Seamus Riordan looks at Bobby. “Am I a suspect in something?”
“Not at all.”
“I’m just a potential witness?”
“That you are.”
“So if I don’t like this dickhead’s attitude, I can just walk away, go climb back up in my crane, am I right?”
Bobby places a hand to a surging Vincent’s chest. “You can.”
Seamus Riordan gives Vincent a fuck you glare. “Then you should check your fucking attitude, Serpico.”
Now Vincent’s torn — between embracing the comparison to his idol (not Serpico the man, whose ethics he doesn’t share, but Al Pacino as Serpico, his fashion hero) or taking the comparison for the insult Bobby is sure Seamus Riordan intends it to be.
Vincent leans into the former. “Check your fucking attitude, little man.”
Seamus gives Bobby a wry smirk of the eyes, as if to say, Kids these days, am I right?
Bobby lights his own cigarette. Offers Seamus the pack. Seamus takes one and Bobby lights it for him and then lights Vincent’s and suddenly they’re all friends. Ready to go to the bar together once they’re done, that kinda vibe.
“It was over by the time I got out of the train,” Seamus says.
“Tell me,” Bobby says.
“There were these four kids...”
“White?”
“Yeah.”
“Male or female?”
“Two boys, two girls. The inbound train had just left and they were standing on the edge of the platform and the boys were screaming at each other, one of them calling the other a retard, I heard that. And one of the girls was, like, just screaming? Like losing-her-fucking-mind screaming. And then the other girl slapped her and she shut up.”
This is now as far as Bobby and Vincent have gotten into the timeline of the night. The other witnesses have taken them through:
1. Auggie being chased into the station.
2. Auggie jumping the turnstiles.
3. Four white kids — as of yet not positively identified but suspected to be George Dunbar, Rum Collins, Brenda Morello, and Jules Fennessy — immediately jumping the turnstiles behind him.
4. Auggie running onto the platform as the inbound train neared the station.
5. The kids charging after him.
6. One of the white boys calling, “We just want to talk to you.”
7. A white girl calling, “You run slow for a nigger.”
8. One of the four kids (no one could say which kid) throwing a beer bottle.
9. The beer bottle landing by Auggie Williamson’s right foot, causing Auggie to look back over his shoulder. Causing his feet to tangle.
10. The train entering the station.
11. Auggie Williamson stumbling.
12. One of the four kids (a female) yelling, “You’re in the wrong fucking neighborhood.”
13. A thump. Every one of the first five witnesses heard the thump. The sound of impact — object meets human. (The conductor, meanwhile, possibly drinking on the job and a year short of his pension, claims to have seen and heard exactly nothing.)
14. Auggie Williamson spinning in place and falling in a heap to the platform.
From that point, all recollections of the first five witnesses grew hazy. Those were four loud, violent kids on that platform. No one wanted to catch any of their eyes by mistake. No one wanted to be dragged into this. Be the next person to hear they were in the wrong neighborhood.
So they looked away.
Then three walked off. Left the station. Took their chances hailing cabs.
Two waited for the outbound train that Seamus Riordan arrived on. Kept their eyes focused on the tracks until they could see the lights of the incoming train. But neither looked back at those four kids and whatever they were doing to the kid they’d been chasing.
The outbound train arrived. The two witnesses got on.
Seamus Riordan got off. At twenty past midnight, he was the only passenger to exit.
“And that’s when I seen the five of them.”
“You mean four.”
“The four of them and the spook kid.”
“Wait,” Bobby said, “what?”
“The four white kids and the black kid,” Seamus said. “Four plus one makes five.”
“But he’d fallen off the platform by then.”
Seamus Riordan narrows his eyes. “He was lying at their feet.”
“After the train left the station?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not making this up?” Vincent says.
“Who the fuck would make that up? Your parents raise any kids who aren’t fucking retarded?”
Bobby Coyne watches Vincent for signs of impending violence, but by now he’s like a ball-snipped dog. If Seamus gives him much more abuse, he’ll roll on his back for a belly rub.
“So,” Bobby says, “the train’s gone, the victim’s still on the platform with the kids standing over him?”
“Yup.”
“And then?”
Seamus’s eyes bug. “I don’t fucking know. I didn’t make it to forty-three in this fucking town because I linger when I see four people standing over a body.”
“So he was dead?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said ‘a body.’”
“Yeah, like, someone lying on the ground. He was kinda moving from side to side. I could see that much. Then I left.”
“But he was on the platform.”
“How many times I gotta say it? You wanna try a new language? Fucking, I dunno, Flemish, that be better? He was on the platform. Rolling back and forth a bit. Wait, not rolling. More like... flapping.” He shrugs. “Like a, I dunno, a fish just came off the hook.”
Vincent peers at Seamus Riordan. “But what kind of fish?”
“A black cod,” Seamus says. And he and Vincent laugh their asses off.
Not for the first time in his life — or even the eightieth — Bobby hates humanity. Wonders if God’s great unforgivable crime was creating us in the first place.
“And then you left?” he asks Seamus Riordan.
Seamus Riordan’s laughter trails off. “Yeah, I left.”
“And a kid died.”
Something catches in Seamus Riordan’s eyes. A glint of shame, perhaps. Or maybe Bobby’s just being hopeful.
Because in the next breath, Seamus shrugs and says, “Wasn’t my kid.”
12
After his shift, Bobby has a few pops with a couple of Robbery detectives at JJ Foley’s and then heads home to the house on Tuttle Street where he lives with his five sisters and his brother, Tim, the failed priest. None of the Coyne siblings is married. Three, Bobby among them, tried and failed. Two came close to the altar but didn’t make it the whole way there. The other two have never even had a long-term relationship.
This is a source of great mystery in the extended family of Coynes and those families the previous generations married into — the McDonoughs and Donnellys and Kearneys and Mullens — as well as to the neighborhood at large, because several of the Coyne girls were real lookers, or had been in their youth, anyway.
The house is one of the last of the sprawling single-family Victorians that’s stayed a single family on Tuttle Street. Most of the rest of them, built for large Irish families between the big wars of the first half of the century, have been converted into two-family houses. Some have even been cut up into multiple-unit buildings. But not the Coyne house. It remains exactly as it was when they all grew up here, learning its creaks and hiding places and the source of its sad groans on heartless winter nights.
He finds Nancy and Bridget sitting at the kitchen table, nursing their nightly highballs and smoking their cigarettes — Parliaments for Nancy, Kents for Bridget. He grabs a beer from the fridge and a fresh ashtray and joins them at the table. Nancy, who works in urban planning, is bitching about a coworker to Bridget, who’s an ER nurse at City. Nancy, still a stunner in her early forties, can talk paint off a wall; Bridget, meek and mousy and perpetually pickled when not working, barely utters a full sentence in a given day.