Dennis Lehane

by Mystic River (v5)

  So really, his final visual image of her had been of the side of her face as she’d pulled her lips from his cheek and said, “Later, Daddy.”

  Later, Daddy.

  Jimmy realized it was the “later”—the later part of the evening, the later minutes of her life—that would stab him. If he’d been there, if he’d been able to share a little more time a little later into the evening with his daughter, maybe he’d be able to hold on to a more recent image of her.

  But he wouldn’t. Dave would. And Eve and Diane. And her killer.

  If you had to die, Jimmy thought, if such things really are preordained, then I wish that somehow you could have died looking into my face. It would have hurt me to watch you die, Katie, but at least I would know that you felt a little less alone looking into my eyes.

  I love you. I love you so much. I love you, in truth, more than I loved your mother, more than I love your sisters, more than I love Annabeth, so help me God. And I love them deeply, but I love you most because when I came back from prison and sat with you in the kitchen, we were the last two people on earth. Forgotten and unwanted. And we were both so afraid and confused and so utterly fucking forlorn. But we rose from that, didn’t we? We built our lives into something good enough so that one day we weren’t afraid, we weren’t forlorn. And I couldn’t have done that without you. I couldn’t have. I’m not that strong.

  You would have grown into a beautiful woman. A beautiful wife, maybe. A miracle of a mother. You were my friend, Katie. You saw my fear, and you didn’t run. I love you more than life. And missing you will be my cancer. It will kill me.

  And just for a moment, standing in the shower, Jimmy felt her palm on his back. That’s what he’d forgotten of his final moment with her. She’d placed her hand on his back as she’d leaned in to kiss his cheek. She’d placed it flat against the spine, between the shoulder blades, and it had felt warm.

  He stood in the shower with the touch of her hand lingering on his beaded flesh, and he felt the need to weep pass. He felt strong in his grief again. He felt loved by his daughter.

  WHITEY AND SEAN found a parking space around the corner from Jimmy’s place and walked back up onto Buckingham Avenue. The late afternoon was turning cool around them, the sky darkening toward navy, and Sean found himself wondering what Lauren was doing right now, if she was near a window, could see the same sky he saw at the same moment, feel a chill advancing.

  Just before they reached the three-decker where Jimmy and his wife lived sandwiched between various Savage lunatics and their wives or girlfriends, they saw Dave Boyle leaning into the open passenger side of a Honda parked out front. Dave reached into the glove compartment and then snapped it shut, leaned back out of the car with a wallet in his hand. He noticed Sean and Whitey as he locked the car door, and he smiled at them.

  “You two again.”

  “We’re like flu,” Whitey said. “Always popping up.”

  Sean said, “How’s it going, Dave?”

  “Not much has changed in four hours. You dropping in on Jimmy?”

  They nodded.

  “Did you have some kind of, what, break in the case?”

  Sean shook his head. “Just dropping in to pay our respects, see how they’re doing.”

  “They’re okay right now. I think they’re worn out, you know? Far as I can tell, Jimmy hasn’t gone to bed since yesterday. Annabeth got a craving for cigarettes, so I offered to pick some up, forgot I’d left my wallet in the car.” He held it up in his swollen hand, then slipped it into his pocket.

  Whitey put his own hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels, a tight smile on his face.

  Sean said, “That looks painful.”

  “This?” Dave raised his hand again, considered it. “Ain’t too bad, really.”

  Sean nodded, added his own tight smile to Whitey’s, the two of them standing there, looking in at Dave.

  “I was playing pool the other night?” Dave said. “You know the table they got at McGills, Sean. A good half of it is against the wall, you got to keep using that shitty short stick.”

  Sean said, “Sure.”

  “So the cue ball’s lying just a hair off the rail, and the target ball’s the other end of the table. I pull back my hand to shoot, like really hard, forgetting I’m against the wall? And bam! My hand goes through the fucking wall almost.”

  “Ouch,” Sean said.

  “You make it?” Whitey said.

  “Huh?”

  “The shot.”

  Dave frowned. “Scratched. ’Course I was no good for the rest of the game.”

  “’Course not,” Whitey said.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Sucked, ’cause I was in the zone until that happened.”

  Whitey nodded, looked over at Dave’s car. “Hey, you have the same problem I had with mine?”

  Dave looked back at his car. “Never had a problem with mine, no.”

  “Shit. The timing chain on my Accord went at sixty-five thousand on the nose. I find out the same thing happened to another buddy of mine. What it costs to fix ain’t much less than the Blue Book, damn near totals the car. You know?”

  Dave said, “Nope. Mine’s been a dream.” He looked over his shoulder, then back at them. “I’m going to go get those smokes. See you guys inside?”

  “See you there,” Sean said, and gave Dave a small wave before Dave stepped off the curb and crossed the avenue.

  Whitey looked at the Honda. “Nice dent over the front quarter panel there.”

  Sean said, “Gee, Sarge, wasn’t sure you’d noticed.”

  “And the pool stick story?” Whitey whistled. “What—he’s holding the butt of the stick against his palm?”

  “Got a problem, though,” Sean said as they watched Dave enter Eagle Liquors.

  “Yeah, what’s that, Supercop?”

  “If you make Dave for the guy Souza’s witness saw in the parking lot of the Last Drop, then he was kicking someone else’s head in when Katie Marcus was killed.”

  Whitey gave him a disappointed grimace. “You think so? I make him for a guy sitting in a parking lot when a girl who would die half an hour later left the bar. I make him for someone who wasn’t home at one-fifteen like he said.”

  Through the glass storefront, they could see Dave at the counter, talking to the clerk.

  Whitey said, “The blood CSS scraped off the ground in the parking lot could have been there for days. We got no proof anything ever happened there but a bar fight. Guys in the bar say it didn’t happen that night? It could have happened the day before. It could have happened that afternoon. There’s no causal connection between the blood in that parking lot and Dave Boyle sitting in his car at one-thirty. But there is one helluva causal connection between him in that car when Katie Marcus left the bar.” He clapped Sean’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s go up.”

  Sean took a last look across the avenue as Dave handed cash to the clerk in the liquor store. He felt sorry for Dave. No matter what he may have done, Dave just elicited that in a person—pity, unrefined and a little bit ugly, sharp as shale.

  CELESTE, sitting on Katie’s bed, heard the policemen coming up the stairs, their heavy shoes tramping up the old risers just on the other side of the wall. Annabeth had sent her in here a few minutes ago to get a dress of Katie’s that Jimmy could bring over to the funeral home, Annabeth apologizing for not being strong enough to go in the room herself. It was a blue dress with an off-the-shoulder cut to it, and Celeste remembered when Katie had worn it to Carla Eigen’s wedding, a blue-and-yellow flower pinned to the side of her upswept hair just over the ear. She’d literally caused a few gasps that day, Celeste knowing she herself had never looked that good in her life, and Katie so completely unaware of just how dazzling her beauty was. The moment Annabeth had mentioned a blue dress, Celeste knew exactly which one she wanted.

  So she’d come in here, where last night she’d seen Jimmy holding Katie’s pillow to his face, breathing her in, and she’d opened the w
indows to clear the room of the musty scent of loss. She’d found the dress zipped up in a garment bag in the back of the closet, and she’d taken it out and sat on the bed for a moment. She could hear the sounds of the avenue below—the snap of car doors shutting, the stray, fading chatter of people walking along the sidewalks, the hiss of a bus as it opened its doors at the corner of Crescent—and she looked at a photograph of Katie and her father on Katie’s nightstand. It had been taken a few years ago, Katie’s smile tight around her braces as she sat on her father’s shoulders. Jimmy held her ankles in his hands and looked into the camera with that wonderfully open smile he had, the one that could surprise you if only because so little about Jimmy seemed open, and the smile was one place where his reserve failed to reach.

  She was picking the picture up off the nightstand when she heard Dave’s voice from the pavement below: “You two again.”

  And she’d sat there, dying in increments, as she heard Dave and the policemen talk, and then heard what Sean Devine and his partner said after Dave had crossed the street to get Annabeth’s cigarettes.

  For ten or twelve horrible seconds, she almost vomited on Katie’s blue dress. Her diaphragm lurched up and down and her throat constricted, and the contents of her stomach boiled. She bent in half, trying to hold it in, and a hoarse hacking noise escaped her lips several times, but she didn’t throw up. And it passed.

  She still felt nauseous, though. Nauseous and clammy, and her brain seemed to have caught fire. It burned, something raging in there, dimming the lights, filling her sinuses and the spaces immediately behind her eyes.

  She lay back on the bed as Sean and his partner ascended the stairs, and she wished to be struck by lightning or have the ceiling cave in on her or to simply be lifted by some unknown force and tossed out the open window. All of these scenarios were preferable to the one she found herself facing now. But maybe he was merely protecting someone else, or maybe he had seen something he shouldn’t have and he’d been threatened. Maybe the police questioning him meant only that they considered him a suspect. None of this meant, beyond a doubt, that her husband had murdered Katie Marcus.

  His story about the mugger had always been a lie. She’d known that. She’d tried to hide from that knowledge several times over the last couple of days, to blot it out of her head the way a thick cloud blots out the sun. But she’d known, since the night he’d told her, that muggers don’t punch with one hand when they can stab with the other, and they didn’t use clever lines like “Your wallet or your life, bitch. I’m leaving with one of them.” And they didn’t get disarmed and beaten up by men like Dave who hadn’t been in a fight since grade school.

  If it had been Jimmy who’d come home with the same story, that would be another thing. Jimmy, slim as he was, looked like he could kill you. He looked like he knew how to fight and had simply matured past the point where violence was necessary in his life. But you could still smell danger coming from Jimmy, a capacity for destruction.

  The scent Dave gave off was of another kind. It was of a man with secrets, grimy wheels turning in a sometimes grimy head, a fantasy life going on behind his too-still eyes that no one else could enter. She had been married to Dave for eight years, and she’d always thought his secret world would eventually open for her, but it hadn’t. Dave lived up there in the world of his head far more than he lived down here in the world of everyone else, and maybe those two worlds had seeped into one another so that the darkness of Dave’s head had spilled its darkness onto the streets of East Buckingham.

  Could Dave have killed Katie?

  He’d always liked her. Hadn’t he?

  And, honestly, could Dave—her husband—be capable of murder? Of chasing the daughter of his old friend into a dark park? Of beating her and hearing her scream and plead? Of firing a gun into the back of her head?

  Why? Why would anyone do such a thing? And if you accepted that someone, in point of fact, could, was it a logical leap to assume Dave could be that person?

  Yes, she told herself, he lived in a secret world. Yes, he’d probably never be whole because of the crimes committed against him when he was a child. Yes, he’d lied about the mugger, but maybe there was a reasonable explanation for that lie.

  Like what?

  Katie was murdered in Pen Park shortly after leaving the Last Drop. Dave had claimed to have fought off a mugger in the parking lot of the same bar. He had claimed he left the mugger there, unconscious, but no one had ever found the guy. The police had mentioned something about finding blood in the parking lot, though. So, maybe Dave had been telling the truth. Maybe.

  And yet, she kept coming back to the timing of everything. Dave had told her he was at the Last Drop. Apparently, he’d lied about that to the police. Katie was murdered between two and three in the morning. Dave had walked back into the apartment at ten past three, covered in someone else’s blood and with an unconvincing story as to how it had gotten there.

  And that was the most glaring coincidence of all—Katie is murdered, Dave returns home covered in blood.

  If she wasn’t his wife, would she even question the conclusion?

  Celeste bent forward again, trying to keep her insides in and block the voice in her head that kept saying the words in a hissing whisper:

  Dave killed Katie. Jesus Christ. Dave killed Katie.

  Oh, dear God. Dave killed Katie, and I want to die.

  “SO YOU’VE DISCOUNTED Bobby and Roman as suspects?” Jimmy said.

  Sean shook his head. “Not completely. It doesn’t rule out the possibility that they hired someone.”

  Annabeth said, “But I can see it in your face, you don’t think that’s likely.”

  “No, Mrs. Marcus, we don’t.”

  Jimmy said, “So who do you suspect? Anyone?”

  Whitey and Sean looked at each other, and then Dave came into the kitchen, unwrapping the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, and handed them to Annabeth. “Here you go, Anna.”

  “Thank you.” She looked at Jimmy with a minor embarrassment in her face. “I just got the urge.”

  He smiled softly and patted her hand. “Honey, whatever you need right now is fine. It’s cool.”

  She turned to Whitey and Sean as she lit up. “I quit ten years ago.”

  “Me, too,” Sean said. “Can I bum one?”

  Annabeth laughed, the cigarette jerking between her lips, and Jimmy thought it may have been the first beautiful sound he’d heard in twenty-four hours. He saw the grin on Sean’s face as he took a cigarette from his wife, and he wanted to thank him for making her smile.

  “You’re a bad boy, Trooper Devine.” Annabeth lit his cigarette.

  Sean took a puff. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Heard it last week from the commander,” Whitey said, “if I remember right.”

  Annabeth said, “Really?” and fixed Sean in the warmth of her interest, Annabeth being one of those rare people who could invest as much effort in her listening as in her talking.

  Sean’s grin widened as Dave took a seat, and Jimmy could feel the air in the kitchen grow lighter.

  “I’m just coming off a suspension,” Sean admitted. “Yesterday was my first day back.”

  “What did you do?” Jimmy said, leaning into the table.

  Sean said, “That’s confidential.”

  “Sergeant Powers?” Annabeth said.

  “Well, Trooper Devine here—”

  Sean looked over at him. “I got stories about you, too.”

  Whitey said, “Good point. Sorry, Mrs. Marcus.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No way. Sorry.”

  “Sean,” Jimmy said, and when Sean looked over at him, Jimmy tried to convey through his eyes that this was good, this was what they needed right now. A respite. A conversation that had nothing to do with homicide or funeral homes or loss.

  Sean’s face softened until for a moment it looked like the face he’d had as an eleven-year-old, and he nodded.

 
He turned back to Annabeth and said, “I buried a guy in phantom tickets.”

  “You what?” Annabeth leaned forward, cigarette held up by her ear, eyes wide.

  Sean leaned his head back, took a drag from his cigarette, and blew it out at the ceiling. “There was this guy I didn’t like, never mind why. Anyway, once a month or so, I’d enter his license plate into the RMV database as a parking offender. I’d mix it up—one month it was parking at an expired meter, the next it was parking in a commercial zone, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, the guy goes into the system, but he doesn’t know it.”

  “Because he never got a ticket,” Annabeth said.

  “Exactly. And every twenty-one days he gets hit another five bucks for failure to pay, and then the fines keep racking up until one day he gets a summons to court.”

  Whitey said, “And finds out he owes the Commonwealth about twelve hundred dollars.”

  “Eleven hundred,” Sean said. “But yeah. He says he never got the tickets, but the court didn’t believe him. They hear that all the time. So the guy’s screwed. He’s in the computer, after all, and computers don’t lie.”

  Dave said, “This is great. You do this a lot?”

  “No!” Sean said, and Annabeth and Jimmy laughed. “No, I do not, David.”

  “Calling you ‘David’ now,” Jimmy said. “Watch out.”

  “I did it this one time to this one guy.”

  “So, how’d you get caught?”

  “Guy’s aunt worked in the RMV,” Whitey said. “You believe that?”

  “No,” Annabeth said.

  Sean nodded. “Who knew? The guy paid the fines, but then he put his aunt on it and she traced it back to my barracks, and since I had a previous history with the gentleman in question, it was easy for the commander to add motive to opportunity and narrow down the suspects, so I got bagged.”

  “Exactly how much shit,” Jimmy said, “did you have to eat over this?”

  “Bags of it,” Sean admitted, and this time all four of them laughed. “Big, huge, trash-can-size bags.” Sean caught the glee in Jimmy’s eyes and started laughing himself.