All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  “For nothing.”

  “For nothing. Isn’t that darlin’, for nothing. Instead of pocketing couple hundred bucks a week, I can take five in the belly and bleed to death in a fucking mah-jongg parlor. What’s wrong with you, Conn? I’m serious. I wouldn’t prob’ly ask if I wasn’t drunk. But what the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Unlucky in love, Knocko.”

  “You mean Mellen? For Crissake, you just got married.”

  “It’s not Mellen.”

  The vice detective kissed the nine ball into a side pocket and set himself up for the ten ball in the corner. He laughed, and took a pull from an unlabeled brown beer bottle.

  “Conn, Goddammit, if I’m gonna get shot because of you I want to know why.”

  Knocko pointed a thick forefinger at Conn’s chest.

  “Is there anything in there? Is there anything scares you, or makes you happy, or does anything?”

  Conn took a deep swallow of whiskey. He felt it move inside him, spreading through him the way it did. He listened to the click of the balls on the pool table.

  “No, there isn’t,” Conn said softly.

  There was a sound in Conn’s voice that Knocko had never heard. Suddenly, Knocko didn’t know what to say. The two men sat silently. The vice detective finished his solitary pool game. He put his cue stick away, drank the rest of his beer, racked the balls, and left. The bartender was at the other end of the bar reading a newspaper. Conn and Knocko were alone.

  “I was in love,” Conn said. “She turned me in to the English.”

  “During the troubles.”

  Conn nodded. He was looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

  “And that’s it? That’s why you don’t care about anything? I mean, I ain’t trying to tell you it was nothing, but, Conn, people get over things.”

  “I’m over it,” Conn said. “I stopped caring about it a long time ago. But it was so hard to stop caring about her that I had to stop caring about everything. You understand that?”

  Knocko shrugged. “So what’s that got to do with wanting to shoot the Chinamen?”

  Conn stared into his whiskey glass, turning it slowly in his hands.

  “I won’t let anybody threaten me,” he said. “One of the rules. You got no feelings, rules get to be important. You know?”

  “You ever have any fun?” Knocko said.

  “Sure I have fan. I fuck, I drink, I like a good meal.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “How about Mellen?” Knocko said.

  Conn shrugged.

  “You knock her up?” Knocko said.

  Conn nodded.

  “Christ,” Knocko said. “I coulda sent her someplace. You didn’t have to fucking marry her.”

  Conn shrugged again.

  “I know,” he said.

  “So why did you?”

  “Why not?” Conn said.

  Knocko was silent. Conn was silent, staring at his drink.

  “That woman,” Knocko said finally. He didn’t look at Conn. He looked instead at the mirror. “The one in Ireland … That woman killed you, Conn.”

  “I know.”

  Conn raised his head slowly. Two tears ran silently down his face. They both saw the tears in the bar mirror.

  “Oh, shit,” Knocko said.

  1994

  Voice-Over

  “Knocko said Conn wasn’t really on the take,” I said. “Knocko was, and proud of it; but he says Conn didn’t really care about taking money or not taking money. When Knocko worked up some graft, Conn would take some, the way you might share some popcorn if it was offered. But he never seemed interested.

  “Marrying Mellen didn’t change him any.”

  “No,” Grace said. “I imagine not.”

  “Mellen became somebody he serviced as necessary, and other women was where he put his money. I guess he didn’t solicit graft, that was Knocko’s deal, but stylish womanizing was expensive. This was during the Depression, remember, and a guy with a little money could buy a lot of things. He could take them to the air-conditioned movie theater. He could take them to eat at Locke-Ober’s. He could give some stumblebum a dollar for an apple. He could afford a room in a good hotel for seductions. There were about five million people unemployed the year my father was conceived, but Conn Sheridan was not one of them. He had steady work.

  “My father was born, a little, ah, premature on the seventeenth of September, 1932. Conn took Mellen to the hospital about four o’clock in the morning and then sat and read stories in Black Mask magazine, which he probably found pretty funny, being an actual cop. Nothing happened, so he left and went down on Canal Street to an all-night movie and watched Paul Muni in Scarface which he probably found pretty funny too and came out and had some eggs and bacon in a diner under the elevated and went back to the hospital where Mellen was lying in bed crying and feeding his son, Augustus Sheridan, my father, who at the time weighed just under seven pounds, as befits a kid slightly premature…. I like to think Conn felt something, that he saw his son and felt something for the first time since Hadley turned him in…. But I don’t know if he did or not. Gus says he thinks Conn tried. But … what I know is that Mellen could never really see Gus the way new mothers are supposed to see new babies. He was an emblem of her sin. And from the day of his birth he never looked at her face and saw joy.”

  1935

  Conn

  Conn lay quietly on his back on his side of the bed, his hands behind his head.

  “We haven’t done it, since before Gus was born,” Conn said.

  Mellen was in the bed beside him. It was a big bed. There was space between them.

  “I know.”

  “Kid’s three years old,” Conn said.

  “I’m sorry,” Mellen said.

  The ornamental tops of the bedposts always reminded Conn of asparagus tips. The posts themselves were shaped like fluted baseball bats. Conn used to think what fine bludgeons they would make, if you sawed them off.

  “Sure you are,” Conn said. “So’s my pecker.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Mellen said.

  “Or think like that,” Conn said without anger. “Or be like that.”

  Mellen lay quite stiffly on her side of the bed, her face turned away from Conn. Her rosary beads lay in a neat gather on her bedside table.

  “What we did before we were married was sinful,” she said. Her voice was flat.

  “A couple of Our Fathers should take care of it,” Conn said, “a nice act of contrition.”

  “Please,” Mellen said, “don’t mock the Church.”

  “Hard not to,” Conn said. “All the pantywaist priests looking to diddle the altar boys.”

  Mellen turned onto her side, away from Conn, and put her hands over her ears.

  “May God forgive you,” she said. Her voice seemed frozen.

  “He might,” Conn said quietly. “You won’t. You’ll never forgive me. Hell, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

  “Our marriage is founded on mortal sin, Conn. Our son is the product of mortal sin.”

  “And you won’t forgive him either, will you?”

  With her back to him and her knees drawn up, Mellen was gracelessly angular under the covers. She clutched the bedspread about her shoulders, as if she were cold, though the June night outside their bedroom was very mild.

  “What you can’t stand,” Conn said thoughtfully, as if he were talking to himself, “is that you liked it.”

  She made no sound.

  “That’s the dirty little secret,” Conn said musingly, “and I found it out. You like to fuck, saints-preserve-us. And I’m the guy knows it. And I’m the guy proved it to you. You’re married to me because you like to fuck.”

  Mellen stayed rigidly on her side with her back to him, the spread held tightly around her.

  “And Gus, the poor little bastard, reminds you every day that he’s here because you like to fu
ck.”

  Mellen began to pray to herself in a soft flat voice.

  “Hail Mary, fall of grace …”

  “You can never fuck again, but it won’t go away,” Conn said.

  “The Lord is with thee …”

  “The feeling will always be there.”

  “Blessed art thou amongst women …”

  “The hot feeling down at the bottom of your stomach when you think about it.”

  “And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

  Conn had nothing else to say. He lay still on his back in the warm night and listened to his wife saying Hail Marys repetitively, and remembered his time with Hadley Winslow.

  1942

  Gus

  Conn bought some sea worms and rented a rowboat and took Gus fishing in Pleasure Bay. The water was a hard, clear gray, as Conn rowed out from the dock. Occasionally there would be a thin iridescent oil slick, remote evidence of a tanker sunk in the North Atlantic. Gus was always excited by an oil slick. It was not bloodthirstiness, Conn knew, so much as the sense of connectedness Gus felt to the large events of the world. It was the same sense that the sixteen-year-old Conn had felt outside the GPO, Easter week, sniping at British soldiers. It had been a long time since Conn felt connected to anything.

  Conn shipped his oars, dropped the anchor, felt it catch. He watched Gus thread the squirming sea worm onto his hook, carefully. Gus was a little scared about the pincers. But he didn’t say anything. Conn made no offer to help. Hooks baited, they fed the lines out over the gunwales of the rowboat. They were after flounder. Each had a lead sinker on the end of the line, and several baited hooks about ten inches above the sinker. When the sinker hit, each of them jigged the line to make sure that the sinker was just touching, and kept it that way, just bumping the bottom, the line held in gentle tension over the crooked forefinger.

  Conn was home no more than he had to be. Fishing was one of the few things they did together. Until Gus made his first communion they used to fish every Sunday morning while Mellen was at Mass. Now that Gus went with her, the fishing happened at odd moments.

  A harbor patrol boat chugged past them. One of the crewmen studied them as he went by.

  “Why are they looking at us?” Gus said.

  “Make sure we’re not German saboteurs,” Conn said, “sneaking in to blow up the L Street Bathhouse.”

  “Honest to God?”

  Conn shrugged. “Sort of.”

  Gus watched the patrol boat ease out of sight past Castle Island.

  “I wish I was in the war,” Gus said. “You?”

  “It can be fun,” Conn said.

  “Were you in a war?”

  Conn smiled and didn’t say anything.

  “Well, were you?” Gus said.

  Conn’s face hardened in a look Gus had come to recognize. Conn shook his head. There was a tug on Gus’s line. He jerked it upward to set the hook, and began to haul it in, hand over hand, feeling the fish struggle at the other end. Gus was careful to hold it clear as he brought it into the boat, the way Conn had shown him, so as not to knock it loose on the gunwales. He unhooked it, and put it flopping in the bucket, rebaited the hook, and dropped the line in again, letting it uncoil from the floorboards where it had fallen. The line tangled. Conn watched silently while Gus struggled with the snarl. The boy made no progress and finally looked at his father.

  “Can you do it?” he said.

  Conn shook his head.

  “I can’t get it undone,” Gus said.

  “Then you can’t fish,” Conn said.

  Tears began to form in Gus’s eyes.

  “How come you won’t help me?” he said.

  Conn was silent for a moment. The sun was behind Gus and Conn had to squint into it to look at him. Seagulls rode the low waves around the boat, waiting for the discarded bait, or fish guts, or sandwich crusts that they had learned to expect from fishermen. The birds seemed entirely comfortable on the ocean surface, moving on it as easily as the ocean itself moved. On it, in it, yet free to fly away.

  “You might as well learn it now, on stuff that doesn’t matter much,” Conn said finally. “You got to untangle your own stuff. You get snarled up with other people and …” Conn didn’t finish. He seemed to be looking past Gus into the sun, his eyes nearly shut.

  Gus felt a little scared and a little excited because he realized his father was talking to him about real things as if he were an adult.

  “What do you mean?” Gus said.

  “You’re on your own, kid. Sooner you know that, the sooner you get used to it.”

  “Ma says God will take care of me,” Gus said.

  He didn’t care so much what the answer was, he didn’t want the conversation to end. It was rare when his father talked about much of anything.

  “Your mother thinks God’s a lot more interested than I’ve found him to be,” Conn said.

  “Ma says I should be a priest,” Gus said.

  Conn was silent for a moment, squinting at the boy. Then he laughed.

  “You won’t be no priest,” Conn said.

  As they talked Gus worked at the tangled line.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to be,” Gus said.

  “That’ll sort of take care of itself,” Conn said.

  “Ma prays for stuff,” Gus said. “She says if you pray hard and you’re good, God gives you what you pray for.”

  “Sure,” Conn said.

  “You believe that, Dad?”

  “No,” Conn said. “But maybe I was just never good enough.”

  1946

  Conn

  When Conn arrived at the church there were two patrol units from the City Square Station, and an assistant medical examiner. The victim was a little girl.

  “I’d guess about twelve years old,” the ME said to Conn. “Where’s Knocko?”

  Conn didn’t know any of the patrol cops. He put his badge on his lapel where it would show.

  “In court,” Conn said. “Be there all week.”

  They were standing in the drab cellar of the church. One of the patrol cops was talking to the priest. Conn looked down at the little girl on the floor under the table. The skirt of her plaid school uniform was bunched around the waist. Except for her brown strap shoes and white ankle socks she was naked below the waist. There was blood in her hair and pooled under her head. There was a trace of blood on her right thigh. A brown teddy bear wearing a plaid bow tie nestled in the crook of her left arm.

  “What’s your name?” Conn said to the patrol cop next to him.

  “Shaughnessy, Sergeant,” the young cop said. He avoided looking at the girl.

  “Conn Sheridan. You find her here?”

  “Yeah. Under the table. The tablecloth was hanging down. Looks like somebody tried half-assed to hide her.”

  “Who discovered the body?”

  The young cop nodded at the priest.

  “Father was down here getting ready for some kind of meeting.”

  Conn glanced around the room.

  “She been raped?” Conn said.

  “Some sort of penetration,” the ME said. “There’s some blood.”

  “Usually is, kids her age,” Conn said. “What killed her?”

  “Gunshot, I assume,” the ME said. “We’ll know more once we get her on a table.”

  “Recent?” Conn said.

  “Not today,” the ME said, “more likely yesterday. Something special, though. There’s tooth marks on her right buttock.”

  “He bit her on the ass?” Conn said.

  “That would be the technical description,” the ME said.

  Conn nodded and looked at the young cop.

  “Do we know who she is?”

  The young cop shook his head.

  “Father says she may be in his parish. Says he doesn’t recognize her, but it’s a big parish.”

  “And he’s probably a busy man. Call the station, see if she’s been reported missing. Anyone seen her underpants?” Con
n said.

  The young cop shook his head and headed for a phone. Conn asked the other cops. They hadn’t seen her underpants.

  “Look for them,” Conn said.

  One of the cops said, “Maybe she didn’t have any, Sergeant.”

  “Sure she didn’t. A ten-year-old Irish Catholic girl from Charlestown, in her school uniform, going to a meeting in the church. Sure she wouldn’t be wearing underwear.”

  “How come you know she’s Irish Catholic?” the cop said.

  “Because I’m a fucking detective sergeant,” Conn said. “Find the underwear.”

  The assistant medical examiner straightened. “You finished with her, Conn?”

  “Not yet,” Conn said. “Tell the wagon to stand by.”

  The assistant medical examiner started for the door.

  He said, “Give them a shout when you’re ready.”

  Conn turned to the priest.

  “What do you know, Father?”

  The priest shook his head. He was round shouldered and dark haired with a permanent shadow of a beard. His cheeks bore a fine filigree of broken blood vessels, and his dark eyebrows were very heavy. When he was close to him Conn realized that the priest was not even middle aged yet.

  “You can’t identify the victim.”

  The priest shook his head again.

  “When’s the last time the room was used?”

  “This afternoon. CCD meeting here ended at four-forty.”

  “So she arrived here after that,” Conn said. He was talking to himself, but the priest answered him anyway.

  “Yes, she would have had to.”

  “What was the meeting you were preparing for?”

  “The meeting? … oh, the meeting … we called it VASE—Volunteer After School Enrichment. College students would come in to tutor poor children. I’ve canceled tonight’s meeting, of course.”

  “How often did it meet?”

  “Every weekday.”

  “Same personnel?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Same college kids teach the same poor kids every day?”

  “No. It’s a popular program. We have different teachers and different students every day.”

  “Anybody else use the space?”