Gone, Baby, Gone

23

Five months passed, and Amanda McCready stayed gone. Her photograph-in which her hair fell limply around her face and her eyes seemed still and empty-stared out from construction sites and telephone poles, usually torn or decayed by weather, or on a newscast update every now and then. And the more we saw the photo, the more it blurred, the more Amanda seemed a fiction, her image just another in a steady barrage of images attached to billboards, sent out through picture tubes, until passersby noted her features with a detached wistfulness, unable to remember who she was anymore or why her picture was plastered to the light pole by the bus stop.

Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.

A month-long search of the quarries yielded nothing and ended when temperatures plummeted and November winds swept the hills. Come spring, divers promised they’d go back in, and once again proposals to drain and then cover the quarries with landfill were raised, and Quincy city officials who worried about the millions of dollars it would cost found strange bedfellows in preservationists who warned that filling the quarries would damage the environment and destroy a multitude of scenic vistas for hikers and walkers, deprive the people of Quincy of sites of great historical significance, and eradicate some of the best rock climbing in the state.

Poole returned to active duty in February, six months shy of his thirty, and was reassigned to narcotics and quietly demoted to detective first grade. Compared to Broussard, though, he was lucky. Broussard was busted down from detective first to patrolman, placed on nine months’ probation, and assigned to the motor pool. We met him for drinks the day after his demotion, a little over a week after that night in the quarries, and he smiled bitterly at his plastic swizzle stick as he swirled it through the cubes of ice in his Tanqueray and tonic.

“So Cheese said she was alive, and someone else told you Gutierrez was DEA.”

I nodded. “Far as her being alive, Cheese said Ray Likanski can corroborate.”

Broussard’s bitter smile lost its edge and turned forlorn. “We had APBs out for Likanski both here and in Pennsylvania. I’ll keep ’em active for you, if you want.” He gave me a small shrug. “Won’t hurt anything, I suppose.”

“You think Cheese was lying,” Angie said.

“About Amanda McCready being alive?” He removed the swizzle stick, sucked the gin off it, and placed it on the edge of the cocktail napkin. “Yes, Miss Gennaro, I think Cheese was lying.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a criminal and that’s what they do. Because he knew you wanted her to be alive so bad you’d buy it.”

“So when you visited him that day, he didn’t say anything like that to you?”

Broussard shook his head and removed a pack of Marlboros from his pocket. Smoking full-time now. “He acted all surprised about Mullen and Gutierrez getting hit, and I told him I was going to fuck up his life if it was the last thing I ever did. He laughed. Next day he died.” He lit the cigarette, closed one eye against the flare of heat from the match. “Swear to God, I wish I’d killed him. Shit, I wish I’d put a con up to it. Really. I just wish he died because someone who cared about that little girl iced him, and he knew that’s why he was dying all the way down to Hell.”

“Who did kill him?” Angie asked.

“Word I get is they’re looking at that psycho kid from Arlington, just got convicted of double homicide.”

“The kid who killed his two sisters last year?” Angie said.

Broussard nodded. “Peter Popovich. He was there a month for processing, and supposedly Cheese and him had some words in the yard. Either that or Cheese really did slip on the floor.” He shrugged. “Whichever, it works for me.”

“You don’t find it suspicious that Cheese tells us he has information on Amanda McCready and the next day he gets killed?”

Broussard took a sip of his drink. “No. Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t know what happened to that girl, and it bugs me. Bugs me bad. But I don’t think she’s alive, and I don’t think Cheese Olamon knew how to tell the truth even if it could help him.”

“What about Gutierrez as DEA?” Angie said.

He shook his head. “No way. We’d have been told by now.”

“So,” Angie said quietly. “What happened to Amanda McCready?”

Broussard looked down at the table for a bit, shaved off the white head of his cigarette against the rim of the ashtray, and when he looked up tears glistened in the red pockets under his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish to God I’d done everything differently. I wish I’d called in the Feds. I wish-” His voice cracked and he lowered his head and covered his right eye with the heel of his hand. “I wish…”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Then he sucked a wet breath down into his lungs, but he didn’t say anything more.

Angie and I took other cases throughout the winter, though none that had anything to do with missing children. Not that many distraught parents would have hired us in the first place. We’d failed to find Amanda McCready, after all, and the acrid odor of that failure seemed to follow us when we were out at night in the neighborhood or shopping in the supermarket on Saturday afternoons.

Ray Likanski stayed gone as well, something that bothered me more than anything else in the case. As far as he knew, the heat was off him; there was no reason for him to stay gone. For a few months, Angie and I would, on a whim, stake out his father’s house for a day and a night and get nothing for our efforts but the taste of cold coffee, our bones and muscles drawn stiff by a car seat. In January, Angie bugged Lenny Likanski’s phone, and for two weeks we listened to tapes of him calling 900 numbers and ordering Chia pets off the Home Shopping Network, but never once did he call or hear from his son.

One day we’d had enough and drove all night to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. We located the Likanski brood from the phone book and staked them out for a weekend. There was Yardack and Leslie and Stanley, three brothers and first cousins to Ray. All three worked at a paper plant that filled the air with fumes that smelled like toner in a Xerox machine, and all three drank every night at the same bar, flirted with the same women, and went back alone to the house they shared.

The fourth night, Angie and I followed Stanley into an alley, where he scored some coke from a woman who rode a dirt bike. As soon as the dirt bike left the alley, while Stanley spread a rough line on the back of his hand and snorted it, I stepped up behind him, tickled his earlobe with my.45, and asked him where Cousin Ray was.

Stanley urinated in place; steam rose off the frozen ground between his shoes. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Ray since two summers ago.”

I cocked the gun and dug it into his temple.

Stanley said, “Oh, Jesus God, no.”

“You’re lying, Stanley, so I’m going to shoot you now. Okay?”

“Don’t! I don’t know! I swear to God! Ray, Ray, I ain’t seen Ray in almost two years. Please, Christ’s sake, believe me!”

I looked over his shoulder at Angie, who stared up into his face. She met my eyes and nodded. Stanley was telling the truth.

“Coke makes your dick soft,” Angie told him, and we walked up the alley, got in our car, and left Pennsylvania.

Once a week, we visited Beatrice and Lionel. The four of us would hash over everything we knew and then everything we didn’t, and the latter always seemed much larger and deeper than the former.

One night in late February as we left their home and they stood shivering on the porch to make sure, as they always did, that we reached our car without incident, Beatrice said, “I wonder about headstones.”

We stopped as we reached the sidewalk and looked back at her.

Lionel said, “What?”

“At night,” Beatrice said, “when I can’t sleep, I wonder what we’d put on her headstone. I wonder if we should get her one.”

“Honey, don’t-”

She waved him away, tightened her cardigan around her. “I know, I know. It seems like giving up, like saying she’s dead when we want to believe she’s alive. I know. But…see-you know?-nothing says she ever lived.” She pointed down at the porch. “Nothing marks her as having been here. Our memories aren’t good enough, you know? They’ll fade.” She nodded to herself. “They’ll fade,” she said again, and turned back into the house.

I saw Helene once in late March when I was shooting darts with Bubba down at Kelly’s Tavern, but she didn’t see me-or pretended not to. She sat at the corner of the bar, alone, and nursed a drink for a full hour, staring into the glass as if Amanda were waiting at the bottom.

Bubba and I had arrived late, and after we finished with darts we moved on to pool as the last-call crowd poured in and filled the place three-deep within about ten minutes. Then last call had passed, and Bubba and I finished our game, finished our beers, and placed the empties on the bar as we headed for the door.

“Thank you.”

I turned and looked down the bar, saw Helene sitting in the corner, surrounded by stools the bartender had already propped up on the mahogany around her. I’d thought for some reason that she’d left.

Or maybe I’d just hoped she had.

“Thank you,” she said again, very softly, “for trying.”

I stood there on the rubber tile and was aware that I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Or my arms. Or any of my limbs, for that matter. My entire body felt awkward and clumsy.

Helene kept her eyes on her drink, her unwashed hair falling in her face, tiny among all those overturned stools, the dim lights that had fallen on the bar at closing time.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure I could speak. I wanted to go to her and hold her and apologize for not saving her daughter, for not finding Amanda, for failing, for everything. I wanted to weep.

Instead, I turned and headed for the door.

“Mr. Kenzie.”

I stopped, my back to her.

“I’d do it all differently,” she said, “if I could. I’d…I’d never let her out of my sight.”

I don’t know if I nodded or not, gave any indication that I’d heard her. I know that I didn’t look back. I got the hell out of there.

The next morning, I woke before Angie and brewed coffee in the kitchen, tried to shake Helene McCready from my head, those horrible words of hers:

“Thank you.”

I went downstairs for the paper, tucked it under my arm, and came back up. I made my cup of coffee and took it into the dining room with me as I opened the paper and discovered that another child had disappeared.

His name was Samuel Pietro, and he was eight.

He’d last been seen leaving his friends in a Weymouth playground and walking back toward home Saturday afternoon. It was now Monday morning. His mother hadn’t reported him missing until yesterday.

He was a handsome kid with large dark eyes that reminded me of Angie’s, and a friendly, crooked smile in the photo they’d cropped from his third-grade class picture. He looked hopeful. He looked young. He looked confident.

I considered hiding the paper from Angie. Ever since Allegheny, when we’d left that alley and all the steam had run out of us, all the determination, she’d become even more deeply obsessed with Amanda McCready. But it wasn’t an obsession that found an outlet in action, since there was very little action to take. Instead, Angie pored over all our case notes, drew Time Line and Major Figures charts on poster board, and talked for hours with Broussard or Poole, always rehashing, always circling the same ground.

No new theories or sudden answers came from these long nights or burst from the poster board, but she kept at it anyway. And every time a kid went missing and it was reported on the national news, she watched, rapt, as the minuscule details unfolded.

She wept when they turned up dead.

Always quietly, always behind closed doors, always at times when she thought I was on the other side of the apartment and couldn’t hear.

It was only recently that I’d realized how deeply her father’s death had affected Angie. It wasn’t the death itself, I don’t think. It was the never knowing for sure how he died. Without a body to point to, to lower into the ground for one last look, maybe he’d never been completely dead to her.

I was with her once when she asked Poole about him, and I could see the fear of his own inadequacy in Poole’s face as he explained that he’d barely known the man, just to see on the street occasionally, come across in a gambling raid, Jimmy Suave, always a perfect gentlemen, a man who understood that the cops were doing a job just as he was doing his.

“Eats at you still, huh?” Poole had said.

“Sometimes,” Angie said. “It’s having to accept someone’s gone in your head, but your heart never gets completely…settled about the whole thing.”

And so it was with Amanda McCready. So it was with all those kids who went missing nationally and weren’t found, dead or alive, over the long winter months. Maybe, I thought once, I’d become a private detective because I hated to know what happened next. Maybe Angie became one because she needed to know.

I looked down at Samuel Pietro’s smiling, confident face, those eyes that seemed to drink you up just like Angie’s did.

Hiding the paper, I knew, was stupid. There were always more papers, always TV and radio, always people talking in supermarkets and bars and while pumping gas at the self-serve.

Maybe forty years ago it was possible to escape the news, but not now. News was everywhere, informing us, bludgeoning us, maybe even enlightening us. But there. Always there. No room to duck from it, no place to hide.

I traced my finger around the outline of Samuel Pietro’s face and, for the first time in fifteen years, said a silent prayer.