Small Mercies

13

The next morning Bobby sends out four cruisers to pick the kids up. The uniforms come back with only two of the kids, though. Julie Fennessy still seems to be in the wind; no one’s seen her since the night Auggie Williamson died. The rumor on the street is that she’s down in Florida, but nobody knows where specifically. It nags at Bobby — the mother was clearly worried about her daughter’s whereabouts. But if the girl was involved in a death, taking off to Florida might make sense, particularly to a seventeen-year-old.

The other miss is George Dunbar, the drug dealer. He’s the son of Marty Butler’s main piece of ass, which might mean the patrolmen didn’t look too hard for him or maybe didn’t even look at all.

Which means when Bobby and Vincent go down to holding, the only two assholes waiting for them in the interview rooms are Ronald Collins and Brenda Morello. Ronald Collins, a Southie kid from a line of Collinses who go back to the potato famine, is as dumb as his older brothers, his father, and his three uncles, most of whom, per Bobby’s recent research, have done time. He’s a hard case not because he’s particularly hard but because he’s too fucking stupid to know there’s any other way to be.

Brenda Morello, on the other hand, with her wet eyes and her shaky chin, is the jackpot. She’s been ready to blab since the moment she was picked up walking to her summer job at Sullivan’s on Castle Island. When Bobby and Vincent enter the interview room, she looks up at them with her tear-streaked face, and the first words out of her mouth are “Can I please go home?”

Bobby takes the seat across from her.

Vincent remains standing, which, of course, makes Brenda more nervous.

Bobby gives her his friendliest smile. “Just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

“And then I can go home?”

She can walk right out the door right now — she hasn’t been charged with anything — but she doesn’t grasp that, and it’s not part of their job description to enlighten her.

“Can you tell us what you did Saturday night?”

Brenda pretends to think about it, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. “I dunno. Hung out.”

“Where?”

“You know.”

“We don’t.”

“Around.”

“Around Columbia Park?” Bobby says.

She stares back at him, her mind working furiously now that his question confirms all her fears about why she’s there.

“You were there with Ronald Collins, George Dunbar, and Jules Fennessy.”

“Maybe?” she tries.

“No fucking maybe about it,” Vincent says as he walks behind her.

Her eyes fill. Vincent walks behind her again and she tenses, expecting a slap.

“Brenda,” Bobby says gently, “look at me.”

She does.

“We know you were there. And then something happened.”

“What happened?”

“Why don’t you tell us?”

Bobby can see it consuming her suddenly — this terrible knowledge she’s kept inside of her for almost a week now.

But she replies, “Nothing happened. Nothing I remember.”

Bobby pops open his briefcase, removes a photo of Auggie Williamson, and places it on the table. It’s not just any photo. Bobby goes for the jugular — it’s the morgue photo.

It has the desired effect. Brenda’s face half crumbles, and she puffs air like a fish in a bucket.

“No,” she says. “Nothing happened.”

Now Vincent does hit her. Just a quick flick of his fingers off the back of her head. She yelps. In outrage more than pain.

Bobby puts a finger on the photo. “This young man is dead. And we have it on good authority, Brenda, that you were one of the last people to see him alive.”

She shakes her head several times. “No.”

Vincent stands directly behind her. “Say no again, you little twat, and see where it gets you. You ever spent time in an ICU?”

Bobby flicks him a dial it back glance and then waits for Brenda to look at him again before he asks her, “Were you the one who said, ‘You run slow for a nigger’?”

Brenda’s mouth forms an O of shock. “I never said that.”

“No?” Bobby looks at Vincent for a moment. “We heard you did.”

“Well, then someone’s fucking lying, cuz I didn’t say that.”

“But you were on the platform at Columbia Station when someone said it.”

“I — What? No, I was — No, I was not on any platform. I was at Columbia Park with my friends, and I got in a fight with my boyfriend and I left. And they went to the beach.”

“We have witnesses who place you on the subway platform.”

“Well, they’re lying.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I dunno. Ask them.”

“We can put you in a lineup.”

That puts a fresh quiver in her chin.

“If we put you in a lineup, this lady you knocked down, she’s gonna remember you, Brenda.”

“I didn’t knock any lady down,” Brenda says with clear indignation.

“That’s not what she said,” Vincent says.

“Well, she’s lying.”

“Everyone’s lying, aren’t they, Brenda?”

“Maybe not, but she is.”

“She was pretty convincing,” Bobby says. “Has her elbow all scraped up. Says she stepped off the outbound train and you slammed into her.”

“We weren’t on the outbound side of the platform,” Brenda says. “We were on the inbound.” She realizes her mistake a second too late. Lowers her head, stares at her shoes.

When she raises her head, Bobby can see in her eyes that they broke her. She’ll tell them everything now. She won’t stop talking until sunup.

There’s a soft rap on the door, and Vincent opens it on Tovah Shapiro, attorney at large. Even before Tovah Shapiro crosses the threshold, she’s already telling Brenda, “Don’t say another fucking word.”

Tovah Shapiro is the worst kind of defense attorney — she used to be a prosecutor, so she knows how cops think. Plan. Act.

“Did they read you your rights?”

Brenda has no idea who this woman is.

“Did they?”

“No,” Brenda manages.

“My name is Tovah Shapiro. I’m your attorney.” She sits at the table by her “client.”

“Don’t you mean you’re Marty Butler’s attorney?” Bobby asks.

Tovah cocks her head at him. “Hey, Bobby. How you been?”

“Been good, Tovah. You?”

“Never better. Still living at Mommy and Daddy’s house?” Before Bobby can answer, she turns back to Brenda. “So you weren’t Mirandized.”

“What?”

“Did anyone say the words ‘You are under arrest’ to you?”

“No.”

“Then we can go.”

“Right now?”

“Right now, sweetheart.”

As Brenda stands, she chin-gestures at Vincent. “He hit me.”

Tovah whistles slowly, says to Vincent, “With complaints already pending against you? Oh, Vinny, you make it so easy.”

Bobby holds up the photo of Auggie Williamson in front of Brenda. Brenda looks and then quickly looks away. “He was a human being, Brenda. You know what happened to him. We can offer you a deal.”

Tovah gives that a sharp laugh. “You have to be able to charge someone with something, Bobby, before you offer a deal.”

“We’ll make that happen real soon.”

Tovah rolls her smoky eyes at him. Everything about Tovah is smoky. Smoky and sexy as hell — the way she moves, the way she laughs, the way she chews her bottom lip before she delivers one bomb or another.

“You’ve got nothing.” She searches his eyes for confirmation.

Bobby hopes he’s giving her dead eyes in return. He’s trying like hell. “We’ve got plenty.”

Her eyes keep searching his. Roving. If she keeps it up much longer, he’ll need a cold shower. “I repeat — you’ve got nothing.”

They exit the interview room and find Rum Collins standing in the hallway alongside Boon Fletcher of Fletcher, Shapiro, Dunn & Levine. Boon gives Bobby a withering roll of his eyes, as if to say he expected better of him, and Bobby uses his middle finger to scratch the bridge of his nose.

He and Vincent stand in the hall and watch the two Southie kids walk out with two lawyers they couldn’t afford if they hit the number every day for a month straight, and Bobby knows that if they want to close this case now, it just got a hell of a lot fucking harder.

After he punches out, Bobby can feel the eels creeping into his blood, starting to itch. In the past, the primary way to scratch that itch was the needle, the spoon, and the brown powder. Now he recognizes it as a sign that it’s been too long since he went to a meeting.

He finds one in a church basement in Roxbury. He walks down the steps into the basement room that smells the way all Narcotics Anonymous meeting rooms smell — of coffee and cigarette smoke and donuts.

He takes a seat in the circle. Sparse attendance tonight — eleven bodies for thirty chairs — and no one’s too chatty. A white businessman with a briefcase looks really pissed off; a Puerto Rican woman dressed like a maid seems embarrassed. There’s a chunky black guy wearing construction boots caked with the same plaster dust that salts his hair. A woman who looks like a grade school teacher, a middle-aged guy with the sad eyes of a dog in the pound, a twenty-year-old who’s probably court-ordered and looks like he could be high right now. Three of them Bobby’s crossed paths with at other meetings for sure — the black Pan Am stewardess, the Polish truck driver, the birdlike woman who lost one of her kids in a fire. But no one’s in a sharing mood tonight. Finally, the guy running the group, Doug R., looks to Bobby and says, “How about you, friend? Care to share?”

It’s been months since Bobby shared at a meeting. He’s been warned by his sponsor, Mel, a retired cop, that this is another sign a slip could be coming. Walling oneself off into one’s own bullshit is its own form of dishonesty.

After a few dry coughs and a few false starts, he manages to get out a couple of sentences. “I had this dream the other night. My mother and a friend of mine from the marines were looking for me on a street in Hué.”

“In Way?” asks a woman with frizzy blond hair and sharp green eyes. She’s the one Bobby guessed might be a teacher.

“Hué. It’s a city in Vietnam. I was stationed around there for a while. So, yeah, my mother, who died when I was a kid, and my buddy Carl Johansen, who died when I was over there, they’re walking up this street looking for me. And I can see them because I’m in this, like, empty storefront with windows that stretch the entire block. And I’m running right alongside them yelling, ‘Hey, it’s me! It’s me!’ But they can’t hear me. I start banging on the windows and they still can’t hear me. Then I reach the end of the building. And I can’t get out. My mother and Carl just keep walking and calling my name until I can’t see them anymore. And then, after a while, I can’t hear them anymore. So, so I turn around in this empty store, and there’s a table with my lighter and my spoon and my powder on it. The syringe is brass-plated. Really comfy-looking chair for me to sit in. So I do. And I, ya know, get my works in order and shoot up. I won’t lie — it felt fucking great.”

People shift in their chairs. He can feel Doug R. watching him carefully, wondering if he made a mistake asking Bobby to share.

“I think,” Bobby says, “that Carl was in my dream because, for a long time, I used the war as an excuse to shoot up. ‘I saw this terrible thing, I saw that terrible thing, so I got lost.’ But war didn’t make me lost. I came back without a scratch. But I did get lost over there. Because I was like a child again. I knew nothing, not even the language. I didn’t know their gods, I didn’t know their customs, what was the right or wrong way to behave. I was just a twenty-two-year-old with a gun.” He looks out at the group, can’t tell from their eyes or their body language if he’s going on too long, if he’s connecting with any of them. But he plows forward, stumbling into each sentence like a toddler learning to walk. “This city here, it’s kinda gray all the time. You know?” He looks up at the ceiling. “Right now the sun shines during the day, but it’s pretty gray seven months out of the year. Or maybe, I dunno, it was just gray in my house growing up. I think of my house after my mother died — maybe even when she was still alive — and it just feels like everything was the color of the sidewalk, even the air.

“But in-country? Vietnam?” He looks around the circle. “You’ve never seen the color green until you’ve seen Vietnam. I’ve been trying to describe it for years and just fucking failing — the rice paddies in the morning with the mist coming off them and the blood-orange sky at night and birds flying low over the deltas and, I dunno, it looks like a place gods would choose to go on vacation. Filled with wonder. But that beauty got all tangled up with death, and fucked up my head once I realized that I was death, walking around with my big gun. I was the one killing all the beauty.” He notices he’s involuntarily hung his head and corrects it. Looks them all in the eyes. “But when I shot up, that went away, and all I could feel was the wonder. When I shot up, it felt like, like...” He fixes on the face of the blond woman, sees something in her eyes that feels desperate and hopeful at the same time. “Like all that beauty spread through my veins. It found a home in my body. And I was perfect. I was whole.”

The blond woman blinks. A single tear falls from her eye and breaks as it crests her cheekbone into three tinier tears that feel, for Bobby, like a trio of sacred C-words — communion, consecration, consummation.

The woman looks away, but Bobby can feel the eyes of the rest of the room on him. He shrugs, suddenly embarrassed to have gone on for so long.

Doug R. says, “Thanks for sharing.”

There’s a smattering of polite golf claps.

The angry-looking guy in the business suit says with precise enunciation, “I am a heroin addict because God, if not dead, is certainly on sabbatical.”

Bobby can feel everyone trying not to groan.

On the front steps, as Bobby’s leaving, the blond woman comes down the steps alongside him. She says, “Do people in there know you’re a cop?”

He considers her, realizes there’s something vaguely familiar about her. “It’s not something I advertise.”

“You arrested me once. Two years ago.”

Shit. This is exactly why Bobby doesn’t admit his profession in the meetings.

“I’ve never forgotten you,” she says. “The hard face but the kind voice.” She lights a cigarette and stares through the smoke at him when she exhales. “Were you using then?”

“Two years ago?” He nods. “That would have been right before I kicked it.”

“So, you were using, but you were busting addicts like me.”

Bobby tries not to hide from his ugly truths anymore. “Yes.”

Everyone else has gone to their cars. It’s just the two of them in front of the church. A slight breeze slides through the trees and fingers the strands of their hair. In the distance, they can hear the traffic on the southeast expressway — a quick horn beep, the rattle-and-thump of truck tires.

She smiles. It’s warm and sudden. “You arrested me, but you never charged me.”

“No?”

She shakes her head. “You put me in a car and drove me toward the station house. But then you asked me who I used to be before I got hooked on junk, and I told you I was a functioning druggie, thank you very much. Had a good job as a—”

“Social worker.” He smiles, remembering. “Your hair was different.”

“It’s naturally kind of a mousy brown, so I color it now. Got a perm.”

“It’s becoming,” he says, and immediately wants to shoot himself in the fucking head. Becoming? Where the fuck did that come from?

“You drove me to a clinic on Huntington Avenue,” she says. “You remember?”

“A bit.”

“You walked me in and said, ‘You can still go back to who you really are.’”

“Did it take?”

“Not for another six months. But I’ve been clean for four hundred and eighty-one days now.”

“Good for you.”

“It’s still scary. Is it scary for you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She holds out her hand. “Carmen.”

“You don’t look like a Carmen.”

“I know. But my mom was into opera.”

Bobby smiles like he knows what the connection between the two things could be. He shakes her hand. “Michael. But everyone calls me Bobby.”

“For God’s sakes, why?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Could you tell me on the walk to my car? I’m several blocks away, and it’s a little dicey around here.”

“Sure.”

They turn up the sidewalk together.

It’s a soft summer night that smells of imminent rain. Bobby walks Carmen toward her car. He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.