Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [153]
“Remy.”
His eyes flickered open and the gun fell from his hand into the gravel. He tilted his head toward it, but left his hand on his lap.
“Come on, man. Do something right before you die. You got a lot of blood on your hands.”
“I know,” he slurred. “Kimmie and David. You didn’t even figure me for that one.”
“It was gnawing at the back of my brain the last twenty-four hours,” I said. “You and Poole?”
He gave his head a half shake against the vent. “Not Poole. Pasquale. Poole was never a shooter. That’s where he drew the line. Don’t debase his mem’ry.”
“But Pasquale wasn’t at the quarries that night.”
“He was nearby. Who do you think cranked Rogowski in Cunningham Park?”
“But that still wouldn’t have given Pasquale the time to reach the other side of the quarries and kill Mullen and Gutierrez.”
Broussard shrugged.
“Why didn’t Pasquale just kill Bubba by the way?”
Broussard frowned. “Man, we never killed anyone wasn’t a direct threat to us. Rogowski didn’t know shit, so we let him live. You, too. You think I couldn’t have hit you from the other side of the quarry that night? No, Mullen and Gutierrez were direct threats. So was Wee David, Likanski, and, unfortunately, Kimmie.”
“Let’s not forget Lionel.”
The frown deepened. “I never wanted to hit Lionel. I thought it was a bad play. Someone got scared.”
“Who?”
He gave me a short harsh laugh that left a fine spray of blood on his lips and closed his eyes tight against the pain. “Just remember—Poole wasn’t a shooter. Let the man’s death have dignity.”
He could have been bullshitting me, but I didn’t see the point, really. If Poole hadn’t killed Pharaoh Gutierrez and Chris Mullen, I’d have to refigure some things.
“The doll.” I tapped his hand and he opened one eye. “Amanda’s shirt fragment stuck to the quarry wall?”
“Me.” He smacked his lips, closed his eye. “Me, me, me. All me.”
“You’re not that good. Hell, you’re not that smart.”
He shook his head. “Really?”
“Really,” I said.
He snapped his eyes open, and there was a bright, hard awareness in them. “Move to your left, Kenzie. Let me see the city.”
I moved and he stared out at the skyline, smiled at the lights flickering in the squares, the red pulse of the weather beacons and radio transmitters.
“’S pretty,” he said. “You know something?”
“What?”
“I love children.” He said it so simply, so softly.
His right hand slid into mine and squeezed, and we looked off over the water to the heart of the city and its shimmer, the dark velvet promise that lived in those lights, the hint of glamorous lives, of sleek, well-fed, well-tended existences cushioned behind glass and privilege, behind redbrick and iron and steel, curving staircases, and moonlit views of water, always water, flowing gently around the islands and peninsulas that made up our metropolis, buffeted it against ugliness and pain.
“Wow,” Remy Broussard whispered, and then his hand fell from mine.
34
“…at which point the man later identified as Detective Pasquale responded, ‘We have to do this. We have orders. Do it now.’” Assistant District Attorney Lyn Campbell removed her glasses and pinched the flesh between her eyes. “Is that accurate, Mr. Kenzie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“‘Ms. Campbell’ will do fine.”
“Yes, Ms. Campbell.”
She slid her glasses back up on her nose, looked through the thin ovals at me. “And you took that to mean what exactly?”
“I took that to mean that someone besides Detective Pasquale and Officer Broussard had given the order to assassinate Lionel McCready and possibly the rest of us in the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
She flipped through her notes, which—in the six hours I’d been in Interrogation Room 6A of the BPO’s District 6 station—had grown to take up half the notepad. The sound of her turning sheets of paper made brittle and curled inward by her furious scribbling with a sharp ballpoint reminded me of the late-autumn rustle of dead leaves against curbstone.
Besides myself and ADA Campbell, the room was occupied by two homicide detectives, Janet Harris and Joseph Centauro, neither of whom seemed to like