Mystic River

Sean said, "Oh, I can talk now?" He opened his own file. "Employment records, IRS records, social security payments? everything comes to a dead halt in August of 1987. Poof, he disappears."

"You check nationally?"

"The request is being processed as we speak, good sir."

"What are our possibilities?"

Sean propped the soles of his shoes up on his desk again and leaned back in his chair. "One, he's dead. Two, he's in Witness Protection. Three, he went deep, deep, deep underground and just popped back into the neighborhood to pick up his gun and shoot his son's nineteen-year-old girlfriend."

Whitey tossed his file down onto the empty desk. "We don't even know if it's his gun. We don't know shit. What are we doing here, Devine?"

"We're getting up for the dance, Sarge. Come on. Don't gas out on me this early. We got a guy who was a prime suspect in a robbery eighteen years ago during which the murder weapon was used. Guy's son dated the victim. Guy has a rap sheet. I want to look at him and I want to look at the son. You know, the one with no alibi."

"Who passed a poly and who you and I agreed didn't have the stuff necessary to do this."

"Maybe we were wrong."

Whitey rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Man, I'm sick of being wrong."

"So you're saying you were wrong about Boyle?"

Whitey's hands remained over his eyes as he shook his head. "Ain't saying that at all. I still think the guy's a piece of shit, but whether I can tie him to Katherine Marcus's death is another matter." He lowered his hands, the puffy flesh under his eyes ringed red now. "But this Raymond Harris angle doesn't look too promising, either. Okay, we take another run at the son. Fine. And we try to track down the father. But then what?"

"We tie somebody to that gun," Sean said.

"Gun could be in the fucking ocean by now. I know that's what I'd do with it."

Sean tipped his head toward him. "You would've done that after you held up a liquor store eighteen years ago, though, too."

"True."

"Our guy didn't. Which means?"

"He ain't as bright as me," Whitey said.

"Or me."

"Jury's still out there."

Sean stretched in his chair, locking his fingers and raising his arms above his head, pushing toward the ceiling until he could feel the muscles stretch. He let loose a shudder of a yawn, and brought his head and hands back down. "Whitey," he said, trying to hold back as long as possible on the question he'd known he'd have to ask all morning.

"What's up?"

"Anything in your file on known associates?"

Whitey lifted the file off the desk and flipped it open, turned the first few pages over. "'Known criminal associates,'" he read, "'Reginald (aka Reggie Duke) Neil, Patrick Moraghan, Kevin "Whackjob" Sirracci, Nicholas Savage'? hmm? 'Anthony Waxman?'" He looked up at Sean, and Sean knew it was there. "'James Marcus,'" Whitey said, "'aka "Jimmy Flats," reputed leader of a criminal crew sometimes called the Rester Street Boys.'" Whitey closed the file.

Sean said, "And the hits just keep on coming, don't they?"

* * *

THE HEADSTONE Jimmy picked was simple and white. The salesman spoke in a low, respectful voice, as if he'd rather be anyplace but here, and yet he kept trying to nudge Jimmy toward more expensive stones, ones with angels and cherubs or roses engraved in the marble. "Maybe a Celtic cross," the salesman said, "a choice that's quite popular with?"

Jimmy waited for him to say "your people," but the salesman caught himself and finished with "?an awful lot of people these days."

Jimmy would have forked over the money for a mausoleum if he thought it would make Katie happy, but he knew his daughter had never been a fan of ostentation or overadornment. She'd worn simple clothes and simple jewelry, no gold, and she'd rarely used makeup unless it was a special occasion. Katie had liked things clean, with just a subtle hint of style, and that's why Jimmy chose the white and ordered the engraving in the calligraphic script, the salesman warning him that the latter choice would double the engraver's cost, and Jimmy turning his head to look down at the little vulture, backing him up a few feet as he said, "Cash or check?"

Jimmy had asked Val to drive him over, and when he left the office, he got back in the passenger seat of Val's Mitsubishi 3000 GT, Jimmy wondering for probably the tenth time how a guy in his mid-thirties could drive a car like this and not think he looked anything but silly.

"Where to next, Jim?"

"Let's get some coffee."

Val usually had some sort of bullshit rap music blaring from his speakers, the bass throbbing behind tinted windows as some middle-class black kid or white-trash wannabe sang about bitches and hos and whipping out his gat and made what Jimmy assumed were topical references to all these MTV pussies Jimmy would never have known of if he hadn't overheard Katie using their names on the phone with her girlfriends. Val kept his stereo off this morning, though, and Jimmy was grateful. Jimmy hated rap and not because it was black and from the ghetto? hell, that's where P-Funk and soul and a lotta kick-ass blues had come from? but because he couldn't for the life of him see any talent in it. You strung a bunch of limericks together of the "Man from Nantucket" variety, had a DJ scratch a few records back and forth, and threw out your chest as you spoke into a microphone. Oh, yeah, it was raw, it was street, it was the truth, motherfucker. So was pissing your name in the snow and vomiting. He'd heard some moron music critic on the radio say once that sampling was an "art form" and Jimmy, who didn't know much about art, wanted to reach through the speaker and bitch-slap the obviously white, obviously overeducated, obviously dickless pinhead. If sampling was an art form, then most of the thieves Jimmy had known growing up were artists, too. Probably be news to them.

Maybe he was just getting old. He knew it was always a first sign that your generation had passed the torch of relevancy if it couldn't understand the music of the younger one. Still, deep in his heart, he was pretty sure that wasn't it. Rap just sucked, plain and simple, and Val listening to it was a lot like Val driving this car, trying to hold on to something that had never been all that worthwhile in the first place.

They stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and tossed their lids in the trash on the way out the door, sipped their coffee leaning against the spoiler attached to the trunk of the sports car.

Val said, "We went out last night, asked around like you said."