Small Mercies

8

The two guys leaning against the faded brown sedan parked out in front of her building look so much like cops they should have just stayed in uniform. The younger and taller of the two has a bandit mustache and long sideburns. His thick hair reaches the shoulders of his black pleather car coat, and a gold chain around his neck catches the streetlight and winks at her as she approaches. Mary Pat would bet he’s seen Serpico at least three times.

The other one is shorter, fleshy and on his way to fat if he’s not careful. He has the kind of face she usually associates with boxers and loan sharks. He wears a porkpie hat. His clothes are too tight on him, and his tie has been askew since the day he bought it. Divorced, she guesses, lots of TV dinners and drinking alone. A description, she quickly realizes (and just as quickly banishes), could describe her. Upon closer inspection, she puts his age at mid-thirties, ten years younger than her initial assumption, but hard years are baked into those decades somewhere.

They flash their badges. The young one identifies himself as Detective Pritchard. The older one is Detective Coyne.

“Is Julie around?” Coyne has a surprisingly gentle voice that doesn’t match the rest of him.

“No, she’s not.”

“May I ask where she might be?” Again, his tone is almost courtly.

“I don’t know. I’ve been looking for her myself.”

“Since when?” This comes from the young cop in the car coat. His voice is curt and without a hint of kindness.

“Haven’t seen her in” — something catches in her throat as she realizes it — “forty-eight hours.”

“You report it to anyone?”

“To who?”

“To us?”

“What’re you gonna do? Would you actively search for her?”

“Without clear evidence of foul play?” The older one shakes his head. “No, we don’t do that.”

“So what good would reporting it do?”

They look at each other and nod-shrug at the same time. Fair point.

“Can we come inside?” Coyne asks.

Mary Pat’s not going to be seen voluntarily walking two cops into her building. That would be like bringing a pornographer to Christmas dinner. “It’s a mess,” she says.

Coyne smiles politely, but his eyes say he doesn’t believe her.

“There’s a bench over there.” She indicates it with her head.

They sit on a bench facing a basketball court with no basketball hoops, just poles and backboards, under lights that turn the air the color of brown mustard. Every now and then a bat flies overhead in a crazed kilter, like a kite caught in a storm.

Coyne says, “So, the last time you saw Julie, she—”

“Jules.”

“Sorry?”

“Nobody calls her Julie. It’s Jules.”

“Got it. Last time you saw her?”

“Night before last. Around eight o’clock.”

Pritchard writes that in his notebook.

“Can we skip this back-and-forth shit?” she says.

“Of course,” Coyne says easily, and she likes his easiness. Maybe he’s the first cop she’s ever met who’s not a drunken, philandering asshole. Or maybe he’s just perfected the art of resembling a decent man.

Mary Pat puts a cigarette in her mouth, and Coyne’s there with a Zippo before she can find her Bic. The Zippo has the Marine Corps emblem on it — eagle, globe, anchor — and dates of service she can’t make out. She nods once her cigarette glows, and he removes the lighter with a quiet click.

“My daughter,” she begins, “didn’t come home Saturday night. I been looking for her since. I figured out she was with several people who claim they were at Columbia Park and then Carson Beach between eleven and twelve-forty-five. Those people were Ronald Collins, Brenda Morello, George Dunbar, and my niece, Peg McAuliffe.”

She waits for Pritchard to get the names into his little notepad before she continues.

“There were other kids there too, but I don’t know exactly who. My niece left before midnight. George Dunbar and Ronald Collins claim my daughter left them at twelve-forty-five to walk home, and that’s the last anyone ever saw of her.”

“You believe that story?” Pritchard asks, still writing in his notepad.

“No.”

“Is that why you beat the piss out of Ronald Collins in Marty Butler’s bar last night?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Coyne laughs. “It’s all over town, Mrs. Fennessy.”

Pritchard says, “You snip his fucking balls while you were at it?”

“Hey,” Coyne says sharply.

“What?”

“You don’t swear around a woman. You don’t talk about genitalia.”

“Gena-what?”

Mary Pat shoots a look of gratitude at Coyne. It’s a neighborhood thing — if you don’t know a woman, you don’t curse around her, even if she herself swears like a drunken trucker. It’s considered discourteous. Same rule applies to discussing private parts.

“Where you from?” she asks Coyne, because now she knows he’s a ’hood rat from somewhere.

He tilts his head toward Dorchester. “Savin Hill.”

“Stab-n-Kill,” she says.

“You got a nerve to talk,” he says, looking around at the redbrick wasteland of Commonwealth.

She shoots him a touché smile. “Jules ain’t contacted anyone, not me, not her stepfather, not her friends — at least according to her friends. A mother knows things about her kids.”

“And what do you know?”

“She’s in trouble,” Mary Pat says through a wet exhale of gray smoke. “Why’re you looking for her?”

“Why do you think?” Coyne’s eyes never leave hers.

She looks out at the empty basketball court, can hear the bat up there somewhere pinwheeling desperately across the sky. She recalls what she’s known since the moment Ken Fen raised the possibility. “It has something to do with Auggie Williamson. The kid who died at Columbia Station.”

Coyne’s face is unreadable. “Why would you say that?”

“Because she was in the area with some of her asshole friends, and now you’re here asking about her. One plus one.” She flicks her cigarette through the chain-link fence onto the empty court.

Coyne lights his own and places the lighter on the bench between them. She catches half the word — “Viet” — peeking out of the shadow that falls on the bench. “Where did you serve?”

He can’t follow for a second but then notices the focus of her gaze. “I was all over. It wasn’t a war yet. I was an ‘adviser.’”

“Was it already a fucked-up place?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “It was just prettier. We hadn’t blown a lot of it up yet. Charlie neither. But you knew it was going to go sideways even back in ’sixty-two. You know someone who served?”

She nods. “My son.” She catches Pritchard giving Coyne a let’s move her along look, but Coyne just stares the younger man down.

“He make it home?” Coyne asks her.

“Kinda,” she says.

“What’s ’kinda’?” He looks around the basketball court as if Noel might be hanging out there right at this moment.

“He OD’d.” She looks at Coyne. “So, he kinda made it home and he kinda didn’t.”

For a moment it seems like he forgot how to move. His chalk white skin manages to find an even whiter shade, and she suspects he’s lost someone close to him — a son or a brother — to the brown powder. When he lifts his lighter off the bench and pockets it, she notices the faintest of tremors in his hand. He exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fennessy.”

She says, “You know what neighborhood sent the most kids to Vietnam?”

He guesses. “Southie?”

She shakes her head. “Charlestown. But Southie was second. Then Lynn. Then Dorchester. Roxbury. I got a cousin works for the draft board. She told me all this. You know who didn’t send a lot of kids to Vietnam?”

“I can guess,” he says with a bitterness so old it comes out as apathy.

“People in Dover,” she says. “In Wellesley and Newton and Lincoln — their kids get to hide in college and grad school and have doctors who say they got fucking tinnitus or fallen arches or bone spurs or whatever other bullshit they can come up with. These are the exact same people who want me to bus my kid to Roxbury but wouldn’t let a black guy take two steps into their neighborhood once the lawns have been cut and the sun goes down.”

“I ain’t arguing with you,” Coyne says. “How does Jules feel about being bused?”

She stares at him for so long he finishes his cigarette and starts to look uncomfortable.

“Mrs. Fennessy?”

She sees where this is going now. “A black kid runs in front of a train, and you think some white kids were somehow involved because they were pissed off about busing?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“And the kid didn’t run in front of any fucking train,” Pritchard says.

Coyne’s jaw tightens and his kind eyes flash, cold and unkind, at his partner.

“How’d he die?” Mary Pat says.

“Still waiting on a final determination of that,” Coyne says.

“Why don’t you ask your daughter?” Pritchard says.

“Vince,” Coyne says to his partner, “will you shut up, please? Just do me that courtesy.”

Pritchard rolls his eyes and shrugs like a teenager.

Coyne turns back to Mary Pat. “We have witnesses who saw Auggie Williamson exchange words with a group of white kids on the outskirts of Columbia Park around midnight. Those kids then chased him into Columbia Station, where he died. We can’t confirm whether your daughter was one of those kids, but it would be very smart for her to come to us before we come to her. So, Mrs. Fennessy, if you know where she is, do yourself a huge favor and tell us.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Mary Pat says. “I’ve torn my hair out trying to find her.”

He holds her gaze with his own. “I want to believe you.”

“I could give a shit whether you believe me, I just want to find my daughter. So if you guys want to go on the hunt for her, please, be my fucking guest.”

Coyne nods. “Do you know any place she could be hiding out?”

If Jules is hiding, she’s hiding in her secret life. The one that may involve Frank Toomey. Which would, by association, involve Marty Butler. And saying anything to a cop that leads them to Marty Butler would be the same as sticking her head in an oven, turning on the gas, and firing up one last cigarette.

“I don’t.”

She’s trying to keep the hope from her eyes and voice because something finally makes sense — if Jules was involved in some stupid shit that led to the death of that black kid, then she could very well be hiding somewhere within a ten-block radius of where Mary Pat sits right now. And if that’s the case, well, Mary Pat can address any bad shit her kid may have gotten up to, she can deal with that.

Coyne hands her a business card — Det. Sgt. Michael Coyne, BPD Homicide Div.

Homicide. Hom-i-cide. This is not your everyday bad shit that would bring a cop calling. It’s not a shoplifting beef or check kiting. This is as serious as a tumor on an ovary.

Coyne points at the card. “If she pops her head up, you call that number and have them put you through to that extension. Or you just ask for me by name.”

“Detective Michael Coyne.”

“Bobby,” he says. “Everyone calls me Bobby.”

“Why?”

He shrugs.

“What’s your middle name?”

“David,” he says.

“But everyone calls you Bobby?”

He shrugs. “This life. You know? Try and make sense of it.”

“Okay, Bobby.” She pockets the card.

He stands and brushes at the wrinkles in his trousers. Pritchard flips his notepad closed.

“If you see your daughter,” Coyne says, “do the smart thing, Mrs. Fennessy.”

“And what would that be?”

“Have her call us first thing.”

She nods.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a nod.”

“As in you’ll think about it?”

“As in I heard the words that left your mouth.”

She scoops up her cigarettes and walks back to her building, lets herself in.