Mystic River

"Across town?" Dave looked back up the empty street he'd just come down. "Well, I'll have to get home at some point."

"Sure, sure," Val said. "I'll take you back whenever you want. Come on. Hop in. We'll have ourselves a boys' night in the middle of the day."

Dave smiled and took the smile with him as he walked around the front of Val's car toward the passenger door. Boys' night in the middle of the day. Exactly what was called for. Him and Val, hanging like old pals. And that was one of the great things about a place like the Flats, the thing he feared would be lost? the way old feelings and entire pasts could be laid to rest with time, as you aged, once you realized that everything was changing and the only things that remained the same were the people you'd grown up with and the place you'd come from. The neighborhood. May it live forever, Dave thought as he opened the door, if only in our minds.

25

TRUNK BOY

WHITEY AND SEAN had a late lunch in Pat's Diner, one highway exit down from the barracks. Pat's had been around since World War II and had been a hangout for the Staties so long that Pat the Third liked to say his may have been the only family of restaurateurs to go three full generations without getting robbed.

Whitey swallowed a hunk of cheeseburger and chased it with his soda. "You don't think for a second the kid did it, do you?"

Sean took a bite of his tuna sandwich. "I know he was lying to me. I think he knows something about that gun. And I think? just possibly now? that his old man's still alive."

Whitey dipped an onion ring in some tartar sauce. "The five hundred a month from New York?"

"Yeah. You know what that adds up to over the years? Almost eighty grand. Who's going to send that if it ain't the father?"

Whitey dabbed his lips with a napkin and then dove back into his cheeseburger, Sean wondering how the guy had managed to dodge a heart attack so far, eating and drinking the way he did, pulling seventy-hour weeks when a case sank its teeth into him.

"Let's say he is alive," Whitey said.

"Let's."

"What's this, then? some grand mastermind plot to get back at Jimmy Marcus for something by wasting his daughter? What, we're starring in a movie now?"

Sean chuckled. "Who would play you, you think?"

Whitey sucked his soda through a straw until it slurped against the ice. "I think about that a lot, you know. It could happen, we bust this case, Supercop. Phantom from New York kinda shit? You know we'd be up there on the big screen. And Brian Dennehy would be all over the chance to play me."

Sean considered him. "That's not entirely insane," he said, wondering how he'd never seen it before. "You're not as tall, Sarge, but you got the gut."

Whitey nodded and pushed his plate away. "I'm thinking one of those Friends pussies could play you. You know, guys look like they spend an hour every morning clipping their nose hair and plucking their eyebrows, get pedicures once a week? Yeah, one of them would do just fine."

"Jealous."

"That's the thing, though," Whitey said. "This Ray Harris angle is such a curve. It's got a probability quotient of, like, six."

"Out of ten?"

"Out of a thousand. Backtrack, okay? Ray Harris rats out Jimmy Marcus. Marcus finds out, gets out of the stir, puts a hit on Ray. Harris, what, he gets away somehow, goes to New York, finds a steady enough job to send five bills home each and every month for the next thirteen years? Then one day he wakes up and goes, 'Okay. Payback time,' and gets on a bus, comes here, and smokes Katherine Marcus. And not just in the regular everyday kinda way, but he smokes her with extreme prejudice. That was psycho rage in that park. And then, old Ray? and I do mean old, he's gotta be forty-five, humping through that park after her? he just gets on a bus and goes back to New York with his gun? Did you check New York?"

Sean nodded. "No matches on the social, no credit cards in his name, no employment history for a guy with his name and age. NYPD and State have never arrested anyone matching his prints."

"But you think he killed Katherine Marcus."

Sean shook his head. "No. I mean, not for sure. I don't even know if he's alive. I'm just saying I think he could be. And it's real likely that the murder weapon was his gun. And I think Brendan knows something, and he definitely has no one who can confirm that he was home in bed when Katie Marcus was murdered. So I'm hoping he spends enough time in that cell, he'll tell us a few things."

Whitey let out a burp that ripped the air.

"You're a prince, Sarge."

Whitey shrugged. "We don't even know that Ray Harris held up that liquor store eighteen years ago. We don't know if that was his gun. It's all conjecture. It's circumstantial at best. Never hold up in court. Hell, a good ADA wouldn't even present it."

"Yeah, but it feels right."

"Feels." He looked over Sean's shoulder as the door behind Sean opened. "Oh, Jesus, the moron twins."

Souza came around the side of their booth with Connolly a few steps behind.

"And you said it was nothing, Sarge."

Whitey put a hand behind his ear, looked up at Souza. "What's that, boy? My hearing, you know?"

"We ran the tow records from the parking lot of the Last Drop," Souza said.

"That's BPD jurisdiction," Whitey said. "What I tell you about that?"

"We found a car ain't been claimed yet, Sarge."

"And?"

"We had the attendant go out to double-check it was still there. He came back on the phone, said the trunk's leaking."

"Leaking what?" Sean said.

"Don't know, but he said it smelled awful ripe."

* * *

THE CADILLAC WAS two-toned, a white hardtop over a midnight blue body. Whitey bent by the passenger window, his hands on either side of his eyes. "I'd say that's a suspicious-looking brown smear by the driver's door console."

Connolly, standing by the trunk, said, "Jesus, you smell this shit? It's reeking like friggin' low tide at Wollaston."

Whitey came around the back just as the tow lot attendant put the lock-puncher into Sean's hand.

Sean stepped up beside Connolly, moving the man out of the way as he said, "Use your tie."

"What?"

"Over your mouth and nose, man. Use your tie."

"What are you using?"

Whitey pointed at his own shiny upper lip. "We put Vicks on during the ride over. Sorry, boys, all out."

Sean positioned the rim at the end of the lock-punch. He slipped it over the Cadillac's trunk lock and drove it home, felt the metal slide over metal and then catch, grip the entire lock cylinder.