Dennis Lehane

by Mystic River (v5)

  “He might start, we leave him alone to think.”

  Whitey looked back at the door like he wanted to burn it down. “Maybe.”

  “I think it’s the gun,” Sean said. “We bust this open on that gun.”

  Whitey chewed the inside of his mouth and eventually nodded. “It’d be nice to know more about the gun. You want to take that?”

  “Same guy still own the liquor store?”

  Whitey said, “I don’t know. The case file was from ’eighty-two, but the owner then was a Lowell Looney.”

  Sean smiled at the name. “Has a ring to it, don’t it?”

  Whitey said, “Why don’t you take a ride over? I’ll watch fuckhead in there through the glass, see if he starts singing songs about dead girls in the park.”

  LOWELL LOONEY was about eighty years old and looked like he could beat Sean in a hundred-yard dash. He wore an orange T-shirt from Porter’s Gym over blue sweats with white piping and spanking-new Reeboks, and he moved around like he’d jump for the highest bottle behind the counter if you asked him to.

  “Right there,” he said to Sean, pointing at a row of half-pint bottles behind the counter. “Went in through a bottle and stuck right in that wall there.”

  Sean said, “Scary, huh?”

  The old man shrugged. “Scarier than a glass of milk, maybe. Not as scary as some nights around here, though. Some wacko kid put a shotgun in my face ten years ago, had that crazed-dog look in his eyes, kept blinking at the sweat? That was scary, son. The guys who put the bullet in the wall, though, they were pros. Pros I can deal with. They just want the money, they ain’t pissed at the world.”

  “So these two guys…?”

  “Come in the back,” Lowell Looney said, zipping down to the other end of the counter where a black curtain hung over the storeroom. “There’s a door back there leads to the loading dock. I had a kid working part-time for me back then who’d dump the trash, smoke himself a little weed while he was out there. Half the time he’d forget to lock the door when he come back in. Either he was in on it or they watched him enough times to know he was brain-dead. That night, they came in through the unlocked door, fired off the warning round to keep me from reaching for my own gun, and took what they came for.”

  “How much they hit you for?”

  “Six grand.”

  Sean said, “That’s a chunk of change.”

  “Thursdays,” Lowell said, “I used to cash checks. I don’t anymore, but back then I was stupid. ’Course, if the thieves had been a little brighter, they would have hit me in the morning before a lot of those checks were cashed.” He shrugged. “I said they were pros, just not the smartest pros around, I guess.”

  “This kid who left the door open,” Sean said.

  “Marvin Ellis,” Lowell said. “Hell, maybe he was involved. I fired him the next day. Thing is, the only reason they would have fired that shot was because they knew I kept a piece under the counter. And it wasn’t like that was common knowledge, so it was either Marvin who told ’em, or one of them two used to work here.”

  “And you told the police that at the time?”

  “Oh, sure.” The old guy waved his hand at the memory. “They went through my old records, questioned everyone who used to work for me. So they said, anyway. They never arrested no one. You say the same gun was used in another crime?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said. “Mr. Looney—”

  “Lowell, for Christ’s sake, please.”

  “Lowell,” Sean said, “you still got those employment records?”

  DAVE STARED at the mirrored glass in the interrogation room knowing that Sean’s partner, and maybe Sean, too, stared back at him.

  Good.

  How’s it going? I’m enjoying this Sprite myself. What’s it they put in the stuff? Limon. That’s right. I’m enjoying my limon, Sergeant. Mmm-mmm good. Yes siree. Can’t wait to get me another can of this.

  Dave stared straight into the center of the mirror from the other side of the long table and he felt great. True, he didn’t know where Celeste had gone with Michael, and a dread came with the ignorance that polluted his brain far more than the fifteen or so beers he’d downed last night. But she’d come back. He seemed to remember he might have scared her last night. He definitely hadn’t made much sense, going on about vampires and things that went in you not being able to come back out, so maybe she’d gotten a little spooked.

  Couldn’t say he blamed her. It was really his fault allowing the Boy to take over like that and show his ugly, feral face.

  But outside of Celeste and Michael being gone, he felt strong. He felt none of the indecision he’d felt over the last few days. Hell, he’d even managed to sleep six hours last night. He woke feeling stale and woolen-mouthed, his skull weighted down by granite, yet somehow clear.

  He knew who he was. And he knew he’d done right. And killing someone (and Dave couldn’t blame it on the Boy anymore; it was him, Dave—he’d done the killing) had empowered him now that he’d gotten his head around it. He’d heard somewhere of ancient cultures that used to eat the hearts of the people they murdered. They ate the hearts, and the dead were subsumed into them. It gave them power, the power of two, the spirit of two. Dave felt that way. No, he hadn’t eaten anyone’s heart. He wasn’t that fucked in the head. But he had felt the glory of the predator. He had murdered. And he had done right. And he had stilled the monster inside of him, the freak who longed to touch a young boy’s hand and melt into his embrace.

  That freak was fucking gone now, man. Gone down to hell with Dave’s victim. In killing someone, he’d killed that weak part of himself, that freak who had lain in him since he was eleven years old, standing in his window, looking down at the party they were throwing on Rester Street in honor of his return. He’d felt so weak, so exposed at that party. He’d felt people were secretly laughing at him, parents smiling at him with the fakest smiles, and he could see behind their public faces that they privately pitied him and feared him and hated him, and he’d had to leave the party just to escape that hate because it made him feel like a puddle of piss.

  But now another’s hate would make him strong, because now he had another secret that was better than his old, sorry secret, the one that most people seemed to guess anyway. Now, he had a secret that made him tall, not small.

  Come close, he’d feel like saying to people now, I’ve got a secret. Closer, and I’ll whisper it in your ear:

  I’ve killed someone.

  Dave locked his eyes on the fat cop behind the mirror:

  I’ve killed someone. And you can’t prove it.

  Who’s weak now?

  SEAN FOUND WHITEY in the office on the other side of the two-way mirror overlooking Interview Room C. Whitey stood there, one foot planted on the seat of a torn leather chair, looking in at Dave and sipping coffee.

  “You do the lineup?”

  “Not yet,” Whitey said.

  Sean came up beside him. Dave was looking directly back at them, seemed almost to be locking eyes with Whitey as if he could see him. And, even weirder, Dave was smiling. It was a small smile, but it was there.

  Sean said, “Feeling bad, huh?”

  Whitey looked over at him. “I’ve felt better.”

  Sean nodded.

  Whitey pointed his coffee cup at him. “You’ve got something. I can tell, prick. Give it up.”

  Sean wanted to draw it out a little longer, drive Whitey a little nuts with the waiting, but in the end he didn’t have the heart.

  “I got someone interesting who used to work at Looney Liquors.”

  Whitey placed his coffee cup on the table behind him and took his foot off the chair. “Who?”

  “Ray Harris.”

  “Ray…?”

  Sean felt his grin break wide across his face. “Brendan Harris’s father, Sarge. And he’s got a rap sheet.”

  23

  LITTLE VINCE

  WHITEY SAT UP on the empty desk across from Sean’s own with the probation
report open in his hand. “Raymond Matthew Harris—born September the sixth, 1955. Grew up on Twelve Mayhew Street in the East Bucky Flats. Mother, Delores, a housewife. Father, Seamus, a laborer who left the family in 1967. Predictable shit follows as the father is arrested on petty larceny in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1973. Bunch of DUIs and D and D’s follow. Father dies of a coronary in Bridgeport, 1979. Same year, Raymond marries Esther Scannell—that lucky bastard—and takes a job working for the MBTA as a subway car operator. First child, Brendan Seamus, born 1981. Late the same year, Raymond indicted in a scam to embezzle twenty thousand dollars in subway tokens. Charges ultimately dismissed, but Raymond is fired for cause from the MBTA. Works odd jobs after that—day laborer on a home improvement crew, stock clerk at Looney Liquors, bartender, forklift operator. Lost the forklift operator job over the disappearance of some petty cash. Again, charges filed, then dropped, Raymond gets fired. Questioned in the 1982 robbery of Looney Liquors, released on lack of evidence. Questioned in the robbery, same year, of Blanchard Liquors in Middlesex County; once again, released on lack of evidence.”

  “Beginning to become known, though,” Sean said.

  “He’s getting popular,” Whitey agreed. “A known associate, one Edmund Reese, fingers Raymond in the 1983 heist of a rare comic book collection from a dealer in—”

  “Fucking comic books?” Sean laughed. “You go, Raymond.”

  “A hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of comic books,” Whitey said.

  “Oh, excuse me.”

  “Raymond returns said literature unharmed and is given four months, a year suspended, two months time served. Comes out of prison apparently with a wee bit of a chemical dependency problem.”

  “My, my.”

  “Cocaine, of course, this being the eighties, and that’s where the rap sheet grows. Somehow Raymond’s smart enough to keep whatever it is he’s doing to pay for the cocaine under the radar, but not so smart he doesn’t get picked up in his attempts to procure said narcotic. Violates his parole, does a year solid inside.”

  “Where he learns the error of his ways.”

  “Apparently not. Picked up by a joint Major Crime Unit/FBI sting for trafficking stolen goods across state lines. You’re going to love this. Guess what Raymond stole. Think 1984 now.”

  “No hints?”

  “Go with your first instinct.”

  “Cameras.”

  Whitey shot him a look. “Fucking cameras. Go get me some coffee, you’re not a cop anymore.”

  “What then?”

  “Trivial Pursuit,” Whitey said. “Never saw that one coming, did you?”

  “Comic books and Trivial Pursuit. Our boy’s got style.”

  “He’s got a shitload of grief, too. He stole the truck in Rhode Island, drove it into Massachusetts.”

  “Hence the federal interstate rap.”

  “Hence,” Whitey said, shooting Sean another look. “They’ve got his balls, basically, but he does no time.”

  Sean sat up a bit, took his feet off his desk. “He rolled on someone?”

  “Looks that way,” Whitey said. “After that, nothing else on the rap sheet. Raymond’s probie notes that Raymond is dutiful in appearing for his appointments until he’s released from probation in late eighty-six. His employment records?” Whitey looked over the file at Sean.

  Sean said, “Oh, I can talk now?” He opened his own file. “Employment records, IRS records, social security payments—everything comes to a dead halt in August of 1987. Poof, he disappears.”

  “You check nationally?”

  “The request is being processed as we speak, good sir.”

  “What are our possibilities?”

  Sean propped the soles of his shoes up on his desk again and leaned back in his chair. “One, he’s dead. Two, he’s in Witness Protection. Three, he went deep, deep, deep underground and just popped back into the neighborhood to pick up his gun and shoot his son’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend.”

  Whitey tossed his file down onto the empty desk. “We don’t even know if it’s his gun. We don’t know shit. What are we doing here, Devine?”

  “We’re getting up for the dance, Sarge. Come on. Don’t gas out on me this early. We got a guy who was a prime suspect in a robbery eighteen years ago during which the murder weapon was used. Guy’s son dated the victim. Guy has a rap sheet. I want to look at him and I want to look at the son. You know, the one with no alibi.”

  “Who passed a poly and who you and I agreed didn’t have the stuff necessary to do this.”

  “Maybe we were wrong.”

  Whitey rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Man, I’m sick of being wrong.”

  “So you’re saying you were wrong about Boyle?”

  Whitey’s hands remained over his eyes as he shook his head. “Ain’t saying that at all. I still think the guy’s a piece of shit, but whether I can tie him to Katherine Marcus’s death is another matter.” He lowered his hands, the puffy flesh under his eyes ringed red now. “But this Raymond Harris angle doesn’t look too promising, either. Okay, we take another run at the son. Fine. And we try to track down the father. But then what?”

  “We tie somebody to that gun,” Sean said.

  “Gun could be in the fucking ocean by now. I know that’s what I’d do with it.”

  Sean tipped his head toward him. “You would’ve done that after you held up a liquor store eighteen years ago, though, too.”

  “True.”

  “Our guy didn’t. Which means…”

  “He ain’t as bright as me,” Whitey said.

  “Or me.”

  “Jury’s still out there.”

  Sean stretched in his chair, locking his fingers and raising his arms above his head, pushing toward the ceiling until he could feel the muscles stretch. He let loose a shudder of a yawn, and brought his head and hands back down. “Whitey,” he said, trying to hold back as long as possible on the question he’d known he’d have to ask all morning.

  “What’s up?”

  “Anything in your file on known associates?”

  Whitey lifted the file off the desk and flipped it open, turned the first few pages over. “‘Known criminal associates,’” he read, “‘Reginald (aka Reggie Duke) Neil, Patrick Moraghan, Kevin “Whackjob” Sirracci, Nicholas Savage’—hmm—‘Anthony Waxman…’” He looked up at Sean, and Sean knew it was there. “‘James Marcus,’” Whitey said, “‘aka “Jimmy Flats,” reputed leader of a criminal crew sometimes called the Rester Street Boys.’” Whitey closed the file.

  Sean said, “And the hits just keep on coming, don’t they?”

  THE HEADSTONE Jimmy picked was simple and white. The salesman spoke in a low, respectful voice, as if he’d rather be anyplace but here, and yet he kept trying to nudge Jimmy toward more expensive stones, ones with angels and cherubs or roses engraved in the marble. “Maybe a Celtic cross,” the salesman said, “a choice that’s quite popular with…”

  Jimmy waited for him to say “your people,” but the salesman caught himself and finished with “…an awful lot of people these days.”

  Jimmy would have forked over the money for a mausoleum if he thought it would make Katie happy, but he knew his daughter had never been a fan of ostentation or overadornment. She’d worn simple clothes and simple jewelry, no gold, and she’d rarely used makeup unless it was a special occasion. Katie had liked things clean, with just a subtle hint of style, and that’s why Jimmy chose the white and ordered the engraving in the calligraphic script, the salesman warning him that the latter choice would double the engraver’s cost, and Jimmy turning his head to look down at the little vulture, backing him up a few feet as he said, “Cash or check?”

  Jimmy had asked Val to drive him over, and when he left the office, he got back in the passenger seat of Val’s Mitsubishi 3000 GT, Jimmy wondering for probably the tenth time how a guy in his mid-thirties could drive a car like this and not think he looked anything but silly.

  “Where t
o next, Jim?”

  “Let’s get some coffee.”

  Val usually had some sort of bullshit rap music blaring from his speakers, the bass throbbing behind tinted windows as some middle-class black kid or white-trash wannabe sang about bitches and hos and whipping out his gat and made what Jimmy assumed were topical references to all these MTV pussies Jimmy would never have known of if he hadn’t overheard Katie using their names on the phone with her girlfriends. Val kept his stereo off this morning, though, and Jimmy was grateful. Jimmy hated rap and not because it was black and from the ghetto—hell, that’s where P-Funk and soul and a lotta kick-ass blues had come from—but because he couldn’t for the life of him see any talent in it. You strung a bunch of limericks together of the “Man from Nantucket” variety, had a DJ scratch a few records back and forth, and threw out your chest as you spoke into a microphone. Oh, yeah, it was raw, it was street, it was the truth, motherfucker. So was pissing your name in the snow and vomiting. He’d heard some moron music critic on the radio say once that sampling was an “art form” and Jimmy, who didn’t know much about art, wanted to reach through the speaker and bitch-slap the obviously white, obviously overeducated, obviously dickless pinhead. If sampling was an art form, then most of the thieves Jimmy had known growing up were artists, too. Probably be news to them.

  Maybe he was just getting old. He knew it was always a first sign that your generation had passed the torch of relevancy if it couldn’t understand the music of the younger one. Still, deep in his heart, he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Rap just sucked, plain and simple, and Val listening to it was a lot like Val driving this car, trying to hold on to something that had never been all that worthwhile in the first place.

  They stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and tossed their lids in the trash on the way out the door, sipped their coffee leaning against the spoiler attached to the trunk of the sports car.

  Val said, “We went out last night, asked around like you said.”

  Jimmy tapped his fist into Val’s. “Thanks, man.”