Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“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.