“May their hell be a lifetime in the bodies of their victims,” Broussard said. He raised his eyebrows up and down. “Can I get an amen, brother?”
“Amen, brother.”
28
I sat for a long time in the ashen, half-dark of my moonlit bedroom watching Angie sleep. I ran my conversation with Broussard over and over in my head, sipped from a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d picked up on my walk home, smiled when Angie mumbled the name of the dog she’d had as a child and reached out and stroked the pillow with the palm of her hand.
Maybe it was shell shock over the interior of the Tretts’ house that had triggered it. Maybe it was the rum. Maybe it was just that the more determined I am to keep painful events at bay, the more likely I am to focus on the little things, minutiae, a casually dropped word or phrase that rings in my head and won’t stop. Whatever the case, tonight in the playground, I’d found a truth and a lie. Both at the same time.
Broussard had been right: nothing worked.
And I had been right: facades, no matter how well built, usually come down.
Angie rolled onto her back and let out a soft moan, kicked at the sheet tangled up by her feet. It must have been that effort—trying to kick with a leg encased in plaster—that woke her. She blinked and raised her head, looked down at the cast, then turned her head and saw me.
“Hey. What’re…” She sat up, smacked her lips, pushed hair out of her eyes. “What’re you doing?”
“Sitting here,” I said. “Thinking.”
“You drunk?”
I held up my coffee cup. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
“Then come to bed.” She extended her hand.
“Broussard lied to us.”
She pulled the hand away, used it to push herself farther up the headboard. “What?”
“Last year,” I said. “When Ray Likanski bolted the bar and disappeared.”
“What about it?”
“Broussard said he barely knew the man. Said he was one of Poole’s occasional snitches.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Tonight, with half a pint of rum in him, he told me Ray was his own snitch.”
She reached over to the nightstand, turned on the light. “What?”
I nodded.
“So…so maybe he just made an oversight last year. Maybe we heard him wrong.”
I looked at her.
Eventually she held up a hand as she turned toward the nightstand for her cigarettes. “You’re right. We never hear things wrong.”
“Not at the same time.”
She lit a cigarette and pulled the sheet up her leg, scratched at her knee just above the cast. “Why would he lie?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been sitting here wondering the same thing.”
“Maybe he had a reason to protect Ray’s identity as his snitch.”
I sipped some coffee. “Possibly, but it seems awful convenient, doesn’t it? Ray is potentially a key witness in the disappearance of Amanda McCready; Broussard lies about knowing him. Seems…”
“Shady.”
I nodded. “A bit. Another thing?”
“What?”
“Broussard’s retiring soon.”
“How soon?”
“Not sure. Sounded like very soon. He said he was closing in on his twenty, and as soon as he reached it he was turning in his shield.”
She took a drag off her cigarette, peered over the bright coal at me. “So he’s retiring. So what?”
“Last year, just before we climbed up to the quarry, you made a joke to him.”
She touched her chest. “I did.”
“Sí. You said something like ‘Maybe it’s time we retired.’”
Her eyes brightened. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we hung ’em up.’”
“And he said?”
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and thought about it. “He said…” She jabbed the air with her cigarette several times. “He said he couldn’t afford to retire. He said something about medical bills.”
“His wife’s, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “She’d been in a car accident just before they were married. She wasn’t insured. He owed the hospital big.”
“So what happened to those medical bills? You think the hospital just said, ‘Ah, you’re a nice guy. Forget about it’?”
“Doubtful.”
“In the extreme. So a cop who was poor lies about knowing a key player in the McCready case, and six months later the cop’s got enough money to retire—not on the kind of money a cop gets after thirty years in, but somehow on the kind a cop gets after twenty.”
She chewed her lower lip for a minute. “Toss me a T-shirt, will you?”
I opened my dresser, took a dark green Saw Doctors shirt from the drawer, and handed it to her. She pulled it over her head and kicked away the sheets, looked around the room for her crutches. She looked over at me, saw that I was chuckling under my breath.
“What?”
“You look pretty funny.”
Her face darkened. “How’s that?”
“Sitting there in my T-shirt with a big white cast on your leg.” I shrugged. “Just looks funny is all.”
“Ha,” she said. “Ha-ha. Where are my crutches?”
“Behind the door.”
“Would you be so kind?”
I brought them to her and she struggled onto them, and then I followed her down the dark hall into the kitchen. The digital display on the microwave read 4:04, and I could feel it in my joints and the back of my neck, but not in my mind. When Broussard had mentioned Ray Likanski on the playground, something had snapped to attention in my brain, started marching double time, and talking with Angie had only given it more energy.
While Angie made half a pot of decaf and pulled cream from the fridge and sugar from the cupboard, I went back to that final night in the quarry, when it seemed we’d lost Amanda McCready for good. I knew a lot of the information I was trying to recall and sift through was in my case file, but I didn’t want to rely on those notes just yet. Poring over them would just put me back in the same place I’d been six months ago, while trying to conjure it all back up from this kitchen could bring a fresh perspective.
The kidnapper had demanded four couriers to bring Cheese Olamon’s money in return for Amanda. Why all four of us? Why not just one?
I asked Angie.
She leaned against the oven, crossed her arms, thought about it. “I’ve never even considered that. Christ, could I be that stupid?”
“It’s a judgment call.”
She frowned. “You didn’t question it.”
“I know I’m stupid,” I said. “It’s you we’re trying to decide on.”
“A whole dragnet,” she said, “swept those hills, locked down the roads around it, and they couldn’t find anyone.”
“Maybe the kidnappers had been tipped off to an escape route. Maybe some of the cops had been paid off.”
“Maybe there was no one up there that night besides us.” Her eyes shimmered.
“Holy shit.”
She bit down on her lower lip, raised her eyebrows several times. “You think?”
“Broussard fired those guns from his side.”
“Why not? We couldn’t see anything over there. We saw muzzle flashes. We heard Broussard saying he was under fire. But did we see him at all during that time?”
“Nope.”
“The reason, then, that we were brought up there was to corroborate his story.”
I leaned back in my chair, ran my hands through the hair along my temples. Could it be that simple? Or, maybe, could it be that devious?
“You think Poole was in on it?” Angie turned from the counter as steam rose from the coffeemaker behind her.
“Why do you say that?”
She tapped her coffee mug against her thigh. “He was the one who claimed Ray Likanski was his snitch, not Broussard’s. And, remember, he was Broussard’s partner. You know how that works
. I mean, look at Oscar and Devin—they’re closer than husband and wife. A hell of a lot more blindly loyal to each other.”
I considered that. “So how did Poole play into it?”
She poured her coffee from the pot even though the machine was still percolating and coffee dripped through the filter, sizzled off the heating pan. “All these months,” she said as she poured cream into her cup, “you know what’s nagged me?”
“Give it to me.”
“The empty bag. I mean, you’re the kidnappers. You’re pinning a cop down to a cliff top and sneaking in to scoop up the money.”
“Right. So?”
“So you pause to open the bag and pull the money out? Why not just take the bag?”
“I don’t know. Either way, what difference does it make?”
“Not much.” She turned from the counter, faced me. “Unless the bag was empty to begin with.”
“I saw the bag when Doyle handed it to Broussard. It was bulging with money.”
“But what about by the time we reached the quarry?”
“He unloaded it during the walk up the hill? How?”
She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”
I came out of my chair, got a cup from the cupboard, and it fell from my fingers, glanced the edge of the counter, and fell to the floor. I left it there.
“Poole,” I said. “Son of a bitch. It was Poole. When he had his heart attack or whatever it was, he fell on the bag. When it was time to go, Broussard reached under him and pulled the bag out.”
“Then Poole goes down the side of the quarry,” she said in a rush, “and hands off the bag to some third party.” She paused. “Kills Mullen and Gutierrez?”
“You think they planted a second bag by the tree?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t either. I could maybe buy that Poole had siphoned two hundred thousand in ransom money, but executing Mullen and Gutierrez? That was a stretch.
“We agree there had to be a third party involved.”
“Probably. They had to get the money out of there.”
“So who was it?”
She shrugged. “The mystery woman who made the phone call to Lionel?”
“Possibly.” I picked up my coffee cup. It hadn’t broken, and after checking for chips, I filled it with coffee.
“Christ,” Angie said and chuckled. “This is a hell of a reach.”
“What?”
“This whole thing. I mean, have you been listening to us? Broussard and Poole orchestrated this whole thing? To what end?”
“The money.”
“You think two hundred thousand would be enough motive for guys like Poole and Broussard to kill a child?”
“No.”
“So, why?”
I fumbled for an answer, but didn’t come up with one.
“Do you honestly think either of them is capable of killing Amanda McCready?”
“People are capable of anything.”
“Yeah, but certain people are also categorically incapable of certain things. Those two? Killing a child?”
I remembered Broussard’s face and Poole’s voice as Poole had talked about finding a child in watery cement. They could be great actors, but those were De Niro-caliber performances if they really did feel as indifferent to a child’s life as they would to an ant’s.
“Hmm,” I said.
“I know what that means.”
“What?”
“Your ‘hmm.’ It always means you’re completely baffled.”
I nodded. “I’m completely baffled.”
“Welcome to the club.”
I sipped some coffee. If just a tenth of what we were hypothesizing was true, a pretty large crime had been committed right in front of us. Not near us. Not in the same zip code. But as we’d knelt beside the perpetrators. Right under our noses.
Did I mention that we make our livings as detectives?
Bubba came to the apartment shortly after sunrise.
He sat on the living room floor with his legs crossed and signed Angie’s cast with a black marker. In his large fourth-grader’s scrawl, he wrote:
Angie
Brake a leg. Or too. Ha ha.
Ruprecht Rogowski
Angie touched his cheek. “Aww. You signed it ‘Ruprecht.’ How sweet.”
Bubba blushed and swatted her hand, looked up at me. “What?”
“Ruprecht.” I chuckled. “I’d almost forgotten.”
Bubba stood up and his shadow fell across my entire body and most of the wall. He rubbed his chin and smiled tightly. “’Member the first time I ever hit you, Patrick?”
I swallowed. “First grade.”
“’Member why?”
I cleared my throat. “Because I gave you shit about your name.”
Bubba leaned over me. “Care to try again?”
“Ah, no,” I said, and as he turned away I added, “Ruprecht.”
I danced away from his lunge and Angie said, “Boys! Boys!”
Bubba froze and I used that time to put the coffee table between the two of us.
“Could we address the matter at hand?” She opened the notebook on her lap, uncapped a pen with her teeth. “Bubba, you can beat up Patrick anytime.”
Bubba thought about it. “This is true.”
“Okay.” Angie scribbled in her notebook, shot me a look.
“Hey.” Bubba pointed at her cast. “How do you shower in that thing?”
Angie sighed. “What did you find out?”
Bubba sat on the couch and propped his combat boots up on the coffee table, not an act I usually tolerate, but I was already on thin ice with the Ruprecht thing, so I let it slide.
“The word I get from what’s left of Cheese’s crew is that Mullen and Gutierrez didn’t know nothing about a missing kid. As far as anyone knew, they went to Quincy that night to score.”
“Score what?” Angie said.
“What drug dealers usually score: drugs. Chat around the campfire,” Bubba said, “was that after one hell of a dry spell the market was going to be flooded with China White.” He shrugged. “It never happened.”
“You’re sure about this?” I said.
“No,” he said slowly, as if talking to a slow child. “I talked to some guys in Olamon’s organization, and they all said Mullen and Gutierrez never mentioned going to the quarries with a kid. And no one on Cheese’s crew ever saw a kid hanging around. So, if Mullen and Gutierrez had her, it was strictly their deal. And if they were going to Quincy that night to dump a kid, that was strictly their deal, too.”
He looked at Angie, jerked a thumb at me. “Didn’t he used to be smarter?”
She smiled. “Peaked in high school, I think.”
“Another thing,” Bubba said. “I never could figure why someone didn’t just kill me that night.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Everyone I talk to on Cheese’s crew swears up and down they had nothing to do with piping me. I believe ’em. I’m a scary guy. Sooner or later, someone would have coughed it up.”
“So the person who piped you…”
“Probably isn’t the type who kills on a regular basis.” He shrugged. “Just an opinion.”
The phone rang from the kitchen.
“Who the hell calls here at seven in the morning?” I said.
“No one familiar with our sleeping patterns,” Angie said.
I walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone.
“Hey, brother.” Broussard.
“Hey,” I said. “You know what time it is?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Look, I need a favor. Big one.”
“What is it?”
“One of my guys broke his arm chasing a perp last night and now we’re one short for the game.”
“The game?” I said.
“Football,” he said. “Robbery-Homicide versus Narcotics-Vice-CAC. I might be Motor Pool, but I’m still Narco-Vice-CAC when it comes to ball.” r />
“And this,” I said, “concerns me how?”
“I’m short a player.”
I laughed so loudly Bubba and Angie turned their heads in the living room, looked over their shoulders at me.
“That’s hilarious?” Broussard said.
“Remy,” I said, “I’m white and over thirty. I have permanent nerve damage to one hand, and I haven’t picked up a football since I was fifteen.”
“Oscar Lee told me you ran track in college, played baseball, too.”
“To pay my tuition,” I said. “I was second-string in both cases.” I shook my head and chuckled. “Find another guy. Sorry.”
“I don’t have time. Game’s at three. Come on, man. Please. I’m begging you. I need a guy can tuck a ball under his arm and run short yards, play a little defensive end. Don’t bullshit me. Oscar says you’re one of the fastest white guys he knows.”
“I take it Oscar will be there.”
“Hell, yeah. Playing against us, of course.”
“Devin?”
“Amronklin?” Broussard said. “He’s their coach. Please, Patrick. You don’t help me out, we’re screwed.”
I looked back at the living room. Bubba and Angie were staring at me with perplexed faces.
“Where?”
“Harvard Stadium. Three o’clock.”
I didn’t say anything for a bit.
“Look, man, if this helps, I play fullback. I’ll be punching your holes for you, making sure you don’t get a scratch.”
“Three o’clock,” I said.
“Harvard Stadium. See you there.”
He hung up.
I immediately dialed Oscar’s number.
It was a full minute before he stopped laughing. “He bought it?” he sputtered eventually.
“Bought what?”
“All that shit I sold him about your speed.” More laughter, loud and followed by a few coughs.
“Why’s that so funny?”
“Whoo-ee,” Oscar said. “Whoo-ee! He’s got you playing running back?”
“That seems to be the plan.”
Oscar laughed some more.
“What’s the punch line?” I said.
“The punch line,” Oscar said, “is you better stay away from the left side.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m starting at left tackle.”