Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

“Thank you.”

I turned and looked down the bar, saw Helene sitting in the corner, surrounded by stools the bartender had already propped up on the mahogany around her. I’d thought for some reason that she’d left.

Or maybe I’d just hoped she had.

“Thank you,” she said again, very softly, “for trying.”

I stood there on the rubber tile and was aware that I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Or my arms. Or any of my limbs, for that matter. My entire body felt awkward and clumsy.

Helene kept her eyes on her drink, her unwashed hair falling in her face, tiny among all those overturned stools, the dim lights that had fallen on the bar at closing time.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure I could speak. I wanted to go to her and hold her and apologize for not saving her daughter, for not finding Amanda, for failing, for everything. I wanted to weep.

Instead, I turned and headed for the door.

“Mr. Kenzie.”

I stopped, my back to her.

“I’d do it all differently,” she said, “if I could. I’d…I’d never let her out of my sight.”

I don’t know if I nodded or not, gave any indication that I’d heard her. I know that I didn’t look back. I got the hell out of there.

The next morning, I woke before Angie and brewed coffee in the kitchen, tried to shake Helene McCready from my head, those horrible words of hers:

“Thank you.”

I went downstairs for the paper, tucked it under my arm, and came back up. I made my cup of coffee and took it into the dining room with me as I opened the paper and discovered that another child had disappeared.

His name was Samuel Pietro, and he was eight.

He’d last been seen leaving his friends in a Weymouth playground and walking back toward home Saturday afternoon. It was now Monday morning. His mother hadn’t reported him missing until yesterday.

He was a handsome kid with large dark eyes that reminded me of Angie’s, and a friendly, crooked smile in the photo they’d cropped from his third-grade class picture. He looked hopeful. He looked young. He looked confident.

I considered hiding the paper from Angie. Ever since Allegheny, when we’d left that alley and all the steam had run out of us, all the determination, she’d become even more deeply obsessed with Amanda McCready. But it wasn’t an obsession that found an outlet in action, since there was very little action to take. Instead, Angie pored over all our case notes, drew Time Line and Major Figures charts on poster board, and talked for hours with Broussard or Poole, always rehashing, always circling the same ground.

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.

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.