My Brother's Keeper (11 page)

Meridian Avenue was quickly becoming another link in a chain of forgotten neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia. Every time Lou pulled up in front of his house he saw the subtle changes; the way people kept up their properties or didn't keep them up. Overbrook, Germantown, Kensington, Logan and a dozen other neighborhoods just like them could all be stricken from the map of the city and nobody would notice. They had become like little cities unto themselves, isolated even from each other. They could be written out of the history books and the only people who would know or care would be the ones still living there, the ones too poor or too stubborn or too stupid to get out.

Even Lou was finding it difficult to care what the hell happened here anymore. What did it matter? All the old neighborhoods were disappearing. They were being transformed into something Lou no longer seemed able to recognize. Sections of the city that were once filled with the hard-working sons and daughters of immigrants were fading from Philadelphia's collective memory. The drug trade had taken its toll and the streets teemed now with a kind of zombie, a generation constantly under the influence. Lou could see it in their eyes, in their nocturnal wanderings. They'd become something less than human, something that saw their fellow men as prey, like some kind of reptile in a primordial swamp. The sole purpose of their existence was to satisfy a hunger.

But why should he care? It ceased to be his struggle long ago. He bore witness to it, sure, but it didn't belong to him. It wasn't his goddamn problem anymore. And there weren't many left around to mourn its passing. And yet he'd returned to this neighborhood, to the same brick row house, to the same crumbling steps and rusted iron railing, his daughter joining him here among the ghosts and shadows of the forbearers she never knew, as if by her presence alone their spirit could fill her. He often thought his parents would have done a better job raising Maggie than he'd done. Maybe that was one of the reasons he'd come back.

It certainly wasn't for the gang of sixteen-year-old boys selling crack on the corner. Rosenberg's grocery store used to be there and if Buddy Rosenberg was still around, he would have put those boys to work and if they didn't want to work he would have sent them home to their mothers in the back of a police car. Buddy hadn't come home from World War II to get scared off by a handful of juvenile delinquents. But now there was a pile of rotting garbage in front of the place and Lou didn't even know where it came from or who put it there. He only knew that the smell of decay wafted up from the open cans and was carried down the block by the same wind that carried in the cold off the river.

If enough people complained maybe the city would send a few guys over to clean it up. Being a garbage man wasn't much different than being a cop, Lou thought. They both were responsible for cleaning the streets and their methods were often strangely similar.

He remembered how he used to listen for the sound of the garbage truck rumbling up Meridian Avenue. The garbage cans were made of metal back then, from the days when their houses were warmed by coal and the burnt ash had to be carried out every morning. He'd rush to the window in his pajamas, his father already up in his uniform and pouring his first cup of coffee. He'd watch these dark, strong men lifting the dented metal cans, tossing them from the moving truck, hearing the sound of the cans hitting the street and wondering how early these men had to wake up, if it was still dark when they crawled from their beds and drove around the city on that massive truck as if they were riding on the back of an elephant.

Lou squeezed into a spot about halfway down the block, backing up and using the mirrors on both sides and pulling forward until he touched bumpers with the car in front of him. Maggie screeched like a bird and Lou made a production of walking around and inspecting the damage. He put his hand to his chin, waiting thoughtfully for Maggie to come around with her skeptical frown.

‘Not a scratch. Pretty soft touch, huh?'

‘Is that what you call it? I call it poor judgment.'

‘It's a tight spot.'

‘I've seen tighter.'

They walked down the block with the wind at their backs and a full moon hiding behind steadily moving clouds. It would poke out its white grinning face just long enough to cast a few ominous shadows across the sidewalk and laugh silently at Lou and his daughter for their fear of the dark and their susceptibility to the cold.

They reached the front steps of the house, the stairs cracking again where Lou had patched it. They were careful about where they placed their feet and they were able to navigate the six or seven steps without much trouble. They were careful also not to lean too heavily on the loosened iron banister. A set of keys jingled in Lou's hand as he turned the deadbolt and grabbed the handle with his thumb on the latch as if he was opening a bottle of soda. The small front porch was just a slab of concrete running into the evening shadows.

It was Maggie who first saw the blood.

Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and she followed the trail of red spots to a man slumped in the chair at the edge of the porch. She'd only ever seen her father in that chair, sitting in the dark and smoking, leaning his head back against the brick wall of the house and blowing the smoke up towards the light. The glass ashtray on the floor was still there like a single polished stone in a rock garden. The man in the chair moved and his bloody arm fell, his fingers dangling just inches from the floor as if he was reaching in vain for the blood spilling from his body and gathering in a small puddle beneath him.

Maggie screamed and a black drop trickled from the man's hand and landed with what seemed like an explosion in Lou's head.

Jimmy Patterson was still alive but he wouldn't be for much longer. Lou tried to imagine what Jimmy must have looked like crawling up on that porch and into the chair with the two fresh bullet wounds he had in his stomach, the blood running freely now into his lap. Jimmy had lost the strength to keep pressure on his bleeding abdomen. He'd dragged himself the six long blocks from his house to Lou's front porch and was exhausted. There was nothing left for him to do but die.

Lou lifted Jimmy's head and looked into his dull black eyes. He smelled the blood and the alcohol that saturated it.

‘What happened, Jimmy?' Lou yelled, begging the question though he knew Jimmy was drifting, the world of sight and sound falling away. ‘Jimmy, can you hear me?'

Jimmy opened his mouth to speak and blood gurgled in his throat and spewed over his chin and onto his blood-soaked shirt. His left leg kicked out, going suddenly rigid and then circling under him, his ankle catching in the leg of the chair. Jimmy groaned from somewhere deep in his chest and coughed up another clot of thick red blood. In the next instant his body went limp as if he were a marionette and his strings had been cut all at once. Lou looked down at Jimmy's hands, one that lay motionless in his lap and the other hanging limp to the ground. His fingers relaxed and gravity seemed to pull them toward something floating in the pool of blood at his feet.

Jimmy's hand hadn't been pointing. It was reaching. Lou saw it now. He'd been reaching toward something partially submerged in the congealing puddle of blood. Lou bent to one knee and plucked out a gold ring. He held it up to the street light, turning it over and examining the oval-shaped diamond in its center, cloudy and red with blood.

Maggie had been on her cell phone, frantically telling the little she knew to the dispatcher on the other end of the line, something about a man covered in blood sitting on her front porch. A female operator with a very matter-of-fact voice asked Maggie if he was still breathing. A logical question followed by another one asking just how much blood there was. Both logical questions that Maggie was finding impossible to answer, her voice caught in her throat. The ambulance was on its way and so were the cops and they'd be there as soon as they could. But it was Philadelphia, the dispatcher told her, what the hell did she expect?

TEN

T
he ambulance arrived first and by the time Philly's finest rolled onto the scene Lou had Maggie inside, calming her down at the kitchen table. He'd turned on the stove, the gas jets heating the room. She was still trembling but the color was returning to her face. He'd quickly put together a cup of hot chocolate from a packet of powder. She seemed to be handling it pretty well, he thought, better than Jimmy Patterson was handling the two holes in his belly, his body chilling on the front porch, the last of the urine emptying from his bladder and mixing with the blood on the ground.

Lou had checked the body one final time before the uniforms arrived and sealed the place off in a maze of yellow crime scene tape. He'd pocketed the cigarette lighter from the window ledge behind Jimmy's head. He'd attempted to follow the trail of blood down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. It led him across the street and to the end of Meridian Avenue, droplets of blood heavier in some places and lighter in others. He'd followed it to the edge of Morris Park where it seemed to have disappeared. His eyes had swept across the open park and into the deepening darkness, taking in the swaying cluster of pine trees at the top of the knoll and the moon casting long moving shadows over the yellow grass. Morris Park was known to have kept its secrets over the years, much as Judy Garland Park and other parks in the city had, and it would have to keep one more. Whatever the cops found here, Lou thought, they could have. He'd keep the ring to himself, for now.

Lieutenant Kevin Mitchell was standing on the porch when Lou got back, a small congregation of uniformed officers standing in the yard below him. Mitch wore a black trench coat, black boots and gloves. A transparent plume of steam rose from his mouth every time he took a breath, like a musk ox on a snow-covered hill. He didn't look happy to get a call at home, the type of call that brought him out on a cold night after he'd already slipped into a pair of flannels and downed his third bottle of Yuengling lager. The fact that an ex-Philadelphia cop lay dead not ten feet from where he stood was incidental. Mitch wasn't shedding any tears over Jimmy Patterson. A body was a body and he was a police lieutenant and he'd want straight answers about what Lou was working on and why Jimmy would pick a place like Lou Klein's porch to die.

Lou weaved between the officers and ducked under the line of yellow tape. Someone should have stopped him but no one did.

‘Looks like being friends with you is getting kind of dangerous, Lou.'

‘Never used to be.'

‘Not since you went all private on us.'

‘It's a job, Mitch. I don't always like it. Like you don't always like yours.'

‘Tell me about it.'

They stood side by side on the porch, not looking at each other and not looking at Jimmy Patterson. Their furtive policeman's glances tended to be drawn to the street light that burned like a low-hanging moon. The cops searching the ground for clues would turn their heads toward the two, watching them curiously as if they were two actors on a stage, their destinies inexorably linked.

‘What do you know about the Haggerty family, Mitch?'

‘Whoa, let's stop right there, Lou. I'm asking the questions and you're giving the answers.'

‘Is that the way it works?'

‘Suppose I humor you just this once. I don't know any more or less about the Haggertys than I ought to. And neither should you.'

‘Well, if by chance you do know who Brian Haggerty is, then you should know that's his brother-in-law over there bleeding all over my porch.'

‘That much I do know.'

‘And what are you going to do about it?'

‘Same as I'd do for anyone else.'

‘The Haggertys seem to be a family that are pretty good at getting away with murder.'

‘Wait a second, Lou.'

‘Just hearsay, Mitch. Nothing but a lot of rumors that have been running around this town like ghosts in a graveyard.'

‘Ghosts don't make the kind of noise you're making.'

Lou took Mitch by the arm and led him into the shadows. He wanted to avoid the rapt attention of a growing audience that seemed to have forsaken their task, preferring to await some sort of climax from the stage. The two men stood over Jimmy Patterson and continued the conversation in hushed tones. Jimmy didn't look the least bit interested.

‘Listen, Mitch. This morning, at that accident, Jimmy asked me to look into a little trouble his sister was having with her husband. Next thing I know the sister shows up on my doorstep and she's scared. She's trying real hard not to show it but she's never been one to hide her feelings very well.'

‘Takes after her big brother.'

‘She's shaking like a fucking leaf and apparently she has good reason.' Lou's hands began fumbling in his pockets, finding the lighter and wishing he had a pack of cigarettes to go with it. ‘It turns out she's Haggerty's alibi for that nasty little business with his first wife and his father. That alone would be enough to make me nervous but there's more. Haggerty's first wife, the former Miss Valerie Price, began her illustrious rise to fame as a dancer at the Arramingo Club, Haggerty's place on the waterfront. And she was fooling around with more men than just Haggerty's old man. Rumor has it the list was pretty long, names you and I might recognize, including our friend here.'

Lou pointed at Jimmy's ashen blue face with his thumb as if he was hitching a ride on a cold night on the Schuylkill Expressway. But nobody picked up anybody on the Schuylkill Expressway, not if they wanted to make it home alive.

Mitch looked as if he wasn't buying Lou's story. He was nodding his head but he wasn't buying it and Lou knew why. There wasn't a cop on the force willing to dig up any dirt on the Haggertys, especially one with thirty years on the job and a fat pension to protect. Mitch pulled his gloves on a little tighter.