He pulls the needle out. Hands it to her. “What now?”
“We wait.”
Noel would talk about anything in the early stages of a high, back when he still lived with them and would use the bathroom to shoot up. He’d come out all dreamy-eyed and relaxed, sit at the kitchen table with her, and shoot the shit about anything — no defenses — for about ten minutes before she’d lose him. It’s that sweet spot — about five minutes in but no longer than fifteen — that she waits for.
“What happened to Jules after you killed Auggie Williamson?”
He shrugs.
“George,” she says, “what happened?”
Another shrug. “Dunno. She left with Frank.”
“And after that?”
“Told ya — dunno.”
She stares at him. Is he slick enough to lie under the influence of his first hit of heroin? Does he — does anyone — have that kind of willpower?
He smiles at her. A dreamy, distant smile. Knowing but not arrogant.
“You know how to pour concrete?” he asks her.
“You mix it, you pour it.”
He sighs. “You’ve never done it, have you?”
“No, George, I haven’t.”
“Most people think it’s easy. You grab a bag of it, mix it with some water, lay it down with a trowel, wait for it to dry.”
She can sense this is not a random topic between them. She’s aware that his family business — started by his uncles and his late father shortly after World War II — is cement.
“But it’s not easy?” she offers.
A long slow shake of his head. “Not if you’ve never done it before, not if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not if your basement is eighty-five fucking degrees on a summer day and you mixed it wrong anyway, so it’s already cracking five minutes after it fucking dries, and it fucking dries five minutes after you lay it down. What you got then is a mess. You can’t get to what you’re trying to seal over, but you haven’t totally sealed it over either. I mean, it’s there, what you tried to cover, like a fucking bug trapped in ice. And the fumes will knock you out.”
He slides down the side of the car and sits against the tire and looks off at nothing. “I had this tricycle once. Metal. Heavy. It had a red seat.”
She waits for more — a point, perhaps — but that’s all she’s getting.
“George,” she says.
“Hmmm?”
“What were you trying to seal over?”
“Hmmm?”
“You said you were trying to seal something over in a hot basement.”
He drifts, and then it’s as if her words finally reach him at the other end of a long tunnel. “I wasn’t the one who fucked up.”
“No?”
Another slow headshake. “I don’t fucking make mistakes with cement. They did.”
“Who?”
He licks his lips several times. “You know.”
“No, I—”
“Marty and Frank.” He stares at her through half-mast eyes.
“What about them?”
“They tried to bury her in the basement, but they mixed the cement wrong, so they had to do it all over again.”
Two thick veins, one on either side of Mary Pat’s larynx, start to throb. “Say her name.”
“Jules.” A lazy smile for her as the heroin bathes his inner body from head to toe. “They had to bury her twice.”
23
It’s a few moments before she can speak.
She remembers the day she forced her way into the Fields. Larry Foyle and Weeds sported dirty T-shirts, their bodies sweaty and ripe with B.O. And then Brian Shea, his skin speckled with chalky residue, claimed he’d been helping “renovate” Marty’s house. A sledgehammer rested against a toolbox in the rear grotto. Brian had been indignant because she’d gone to his house and questioned his wife in the disappearance of her daughter. He’d been threatening. Flicked a cigarette at her.
Insinuated that she was a bad neighbor.
Acted self-righteous.
And all the while, her daughter’s body lay just twenty feet away in a cellar.
Brian Shea, with whom she’d had clammy, forgettable high school sex in his mother’s bedroom.
Brian Shea, for whom Dukie had put in a word when he was just another kid on the make, trying to get in with Marty Butler.
Brian Shea, to whom Dukie once loaned money, only to have to chase him down to get it back.
Brian Shea, who was at the party they threw after Jules’s christening.
Had been in their home, had eaten at their table, had drunk their liquor and beer.
Brian Fucking Shea.
“Why you crying?” George Dunbar, his back against the Nova, is watching her with a loose, sleepy gaze.
“Am I?” She dabs under her eyes with the heel of her hand.
He doesn’t even hear her. He’s already floating again.
She squats down by him and snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Did you see her?”
“Who?”
“Jules.”
“When?”
“When you reset the basement floor?”
“Whose?”
“Marty’s.”
“Nah, nah, nah. We, um, we brought in the Quikrete. It’s the stuff they should have used from the start. Concrete but sand too. It’s good shit, dries fast...” He lowers his head, seems to fall asleep.
She slaps his face. His eyes snap open, meet hers. “You never saw Jules?”
“No, no. She... I mean, there was a hole in the floor, and it had been patched over, and then they poured the bad cement mix over that. So they busted up all the bad cement, and we came in and laid the Quikrete down, and that’s where she is.”
“Under the Quikrete.”
He doesn’t answer. He’s into another nod.
She slaps him again.
“George! Is she under the Quikrete?”
“Yeah. She’s there.” His words are a muddy slur at this point. “She’s there.”
“George,” she says before she loses him, “does anyone come to this garage besides you?”
He smiles and rolls his head on his neck. “No one knows it’s here.”
“No one?”
“Not a soul,” he slurs.
If he notices when she handcuffs him to the handle of the car door, he doesn’t seem to mind.
She gets some sleep in the backseat of the Nova.
When she wakes, it’s hot as hell in there, the garage’s metal door serving as a conductor for the rays of sun pounding the other side of it. George is rattling his handcuff against the door handle. She looks at her watch — two-thirty. Heroin begins to leave the bloodstream after six hours. George is right on schedule.
She loops the seat belt once around the back of the passenger seat. She uncuffs George, leads him over, and pushes him down into the seat. He groans a few times, asks her what she’s doing, but she ignores him. She has to pull hard on the belt to get the latch plate up near his hip, but once she does, she slaps the cuff into the latch plate hole on the first try.
“You know what I don’t get,” she says.
He shakes his head, still a little foggy.
“You and Brenda. You don’t seem like a couple.” It’s something that nagged at her while she was falling asleep in the back of the car.
“We’re not.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, wondering if there’s any bottom to this.
“So if Rum was a cover for Frankie Toomey, who were you the cover for?”
“Who do you think?”
In the dark swelter of the car, she says nothing for a bit. And then:
“Marty.”
He doesn’t nod. But he doesn’t shake his head. He just holds her gaze.
“And George? One last question — when did they really take up with the girls?”
He takes a minute to formulate his thoughts. “Frank liked to say the reason they call it freshman year is because that’s when it’s freshest.”