Mystic River (13 page)

“Don’t. I’m cool for now. Ain’t no other choice, is there?”

Chuck didn’t answer and Jimmy looked across Sydney, past his daughter’s car, to see Sean Devine walking out of the park and into the weeds, eyes on Jimmy the whole way, Sean a tall guy and moving fast, but Jimmy could still see that thing in his face he’d always hated, the look of a guy the world had always worked for, Sean wearing it like a bigger badge than the one clipped to his belt, pissing people off with it even if he wasn’t aware of it.

“Jimmy,” Sean said, and shook his hand. “Hey, man.”

“Hey, Sean. I heard you were in there.”

“Since early this morning.” Sean looked back over his shoulder, then around again to Jimmy. “I can’t tell you anything right now, Jimmy.”

“She in there?” Jimmy could hear the tremor in his own voice.

“I don’t know, Jim. We haven’t found her. I can tell you that much.”

“So let us in,” Chuck said. “We can help look. See it all the time on the news, ordinary citizens searching for missing kids and shit.”

Sean kept his eyes on Jimmy, as if Chuck wasn’t even there. “It’s a little more than that, Jimmy. We can’t have any nonpolice personnel in there until we’ve gone over every inch of the scene.”

“And what’s the scene?” Jimmy asked.

“The whole damn park at the moment. Look”—Sean patted Jimmy’s shoulder—“I came out here to tell you guys there’s nothing you can do right now. I’m sorry. I really am. But there it is. We know anything—the
first
thing, Jimmy? We’ll tell you immediately. No bullshit.”

Jimmy nodded and touched Sean’s elbow. “I talk to you a sec?”

“Sure.”

They left Chuck Savage on the curb and walked a few yards down the street. Sean squared himself, getting ready for whatever he thought Jimmy was going to say, all business, cop’s eyes staring back at Jimmy, no mercy in them.

“That’s my daughter’s car,” Jimmy said.

“I know. I—”

Jimmy held up a hand. “Sean? That’s my daughter’s car. It’s got blood in it. She don’t show up for work this morning, don’t show up for her little sister’s First Communion. No one’s seen her since last night. Okay? That’s my daughter we’re talking about, Sean. You don’t have kids, I don’t expect you to understand all the way, but come on, man. My daughter.”

Sean’s cop’s eyes stayed cop’s eyes, Jimmy not even making a dent.

“What do you want me to say here, Jimmy? If you want to tell me who she was out with last night, I’ll send some officers to talk to them. She had enemies, I’ll go round them up. You want—”

“They brought fucking
dogs
in, Sean. Dogs, for my daughter. Dogs and frogmen.”

“Yeah, they did. And we got half the fucking force in there, Jimmy. State
and
BPD. And two helicopters, and two boats, and we’re going to find her. But you, there’s nothing you can do, man. Not right now. Nothing. We clear?”

Jimmy looked back at Chuck standing on the curb, eyes on the weeds leading into the park, body tilting forward, ready to rip through his own skin.

“Why you got frogmen looking for my daughter, Sean?”

“We’re covering all bases, Jimmy. We got a body of water, that’s how we search it.”

“Is she in the water?”

“All she is is
missing
, Jimmy. That’s it.”

Jimmy turned away from him for a moment, his mind not
working too well, getting black and gummy. He wanted in that park. He wanted to walk down the joggers’ path and see Katie walking toward him. He couldn’t think. He needed in.

“You want a public relations nightmare on your hands?” Jimmy asked. “You want to have to bust me and every single one of the Savage brothers trying to get in there and look for our loved one?”

Jimmy knew the moment he stopped speaking that it was a weak threat, a grasp, and he hated that Sean knew it, too.

Sean nodded. “I don’t want to. Believe me. But if I have to, Jimmy, yeah. I will, man.” Sean flipped open a notepad. “Look, just tell me who she was with last night, what she was doing, and I’ll—”

Jimmy was already walking away when Sean’s walkie-talkie went off, loud and shrill. He turned back as Sean put it to his lips, said, “Go.”

“We got something, Trooper.”

“Say again.”

Jimmy stepped up to Sean, heard the barely suppressed emotion in the voice of the guy on the other end of the walkie-talkie.

“I said we got something. Sergeant Powers said you need to get in here. Uh, ASAP, Trooper. Like right now.”

“Your location?”

“The drive-in screen, Trooper. And, man, it’s a fucking mess.”

C
ELESTE WATCHED
the twelve o’clock news on the small TV they kept up on the kitchen counter. She ironed as she watched, aware at one point that she could be mistaken for a 1950s housewife, doing menial chores and tending to the child while her husband went off to work carrying his metal lunchpail, returned home expecting a drink in his hand and dinner on the table. But it wasn’t like that, really. Dave, for all his faults, pitched in when it came to housework. He was a duster and vacuumer and dishwasher, whereas Celeste took pleasure in laundry, in the sorting and folding and ironing, in the warm smell of fabric that had been cleansed and smoothed of wrinkles.

She used her mother’s iron, an artifact from the early sixties. It was as heavy as a brick, hissed constantly, and released sudden bursts of steam without warning, but it was twice as capable as any of the newer ones that Celeste, lured by sales and claims of space-age technology, had tried over the years. Her mother’s iron left creases you could split a loaf of French bread on and erased thick wrinkles in one smooth swoop that a newer one with a plastic shell would have had to ride over half a dozen times.

It could piss Celeste off sometimes to think about the way everything these days seemed built to crumble—VCRs, cars, computers, cordless phones—where the tools of her
parents’ time had been built to last. She and Dave still used her mother’s iron and her blender, and kept her squat, black rotary phone by their bed. And yet, over their years together, they’d thrown out several purchases that had quit long before one would have assumed logical—TVs with blown picture tubes, a vacuum that poured blue smoke, a coffeemaker that produced liquid only slightly warmer than bathwater. These and other appliances had ended up discarded with the trash because it was almost cheaper to buy a new one than repair the old. Almost. So of course you spent the extra money on the next-generation model, which is what the manufacturers, she was sure, counted on. Sometimes Celeste found herself consciously trying to ignore a notion that it wasn’t only the things in her life but her life, itself, that was not meant to have any weight or lasting impact, but was, in fact, programmed to break down at the first available opportunity so that its few usable parts could be recycled for someone else while the rest of her vanished.

So there she was ironing and thinking about her own disposability when, ten minutes into the news, the newscaster looked gravely into the camera and announced that police were looking for the assailant in a vicious assault outside one of the city’s neighborhood bars. Celeste moved toward the TV to turn it up, and the newscaster said, “That story, plus Harvey on the weather when we return.” Next thing, Celeste was watching a woman’s manicured hands scrub a baking dish that looked like it had been submerged in warm caramel, a voice hawking the benefits of an all-new-and-improved dishwashing detergent, and Celeste wanted to scream. The news was like those disposable appliances somehow—built to tease and leer, to chuckle out of earshot at your gullibility in believing, yet again, that it would deliver on its promises.

She adjusted the volume and resisted the urge to rip the cheap knob off the piece-of-shit TV and went back to the ironing board. Dave had taken Michael out half an hour ago to shop for kneepads and a catcher’s mask, saying he’d catch
the news on the radio, Celeste not even bothering to look at him to see if he was lying. Michael, small and slim as he was, had proven himself a talented catcher—a “prodigy,” his coach, Mr. Evans, had said, with a “ballistic missile” for an arm, a kid his age. Celeste thought of kids she’d known growing up who’d played the position—big kids, usually, with flattened noses and missing front teeth—and she’d voiced her fears to Dave.

“These masks they make now, honey? They’re like friggin’ shark cages. Hit ’em with a truck, the truck breaks.”

She’d taken a day to consider it and come back to Dave with her deal. Michael could play catcher or any other baseball position as long as he had the best equipment and, here was the clincher, never went out for organized football.

Dave, never a football player himself, agreed after only ten minutes of perfunctory argument.

So now they were out buying equipment so Michael could be a mirror of his old man, and Celeste stared at the TV, iron held stationary a few inches above a cotton shirt as a dog food commercial ended and the news returned.

“Last night in Allston,” the newscaster said, and Celeste’s heart sank, “a BC sophomore was assaulted by two men outside this popular nightspot. Sources say the victim, Carey Whitaker, was beaten with a beer bottle and is listed in critical condition at…”

She pretty much knew then, as small clumps of wet sand drizzled inside her chest, that she wasn’t going to see anything on the assault or murder of a man outside the Last Drop. And once they turned to weather with a promise of sports to follow, she knew beyond any doubt.

By now, they would have found the man. If he’d died (“Honey, I may have killed a man”), the reporters would have picked up on it through sources at the precinct house, off the police blotter, or simply by monitoring the police radios.

So maybe Dave had overestimated the fury of his violence against the mugger. Maybe the mugger—or whoever it had been—had simply crawled off somewhere to lick his
wounds after Dave left. Maybe those hadn’t been pieces of brain she’d watched swirl down the drain last night. But all that blood? How could someone lose all that blood from his head and
survive
, never mind walk away?

Once she’d ironed the last pair of pants and put everything away in either Michael’s closet or hers and Dave’s, she returned to the kitchen and stood in the center of it, not sure what to do next. Golf played on the TV now, the soft thwacks of the ball and the dry, muted cackles of applause temporarily calming something inside of her that had been itchy all morning. It went beyond her problems with Dave and the holes in his story, yet had something to do with that at the same time, something to do with last night and the sight of him coming through the bathroom door with blood on him, all that blood on his pants staining the tile, bubbling in his wound, turning pink as it swirled down the drain.

The drain. That was it. That’s what she’d forgotten. Last night, she’d told Dave she would bleach out the inside of the drainpipe under the sink, eradicate the rest of the evidence. She went to it immediately, dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor and opened the cupboard underneath, stared in at the cleaning supplies and rags until she saw the lug wrench near the back. She reached back there, trying to ignore the phobia she had about reaching into the sink cupboard, an irrational feeling she always got that a rat lay waiting under the pile of rags, sniffing the air at the scent of her flesh, raising its snout from the rags now, whiskers twitching…

She snatched the lug wrench out, then rattled it through the rags and cans of cleanser just to be sure, quite aware that her fear was silly, but determined nonetheless, because, hey, that’s why they called them phobias. She hated sticking her hand into low, dark places; Rosemary had been terrified of elevators; her father had hated heights; Dave broke out into cold sweats whenever he had to descend into the cellar.

She placed a bucket under the drainpipe to catch any excess runoff. She lay on her back and reached up, loosened
the trap plug with the wrench, and then twisted with her hand until it came free and water came with it, splashing down into the plastic bucket. She worried for a moment that it would overfill the bucket, but soon the flow diminished to a dribble and she watched as a dark clump of hair and small kernels of corn followed the last of the water into the bucket. The slip nut closest to the rear wall of the cupboard was next, and that took a while, the nut refusing to budge and Celeste getting to the point where she was pushing off the base of the cupboard with her foot and pulling back on the lug wrench with so much force she feared either the wrench or her wrist would snap in half. And then the nut turned, just a fraction of an inch, with a loud metallic screech, and Celeste repositioned the lug wrench and pulled back again, the nut turning twice as much this time, though still fighting her.

A few minutes later she had the whole drainpipe on the kitchen floor in front of her. Her hair and shirt were damp with sweat, but she felt a sense of accomplishment that bordered on pure triumph, as if she’d fought something recalcitrant and indisputably male, muscle against muscle, and won. In the rag pile, she found a shirt Michael had grown out of, and she twisted it in her hands until she could thread it through the pipe. She worked it through the pipe several times until she was satisfied the pipe was clear of everything but old rust, and then she placed the shirt in a small plastic grocery bag. She took the pipe and a bottle of Clorox out onto the back porch and bleached the inside of the pipe, allowing the liquid to spill out the other end and into the dry, fuzzy soil of a potted plant that had died last summer and sat on the porch all winter waiting for them to throw it out.

When she was done, she refitted the pipe, finding it much easier going back on than it had been coming off, and reattached the trap plug. She found the plastic trash bag she’d put Dave’s clothes into last night and added the bag with Michael’s tattered shirt to it, poured the contents of the plastic bucket through a strainer over the toilet, wiped the
strainer clean with a paper towel, and threw the towel in the bag with the rest of it.

So there it was: all the evidence.

Or at least all the evidence she could do anything about. If Dave had lied to her—about the knife, about leaving his fingerprints anywhere, about witnesses to his—crime? self-defense?—then she couldn’t help him there. But she’d risen to the challenge here in her own home. She’d taken everything that had been thrown at her since he’d come home last night and she’d dealt with it. She’d conquered it. She felt giddy again, powerful, as vibrant and valid as she’d ever felt, and she knew with a sudden, refreshing certainty that she was still young and strong and she was most definitely not a disposable toaster or broken vacuum. She had lived through the deaths of both her parents and years of financial crises and her son’s pneumonia scare when he was six months old and she hadn’t grown weaker, as she’d thought, only wearier, yes, but that would change now that she’d remembered who she was. And she was—definitely—a woman who did not shrink from gauntlets, but stepped up to them, and said, Okay, bring it. Bring your worst. I will get back up. Every time. I will not shrivel and die. So watch out.

She picked the green trash bag up off the floor and twisted it in her hands until it resembled a scrawny old man’s neck, then wrung it tight and tied it off in a knot at the top. She paused then, thinking it strange that it had reminded her of an old man’s neck. Where had that come from? And she noticed that the TV had gone blank. One moment Tiger Woods was stalking the green, the next the screen was black.

Then a white line blipped up the screen, and Celeste knew that if this TV had blown a picture tube, too, it was going off the porch. Right now, fuck the consequences, it was going.

But the white line gave way to the newsroom studio, and the anchorwoman, looking rushed and harried, said, “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a breaking story. Valerie Corapi is on the scene outside Penitentiary Park in East
Buckingham, where police have launched a massive search for a missing woman. Valerie?”

Celeste watched as the studio shot gave way to a helicopter shot—a jerky overhead view of Sydney Street and Penitentiary Park and what looked like an invading army of police milling around outside. She saw dozens of small figures, black as ants from the distance, walking through the park, and police boats on the channel. She saw a line of the antlike figures moving steadily toward the grove of trees that surrounded the old drive-in screen.

The helicopter was buffeted by wind and the camera lens shifted, and for a moment Celeste was looking at the land on the other side of the channel, at Shawmut Boulevard and its stretch of industrial parks.

“This is the scene here in East Buckingham right now where police arrived early this morning and commenced a large-scale search for a missing woman that continues now into the early afternoon. Unconfirmed sources have told News Four that the woman’s abandoned car showed signs of foul play. Now, this, Virginia, is—I don’t know if you can see it yet…”

The helicopter camera turned away from the industrial parks on Shawmut in a nauseating one-eighty and pointed down at a dark blue car with its door open that sat on Sydney Street, looking somehow forlorn as police backed a tow truck up to it.

“Yes,” the reporter said. “What you are looking at now is what I have been told is the missing woman’s car. Police found it this morning and immediately launched this search. Now, Virginia, no one will confirm either the name of the missing woman or the reasons for this rather large—as I’m sure you can see—police presence. However, sources close to News Four have confirmed that the search seems to be focusing on the old drive-in screen, which, as you know, is the site of local theater in the summer. But this is not a fake drama playing out for us here today. This is real. Virginia?”
Celeste was trying to figure out what they’d just told her. She wasn’t sure she’d learned anything except that police had, in fact, descended upon her neighborhood like they were taking it over.

The anchorwoman looked confused, too, as if she was being cued off camera in a language she didn’t understand. She said, “We’ll keep you posted on this…developing story as we learn more. Now we return you to your regularly scheduled program.”

Celeste changed channels several times, but no other stations seemed to be covering the story yet, so she turned back to the golf and left the volume up.

Someone was missing in the Flats. A woman’s car had been abandoned on Sydney. But police didn’t launch this kind of massive operation—and it was massive; she’d noticed both state and city police cruisers down on Sydney—unless they had evidence of something more than just a missing woman to go on. There had to be something about that car that suggested violence. What had the reporter said?