She doesn’t trust herself to speak. She manages a nod.
“We understand each other then, hon.” Marty squeezes her shoulder once before he and Lewis walk back up the causeway toward land.
Once they’re out of earshot, she stops constricting her face, and the sob leaves the back of her throat like a ball of bile and exits her mouth. She looks down at the money in the bag as her tears stream onto the paper.
And she knows her daughter is dead.
She knows her daughter is dead.
11
Bobby Coyne and Vincent Pritchard drive through Southie to interview the final witness on their list — thus far — to the last night of Auggie Williamson’s life. The witness, a tower crane operator named Seamus Riordan, agrees to meet them at Boyd Container Terminal along Summer Street during his lunch break.
The moment they cross into Southie, Bobby feels a difference in the air. Bobby grew up only a few miles south in Dorchester, in a parish that was wholly white and predominantly Irish; he presumes that in most places in America, a distance of a few miles between two enclaves that share identical ethnic characteristics doesn’t represent a seismic difference in culture. But crossing the border into Southie always gives him the feeling that he’s just entered the rain forest of an unknowable tribe. Not specifically hostile, not dangerous by their nature. But, at their heart, opaque.
Driving along Broadway, he sees a young guy exit a bus and then turn to help an old woman who was waiting to board that bus. In his entire life, Bobby’s never seen more people help little old ladies cross streets, avoid puddles or potholes, carry their groceries, or find their car keys in purses overstuffed with rosary beads and damp tissues.
Everyone knows everyone here; they stop one another in the streets to ask after spouses, children, cousins twice removed. Come winter, they shovel walks together, join up to push cars out of snowbanks, freely pass around bags of salt or sand for icy sidewalks. Summertime, they congregate on porches and stoops or cluster in lawn chairs along the sidewalks to shoot the shit, trade the daily newspapers, and listen to Ned Martin calling the Sox games on ’HDH. They drink beer like it’s tap water, smoke ciggies as if the pack will self-destruct at midnight, and call to one another — across streets, to and from cars, and up at distant windows — like impatience is a virtue. They love the church but aren’t real fond of mass. They only like the sermons that scare them; they mistrust any that appeal to their empathy.
They all have nicknames. No James can just be a James; has to be Jim or Jimmy or Jimbo or JJ or, in one case, Tantrum. There are so many Sullivans that calling someone Sully isn’t enough. In Bobby’s various incursions here over the years, he’s met a Sully One, a Sully Two, an Old Sully, a Young Sully, Sully White, Sully Tan, Two-Time Sully, Sully the Nose, and Little Sully (who’s fucking huge). He’s met guys named Zipperhead, Pool Cue, Pot Roast, and Ball Sac (son of Sully Tan). He’s come across Juggs, Nicklebag, Drano, Pink Eye (who’s blind), Legsy (who limps), and Handsy (who’s got none).
Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t.
They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.
He has no idea where it all comes from — the loyalty and the rage, the brotherhood and the suspicion, the benevolence and the hate.
But he suspects it has something to do with the need for a life to have meaning. Bobby is a child of the ’40s and ’50s. When, as he recalls, you knew who you were. Without question.
And it’s the “without question” that’s bothered him ever since. While he tromped through Vietnam. While he danced with the needle. While he worked patrol in the heart of the city’s black communities — Roxbury and Mattapan, Egleston Square and Upham’s Corner.
He wants to question. He needs to question. A Vietnamese hooker he’d thought was a friend once walked up to him in a club in Saigon and tried to cut his throat with a razor blade in her teeth. Bobby thought she’d been leaning in to give him a kiss until the last microsecond, when he felt a voice in his chest scream-whisper, No. Fuck no. Even as he chucked her off his lap, he felt an odd sympathy for her — if he were a Vietnamese bar girl, he’d want to kill his ass too.
Looking out at Southie now, as the bustle of Broadway passes by in its uniform whiteness — white baby pushed in a stroller by white mother as three white muscle-heads in their straining white T-shirts exit the drugstore and pass an old white couple sitting on a bench and a gaggle of white girls runs along the sidewalk past a white boy sitting on a mailbox looking forlorn, and all around them, in the background and in the foreground, are other white people — Bobby recalls a taxi girl in Hué telling him she could never go back to her village now that it was known she’d slept with a white man. (Not Bobby; some guy way before Bobby.) It shocked him, this idea that she could be looked down upon because she’d slept with a white man. That made no fucking sense, where Bobby came from. He told her that. He said, “We’re the people who solve problems. That’s why we’re here.”
His taxi girl, Cai, said, “People should be left to themselves.”
Is that the key? he wonders as he looks out on Broadway. Should everyone just leave everyone else the fuck alone?
Seamus Riordan seems to think so. Those are the first words out of his mouth when they meet up with him in the break-room trailer at Boyd Container Terminaclass="underline" “Couldn’t you’ve just left me be?”
Seamus Riordan is from Southie, so he’s a hard case. He’ll bust their balls as a matter of course.
“Why were you on the platform that night?” Bobby asks.
“Coming home.”
“From?” Vincent asks.
“Being out.”
“Out where?” Bobby wonders.
“Of the house.”
“So, you’re out of the house,” Bobby says pleasantly. “Any place specific?”
“Yup,” Seamus says, and folds his arms.
“Where?”
“Specifically?”
“Yes.”
“I was, ya know.”
“I don’t.”
“Hanging out with someone.”
“A friend?”
“Sure.”
“Hey!” Vincent says. “Why don’t you cut the shit?”
Vincent looks ready to pop out of his skin. Like a lot of guys who try too hard to act like they deserve respect, he has very low tolerance for people he correctly perceives don’t respect him. This leads to Vincent getting in a lot of confrontations, which has led to two excessive-force complaints being leveled against him in the last eighteen months. So the fact that, at a relatively young age, he’s reached Homicide, the very tip-top of the career ladder, means he’s inexplicably failing upward, which can only mean he’s connected to someone with major juice in the department. He’s someone’s nephew, someone’s cousin, someone’s rent boy.
He doesn’t play Bad Cop well, though. He comes off more as Bitch Cop or Whiny Cop or Embarrassing Teenage Son Cop.
Which is what elicits Seamus Riordan’s black hole of a smile. “Cut the what?”
“The shit.” Vince lights a cigarette and exhales the gray smoke through his nostrils, which is why his nose hairs are more prevalent than they should be on a guy in his late twenties.