“If Marty Butler doesn’t have success paying your legal bills,” she says eventually, “he’ll cut bait and pay for your funeral.”
“Which could be why we’re not turning up the heat too quickly.”
“But if you wait too long, they’ll get their stories straight, Marty will pay off people to be their alibis, and you’ll get nowhere at all.”
“That’s the risk.” He puts a foot on the fender.
“You think my daughter was involved, and I know she wasn’t. If we can prove what happened, I can prove her innocence.”
“And then maybe she’ll come out of hiding?”
She drifts on him for a moment. Like she just — poof — leaves her body, and he’s left staring at a statue perched on the hood of a car.
Then she comes back, but her voice is small and thin. “Yes. Then she’ll come out of hiding.”
He’s been watching her face as close as he can. “She is in hiding? Yes?”
She plucks at one of her sneaker laces. “She’s in hiding for sure.”
“Then,” he says, “you’ll just have to be patient, Mrs. Fennessy.”
“Mary Pat.”
“You’ll have to be patient, Mary Pat. If I want this to stick, I have to do it right.”
He can tell from the look on her face that she thinks he’s not only lying to her, he’s lying to himself.
“What if I talked to them?” she says.
“To who?”
“The people who don’t want to talk.”
“No,” he says. “Bad idea.”
“Why?”
He indicates her hand and face. “Your type of negotiation is called coercion under duress. It doesn’t stand up in court.”
“Only if” — she strikes the air with her cigarette — “an officer of the law had prior knowledge of it.”
“What’d you read a law book?”
“I was married to Dukie. He managed to stay out of prison most of his life and rob everything of fucking value that wasn’t nailed down in this city at one time or another. He was a law book.”
“What ever happened to Dukie?” Bobby asks.
“He didn’t take a knee.”
“To who?”
“The person you’re supposed to take a knee to.”
Standing there, taking her in, he gets a sudden whiff of her utter solitude. Of the series of traumas, big and small, that’s passed for her life.
“Mrs. Fennessy, please go home.”
“And do what?”
“Whatever you do when you’re home.”
“And then what?”
“Get up the next day and do it again.”
She shakes her head. “That’s not living.”
“It is if you can find the small blessings.”
She smiles, but her eyes shine with agony. “All my small blessings are gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“Then find new ones.”
She shakes her head. “There aren’t any left to find.”
Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.
Because they’re going. Make no mistake. They are fucking going.
“Mary Pat,” he says gently, and she looks up at him, “do you have someone you can talk to?”
“About what?”
“About whatever you’re going through right now?”
“I’m talking to you.”
Fair enough.
“And I’m listening.”
Mary Pat studies his face for a bit. “But you’re not hearing.”
“What am I not hearing?”
Sitting on the hood of that ugly car, her eyes still far too bright for Bobby’s liking, she points a finger at the sky, twirls it, and answers him. “The silence.”
Bobby tries to formulate some kind of response, but nothing occurs to him.
Mary Pat comes off the hood, walks to door of her heap, and gets behind the wheel. She backs up, then pulls forward, and gives no indication she even sees him as she drives away.
17
A few hours later, Bobby has dinner with Carmen Davenport at Jacob Wirth, a German restaurant in the theater district. Bobby picks it because it’s just upscale enough to feel special for two civil servants, but not so upscale he’ll have to go to a loan shark to cover the tab. His mind keeps drifting, though; he can’t shake his odd encounter with Mary Pat. This is not where he wants his head to be on the first date he’s managed to get in ten months. But he can’t quit thinking of that finger of hers, twirling, as she pointed it at the sky and spoke of “the silence.”
What fucking silence?
“So, out with it,” Carmen says.
“What?”
“Whatever’s got you distracted.”
“Maybe I’m just nervous.”
“Mmmm, nah.” She places her napkin on her lap, settles her chair in relation to the table. “You’re not here. In this restaurant. With me. And I look kinda nice, in case you overlooked it.”
She wears a white peasant blouse over a denim skirt and knee-high boots the same mahogany color as the bar. Her hair is combed a little different than the night they met, falling a bit more into a curve over her eyes, and she’s wearing more jewelry — a silver choker that matches the bracelet on her left wrist, thin white-gold hoop earrings. The green of her eyes is so pale it’s almost translucent; it gives Bobby the impression she can see straight through the back of him.
Bobby tells her she looks beautiful.
“About time,” she says. “Okay, you can stop squirming — what’s on your mind?”
“You.”
She chuckles and shoots him the bird. “I would rather you tell me what’s preoccupying you than you stay preoccupied and eventually piss me off.”
Their drinks come — red wine for her, a draft for Bobby — and they pause to toast their first date before they drink.
Bobby tells her about Auggie Williamson and all the witnesses who saw the four kids chase him near the train. And how Auggie ended up being found dead on the tracks the next morning. And how some of the witnesses corroborated who those kids could have been — four kids from Southie, two girls and two boys. And how, just when they had two of them in their hands, lawyers associated with Marty Butler showed up and bailed them out.
“What about the other two kids?” she asks.
“One’s a hard case. The hardest case of the four, actually, and he’s got a personal connection to Marty, so he’s not gonna say shit.”
“And the other one, the girl?”
“No one knows where she is.”
“Is she dead?”
“Rumor is she’s in Florida.”
“You don’t sound like you believe it.”
“I’m wavering on the theory,” he admits. “Of the four kids, I don’t see why she would be singled out as a threat. That’s what I keep bumping against.”
Carmen thinks on that as she takes a sip of wine, staring at him with a calm intensity that he finds so attractive he immediately wants to duck from it. It’s a Coyne family trait — if you feel happiness, duck. Because the only thing that could possibly follow happiness is pain. Thanks, Mom, Bobby thinks. Thanks, Dad. What an outlook you gave your children. What a pair of fucking pips you were.