Small Mercies

28

The line about Frank Toomey you always hear around Southie is that he’s not all that hard to find because who, in their right mind, would go looking for him? But now, with everyone on high alert for a sighting of Mary Pat, her milling about anywhere near Frank Toomey’s known hangouts or places of business is out of the question. And she has to figure if they assume she’s coming for him, visiting the street where he makes his home is out of the question too.

But his wife, Agnes, a thin woman with a birdlike face and shoulders, is quite active in ROAR, the sister group of SWAB. Restore Our Alienated Rights was formed by Louise Day Hicks, a member of the Boston School Committee, to protect the “vanishing rights of white citizens.” The only reason SWAB and ROAR haven’t folded into the same organization yet is because Carol Fitzpatrick, the leader of SWAB, and Louise Day Hicks, the leader of ROAR, hate each other, dating back to some spat they had in kindergarten. Rumor has it the source of the lifelong animosity is a broken crayon, but that’s never been confirmed. SWAB is in disarray at the moment anyway, in no small part because Mary Pat knocked out some of the members’ teeth and broke at least one nose, so the ladies of SWAB don’t look particularly “match fit,” as her grandfather used to say, for a rally. But ROAR has been planning their rally for a month. And Agnes Toomey has utilized the manpower of all her husband’s underlings in the Butler crew to get the word out. So Agnes, who’s spent her life in the shadow of her fearsome husband, is taking her place front and center at tonight’s rally. And since the Butler crew has spent endless man-hours getting the word out, it’s possible — not probable, mind you, but possible — that Frankie will show up to support the Cause.

Mary Pat uses some of the blood money Marty gave her to go shopping at Filene’s Basement. She buys a pair of large oval sunglasses that remind her of Jackie O’s. She adds a black wig and a tan kerchief to her cart. She buys a powder blue gabardine pantsuit, a white blouse, and a pair of white nursing shoes. She treats herself to some lipstick, rouge, foundation, and false eyelashes that match the black of the wig. She splurges on a new purse for her gun.

After purchasing everything, she takes it to the dressing room and transforms herself. She’s a little surprised the nursing shoes bite at her heels; the whole point of nursing shoes, she’s always heard, is that they’re comfortable and you don’t have to break them in. Other than that, her shopping spree is a grand success. She looks in the mirror of the ladies’ dressing room at Filene’s Basement, and a stranger stares back at her. It’s a bit disconcerting how easily she vanished. She takes the glasses off, and okay, there she is, if someone got up close and personal, those are Mary Pat’s blue eyes for sure. But with the glasses back on, she has to peer hard at her profile to identify herself. And straight on, forget about it — she’s another person entirely.

Last year, right before they ended, she and Ken Fen went to the movies at the Bug House on Broadway and saw a spaghetti western, My Name Is Nobody, with Henry Fonda and Terence Hill.

That’s who she is now as she looks in the mirror: nobody.

A ghost.

With a gun.

After Filene’s, she walks a few blocks and turns onto West Street for her appointment at the law offices of Anthony Chapstone, better known as Tony Chap. Tony Chap had been Dukie’s attorney and did well by him, never billed him for so much as a paper clip unless he could point to the papers he’d clipped with it. It was Tony Chap who’d helped her get Dukie declared legally dead so she could marry Ken Fen in the church and, just as Dukie had said, his rates proved reasonable and without any hidden surprises.

Seeing him in his little office after the passage of half a dozen years, she’s struck once again by what an odd and solitary figure he has always cut. She knows of no wife, no family. The only framed photographs in his office are of small dogs and places she presumes he’s visited — leafy, mountainous places. He is, as always, impeccably dressed, but in a style at least fifteen years out of date — narrow lapels on his suit jacket, suspenders underneath, a silk bowtie. He’s a courteous man, kind-eyed, and she’s long since stopped questioning whether he has integrity, but knowable he is not. She doesn’t even know how old he is — somewhere between forty and fifty-five, his face still as smooth and unlined as a light bulb.

He guides her to a chair and expresses his condolences for Jules. He assures her that all the paperwork is prepared and brings in his secretary, old Maggie Wheelock, been with him his entire career, to witness and notarize everything.

When it’s all done — everything signed and initialed in triplicate — she removes some pocket change for herself from the bag of blood money and leaves the bag with Tony Chap.

She would have thought it would have given her pause to leave that bag of cash behind. In truth, she feels a hundred pounds lighter. And cleaner. Like she just took a bath in a baptismal font.

The Rally Against Tyranny takes place at seven o’clock, as the sun is beginning to set outside the Suffolk County District Courthouse on East Broadway in South Boston. The courthouse is just east of where East and West Broadway meet, and that intersection is already clogged with people. With no traffic getting through, they line the street and sidewalks outside the courthouse, and the various leaders speak from the courthouse steps.

The fifth speaker, Agnes Toomey, a woman few have ever heard speak above a whisper, has no trouble finding her voice with a bullhorn. It goes against God’s plan, she tells the crowd, to force a neighborhood, a culture, a place of pride and honor, to change its ways to accommodate those who are too weak or too lazy to help themselves.

Mary Pat, moving along the fringe of the crowd on the far side of the street, catches herself thinking that a woman whose husband kills people for a living might want to lay off the God talk.

The crowd doesn’t get the irony. They’re eating it up.

“If they want better schools,” Agnes calls through the bullhorn, “let them build them. No one’s stopping them.”

Up and down Broadway, people honk their horns.

“If they want a better life,” Agnes says, “let them get off their heinies and work for it.”

Heinies?

The crowd cheers. The horns continue to honk.

“The American Dream is no handout.”

The crowd goes fucking wild.

“The American Dream is roll up your sleeves and make your own way. Without welfare!”

A tidal wave of applause.

“Without government help and government orders!”

A group of men walk by Mary Pat, carrying pale white bodies under their arms, or that’s what it looks like until Mary Pat looks close and sees they’re life-size dolls, clearly as light as air in the big men’s arms. The crowd lets the men pass. One of the men, she realizes, is Terror McAuliffe, Big Peg’s husband. He looks right at Mary Pat, checking her out — face to breasts, breasts to face — and then he moves on.

No recognition.

“Francis and I have four children,” Agnes is saying, “three of them at Southie High. But they’re not going to school tomorrow. Because I won’t let them go. Southie won’t let them go! Am I right? Southie won’t go!”

The chant rolls up and down Broadway: “Southie won’t go! Southie won’t go! Southie won’t go!”

Agnes stands back, beaming, and her eyes drift to someone in the crowd, off to her right, about fifty yards from where Mary Pat stands. Mary Pat catches a glimpse of curly black hair in that section of crowd.

Mary Pat moves through the crowd. All her cockiness about her disguise suddenly feels like false confidence. Barroom bravado. Anyone, at any point, could turn, see her profile an inch away from their nose and...

What?

Scream her name.

That would do it.

Tom O’Rourke has the bullhorn now. Tom is also on the school committee. But he’s a dry speaker, a cure for insomnia is ol’ Tom, and even though he cycles through the usual greatest hits — tyranny, reverse racism, disruption of community and culture — he’s got everyone’s eyelids drooping when a cheer rips through the crowd. Mary Pat follows dozens of turned heads to see the men with the dolls swinging ropes over the streetlamps and flagpoles up by the courthouse. They’re not practiced at it — only one rope holds fast on the first try — but the crowd gives them so much vocal support that Tom O’Rourke calls it a day. Which brings another round of cheers.

Mary Pat nears where she thinks she saw Frank Toomey, but the sun’s gone down at this point. It’s not yet full dark, but deep shadows have fallen across the crowd in jagged swaths. This makes it harder to discern faces than it would be in full dark, where your eyes tend to adjust. And the sunglasses sure don’t help. Someone with black hair passes close to her, but when he emerges from the other side of the couple between them, he’s got a beard and a double chin, and she recognizes him as one of the Clarks from I Street. She turns in the crowd and he’s coming toward her, his eyes locking with hers, Frank Toomey himself, all brute force and Old Spice as he works his way through the crowd with a gruff “’Scuse me, ’scuse me” that sounds less like a minor plea and more like a major command. He comes right for Mary Pat; she can’t move. They’re packed in there too tight, people jostling and turning to see whatever’s going on by the courthouse at the moment, but Mary Pat’s realizing too late she should be reaching into her purse, which is twisted to the back of her right hip, as Frankie is almost on her, his mouth curving into a cruel smile as he gets in close enough for her to smell his breath and says, “’Scuse me, hon, I just gotta get by.”

She pivots to her right as best she can and then he’s brushing past her, his big bearish body sliding against her own, close enough for her to notice the smallest flecks of gray beginning to find his sideburns, and then he’s moved on. And right behind him, hands in their jacket pockets on a summer night, are Johnny Polk and Bubsie Gould, two headbreakers who run South Shore Sand & Gravel and several porn shops in the Combat Zone.

Before the crowd can close, she steps into their wake, staying right on their heels, as Frank, two steps ahead of them, parts the crowd like the prow of a boat. She wishes she hadn’t chosen a powder blue pantsuit — it seems the kind of detail people will remember later — but then she reminds herself she has no other endgame. Her primary objective is not to kill Frank Toomey and escape. It’s simply to kill Frank Toomey. Which, arguably, she could do right now — just pull out the gun and shoot all three assholes in the back. But who would be the true asshole then? Bullets could pass through their bodies; a panicked stampede could leave people trampled; she could miss. No, here was not the place.

The crowd surges forward as one, and Mary Pat is spun halfway around so that she’s involuntarily facing the courthouse again. The life-size dolls are hanging from the flagpoles and lampposts now with signs around their necks. One reads sen. kennedy, another judge garrity, a third mayor k. white, and a fourth william taylor, a name she doesn’t recognize. The men who carried the effigies stand below them with lighters in their hands. As the crowd bellows its approval, they light the dolls on fire.

It takes a minute. The flames dance along the edges of the effigies, some blue, some yellow. One of them — Garrity’s — goes out, and they have to start again. But then...

The light from the flames washes over the crowd closest to the courthouse. It bathes them in red and yellow and blue light that floods their heads and faces like liquid. The air smells of lighter fluid and fury. The effigies twist on their ropes and burn.

The crowd chants, “Southie won’t go!”

The crowd chants, “Niggers suck!”

The crowd chants, “We are one!”

For a moment Mary Pat’s vision turns telescopic, and all she can see are the faces surging forward on necks that strain from the stretching, red mouths slick with spittle, signs thrusting into the air like pitchforks, legs of children draped down their parents’ shoulders and chests. Moving through the thickness of the crowd and the thickness of its rage is like trying to squirm her way between freshly laid brick. Her lungs ache as if she chain-smoked half a dozen cigarettes in a row, and her head grows light.

Just when she thinks she might pass out, she clears the crowd. Pops out on the corner where West Broadway meets East.

Across Broadway, Frank Toomey reaches a cherry red Caddy with a white hard plastic roof. He chats easily with Johnny Polk and Bubsie Gould. He grimaces comically, and they share a laugh. He says something that makes both of them cock their heads. He nods several times so they’ll accept that he means what he says. Then he gets in the Caddy and pulls off the curb. He U-turns and heads up West Broadway.

It’s fucking agony as she waits to see what Johnny and Bubsie are going to do. They seem to be wondering themselves. Then they nod and walk three doors down to a bar.

Mary Pat runs full out for two blocks, hops behind the wheel of Bess, and stands on the gas. Bess putters out of the parking space. Begins to gain speed. Nears a stop sign. Mary Pat cranes her neck — nobody around — and blows the stop sign. She blows the next stop sign and reaches West Broadway with some momentum. At this point, all she’s got are guesses. If Frank were heading home, he’d have taken a side street that ran parallel to Dorchester Street and worked his way over to his house on West Ninth. But he didn’t. He drove up Broadway toward the bridge. Mary Pat lays all her chips on the table and decides he’s heading into the city itself, downtown somewhere.

If that had been the case — and someone hadn’t lit a car on fire and left it at the intersection of Broadway and E — she would have lost Frank Toomey for the night. But she reaches the intersection just as the traffic begins to snake around the burning car, and she catches sight of that white roof and cherry red frame as it passes the flames — is everything on fire tonight? — and keeps the car in sight until it turns right at the I-93 on-ramp.

She’s three cars back by the time the Caddy exits at North Station and then crosses the bridge into Charlestown. The two cars between them pull over at City Square, so she plays it safe and lets Frank get way ahead of her. Too far ahead, it turns out, but she doesn’t panic. Doesn’t allow the fear to rule her. It’s Charlestown — one mile square and not known for having covered garages. If he’s staying in the neighborhood, she’ll find him.

And she does.

Well, his car. She finds it parked in front of a barbershop across from the Training Field on Common Street. The barbershop is closed, its lights off. All around it are homes, some dating back to Revolutionary times, most to the early 1800s. They’re row houses — either redbrick, brownstone, or clapboard — not an inch to spare between them. He could be in any of them. Or none of them. Could have taken a parking space where he found it and walked off around the corner. She thinks about looking for him on foot, but the only place more clannish than Southie is Charlestown. If she starts walking around looking in windows, word will get to Frank before she gets half a block.

But he’ll come back for the Caddy, she hopes. She finds a spot with a clear view of his car on the far side of the Training Field, so named because it was where Union troops mustered and trained during the Civil War, and checks her wig and makeup in the rearview mirror. She settles in and tells herself she’s not exhausted. She can’t remember the last time she had real sleep; even in the motel last night, she got three hours tops. She pinches her thigh as hard as she can. Slaps her own face a few times. Smokes cigarette after cigarette...

She wakes around midnight with no idea when she fell asleep. She blinks half a dozen times, slaps herself again, and gets a clear look across the Training Field. The Caddy is still where Frank Toomey parked it.

Jesus.

Dumb fucking luck. Nothing more.

She resolves to stay awake even if she has to cut herself, but halfway through her next cigarette, her eyelids flutter. She gets out of the car. Stands in the clammy air, her wrists leaning against Bess’s roof as she smokes. She spots a phone booth half a block up on the corner. Perfect angle on Frank’s car from there, so she trudges up to it and steps in, closes the door behind her. She thinks of who she can call at this late hour — or at any hour anymore, she realizes with the pang of the exiled — and then she drops a dime in the slot and dials.

“Mary Pat,” he says when they put him through to her. “How’d you know I’d be working the late shift?”

“Luck o’ the Irish, Detective.”

“We took three nasty automatic rifles off the street this morning.”

“Did you?”

“We certainly did. Thank you.”

“If you worked this morning, why you still at it?”

“I went home and slept,” he says. “Came back, though. Everyone’s doubling up. Half the cops in the city are gearing up for tomorrow. A lot of them were over your way keeping the peace tonight.”

“I saw you at Auggie Williamson’s funeral.”

“Noticed you myself.”

“Why’d you rush off?”

“We got a warrant we’d been waiting on. Had to serve it to a shithead who killed his girlfriend, stop him before he could kill another one.”

“That must have been satisfying.”

“Not really. What I do feels a lot like sanitation work most days.” He fails to suppress a yawn of pure exhaustion. “I heard you exchanged some words with Auggie’s parents.”

“Mmmm,” she manages.

“I bet that wasn’t pleasant.”

“It wasn’t.”

He makes the same excuse she tried for. “They lost a son. Violently. They can’t see straight.”

“No.” She sucks in a big wet breath that rattles in the confines of the phone booth. “They see fine.” She looks out through the smeared glass at the Training Field where soldiers once prepared for battles to free the slaves. She imagines they were young, impressionable. Scared shitless. The grass of the field has turned nearly white in the summer heat — there’s been no rain this summer; none — and under the streetlights and through the grimy glass, it looks like snow. She’s never felt more lost.

No, she realizes, not lost.

Homeless.

She clears her throat and tries to explain something to Detective Michael “Bobby” Coyne, a perfect stranger when you get right down to it, but she feels the need to tell him something even she doesn’t understand. She feels the need to be heard, whether she makes sense or not. “When you’re a kid and they start in with all the lies, they never tell you they’re lies. They just tell you this is what it is. Whether they’re talking about Santa Claus or God or marriage or what you can or can’t make of yourself. They tell you Polacks are this way and wops are another and don’t even get us started on the spics and the niggers but you sure can’t trust them. And they tell you that’s the Way. And you, you’re a fucking kid, you think, I want to be part of the Way. I sure don’t want to be outside the Way. I gotta live with these people my whole life. And it’s warm in there. So warm. The rest of the world? That’s so fucking cold. So you embrace it, you know?”

“I know,” Bobby says.

“And then you dig in because now you got kids and you want them to feel warm. And you spread the same lies to them, mainline them into their blood. Until they become the kinda people who can chase some poor boy into a train station and bash his head in with a rock.”

“It’s okay,” he says gently.

“It’s not!” she screams into the confines of the phone booth. “It’s not. My daughter’s dead and Auggie Williamson’s dead too because I sold my daughter lies. And before she ended up swallowing them? She knew it. They always know it. They know at five. But you keep repeating the lies until you wear them down. That’s the worst of it — you wear them down until you scoop all the good out of their hearts and replace it with poison.”

She has no idea how long she weeps. Only that at one point, she has to put another dime in the phone, and still she can’t stop crying.

Bobby stays on the line with her the whole time.

Once the sobs have become sniffles, she hears his voice through the earpiece: “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, I’d like you to take a day off.”

She can’t speak yet. Her throat is filled with saline and mucous.

“Mary Pat? Please. Take twenty-four hours. Don’t do anything. I’ll meet you wherever you want. No badge. Just a friend.”

“Why are you my friend?” she manages eventually.

“Because we’re both parents,” he says.

“I was. Not anymore.”

“No, you still are. You always will be. And all parents know failure. It’s the only thing we know for sure. So, yeah, your daughter, Jules, she had some failings that you passed on to her. Okay. But everyone I spoke to about her? They all talked about how kind she was. How funny. What a great friend she could be.”

“What’s your point?”

“You gave her those qualities too, Mary Pat. We’re not one thing. We’re people. The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”

“I’m good at battle,” she says.

“That’s not the battle I’m talking about.”

“About the only thing I’m good at.”

“I bet there’s a lot more you’re good at.”

“Now you’re shining me on to keep me on the phone.”

“You called me.”

“So?”

“So I think you want me to talk you out of whatever you’re planning to do.”

She laughs, and he’s chastened to hear that it’s a dry laugh. “I don’t want you to talk me out of anything.”

“Then why call?”

“Because someday someone’s going to make sense of this.”

“What’s ‘this’?”

“What I’m about to do.”

“Don’t do it.”

“And I want you to tell them what I told you.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I told you, Detective Coyne, that you can’t take everything from someone. You have to leave them something. A crumb. A goldfish. Something to protect. Something to live for. Because if you don’t do that, what in God’s name do you have left to bargain with?”

Just as Bobby’s thinking he should have started a trace on this call five minutes ago, she hangs up.

He sits there, staring at the phone, and remembers why he started doing heroin in the first place — when you’re high on smack, the world seems gorgeous. When you aren’t, it seems like a hopeless fucking mess.

Mary Pat hangs up the phone and leans back in the booth and watches with a kind of stupefied awe as Frank Toomey drives right past her.

She follows him back to Southie, once again taking the gamble that she knows where he’s going, so she doesn’t have to tail him tightly.

And he rewards her when he pulls over in front of his home on West Ninth. The street is so still, you could hear someone blow their nose from a block over. When Frank opens the door of the Caddy, she can hear the hinges creak.

Bess is already rolling. Mary Pat has her foot off the gas and is just allowing the creaky bitch to move via her own momentum. She waits to hit the gas until Frank closes the door to the Caddy and bends to lock it with the key.

This is it, she thinks. This is the end. I run him the fuck over, slam it into reverse to finish the job if necessary, and drive away. I go as far as the money and luck will take me. Which, let’s be honest, won’t be far. And I die from police bullets or Butler crew bullets because I will not go to jail and I will not let those Butler vermin lay their hands on me.

But Frank turns to see the car coming at him and drops to the ground. He rolls under the Caddy and almost makes it — he almost does — but the tires crunch one of his legs. From underneath the Caddy, his scream is sharp.

She screeches to a halt and gets out of Bess.

Lights come on — first in the next-door neighbors’ house and then in Frank’s. Frank has crawled out from under the Caddy and tries to get to one foot on the sidewalk. He’s reaching into his jacket for a gun. But she’s already coming around the front of the Caddy with her gun pointed at him, her wig sliding halfway down the right side of her head, and she fires. The shot goes wide, hits what sounds like a trash can down the street. Frank’s hand clears his jacket, something in it for sure. She takes better aim and fires a second time, hears Frank shout, “Fuck!” He drops a gun and doubles over, and the blood spills from a hole in his stomach and through his fingers under the white streetlight glare and down the front of his white pants.

He tries to charge her, even with the bullet in him, but the mangled left foot isn’t cooperating. He makes the mistake of trying to put his weight on it, and he screams — it’s more of a shriek, actually — and falls to his knees, ends up on all fours at her feet as she puts the gun to the crown of his head.

“Daddy!”

Mary Pat looks up to see the girl on the stoop. Agnes crouches behind her, holding the girl back. It’s Frank’s youngest daughter — Caitlin, the one who just had her first communion a few months back.

“Don’t hurt my daddy,” Caitlin screams. “Please, lady, please!”

Frank grabs at her legs. Mary Pat clubs him with the butt of the revolver.

Caitlin howls. “Don’t hurt him!”

The next-door neighbor, Rory Trescott, runs toward them with a bat cocked. Mary Pat fires the gun once, aiming well wide of him, and Rory hits the deck.

Frank flops over on his side, blood pumping out of the hole in his stomach like a weak water fountain.

Mary Pat grabs his gun off the sidewalk and puts it in her waistband.

Caitlin Toomey comes off the porch as her mother swipes at her, trying to hold her back.

Mary Pat screams, “You keep her the fuck back!”

Agnes grabs her daughter.

Mary Pat sinks both her hands into Frank’s greasy wet hair and gets a solid grip. She drags him across the asphalt to Bess — he’s fucking heavy; it’s like dragging a fridge — and her wig falls off as she does, lands in the street in a streak of Frank’s blood.

“I know you, Mary Pat!” Agnes calls. “I know you!”

Mary Pat gets the back door open. She yanks Frank’s hands — first the right and then the left — behind his back and cuffs them at the wrist. She shoves Frank onto the backseat like he’s a rolled-up rug. Just pushes until he’s in. She slams the door shut and runs around the side of the car.

“I know you!” Agnes calls again. “I know you! I know you!”

Mary Pat gets behind the wheel, drops the shift into drive, and pulls up the street. They’ve driven a few blocks when Frank groans from the backseat. “I’m bleeding bad.”

“I know it,” Mary Pat says.

“I could bleed out,” Frank says.

“Well, shit, Frank,” Mary Pat says, “wouldn’t that just break my damn heart?”