“But, Lionel,” Angie said, “what if you had reported Helene to Chile Welfare? If you’d done it enough times, I’m sure you could have petitioned the courts to allow you and Beatrice to adopt Amanda.”
Lionel laughed, and Ryerson shook his head slowly at Angie.
“What?” she said.
Ryerson snipped the end of a cigar. “Miss Gennaro, unless the birth mother is a lesbian in states like Utah or Alabama, it is all but impossible to remove parental rights.” He lit the cigar and shook his head. “Let me amend that: It is impossible.”
“How can that be,” Angie said, “if the parent has proven herself consistently negligent?”
Another sad shake of the head from Ryerson. “This year in Washington, D.C., a birth mother was given full custody of a child she’s barely seen. The child has been living with foster parents since he was born. The birth mother is a convicted felon who gave birth to the child while she was on probation for murdering another of her children, who had reached the ripe old age of six weeks and was crying from hunger when the mother decided enough was enough and smothered her, tossed her in a trash bin, and went to a barbecue. Now this woman has two other kids, one of whom is being raised by the father’s parents, the other of whom is in foster care. All four kids were fathered by different men, and the mother, who served only a couple of years for killing her daughter, is now—responsibly, I’m sure—raising the child she took back from the loving foster parents who’d petitioned the courts for custody. This,” Ryerson said, “is a true story. Look it up.”
“That’s bullshit,” Angie said.
“No, it’s true,” Ryerson said.
“How can…?” Angie dropped her hands from the table, stared off into space.
“This is America,” Ryerson said, “where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young.”
Angie had the look of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, then slapped in the face as she’d doubled over.
Lionel rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Agent Ryerson is right, Miss Gennaro. There’s nothing you can do if an awful parent wants to hold on to her child.”
“That doesn’t get you off the hook, Mr. McCready.” Ryerson pointed his cigar at him. “Where’s your niece?”
Lionel stared into Ryerson’s cigar ash, then eventually shook his head.
Ryerson nodded and jotted something in his notebook. Then he reached behind his back, produced a set of handcuffs, and tossed them on the table.
Lionel pushed his chair back.
“Stay seated, Mr. McCready, or the next thing I put on the table is my gun.”
Lionel gripped the arms of the chair but didn’t move.
I said, “So you were angry at Helene about Amanda’s burns. What happened next?”
I met Ryerson’s eyes and he blinked softly, gave me a small nod. Going straight at the question of Amanda’s whereabouts wasn’t working. Lionel could just clam up, take the whole fall, and she’d stay gone. But if we could get him talking again….
“My UPS route,” he said eventually, “covers Broussard’s precinct. That’s how we stayed in touch so easily over the years. Anyway…”
The week after Amanda’s sunburn, Lionel and Broussard had gone out for a drink. Broussard had listened to Lionel pour out his concern for his niece, his hatred of his sister, his conviction that Amanda’s chances to grow up to be anything but a mirror of her mother were slipping away day by day.
Broussard had bought all the drinks. He’d been generous with them, too, and near the end of the night, when Lionel was drunk, he’d put his arm around him and said, “What if there were a solution?”
“There’s no solution,” Lionel had said. “The courts, the—”
“Fuck the courts,” Broussard had said. “Fuck everything you’ve considered. What if there were a way to guarantee Amanda a loving home and loving parents?”
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch is: No one can ever know what happened to her. Not her mother, not your wife, not your son. No one. She vanishes.”
And Broussard had snapped his fingers.
“Poof. Like she never existed.”
It took a few months for Lionel to go for it. In that time, he’d twice visited his sister’s house to find the door unlocked and Helene gone over to Dottie’s, her daughter sleeping alone in the apartment. In August, Helene dropped by a barbecue in Lionel and Beatrice’s backyard. She’d been driving around with Amanda in a friend’s car and she was fucked up on schnapps, so fucked up that while pushing Amanda and Matt on the swings, she accidentally pushed her daughter off the seat and fell across it herself. She lay there, laughing, as her daughter got up off the ground, wiped the dirt from her knees, checked herself for cuts.
Over the course of the summer, Amanda’s skin had blistered and scarred permanently in places because Helene occasionally forgot to apply the medicine prescribed by the emergency room doctor.
And then, in September, Helene talked about leaving the state.
“What?” I said. “I never heard this.”
Lionel shrugged. “Looking back, it was probably just another of her stupid ideas. She had a friend who’d moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, got a job at a T-shirt shop, told Helene how it was sunny all the time, drinks were flowing, no more snow, no more cold. Just sit on the beach and occasionally sell T-shirts. For a week or so, it was all Helene talked about. Most times, I’d have brushed it off. She was always talking about living somewhere else, just like she was sure she’d hit for the lottery someday. But this time, I dunno, I panicked. All I could think was: She’ll take Amanda. She’ll leave her alone on beaches and in unlocked apartments and she won’t have me or Beatrice around to pick up the slack. I just…I lost it. I called Broussard. I met the people who wanted to take care of Amanda.”
“And their names were?” Ryerson’s pen hovered over the pad.
Lionel ignored him. “They were great. Perfect. Beautiful home. Loved kids. Had already raised one perfectly, and now she’d moved out, they felt empty. They’re great with her,” he said quietly.
“So you’ve seen her,” I said.
He nodded. “She’s happy. She really does smile now.” Something caught in his throat, and he swallowed against it. “She doesn’t know I see her. Broussard’s first rule was that her whole past life had to be wiped out. She’s four. She’ll forget, given time. Actually,” he said slowly, “She’s five now. Isn’t she?”
The realization that Amanda had celebrated a birthday he hadn’t witnessed slid softly across his face. He shook his head quickly. “Anyway, I’ve snuck up there, watched her with her new parents, and she looks great. She looks…” He cleared his throat, looked away from us. “She looks loved.”
“What happened the night she disappeared?” Ryerson said.
“I came in from the back of the house. I took her out. I told her it was a game. She liked games. Maybe because Helene’s idea was a trip down to the bar, play with the Pac-Man machine, honey.” He sucked ice from his glass and crushed it between his teeth. “Broussard was parked on the street. I waited in the doorway to the porch, told Amanda to be real, real quiet. The only neighbor who could have seen us was Mrs. Driscoll, across the street. She was sitting on her stoop, had a direct line on the house. She left the stoop for a second, went back in the house for another cup of tea or something, and Broussard gave me an all-clear signal. I carried Amanda to Broussard’s car, and we drove away.”
“And no one saw a thing,” I said.
“None of the neighbors. We found out later, though, that Chris Mullen did. He was parked on the street, staking out the house. He was waiting for Helene to come back so he could find out where she’d hid the money she stole. He recognized Broussard. Cheese Olamon used it to blackmail Broussard into retrieving the missing money. He was also supposed to steal some drugs from evidence lockup, give them to Mullen that night at the quarry.”
“Back to the night Amanda disappeared,
” I said.
He took a second cube of ice from the glass with his thick fingers, chewed it. “I told Amanda my friend was going to take her to see some nice people. Told her I’d see her in a few hours. She just nodded. She was used to being dropped off with strangers. I got out a few blocks away and walked home. It was ten-thirty. It took my sister almost twelve hours to notice her daughter was gone. That tell you anything?”
For a while we were so quiet, I could hear the thump of darts hitting cork near the back of the bar.
“When the time was right,” Lionel said, “I figured I’d tell Beatrice, and she’d understand. Not right away. A few years down the road, maybe. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that through. Beatrice hates Helene, and she loves Amanda, but something like this…See, she believes in the law, all the rules. She’d never have gone along with something like this. But I hoped, maybe, once enough time had passed…” He looked up at the ceiling, gave a small shake of his head. “When she decided to call you two, I got in contact with Broussard and he said try and dissuade her, but not too hard. Let her do it if she has to. He told me the next day that if push came to shove, he had some things on you two. Something about a murdered pimp.”
Ryerson gave me a raised eyebrow and a cold, curious smile.
I shrugged and looked away, and that’s when I saw the guy in the Popeye mask. He came in through the back fire exit, his right arm extended, a .45 automatic pointed at chest level.
His partner brandished a shotgun and also wore a plastic Halloween mask. Casper the Friendly Ghost’s moony white face stared out as he came through the front door and shouted, “Hands on the table! Everyone! Now!”
Popeye herded the two darts players in front of him, and I turned my head in time to see Casper throw the bolt lock on the front door.
“You!” Popeye screamed at me. “You deaf? Hands on the fucking table.”
I put my hands on the table.
The bartender said, “Oh, shit. Come on.”
Casper pulled a string by the window and a heavy black curtain fell across it.
Beside me, Lionel’s breathing was very shallow. His hands, flat on the table, were completely still. One of Ryerson’s hands dropped below the table, and one of Angie’s did as well.
Popeye hit one of the darts throwers on the back of the spine with his fist. “Down! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Do it. Do it. Do it now!”
Both men dropped to their knees and began locking their hands behind their necks. Popeye looked at them, his head cocked. It was an awful moment, filled with the worst sort of possibility. Whatever Popeye decided, he could do. Shoot them, shoot us, cut their throats. Whatever.
He kicked the older of the two in the base of the spine.
“Not on your knees. On your stomachs. Now.”
The men dropped to their stomachs by my feet.
Popeye turned his head very slowly, stopped on our table.
“Hands on the damn table,” he whispered. “Or you fucking die.”
Ryerson withdrew his hand from under the table, held both empty palms to the air, then placed them flat on the wood. Angie did the same.
Casper came up to the bar across from us. He leveled the shotgun at the bartender.
Two middle-aged women, office workers or secretaries by the looks of their clothes, sat in the middle of the bar directly in front of Casper. When he extended the shotgun, it brushed the hair of one of the women. Her shoulders tensed and her head jerked to the left. Her companion moaned.
The first woman said, “Oh, God. Oh, no.”
Casper said, “Stay calm, ladies. This will all be over in a minute or two.” He pulled a green trash bag from the pocket of his leather bombardier’s jacket and tossed it on the bar in front of the bartender. “Fill it up. And don’t forget the money from the safe.”
“There’s not much,” the bartender said.
“Just get what there is,” Casper said.
Popeye, the crowd control, stood with his legs spread apart by roughly a foot and a half and bent slightly at the knees, his .45 steadily moving in an arc from left to right, right to left, and back again. He was about twelve feet from me, and I could hear his breathing from behind the mask, even and steady.
Casper stood in an identical stance, shotgun trained on the bartender, but his eyes scanned the mirror behind the bar.
These guys were pros. All the way.
Besides Casper and Popeye, there were twelve people in the bar: the bartender and waitress behind the bar, the two guys on the floor, Lionel, Angie, Ryerson, and me, the two secretaries, and two guys at the end of the bar closest to the entrance, teamsters by the look of them. One wore a green Celtics jacket, the other a canvas and denim thing, old and thickly lined. Both were mid-forties and beefy. A bottle of Old Thompson sat between two shot glasses on the bar in front of them.
“Take your time,” Casper said to the bartender, as the bartender knelt behind the bar and fiddled with what I assumed was the safe. “Just go slow, like nothing’s happening, and you won’t spin past the numbers.”
“Please don’t hurt us,” one of the men on the floor said. “We got families.”
“Shut up,” Popeye said.
“No one’s getting hurt,” Casper said. “As long as you keep quiet. Just keep quiet. Very simple.”
“You know whose fucking bar this is?” the guy in the Celtics jacket said.
“What?” Popeye said.
“You fucking heard me. You know whose bar this is?”
“Please, please,” one of the secretaries said. “Be quiet.”
Casper turned his head. “A hero.”
“A hero,” Popeye said, and looked over at the idiot.
Without moving his mouth it seemed, Ryerson whispered, “Where’s your piece?”
“Spine,” I said. “Yours?”
“My lap.” His right hand moved three inches to the edge of the table.
“Don’t,” I whispered, as Popeye’s head and gun turned back in our direction.
“You guys are fucking dead,” the teamster said.
“Why are you talking?” the secretary said, her eyes on the bar top.
“Good question,” Casper said.
“Dead. Got it? You fucking punks. You fucking humps. You fucking—”
Casper took four steps and punched the teamster in the center of the face.
The teamster dropped off the back of his stool and hit his head so hard on the floor that you could hear the crack when the back of his skull split.
“Any comment?” Casper asked the guy’s friend.
“No,” the guy said, and looked down at the bar.
“Anyone else?” Casper said.
The bartender came up from behind the bar and placed the trash bag on top.
The bar was as silent as a church before a baptism.
“What?” Popeye said, and took three steps toward our table.
It took me a moment to realize he was talking to us, another moment to know with a complete certainty that this was all about to go terribly wrong terribly fast.
None of us moved.
“What did you just say?” Popeye pointed the gun at Lionel’s head, and his eyes behind the mask skittered uncertainly over Ryerson’s calm face, then came back to Lionel’s.
“Another hero?” Casper took the bag off the bar, came over to our table with his shotgun pointed at my neck.
“He’s a talker,” Popeye said. “He’s talking shit.”
“You got something to say?” Casper said, and turned his shotgun on Lionel. “Huh? Speak up.” He turned to Popeye. “Cover the other three.”
Popeye’s .45 turned toward me and the black eye stared into my own.
Casper took another step closer to Lionel. “Just yapping away. Huh?”
“Why do you keep antagonizing them? They have guns,” one of the secretaries said.
“Just be quiet,” her companion hissed.
Lionel looked up into the mask, his lips shut tight, his fin
gertips digging into the tabletop.
Casper said, “Go for it, big man. Go for it. Just keep talking.”
“I don’t have to listen to this shit,” Popeye said.
Casper rested the tip of the shotgun against the bridge of Lionel’s nose. “Shut up!”
Lionel’s fingers shook and he blinked against the sweat in his eyes.
“He just don’t want to listen,” Popeye said. “Just wants to keep talking trash.”
“Is that it?” Casper said.
“Everyone stay calm,” the bartender said, his hands held straight up in the air.
Lionel said nothing.
But every witness in the bar, deep in states of panic, sure they were going to die, would remember it the way the shooters wanted them to—that Lionel had been talking. That all of us at the table had. That we’d antagonized some dangerous men, and they’d killed us for it.
Casper racked the slide on the shotgun and the noise was like a cannon going off. “Got to be a big man. Is that it?”
Lionel opened his mouth. He said, “Please.”
I said, “Wait.”
The shotgun swung my way, its dark, dark eyes the last thing I’d see. I was sure of it.
“Detective Remy Broussard!” I yelled, so the whole bar could hear me. “Everyone got that name? Remy Broussard!” I looked through the mask at the deep blue eyes, saw the fear in there, the confusion.
“Don’t do it, Broussard,” Angie said.
“Shut the fuck up!” It was Popeye this time, and his cool was slipping. The tendons in his forearm clenched as he tried to cover the table.
“It’s over, Broussard. It’s over. We know you took Amanda McCready.” I craned my neck out to the bar. “You hear that name? Amanda McCready?”
Gone, Baby, Gone Page 35
