Brighton (12 page)

BOBBY SAT
in his room and watched Barney Fife watch himself in a mirror. He was teaching Opie how to use a slingshot and wound up breaking a pane of glass in a bookcase for his trouble. Barney got all kinds of agitated until Andy stepped in and made it all better. Then Andy gave Opie a lecture on the dangers of the slingshot and sent the boy on his way. Bobby knew it was only a TV show, but Mayberry offered comfort. And there were many days, even more nights, when Bobby needed comfort. So he lost himself in the black-and-white images tumbling across the screen and barely stirred when the phone rang. Eventually, his eyes wandered to a clock he kept by the bed. Seven
A.M.
Damn, where did the time go? Bobby picked up the remote to turn off the set and paused. Opie had accidentally killed a bird with the slingshot and held the body in his hands. Six years old, trembling, crying, willing the bird to fly and tossing it up in the air, as if that could undo what had been done. No such luck, Op.

Bobby snapped off the set and lay back on his bed. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment above Joey’s. The apartment was a dump, not to mention a firetrap, but it was convenient. And part of the routine that had become his prison. He got up and pulled
a chair to the window for cigarettes. Bobby smoked and stared at an old Red Sox schedule he’d taped to the wall. Then he looked out the window. The shower had been cold and brief, washing the streets clean, leaving them slick and bright. The traffic up and down Market was light so it wasn’t hard to miss the beat-up Volvo when it pulled in across the street. Bobby edged his chair back a foot or so and watched from the shadows as Kevin Pearce got out and took a look around. He was taller than Bobby pictured, a man now, but Bobby could still see the kid in him. The way he held his head as he glanced up and down the block, the hesitation in his step as he walked over to Johnny D’s produce stand. The two of them stood in front of a display of bananas and talked. Bobby knew Johnny D was studying Kevin, the long hair and rumpled coat, probably trying to place him and figuring out how much to tell him. Finally, the produce man pointed back toward Joey’s. Kevin shook his hand and headed that way. The first rays of sun slanted between the buildings and licked at his feet as he walked. Bobby flicked his cigarette out the window and took another ten seconds to study his childhood pal. He was like a letter that had been posted in the mail years ago and been circling through time ever since. The letter was gonna show up in Bobby’s mailbox someday. And today was that day.

“Coffee?” Bobby pointed to a Mr. Coffee plugged into the wall. Kevin shook his head. He was standing in the doorway, unsure whether he was coming or going.

“Sit down.” Bobby took a seat at the table and pushed forward a chair with his foot. Kevin sat down and looked around.

“I know. Forty-four years old and I live in a dump.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. It’s cheap. And I don’t need much. Just a place to shower, sleep, hang my clothes.” Bobby was wearing black Nike sweatpants with white trim and a plain gray T-shirt. He nodded at the closet and a half-dozen collared shirts, neatly pressed and hanging in a row. “My life’s simple. And quiet.”

“What do you do?”

“You know about the betting?”

Kevin nodded.

“Fingers died and there was no one else but me.” Bobby spread his hands. “So I take the action and keep people happy.”

“You like it?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you walk away from.”

“I saw Finn down at the park. He told me you also work construction.”

“I hang Sheetrock six, eight hours a day. Then I come home, fix up some dinner, and go to bed. Twice a week, I have a couple of beers downstairs. And I go to mass most days.”

“Mass?”

“I like Jesus. I like his life. So I go.”

Kevin’s eyes ranged across the room to a single shelf of books. “You read a lot?”

“Depends.”

Kevin walked over and ran his fingers across a Bible stacked beside a Quran. Propped up at the end of the shelf was an old vinyl album from Johann Sebastian Bach. Kevin held it up.

“Where’s the turntable?”

“That’s Bach’s mass in B-minor. Most perfect music ever composed.”

Kevin put the album back and pulled out a paperback copy of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.

“He’s good,” Bobby said. “But the macho stuff doesn’t really work without the rest of it. Empathy, compassion, suffering. Your grandmother taught you that.”

Kevin walked back to the table and sat down. “Are you pissed I came back?”

“I told you to stay away.”

“And I did. For twenty-five years.” He spoke with a quiet conviction, but Bobby saw through it.

“You’ve been in and out of Brighton.”

“Only when I had to. And not for very long.”

“A lot’s changed. Everyone’ll tell you that, first fucking thing.”

“Sounds like you don’t believe it.”

“I do and I don’t. The people I see, people who grew up here, people who stayed, they know what they know and can’t imagine nothing different. Still walk around smug as shit, wanting to kick the piss out of anyone who tries to tell ’em otherwise. They’ll hate you, by the way. Figure you came back just to rub their faces in it. You sure you don’t want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Bobby poured himself a cup, fixed it up with milk and sugar, and brought it back to the table.

“What about the rest of them?” Kevin said. “The ones who didn’t grow up here?”

“What about ’em?”

“What are they like?”

“Who gives a fuck? You keep in touch with your sisters?”

“Colleen, here and there. Bridget, not so much.”

“Haven’t been back to Champney?”

“You know I haven’t.”

Bobby took a precious sip from his coffee and rubbed his lips together. “Finn told me about the Pulitzer. Un-fucking-believable. Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Actually, it was a story about a Brighton guy. James Harper. He was convicted of killing a woman named Rosie Tallent.”

Bobby got up again and pulled out a trunk from under the bed. He dug around until he found a manila envelope and tossed it on the table. It was stuffed with clippings from the
Globe
.

“Second time in as many days that I’ve seen a collection of my stuff,” Kevin said.

“I read everything you ever wrote on Tallent. I’m proud of you, Kev. Your grandmother would be busting . . . when she wasn’t telling everyone ‘I told you so.’ Doesn’t mean you should have come back, though. You shouldn’t have.”

“Why?”

“Same reason you stayed away in the first place. Out there you’ve got your future. Something special.”

“And back here I’ve got a past?”

“Eat you whole, brother. Bones and all.”

Bobby laid down the thirty-eight with the gray tape on the grip. The silver twenty-two sat beside it. Kevin took a seat on the bed and stared at the guns as Bobby filled up a trash bag with clothes. They were in his room above the cab office. Less than a mile away, Curtis Jordan’s body was cooling on the floor of his apartment. Bobby threw a pair of torn-up jeans in the bag. The smell of cut grass and turned earth blew through an open window.

“I can get my own clothes,” Kevin said.

Bobby shook his head. “Just wear mine. Most of this stuff is too small for me anyway. You got any blood on your shoes?”

Kevin stuck up his feet, shod in a pair of black Cons.

“Take ’em off.” Bobby found a pair of no-name, beat-up sneaks in a closet and tossed them at Kevin. Outside, a car engine coughed, then settled into a throaty rumble.

“Where am I going?” Kevin said.

“New York. You’re gonna stay with your aunt for a while.”

“How am I gonna get there?”

“Shuks is downstairs. He’s gonna drive you.”

“Why?”

“Cuz that’s how it is. You gotta go. And you gotta go now.”

“What about the wake?”

Bobby sat down on the bed. Kevin’s pupils were blown wide open. Quiet fear vibrated between them like a tuning fork. “Not gonna happen, buddy. I’m sorry.”

“At least I got to see her in the basement.”

“You never should have been involved, Kev.”

“I had a gun, too.”

“You weren’t gonna pull the trigger.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But you do. And that’s important. Did anyone see you in the building?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Kevin nodded.

“Let me take a look at that shirt.”

Kevin pulled off his shirt. Bobby checked it for blood and threw it in the closet.

“Put on one of mine.”

Kevin shrugged on a long-sleeve polo and rolled up the sleeves so it fit. Bobby picked up the thirty-eight in one hand and the twenty-two in the other. He stashed the guns in a dresser drawer, then tied up the bag of clothes in a knot.

“When will I be back?” Kevin said.

“Two weeks. A month, tops.”

The kid was never coming back. And would never leave if he caught even a whiff of that simple fact. Bobby shoved the bag of clothes in his chest. “Come on. Shuks is waiting.”

“I’m gonna miss you, Bobby.”

“It’s just for a month. Cool?”

“Cool.”

“Good. Now, let’s get moving.”

“I ran like a coward.” Kevin flicked at the news clippings with a finger.

“You were a kid.”

“I ran like a coward. And I let you take the weight.”

“That’s your ego talking.”

“I know how I feel.”

“So what’s next? You gonna walk over to Station Fourteen and give them a statement?”

Kevin shook his head.

“Then what?”

“I guess I just needed to come back. To see you. Say what I said.”

“Consider it done. Now go.”

They sat in silence. Bobby sipped at his coffee and stared at a watery patch of sunlight on the wall.

“I was thinking about stopping by Champney,” Kevin said.

“Did Colleen tell you Bridget and I had a thing?”

“I heard it wasn’t a big deal.”

“It wasn’t. Bridget helps with Fingers’s operation. Handles all the bookkeeping.”

“That’s how she pays the bills?”

“She earns it, Kevin. Girl’s organized as shit. And she likes money.” Bobby took the clippings back to the trunk and packed them away.

“Can I ask you something?” Kevin said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve written hundreds of pieces for the
Globe
. Why pick out Tallent to save?”

“How do you know I didn’t save everything you’ve written?”

“Did you?”

“No. Tallent was your best stuff. And she was from Brighton. Hell, it won the Pulitzer so I must know something.” Bobby pushed the trunk back under the bed and sat down at the table, leaning forward with his shoulders and chest, fingertips touching, voice hushed as if the entire world and everything in it depended on whatever came next. “It’s never gonna be like you want. Never in a million fucking years. You try to fix things from back then, you try to meddle, even a little bit, and poof.” Bobby exploded the world with his hands. “It all comes apart. People start getting hurt. You know what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“It was good to see you, Kev. Proud as hell. Don’t ever forget that.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. Now go, enjoy your life. And stay the fuck out of Brighton.”

Bobby showed him to the door and watched from the high window as he crossed the street. The kid was a grown man now, with grown-man habits, like lying through his teeth. But that was all right. He’d returned as Bobby knew he would. Knew he must. What would come to pass Bobby didn’t know, just that it had always been and would happen now and there was nothing either of them could have done that would have changed a word of it. And that gave Bobby some peace. He freshened his coffee and sat at a small desk he’d set up in a corner of the room. From a side drawer he took out a photo, curled at the corners and faded with age. Sixteen kids standing in front of a school bus, a wooden roller coaster behind them, dropping from the sky like an enormous bird of prey. PARAGON PARK, LABOR DAY, 1972 was scrawled in pen on the back. Bobby was fourteen, third from the left in the front row. He sipped at his coffee and rubbed the photo with his thumb before putting it back in the drawer and rinsing out his cup in the sink. Then he turned on the shower and knocked out two-hundred push-ups while the water got hot.

LISA MIGNOT
hit the pause button and waited for her boss to speak.

“They’re talking about Curtis Jordan,” Frank DeMateo said.

“We don’t know that.”

“Play it again.”

Lisa hit rewind. She was sitting in a delivery van a block from Bobby Scales’s apartment. Her boss was buried in the basement of the Suffolk County D.A.’s office. They’d gotten the order for the wiretap yesterday afternoon, just before Lisa met Kevin for drinks. The judge had bitched and moaned about the proposed scope of the tap. Then they told him the dead girl was a cop and he signed whatever the fuck they wanted. One of the black bag guys, a kid named Danny Mendez, planted the bug in Scales’s apartment while he was at mass yesterday afternoon. Now Danny sat in the driver’s seat and monitored the wire while Lisa and Frank ran through the conversation between Scales and Kevin for a second time. The recording had barely finished before Lisa jumped in.

“The court order’s specific. We’re listening for anything that might pertain to Sandra Patterson’s death.”

“And if we happen upon anything else, we’re free to go after it. In this case, it might very well lead us back to Patterson. In fact, that’s the whole point.”

There was a pause on the line. Lisa needed a cigarette. And some space. Frank DeMateo was giving her neither.

“Kevin’s not a criminal, Frank. And he sure as hell isn’t a killer.”

“I think you’re right.”

“But we need to look at it?”

“We need to look at Scales. And Kevin’s our way in. You knew this was a possibility.”

“Fuck.”

“You want out?”

“I want you to trust me.”

“What does that mean?”

“If Scales is our guy, he goes down.”

“And your boyfriend?”

“He just won the Pulitzer Prize. On the Rosie Tallent murder.”

“He was involved in the Jordan thing, Lisa. Maybe nothing criminal, but he was involved.”

The possibility had always been there. She’d ignored it best she could even as she agreed to use Kevin as a stalking horse. But it had always been there. He could lead her to Scales, yes, but Kevin could also wind up being implicated. And there was very little she could do to protect him. “Let me see it through.”

The district attorney for Suffolk County grunted. Lisa couldn’t tell if it was a good grunt or a bad grunt. She decided to assume the former. “When do you tell everyone Sandra was a cop?”

“Press conference, probably later on today. Tomorrow at the latest. I’d love to announce an arrest at the same time.”

“Be nice if it was the right guy, Frank. What about the staties?”

“What do you think? Crawling the fucking walls.”

“Do they know about the wire?”

“I told them timing was critical, and we already had the people in place. They’re working forensics with the city’s homicide guys.”

“Does anyone know who we’re looking at?”

“Not yet, but we’re gonna meet after the presser. At that point, all bets are off.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just get me something on Scales. I’ll handle the rest.”

DeMateo cut the line. Lisa flipped her phone shut. Danny pulled off his headphones and slid closer.

“He hasn’t said a word. I’m guessing he’s still in the shower.”

“Once he leaves, I’m gonna head out. You sit on the wire in case he comes home during the day. I’ll be back around four. Then you can take off.”

“What did the boss say?”

“Usual bullshit. Sounds like we might get big footed once they go public.”

“Can they do that?”

“Typically, no. But this isn’t typical, so maybe. It’s nothing you have to worry about. We have the wire today and tonight for sure. Let’s see what we get.”

“You think Scales is the guy?”

“He worked with Patterson at Habitat. And he keeps clippings from Rosie Tallent’s murder under his bed.”

“Is that it?”

“You sound like the judge. That’s all I’m gonna talk about.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“One more.”

“This other guy on the tape, Kevin. Is he your boyfriend?”

“Who told you that?”

“Forget it. It’s none of my business, anyway.”

“We live together.”

Danny lifted an eyebrow. “Does he know he’s being listened to?”

Lisa nodded at the phones in his lap. “Get back on the wire.”

Danny slipped on his headphones. Lisa knew what he was thinking. She’d pinned a bull’s-eye on her boyfriend. Now, they’d all see where it led.