her front tires into that curb. Smart enough to pick a spot on Sydney where few people would be likely to hear or see anything. The fact that Old Lady Prior had heard something was an aberration, the one thing the killer couldn’t have predicted, because even Sean had been surprised to learn anyone still lived on that scorched-out block. Otherwise, though, the guy had been smart.

  “Smart enough to cover his tracks, you think?” Sean said.

  “Huh?”

  “The perp. Maybe he killed her and then went back and kicked mud into his own tracks.”

  “Possible, but how’s he going to remember every place he stepped? He’s in the dark. Even, let’s say, he had a flashlight? That’s still a lot of ground to cover, a lot of footprints to identify and make disappear.”

  “But the rain, man.”

  “Yeah.” Whitey sighed. “I’ll buy the rain theory if we end up looking at a guy weighs a hundred fifty or less. Otherwise…”

  “Brendan Harris didn’t look like he tipped the scales at much over that.”

  Whitey groaned. “You honestly think the kid has that in him?”

  “No.”

  “Me, either. What about your pal, though? He’s a slim guy.”

  “Who?”

  “Boyle.”

  Sean came off the counter. “How’d we get to him?”

  “We’re getting to him now.”

  “No, wait a sec—”

  Whitey held up a hand. “He says he left the bar around one? Bullshit. Those car keys stopped that fucking clock at ten of. Katherine Marcus left that bar at twelve-forty-five. That’s solid, Sean. This guy’s alibi’s got a fifteen-minute gap that we know of. How do we know when he got home? I mean, really got home?”

  Sean laughed. “Whitey, he’s just a guy who was in the bar.”

  “The last place she went. The last place, Sean. You said it yourself.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “We could be looking for a guy who stayed home on prom night.”

  “I was—”

  “I’m not saying he did this, man. I’m not even in the ballpark of saying that. Yet. But there is something wrong about the guy. I mean, you heard that shit about this city needing a good fucking crime wave. He was serious about that shit.”

  Sean put his empty Coke on top of the kitchen counter. “You recycle?”

  Whitey frowned. “No.”

  “Not even for a nickel a can?”

  “Sean.”

  Sean tossed the can in the wastebasket. “You’re telling me that you think a guy like Dave Boyle would kill his wife’s—what?—second cousin because he’s pissed about gentrification? That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “I busted a guy once killed his wife because she gave him shit about his cooking.”

  “But that’s a marriage, man. That’s shit building up between two people for years. You’re talking about a guy saying. ‘Damn, these rents are killing me. I should go kill a few people until they drop back to normal.’”

  Whitey laughed.

  “What?” Sean said.

  “You put it that way,” Whitey said. “Okay. It’s dumb. Still, there’s something about that guy. If he didn’t have a hole in his alibi, I’d say okay. If he didn’t see the victim an hour before she died, I’d say okay. But he does have a hole, and he did see her, and there’s something off about the guy. He says he went right home? I want his wife to confirm that. I want his first-floor neighbor to have heard him walking up the stairs at one-oh-five. You know? Then I’ll forget about him. Did you notice his hand?”

  Sean didn’t say anything.

  “His right hand was almost twice the size of his left. That guy got into something recently. I want to know what. Once I know it was just a beef down the bar, something like that, I’m good. I’ll let it go.”

  Whitey drained his second Coke and tossed it in the wastebasket.

  “Dave Boyle,” Sean said. “You seriously want to take a look at Dave Boyle.”

  “A look,” Whitey said. “Just a little look.”

  THEY MET in a third-floor conference room shared by Major Crimes and Homicide in the DA’s office, Friel always preferring to hold his meetings here because it was cold and utilitarian, the chairs hard, the table black, the walls a cinder-block gray. It wasn’t room that gave itself to witty asides or rambling non sequiturs. No one hung around in this room; they did their business and they got back at it.

  There were seven chairs in the room this afternoon, and every one was taken. Friel sat at the head of the table. To his right sat the deputy chief of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Homicide Unit, Maggie Mason, and to his left Sergeant Robert Burke, who ran Homicide’s other squad. Whitey and Sean faced each other across the table, followed by Joe Souza, Chris Connolly, and the other two detectives from State Homicide, Payne Brackett and Shira Rosenthal. Everyone had stacks of field reports or copies of field reports on the table in front of them as well as crime scene photos, the medical examiner’s reports, CSS reports, plus their own report pads and notebooks, a few napkins with names scribbled on them, and some crudely drawn crime scene diagrams.

  Whitey and Sean went first, running down their interviews
with Eve Pigeon and Diane Cestra, Mrs. Prior, Brendan Harris, Jimmy and Annabeth Marcus, Roman Fallow, and Dave Boyle, whom Whitey, to Sean’s gratitude, referred to only as a “witness from the bar.”

  Brackett and Rosenthal went next, Brackett doing most of the talking but Rosenthal, Sean was sure if past history was any indicator, having done most of the legwork.

  “Coworkers at her father’s store all have solid alibis and no evident motive. To the man, they all stated that the victim, far as they knew, had no known enemies, no outstanding debt or narcotic dependency. Search of the victim’s room yielded no controlled substances, seven hundred dollars in cash, and no diary. A review of the victim’s bank records showed the victim’s deposits were in statistical keeping with the amount of money she earned. No large deposits or withdrawals until the morning of Friday the fifth when she closed out the account. That money was recovered from the dresser drawer in her room and is in keeping with Sergeant Power’s discovery that she was planning to leave town on Sunday. Preliminary interviews with neighbors have yielded nothing to support any theories of family strife.”

  Brackett stacked his pages together against the table to indicate he was finished, and Friel turned to Souza and Connolly.

  “We ran down the lists acquired from the bars the victim was seen in, her last night. We interviewed twenty-eight of the patrons so far out of a possible seventy-five, not counting the two Sergeant Powers and Trooper Devine took, ah, Fallow and this David Boyle. Troopers Hewlett, Darton, Woods, Cecchi, Murray, and Eastman took the remaining forty-five and we have preliminary reports from them.”

  “What’s the word on Fallow and O’Donnell?” Friel said to Whitey.

  “They’re clean. Don’t mean they couldn’t have hired the job out, though.”

  Friel leaned back in his chair. “I’ve worked a lot of contract hits over the years, and this doesn’t look like one.”

  “If it was a hit,” Maggie Mason said, “why not just blast her there in the car?”

  “Well, they did,” Whitey said.

  “I think she means more than once, Sergeant. Why not just unload?”