My Brother's Keeper (3 page)

The cop that eventually showed up was a baby-faced rookie. Jimmy could see where he'd cut himself shaving that morning and he could smell the fresh oil on his brand-new gun. The cop looked around from behind a pair of mirrored shades at the suddenly empty street, wondering what all the fuss was about. He stared reflectively at the bare metal showing through the dark green paint, running his fingertips over it, the kind of scratch done with a key. It would have made a noise like fingernails on a blackboard. Not an accident, he imagined. He held a clipboard in his hand and began jotting down numbers on a report with a ballpoint.

‘You sure it's not vandalism?' the cop had inevitably asked. ‘There are a lot of kids in this neighborhood. You know how kids can be.'

‘Lotsa kids around here,' Jimmy agreed. ‘But they know better than to be scratchin' the paint on my car. They know what'd happen to 'em.'

Jimmy waved at Lou Klein, who was jogging slowly up the opposite side of the street.

Lou was running every morning now. He'd quit smoking and had decided he didn't want to be one of those ex-cops who blew out a valve at fifty after signing over the remnants of a police pension to an ex-wife who had never liked him very much.

He figured he had a few more good years left and chasing the bad guys around town kept him young, though his decision to become a private detective still haunted him. He didn't have much of a choice, it seemed. It had been thrust upon him, evolving from city cop to private eye like so many other cops before him. But for Lou it had been personal, and not a day went by that he didn't weigh it out, the pros and the cons, the risks and the rewards. And the regrets. There were plenty of those.

It had started with a woman, the wife of an old friend, his partner back in the glory days when they rode the Nineteenth Precinct together. She had a daughter that was giving her trouble and she needed help. His friend was dead but there had been promises made, promises that Lou had intended to keep. He'd tried his best to fulfill those promises but he'd fallen short and the specter of failure seemed to hang over him. Maybe that's why he stayed in the game. He still had something to prove.

There were days when it ate him alive. It was the kind of regret he could taste. It came out of his pores as he ran, a sour sweat dripping down his face. Some things you just needed to learn to live with. Even the whiskey hadn't been able to wash it away. That's what happened when you dredged up the past, he'd told himself. Nothing good ever came of it.

It was days like this one, churning his tired legs up Remington Road, that he wondered if he could still do the job, if he wasn't just wasting his time, clinging to some misguided sense of purpose. He'd known guys that had hung on too long, tried to go it alone as private detectives and had lost it all, more than just their self-respect. They'd turned into caustic old men. And for what? They'd tried to prove something to themselves and ended up losing their pensions, their families and sometimes even their lives.

The morning sun wasn't doing much to warm his back and the crisp November wind stung his face. The summer had come and gone like a flower and with the sun becoming scarce he was already turning pale. His mouth was dry. November mornings in Philadelphia would never change, Lou thought: ice-cold mornings, frost-covered cars, black ice and everybody holding their breath, waiting for the afternoon warm-up when the sun would peek through the clouds for a scant few hours.

Jimmy Patterson had been a cop right there alongside Lou and Joey Giordano at the Nineteenth Precinct, back in the days when Rizzo was chief and the cops could do whatever the hell they wanted. Once Goode became mayor and that whole MOVE thing put the spotlight on Philly, a lot of guys bailed out, took early retirement just to avoid taking the heat for someone else's mistakes.

It was about that time Jimmy had busted his knee dragging a four-hundred-pound guy in a wheelchair down three flights of stairs in a working apartment fire. Now he was subsidizing his meager disability pension by selling cars at the Honda dealership and working a security gig at Haverford College. Lou had responded to the same fire. He'd been on the third floor, kicking in doors and clearing rooms, when the smoke got to him. Two firemen with air packs had dragged him out by his shirt. They'd dropped him in the front yard as if he was a stray cat they'd pulled from a tree and stuck an oxygen mask on his face before going back inside the burning building. He should have taken his disability right then and there, walked out the door behind his old pal, Jimmy Patterson. If he'd had a crystal ball, if he'd been able to see what was coming, he would have done just that.

On Lou's first day out running, he'd seen Jimmy coming down the front steps of a brick twin on Remington and recognized him immediately. They'd been more than just casual acquaintances. There had been some history between them, ancient history now. A rumor had once gotten back to Jimmy that Lou had been chasing Franny Patterson around with his tongue hanging out, as if maybe he'd forgotten she was Jimmy Patterson's little sister. It wasn't just a rumor, though he wouldn't have been the first cop to get his hopes up about Franny Patterson – false hopes for the most part. It came to a head in front of the Penn Wynne Firehouse in one of those legendary confrontations where no one was sober enough to remember who threw the first punch or who threw the last. They were both still standing at the end and to this day neither of them had ever admitted defeat.

Now, Lou would see Jimmy every morning dressed up nice for work in a sport jacket, a collared shirt, pressed pants and a pair of polished Dockers. He'd slow down a little, trudging up that long hill, and Jimmy would say something to him and Lou would say something back. It had become a ritual.

Lou was running three miles regardless of the weather and Remington Road was the last leg, taking him back toward the office in time for a quick shower and then breakfast at the Regal. He was breathing heavily as he drew closer to Jimmy Patterson, who was waving his arms and pointing at the scratch on the car and then up the road in the direction he'd assumed the striking vehicle had come. The cop kept writing, ignoring Jimmy and Lou, seemingly annoyed that his new job was turning out to be nothing but a lot of paperwork and that he had twenty more years of it ahead of him.

‘It's a goddamn hit-and-run. That's what it is. And you better write it up that way,' Jimmy yelled. ‘Hey, Lou, you better watch you don't give yourself a heart attack.'

Lou put a hand over his chest and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He wore a blue sweatshirt and sweat pants and a pair of black leather sneakers laced up over his ankles. He stopped in front of them, his legs still moving, running in place.

‘You better watch you don't get yourself arrested.'

‘It would take three more guys like this one to lock me up.'

‘Why don't you give your brother a call? He's still a cop, isn't he?'

‘You see what I mean? It's no wonder Philly's a shithole.'

Lou heard the screech of rubber on the road. Jimmy heard it, too. If the cop heard it, he didn't show it. Maybe he was too engrossed in his report to turn around. A white Mustang convertible was negotiating the curve at the top of the hill. There was a girl driving. She looked in her early twenties with a lot of blonde hair, spinning the wheel with two fingers and talking on the phone. The music was blaring and her dark, oversized sunglasses had fallen down on her face. The car was moving too fast. The windshield was a reflection of glaring white light. Jimmy backed up onto the sidewalk and Lou followed.

The next sound they heard was the crash. The Mustang rear-ended the police car with enough force to move it three feet forward. The front bumper of the police car clipped the cop at the knees and sent him to the ground. There was glass all over the road.

The blonde behind the wheel hadn't been wearing her seatbelt and she'd kissed the windshield with her nose and mouth and was slumped down in the seat, bleeding into her lap. The windshield hadn't shattered but a spider's web of cracked glass had formed where the girl's head had made contact. Lou looked over at the cop who was pulling himself slowly to his feet, keeping his right leg awkwardly straight, his mirrored shades hanging on by one ear. Jimmy ran over to the Mustang. The steel crunched as he ripped open the driver's door, the music still blasting from the stereo. He reached inside and took the girl by the shoulders and gently eased her back in the seat.

Her face looked like it had been cracked in half. Her forehead was split down the middle and her nose was obviously broken. The blood ran freely from both nostrils, pooling in her open mouth. Her head was beginning to swell from her hairline to her eyebrows.

Lou was trying to help the young cop who was bracing himself against the side of his police car and hopping toward the door. He shook Lou off and reached inside for the microphone, muttering in a high-pitched whine like a child who had just pissed his pants. He was trying to give his location but he was unsure exactly where he was. Lou had seen grown men piss themselves before. They were either very scared or dead.

Jimmy was holding the blonde upright in the seat, watching air bubbles pop through the blood in her mouth. She was making that kind of gurgling sound, a sort of snoring that was often followed by no breathing at all. Lou thought she might have had a couple of broken ribs to go with the crushed face, maybe even a punctured lung.

Across the street, an old lady in a light blue housecoat had come out of her front door and stood watching from her porch, peering through the bare branches of an old maple tree, the few remaining leaves fluttering precariously in the cold morning breeze, determined to hang on for one more day. She leaned on the wooden rail to get a better view and the handset of a portable telephone slipped from the pocket of her housecoat. She probably would have called the police if she hadn't seen the police car in the middle of the street. Why bother, she thought, the cops were already there.

Jimmy kept the palm of his hand against the girl's forehead. He didn't want to move her. That much he remembered. She was starting to go into seizure. Her head and shoulders had begun to shake and her eyes fluttered and rolled back into their sockets, showing a cloudy white sclera, speckled with blood. A drop of blood trickled from her left ear and ran down the side of her face. It was a bad sign.

‘I think her eggs are scrambled, Lou.'

‘Hang on,' Lou whispered, ‘just hang on,' repeating it silently to himself, not sure if he was talking to Jimmy or the girl.

They heard the sirens and in the next minute a police car roared around the corner with an ambulance right behind it. The cop with the bruised knee tried to look poised and uninjured. He'd managed to adjust his sunglasses, which now sat lopsided on the bridge of his nose. Another police car came around the corner, an unmarked blue Ford with a white shirt behind the wheel. Patrolmen wore blue.

The unmarked navigated around the wreck and came to a screeching halt. The door flew open and Lieutenant Kevin Mitchell swung out his two feet, put them flat on the ground and pushed himself up from the vehicle with a low groan as if he had a bad back or a nagging case of heartburn. He took one look at Lou and shook his head in disgust, the smirk showing at the corners of his mouth.

‘As soon as I heard this come out, you know whose face popped into my mind? Lou Klein. Don't ask me why. Maybe because of the location or maybe because I'd spent almost thirty years with the Philadelphia Police Department and knew what kind of cluster fuck I'd find when I got here.'

‘It's good to see you too, Mitch.'

A gust of wind caught the wave of coarse gray hair that flowed over the flat top of his head, exposing a broad, tightly-knit forehead, shiny with sweat. He squinted in the sunlight, his eyebrows knitted together, forming a continuous ridge over his steel-blue eyes. The color of his eyes seemed to match the color of his hair and the black pinpoint irises shown in stark contrast. If he was cold he didn't show it.

The skin on his face looked freshly shaven. Mitch always looked freshly shaven, as if he was one of those cops that kept an electric shaver planted deep in a desk drawer and took advantage of every idle moment to whip it out and run it a few times around his hanging cheeks and nub of a jaw. He probably liked the way it sounded, the electric buzz, and he liked the way it felt, the vibrating steel blades massaging his thick skin.

‘Put yourself in my shoes, Lou. I got the radio on the desk and I hear, “vehicle into a police car,” as if a police car was some kind of fixed object. It couldn't have been a vehicle into a tree or a pole or even a hydrant. But into a
police car
, like we can't even get out of our own goddamn way anymore.'

‘Take it easy, Mitch. You have an injured officer over there and a badly hurt girl.'

‘He don't look injured.'

‘He's doing a good job at hiding it.'

‘She gonna make it?'

Mitch pointed with his chin at the ambulance crew loading the girl onto the stretcher and then loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The paramedic already had her hooked up to a monitor and was preparing an IV.

‘Honestly, Mitch? It doesn't look good.'

‘If she dies the
Inquirer
will have a field day. They've been crucifying us lately.'

‘Why's that?'

‘Homicides are up. Manpower is down. Every thug in the city is running around with a gun in his pants.'

‘Since when are you guys to blame for that?'

‘Since when did it matter?'

Jimmy Patterson was wiping the blood off his hands with a paper towel as he walked slowly toward Lou and Mitch. His eyes seemed to have glazed over and the color had drained from his face.

‘You all right, Jimmy?' Lou asked. ‘You look like you could use a drink.'

‘I'm fine,' Jimmy answered. ‘Funny how it all comes back to you. After so many years in the business you just know what to do.'