My Brother's Keeper (26 page)

She was wearing a green and white Eagles T-shirt and green sweat pants. She was on the floor curled up in the corner. It looked as if she'd crawled there trying to escape until she had nowhere left to go. From what Lou could tell there were multiple stab wounds covering her entire torso. But there wasn't much left of her. She wasn't quite as beautiful as Candy had described.

She'd obviously been there a long time, a month or more, too long to leave a dead body lying around and expect the same person to be there waiting when you got back. He assumed he was looking at Mary Grace Flannery but there was no way to tell for sure. It wouldn't have mattered if he had seen her before or if Shar had given him a description or if he'd kept her picture in his wallet or if he'd dated her in high school. There was nothing left of her face to identify.

The cats had gotten to her, pushed to it by starvation, going first for the soft, mollified flesh of her cheeks and then her tender, succulent lips, ripping the meat away in thin, pulpy shreds from around her mouth and under her eyes and the side of her neck. All of it was gone, eaten away and exposed. The flies did the rest.

The cats had been her pets, her loyal companions. She'd cared for them, given them food and water, petted them and brushed them and held them and loved them. And yet they'd fed on her as any carnivore might. They'd succumbed to the hunger, reverted to their primitive selves and devoured her one small scrap at a time.

‘If only these cats could talk. They must have witnessed the whole thing.'

‘And didn't bat an eye.'

‘I always preferred dogs. Never liked cats. You hear all those stories about dogs waking someone up in the middle of the night. The house is on fire. Or they find some lost kid. Ya never hear that shit about cats.'

‘True. But an animal is an animal, Joey. Keep them warm and well fed and they're under control. Keep them starved, keep them cold, abuse them, and you have a wild animal on your hands.'

‘We talkin' about cats and dogs now. Right, Lou?'

‘What else?'

Lou wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. Gracie must have liked it warm. Even now, Lou could hear the popping of steam rising through the pipes in the walls. He could hear it hissing through the iron radiator in the corner, the furnace working in the basement, keeping the water boiling hot. The tan curtains, the color of New Jersey sand, swayed gently as the heat radiated across the floor and a cat darted suddenly from behind its folds, bounding silently over the mint-green carpet. He looked into the cat's eyes. They were indignant, impugning eyes and he blew out the breath of air he was holding for what seemed like minutes before turning his attention back to the body on the floor.

One of those flies had decided to hang around, making itself at home in the ameliorated remnants of cartilage that were once this woman's presumably perfect nose. The insect crawled out of one hollow nostril and fanned the air with its wings as if it was warming up for a take-off. It had swollen red eyes; alien eyes with flashes of gold and metallic green on its head resembling a gladiator's helmet and a black and white checkered thorax and sharp prongs like fish hooks on all six of its primeval legs. Its arced mandible hung open and its antennae twitched with an instinctual awareness.

Joey winced and recoiled in disgust.

‘Is this absolutely necessary?'

‘We won't be here long.'

‘I know I won't be.'

‘Why don't you give Mitch a call, let him know what we've got.' Joey started walking away. ‘Just tell him it's a body. Give him the address. Nothing about Haggerty.'

‘And what are you going to be doing?'

‘Looking around.'

‘Looking for what?'

Lou looked down at Mary Grace Flannery, at the numerous stab wounds over her flayed torso, at the many defensive wounds, deep cuts on her fingers and hands, the gouged muscle of her arms, her hollowed eye sockets and yellowed teeth.

‘Signs of a lost childhood.'

Joey stepped out onto the back porch and fished for the cell phone in his jacket pocket. He was coughing spasmodically and with his other hand he was reaching for the pack of cigarettes. He leaned over the loose wooden railing and retched.

Lou left Gracie where he'd found her, apologizing to her as he walked away, the words
I'm sorry
sounding strange to him, saying them out loud and no one in the room except him and a decomposing corpse. He wouldn't have much time. Joey and Mitch would trade jabs before getting down to business and then Mitch would send the cavalry and they'd secure the crime scene and Lou would be back on the outside looking in.

Two bedrooms sat in an adjacent hallway separated by a paper-thin plaster wall that ran the length of the apartment. He entered the first bedroom, found the light switch and stood studying the décor for a moment. It was a woman's bedroom, the bed neatly made with a lavender cover tucked under a pair of fluffy white pillows. A pair of pink fuzzy slippers sat at the foot of a bedstand with a lamp and a phone and an empty glass ashtray on top of that. The ashtray looked like it belonged to the Golden Rose.

He wandered across the room to where a mirrored chest stood against the wall. He lifted the lid of a silver jewelry box and found it still full with a tangle of necklaces at the bottom like snakes in a pit. There was an assortment of rings in a tray on top. Lou had never familiarized himself with jewelry beyond the lists of stolen property he'd documented over the years. He was no expert. He couldn't look at a diamond and know if it was glass, if it was real or fake or what it was worth. Other than the engagement ring he'd bought his ex-wife twenty years ago, he wouldn't know white gold from aluminum. He gently closed the lid. There seemed to be nothing missing.

He opened a closet door and briefly examined the rows of clothes hanging from two parallel rods. Looked like expensive stuff on one side: cocktail dresses, a lot of wool and leather. On the other side there were mostly T-shirts and faded jeans. A well-organized collection of shoes sat in pairs on the floor, everything from high heels to sneakers to hiking boots to sandals. Nothing seemed out of place. Other than the putrefied body in the living room, the cat feces on the floor, the broken glass in the kitchen and the flies, the place was in order.

The second door had a ‘keep out' sign hanging from the door knob on a wire hanger. Lou remembered his daughter had made something similar and hung it from her door,
Keep Out
sewn onto a small pillow shaped like a blue heart. She would have been about eleven. Lou turned the knob and gave the door a little push with his foot, the dangling hanger rocking idly as he brushed past.

Lou repeated the motion of reaching for the light switch on the wall, hoping to find it in the same place as he had previously. He snapped it up with his forefinger and nothing happened. He flicked it up and down a few times and still only blackness, not even any light from the windows or from a street light or the half-moon that had been hanging over them since the trip back from Delaware.

He found the cigarette lighter that had fallen through the hole in his pocket and was floating around in the lining of his jacket. The flame from the lighter dimly lit a bedroom half the size of the other one, a room with a single unmade bed, a wooden desk and a wicker basket brimming with dirty laundry. The shades were drawn down tightly over the windows. The desk and the carpet and the mattress were scarred with burn marks from what looked like cigarettes. A coffee cup on the desk was overflowing with butts in a syrupy brown liquid and the surface of the desk was marred with carvings, deep indentations made with a knife or a screwdriver. In the darkness of the room they looked like stick figures.

The lighter began to burn his finger and it abruptly went out. He switched it to his other hand, the flame a little shorter this time. The walls were covered with hand-drawn pictures like a sort of mural. He held the light closer. It was done in black ink, a story that seemed to take shape, covering the entire wall like a tattoo that covers the skin of a human body.

Lou noticed a halogen lamp in the opposite corner. The brightness hurt his eyes briefly as he took a closer look at the world he'd walked in on. There was a portrait on the wall over the bed. It was of a woman, a very beautiful woman, her ivory face glowing as if the sun shone upon it morning and night. Her skin seemed made of white satin, a luminous complexion that radiated the warmth it had absorbed from the sun. But her eyes seemed glazed over, unable to reflect that light. They were dark, black orbs, soulless eyes like those on the statues outside the Arramingo Club.

Her hair was as dark as her eyes, flowing behind her as if blown by the wind, moving as if the wind and the light had brought the portrait to life. And her beauty had a savagery to it, the emptiness in her eyes reflecting the hand that drew it as much as the woman herself. It was Valerie Price. He was sure of it – as sure as he was that the woman on the floor in the living room was Mary Grace Flannery.

There was more to see. Beside the portrait was a cemetery scene, two open graves dug into the earth so there was only blackness within their depths and mounds of black dirt piled alongside them and two nameless gray tombstones.

Lou pulled out his cell phone, held it up until the image was in focus and took a few pictures. The police photographers would have a field day. These would be just in case Mitch decided to deny him access. He was like that sometimes.

Every inch of space was covered, some of it in pencil and some of it in ink, depictions of death by various forms of torture like something out of the Black Museum. Decapitation was a favorite theme, human heads rolling in the street, lying under guillotines and blocks of wood, hanging from decrepit old trees, impaled on the end of spears and sinking into a murky swamp. And all the faces on all these severed heads looked alive, heads separated from their bodies but still alive, their eyes open and staring. And finally there was the executioner, hooded and faceless, a grim reaper doing his duty without emotion, without remorse or pity.

Lou stood in the middle of the room and tried to get an impression of the personality that had used these walls as a canvas, a blank slate where an inner life, a deeply personal life, had found expression through art. As primitive as it seemed there was a message here, in these drawings, and Lou wanted to know what it was.

The door opened and Joey was standing there, his face pale compared to its normal ruddiness. He still held the closed cell phone in his fist.

‘You almost ready? Mitch said not to touch anything.' Joey glanced at the walls in the room, trying to take it all in at once and make some sense of it. ‘Mitch said something else. Thought you might like to know. The Arramingo Club is on fire. Fully involved. They're still not sure if everyone's out.'

TWENTY-FOUR

T
hey couldn't get anywhere near it, not by car at least. A uniform cop leaned against an orange wooden barricade with Philadelphia Police stenciled in blue. He had his back turned to the growing crowd and he held a cell phone to his ear with a gloved hand, listening intently to the annoying voice at the other end of the line, his wife most likely, giving him shit for not getting home in time. Joey drove past and parked about a block away and he and Lou came back up through the alley, the dingy water from the fire scene trickling under their feet. The temperature had dropped a few more degrees and they could see the smoke from the Arramingo Club in the distance. They couldn't see flames, just curling gray smoke.

Fire trucks lined the street, their powerful spotlights aimed at the gutted nightclub. One of the trucks had its ladder fully extended and there was a fireman at the end of the ladder showering down a steady stream of water into a hole in the roof where billowing smoke rose in thick black clouds. A rainbow had appeared where the spotlight from the truck crossed the streaming water, the smoke filtering through it and disappearing into the night sky.

Mitch was standing behind one of the trucks, speaking with a fireman in a red helmet and a fireproof jacket that had Chief printed on the back in yellow letters.

‘Shouldn't you be on your way to Grays Ferry?'

‘Not my district. Steve Laughlin is on his way over there now. I think he can handle it.'

‘Whadd'ya got here?'

‘Fire marshall is calling it arson.'

‘Not wasting any time.'

‘He was in and out in ten minutes. You know Bedrossian. He's a hands-on kind of guy.'

‘Didn't think it was an accident?'

‘No such thing as accidents anymore, Lou. Your ten-year-old spills his milk at the breakfast table – that's an accident.' Mitch looked at Joey and they scowled at each other. ‘Bedrossian didn't go in because he likes to play with fire, Lou. They pulled a body out of there, about ten minutes before you got here.'

‘Never a shortage of dead bodies.'

Mitch turned back to Joey, who was lighting a cigarette, one foot up on the shining chrome bumper of the fire truck.

‘How about one of those, Giordano?' Joey tossed him the pack. ‘It was a woman. That's about all they could tell.'

‘What else would it be? Seems like a lot of women think Philly is a good place to die. Don't ask me why. They're like elephants and salmon, travel hundreds of miles back home to die. It's a goddamn migration.'

‘Some never leave. And by the way, Lou, salmon spawn before they die.'

‘So do most of these women.'

Mitch had the cigarette going and tossed the pack back at Joey.

‘It wasn't pretty. I'll tell you that. Hard to identify from the way she looked when they pulled her out. Like a French fry caught at the bottom of the fryer.'

‘I wondered why you were here and not babysitting Mary Grace Flannery.'

‘Laughlin will make sure I get a copy of the report from the medical examiner.'

‘You're going to want to see that apartment, Mitch.'