Small Mercies

He stands beside her in the corridor as Drew Curran wheels the gurney up to the viewing window, the sheet covering the body, head to toe. Drew comes around to the side of the gurney closest to the window and puts his finger on the corner of the sheet, looks through the glass at Bobby.

“You ready?” Bobby asks her.

“No one’s ready for this.” She sucks in some air. “Okay. Okay. Do it.”

He nods at Drew.

Drew pulls back the sheet, stopping at the shoulders.

“Oh,” Mary Pat says. “Ohhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhh.”

First her face crumbles, then her body, and Bobby catches her before she can hit the floor. She keeps saying that one plaintive “Oh” over and over.

She stares through the glass at her daughter’s corpse and then presses her face to the glass, the movement so fast and Mary Pat so strong that she drags Bobby to the glass with her in a single lurch. She shrugs him off her and places her palms to the glass and weeps and whispers her daughter’s name.

Bobby never sees her leave. She fills out the paperwork and excuses herself to the bathroom, and after a while, he realizes he hasn’t seen her come out. They send in a female lab tech, but she’s not there. Her car’s no longer in the back lot.

He can hear that “Oh” ringing in his head. Wonders if he’ll ever get it out.

Turns out the house behind the Fields of Athenry isn’t in Marty’s name. It’s in the name of a guy whose body was found in the trunk of a car in long-term parking at the Amtrak station in Pawtucket in 1969. The guy’s name was Lou Spiro, and he left no surviving relatives, so no one ever looked into his estate. But Lou was sitting on some gold mines — a Southie liquor store, a Medford car wash, a metal compacting company in Somerville, and two strip clubs in Revere — that everyone has long assumed belong to Marty Butler.

While the BPD can’t directly tie Marty or Frank Toomey to the body they found in the basement, they can freeze all the assets of the late Lou Spiro and begin taking steps to seize all his properties. That makes the burning of the home behind the Fields of Athenry the most disastrous calamity — by a huge fucking margin — to ever befall the Butler crew.

“You need to get out of town,” Bobby tells Mary Pat the next time she calls him. “Maybe the country.”

“But why?” she asks, all mock innocence.

“You’re a marked woman.”

“Eh.” She takes a drag on a cigarette.

“Rum and George confessed,” he tells her. “It’ll be in the papers tomorrow or the next day. We’re running around confirming all their details now. You won.”

That brings a wet, angry laugh over the line. “I didn’t win shit. They’re walking around free.”

“We have George Dunbar saying Frank and Marty hired him to repave the basement floor with Quikrete.”

“So?”

“So it puts them by the body.”

“They’ll have twenty fucking alibis — minimum — for the night she died. They’ll have witnesses placing them in Persia. You don’t have anything on them.”

“We got Frank giving an order on Auggie Williamson.”

“I heard about that ‘order,’” she says. “‘Finish the job’ could mean anything. That’s what they’ll say in court. You know that.”

He does.

“They’re gonna walk from this just like they walk from everything.”

“Mary Pat,” he says, “don’t wreck your life trying to do something that is doomed to fail.”

“My life,” she says, “was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby. I’m a testament.”

“What?”

“That’s what ghosts are — they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.”

“Mary Pat, you need help.”

A dark chuckle. “It’s not me who’s gonna need help, believe you me.”

“You’ve already dented their drug business, taken a blowtorch to their headquarters, and fucked up at least five businesses they own, by my latest count. Worse than all that, you embarrassed them. Made them look like fucking dunces.”

“They’re still walking the streets!”

Her voice is so loud he has to hold the phone away from his ear for a moment. When he puts it back, she speaks calmly:

“George tell you about the rifles he handed off to some black guys in Roxbury?”

Bobby grabs his notepad. “He did not.”

“They were on Moreland Street not far from Warren, by a little park and playground. Three guys with big ’fros and goatees.”

Bobby knows those assholes. It’s a schizo-political group calls themselves the Global Liberian Liberation Front but go by the street name the Moorlocks. They’re a batshit brew of conflicting ideologies — Stokely Carmichael and Malcom X crossed with Back-to-Africa crossed with the Weather Underground and the West German Red Army Faction, all of it needing to be financed, so they deal a shitload of drugs to the very people they claim to want to “liberate.”

“You know what the guns are for?”

“Brian Shea said they damn well better make some noise with them.”