Gone, Baby, Gone Page 8

“Ange,” I said, “those guys in the Filmore were human waste. They’re not worth a single moment’s thought.”

  “Uh-huh.” She took a deep breath through her mouth, and I could hear it rattle its way through the liquid clogging her throat. “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” I said. I stroked her forearm with my palm. “I’m serious. They’re nothing. They’re—”

  “They would have raped me, Patrick. I’m sure of it.” She looked at me, and her mouth jerked erratically until it froze for a moment in a smile, one of the strangest smiles I’ve ever seen. She patted my hand and the flesh around her mouth crumbled, and then her whole face crumbled with it. The tears poured from her eyes, and she kept trying to hold that smile and pat my hand.

  I’ve known this woman all my life, and I can count on one hand how many times she’s wept in my presence. I didn’t understand completely at the moment what had brought this on—I’d seen Angie face far more dire situations than the one we faced in the bar today and shrug them off—but whatever the cause, the pain was real, and seeing it in her face and body killed me.

  I came out from my side of the booth, and she waved me away, but I slid in beside her, and she caved into me. She gripped my shirt and wept silently into my shoulder. I smoothed her hair, kissed her head, and held her. I could feel the blood coursing through her body as she shook in my arms.

  “I feel like such a goof,” Angie said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  We’d left the Ashmont Grille and Angie asked me to stop at Columbia Park in South Boston. A horseshoe of bleachers set in granite surrounded the dusty track at the tip of the park, and we bought a six-pack and took it down there with us, dusted some splinters off a bleacher plank before sitting down.

  Columbia Park is Angie’s sacred place. Her father, Jimmy, disappeared in a mob hit over two decades ago, and the park is where her mother chose to tell Angie and her sister that their father was dead, corpse or no corpse. Angie returns to the park sometimes during her dark nights, when she can’t sleep, when the ghosts crawl around in her head.

  The ocean was fifty yards to our right, and the breeze coming off it was cool enough for us to wrap up in each other to keep from shivering.

  She leaned forward, staring out at the track and the wide swath of green park beyond. “You know what it is?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t understand people who choose to hurt other people.” She turned on the bleacher until she was facing me. “I’m not talking about people who respond to violence with violence. I mean, we’re as guilty of that as anyone. I’m talking about people who hurt other people without provocation. Who enjoy ugliness. Who get off on dragging everyone down into the muck with them.”

  “The guys in the bar.”

  “Yeah. They would have raped me. Raped. Me.” Her mouth remained open for a moment, as if the full implication of that were truly hitting her for the first time. “And then they would have gone home and celebrated. No, no, wait.” She raised her arm in front of her face. “No, that’s not it. They wouldn’t have celebrated. That’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is, they wouldn’t have given it much thought at all. They would have opened up my body, violated me in every sick way they could think of, and then after they were done, they’d remember it the way you’d remember a cup of coffee. Not as something to celebrate, just as one more thing that got you through your day.”

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. I held her eyes and waited for her to go on.

  “And Helene,” she said. “She’s almost as bad as those guys, Patrick.”

  “With all due respect, that’s pushing it, Ange.”

  She shook her head, her eyes wide. “No, it’s not. Rape is instant violation. It burns your insides out and reduces you to nothing in the time it takes some asshole to shove his dick in you. But what Helene does to her child…” She glanced at the dusty track below, took a slug from her beer. “You heard the stories from those mothers. You saw how she’s dealing with her little girl’s disappearance. I bet she violates Amanda every day, not with rape or violence but with apathy. She was burning that child’s insides out in tiny doses, like arsenic. That’s Helene. She’s arsenic.” She nodded to herself and repeated in a whisper, “She’s arsenic.”

  I took her hands in mine. “I can make a phone call from the car and drop this case. Now.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No way. These people, these selfish, fucking people—these Big Daves and Helenes—they pollute the world. And I know they’ll reap what they sow. And good. But I’m not going anywhere until we find that child. Beatrice was right. She’s alone. And nobody speaks for her.”

  “Except us.”

  “Except us.” She nodded. “I’m going to find that girl, Patrick.”

  There was an obsessive light in her eyes I’d never seen shine so brightly before.

  “Okay, Ange,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” She tapped my beer can with her own.

  “What if she’s dead already?” I said.

  “She isn’t,” Angie said. “I can feel it.”

  “But if she is?”

  “She isn’t.” She drained her beer, tossed the can into the bag at my feet. “She just isn’t.” She looked at me. “Understand?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Back at the apartment, all Angie’s energy and fire drained out of her at once, and she passed out on top of the bedcovers. I slid them out from under her, then pulled them over her and turned out the light.

  I sat at the kitchen table, wrote Amanda McCready on a file folder, and scribbled a few pages of notes regarding the last twenty-four hours: our interviews with the McCreadys and the men at the Filmore and the parents at the ball game. When I was through, I got up, took a beer from the fridge, and stood in the middle of the kitchen floor as I drank some of it. I hadn’t pulled the shades on the kitchen windows, and every time I looked at one of the dark squares, Gerry Glynn’s face leered back at me, his hair soaked with gasoline, his face spotted with the blood of his last victim, Phil Dimassi.

  I pulled the shades.

  Patrick, Gerry whispered from the center of my chest, I’m waiting for you.

  When Angie, Oscar, Devin, Phil Dimassi, and I had gone head-to-head with Gerry Glynn, his partner, Evandro Arujo, and an imprisoned psychotic named Alec Hardiman, I doubt any of us had realized the toll it would take. Gerry and Evandro had been eviscerating people, decapitating and disemboweling and crucifying them, out of a sense of fun or spite, or because Gerry was mad at God, or just because. I never fully understood the reasons behind it. I’m not sure anyone could. Sooner or later motives pale in light of the actions they give birth to.

  I had nightmares about Gerry often. Always Gerry. Never Evandro, never Alec Hardiman. Just Gerry. Probably because I’d known him my entire life. Back when he’d been a cop, walking the local beat, always with a smile and a friendly. ruffle of the hair for us kids. Then, after he’d retired, as owner and chief bartender of the Black Emerald. I drank with Gerry, had conversations long into the night with Gerry, felt at ease with him, trusted him. And all that time, over the course of three decades, he’d been killing runaway kids. A whole forgotten populace that nobody was looking for and nobody missed.

  My nightmares varied, but usually Gerry killed Phil in them. In front of me. In reality, I hadn’t seen him slice Phil’s throat, even though I’d been only eight feet away. I’d been on the floor of Gerry’s bar, trying to keep his German shepherd from plunging its teeth into my eye, but I’d heard Phil scream; I’d heard him say, “No, Gerry. No.” And I’d held him while he died.

  Phil Dimassi had been Angie’s husband for twelve years. Until their wedding, he’d also been my best friend. After Angie filed for divorce, Phil quit drinking, became gainfully employed again, was on the road to a kind of redemption, I think. But Gerry blew all that away.

  Gerry fired a bullet into Angie’s abdomen. Gerry cut fissures into my jaw with
a straight razor. Gerry helped end the relationship I had with a woman named Grace Cole and her daughter, Mae.

  Gerry, the left side of his body on fire, had a shotgun pointed at my face when Oscar fired three bullets into him from behind.

  Gerry damn near destroyed all of us.

  And I wait for you down here, Patrick. I wait.

  I had no logical reason to think that searching for Amanda McCready was going to lead to the sort of carnage my encounter with Gerry Glynn and his pals had created, no logical reason at all. It was this night, I reasoned, the first cool night in a few weeks, the dark-slate feel of it all. If it were last night, moist and balmy, I wouldn’t be feeling this way.

  But then again…

  What we’d learned, unequivocally, during our pursuit of Gerry Glynn was exactly what Angie had spoken of tonight—that people could rarely be understood. We were slippery creatures, our impulses ruled by a variety of forces, many of them incomprehensible even to ourselves.

  Why would someone abduct Amanda McCready?

  I had no idea.

  Why would someone—several someones, actually—want to rape a woman?

  Once again, I had no idea.

  I sat for a while with my eyes closed, trying to see Amanda McCready, to conjure up a concrete inner sense of whether she was alive or not. But behind my eyelids, I saw only the dark.

  I finished my beer and looked in on Angie.

  She slept on her stomach in the middle of the bed, one arm splayed across the pillow on my side, the other clenched in a fist against her throat. I wanted to go to her and hold her until what happened in the Filmore stopped happening in her head, until her fear went away, until Gerry Glynn went away, until the world and everything ugly in it passed over our bodies and rode the night wind out of our lives.

  I stood in the doorway a long time, watching her sleep, hoping my silly hopes.

  8

  After her estrangement from Phil and before she and I became lovers, Angie dated a producer with New England Cable News Network. I’d met the guy once and hadn’t been particularly impressed, though I do recall he had great taste in ties. Wore too much aftershave, though. And mousse. And dated Angie. So the chances of us getting together for late-night Nintendo games and Saturday softball were pretty slim from the get-go.

  The guy proved useful after the fact, however, because Angie kept in touch and occasionally, when we needed them, scored us tapes of local news broadcasts. It’s always amazed me how she can do that—stay in touch, remain friends, get a guy she dumped two years ago to do her favors. I’d be lucky to call an ex-girlfriend and get my own toaster back. Maybe I need to work on my breakup technique.

  The next morning, while Angie showered, I went downstairs and signed off with the FedEx guy for a box from Joel Calzada of NECN. This city has eight news channels: the major network affiliates, Four, Five, and Seven; the UPN, WB, and Fox channels; NECN; and finally a mom-and-pop independent at the top of the dial. Among these eight stations, all have noon and six P.M. broadcasts, three have five o’clocks, two have five-thirtys, four have ten in the evenings, and four wrap up at eleven. They broadcast at various times throughout the morning, beginning at five, and each has one-minute updates at several different times, during the day.

  Joel had, at Angie’s request, gotten his hands on every broadcast by every station concerning Amanda’s disappearance since the night she’d vanished. Don’t ask me how he pulled this off. Maybe producers trade tapes all the time. Maybe Angie can sweet-talk with the best of them. Maybe it was Joel’s ties.

  I’d spent a few hours last night rereading all the newspaper articles about Amanda, and I’d come up with nothing new except for hands stained so deeply with black ink I’d made a fingerprint collage on a sheet of legal paper before going to bed. When a case seems as dense and protective of its secrets as marble, sometimes the only thing to do is attempt a fresh approach, or at least an approach that feels fresh. That was the idea here—watch the tapes, see what jumped out at us.

  I removed eight VHS tapes from the FedEx box, stacked them on the floor of the living room by the TV, and Angie and I ate breakfast at the coffee table and compared case notes and tried to come up with a plan of attack for the day. Short of trying to track down Skinny Ray Likanski and reinterviewing Helene, Beatrice, and Lionel McCready—in the desperate hope they’d remember something crucial they’d heretofore forgotten regarding the night Amanda disappeared—very little occurred to us.

  Angie leaned back against the couch as I picked up her empty breakfast plate. “And then,” she said, “there are times you think, A job with the electric company—now why didn’t I take that?” She looked up at me as I placed her plate on top of my own. “Great benefits.”

  “Excellent retirement plan.” I took the plates into the kitchen, placed them in the dishwasher.

  “Regular hours.” Angie called from the living room, and I heard the snap of her Bic as she lit the morning’s first cigarette. “Stellar dental.”

  I made us each a cup of coffee and returned to the living room. Angie’s thick hair was still damp from the shower, and the man’s sweatpants and T-shirt combination she usually wore in the morning made her seem smaller and less substantial than she really was.

  “Thanks.” She took her coffee cup from my hand without looking up, turned a page of her notes.

  “Those things’ll kill you,” I said.

  She took her cigarette from the ashtray, eyes still on her notes. “I’ve been smoking since I was sixteen.”

  “Long time.”

  She turned another page. “And in all that time, you never gave me shit.”

  “Your body, your mind,” I said.

  She nodded. “But now that we’re sleeping together, it’s somehow partly your body, too. That it?”

  Over the last six months, I’d become accustomed to her morning moods. Often she was insanely energetic—back from aerobics and a walk along Castle Island before I woke up—but even in the best of times, she was far from a Chatty Cathy in the morning. And if she felt she’d exposed some part of herself the night before, been vulnerable or weak (which in her mind was usually the same thing), a thin, cold mist would surround her like ground fog at dawn. You could see her, know she was there, but then you’d take your eyes off her for a second and she’d be gone, had drifted back behind wisps of white fog, wasn’t coming out for a while.

  “Am I nagging?” I said.

  She looked up at me, smiled coldly. “Just a bit.” She sipped her coffee and looked down at her notes again. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Patience.” I turned on the TV, popped the first tape into the VCR.

  The leader counted down from seven, the numbers black and slightly fuzzy against a blue backdrop, a header flashed the date of Amanda’s disappearance, and suddenly we were in the studio with Gordon Taylor and Tanya Biloskirka, anchors extraordinaire for Channel Five. Gordon always seemed to have trouble keeping his dark hair from falling to his forehead, unusual in this age of freeze-dried anchor heads, but he had piercing, righteous eyes and a constant quaver of outrage in his voice that made up for the hair thing, even when he was reporting on Christmas tree lightings and Barney sightings. Tanya, of the unpronounceable last name, wore glasses to give her an air of intellectualism, but every guy I knew still thought she was a babe, which I guess was the point.

  Gordon straightened his cuffs and Tanya did this cool squirming/settling thing in her chair as she shuffled some papers in her hand and prepared to read from the TelePrompTer. The words MISSING CHILD appeared in the pop-up box image between their heads.

  “A child disappears in Dorchester,” Gordon said gravely. “Tanya?”

  “Thanks, Gordon.” The camera moved in for a close-up. “A four-year-old Dorchester girl’s disappearance has police baffled and neighbors worried. It happened just a few hours ago. Little Amanda McCready vanished from her Sagamore Street home, without, police say”—she leaned forward a hair and her voice dropped an o
ctave—“a trace.”

  They cut back to Gordon, who hadn’t been expecting it. His hand froze halfway up his forehead, a lock of his annoying hair spilling over his fingers. “For more on this breaking story, we go live to Gert Broderick. Gert?”

  The street was crowded with neighbors and the curious as Gert Broderick stood with microphone in hand and reported the information Gordon and Tanya had just told us. About twenty feet behind Gert, on the other side of a stream of yellow caution tape and uniformed cops, a hysterical Helene was being held by Lionel on her front porch. She was shouting something that was hard to decipher amid the crowd noise, the hum of light generators from the news crews, the gaspy words of Gert’s reportage.

  “…and that’s what police seem to know now—precious little.” Gert stared into the camera, trying not to blink.

  Gordon Taylor’s voice cut into the live feed. “Gert.”

  Gert touched a hand to her left ear. “Yes, Gordon. Gordon?”

  “Gert.”

  “Yes, Gordon. I’m here.”

  “Is that the little girl’s mother on the porch behind you?”

  The camera lens zoomed toward the porch, racked focus, and closed tight on Helene and Lionel. Helene’s mouth was open and tears poured down her cheeks and her head made an odd up-and-down, up-and-down motion, as if, like a newborn’s, it had lost the support of the neck muscles.

  Gert said, “We believe that’s Amanda’s mother, though it has not been officially confirmed at this time.”

  Helene’s fists hit Lionel’s chest and her eyes snapped open. She wailed and her left hand surged over Lionel’s shoulder, the index finger pointing at something off-camera. It was a live crumbling we were being made witness to on that porch, a deep invasion of the privacy of grief.

  “She seems upset,” Gordon said. That Gordon, nothing slipped past him.

  “Yes,” Tanya agreed.

  “Since time is of the essence,” Gert said, “police are asking for any information, anyone who may have seen little Amanda—”