Authors: Keith Gilman
Lou had cut him down. It had smelled like a sewer in there, the man’s pants soaked with urine. The flies were using the guy’s nose as a front door. The kid’s grandmother had taken the boy in the house, was waving a popsicle under his nose when Lou walked in, wrapping his fingers around the stick when he refused to take it. Lou knelt in front of him. The boy just stared at the popsicle in his hand, watching it melt into a paper towel, turning it a soupy red.
Lou reached for the bottle of Jim Beam and poured a shot into the cup of hot coffee. He felt the burn this time. He stepped out onto the porch and lit a cigarette. The morning paper was stuck inside the mailbox along with three days’ worth of mail. It was a cold damp morning with the sun burning off a low fog. He tore open a few of the envelopes, to see what he owed and to whom. He paged through an Eddie Bauer cata logue, priced a pair of hikers and a barn coat, not that he could have afforded either one on his meager police pension. He threw what little was left of his cigarette into the wet grass.
He was about to go back into the house for the Jim Beam and the coffee when a car rounded the corner and pulled up in
front. His fingers twitched, instinctively moving toward the place on his hip where the gun should have been. The car was Mitch’s unmarked blue Ford, with a dusty tint on the windows and a little antenna on the roof. Mitch groaned as he stepped from the vehicle, his hands on his hips and dressed for eighteen holes of golf in a light gray jacket and matching cap.
“A little out of your territory, aren’t you, Lieutenant? I don’t know of any golf courses around here.”
“My jurisdiction is bigger than you think.”
They went inside and sat at the kitchen table. Lou poured him a coffee and slid a pack of cigarettes toward him. They could hear the shower going upstairs.
“Help yourself.”
“You’re a bad influence, Lou. I gave these things up.”
“For good?”
“When you give something up, isn’t it supposed to be for good.”
“Supposed to be. It isn’t always.”
“Well, some people can have one or two, when they feel like it or if they’re nervous, or hungry, or whatever, and it’s no problem. I have one or two, then four and five and pretty soon I’m chain smoking. I can’t breathe and I’m coughing up a lung every morning. I’m flushing money down the toilet and my wife won’t get near me. My car stinks. My clothes stink and my breath stinks.”
“And you want to blame me for that.”
“I hope you don’t mind me coming by. I figured we’d take my car, get an early start. I’ll be sure to get us a good parking spot.”
Lou took the plastic-wrapped bullet out of his pocket and dropped it on the table in front of Mitch. He turned on the water, put his cigarette out under the stream, and tossed it into a wastebasket under the sink. Mitch held the mangled hunk of lead up to the light and pushed it around with his fingers.
“Someone took a pot-shot at me last night. I dug that out of the door.”
“I take it they missed.”
“Can you turn it over to the lab, see what kind of gun it came from and if it matches up with any recent homicides you might be working on?”
“I could do that. Will you be making an official report?”
“Not yet. Let’s wait and see.”
“Be careful, Lou. Somebody out there doesn’t like you.”
“Hey, Mitch. I wanted to ask you something, before Maggie comes down.”
“Shoot.”
“You guys find a baby in the river, sometime in the last few months?”
“Where the hell is that coming from?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
Mitch put the half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray on the table and sipped his coffee. The sun coming through the window was deceiving. It was bright and warm through the glass but it was cold outside. Lou finished his coffee and was rinsing his cup with water from the tap.
“We find a lot of babies in the river. Throwing babies into the river seems to be a sport in Philadelphia. Why do you think they passed that new law? I think they call it Safe Haven. If you dump your baby at or near a hospital, we don’t prosecute. It’s better than the river.”
“Does it work?”
“What do you think?”
Maggie came down the steps. Her hair was still wet. She hurried past them and poured herself a cup of coffee, leaving a little puddle on the counter. She ran back upstairs with the coffee, acknowledging them with a hurried smile. Lou wiped the spill with a yellow sponge. They heard the blow dryer going.
A few drawers got slammed, followed by a few doors and Maggie reappeared, ready for her first day at work.
She rode in the back seat of the police car, trying to get a look at herself in the rear-view mirror, her face against the thick plastic barrier. Her father had told her she’d have to ride in the cage. She knew what he meant. There were bars over the windows and the doors wouldn’t open from the inside. The seat was hard blue plastic and there was no leg room. Heshy’s was only fourteen blocks away. She could have walked if she had to.
They walked Maggie into
the restaurant and sat down next to Joey Giordano, who was already into a western omelet at the counter. Joey liked his eggs smothered in ketchup and he liked his toast burnt to a crisp. Heshy poured them cups of coffee without asking and handed Maggie a white apron.
“I’ll take good care of her, Lou.”
“Put her to work, Hesh. And don’t let her eat all the profits.”
Mitch slapped Joey on the back and massaged his thick neck. Joey glanced at him over his shoulder, his mouth full.
“Stay sharp, Joey. Things are heating up,” Mitch said.
“What kind of things?”
“The kind of things that make people dead. The kind of things that make certain people nervous enough to kill other people. Does that answer your question?”
“I think I get the picture.”
“That’s good. Just stay on your toes.”
“Yeah, okay.”
They spent fifteen minutes on a crowded highway and another
few minutes on the Vine Street Expressway. Mitch stayed in the left lane, though it moved no more quickly than the right. The number of commuters entering the city every morning was enormous and reminded Lou of a herd of cattle funneling into a corral. The cops were like cowboys on horse back, keeping everybody moving, trying to avoid a stampede. Drivers jerked their steering wheels, trying to keep their coffees out of their laps. The road split and cars weaved in and out of traffic, racing toward a series of downtown traffic lights. Congestion forced their pace to a crawl. A jet soared by overhead, leaving a white trail, a line of smoke in the sky. They both looked up as if they’d missed their flight.
The city was a web of alternating one-way streets, just like any other city, two and three lanes of blaring horns and grinding rubber. Double-parked delivery trucks and crowded buses blocked the flow of cars. Their thick black smoke smelled of diesel.
The court house was directly in the center of town. Mitch flashed a badge and they were waved into a parking garage. The ramp wound in circles like a spiral staircase to the roof. They parked and took an elevator down to the main lobby.
The elevator stopped with a jolt and they stepped out into a rotunda, a circular room of Doric columns with hallways branching off it. Lou’s line of vision swept over it, the memories flooding back, the years of his life he’d spent in that building, sweating in a polyester uniform, sweating in a pinstripe suit. He suddenly felt trapped like a ghost roaming the corridors of his past, unable to find a way out.
The halls of justice were the same everywhere, the same hard, polished look, the same wide gray hallways and high ceilings, the same pictures on the walls, judges and presidents. The architecture was stately, with granite walls and tile floors.
Lawyers in gray suits and red ties, prosecution and defense,
marched up and down those corridors like a flock of sheep. After all that had happened, he found it hard to believe that he’d ever been part of it, one of the flock. Maybe he cared back then, at least he thought he was doing some good. But now, as he looked back, all he saw were the same four walls, the same empty faces, saw himself playing a role that meant nothing anymore, less than nothing.
There was one day in his life—a day he sat before the honorable Judge Glen Rappaport, President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas—when he asked himself what side of the fence he was on, which side of the law. His ass was sore from sitting in that hard wooden chair. The hair bristled on the back of his neck, his ears red with anger, as he watched them roll in the registered sex-offender he’d put in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down, as he listened to the defense attorney, Warren Armstrong, chew up a good cop and spit him out while the district attorney sat mute. Lou had spent most of the time peering up at the stained-glass windows, the bright reds and blues of the flag with the sun coming through them in an explosion of color like fireworks frozen in the sky on the Fourth of July. He’d heard the decision of the judge at the suppression hearing and later at the trial. The defendant was a free man.
He’d expected it. It was a small consolation that this guy would never get a hard-on again, would suck the rest of his meals through a glass straw. But what made it worse, what stuck with him all these years, was that little girl, the one he’d saved, was sitting in the courtroom during the entire trial, listening to every detail, hearing it all over again. She sat next to her mother in the first row, in her Sunday best, a fluffy blue dress with white lace trim, a hand-me-down she’d worn to church for the last two years and was now too small, not quite covering her knees. She’d
reminded Lou of Dorothy in the
Wizard of Oz
, with the pigtails and the shiny shoes. Her mother had her current boyfriend with her. She’d held his hand throughout the entire proceeding, her hair hanging in a limp curl over her bare shoulders, her tears smearing the makeup on her cheeks. A loose strap on her red dress kept slipping down, exposing her right breast like a half moon on a clear night.
Lou saw her look Lou’s way and smile more than once during his testimony and again during the closing arguments. He’d arrived then at his own verdict on the child she’d brought into the world. The girl was doomed.
He’d sat in that exact same courtroom, as a boy of fifteen, at the trial of his father’s murderer, Ronnie Pitman. He didn’t know what to expect then, only that he’d see the man that killed his father. The man was nothing like he’d expected. He was tall, but he’d lost weight during his time in prison before the trial. His brown suit hung on him, and with that pockmarked face and thin brown hair, he wasn’t very scary. Lou had sat next to his mother, had seen the hate in her eyes, and knew that he should have hated him, too.
After the third day of the trial, they were both already emotionally drained. They had a police escort to and from the court house. Lou would watch the police car from his window, parked in front of his house all night. There had been threats from some of Pitman’s cohorts and the last thing the Philadelphia Police Department needed was another shooting, the wife and son of a cop bleeding all over the sidewalk in front of their house. Lou would watch the cop in the driver’s seat toying with buttons on the radio, his hat balanced on the dashboard, while Lou’s mother cried in the kitchen downstairs. That was the night he’d decided to look through some of his father’s stuff, packed away in boxes in the attic.
He’d found the old uniforms, the navy blue pants, the French
blue shirts. He’d found the old leather jacket his father wore when he was with the Highway Unit until he decided he was too old to ride a motorcycle and transferred back to Patrol. That’s where he always belonged, he’d say, walking the beat. Lou had found other things too: a badge and a heavy leather belt, a set of handcuffs, and a nightstick. Between two woolen sweaters he’d found a gun. There was an unopened box of bullets next to it. He’d slipped the magazine out of the gun and loaded the bullets into it. The spring was stiff and he had to push each one in with his thumb. He tapped the magazine back into the base of the gun and racked the slide as his father had taught him. It was big and black and heavy in his hand. He held it out in front of him and looked down the barrel. He wondered if he could pull the trigger.
He’d brought it with him to the court house the next day, tucked into his belt. He kept his suit jacket buttoned and hoped no one would notice the bulge. He tried to stand straight. The cold steel bit into the skin on his hip when he sat down. He sat next to his mother and warmed his hands between his legs. Their shoulders touched and he pulled away quickly, thinking she’d sense what he was carrying, the extra weight, see something in his eyes, what he was contemplating.
The deputies had brought Ronnie Pitman into the courtroom and sat him at a table not more than three rows in front of them. Lou had never fired a gun but he knew from that distance he could bury one right into the back of Pitman’s brain before anyone could stop him. He would avenge his father’s murder—it was what he had to do, was what he was expected to do, he thought. He knew his mother would do it if she could. He tried to listen to the testimony as the day dragged on, but he found himself struggling to stay awake. He’d stayed up too late the night before, planning his revenge, playing it over in his mind, pointing the gun at Ronnie Pitman and squeezing the trigger over
and over until it was empty and Pitman was dead. But at the end of the day, the gun was still tucked away at his waist and Ronnie Pitman was still alive.
Lou had kept that gun with him from that moment on, hung on to it throughout his entire police career, took it with him on patrol as a backup, as a reminder of just what could happen. On more than one occasion, he’d felt, it had kept him alive.
“Are you okay, Lou? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Maybe I have, Mitch.”
“Let’s go find Jack. He’s probably spreading cream cheese on a bagel at this very moment.”
They walked down the hallway on the first floor and entered a small coffee shop. A line of suits waited in single file in front of a counter. Behind the counter, one girl poured coffee and toasted bagels while another took payment and made change in an antique cash register. The girls wore green aprons and matching caps and never stopped moving. There was no place to sit down. Every seat was taken. If they put a revolving door at the entrance, it would spin all day. There seemed to be only two things on the menu. He took his coffee black and almost felt guilty asking for it. It would have been easier if he served himself.