Fresh Kills (18 page)
Authors: Bill Loehfelm
“Relax,” Waters said. “The badge gets to his head sometimes, and good-looking women always do, but he doesn’t know anything I just told you. I sent him to Fontana’s while I checked out the other witness, speed things up. He didn’t even know I was meeting you here.”
“I don’t want him around us,” I said, trying to sound casual about it. “He’s too interested in other things. Julia, Molly.”
“He’s working the case with me,” Waters said. “Julia’s the daughter of the victim. Molly’s your alibi. It’s professional.”
“The hell it is. He likes to play games with what he thinks he knows.”
We watched Purvis pull the car to the curb. He came in too hard, scraping the hubcaps on the concrete. Purvis swore inside the car. I laughed. Waters just stared down into his coffee. “Every time,” he said.
Purvis sat with his hands on the wheel, trying to mask his embarrassment with a scowl. Waters rapped on the window with his knuckle. “Unlock the door, Carlo,” he said. Purvis jumped and hit the button. Waters turned to me before he reached for the door. “You give Carlo too much credit.” He opened the door and piled his bulk into the passenger seat.
I grabbed the door before Waters could close it. Waters raised his eyebrows at me, but I leaned into the car anyway. “Purvis,” I said, “you tell your boss what we talked about this afternoon?”
Purvis swallowed. “My conversations with my partner are none of your business.”
Waters turned. I knew he was giving Purvis the eyebrows now.
“You tell him you abandoned my sister to the fates in Crack Town?” I asked. “And maybe that’s why I have a problem with you.”
Purvis looked at Waters. “It’s a long story.”
Waters just stretched his arms out, gripping the dashboard and flexing his arms. He wouldn’t look at either of us.
“It was back in high school,” Purvis told him.
Waters blew out a long breath that clouded the windshield. He turned to Purvis. “Carlo and I will discuss it,” he said. He turned to me, glaring at my face, and then at my hand on the door. I let go and backed up. “As for you, Junior? Maybe you should think about how long and how hard you need to hold grudges. They only get heavier with time.” He slammed the car door but he rolled down the window. “I’ll stay in touch.”
“One more thing,” I said.
Waters leaned his elbow out the window. “What?”
I meant to ask him about his own grudges, about how often he took his own advice, but the look on his face told me he was about out of patience. “You know who won the Met game last night?”
“The Mets,” Waters said. “Delgado hit a walk-off. You still follow those jokers?”
“Not really,” I said. “But I had a bill riding on the game.”
Waters just waved as they pulled out into traffic. I watched them drive away, then walked back to my car.
An extra-inning, walk-off home run. A thing of beauty, that was. My anger at Purvis vanished. The win, and the way it happened,made me feel better than I had in days, even if I had missed it. Even if the Mets were still mired in second as the Braves ran away with the division again. What mattered was that it had happened. I stood by my car, keys in my hand, just thinking about it.
I’d seen enough of Delgado’s moon shots to imagine it well enough. The ball an aspirin-sized dot in the night sky, unstoppable, unalterable, soaring over the field, the fence, the stands, and out into the parking lot. Sheer bedlam at Shea. Ecstatic teammates leaping up the dugout steps. Delgado oblivious to it all, his cool conqueror’s glare fixed on the ball the whole way, as if the hit not only won the night’s game, but exacted some kind of primordial, private vengeance he’d sworn to reap. He hit home runs the way they ought to be hit. High and far and long, leaving no question. He took someone else’s best shot and beat a perfect, pure, victorious moment out of it, a moment when everything went right.
I unlocked the car, cheered more than any grown man with dead parents had a right to be by a day-old baseball game. I wondered if I really was losing my mind, and how much further I had to go before I got it over with. I thought maybe I was such a fan of Carlos Delgado and his team because we all took the game of baseball way too seriously.
I stepped into the street in front of Scalia’s. The place was dark, except for a dim light burning in the back, its glow bleeding out into the parking lot. I wondered what room it was, if it was the room my father was in. It couldn’t be. No way a room like that had windows. He’d be in the basement, underground, already down in a hole. As I stood there in the street, I envisioned my father’s huge form prone on the slab, still and silent beneath a sheet. If I knocked at the door, would the Scalias let me in? Let me see that he was really dead. Really gone.
I dragged my hands down my face. Who was I trying to kid? I wanted no part of that room or anything that happened in there. My mouth went dry and I tried to spit in the street anyway. I lit a cigarette and it made me sick. A trickle of sweat ran past my ear. I stood there, waiting.
Maybe if I stood there long enough my father would walk out that door, down the steps and meet me in the street, playing out the sick joke to the bitter end. He’d be laughing at me all the way, rolling his shoulders to loosen them up, cracking his knuckles, eyes sparking with violence. We could settle things once and for all. I cracked my knuckles, rolled my shoulders, breathed shallow.
What if the guy who helped Fontana down to the corner store every Sunday walked out, the quick-minded guy who would’ve made a great coach. The man who rode carousels with his daughter. What would I do then? Because him I didn’t know. Him, I’d never even met. And I wanted to. I had some things to say to him.
I felt sicker. My hand shook against my forehead. I licked my lips, swallowed hard. Something stuck in my throat. Something hard that had risen up from my gut. I felt badly confused, off-balance. I wanted to ask my father something, but I didn’t know what. Or which version of my father to ask. Should I ask
Where the hell ya been?
Should I ask if the Jets would make the playoffs? Which man would answer? Which one did I want to talk to me? I didn’t know what answers I wanted.
Where the hell ya been?
Should I ask if the Jets would make the playoffs? Which man would answer? Which one did I want to talk to me? I didn’t know what answers I wanted.
Then the light in the back of the funeral home went out and I was alone in the dark. Sick and sweating and afraid.
And I remembered, as a train rolled into the station, that my father wasn’t walking out any doors, wasn’t picking fights or talking football with anyone anymore, no matter how long I waited. I felt a hole open inside me so wide I thought I’d disappear. It swallowed the hard thing I couldn’t swallow myself as it moved up my throat and it hurt like hell and I welcomed it. I closed my eyes and held my breath, waiting for it, wishing for it to happen. But it didn’t, because I lit up in the headlights of the car that turned the corner and screeched to a stop three feet short of where I stood.
I think I screamed. The adrenaline charge sucked me right back into my boots. I stumbled away from the car and tripped over the curb, nearly toppling the makeshift 9-11 shrine by the sidewalk. The driver put her cell phone down long enough to shout a few choice curses at me as she drove away. I was too confused to answer. I rubbed the sweat on my forehead back into my hair and tried to catch my breath.
Standing alone under the streetlights and stars, shaking in my boots, I watched a stray dog sniff around the trash can on the corner where my father died. I looked around at my feet for something to throw at it, but found nothing. The dog watched me as it lifted its leg on the can before trotting away out of sight.
I turned to the memorial and righted the pictures and candles I’d knocked over. When I’d fixed things up as best I could, I lit a candle underneath a fading picture of a dead police officer. He was Eddie Francis, NYPD, age thirty-six years, father of two. Beloved brother. I’d known him well when we were both younger, different men. He’d always thought his sister and I made a good match.
I hustled through the murder scene with my eyes closed and headed for Joyce’s to drink all the whiskey the Republic had to offer.
NINE
I EDGED OVER AS SOMEONE TOOK THE BAR STOOL NEXT TO ME, keeping my eyes fixed on my pint of Harp, well on my way to seeing double. There was no ball game. The home stand had ended and the Mets were traveling to Houston. I still felt better, more solid in my skin, sitting in Joyce’s, wrapped in a warm crowd of strangers, even without the distraction of a ball game. Each shot of Jameson blurred my thoughts of Scalia’s a little more. I worried they’d come looking for me again when I hit the couch that night, but what was there to do about that?
The gathering pile of coins before me on the bar was enough to call Molly three times over. But with each drink, the bubble around me solidified, the gravity in my bar stool got stronger, and the hour got later.
The voice next to me caught my ear when he ordered a double Jameson, neat. Then he told Joyce to back me up, and I turned to look. Jimmy McGrath, Jimmy the Saint, grinned back at me. It was a night for ghosts, and there was no getting away from it. “’Tis himself,” Jimmy said, settling back in beside me.
Joyce brought over the shots. Jimmy raised his glass and I met it with mine.
“Sláinte,”
he said, and we drank. “Julia said you’d be down here.” He grinned again and half-stood, fishing for his wallet.
“Sláinte,”
he said, and we drank. “Julia said you’d be down here.” He grinned again and half-stood, fishing for his wallet.
Back in high school, Jimmy was the only close friend I’d had. Right off the bat, our freshman year, Jimmy and I bonded in the back of the detention hall. We learned quick that we frustrated the dean much better as a duo than we did individually. We were greater than the sum of our parts, bolder and more confident. It made all the difference to me, having someone share both the commission and the consequences of my minor crimes. I thought
I
didn’t care about anything? There was nothing and no one Jimmy wouldn’t laugh at. I admired the hell out of him and sometimes, when he was at his most dismissive of the world, burned with envy.
I
didn’t care about anything? There was nothing and no one Jimmy wouldn’t laugh at. I admired the hell out of him and sometimes, when he was at his most dismissive of the world, burned with envy.
I’d hung the nickname Jimmy the Saint on him our senior year. In the midst of a U2 fixation he took up Jesus, Causes, and black clothes, morphing from a mischievous teen into an insufferable little Bono right before my eyes. We didn’t see each other in detention anymore, though for different reasons. Jimmy straightened up and stopped getting sent. Bored there without him, I simply stopped going. I didn’t graduate from Farrell as much as I was shoved out the door.
Jimmy went away to college in Florida, where he traded Jesus and Causes for keg beer and older women. I enrolled at the College of Staten Island, even pulling decent grades my first semester. On his holiday breaks, we’d get together and tie one on, but there wasn’t much to talk about. I didn’t know the people he knew down in Florida, didn’t do the things he did.
We got some of the old magic back the summer of ’99, after he graduated. For a couple of sweet months, it was like those four years apart had never happened. We were eighteen again, running the same streets. We went out to Shea and the Garden together, played softball and darts for the same bars. We chased women and caught bands in Manhattan, riding back on the empty ferry at the crack of dawn, Bud tall boys in paper bags between our knees, Jimmy in a black leather jacket and wraparound shades.
I didn’t know it then but that summer wasn’t a reunion; it was a last hurrah. He was gone again in the fall, this time to graduate school upstate. He didn’t come back to the island for three years. I blamed school for taking Jimmy from me. It made a good excuse to drop out of CSI after my third semester. Just when I figured I’d never see him again, he came back for a teaching position at Tottenville High, working like crazy to learn the ropes of a job he discovered he loved. I didn’t see much more of him than I did when he was upstate. Then, in December of his third year teaching, he met Rose Murphy. It wasn’t long before he discovered he loved her, too. He moved in with Rose the next summer, way down at the southern end of the island, near his school. They never answered the phone after ten.
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