Authors: Keith Gilman
He climbed the front porch steps of an old brick Colonial, on a street of old brick Colonials. The twisted branches of a maple tree reached across the yard and over a narrow driveway. He noticed the front door was open. He approached quietly and listened. Not hearing anything, he knocked lightly and entered. He pushed the door open with his shoe and slid inside on his toes. It was a cool night in early summer, and with the windows open, the house smelled of lilac and pine. The place was neat to a fault, nothing out of place.
The furniture was Victorian, dark greens and grays, faded with age and wear. The rug was Persian, dull red roses with green stems lay thin and flat across the floor. Soon it would be nothing but dust. A dull yellow light emanated from matching lamps. The shades were drawn over every window. A stairway to the second floor disappeared into the darkness overhead. The grandfather clock in the corner swung a silver pendulum back and forth, its grinding pulse winding down.
A black cat with white paws poked its head from behind the sofa. It stared at him for a second with blazing green eyes, hissed, and ran across the room, up those dark steps. Lou walked through the living room into the kitchen. A pitcher of lemonade filled with ice sat on the table, sweating in the summer heat, two empty glasses alongside. The sink was empty and white, a damp towel folded on the counter. An old, rotary telephone hung on the wall, its long black cord dangling on the floor, frayed at the end where the cat had scratched it. He continued toward the back door, stepping gently over the bowl of food and water without a sound, waiting for a movement or a noise.
He stepped onto the back porch. The smell of rotting garbage hit him first. Trash cans were lined against the wall, a dirty brown liquid pooling in the corner. The backyard was dark, shrouded by a border of overgrown pines. He descended a short flight of steps, felt his boots touch the soft wet ground. Deep in the shadows of the yard, he saw a man kneeling over a young girl. He felt frozen in time. The girl couldn’t have been more than six or seven. A large hand covered her mouth, silenced the scream visible in her eyes. She was pinned beneath him.
He approached quickly, silently from behind, his eyes riveted on the man’s back, his mind racing. He pulled a black baton from his belt. He felt the sting of cold steel in his hand, its hardness and its weight. He struck with all his might, without
warning, landing blows against the base of the man’s skull. The man collapsed after the first strike. Lou hit him four or five more times and knew the damage had been done.
Stripped of his pension and practically broke, Lou had eventually been picked up by the District Attorney’s office, where he had a few friends left. They were the kind of friends he needed, the kind with connections, the kind that reminded him how lucky he was not to be rotting in a jail cell.
But he was never good at kissing ass and was dismissed from the District Attorney’s office seven years later, with a kick in the pants and a few choice words from an irate DA. It wasn’t like he didn’t do his job. If you asked him, he did it too well. So, while most guys he worked with were getting off the mean streets and slipping into comfortable retirements, Louis Klein was still in the saddle, awake while the world slept, doing other people’s dirty work. He hadn’t really put his life back together. He’d picked up an odd job here and there, serving a summons, repossessing cars. That was about it.
After his mother’s murder, he wanted to leave the city for good, say good riddance to the job and the crime and the wasted years. He’d put a thousand dollars down on five acres of land in the Pocono Mountains. It was at the end of a gravel drive that wound blindly between rows of overlapping maple and oak trees and emptied into a flat circular clearing. There was a rectangular trailer that resembled a hunting cabin more than a house. It sat about four feet off the ground on columns of gray cinder block. The white siding had turned gray over the years and the few small, square windows were covered with a cloudy layer of grime.
It belonged to an old farmer with more land than he knew what to do with. The remnants of an old stone wall overgrown with ivy marked the property line. There was a stream that ran nearby and not much else except the crickets and the deer. The
stream would flood once a year according to the old guy, usually in early spring, and the ground would stay muddy until winter, when it froze solid.
There was nothing out there in the mountains for him, though, and he knew it. A self-imposed exile sounded fine. Loneliness wasn’t one of the diseases he suffered from. But something would call him back. Something always did. It was only two weeks before his mother’s death that he’d begged her to look at a condo in Sea Isle City, a nice two-bedroom that one of his old buddies from the department had for sale. He’d tried to convince her to leave, to give up the old place, that they didn’t belong there anymore. The neighborhood had changed and they’d overstayed their welcome.
She’d flatly refused, and thinking back, Lou thought it was that stubborn refusal that finally sealed her fate. She’d been stubborn in a way that gave her an inner strength, born out of an immigrant mentality she’d inherited from her mother and that kept her attached to the ground under her feet. Regardless of all his attempts to protect her, she’d still been killed, and he eventually came to realize that she would have rather died than run away. It was the way she died.
He’d gotten the call from the Philadelphia police, from a sergeant with a voice that made him sound like he was in junior high. They’d found her, found his mother, he said, as if she’d been wandering the streets of Overbrook in her nightgown, feeding the pigeons, and talking to herself. When the Philadelphia police find someone, they’re either wanted or dead, and since his mother had never committed a crime in her life, he knew immediately she was dead.
A neighbor, Rose Conforti, had called it in, a week’s worth of mail in the box, newspapers on the stoop, a smell in the yard like rotting garbage, which was unlike Mrs. Klein who was always so clean. The police had set up a ladder in the back and
went in through a second-story window. She was on the first floor, in the kitchen—she had been there five or six days during one of Philadelphia’s classic summer heat waves. She’d been strangled.
Lou had listened to the voice over the phone giving him the bad news, and remembered the sound of his own voice as he’d told her how much cooler it would be up in the mountains or down the shore. He could picture her smiling into the phone as he said it, her son trying to convince her to give up her home, trying to pull the rug out from under her.
The police sergeant had told him they’d found semen and they believed she’d been sexually assaulted. They believed. Three days past her seventieth birthday and they thought, just possibly, the sex was consensual. They were sorry but they needed him to identify the body, after a week sealed in a pressure cooker, the windows locked shut, the temperature approaching one hundred and ten degrees, her skin sliding from her flesh, her insides boiling, the putrid gas escaping. They knew he was a former police officer, knew he would understand.
Lou pulled onto Meridian Avenue and found a parking spot near the end of the block. Parked cars lined both sides of the street, a couple of them left unmoved for months, leaves and old newspapers caught under all four tires. If someone complained, the cops might come and put an abandoned sticker on one of them. They’d threaten to tow it but a tow truck could never get in there. The owner would scrape the sticker off the windshield with a razor blade and the car would sit there for another month. The Davinis across the street saved their space with two garbage cans and a folding chair. Lou parked at the corner under a stop sign and walked back to the house.
The house hadn’t changed much since the day he’d moved
in. He climbed the narrow concrete steps. The black metal banister was loose. He leaned on it, his hand running over the cold metal. It wobbled under his weight. If he didn’t fix it soon, he thought, the whole thing would snap off and topple onto the grass. He sat in the single chair he’d put on the porch and lit a cigarette before going inside. He leaned the chair back onto its hind legs until his head touched the brick wall behind him. He was in complete darkness except for the glowing tip of the cigarette that cast a red tint over his face and two points of light in his eyes.
He remembered the quiet nights he’d spent there on Meridian Avenue, lying awake at night in his bed, the window open and not a sound coming through other than the wind rattling the thick maple leaves, brushing past the curtains. If he closed his eyes, he could still smell the summer air that cooled his house at night and washed over him as he threw off his blanket and ran to the open window. He could look out that window for hours.
One night he saw Jimmy D’Antona stumbling home from the bar, a six-pack in a brown paper bag tucked under his arm like a football. Everyone called him Jimmy D. He was only about thirty-five years old but looked at least fifty. Both his parents had died within a year of each other and he lived alone in their house. He’d never worked a day in his life. He spent his afternoons leaning against the wall outside the EZ Market, ready to buy beer for any kid with the money and willing to give him a bottle from the pack. At night, he’d go from bar to bar, workingclass bars, where he’d bum drinks. Most of the guys worked at the A&P warehouse or for the gas company and didn’t mind shelling out a quarter for a draft.
The world was full of Jimmy D.’s, Lou thought. He’d seen their faces before, in every neighborhood, in every section of the city. He’d seen them in the street and in the bars, the same faces,
all bearing a striking resemblance to each other, those he’d known then and now. Sometimes it seemed as if everyone was a Jimmy D., with the same soiled, beer-soaked jeans, the same greasy skin and bad teeth, the same shifting eyes, the same need and the compulsion to do just about anything to satisfy that need. Jimmy’s need was alcohol. There were other needs.
He’d had to keep his window closed since he’d been back. Usually the stillness of the night was only broken by the rumble of trucks using Meridian Avenue as a cut-through to Woodbine. But some nights the voices on the street were loud enough to eclipse the grinding trucks, drunken voices that carried all night long, accompanied by an occasional gunshot. Parents called in their young children soon after sunset, the ones they could still control, the ones that hadn’t yet been lured away by the night, by crime, the easy money and drugs. They locked their doors and pulled the shades and peered out at the thugs that ruled the night. Those that could afford to leave escaped to the suburbs. Property values plummeted. Those that stayed huddled in their worthless homes like refugees in a bunker.
He finished his cigarette and tossed it onto the damp grass. He couldn’t help but think he’d made a mistake, coming back, opening his mother’s house, living here as if nothing had changed, not the neighborhood, not him.
He fumbled with a set of keys and the front door came slowly open. The darkness was thick inside. He reached for the light switch against an adjacent wall. He heard movement, a brush of fabric against the couch or a slight release of air. He wasn’t sure. He navigated from memory, moved silently down the hallway, into the kitchen. He pulled the Glock and faced the silhouette of a figure in the center of the room.
“Call off your dogs,” said a familiar female voice.
A lamp clicked on and flooded the room with soft yellow light.
“I hope I didn’t scare you, champ. I didn’t think that you scared that easily or I would have called first. You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack.”
Lou watched his daughter drop her backpack onto the table. She unzippered it and pulled out a small box in red wrapping paper and a green bow.
“I brought you a present, ding-dong. Open it up.”
Lou let out a long, exasperated sigh, caught his breath, and placed the gun gently on the counter. He opened a cabinet under the sink and reached for the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam.
“I could have killed you, Maggie.”
He poured the brown liquid into a shot glass. It overflowed, spilling onto the counter.
“I would have got you first.”
“How’d you get here?”
“I hitched.”
“Not safe, Maggie.”
“I carry this.” She pulled a can of pepper spray from her bag and pointed it toward him. “Remember this? You gave it to me.”
“How did you get in?”
“Bathroom window.”
“How long you been here?”
“Couple of hours.”
“You always sit alone in the dark?”
“Only when I’m waiting for a grumpy, over-the-hill ex-cop, son of a bitch, piece of—”
“That’s enough, Maggie. Does your mother know you’re here?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t.”
“Neither does she.”
Lou drank down the whiskey with a quick flip of his right hand. The glass never touched his lips. He sank down into the
couch and slung his arm heavily across the girl’s shoulders. He leaned his weight gently against her. He shook the little wrapped box near his ear. It reminded him of a Christmas present he’d given her many years before, a small white box wrapped in red paper with green ribbon, the smallest present under the tree. She couldn’t have been much more than nine or ten. She’d opened it first, as he’d hoped, ignoring the larger boxes. He could still picture her childlike face, the buckteeth, the freckles, her wide eyes admiring herself in the mirror as she tried on her new earrings. She’d pulled her hair back, blushing, to expose the two crescent moons dangling from a silver chain, a green glowing emerald on each one.
They weren’t imitation, not a piece of molded plastic like the others had been, not a baby’s toy. They were real jewelry, expensive, bought in a jewelry store, not a toy store. She wouldn’t take them off until her ears got infected and her mother daubed them with peroxide. The earrings went back into the box and the box went into a drawer. That was the last year they’d spent together as a family.
“Why don’t you give your mother a call.”