Gone, Baby, Gone Page 10

  “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.

  So Charlestown is an easy place to get confused. Signs bearing street names disappear all the time, and the houses are often stacked so close together they conceal small alleys that lead to other homes behind. The streets that climb the hill are apt to dead-end or else force the driver to turn in the opposite direction from where he was headed.

  The sections of Charlestown change character with bewildering speed as well. Depending on which direction one is heading, the Mishawum Housing Project can give way to the gentrified brownstones surrounding Edwards Park in a horseshoe; the roads passing through the grandeur of the red-brick and white-tri
m colonial town houses fronting Monument Square drop without warning or respect for gravity into the dark gray of Bunker Hill Project, one of the most poverty-stricken white housing developments this side of West Virginia.

  But speckled throughout it all, one finds a sense of history—of brick and mortar, colonial clapboard and cobblestone, pre-Revolutionary taverns and post-Treaty of Versailles sailors quarters—that’s hard to duplicate in most of America.

  Still sucks to drive through, though.

  Which is what we’d been doing for the last hour, following Poole and Broussard, accompanied by Helene in the backseat of their Taurus, up and over and around and across Charlestown. We’d crisscrossed the hill, loped around the back of both housing projects, jerked bumper-to-bumper through the yuppie enclaves up by the Bunker Hill Monument and down at the base of Warren Street. We’d driven along the docks, rolled past Old Ironsides and the naval quarters and once-dingy warehouses and tanker-repair hangars converted into pricey condos, rumbled along the cracked roads that skirted the burned-out shells of long-forgotten fisheries at the edge of the land mass, where more than one wise guy had gazed at his final vista of moonlight bathing the Mystic River as a bullet cracked through a breech and into his head.

  We’d tailed the Taurus along Main Street and Rutherford Avenue, followed the hill up to High Street and down to Bunker Hill Avenue and beyond to Medford Street, and we’d cased every tiny street in between, idling at the alleys that appeared suddenly out of the corners of our eyes. Looking for a car on blocks. Looking for two hundred grand. Looking for Garfield.

  “Sooner or later,” Angie said, “we’re going to run out of gas.”

  “Or patience,” I said, as Helene pointed at something through the Taurus window.

  I applied the brakes, and once again the Taurus stopped ahead of us, and Broussard got out with Helene and they walked over to an alley and stared in. Broussard asked her something and Helene shook her head and they walked back to the car and I took my foot off the brake.

  “Why are we looking for the money again?” Angie asked a few minutes later as we dropped over the other side of the hill and the hood of our Crown Victoria pointed straight down and the brakes clacked and the pedal jumped against my foot.

  I shrugged. “Maybe because, A, this is the closest lead there’s been in a while to anything and, B, maybe Broussard and Poole figure it’s a drug-related kidnapping now.”

  “So where’s the ransom demand? How come Chris Mullen or Cheese Olamon or one of their boys hasn’t contacted Helene yet?”

  “Maybe they’re waiting for her to figure it out.”

  “That’s expecting a lot from someone like Helene.”

  “Chris and Cheese ain’t rocket scientists.”

  “True, but—”

  We’d stopped again, and this time Helene was out of the car before Broussard, gesturing maniacally at a construction Dumpster on the sidewalk. The construction crew working on the house across the street was nowhere to be seen; I knew they were somewhere nearby, though, if only for the scaffolding erected against the building facade.

  I pressed down the emergency brake and stepped out of the car, and pretty soon I saw why Helene was so excited. The Dumpster, five feet tall and four feet wide, had obscured the alley behind it. There in the alley sat a late-seventies Grand Torino, up on blocks, one fat orange cat attached by suction cups to the rear window, paws spread wide, smiling like an idiot through the dirty glass.

  It was impossible to double-park on the street without blocking it entirely, so we spent another five minutes finding parking spaces back up the hill on Bartlett Street. Then the five of us walked back toward the alley. The construction crew had returned in the interim and milled around the scaffolding with their coolers and liters of Mountain Dew. They whistled at Helene and Angie as we walked down the hill.

  Poole saluted one of them as we neared the alley, and the man quickly looked away.

  “Mr. Fred Griffin,” Poole said. “Still have a taste for the amphetamines?”

  Fred Griffin shook his head.

  “Apologize,” Poole said in that threatening singsong of his, as he turned into the alley.

  Fred cleared his throat. “Sorry, ladies.”

  Helene flipped him the bird and the rest of the construction crew hooted.

  Angie nudged me as we lagged behind the other three. “You get the feeling Poole’s a bit tightly wound behind that big smile?”

  “Personally,” I said, “I wouldn’t fuck with him. But I’m a wuss.”

  “That’s our secret, babe.” She patted my ass as we turned into the alley, which drew another round of hoots from across the street.

  The Gran Torino hadn’t been used in a while. Helene was right about that. Chips of rust and sallow beige spots stained the cinder blocks under the wheels. The windows had accumulated so much dust it was a wonder we’d been able to discern Garfield in the first place. A newspaper that bore a headline detailing Princess Diana’s peace mission to Bosnia lay on the dashboard.

  The alley was cobblestone, cracked in places, shattered in others, to reveal a pink-gray earth beneath. Two plastic trash cans spilled garbage beneath a cobwebbed gas meter. The alley cut so narrowly between two three-deckers, I was surprised they’d been able to fit the car in.

  At the end of the alley, about ten yards off the street, sat a single-story box of a house, dating back to the forties or fifties, from the unimaginative look of the construction. It could have been the foreman’s shack on a construction site or a small radio station, and probably wouldn’t have stood out quite so much if it were in a less architecturally rich neighborhood, but even so it was an eyesore. There were no steps, just a crooked door raised about an inch off the foundation, and the wood shingles were covered in black tarpaper, as if someone had once considered aluminum siding but then quit before the delivery was made.

  “You remember the names of the occupants?” Poole asked Helene, as he unsnapped his holster strap with a flick of his thumb.

  “No.”

  “’Course not,” Broussard said, his eyes scanning the four windows fronting the alley, the grimy plastic shades pulled down to their sills. “You said there were two?”

  “Yeah. A guy and his girlfriend.” Helene looked up and around at the three-deckers casting their shadows over us.

  A window behind us shot open, and we spun toward the sound.

  “Jesus Christ,” Helene said.

  A woman in her late fifties stuck her head out a second-story window and peered down at us. She held a wooden spoon in one hand, and a strand of linguine fell off the edge and dropped to the alley.

  “You the animal people?”

  “Ma’am?” Poole squinted up at her.

  “The SPCA,” she said and waggled the wooden spoon. “You with them?”

  “All five of us?” Angie said.

  “I been calling,” the woman said. “I been calling.”

  “Pertaining to what?” I asked.

  “Pertaining to those friggin’ cats, smart-ass, that’s what. I gotta listen to my grandson Jeffrey whining in one ear and my husband bitching in the other. I look like I got a third ear at the back of my head to listen to those friggin’ cats?”

  “No, ma’am,” Poole said. “No third ear I can see.”

  Broussard cleared his throat. “Of course, we can only see your front from here, ma’am.”

  Angie coughed into her fist and Poole dropped his head, looked at his shoes.

  The woman said, “You’re cops. I can tell.”

  “What gave it away?” Broussard asked.

  “The lack of respect for working people.” The woman slammed the window back down so hard the panes shook.

  “We can only see your front.” Poole chuckled.

  “You like that?” Broussard turned to the door of the small house and knocked.

  I looked in the overstuffed trash cans by the gas meter, saw at least ten small tins of cat food.

  Broussard knocked agai
n. “I respect working people,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Most times,” Poole agreed.

  I looked over at Helene. Why hadn’t Poole and Broussard left her in the car?

  Broussard knocked a third time, and a cat yowled from inside.

  Broussard stepped back from the door. “Miss McCready?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pointed at the door. “Would you be so kind as to turn the doorknob?”

  Helene gave him a look but did so, and the door opened inward.

  Broussard smiled at her. “And would you take one step inside?”

  Again, Helene did so.

  “Excellent,” Poole said. “See anything?”

  She looked back at us. “It’s dark. Smells funny, though.”

  Broussard said as he jotted in his notebook, “Citizen stated premises smelled abnormal.” He capped his pen. “Okay. You can come out, Miss McCready.”

  Angie and I looked at each other, shook our heads. You had to hand it to Poole and Broussard. By getting Helene to open the door and step in first, they’d avoided the need for a warrant. “Abnormal smell” was good enough for probable cause, and once Helene had opened the door, just about anyone could legally enter.

  Helene stepped out onto the cobblestones and looked back up at the window where the woman had complained about the cats.

  One of them—an emaciated orange tabby with sharply defined ribs—shot past Broussard and then around me, leaped into the air, landed atop one of the trash cans, and dove its head into the collection of tins I’d seen.

  “Guys,” I said.

  Poole and Broussard turned from the doorway.

  “The cat’s paws. There’s dried blood on them.”