The Drop

by Dennis Lehane

  “Yup.”

  “What was time in South Carolina like?”

  Eric lifted his second slice. Looked over it at Cousin Marv. “Like no time at all.”

  ALL THE TIME TORRES spent looking into the disappearance of Richie Whelan ten years ago yielded pretty much nothing. Kid just up and vanished one night. Left Cousin Marv’s Bar, said he’d be back in fifteen, soon as he scored some pot up the block. It had been freezing that night. A lot worse than freezing actually—kind of night made people invest in land they’d never seen in Florida. Six degrees when Richie Whelan left the bar at eleven-forty-five. Torres did a little more digging, found out the wind chill factor that night made that six degrees feel like negative ten. So there’s Richie Whelan hustling along the sidewalk in ten-below weather, kind of cold he would have felt burning in his lungs and in the spaces between his lower teeth. No one else on the street that night because only a pothead who’d run out of pot or a cokehead who’d run out of coke would brave that kind of weather for a midnight stroll. Even though the stroll was only three blocks, which was the exact distance between Cousin Marv’s Bar and the place where Whelan went to score.

  Whelan’s alleged dealers that night were two knuckleheads named Eric Deeds and Tim Brennan. Brennan had given a statement to the police a few days later, said Richie Whelan had never made it to his apartment that night. When asked what his relationship was with Whelan, Tim Brennan had said in his statement, “Sometimes he scored weed off me.” Eric Deeds had never given a statement; his name only came up in the statements provided by the friends Richie Whelan had left behind in the bar that night.

  So, if Torres accepted that Brennan had no reason to lie, since he’d been reasonably forthcoming about dealing drugs to the missing Richie Whelan, then it was possible to believe Richie Whelan had disappeared within three blocks of Cousin Marv’s Bar.

  And Torres couldn’t shake the suspicion that this little detail carried more weight than any of the prior detectives who’d worked the Whelan disappearance had conferred on it before.

  Why? his Loo, Mark Adeline, would have asked (if Torres had been dumb enough to admit he was looking into someone else’s cold case).

  Because that motherfucker doesn’t take Communion, Torres would have said.

  In the movie of Torres’s life, Mark Adeline would have leaned back in his chair, the mist of wisdom dawning in his eyes, and said, “Huh. You could be onto something there. I’ll give you three days.”

  In reality, Adeline was up his ass to get his fucking Robbery clearance rate up. Way up. A new class of recruits was coming out of the Academy. That meant a bunch of patrolmen were about to get bumped up into plainclothes. Robbery, Major Crimes, Homicide, Vice—they’d all be looking for new blood. And the old blood? The ones who chased down other cops’ cold cases while their own cases gathered mold and fuzz? They got shipped to the property room or over to the Hackney Carriage Unit, Media Relations, or, worse, the Harbor Unit, enforcing maritime codes in four fucking degrees Fahrenheit. Evandro Torres had case files stacked on his desk and clogging up his hard drive. He had statements he should be taking on a liquor store stickup in Allston, a street rip on Newbury Street, and a smash-n-grab gang working pharmacies all over the city. Plus the stickup of Cousin Marv’s. Plus those houses kept getting hit midday in the South End. Plus the delivery trucks down the Seaport kept losing fresh seafood and frozen meat.

  Plus, plus, plus. Shit stacked up and then kept stacking higher while the bottom slid out toward a man. Before he knew it he’d been consumed by the stack.

  Torres walked to his car, telling himself he was driving to the Seaport to brace that driver he liked for the thefts, the one who was too chummy last time they’d chatted, chewed gum like a squirrel chewed nuts.

  But instead he drove over to the electric plant in Southie, the sun coming up just as the night shift was letting out, and had the foreman point out Sean McGrath to him. McGrath was one of Whelan’s old buddies and, according to anyone Torres had already chatted up, the leader of the pack of guys who paid tribute to Glory Days once a year on the anniversary of the night he vanished.

  Torres introduced himself and started to explain why he’d dropped by, but McGrath held up a hand and called to one of the other guys. “Yo, Jimmy.”

  “S’up?”

  “Where we going?”

  “Up the place.”

  “Place by the deli?”

  Jimmy shook his head, lit a cigarette. “Other place.”

  Sean McGrath said, “Cool.”

  Jimmy waved and walked off with the other guys.

  Sean McGrath turned back to Torres. “So you’re asking about the night Richie got in the wind?”

  “Yeah. You tell me anything?”

  “Nothing to tell. He left the bar. We never saw him again.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That is it,” McGrath said. “Believe me, nobody likes it that that’s it, but that’s it. No one ever saw the guy again. If there’s a Heaven and I make it there, first question out of my mouth—even before ‘Who killed JFK?’ or, like ‘Jesus around?’—is gonna be ‘What the fuck happened to my friend Richie Whelan?’”

  Torres watched the guy shifting from foot to foot in the morning chill and knew he wouldn’t be able to hold him here long. “Your original statement, you said he went to—”

  “Score weed, yeah. Guys he usually got it from were that shithead, Tim Brennan, and another guy.”

  Torres consulted his notebook. “Eric Deeds. That was in your original statement. But let me ask you something.”

  McGrath blew on his hands. “Sure.”

  “Bob Saginowski and Cousin Marv? Were they both working that night?”

  Sean McGrath stopped blowing on his hands. “You trying to tie them to this?”

  Torres said, “I’m just trying to—”

  McGrath stepped in close and Torres got that rare whiff of a man who truly shouldn’t be fucked with too much. “You know, you come up to me, you say you’re with Robbery. But Richie Whelan wasn’t robbed. And you got me standing out here, full view of the guys I work with, looking like a snitch. So, I mean, thank you for that.”

  “Look, Mr. McGrath—”

  “Cousin Marv’s place? That’s my bar.” He took another step closer and eye-fucked Torres, breathed heavily through flared nostrils. “Don’t fuck with my bar.”

  He threw Torres a mock salute and walked up the street after his friends.

  ERIC DEEDS LOOKED OUT his second-story window as the doorbell rang a second time. He couldn’t fucking believe it. That was Bob down there. Bob Saginowski. The Problem. The Dognapper. The Do-Gooder.

  Eric heard the squeak of the wheels too late and turned to see his father rolling his wheelchair into the hallway by the intercom.

  Eric pointed at him. “Get back in your room.”

  The old man stared back at him, like a child who hadn’t learned how to speak yet. The old man, himself, hadn’t been able to speak in nine years and he had a lot of people convinced it made him feeble and retarded and shit, but Eric knew the evil bastard was still in there, still living right behind the skin. Still thinking about ways to get to you, to fuck with you, to make sure the ground below you always felt like quicksand.

  The doorbell rang again and the old man ran a finger over the intercom buttons—LISTEN, TALK, and ENTRY.

  “I said don’t fucking touch anything.”

  The old man crooked his finger and held it over the ENTRY button.

  Eric said, “I’ll throw you out this window. Throw that squeaking fucking chair down on top of you while you’re fucking lying there.”

  The old man froze, his eyebrows up.

  “I’m serious.”

  The old man smiled.

  “Don’t you—”

  The old man pressed ENTRY, and held it.

  Eric charged across the living room and tackled his father, knocked him the fuck out of that wheelchair. The old man just cackled. Just lay the
re without his wheelchair, cackling with a soft, distant look in his milk-pale eyes, like he could see into the next world and everyone there was just as full of shit as everyone in this one.

  BOB HAD JUST REACHED the sidewalk when he heard the buzzer. He trotted back up the stairs and crossed the porch. He reached for the door just as the buzzer stopped buzzing.

  Fuck.

  Bob rang the doorbell again. Waited. Rang it again. Waited. He craned his neck off the edge of the front porch, looked up at the second-story window. He went back to the doorbell, pressed it again. After a while, he walked off the porch. He stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the second floor again, wondering if one of the tenants had left the back door open. They often did, or else the landlord didn’t pay as much attention if the wood around the lock had rotted over the winter or if termites had gotten to it. But what was Bob going to do—break in? That kind of shit was so far in his rearview mirror it might as well have been the life of a look-alike or a twin he’d never been particularly close to.

  He turned to head up the street and Eric Deeds stood right in front of him, staring at him with that fucked-up light in his face, as if he’d been a finalist in a beatification ceremony for people who’d been dropped on their heads as infants. He must have snuck up from the side alley, Bob decided, and now he stood before Bob with an energy coming off him like a power line downed in a storm, hissing and popping in the street.

  “You upset my father.”

  Bob said nothing, but he must have moved his face in a certain way because Eric mocked him with an elaborate up-and-down pantomime of his mouth and eyebrows.

  “How many fucking times you gotta ring a doorbell before you decide the people not answering aren’t gonna start, Bob? My old man’s fucking old. He needs peace and serenity and shit.”

  “Sorry,” Bob said.

  Eric liked that. He beamed. “Sorry. That’s what you got to say. The old ‘sor-ry.’” The smiled died on Eric’s face and something so desolate replaced it—the look of a small animal with a broken limb who found himself in a part of the forest he didn’t recognize—and then the desolation drowned under a wave of cunning and cold. “Well, you saved me a trip.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I was coming by your house later anyway.”

  Bob said, “I had that feeling, yeah.”

  “I returned your umbrella.”

  Bob nodded.

  “Coulda taken the dog.”

  Another nod from Bob.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Bob asked.

  Eric looked out on the street for a bit as the morning traffic began to thin. “He doesn’t fit into my plans anymore.”

  “Okay,” Bob said.

  Eric snorted some cold morning air into his nostrils and then hucked louie into the street. “Give me ten thousand.”

  Bob said, “What?”

  “Dollars. By tomorrow morning.”

  “Who has ten thousand dollars?”

  “You could find it.”

  “How could I poss—?”

  “Say, that safe in Cousin Marv’s office. That might be a place to start.”

  Bob shook his head. “Can’t be done. It’s on a timer—”

  “—lock, I know.” Eric lit a cigarette. The match caught the wind and the flame found his finger and he shook both until the flame went out. He blew on his finger. “Goes off at two AM and you have ninety seconds to transfer the money from the floor safe or it triggers two silent alarms, neither of which goes off in a police station or a security company. Fancy that.” Eric gave him some raised eyebrows again and took a hit off his cigarette. “I’m not greedy, Bob. I just need stake money for something. I don’t want everything in the safe, just ten grand. You give me ten grand, I’ll disappear.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “So, it’s ridiculous.”

  “You don’t just walk into someone’s life and—”

  “That is life—someone like me coming along when you’re not looking and you’re not ready. I’m a hundred seventy pounds’ worth of End Times, Bob.”

  Bob said, “There’s gotta be another way.”

  Eric Deeds’s eyebrows went up and down again. “You’re racing through all your options, but they’re options for normal people in normal circumstances. I’m not offering those things. I need my ten grand. You get it tonight, I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning. For all you know, I’m betting it on the Super Bowl, got me a sure thing. You just be at your house tomorrow morning at nine sharp with ten grand. If you don’t, I’ll jump up and down on that bitch-whore Nadia’s head until her neck snaps and there’s no face left. Then I’ll beat the dog’s head in with a rock. Look in my eyes and tell me which part I’m lying about, Bob.”

  Bob met his eyes. Not for the first time in his life, and not for the last, he had to swallow against the nausea that roiled his stomach in the face of cruelty. It was all he could do not to vomit in Eric’s face.

  “What is wrong with you?” Bob said.

  Eric held out his hands. “Pretty much everything. I’m severely fucked in the ol’ squash, Bob. And you took my dog.”

  “You tried to kill it.”

  “Nah.” Eric shook his head like he believed it. “You heard what I did to Richie Whelan, right?”

  Bob nodded.

  Eric said, “Piece of shit, that kid. Caught him trying to tap my girl’s shit so bye-bye, Richie. Reason I bring him up, Bob? I had me a partner on the Richie thing. I still have him. So you think of doing anything to me? Then you’ll spend the rest of your limited days of freedom wondering when my partner’s going to come for his or drop a dime to Five-O.” Eric flicked his cigarette into the street. “Anything else, Bob?”

  Bob didn’t say a fucking word.

  “See you in the morning.” Eric left him on the sidewalk and headed back into his house.

  “WHO IS HE?” BOB asked Nadia as they walked Rocco through the park.

  “Who is he?” Nadia said. “Or ‘Who is he to me?’”

  The river had frozen again last night but the ice was already coming apart in a series of cracks and moans. Rocco kept trying to place a paw over the edge of the bank, and Bob kept snapping him back.

  “To you, then.”

  “I told you. We dated for a while.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “He’s a guy who grew up on my street. He goes in and out of prison. Hospitals too. People say he killed Richie Whelan back in oh-four.”

  “People say it, or he says it?”

  Another shrug. “’Mounts to the same thing.”

  “Why’d he kill Richie Whelan?”

  “I heard he was trying to impress some hard guys down on Stoughton Street.”

  “Leo’s crew.”

  She looked at him, her face a white moon under her black hoodie. “That’s the rumor.”

  “So he’s a bad guy.”

  “Everyone’s bad.”

  “No,” Bob said, “they’re not. Most people are okay.”

  “Yeah?” A smile of disbelief.

  “Yeah. They just, I dunno, make a lotta messes and then they make more messes trying to clean those first messes up and after a while that’s your life.”

  She sniffled and chuckled at the same time. “That’s it, uh?”

  “That’s it sometimes.” He looked at the dark red cord around her neck.

  She noticed. “How come you’ve never asked?”

  “I told you—I didn’t think it would be polite.”

  She smiled that heartbreaker of hers. “Polite? Who has those kind of manners anymore?”

  “No one,” he admitted. It felt a bit tragic, that admission, as if too many things that actually should matter in the world had lost their place in line. You’d wake up one day and it would all be gone, like 8-tracks or newspapers. “Was it Eric Deeds?”

  She shook her head. Then she nodded. Then she shook her head again. “He did something to me during one of his, I dunno—the shrinks call it ‘manic
periods.’ I didn’t take it well. I had a lot of other shit coming down on my head at the same time, it wasn’t just him—”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “—but he was definitely the last straw.”

  “You cut your own throat?”

  She loosed a series of short, quick nods. “I was pretty high.”

  Bob said, “You did that to yourself?”

  Nadia said, “With a box cutter. One of those—”

  “Oh, God. No, I know what they are.” Bob repeated it: “You did that to yourself?”

  Nadia stared back at him. “I was a different person. I didn’t, you know, like myself at all?”

  Bob said, “You like yourself now?”

  Nadia shrugged.

  Bob said nothing. He knew if he spoke he’d kill something that deserved life.

  After a while, Nadia looked at Bob, her eyes gleaming, and shrugged again.

  They walked for a bit.

  “Did you ever see him with Rocco?”

  “Huh?”

  “Did you? I mean, he lived on your block.”

  “No, I don’t think.”

  “You don’t think?”

  She took a step back. “Who are you right now, Bob? ’Cause you’re not yourself.”

  “I am,” he assured her. He softened his voice. “Did you ever see Eric Deeds with Rocco?”

  Another series of quick nods, like a bird bobbing for water.

  “So you knew it was his dog.”

  Those nods kept coming, short and fast.

  “That he threw in the trash.” Bob let loose a low sigh. “Right.”

  They crossed a small wooden bridge over a patch of still-frozen river, the ice gone light blue and thin, but holding.

  “So he says he just wants ten thousand?” she said eventually.

  Bob nodded.

  “But if you lose that ten thousand?”

  “Someone will pay.”

  “You?”

  “And Marv. Both of us. Place already got held up once.”

  “Will they kill you?”

  “It depends. A group of them will get together, the Chechens, the ’Talians, the Micks. Five or six fat guys having coffee in some parking lot, and they’ll make a decision. For ten grand on top of the five we lost in the robbery? It wouldn’t look good.” He looked up at the bald sky. “I mean, I could scratch together ten on my own. I’ve been saving up.”