My Brother's Keeper (13 page)

The back door was locked as tightly as the front with what looked like a newly installed deadbolt. Lou could see into the small kitchen, a white coffee maker on the counter, an open box of cat food on the table and a cordless phone, quiet in its cradle. The backyard ran right up to an alley with a wooden shed angled in the corner and a worn patch of dirt where Jimmy might have parked his car if there were no spaces on the street.

Two garbage cans sat next to a side door that probably led to the basement. One looked brand new with a set of black handles that locked down the lid. The other was mildewed brown, half the size of the other one, with a longitudinal crack in it from top to bottom. The lid was held down with a brick, its rough edges and points worn smooth.

Lou's mother used bricks the same way. It was a good way to keep the squirrels and the raccoons and the stray cats out of the garbage. If they were hungry enough they'd find a way to gnaw through the plastic and in the morning she'd find debris strewn across the back porch. She'd spent more than one evening at the back door waiting for them, discovering that some animals only came out at night. They came out to feed and were impossible to stop. She'd shaken her broomstick at them, set traps, used sprays to keep them away like they were weeds in her garden. But all her attempts proved futile and she had begun to question the effectiveness of her bricks and her fence.

She'd stack them along the bottom of the chain link fence that bordered the back of her property. She'd stack them around the small garden in the backyard. She'd spent most of her days in that garden, weather permitting, cultivating and working like a bricklayer, building a small wall around her frail tomato plants. Lou had always wondered where she got the bricks from, picturing his mother standing in front of a mound of rubble, sifting through the wreckage of some demolished apartment building, loading them into her metal shopping cart and wheeling them down the uneven sidewalk. They could have weighed a ton but she would have gotten them home. She could have built a wall with those bricks, a great brick wall separating her from the rest of the city.

Lou picked up the brick and the garbage can toppled over. He tossed it into the wet grass where it landed with a dull thud. He pulled a pen flashlight from his jacket pocket and aimed the beam down at the contents that had spilled onto the walk. There were two plastic bags still inside, thin white plastic stretched to the breaking point like the skin of a bloated corpse. He poked one of them with the pen and it split open, white maggots tumbling from the broken bag in a choppy torrent of cracked eggshells, rotten vegetables and steak bones with slivers of flesh and fat still clinging to them. Lou picked up a broken branch lying in the grass, a thin brittle stick that had fallen from the neighbor's poplar. He prodded the bag gently with the dry, fragile stick. A few cans of Campbell's soup tumbled out and clattered on the walk as if they were tied to the bumper of an old Buick with a couple of newlyweds inside making for Interstate 95 and points south.

A light came on in a first-floor window in the house adjacent to Patterson's. Lou saw a figure peel back the blinds and peer out. It was a woman, thin and hunched, her fingers like bone against the glass. Lou could see through the sheer curtains to the lighted room behind her, a neat little parlor that appeared frozen in time, like a miniature English manor dropped into a row home in West Philadelphia. Lou raised his hand and gave an innocent wave, trying to put her mind at ease, this old lady, maybe drying herself after a hot bath, about to put her tired body to bed and hearing a sound outside and climbing down those stairs one last time, afraid of what she might see but afraid also of falling, remembering the time she'd fallen before, coming down those stairs for a cup of hot tea with milk and a touch of whiskey that she hoped would help her sleep. No matter what Lou did now, she'd be calling 911.

He flipped the lid off the other can. Six pizza boxes sat wedged inside with another white plastic bag on top. Lou reached in and tore it open. A vacuum cleaner bag rolled over, spilling its contents of thick gray dirt and dust. Jimmy had never run a sweeper in his life. It must have been Franny, cleaning the place up if she was going to be staying there for a while. It would have been good therapy since her romance with Brian Haggerty had gone sour. She would have fallen into a routine she was used to, one she'd followed before, taking care of her father and three brothers, two of them cops, one a firemen, living with the memory of their dead mother and the baby brother who'd never come back from Iraq. Lou poked at the garbage bag, thinking of Jimmy Patterson and his sister, the two having never said their last goodbyes.

Mitch's boys were surely on their way by now. But they wouldn't take the time to sift through Jimmy's garbage. They wouldn't want to hang around that long. They had better things to do. There were other murders and other crime scenes and honestly, they didn't have the patience. And what did they really expect to find? To get a conviction these days they'd need an eye-witness or a confession. And they weren't going to find either at the bottom of a garbage can.

But it wasn't the first time Lou had searched through people's garbage and found something valuable. It was an old police trick, a way to collect evidence without a warrant, without setting foot inside a suspect's house. Trash was considered abandoned property, fair game for anyone willing to sift through someone else's junk to get a glimpse of their discarded life beneath the surface. It had the smell of eavesdropping, sticking your nose in where it didn't belong.

His mother would always curse the men she'd see cruising the neighborhood at night in noisy, beat-up pick-up trucks, picking through stuff at the curb as if they were at a rummage sale or a flea market, referring to them as garbage scouts. The police did the same thing, commandeering a city truck for the day and grabbing what they wanted from a list of addresses, bringing it all back to the station and sorting through it, wearing rubber gloves and particle masks. It was a good way to find out about a person, see what they threw away, what they no longer had any use for. Turned out there wasn't much difference between a cop and a trash man after all.

Needles and empty baggies were what the cops had been looking for, packaging from over-the-counter cold medications, certain chemicals, cleaning products, receipts. They'd always find enough beer cans to get a few bucks for the aluminum at the recycling center. Now, Lou wasn't sure exactly what he was looking for.

He shone the light down to the bottom of the can, the fractured beam growing dimmer, losing power. He used the stick, pushing aside paper plates and plastic cups and soiled napkins. It looked as if someone had a birthday party with a sheet cake from the Superfresh and a few soggy gallons of WAWA ice cream. The beam of light landed on a wad of paper towels rolled into a ball, damp and dark with moisture. Lou used the stick like a divining rod, pushing on the clump of paper towels until they broke open. It looked sticky, like a used bandage saturated with matted blood.

He used the stick to ease the bloody towel out onto the driveway. He gave it a nudge with the stick and then another and it began to unravel. And then he saw it, a severed finger, gray and swollen, like a sausage link ready for the grill. It was a woman's finger. He wasn't sure just how he knew, with the nail torn off and the knuckle twisted as if it had been caught in a car door and crushed. First the ring and now a finger and still no sign of Franny.

Lou suddenly found himself fighting the urge to vomit. It started as a tingling deep in his throat and then his insides beginning to churn and whatever was left in his stomach began moving around. He swallowed hard and felt his mouth fill with saliva. He threw up in the frozen grass.

He caught his breath and turned his gaze back to the severed finger. He looked down at the dappled skin and the ugly black vein protruding from its base like a worm from the ground and the jagged shard of bone from which a grizzly ounce of flesh still clung and he wanted to kick it into the dirt, bury it like a dog buries a bone. He wanted to go home and gather up his daughter and keep driving until they were somewhere warm and sunny, somewhere safe near the ocean, where the body parts that drifted ashore belonged to people he'd never known, people he'd never cared about, people who'd lived on the other side of the goddamned world.

TWELVE

L
ou flipped open his cell phone, got Mitch on his private line and told him to send one of his boys over if he hadn't already. Lou didn't have any more room in his pockets for another piece of evidence. He had the ring in one pocket and the pack of matches from the Arramingo Club in the other. He figured this long-lost finger belonged in a laboratory somewhere deep in the bowels of the Philadelphia Police Department where it could be properly dissected. He walked up the driveway toward the back of the house, out of the reach of that stubborn spotlight, where he lit up another cigarette.

The shed in the corner of the yard looked like a dilapidated doll's house, with small shuttered windows and a shingled roof. It was a replica of a Tudor mansion, just large enough for a child to climb inside and hide if he had the courage to brave the dark tangle of spider webs anchored in the ceiling like angry black clouds. The whole thing sat on a concrete foundation that had begun to crumble at the edges where the rainwater rolled off the roof and eroded the stone. As Lou got closer he noticed that the door of the shed was warped and hung open, a rusty metal hasp hanging unlocked.

Lou pulled on the hasp and stood back from the swinging door. A bare bulb dangled from a frayed black cord, a pull string hanging from that. He reached inside and gave it a tug and the light came on and a hundred spiders seemed to move in that instant, retreating into the concealment of the pitched ceiling. The bulb swung like a pendulum, the shadows on the wall moving in time with the swinging light. Lou steadied it and stepped in.

A lawn mower sat on the concrete floor, a couple of red plastic gas cans beside it. And beside that lay Franny Patterson. It looked as if she was floating on a river of blood, lying on her side, curled up and fetal as if she meant to die in the same position in which she was born. But she wasn't dead.

Her arms were pulled in against her sides as if she could stop her own blood from flowing, wrap her arms around herself like a clamp. More blood, Lou thought, so much blood. He was sick of it. He knelt at her side and rolled her onto her back and saw the puncture wounds on her chest and the defensive wounds on her arms. He couldn't see how deeply she'd been stabbed but he could see the blood in her mouth as it opened and closed like a fish mouth with a hook caught in its throat. She was trying to speak, forcing words through the blood with the last shred of air left in her collapsing lungs.

‘I'm sorry, Lou.' Guttural and rasping, a trailing whisper and a trickle of blood. ‘I'm sorry. I should . . . I should have . . .'

She couldn't finish the sentence. She fell unconscious in Lou's arms. But he knew what she was going to say. He heard it in her voice and finished the sentence for her.

‘You should have told me the truth. I know.' He took off his jacket and slid it under her head. ‘I know.'

He flipped open his cell phone again. This time he called for an ambulance.

He stayed at her side and held her head in his lap, pushing the hair from her face and counting the seconds until he could hear the sirens getting closer. His eyes scanned the cluttered shed. There were an assortment of tools in matching green buckets lining a low shelf and other tools hanging from hooks on the back wall: a weed trimmer with a strand of fluorescent green wire dangling from its base like a tongue from the head of a snake, a long silver tree saw, a hack saw next to that, a hedge trimmer and a pair of snips and a shovel with dried dirt caked on the blade.

On the top shelf cans of paint were stacked in three neat rows. The paint cans looked as if they'd been sitting empty for a very long time, their labels obscured with dried paint smeared over the face of each can. They reminded Lou of the painted faces of Native Americans he'd seen in grade school history books and on record albums, conquered tribes with nothing left worth fighting for, the painted faces of defeat, faces turned into masks, masks that mimicked death.

Lou's eyes continued to scan the small shed. There was a square window in the back with a screen and an open vent. Nails came through the ceiling where the shingles had been tacked down, their pointed ends protruding through the wood like sharks' teeth. On the right a pile of newspapers sat on the shelf and a case of beer next to that and a sleeping bag next to that. Why the sleeping bag? Lou wondered.

Franny's breathing was shallow but steady. A good sign. He let her head rest on the jacket and stood to examine the contents of the shelf. He pulled out an empty bottle of beer from the case and held it up to the light. Cigarette butts lay at the bottom of the bottle, soaking in warm beer. He slid the bottle back into the case. He thought he'd smelled body odor when he first entered the shed. It didn't smell like Franny. Someone else had been in there. And not just to hide Franny's body.

He grabbed a newspaper off the top of the pile and looked for a date. He picked up a few more and did the same. They were relatively recent, from the last month. Most of the headlines dealt with the sudden rash of violence in Philadelphia, the stabbing of a stripper off Delaware Avenue and the body of a man found in Judy Garland Park. Violence was like a rash, Lou thought. It got under your skin and just when you thought it was gone there it was again, back with a vengeance.

Lou peeled off a few more papers. They were smudged and worn like the ones at the Regal, as if they'd been handled by a thousand greasy fingers, used to swat flies and mop up spilled coffee. He read under the light from the bare bulb. It was more of the same: dead bodies turning up in public parks, most of them women, and none of them out for an afternoon stroll with the tikes in a baby carriage. Supply and demand, Lou thought. In Philadelphia there weren't many good reasons to be in a public park after dark. You either had a bad habit to feed or you were looking for the kind of fun you couldn't find at home. And that's what it was: good, clean fun. Until you brought a disease home to your wife or some politician got pinched in a sting and ended up in the morning paper. Then it got serious.