My Brother's Keeper (32 page)

Franny Patterson came up behind them, watching from the top of the cathedral steps. She was thin as a rail. Standing there alone in a long black dress and no coat, with those deep-set eyes beneath a black veil, she seemed like a ghost, inured to the cold.

The procession was led by two cops on motorcycles. They cruised in tandem, staying ahead of the hearse, lights flashing red and blue. They were dressed entirely in black leather: heavy polished jackets, boots to their knees and thick gloves. Their helmets were white, though. They wore black mirrored sunglasses and from where Franny was sitting they must have seemed like a pair of knights on horseback, delivering the dead to the doorstep of heaven.

They'd close each intersection and let the cars in the funeral train glide by, their orange flags waving like banners. Most drivers didn't have a problem waiting for death to pass. They'd gape open-mouthed as the traffic signal cycled from red to green and back to red again, grateful that it was someone else this time. But the clock was ticking. That much they knew and that's why they waited.

Maggie rode with Lou. She'd been quiet thus far. She'd always been quiet in church, Lou recalled. They followed Joey's white Cadillac with Betty in the passenger seat and the traffic on Sproul Road slowing to a crawl.

‘I'll never forget the night Jimmy Patterson died on our porch. Jesus. How do you deal with that?'

‘You don't.'

‘No wonder you have nightmares. You still having them?'

‘Not as often. But I don't sleep much either.'

‘Still dreaming about Catherine Waites?'

‘That. And others. They're nothing, really.'

‘They're not nothing.'

‘They're just dreams, Maggie. They're not real. What does it matter?'

‘It does matter, Dad. They mean something. You can't just ignore them.'

A high stone arch stood at the entrance to St Peter's Cemetery, tall, wrought-iron gates standing open. The procession weaved along a narrow path and stopped beside an open grave with a large mound of rich black dirt ready to cover it over. The line of cars pulled onto the grass and parked. The pall-bearers, including Lou and Mitch and Joey, went immediately to the back of the hearse while the rest gathered around in a half-circle.

The air was biting, a cold rain falling. It seemed to be getting colder, the rain beginning to mix with frozen crystals, fine particles of ice that tapped against the top of the casket as they maneuvered it into position.

Franny looked frail on her brother's arm as Father Penn recited a final prayer for the dead and she watched her brother's casket descend into the ground. It disappeared into the blackness, seeming to take a very long time until it reached bottom, resting finally in the earth beyond their sight. Joey crossed himself. He and Betty moved back up onto the narrow road and lit cigarettes. Maggie went with them. Betty had her umbrella open and Maggie hunched under it. Others followed suit, walking back to their cars, their faces hidden under black umbrellas.

Lou moved up beside the open grave and stood next to Franny. He took her hand. When he let go she had the ring. He'd passed it to her wordlessly and she looked down at the diamond in her open palm. It wasn't big, not much more than a couple carats. But it sparkled where the rain hit it, making it look larger and brighter than it was.

‘I thought you might have had it.'

‘I got it from Jimmy. He had it when he died.'

‘Remember I said we wouldn't lie to each other anymore? And now you're here, still waiting for me to tell you the truth.'

‘I can wait.'

‘You shouldn't have to.'

‘Secrets rarely stay secrets for very long, Franny. The truth comes out. It has a will all of its own. You don't owe me any explanations.'

‘Still, you should hear it from me, Lou.' Lou took her arm and together they inched to the edge of the open grave. ‘It was Jimmy's ring all along. He gave it to Valerie Price.' She held the ring out in front of her and stared through the circle of white gold. ‘And you know what she did? She laughed. She put the ring on her finger and laughed at him, laughed at him for thinking she'd marry a cop when she could have anyone she wanted, pregnant or not. She paraded around saying Brian Haggerty gave it to her. Said it was his baby inside her and he was going to make her an honest woman.'

‘I don't know what to say, Franny.'

‘Jimmy told me everything that day, the day he died. He even asked me to forgive him. He never thought any harm would come to me. He thought he could protect me. He was a good man, Lou. He made mistakes. But he was a good man.'

‘I know.'

She dropped the ring into the grave. They listened but it never made a sound and Lou imagined it falling forever, a bottomless pit where all of Jimmy's best laid plans inevitably fell.

Lou walked her back to the limo. He opened the rear door and felt the heat from the warm car. Franny put her arms around his neck and rested her head on his chest. His hands went to her waist and she felt light and withered under his touch, light as the air and weak as the winter sun.

‘Everything got so mixed up, Lou.'

‘It sure did.'

‘Are you coming by the house?'

‘Yeah, I'll be by.'

Franny crawled into the back seat and Lou closed the door. He watched the car drive away, he and Maggie standing there alone, the last ones left.

A sharp gust of wind revved up and blew across the abandoned cemetery, splashing over Maggie's face and blowing her dark hair into a mad tangle. They turned their backs to it, walking between the tombstones toward the car.

‘Do you ever regret coming back here, Dad, getting involved in all this?'

‘You asked me that once before.'

‘I know. I wondered if you'd changed your mind.'

‘I have a lot of regrets, Maggie. But coming back home isn't one of them.'

‘Is Franny Patterson one of your regrets?'

‘No.' He was shaking his head, looking down at a bunch of wilted flowers on a grave. He read the name and the dates on the stone. Max Coffey, ninety-one when he died and still someone was putting flowers on his grave. ‘It's nice to think about. But no.'

They looked over the crest of the hill at the various markers and monuments that stretched out to the horizon and out of sight. The ground was still soft beneath their feet. It might not harden for another month, when winter would solidify its grip.

‘Why did you come back, Dad?'

Lou slowed his pace and Maggie turned to face him.

‘I had nowhere else to go.'

‘That's it? You had no place to go, so you decided to come home. Just like that?'

‘The house was empty. It'd been empty for a long time. That house and you were all I had left. I thought it was time to breathe some life back into it, back into the house and back into my life. At least, that's what I hoped.'

‘Where were you all those years? Why'd you stay away for so long?'

Two crows caught their attention, lighting on a headstone nearby, bobbing their heads and cackling like a couple of wise guys in black suits. Lou picked a pebble out of the wet grass and tossed it at them. They leapt from the stone, both of them flapping their wings hard against the implacable wind. They drifted wistfully over the deserted graveyard, settling down on another stone to begin their laughing all over again.

‘It seems like I've been holding my breath, dreading the day you'd ask that question.'

‘Why?'

‘I was afraid of telling you the truth.'

‘That seems to be going around.'

‘I wanted to protect you, Maggie. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. Your mother wanted to protect you, too. It was one of the few things we agreed on. After the divorce, we wanted to spare you any more pain. So we told you I was still a cop, that I left the police department and I was working as a detective with the district attorney and I needed some time to build a new life. You were young. It was a believable story. It didn't exactly explain my long absence, but . . .'

‘But it was a lie.'

‘Yeah.' They got to the car and climbed in. They just sat there looking through the windshield and listening to the frozen rain hit the glass. ‘I wanted to tell you, but things were going so well between us. I didn't want to ruin it.'

‘You won't ruin anything. We lost each other for a while. Now we got it back. Nothing else matters. Right?'

His hands were on the steering wheel. He thought he saw a few snowflakes swirling in front of him. The freezing rain had first turned to sleet and now it was snowing.

‘I was in prison, Maggie.'

They sat in silence. Lou started the car and tried to get a little heat going and then they were pulling away.

‘For how long?'

‘Almost five years.'

‘Five years.' Lou could see her calculating the time in her head. It was a quarter of her life. Back then it would have been half. ‘For what you did to that man? The man that molested Catherine Waites?'

‘Yeah. At first he was just paralyzed. The charges were dropped and he sued the city. He was paid off and I resigned and that was supposed to be the end of it. All he cared about was the money. But he got some kind of infection. He went back into the hospital and twelve days later he was dead. His family claimed his death was a direct result of the beating he took. The one I gave him. The medical examiner agreed and the district attorney charged me.'

They were rolling slowly down the narrow drive, exiting the cemetery, passing back through the stone archway and the wrought-iron gate.

‘I pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter.'

‘You pled guilty?'

‘A long trial would have made things worse. It just would have dragged things out and I didn't want that. I wasn't afraid to go to jail. I'm sorry, Maggie. I never wanted to lie to you. I didn't know what else to do.'

She reached across the seat and took his hand.

‘It's OK. You did what you thought was right. You always did.'

TWENTY-NINE

M
aggie wasn't comfortable going to the Pattersons'. She wasn't in the mood for coffee and cake and didn't feel like spending the rest of the day listening to a bunch of cops talk about Jimmy Patterson as if he was sitting there in his favorite chair, matching them beer for beer. She pictured her father with Joey and Mitch and Jimmy's brother, Tony, and Donny Weeks, all of them getting drunk together around the kitchen table. It would probably end up in a fist fight. Lou wasn't surprised when she told him she'd promised to meet Betty at the hospital.

Betty's shift would be starting soon. She'd been working twelve-hour shifts round the clock for weeks now as a result of the nursing shortage. They'd work all night and sleep all day or vice versa. They'd cover for each other if need be, a lifestyle not much different than that of a cop, working and sleeping and trying to find a way to stay human. Maggie had decided to pursue nursing as a career and Betty was getting her an internship at the hospital. Lou wondered if she had any idea what she was getting herself into.

‘It's long hours. And hard work. There's death, up close and personal. You got to go in with your eyes open.'

‘I know all about it. Not everybody could do it. I think I could.'

‘My little angel of mercy.'

‘What's wrong with that?'

‘You'll never be out of work. That's for sure.'

‘What're you afraid of? You think I'll meet some cop in the emergency room and want to marry him?'

‘I was hoping it'd be a doctor.'

They drove in silence for a while. And he was reminded that he still saw something beautiful in this city. There was the physical beauty, rivers running through it like arteries through a beating heart. And there was its age-old architecture, the old churches and the monuments and the cobblestone streets. But it was more than just its physical beauty. It was deeper than that. It was the soul of Philadelphia that drew him to her.

He'd been to other cities. He'd spent time in Baltimore and had actually been accepted to their police department. It was a time when he thought about leaving Philly for good. And yet it had been like a game he'd played with himself. He knew he'd only end up coming back, working for the Philadelphia Police Department and following in his father's footsteps.

There were still so many things he needed to tell Maggie, things about himself that he'd never told anyone, stories from his childhood, things they had in common, the most defining moments of his life. He hoped she would begin to know him for who he really was. The first story he would tell her would be about a time he'd been sitting at his bedroom window, as was his custom in those days, and had seen a bird falling from the old maple tree in his front yard.

He'd followed it with his eyes, its wings beating wildly as it descended, fluttering between the branches and wet leaves as it fell with no sound at all, disappearing and then appearing again on the soft grass. He'd watched from the window and looked at the bird lying motionless for quite a while before he decided to go down. He wasn't sure what to do. He was just a boy, no more than twelve. He thought it was dead, wondering if this was what death really looked like, until it opened its wide, unblinking eyes. Its head twisted around as if something had come loose in its neck and only needed to be tightened.

Lou had cupped his hands gently around the crippled bird and carried it onto the porch. He trapped it under one of his mother's milk crates and set one of his mother's bricks on top of it. He'd been suddenly pleased with himself. His bird was alive and safe in his care, his first rescue attempt a success. He remembered how anxious he was to show his father.

He'd retrieved a box from the basement, one of those five-sided boxes where his mother stored her hats. She'd kept them on a dusty wooden shelf in the basement and Lou didn't think she'd mind if he used one for his precious bird. He'd pulled the box off the shelf and removed the lid. It was dark in the basement and the black, fur-lined hat looked like a raccoon, curled up and asleep. He reached in and removed the hat, placing it back on the dusty shelf.