sit and look out the window. Well, the other night — the night the girl went missing — I was sitting there wishing the pain’d just go away. Across the street the front door opens and this girl who looked like the one they’re showing on TV, well, she’s standing in the doorway yelling and screaming at somebody. Then she takes off, fuming mad. I got a good look, and I tell you it was the Dubois kid.’

‘Can you remember what she was screaming about?’

‘Oh, you know, f-ing this and f-ing that. I’m no prude, and I cursed out more than one jerk in my time, but I wouldn’t want to repeat what I heard her screaming. Even to an Irish cop who I’m sure has heard it all before. All the while, she’s standing there wearing this tiny little miniskirt, showin’ off her cute little ass and swearing like a sailor.’

‘Do you remember what time it was?’

‘About eleven thirty. The clock said eleven fifteen when I got out of bed, and not much time’d passed.’

‘Who lives in the house, the one across the street?’

‘Well, that’s what was so surprising. It’s this nice young man. Always real polite. Shovels my steps for me when it snows, brings me groceries — ’

‘Mrs. Rafferty, can you tell me his name?’

‘He’s a teacher over at the high school.’

‘His name? Please.’

‘Yes… his name. It’s Kenney. Tobin Kenney.’

‘Well, whaddyaknow!’ Maggie mouthed the words both silently and loudly, if such a thing were possible. She smiled and gave McCabe a thumbs-up.

‘Mind if we stop over, Mrs. Rafferty?’

‘Annie.’

‘What?’

‘Call me Annie.’

‘Okay, Annie then. Please don’t go anywhere or talk to anybody about any of this till we get there.’

*

Hackett was a short street, running just two blocks along the northern edge of Munjoy Hill. Small frame houses built around 1900 for the families of merchants and tradesmen lined both sides. Like much of the Hill, Hackett Street had fallen on hard times in the sixties and seventies as a generation of younger families fled Portland for the city’s growing suburbs. Many of the houses were broken up into small apartments. Others simply deteriorated. Now, after decades of decay, gentrification was taking root, and some of the houses were being restored by young urban homesteaders. As McCabe and Maggie pulled up, it was easy to see Annie Rafferty’s wasn’t one of them. The house had long ago abandoned its middle-class pretensions, and nobody was fixing it up. The dark green asbestos siding, probably put up forty years ago, was deteriorating. The trim was badly in need of paint. Drooping lace curtains, once white, had turned a dusky gray.

Maggie rang the bell. As they waited, they noted that Tobin Kenney’s house stood directly across the street and that the car in the driveway was a Subaru. She rang again. Finally Annie Rafferty, wearing a stained polyester housecoat, dark blue and decorated with big pink flowers, answered the door. From the way the thin fabric clung to her bony body, McCabe could tell she had nothing on underneath. While Mrs. Rafferty hadn’t bothered to dress for their visit, she’d definitely made up her face. She wore lipstick that was bright red and freshly applied. Pink blusher shone from the hollows of her cheeks. Her thinning hair was colored a shade of red McCabe had never seen before. At least not on a human head. She smelled of cigarette butts.

‘Mrs. Rafferty?’ asked McCabe.

‘You must be Sergeant McCabe,’ she said. ‘You aren’t Tessie McCabe’s boy, are you? From Windham?’

‘Sorry. I’m Rosie McCabe’s boy. From the Bronx.’

Rafferty glanced at Maggie and then back to McCabe. ‘I thought you said you was comin’ alone.’ She winked at him. ‘Too bad you didn’t.’

In spite of himself, McCabe blushed. Then, feeling slightly ridiculous, he introduced Maggie. ‘This is my partner, Detective Margaret Savage.’ Maggie nodded. She didn’t look happy. McCabe guessed she was imagining how a jury might react to the flirtatious Mrs. Rafferty on the witness stand. Well, at least she wouldn’t be wearing the clinging housecoat. ‘May we come in?’

‘That’s why you came, isn’t it? But I already told you everything I know on the phone.’ She turned and headed back into the living room.

McCabe and Maggie followed her in. The living room, like the woman, smelled of stale smoke. Mrs. Rafferty signaled McCabe and Maggie to sit on a worn green sofa, not unlike one McCabe’s parents had purchased from a Sears store off Bruckner Boulevard in the seventies. McCabe wondered if his mother’s sofa would look as shabby as this one to a pair of cops entering her house today. He was sure it wouldn’t look as dirty.

The room was filled with junk. Piles of old newspapers and magazines lay against the walls. Knickknacks and souvenirs of vacations taken decades earlier covered every surface. McCabe noticed a framed photograph on the wall. Two overweight men were flipping steaks at a backyard barbecue and clowning for the camera. ‘The one on the left is my husband, Dennis,’ said Mrs. Rafferty. ‘He dropped dead of a heart attack just a coupla weeks after that picture was taken. Nineteen eighty-five.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said McCabe.

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Dennis was a nasty sonofabitch. He used to beat me silly every chance he got. I like to think God spared me a bunch of black eyes and maybe a few broken bones when he gave Dennis that heart attack. So,’ she added, ‘what else you wanna know?’

‘I’d like to look out the window where you saw Katie Dubois. If you don’t mind.’

‘No, I don’t mind. Not if you don’t mind the mess in the bedroom.’

The three of them climbed the stairs to a small bedroom at the front of the house. Mrs. Rafferty was right about the mess. The bed was unmade. Clothes were piled on the chair by the window. The old woman collected the clothes and tossed them on the bed. McCabe sat and looked out the window. He had an expansive view of the house and porch across the street. Of course, at five foot two Annie Rafferty would never have seen as much of Kenney’s house as McCabe at six foot one. He scrunched down to approximate Mrs. Rafferty’s height. Even at that level, he had a direct line of sight to Tobin Kenney’s front steps. It would have been easy for her to see the girl’s face as she turned, even in the dark. Unless, of course, the girl was silhouetted by light shining behind her from Kenney’s house. That was possible. A defense lawyer might try to make something of that. Still, even if Mrs. Rafferty’s testimony was bulletproof, it didn’t make Kenney a murderer. All the old woman saw was an angry girl leaving Kenney’s house alive. It seemed to McCabe that Kenney as a suspect was beginning to feel considerably cooler. Maggie asked Mrs. Rafferty if she’d mind coming down to police headquarters and repeating her story in an official interview. She said she wouldn’t. They set up a time. Then they left.

14

Sunday. 11:30 A.M.

After leaving Annie Rafferty’s house, the two detectives walked directly across the street. Nobody answered the doorbell, so they wandered around back, where they found Tobin Kenney up a ladder applying varnish to the side of an old wooden sailboat mounted on scaffolding.

Like a lot of young guys losing their hair, Kenney shaved his head in an effort to look cool instead of bald. McCabe figured he was twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, lean and muscular with a flat stomach. No hint of a paunch. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses. His jeans were torn at the knees and stained with varnish. His gray T-shirt was adorned with a picture of a football and the words UVM. UNDEFEATED SINCE 1974. McCabe wondered if he was the kind of guy a teenage girl might find sexy.

‘Pretty good record,’ said Maggie, as Kenney stepped down from the ladder. She was gesturing at the T- shirt.

‘Oh, that,’ said Kenney with a smile. ‘That’s a UVM joke — ’74’s the year Vermont dropped football. I suppose you’re cops, aren’t you?’

McCabe ignored the question. ‘That’s a beautiful boat you’re working on,’ he said.

Вы читаете The Cutting
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату