Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [145]
“So you’ve seen her,” I said.
He nodded. “She’s happy. She really does smile now.” Something caught in his throat, and he swallowed against it. “She doesn’t know I see her. Broussard’s first rule was that her whole past life had to be wiped out. She’s four. She’ll forget, given time. Actually,” he said slowly, “She’s five now. Isn’t she?”
The realization that Amanda had celebrated a birthday he hadn’t witnessed slid softly across his face. He shook his head quickly. “Anyway, I’ve snuck up there, watched her with her new parents, and she looks great. She looks…” He cleared his throat, looked away from us. “She looks loved.”
“What happened the night she disappeared?” Ryerson said.
“I came in from the back of the house. I took her out. I told her it was a game. She liked games. Maybe because Helene’s idea was a trip down to the bar, play with the Pac-Man machine, honey.” He sucked ice from his glass and crushed it between his teeth. “Broussard was parked on the street. I waited in the doorway to the porch, told Amanda to be real, real quiet. The only neighbor who could have seen us was Mrs. Driscoll, across the street. She was sitting on her stoop, had a direct line on the house. She left the stoop for a second, went back in the house for another cup of tea or something, and Broussard gave me an all-clear signal. I carried Amanda to Broussard’s car, and we drove away.”
“And no one saw a thing,” I said.
“None of the neighbors. We found out later, though, that Chris Mullen did. He was parked on the street, staking out the house. He was waiting for Helene to come back so he could find out where she’d hid the money she stole. He recognized Broussard. Cheese Olamon used it to blackmail Broussard into retrieving the missing money. He was also supposed to steal some drugs from evidence lockup, give them to Mullen that night at the quarry.”
“Back to the night Amanda disappeared,” I said.
He took a second cube of ice from the glass with his thick fingers, chewed it. “I told Amanda my friend was going to take her to see some nice people. Told her I’d see her in a few hours. She just nodded. She was used to being dropped off with strangers. I got out a few blocks away and walked home. It was ten-thirty. It took my sister almost twelve hours to notice her daughter was gone. That tell you anything?”
For a while we were so quiet, I could hear the thump of darts hitting cork near the back of the bar.
“When the time was right,” Lionel said, “I figured I’d tell Beatrice, and she’d understand. Not right away. A few years down the road, maybe. I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that through. Beatrice hates Helene, and she loves Amanda, but something like this…See, she believes in the law, all the rules. She’d never have gone along with something like this. But I hoped, maybe, once enough time had passed…” He looked up at the ceiling, gave a small shake of his head. “When she decided to call you two, I got in contact with Broussard and he said try and dissuade her, but not too hard. Let her do it if she has to. He told me the next day that if push came to shove, he had some things on you two. Something about a murdered pimp.”
Ryerson gave me a raised eyebrow and a cold, curious smile.
I shrugged and looked away, and that’s when I saw the guy in the Popeye mask. He came in through the back fire exit, his right arm extended, a .45 automatic pointed at chest level.
His partner brandished a shotgun and also wore a plastic Halloween mask. Casper the Friendly Ghost’s moony white face stared out as he came through the front door and shouted, “Hands on the table! Everyone! Now!”
Popeye herded the two darts players in front of him, and I turned my head in time to see Casper throw the bolt lock on the front door.
“You!” Popeye screamed at me. “You deaf? Hands on the fucking table.”
I put my hands on the table.
The bartender said, “Oh, shit. Come on.”
Casper pulled a string by the window and a heavy black curtain