“You started a fight in Marty’s place. His sanctuary.”
“That wasn’t a fight,” she says.
“Oh, no?”
She shakes her head. “That was a beatdown. That little pussy didn’t get one shot in.”
“You can’t do beatdowns in Marty’s place. If you were a fucking guy, you’d be dead. Or, you know, at least in a body cast.”
“So put me in a body cast, but wait until after I find my daughter.”
He narrows his eyes. Downs his own shot. “Jules?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s she at?”
“That’s my question. No one’s seen her since last night.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I did.” She jerks her thumb at the blood and vomit Rum left in his wake. “To him.”
He grimaces. “That fucking putz? Asking him for information is like asking a telephone pole for a steak and cheese.” He points two fingers at his own chest. “We help. We provide services to this neighborhood. We coulda been looking for Jules all day if you’d asked. No one forgets what you did for us, what Dukie did for us — we’re here for you, Mary Pat.” He takes out a small notepad and a pencil. Licks the tip of the pencil as he opens the notepad on the bar. “Tell me everything you know.”
After she finishes, he says, “I’ll square what you did here tonight with Marty.” He puts the notebook and pencil back in the pocket of his Baracuta. “But you gotta give us twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty-four hours?”
“It’s not gonna take that. It’s probably gonna take, like, three, but you can’t be running around like Billy Jack — fuckin’ Mary Pat Jack — beating the fuck out of people. You can’t do it. It’s gonna bring attention.”
“I can’t sit on my hands for twenty-four hours.”
He exhales loudly. “Then give us till, say, five tomorrow. A full day. Give us that long to find her for you. You don’t rattle any cages, you sure as shit don’t go to the fuckin’ cops, you let us work for you.”
She lights a cigarette, turns it between her fingers, round and round. Closes her eyes. “That’s a lot to ask.”
“I know it is. But with this busing bullshit and that spook getting himself killed last night, we don’t need one more outside eye looking into this neighborhood. Because they might start asking how it really runs, how things really get done, and we cannot have that, Mary Pat. We absolutely cannot.”
She looks around the bar, can feel that everyone was just looking at them and are now pretending they weren’t. She looks back at Brian Shea. “Five o’clock tomorrow. That’s my good-girl-behavior limit.”
Brian signals Tommy for another round. “Fair enough.”
6
She doesn’t sleep more than three hours all night, and none of that sleep strings together but arrives instead in fifteen-minute blocks followed by alert anguish, staring into the black, fidgety and hopeless, followed by another fifteen-minute spurt of sleep two hours later, followed by staring into the black.
Lying in bed, staring up at the dark, she feels seen but not heard by whatever looks down upon her. Eventually, its eyes leave her, and she is alone in the universe.
At work she’s a zombie, stumbling through her shift, hoping no patient codes on her because she won’t be up to the task. Again Dreamy takes a personal day, so again they’re shorthanded. Gossip flies up and down the corridors — Auggie Williamson committed suicide. No, he OD’d and fell in front of a train. There are witnesses, but they haven’t come forward. He was chased onto the platform. It was a drug deal gone bad and he tried to run, slipped on the platform, and fell in front of a train. Ker-runch.
But none of the rumors addresses how it is that the train conductor never noticed the impact. Maybe he hadn’t seen Auggie, but he must have felt the impact. It was in all the papers that Auggie died somewhere between midnight and one, but his body wasn’t found until the morning commute, tucked under the platform. So, what’s it like to get off your shift, go home and sleep eight hours, then wake to the news that you drove your subway car into someone’s head? The poor guy, someone says, he has to live with that the rest of his life.
After work, Mary Pat changes out of her uniform in the locker room and puts on the clothes she arrived in, and then she does something she doesn’t even admit to herself she’s doing until she’s crossing over the Charles River on the Red Line — she takes the subway to Cambridge.
Getting out at Harvard Station, she enters Harvard Square, and it’s as bad as she suspected it would be — fucking hippies are everywhere, the air smells like pot and B.O., every twenty feet or so someone’s playing a guitar and crooning about either love, man, or Richard Nixon, man. Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn almost three weeks ago, but he’s still their bogeyman, these pampered, overeducated, draft-dodging pussies. She loses count of how many of them are barefoot, tromping around dirty streets in their frayed bell-bottoms and their multicolored shirts with their beads and long hair, the girls without bras and their ass cheeks spilling out of their cutoff shorts, filling the air with cigarette smoke and clove cigarette smoke and pot smoke and every one of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents, who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world — a school no poor person could ever get into, that’s for fucking certain — and they return the favor by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.
When she steps onto campus, the ratio of hippies to normal-looking college students drops to about one in three, which is somewhat comforting. The rest of the students look like the college students in movies — square jaws and square haircuts, the girls in dresses or skirts and blouses, hair straightened and shiny, the boys wearing oxfords and chinos and walking with the assured posture of the upper class.
What both groups have in common, though, is a deep-seated confusion about what she could be doing on their campus.
She’s not dressed like a slob from the projects. She’s dressed like many a housewife walking around South Boston (or Dorchester or Rozzie or Hyde Park) at this very moment — red polyester shirt, tan slacks, and a plaid shirt jacket in defiance of the heat. She wore the outfit to work this morning because she wanted to say to anyone who cared to look — I am in control. I have my shit together. Ignore the cuts and bruises on my knuckles and see only the classy lady your eyes behold. But some part of her must have also known that she might not be heading straight home after work, that she might be making a trip across the river into a world so alien she’d feel more at home in another country. Ireland, for sure. Canada, maybe. She’d thought she looked smart, put together, but judging by the sidelong stares she’s getting from the snot-noses and the hippies in Harvard Yard, she sticks out for exactly who she is — a working-class broad from the other side of the river who came into their world in her laughable Sears-catalog best. They presume she took the wrong subway car, ended up wandering the Harvard campus like a child lost in a supermarket, before she’ll return to her grimy world to tell her grimy kids about all the shiny things she’s seen but was never allowed to touch.
She’s visited here once with Ken Fen, just before Christmas two years back, the day after he officially got the job working in the mail room. It was a Saturday in the dead of winter, so there were only a few bundled-up students in the Yard, and no hippies loitered in the square on a 15-degree day. They’d met his boss, whose face she could no longer remember, and he’d given Ken Fen the keys to the room and the master key to the mailboxes and explained the duties of his shift, which would go from noon to eight-thirty every weekday. Then he left them to roam the room themselves.