Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “Hey, Jimmy.” Ed Deveau, opening a package of M&M’s with his teeth, nudged Jimmy with his elbow.

  “What’s up, Ed?”

  Deveau shrugged. “That copter’s the second one gone in. The first one kept doing passes over my house ’bout a half an hour ago, I says to the wife, ‘Honey, we move to Watts, no one told me?’” He poured some M&M’s into his mouth and shrugged again. “So, I come down to see what the fuss is about.”

  “What’d you hear?”

  Deveau slid the flat of his hand over the air in front of them. “Nothing. They’re locked up tighter than my mother’s purse. But they’re serious, Jimmy. I mean, shit, they got Sydney blocked off from every possible angle—cops and sawhorses on Crescent, Harborview, Sudan, Romsey, all the way down to Dunboy, what I hear. People live on the street can’t get out, they’re fucking pissed. I hear they got boats running up and down the Pen, and Boo Bear Durkin called, said he saw frogmen going in from his window.” Deveau pointed. “I mean, look at that shit there.”

  Jimmy followed Deveau’s finger and watched three cops pull a wino out of one of the scorched three-decker shells on the far side of Sydney, the wino not liking it much, struggling until one of the cops chucked him face first down the rest of the charred stairs, Jimmy still half-back at that word Ed had said: frogmen. They didn’t send frogmen into a body of water if they were looking for something good, something alive.

  “They ain’t playing.” Deveau whistled, then looked at Jimmy’s clothes. “Why you all decked?”

  “Nadine’s First Communion.” Jimmy watched a cop pick the wino up, say something into his ear before manhandling him to an olive sedan with the siren stuck cockeyed to the edge of the roof above the driver’s door.

  “Hey, congratulations,” Deveau said.

  Jimmy smiled his thanks.

  “So, the hell you doing here then?”

  Deveau looked back up Roseclair toward Saint Cecilia’s, and Jimmy suddenly felt ridiculous. What the hell was he doing here in his silk tie and six-hundred-dollar suit, scuffing his shoes in the weeds that sprouted up from under the guardrail?

  Katie, he remembered.

  But that still seemed ridiculous. Katie’d blown off her half sister’s First Communion to sleep off a drunk or listen to some more pillow talk from her latest guy. Shit. Why would she come to church if she wasn’t dragged? Until Katie’s own baptism, Jimmy himself hadn’t been inside a church for a solid decade. And even after that, it hadn’t been until he’d met Annabeth that he’d started going regular again. So what if he’d walked out of the church, seen the cruisers banging the turn onto Roseclair, and had felt a—what, premonition?—of dread? It had only been because he’d been worried about Katie—and pissed at her, too—and so she’d been on his mind as he watched some cops lead-foot it toward the Pen.

  But now? Now he felt dumb. Dumb and overdressed and really fucking silly for telling Annabeth to take the girls to Chuck E. Cheese’s, he’d meet her there, Annabeth looking into his face with a mix of exasperation, confusion, and anger held barely in check.

  Jimmy turned to Deveau. “Just curious like everyone else, I guess.” He clapped Deveau’s shoulder. “Outta here, though, Ed,” he said, and down on Sydney, one cop tossed a set of car keys to another and the second cop hopped in the K-9 van.

  “Awright, Jimmy. You take care.”

  “You, too,” Jimmy said slowly, still watching the street as the K-9 van backed up and stopped to shift gears and cut the wheels to the right, and Jimmy felt that mean certainty again.

  You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes—beyond logic—and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes—to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.

  Jimmy felt that mean certainty drive nails through his shoes and plant him in place even though he wanted more than anything to run, run as fast as he ever had, do anything but stand there and watch that van pull out into the street. The nails found his chest, a fat, cold grouping of them as if shot from a cannon, and he wanted to shut his eyes but they were nailed, too, nailed wide open, as the van reached the middle of the street and Jimmy stared at the car it had been blocking, the car everyone was gathered around, dusting with brushes, photographing, peering inside, passing bagged items out to cops standing in the street and on the sidewalk.

  Katie’s car.

  Not just the same model. Not one that looked like it. Her car. Right down to the dent on the right front bumper and the missing glass over the right headlight.

  “Jesus, Jimmy. Jimmy? Jimmy! Look at me. You all right?”

  Jimmy looked up at Ed Deveau, not sure how he’d ended up here, on his knees, the heels of his hands pressed to the ground, round Irish faces looking down at him.

  “Jimmy?” Deveau offered him a hand. “You okay?”

  Jimmy looked at the hand and had no idea how to answer that. Frogmen, he thought. In the Pen.

  WHITEY FOUND SEAN in the woods a hundred yards past the ravine. They’d lost the blood trail and any evidence of footprints in the more open areas of the park, last night’s rain having wiped clean anything that nature didn’t cover.

  “We got dogs sniffing something over by the old drive-in screen. You wanna take a walk over?”

  Sean nodded, but then his walkie-talkie bleated.

  “Trooper Devine.”

  “We got a guy out front here—”

  “Which front?”

  “The Sydney Street side, Trooper.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Guy claims he’s the father of the missing girl.”

  “The fuck’s he doing on-scene?” Sean felt his face fill with blood, get hot and red.

  “Slipped through, Trooper. What can I say?”

  “Well, push him back. You got a psychologist on-scene yet?”

  “En route.”

  Sean closed his eyes. Everyone was en route, like they were all sitting in the same fucking traffic jam.

  “So, keep the father calm till the shrink’s on-scene. You know the drill.”

  “Yeah, but he’s asking for you, Trooper.”

  “Me.”

  “Said he knows you. Said someone told him you were here.”

  “No, no, no. Look—”

  “He’s got some guys with him.”

  “Guys?”

  “Bunch of scary-looking dudes. Half of ’em are like semi-midget, and all of ’em look alike.”

  The Savage brothers. Shit.

  “I’m on my way,” Sean said.

  ANY SECOND NOW, and Val Savage was going to get himself arrested. Chuck, too, maybe, the Savage blood—rarely down—up as all hell now, the brothers shouting at the cops, the cops looking like they’d be going knuckles-’n’-night-sticks any second.

  Jimmy stood with Kevin Savage, one of the saner ones, a few yards from the crime scene tape where Val and Chuck were pointing with their fingers, saying, That’s our niece in there, you dumb fucking prick pieces of shit.

  Jimmy felt a controlled hysteria, a barely suppressed need to erupt that left him numb and just a little addled. Okay, so that was her car there, ten feet away. And, yes, no one had seen her since last night. And that was blood he’d glimpsed on the driver’s seat back. So, yeah, it didn’t look good. But there was a full battalion of cops searching in there now, and no body bags had come out yet. So there was that.

  Jimmy watched an older cop light a cigarette and he wanted to pull it from his mouth, shove the burning coal deep into the veins of his nose, say, Get the fuck back in there and look for my daughter.

  He counted back from ten, a trick he’d learned in Deer Island, counting slow, seeing the numbers appear, floating and gray in the darkness of his brain. Screaming would get him barred from the scene. Any outward show of g
rief or anxiety or the electric fear surging through his blood would result in the same thing. And then the Savages would go nuclear, and they’d all spend this day in a cell instead of on the street where his daughter was last seen.

  “Val,” he called.

  Val Savage pulled his hand back over the crime scene tape and his finger out of the stony cop’s face, looked back at Jimmy.

  Jimmy shook his head. “Ease up.”

  Val charged back toward him. “They’re fucking stonewalling us, Jim. They’re holding us back.”

  “They’re doing their job,” Jimmy said.

  “Their fucking job, Jim? All due respect, the doughnut shop’s the other direction.”

  “You want to help me here?” Jimmy said as Chuck sidled up beside his brother, almost twice as tall, but half as dangerous, which was still more dangerous than most of the population.

  “Sure,” Chuck said. “Tell us what to do.”

  “Val?” Jimmy said.

  “What?” Val’s eyes spinning, fury pouring out of him like an odor.

  “Do you want to help?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanna help, Jimmy. Jesus fuck, you know?”

  “I know,” Jimmy said, hearing a rise in his voice that he tried to swallow against. “I fucking know, Val. That’s my daughter in there. You hear what I’m saying?”

  Kevin put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and Val took a step back, looked down at his feet for a bit.

  “Sorry, Jimmy. Awright, man? I’m just freaking. I mean, shit.”

  Jimmy got the calm back in his voice, forced his brain to work. “You and Kevin, Val? You go down the street to Drew Pigeon’s house. You tell him what’s going on.”

  “Drew Pigeon? Why?”

  “I’m telling you why, Val. You talk to his daughter Eve and Diane Cestra, too, if she’s still there. You ask them when they last saw Katie. What time, Val, exactly. You find out if they were drinking, if Katie had plans to meet anyone, and who she was dating. Can you do that, Val?” Jimmy asked, looking at Kevin, the one who’d hopefully keep Val in check.

  Kevin nodded. “We got it, Jim.”

  “Val?”

  Val looked over his shoulder at the weeds leading into the park, then back at Jimmy, his small head bobbing. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “These girls are friends. You don’t have to get hard on them, but get those answers. Right?”

  “Right,” Kevin said, letting Jimmy know he’d keep it contained. He clapped his older brother’s shoulder. “Come on, Val. Let’s do it.”

  Jimmy watched them walk up Sydney, felt Chuck beside him, jumpy, ready to kill someone.

  “How you holding up?”

  “Shit,” Chuck said, “I’m fine. You I’m worried about.”

  “Don’t. I’m cool for now. Ain’t no other choice, is there?”

  Chuck didn’t answer and Jimmy looked across Sydney, past his daughter’s car, to see Sean Devine walking out of the park and into the weeds, eyes on Jimmy the whole way, Sean a tall guy and moving fast, but Jimmy could still see that thing in his face he’d always hated, the look of a guy the world had always worked for, Sean wearing it like a bigger badge than the one clipped to his belt, pissing people off with it even if he wasn’t aware of it.

  “Jimmy,” Sean said, and shook his hand. “Hey, man.”

  “Hey, Sean. I heard you were in there.”

  “Since early this morning.” Sean looked back over his shoulder, then around again to Jimmy. “I can’t tell you anything right now, Jimmy.”

  “She in there?” Jimmy could hear the tremor in his own voice.

  “I don’t know, Jim. We haven’t found her. I can tell you that much.”

  “So let us in,” Chuck said. “We can help look. See it all the time on the news, ordinary citizens searching for missing kids and shit.”

  Sean kept his eyes on Jimmy, as if Chuck wasn’t even there. “It’s a little more than that, Jimmy. We can’t have any nonpolice personnel in there until we’ve gone over every inch of the scene.”

  “And what’s the scene?” Jimmy asked.

  “The whole damn park at the moment. Look”—Sean patted Jimmy’s shoulder—“I came out here to tell you guys there’s nothing you can do right now. I’m sorry. I really am. But there it is. We know anything—the first thing, Jimmy? We’ll tell you immediately. No bullshit.”

  Jimmy nodded and touched Sean’s elbow. “I talk to you a sec?”

  “Sure.”

  They left Chuck Savage on the curb and walked a few yards down the street. Sean squared himself, getting ready for whatever he thought Jimmy was going to say, all business, cop’s eyes staring back at Jimmy, no mercy in them.

  “That’s my daughter’s car,” Jimmy said.

  “I know. I—”

  Jimmy held up a hand. “Sean? That’s my daughter’s car. It’s got blood in it. She don’t show up for work this morning, don’t show up for her little sister’s First Communion. No one’s seen her since last night. Okay? That’s my daughter we’re talking about, Sean. You don’t have kids, I don’t expect you to understand all the way, but come on, man. My daughter.”

  Sean’s cop’s eyes stayed cop’s eyes, Jimmy not even making a dent.

  “What do you want me to say here, Jimmy? If you want to tell me who she was out with last night, I’ll send some officers to talk to them. She had enemies, I’ll go round them up. You want—”

  “They brought fucking dogs in, Sean. Dogs, for my daughter. Dogs and frogmen.”

  “Yeah, they did. And we got half the fucking force in there, Jimmy. State and BPD. And two helicopters, and two boats, and we’re going to find her. But you, there’s nothing you can do, man. Not right now. Nothing. We clear?”

  Jimmy looked back at Chuck standing on the curb, eyes on the weeds leading into the park, body tilting forward, ready to rip through his own skin.

  “Why you got frogmen looking for my daughter, Sean?”

  “We’re covering all bases, Jimmy. We got a body of water, that’s how we search it.”

  “Is she in the water?”

  “All she is is missing, Jimmy. That’s it.”

  Jimmy turned away from him for a moment, his mind not working too well, getting black and gummy. He wanted in that park. He wanted to walk down the joggers’ path and see Katie walking toward him. He couldn’t think. He needed in.

  “You want a public relations nightmare on your hands?” Jimmy asked. “You want to have to bust me and every single one of the Savage brothers trying to get in there and look for our loved one?”

  Jimmy knew the moment he stopped speaking that it was a weak threat, a grasp, and he hated that Sean knew it, too.

  Sean nodded. “I don’t want to. Believe me. But if I have to, Jimmy, yeah. I will, man.” Sean flipped open a notepad. “Look, just tell me who she was with last night, what she was doing, and I’ll—”

  Jimmy was already walking away when Sean’s walkie-talkie went off, loud and shrill. He turned back as Sean put it to his lips, said, “Go.”

  “We got something, Trooper.”

  “Say again.”

  Jimmy stepped up to Sean, heard the barely suppressed emotion in the voice of the guy on the other end of the walkie-talkie.

  “I said we got something. Sergeant Powers said you need to get in here. Uh, ASAP, Trooper. Like right now.”

  “Your location?”

  “The drive-in screen, Trooper. And, man, it’s a fucking mess.”

  10

  EVIDENCE

  CELESTE WATCHED the twelve o’clock news on the small TV they kept up on the kitchen counter. She ironed as she watched, aware at one point that she could be mistaken for a 1950s housewife, doing menial chores and tending to the child while her husband went off to work carrying his metal lunchpail, returned home expecting a drink in his hand and dinner on the table. But it wasn’t like that, really. Dave, for all his faults, pitched in when it came to housework. He was a duster and vacuumer and dishwasher, whereas Celeste took p
leasure in laundry, in the sorting and folding and ironing, in the warm smell of fabric that had been cleansed and smoothed of wrinkles.

  She used her mother’s iron, an artifact from the early sixties. It was as heavy as a brick, hissed constantly, and released sudden bursts of steam without warning, but it was twice as capable as any of the newer ones that Celeste, lured by sales and claims of space-age technology, had tried over the years. Her mother’s iron left creases you could split a loaf of French bread on and erased thick wrinkles in one smooth swoop that a newer one with a plastic shell would have had to ride over half a dozen times.

  It could piss Celeste off sometimes to think about the way everything these days seemed built to crumble—VCRs, cars, computers, cordless phones—where the tools of her parents’ time had been built to last. She and Dave still used her mother’s iron and her blender, and kept her squat, black rotary phone by their bed. And yet, over their years together, they’d thrown out several purchases that had quit long before one would have assumed logical—TVs with blown picture tubes, a vacuum that poured blue smoke, a coffeemaker that produced liquid only slightly warmer than bathwater. These and other appliances had ended up discarded with the trash because it was almost cheaper to buy a new one than repair the old. Almost. So of course you spent the extra money on the next-generation model, which is what the manufacturers, she was sure, counted on. Sometimes Celeste found herself consciously trying to ignore a notion that it wasn’t only the things in her life but her life, itself, that was not meant to have any weight or lasting impact, but was, in fact, programmed to break down at the first available opportunity so that its few usable parts could be recycled for someone else while the rest of her vanished.

  So there she was ironing and thinking about her own disposability when, ten minutes into the news, the newscaster looked gravely into the camera and announced that police were looking for the assailant in a vicious assault outside one of the city’s neighborhood bars. Celeste moved toward the TV to turn it up, and the newscaster said, “That story, plus Harvey on the weather when we return.” Next thing, Celeste was watching a woman’s manicured hands scrub a baking dish that looked like it had been submerged in warm caramel, a voice hawking the benefits of an all-new-and-improved dishwashing detergent, and Celeste wanted to scream. The news was like those disposable appliances somehow—built to tease and leer, to chuckle out of earshot at your gullibility in believing, yet again, that it would deliver on its promises.