Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  It was light outside by now, but you wouldn’t know it from Devin’s living room. The shades were drawn tight, and the room still bore that vaguely metallic air of deep night.

  Devin got up from the couch, removed a Sinatra CD from the tray, and replaced it with Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits.

  “Worst part of all this,” Oscar said, “is not that I might be helping bring down a cop. It’s that I might be helping bring down a cop while listening to this shit.” He looked over his shoulder at Devin as Devin slid the Sinatra CD back into the rack. “Man, play some Luther Allison, the Taj Mahal I gave you last Christmas, anything but this. Shit, I’d rather hear that crap Kenzie listens to, all those skinny suicidal white boys. Least they got some heart.”

  “Where’s Doyle live?” Devin came over to the coffee table and lifted his mug of tea, having passed on the Jack Daniel’s shortly after he’d called Oscar.

  Oscar frowned as Dino warbled “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.”

  “Doyle?” Oscar said. “Has a house in Neponset. ’Bout half a mile from here. Though once I went to a surprise sixtieth birthday party for him at a second house in a little town called West Beckett.” He looked at me. “Kenzie, you really think he has that girl?”

  I shook my head. “Not sure. But if he’s in on this, I bet he has someone’s kid up there.”

  Angie was released at two in the afternoon, and I met her at the rear door and we skirted the mob of press out front, drove up onto Broadway, and pulled behind Devin and Oscar as they turned off their hazards and rolled across the bridge toward the Mass Pike.

  “Ryerson’s going to pull through,” I said. “They’re still not sure if they can save his arm.”

  She lit a cigarette, nodded. “Lionel?”

  “Lost his right eye,” I said. “Still under sedation. And that teamster Broussard hit suffered a severe concussion, but he’ll recover.”

  She cracked her window. “I liked him,” she said softly.

  “Who?”

  “Broussard,” she said. “I really liked him. I know he came to that bar to kill Lionel, and maybe us, too, and he had that shotgun swung my way when I fired….” She raised her hands but then dropped them back in her lap.

  “You did the right thing.”

  She nodded. “I know. I know I did.” She stared down at the cigarette shaking in her hand. “But I just…I wish it hadn’t gone down that way. I liked him. That’s all.”

  I turned onto the Mass Pike. “I liked him, too.”

  West Beckett was a Rockwell painting in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains. White steeples formed bookends to the town itself, and Main Street was bordered by red pine boardwalks and delicate antiques and quilt shops. The town lay in a small valley like a piece of china in a cupped hand, the dark green hills rising up around it, pocked with remnants of snow that hovered in all that green like clouds.

  Jack Doyle’s house was, like Broussard’s, set back off the road and up on a slope, obscured by trees. His, however, was far deeper in the woods, at the end of a drive a quarter mile long, the nearest house a good five acres to the west and shuttered tight, its chimney cold.

  We buried the cars twenty yards off the main road, about halfway up, and walked the rest of the way through the woods, slow and cautious, not only because we were neophytes in nature but because Angie’s crutches didn’t find purchase as easily as they would on level ground. We stopped about ten yards short of the clearing that circled Doyle’s lodge-style one-story and peered at the wraparound porch, the logs stacked under the kitchen window.

  The driveway was empty, and the house appeared to be as well. We watched for fifteen minutes, and nothing moved past the windows. No smoke flowed from the chimney.

  “I’ll go,” I said eventually.

  “He’s in there,” Oscar said, “he’ll have the legal right to shoot you as soon as you step on his porch.”

  I reached for my gun and remembered that it was in the custody of the police at the same moment my fingers touched an empty holster.

  I turned to Devin and Oscar.

  “No way,” Devin said. “Nobody’s shooting any more cops. Even in self-defense.”

  “And if he draws on me?”

  “Find the power of prayer,” Oscar said.

  I shook my head, parted the small saplings in front of me, raised my knee to step forward, and Angie said, “Wait.”

  I stopped and we listened, heard the engine as it purred toward us. We looked to our right in time to see an ancient Mercedes-Benz jeep with a small snowplow blade still attached to the front grille as it bumped up the road and pulled into the clearing. It parked by the steps, the driver’s side facing us, and the door opened and a round woman with a kind, open face stepped out. She took a sniff of the air and stared through the trees, seemed to be looking right at us. She had marvelous eyes—the clearest blue I’ve ever seen—and her face was strong and bright from mountain living.

  “The wife,” Oscar whispered. “Tricia.”

  She turned from the trees and reached back into the car, and at first I thought she’d come back with a bag of groceries, but then something leapt and died at the same time in my chest.

  Amanda McCready’s chin fell to the woman’s shoulder, and she stared through the trees at me with sleepy eyes, one thumb in her mouth, a red and black hat with ear flaps covering her head.

  “Somebody fell asleep on the ride home,” Tricia Doyle said. “Didn’t she?”

  Amanda turned her head and nestled it into Mrs. Doyle’s neck. The woman removed Amanda’s hat and smoothed her hair, so bright—almost gold—under the green trees and bright sky.

  “Want to help make lunch?”

  I saw Amanda’s lips move but didn’t hear what she said. She tilted her chin again, and the shy smile on her lips was so content, so lovely, it opened my chest like an ax.

  We watched them for another two hours.

  They made grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, Mrs. Doyle over the frying pan and Amanda sitting up on the counter handing her cheese and bread. They ate at the table, and I climbed up a tree, feet on one branch, hands on another, and watched them.

  They talked around their sandwiches and soup, leaned into one another, and gestured with their hands, laughed with food in their mouths.

  After lunch, they did the dishes together, and then Tricia Doyle sat Amanda McCready up on the counter and dressed her again in coat and hat, watched with generous approval as Amanda placed her sneakers up on the counter and tied them.

  Tricia disappeared into the rear of the house for her own coat and shoes, I assumed, and Amanda remained on the counter. She looked out the window and a sense of agonized abandonment gradually filled her face, pulled at it. She stared out the window at something beyond those woods, beyond the mountains, and I was unsure whether it was the marrow-sapping neglect of her past or the crushing uncertainty of her future—one I’m sure she had yet to believe was truly real—that tore her features. In that moment, I recognized her as her mother’s daughter—Helene’s daughter—and I realized where I’d seen that look on her face before. It had been on Helene’s face the night she’d seen me in the bar and promised, if she ever had a second chance, that she’d never let Amanda out of her sight.

  Tricia Doyle came back into the kitchen, and a cloud of confusion—of old and new hurts—drifted across Amanda’s face before being replaced by a hesitant, warily hopeful smile.

  They came out on the porch as I climbed down from the tree and there was a squat English bulldog with them, its coat a patchwork of brindle and white that matched a swath of hillside behind them where the ground was open and bare save for a ridge of frozen snow anchored between two rocks.

  Amanda rolled with the dog, shrieked as he got on top of her and a gob of drool dripped toward her cheek. She escaped him, and he followed her and jumped at her legs.

  Tricia Doyle held him down and showed Amanda how to brush his coat, and she did so on her knees, gently, as if brushing her
own hair.

  “He doesn’t like it,” I heard her say.

  It was the first time I’d heard her voice. It was curious, intelligent, clear.

  “He likes when you do it better than me,” Tricia Doyle said. “You’re gentler than I am.”

  “I am?” She looked up into Tricia Doyle’s face and continued brushing the dog’s coat with slow, even strokes.

  “Oh, yes. Much gentler. My old woman’s hands, Amanda? I have to grip the brush so hard, I sometimes take it out on old Larry here.”

  “How come you call him Larry?” Amanda’s voice turned musical on the name, riding up on the second syllable.

  “I told you that story,” Tricia said.

  “Again,” Amanda said. “Please?”

  Tricia Doyle chuckled. “Mr. Doyle had an uncle when we were first married who looked like a bulldog. He had big, droopy jowls.”

  Tricia Doyle used her free hand to grip her own cheeks and pull the skin down toward her chin.

  Amanda laughed. “He looked like a dog?”

  “He did, young lady. He even barked sometimes.”

  Amanda laughed again. “No suh.”

  “Oh, yes. Ruff!”

  “Ruff!” Amanda said.

  Then the dog got into it as Amanda placed the brush aside and Mrs. Doyle let Larry go and the three of them faced one another on their haunches and barked at each other.

  In the trees, none of us moved or spoke for the rest of the afternoon. We watched them play with the dog and play with each other, build a mini-version of the house out of old numbered building blocks. We watched them sit on the bench set against the porch rails with an afghan pulled over them against the gathering cold and the dog at their feet, as Mrs. Doyle spoke with her chin on Amanda’s head and Amanda lay on her chest and spoke back.

  I think we all felt dirty in those woods, petty and sterile. Childless. Proven, as of yet, inept and unable and unwilling to rise to the sacrifice of parenting. Bureaucrats in the wilderness.

  They had gone back in the house, hand in hand, dog squirming between their legs, when Jack Doyle pulled into the clearing. He climbed out of his Ford Explorer with a box under his arm, and whatever was in it made both Tricia Doyle and Amanda shriek when he opened it in the house a few minutes later.

  The three came back into the kitchen and Amanda perched on the counter again and talked nonstop, her hands pantomiming her brushing of Larry, her fingers gripping her cheeks as she aped Tricia’s description of distant Uncle Larry’s jowls. Jack Doyle threw back his head and laughed, smothered the small girl against his chest. When he raised himself up from the counter, she clung to him and rubbed her cheeks against his five o’clock shadow.

  Devin reached into his pocket and removed a cell phone, dialed 411. When the operator answered, he said, “West Beckett Sheriff’s office, please.” He repeated the number under his breath as she gave it to him, then punched the numbers into his cell phone keypad.

  Before he could press SEND, Angie put a hand on his wrist. “What are you doing, Devin?”

  “What are you doing, Ange?” He looked at her hand.

  “You’re going to arrest them?”

  He looked up at the house, then back at her and scowled. “Yes, Angie, I’m going to arrest them.”

  “You can’t.”

  He pulled his hand away from her. “Oh, yes, I can.”

  “No. She’s—” Angie pointed through the trees. “Haven’t you been watching? They’re good for her. They’re…Christ, Devin, they love her.”

  “They kidnapped her,” he said. “Were you awake for that part?”

  “Devin, no. She’s…” Angie lowered her head for a moment. “If we arrest them, they’ll give Amanda back to Helene. She’ll suck the life out of her.”

  He stared down at her, peered into her face, a stunned disbelief in his eyes. “Angie, listen to me. That’s a cop in there. I don’t like busting cops. But in case you’ve forgotten, that cop engineered the deaths of Chris Mullen, Pharaoh Gutierrez, and Cheese Olamon, if not implicitly, then tacitly. He ordered Lionel McCready and the two of you probably to be murdered. He’s got Broussard’s blood on his hands. He’s got Pasquale’s blood on his hands. He’s a killer.”

  “But…” She looked desperately toward the house.

  “But what?” Devin’s features were screwed up into a mask of anger and confusion.

  “They love that girl,” Angie said.

  Devin followed her gaze to the house, to Jack and Tricia Doyle, each holding one of Amanda’s hands as they swung her back and forth in the kitchen.

  Devin’s face softened as he watched, and I could feel an ache invade him as a cloud crossed his face and his eyes grew wide as if opened by a breeze.

  “Helene McCready,” Angie said, “will destroy that life in there. She will. You know it. Patrick, you know it.”

  I looked away.

  Devin took a deep breath, and his head snapped to the side as if he’d taken a punch. Then he shook his head and his eyes grew small and he turned back from the house and pressed SEND on his phone.

  “No,” Angie said. “No.”

  We watched as Devin held the phone to his ear and the phone on the other end rang and rang. Eventually he lowered it from his ear and pressed END.

  “No one there. Sheriff’s probably out delivering the mail, a town this size.”

  Angie closed her eyes, sucked in a breath.

  A hawk flew over the treetops, cut the cold air with its sharp call, a piercing sound that always makes me think of sudden outrage, reaction to a fresh wound.

  Devin shoved the phone in his pocket and removed his badge. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

  I turned toward the house and Angie grabbed my arm, turned me back. Her face was feral, torn, her hair falling in her eyes.

  “Patrick, Patrick, no, no, no. Please, for God’s sake. No. Talk to him. We can’t do this. We can’t.”

  “It’s the law, Ange.”

  “It’s bullshit! It’s…it’s wrong. They love that child. Doyle’s no danger to anyone anymore.”

  “Bullshit,” Oscar said.

  “Who?” Angie said. “Who’s he a danger to? With Broussard dead, no one knows he was involved. He has nothing to protect. No one’s a threat to him.”

  “We’re a threat!” Devin said. “You on fucking drugs?”

  “Only if we do something about it,” Angie said. “If we leave this place now, never tell anyone what we know, it’s over.”

  “He’s got someone else’s kid in there,” Devin said, his face an inch from hers.

  She spun toward me. “Patrick, listen. Just listen. He…” She pushed at my chest. “Don’t do this. Please. Please!”

  There was nothing resembling logic in her face, nothing reasonable. Just desperation and fear and wild longing. And pain. Rivers of it.

  “Angie,” I said quietly, “that child does not belong to them. She belongs to Helene.”

  “Helene is arsenic, Patrick. I told you that a long time ago. She’ll suck everything bright out of that girl. She’ll imprison her. She…” Tears poured down her cheeks and bubbled in the corners of her mouth, and she didn’t notice. “She’s death. You take that child out of that home, that’s what you’re sentencing her to. A long death.”

  Devin looked at Oscar, then at me. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”

  “Please!” The word came out of Angie at the pitch of a kettle’s whistle, and her whole face sank around it.

  I put my hands on her arms. “Angie,” I said softly, “maybe you’re wrong about Helene. She’s learned. She knows she was a lousy parent. If you could have seen her the night I—”

  “Fuck you,” she said, with a steel chill in her voice. She pulled her arms out of my hands and wiped the tears violently off her face. “Don’t give me that you-saw-her-and-she-looked-sad shit. Where’d you see her, Patrick? In a bar, wasn’t it? Fuck you and this ‘people learn’ bullshit. People don’t learn. People don’t change.”

>   She turned away from us, to fish in her bag for her cigarettes.

  “It isn’t our right to judge,” I said. “It’s not—”

  “Then whose right is it?” Angie said.

  “Not theirs.” I pointed through the trees at the house. “Those people have chosen to judge certain people on whether they’re fit to raise children. Who gives Doyle the right to make that decision? What if he meets a kid and doesn’t like the religion he’s being raised in? What if he doesn’t like parents who are gay or black or have tattoos? Huh?”

  A squall of icy anger darkened her face. “We’re not talking about that, and you know it. We’re talking about this particular case and this particular child. Don’t give me all that pampered classroom philosophizing the Jesuits taught you. You don’t have the balls to do what’s right, Patrick. None of you do. It’s that simple. You don’t have the balls.”

  Oscar looked up into the trees. “Maybe we don’t.”

  “Go,” she said. “Go arrest them. But I won’t watch you.” She lit the cigarette, and her back stiffened against her crutches. She placed the cigarette between her fingers and curled her hands around the grips of her crutches.

  “I’ll hate all three of you for this.”

  She swung the crutches forward, and we watched her back as she carried herself through the woods toward the car.

  In all the time I’ve been a private detective, nothing has ever been quite so ugly or exhausting as the time I spent watching Oscar and Devin arrest Jack and Tricia Doyle in the kitchen of their home.

  Jack didn’t even put up a fight. He sat in the chair by the kitchen table, shaking. He wept, and Tricia scratched at Oscar as he pulled Amanda from her arms, and Amanda screamed and batted Oscar with her fists and cried, “No, Grandma! No! Don’t let him take me! Don’t let him!”

  The sheriff answered Devin’s second call and pulled up the drive a few minutes later. He walked into the kitchen with a confused look on his face as Amanda lay limp in Oscar’s arms and Tricia held Jack’s head to her abdomen, rocked him as he wept.