Dennis Lehane: Gone, Baby, Gone

“What was B again?” I smiled.

Angie said, “Lieutenant, as we said, we’re trying hard not to take this case. It’s doubtful we’ll be around long enough to get in your way.”

He looked at her a long time with that hard, open gaze of his. “Then why are you standing on this porch talking to me?”

“So far Beatrice refuses to take no for an answer.”

“And you think that’s somehow going to change?” He smiled softly and shook his head.

“We can hope,” I said.

He nodded, then turned back to the railing. “Long time.”

“What?” Angie said.

His eyes remained on the backyard and the one just beyond it. “For a four-year-old to be missing.” He sighed. “Long time,” he repeated.

“And you have no leads?” Angie asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing I’d bet the house on.”

“Anything you’d bet a second-rate condo on?” she said.

He smiled again and shrugged.

“I take that as a ‘not really,’” Angie said.

He nodded. “Not really.” The dry paint sounded like brittle leaves under his clenched hands. “Tell you how I got into the kid-finding racket. ’Bout twenty years ago, my daughter, Shannon? She disappears. For one day.” He turned to us, held up his index finger. “Not even one day, really. Actually, it was from like four o’clock one afternoon till about eight the next morning, but she was six. And I’ll tell you, you have no clue how long a night can be until your child goes missing in one. The last time Shannon ’s friends had seen her she was heading home on her bicycle, and a couple of them said they saw a car following her real slow.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hand and blew a rush of air out of his mouth at the memory. “We found her the next morning in a drainage ditch near a park. She’d cracked up the bike and broken both ankles, passed out from the pain.”

He noticed the looks on our faces and held up his hand.

“She was fine,” he said. “Two broken ankles hurt like hell and she was one scared kid for a while, but that was the worst trauma her or my wife and me suffered through her whole childhood. That’s good luck. Hell, that’s amazing luck.” He blessed himself quickly. “My point, though? When Shannon was missing and the whole neighborhood and all my cop buddies are looking for her, and me and Tricia are driving or walking everywhere and tearing our hair out, we stopped for a cup of coffee. To go, believe me. But for two minutes, while we’re standing in this Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for our coffee, I look at Tricia and she looks at me and both of us, without saying a word, know that if Shannon is dead, we’re dead, too. Our marriage-over. Our happiness-over. Our lives would be one long road of pain. Nothing else, really. Everything good and hopeful, everything we lived for, really, would die with our daughter.”

“And that’s why you joined Crimes Against Children?” I said.

“That’s why I built Crimes Against Children,” he said. “It’s my baby. I created it. Took me fifteen years, but I did it. CAC exists because I looked at my wife in that doughnut shop and I knew, right then and beyond any doubt, that no one can survive the loss of a child. No one. Not you, not me, not even a loser like Helene McCready.”

“Helene’s a loser?” Angie said.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Know why she went to her friend Dottie’s instead of vice versa?”

We shook our heads.

“The picture tube was going on her TV. The color went in and out, and Helene didn’t like that. So she left her kid behind and went next door.”

“For TV.”

He nodded. “For TV.”

“Wow,” Angie said.

He looked at us steadily for a full minute, then hitched his pants and said, “Two of my best guys, Poole and Broussard, will contact you. They’ll be your liaisons. If you can help, I’m not going to stand in your way.” He rubbed his face with his hands again, shook his head. “Shit, I’m tired.”

“When’s the last time you slept?” Angie said.

“Beyond a catnap?” He chuckled softly. “Few days at least.”

“You must have someone who relieves you,” Angie said.

“Don’t want relief,” he said. “I want this child. And I want her in one piece. And I want her yesterday.”

Helene McCready was watching herself on TV when we entered Lionel’s house with Lionel and Beatrice.

The on-screen Helene wore a light blue dress and matching jacket with the bulb of a white rose pinned to the lapel. Her hair flowed down to her shoulders. Her face carried just a hint of excessive makeup, hastily applied around the eyes perhaps.

The real Helene McCready wore a pink T-shirt with the words BORN TO SHOP on the front and a pair of white sweatpants that had been shorn just above the knees. Her hair, tied in a loose ponytail, looked like it had been through so many dye jobs it had forgotten its original color and was stuck somewhere between platinum and greasy wheat.

Another woman sat on the couch beside the real Helene McCready, about the same age but thicker and paler, dimples of cellulite pocking the white flesh under her upper arms as she raised a cigarette to her lips and leaned forward to concentrate on the TV.

“Look, Dottie, look,” Helene said. “There’s Gregor and Head Sparks.”

“Oh, yeah!” Dottie pointed at the screen as two men walked behind the reporter interviewing Helene. The men waved at the camera.

“Look at ’ em waving.” Helene smiled. “The punks.”

“Smart-asses,” Dottie said.

Helene raised a can of Miller to her lips with the same hand that held her cigarette, and the long ash curled down toward her chin as she drank.

“Helene,” Lionel said.

“One sec, one sec.” Helene waved her beer can at him, her eyes fixed on the screen. “This is the best part.”

Beatrice caught our eyes and rolled her own.

On TV, the reporter asked Helene who she thought could be responsible for the abduction of her child.

“How do you answer a question like that?” the TV Helene said. “I mean, like, who would take my little girl? What’s the point? She never did nothing to nobody. She was just a little girl with a beautiful smile. That’s what she did all the time, she smiled.”

“She did have a beautiful smile,” Dottie said.

“Does,” Beatrice said.

The women on the couch seemed not to have heard her.

“Oh, it was,” Helene said. “It was perfect. Just perfect. Break your heart.” Helene’s voice cracked, and she put down her beer long enough to grab a Kleenex from a box on the coffee table.

Dottie patted her knee and clucked. “There, there,” Dottie said. “There, there.”

“Helene,” Lionel said.

TV coverage of Helene had given way to footage of O.J. playing golf somewhere in Florida.

“I still can’t believe he got away with it,” Helene said.

Dottie turned to her. “I know,” she said, as if she’d been unburdened of a great secret.

“If he wasn’t black,” Helene said, “he’d be in jail now.”

“If he wasn’t black,” Dottie said, “he’d have gotten the chair.”

“If he wasn’t black,” Angie said, “you two wouldn’t care.”

They turned their heads and looked back at us. They seemed mildly surprised by the four people standing behind them, as if we’d suddenly appeared there like Magi.

“What?” Dottie said, her brown eyes darting across our chests.

“Helene,” Lionel said.

Helene looked up into his face, her mascara smudged under puffy eyes. “Yeah?”

“This is Patrick and Angie, the two detectives we talked about.”

Helene gave us a limp wave with her sodden Kleenex. “Hi-ya.”

“Hi,” Angie said.