Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

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?”