Small Mercies

Coyne’s face is unreadable. “Why would you say that?”

“Because she was in the area with some of her asshole friends, and now you’re here asking about her. One plus one.” She flicks her cigarette through the chain-link fence onto the empty court.

Coyne lights his own and places the lighter on the bench between them. She catches half the word — “Viet” — peeking out of the shadow that falls on the bench. “Where did you serve?”

He can’t follow for a second but then notices the focus of her gaze. “I was all over. It wasn’t a war yet. I was an ‘adviser.’”

“Was it already a fucked-up place?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “It was just prettier. We hadn’t blown a lot of it up yet. Charlie neither. But you knew it was going to go sideways even back in ’sixty-two. You know someone who served?”

She nods. “My son.” She catches Pritchard giving Coyne a let’s move her along look, but Coyne just stares the younger man down.

“He make it home?” Coyne asks her.

“Kinda,” she says.

“What’s ’kinda’?” He looks around the basketball court as if Noel might be hanging out there right at this moment.

“He OD’d.” She looks at Coyne. “So, he kinda made it home and he kinda didn’t.”

For a moment it seems like he forgot how to move. His chalk white skin manages to find an even whiter shade, and she suspects he’s lost someone close to him — a son or a brother — to the brown powder. When he lifts his lighter off the bench and pockets it, she notices the faintest of tremors in his hand. He exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fennessy.”

She says, “You know what neighborhood sent the most kids to Vietnam?”

He guesses. “Southie?”

She shakes her head. “Charlestown. But Southie was second. Then Lynn. Then Dorchester. Roxbury. I got a cousin works for the draft board. She told me all this. You know who didn’t send a lot of kids to Vietnam?”

“I can guess,” he says with a bitterness so old it comes out as apathy.

“People in Dover,” she says. “In Wellesley and Newton and Lincoln — their kids get to hide in college and grad school and have doctors who say they got fucking tinnitus or fallen arches or bone spurs or whatever other bullshit they can come up with. These are the exact same people who want me to bus my kid to Roxbury but wouldn’t let a black guy take two steps into their neighborhood once the lawns have been cut and the sun goes down.”

“I ain’t arguing with you,” Coyne says. “How does Jules feel about being bused?”

She stares at him for so long he finishes his cigarette and starts to look uncomfortable.

“Mrs. Fennessy?”

She sees where this is going now. “A black kid runs in front of a train, and you think some white kids were somehow involved because they were pissed off about busing?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“And the kid didn’t run in front of any fucking train,” Pritchard says.

Coyne’s jaw tightens and his kind eyes flash, cold and unkind, at his partner.

“How’d he die?” Mary Pat says.

“Still waiting on a final determination of that,” Coyne says.

“Why don’t you ask your daughter?” Pritchard says.

“Vince,” Coyne says to his partner, “will you shut up, please? Just do me that courtesy.”

Pritchard rolls his eyes and shrugs like a teenager.

Coyne turns back to Mary Pat. “We have witnesses who saw Auggie Williamson exchange words with a group of white kids on the outskirts of Columbia Park around midnight. Those kids then chased him into Columbia Station, where he died. We can’t confirm whether your daughter was one of those kids, but it would be very smart for her to come to us before we come to her. So, Mrs. Fennessy, if you know where she is, do yourself a huge favor and tell us.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Mary Pat says. “I’ve torn my hair out trying to find her.”

He holds her gaze with his own. “I want to believe you.”

“I could give a shit whether you believe me, I just want to find my daughter. So if you guys want to go on the hunt for her, please, be my fucking guest.”

Coyne nods. “Do you know any place she could be hiding out?”

If Jules is hiding, she’s hiding in her secret life. The one that may involve Frank Toomey. Which would, by association, involve Marty Butler. And saying anything to a cop that leads them to Marty Butler would be the same as sticking her head in an oven, turning on the gas, and firing up one last cigarette.

“I don’t.”

She’s trying to keep the hope from her eyes and voice because something finally makes sense — if Jules was involved in some stupid shit that led to the death of that black kid, then she could very well be hiding somewhere within a ten-block radius of where Mary Pat sits right now. And if that’s the case, well, Mary Pat can address any bad shit her kid may have gotten up to, she can deal with that.

Coyne hands her a business card — Det. Sgt. Michael Coyne, BPD Homicide Div.

Homicide. Hom-i-cide. This is not your everyday bad shit that would bring a cop calling. It’s not a shoplifting beef or check kiting. This is as serious as a tumor on an ovary.