She noticed the camera. “Birds?”
I looked at it, shook my head. “Just nature in general. Don’t see much of it where I’m from.”
“Boston?”
I shook my head. “Providence.”
She nodded, glanced at the paper, shook off the dew. “They used to wrap them in plastic to keep the moisture off,” she said. “Now I have to hang it in the bathroom for an hour just to read the front page.”
The boy on her hip placed his face sleepily to her breast, stared at me with eyes as open and blue as the sky.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” She kissed his head. “Tired?” She stroked his slightly chubby face, and the love in her eyes was a palpable, daunting thing.
When she looked back over at me, the love cleared, and for a moment I sensed either fear or suspicion. “There’s a forest.” She pointed down the road. “Right down there. It’s part of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation. Get some beautiful pictures there, I bet.”
I nodded. “Sounds great. Thanks for the advice.”
Maybe the child sensed something. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe just because he was a little kid and that’s what little kids do, he suddenly opened his mouth and howled.
“Oh-ho.” She smiled and kissed his head again, bounced him on her hip. “It’s okay, Nicky. It’s okay. Come on. Mommy’ll get you something to drink.”
She turned up the sloping driveway, bouncing the boy on her hip, caressing his face, her slim body moving like a dancer’s in her red-and-black lumberjack shirt and blue jeans.
“Good luck with nature,” she called over her shoulder.
“Thanks.”
She turned a bend in the driveway and I lost sight of her and the child behind the same thicket that obscured most of the house from the road.
But I could still hear her.
“Don’t cry, Nicky. Mommy loves you. Mommy’s going to make everything all right.”
“So he has a son,” Ryerson said. “So what?”
“First I heard of it,” I said.
“Me, too,” Angie said, “and we spent a lot of time with him back in October.”
“I have a dog,” Ryerson said. “First time you’ve heard about it. Right?”
“We’ve known you less than a day,” Angie said. “And a dog isn’t a child. You have a son and you spend a lot of time on stakeouts with people, you’re going to mention him. He mentioned his wife a lot. Nothing big, just ‘Got to call my wife.’ ‘My wife is going to kill me for missing another dinner.’ Et cetera. But never, not once, did he mention a child.”
Ryerson looked in his rearview at me. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s odd. Can I use your phone?”
He handed it back to me and I dialed, looked out at Ted Kenneally’s antiques store, the CLOSED sign hanging in the window.
“Detective Sergeant Lee.”
“Oscar,” I said.
“Hey, Walter Payton! How’s the body?”
“Hurts,” I said. “Like hell.”
His voice changed. “How’s that other thing?”
“Well, I got a question for you.”
“A rat-out-my-own-people sort of question?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Shoot. I’ll decide if I like it.”
“Broussard’s married, right?”
“To Rachel, yeah.”
“Tall brunette?” I said. “Very pretty?”
“That’s her.”
“And they have a kid?”
“’Scuse me?”
“Does Broussard have a son?”
“No.”
I felt a lightness eddy in my skull, and the throbbing aches from yesterday’s football game disappeared.
“You’re sure?”
“’Course I’m sure. He can’t.”
“He can’t or he decided not to?”
Oscar’s voice became slightly muffled, and I realized he’d cupped the phone with his hand. His voice was a whisper. “Rachel can’t conceive. It was a big problem for them. They wanted kids.”
“Why not adopt?”
“Who’s gonna let an ex-hooker adopt kids?”
“She was in the life?”
“Yeah, that’s how he met her. He was on Homicide track until then, man, just like me. It killed his career, got him buried in Narco until Doyle bailed him out. But he loves her. She’s a good woman, too. A great woman.”
“But no kid.”
His hand left the phone. “How many times I got to tell you, Kenzie? No friggin’ kid.”
I said thanks and goodbye, hung up, and handed the phone back to Ryerson.
“He doesn’t have a son,” Ryerson said. “Does he?”
“He has a son,” I said. “He definitely has a son.”
“Then where’d he get him?”
It all fell into place then, as I sat in Ryerson’s Suburban and looked out at Kenneally’s Antiques.
“How much you want to bet,” I said, “that whoever Nicholas Broussard’s natural parents are, they probably weren’t real good at the job?”
“Holy shit,” Angie said.
Ryerson leaned over the steering wheel, stared out through the windshield with a blank, stunned look on his lean face. “Holy shit.”
I saw the blond boy riding Rachel Broussard’s hip, the adoration she’d poured on his tiny face as she’d caressed it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Holy shit.”
32
At the end of an April day, after the sun has descended but before night has fallen, the city turns a hushed, unsettled gray. Another day has died, always more quickly than expected. Muted yellow or orange lights appear in window squares and shaft from car grilles, and the coming dark promises a deepening chill. Children have disappeared from the streets to wash up for dinner, to turn on TVs. The supermarkets and liquor stores are half empty and listless. The florists and banks are closed. The honk of horns is sporadic; a storefront grate rattles as it drops. And if you look closely in the faces of pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights, you can see the weight of the morning’s unfulfilled promise in the numb sag of their faces. Then they pass, trudging toward home, whatever its incarnation.
Lionel and Ted Kenneally had arrived back late, close to five, and something broke in Lionel’s face as he saw us approach. When Ryerson flashed his badge and said, “Like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. McCready,” that broken thing in Lionel’s face broke even further.