Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [141]
Oscar’s voice became slightly muffled, and I realized he’d cupped the phone with his hand. His voice was a whisper. “Rachel can’t conceive. It was a big problem for them. They wanted kids.”
“Why not adopt?”
“Who’s gonna let an ex-hooker adopt kids?”
“She was in the life?”
“Yeah, that’s how he met her. He was on Homicide track until then, man, just like me. It killed his career, got him buried in Narco until Doyle bailed him out. But he loves her. She’s a good woman, too. A great woman.”
“But no kid.”
His hand left the phone. “How many times I got to tell you, Kenzie? No friggin’ kid.”
I said thanks and goodbye, hung up, and handed the phone back to Ryerson.
“He doesn’t have a son,” Ryerson said. “Does he?”
“He has a son,” I said. “He definitely has a son.”
“Then where’d he get him?”
It all fell into place then, as I sat in Ryerson’s Suburban and looked out at Kenneally’s Antiques.
“How much you want to bet,” I said, “that whoever Nicholas Broussard’s natural parents are, they probably weren’t real good at the job?”
“Holy shit,” Angie said.
Ryerson leaned over the steering wheel, stared out through the windshield with a blank, stunned look on his lean face. “Holy shit.”
I saw the blond boy riding Rachel Broussard’s hip, the adoration she’d poured on his tiny face as she’d caressed it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Holy shit.”
32
At the end of an April day, after the sun has descended but before night has fallen, the city turns a hushed, unsettled gray. Another day has died, always more quickly than expected. Muted yellow or orange lights appear in window squares and shaft from car grilles, and the coming dark promises a deepening chill. Children have disappeared from the streets to wash up for dinner, to turn on TVs. The supermarkets and liquor stores are half empty and listless. The florists and banks are closed. The honk of horns is sporadic; a storefront grate rattles as it drops. And if you look closely in the faces of pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights, you can see the weight of the morning’s unfulfilled promise in the numb sag of their faces. Then they pass, trudging toward home, whatever its incarnation.
Lionel and Ted Kenneally had arrived back late, close to five, and something broke in Lionel’s face as he saw us approach. When Ryerson flashed his badge and said, “Like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. McCready,” that broken thing in Lionel’s face broke even further.
He nodded several times, more to himself than to us, and said, “There’s a bar up the street. Why don’t we go there? I don’t want to do this at my home.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald was about as small as a bar could get without becoming a shoeshine stand. When we first walked in, a small area opened up on our left with a counter running along the only window and enough space for maybe four tables. Unfortunately they’d stuck a jukebox in there, too, so only two tables fit, and both were empty when the four of us entered. The bar itself could sit seven people, eight tops, and six tables took up the wall across from it. The room opened up a bit again in back, where two darts players tossed their missiles over a pool table wedged so close to the walls that from three of four possible sides, the shooter would have to use a short stick. Or a pencil.
As we sat down at a table in the center of the place, Lionel said, “Hurt your leg, Miss Gennaro?”
Angie said, “It’ll heal,” and fished in her bag for her cigarettes.
Lionel looked at me, and when I looked away, that constant sag in his shoulders deepened. The rocks that normally sat up there had been joined by cinder blocks.
Ryerson flipped a notepad open on the table, uncapped a pen. “I’m Special Agent Neal Ryerson, Mr. McCready. I’m with the Justice Department.”
Lionel said, “Sir?”
Ryerson gave him a quick flick of the eyes. “That’s right, Mr. McCready. Federal government. You have some explaining to do. Wouldn’t you say?”
“About what?” Lionel looked over his shoulder, then around the bar.
“Your niece,” I said. “Look, Lionel, bullshit time is over.”
He glanced to his right,