“Look, I—”
“Where’s the money?” The lighter and more melodious the singsong got, the more threatening Poole seemed.
“I don’t…” Helene ran a hand over her face, and her body sagged against the railing. “I was stoned, okay? We left the motel; two seconds later every cop in New Hampshire is running through the parking lot. Ray snuggled up to me, and we just walked right through them. Amanda was crying, so they must have thought we were just a family who’d been on the road.”
“Amanda was there with you?” Beatrice said. “Helene!”
“What,” Helene said, “I was going to leave her in the car?”
“So you drove away,” Poole said. “You got stoned. And then what?”
“Ray stopped at a friend’s place. We were in there, like, an hour.”
“Where was Amanda?” Beatrice said.
Helene scowled. “The fuck I know, Bea? In the car or in the house with us. One of the two. I told you, I was fucked up.”
“Was the money with you when you left the house?” Poole asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Broussard flipped open his steno pad. “Where was this house?”
“In an alley.”
Broussard closed his eyes for a moment. “Where was it located? The address, Miss McCready.”
“I told you, I was stoned. I—”
“The fucking town then.” Broussard’s teeth were clenched.
“Charlestown,” she said. She cocked her head, thought about it. “Yeah. I’m almost sure. Or Everett.”
“Or Everett,” Angie said. “That narrows it down.”
I said, “Charlestown’s the one with the big monument, Helene.” I smiled my encouragement. “You know the one. Looks like the Washington Monument, except it’s on Bunker Hill.”
“Is he making fun of me?” Helene asked Poole.
“I wouldn’t hazard a guess,” Poole said. “But Mr. Kenzie has a point. If you were in Charlestown, you’d remember the monument, wouldn’t you?”
Another long pause as Helene searched what remained of her brain. I wondered if I should go grab another beer for her, see if it would speed things up.
“Yeah,” she said, very slowly. “We drove over the big hill by the monument on our way out.”
“So the house,” Broussard said, “was on the east side of town.”
“East?” Helene said.
“You were closer to Bunker Hill project, Medford Street or Bunker Hill Avenue, than you were to Main or Warren streets.”
“If you say so.”
Broussard tilted his head, ran the back of his hand slowly across the stubble on his cheek, took a few shallow breaths.
“Miss McCready,” Poole said, “besides the fact that the house was at the end of an alley, do you remember anything else about it? Was it a one-family or two?”
“It was really small.”
“We’ll call it a one-family.” Poole jotted in his notepad. “Color?”
“They were white.”
“Who?”
“Ray’s friends. A woman and a guy. Both white.”
“Excellent,” Poole said. “But the house. What color was that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Let’s go look for Likanski,” Broussard said. “We can go to Pennsylvania. Hell, I’ll drive.”
Poole held up a hand. “Give us another minute here, Detective. Miss McCready, please search your memory. Remember that night. The smells. The music Ray Likanski played on his stereo. Anything that will help put you back in that car. You drove from Nashua to Charlestown. That’s about an hour’s drive, maybe a little less. You got stoned. You pulled over into this alley, and you—”
“We didn’t.”
“What?”
“Pull into the alley. We parked on the street because there was an old broken-down car in the alley. We had to drive around for like twenty minutes till we found a parking space, too. That place sucks for parking.”
Poole nodded. “This broken-down car in the alley, was there anything memorable about it?”
She shook her head. “It was just a rust heap, up on blocks. No wheels or nothing.”
“Hence the blocks,” Poole said. “Nothing else?”
Helene was midway through another shake of her head when she stopped and giggled.
“Care to share your joke with the class?” Poole said.
She looked over at him, still smiling. “What?”
“Why are you laughing, Miss McCready?”
“Garfield.”
“James A.? Our twentieth president?”
“Huh?” Helene’s eyes bulged. “No. The cat.”
We all stared at her.
“The cat!” She held out her hands. “In the comic strip.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“’Member when everyone used to have those Garfields stuck to the back of their windows? Well, this car had one, too. That’s how I knew it had been there, like, forever. I mean, who puts Garfields on their windows anymore?”
“Indeed,” Poole said. “Indeed.”
10
When Winthrop and the original settlers arrived in the New World, they chose to settle on a square mile’s worth of land, most of it hill, that they named Boston, after the town in England they’d left behind. During the one harsh winter Winthrop’s pilgrims spent there, they found the water inexplicably brackish, so they moved across the channel, taking the name Boston with them and leaving what would become Charlestown without a name or purpose for a while.
Since then, Charlestown has held tight to an outpost’s identity. Historically Irish, home to deca-generations of fishermen, merchant marines, and dockworkers, Charlestown is infamous for its code of silence, a resistance to speaking to the police, which has left it with a murder rate that, while low, boasts the highest percentage of unsolved cases in the nation. This adherence to keeping one’s mouth shut even extends to simple directions. Ask a townie how to get to such-and-such street and his eyes will narrow. “The fuck you doing here if you don’t know where you’re going?” might be the polite response, followed by an extended middle finger if he really likes you.
So Charlestown is an easy place to get confused. Signs bearing street names disappear all the time, and the houses are often stacked so close together they conceal small alleys that lead to other homes behind. The streets that climb the hill are apt to dead-end or else force the driver to turn in the opposite direction from where he was headed.