Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  “Stable?” Broussard stepped over to the table. “Are you telling us you exploited Helene McCready for the purposes of prostitution, Cheese Whiz?”

  Cheese leaned forward and laughed. “P-p-p-purposes of p-p-p-prostitution. Dang, that’s got a nice ring to it, don’t it now? Form myself a band, call it Purposes of Prostitution, pack the clubs like a motherfucker.”

  Broussard flicked his wrist and hit Cheese Olamon in the center of the nose with the back of his hand. It wasn’t a love tap, either. Cheese got his hands up to his nose and blood immediately seeped through the fingers, and Broussard stepped between the big man’s open legs and grabbed his right ear in his hand, squeezed until I heard cartilage rattle.

  “Listen to me, mutt. You listening?”

  Cheese made a noise that sounded like an affirmative.

  “I don’t give a fuck about Helene McCready and whether you turned her out on Easter Sunday to a roomful of priests. I don’t care about your bullshit scag deals and the street you’re still running from behind these walls. I care about Amanda McCready.” He leaned into the ear, twisted his vise-grip hold. “You hear that name? Amanda McCready. And if you don’t tell me where she is, you Richard Roundtree-wannabe piece of shit, I’m going to get the names of the four biggest black-buck cons who hate your dumb ass and make sure they spend a night with you in solitary with nothing but their dicks and a Zippo. You following this or should I hit you again?”

  He let go of Cheese’s ear and stepped back.

  Sweat had darkened Cheese’s hair, and the thick rattle he made behind his cupped hands was the same one he’d made as a kid between coughing attacks, often just before he vomited.

  Broussard flourished a hand in Cheese’s direction and looked over at me. “Judgment,” he said, and wiped the hand on his pants.

  Cheese dropped his hands from his nose and leaned back on the picnic bench as blood trickled over his upper lip and into his mouth. He took several deep breaths, his eyes never leaving Broussard.

  The guards in the towers looked off into the sky. The two guards manning the gates studied their shoes as if they’d each received a new pair that morning.

  I could hear a distant clank of steel as someone worked out with weights inside the prison walls. A tiny bird swooped across the visitors’ yard. It was so small and moved so fast, I couldn’t even tell what color it was before it shot up the wall and over the cyclone wire, disappeared from view.

  Broussard stood back from the bench, his feet spread, staring at Cheese, his gaze so devoid of emotion or life he could have been studying tree bark. This was another Broussard, one I hadn’t met before.

  As fellow investigators, Angie and I had been treated by Broussard with professional respect and even a bit of charm. I’m sure that’s the Broussard most people knew—the handsome, articulate detective with flawless grooming and a movie star’s smile. But in Concord Prison, I was seeing the street cop, the alley brawler, the interrogation-by-nightstick Broussard. As he leveled his dark gaze at Cheese, I saw the righteous, win-at-all-costs menace of a guerrilla fighter, a jungle warrior.

  Cheese spit a thick mix of phlegm and blood onto the grass.

  “Yo, Mark Fuhrman,” he said, “kiss my black ass.”

  Broussard lunged for him, and Poole caught the back of his partner’s jacket as Cheese scrambled backward and swung his huge body off the picnic table.

  “These are some sorry-ass crackers you hanging with, Patrick.”

  “Hey, mutt!” Broussard shouted. “You remember me that night in solitary! You got it?”

  “Got a picture of your wife doing it with a pile of dwarfs in my cell,” Cheese said. “That’s what I got. Want to come look?”

  Broussard made another lunge, and Poole wrapped his arms around his partner’s chest, lifted the bigger man off his feet, and pivoted away from the bench.

  Cheese headed for the prisoners’ gate and I trotted to catch up.

  “Cheese.”

  He looked back over his shoulder, kept walking.

  “Cheese, for Christ’s sake, she’s four years old.”

  Cheese kept walking. “I’m real sorry about that. Tell the man he need to work on his social skills.”

  The guard stopped me at the gate as Cheese passed through. The guard had mirrored sunglasses, and I could see my funhouse reflection in each eye as he pushed me back. Two little shimmering versions of me, the same goofy, dismayed look in each face.

  “Come on, Cheese. Come on, man.”

  Cheese turned back to the fence, put his fingers through the rungs, stared at me for a long time.

  “I can’t help you, Patrick. Okay?”

  I gestured over my shoulder at Poole and Broussard. “Their deal was real.”

  Cheese shook his head slowly. “Shit, Patrick. Cops are like cons, man. Motherfuckers always got an angle.”

  “They’ll come back with an army, Cheese. You know how this works. They’re working a red ball and they’re pissed.”

  “And I don’t know shit.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He smiled broadly, the blood beginning to clot and thicken on his upper lip. “Prove it,” he said, and turned away, walked along the pebbled path that led across a short lawn and back into the prison.

  I walked back past Broussard and Poole on my way to the visitors’ gate.

  “Nice judgment,” I said. “Picture-fucking-perfect.”

  13

  Broussard caught up with me as we made our way down the corridor toward the sign-in desk. His hand gripped my elbow from behind and turned me toward him.

  “Problem with my method, Mr. Kenzie?”

  “Fucking method?” I pulled my arm out of his grasp. “That what you call what you did back there?”

  Poole and the guard reached us, and Poole said, “Not here, gentlemen. There are appearances to maintain.”

  Poole steered us both down the corridor and through the metal detectors and the last remaining gate. Our weapons were returned to us by a sergeant with hair plugs springing from the top of his head in tiny, tightly wrapped bundles, and then we walked out into the parking lot.

  Broussard started in as soon as our shoes hit gravel. “How much bullshit were you willing to swallow from that slug, Mr. Kenzie? Huh?”

  “Whatever it took to—”

  “Maybe you’d like to go back in, talk about dog suicides and—”

  “—get a fucking deal, Detective Broussard! That’s what I—”

  “—how much you’re down with your man Cheese.”

  “Gentlemen.” Poole stepped in between us.

  The echo of our voices was raw in that parking lot, and our faces were red from shouting. The tendons in Broussard’s neck bulged like lines of rope stretched taut, and I could feel adrenaline shake my blood.

  “My methods were sound,” Broussard said.

  “Your methods,” I said, “sucked.”

  Poole put a hand on Broussard’s chest. Broussard looked down at it and kept his eyes there for a bit, his jaw muscles rolling up under the flesh.

  I walked across the parking lot, felt the adrenaline turning to jelly in my calves, the gravel crunching underfoot, heard the sharp cry of a bird slicing through the air from the direction of Walden Pond, saw the sun soften and spread against the tree trunks as it died. I leaned against the back of the Taurus, placed a foot up on the bumper. Poole still had a hand on Broussard’s chest, was talking to him, his lips close to the younger man’s ear.

  All the shouting aside, my temper hadn’t really shown itself yet. If I’m truly angry, if that switch in my head has been tripped, my voice rides a flat line, becomes dead and monotonous, and a red marble of light drills through my skull and blots out all fear, all reason, all empathy. And the hotter the red marble glows, the colder my blood chills, until it’s the blue of fine metal, and the monotone becomes a whisper.

  That whisper—rarely with any warning to myself or anyone else—is then broken by the lash of my hand, the kick of my foot,
the fury of muscle extending in an instant from that pool of red marble and ice-metal blood.

  It is my father’s temper.

  So even before I was aware I had it, I knew its character. I’d felt its hand.

  The crucial difference between my father and me—I hope—has always been a matter of action. He acted on his anger, whenever and wherever it beset him. His temper ruled him the way alcohol or pride or vanity rules other men.

  At a very early age, just as the child of an alcoholic swears he’ll never drink, I swore to guard against the advance of the red marble, the cold blood, the tendency toward monotone. Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals. A monkey can’t choose to control his appetite. A man can. My father, at certain hideous moments, was an animal. I refuse to be.

  So while I understood Broussard’s rage, his desperation to find Amanda, his lashing out at Cheese Olamon’s refusal to take us seriously, I refused to condone it. Because it got us nowhere. It got Amanda nowhere—except, maybe, deeper down the hole in which she already lay and that much farther away from us.

  Broussard’s shoes appeared on the gravel below the bumper. I felt his shadow cool the sun on my face.

  “I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was so soft it almost disappeared on the breeze.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Let scumbags hurt kids and walk away, feel like they’re clever. I can’t.”

  “Then quit your job,” I said.

  “We have his money. He has to go through us and trade the girl to get it.”

  I looked up into his face, saw the fear there, the rabid hope he’d never see another dead or hopelessly fucked-up kid again.

  “What if he doesn’t care about the money?” I said.

  Broussard looked away.

  “Oh, he cares.” Poole came over to the car, rested his hand on the trunk, but he didn’t sound so sure.

  “Cheese has a shitload of money,” I said.

  “You know these guys,” Poole said, as Broussard stood very still, a frozen curiosity in his face. “There’s never enough money. They always want more.”

  “Two hundred grand isn’t pocket change to Cheese,” I said, “but it ain’t house money either. It’s bribe and property-tax petty cash. For one year. What if he wants to make a moral point?”

  Broussard shook his head. “Cheese Olamon has no morals.”

  “Yes, he does.” I kicked the bumper with my heel, as surprised as anyone, I think, by the vehemence in my voice. More quietly, I repeated, “Yes, he does. And the number one moral law in his universe is: Don’t fuck with Cheese.”

  Poole nodded. “And Helene did.”

  “Goddamn right.”

  “And if Cheese is pissed off enough, you think he’ll kill the girl and say ‘fuck it’ to the money just to send that message.”

  I nodded. “And sleep right through the night.”

  Poole’s face took on a gray cast as he stepped into the shadow between Broussard and me. He suddenly looked very old, no longer vaguely threatening so much as vaguely threatened, and the sense of elfin mischief had left him.

  “What if,” he said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear, “Cheese wishes to make both his moral point and a profit?”

  “Run a bait-and-switch?” Broussard said.

  Poole dug his hands into his pockets, steeled his back and shoulders against the sudden late-afternoon bite in the breeze.

  “We may have tipped our hand in there, Rem.”

  “How so?”

  “Cheese now knows we’re so desperate to get the child back that we’re willing to break the rules, leave the badge at home, and step into a money-for-child scenario with no official authority.”

  “And if Cheese wants to walk away a winner…”

  “Then no one else walks away at all,” Poole said.

  “We’ve got to get to Chris Mullen,” I said. “See who he leads us to. Before the trade goes down.”

  Poole and Broussard nodded.

  “Mr. Kenzie.” Broussard offered his hand. “I was out of line in there. I let that mug get the better of me, and I could have fucked us on this.”

  I took the hand. “We’ll bring her home.”

  He tightened his grip on my hand. “Alive.”

  “Alive,” I said.

  “You think Broussard’s cracking under the strain?” Angie said.

  We sat parked at the edge of the financial district on Devonshire Street, covering the rear of Devonshire Place, Chris Mullen’s condo tower. The CAC detectives who’d tailed Mullen back here had gone home for the night. Several other two-man teams covered all the other key players in Cheese’s crew, while we watched Mullen. Broussard and Poole covered the front of the building from the Washington Street side. It was just past midnight. Mullen had been inside for three hours.

  I shrugged. “Did you see Broussard’s face when Poole talked about finding Jeannie Minnelli’s body in the barrel of cement?”

  Angie shook her head.

  “It was worse than Poole’s. He looked like he was going to have a nervous breakdown just hearing about it. Hands started to shake, face got all white and shiny. The man looked bad.” I looked up at the three yellow squares on the fifteenth floor that we’d identified as Mullen’s windows as one of them went black. “Maybe he is losing it. He overreacted with Cheese, that’s for sure.”

  Angie lit a cigarette and cracked her window. The street was still. Brooked by canyons of white limestone facades and shimmering blue-glass skyscrapers, it looked like a film set at night, a giant model of a world no real people occupied. In the daytime, Devonshire would be packed with the vaguely joyous, vaguely violent hustle of pedestrians and stockbrokers, lawyers and secretaries and bicycle messengers, trucks and cabs honking their horns, briefcases, power ties, and cell phones. But after nine or so it shut down, and sitting in a car packed between all that vast and empty architecture felt like we were just one more prop in a giant museum piece, after the lights have been dimmed and the security guards have left the room.

  “’Member the night Glynn shot me?” Angie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just before it happened, I remember struggling with you and Evandro in the dark, all the candles in my bedroom flickering like eyes, and I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t invest any more of myself—not one more piece—in all this violence and…shit.” She turned on the seat. “Maybe that’s what Broussard feels. I mean, how many kids can you find in pools of cement?”

  I thought about the pure nothing that had come into Broussard’s eyes after he’d slapped Cheese. A nothing so complete it had overwhelmed even his fury.

  Angie was right: How many dead kids could you find?

  “He’ll burn down the city if he thinks it’ll lead to Amanda,” I said.

  Angie nodded. “Both of them will.”

  “And she may already be dead.”

  Angie flicked her cigarette ash over the top of her window. “Don’t say that.”

  “Can’t help it. It’s a distinct possibility. You know it. So do I.”

  The towering quiet of the empty street slipped into the car for a bit.

  “Cheese hates witnesses,” Angie said eventually.

  “Hates ’em,” I agreed.

  “If that child is dead,” Angie said, and cleared her throat, “then Broussard definitely—and Poole most probably—will snap.”

  I nodded. “And God help whoever they think was involved.”

  “You think God’ll help?”

  “Huh?”

  “God,” she said, and crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “You think He’ll help Amanda’s kidnappers any more than He helped her?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then again…” She looked out the windshield.

  “What?”

  “If Amanda is dead and Broussard flips out, kills her kidnappers, maybe God is helping.”

  “Heck of a strange God.”

  Angie shrugged.
“You take what you can get,” she said.

  14

  I’d heard about Chris Mullen’s banker’s hours, his determination to run a nighttime business during daylight hours, and the next morning, at exactly 8:55, he walked out of Devonshire Towers and turned right on Washington.

  I was parked on Washington a half block up from the condo towers, and when I picked up Mullen walking toward State in my rearview mirror, I depressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie lying on the seat and said, “He just left through the front.”

  From her post on Devonshire Street, where no cars were allowed to park or even idle in the morning, Angie said, “Gotcha.”

  Broussard, wearing a gray T-shirt, black sweats, and a dark blue and white warm-up jacket, stood across from my car in front of Pi Alley. He sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup and read the sports page like a jogger just finished his run. He’d rigged a headset to a receiver strapped to his waistband and painted both the earphones and receiver yellow and black to look like a Discman. He’d even sprayed water down the front of his shirt five minutes ago to make it look like sweat. These ex-vice and narcotics guys—masters of the small details of disguise.

  As Mullen took a right at the flower stand in front of the Old State House, Broussard crossed Washington and followed. I saw him raise his coffee to his mouth and his lips move as he spoke into the transmitter strapped under his watchband.

  “Moving east on State. I got him. Showtime, kids.”

  I turned the walkie-talkie off and slipped it into my coat pocket until my part had been played. In keeping with the disguise motif of the day, I was dressed in the rattiest gray trench coat this side of a subway bum, and I’d stained it freshly this morning with egg yolk and Pepsi. My soiled T-shirt was torn across the chest and my jeans and the tops of my shoes were speckled with paint and dirt. The tips of my shoe soles were separated from the top and clapped softly as I walked, and my bare toes peeked out. I’d brushed my hair straight off my forehead and blown it dry to give it that Don King look, and what remained of the egg I’d used on the trench coat I’d rubbed into my beard.