Mystic River (18 page)

“You were here,” Sean said.

“I was here. Moron Crosby wants to drive home. His friends try to take his keys. Shithead throws them at them. He misses. Hits that clock.”

Sean looked up at the clock over the doorway leading to the kitchen. The glass had spiderwebbed and the hands had stopped at 12:52.

“And they left before that?” Whitey asked the old-timer. “The girls?”

“About five minutes before,” the guy said. “The keys hit the clock, I’m thinking, ‘I’m glad those girls aren’t here. They don’t need to see that shit.’”

In the car, Whitey said, “You work up a timeline yet?”

Sean nodded, flipped through his notes. “They leave Curley’s Folly at nine-thirty, do the Banshee, Dick Doyle’s Pub, and Spire’s in quick succession, end up at McGills around eleven-thirty, are inside the Last Drop at ten past one.”

“And she’s crashing her car about half an hour later.”

Sean nodded.

“You see any familiar names on the bartender’s list?”

Sean looked down at the list of Saturday night patrons the bartender at McGills had scribbled on a sheet of paper.

“Dave Boyle,” he said aloud when he got to it.

“The same guy you were friends with as a kid?”

“Could be,” Sean said.

“He might be a guy to talk to,” Whitey said. “He thinks you’re a friend, he won’t treat us like cops, clam up for no good reason.”

“Sure.”

“We’ll put him on tomorrow’s to-do list.”

T
HEY FOUND
R
OMAN
F
ALLOW
sipping a latte at Café Society in the Point. He sat with a woman who looked like a model—kneecaps as sharp as her cheekbones, eyes bulging slightly because the skin on her face was pulled so tight it looked like it had been glued to the bone, nice off-white summer dress with those spaghetti straps that made her look sexy and skeletal at the same time, Sean wondering how she pulled that off and deciding it must be the pearl glow of her perfect skin.

Roman wore a silk T-shirt tucked into pleated linen trousers, looking like he just stepped off a soundstage of one of those old RKO movies set in Havana or Key West. He sipped his latte and leafed through the paper with his girl, Roman reading the business section, his model thumbing through the style section.

Whitey pulled a chair over to them and said, “Hey, Roman, they sell men’s clothes where you got that shirt?”

Roman kept his eyes on his paper, popped a piece of croissant in his mouth. “Sergeant Powers, how you doing? How’s that Hyundai working out for you?”

Whitey chuckled as Sean sat down beside him. “Looking at you, Roman, you know, in this place, I’d swear you were just another yuppie, ready to get up in the morning and go do some day trading on your iMac.”

“Got a PC, Sergeant.” Roman closed his paper and looked
at Whitey and Sean for the first time. “Oh, hi,” he said to Sean. “I know you from somewhere.”

“Sean Devine, State Police.”

“Right, right,” Roman said. “Sure, I remember now. Saw you in court once testifying against a friend of mine. Nice suit. They’re stepping things up at Sears these days, huh? Getting hip.”

Whitey glanced over at the model. “Get you a steak or something, honey?”

The model said, “What?”

“Maybe some glucose on an IV drip? My treat.”

Roman said, “Don’t do that. This is business, right? Keep it between us.”

The model said, “Roman, I don’t get it.”

Roman smiled. “It’s okay, Michaela. Just ignore us.”

“Michaela,” Whitey said. “Cool name.”

Michaela kept her eyes on her newspaper.

“What brings you by, Sergeant?”

“The scones,” Whitey said. “Love the scones in this place. And, oh yeah, you know a woman named Katherine Marcus, Roman?”

“Sure.” Roman took a small sip of his latte and wiped his upper lip with his napkin, dropped it back on his lap. “She was found dead this afternoon, I heard.”

“She was,” Whitey said.

“Never good for the neighborhood rep when something like that happens.”

Whitey crossed his arms, looked at Roman.

Roman chewed another piece of croissant and drank some more latte. He crossed his legs, dabbed at his mouth with the napkin, and held Whitey’s gaze for a bit, Sean thinking this was one of the things that had begun to bore him the most about his job—all these big-dick contests, everyone staring each other blind, nobody backing down.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Roman said, “I knew Katherine Marcus. Is that what you came here to ask?”

Whitey shrugged.

“I knew her, and I saw her in a bar last night.”

“And you exchanged words with her,” Whitey said.

“I did,” Roman said.

“What words?” Sean said.

Roman kept his eyes on Whitey, as if Sean didn’t rate any more acknowledgment than he’d already given.

“She was dating a friend of mine. She was drunk. I told her she was making a fool of herself and she and her two friends should go home.”

“Who’s your friend?” Whitey said.

Roman smiled. “Come on, Sergeant. You know who it is.”

“So say the words.”

“Bobby O’Donnell,” Roman said. “Happy? She was dating Bobby.”

“Currently?”

“Excuse me?”

“Currently,” Whitey repeated. “She was currently dating him? Or she had
once
dated him?”

“Currently,” Roman said.

Whitey scribbled in his notebook. “Goes against the information we have, Roman.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. We heard she dumped his doughy ass seven months back, but he wouldn’t let go.”

“You know women, Sergeant.”

Whitey shook his head. “No, Roman, why don’t you tell me?”

Roman closed his section of the paper. “She and Bobby went back and forth. One minute he was the love of her life, the next he was cooling his heels.”

“Cooling his heels,” Whitey said to Sean. “That sound like the Bobby O’Donnell you know?”

“Not at all,” Sean said.

“Not at all,” Whitey said to Roman.

Roman shrugged. “I’m telling you what I know. That’s all.”

“Fair enough.” Whitey wrote in his notebook for a bit.
“Roman, where’d you go last night after you left the Last Drop?”

“We went to a party at a friend’s loft downtown.”

“Oooh, a loft party,” Whitey said. “Always wanted to go to one of those. Designer drugs, models, lots of white guys listening to rap, telling themselves how ‘street’ they are. By ‘we,’ Roman, you mean yourself and Ally McBeal over here?”

“Michaela,” Roman said. “Yes. Michaela Davenport if you’re writing it down.”

“Oh, I’m writing it down,” Whitey said. “Is that your real name, honey?”

“What?”

“Your real name,” Whitey said, “is Michaela Davenport?”

“Yes.” The model’s eyes bulged a little more. “Why?”

“Your mother watch a lot of soaps before you were born?”

Michaela said, “Roman.”

Roman held up a hand, looked at Whitey. “What I say about keeping this between us? Huh?”

“You taking offense, Roman? You going to go all Christopher Walken on me, try to come on strong? Is that the idea? Because, I mean, we could go on a drive till your alibi clears. We could do that. You got plans for tomorrow?”

Roman went back into that place Sean had seen most criminals go when a cop came down hard—a recession into self so total that you’d swear they’d stopped breathing, the eyes looking back at you, dark and disinterested and shrinking.

“No offense, Sergeant,” Roman said, his voice a flat line. “I’ll be happy to provide you with the names of everyone who saw me at the party. And I’m sure the bartender at the Last Drop, Todd Lane, will verify that I left the bar no earlier than two.”

“Good boy,” Whitey said. “Now what about your pal Bobby? Where can we find him?”

Roman allowed himself a broad smile. “You’re going to love this.”

“What’s that, Roman?”

“If you’re liking Bobby for Katherine Marcus’s death, I mean, you’re really going to love this.”

Roman flicked his predator’s glance in Sean’s direction, and Sean felt the excitement he’d felt since Eve Pigeon had mentioned Roman and Bobby wither.

“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.” Roman sighed and winked at his girlfriend before turning back to Sean and Whitey. “Bobby was pulled over on a DUI Friday night.” Roman took another sip of his latte, drawing it out. “He’s been in jail all weekend, Sergeant.” He wiggled his finger back and forth between the two of them. “Don’t you guys check these things?”

S
EAN WAS FEELING
the day in his bones, sucking at the marrow, by the time the troopers radioed that Brendan Harris had returned to his apartment with his mother. Sean and Whitey got there at eleven, sat in the kitchen with Brendan and his mother, Esther, Sean thinking, They don’t make apartments like this anymore, thank God. It was like something out of an old TV show—
The Honeymooners
, maybe—as if it could only be truly appreciated seen in black and white through a thirteen-inch picture tube that cackled with electricity and watery reception. It was a railroad apartment; the entrance doorway had been cut dead in the center so that you walked out of the stairwell and into a living room. Past the living room on the right was a small dining room that Esther Harris used as her bedroom, stacking her brushes and combs and assorted powders in the crumbling butler’s pantry. Beyond that was the bedroom Brendan shared with his little brother, Raymond.

To the left of the living room was a short hallway with a lopsided bathroom branching off it on the right, and then the kitchen, tucked back there where the light reached for a total of maybe forty-five minutes in the late afternoon. The kitchen was done up in shades of faded green and greasy yellow, and Sean, Whitey, Brendan, and Esther sat at a small
table with metal legs that were missing screws at the joints. The tabletop was covered in yellow-and-green floral Contact paper that peeled up at the corners and had come away in chips the size of fingernails in the center.

Esther looked like she fit here. She was small and craggy and could have been forty, could have been fifty-five. She reeked of brown soap and cigarette smoke and her grim blue hair matched the grim blue veins in her forearms and hands. She wore a faded pink sweatshirt over jeans and fuzzy black slippers. She chain-smoked Parliaments and watched Sean and Whitey talk to her son as if she thought they couldn’t be any less interesting if they tried but she didn’t have anyplace better to be.

“When’s the last time you saw Katie Marcus?” Whitey asked Brendan.

“Bobby killed her, didn’t he?” Brendan said.

“Bobby O’Donnell?” Whitey said.

“Yeah.” Brendan picked at the tabletop. He seemed to be in shock. His voice was monotonous, but he’d suddenly take these sharp breaths and the right side of his face would curl up as if he were being stabbed in the eye.

“Why would you say that?” Sean asked.

“She was afraid of him. She’d dated him, and she always said if he found out about us, he’d kill us both.”

Sean glanced at the mother then, figuring he’d see some sort of reaction, but she just smoked, chugging out streams of it, wrapping the entire table in a gray cloud.

“Looks like Bobby has an alibi,” Whitey said. “How about you, Brendan?”

“I didn’t kill her,” Brendan Harris said numbly. “I wouldn’t hurt Katie. Never.”

“So, again,” Whitey said, “when’s the last time you saw her?”

“Friday night.”

“What time?”

“About, like, eight or so?”

“‘About, like, eight,’ Brendan, or at eight?”

“I don’t know.” Brendan’s face was twisted with an anxiousness Sean could feel jangling across the table between them. He clenched his hands together and rocked a bit in his chair. “Yeah, eight. We had a couple of slices at Hi-Fi, right? And then…then she had to go.”

Whitey jotted “
Hi-Fi, 8p, Fri
.” in his report pad. “She had to go where?”

“I dunno,” Brendan said.

The mother crushed another cigarette into the pile she’d built in the ashtray, igniting one of the dead cigarettes so that a stream of smoke pirouetted up from the pile and snaked into Sean’s right nostril. Esther Harris immediately fired up another butt, and Sean got a mental image of her lungs—knotty and black as ebony.

“Brendan, how old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“And when’d you graduate high school?”

“Graduate,” Esther said.

“I, ah, got my GED last year,” Brendan said.

“So, Brendan,” Whitey said, “you have no idea where Katie went Friday night after she left you at Hi-Fi?”

“No,” Brendan said, the word dying wet in his throat, his eyes beginning to grow red. “She’d dated Bobby and he was all psycho over her and then her father doesn’t like me for some reason, so we had to keep the thing between us quiet. Sometimes she wouldn’t tell me where she was going because it might be to meet Bobby, I guess, to try to convince him that they were over. I dunno. That night she just said she was going home.”

“Jimmy Marcus doesn’t like you?” Sean said. “Why?”

Brendan shrugged. “I have no idea. But he told Katie he never wanted her to see me.”

The mother said, “What? That thief thinks he’s better than this family?”

“He’s not a thief,” Brendan said.

“He
was
a thief,” the mother said. “You don’t know that, huh, GED? He was a scumbag burglar from way back. His
daughter probably had the gene in her. She would’ve been just as bad. Count yourself lucky, son.”

Sean and Whitey shot each other looks. Esther Harris was quite possibly the most miserable woman Sean had ever met. She was fucking evil.

Brendan Harris opened his mouth to say something to his mother, then closed it back up again.

Whitey said, “Katie had brochures for Las Vegas in her backpack. We hear she was planning to go there. With you, Brendan.”

“We…” Brendan kept his head down. “We, yeah, we were going to Vegas. We were going to get married. Today.” He raised his head and Sean watched the tears bubble in the red undercarriage of his eyes. Brendan wiped at them with the back of his hand before they could fall, and said, “I mean, that was the plan, right?”

“You were going to leave me?” Esther Harris said. “Just leave without a word?”