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.
‘It surely is that,’ said Kenney. ‘She’s a 1936 Alden sloop. Kind of rare. They don’t make boats like this anymore.’
‘Yours?’
‘I wish. There’s no way I could afford anything like this. Rich people buy these boats and hire people like me to fix them up. Like I asked before, you guys are cops, right?’
‘That’s right,’ said Maggie. ‘I’m Detective Margaret Savage, Portland PD.’ She held out her shield and ID. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe. If you’re Tobin Kenney, we’d like to talk to you.’
‘Yeah, that’s me. I guess you want to talk about Katie? Jesus, what a terrible thing that was.’ He walked away from the scaffolding that held the boat, across the small yard, and up three steps to a wooden deck at the back of the house. Maggie and McCabe followed. ‘Anybody want a beer? Or an iced tea or something. You probably can’t drink alcohol if you’re on duty.’