Authors: Mary Kay Andrews
On the floor of the car was a stack of plastic fast food cups, a shoe box full of crayons, and a naked black Barbie doll.
I got in. Tanya climbed up into the driver’s side and knelt. She grasped the steering wheel and began spinning it to and fro, making happy little motor noises in the back of her throat.
“Are we going on a trip?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Where shall we go?” I asked.
Her dark eyes sparkled. “We goin’ to Disney World. See Mickey Mouse and the Little Mermaid. And we gonna see Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and have some ice cream.”
“Let’s go!” I said.
She made more motor noises, and we steered the car down the imaginary streets of Disney World, with Tanya pointing out all the hot spots, which seemed to include McDonald’s, Burger King, and the ice cream store.
“You wanna see a movie now?” she asked, finally tiring of the game.
“Sure,” I said. “Is it a good movie?”
“I don’ know,” she admitted. “It’s Deecie’s movie. That’s the secret. But Deecie’s dead. And my mama say she’ll whip my behind if I don’t quit playing in my clubhouse.”
She clambered over the backseat of the car, reached under the seat, and brought out a black videotape cassette, which she handed to me. “Can we go watch Deecie’s movie now?”
We walked hand in hand back to the front of the apartment building, where we were met by Austine Rudolph, the older woman who’d talked to me about Deecie the first time I’d gone to Memorial Oaks.
“Tanya,” she scolded. “Where’d you get to, girl? I was worried to death ‘bout you.”
Tanya looked down at her shoe. “I just showed the lady my clubhouse. Deecie dead. She can’t go there no more.”
“I’m sorry we worried you,” I told Mrs. Rudolph. “She just wanted me to see her secret place. That white Toyota out back. Was that Deecie’s?”
“Faheem’s daddy,” Mrs. Rudolph said. “That was his car. He left it here when it quit running. Left Deecie and Faheem too. Good riddance.”
Mrs. Rudolph took Tanya’s hand. “Just don’t be going off with strangers no more, you hear me? Bad things happening around here. We don’t want nothing bad happening to you.”
When I got home, the house was empty. I got a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator and went into the den, where I popped the videotape into the VCR.
The film quality was about what you’d expect: lousy, mostly out of focus, with grainy, ghostly images flitting in and out of what was vaguely recognizable as the Budget Bottle Shop.
A time counter at the bottom of the screen started at 11:00 hours. I fast forwarded until the time was showing 23:00. The video’s plot wasn’t much better than the quality.
There is the back of Deecie’s head. Her neck is long and slender. For a moment, I thought about that neck, necklaced in blood. Then I blinked and forced the image away. Customers come in. They browse, select their bottles and cans, pay, and leave. Business is steady. Why not, it’s a drinking man’s holiday. St. Patrick’s Day. When the counter shows 11:45, Bucky walks in the door. His tie is loosened, he’s left the jacket in the car. He looks around, waves at Deecie. She waves back. Not a care in the world.
Bucky goes directly to the glass-doored beer cooler. He opens the door, stands there, looking. He closes the door, walks up to the counter, talks briefly to Deecie. They seem to be sharing a joke. The last joke. Now Deecie ducks down and when she stands up, she’s holding the baby. Bucky gives Faheem a little chuck under the chin. Cute kid, he seems to be saying. More conversation. Now Bucky goes to the door leading to the stockroom, opens it and walks in.
I watched the time counter carefully. Three minutes passed. At 11:49, Bucky throws open the door of the stockroom and strides quickly toward the door, a six-pack of beer in his right hand. But there’s somebody else right behind him, coming out of the stockroom. It’s a man. He walks rapidly toward Bucky, his face turned away from the camera. When he finally comes
into the camera range, I can see that he wears a dark stocking mask and holds a small pistol in his outstretched hand. Bucky turns, drops the six-pack of beer, and reaches for the mask. He rips it halfway off, and I can see the expression of fear and shock on his face. The gunman pushes Bucky’s hand away, points the pistol at Bucky’s skull, and fires. Bucky crumples to the ground. The gunman stands still, looking down at him, hesitates, then stands over Bucky and fires another time, directly into Bucky’s head. He stands up straight, looks directly at the camera, pulls the mask down, and approaches the counter. Deecie’s back is still turned to the camera, but I can see she is holding the baby. The gunman stands in front of her, the pistol pointed at her chest. He hesitates, looks toward the stockroom door. Another figure emerges from the stockroom, shouting, pointing at Deecie. He wears a baseball cap with a bill that shades his face, but the build is familiar. He’s wearing a dark blazer, a twin to the one Bucky wore earlier in the evening. He’s got a potbelly, walrus mustache. The gunman drops the pistol, turns, and runs toward the stockroom. Both men disappear. Now only Deecie is visible. Deecie, seen crawling on the floor. Now standing, she walks over, looks down at Bucky’s unmoving body. Waits a moment, then walks toward the stockroom. Two minutes later, she emerges, runs to the front door of the store and comes back. The tape abruptly turns to black.
I stop the film, rewind it, and watch it, twice more. The film quality is atrocious, but I can see enough. In slow motion, I can see Sean Ragan’s frightened face as Bucky rips the mask away. The other man’s face is not visible, but the figure is one I’ve seen before. Despite the middle-aged paunch, he stands erect, the way the nuns taught him to stand all those years in parochial school. He would have been their favorite altar boy, clever, nice manners. Smart. How proud the nuns were, when they heard he’d become a police officer, later a much-decorated detective. The nuns never would have recognized their Johnny Boylan now.
I
t was a day of blinking lights. First the VCR, then the answering machine. Two calls from clients who wanted to discuss scheduling a spring cleaning date, and a message from C. W.
“Callahan!” His usually laid-back voice had a new tone of urgency. “Uh, you could have been right about Lisa Dugan,” he said. “Part right, anyway. I checked the call-out sheet for the night Bucky was shot. She was where she was supposed to be. But there’s something funny about the sheets for the night Sean Ragan was killed. She was supposed to be off that night, but instead she showed up at the scene and helped canvass the area for suspects. Call me.”
Dugan. What was it about that woman that made me all twitchy? I knew for certain now that she didn’t have anything to do with Bucky’s shooting. Still, I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook. Not yet.
There also was a message from a voice identifying himself as Agent Halstead with the FBI, urgently requesting a meeting.
Agent Halstead wasn’t in. I left a voice mail. I tried calling Lloyd Mackey. His secretary said he’d be gone all afternoon, but she graciously allowed me to leave a voice mail for him,
too. I was starting to get lonely for the sound of another real live human being.
In the kitchen, I started to make myself a sandwich, till I glanced at the clock. Noon already. Sean Ragan’s funeral was scheduled for one o’clock at Sacred Heart Church downtown. Damn. Wedged into the downtown hotel district, Sacred Heart was a beautiful old cathedral, with almost no parking. No question that I would go to the funeral. Certainly not for Sean Ragan, the murdering bastard. Not even for poor old Corky Hanlon, who’d probably be denied a proper Catholic burial of his own. I would go for Bucky.
I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing a black turtleneck tunic and black leggings. No time to change now. At least the color was appropriate.
Traffic in Midtown was heavy for a weekday. And as soon as I turned onto Peachtree Street I knew why. I was in trouble. A cop stood in the intersection ahead, directing traffic away from the church. I turned down a side street and found another cop directing traffic at the next intersection.
When it came time to turn, the cop motioned for me to turn right. I rolled my window down and stuck my head out the window. “I’m trying to get to Sean Ragan’s funeral,” I called. “Where’s the best place to park?”
“Macon,” he shouted back. Then he waved for me to move forward. I gave him a grateful nod and ignored the resentful honks from the line of cars in back of me.
Both sides of the streets leading to the cathedral were lined with police cruisers, parked nose to nose, with barely enough room for one car to creep through what was left of the center lane. I made it up one block and could see it was no use to try going forward. The streets ahead were a solid wall of more cruisers. I turned right onto International Boulevard and saw four television camera vans with their extended satellite antennas parked on the sidewalk that ran alongside the Marriott Marquis. I pulled up behind a blue van from the local ABC affiliate, found a piece of notebook paper, and scrawled on it. “NBC NIGHTLY NEWS PRODUCER. NO TOW!”
I said a little prayer to the god of parking spaces, tucked the
note under the windshield, locked the van, and set out for Sacred Heart on foot.
The streets were packed. I’d never seen so many cops in one place in all my life.
They were all in dress uniforms, dark blues, dark greens, blacks, browns, and grays. Most had black armbands fastened to their sleeves, and the black slash covering their badges. Twice I had to move off the sidewalk and into the street for a line of cops walking their K-9 unit dogs. They were big animals, German shepherds and Rottweilers, straining at the ends of their leashes. I looked down at the dog tags dangling from their collars; they were replicas of their handler’s badges. Those too wore the black slash.
At the triangular point where Peachtree and Spring came together in front of the old red-brick church, the streets had been cleared of traffic, but the sidewalks were packed five deep with mourners.
Just as I glanced down at my watch, church bells began to toll. The sound came from up the street, not from Sacred Heart, but from the other big old downtown churches: St. Luke’s Episcopal, Peachtree United Methodist, North Avenue Presbyterian, and the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. So many chimes, each in a different key.
I struggled to work my way toward the church doors, but as I got closer, I saw it was useless. A uniformed honor guard of Atlanta police officers stood at attention on both sides of the massive oak doors, forming a solid wall of blue reaching all the way to the curb in front of Sacred Heart.
As soon as the bells finished tolling, the motorcade began arriving.
The motorcycle units came first. Row after row of gleaming police Harley-Davidsons, their big engines throbbing as they slowly rolled down Peachtree. I quit counting after the first fifty hawgs rumbled by. Behind them I could see waves of uniformed patrolmen marching on foot. After the noise of the Harleys, the street was eerily quiet except for the steady measured beat of three hundred pairs of black mirror-polished Florsheims meeting the pavement in unison.
I heard the bagpipes and drummers before they marched into view, and began inching my way toward the curb to see for myself.
Sure enough, it was the Shamrocks. The bagpipers, got up in tartan kilts, short green velvet jackets, and green tams, marched six abreast down the street, playing a ragged but no less moving version of “Amazing Grace.” I craned my neck to see if I recognized any of the pipers, accidentally jostling a woman in front of me. She shot me a look of annoyance. “Sorry,” I muttered, inching forward.
I was at the curb as the pipers passed. Directly behind the bagpipers came three dozen men and women, all dressed in the same dark-green blazers and black slacks they’d sported the night before at Manuel’s Tavern.
John Boylan marched past, and I spotted Lisa Dugan in the group too.
There was a break in the procession as the Shamrocks lined themselves along the curb, the bagpipers switching to a song I didn’t recognize at first.
When the first gleaming black limousine pulled in front of the church, and one of the Shamrocks stepped forward to open the door and help Alexis Ragan out of the backseat, I recognized the song.
“Danny Boy.” Normally, the song makes me choke up. This time, I wanted to hit somebody.
Alexis Ragan faltered for a moment, getting out of the car. John Boylan stepped forward, leaned down, and helped her out, offering an arm to steady her. Such a gallant gesture. Boylan was big on the gesture.
They stepped away from the car, which rolled forward, and the hearse moved up in line.
Two members of the APD honor guard marched to the rear of the hearse, and six of the Shamrocks, Kehoe among them, stepped up to shoulder the flag-draped casket onto their shoulders, before it was handed off to the honor guard.
Alexis Ragan glanced backward once at the casket, and stepped onto the curb, where she was joined by the mayor on one side and the chief on the other. Each took an arm, and the
pregnant widow walked unsteadily up the steps to the church, teetering a bit on her black high heels.
Just then we heard a commotion overhead. Every face in the crowd turned skyward as six dark-blue helicopters came thudding past the spires of the church. When they were directly overhead, the helicopters maneuvered into a V-formation and hovered there, until the helicopter at the base of the V peeled off and banked away from the others, sharply upward, toward the heavens.
“Missing man formation,” whispered an elderly man beside me as he held his ball cap over his chest.
He meant Sean Ragan, of course, but I was thinking of Bucky Deavers, as I watched the helicopter skim past the low gray cloud cover above Midtown Atlanta. There had been a window near his bed on the seventh floor of Grady Hospital, and I wondered if any light ever came in through that window. I wondered what sensations he might still possess. Was it possible he might see the blue state patrol helicopters, hear the chop of the rotating blades over the roar of the traffic on the Interstate rippling along beside the hospital?