Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

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, toward the bar, as if someone there might be waiting to help him out.

“Mr. McCready,” Ryerson said, “we can spend half an hour playing No-I-Didn’t/Yes-You-Did, but that would be a waste of everyone’s time. We know you were involved in your niece’s disappearance and that you were working with Remy Broussard. He’s going to take a hard fall, by the way, hard as hard gets. You? I’m offering you a chance to clear the air, maybe get some leniency down the road.” He tapped the pen on the table to the cadence of a ticking clock. “But if you bullshit me, I’ll walk out of here and we’ll do it the rough way. And you’ll drop into prison for so long your grandkids will have driving licenses by the time you get out.”

The waitress approached and took our order of two Cokes, a mineral water for Ryerson, and a double scotch for Lionel.

While we waited for her return, no one spoke. Ryerson continued to use his pen like a metronome, tapping it steadily against the edge of the table, his level, dispassionate gaze locked on Lionel.

Lionel didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the coaster in front of him, but I don’t think he saw it; he was looking much deeper, much farther away than a table or this bar, his lips and chin picking up a sheen of sweat. I had the sense that what he saw at the end of his long inward gaze was the shoddy finale of his own unraveling, the waste of his life. He saw prison. He saw divorce papers delivered to his cell and letters to his son returned unopened. He saw decades stretching into decades in which he was alone with his shame, or his guilt, or merely the folly of a man who’d done a dumb thing society had stripped naked under klieg lights, exposed for public consumption. His picture would be in the paper, his name associated with kidnapping, his life the fodder for talk shows and tabloids and sneering jokes remembered long after the comics who’d told them were forgotten.

The waitress brought our drinks, and Lionel said, “Eleven years ago, I was in a bar downtown with some friends. A bachelor party came in. They were all real drunk. One of them was looking for a fight. He picked me. I hit him. Once. But he cracked his skull on the floor. Thing is, I didn’t hit him with my fist. I had a pool stick in my hand.”

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Actually, it was worse than that. The guy had been shoving me, and I’d said—I don’t remember saying it, but I guess I did—I’d said, ‘Back off or I’ll kill you.’”

“Attempted murder,” I said.

Another nod. “I go to trial. And it’s my friends’ words against this guy’s friends’ words. And I know I’m going to jail, because the guy I hit, he was a college student, and after I hit him, he claims he can’t study anymore, can’t concentrate. He’s got doctors claiming brain damage. I can tell by the way the judge looks at me that I’m done. But a guy who was in the bar that night, a stranger to both parties, testifies that it was the guy I hit who said he was going to kill me, and that he’d thrown the first punch, et cetera. I walk, because the stranger was a cop.”

“Broussard.”

He gave me a bitter smile and sipped his scotch. “Yeah. Broussard. And you know what? He lied up there on the stand. I might not be able to remember everything the guy I hit said, but I know for sure I hit him first. Don’t know why, really. He was bugging me, in my face, and I got angry.” He shrugged. “I was different then.”

“So Broussard lied and you walked, and you felt you owed him.”

He lifted his scotch glass, changed his mind, and set it back on the coaster. “I guess. He never brought it up, and we became friends over the years. We’d run into each other, he’d give me a call every now and then. It was only looking back that I realized he was keeping tabs on me. He’s like that. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good guy, but he’s always watching people, studying them, seeing if someday they’ll be useful to him.”

“Lotta cops like that,” Ryerson said, and drank some mineral water.

“You?”

Ryerson gave it some thought. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

Lionel took another sip of scotch, wiped his lips with the cocktail napkin. “Last July, my sister and Dottie took Amanda to the beach. It was a really hot day, no clouds, and Helene and Dottie meet some guys who, I dunno, had a bag of pot or whatever.” He looked away from us, took a long pull on the scotch, and his face and voice were haunted when he spoke again. “Amanda fell asleep on the beach, and they…they left her there, alone and unwatched, for hours. She roasted, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. She suffered deep burns to her back and legs, one stage less than third degree. One side of her face was so swollen it looked like she’d been attacked by bees. My fucking slut whore junkie douche-bag piece-of-shit waste of a sister allowed her daughter’s flesh to burn. They brought her home, and Helene calls me because Amanda, and I quote, ‘Is being a bitch.’ She wouldn’t stop crying. She was keeping Helene up. I go over there and my niece, this tiny four-year-old baby, is burned. She’s in pain. She’s screaming, it’s so bad. And you know what my sister had done for her?”