Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  22

  THE HUNTING FISH

  “YOU TOWED his car?” Sean said.

  “His car was towed,” Whitey said. “Not the same thing.”

  As they pulled out of the morning rush-hour traffic and down onto the East Buckingham exit ramp, Sean said, “For what kind of cause?”

  “It was abandoned,” Whitey said, whistling lightly through his teeth as he turned onto Roseclair.

  “Where?” Sean said. “In front of the man’s house?”

  “Oh, no,” Whitey said. “The car was found down in Rome Basin along the parkway. Lucky for us the parkway’s State jurisdiction, ain’t it? Appears someone jacked it, took it for a joyride, then abandoned it. These things happen, you know?”

  Sean had woken up this morning from a dream in which he’d held his daughter and spoken her name, even though he didn’t know it and couldn’t remember what he’d said in the dream, so he was still a little foggy.

  “We found blood,” Whitey said.

  “Where?”

  “The front seat of Boyle’s car.”

  “How much?”

  Whitey held his thumb and index finger a hair’s width apart. “A bit. Found some more in the trunk.”

  “In the trunk,” Sean said.

  “A lot more actually.”

  “So?”

  “So, it’s at the lab.”

  “No,” Sean said. “I meant so what if you found blood in the trunk? Katie Marcus never got in anyone’s trunk.”

  “That’s a fly in the ointment, sure.”

  “Sarge, your search of the car’s going to be tossed out.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “The car was stolen and abandoned in State jurisdiction. Purely for insurance purposes and, I might add, in the best interest of the owner—”

  “You did a physical search and filed a report.”

  “Ah, you’re quick, boy.”

  They pulled up in front of Dave Boyle’s house and Whitey raised the gearshift on the driver’s column into park. He killed the engine. “I got enough to bring him in for a chat. That’s all I want right now.”

  Sean nodded, knowing there was no point in arguing with the man. Whitey got to be a sergeant in the Homicide Unit by the dog-to-a-bone tenacity he had regarding his hunches. You didn’t talk him out of his hunches, you rode them out.

  “What about the ballistics?” Sean said.

  “That’s a weird one, too,” Whitey said as they sat looking at Dave’s house, Whitey making no move to leave just yet. “The gun was a thirty-eight Smith like we figured. Part of a lot stolen from a gun dealer in New Hampshire in ’eighty-one. The same gun that killed Katherine Marcus was involved in a liquor store holdup in ’eighty-two. Right here in Buckingham.”

  “The Flats?”

  Whitey shook his head. “Up in Rome Basin, place called Looney Liquors. It was a two-man job, both guys wearing rubber masks. They came in through the back after the owner had shut the front doors, and the first guy into the store fired a warning shot that went through a bottle of rye and embedded in the wall. Rest of the robbery went smooth-’n’-styling, but the bullet was recovered. Ballistics matched it to the same gun as the one killed the Marcus girl.”

  “So that would tend to point in another direction, don’t you think?” Sean said. “Nineteen-eighty-two, Dave was, like, seventeen and starting out at Raytheon. I don’t think he was pulling any liquor store jobs.”

  “Don’t mean the gun didn’t eventually end up in his hands. Shit, kid, you know the way they get passed around.” Whitey didn’t sound as sure of himself as he had last night, but he said, “Let’s go get him,” and pushed open his door.

  Sean got out of the passenger side and they walked up to Dave’s place, Whitey thumbing the cuffs on his hip like he was hoping he’d get an excuse to use them.

  JIMMY PARKED his car and carried a cardboard tray of coffee cups and a bag of doughnuts across the cracked tar parking lot toward the Mystic River. The cars slammed across the metal extension spans of the Tobin Bridge above him, and Katie knelt by the water’s edge with Just Ray Harris, both of them peering into the river. Dave Boyle was there, too, his bruised hand ballooned to the size of a boxing glove. Dave sat in a sagging lawn chair beside Celeste and Annabeth. Celeste had some kind of zipper contraption covering her mouth and Annabeth smoked two cigarettes at once. All three of them wore black sunglasses and didn’t look at Jimmy. They stared up at the underside of the bridge, and gave off an air that said they’d prefer to be left alone in their lawn chairs, thank you very much.

  Jimmy put the coffee and doughnuts down beside Katie and knelt between her and Just Ray. He looked down at the water and saw his reflection, saw Katie’s and Just Ray’s, too, as they turned toward him, Ray with a big red fish clamped between his teeth, the fish still flopping.

  Katie said, “I dropped my dress in the river.”

  Jimmy said, “I can’t see it.”

  The fish plopped out of Just Ray’s mouth and landed in the water, lay there on top of the surface flopping away.

  Katie said, “He’ll get it. He’s hunting fish.”

  “Tasted just like chicken,” Ray said.

  Jimmy felt Katie’s warm hand on his back, and then he felt Ray’s on the back of his neck, and Katie said, “Why don’t you go get it, Dad?”

  And they pushed him over the edge and Jimmy saw the black water and the flopping fish rise up to meet him and he knew he was going to drown. He opened his mouth to scream and the fish jumped up inside there, cutting off his oxygen, and the water felt like black paint when his face plunged into it.

  He opened his eyes and turned his head, saw the clock reading seven-sixteen, and he couldn’t remember coming to bed. He must have, though, because here he was, Annabeth sleeping beside him, Jimmy waking up to a brand-new day with an appointment to pick out a headstone in a little over an hour, and Just Ray Harris and the Mystic River knocking at his door.

  THE KEY to any successful interrogation was to get as much time as possible before the suspect demanded a lawyer. The hard cases—the dealers and gangbangers and bikers and mobbed-up guys—usually asked for a “mouth” right off the bat. You could fuck with them a little bit, try to rattle them before the lawyer showed up, but for the most part, you were going to have to rely on physical evidence to make your case. Rarely had Sean taken a hard guy into the box and come out with much of use.

  When you were dealing with regular citizens or first-time felons, on the other hand, most of your cases were dunked during Q & A’s. The “road rage” case, Sean’s career topper so far, had been made like that. Out in Middlesex, guy’s driving home one night, the right front tire of his SUV came off at eighty miles an hour. Just came off, rolled across the highway. The SUV flipped over nine or ten times, and the guy, Edwin Hurka, was dead on-scene.

  Turned out the lug nuts on both his front tires were loose. So they were looking at involuntary manslaughter at best because prevailing opinion was that it was probably just some hungover mechanic’s error, and Sean and his partner, Adolph, found out that the victim did have his tires replaced just a few weeks before. But Sean had also found a piece of paper in the victim’s glove compartment that bothered him. It was a license plate, hastily scrawled, and when Sean ran it through the RMV computer, he’d come up with the name Alan Barnes. He’d dropped by Barnes’s house and asked the guy who answered the door if he was Alan Barnes. The guy, nervous as hell, said, Yeah, why? And Sean, feeling it through his whole body, said, “I’d like to talk to you about some lug nuts.”

  Barnes broke right there in his doorway, told Sean he’d just meant to fuck the guy’s car up a little, give him a scare, the two of them having gotten into it a week before in the merge lane heading into the airport tunnel, Barnes so pissed by the end of it that he hung back, skipped his appointment, and followed Edwin Hurka home, waited till the guy had shut off all the lights in his house before he went to work with his tire iron.

  Peo
ple were stupid. They killed each other over the dumbest things and then they hung around hoping to get caught, walked into court pleading not guilty after giving some cop a four-page, signed confession. It was knowing how stupid they really were that was a cop’s best weapon. Let them talk. Always. Let them explain. Let them unload their guilt as you plied them with coffee and the tape recorder reels spun.

  And when they asked for a lawyer—and the average citizen almost always asked—you frowned and asked if they were sure that’s what they wanted and let a very unfriendly vibe fill the room until they decided that they’d really like all three of you to be friends, so maybe they’d talk a bit more before they brought that lawyer down here and spoiled the mood.

  Dave didn’t ask for a lawyer, though. Not once. He sat in the chair that bucked when you leaned too far back in it, and he looked hungover and annoyed and pissed at Sean, in particular, but he didn’t look scared and he didn’t look nervous, and Sean could tell it was beginning to get to Whitey.

  “Look, Mr. Boyle,” Whitey said, “we know you left McGills before you said you did. We know you showed up a half-hour later in the parking lot of the Last Drop around the same time the Marcus girl left. And we sure as shit know you didn’t get that swollen hand by banging it off a wall making a pool shot.”

  Dave groaned. He said, “How about a Sprite, something like that?”

  “In a minute,” Whitey said for the fourth time in the half an hour they’d been in here. “Tell us what really happened that night, Mr. Boyle.”

  “I already did.”

  “You lied.”

  Dave shrugged. “Your opinion.”

  “No,” Whitey said. “Fact. You lied about leaving McGills. The fucking clock was stopped, Mr. Boyle, five minutes before you claim to have left.”

  “Five whole minutes?”

  “You think this is funny?”

  Dave leaned back a bit in the chair and Sean waited to hear the telltale crack it emitted before it would buckle, but it didn’t, Dave pushing it to the edge, but not going any further.

  “No, Sergeant, I don’t think it’s funny. I’m tired. I’m hungover. And my car was not only stolen but now you’re telling me you won’t release it to me. You say I left McGills five minutes before I said I did?”

  “At least.”

  “Fine. I’ll give you that. Maybe I did. I don’t look at my watch as much as you guys apparently do. So if you say I left McGills at ten of one instead of five of one, I say, okay. Maybe I did. Oops. But that’s it. I went home right after that. I didn’t go to any other bar.”

  “You were seen in the parking lot of—”

  “No,” Dave said. “A Honda with a dented quarter panel was seen. Right? You know how many Hondas there are in this city? Come on, man.”

  “How many with dents, though, Mr. Boyle, in the same place as yours?”

  Dave shrugged. “A bunch, I bet.”

  Whitey looked at Sean and Sean could feel that they were losing. Dave was right—they could probably find twenty Hondas with dented quarter panels on the passenger side. Twenty, easy. And if Dave could throw that at them, then his lawyer would come up with a lot more.

  Whitey came around the back of Dave’s chair and said, “Tell us how the blood got in your car.”

  “What blood?”

  “The blood we found in your front seat. Let’s start there.”

  Dave said, “How about that Sprite, Sean?”

  Sean said, “Sure.”

  Dave smiled. “I get it. You’re a good cop. How about a meatball sub while you’re at it?”

  Sean, half out of his chair, sat back down. “Ain’t your bitch, Dave. Looks like you’ll have to wait awhile.”

  “You’re somebody’s bitch, though. Aren’t you, Sean?” There was a crazy leer in his eyes when he said it, a preening cockiness, and Sean started thinking maybe Whitey was right. Sean wondered if his father, seeing this Dave Boyle, would have the same opinion of him as he’d had last night.

  Sean said, “The blood on your front seat, Dave. Answer the sergeant.”

  Dave looked back up at Whitey. “We got a chain-link fence in our backyard. You know the kind, with the links curling inward at the top? I was doing yard work the other day. My landlord’s old. I do it, he keeps the rent reasonable. So I’m cutting away these bamboo-looking things he’s got back there—”

  Whitey sighed, but Dave didn’t seem to notice.

  “—and I slip. I got this electric hedge trimmer in my hand, and I don’t want to drop it, so when I slip, I fall into the chain-link fence and I slice myself against it.” He patted his rib cage. “Right here. It wasn’t bad, but it bled like hell. Like ten minutes later? I gotta go pick up my son at Little League practice. It was probably still bleeding, I got into the seat. That’s the best I can figure it.”

  Whitey said, “So that was your blood in the front seat?”

  “Like I said—best I can figure it.”

  “And what blood type are you?”

  “B negative.”

  Whitey gave him a broad grin as he came back around the chair, perched on the edge of the table. “Funny. That’s the exact type we found in the front seat.”

  Dave held up his hands. “Well, there you go.”

  Whitey mimicked Dave’s hands. “Not quite. Care to explain the blood in the trunk? That blood wasn’t B negative.”

  “I don’t know anything about any blood in my trunk.”

  Whitey chuckled. “No idea how a good half pint of blood got in the trunk of your car?”

  “No, I don’t,” Dave said.

  Whitey leaned in, patted Dave’s shoulder. “I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Boyle, that this is not the avenue you want to take. You claim in court that you don’t know how someone else’s blood got in your car, how’s that going to look?”

  “Fine, I suppose.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Dave leaned back again and Whitey’s hand fell from his shoulder. “You filled out the report, Sergeant.”

  “What report?” Whitey said.

  Sean saw it coming and thought, Oh, shit, he’s got us.

  “The stolen car report,” Dave said.

  “So?”

  “So,” Dave said, “the car wasn’t in my possession last night. I don’t know what the car thieves used it for, but maybe you want to find out, because it sounds like they were up to no good.”

  For a long thirty seconds, Whitey sat completely still, and Sean could feel it dawning on him—he’d gotten too smart and he’d fucked himself. Just about anything they found in that car would be thrown out in court because Dave’s lawyer could claim the car thieves had put it there.

  “The blood was old, Mr. Boyle. Older than a few hours.”

  “Yeah?” Dave said. “You can prove that? I mean, conclusively, Sergeant? You’re sure it didn’t just dry fast? I mean, it wasn’t a humid night last night.”

  “We can prove it,” Whitey said, but Sean could hear the doubt in his voice, so he was pretty sure Dave could hear it, too.

  Whitey got up off the table and turned his back to Dave. He put his fingers over his mouth and drummed them against his upper lip as he walked the length of the table down toward Sean’s end, his eyes on the floor.

  “Things looking any better on that Sprite?” Dave said.

  “WE’RE BRINGING DOWN the kid Souza talked to, the one who saw the car. Tommy, ah—”

  “Moldanado,” Sean said.

  “Yeah.” Whitey nodded, his voice a little thin, his face a fist of distraction, the look of a guy who’d had a chair pulled out from under him, found his ass hitting the floor, wondering how he got there. “We’ll, ah, put Boyle in a lineup, see if this Moldanado picks him out.”

  “It’s something,” Sean said.

  Whitey leaned against the corridor wall as a secretary passed them, her perfume the same kind Lauren used, Sean thinking maybe he’d call her on her cell, see how she was doing today, see if she’d talk now that he’d made th
e first move.

  Whitey said, “He’s too cool in there. Guy’s first time in the box and he’s not even sweating?”

  Sean said, “Sarge, it’s not looking good, you know?”

  “No shit.”

  “No, I mean, even if we didn’t get blown out on the car, it’s not the Marcus girl’s blood. There’s nothing to tie him to this.”

  Whitey looked back at the door to the interrogation room. “I can break him.”

  “He kicked our asses in there,” Sean said.

  “I’m not even warmed up.”

  Sean could see it in his face, though, the doubt, the first crumbling of the primary hunch. Whitey was stubborn and mean, too, if he thought he was right, but the man was too smart to ever flame out on a hunch that kept running into substantiation problems.

  “Look,” Sean said, “let’s let him sweat a bit in there.”

  “He ain’t sweating.”

  “He might start, we leave him alone to think.”

  Whitey looked back at the door like he wanted to burn it down. “Maybe.”

  “I think it’s the gun,” Sean said. “We bust this open on that gun.”

  Whitey chewed the inside of his mouth and eventually nodded. “It’d be nice to know more about the gun. You want to take that?”

  “Same guy still own the liquor store?”

  Whitey said, “I don’t know. The case file was from ’eighty-two, but the owner then was a Lowell Looney.”

  Sean smiled at the name. “Has a ring to it, don’t it?”

  Whitey said, “Why don’t you take a ride over? I’ll watch fuckhead in there through the glass, see if he starts singing songs about dead girls in the park.”

  LOWELL LOONEY was about eighty years old and looked like he could beat Sean in a hundred-yard dash. He wore an orange T-shirt from Porter’s Gym over blue sweats with white piping and spanking-new Reeboks, and he moved around like he’d jump for the highest bottle behind the counter if you asked him to.

  “Right there,” he said to Sean, pointing at a row of half-pint bottles behind the counter. “Went in through a bottle and stuck right in that wall there.”

  Sean said, “Scary, huh?”