My Brother's Keeper (10 page)

Lou noticed his bowed legs, the broad forehead, the beginning of a belly, the wear on the outside of his shoes, his feet gone flat a long time ago. He was chewing gum and had a flashlight in his left hand, tapping it in the palm of his right. Lou already had his badge out. Maggie stiffened in the seat beside him.

‘Still stopping cars, Officer? You get paid the same whether you stop 'em or not. You go looking for trouble, it'll find you.'

‘Bored, I guess.' He took Lou's gold retirement badge and held the worn leather wallet in his hand. He stared down at it. It looked like a brass trinket, a prize in a cheap carnival game, something he might have given to his own daughter to play with like the collection of junk she kept in one of her mother's old purses under her bed. ‘Louis Klein,' he uttered just above a whisper. ‘You worked the Nineteenth, right?'

‘How'd you guess?'

‘Worked with Joey Giordano.'

‘You could say that.'

‘I escorted a prisoner down to Southwest Detectives one time. This is going way back. He's wanted for something, not sure exactly what. I barely get him out of the car and your partner starts beating the shit out of him. The guy's still handcuffed.'

‘Yeah, Joey got like that sometimes, a real junkyard dog. Problem was we couldn't keep him chained up.'

‘Yeah, well, I ask him to stop, at least 'til I get the handcuffs off and finish the paperwork. Anyway, as soon as I sign the property receipt, Giordano kicks the guy in the balls and stomps his face onto the parking lot. The guy's nose is broken. His ear looks like ground beef. He's bleeding all over the place.'

‘The man's a dinosaur. But you could get away with shit like that back then.'

‘It's the truth. Nowadays someone would have us on videotape and the DA would be ready to prosecute. Hey, if you see Giordano, make sure to tell him the dude he tuned up that day had just tested positive for Hepatitis C. I was going to tell him then but he didn't give me a chance.'

‘I'll be sure to tell him but he's probably immune.'

The officer closed the wallet and handed it back through the window. Lou opened the glove compartment and tossed it in. The officer tilted his hat back on his forehead and started to walk away.

‘Officer, hold on a minute.' Lou hopped out and started walking with him. ‘I'd like to ask you a favor.'

‘Shoot.'

‘There was an accident this morning on Remington Road. A girl crashed into the back of a police car. I wonder if you know how she's doing? Looked like she was hurt pretty bad.'

‘I don't know but I can find out.'

The officer walked back to his car, slipped on a pair of reading glasses and started punching numbers into a cell phone. He kept the window down and Lou heard a loud, bristling laugh. Lou got a look inside and saw an open bag of pretzels on the passenger seat, a mixture of dust and crumbs on the console, the shotgun in a rack overhead. Not so long ago that would have been Lou sitting inside a patrol car, serving out the tail end of his career. There were times he asked himself if he missed it. The answer was always no.

He'd already wasted too much time dwelling on the years he'd spent pushing a patrol car around the streets of Philadelphia. It served no purpose. He knew that those thoughts could get stuck in his head like a blood clot, damming up his arteries with bad memories. Eventually something would burst.

Ironically, though, his thoughts were rarely about the job itself. His years with the department seemed to run together with only a few discernible moments between his auspicious beginning and fairly tragic end. What he remembered most was his time away from the job, long hours spent at Fortunato's with Danny Butler behind the piano and Butchy DeLuca behind the bar.

Back then Butchy looked like a young Brando, with the white T-shirt and the sleeves rolled high onto his shoulders and the grooved muscles in his arms working the tap. He'd yell out a song and Danny would play it, his eyes half-closed, his body swaying and his fingers moving with a life of their own. Danny's face always glowed. It was spotted with light brown freckles that covered the tops of his cheeks and ran like speckled dust across the bridge of his nose. His teeth had gone gray but his smile had remained wild and childlike as if he was always ready with some old joke or thinking of an old girlfriend who was supposed to have broken his heart. He'd get drunk and play as if he'd never regretted a day in his life.

Danny's hair was a dull, coarse red and didn't seem to fit the shape of his head, jutting out at strange angles with no real pattern. Butchy had said that Danny didn't bother to comb his hair anymore. Danny said it had a mind of its own. One of the waitresses, Daisy Arguello, would always beg him to let her cut it and he'd just keep playing with that same contented smile plastered on his face. He'd make love to Daisy when the mood struck him and Daisy would say that Danny Butler had played her like a baby grand.

They found Danny dead behind the bar one night, the needle still in his arm. Butchy never replaced him. It was quiet in Fortunato's for a long time. The piano sat idle with a layer of dust across the top. Guys using the pay phone in the corner started putting their bottles on top of it and Butchy would get pissed, yelling at them to keep the bottles off the piano. He'd wipe the wet rings from the dark wood with a bar towel and soon after that he got rid of the phone. The piano stayed.

It was around that time Lou had been terminated from the police department and his wife had thrown him out, the two events coalescing in his mind, becoming one colossal weight. If it hadn't been for Fortunato's and Danny Butler's piano and the endless supply of Irish whiskey, he might have gone the way of so many other policemen who'd found themselves on the outside looking in, no longer part of the only family they'd ever known. Some cops decided that swallowing a bullet was better than living with the humiliation.

They'd found more than one dead cop with his service weapon in one hand and his badge in the other.

The officer turned to him through the window, the remnants of his dying laughter still showing through the faint smile on his face.

‘Any luck?'

‘Girl's in a coma. They got her over at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. One of those deals where she could sleep forever or wake up tomorrow. They don't know.'

‘Best damn doctors in the world and they don't know?'

‘That's just their way of saying don't get your hopes up.'

‘You wouldn't know the girl's name, would you?'

‘Sure. Her name's Catherine Waites. Poor girl's over there by herself. That was the medic I had on the phone. He said they still haven't been able to locate a family member. She's over eighteen but they'd still like to get a hold of her parents. So far, no luck.'

Lou heard the name and it hit him somewhere between his chest and his scrotum, like a punch in the gut. He knew the name, knew it as well as he knew his own. Catherine Waites, the girl from his dreams, the girl from his past, his last call as a Philly cop, the face that had been haunting his every night. He'd listened to the officer say it and even as it reached his ears, he didn't want to believe it.

It had taken a few seconds to sink in and hearing it spoken out loud after all this time, from the mouth of a total stranger, gave it a prescient reality that seemed to pin Lou to the back of his seat and take the wind out of him. His face grew pale and he felt suddenly sick to his stomach. His eyes clouded over, parked there on a city street and talking with this cop who was wondering now if maybe Lou was drunk. He hadn't thought so at first. But now he wasn't so sure.

Lou had climbed back into the driver's seat of his car, thanking the officer. The headlights coming at him in broken streams of white light seemed to burst in his eyes. He was holding onto the steering wheel, trying to stop the spinning in his head. A chill moved through his body. He was trying to control the shaking. Maggie was looking at him as if he was a stranger, his behavior beginning to frighten her.

‘What's the problem, Dad?'

‘I know her.'

‘You know who?'

‘Catherine Waites.'

‘Who's Catherine Waites?'

‘The girl from my dreams, the girl I saved. The girl I saved and then lost everything. My God, I haven't heard that name in so long. She was nine years old at the time.'

‘You saw her? It's the same girl?'

‘It must be. After all these years. And she was right there and I didn't even recognize her.'

‘Where did you see her?'

‘There was an accident this morning in front of Jimmy Patterson's. She lost control coming down Remington Road.'

‘Are you sure it's her?'

‘It's her. And I just stood there and watched. It was Jimmy that helped her, not me.'

‘You saved her life once already, didn't you?'

‘I wish I can say that I had saved her. Oh, I protected her at the time. But I didn't save her from anything. That guy I crippled, it was her uncle, her pedophile uncle, and it wasn't the first time she'd been molested.' Lou's mouth hung open and a broken laugh escaped. It sounded more like the groan of some wounded animal. ‘And it wasn't going to be the last, if you'd seen her mom's latest boyfriend in the courtroom.'

‘There's nothing you could have done about that. It wasn't your job to solve people's problems. Don't beat yourself up over it. The way I heard the story you did the right thing. You took a dangerous predator off the street. And if he was made to suffer, so what? He got what he deserved.'

‘I hit him four or five times with my nightstick, Maggie, in the back of the head. I could have just reached down and pulled him off her. A swift kick in the ribs would have done the trick. I saw him on top of that little girl and I lost it.'

‘They should have pinned a medal on you.'

‘Well, instead I was strongly advised by the department to take an early retirement, a polite way of saying get lost. The alternative would have been criminal prosecution. The charges were dropped at the time to avoid a messy lawsuit. I was proud to be a Philadelphia cop. I thought those guys were my friends and suddenly nobody wanted to be associated with me. Arnold Stegman walked.'

‘You mean he rolled. You put him in a wheelchair, remember.' Lou turned his head slowly toward his daughter. He reached his hand behind her neck, her hair tangling in his fingers. He kissed her on the top of the head. ‘You ever see her again after that?'

‘I heard from her once, a couple years after the incident. She wrote me a letter, thanking me. She must have been about twelve or thirteen by then but I remember reading it and thinking that she still sounded like the same nine-year-old girl. She said that her mom thanked me too but her mom wasn't very good at writing letters so she was writing for both of them. You know what she asked me? She wanted to know if I'd mind being her dad for a while. She'd said her mom had broken up with Jessie and wasn't home much anymore. I guess Jessie was the boyfriend I'd seen in the courtroom. “For a while,” she'd said. How do you become someone's dad for a while?'

Maggie folded her arms across her chest as if the cold was beginning to sink in. Lou rolled up the window. They both watched the squad car pull away, the cop giving a brief wave, a half-assed salute as he passed.

‘You still have the letter?'

‘I could probably dig it up. Why?'

‘I'd like to see it.'

‘I'll look for it.'

‘Why don't we visit her in the hospital?'

‘I was thinking the same thing.'

They weren't far from home and they drove the short distance in silence, Lou lost in his thoughts and Maggie lost in hers, both thinking about Catherine Waites: if she'd live or die and if they were the only two people in the world that cared. She was in a coma, the officer said. Maybe the first good night's sleep Catherine Waites ever had. And if she never woke up, at least the pain that seemed to stalk her from childhood would finally be over. There was physical pain and then there was emotional pain. Was one worse than the other, Lou wondered? Catherine Waites could answer that question better than he could. Perhaps he'd ask her if she ever woke up.

Maggie was thinking the same thing. Lou could sense her thoughts. There had always been that connection between them. They'd even made a game into it, trying to guess what the other was thinking.

Catherine Waites had become a sort of conduit for them, a passageway back to a time when everything had changed for both of them, a time when he first discovered that everything he'd believed in was false, that there was nothing for him to return to: no job, no family and no home. And just as Lou's life was in turmoil, so too was his daughter's. It was a time of great confusion and sadness, a time when Maggie spent her nights awake in bed wondering where her father had gone and if he would ever return.

So, while Lou had been answering his last call as a policeman, responding to the screams of a child and saving this girl who a moment before was a stranger to him, his own daughter was on the brink of losing the innocence of her own childhood, losing the permanence that came with a marriage and a family and a home, finding out that it was all just a bus ticket away from a long, empty ride to nowhere, finding out that it was all just an illusion. And finding it out the hard way.

They interlocked their fingers on the seat between them. He wished he could give her back the time she'd lost, restore all those wasted years. He wished he could have collected her tears in a great round barrel, all of them running together like some secluded reservoir brimming with rainwater, and return them to her one fragile cup at a time.

NINE

T
hey turned onto Meridian Avenue. A light sprinkling of snow swirled around the street light at the corner, the first few flakes confirming the arrival of winter. His headlights caught the dusting of white on the cars parked up and down the block. It had only been a few months earlier he'd seen moths circling in the light, their small white wings as light as rice paper and coated with a fine layer of white powder like dust on the tattered sheaf of a forgotten book. They were attracted by the light and danced in the night sky as if they were celebrating their last night on earth. And for most of them it was, the hordes of black bats circling nearby, picking them off one by one, drawn to the movement and to the smell of blood.