Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “You talk to anybody who did?”

  Val held up two fingers as he took another drink. “One guy—you know Tommy Moldanado?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  “Grew up in the Basin, paints houses. Anyway, he claims he saw someone staking out the parking lot of the Last Drop just before Katie left. He said the guy definitely wasn’t no cop. Drove a foreign car with a dented front quarter, passenger side.”

  “Okay.”

  “Other weird thing was, I talk to Sandy Greene. ’Member her from the Looey?”

  Jimmy could see her sitting in the classroom, brown pigtails, crooked teeth, always chewed her pencils until they snapped in her mouth and she had to spit out the lead.

  “Yeah. What’s she doing these days?”

  “Hooking,” Val said. “And she looks rough, man. Our age, right? And my mother looked better in her coffin. Anyway, she’s like the oldest pro out there on that circuit near the Last Drop. She says she sort of adopted this kid. Runaway kid, works the trade.”

  “Kid?”

  “Like eleven-, twelve-year-old boy.”

  “Ah, Jesus.”

  “Hey, that’s life. Anyway, this kid, she thinks his real name is Vincent. Everyone called him ‘Little Vince’ except Sandy. She said he preferred ‘Vincent.’ And Vincent’s a lot older than twelve, you know? Vincent’s a pro. She says he’ll fuck you up you try anything with him, keeps a razor blade tucked under his Swatch band, that sorta thing. There six nights a week. Until this Saturday, that is.”

  “What happened to him on Saturday?”

  “No one knows. But he vanished. Sandy said he sometimes crashed at her place. She gets back there Sunday morning and his shit is gone. He blew town.”

  “So, he blew town. Good for him. Maybe he got out of the life.”

  “That’s what I said. Sandy said, No, this kid was into it. She said he was going to make one very scary adult, you know? But for now, he’s a kid, and he dug the work. She said if he blew town, only one thing could have caused it and that was fear. Sandy thinks he saw something, something that terrified him, and she said that something would have to be pretty bad, because little Vince don’t scare easy.”

  “You got feelers out?”

  “Yeah. It’s hard, though. The kiddie trade ain’t, like, organized. You know? They’re just living on the street, picking up a couple of bucks however they can, blowing town whenever they feel like it. But I got people looking. We find this Vincent kid, I figure maybe he knows something about the guy sitting in the parking lot of the Last Drop, maybe he saw the, you know, Katie’s death.”

  “If it had anything to do with this guy in the car.”

  “Moldanado said the guy gave off a bad vibe. Something about him, he said, even though it was dark, he couldn’t see the guy good, he just said a vibe came from that car.”

  A vibe, Jimmy thought. Oh, yeah, that’s helpful.

  “And this was just before Katie left?”

  “Just before, yeah. The police, right, they sealed off the parking lot Monday morning, had a whole team down there, scraping the asphalt.”

  Jimmy nodded. “So something went down in that parking lot.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I don’t get. Katie was taken off on Sydney, man. That’s like ten blocks away.”

  Jimmy drained his coffee cup. “What if she went back?”

  “Huh?”

  “To the Last Drop. I know what the prevailing theory is—she dropped Eve and Diane, drove up Sydney, and that’s when it happened. But what if she drove back to the Last Drop first? She drove back, she runs into the guy. He abducts her, forces her to drive back to Pen Park, and then it goes down like the cops think?”

  Val tossed his empty coffee cup back and forth between his hands. “That’s possible. But what brought her back to the Last Drop?”

  “I don’t know.” They walked to the trash barrel and dumped their cups, and Jimmy said, “What about Just Ray’s kid, you find anything out there?”

  “Asked around in general about him. The kid’s a mouse by all accounts. No trouble to anyone. If he wasn’t so good-looking, I’m not sure anyone would even remember meeting him. Eve and Diane both said he loved her, Jim. Loved her like once-in-a-lifetime kinda love. I’ll take a run at him, you want.”

  “Let’s hold off for the time being,” Jimmy said. “Watch and wait when it comes to him. Try to track down that Vincent kid.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Jimmy opened the passenger door, saw Val looking at him over the roof, Val holding something back, chewing it.

  “What?”

  Val blinked in the sunlight, smiled. “Huh?”

  “You want to spit something. What is it?”

  Val lowered his chin out of the sun, spread his arms on the roof. “I heard something this morning. Just before we left.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Val said, and looked off into the doughnut shop for a moment. “I heard those two cops were by Dave Boyle’s again. You know, Sean from the Point and his partner, the fat one?”

  Jimmy said, “Dave was in McGills that night, yeah. They probably just forgot to ask him something, had to come back.”

  Val’s gaze left the doughnut shop and his eyes met Jimmy’s. “They took him with them when they left, Jim. You know what I mean? Put him in the backseat.”

  MARSHALL BURDEN CAME into the Homicide Unit during lunch hour and called to Whitey as he pushed through the small gate attached to the reception desk. “You the guys looking for me?”

  Whitey said, “That’s us. Come on over.”

  Marshall Burden was a year short of his thirty and he looked it. He had the milky-wet eyes of a man who’d seen more of the world and more of himself than anyone wanted to, and he carried his tall, flabby frame like he’d rather move backward than forward, as if the limbs were at war with the brain and the brain just wanted out of the whole deal. He’d run the property room for the last seven years, but before that he’d been one of the aces of the whole State Police Department, groomed for a colonel’s slot, working his way up from Narcotics to Homicide to Major Crimes without a bump in the road until one day, the story went, he just woke up scared. It was a disease that usually afflicted the guys who worked undercover and sometimes the highway troopers who suddenly couldn’t pull over one more car, so sure were they that the driver had a gun in his hand and nothing left to lose. But Marshall Burden caught it somehow, too, started becoming the last guy through the door and dragging his ass to calls, freezing in stairwells as everyone else kept climbing.

  He took a seat beside Sean’s desk, giving off an air of spoiled fruit, and thumbed through the Sporting News page-a-day calendar Sean kept there, the pages going back to March.

  “Devine, right?” he said without looking up.

  “Yeah,” Sean said. “Good to meet you. We studied some of your work in the Academy, man.”

  Marshall shrugged as if the memory of his old self embarrassed him. He thumbed through a few more pages. “So what’s up, guys? I gotta get back in half an hour.”

  Whitey wheeled his chair over by Marshall Burden. “You worked a task force with the Feebs in the early eighties, right?”

  Burden nodded.

  “You took down a small-timer named Raymond Harris, stole a truckload of Trivial Pursuit from a rest stop in Cranston, Rhode Island.”

  Burden smiled at one of the Yogi Berra quotes in the calendar. “Yeah. Trucker went to take a piss, didn’t know he was staked out. The Harris guy jacked the truck and drove away, but the trucker called in, put it on the wire right away, we pulled the thing over in Needham.”

  “But Harris walked,” Sean said.

  Burden looked up at him for the first time, Sean seeing the fear and self-hatred in those milky eyes and hoping he never caught what Burden had.

  “He didn’t walk,” Burden said. “He rolled. He rolled on the guy who’d hired him for the trucking job, guy name a Stillson, I think. Yeah, Meyer Stillson.”

&
nbsp; Sean had heard about Burden’s memory—supposedly photographic—but to see the guy reach back eighteen years and pluck names out of the fog like he’d been talking about them yesterday was humbling and depressing at the same time. Guy could have run the whole show, for Christ’s sake.

  “So he rolled and that was it?” Whitey said.

  Burden frowned. “Harris had a record. He wasn’t walking just because he gave us his boss’s name. No, BPD’s Anti-Gang Unit stepped in to get info on another case, and he rolled again.”

  “On who?”

  “Guy ran the Rester Street Boys, Jimmy Marcus.”

  Whitey looked over at Sean, one eyebrow cocked.

  “This was after the counting room robbery, right?” Sean said.

  “What counting room robbery?” Whitey asked.

  “It’s what Jimmy did time for,” Sean said.

  Burden nodded. “Him and another guy took off the MBTA counting room on a Friday night. In and out in two minutes. They knew what time the guards changed shifts. They knew exactly when they bagged up the cash. They had two guys out on the street who stalled the Brinks truck as it came to make the pickup. They were slick as hell and they knew too much not to have had a guy on the inside, or at least someone who’d worked for the T at some point in the previous year or two.”

  “Ray Harris,” Whitey said.

  “Yup. He gave us Stillson and he gave the BPD the Rester Street Boys.”

  “All of ’em?”

  Burden shook his head. “No, just Marcus, but he was the brains. Cut off the head, the body dies, you know? BPD picked him up coming out of a storage warehouse the morning of the Saint Pat’s parade. That was the day they planned to split up the take, so Marcus had a suitcase full of money in his hand.”

  “But wait,” Sean said, “did Ray Harris testify in open court?”

  “No. Marcus cut a deal long before it went to court. He dummied up on who he’d been working with and he took the fall. All the shit everyone knew he’d been behind they couldn’t prove. Kid was like nineteen or something. Twenty? He’d been running that crew since he was seventeen and he’d never even been arrested. DA cut the deal for two inside, three suspended, because he knew there was a good chance they wouldn’t even be able to convict in open court. Heard the Anti-Gang guys were pissed, but whatta you going to do?”

  “So Jimmy Marcus never knew Ray Harris ratted him out?”

  Burden looked up from the calendar again, fixed his swimming eyes on Sean with a vague contempt. “In a three-year span, Marcus pulled off something like sixteen major heists. Once, right, he hit twelve different jewelers in the Jeweler’s Exchange building on Washington Street. Even now, no one knows how the fuck he did it. He had to circumvent close to twenty different alarms—alarms running off phone lines, satellites, cellular, which was a completely new technology back then. He was eighteen. You believe that shit? Eighteen years old and he’s breaking alarm codes that pros in their forties couldn’t crack. The Keldar Technics job? He and his guys went in through the roof, jammed the fire department frequencies, and then they set off the sprinkler system. Best anyone could figure at the time, they were hanging suspended up at the ceiling until the sprinkler system shorted out the motion detectors. The guy was a fucking genius. If he went to work for NASA instead of himself? We’d be taking the wife and kids on vacation to Pluto. You think a guy this smart wouldn’t have figured out who fingered him? Ray Harris vanished from the face of the earth two months after Marcus rotated back into the free world. What does that tell you?”

  Sean said, “It tells me you think Jimmy Marcus murdered Ray Harris.”

  “Or he had that midget prick, Val Savage, do it. Look, call Ed Folan at the D-7. He’s a captain there now, but he used to work the Anti-Gang Unit. He can tell you all about Marcus and Ray Harris. Every cop who worked East Bucky in the eighties will tell you the same thing. If Jimmy Marcus didn’t kill Ray Harris, I’m the next Jewish pope.” He pushed the calendar away with his finger and stood up, hitched his pants. “I gotta go eat. You take her easy, fellas.”

  He walked back through the squad room, his head swiveling as he took it all in, maybe the desk he used to sit at, the board where his cases used to be listed beside everyone else’s, the person he had been in this room before that person went AWOL, ended up in the property room praying for the day when he could punch that clock for the last time, go someplace where no one remembered who he could have been.

  Whitey turned to Sean. “Pope Marshall the Lost?”

  THE LONGER HE SAT in the rickety chair in that cold room, the more Dave realized that what he’d thought was a hangover this morning had merely been the continuation of last night’s drunk. The true hangover began to set in around noon, crawling through him like tight packs of termites, taking over his bloodstream and then his circulation, squeezing his heart and picking at his brain. His mouth dried up and sweat turned his hair damp, and he could smell himself suddenly as the alcohol began to leak through his pores. His legs and arms filled with mud. His chest ached. And a wash of the downs cascaded through his skull and settled behind his eyes.

  He didn’t feel brave anymore. He didn’t feel strong. The clarity that just two hours ago had seemed as permanent as a scar left his body and took off out of the room and down the road, only to be replaced by a dread far worse than any he’d ever experienced. He felt certain he was going to die soon and die badly. Maybe he’d stroke out right here in this chair, slam the back of his head off the floor as his body shook with convulsions and his eyes leaked blood and he swallowed his tongue so deeply no one could pull it back out. Maybe a coronary, his heart already banging against the walls of his chest like a rat in a steel box. Maybe once they let him out of here, if they ever did, he’d step out on the street, hear a horn right beside him, and be flat on his back as the thick treads of a bus tire rolled up his cheekbone and kept rolling.

  Where was Celeste? Did she even know he’d been picked up and taken down here? Did she even care? And what about Michael? Did he miss his father? The worst thing about being dead was that Celeste and Michael would move on. Oh, it might hurt them for a small amount of time, but they would endure and start new lives because that’s what people did every day. It was only in movies that people pined for the dead, their lives freezing up like broken clocks. In real life, your death was mundane, a forgettable event to everyone but you.

  Dave sometimes wondered if the dead looked down on the ones they’d left behind and wept to see how easily their loved ones were getting along without them. Like Stanley the Giant’s kid, Eugene. Was he up there in the ether somewhere with his little bald head and white hospital johnny, looking down at his dad laughing in a bar, thinking, Hey, Dad, what about me? You remember me? I lived.

  Michael would get a new dad, and maybe he’d be in college and he’d tell a girl about the father who’d taught him baseball, the one he barely remembered. It happened so long ago, he’d say. So long ago.

  And Celeste was certainly attractive enough to get another man. She’d have to. Loneliness, she’d tell her friends. It just got to me. And he’s a nice guy. He’s good with Michael. And her friends would betray Dave’s memory in a flash. They’d say, Good for you, honey. It’s healthy. You have to get back on that bike and move ahead with your life.

  And Dave would be up there with Eugene, the two of them looking down, calling out their love in voices none of the living could hear.

  Jesus. Dave wanted to huddle in the corner and hug himself. He was falling apart. He knew if those cops came back in now, he’d crack. He’d tell them anything they wanted to know if they’d just show him a little warmth and get him another Sprite.

  And then the door to the interrogation room opened up on Dave and his dread and his need for human warmth, and the trooper who entered in full uniform was young and looked strong and had those trooper eyes, the kind that managed to be impersonal and imperious at the same time.

  “Mr. Boyle, if you could come with me now.”
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  Dave stood up and went to the door, his hands trembling slightly as the alcohol continued to fight its way out of him.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “You’ll be stepping into a lineup, Mr. Boyle. Someone wants to take a look at you.”

  TOMMY MOLDANADO wore jeans and a green T-shirt speckled with paint. There were specks of paint in his curly brown hair and teardrops of it on his tan work boots and chips of it on the frames of his thick glasses.

  It was the glasses that worried Sean. Any witness who walked into court wearing glasses might as well have put a target sign on his chest for the defense attorney. And the juries, forget about it. Experts all in regard to eyeglasses and the law thanks to Matlock and The Practice, they watched the bespectacled take the stand the same way they watched drug dealers, blacks without ties, and jailhouse rats who’d cut a deal with the DA.

  Moldanado pressed his nose up against the viewing room glass and looked in at the five men in the lineup. “I can’t really tell with them looking head-on. Can they turn to the left?”

  Whitey flicked the switch on the dais in front of him and spoke into the microphone. “All subjects turn to the left.”

  The five men shifted left.

  Moldanado put his palms against the glass and squinted. “Number Two. It could be Number Two. Could you get him to step closer?”

  “Number Two?” Sean said.

  Moldanado looked back over his shoulder at him and nodded.

  The second guy in the lineup was a narc named Scott Paisner, who normally worked Norfolk County.

  “Number Two,” Whitey said with a sigh. “Take two steps forward.”

  Scott Paisner was short, bearded, and round with a rapidly receding hairline. He looked about as much like Dave Boyle as Whitey did. He turned face-front and stepped up to the glass, and Moldanado said, “Yeah, yeah. That’s the guy I saw.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ninety-five percent,” he said. “It was night, you know? There are no lights in that parking lot and, hey, I was buzzed. But otherwise I’m almost positive that’s the guy I saw.”