Okay.
The mourning is not over — not by a long shot — but she decides, as she rises and tosses the ice into the sink, that it can be paused for a bit.
She opens every beer can in the fridge, one by one, drains them in the sink, and tosses the cans in the trash. She follows the cans with the bottles — of whiskey, of vodka, of — who the fuck brought this into my house? — peach schnapps. She rinses the sink until the smell is gone and wipes it down with the napkins that held the ice and throws those in the trash too.
She looks at the counters and resolves for them to stay that way. From here on out, it’s clean counters. Clean counters and a clear head.
She refills the liquor bottles with water from the tap and puts them in a cardboard box. Adds toilet paper and bags of chips and peanuts, a loaf of bread. She goes through the apartment with another box and adds any clothes she’ll want to wear over the next few days. She removes the basketful of medical supplies from under the bathroom sink. She takes the two boxes and the basket out to Bess and loads them in the trunk.
Back inside, she digs Dukie’s kit bag out of the corner of her closet. That’s what he always called it — his “kit” bag. It’s dark green canvas and, if caught on his person, could have added years to a burglary sentence. It contains the tools of his trade: lockpicks, a glass cutter and suction cup, electrical tape, a stethoscope, two bolt cutters (one small, one large), several watches (the batteries long since dead), nylons to use as masks, several pairs of gloves, a lock punch, duct tape, binoculars, and a pair of handcuffs and key.
Jesus, Dukie, she wonders, why the handcuffs?
“Never mind,” she says out loud. “I don’t wanna know.”
She leaves the dead watches behind, goes into the kitchen, and sweeps all the sharp knives into the bag. She gets Marty’s bag of money from the dresser drawer and walks those two bags out to Bess’s trunk too.
Her last trip to the apartment, she stands inside, taking it in for a minute. She’s lived here since she was twenty-two. Maybe she’ll see it again.
Maybe she won’t.
16
Bobby comes out the back of the BPD headquarters to find Mary Pat Fennessy sitting on the hood of the ugliest fucking car he’s ever seen, just past the back of the parking lot. Bobby takes the T to and from work, and the exit of the parking lot leads to an alley that unwinds in a lazy curve to the rear of the subway station. Mary Pat and her “car” are parked right at the mouth of the alley, clearly waiting on him.
Bobby stops by the car and lights a cigarette. “Is this thing street-legal?”
“Hundred percent,” Mary Pat says.
Bobby walks once around the car. It has the look of something that if you blow on it, even slightly, it’ll come apart like in a cartoon. He smiles at the tailpipe — cooking twine is definitely not legal to secure a tailpipe — and marvels at the complete lack of tread on the tires. A baby’s ass was never so smooth. He bends, looks under the chassis, can’t see any engine parts or brake pads dangling down there. So, that’s something. He returns to the front and Mary Pat. “Hundred percent, huh?”
She gives him a tiny smile. “Maybe ninety.”
“Try sixty,” he says.
As he gets closer, he sees her face looks like she was attacked by live trees in a fairy tale. They just whacked at her with their thin branches until she reached the other side of the haunted forest. She sports a large flesh-colored bandage that almost blends in with her neck. Her hands are bruised, the knuckles swollen. She wears a sleeveless white-and-yellow-checked blouse over blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs and low-top canvas Converse sneakers. When she looks back at him, her eyes are a little too bright for Bobby’s taste. It’s a brightness he’s seen before in the eyes of people who can’t be reached.
He eyes her cuts, her bruises and bandages. “Happened to you?”
She shrugs. “You should see the other girls.”
“Plural?”
She nods. “Never could respect bitches who forget that if you start a fight you should damn well fucking know how to finish one.”
He feels the smile find his face a second before he thinks to pull it back. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Fennessy?”
“Call me Mary Pat.”
“What can I do for you, Mary Pat?”
“I was wondering if you were still looking for my daughter.”
“You betcha. Happen to know where she is?”
Something dislodges in the brightness of her eyes for a moment, a flash of uncertainty and pain, but then it disappears, and the brightness returns.
“I don’t,” she says.
“So why are you here?”
“It might help me find her if I knew — really knew — why you were looking for her.”
He cocks his head at her, waits her out.
“What?” she asks.
“You know why I’m looking for her.”
“Because you think she was on the platform when Auggie Williamson died.”
“It’s gone a little beyond ‘think.’”
“Okay,” she says. “So how come no one has been arrested?”
“Because there are laws against just arresting people willy-nilly without hard evidence.”
“But you can bring them in for questioning.”
“Who says we haven’t?”
“If you had, you would have gotten some evidence.”
“Is that how it works?” He chuckles as he flicks his cigarette into the alley. “Wasn’t your first husband Dukie Shefton?”
She cocks her head at him. “Someone’s been doing his homework.”
“And Dukie was in the Life. I mean, man was a legend among thieves.”
Mary Pat feels a small flush of ancient pride well up in her at the memory of her first husband and his street rep. “He was.”
“And he was an independent, correct?” Bobby says. “Wasn’t affiliated with a crew.”
“He was independent, all right.” Mary Pat lights her own cigarette.
“But,” Bobby says, hitting the word for emphasis, “he still kicked up a percentage of his take to Marty Butler.”
She shrugs. “That’s the way it is in Southie.”
“‘That’s the way it is in Southie.’ We’re in agreement then, Mary Pat. So, if I bring people in for questioning but can’t get any evidence at all out of them because they don’t even get to talk to me for five minutes before a lawyer raps on the door, what does that tell you?”
She looks at him for a long while, rolling the cigarette up and down between her fingers. “Tells me those people are a lot less afraid of you than they are of someone else.”
“Yup.”
She takes a thoughtful drag, exhales a series of smoke rings that drift toward the alley before dissipating one by one. “So you’re saying the crime will go unsolved?”
“Hell, no,” he tells her. “No one’s letting this one drop.”
“Because a black kid died?”
“Because a black kid died on the dividing line between Southie and Dorchester on the eve of busing. It makes for the kinda story line newspapers tend to squeeze a lot of mileage out of.”
“Yet no one’s in jail.”
“Because we haven’t broken the logjam. But we will. And when we do, the dominoes will fall.”
“Or the bodies will.”
“Excuse me?”
She shifts on the hood, pulls one leg up there with her, grips the ankle. “You know as well as me that if any of this leads back to Marty Butler, all the kids on that platform that night are as dead as Auggie Williamson.”
“Why’d you say it that way?”
“What way?”
“You said ‘all’ the kids like some of them are gonna be dead regardless.”