Small Mercies

Brian Shea is waiting out back. She’s never been out here before and is mildly surprised they’ve made a kind of grotto out of it, with cobblestone covering the ground and lights strung from the exterior walls of the bar and the body shop next door. A few wrought-iron tables and chairs share space with potted plants and the occasional beer keg. At the far end stands a blue three-decker house with white trim. That house has been the subject of dozens of rumors over the years — it’s Marty Butler’s true residence; it’s a stash house; it’s a high-end casino; it’s a high-end bordello; it’s where they keep all those paintings that were stolen from the Fogg Museum back in ’71. Until tonight she’d never seen it full-on, only the top floor from the street. It looks like nothing much, like every other three-decker in Southie and Dorchester, though the paint’s been kept up.

Brian Shea doesn’t offer her a seat, but she takes the one across from him anyway. The first thing he says, with a hint of cruelty in his tiny smile, is “You went to my house?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You didn’t keep your word.”

“My what?”

“Your word. You told me you would reach out to me by five o’clock. You didn’t.”

The smile grows a little larger, a little crueler. “You’ve been around long enough, Mary Pat, to know that someone like you doesn’t make demands of someone like me.”

“And you’ve been around long enough, Brian, to know I don’t give a fuck what you think I’ve been around long enough to know.”

He puts his palm to the back of his neck and stares at her with his Windex eyes. His T-shirt isn’t as soiled as Weeds’s was, but she notices streaks of chalky residue on his arms and a spot of it on his cheek.

Did these guys break into a schoolhouse? Or hot-wire a cement mixer?

“Did you know my Jules was having an affair with Tombstone?”

“He doesn’t like that nickname.”

“He’d prefer Child Molester?”

“She’s seventeen.”

“So you did know.”

A small downward flick of the eyes. “I knew.”

She feels light-headed for a moment. As if she might fall out of her chair. “Is she with him now? With Frankie?”

He shakes his head. “Frank hasn’t seen her in days.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. I promised you I’d ask around, I did.”

“I’ll ask him myself.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. There’s a thin wisp of fury in his voice, and she knows it’s a far bigger threat because it isn’t a threat but a promise. “Frank has a wife and kids and probably twenty-four-hour BPD or fed surveillance on him. You are not going to go making a scene at Frank Toomey’s house. You hear me?”

“So where is she?”

“I asked if you fucking heard me.”

“I heard you.”

The cords in his neck relax. He sits back.

“So where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you asked around.”

“Yes.”

“And what did you hear?”

“That the last anyone saw of Jules was when she walked home that night.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Cops came by my place.”

“You sure you didn’t go to them?”

She grimaces.

He widens his eyes. “Well, I dunno, Mary Pat. I don’t know who you are right now. You’re off your fucking nut.”

“My daughter is missing.”

“Girls her age go missing all the time. Maybe she’s hitchhiking to San Francisco or, I dunno, fucking Florida.”

“The cops said—”

“You’re quoting cops now?”

“They said she was mixed up in that thing where the boy got killed.”

“What boy?”

“The boy at the train station.”

“The nigger drug dealer?”

“How do you know he was a drug dealer?”

A snort. “Oh, okay, he was looking for the Peace Corps office and got lost. Make you happy?”

“The cops said—”

“Stop saying ‘the cops said,’ ‘the cops told me.’ Are you out of your fucking mind? We don’t talk to cops around here.”

“I didn’t talk to them, they talked to me. They told me a group of white kids chased the black kid into the station. They think those white kids might have been George Dunbar, Rum, Brenda Morello, and my daughter.” She lights a cigarette.

Brian is watching her with an expectant look in his eyes that gradually fades. “That’s it? Cops tell you some white kids who might have been your daughter and her friends might have chased a nigger drug dealer into Columbia Station where he might have fallen on his spearchucker head and fucking died? And you want to do what with this information?”

“Find out if it’s true so it’ll help me find my daughter.”

He notices the chalk on his arms and slaps it off with his hands. He indicates something she hadn’t noticed before — a sledgehammer resting against a toolbox by the steps to Marty’s three-decker.