Small Mercies

23

It’s a few moments before she can speak.

She remembers the day she forced her way into the Fields. Larry Foyle and Weeds sported dirty T-shirts, their bodies sweaty and ripe with B.O. And then Brian Shea, his skin speckled with chalky residue, claimed he’d been helping “renovate” Marty’s house. A sledgehammer rested against a toolbox in the rear grotto. Brian had been indignant because she’d gone to his house and questioned his wife in the disappearance of her daughter. He’d been threatening. Flicked a cigarette at her.

Insinuated that she was a bad neighbor.

Acted self-righteous.

And all the while, her daughter’s body lay just twenty feet away in a cellar.

Brian Shea, with whom she’d had clammy, forgettable high school sex in his mother’s bedroom.

Brian Shea, for whom Dukie had put in a word when he was just another kid on the make, trying to get in with Marty Butler.

Brian Shea, to whom Dukie once loaned money, only to have to chase him down to get it back.

Brian Shea, who was at the party they threw after Jules’s christening.

Had been in their home, had eaten at their table, had drunk their liquor and beer.

Brian Fucking Shea.

“Why you crying?” George Dunbar, his back against the Nova, is watching her with a loose, sleepy gaze.

“Am I?” She dabs under her eyes with the heel of her hand.

He doesn’t even hear her. He’s already floating again.

She squats down by him and snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Did you see her?”

“Who?”

“Jules.”

“When?”

“When you reset the basement floor?”

“Whose?”

“Marty’s.”

“Nah, nah, nah. We, um, we brought in the Quikrete. It’s the stuff they should have used from the start. Concrete but sand too. It’s good shit, dries fast...” He lowers his head, seems to fall asleep.

She slaps his face. His eyes snap open, meet hers. “You never saw Jules?”

“No, no. She... I mean, there was a hole in the floor, and it had been patched over, and then they poured the bad cement mix over that. So they busted up all the bad cement, and we came in and laid the Quikrete down, and that’s where she is.”

“Under the Quikrete.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s into another nod.

She slaps him again.

“George! Is she under the Quikrete?”

“Yeah. She’s there.” His words are a muddy slur at this point. “She’s there.”

“George,” she says before she loses him, “does anyone come to this garage besides you?”

He smiles and rolls his head on his neck. “No one knows it’s here.”

“No one?”

“Not a soul,” he slurs.

If he notices when she handcuffs him to the handle of the car door, he doesn’t seem to mind.

She gets some sleep in the backseat of the Nova.

When she wakes, it’s hot as hell in there, the garage’s metal door serving as a conductor for the rays of sun pounding the other side of it. George is rattling his handcuff against the door handle. She looks at her watch — two-thirty. Heroin begins to leave the bloodstream after six hours. George is right on schedule.

She loops the seat belt once around the back of the passenger seat. She uncuffs George, leads him over, and pushes him down into the seat. He groans a few times, asks her what she’s doing, but she ignores him. She has to pull hard on the belt to get the latch plate up near his hip, but once she does, she slaps the cuff into the latch plate hole on the first try.

“You know what I don’t get,” she says.

He shakes his head, still a little foggy.

“You and Brenda. You don’t seem like a couple.” It’s something that nagged at her while she was falling asleep in the back of the car.

“We’re not.”

She closes her eyes for a moment, wondering if there’s any bottom to this.

“So if Rum was a cover for Frankie Toomey, who were you the cover for?”

“Who do you think?”

In the dark swelter of the car, she says nothing for a bit. And then:

“Marty.”

He doesn’t nod. But he doesn’t shake his head. He just holds her gaze.

“And George? One last question — when did they really take up with the girls?”

He takes a minute to formulate his thoughts. “Frank liked to say the reason they call it freshman year is because that’s when it’s freshest.”

This is one of the moments she’ll look back on and wonder how it was she managed not to kill him.

She drives them downtown.

“What do you know about how she died?”

George is out of sorts and grumpy. He keeps trying to raise his cuffed hand to block the sun from his eyes. He switches to his left hand, but it’s still too much sun for one hand. “Frankie was pissed because she called his house after midnight and threatened to tell people.”

“Tell people what?”

He gives her a careful look.

“Rum already told me she was pregnant,” she tells him.

“Then, yeah, that’s what she was threatening.”

She drifts into oncoming traffic and has to swerve hard to avoid an oncoming cab. It’s not anything George said. It’s a fragment of memory from the last day she spent with Jules. They’d been walking along Old Colony, and Jules had spiraled into that weird dark mood which grew so exasperating that Mary Pat had asked her if she was PMSing. To which Jules replied:

No, Ma. Definitely no.

She was trying to tell me, Mary Pat thinks. And I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear. Because I didn’t want to. Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your world.

They have to divert at the Broadway bridge because an anti-busing demonstration has shut down the bridge. As they follow the detour down along A Street, they pass throngs walking toward the bridge with anti-busing signs, anti-Garrity signs, anti-black signs.

They stop at an intersection and wait out the passing of a thick line of protesters.

“Why’d he kill her?” she says softly, surprised the words left her mouth because, in the end, no reason could be good enough.

“She wanted money to raise her kid.”

“He has plenty of money.”

“Doesn’t mean he wants to share any. Plus, I heard she was asking for a lot. Said she didn’t want to raise her kid the way she was raised.”

Mary Pat tries to keep the wince in her heart from appearing on her face. “And if she didn’t get the money?”

“She’d tell people it was his.”

“Who told you this?”

“Larry Foyle. He was pretty down about it. Said it wasn’t right. Said, ‘We’re killing little girls now?’”

“How’d you feel about it?”

“Really sad.”

She looks over at him. He’s still trying to dodge the sun, moving his head below his hand.

“No, you didn’t,” she says.

He sighs. “No, I didn’t.”

“Do you feel things, George? I’ve always wondered.”

He frowns at his own reflection in the window. “I think it’s a pretty idea, but no. Honestly? Outside of my mom, I never felt anything for anyone.”

“At least you’re honest.”

He points at the protesters, stragglers now, but still a decent number of them working their way up A Street. “Look at these fucking morons. Whether niggers walk the halls of Southie High this year or not, you’ve all already lost. The towelheads just told us to go fuck ourselves and get used to walking until they decide to let us have more oil. But you’ll pick a fight with the niggers, who are just as poor and fucked as you are, and tell yourselves you stand for something.”

The traffic moves. They make it through the intersection just as the light turns from yellow to red.

“If you don’t care about any of it, George, why’d you pick a fight with Auggie Williamson?”

He lowers his hand and looks at her, and the sun bathes the side of his face in harsh yellow that bounces and refracts as she drives.

“He was weak,” he says. “You could see it in his eyes.”

“Maybe he was just scared.”

“Fear’s a weakness.” He holds his hand back up to the sun. “I don’t like weakness.”

“Maybe it’s not weakness. Maybe it’s just a kind heart.”

He checks to see if she’s serious. Once he decides she is, he lets out a bark of a laugh. “Well, I mean, fuck that, then.”

She looks over at him for a bit and finally understands him after all these years. “I get it now. You don’t have the anger, George. You just have the hate.”

Neither says anything for two traffic lights.

As she turns onto Congress Street, Mary Pat says, “Why did they keep her body?”

“Huh?”

“If Frank Toomey did kill my daughter in that house, why did he leave her body there?”

“It’s being watched.” He shrugs. “That’s what Marty’s been told, anyway.”

“Watched by who?”

“DEA.”

“How does Marty know?”

“He’s got someone in the FBI.”

“No shit?” She can feel her eyes widen and hear an involuntary whistle leave her lips.

“Yup,” George says. “That why he’s untouchable.”

She turns that over in her head a bit.

“Where we going?”

“I’m taking you to your drugs.”

“Yeah?” He only half believes her.

“We had a deal. I’m holding up my end.”

“I didn’t promise I wouldn’t say anything.”

“You mean to Marty? About me jacking your drugs?”

“Yeah.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s all fine, George.”

He can’t seem to compute that.

“Here we go,” she says, and pulls over on the Congress Street Bridge by the harbor.

He looks at the red clapboard building that overlooks the water. At the gangway that descends to the harbor. At the yellow boat at the bottom of the gangway. “What’re we doing here?”

“Do you know what that boat is?”

“Yes,” he says irritably.

“Tell me.”

“It’s a replica of the ship.”

“What ship?”

“What’re we, in grammar school?”

“Humor me, George.”

He gives her teenage-girl eye rolls. “It’s a replica of the ship the Sons of Liberty boarded when they chucked all the British tea into the harbor back in seventeen seventysomething.”

“Very good!” She claps his knee. “And why did they do that, George?”

“To protest taxes. Can you just—”

“Not taxes,” she says. “Taxes without representation. That was the key part, George. They paid the British, but the British just took the money and didn’t do a damn thing for them. So they chucked their precious limey tea right into the harbor. The point they were making, George, is if you take from me, then I fucking take from you.”

He looks across the seat at her. “What are you on about?”

She gestures with her chin at the water. “That’s where Marty’s drugs are, George.”

He doesn’t get it. “On the boat?”

She shakes her head. “In the water.”

George’s mouth opens in a wide O. He stares through the windshield and blinks repeatedly. People walk by on the sidewalk outside the car, oblivious to the destruction going on within.

George finally speaks. He says, “Come on. No.” His voice is small and pleading and cracks on the final word.

“I stood right up there in the middle of the bridge last night...”

“Please?” George stares through the windshield at the harbor.

“And I cut open the bags, one by one.”

“Just... stop,” he whispers.

“And I rained all those pills and powder down into the water.”

He whispers something.

“What, George? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

He makes a sound that falls somewhere between a grunt and a moan. “I’m dead.”

“Without your drugs?”

“I’m fucking dead.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, “you certainly are.”

She places the muzzle of the .38 into his midsection and reaches across his body to unlock the handcuff from the seat belt latch plate. She digs the muzzle farther into his abdomen, looks in his eyes, their noses only half an inch apart. She takes his wrist and swings it across their bodies and snaps the cuff into the driver’s wheel.

She sits back and places the gun back under her shirt. “I look at you now, George, and I see a little boy who’s scared, who wants a second chance. But they don’t hand out second chances when you’re an adult. Not around here. As a mother, I want to hold you in my arms. I want to whisper ‘Shh’ in your ear and tell you everything will be all right.”

He’s looking at her wildly, like maybe she’ll do these things. “So, so, help me, Mrs. Fennessy. Please.”

“I’d love to, George. I would.” She caresses the back of his head and presses her forehead to his for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is kind and motherly. “But then? Then I remember that you sold my son the drugs that killed him, you murdered that poor black boy who just wanted to get home, and you helped bury my daughter in a basement.” She removes her forehead from his, holds his hateful gaze with her own. “So I don’t give a flying fuck, really, whether you die tonight or live a long hellish life in prison. I just know if I never look on your face again, it’ll be a blessing from God Himself.”

He repeatedly yanks the handcuff against the wheel as she exits the car.

She stops at a pay phone beside the Tea Party Museum and dials the number on the card she was given last week.

He answers on the third ring. “Detective Coyne.”

She tells him where to find George Dunbar and hangs up.