No new theories or sudden answers came from these long nights or burst from the poster board, but she kept at it anyway. And every time a kid went missing and it was reported on the national news, she watched, rapt, as the minuscule details unfolded.
She wept when they turned up dead.
Always quietly, always behind closed doors, always at times when she thought I was on the other side of the apartment and couldn’t hear.
It was only recently that I’d realized how deeply her father’s death had affected Angie. It wasn’t the death itself, I don’t think. It was the never knowing for sure how he died. Without a body to point to, to lower into the ground for one last look, maybe he’d never been completely dead to her.
I was with her once when she asked Poole about him, and I could see the fear of his own inadequacy in Poole’s face as he explained that he’d barely known the man, just to see on the street occasionally, come across in a gambling raid, Jimmy Suave, always a perfect gentlemen, a man who understood that the cops were doing a job just as he was doing his.
“Eats at you still, huh?” Poole had said.
“Sometimes,” Angie said. “It’s having to accept someone’s gone in your head, but your heart never gets completely…settled about the whole thing.”
And so it was with Amanda McCready. So it was with all those kids who went missing nationally and weren’t found, dead or alive, over the long winter months. Maybe, I thought once, I’d become a private detective because I hated to know what happened next. Maybe Angie became one because she needed to know.
I looked down at Samuel Pietro’s smiling, confident face, those eyes that seemed to drink you up just like Angie’s did.
Hiding the paper, I knew, was stupid. There were always more papers, always TV and radio, always people talking in supermarkets and bars and while pumping gas at the self-serve.
Maybe forty years ago it was possible to escape the news, but not now. News was everywhere, informing us, bludgeoning us, maybe even enlightening us. But there. Always there. No room to duck from it, no place to hide.
I traced my finger around the outline of Samuel Pietro’s face and, for the first time in fifteen years, said a silent prayer.
PART THREE
THE CRUELEST MONTH
24
By early April, Angie was spending most nights with her poster boards, Amanda McCready notes, and the small shrine she’d built to the case in the tiny second bedroom in my apartment, the one I’d previously used to store luggage and boxes I kept meaning to drop off at Goodwill, where small appliances gathered dust while they waited for me to take them to a repair shop.
She’d moved the small TV and a VCR in there and watched the newscasts from October over and over again. In the two weeks since Samuel Pietro had disappeared, she logged at least five hours a night in that room, photographs of Amanda staring out with that unexcitable gaze of hers from the wall above the TV.
I understand obsession in the same general sense most of us do, and I couldn’t see that this was doing Angie too much harm—yet. Over the course of the long winter, I’d come to accept that Amanda McCready was dead, curled into a shelf 175 feet below the waterline of the quarry, flaxen hair floating with the soft swirls of the current. But I hadn’t accepted it with the sort of conviction that allowed me to look derisively on anyone who believed she was still alive.
Angie held firmly to Cheese’s assurance that Amanda lived, that proof of her whereabouts lay somewhere in our notes, somewhere in the minutiae of our investigation and that of the police. She’d convinced Broussard and Poole to loan her copies of their notes, as well as the daily reports and interviews of most of the other members of the CAC task force who’d been assigned to the case. And she was certain, she told me, that sooner or later all that paper and all that video would yield the truth.
The truth, I told her once, was that someone in Cheese’s organization had pulled a double-cross on Mullen and Gutierrez after they’d dumped Amanda over a cliff. And this someone had taken them out and walked away with two hundred thousand dollars.
“Cheese didn’t think so,” she said.
“Broussard was right about that. Cheese was a professional liar.”
She shrugged. “I beg to differ.”
So at night she’d return to autumn and all that had gone wrong, and I would either read, watch an old movie on AMC, or shoot pool with Bubba—which is what I was doing when he said, “I need you to ride shotgun on something down in Germantown with me.”
I’d only had half a beer by this point, so I was pretty sure I’d heard him right.
“You want me to go on a deal with you?”
I stared across the pool table at Bubba as some heathen chose a Smiths song on the jukebox. I hate the Smiths. I’d rather be tied to a chair and forced to listen to a medley of Suzanne Vega and Natalie Merchant songs while performance artists hammered nails through their genitalia in front of me than listen to thirty seconds of Morrissey and the Smiths whine their art-school angst about how they are human and need to be loved. Maybe I’m a cynic, but if you want to be loved, stop whining about it and you just might get laid, which could be a promising first step.
Bubba turned his head back toward the bar and shouted, “What pussy played this shit?”
“Bubba,” I said.
He held up a finger. “One sec.” He turned back toward the bar. “Who played this song. Huh?”
“Bubba,” the bartender said, “now calm down.”
“I just want to know who played this song.”
Gigi Varon, a thirty-year-old alkie who looked a shriveled forty-five, raised her meek hand from the corner of the bar. “I didn’t know, Mr. Rogowski. I’m sorry. I’ll pull the plug.”
“Oh, Gigi!” Bubba gave her a big wave. “Hi! No, never mind.”
“I will, really.”
“No, no, hon.” Bubba shook his head. “Paulie, give Gigi two drinks on me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rogowski.”
“No problem. Morrissey sucks, though, Gigi. Really. Ask Patrick. Ask anyone.”
“Yeah, Morrissey sucks,” one of the old guys said, and then several other patrons followed suit.
“I put the Amazing Royal Crowns in next,” Gigi said.
I’d turned Bubba on to the Amazing Royal Crowns a few months back, and now they were his favorite band.
Bubba spread his arms wide. “Paulie, make it three drinks.”
We were in Live Bootleg, a tiny tavern on the Southie/ Dorchester line that had no sign out front. The brick exterior was painted black, and the only indication the bar had a name at all was scrawled in red paint on the lower right corner of the wall fronting Dorchester Avenue. Ostensibly owned by Carla Dooley, aka “The Lovely Carlotta,” and her husband, Shakes, Live Bootleg was really Bubba’s bar, and I’d never been in the place when every stool wasn’t filled and the booze wasn’t flowing. It was a good crowd, too; in the three years since Bubba had opened it, there’d never been a fight or a line for the bathroom because some junkie was taking too long to shoot up in the stall. Of course, everyone who entered knew who the real owner was and how he’d feel if anyone ever gave the police reason to knock on his door, so for all its dark interior and shady rep, Live Bootleg was about as dangerous as the Wednesday night bingo game at Saint Bart’s. Had better music, too, most times.