Old school bones, p.26
Old School Bones, page 26
They had another fight at the top of the steps in Hibernia House. Danny pushed Roxy. She fell down the stairs. Broke her neck. Then Danny dragged the body up into the club room. Left Roxy for us (like “fuck you pricks”) to deal with. Just lovely.
LT. LOUIS VOTOLATTO
Where does Liberty Baker’s death fit in?
JEAN-CLAUDE RAUSCHE
Danny called me in early April and asked me if I had heard about the black girl who died at Tolchie. She said her girlfriend Awasha was on a mission to prove it was murder … and it had something to do with secret societies at the school. She said the Red Tooth gang was already starting to freak out. I might want to tell the Club Tropical guys to watch their backs.
LT. LOUIS VOTOLATTO
How does this implicate your half sister in a murder?
JEAN-CLAUDE RAUSCHE
Because I asked her why she was being so generous to give me this heads-up. It’s not like we’ve been close since boarding school, since Roxy died.
She said the stuff about Roxy and the drug dealing might come out. She didn’t think Red Tooth could go for that. They might try some dirty tricks or sick the police on my boys. Or her. They aren’t like the Club Tropical. They’re still alive and well. Flourishing, if you believe Danny.
LT. LOUIS VOTOLATTO
Come on Jean-Claude. Get to the point. Your half sister and the death of Liberty Baker?
JEAN-CLAUDE RAUSCHE
Danny said that if the heat came down on either one of us that we had to cover for each other. That we had made a promise that summer after Roxy died. She said we had to stand by our word. She said we both had a lot to lose. She sounded nervous.
LT. LOUIS VOTOLATTO
So?
JEAN-CLAUDE RAUSCHE
So I asked her if she had something to do with this black girl’s death. She said she was trying to protect her girlfriend. The Indian sweetie.
LT. LOUIS VOTOLATTO
Did you believe her?
JEAN-CLAUDE RAUSCHE
No. Didn’t make sense. First she says the Indian chick is out to prove there’s a murder. Then she all of a sudden says she’s trying to protect her girlfriend. Like now her flavor-of-the-month is a player in this death. See?
LT. LOUIS VOTOLATTO
Was your half sister involved with Liberty Baker in some way?
JEAN-CLAUDE RAUSCHE
You think this is about jealousy again?
71
“MY parents are taking me back home to Hong Kong tomorrow.” Gracie reaches across the table for his hand as he sets down his glass of vinho tinto. “I don’t think I’ll ever be coming back. My dad’s pretty pissed at America.”
They are in the churrascaria, called Vinho Negro, near Inman Square where he took her so many months ago when Liberty’s death was so fresh it was all either of them could think about. The pain.
“Maybe it is the best thing. Get away from all of this. I wish I could go to the other side of the planet right now.”
“You have your fishing with your dad. It’s kind of the same thing.”
He nods, thinks that within a week he will be offshore in the Rosa Lee at the canyons with Caesar and Tio Tommy. Sun hot. The birds circling in the air, watching for a free meal. Radio broadcasting the Sox game. The blue sharks will be out there too. Basking. Probably humpback whales. Maybe right whales. And the schools of silver cod. Smelling like a certain kind of heaven. He wonders why he would ever want to be any place else … But there won’t be any seals. Not out there.
“You know, I’ve really had a massive crush on you, Michael.” She squeezes his hand.
He’s going to pretend she didn’t say this. “I heard Sufridge—Bumbledork—is getting fired. Lou says the U.S. Attorney’s Office is looking into Red Tooth.”
“Sometimes I was so envious and angry about what Doc P had with you. Sometimes I wished one of you was dead. Like that night I saw you two on the fishnets in Provincetown. And now …”
He feels her eyes on his, looks away. “You hardly touched your moqueca.”
“Hey! Earth to Michael. Did you hear what I said? I just wanted you to know before I go, OK? I had thoughts about your body. And hers. Together. And sometimes I hated it. OK? Hated being the one left out. The kid. I wanted to be Ninja Girl, you know? I wanted you to see me as someone special. The way you saw her. And now, I don’t know. I feel dirty. I feel like shit.”
He withdraws his hand, lifts his wine glass. Stares at the purple fluid back-lit by the candle burning on the table. Sets it back down.
“I don’t know what to say, Gracie. None of this was your fault. You’ve been a superstar. There could have been no justice without you.”
“Jesus. Jesus Hell! You’re avoiding, Michael! I offer my heart, my soul. My deepest secrets! And you give me back what? Some fucking detached compliments?”
“What do you want me to say? You want me to tell you that if I were eighteen, I could fall hard for you? It’s true. But … but, Gracie, I’m not even a little like eighteen any more … And I seem to have lost my heart to.” He shakes his head. Can’t say Awasha’s name.
She pulls her napkin off her lap, throws it on the table. “Shit! Shit! Shit! How do we get them out of our minds? Everywhere I turn, every time I close my eyes. I hear their voices, see them. All the dead. Especially Lib. Sometimes I even smell them. It’s just fucking hard.”
“I don’t know … I guess I should say that they have gone to a better place. They are not suffering. We have to let them go.” Like Vóvó. Like my mother, Maria. Alice. Awasha. And the living who will never come back. Cassie. Filipa. Tuki. “We have to believe they are at peace.”
“While that bitch is still alive?”
He feels the bullet go through his lung again. “Remember what Teddie Baker said to us in the hospital? ‘Justice will be served now. She just takes her own sweet time.’ I want to believe Teddie’s right.”
“You mean like what goes around, comes around? Doc P probably would have some trippy Indian way of explaining that. Circles of life or something.”
He stares into his wine glass again. Sees nothing.
“Come on Michael. I need some closure here. Help me.”
He lets out a long, slow breath. “I saw Lou Votolatto this afternoon.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth he knows they were a mistake. He shouldn’t be getting into this with Gracie. Not with her so touchy, so raw.
“So?”
“Yesterday Denise Pasteur confessed.”
“To killing Liberty?”
“Manslaughter in the death of Roxana Calderón.”
“What about Liberty? Liberty’s why we went through this hell.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I can’t stand this! There’s something you’re not telling me. Fuck, Michael!”
“The cops found out stuff we didn’t know about. Denise Pasteur wanted to be the next head of Tolchester-Coates. She had been promoting herself behind the scenes for years. Back in January the trustees of the school made her an offer in private. They were going to force Sufridge to retire, and crown her.”
“What’s that have to do with Liberty?”
“The D.A. thinks that history paper you two were doing on the secret societies opened up Pandora’s box. On multiple fronts. Danny Pasteur was advisor to the school newspaper. She must have heard about your and Liberty’s investigation into the clubs from the student editors or writers. Maybe she even saw that video Liberty had on MySpace, the Old School Bones one.”
“You mean it could be the school paper was planning to tap into what Liberty and I found and do their own exposé?”
“She had to have felt threatened, feared you guys would find out about Club Tropical, Roxy … and her. Wreck everything she had been working for. Totally tarnish her in the eyes of the trustees, especially the Red Tooth types.”
“Or maybe some of the editors are Red Tooth and they were sworn to protect club secrets. They have a good thing going supplying drugs, right? No Club Tropical to challenge them now. And Red Tooth could be in hundreds of these kinds of schools. Like the goddamn mafia.”
“The police are looking into it.”
“So Red Tooth killed Liberty after all?”
“The D.A. thinks not. He thinks Red Tooth set up Ronnie Patterson for the drug bust and burned his house. Maybe even beat you in bed that night. And got Awasha fired. All to stop our investigation, shut us down. They thought we were the threat. They didn’t know about Denise Pasteur.”
“Who felt threatened by us too.”
“She saw the big picture. Saw that our investigation was as big a pain to Red Tooth as to her.”
“You think Denise Pasteur could have put that awful message in Liberty’s physics book and the boast about Red Tooth in the headlines herself … to make Red Tooth look bad? Take the spotlight off her?”
He shrugs. “If she could weasel a car from the Singletons and use it to nearly kill me, I guess she could write a racist threat and doctor some headlines to hide her tracks.”
“And kill Liberty.”
“We’re speculating.”
She stares at the plate of moqueca in front of her. “That bitch tried to fucking kill us all. I was there!”
For a second he tries to reflect on Denise Pasteur’s ambition, decades of anger at an aristocratic male hierarchy, her tortured love life, an abiding jealousy of the boys, a desperate need for credence.
But his head fills with the crack of gun shots again. First one. A second. A third. Fourth.
“She murdered Liberty.” Gracie is suddenly sobbing.
“We’ll never know for sure,” he says. The words just fly out.
“Why? Just tell me why, Michael! Why won’t we know?”
“Denise Pasteur hung herself with her sports bra in her cell this afternoon.”
“Fuck all!”
Exactly.
EPILOGUE
“SHE really loved it here on Lighthouse Beach,” says Ronnie. “I’m glad you could come. I wanted to thank you for everything you did for me and my sister.”
“I just tried to help.” What else can I say? I’m goddamn dying inside?
“Aquinnah was ground zero for her. But this beach, Chatham, she never got enough of them when we were living out here as school kids. She adored the seals in the winter and spring.”
He nods, tries to keep pace with the big Indian striding south at water’s edge. Thinks about when he lived over Alice Patterson’s liquor store on Main Street, used to walk this beach. “Me too.”
He feels the hot sun, southerly breeze on his cheeks, thinks about when he was last here to clear his head. Back in March. The pair of gray seals basking together on a pillow of sand, nuzzling. Nipping. How he felt the urge to bark at them. Feels it again now. Even though the seals are long gone. Following the herring north to colder waters … It’s late June, after all. The solstice. Summer people—couples, families, teenage au pairs with toddlers—replacing the play of seals here on the beach.
“What are you going to do now that the feds dropped your case, Ronnie?”
The Indian shrugs. “I’ve hauled my pots. Since I got no house anymore, I figure I’ll go fishing for a while. I got a site on a sword boat out of Hyannis. We leave Wednesday afternoon with the tide.”
He pictures the Andrea Gail, her crew. Lost at sea. The Perfect Storm. Not George Clooney, not actors in a movie. The guys. Real fishermen. Pros. His father and Tio Tommy met them once at the Crow’s Nest in Gloucester when the Rosa Lee had come in from fishing Jeffries to repair the ice machine.
“Tough guy, huh, longlining?”
“Oh yeah. Maybe it will keep me out of trouble … They’re starting up a twelve-step thing for Iraq War vets in Hyannis. I’m going to try it out when I get back ashore.”
“I hear it can help.”
The Indian shrugs. “You fishing again?”
“We just got back. Sold off the catch at Friday’s auction. I’m rich for a week. Then we go back out. Summertime. Fish when you can.”
“Going to stick with it? Take over your old man’s boat?”
“He’ll never give it up. And my Tio Tommy’s mate-in-perpetuity. So … I don’t know. I got to find something. You and I got this cop friend says I ought to stay away from the law, claims it’ll kill me sooner or later.”
“What do you think?”
“I got a pretty toxic score card the last couple of years.”
“She wouldn’t have cared.”
“What?”
“Awasha. She would have stuck by you. Lawyering, fishing, whatever. You were the one she had always been looking for. I could tell!”
He’s stuck for words again. Can’t say the crazy shit running through his head. If only I had brought the cops in sooner as Lou had
suggested. Maybe the lab would have found Danny Pasteur’s prints on the can of Red Bull earlier …
Maybe the cops would have searched her apartment at Beedle Cottage and found the vial of GHB she hid under the bathroom sink …
Maybe before anybody else got hurt, some real detective would have found a way to prove Denise lured Liberty into Awasha’s apartment with an offer of Red Bull and sympathy. Then killed her to keep her quiet.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to live with this riptide in my chest. This saudade. This compulsion to bark until my voice is gone …
“You believe in ghosts, Michael? What the old Wampanoags call tcipai?”
Suddenly she’s there. He sees her.
Almost close enough for shouting. Down the beach fifty yards, where the tide pools are filling with the silver sea. Her cheeks sparkling with brine. The wind lifting strands of black hair off her back. She stands in the bright sun balancing between land and sea … in her yellow fleece pullover. Jeans. One hand on her waist, her eyes fixed on a collage of black shapes slewing, tumbling in the waves in Pleasant Bay. Seals. A congregation of seals …
“Michael, ghosts?”
“I carry my share.”
“You think they’re ever any good? You know, any use to us?”
He can hear the shudders of pain in Ronnie’s voice. But his eyes are still on the seals, on her.
“Yeah … I have to. Have to believe ghosts are not just here to torment us. Why? Why do you want to know if I believe in ghosts?”
Ronnie stops. Shuffles his feet in the sand. Looks out. Maybe sees the seals. Smiles. “There was a girl once …”
“Tell me about it.”
Randall Peffer, Old School Bones
