No Safe Place (20 page)

Kerry’s instinct for silence was deep. He simply waited.

“You’ve got a file,” Nunzio went on. “The Frankie Scaline case. It’s up for prelim next week.”

Kerry had numerous cases; he did not know this one. But the name Scaline was familiar. “I haven’t read the file yet,” Kerry said.

Nunzio spread his hands. “Domestic quarrel—wife gets upset, tells a cop the husband whacked her. Who knows?”

Kerry felt his eyes grow cold. “Who cares?” he asked softly.

Nunzio stared back at him. “The case is weak. They always are. I don’t want to waste your time.”

Kerry paused. Voice still quiet, he said, “Give it to someone else, then.”

Nunzio sat back, hands folded beneath his chin. “I think you should dismiss it.”

At once, Kerry understood. If something later happened to the wife, a reassignment might look peculiar; Flavio wanted
Kerry’s fingerprints on this one, not his own. “Maybe I should interview the wife,” Kerry answered.

For a moment, Nunzio was silent. “I understand she’s sorry now.” His voice had an undertone, the hint of patience lost. “No point in bothering this lady. It’s
her
marriage, not yours or mine.”

Kerry felt his chest tighten. The woman had persisted, and someone had placed a phone call. That was how it was done.

“Let me read the file,” he said.

Nunzio stood. “You do that, Kerry. By tomorrow.”

When Nunzio was gone, Kerry sat very still, staring at nothing. A half hour passed before he picked up the telephone.

“Who’s Frankie Scaline?” he asked Liam.

“Peter Scaline’s boy,” Liam answered. As was typical, he asked no questions.

“That’s what I thought,” Kerry said.

“You should know,” Liam continued evenly, “that Peter is a great supporter of Vincent Flavio. Vincent’s also Frankie’s godfather, if memory serves.”

And you’re mine,
Kerry thought. “Thanks, Liam.”

There was silence, Liam weighing his obligations. “Things all right over there?”

Liam had done enough for him, Kerry thought. To intervene with Flavio would squander a piece of the political capital Liam needed for more important matters. “Things are fine,” Kerry said, and got off.

He found the Scaline file in a stack atop the filing cabinet.

According to the police report, Frankie Scaline was twenty-four. His wife of less than a year, Elaine Scaline, had locked herself in the bedroom and called 911. Arriving, the police saw a bruise on her face, a slightly swollen lip. She claimed that Frankie had slapped her for refusing oral sex; her husband, embarrassed and belligerent, claimed that she had tripped. To men like Vincent Flavio, a comedy, a favor to be done.

Putting down the file, Kerry touched his eyes.

It was Elaine Scaline’s second complaint. Through the wooden prose of the report, Kerry had an image of her plight; intuitively, he believed that Frankie was a wife beater and that his wife knew he would grow worse. That was why she had not backed down.

It was the last case Kerry wanted.

He faced the reasons. For others, it would be enough that domestic violence cases were the dregs of the office—losers, pitting one witness against another, often abandoned by the complainant herself. Most of them would gladly do as Nunzio asked. But Kerry knew that his own reasons went far deeper: the habit of silence, passed from his mother to Kerry, the need to forget.

That part of his life was over. He had no wish to go back.

The morning of the preliminary hearing for Frankie Scaline, Kerry went to court.

Everything went as planned. Speaking for the State of New Jersey, Assistant County Prosecutor Kerry Kilcannon asked that the case be dismissed. Frankie was absent, and so was his wife. The hardest part was done—Kerry’s phone call to Elaine Scaline, explaining that her case was problematic. Frankie Sca-line’s lawyer did not have to say a word.

As they left the courtroom, he shook Kerry’s hand and thanked him.

Solitary, Kerry stopped on the courthouse steps. He did not know what he would do, or even where he was going.

At the end of their conversation, Elaine Scaline had started to cry.

Torn between anger and self-hatred, Kerry went to his office. The envelope was still on his desk.

Tearing a scrap of paper from his notepad, Kerry scrawled three words and slid the paper in the envelope. Then he walked the maze of corridors to Vincent Flavio’s corner office and opened the door.

Flavio was on the telephone. Looking up at Kerry, he neither waved him to a chair nor cut short the conversation. Kerry waited.

Hanging up the phone, Flavio studied him, a silent reproach for his rudeness. “What is it?” he demanded.

Kerry walked across Flavio’s Oriental rug and placed the envelope in his hand. As Flavio removed the scrap of paper, Kerry watched his face turn red.

“State v. Scaline,”
Kerry had written.

Kerry’s voice shook. “That’s my contribution, Vincent. It seems like enough.”

Before Flavio could answer, Kerry turned and left.

He did not have long to wait. Within hours, they dispatched his friend Tommy Corcoran to share another office. Tommy’s replacement was a heavyset black lawyer, Clayton Slade, with his own inclination toward quiet.

Two days later, Carl Nunzio called Kerry to his office. “I’m giving you a new assignment,” he said, and waited for Kerry’s question.

There was none.

“We’ve been taking some heat on domestic violence,” Nunzio went on. “Vincent thinks we need a specialist.” For once, amusement played on his wizened face. “Of course I thought of
you
, Kerry. After all, you’ve got experience.”

Two weeks later, the Musso case came in.

Bridget Musso was the victim. When the cops arrived, her husband was gone; she was sprawled on the living room floor, unconscious. Her face was bruised and several teeth were broken. But the detail Kerry found most chilling was that her eight-year-old son sat next to her, so uncommunicative that at first they thought he was retarded. His only words to the police were “I think my mommy’s dead.”

They rushed Bridget to the hospital and her son to a Catholic home for boys. This made sense to Kerry; in the Vailsburg apartment house where the Mussos lived, the father had a reputation for drunkenness and fits of temper. When the police tracked down Anthony Musso in a bar, he claimed that
his alcoholic
wife had tripped in the bathroom, smashing her face against the sink. He did not ask about his son.

The second problem, it seemed, was Bridget herself.

The admitting report from the hospital showed traces of drugs in her system, and a blood alcohol content well above the legal limit. The drugs were prescribed for epilepsy but, combined with too much alcohol, they produced an incapacitating haze.

That was how the neighbors frequently saw her—dazed, remote, with a vacant stare that made them feel invisible. It seemed John Musso had no parents worth the name.

The other thing it meant, Kerry knew, was that a good defense lawyer might impeach Bridget Musso. That drunks can stumble and injure themselves was emblazoned in Kerry’s memory.

Before anything else, he must interview Bridget.

When they discharged her from the hospital, she was afraid to go home. She and her child were living in a shelter run by the city; over the telephone, Kerry confirmed that she was drinking again. He reserved a witness room and sent the police to escort her in.

She was red-haired, Irish-looking, and the file said she was thirty-five. But ill health and addiction seemed to have sapped the life from her. There was a softness to her chin, a slackness to her face and body: her pale skin was blotchy, and Kerry noticed burst blood vessels beneath the surface of her cheeks. Though it was eleven-thirty in the morning, Kerry could smell whiskey on her breath.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.

She touched her face, as if this would help her remember. Beneath her delicate fingers, the swollen bruise was fading to green-yellow. When at last she spoke, Kerry saw her ruined teeth, the stitches on the inside of her lip. “Anthony did this,” she said dully, and then she shrugged. “He’s no different than anyone. Sometimes men get angry.”

The words left pinpricks on Kerry’s neck. “Your father beat your mother?” he asked gently. “Or you?”

For a time, she just looked past him. “Both.”

Sweet Jesus,
Kerry thought in despair. But he stifled the
impulse to ask about this; already, she seemed enervated. “That night,” he asked, “what did your husband do to you?”

For almost an hour, question by question, Kerry negotiated the minefield of her memory—bursts of vivid clarity, surrounded by black holes. The memory of a drunk.

By the time it was over, Kerry was exhausted, the night, as he pieced it together from Bridget and the file, indelible.

She was alone in the shabby living room. John was probably in his room—about this Bridget Musso had no curiosity. The light from the living room lamp receded into darkness. The acrid smell of burned pasta sauce reminded her, vaguely, that she had not turned off the kitchen stove.

Anthony had not come home for dinner.

Waiting, Bridget poured more whiskey into the plastic glass. The music on the soft-rock station seemed to come from far away, a note at a time. She barely heard the sound of a key opening the apartment door, the door softly closing.

Her husband was a large form in the darkness.

Bridget jerked upright. He stood over her, very still, his face still in shadows. “Why do you do this to me, Bridget?”

His voice was mournful, a whisper. That was how Bridget knew to fear him.

Numb, she shook her head.

“Why?” he asked again.

His eyes were dark pools, his beard a neglected stubble. Like her father’s …

Frozen, Bridget felt the urine run down her leg.

Her husband gazed at the stain she had made, spreading across the cushioned chair. “Like an animal.” His voice was hoarse now. “A dog.”

Bridget began to cry. When he jerked her from the chair, she screamed in pain …

The world went dark.

She was in the bathroom now, dress pulled up around her waist, spraddled across the toilet. Her husband slapped her so hard that her head hit the wall.

“Now you can piss,” he ordered. “Go ahead—
do
it.”

Closing her eyes, she tried, her body trembling with the effort.

His voice rose. “Do it
now
.”

Dazed, she felt the tears on her face.

He slapped her again. Falling sideways, she clawed at the sink with one hand.

She caught herself, pulled upright to stand, underpants around her ankles. In the cracked mirror above the sink, her husband’s face broke into pieces.

With one powerful hand at the base of Bridget’s skull, he smashed her face into the sink.

Bridget cried out in shock and pain. Reeling, she lurched toward the bathroom door, spitting fragments of her teeth.

Her son stood in the doorway, his eyes filled with terror. Bridget stumbled past him, into darkness.

She remembered nothing more. It was her eight-year-old son who had called 911.

Drained, Kerry studied her across the table. The cubicle they sat in was pale green in the fluorescent light. The air felt hot and close.

Kerry kept his voice soft. “I need you to testify.”

Mute, she shook her head, staring at the rings of coffee stains on the battered wooden table. At last, she murmured, “If I do, he’ll kill me.”

Kerry’s mouth felt dry. “Bridget,” he said quietly, “he’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Her greenish eyes, Kerry thought, were close to dead. Only her tears said that she had heard him.

When he returned to his office, Kerry loosened his tie and sat back in his chair, eyes half shut with weariness. He took no notice of Clayton Slade.

In Mary Kilcannon, Kerry thought, he had been luckier than he knew.

“So,” he heard Clayton ask, “how was she?”

Surprised, Kerry turned to him, wondering how much Clayton had divined from Kerry’s calls to the shelter, the hospital, the police. “A mess.” Suddenly Kerry realized that it would be a relief to talk like a professional, a lawyer. “Major gaps in memory. Past the legal limit when it happened. Scared to testify.”

“What about the injuries?”

“
She
says he slammed her face into the sink.
He
says she fell, so drunk she pissed all over herself. Which she did.”

Frowning, Clayton folded his hands across his stomach. “You’re going to need the kid,” he said.

That night, Kerry went to his apartment, put on some tapes of Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny, and began taking inventory of his life.

He was twenty-seven and single, the less gifted younger brother of a senator, with a boss who was his enemy and a docket of domestic violence cases. The sole escape was James Kilcannon; during Kerry’s first trip to Washington, Jamie had offered to secure him an entry-level position in the Senate bureaucracy. But Washington had no allure for Kerry, and becoming Jamie’s dependent would condemn him to a life in his brother’s shadow, having nothing of his own.

“You’re going to need the kid,” Clayton Slade had told him.

Unbidden, the image of his father came to Kerry’s mind.

In his last years, Michael Kilcannon had been a quiet brooding figure, drinking alone, ashamed of what he had become, unable to apologize to his wife or sons. For Kerry, his father was dead before he died; content that his mother was safe, Kerry hardly spoke to him. Then he was gone, and Kerry, to his shock, wept from loneliness and unresolved anger—he had desperately wanted a father, he realized, but all he had was the terror of his father’s violent moods, the determination never to be like him.

John Musso was eight years old.

Against the habit of a lifetime, Kerry forced himself to remember.

At eight, Kerry had known there was no help for them: Jamie had turned his back, and his mother feared calling the police. If she had done so, Kerry wondered, would he have had the courage to speak for her? But Mary Kilcannon had not been a pathetic drunk, as hopeless and indifferent as his father was brutal.