My Brother's Keeper (12 page)

‘You expect me to believe that Brian Haggerty pumps a couple of bullets into Jimmy Patterson because he might know something about a ten-year-old murder or his sister might, or because he slept with his dead wife or because he's sending some kind of a message to his current wife? And he drops him off on your porch because Jimmy is just too drunk to drive himself. Maybe Haggerty thought you'd sober him up and take him home.'

‘I'm not saying that's the way it happened. I'm saying Brian Haggerty is a suspect, a strong suspect and maybe in more than one murder.'

‘Let us handle the murder investigations. OK, Lou? The Philadelphia police are still capable of solving a homicide, in case you've forgotten. Let's just wait and see what comes back from the lab and ballistics. Maybe we'll get lucky.'

‘Someone's going to have to break the news to Franny.'

‘I was hoping you'd do the honors. Better coming from you than me.'

‘I'll handle it, but you might want to talk to her yourself. If she knows anything, she could be in danger. She could even be a witness.'

‘I doubt that.'

‘I'd just keep an eye on her if I were you.'

‘Sounds to me like you're doing a damn good job of that yourself.'

Lou went back in the house to check on Maggie. Her trembling had subsided to an occasional shudder. Her eyes were closed and she was holding her head in her hands as if she was trying to reach inside and pull out the memory of what she'd seen and dump it out onto the table like so much spilled coffee, wipe it up with a wet rag and rinse it down the drain. Lou sat next to her and put his hand gently over hers.

‘It's like a bad dream.'

‘I know, honey.'

‘That's the first thing I thought when I saw him, that I was dreaming and I'd wake up and be somewhere else, back in my bed. Have you ever felt like that?'

‘Sometimes. It happens when reality becomes too painful to deal with.'

‘Turn it into a dream and dreams aren't real.'

‘Sort of.'

‘No wonder you have nightmares.' She tried to force a smile. ‘But this isn't a dream. Is it?'

‘No.'

‘He just looked so relaxed sitting there. It wasn't what I expected. I always thought if you got shot and you knew you were going to die you'd be screaming, writhing in pain. But he seemed so calm. The look on his face: he seemed content. It was like he was made of wax, like he wasn't a real person. It gave me the chills, watching someone die like that. I won't ever forget it.'

‘I'm going to try to find out what happened to him. But first I'm going to call Joey, have him come up here and sit with you for a while.'

She stood up and walked to the kitchen sink, spilling out what was left of the now-cold hot chocolate and rinsing out the cup. She pulled a dish towel from a drawer and started drying the cup, continuing to wipe it even after it was dry.

‘I don't need a babysitter. I'll be fine. You should take Joey with you. You'll need him more than I will.'

Lou put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her on the top of the head and turned to go. One of Mitch's investigators was still on the porch, photographing Jimmy from a variety of different angles, snapping pictures as if he was the paparazzi and Jimmy was on the red carpet, real celebrity. The medical examiner had a team there, ready to take him away once Mitch was done. They stood on the street, snapping on their rubber gloves and leaning against a tan-colored van. The back doors of the van hung open and they'd pulled out a thin metal stretcher with a black body bag flat across the top of it. It didn't look big enough to hold Jimmy Patterson. They'd have to squeeze him in and zip him up and it would take all three of them to carry him down the stairs.

Lou pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open and found Joey in his list of contacts. He hit the speed dial and held the phone to his ear as he watched a detective rummaging through Jimmy's pockets like an ordinary thief. Joey picked up on the fourth ring. His voice came back with the loose texture of bourbon in it.

‘How soon can you get over here?'

‘Why, what's up?'

‘I just found Jimmy Patterson sound asleep on my porch. He won't be waking up any time soon. By the time you get here they'll have him down at the morgue and they'll be checking his belly to see what he had for dinner other than two thirty-eight-caliber pieces of lead.'

‘Shit.'

‘Maggie's a little shook up. Could you stay with her a little while?'

‘Where you going?'

‘First, I'm going to try to find Franny. Then I'll hit the Arramingo Club.'

‘You sure you don't want company?'

‘I'd feel better if you stayed here with Maggie.'

‘You got it.'

Lou snapped the phone shut and clipped it on his belt. He took one last look at Jimmy Patterson and then at the floor of the concrete porch that Lou had recently painted battleship gray and was now a shiny crimson, still slick with blood. He craved a cigarette. It wasn't the first time he wanted one since he quit but this time it was more like need than want. He longed for the feel of it in his hand, the warm smoke in his mouth, the burning in his nose, the calming effect of the nicotine. Maybe it was because of Jimmy. He laughed to himself, recalling that Jimmy had just quit smoking. Everybody was quitting except Joey. He could have bummed a cigarette from one of the cops parading around his property. They'd already littered the yard with smoldering butts. They were searching the ground with their flashlights, looking for footprints or spent bullet casings, poking their noses under the thin bushes against the house and around the steps where the dirt had begun to subside. They wouldn't find a thing.

His eyes locked onto a pack of cigarettes on the window ledge directly behind Jimmy's left shoulder. Lou couldn't seem to remember now if they were one of his old packs and he'd just left them there or if maybe Jimmy had brought them.

He took a few steps across the porch, careful to miss the puddle of blood, and palmed the pack of cigarettes. If the crime scene guys suspected that he was removing evidence they didn't show it. They must have just assumed the pack was his and they all understood how possessive a man can be when it came to his cigarettes, especially cops, who always seemed to be dishing them out to suspects and confidential informants to loosen their tongues. Cigarettes were like money in prison and they seemed to understand the language. As he turned and started down the stairs, Mitch caught him by the wrist.

‘I thought you gave those up.'

‘I started again.'

‘All that running and you top it off with a smoke?'

‘It's a tough habit to break.'

‘Yeah. If it wasn't for people's bad habits, we'd be out of a job.' He released Lou's wrist, opening his hand with an exaggerated motion as if he were releasing a trapped bird. ‘Call me if you find something out.'

‘You got it.'

Lou trotted down the steps and jumped into his car. He tapped a cigarette from the pack and put it to his lips. There were matches wedged behind the cellophane. He struck one between his cupped hands. It flared in front of him, illuminating his face in the rear-view mirror. He took a hard drag on the cigarette. It was his first in over a month and it tasted good. He looked down at the matchpack. In the flickering light it read ‘The Arramingo Club,' with the silhouette of a woman on the cover, just a black shadow, all legs and breasts and hair. The match went out and he was left in darkness.

He put the car in gear and eased slowly past the police cars, thinking that he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Jimmy Patterson with a cigarette in his hand. He picked up a little speed toward the end of Meridian Avenue. Jimmy Patterson didn't smoke anymore. He'd given it up just as Lou had. But Franny still smoked, like a chimney.

ELEVEN

R
emington Road was quiet and dark. Thick, bare branches threw shadows over the narrow street. The same pale-faced moon cast a trickle of light past the overhanging trees and made Remington Road look more like a muddied river run dry. Lou pulled up in front of the Patterson house. He shut off the car and sat in the quiet. The house was shrouded in darkness. There weren't any cars in the driveway or parked in front. That very morning Lou had been standing there watching Jimmy rub the long scratch on his car door, listening to him wise off to the cop and wave with his big paw in the air like a grizzly bear with his nose in a beehive. Jimmy had been the first one to help Catherine Waites after the accident, rushing to her aid because that's who he was; it was the only way he knew.

Lou wondered what Franny's involvement was, if she'd been there when it happened or if she was up in bed and hadn't gotten the news yet. He wondered if she'd sprung awake at the very moment Jimmy had taken his last breath, letting her ring fall from his bloody hand. It happened that way sometimes. She would have run to the window, knowing something was wrong, death hovering in the night like a low-hanging cloud. The stillness of the night wouldn't have fooled her, though. Somehow, she would know.

Lou sat for a moment more in the stony silence. There were plastic trash containers and yellow recycling bins in front of every house on the block except Jimmy's. Lou had a sudden urge to take Jimmy's garbage down to the curb for him, stack it in a neat pile so when the garbage men came in the morning they wouldn't wonder why, for the first time in fifteen years, Jimmy Patterson didn't have his garbage ready and waiting to be collected. Surely the city owed him at least that. Haul the man's trash away. Send a cop down his street once in a while. It wasn't that much to ask.

Lou climbed the front steps and stood on the porch looking down at the street, seeing it as Jimmy had every morning, the same people and the same cars, the same trees with the bark peeling off like the mottled skin of the old men that came to the Regal on Sunday mornings for bagels and tea. Only today had been different. It was the last time he would see it and Lou wondered if Jimmy had ever thought about that, if he took the view of the world from his front porch for granted.

The view from Lou's porch was much the same, a view like so many others in this city where everything looked the same, like a movie set, a facade that got packed up in a truck at the end of the day and hauled away. But it was the only view they had. It's not like they paid anything extra for it. They could have left at any time if they didn't like it, sold everything and moved into an apartment nearer their children, where the deafening silence of the suburban nights would keep them awake at night, an imposing silence that could drive a sane man crazy. There was still cheap land out in Lancaster County; they could live like the Amish, without cars, without phones, without electricity or television. Wear a straw hat and a smile and try to forget that the heart of man was still vicious, the heart of an animal, and he'd always find the tools to kill.

Lou couldn't blame the neighborhood for what happened to Jimmy Patterson. Shit like this could happen anywhere. It just happened in Philadelphia a little more often.

There didn't seem to be anyone home but Lou couldn't just drive away, not after what had happened. And if he'd decided to sit there on Jimmy's front stoop dreaming about all the years Jimmy Patterson had spent in that house, one of the neighbors would eventually notice him and call the cops. They'd do that for Jimmy. It was still that kind of neighborhood. They watched out for each other. They might even get a license plate before he left, if they could see it in the thick darkness. And if there were any more corpses lying around for Lou to trip over, he'd prefer to find them before the law arrived and not hear about it from Mitch afterwards.

He tried the handle on the front door, giving it a little rattle first but it held fast. He cupped his hands over his eyes and put them against the window. The glass was cold and it was all darkness inside. He could make out the shapes of a sofa and chairs, a lamp with an oversized shade on a table between them, the faint outline of pictures on the wall, the flat black screen of a television across the room. His eye caught movement, a lean black cat bounding from the couch and over the dark carpet. It was light and fast and moved like a shadow, like a stone skipping over the placid surface of a frozen pond.

He walked around toward the back of the house, following a narrow stone walkway between the houses. A spotlight clicked on, the flash blinding him, forcing his eyes shut as he turned his head away. He must have activated a sensor, one of Jimmy's security set-ups, for all the good it did. The spotlight threw long dark shadows almost to the street, lighting the thin branches of the young maple tree in the yard, its sinewy gray trunk twisted and cracked, its shrinking leaves transforming from red to orange to a rusty brown. Under the tree a crusty layer of ice had formed on the grass and hardened like crystal. The windows on this side of the house weren't at ground level. They were higher up and looked securely fastened with the curtains drawn tightly closed.

There wasn't much room between the houses in that neighborhood: two-story, red-brick colonials, most of them separated into twins, the space between them so small as to be almost touching like hotels on a Monopoly board, close enough to see into your neighbors' windows, hear their arguments, smell what they were having for dinner, near enough to see what color underwear your neighbor's wife was wearing. At least it wasn't the projects – the chicken coops as the cops had called them: fourteen stories of filth, one crowded floor stacked upon another, its residents squeezed together like rats in the sewer and all that shit running downhill like a polluted river.

Once you were in there you'd never escape. There was no hope of it. You were trapped every second of the day and night, unable to get a breath of fresh air or see the sun in the sky or walk down a street that wasn't congested with people, no respite from the world of men. Not a moment's privacy, not a moment's peace. And for many the only way out was death, a quiet, peaceful death if you could manage it, fall asleep and never wake up. But more likely it was violent, a hail storm of bullets raining down from the heavens, the gods of the city playing some pathetic game with humanity.