Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

“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 w
as 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.