“No,” I said. “But I’ll try again with some coffee and smelling salts.”

17

I figured Grandma Sullivan must be waiting for Mattie and the twins to come home from school. I bet she was making lemonade and baking sugar cookies. She may have taken up sewing or crochet to pass the time. Perhaps she would even invite me to dinner. Pot roast with new potatoes. A homemade apple pie for desert. Perry Como on the hi-fi.

I had to knock on the door for five minutes before she opened it.

Grandma had been sleeping one off. I was shocked. But I composed myself and gave another introduction, since she’d been comatose when we’d first met.

She didn’t answer me. She walked back in the apartment and sat down on a ratty plaid chair. Grandma Sullivan lit a cigarette and fanned away the smoke. She didn’t look quite as old and skinny today. She’d put on some makeup and wore a red camisole top that showed off some shapely freckled shoulders. Her nose was pert and her eyes a deep green. She was still in her forties, hard but not unattractive. Or maybe it was the dim light.

A little bit of light from the half-open curtains looked to be causing her some pain. I walked over, closed them, and sat down on a sofa. A television played a soap opera on mute. A man was in a hospital with a bandaged head. A woman appeared to be crying.

Grandma smoked some more. Strands of light bled from the curtains like thick fingers through the smoke. “You’re the detective.”

“I slay dragons, rescue maidens.”

“Mattie talks about you a lot.”

I nodded.

“She trusts you.”

I nodded again. “She’s a good kid.”

“Stubborn,” she said.

“What makes her so good.”

“Mother was the same way,” she said. “Couldn’t tell her shit. She knew it all.”

“People have said similar things about me,” I said. “Can you tell me a bit about your daughter?”

“She was wild with boys and drinking, but she straightened it all out for Mattie,” she said. “God bless that girl, she brought my Julie back for a while.”

“How long?”

“Few years.”

Grandma walked over to the wall and the framed high-school photo of Julie. She held it in both hands and handed it to me with great care. Dust motes spun in a sliver of sunlight. The room had an attic-like quality, smelling of moth balls and old clothes. Toys and stuffed animals cluttered a rug in the center of the room. She stood over me as I studied the photo of Julie. She absently fingered her black-ink tattoo of her daughter’s name.

“You know about the car wreck?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Mattie was four years old when Julie got hurt,” Grandma said. “That wreck changed everything. Some stupid bastard T-boned her car as she was headed to work. That’s how she got into pills, and from pills into coke. You go on from there.”

“What about the guy who hit her?”

“We won ten grand in a settlement,” Grandma said. “He was some jerk-off business guy from Revere. Never said he was sorry, hid behind his lawyer like a woman’s skirt. Julie lost her job.”

She tucked her unwashed hair behind her ears. Her complexion was blotchy. She stubbed out the cigarette and started a new one. I learned her name was Colleen.

“And I guess the money did not provide a wealth of stability?”

“Money went straight into her arm,” Colleen said. “I couldn’t stop her. Then she started stealing shit. She sold all my dead ma’s rings. She sold our TV. She’d moved in, and I had to kick her out. I kept Mattie. She didn’t care about Mattie anymore. She didn’t care about me until she got knocked up with the twins. That kept her clean for nearly a year. And then it was back to the stealing and lies.”

“Who were her friends before she died?”

“Don’t ever call those parasites friends. And don’t get Mattie’s hope up, either. How much is she paying you?”

“A dozen donuts.”

“You’re a funny one, aren’t you,” she said. She laughed as if I were being funny. “That how you got that eye?”

I placed my hands in my coat pockets. I shrugged. Grandma smiled at me in a hazy way. Maybe through the smoke and booze, the scar tissue around my eyes and busted nose wasn’t as prom-

inent.

“Ever see Julie with a guy named Red Cahill?” I asked.

She blew out some smoke and shook her head.

“Moon Murphy?”

She shook her head some more. She waved away the smoke.

“Touchie Kiley?”

She shook her head, not seeming to listen.

“You don’t think much of me, do you?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

“You have kids?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t want to outlive a kid,” she said. “I’d trade places with Julie any day.”

I nodded.

“I’m doing the best I can,” she said. “Mattie’s strong. Stronger than me.”

She’d started to cry, heavy with the booze, singing very softly a very old song. “‘Oft, in dreams I wander to that cot again. I feel her arms a-hugging me. As when she held me then.’”

“You know that old song?” she asked. “I used to sing it to Julie. I was just a kid myself when she was born. Isn’t that some sentimental shit?”

“I heard Bing Crosby sing it in a movie once,” I said. “I liked it.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Hell, you want a drink?” she asked.

“It’s pretty early.”

“I didn’t ask you for the time.”

I shrugged. She walked into the small kitchen and reached into a cupboard over the stove. She pulled out some Old Forester and poured a generous shot into two jelly jars featuring Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird. She handed me the glass as if it were made of crystal.

“Ah, the good stuff,” I said.

“Good enough for me.”

“You know Mickey Green?” I asked.

“Whaddya you think,” she said. “He’s the rotten son of a bitch who killed my Julie.”

“Did you know him before she was killed?”

“Yeah, I seen him around. Always acting like he was a good guy, doing little chores and crap to win favors.”

“Mattie believes he’s innocent.”

“Kids need something to believe in,” she said. She finished her drink in one gulp. “Like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and all them saints. Me, I’m too old for that. So don’t break my little doll’s heart. Okay? Bad things happen in life. You swallow it and keep moving ahead.”

I nodded. We just sat there for a while.

“You aren’t half bad looking,” she said.

“It’s the other half that ruins it.”

“You look like you’ve been in some scraps.”

“Trouble is my business,” I said.

I downed the Old Forester. Mattie’s grandmother smiled at me for a while. It was a wavering, fuzzy smile. She leaned back in her chair, stretched, and let out a long, tired breath. An uncomfortable silence passed between us. I finished the booze, feeling it warm my stomach. I winked at her before I let myself out.

The wind in the common ground swirled in a bright, chilled vortex. Trash spun and danced, hitting brick walls and collapsing in a heap. I walked back to Kemp Street but could not find my car. If it had been a horse, I would have whistled.

I looked both ways. But my car had disappeared.

18

I saw two of them approach from Dorchester Avenue.

I walked in the opposite direction toward Monsignor O’Callaghan Way and north toward the T station. Two more met me halfway through the projects. I kept a bright, smiling clip. I could confront them, but I wanted to see what developed. I did not leer. I did not stick out my tongue. I did not wave around my .38. I walked with intent.

I nodded politely at an older Asian woman carrying groceries from her car. I waited on the sidewalk as a Hispanic boy played with a remote-control truck that jumped snow and trash. I turned up on a street called Logan, still within the brick maze of the Mary Ellen McCormack, and circled back toward Dorchester. I had not recognized any of the men. The first two looked like hard older guys, one with a beard, the other guy in an Army jacket. They looked like dopeheads, not toughs.