Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [101]
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.
Bubba turned his head back toward the bar and shouted, “What pussy played this shit?”
“Bubba,” I said.
He held up a finger. “One sec.” He turned back toward the bar. “Who played this song. Huh?”
“Bubba,” the bartender said, “now calm down.”
“I just want to know who played this song.”
Gigi Varon, a thirty-year-old alkie who looked a shriveled forty-five, raised her meek hand from the corner of the bar. “I didn’t know, Mr. Rogowski. I’m sorry. I’ll pull the plug.”
“Oh, Gigi!” Bubba gave her a big wave. “Hi! No, never mind.”
“I will, really.”
“No, no, hon.” Bubba shook his head. “Paulie, give Gigi two drinks on me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rogowski.”
“No problem. Morrissey sucks, though, Gigi. Really. Ask Patrick. Ask anyone.”
“Yeah, Morrissey sucks,” one of the old guys said, and then several other patrons followed suit.
“I put the Amazing Royal Crowns in next,” Gigi said.
I’d turned Bubba on to the Amazing Royal Crowns a few months back, and now they were his favorite band.
Bubba spread his arms wide. “Paulie, make it three drinks.”
We were in Live Bootleg, a tiny tavern on the Southie/ Dorchester line that had no sign out front. The brick exterior was painted black, and the only indication the bar had a name at all was scrawled in red paint on the lower right corner of the wall fronting Dorchester Avenue. Ostensibly owned by Carla Dooley, aka “The Lovely Carlotta,” and her husband, Shakes, Live Bootleg was really Bubba’s bar, and I’d never been in the place when every stool wasn’t filled and the booze wasn’t flowing. It was a good crowd, too; in the three years since Bubba had opened it, there’d never been a fight or a line for the bathroom because some junkie was taking too long to shoot up in the