“Maybe?” she tries.
“No fucking maybe about it,” Vincent says as he walks behind her.
Her eyes fill. Vincent walks behind her again and she tenses, expecting a slap.
“Brenda,” Bobby says gently, “look at me.”
She does.
“We know you were there. And then something happened.”
“What happened?”
“Why don’t you tell us?”
Bobby can see it consuming her suddenly — this terrible knowledge she’s kept inside of her for almost a week now.
But she replies, “Nothing happened. Nothing I remember.”
Bobby pops open his briefcase, removes a photo of Auggie Williamson, and places it on the table. It’s not just any photo. Bobby goes for the jugular — it’s the morgue photo.
It has the desired effect. Brenda’s face half crumbles, and she puffs air like a fish in a bucket.
“No,” she says. “Nothing happened.”
Now Vincent does hit her. Just a quick flick of his fingers off the back of her head. She yelps. In outrage more than pain.
Bobby puts a finger on the photo. “This young man is dead. And we have it on good authority, Brenda, that you were one of the last people to see him alive.”
She shakes her head several times. “No.”
Vincent stands directly behind her. “Say no again, you little twat, and see where it gets you. You ever spent time in an ICU?”
Bobby flicks him a dial it back glance and then waits for Brenda to look at him again before he asks her, “Were you the one who said, ‘You run slow for a nigger’?”
Brenda’s mouth forms an O of shock. “I never said that.”
“No?” Bobby looks at Vincent for a moment. “We heard you did.”
“Well, then someone’s fucking lying, cuz I didn’t say that.”
“But you were on the platform at Columbia Station when someone said it.”
“I — What? No, I was — No, I was not on any platform. I was at Columbia Park with my friends, and I got in a fight with my boyfriend and I left. And they went to the beach.”
“We have witnesses who place you on the subway platform.”
“Well, they’re lying.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I dunno. Ask them.”
“We can put you in a lineup.”
That puts a fresh quiver in her chin.
“If we put you in a lineup, this lady you knocked down, she’s gonna remember you, Brenda.”
“I didn’t knock any lady down,” Brenda says with clear indignation.
“That’s not what she said,” Vincent says.
“Well, she’s lying.”
“Everyone’s lying, aren’t they, Brenda?”
“Maybe not, but she is.”
“She was pretty convincing,” Bobby says. “Has her elbow all scraped up. Says she stepped off the outbound train and you slammed into her.”
“We weren’t on the outbound side of the platform,” Brenda says. “We were on the inbound.” She realizes her mistake a second too late. Lowers her head, stares at her shoes.
When she raises her head, Bobby can see in her eyes that they broke her. She’ll tell them everything now. She won’t stop talking until sunup.
There’s a soft rap on the door, and Vincent opens it on Tovah Shapiro, attorney at large. Even before Tovah Shapiro crosses the threshold, she’s already telling Brenda, “Don’t say another fucking word.”
Tovah Shapiro is the worst kind of defense attorney — she used to be a prosecutor, so she knows how cops think. Plan. Act.
“Did they read you your rights?”
Brenda has no idea who this woman is.
“Did they?”
“No,” Brenda manages.
“My name is Tovah Shapiro. I’m your attorney.” She sits at the table by her “client.”
“Don’t you mean you’re Marty Butler’s attorney?” Bobby asks.
Tovah cocks her head at him. “Hey, Bobby. How you been?”
“Been good, Tovah. You?”
“Never better. Still living at Mommy and Daddy’s house?” Before Bobby can answer, she turns back to Brenda. “So you weren’t Mirandized.”
“What?”
“Did anyone say the words ‘You are under arrest’ to you?”
“No.”
“Then we can go.”
“Right now?”
“Right now, sweetheart.”
As Brenda stands, she chin-gestures at Vincent. “He hit me.”
Tovah whistles slowly, says to Vincent, “With complaints already pending against you? Oh, Vinny, you make it so easy.”
Bobby holds up the photo of Auggie Williamson in front of Brenda. Brenda looks and then quickly looks away. “He was a human being, Brenda. You know what happened to him. We can offer you a deal.”
Tovah gives that a sharp laugh. “You have to be able to charge someone with something, Bobby, before you offer a deal.”
“We’ll make that happen real soon.”
Tovah rolls her smoky eyes at him. Everything about Tovah is smoky. Smoky and sexy as hell — the way she moves, the way she laughs, the way she chews her bottom lip before she delivers one bomb or another.
“You’ve got nothing.” She searches his eyes for confirmation.
Bobby hopes he’s giving her dead eyes in return. He’s trying like hell. “We’ve got plenty.”
Her eyes keep searching his. Roving. If she keeps it up much longer, he’ll need a cold shower. “I repeat — you’ve got nothing.”
They exit the interview room and find Rum Collins standing in the hallway alongside Boon Fletcher of Fletcher, Shapiro, Dunn & Levine. Boon gives Bobby a withering roll of his eyes, as if to say he expected better of him, and Bobby uses his middle finger to scratch the bridge of his nose.
He and Vincent stand in the hall and watch the two Southie kids walk out with two lawyers they couldn’t afford if they hit the number every day for a month straight, and Bobby knows that if they want to close this case now, it just got a hell of a lot fucking harder.
After he punches out, Bobby can feel the eels creeping into his blood, starting to itch. In the past, the primary way to scratch that itch was the needle, the spoon, and the brown powder. Now he recognizes it as a sign that it’s been too long since he went to a meeting.
He finds one in a church basement in Roxbury. He walks down the steps into the basement room that smells the way all Narcotics Anonymous meeting rooms smell — of coffee and cigarette smoke and donuts.
He takes a seat in the circle. Sparse attendance tonight — eleven bodies for thirty chairs — and no one’s too chatty. A white businessman with a briefcase looks really pissed off; a Puerto Rican woman dressed like a maid seems embarrassed. There’s a chunky black guy wearing construction boots caked with the same plaster dust that salts his hair. A woman who looks like a grade school teacher, a middle-aged guy with the sad eyes of a dog in the pound, a twenty-year-old who’s probably court-ordered and looks like he could be high right now. Three of them Bobby’s crossed paths with at other meetings for sure — the black Pan Am stewardess, the Polish truck driver, the birdlike woman who lost one of her kids in a fire. But no one’s in a sharing mood tonight. Finally, the guy running the group, Doug R., looks to Bobby and says, “How about you, friend? Care to share?”
It’s been months since Bobby shared at a meeting. He’s been warned by his sponsor, Mel, a retired cop, that this is another sign a slip could be coming. Walling oneself off into one’s own bullshit is its own form of dishonesty.
After a few dry coughs and a few false starts, he manages to get out a couple of sentences. “I had this dream the other night. My mother and a friend of mine from the marines were looking for me on a street in Hué.”
“In Way?” asks a woman with frizzy blond hair and sharp green eyes. She’s the one Bobby guessed might be a teacher.