Small Mercies

24

Though the OPEC oil embargo officially ended five months earlier, a major side effect of the gas shortages of ’73 is that no one drives around with a tank that’s any less than half full. You never know when the Arabs are going to hold the oil hostage again, and no one wants to get stuck sitting for hours on end in those fucking lines.

So the cars parked out front of the Fields of Athenry that night are all sitting on gas tanks at least two thirds full. Most, including Marty Butler’s AMC Matador, are topped up all the way. When someone tears a man’s shirt — what arson investigators will later determine was the dress uniform of a U.S. Army corporal — into strips, ties the bottom of each strip to a small stone, and drops those strips into the gas tanks of every car parked in front of the Fields, it would take only a match, a firm hand, and balls the size of fucking ostrich eggs to light one hell of a fire.

Which is what happens.

The men in the bar notice the light playing off the windows. It almost seems like Christmas lights, maybe strung in a garland between two streetlamps and lifting in the winter breeze. But it’s not winter, and those aren’t Christmas lights. By the time they all get out to the sidewalk, it’s like the end of the world or some fucking thing. Six cars in a row — half a block of them — are bonfires. Smoke and heat roil off the shells in oily waves.

They pull the hoses out from behind the bar and grab every fire extinguisher they can lay their hands on to keep the flames from hitting the bar itself, but the heat is like the heat of hell, and when the car windows start to blow out, guys get blasted with pebbles of glass. Poor Weeds catches a bunch of it in his right ear, enough to turn it into ground pork, as if his face weren’t already bad enough, and they drag him back into the bar and someone goes looking for tweezers.

By the time the firemen show up, sparks drizzle off the roof and fat blue flames dance along the exterior walls of the bar. Everyone’s evacuated. So they’re standing there on the street — Marty and Frankie and Brian Shea and about fifteen other guys in the most feared crew on the south side of the city — and they’re all sooty and bewildered, and the firemen push them back like they’re regular citizens, everyday fucking schmoes.

It’s Brian Shea who looks beyond the roof of the bar to the top of the building behind it and says, “Oh my God.”

The firemen see it too, and they start shouting and pointing and calling for backup.

They’d all thought the bar was on fire, but the bar has just a couple of sparks and flames to deal with, flames that are already dying under the weight of the water smashing into them. But the house behind the bar — the house where Marty has done his deals and run his girls and his casino nights for wiseguys all across New England — that’s got towers of flame shooting twelve feet high off the top of it.

They try to get to it, but the firemen push them back. Now the police are there and EMTs and, fuck, even reporters from 4, 5, and 7 and the Globe, the Herald, the Argus, and the Patriot Ledger.

Marty watches it all burn and says to Frankie, “If this is who I think it is, it falls on you, Tombstone. All on you.”

Bobby finds a message taped to his desk lamp the next morning:

To: Det. Sgt. M. Coyne

Fr: Some Southie Broad

Message: Sorry I burned the toast. She never got to Florida. She never left the cellar.

Bobby can tell from the handwriting that Cora Sterns took the message. He finds her coming out of the women’s locker room in street clothes. She doesn’t want to stand around work one second longer than she has to, so Bobby has to hotfoot beside her toward the parking lot.

“When did the call come in?”

“Three in the morning.”

“She called herself ‘Southie Broad’?”

“Called herself ‘Some Southie Broad.’”

“And she said she burned the toast?”

Cora pushes out through the door into the parking lot. “She insisted I put that in the message. I was like, ‘Lady, you fucking up the detective’s breakfast sounds like personal business you don’t call in on a department line.’ But she made me write it down.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t give your chippies your work number, Detective, let your sisters deal with them.”

“Yes, Cora.”

She shoots him a kinda friendly/kinda not middle finger as she walks to her car.

Twenty minutes later, Bobby hears about the fire in Southie last night, and the penny drops.

The arson investigators, tracing the point of origin, determined that the blaze started in the basement. They hand Bobby an oxygen mask and tank, tell him the basement flooring was recently done over with cement that’s still settling, so the fumes are toxic. They lead him down a blackened set of stairs and shine a light on a dark brown oval in the center of the floor. The rest of the floor is a goopy blue-gray. There’s a film of it over the brown oval, but it’s thin.

The arson investigator’s voice comes through his mask as if up from a bathtub. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Bobby nods.

It takes them half the day to get the body up. They’re all down there, sweating their balls off in masks and hazmat whites and the firemen trying to shore up the whole basement and make sure it doesn’t collapse on their heads. To dig up the body, they have to send someone out to the special-equipment warehouse in Canton to get the right tool, which looks like a jackhammer with a putty-knife blade, but it cuts a perfect rectangle in the floor that looks, appropriately, like a coffin.

They keep taking trips upstairs to the grotto outside because, even with the masks and oxygen, it’s easy to get dizzy down there. Brian Shea and half a dozen Butler guys watch them from the little tables out back of the bar, ask them why they’re not somewhere fighting real crime, maybe busting the niggers before they can come in here and fuck up the schools and every other fucking thing by Thursday.

Gregor, one of the crime tech guys, has a smoke with Bobby, and Bobby asks why they’re choosing to bring out the body with the soft cement and dirt still encasing it.

“Evidence,” Gregor says. “We don’t know what mighta leached in there.”

Guys with the ME’s office carry the body out in a black bag while they’re sitting there, and Bobby and Gregor step aside while the guys load it into the morgue van. Bobby catches Brian Shea watching from across the way. Brian’s a cold fish, a hell of a poker player, Bobby’s always heard, but he looks pretty sick right now, like his stomach is filling with acid.

Bobby shoots him a broad smile and a big salute.

Down at the morgue, they cut away the cement and dirt around the body and bag it all. Then they clean the corpse and straighten the legs and arms as best they can.

“Cause of death?” Bobby says.

Drew Curran, the medical examiner for this shift, grimaces at him. “This is my first look. Can you give me a second?”

Bobby sighs and reaches for a cigarette.

“You can’t smoke in here, Detective.”

A few minutes later, Drew says, “Oh, yeah, we got it.”

Bobby comes out of his seat.

Drew peels back a puckered hole just below the left rib cage. “Someone shoved a five-inch blade right under her ribs and straight into her heart. Could’ve been looking in her eyes when he did it.”

Bobby looks at her now, this child who came out of Mary Pat Fennessy’s womb less than eighteen years ago. Even with the early stages of decomposition settling in, he can see what a pretty girl she was. Not just pretty but... soft. The mother is all hard edges and angles, a jawline set in permanent opposition, thin lips usually one curl away from a sneer. The mother is built for battle. The daughter, on the other hand, seems, even in death, to have arrived from a fairy tale. As if she’s not dead but merely awaiting the restorative kiss of the prince, who, even as Bobby and Drew stand there, nears this building and the end of his quest.

We’re not built for princesses down here, Bobby thinks.

“What’d you say?” Drew asks.

“Nothing,” Bobby says. “Nothing.”

“You got what you need?”

“Yeah,” Bobby says, and leaves.

Next time she calls is halfway through his shift.

“We went by your place looking for you.”

“I’m not there right now,” she says.

“That’s probably a good thing.”

“I understand you may have taken a body out of a burned building recently.”

“We did, yes.”

“Has it been identified by next of kin?”

“We’re waiting on next of kin to arrive.”

“Would next of kin have to worry about arrest?”

“For what?”

“You tell me.”

Neither speaks for a bit.

“My dad,” Bobby tells her eventually, “was the best housepainter you ever saw. Inside, outside, didn’t matter. He was a magician with a brush or a roller. People would ask him questions, though, about wood rot and load-bearing walls, even the electrical. My father would say, ‘I do one thing better than anybody by not concerning myself with anything else.’”

“Sounds like a cool guy,” Mary Pat says.

“When he was sober, yeah, he was.” Bobby realizes how much he misses the old bastard in that moment. “I’m a homicide investigator. I don’t investigate arson. That’s what arson investigators are for. I don’t investigate assault and battery. I don’t concern myself with someone, say, who claims he was forced at gunpoint to shoot heroin into his veins.”

“Well, that’s a crazy tale,” Mary Pat says.

“Right?” Bobby chuckles. “You should hear the one about the kid who was threatened with castration.”

“Here?” Mary Pat says. “In the United States of America?”

“We suspect so, yes.”

“What is happening to this world, Detective?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Fennessy. I really don’t.”

The silence on the line is comfortable until Bobby rips the Band-Aid.

“Can you meet me at the city morgue, 212 Hester Street, in two hours?”

Her tone darkens to pure black. “I’ll be there.”

He stands beside her in the corridor as Drew Curran wheels the gurney up to the viewing window, the sheet covering the body, head to toe. Drew comes around to the side of the gurney closest to the window and puts his finger on the corner of the sheet, looks through the glass at Bobby.

“You ready?” Bobby asks her.

“No one’s ready for this.” She sucks in some air. “Okay. Okay. Do it.”

He nods at Drew.

Drew pulls back the sheet, stopping at the shoulders.

“Oh,” Mary Pat says. “Ohhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhh.”

First her face crumbles, then her body, and Bobby catches her before she can hit the floor. She keeps saying that one plaintive “Oh” over and over.

She stares through the glass at her daughter’s corpse and then presses her face to the glass, the movement so fast and Mary Pat so strong that she drags Bobby to the glass with her in a single lurch. She shrugs him off her and places her palms to the glass and weeps and whispers her daughter’s name.

Bobby never sees her leave. She fills out the paperwork and excuses herself to the bathroom, and after a while, he realizes he hasn’t seen her come out. They send in a female lab tech, but she’s not there. Her car’s no longer in the back lot.

He can hear that “Oh” ringing in his head. Wonders if he’ll ever get it out.

Turns out the house behind the Fields of Athenry isn’t in Marty’s name. It’s in the name of a guy whose body was found in the trunk of a car in long-term parking at the Amtrak station in Pawtucket in 1969. The guy’s name was Lou Spiro, and he left no surviving relatives, so no one ever looked into his estate. But Lou was sitting on some gold mines — a Southie liquor store, a Medford car wash, a metal compacting company in Somerville, and two strip clubs in Revere — that everyone has long assumed belong to Marty Butler.

While the BPD can’t directly tie Marty or Frank Toomey to the body they found in the basement, they can freeze all the assets of the late Lou Spiro and begin taking steps to seize all his properties. That makes the burning of the home behind the Fields of Athenry the most disastrous calamity — by a huge fucking margin — to ever befall the Butler crew.

“You need to get out of town,” Bobby tells Mary Pat the next time she calls him. “Maybe the country.”

“But why?” she asks, all mock innocence.

“You’re a marked woman.”

“Eh.” She takes a drag on a cigarette.

“Rum and George confessed,” he tells her. “It’ll be in the papers tomorrow or the next day. We’re running around confirming all their details now. You won.”

That brings a wet, angry laugh over the line. “I didn’t win shit. They’re walking around free.”

“We have George Dunbar saying Frank and Marty hired him to repave the basement floor with Quikrete.”

“So?”

“So it puts them by the body.”

“They’ll have twenty fucking alibis — minimum — for the night she died. They’ll have witnesses placing them in Persia. You don’t have anything on them.”

“We got Frank giving an order on Auggie Williamson.”

“I heard about that ‘order,’” she says. “‘Finish the job’ could mean anything. That’s what they’ll say in court. You know that.”

He does.

“They’re gonna walk from this just like they walk from everything.”

“Mary Pat,” he says, “don’t wreck your life trying to do something that is doomed to fail.”

“My life,” she says, “was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby. I’m a testament.”

“What?”

“That’s what ghosts are — they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.”

“Mary Pat, you need help.”

A dark chuckle. “It’s not me who’s gonna need help, believe you me.”

“You’ve already dented their drug business, taken a blowtorch to their headquarters, and fucked up at least five businesses they own, by my latest count. Worse than all that, you embarrassed them. Made them look like fucking dunces.”

“They’re still walking the streets!”

Her voice is so loud he has to hold the phone away from his ear for a moment. When he puts it back, she speaks calmly:

“George tell you about the rifles he handed off to some black guys in Roxbury?”

Bobby grabs his notepad. “He did not.”

“They were on Moreland Street not far from Warren, by a little park and playground. Three guys with big ’fros and goatees.”

Bobby knows those assholes. It’s a schizo-political group calls themselves the Global Liberian Liberation Front but go by the street name the Moorlocks. They’re a batshit brew of conflicting ideologies — Stokely Carmichael and Malcom X crossed with Back-to-Africa crossed with the Weather Underground and the West German Red Army Faction, all of it needing to be financed, so they deal a shitload of drugs to the very people they claim to want to “liberate.”

“You know what the guns are for?”

“Brian Shea said they damn well better make some noise with them.”

Damn, Bobby thinks, if I’d met Mary Pat five years ago and she worked the street like this? I’d have made lieutenant by now.

“Leave town,” he tells her.

“Oh, Bobby,” she says in a mildly baffled tone, “no one’s gonna chase me out of my hometown.”

And she hangs up.