Her mother stood in front of the door, her arms crossed, blocking Maureen’s exit. She looked like Molly from the night before, if Molly was tiny and fragile. God, Maureen thought, Mom’s barely my size. She does look scary, though.
“Where are you going?” Amber asked. “What’s going on?”
“Ma, I gotta go.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I know you’re up to something. Mothers can tell.”
“The landlord called,” Maureen said. “The building is habitable again.”
“Oh, please,” Amber said. “You didn’t think I believed that crapola.”
Maureen threw her bag over her shoulder. She raised up to her full five-four, eye to eye with Amber. “Please move, Ma.”
“It’s not right,” Amber said. “I never hear from you, and then you treat my house like you’re a crook and this is some convenient hideout. When are you coming back?”
“Don’t worry about it, Ma.”
“Then don’t make me, Maureen,” Amber said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you didn’t answer my question. That’s never worked. Didn’t for your father, doesn’t for you.”
Bringing up Dad isn’t gonna work this time, either, Maureen thought. She took her mom by the shoulders and eased her to the side. She reached for the doorknob, stopped, turned, and grabbed Amber in a hug.
“It’s all right, Ma. Don’t worry. I got some things I gotta do, some errands to run. I’ll call you later. I promise. I’m a big girl, remember?”
Amber stood aside, stepping under the dusty picture of William Coughlin. “Do me one favor, then.”
Maureen opened the door and waited.
“Throw that dumb lawn sign in the trash,” Amber said. “Gloria comes asking, I’ll tell her it was stolen.”
“You got it, Ma.”
Outside, the empty street did nothing to settle the butterflies in Maureen’s stomach. The cardboard campaign sign stuck in her mother’s lawn bent over backward in the winter breeze. She strode to the end of the walk, looking around, shoulders set, head high, and yanked the red-white-and-blue sign from its wire frame. It was cheap and she tore it up easily, first in half and then into quarters. Walking up the driveway to the trash can, the pieces of the sign tucked under one arm, the wire stand in her other hand, she caught herself hoping someone was watching. So they could see she wasn’t afraid.
She knew Amber stood staring at the front door, willing her daughter back into the house. Maureen could feel it. She also knew her mom was too proud to open the door and ask her to come back. But hiding out wasn’t doing anyone any good. She couldn’t wait around any longer for Waters. And she had to stop thinking of Sebastian as a specter and remember he was a human being. She had to think of him as a man, as a pushy customer at the bar, even. He had a weak point somewhere, a raw nerve she could tug. She just had to find it. She thought of Dr. Travis. One red hair had blown his shit to smithereens. She had a lot more than that on Sebastian. Someone in his world would react to it. She just had to find someone to listen to her. If not the press, maybe his wife?
She surveyed her mom’s dead-end street. Homes as stunted and plain as the lifeless maples along the Bay Street promenade lined both sides of the block. Empty driveways spread wide in front of their two-car garages. All the houses had the same blank windows, dead lawns, flat concrete stoops, and fake gas-lamp porch lights. It’s a wonder, Maureen thought, considering the many times she’d come home drunk in high school, that she hadn’t rung the wrong doorbell at least once. Maybe she had. She had a brief image of her father making that mistake, of him walking through the wrong door, out of her life, and into another only a few yards away.
Maureen realized that Bovanizer Street, made up of small raised ranch homes wrapped in pale white, yellow, or blue vinyl siding, resembled the product of a kindergarten art project, one where each kid gets the same photocopied page from the coloring book and the whole class shares a single box of six broken crayons, the kind of project where students are rewarded for how closely their work mimics that of their neighbor. The washed-out sameness of everything, Maureen felt, caused the entire block, the whole neighborhood, really, to pulse with an emptiness that hurt her eyes, that she would’ve associated with standing in the desert or looking out over the black surface of the ocean at night. She smiled to herself. She felt marooned in a ghost town, or maybe adrift alone in a lifeboat. I grew up here, she thought. How is it possible I feel this alone?
Past the houses, the street ended at a battered guardrail split by a green post that hadn’t worn a dead-end sign in Maureen’s lifetime. Back through the charcoal-colored trees, on the other side of a chain-link fence topped with loops of barbed wire, ran the train tracks. Maureen figured if she really had to move without being seen, she could walk the tracks. That was one way to dodge Sebastian’s watchful eyes, as long as she could dodge the oncoming trains. Shouldn’t be hard. The tracks always started humming way ahead of the train. The tracks led from one end of the island to the other. She could pop back out into the world wherever she wanted and disappear just as quick. Like a phantom. Or, she thought, a hobo.
Ten miles. About ten miles along the rails from where she stood, Dennis’s blood had stained the railroad ties. Walk the tracks. Yeah, right.
Raising her collar up against the weather, Maureen turned her back to the tracks. She jumped a crack in the sidewalk and headed for Amboy Road. She’d walk for a while, think of a plan. Follow Amboy to Richmond—those streets were full of traffic and people—and find a diner or a bar where she could get some sugar and some caffeine in her system. Someplace with a recent phone book. And after that a place with a computer. That was really what she needed, a computer. She’d been a college student three or four different times. She knew how to do research.
15
At the Golden Dove, Maureen sat at the counter, hunched over her third hot chocolate, letting the steam rise into her cheeks and forehead, her face sheltered on both sides by her hair. Her bag sat between her feet. She knew she should order something to eat, should pay rent on the counter space. But lunch was over and the counter had seats to spare. The waitress didn’t seem to mind. If the place got busy again, maybe she’d order something to go. She wasn’t sure where she’d take it, though. Maureen considered revealing that she was in the business, that she was a big tipper. But, being in the business, she also knew the verbal tip was death. She might want another hot chocolate.
While walking along Richmond Avenue on her way to the diner, passing under the Eltingville station as a train roared by overhead, Maureen had stumbled upon one of Sebastian’s campaign offices. She hadn’t even known it was there. A small storefront tucked in between a busy Chinese takeout and a dry cleaner’s, its floor-to-ceiling windows were plastered with campaign posters. Maureen stood there, frozen for a moment under the gazes of three dozen silver-haired Sebastians. His strangely unlined faces, their seventy-two ash-gray eyes hovering over high pink cheekbones, smiled regally out at the neighborhood. All those faces gave Maureen the same skin-crawly feeling she got as a kid watching ants swarm over a lollipop melted on the sidewalk.
She stepped to the storefront glass, peeking around the posters for a look inside the office. No one was in there. A couple of long folding tables like the ones in the catering hall at work sat surrounded by folding chairs. More posters and yard signs sat stacked around the room. She tried the door and found it locked. Shading her eyes, she peeked in again. Dark and dusty, empty in the middle of a weekday, the office didn’t look like anyplace the man himself had actually been. It looked left over from a long-ago election or one coming up, she thought, that everyone knew was a foregone conclusion.
She walked away from the building feeling the stares of the posters boring holes in her back, the faces following her with their eyes like portraits hung on the walls of a haunted house. She’d kept a quick pace all the way to the Dove, fighting the urge to look back over her shoulder.
At the diner counter, sliding her
mug aside, she reread the list of names and numbers she’d copied out of the Golden Dove’s phone book onto a napkin. Security companies. Four of them, any one of which could be Sebastian’s. He was vain, but not enough to put his name on his business. Looking through the listings, Maureen had realized she didn’t know him well enough to make a reasonable guess at which one might be his. Could be North Shore, could be South Shore, could be both or neither. She hadn’t been surprised to find his home number unlisted. The campaign offices weren’t in the book.
She folded the napkin and slipped it into her coat pocket. She wished she’d taken a look at that envelope Gloria had given her mom. That might have something useful in it. Could she get her hands on it if she went back there? Her resources, Maureen decided, were too primitive. Too bad she wasn’t a cop. Files, records, friends to do her favors. She could really do some damage then, though the cops had been a fat lot of help so far.
Maybe she had panicked at her mother’s house and confused the feeling with bravery. Talking to the cops had knocked her even more off balance. Could be that going after Sebastian wasn’t her best option. What about blowback, repercussions? He might hit at her through her mom, or through someone else, though she couldn’t figure who that someone else could be. Her other option was continuing to run. That was always what she chose, running. Plenty of boys and bosses out there could attest to it. Her first, most powerful instinct. Maybe it was genetic and she was just her father’s daughter.
Maureen felt in her pocket for her phone. She’d told the cops she wasn’t in trouble. Could she call back with a different story and expect them to listen? Who else could she call? John? Maybe not. Molly had a point. Maureen had no right dragging John into her troubles. What was he gonna do anyway, beat up Sebastian? Give Maureen a plane ticket? Hey, John, you hardly know me and your girl doesn’t like me, but I couldn’t lay off the coke the other night and now I got big problems. Can you help a sister out? Yeah, that would work. Maureen ground her palms into her eyes, setting off shooting stars.
Stop. Relax and think. Show some spine and call the cops back.
Somebody big and heavy walked in and sat on the neighboring stool. Maureen’s gut went so tight that her toes curled inside her boots. She gripped her phone in her fist. She kept her eyes locked on the brown sludge at the bottom of her mug. Don’t scream, not yet. The man beside her breathed heavily though his nose. Maureen could smell it, the maleness of him: a locker room, a stuffy closet, an old car with the windows rolled up. She held her breath. Not Sebastian. He didn’t smell like that. The big man shifted in his seat, a hair farther into Maureen’s space.
“You’re a hard woman to keep track of,” he said.
Maureen slid her eyes sideways, looked at Waters through her hair. “You seem to manage it okay.”
“You don’t make it easy. Answering your phone would help.”
Maureen opened her phone, confused. When had she turned it off? She pressed the power button. The phone wasn’t off; the battery was dead. Good thing she had a list of phone numbers in her pocket. C’mon, Maureen, she thought, help yourself out here.
“It’s cold out,” Waters said. “You’re on foot. I got to your mom’s not long after you left.” Waters shrugged. “Detective. Kinda my job.”
“My dad used to take us here,” Maureen said, setting the useless phone on the counter. “He loved the waffles.”
“Your mom told me that.” A small smile. “Those waffles are good.” He patted his gut. “Especially at three in the morning, piled high with ice cream.” He nodded as the waitress set his coffee on the counter. “This place is a favorite of mine, too.”
Maureen waited for Waters to ask what she had called about, to ask why she had left her mom’s house. Instead, he sat there sipping his coffee as if they were two old friends gearing up for a long, lazy afternoon of checkers in the park. Then she realized why Waters wasn’t asking questions; he already knew the answers. “I take it my mom mentioned our special guest over at the house this morning.”
“She’s worried about you,” Waters said.
“What else is new?”
“You blame her? You show up late at night trailing a politician who’s got a cop trailing him. That’s enough to worry anyone.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“More of the truth than you did, apparently,” Waters said. “That there was an incident at the bar, a death after a campaign dinner for Sebastian. That I wanted to talk to you about it, among other people from the Narrows.” He paused, as if waiting for Maureen to fill in the space. “Other people such as your friend Tanya.”
Straightening in her seat, Maureen licked her lips. “Yeah, about that.” She took a deep breath. “My mom’s house was the second time I saw Frank Sebastian this morning.”
Waters’s head rotated slowly in Maureen’s direction, his coffee mug frozen halfway to his mouth. He had tensed at her statement, like a watchdog stilled by a sound in the distance. He was trying to hide it.
“I saw him at Dennis’s place,” Maureen said, “when I met Tanya there.”
“Interesting.” Waters wiped his big hand down his face, trying to erase, Maureen could tell, the anger from it. He took a long moment deciding which fact to address first.
“Start at the beginning,” he said, “or the middle, or start at the end and go backward. Just do me a favor and try to point out the truth on your way past it.”
“Tanya said she had to get some things,” Maureen said, “that she’d left behind at the apartment. She’d been involved with Dennis. She told me last night she was afraid to go alone, so I agreed to go with her. We made a deal. It was how I got her to agree to talk to you.”
“Which hasn’t happened,” Waters said. “So much for your deal.”
“I tried calling you all morning and couldn’t get an answer.”
“But I got your messages,” Waters said. “She hasn’t called me. I would know.” He leaned closer to Maureen. “Would you know why she hasn’t called?”
“She’s with Sebastian. She set me up. He was waiting for me at Dennis’s place.” She swallowed hard. “He tried to force me inside the apartment.”
“What happened?”
“I wouldn’t go in, obviously,” Maureen said, “so he came out after me. But then Dennis’s brother showed up and Sebastian backed down.” She noticed Waters hadn’t taken out his notepad. “Shouldn’t you be writing this down? Isn’t this important?”
“I’m not gonna forget a thing. Trust me.”
“Sebastian says he knows you,” Maureen said. “He didn’t seem very afraid of you—or any other cop.”
“He doesn’t know me as well as he thinks,” Waters said. He knocked back the rest of his coffee.
“You told me,” Maureen said, “that you guys didn’t know each other at all.”
“That’s not true. I never said I didn’t know him. I do, or I did, a long time ago, before he left the job. What I told you is that he and I are not friends. And that’s true. We’re not.”
“Were you?”
Waters hesitated. “Hard to say. We worked together, briefly. We never socialized much. I promise you, Maureen, that you are safe with me. Whatever connection he and I had was broken a long time ago. For good.”
“Because of what happened in Brooklyn?”
“He told you about Brooklyn. Wow.” Waters wrinkled his nose, looked away from her, considering, Maureen could tell, how much more to say on the subject. He looked into her face for a long moment and decided they’d already said enough. “I need you to tell me what you and Tanya talked about last night.”
Maureen dropped her eyes to the counter. She couldn’t believe it; she’d done exactly what Sebastian had told her. Why? What was she thinking? It was pretty obvious that he didn’t have her best interests at heart. There was no question, judging from Waters’s reaction, that something big had gone down in Brooklyn. What that was, Maureen was dying to know. At least, according to Tanya, Sebastian had left the
department a hero. Had Waters been the story’s villain? Of course, Tanya wasn’t exactly a reliable source of anything but grief.
“So we’re not gonna talk about Brooklyn,” Maureen said. “I should just believe whatever Sebastian told me?”
“This is some kind of quid pro quo? Because I’m the one helping you here. I don’t really see what you have to offer.”
“I’d feel better if we could put it to rest.” She smiled. “Just point at the truth when you pass it.”
“It’s not half as interesting as you think,” Waters said. “He and I worked vice together in North Brooklyn. The precinct was restructured, and our squad got busted up. He took early retirement; I moved to homicide and over to the island. Case closed.”
Maureen waited for him to say something about the pun. He didn’t. Waters’s sense of humor wasn’t the first thing you noticed about him. Or the second. Or the third. She wondered if he had always been that way. So serious.
“Can we get back to the matter at hand?” Waters asked. “Namely, what Sebastian and Tanya were doing at Dennis’s house?”
“Dennis owed Sebastian money,” Maureen said. “He and Tanya were working off the debt on film, if you catch my meaning. The camera was at Dennis’s place. Tanya told me she wanted to get the camera and erase the videos before Sebastian got them. That’s why I met her there.”
The Devil She Knows Page 16