Small Mercies

They pass a woman feeding the seagulls. She flicks hard pieces of bread at the birds from a white paper bag dotted with grease spots. She’s surprisingly young for a bird feeder, no older than Mary Pat, but her eyes burn with loss. Loss of love, loss of hope, loss of mind — it’s impossible to tell which. But loss. The gulls caw and tread the air in front of the woman in terror. Afraid to get close, too hungry not to risk it.

“I’m not going to cause any trouble,” Mary Pat tells Marty.

“You’re already causing it.” He fishes a pack of Dunhills from his Baracuta and lights one with a slim gold lighter, turning away from the mild breeze to do so. She gets a look at the crown of his head and notes that his brown hair is orange up there, which tells her he uses hair dye, which makes her wonder for a moment if he’s a closet fag. Were that the case, so many things about Marty Butler would finally make sense.

“If I’m causing trouble,” she says carefully, “it’s not because I want to cause you trouble. It’s because I want to find my daughter.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“She was Frank Toomey’s mistress.”

He makes a face as if he just bit into something unpleasant. He turns the grimace to the sea for a moment and then sighs softly. “I’m aware.”

“Marty,” she says, “you’re fucking aware?”

He holds a hand up to his ear, a man who loathes when women use profanities. “Frank assures me he hasn’t seen your daughter in a couple weeks. I asked all my men. She hasn’t been around Frank, she hasn’t been around the Fields.”

“So where is she?”

“That’s not the issue at hand.”

“It very much is the fucking issue at hand.”

He shakes his head. “Your daughter is missing. My heart breaks for you. But her leaving to wherever she went does not overrule my right to conduct business in this neighborhood.”

“No one’s stopping you from conducting business.”

“You are.” He doesn’t raise his voice, but it definitely grows tighter. “You are.”

“How?”

“Everyone’s watching us. If this busing abomination happens? Cameras will be on this neighborhood like it’s the moon landing. And now with this colored kid getting killed and your daughter maybe being mixed up in it, they’re going to bring more cameras in here. And the one place those cameras can’t point? Is at me. And mine. But if you keep acting the way you’re acting, hon? I fear they may have no choice.”

“I just want to find my daughter.”

“So find her. But look someplace besides my organization.”

“But what if someone in your organization knows something they’re not telling you?”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

They near the Sugar Bowl, and Mary Pat is surprised to realize it’s almost empty. Just one man sitting on the center bench watching them come. The Sugar Bowl is never empty on a summer day. But here’s this one man and no one else.

Do I die here? she wonders. Is my crime already that big?

It wouldn’t be, she knows all too well, the first time (or the fifth) that Marty Butler made a problem vanish by making a person vanish.

They reach the end of the causeway, and the man who rises from the bench is a man she’s never seen before. He’s wearing a blue leisure suit with a white turtleneck. His brown hair is combed back tight against his scalp. He holds a doctor’s satchel in his right hand as he stands and looks down at Mary Pat. He’s very tall.

Marty says, “This is a friend of mine from down Providence. You can call him Lewis. You see that bag in Lewis’s hand, Mary Pat?”

She nods. Lewis stares at her the way ravens stare at worms.

“I want to give you the bag,” Marty says. “Lewis wanted to give you something else. Because it’s not merely my business you’re affecting with all your noise. You’re affecting Lewis’s. And the people he works with down Providence.”

“I’m just—”

“Don’t say you’re just looking for your daughter. There’s more to this. And you know it. Now, Lewis would like to end this his way. But I convinced him to try my way first.”

Lewis hands her the satchel.

“Open it,” Marty says.

She notices, with no shortage of humiliation, that her hands shake as she unsnaps the clasp over the center of the satchel, then pries the bag open. It’s half filled with money — stacks of well-used hundreds, all rubber-banded together.

“Brian tells me Jules went to Florida,” Marty says.

The man from Providence stares at her and never blinks.

“Brian feels pretty sure of this.”

“I don’t know that she did,” Mary Pat manages.

“Ah,” Marty says, “but that’s where you have to take a leap of faith. Your friends have looked for her on your behalf, those friends of yours that people don’t lie to. And those friends have not found her. So you must put faith in their opinion that she is no longer to be found in this general area. But it’s not just faith I’m asking for. I’m saying you go prove it to yourself.”

“How would I do that?”