Mystic River (23 page)

“Except O’Donnell,” Burke said, “who didn’t want her leaving town.”

“Except him,” Whitey agreed. “But his alibi’s tight and it doesn’t look like a hit. So who’s that leave for enemies? No one.”

“And yet she’s dead,” Friel said.

“And yet she’s dead,” Whitey said. “Which is why I’m thinking it’s random. You take away money or love and hate as possible motives, you’re not left with much. You’re left with some dumb fucking stalker type who might have a Web site devoted to the victim or something stupid like that.”

Friel raised his eyebrows.

Shira Rosenthal chimed in: “We’re already checking that, sir. So far, nada.”

“So you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Friel said eventually.

“Sure,” Whitey said. “A guy with a gun. Oh, yeah, and a stick.”

A
FTER HE’D LEFT
D
AVE
on the porch, his face and eyes dry again, Jimmy took his second shower of the day. He could feel it in there with him, that need to weep. It welled up inside his chest like a balloon until he grew short of breath.

He’d gone into the shower because he wanted privacy in case it flooded out of him in gushes, as opposed to the few drops that had slid down his cheeks on the porch. He feared he might turn into a trembling puddle, end up weeping like he’d wept in the dark of his bedroom as a little boy, certain his being born had nearly killed his mother and that’s why his father hated him.

In the shower, he felt it coming again—that old wave of sadness, the one that felt ancient and had been with him since he could remember, an awareness that tragedy loomed somewhere in his future, tragedy as heavy as limestone blocks. As if an angel had told him his future while he was still in the womb, and Jimmy had emerged from his mother with the angel’s words planted somewhere in his mind, but faded from his lips.

Jimmy raised his eyes to the shower spray. He said without speaking: I know in my soul I contributed to my child’s death. I can feel it. But I don’t know how.

And the calm voice said, You will.

Tell me.

No.

Fuck you.

I wasn’t finished.

Oh.

The knowledge will come.

And damn me?

That’s your choice.

Jimmy lowered his head and thought of Dave seeing Katie not long before she’d died. Katie alive and drunk and dancing. Dancing and happy.

It was this knowledge—that someone other than Jimmy possessed an image of Katie that postdated Jimmy’s own—that had finally allowed him to weep in the first place.

The last time Jimmy had seen her, Katie had been walking out of the store at the end of her Saturday shift. It had been five past four, and Jimmy had been on the phone with his Frito-Lay vendor, placing orders and distracted, as Katie leaned in to kiss his cheek and said, “Later, Daddy.”

“Later,” he’d said, and watched her walk out of the back room.

But, no. That was bullshit. He hadn’t watched her. He’d
heard
her walk out, but his eyes had been on the order sheet lying in front of him on the desk blotter.

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.

W
HITEY AND
S
EAN
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.

C
ELESTE
, 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 windows 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?