My Brother's Keeper (9 page)

Maggie had made the reservations. She'd reserved a table for two using her first name and not her last. She'd gotten into the habit because she didn't ever want to be confused with her mother. She'd explained that her mother was mean to waitresses and she knew what it was like to have to wait on people for a living. That kind of thing got around and she'd seen the look on the waitress's face when her mother had sent something back to the kitchen, refusing to eat a perfectly good piece of steak because it was overcooked and she liked her meat dripping with blood.

Maggie said she'd been embarrassed too many times to use the name Klein at a restaurant where her mother might have frequented in the past. Lou had countered by opening the phone book and showing her a whole page of Kleins. The policy still applied, though, regardless of the fact that her mother's name was no longer Klein and hadn't been for years. Lou stepped up and gave the name.

The maitre d' shifted his glance from the handwritten list in front of him, surveying the few available tables within sight and twirling a pencil in his fingers. He showed them to a corner table, handing them menus and lighting a small candle.

The candle sat inside the glass carving of a swan. The glass looked smooth and cold as ice and yet the sparkling light from the flame danced under the swan's breast and moved in its eyes and outward through its open wings as if it was alive. Its long, narrow neck arced downward while its wings were raised as if it were trying to fly. It seemed frozen to the ground. If it could only lift its head, Lou thought, but its neck looked too thin and the candle too weak to melt the ice that held it down. Its fate was still better than the fish, Lou thought. After all, the swan was made of glass.

‘Your waitress will be with you shortly.'

Lou nodded, sat back in his chair and looked at his daughter sitting adjacent to him at the table and already unfolding her napkin and laying it across her lap. A youngish boy in a white shirt but no vest and black bangs falling to his eyebrows poured two glasses of water and set a silver decanter of hot tea between them.

Maggie banged a straw on the table until it popped out of its paper wrapper. She speared it into the glass of water, now dripping with condensation. She put her lips to the tip of the straw, stretching her head and neck out over the table, careful not to spill the glass. She reminded Lou of the swan tripping to the riverbank to drink, bending toward the water with its rolling eyes on the sky.

‘You know I worry about you sometimes?'

‘I know you do. But I wish you didn't. It's my job to worry about you.'

‘I just don't understand why you want to keep doing this cop thing. I mean, the department treated you like shit – at least that's what you said. I thought you were sick of it. There are a lot of other things you could do.'

‘Maybe.'

‘You say maybe like you're thinking about quitting but you don't mean it.'

‘I'm not sure I can do anything else. I wouldn't know what else to do.'

‘I know why you do it. You're doing it for your father. You're still trying to fill his shoes. You're trying to be the person he wanted you to be, even now, even though he's dead. I find myself doing the same thing. I do what you tell me to. Because I think it's what you want. But it's not always what I want for myself.'

‘I'm not sure that's true, honey. My father didn't want me to be a cop. I told you that. I made that decision on my own. It was the last thing I said to him on the day he was killed. I told you that, too.'

‘Well, if he really didn't want you to be a cop, did you think you were making him happy by telling him you decided to be one? You must have. Or maybe what he told you and what he really wanted were two different things. It happens like that sometimes. There's nothing wrong with wanting to follow in your father's footsteps. I just want you to see it for what it is.'

‘You know he never actually said those words to me. He never came right out and said he didn't want me to be a cop. It was something I just picked up on from the way he reacted when I asked him about the job, the look he got in his eyes when he talked about the direction his life might have taken if he never put on the badge.'

‘But the way he reacted when you finally told him contradicts all that.'

‘Maybe so. But I'll never be the man my father was. He was a bona fide hero. He left his mark on this city, helped a lot of people. The city of Philadelphia should erect a statue to that man.' Lou poured some tea into a tiny cup and took a sip. ‘Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of truth in what you say.'

‘But not enough to make you change.'

‘Change from what my father wanted to what you want?'

‘No. To what you want.'

‘I want to eat.'

Lou ordered beef and Maggie ordered chicken and they shared, reaching across the table with their forks and occasionally clanking them together, stabbing pieces of meat on each other's plates as if they were crossing swords. They'd both put down a bed of white rice and drowned it in soy sauce until it dripped black and runny to the edges of their plates.

‘Are you still having nightmares?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘Nightmares could be a symptom of a deeper problem, you know.'

‘Almost twenty years as a street cop in the City of Brotherly Love. That's my problem.'

‘And you think by helping Jimmy Patterson you'll make it all go away?'

‘Who told you about Jimmy Patterson?'

‘Joey.'

‘Joey should learn to keep his mouth shut. And it's Franny Patterson, his sister, I'm trying to help.'

‘Is she pretty?'

‘Very.'

Lou offered to take Maggie to Manning's Creamery for ice cream on the way home. It didn't matter that it was November and that most of the old ice-cream parlors in the city were closed for the season. There would never be a substitute for the role ice cream played in their relationship, sweet and rich with sugar and milk like some exotic drink they'd developed an insatiable addiction to. Maggie had inherited her father's sweet tooth and, regardless of the season, they'd kept half the ice-cream shops in Philadelphia in business.

Lou had accumulated many of the photos from their ice-cream adventures on his dresser over the years, dusty pictures leaning against dusty books and empty bottles of aftershave and a square cedar humidor with a few stale cigars inside. His favorite was a faded snapshot of his daughter as a toddler with chocolate all over her face, smiling a brown smile with her first couple teeth. She was sitting in a high chair with a bib around her neck that read ‘I love Daddy,' and a fudgecicle in her hand melting onto the tray, forming a puddle of brown soup. He still looked at it just about every day.

They had Manning's to themselves, the girl behind the counter looking surprised to see customers coming through the door. They ordered hot-fudge sundaes and sat by the window.

‘How's school coming along?'

‘Fine.'

‘Just fine?'

‘Yeah, just fine.'

‘How are you doing?'

‘Good.'

‘Straight A's?'

‘Just about.'

‘Just about?'

‘Why do you have to repeat everything I say, like you don't believe me or something?'

‘I don't normally have to ask how you're doing. You've always been pretty quick to tell me. When I don't hear anything, I think maybe there's a problem.'

‘If you weren't such a cop you wouldn't think that and I wouldn't be afraid to tell you the truth.'

‘The truth about what, honey?'

‘Promise me you'll let me handle it on my own.'

‘I can't promise anything until I know the whole story.'

‘I'm having a little trouble with one of my professors.'

Lou waited. He didn't say anything, didn't ask any questions, didn't repeat her words back to her as if he was interrogating a suspect in the basement of the Nineteenth Precinct. He didn't lean over her as if he was playing good cop/bad cop with Joey's size-thirteen shoe up on the chair, the sleeves of his blue polyester shirt rolled up and his hairy arms beginning to sweat. He didn't close in on her with his eyes as if he was coercing a confession from his only child. He bit down on the plastic spoon until he felt it crack between his teeth.

‘What kind of trouble?'

‘It's my French class. We have a language lab twice a week. We sit at computer terminals with our headphones on, working on pronunciation. This guy walks around the class listening to us. He'll stop if he sees somebody needs help. He always seems to stop behind my desk and I don't need any help. Lately he's been putting his hands on my shoulders like he's giving me a massage. It's creepy. I pull away but he doesn't stop.'

There were a lot of things Lou could have said at that moment, things a father would say, things a cop would say. He knew what she expected him to say. It was more like what she expected him to do.

He tossed the remainder of his ice cream into the garbage on their way to the car. He looked across the lot, at a woman next to a blue Ford Explorer with the quarter panels rusting out and gray smoke rising from the exhaust. She looked about his age, an assortment of kids climbing into the back seat ranging in age from about three to seventeen. She had her hands full keeping them from running around the empty parking lot. One of the younger ones dropped her cone on the ground and started to cry. Lou watched the child scoop the ice cream off the ground, placing it back on the cone and picking out the small round pebbles and sharp little fragments of ground glass.

‘Did you tell him to stop?'

‘Yes, I told him to stop but he just laughed like he thought I was joking or something.'

‘Sounds like the guy's got a problem.'

‘I'm actually glad I told you about it, Dad. But listen, don't worry, I can handle it. If I can't, I promise I'll tell you.'

‘I want to know what happens the next time you're in his class. Don't let it continue another day. The longer he gets away with it the harder it'll be to deal with. We can always go to the school or even to the cops if we have to.'

‘I don't want this guy arrested, Dad. And I don't want him fired either. Let's just see what happens.'

‘Wait and see. Good strategy.'

‘I'm getting cold. Let's go home.'

The remnants of a dark blue sky still hung overhead, turning blacker by degrees as if a heavy velvet curtain was edging slowly from horizon to horizon. With the night came the kind of cold that reminded Lou that winter was just around the corner. It was the wind that brought the cold with it, carrying it down the streets and to his doorstep, blowing away the remaining warmth of autumn, the fallen leaves on the lawn, the songbirds pushed from their nests and flying blindly toward warmer climates, their direction borne out by the sun. For those people like Lou, who still went for ice cream in November and ran in the early morning and sat on their porch at night with a cigarette and a hot coffee or a shot of whiskey, the cold was a fact of life.

It had always stung him, early in the morning and late at night. Philadelphia was a city surrounded by water, the harbor on one side and the ocean beyond that, with the Delaware and the Schuylkill, heavy with sludge, running into it. And always that ever-present wind carrying the icy moisture off the water and down rows of city streets and through the parks. No one was spared. It was a dampness that had gotten into his bones and never left. He knew what it was like to stand on Broad Street at three in the morning, directing traffic around a fatal accident with some teenager lying in the street with her neck broken after getting ejected through the back window of her daddy's SUV.

He'd shift his weight from one foot to the other, his toes numb against the freezing pavement, sleet tapping against the brim of his hat as he waited for the medical examiner's van to take another corpse away to the morgue.

To Maggie, though, winter was just a lot of cold air that made her hands dry and rough and her lips chapped. At her age, the memories of long winter nights usually involved Christmas trees and opening presents, building snowmen and sledding down Fireman's Hill. Winter was part of a weather report she'd hear on the radio, maybe throw on a sweater under her jacket, a pair of gloves stuffed in her pockets.

She couldn't imagine what the approach of winter meant to the aging policemen of the city, the cold grip it had on their knees, the way it cut through the fabric of their uniform and locked their legs into a sharp, cutting vice. She hadn't begun to associate physical pain with the weather, with the seasons of the year and the time of a person's life. How could she? She hadn't experienced it. She had yet to awaken to that deep ache inside her joints. But her father had. He had the arthritis to prove it and the sore hip where his gun had hung for twenty years and the sprained rotator cuff that acted up when his arm rested on top of the steering wheel.

Lou turned up the heat in the car. He leaned down and felt for it coming through the vent. And he had to admit, it felt good.

EIGHT

T
he lights on Market Street were flashing yellow as far up as he could see. It would happen when a pole got hit by a speeding car or a bolt of lightning. The system would get shorted out for miles. In Philly a blinking yellow light was the same as a green, drivers making time from one intersection to another, racing from block to block before they all turned back to red. Lou was making time himself and he'd jumped onto Cobbs Creek Parkway before he realized there was a police cruiser behind him. The overhead lights came on and the cop hit the siren and Lou pulled his car to the side of the road and rolled down his window.

He glanced in his rear-view mirror, focusing on the officer pulling himself slowly from the patrol car. The officer used two hands to fit a hat onto his head and then reached for a microphone snapped to an epaulet on his shoulder. He wore a silver badge and a nameplate on his blue uniform. If he'd gotten any medals he wasn't wearing them. Lou thought he'd looked young at first, a rookie maybe, ready to pull over anything that moved, anxious to reach his quota of vehicle stops for the night. But as he sauntered up alongside Lou's car, Lou could see the man was a veteran, older than he looked from a distance.