Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

For whatever reason, the memories I have of Cheese and his parents seem trapped in the saber-blade sunlight of early winter: snapshots of an ugly little boy at the edge of a schoolyard pocked with half-frozen puddles watching his gigantic parents stoop their shoulders and walk under shivering black trees.

Cheese took multiple shit and multiple beatings for his light accent, his parents’ far thicker ones, his country-village clothes, and his skin, which had a soapy, yellowish luster that reminded kids of bad cheese. Hence the name.

During Cheese’s seventh year at St. Bart’s, his father, a janitor at an exclusive grade school in Brookline, was indicted for physically assaulting a ten-year-old student who’d spit on the floor. The child, the son of a Mass General neurosurgeon and visiting professor at Harvard, had received a broken arm and nose in the few seconds of Mr. Olamon’s sudden attack, and the penalty promised to be stiff. The same year, Cheese grew ten inches in five months.

The next year—the year of his father’s conviction and sentence to three-to-six—Cheese bulked up.

Fourteen years of being pissed on went into the muscle mass, fourteen years of being taunted and having his slight accent aped, fourteen years of humiliation and swallowed rage turned into a hot, calcified cannonball of bile in his stomach.

That summer between eighth grade and high school became Cheese Olamon’s Summer of Payback. Kids got sucker-punched rounding corners, looked up from the sidewalk to see one of Cheese’s size twelves descending into their ribs. There were broken noses and broken arms, and Carl Cox—one of Cheese’s oldest and most merciless tormentors—got a rock dropped on his head from a three-decker roof that, among other things, tore off half his ear and left him talking funny for the rest of his life.

It wasn’t just the boys from our graduating class at St. Bart’s who got it, either; several fourteen-year-old girls spent that summer with bandages over their noses or making trips to the dentist to repair broken teeth.

Even then, though, Cheese knew how to pick his targets. The ones whom he correctly guessed were too timid or powerless to come back against him saw his face when he hurt them. The ones he hurt worst—and therefore those most likely to speak to the police or their parents—never saw anything at all.

Among the ones who escaped Cheese’s revenge were Phil, Angie, and myself, who’d never tormented him, if only because we each had at least one unfashionably immigrant parent ourselves. And Cheese left Bubba Rogowski alone, as well. I don’t remember if Bubba had ever messed with Cheese or not, but even if he had, Cheese was smart enough to know that, when it came to warfare, Cheese would be the German army and Bubba the Russian winter. So Cheese stuck to the fronts and battles he knew he could win.

No matter how much bigger, craftier, and more dangerously psychotic Cheese became over the years, he maintained an almost sycophantic persona in Bubba’s presence, even going so far as to personally feed and groom Bubba’s dogs when Bubba was overseas on various weapons buys.

That’s Bubba for you. The people who terrify you and me feed his dogs.

“‘Mother institutionalized when subject was seventeen,’” Broussard read from Cheese Olamon’s file, as Poole drove past Walden Pond Nature Preserve toward Concord Prison. “‘Father released from Norfolk a year later, disappeared.’”

“Rumor has it Cheese killed him,” I said. I lounged in the backseat, head against the window, Concord’s glorious trees floating past.

After Broussard and Poole had called in the double homicide at Wee David’s, Angie and I took the bag of money and drove Helene back to Lionel’s house. We dropped her off and drove to Bubba’s warehouse.

Two o’clock in the afternoon is prime sleeping time for Bubba, and we were greeted at the door by the sight of him in a flaming red Japanese kimono and a somewhat irritated look on that deranged cherub’s face of his.

“Why am I awake?” he said.

“We need your safe,” Angie said.

“You own a safe.” He glowered at me.

I looked up into his glare. “Ours doesn’t have a minefield protecting it.”

He held out his hand, and Angie placed the bag in it.

“Contents?” Bubba said.

“Two hundred grand.”

Bubba nodded as if we’d just said Grandmother’s heirlooms. We could have told him Proof of extraterrestrials, and the reaction would have been the same. Unless you could hook him up on a date with Jane Seymour, Bubba’s pretty hard to impress.

Angie pulled the pictures of Corwin Earle and Leon and Roberta Trett from her bag, fanned them up in front of Bubba’s sleepy face. “Know any of them?”

“Hot goddamn!” he said.

“You do?” Angie said.

“Huh?” He shook his head. “No. That’s one big hairy bitch, though. She walk upright and everything?”

Angie sighed and put the photos back in her bag.

“The other two were cons,” Bubba said. “Never met ’em, but you can always tell.”

He yawned, nodded, and shut the door in our faces.

“It wasn’t his presence I missed when he was in jail,” Angie said.

“It was the engaging verbal discourse,” I said.

Angie dropped me back at my apartment, where I waited for Poole and Broussard, while she drove over to Chris Mullen’s condo building to begin surveillance. She opted for the duty because she’s never been real keen on entering men’s prisons. Besides, Cheese gets kind of funny around her, takes to blushing and asking her who she’s dating these days. I took the ride with Poole and Broussard because I was an allegedly friendly face, and Cheese has never been known for cooperating with the men in blue.

“Suspect in the death of one Jo Jo McDaniel, 1986,” Broussard said, as we wound our way up Route 2.

“Cheese’s mentor in the drug trade,” I said.

Broussard nodded. “Suspect in the disappearance and suspected death of Daniel Caleb, 1991.”

“Didn’t hear about that one.”

“Accountant.” Broussard flipped a page. “Supposedly cooked books for a few unsavory characters.”

“Cheese caught him with his hand in the till.”

“Apparently.”

Poole caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Quite the association you have with the criminal element, Patrick.”

I sat up in the seat. “Gee, Poole, whatever could you mean?”

“Friends with Cheese Olamon and Chris Mullen,” Broussard said.