PART THREE.THE CRUELEST MONTH

24

By early April, Angie was spending most nights with her poster boards, Amanda McCready notes, and the small shrine she’d built to the case in the tiny second bedroom in my apartment, the one I’d previously used to store luggage and boxes I kept meaning to drop off at Goodwill, where small appliances gathered dust while they waited for me to take them to a repair shop.

She’d moved the small TV and a VCR in there and watched the newscasts from October over and over again. In the two weeks since Samuel Pietro had disappeared, she logged at least five hours a night in that room, photographs of Amanda staring out with that unexcitable gaze of hers from the wall above the TV.

I understand obsession in the same general sense most of us do, and I couldn’t see that this was doing Angie too much harm-yet. Over the course of the long winter, I’d come to accept that Amanda McCready was dead, curled into a shelf 175 feet below the waterline of the quarry, flaxen hair floating with the soft swirls of the current. But I hadn’t accepted it with the sort of conviction that allowed me to look derisively on anyone who believed she was still alive.

Angie held firmly to Cheese’s assurance that Amanda lived, that proof of her whereabouts lay somewhere in our notes, somewhere in the minutiae of our investigation and that of the police. She’d convinced Broussard and Poole to loan her copies of their notes, as well as the daily reports and interviews of most of the other members of the CAC task force who’d been assigned to the case. And she was certain, she told me, that sooner or later all that paper and all that video would yield the truth.

The truth, I told her once, was that someone in Cheese’s organization had pulled a double-cross on Mullen and Gutierrez after they’d dumped Amanda over a cliff. And this someone had taken them out and walked away with two hundred thousand dollars.

“Cheese didn’t think so,” she said.

“Broussard was right about that. Cheese was a professional liar.”

She shrugged. “I beg to differ.”

So at night she’d return to autumn and all that had gone wrong, and I would either read, watch an old movie on AMC, or shoot pool with Bubba-which is what I was doing when he said, “I need you to ride shotgun on something down in Germantown with me.”

I’d only had half a beer by this point, so I was pretty sure I’d heard him right.

“You want me to go on a deal with you?”

I stared across the pool table at Bubba as some heathen chose a Smiths song on the jukebox. I hate the Smiths. I’d rather be tied to a chair and forced to listen to a medley of Suzanne Vega and Natalie Merchant songs while performance artists hammered nails through their genitalia in front of me than listen to thirty seconds of Morrissey and the Smiths whine their art-school angst about how they are human and need to be loved. Maybe I’m a cynic, but if you want to be loved, stop whining about it and you just might get laid, which could be a promising first step.

Bubba turned his head back toward the bar and shouted, “What pussy played this shit?”

“Bubba,” I said.

He held up a finger. “One sec.” He turned back toward the bar. “Who played this song. Huh?”

“Bubba,” the bartender said, “now calm down.”

“I just want to know who played this song.”

Gigi Varon, a thirty-year-old alkie who looked a shriveled forty-five, raised her meek hand from the corner of the bar. “I didn’t know, Mr. Rogowski. I’m sorry. I’ll pull the plug.”

“Oh, Gigi!” Bubba gave her a big wave. “Hi! No, never mind.”

“I will, really.”

“No, no, hon.” Bubba shook his head. “Paulie, give Gigi two drinks on me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rogowski.”

“No problem. Morrissey sucks, though, Gigi. Really. Ask Patrick. Ask anyone.”

“Yeah, Morrissey sucks,” one of the old guys said, and then several other patrons followed suit.

“I put the Amazing Royal Crowns in next,” Gigi said.

I’d turned Bubba on to the Amazing Royal Crowns a few months back, and now they were his favorite band.

Bubba spread his arms wide. “Paulie, make it three drinks.”

We were in Live Bootleg, a tiny tavern on the Southie/ Dorchester line that had no sign out front. The brick exterior was painted black, and the only indication the bar had a name at all was scrawled in red paint on the lower right corner of the wall fronting Dorchester Avenue. Ostensibly owned by Carla Dooley, aka “The Lovely Carlotta,” and her husband, Shakes, Live Bootleg was really Bubba’s bar, and I’d never been in the place when every stool wasn’t filled and the booze wasn’t flowing. It was a good crowd, too; in the three years since Bubba had opened it, there’d never been a fight or a line for the bathroom because some junkie was taking too long to shoot up in the stall. Of course, everyone who entered knew who the real owner was and how he’d feel if anyone ever gave the police reason to knock on his door, so for all its dark interior and shady rep, Live Bootleg was about as dangerous as the Wednesday night bingo game at Saint Bart’s. Had better music, too, most times.

“I don’t see why you’re giving Gigi a small coronary,” I said. “You own the jukebox. You loaded the Smiths CD.”

“I didn’t load no friggin’ Smiths CD,” Bubba said. “It’s one of those Best of the Eighties compilations. I had to live with a Smiths song ’cause it’s got ‘Come on, Eileen’ on it and a whole bunch of other good shit.”

“Katrina and the Waves?” I said. “Bananarama? Real cools bands like that?”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s got Nena, so shut up.”

“‘Ninety-nine Luftballoons,’” I said. “Well, all right.” I leaned into the table, pocketed the seven. “Now what’s this about me accompanying you on a deal?”

“I need backup. Nelson’s out of town and the Twoomeys are doing two-to-six.”

“Million other guys will help you for a C-note.” I dropped the six, but it kissed Bubba’s ten on the way in, and I stepped back from the table.

“Well, I got two reasons.” He leaned over the table and banged the cue ball off the nine, watched it bounce around the table, and then shut his eyes tight as the cue dropped in the side pocket. For someone who plays so much pool, Bubba really sucks.

I put the cue back on the table, lined up for the four in the side. “Reason number one?”

“I trust you and you owe me.”

“That’s two reasons.”

“It’s one. Shut up and shoot.”

I dropped the four, and the cue rolled slowly into a sweet lie across from the two ball.

“Reason number two is,” Bubba said, and chalked his stick with great squeaking turns, “I want you to get a look at these people I’m selling to.”

I pocketed the two but buried the cue behind one of Bubba’s balls. “Why?”

“Trust me. You’ll be interested.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“I’m not sure if they are who I think they are, so you gotta join me, see for yourself.”

“When?”

“As soon as I win this game.”

“How dangerous?” I said.

“No more dangerous than normal.”

“Ah,” I said. “Very dangerous then.”

“Don’t be such a puss. Shoot the ball.”

Germantown is set hard against the harbor that separates Quincy from Weymouth. Given its name back in the mid-1700s when a glass manufacturer imported indentured laborers from Germany and laid out the town lots with ample streets and wide squares in the German tradition, the company failed and the Germans were left to fend for themselves when it became apparent that the cost of giving them their freedom would be less expensive than sending them someplace else.

A long line of failure followed, seemed to haunt the tiny seaport and the generations descended from the original indentured servants. Pottery, chocolate, stockings, whale-oil products, and medicinal salt and saltpeter industries all cropped up and fell by the wayside over the next two centuries. For a while the cod-and whale-fishing industries enjoyed some popularity, but they, too, picked up and moved north to Gloucester or farther south toward Cape Cod in search of better catches and better waters.