Gone, Baby, Gone (47 page)

“To killing cops,” he said, and drank.

“I didn’t kill a cop.”

“Your partner did.”

“Devin,” I said, “you’re going to treat me like shit, I’ll leave.”

He raised his glass toward the hallway. “Door’s open.”

I tossed the glass on the coffee table, and some bourbon spilled out of it as I got out of the chair and headed for the door.

“Patrick.”

I turned back, my hand on the doorknob.

Neither of us said anything, and Bobby Darin’s silk vocal slid through the room. I stood in the doorway with all that had gone unspoken and unconfronted in my friendship with Devin hanging between us as Darin sang with a detached mourning for the unattainable, the gulf between what we wish for and what we get.

“Come on back in,” Devin said.

“Why?”

He looked down at the coffee table. He removed the pen from the crossword book, closed it. He placed his drink on top of it. He looked at the window, the dark cast of early morning.

He shrugged. “Outside of cops and my sisters, you and Ange are the only friends I got.”

I came back to the chair, wiped the spill of bourbon with my sleeve. “This isn’t over yet, Devin.”

He nodded.

“Someone ordered Broussard and Pasquale to do that hit.”

He poured himself some more Jack. “You think you know who, don’t you?”

I leaned back in the chair and took a very light sip from my glass, hard liquor never having been my drug of choice. “Broussard said Poole wasn’t a shooter. Ever. I’d always had Poole pegged for the guy who took the money out of the quarries, capped Mullen and Pharaoh, handed the money off to someone else. But I could never figure who that someone else was.”

“What money? What the hell are you talking about?”

I spent the next half hour running it down for him.

When I finished, he lit a cigarette and said, “Broussard kidnapped the kid; Mullen saw him. Olamon blackmails him into finding and returning the two hundred grand. Broussard runs a double-cross, has someone take out Mullen and Gutierrez, has Cheese whacked in prison. Yes?”

“Killing Mullen and Gutierrez was part of the deal with Cheese,” I said. “But otherwise, yes.”

“And you thought Poole was the shooter.”

“Until the roof with Broussard.”

“So who was it?”

“Well, it’s not just the shooting. Someone had to take the money from Poole and make it disappear in front of a hundred and fifty cops. No flatfoot could pull that off. Had to be high command. Someone above reproach.”

He held up a hand. “Ho, wait a minute. If you’re thinking—”

“Who allowed Poole and Broussard to breach protocol and proceed with the ransom drop without federal intervention? Who’s dedicated his life to helping kids, finding kids, saving kids? Who was in the hills that night,” I said, “roving, his whereabouts accountable only to himself?”

“Aw, fuck,” he said. He took a gulp from his glass, grimaced as he swallowed. “Jack Doyle? You think Jack Doyle’s in on this?”

“Yeah, Devin. I think Jack Doyle’s the guy.”

Devin said, “Aw, fuck,” again. Several times actually. And then there was nothing but silence and the sound of ice melting in our glasses for a long time.

35

“Before forming CAC,” Oscar said, “Doyle was Vice. He was Broussard and Pasquale’s sergeant. He approved their transfers to Narcotics, brought them on board with CAC a few years later when he made lieutenant. It was Doyle who kept Broussard from getting transferred to academy instructor after he married Rachel and the brass went nuts. They wanted Broussard busted down to nothing. They wanted him gone. Marrying a hooker is like saying you’re gay in this department.”

I stole one of Devin’s cigarettes and lit it, immediately got a head rush that sucked all the blood out of my legs.

Oscar puffed from his ratty old cigar, dropped it back in the ashtray, flipped another page in his steno pad. “All transfers, recommendations, decorations Broussard ever received were signed off by Doyle. He was Broussard’s rabbi. Pasquale’s, too.”

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.