“I don’t know, really,” she said. She paused, and reddened slightly.
“What?” Gus said.
“We didn’t come here to talk about Tom, did we?”
“Tell me what you were remembering.”
“My wedding night,” Laura said. “Tom and I were never intimate before we were married. A few kisses. And our wedding night was very awkward.”
“He didn’t know what to do?”
“Neither of us was too sure, but that wasn’t it so much. When he saw me for the first time”—she glanced down at her naked self—“he was frightened…. He didn’t … we didn’t … consummate the marriage until weeks later … in the dark.”
“How old were you?”
“Eighteen.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“My mother,” Laura said. “My mother and his mother were friends. They sort of put us together.”
“His mother was Hadley Winslow?”
“Yes. She was very eager that he marry.”
“I’ll bet,” Gus said. “You love him?”
Laura thought about it, and after a moment shook her head.
“No,” she said. “He was an appropriate mate: Ivy League, Episcopalian, wealthy. I was a good girl. I did what I was bidden.”
“And you didn’t learn to love him?”
“No. Everyone told me I would. But I didn’t. Does anyone?”
Gus shook his head.
“I guess he matters to me. But he’s very remote. We’ve gotten used to each other. I’ve lived with him most of my life. We’ve had children. He was not unkind. He never withheld money. We had barely enough sex to conceive the children”—she smiled sadly—“under cover of darkness. And beyond that, we were partners at dinner parties and doubles matches. We had twin beds and separate dressing rooms, and Tom was out more than he was in … in all senses. I don’t really know him very well. He loves Cabot, I think. He seemed very far away from Grace…. He’s remote.”
Gus was quiet.
“What are you thinking?” Laura said.
Gus remained quiet another moment, then he smiled at her.
“Enough with the love talk,” he said. “Into the bed.”
Gus
The house was right where his father’s report said it was, the forty-year-old typescript looking somehow antique in the age of word processors. They weren’t even his father’s words really, just the cumbersome locutions of policeman speak. Only the signature, C. B. Sheridan, with the big flourished S, made him think of the man who wrote it. Conn was a long time dead.
“A fine mess you left for me, Pa,” Gus said aloud as he tried the gate and found it fastened with a chain.
He went back to his car and got out a bolt cutter and returned to the gate and cut the chain. He opened the gate, put the bolt cutter back in his trunk, got back in his car, and drove up the dirt driveway under the overhanging foliage, across the little bridge, and parked in front of the house.
The sun filtered through the thick green overlay of untrimmed shrubs. The damp smell of the slow brook mixed with the smell of weeds and late summer heat. A trumpet vine as thick as a python coiled up the front porch pillars and hung oppressively over the front door. The door was locked. Gus knocked. There was no response. Gus went back down to his car and got a flat prybar from the trunk. He went slowly back up the steps onto the front porch, inserted one end between the door and the jamb, level with the dead bolt, and jimmied the door open.
The living room was messy, with soft-drink cans and movie magazines and stuffed animals scattered about. On the living room floor, near a door in the left-hand wall, was a long-dark smear. He went and squatted on his heels and looked at it. He didn’t touch it. Then he stood and walked through the door in the left wall. It was a bedroom. There was another dark smear on the floor. The bed was unmade and a wide dark brown stain blotched the sheets and one of the pillows. The stain had leeched a little way into the other pillow. Gus picked up the badly stained pillow and looked at it carefully. Then he put it aside and looked at the mattress where the stain had soaked through. He felt around on the surface of the mattress and found a hole. He hoisted the mattress and felt underneath it. There was no exit hole. He dropped the mattress and took a Buck knife out of the small case on the back of his belt and cut into the mattress. When he had cut a big enough opening, he put his hand in, and felt around, and came out with a distorted lead fragment that no longer looked like a bullet, having been misshaped by its passage. He took a small plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and dropped the slug into it and sealed the bag by pressing the blue line into the yellow line until it looked green.
Gus went slowly though the rest of the house, looking at the children’s clothes: the baby doll pajamas, and little girl’s underwear; romance magazines, and comic books, and stuffed animals. He went back into the bedroom and stared down at the stained bed.
“Tommy, you are a weird son of a bitch,” he said aloud. “And I let you walk around loose.”
Then he turned and went out of the little house and got back in his car. At the foot of the driveway, he closed the gate and readjusted the chain so that the cut link didn’t show.
Then he drove back to Boston.
Mary Alice
The sun poured into the mayor’s office through the windows that overlooked Quincy Market. Mary Alice sat quietly on the other side of his desk while Flaherty talked on the phone.
“Lose it,” Flaherty said into the phone. “I don’t give a fuck what you do, get this office and my campaign separated from the fucking thing.”
He hung up the phone and turned toward her.
“Autopsy report says that young girl they found last week in Brighton—she’d had sexual intercourse. Probably with an adult. And probably had been having intercourse for some time.”
Mary Alice winced.
“How old?”
“Coroner’s guessing thirteen.”
“God.”
“Even the fucking pederasts are trying to screw up my election,” Flaherty said.
“Everything happens to me,” Mary Alice said.
“What?”
“Just the punch line to an old joke,” Mary Alice said.
“Yeah, well, your fucking boyfriend has no leads, he says. He ain’t solving shit. And neither is his fucking kid.”
“Parnell. Chris’s not even on the case. He’s your “Yeah, and has he solved one?”
Mary Alice sighed and didn’t answer.
“He was your idea, don’t forget,” Flaherty said.
“How could I forget? You keep reminding me.”
Flaherty got up and took his stance in front of the window, looking down on Quincy Market with his hands clasped behind his back.
“You’re a smart broad, Mary Alice. And you give excellent head …”
“Everybody tells me that,” Mary Alice said.
“… but sometimes I can’t figure you out. Why did you get me involved with your boyfriend’s son.”
He turned slowly from the window, his hands still behind his back, and stared at her, his thought half completed.
“And having done that, and still, as far as I know fucking his father, why are you now fucking me?”
“Girl’s got to look out for herself,” Mary Alice said.
He gave her his riveting gaze, the one he used on his campaign posters.
“No bullshit, Mary Alice. I want to know.”
“Because you want to know, Parnell,” Mary Alice said, “it does not necessarily follow that I have to tell you.”
Flaherty held his look for another moment and then laughed.
“Hey,” he said, “Mary Alice, I’m the fucking mayor. You’re supposed to do what I say.”
“Professionally,” Mary Alice said.
“I’m not sure you do anything, except professionally.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you are a career oriented broad,” Flaherty said. “And you consider the career implications o
f everything you do, dressed or undressed.”
“I’m a single woman,” Mary Alice said. “I’ve been a single woman a long time, long enough to know that nobody’s going to gallop up on a white horse and rescue me.”
“You were married.”
“Yeah, to the back end of the horse.”
Flaherty grinned.
“And you latched onto Gus,” he said.
“Not right away. Gus does not have a happy marriage. I was divorced. We latched onto each other.”
“He pays your rent,” Flaherty said.
“How would you know that?”
“I like to keep up with things.”
“He’s gotten as much out of the deal as I have.”
“You love him?”
Mary Alice shrugged.
“I like him, at least,” she said.
“He straight?” Flaherty said.
Again Mary Alice shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He seems to have a lot of money for a policeman, but … he doesn’t say much.”
“That’s for goddamned sure,” Flaherty said.
“He loves his son,” Mary Alice said.
“Most people love their children,” Flaherty said.
“I know, but for Gus, the kid is like all there is. Like if he does well it’s some sort of redemption for Gus.”
“Lot of weight for the kid to carry,” Flaherty said.
Mary Alice smiled.
“Why, Parnell, that’s damned near sensitive.”
“Sure. Why’d you hang me with him?”
“I didn’t hang you with him. You decided to follow my suggestion.”
“Whatever. What’s your deal?”
“I thought he might actually help. I thought it might get Gus energized. I thought it might help Gus and Chris get free of each other.”
“And?”
Mary Alice smiled again at Flaherty.
“We’re more alike than one would think,” she said.
Flaherty waited.
“And I just figured if things happened that other things might happen. Gus might make some changes.”
“Like dumping the old lady?”
“You never know,” Mary Alice said, “once things start happening, there’s a momentum….”
“But he hasn’t,” Flaherty said.
“Not yet.”
“And you’re still fucking him in case he might?”
“And because I like to,” Mary Alice said.
“And you’re fucking me because you know that the whole idea may go sour and you want an edge when I start handing out blame,” Flaherty said.
“And because I like to,” Mary Alice said.
Flaherty put his hands in his hip pockets and stared at her for a moment, then he turned and went back and gazed out his window at Quincy Market again. He laughed.
“You are a liberated broad, Mary Alice. I’ll give you that.”
Below him in the Marketplace the last summer tourists milled slowly about in the Market, eating at the food stalls, buying Boston T-shirts and dark blue plastic-mesh Red Sox hats. There were jugglers there and strolling musicians, and people who sold little plastic balls with a winter scene inside. There was fried dough, and oysters, and kielbasa, and pizza, sweet and sour pork with pineapples in it, and spinach pies, and beer and doughnuts, and lobster rolls and apple pie and cheap wine and baked beans and bagels. There were also surely pickpockets and mountebanks and men who liked to grope women in a crowd.
He loved all of it.
“I’m going to put Chris on the murder of that girl,” Flaherty said to Mary Alice, with his back to her, still staring down at the Market. “Before I blame him for the crime wave, and fire him.”
“That’s the smart move,” Mary Alice said.
Tommy
At six-fifteen in the morning the Greyhound Bus terminal, hunched among the taller buildings off Park Square, was nearly empty. Tommy, who was there wearing sunglasses, a light tan raincoat with the collar up, and a Snowy River slouch hat that he’d bought at Bean’s, went to the Burger King in the terminal and bought a cup of black coffee. He sipped it as he stood near the entrance, glancing occasionally at his watch, as if he were waiting for a bus. He let his eyes drift around the terminal, as he had yesterday. As he would tomorrow … until he found her.
A fat, middle-aged black woman in a too-small flowered blouse and too-tight stone-washed jeans pushed a broom past him. She paid him no attention, moving past him silently on a pair of Reebok running shoes with a cutaway area on her right shoe giving ease to a sore toe. One ticket window was open, but there was no one behind it. The smell of the terminal always reminded him a little of the smell of the monkey house at the Forest Park Zoo in Springfield, where once he had gone with his aunt.
He went to a newspaper rack, put in a quarter, and bought a copy of the Boston Herald. He took the tabloid to a bench, and sat in the corner of it nearest the door. He put his coffee down on the bench beside him and began to leaf through the paper. The contents didn’t register. It was merely something to do, while he waited. He felt the bottomless feeling in his stomach. His throat was tight. His face felt hot and there was a trembling feeling along the backs of his arms down to his hands.
A panhandler in a filthy maroon parka came by and asked for change. The fur trim on the parka hood was matted into a nearly colorless fringe. Tommy shook his head, and the panhandler muttered, “Have a nice day,” and moved away.
A bus arrived from somewhere and three people got off and came through the terminal carrying their cheap luggage. None of them was She. He waited, turning the meaningless pages slowly, conscious of his breathing, of how shallow it was; hearing his breath go flatly in and out.
Through the door from the St. James Avenue side of the terminal came a young girl wearing black lipstick and a lot of eye shadow. She had on a shiny crimson baseball jacket, a short denim skirt, and cowboy boots. Her hair was tinted maroon. She appeared to be around eleven years old. She was carrying no luggage, not even a purse, and she looked around the terminal as if she were frightened.
Tommy felt as if his skin were stretched to its limit, as if it might give way, and his self would scatter.
He stood slowly, and walked toward the girl.
“Hi,” he said.
She looked at him, her eyes small, and fearful, and appraising.
“Are you alone?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Could I buy you some breakfast?”
The girl smiled. Familiar ground.
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?
Gus
They gathered again on the day after Labor Day, with a gray rain falling on Quincy Market outside the mayor’s window. Gus stood in back of the couch; his raincoat was unbuttoned, his hands in his hip pockets. Sullivan, the police commissioner, was there, and Robinson, the DA, wearing a polka-dot bow tie. Fiora Gardello, Robinson’s chief prosecutor, stood by the window, looking at the rain. Chris sat on the couch beside Mary Alice.
Flaherty stood behind his desk with his coat off. He wore a white shirt with French cuffs, and red suspenders. His pinstriped suit jacket hung on the back of his chair. There were copies of the Globe and the Herald on his desk, as well as neatly typed transcripts of television news programs and radio talk shows. The Globe headline read, FEAR GRIPS HUB. The Herald said, MORE MURDER.
Without preamble, Flaherty picked up one of the transcripts and began to read:
“‘Death played a doubleheader yesterday in the Athens of America.’”
Kendall Robinson said, “Parnell, we’ve all heard this.”
“Shut up,” Flaherty said. “‘The slaying, gangland style, of thirty-eight-year-old Marty Kiley in City Square, and the apparently serial murder of an as yet maica Pond … blah, blah, blah … the failure of the police, and of the mayor’s Ivy League special prosecutor to stem the blood-dimmed tide underscores the unraveling of our civic fabric … blah blah.’”
Flahert
y looked slowly around the room, still holding the transcript.
“That,” he said, “is from a Channel Three editorial that ran yesterday at six and eleven. It’s restrained. The Herald guy says the special prosecutor was imported from the Planet Cambridge and promised a lifetime supply of Brie. The Johnny Rollins show this morning invites callers to discuss the fact that three children have been shot this summer.”
“Three white children,” Gus said.
“Don’t get starry eyed on me, Gus,” Flaherty said. “The electorate doesn’t give a fuck if the coons shoot each other.” He looked around the room. “Anybody got anything more than what’s in the media?”
“Girl’s name is Trudy Boudreau,” Gus said. “Eleven years old, a chronic runaway from Lewiston, Maine. She took a bus to Boston and apparently got out at the Greyhound station in Park Square. Lewis-ton cops say she ran away a lot because her old man probably molested her.”
“Swell,” Flaherty said. “How ’bout you, Chris, you got anything?”
“Nope.”
“Anything on the other girl?”
“Probably killed by the same guy.”
Flaherty slammed the flat of his hand down on his desk.
“Don’t tell me ‘probably,’ Goddamnit. How about the gang war?”
Chris shrugged. Flaherty circled the room with his gaze. No one spoke.
“Okay,” Flaherty said, “it’s head-rolling time.”
Chris looked at Gus, and ran his forefinger across his Adam’s apple. Gus nodded.
“You got that right, Chris,” Flaherty said. “Nothing personal, and I know it’s not your fault. But it’s got to be somebody’s fault and you’re not running for the Senate. I’m going to wait until next Monday, so it won’t look like I’m knee-jerking to the media, and then I’m going to fire you.”
Chris said, “It’s not going to change anything. What are you going to do when the killing doesn’t go away?”
“I got two months till the election,” Flaherty said. “If we get some kind of break in the crime wave, good. If we don’t it’s time for smoke and mirrors.” Flaherty looked at the police commissioner. “Can you get Gus off this case, Sully?”
All Our Yesterdays Page 28