face.
"Sixteen," I said.
"You believe it?" Beatrice smiled. "Where's it go, the time?"
"Into somebody else's gas tank."
"Ain't that the truth."
Another group of athletes and a few studious-looking kids came toward us.
"You said on the phone she was gone again."
"Yeah."
"Runaway?"
"With Helene for a mother, you can't rule it out."
"Any reason to think it's more, I dunno, dire than that?"
"Well, for one, Helene won't admit she's gone."
"You call the cops?"
She nodded. "Of course. They asked Helene about her. Helene said Amanda was fine. The cops left it at that."
"Why would they leave it at that?"
" Why? It was city employees who took Amanda in '98. Helene's lawyer sued the cops, sued their union, sued the city. He got three million. He pocketed a million, and two million went into a trust for Amanda. The cops are terrified of Helene, Amanda, the whole thing. If Helene looks them in the eye and says, 'My kid's fine, now go away,' guess what they do?"
"You talk to anybody in the media?"
"Sure," she said. "They didn't want to touch it either."
"Why not?"
She shrugged. "Bigger fish, I guess."
That didn't make sense. I couldn't imagine what it was but she wasn't telling me something.
"What do you think I can do here, Beatrice?"
"I don't know," she said. "What can you do?"
The softening breeze moved her white hair around. There was zero doubt that she blamed me for her husband getting shot and being charged with a grocery list of crimes while he lay in his hospital bed. He'd left his house to meet me at a bar in South Boston. From there, the hospital. From the hospital, jail. From jail, prison. He'd walked out of his house one Thursday afternoon and never walked back in.
Beatrice kept looking at me the way nuns used to look at me in grammar school. I hadn't liked it then, I didn't like it now.
"Beatrice?" I said. "I'm real sorry your husband kidnapped his niece because he thought his sister was a shitty parent."
"Thought?"
"But he did, in fact, kidnap her."
"For her own good."
"Okay. So we should just let anybody decide what's good for a kid who doesn't belong to them. I mean, why not? Every kid with an asshole parent, line up at the nearest subway station. We'll ship you all to Wonkaville where you'll live happily ever after."
"You through?"
"No, I'm not." I could feel a rage building in me that got closer to the surface of my skin every year. "I've eaten a lot of shit over the years for doing my job with Amanda. That's what I did, Bea, what I was hired to do."
"Poor guy," she said. "All misunderstood."
"What you hired me to do. You said, 'Find my niece.' And I found her. So you want to give me the arched eyebrow of guilt for the next ten years, knock yourself out. I did my job."
"And a lot of people got hurt."
" I didn't hurt 'em, though. I just found her and brought her back."
"That's how you live with it?"
I leaned back against the wall and exhaled a long burst of air and frustration. I reached into my coat and pulled out my Charlie Card to slide through the turnstile. "I gotta go to work, Bea. A pleasure seeing you. Sorry I can't help."
She said, "Is it about money?"
"What?"
"I know we never paid your bill from the first time you found her, but-"
"What? No," I said. "It has nothing to do with money."
"Then what?"
"Look," I said as softly as I could, "I'm hurting just as bad as anyone in this economy. It's not about the money, no, but I can't afford to take on any job that doesn't pay, either. And I'm about to go in for an interview with someone who might give me a permanent job, so I couldn't take side cases anyway. Do you understand?"
"Helene's got this boyfriend," she said. "Her latest? Been in prison, of course. Guess what for."
I shook my head in frustration and tried to wave her off.
"Sex crimes."
Twelve years ago, Amanda McCready had been kidnapped by her uncle Lionel and some rogue cops who'd had no interest in ransoming or hurting her. What they'd wanted was to put that child in a home with a mother who didn't drink like she owned stock in London gin or pick her boy toys from the Sex Freaks Shopping Network. When I found Amanda, she was living with a couple who loved her. They'd been determined to give her health, stability, and happiness. Instead, they'd gone to prison,