Gone, Baby, Gone (12 page)

“Cheese Olamon,” Remy Broussard said, and cleared his throat, “is, among other things, a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.”

“What else is he?” Lionel had a child’s broken curiosity in his face.

“What?”

“You said ‘among other things.’ What other things?”

Beatrice turned from the faucet, placed the kettle on the burner, and ignited the flame underneath. “Helene, why don’t you answer your brother’s question?”

Helene’s hair remained in her face and her voice a million years away. “Why don’t you go suck a nigger’s dick, Bea?”

Lionel’s fist hit the table so hard, a fissure rippled through the cheap covering like a stream through a canyon.

Helene’s head snapped back and the hair flew off her face.

“You listen to me.” Lionel pointed a quaking finger an inch from his sister’s nose. “You don’t insult my wife, and you don’t make racist remarks in my kitchen.”

“Lionel—”

“In my kitchen!” He hit the table again. “Helene!”

It wasn’t a voice I’d heard before. Lionel had raised his voice that first time in our office, and that voice I was familiar with. But this was something else. Thunder. A thing that loosened cement and launched tremors through oak.

“Who,” Lionel said, and his free hand gripped the corner of the table, “is Cheese Olamon?”

“He is a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.” Poole searched his pockets, came up with a pack of cigarettes. “And a pornographer. And a pimp.” He removed a cigarette from the pack, placed it upright on the table, leaned in to sniff from the top. “Also a tax evader, if you can believe that.”

Lionel, who’d apparently never seen Poole’s tobacco ritual before, seemed momentarily transfixed by it. Then he blinked and turned his attention back to Helene.

“You associate with a pimp?”

“I—”

“A pornographer, Helene?”

Helene turned away from him, rested her right arm on the table, and looked out at the kitchen without meeting the eyes of any of its occupants.

“What’d you do for him?” Broussard said.

“Muling occasionally.” Helene lit a cigarette, cupped the match in her hand, and shook it out with the same motion she’d use to chalk a pool cue.

“Muling,” Poole said.

She nodded.

“From where to where?” Angie asked.

“Here to Providence. Here to Philly. It depended on the supply.” She shrugged. “Depended on the demand.”

“And for that you got what?” Broussard said.

“Some cash. Some stash.” Another shrug.

“Heroin?” Lionel said.

She turned her head, looked at him, her cigarette dangling from between her fingers, her body loose and puddling. “Yeah, Lionel. Sometimes. Sometimes coke, sometimes Ex, and sometimes”—she shook her head, turned it back toward the rest of the room—“whatever the fuck.”

“Track marks,” Beatrice said. “We would have seen track marks.”

Poole patted Helene’s knee. “She snorted it.” He flared his nostrils, slid them over his cigarette. “Didn’t you?”

Helene nodded. “Less addictive that way.”

Poole smiled. “Of course it is.”

Helene removed his hand from her knee and stood up, crossed to the refrigerator, and pulled out a can of Miller. She opened it with a hard snap and the beer foamed to the top and she slurped it up into her mouth.

I looked at the clock: ten-thirty in the morning.

Broussard called two CAC detectives and told them to locate and begin immediate surveillance of Chris Mullen. In addition to the original detectives searching for Amanda, and the two who’d been assigned to locate Ray Likanski, the entire CAC division was now clocking overtime on one case.

“This is strictly need-to-know,” he said into the phone. “That means only I need to know what you’re doing for the time being. Clear?”

When he hung up, we followed Helene and her morning beer onto Lionel and Beatrice’s back porch. Flat cobalt clouds drifted overhead and the morning turned sluggish and gray, gave the air a moist thickness, a promise of afternoon rain.

The beer seemed to give Helene a concentration she usually lacked. She leaned against the porch rail and met our eyes without fear or self-pity and answered our questions about Cheese Olamon and his right-hand man, Chris Mullen.

“How long have you known Mr. Olamon?” Poole asked.

She shrugged. “Ten, maybe twelve years. From around the neighborhood.”

“Chris Mullen?”

“’Bout the same.”

“Where did your association begin?”

Helene lowered her beer. “What?”

“Where did you meet this Cheese guy?” Beatrice said.

“The Filmore.” She took a slug off the beer can.

“When did you start working for him?” Angie asked.

Another shrug. “I did some small stuff over the years. ’Bout four years ago I needed more money to take care of Amanda—”

“Jesus Christ,” Lionel said.

She glanced at him, then back at Poole and Broussard. “—so he sent me on a few buys. Hardly ever big stuff.”

“Hardly ever,” Poole said.

She blinked, then nodded quickly.

Poole turned his head, his tongue pushing against the inside of his lower lip. Broussard met his eyes and pulled another stick of gum from his pocket.

Poole chuckled softly. “Miss McCready, do you know what squad Detective Broussard and I worked for before we were asked to join Crimes Against Children?”

Helene grimaced. “I care?”

Broussard popped the gum in his mouth. “No reason you should, really. But just for the record—”

“Narcotics,” Poole said.

“CAC is pretty small, not much in the way of camaraderie,” Broussard said, “so we still hang out mostly with narcs.”

“Keep abreast of things,” Poole said.

Helene squinted at Poole, tried to figure out where this was going.

“You said you ran dope through the Philadelphia corridor,” Broussard said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who to?”

She shook her head.

“Miss McCready,” Poole said, “we’re not here on a narco bust. Give us a name so we can confirm whether you really muled for Cheese Ol—”

“Rick Lembo.”

“Ricky the Dick,” Broussard said, and smiled.

“Where did the deals go down?”

“The Ramada by the airport.”

Poole nodded at Broussard.

“You do any New Hampshire runs?”

Helene took a hit off the beer and shook her head.

“No?” Broussard raised his eyebrows. “Nothing up Nashua way, no quick sales to the biker gangs?”

Again Helene shook her head. “No. Not me.”

“How much you hit Cheese for, Miss McCready?”

“Excuse me?” Helene said.

“The Cheese violates his parole three months ago. He takes a ten-to-twelve fall.” Broussard spit his gum over the railing. “How much you take off him when you heard he got dropped?”

“Nothing.” Helene’s eyes stayed on her bare feet.

“Bullshit.”

Poole stepped over to Helene and gently took the beer can from her hand. He leaned over the railing and tipped the can, poured the contents into the driveway behind the house.

“Miss McCready,” he said, “word I’ve heard on the proverbial street the past few months is that Cheese Olamon sent a goody bag up to some bikers in a Nashua motel just before his arrest. The goody bag was recovered in a raid, but not the money. Since the bikers—hale fellows all—had yet to partake of the contents of the bag, speculation among our northern law enforcement friends was that the deal had gone down only moments before the raid. Further speculation led many to believe that the mule walked off with the money. Which, according to current urban lore, was news to the members of Cheese Olamon’s camp.”

“Where’s the money?” Broussard said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Care to take a polygraph?”

“I already took one.”

“Different questions this time.”

Helene turned to the railing, looked out on the small tar parking lot, the withered trees just beyond.

“How much, Miss McCready?” Poole’s voice was soft, without a hint of pressure or urgency.

“Two hundred thousand.”

The porch was silent for a full minute.

“Who rode shotgun?” Broussard said eventually.

“Ray Likanski.”

“Where’s the money?”

The muscles in Helene’s scrawny back clenched. “I don’t know.”

“Liar, liar,” Poole said. “Pants on fire.”

She turned from the railing. “I don’t know. I swear to God.”

“She swears to God.” Poole winked at me.

“Oh, well, then,” Broussard said, “I guess we have to believe her.”

“Miss McCready?” Poole pulled his shirt cuffs from underneath his suit coat, smoothed them against his wrists. His voice was light and almost musical.

“Look, I—”

“Where’s the money?” The lighter and more melodious the singsong got, the more threatening Poole seemed.

“I don’t…” Helene ran a hand over her face, and her body sagged against the railing. “I was stoned, okay? We left the motel; two seconds later every cop in New Hampshire is running through the parking lot. Ray snuggled up to me, and we just walked right through them. Amanda was crying, so they must have thought we were just a family who’d been on the road.”

“Amanda was there with you?” Beatrice said. “Helene!”

“What,” Helene said, “I was going to leave her in the car?”

“So you drove away,” Poole said. “You got stoned. And then what?”

“Ray stopped at a friend’s place. We were in there, like, an hour.”

“Where was Amanda?” Beatrice said.

Helene scowled. “The fuck I know, Bea? In the car or in the house with us. One of the two. I told you, I was fucked up.”

“Was the money with you when you left the house?” Poole asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Broussard flipped open his steno pad. “Where was this house?”

“In an alley.”

Broussard closed his eyes for a moment. “Where was it located? The address, Miss McCready.”

“I told you, I was stoned. I—”

“The fucking
town
then.” Broussard’s teeth were clenched.

“Charlestown,” she said. She cocked her head, thought about it. “Yeah. I’m almost sure. Or Everett.”

“Or Everett,” Angie said. “That narrows it down.”

I said, “Charlestown’s the one with the big monument, Helene.” I smiled my encouragement. “You know the one. Looks like the Washington Monument, except it’s on Bunker Hill.”

“Is he making fun of me?” Helene asked Poole.

“I wouldn’t hazard a guess,” Poole said. “But Mr. Kenzie has a point. If you were in Charlestown, you’d remember the monument, wouldn’t you?”

Another long pause as Helene searched what remained of her brain. I wondered if I should go grab another beer for her, see if it would speed things up.

“Yeah,” she said, very slowly. “We drove over the big hill by the monument on our way out.”

“So the house,” Broussard said, “was on the east side of town.”

“East?” Helene said.

“You were closer to Bunker Hill project, Medford Street or Bunker Hill Avenue, than you were to Main or Warren streets.”

“If you say so.”

Broussard tilted his head, ran the back of his hand slowly across the stubble on his cheek, took a few shallow breaths.

“Miss McCready,” Poole said, “besides the fact that the house was at the end of an alley, do you remember anything else about it? Was it a one-family or two?”

“It was really small.”

“We’ll call it a one-family.” Poole jotted in his notepad. “Color?”

“They were white.”

“Who?”

“Ray’s friends. A woman and a guy. Both white.”

“Excellent,” Poole said. “But the house. What color was that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Let’s go look for Likanski,” Broussard said. “We can go to Pennsylvania. Hell, I’ll drive.”

Poole held up a hand. “Give us another minute here, Detective. Miss McCready, please search your memory. Remember that night. The smells. The music Ray Likanski played on his stereo. Anything that will help put you back in that car. You drove from Nashua to Charlestown. That’s about an hour’s drive, maybe a little less. You got stoned. You pulled over into this alley, and you—”

“We didn’t.”

“What?”

“Pull into the alley. We parked on the street because there was an old broken-down car in the alley. We had to drive around for like twenty minutes till we found a parking space, too. That place sucks for parking.”

Poole nodded. “This broken-down car in the alley, was there anything memorable about it?”

She shook her head. “It was just a rust heap, up on blocks. No wheels or nothing.”

“Hence the blocks,” Poole said. “Nothing else?”

Helene was midway through another shake of her head when she stopped and giggled.

“Care to share your joke with the class?” Poole said.

She looked over at him, still smiling. “What?”

“Why are you laughing, Miss McCready?”

“Garfield.”

“James A.? Our twentieth president?”

“Huh?” Helene’s eyes bulged. “No. The cat.”

We all stared at her.

“The cat!” She held out her hands. “In the comic strip.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“’Member when everyone used to have those Garfields stuck to the back of their windows? Well, this car had one, too. That’s how I knew it had been there, like, forever. I mean, who puts Garfields on their windows anymore?”

“Indeed,” Poole said. “Indeed.”

10

When Winthrop and the original settlers arrived in the New World, they chose to settle on a square mile’s worth of land, most of it hill, that they named Boston, after the town in England they’d left behind. During the one harsh winter Winthrop’s pilgrims spent there, they found the water inexplicably brackish, so they moved across the channel, taking the name Boston with them and leaving what would become Charlestown without a name or purpose for a while.

Since then, Charlestown has held tight to an outpost’s identity. Historically Irish, home to deca-generations of fishermen, merchant marines, and dockworkers, Charlestown is infamous for its code of silence, a resistance to speaking to the police, which has left it with a murder rate that, while low, boasts the highest percentage of unsolved cases in the nation. This adherence to keeping one’s mouth shut even extends to simple directions. Ask a townie how to get to such-and-such street and his eyes will narrow. “The fuck you doing here if you don’t know where you’re going?” might be the polite response, followed by an extended middle finger if he really likes you.