THEY WENT at it all night and into the morning—Sean, Whitey Powers, Souza and Connolly, two other members of the State Homicide Unit, Brackett and Rosenthal, plus a legion of troopers and CSS techs, photographers and medical examiners—everyone banging at the case like a steel box. They’d scraped every leaf in the park for evidence. They’d filled notebooks with diagrams and field reports. The troopers had conducted the house-to-house Q & A’s of every house within walking distance of the park, filled a van with vagrants from the park and the burned-out shells on Sydney. They searched through the backpack they’d found in Katie Marcus’s car and come up with the usual shit before finding a brochure for Las Vegas and a list of Vegas hotels on lined yellow paper.
Whitey showed the brochure to Sean and whistled. “What we in the biz call a clue. Let’s go talk to the friends.”
Eve Pigeon and Diane Cestra, maybe the last two decent people to see Katie Marcus alive according to her father, looked like they’d taken whacks to the back of their heads from the same shovel. Whitey and Sean worked them softly between the almost constant buckets of tears that streamed down their faces. The girls provided them with a timeline of Katie Marcus’s actions on her last night alive and gave them the names of the bars they’d gone to along with approximate times of arrival and departure, but when it came to the personal stuff, both Sean and Whitey felt they were holding back, exchanging looks before they’d answer, getting vague where before they’d been definite:
“She dating anybody?”
“Nobody, like, regular.”
“How about casually?”
“Well…”
“Yeah?”
“She didn’t keep us real current on that kinda thing.”
“Diane, Eve, come on. Your best friend since kindergarten, and she don’t tell you who she’s dating?”
“She was private like that.”
“Yeah, private. That was Katie, sir.”
Whitey tried another way in: “So there was nothing special about last night? Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“No.”
“How about her planning to leave town?”
“What? No.”
“No? Diane, she had a knapsack in the back of her car. It had brochures for Vegas in it. She was, what, carrying them around for someone else?”
“Maybe. I dunno.”
Eve’s father had piped in then: “Honey, you know something could help, you start talking. This is Katie getting, Jesus, murdered here.”
Which had just brought on a fresh bucket of sobs, both girls going to hell then, beginning to wail and hug each other and shake, mouths wide and oval and slightly skewered in the pantomime of grief Sean had seen time and time again, the moment when, as Martin Friel called it, the levee broke and the permanence of the victim’s absence truly hit home. Times like that, there was nothing you could do but watch or leave.
They watched and waited.
Eve Pigeon did look a bit like a bird, Sean thought. Her face was very sharp, her nose very thin. It nearly worked for her, though. She had a grace about her that gave her thinness an air of the almost-aristocratic. Sean guessed she was the kind of woman who looked better in formal clothing than casual, and she emanated a decency and intelligence that Sean figured would attract only serious men, weed out the scammers and Romeos.
Diane, on the other hand, oozed a defeated sensuality. Sean spotted a faded bruise just behind her right eye, and she struck him as denser than Eve, more given to emotion and possibly laughter, too. A fading hope hung in both her eyes like matching flaws, a neediness that Sean knew rarely attracted any other kind of man but the predatory kind. Sean figured she’d be at the center of a few 911 domestic disturbance calls over the coming years, and that by the time the cops reached her door, that dying hope would be long gone from her eyes.
“Eve,” Whitey said gently when they’d finally stopped crying, “I need to know about Roman Fallow.”
Eve nodded as if she’d been expecting the question, but she didn’t say anything right away. She chewed the skin around her thumbnail and stared at some crumbs on the tabletop.
“That jerkoff hangs around Bobby O’Donnell?” her father said.
Whitey held up a hand to him, glanced over at Sean.
“Eve,” Sean said, knowing Eve was the one they had to get to. She’d be harder to crack than Diane, but she’d yield more in the way of pertinent detail.
She looked at him.
“There won’t be any reprisals, if that’s what’s worrying you. You tell us something about Roman Fallow or Bobby, and it stays with us. They’ll never know it came from you.”
Diane said, “What about when it goes to court? Huh? What about then?”
Whitey gave Sean a look that said: You’re on your own.
Sean concentrated on Eve. “Unless you saw Roman or Bobby pull Katie from her car—”
“No.”
“Then the DA wouldn’t force either of you to testify in open court, Eve, no. He’d ask a lot probably, but he wouldn’t force you.”
Eve said, “You don’t know them.”
“Bobby and Roman? Sure I do. I put Bobby away for nine months when I was working narcotics cases.” Sean reached out and laid his hand on the table about an inch from hers. “And he threatened me. But that’s all he and Roman are—talk.”
Eve gave Sean’s hand a bitter half-smile with pursed lips. “Bull…shit,” she said, dragging it out.
Her father said, “You don’t talk like that in this house.”
“Mr. Pigeon,” Whitey said.
“No,” Drew said. “My house, my rules. I won’t have my daughter talking like she—”
“It was Bobby,” Eve said, and Diane let out a small gasp, stared at her friend as if she’d lost her mind.
Sean saw Whitey’s eyebrows arch.
“What was Bobby?” Sean said.
“Who Katie was dating. Bobby, not Roman.”
“Jimmy know about this?” Drew asked his daughter.
Eve let go one of those sullen shrugs Sean had found endemic to kids her age, a slow twitch of the body that said it barely cared enough to make the effort.
“Eve,” Drew said. “Did he?”
“He knew and he didn’t,” Eve said. She sighed and leaned her head back, stared up at the ceiling with those dark eyes. “Her parents thought it was over because for a while she thought it was over. The only one who didn’t think it was over was Bobby. He wouldn’t accept it. He kept coming back. One night he held her off a third-floor landing.”
“You saw this?” Whitey said.
She shook her head. “Katie told me. He ran into her at a party six weeks, a month ago. He convinced her to come out in the hall to talk to him. ’Cept it was a third-floor apartment, you know?” Eve wiped her face with the back of her hand, even though by the looks of her, she was all cried out at the moment. “Katie told me she kept trying to explain to him that they were broken up, but Bobby wouldn’t hear it, and finally he got so mad he grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her over the railing. He held her over the stairway. Three stories down, the psycho. And he said if she broke up with him he’d break her up. She was his girl until he said otherwise and if she didn’t like it, he’d drop her right fucking then.”
“Jesus,” Drew Pigeon said after a few moments’ silence. “You know these people?”
Whitey said, “So, Eve, what did Roman say to her in the bar Saturday night?”
Eve didn’t say anything for a bit.
Whitey said, “Why don’t you tell us, Diane?”
Diane looked like she needed a drink. “We told Val. That was enough.”
“Val?” Whitey said. “Val Savage?”
Diane said, “He was here this afternoon.”
“And you told him what Roman said, but you won’t tell us.”
“He’s her family,” Diane said, and crossed her arms across her chest, gave them her best “fuck you, cop” face.
“I’ll tell you,” Eve said. “Jesus. He said he’d heard we were drunk and making asses of ourselves and he didn’t like hearing that, and Bobby sure wouldn’t like hearing it and maybe we should go home.”
“So you left.”
“You ever talk to Roman?” she said. “He’s got a way of making his questions sound like threats.”
“And that was it,” Whitey said. “You didn’t see him follow you out of the bar or anything?”
She shook her head.
They looked at Diane.
Diane shrugged. “We were pretty drunk.”
“You had no more contact with him that night? Either of you?”
“Katie drove us to my house,” Eve said. “She dropped us off. That’s all we saw of her.” She bit down on the last word, clenching her face like a fist as she tilted her head back again and looked up, sucking air.
Sean said, “Who was she planning to go to Vegas with? Bobby?”
Eve stared up at the ceiling for a while, her breath gone liquid. “Not Bobby,” she said eventually.
“Who, Eve?” Sean said. “Who was she going to Vegas with?”
“Brendan.”
“Brendan Harris?” Whitey said.
“Brendan Harris,” she said. “Yeah.”
Whitey and Sean looked at each other.
“Just Ray’s kid?” Drew Pigeon said. “The one with the mute for a brother?”
Eve nodded and Drew turned to Sean and Whitey.
“Nice kid. Harmless.”
Sean nodded. Harmless. Sure.
“You got an address?” Whitey asked.
NOBODY WAS HOME at Brendan Harris’s address, so Sean called in, got two troopers to cover the place and call them when Harris returned.
They went to Mrs. Prior’s house next, and sat through tea and stale coffee cakes and Touched by an Angel turned up so loud Sean could hear Della Reese in his head for an hour afterward screaming “Amen” and talking about redemption.
Mrs. Prior said she’d looked out her window around 1:30 A.M. the previous night, seen two kids playing in the street, little kids, out at a time like that, throwing cans at each other, fencing with hockey sticks, using foul language. She thought of saying something to them, but little old ladies had to be careful. Kids were crazy these days, shooting up schools, wearing those baggy clothes, using all that foul language. Besides, the kids eventually chased each other away and down the street and then they were someone else’s problem, but the way they behaved today, I mean, is that any way to live?
“Officer Medeiros told us you heard a car around one-forty-five,” Whitey said.
Mrs. Prior watched Della explain God’s way to Roma Downey, Roma looking all solemn and dewy-eyed and filled to the brim with Jesus. Mrs. Prior nodded several times at the TV, then turned and looked back at Whitey and Sean.
“I heard a car hit something.”
“Hit what?”
“The way people drive today, it’s a blessing I don’t have a license anymore. I’d be afraid to drive these streets. Everyone’s just so mad.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sean said. “Did it sound like a car hitting another car?”
“Oh, no.”
“Hitting a person?” Whitey said.
“Good Lord, what would that sound like? I wouldn’t even want to know.”
“So it wasn’t a really, really loud sound,” Whitey said.
“Excuse me, dear?”
Whitey repeated himself, leaning in.
“No,” Mrs. Prior said. “It was more like a car hitting a rock or a curb. And then it stalled and then someone said, ‘Hi.’”
“Someone said, ‘Hi’?”
“Hi.” Mrs. Prior looked at Sean and nodded. “And then part of the car cracked.”
Sean and Whitey looked at each other.
Whitey said, “Cracked?”
Mrs. Prior nodded her little blue head. “When my Leo was alive, he snapped the axle on our Plymouth? It made such a noise! Crack!” Her eyes grew bright. “Crack!” she said. “Crack!”
“And that’s what you heard after someone said, ‘Hi.’”
She nodded. “Hi and crack!”
“And then you looked out your window and saw what?”
“Oh, no, no,” Mrs. Prior said. “I didn’t look out my window. I was in my dressing gown by then. I’d been in bed. I wasn’t looking out the window in my dressing gown. People could see.”
“But fifteen minutes before, you’d—”
“Young man, I wasn’t in my dressing gown fifteen minutes before. I’d just finished watching TV, a wonderful film with Glenn Ford. Oh, I wish I could remember the name.”
“So you turned off the TV…”
“And I saw those motherless children in the street, and then I went upstairs and changed into my dressing gown, and then, young sir, I kept my shades drawn.”
“The voice that said, ‘Hi,’” Whitey said. “Was it male or female?”
“Female, I think,” Mrs. Prior said. “It was a high voice. Not like either of yours,” she said brightly. “You two have fine masculine voices. Your mothers must be proud.”
Whitey said, “Oh, yes, ma’am. Like you wouldn’t believe.”
As they left the house, Sean said, “Crack!”
Whitey smiled. “She liked saying that, you know? Got some blood pumping in the old girl.”
“You thinking snapped axle or gunshot?”
“Gunshot,” Whitey said. “It’s the ‘Hi’ that’s throwing me.”
“Would suggest she knew the shooter, she says hi to him.”
“Would suggest. Wouldn’t guarantee.”
They worked the bars after that, coming away with nothing but boozy recollections of maybe seeing the girls in here, maybe not, and half-assed lists of possible patrons who’d been in at the approximate times.
By the time they got to McGills, Whitey was getting pissed.
“Two young chicks—and they were young, by the way, underage actually—hop up on this bar right here and dance, and you’re telling me you don’t recall that?”
The bartender was nodding halfway through Whitey’s question. “Oh, those girls. Okay, okay. I remember them. Sure. They must have had great IDs, Detective, because we carded ’em.”
“That’s ‘Sergeant,’” Whitey said. “You barely remembered they were here at first, but now you can remember carding them. You remember what time they left, maybe? Or is that selectively foggy?”
The bartender, a young guy with biceps so big they probably squeezed off the blood flow to his brain, said, “Left?”
“As in departed.”
“I don’t—”
“It was right before Crosby broke the clock,” a guy on the stool said.
Sean glanced over at the guy—an old-timer with the Herald spread out on the bar between a bottle of Bud and a shot of whiskey, cigarette curling down into the ashtray.
“You were here,” Sean said.
“I was here. Moron Crosby wants to drive home. His friends try to take his keys. Shithead throws them at them. He misses. Hits that clock.”
Sean looked up at the clock over the doorway leading to the kitchen. The glass had spiderwebbed and the hands had stopped at 12:52.
“And they left before that?” Whitey asked the old-timer. “The girls?”
“About five minutes before,” the guy said. “The keys hit the clock, I’m thinking, ‘I’m glad those girls aren’t here. They don’t need to see that shit.’”
In the car, Whitey said, “You work up a timeline yet?”
Sean nodded, flipped through his notes. “They leave Curley’s Folly at nine-thirty, do the Banshee, Dick Doyle’s Pub, and Spire’s in quick succession, end up at McGills around eleven-thirty, are inside the Last Drop at ten past one.”
“And she’s crashing her car about half an hour later.”
Sean nodded.
“You see any familiar names on the bartender’s list?”
Sean looked down at the list of Saturday night patrons the bartender at McGills had scribbled on a sheet of paper.
“Dave Boyle,” he said aloud when he got to it.
“The same guy you were friends with as a kid?”
“Could be,” Sean said.
“He might be a guy to talk to,” Whitey said. “He thinks you’re a friend, he won’t treat us like cops, clam up for no good reason.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll put him on tomorrow’s to-do list.”
THEY FOUND ROMAN FALLOW sipping a latte at Café Society in the Point. He sat with a woman who looked like a model—kneecaps as sharp as her cheekbones, eyes bulging slightly because the skin on her face was pulled so tight it looked like it had been glued to the bone, nice off-white summer dress with those spaghetti straps that made her look sexy and skeletal at the same time, Sean wondering how she pulled that off and deciding it must be the pearl glow of her perfect skin.
Roman wore a silk T-shirt tucked into pleated linen trousers, looking like he just stepped off a soundstage of one of those old RKO movies set in Havana or Key West. He sipped his latte and leafed through the paper with his girl, Roman reading the business section, his model thumbing through the style section.
Whitey pulled a chair over to them and said, “Hey, Roman, they sell men’s clothes where you got that shirt?”
Roman kept his eyes on his paper, popped a piece of croissant in his mouth. “Sergeant Powers, how you doing? How’s that Hyundai working out for you?”
Whitey chuckled as Sean sat down beside him. “Looking at you, Roman, you know, in this place, I’d swear you were just another yuppie, ready to get up in the morning and go do some day trading on your iMac.”
“Got a PC, Sergeant.” Roman closed his paper and looked at Whitey and Sean for the first time. “Oh, hi,” he said to Sean. “I know you from somewhere.”
“Sean Devine, State Police.”
“Right, right,” Roman said. “Sure, I remember now. Saw you in court once testifying against a friend of mine. Nice suit. They’re stepping things up at Sears these days, huh? Getting hip.”
Whitey glanced over at the model. “Get you a steak or something, honey?”
The model said, “What?”
“Maybe some glucose on an IV drip? My treat.”
Roman said, “Don’t do that. This is business, right? Keep it between us.”
The model said, “Roman, I don’t get it.”
Roman smiled. “It’s okay, Michaela. Just ignore us.”
“Michaela,” Whitey said. “Cool name.”
Michaela kept her eyes on her newspaper.
“What brings you by, Sergeant?”
“The scones,” Whitey said. “Love the scones in this place. And, oh yeah, you know a woman named Katherine Marcus, Roman?”
“Sure.” Roman took a small sip of his latte and wiped his upper lip with his napkin, dropped it back on his lap. “She was found dead this afternoon, I heard.”
“She was,” Whitey said.
“Never good for the neighborhood rep when something like that happens.”
Whitey crossed his arms, looked at Roman.
Roman chewed another piece of croissant and drank some more latte. He crossed his legs, dabbed at his mouth with the napkin, and held Whitey’s gaze for a bit, Sean thinking this was one of the things that had begun to bore him the most about his job—all these big-dick contests, everyone staring each other blind, nobody backing down.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Roman said, “I knew Katherine Marcus. Is that what you came here to ask?”
Whitey shrugged.
“I knew her, and I saw her in a bar last night.”
“And you exchanged words with her,” Whitey said.
“I did,” Roman said.
“What words?” Sean said.
Roman kept his eyes on Whitey, as if Sean didn’t rate any more acknowledgment than he’d already given.
“She was dating a friend of mine. She was drunk. I told her she was making a fool of herself and she and her two friends should go home.”
“Who’s your friend?” Whitey said.
Roman smiled. “Come on, Sergeant. You know who it is.”
“So say the words.”
“Bobby O’Donnell,” Roman said. “Happy? She was dating Bobby.”
“Currently?”
“Excuse me?”
“Currently,” Whitey repeated. “She was currently dating him? Or she had once dated him?”
“Currently,” Roman said.
Whitey scribbled in his notebook. “Goes against the information we have, Roman.”
“That so?”
“Yeah. We heard she dumped his doughy ass seven months back, but he wouldn’t let go.”
“You know women, Sergeant.”
Whitey shook his head. “No, Roman, why don’t you tell me?”
Roman closed his section of the paper. “She and Bobby went back and forth. One minute he was the love of her life, the next he was cooling his heels.”
“Cooling his heels,” Whitey said to Sean. “That sound like the Bobby O’Donnell you know?”
“Not at all,” Sean said.
“Not at all,” Whitey said to Roman.
Roman shrugged. “I’m telling you what I know. That’s all.”
“Fair enough.” Whitey wrote in his notebook for a bit. “Roman, where’d you go last night after you left the Last Drop?”
“We went to a party at a friend’s loft downtown.”
“Oooh, a loft party,” Whitey said. “Always wanted to go to one of those. Designer drugs, models, lots of white guys listening to rap, telling themselves how ‘street’ they are. By ‘we,’ Roman, you mean yourself and Ally McBeal over here?”
“Michaela,” Roman said. “Yes. Michaela Davenport if you’re writing it down.”
“Oh, I’m writing it down,” Whitey said. “Is that your real name, honey?”
“What?”
“Your real name,” Whitey said, “is Michaela Davenport?”
“Yes.” The model’s eyes bulged a little more. “Why?”
“Your mother watch a lot of soaps before you were born?”
Michaela said, “Roman.”
Roman held up a hand, looked at Whitey. “What I say about keeping this between us? Huh?”
“You taking offense, Roman? You going to go all Christopher Walken on me, try to come on strong? Is that the idea? Because, I mean, we could go on a drive till your alibi clears. We could do that. You got plans for tomorrow?”
Roman went back into that place Sean had seen most criminals go when a cop came down hard—a recession into self so total that you’d swear they’d stopped breathing, the eyes looking back at you, dark and disinterested and shrinking.
“No offense, Sergeant,” Roman said, his voice a flat line. “I’ll be happy to provide you with the names of everyone who saw me at the party. And I’m sure the bartender at the Last Drop, Todd Lane, will verify that I left the bar no earlier than two.”
“Good boy,” Whitey said. “Now what about your pal Bobby? Where can we find him?”
Roman allowed himself a broad smile. “You’re going to love this.”
“What’s that, Roman?”
“If you’re liking Bobby for Katherine Marcus’s death, I mean, you’re really going to love this.”
Roman flicked his predator’s glance in Sean’s direction, and Sean felt the excitement he’d felt since Eve Pigeon had mentioned Roman and Bobby wither.
“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.” Roman sighed and winked at his girlfriend before turning back to Sean and Whitey. “Bobby was pulled over on a DUI Friday night.” Roman took another sip of his latte, drawing it out. “He’s been in jail all weekend, Sergeant.” He wiggled his finger back and forth between the two of them. “Don’t you guys check these things?”
SEAN WAS FEELING the day in his bones, sucking at the marrow, by the time the troopers radioed that Brendan Harris had returned to his apartment with his mother. Sean and Whitey got there at eleven, sat in the kitchen with Brendan and his mother, Esther, Sean thinking, They don’t make apartments like this anymore, thank God. It was like something out of an old TV show—The Honeymooners, maybe—as if it could only be truly appreciated seen in black and white through a thirteen-inch picture tube that cackled with electricity and watery reception. It was a railroad apartment; the entrance doorway had been cut dead in the center so that you walked out of the stairwell and into a living room. Past the living room on the right was a small dining room that Esther Harris used as her bedroom, stacking her brushes and combs and assorted powders in the crumbling butler’s pantry. Beyond that was the bedroom Brendan shared with his little brother, Raymond.
To the left of the living room was a short hallway with a lopsided bathroom branching off it on the right, and then the kitchen, tucked back there where the light reached for a total of maybe forty-five minutes in the late afternoon. The kitchen was done up in shades of faded green and greasy yellow, and Sean, Whitey, Brendan, and Esther sat at a small table with metal legs that were missing screws at the joints. The tabletop was covered in yellow-and-green floral Contact paper that peeled up at the corners and had come away in chips the size of fingernails in the center.
Esther looked like she fit here. She was small and craggy and could have been forty, could have been fifty-five. She reeked of brown soap and cigarette smoke and her grim blue hair matched the grim blue veins in her forearms and hands. She wore a faded pink sweatshirt over jeans and fuzzy black slippers. She chain-smoked Parliaments and watched Sean and Whitey talk to her son as if she thought they couldn’t be any less interesting if they tried but she didn’t have anyplace better to be.
“When’s the last time you saw Katie Marcus?” Whitey asked Brendan.
“Bobby killed her, didn’t he?” Brendan said.
“Bobby O’Donnell?” Whitey said.
“Yeah.” Brendan picked at the tabletop. He seemed to be in shock. His voice was monotonous, but he’d suddenly take these sharp breaths and the right side of his face would curl up as if he were being stabbed in the eye.
“Why would you say that?” Sean asked.
“She was afraid of him. She’d dated him, and she always said if he found out about us, he’d kill us both.”
Sean glanced at the mother then, figuring he’d see some sort of reaction, but she just smoked, chugging out streams of it, wrapping the entire table in a gray cloud.
“Looks like Bobby has an alibi,” Whitey said. “How about you, Brendan?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Brendan Harris said numbly. “I wouldn’t hurt Katie. Never.”
“So, again,” Whitey said, “when’s the last time you saw her?”
“Friday night.”
“What time?”
“About, like, eight or so?”
“‘About, like, eight,’ Brendan, or at eight?”
“I don’t know.” Brendan’s face was twisted with an anxiousness Sean could feel jangling across the table between them. He clenched his hands together and rocked a bit in his chair. “Yeah, eight. We had a couple of slices at Hi-Fi, right? And then…then she had to go.”
Whitey jotted “Hi-Fi, 8p, Fri.” in his report pad. “She had to go where?”
“I dunno,” Brendan said.
The mother crushed another cigarette into the pile she’d built in the ashtray, igniting one of the dead cigarettes so that a stream of smoke pirouetted up from the pile and snaked into Sean’s right nostril. Esther Harris immediately fired up another butt, and Sean got a mental image of her lungs—knotty and black as ebony.
“Brendan, how old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“And when’d you graduate high school?”
“Graduate,” Esther said.
“I, ah, got my GED last year,” Brendan said.
“So, Brendan,” Whitey said, “you have no idea where Katie went Friday night after she left you at Hi-Fi?”
“No,” Brendan said, the word dying wet in his throat, his eyes beginning to grow red. “She’d dated Bobby and he was all psycho over her and then her father doesn’t like me for some reason, so we had to keep the thing between us quiet. Sometimes she wouldn’t tell me where she was going because it might be to meet Bobby, I guess, to try to convince him that they were over. I dunno. That night she just said she was going home.”
“Jimmy Marcus doesn’t like you?” Sean said. “Why?”
Brendan shrugged. “I have no idea. But he told Katie he never wanted her to see me.”
The mother said, “What? That thief thinks he’s better than this family?”
“He’s not a thief,” Brendan said.
“He was a thief,” the mother said. “You don’t know that, huh, GED? He was a scumbag burglar from way back. His daughter probably had the gene in her. She would’ve been just as bad. Count yourself lucky, son.”
Sean and Whitey shot each other looks. Esther Harris was quite possibly the most miserable woman Sean had ever met. She was fucking evil.
Brendan Harris opened his mouth to say something to his mother, then closed it back up again.
Whitey said, “Katie had brochures for Las Vegas in her backpack. We hear she was planning to go there. With you, Brendan.”
“We…” Brendan kept his head down. “We, yeah, we were going to Vegas. We were going to get married. Today.” He raised his head and Sean watched the tears bubble in the red undercarriage of his eyes. Brendan wiped at them with the back of his hand before they could fall, and said, “I mean, that was the plan, right?”
“You were going to leave me?” Esther Harris said. “Just leave without a word?”
“Ma, I—”
“Like your father? That it? Leave me with your little brother never says a word? That’s what you were going to do, Brendan?”
“Mrs. Harris,” Sean said, “if we could just concentrate on the issue at hand. There’ll be plenty of time for Brendan to explain later.”
She threw a glance at Sean that he’d seen on a lot of hardened cons and nine-to-five sociopaths, a look that said he wasn’t worth her attention right now, but if he continued to push it, she’d deal with him in a way that’d leave bruises.
She looked back at her son. “You’d do this to me? Huh?”
“Ma, look…”
“Look what? Look what, huh? What’d I do that was so bad? Huh? What did I do but raise you and feed you and buy you that saxophone for Christmas you never learned how to play? Thing’s still in the closet, Brendan.”
“Ma—”
“No, go get it. Show these men how good you play. Go get it.”
Whitey looked at Sean like he couldn’t believe this shit.
“Mrs. Harris,” he said, “that won’t be necessary.”
She lit another cigarette, the match head jumping with her rage. “All I ever did was feed him,” she said. “Buy him clothes. Raise him.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Whitey said as the front door opened and two kids came in with skateboards under their arms, both kids about twelve or so, maybe thirteen, one of them a dead ringer for Brendan—he had his good looks and dark hair, but there was something of the mother in his eyes, a spooky lack of focus.
“Hey,” the other kid said as they came into the kitchen. Like Brendan’s brother, he seemed small for his age, and he’d been cursed with a face both long and sunken, a mean old man’s face on a kid’s body, peeking out from under stringy hanks of blond hair.
Brendan Harris raised his hand. “Hey, Johnny. Sergeant Powers, Trooper Devine, this is my brother, Ray, and his friend, Johnny O’Shea.”
“Hey, boys,” Whitey said.
“Hey,” Johnny O’Shea said.
Ray nodded at them.
“He don’t speak,” the mother said. “His father couldn’t shut up, but his son don’t speak. Oh, yeah, life’s fucking fair.”
Ray’s hands signed something to Brendan, and Brendan said, “Yeah, they’re here about Katie.”
Johnny O’Shea said, “We went to go ’boarding in the park. They got it closed.”
“It’ll be open tomorrow,” Whitey said.
“Tomorrow’s supposed to rain,” the kid said as if it were their fault he couldn’t skateboard at eleven o’clock on a school night, Sean wondering when parents started letting kids get away with so much shit.
Whitey turned back to Brendan. “You think of any enemies she had? Anyone, besides Bobby O’Donnell, who might have been angry with her?”
Brendan shook his head. “She was nice, sir. She was just a nice, nice person. Everyone liked her. I don’t know what to tell you.”
The O’Shea kid said, “Can we, like, go now?”
Whitey cocked an eyebrow at him. “Someone say you couldn’t?”
Johnny O’Shea and Ray Harris walked back out of the kitchen and they could hear them toss their skateboards to the floor of the living room, go back into Ray and Brendan’s room, banging around into everything the way twelve-year-olds do.
Whitey asked Brendan, “Where were you between one-thirty and three this morning?”
“Asleep.”
Whitey looked at the mother. “Can you confirm that?”
She shrugged. “Can’t confirm he didn’t climb out a window and down the fire escape. I can confirm he went into his room at ten o’clock and next I saw him was nine in the morning.”
Whitey stretched in his chair. “All right, Brendan. We’re going to have to ask you to take a polygraph. You think you’re up for that?”
“Are you arresting me?”
“No. Just want you to take a polygraph.”
Brendan shrugged. “Whatever. Sure.”
“And here, take my card.”
Brendan looked at the card. He kept his eyes on it when he said, “I loved her so much. I…I ain’t ever going to feel that again. I mean, it don’t happen twice, right?” He looked up at Whitey and Sean. His eyes were dry, but the pain in them was something Sean wanted to duck from.
“It don’t happen once, most cases,” Whitey said.
THEY DROPPED BRENDAN back at his place around one, the kid having aced the polygraph four times, and then Whitey dropped Sean back at his apartment, told him to get some sleep, they’d be up early. Sean walked into his empty apartment, heard the din of its silence, and felt the sludge of too much caffeine and fast food in his blood, riding his spinal column. He opened the fridge and took out a beer, sat on the counter to drink it, the noise and lights of the evening banging around inside his skull, making him wonder if he’d finally gotten too old for this, if he was just too tired of death and dumb motives and dumb perps, the soiled-wrapper feeling of it all.
Lately, though, he’d just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio that sounded exactly like other songs on the radio he’d heard years before and hadn’t liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people’s clothes and other people’s hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. Tired of office politics and who was screwing who, both figuratively and otherwise. He’d gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he’d heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn’t seemed fresh the first time he’d heard them.
Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and the food. Too tired to care about one dead girl because there’d be another after her. And another. And sending the killers off to jail—even if you got them life—didn’t yield the appropriate level of satisfaction anymore, because they were just going home, to the place they’d been heading all their dumb, ridiculous lives, and the dead were still dead. And the robbed and the raped were still the robbed and the raped.
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
Katie Marcus was dead, yes. A tragedy. He understood that intellectually, but he couldn’t feel it. She was just another body, just another broken light.
And his marriage, too, what was that if not shattered glass? Jesus Christ, he loved her, but they were as opposite as two people could get and still be considered part of the same species. Lauren was into theater and books and films Sean couldn’t understand whether they had subtitles or not. She was chatty and emotional and loved to string words together in dizzying tiers that climbed and climbed toward some tower of language that lost Sean somewhere on the third floor.
He’d first seen her onstage in college, playing the dumped girl in some adolescent farce, no one in the audience for one second believing that any man would discard a woman so radiant with energy, so on fire with everything—experience, appetite, curiosity. They’d made an odd couple even then—Sean quiet and practical and always reserved unless he was with her, and Lauren the only child of aging-hipster liberals who’d taken her all over the globe as they worked for the Peace Corps, filled her blood with a need to see and touch and investigate the best in people.
She fit in the theater world, first as a college actress, then as a director in local black-box houses, and eventually as a stage manager of larger traveling shows. It wasn’t the travel, though, that overextended their marriage. Hell, Sean still wasn’t sure what had done it, though he suspected it had something to do with him and his silences, the gradual dawn of contempt every cop grew into—a contempt for people, really, an inability to believe in higher motives and altruism.
Her friends, who had once seemed fascinating to him, began to seem childish, covered in a real-world retardant of artistic theory and impractical philosophies. Sean would be spending his nights out in the blue concrete arenas where people raped and stole and killed for no other reason but the itch to do so, and then he’d suffer through some weekend cocktail party in which ponytailed heads argued through the night (his wife included) over the motivations behind human sin. The motivation was easy—people were stupid. Chimps. But worse, because chimps didn’t kill one another over scratch tickets.
She told him he was becoming hard, intractable, reductive in his thinking. And he didn’t respond because there was nothing to argue. The question wasn’t whether he’d become those things, but whether the becoming was a positive or a negative.
But still, they’d loved each other. In their own ways, they kept trying—Sean to break out of his shell and Lauren to break into it. Whatever that thing was between two people, that total, chemical need to attach to each other, they had it. Always.
Still, he probably should have seen the affair coming. Maybe he did. And maybe it wasn’t the affair that truly bothered him, but the pregnancy that followed.
Shit. He sat down on his kitchen floor, in the absence of his wife, and put the heels of his hands to his forehead, and tried for the umpteenth time in the last year to see the wreck of his marriage clearly. But all he saw were the shards and shattered pieces of it, strewn across the rooms of his mind.
When the phone rang, he knew somehow—even before he lifted it off the kitchen counter and pressed “Talk”—that it was her.
“This is Sean.”
On the other end of the line, he could hear the subdued rumble of a tractor-trailer idling and the soft whoosh of cars speeding past on an expressway. He could instantly picture it—a highway rest stop, the gas station up top, a bank of phones between the Roy Rogers and the McDonald’s. Lauren standing there, listening.
“Lauren,” he said. “I know it’s you.”
Someone passed by the pay phone jingling his keys.
“Lauren, just say something.”
The tractor-trailer ground into first gear and the pitch of the engine changed as it rolled across the parking lot.
“How is she?” Sean said. He almost said, “How is my daughter?” but, then, he didn’t know if she was his, only that she was Lauren’s. So, he said again, “How is she?”
The truck shifted into second, the crush of its tires on gravel growing more distant as it headed for the mouth of the plaza and the road beyond.
“This hurts too much,” Sean said. “Can’t you just talk to me?”
He remembered what Whitey had said to Brendan Harris about love, how it doesn’t happen even once to most people, and he could see his wife standing there, watching the truck depart, the phone pressed to her ear but not her mouth. She was a slim woman and tall, with hair the color of cherry wood. When she laughed, she covered her mouth with her fingers. In college, they’d run across campus in a rainstorm, and she kissed him for the first time under the library archway where they’d found shelter, and something had loosened in Sean’s chest as her wet hand found the back of his neck, something that had been clenched and breathless since as long as he could remember. She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she’d ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.
Since she’d left, the usual ritual was that he’d talk until she decided to hang up. She had never spoken, not once in all of the phone calls he’d received since she’d left him, calls from road stops and motels and dusty phone booths along the shoulders of barren roadways from here to the Tex-Mex border and back somewhere in between again. Yet even though it was usually just the hiss of a silent line in his ear, he always knew when it was her. He could feel her through the phone. Sometimes he could smell her.
The conversations—if you could call them that—could last as long as fifteen minutes depending on how much he said, but tonight Sean was exhausted in general and worn out from missing her, a woman who’d disappeared on him one morning when she was seven months pregnant, and fed up with his feelings for her being the only feelings he had left for anything.
“I can’t do this tonight,” he said. “I’m fucking weary and I’m in pain and you don’t even care enough to let me hear your voice.”
Standing in the kitchen, he gave her a hopeless thirty seconds to respond. He could hear the ding of a bell as someone pumped a tire with air.
“Bye, baby,” he said, the words strangling on the phlegm in his throat, and then he hung up.
He stood very still for a moment, hearing the echo of the dinging air pump mix with the ringing silence that descended on the kitchen and thumped through his heart.
It would torture him, he was pretty sure. Maybe all night and into tomorrow. Maybe all week. He’d broken the ritual. He’d hung up on her. What if just as he’d been doing it, she had parted her lips to speak, to say his name?
Jesus.
The image of that got him walking toward the shower, if only so he could run away from it, from the thought of her standing by those pay phones, mouth opening, the words rising in her throat.
Sean, she might have been about to say, I’m coming home.