Shutter Man (32 page)

When Byrne pulled up across the street from Anjelica Leary’s house, there were still a few rubberneckers taking photographs. A CSU van was parked a half-block away, wrapping up their processing of the general scene. Because three or four agencies were involved, a multitude of Ts had to be crossed.

The aftermath of an officer-involved shooting, especially in the past few years, warranted a higher level of scrutiny than a shooting that did not involve a law enforcement officer.

As to Anjelica Leary’s house, except for the sheets of plywood that covered the front window, you would never know what had taken place here.

Byrne passed a few words with the CSU techs. They were in the process of releasing the shuttered store that was next to the Leary house. Because Farren had entered the store in order to gain access to Anjelica Leary’s house, the building had to be gone over inch by inch.

The bomb-sniffing K-9 had cleared it for explosives. But that didn’t mean there weren’t other dangers deliberately set.

Byrne rang the bell, stepped back off the porch. A few moments later, Anjelica answered the door. Despite the stress of what had happened in her house, she looked younger, more alive than the last time he had seen her.

‘Kevin,’ she said. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

‘I’m not intruding?’

‘Never. Please come in.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Can I get you something?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t yet packed the coffee or tea.’

‘No, I’m fine. Thanks.’

‘I might have a wee dram somewhere.’

‘It’s tempting, but I’m on duty for a few more hours.’

Byrne stepped into the living room. It seemed as if he’d never been there. When he’d walked in the first time, all he could think about was saving the innocent lives in the room, defusing the situation. Now it just looked like the front room of a pleasant older row house. No ghouls or demons. The only remnant was a mover’s tarp over the spot where Michael Farren had fallen.

Along the wall where Farren had pinned his photographs were dozens of mover’s boxes, taped and ready to haul away.

‘The last time I moved away from this area was after Catriona was killed. I was in such a fog. I just knew I could no longer be in a place that held her spirit.’

Byrne had decided on coffee after all. They sat at Anjelica’s small dinette table.

Byrne thought about the little girl, how she’d brightened the place with her gentle manner and quiet ways. He thought about her flowers and her hair ribbons. Time had not diminished her memory for him at all. She would always be a little girl.

‘Why did you move back?’ he asked.

Anjelica gave it a moment. ‘When my second marriage failed, I was at a loose end. I guess one yearns for the familiar.’

‘We do,’ Byrne said. His apartment now was less than a mile from where he was born and grew up. He’d tried buying and rehabilitating a house, but it turned out to hold too many ghosts.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to Ireland, believe it or not.’

‘I’m envious.’

‘My mother was born there. County Clare.’

‘Sounds like a dream.’

‘You’ve never been?’ she asked.

Byrne shook his head. ‘Only in the movies.’

Anjelica smiled. ‘What’s your favorite?’

Good question, Byrne thought. There was no shortage. ‘
Odd Man Out
is a good one,’ he said. ‘But I’d have to go with
The Quiet Man
.’

‘You like the old ones, then.’

‘I do.’

‘So do I,’ she said. ‘That Maureen O’Hara was the one, wasn’t she?’

Byrne had often thought that his late mother resembled the actress in some ways. It was one of the reasons he always watched that movie alone. ‘She was.’

He drained his cup. ‘I won’t keep you. I know you have a lot to do. I just wanted to see how you’re getting along.’

‘Sure you won’t stay for another?’

‘No, but thanks. Philly’s misbehaving, and my desk is full.’

‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to have a man looking in on me again.’

She stepped to the sink. The moment she put her hands into the soapy water, the doorbell rang. She glanced at Byrne.

‘Do you want me to get that?’ he asked.

‘Would you mind?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You’re a dear.’

Byrne left the kitchen, walked across the living room. He expected Anjelica’s caller to be someone from the moving company, or perhaps a stray city official with yet another document to sign. It was neither. He opened the door to find a man in his eighties wearing a mismatched navy blue suit and a yellow necktie. His thinning white hair was carefully combed, and even through the screen door Byrne could smell the aftershave, a brand from the seventies. In the man’s hands was a large white cardboard box of the type used for storing legal documents.

‘Well hello,’ Byrne said.

‘Hello to you, sir.’

Byrne propped open the screen door. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m here to see Anjelica Leary. Is she around?’

‘She is indeed,’ Byrne said. ‘May I tell her who’s calling?’

‘Name’s Jack,’ the man said. ‘Jack Permutter.’

Byrne opened the door wide. ‘Please come in, Mr Permutter. I’ll tell her you’re here.’

As Jack tried to negotiate the step over the threshold, Byrne saw that he was struggling a bit.

‘Let me take that.’

‘Much obliged.’

Byrne took the box, put it on the hall table. It was heavy. Anjelica soon came out of the kitchen, drying her hands. She smiled.

‘Two gentleman callers in one day,’ she said. ‘A girl’s head will spin.’

She crossed the room, took Jack in a deep embrace. When they parted, Byrne could see a mist in the man’s eyes. It was clear they had some sort of personal relationship. Byrne suddenly felt as if he should be anywhere but this room.

Perhaps sensing his unease, Anjelica made the introduction.

‘Kevin, this is my dear friend Jack.’

Byrne extended a hand. ‘Pleasure.’

Jack glanced out the window, at the cab waiting at the curb. He looked back at Anjelica, and pointed at the entryway table. ‘I brought over the box you asked me to keep. I didn’t know when you were leaving.’

‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Anjelica said. ‘I could have come for it.’

‘It was no bother,’ Jack said.

Anjelica held him again. ‘I’m going to miss you, you old swab.’

Jack wiped a tear, waved a hand. ‘We’ll see each other again.’ He turned to Byrne. ‘Honored to meet you, young man,’ he said.

‘The honor was mine.’

Byrne watched the man walk slowly toward the waiting cab. As the cab pulled away, a moving truck slid into its place.

Anjelica was silent for a few moments.

‘Jack is ill,’ she said.

She went on to tell Byrne about the man’s prognosis, as well as that of some of her other patients. It was clear she cared about them all.

When the conversation drifted to silence, Byrne pointed at the box Jack had brought. ‘Do you need this in the truck?’ he asked.

‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself. I can do it.’

‘Let me help,’ Byrne said. ‘It’s no trouble at all.’

‘No you don’t have to —’

Before Anjelica could get to the box, Byrne picked it up. When the top slid off, he looked inside. There he saw the cut lengths of pipe, the galvanized-steel end caps, the duct tape, the fuse.

It all came rushing toward him. In an instant he saw it. Forty years distilled into a single moment. How could he have been blind to it?

He turned to face Anjelica. She was looking straight at him. Her eyes told the whole story.

‘You?’ Byrne asked.

Anjelica said nothing. She lowered herself onto the chair near the fireplace.

‘You planted the bomb that night,’ Byrne said. ‘Danny Farren is innocent.’

‘Innocent?’ She laughed, but it was a grave and mirthless sound. ‘Danny Farren and his terrible clan are many things, Kevin Byrne. Innocent isn’t one of them.’

She looked out the window for a moment, back.

‘The building next door was supposed to be empty. I watched it for weeks. Longer. It was boarded up. I didn’t know the woman would be inside. She wasn’t supposed to die. Nobody was supposed to die.’

‘Why, Anjelica?’

She shrugged. ‘Because the Farrens needed to be stopped. If Danny went away for ten years for the firebombing, I knew he would die in prison, just like his mongrel father.’

Byrne tried to add Anjelica Daugherty into the timeline of horrors. He could not. He asked. ‘How?’

Anjelica worried the dish towel in her hands.

‘It took years,’ she said. ‘I had my looks then, mind you, not like now.’ She smoothed her hair. ‘It was not hard to get Danny Farren into my bed. Over the years he began to talk, to brag. You know how men like that are.’

‘And he talked about the bombs?’

‘Oh my God, yes. And so much more. What he didn’t tell me I learned from the internet. Always at the library. I was very careful.’

‘How did you get him there that night?’ Byrne asked. ‘We have him on surveillance video.’

‘I told him that I had talked some sense into the man who refused to pay him, the man who owned that building. I told him I had his money. I was across the street when Danny came, in shadow. When he drove away, I threw the bomb.’

‘And his fingerprints on the duct tape?’

Anjelica glanced at the roll of tape in the box. ‘Danny Farren touched many things in my house.’

Byrne’s mind was reeling. He knew he hadn’t seen any of this because he wasn’t looking.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘Are you recording this?’

‘No.’

‘How do I know that?’

Byrne lifted his shirt, spun in place, tapped his chest.

‘Then I will exercise my right to remain silent,’ she said.

Byrne pointed to the materials in the box. ‘They’re going to tie you to all this. It won’t be difficult.’

‘You don’t have to tell them any of it,’ she said. ‘And why would you? To protect a Farren?’

‘They’ll put it together with or without me.’

‘If it’s what God wants, He will have it.’

‘Jacinta Collins,’ he said. ‘She died in the clinic.’

‘That’s what I hear.’

‘Did you visit that clinic, Anjelica? Did you finish her off to make it a murder charge for Danny Farren?’

Anjelica took a long moment. ‘I did visit the clinic that night, truth be known. I did sign in. I’m sure you have people in your department who will be able to identify my signature, even though it is a name other than my own.’

Byrne said nothing.

‘I collected the pills from my patients for weeks, one at a time. I thought Danny might escape on the charges and would be a free man. I couldn’t have that. But when it came time to do it, I walked away. I couldn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘The poor woman had not harmed my family. The Farrens destroyed it.’

‘They’re going to order a second autopsy on Jacinta Collins.’

‘I’m no doctor, but I am a
very
good nurse, detective. I believe they will find that the woman died of blood poisoning, as it said in the papers.’

‘Who killed Desmond Farren, Anjelica?’

Anjelica rose, crossed over to the window overlooking the street. In this soft light, Byrne could see the younger woman, the woman whose world imploded that night in Schuylkill River Park.

‘I remember when I saw him for the first time,’ she said. ‘Des Farren, that is. Him and his funny white suit. Do you remember that awful suit?’

‘I do.’

‘Mind you, I didn’t know then that he was daft,’ she said. ‘I thought he was kind of handsome, actually. Like all the Farrens.

‘And then, one time, we were at the market. The one on South. Catriona was just a wee girl. Still had the baby teeth, you know? Desmond was out front that morning, cracking walnuts with his foot on the sidewalk, and eating them. Can you imagine?’

Byrne said nothing.

‘He put his eye on her that day. My Catriona.’

‘How do you know?’

Anjelica eased the creases in her skirt. ‘A mother knows, she does.’ She turned to face Byrne. ‘I’ve never gotten that out of my mind. The smell of the bus exhaust, the sound of the cracking walnuts. I’ve not been able to experience either in the past forty years without the walls of my heart crumbling.’

She sat back down.

‘I don’t know who killed Des Farren, detective. I surely would have done the deed myself, and burned what was left of him, but I was still frightened then. I’m not now.’

‘Was it Jimmy?’

Anjelica said nothing.

‘He’s going to be district attorney, Mrs Leary.’

‘So we’re back to
Mrs
now, are we?’ she asked. ‘How time works against you when you’ve got a few spots on your hands and a bit of gray.’

Byrne waited for a reply.

‘District Attorney James Doyle, God love him,’ she said. ‘A boy from the Pocket. A boot-strapper.’

‘Are you really ready for what’s about to happen to you?’

‘I’ve been in hell for forty years, Kevin Byrne. A few more won’t break me. When the last of the Farrens is dead I’ll sleep like a baby, no matter how cold and hard the bed.’

She glanced at one of the moving boxes. On top was a framed photograph. It was a close-up of a smiling Catriona Daugherty.

‘I may not know much, but there is one thing I know for certain,’ she said.

She turned to look at him. Gone was the grieving young mother he recalled from the park that night. In front of him now was a murderer.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘The world is full of weeping.’

On July 4, four days after Jimmy Doyle secured his party’s nomination to become the next District Attorney for the City of Philadelphia, Byrne stood at the edge of Schuylkill River Park.

After the fireworks had finished and the last of the revelers had staggered off, he walked over to the grove of trees near the ball diamond.

He’d thought he would find the man there, and he was right.

‘Congratulations, counselor.’

Jimmy Doyle turned to look at him. He seemed surprised, but not shocked.

‘Thanks, Kevin.’

They did not shake hands. After a few moments, Jimmy knelt down, picked some grass, smelled it.

‘It’s the smells that bring me back,’ he said. ‘You?’

Byrne nodded. ‘Always.’

‘Soft pretzels, water ice, caramel corn. Were we really that young?’

‘We were.’

Jimmy stepped over to the area where Catriona’s body had been found. Byrne had not remembered it being so close to the slope that dropped toward the railroad tracks and the river. He imagined that a lot of things seemed bigger when you were that age. Relationships seemed closer, events more dire, more intense. Time was a great thief of detail. This far from the avenue, he could hear the sound of the river. He thought for a moment of the water that had passed this very spot over the past forty years, the secrets that had been carried with it.

He had turned over the gun and the other items in that box, the bus pass and the glasses. He’d given a full statement regarding his involvement in the incident with Desmond Farren in this very park. The chips would fall where they fell.

It hadn’t taken long to discover that James Patrick Doyle was a minority partner in Greene Towne LLC, the company that was rehabbing the row houses in Devil’s Pocket. Byrne knew that the news of his submission of the items had crossed Jimmy’s radar. There was no point insulting the man’s intelligence with that detail.

‘The
Inquirer
is going to dig,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be blowback about that gun being found in a building you own. About Des Farren’s bus pass, his glasses.’

Jimmy turned to look at him. ‘I’ll answer the question,’ he said.

‘What question?’

‘The one you want to ask.’

Byrne said nothing.

‘I didn’t put the box there, Kevin. Not forty years ago, not twenty years ago, not last month. I don’t know who did. The last time I saw that gun was a few weeks before the Fourth. Back in ’76.’

‘Did you go back to where you’d originally hidden it?’

Jimmy hesitated before responding to this. ‘I did. If for no other reason than to prove to myself it was still there, that it could not have been used in Des Farren’s murder.’

‘And?’

‘It was gone.’

‘Who knew it was there?’

Jimmy laughed. ‘Who
didn’t
know it was there? You knew about it. Dave and Ronan. My stepfather.’

‘Tommy knew about the gun?’

‘Tommy Doyle knew everything. Drunk, violent bastard that he was.’

Byrne took a few steps away. ‘Ronan died in that wreck in ’96. Cops said there was another set of tire tracks. You weren’t there, were you, Jimmy?’

The man said nothing.

‘And Dave. Dave gets shot to death in Pittsburgh while you were there. Know anything about it?’

‘Only what I read in the papers.’

‘What happened in the park that night in 1976?’ Byrne asked. ‘Where did you go?’

Jimmy looked out over the river. ‘I went looking for my stepfather. Him and Bobby Anselmo.’

‘What for?’

‘I might have talked a good game, Kevin, but I was just a skinny kid. I knew my stepfather hated the Farrens. If there was even the slightest possibility that Des Farren had something to do with Catriona’s death, Tommy would have killed him.’

‘Why didn’t he?’

‘I couldn’t find either of them that night. I just went home.’ Jimmy turned to look at Byrne. He let a few long moments pass. ‘What did
you
do, Kevin?’

Byrne had expected this. ‘After you left, I lost Des Farren in the crowd. I lost
everyone
in the crowd.’

‘I tried to get you on that walkie-talkie,’ Jimmy said. ‘You never answered.’

‘That’s because the battery was gone.’

‘Gone? You mean dead?’

‘I mean gone, as in not there,’ Byrne said. ‘I got to the corner of 27th and Lombard, you were nowhere in sight. I tried to get you on the walkie, and it was dead.’

‘I remember a battery being in there when you gave it back to me.’

‘That’s because I replaced it.’

Jimmy nodded. Byrne wondered if he was processing all this in his lawyer’s brain, weighing how it would sound to a judge and jury.

‘Dave Carmody,’ Jimmy said. ‘He was always the weakest.’

‘He was strong in other ways,’ Byrne said. ‘There was never a more loyal kid.’

‘He always felt like he was part of it. He felt like we made Des Farren kill Catriona. So did Ronan. I don’t think the guilt and shame ever lifted from their hearts.’

‘The Des Farren case is still open,’ Byrne said.

‘As is Catriona Daugherty’s,’ Jimmy said. ‘You turn up anything, you bring it to me and I’ll present it to a grand jury. You have my word.’

Byrne took a moment, shaping his thoughts. ‘I recall a meeting in your office where I was told to go wherever the case took me,’ he said.

‘It was true then. It’s true now.’

‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

‘You’ve never been one to be talked out of doing the right thing, Kevin.’

‘Despite my many times being complicit in all manner of larceny, both
petit
and
grand
.’

‘Despite it all,’ Jimmy said. ‘But I stand by what I said. The district attorney stands by it. The City of Philadelphia stands by it.’

‘Sounds like a campaign speech.’

Jimmy broke out the smile that had helped get him to where he was today. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘A little too much salt.’

Jimmy Doyle looked out over the park. In that moment Byrne once again saw the cocksure kid from Devil’s Pocket.

‘You go where your heart takes you, Kevin,’ Jimmy added. ‘You go where your oath takes you. You were always the best of us.’

The two men fell silent. There was just the sound of the river. It was Byrne who spoke first.

‘You’re going to win.’

‘Nothing is a lock in Philly politics,’ Jimmy said.

‘You’re going to win,’ Byrne repeated.

‘You should think about coming over to the homicide unit at the DA’s office, Kevin. No more running and gunning; you still keep the shield and the title. You’d head the unit on your first day.’

‘I’m happy where I am,’ Byrne said.

Jimmy reached to his lapel, took out the carnation that was there. He crouched, put it on the spot where Catriona Daugherty’s body had been found.

‘You know, Catie had this way about her. She looked sometimes like she was so light, so ethereal, that the slightest breeze might carry her away.’ Jimmy stood up. ‘She looked up to me. I couldn’t take care of her. Maybe I don’t deserve this job. I couldn’t even protect an eleven-year-old girl.’

‘One last question.’

‘Sure.’

‘You asked to have Jessica put on the case the same day that box was found. How did that happen, Jim?’

‘It scares me when you call me Jim.’

‘Did you get Eddie Shaughnessy to reach out? Did you expect Jessica to keep an eye on me? To keep an eye on the investigation?’

Jimmy Doyle said nothing.

‘My God.’

‘What?’ Jimmy asked.

‘You don’t know her at all.’