Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

I stood in the doorway a long time, watching her sleep, hoping my silly hopes.

After her estrangement from Phil and before she and I became lovers, Angie dated a producer with New England Cable News Network. I’d met the guy once and hadn’t been particularly impressed, though I do recall he had great taste in ties. Wore too much aftershave, though. And mousse. And dated Angie. So the chances of us getting together for late-night Nintendo games and Saturday softball were pretty slim from the get-go.

The guy proved useful after the fact, however, because Angie kept in touch and occasionally, when we needed them, scored us tapes of local news broadcasts. It’s always amazed me how she can do that-stay in touch, remain friends, get a guy she dumped two years ago to do her favors. I’d be lucky to call an ex-girlfriend and get my own toaster back. Maybe I need to work on my breakup technique.

The next morning, while Angie showered, I went downstairs and signed off with the FedEx guy for a box from Joel Calzada of NECN. This city has eight news channels: the major network affiliates, Four, Five, and Seven; the UPN, WB, and Fox channels; NECN; and finally a mom-and-pop independent at the top of the dial. Among these eight stations, all have noon and six P.M. broadcasts, three have five o’clocks, two have five-thirtys, four have ten in the evenings, and four wrap up at eleven. They broadcast at various times throughout the morning, beginning at five, and each has one-minute updates at several different times, during the day.

Joel had, at Angie’s request, gotten his hands on every broadcast by every station concerning Amanda’s disappearance since the night she’d vanished. Don’t ask me how he pulled this off. Maybe producers trade tapes all the time. Maybe Angie can sweet-talk with the best of them. Maybe it was Joel’s ties.

I’d spent a few hours last night rereading all the newspaper articles about Amanda, and I’d come up with nothing new except for hands stained so deeply with black ink I’d made a fingerprint collage on a sheet of legal paper before going to bed. When a case seems as dense and protective of its secrets as marble, sometimes the only thing to do is attempt a fresh approach, or at least an approach that feels fresh. That was the idea here-watch the tapes, see what jumped out at us.

I removed eight VHS tapes from the FedEx box, stacked them on the floor of the living room by the TV, and Angie and I ate breakfast at the coffee table and compared case notes and tried to come up with a plan of attack for the day. Short of trying to track down Skinny Ray Likanski and reinterviewing Helene, Beatrice, and Lionel McCready-in the desperate hope they’d remember something crucial they’d heretofore forgotten regarding the night Amanda disappeared-very little occurred to us.

Angie leaned back against the couch as I picked up her empty breakfast plate. “And then,” she said, “there are times you think, A job with the electric company-now why didn’t I take that?” She looked up at me as I placed her plate on top of my own. “Great benefits.”

“Excellent retirement plan.” I took the plates into the kitchen, placed them in the dishwasher.

“Regular hours.” Angie called from the living room, and I heard the snap of her Bic as she lit the morning’s first cigarette. “Stellar dental.”

I made us each a cup of coffee and returned to the living room. Angie’s thick hair was still damp from the shower, and the man’s sweatpants and T-shirt combination she usually wore in the morning made her seem smaller and less substantial than she really was.

“Thanks.” She took her coffee cup from my hand without looking up, turned a page of her notes.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said.

She took her cigarette from the ashtray, eyes still on her notes. “I’ve been smoking since I was sixteen.”

“Long time.”

She turned another page. “And in all that time, you never gave me shit.”

“Your body, your mind,” I said.

She nodded. “But now that we’re sleeping together, it’s somehow partly your body, too. That it?”

Over the last six months, I’d become accustomed to her morning moods. Often she was insanely energetic-back from aerobics and a walk along Castle Island before I woke up-but even in the best of times, she was far from a Chatty Cathy in the morning. And if she felt she’d exposed some part of herself the night before, been vulnerable or weak (which in her mind was usually the same thing), a thin, cold mist would surround her like ground fog at dawn. You could see her, know she was there, but then you’d take your eyes off her for a second and she’d be gone, had drifted back behind wisps of white fog, wasn’t coming out for a while.

“Am I nagging?” I said.

She looked up at me, smiled coldly. “Just a bit.” She sipped her coffee and looked down at her notes again. “There’s nothing here.”

“Patience.” I turned on the TV, popped the first tape into the VCR.

The leader counted down from seven, the numbers black and slightly fuzzy against a blue backdrop, a header flashed the date of Amanda’s disappearance, and suddenly we were in the studio with Gordon Taylor and Tanya Biloskirka, anchors extraordinaire for Channel Five. Gordon always seemed to have trouble keeping his dark hair from falling to his forehead, unusual in this age of freeze-dried anchor heads, but he had piercing, righteous eyes and a constant quaver of outrage in his voice that made up for the hair thing, even when he was reporting on Christmas tree lightings and Barney sightings. Tanya, of the unpronounceable last name, wore glasses to give her an air of intellectualism, but every guy I knew still thought she was a babe, which I guess was the point.

Gordon straightened his cuffs and Tanya did this cool squirming/settling thing in her chair as she shuffled some papers in her hand and prepared to read from the TelePrompTer. The words MISSING CHILD appeared in the pop-up box image between their heads.

“A child disappears in Dorchester,” Gordon said gravely. “Tanya?”

“Thanks, Gordon.” The camera moved in for a close-up. “A four-year-old Dorchester girl’s disappearance has police baffled and neighbors worried. It happened just a few hours ago. Little Amanda McCready vanished from her Sagamore Street home, without, police say”-she leaned forward a hair and her voice dropped an octave-“a trace.”

They cut back to Gordon, who hadn’t been expecting it. His hand froze halfway up his forehead, a lock of his annoying hair spilling over his fingers. “For more on this breaking story, we go live to Gert Broderick. Gert?”

The street was crowded with neighbors and the curious as Gert Broderick stood with microphone in hand and reported the information Gordon and Tanya had just told us. About twenty feet behind Gert, on the other side of a stream of yellow caution tape and uniformed cops, a hysterical Helene was being held by Lionel on her front porch. She was shouting something that was hard to decipher amid the crowd noise, the hum of light generators from the news crews, the gaspy words of Gert’s reportage.

“…and that’s what police seem to know now-precious little.” Gert stared into the camera, trying not to blink.

Gordon Taylor’s voice cut into the live feed. “Gert.”

Gert touched a hand to her left ear. “Yes, Gordon. Gordon?”

“Gert.”

“Yes, Gordon. I’m here.”

“Is that the little girl’s mother on the porch behind you?”

The camera lens zoomed toward the porch, racked focus, and closed tight on Helene and Lionel. Helene’s mouth was open and tears poured down her cheeks and her head made an odd up-and-down, up-and-down motion, as if, like a newborn’s, it had lost the support of the neck muscles.