Small Mercies

He wants to question. He needs to question. A Vietnamese hooker he’d thought was a friend once walked up to him in a club in Saigon and tried to cut his throat with a razor blade in her teeth. Bobby thought she’d been leaning in to give him a kiss until the last microsecond, when he felt a voice in his chest scream-whisper, No. Fuck no. Even as he chucked her off his lap, he felt an odd sympathy for her — if he were a Vietnamese bar girl, he’d want to kill his ass too.

Looking out at Southie now, as the bustle of Broadway passes by in its uniform whiteness — white baby pushed in a stroller by white mother as three white muscle-heads in their straining white T-shirts exit the drugstore and pass an old white couple sitting on a bench and a gaggle of white girls runs along the sidewalk past a white boy sitting on a mailbox looking forlorn, and all around them, in the background and in the foreground, are other white people — Bobby recalls a taxi girl in Hué telling him she could never go back to her village now that it was known she’d slept with a white man. (Not Bobby; some guy way before Bobby.) It shocked him, this idea that she could be looked down upon because she’d slept with a white man. That made no fucking sense, where Bobby came from. He told her that. He said, “We’re the people who solve problems. That’s why we’re here.”

His taxi girl, Cai, said, “People should be left to themselves.”

Is that the key? he wonders as he looks out on Broadway. Should everyone just leave everyone else the fuck alone?

Seamus Riordan seems to think so. Those are the first words out of his mouth when they meet up with him in the break-room trailer at Boyd Container Terminal: “Couldn’t you’ve just left me be?”

Seamus Riordan is from Southie, so he’s a hard case. He’ll bust their balls as a matter of course.

“Why were you on the platform that night?” Bobby asks.

“Coming home.”

“From?” Vincent asks.

“Being out.”

“Out where?” Bobby wonders.

“Of the house.”

“So, you’re out of the house,” Bobby says pleasantly. “Any place specific?”

“Yup,” Seamus says, and folds his arms.

“Where?”

“Specifically?”

“Yes.”

“I was, ya know.”

“I don’t.”

“Hanging out with someone.”

“A friend?”

“Sure.”

“Hey!” Vincent says. “Why don’t you cut the shit?”

Vincent looks ready to pop out of his skin. Like a lot of guys who try too hard to act like they deserve respect, he has very low tolerance for people he correctly perceives don’t respect him. This leads to Vincent getting in a lot of confrontations, which has led to two excessive-force complaints being leveled against him in the last eighteen months. So the fact that, at a relatively young age, he’s reached Homicide, the very tip-top of the career ladder, means he’s inexplicably failing upward, which can only mean he’s connected to someone with major juice in the department. He’s someone’s nephew, someone’s cousin, someone’s rent boy.

He doesn’t play Bad Cop well, though. He comes off more as Bitch Cop or Whiny Cop or Embarrassing Teenage Son Cop.

Which is what elicits Seamus Riordan’s black hole of a smile. “Cut the what?”

“The shit.” Vince lights a cigarette and exhales the gray smoke through his nostrils, which is why his nose hairs are more prevalent than they should be on a guy in his late twenties.

Seamus Riordan looks at Bobby. “Am I a suspect in something?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m just a potential witness?”

“That you are.”

“So if I don’t like this dickhead’s attitude, I can just walk away, go climb back up in my crane, am I right?”

Bobby places a hand to a surging Vincent’s chest. “You can.”

Seamus Riordan gives Vincent a fuck you glare. “Then you should check your fucking attitude, Serpico.”

Now Vincent’s torn — between embracing the comparison to his idol (not Serpico the man, whose ethics he doesn’t share, but Al Pacino as Serpico, his fashion hero) or taking the comparison for the insult Bobby is sure Seamus Riordan intends it to be.

Vincent leans into the former. “Check your fucking attitude, little man.”

Seamus gives Bobby a wry smirk of the eyes, as if to say, Kids these days, am I right?

Bobby lights his own cigarette. Offers Seamus the pack. Seamus takes one and Bobby lights it for him and then lights Vincent’s and suddenly they’re all friends. Ready to go to the bar together once they’re done, that kinda vibe.

“It was over by the time I got out of the train,” Seamus says.

“Tell me,” Bobby says.

“There were these four kids...”

“White?”

“Yeah.”

“Male or female?”

“Two boys, two girls. The inbound train had just left and they were standing on the edge of the platform and the boys were screaming at each other, one of them calling the other a retard, I heard that. And one of the girls was, like, just screaming? Like losing-her-fucking-mind screaming. And then the other girl slapped her and she shut up.”