The Blue Edge of Midnight (25 page)

Billy rolled the painting back in place over the television screen and McIntyre started for the kitchen.

“What they like to call a slam dunk case,” she said, stacking the bowls in the sink. “Especially tidy since the suspect is dead.”

“At least
they
k-kept you out of it with that ‘able to ascertain the w-whereabouts’ c-crap,” said Billy, carrying his wineglass to the counter.

“Yeah, at least there’s that,” I said, avoiding a reaction to his emphasis on the word
they.

“Do you think it’s over then?” McIntyre asked me.

“Possibly,” I said, thinking of the knife. “Maybe they’re just hoping that if there were more snakes in the bucket, they crawled away for good.”

She raised another exquisite eyebrow to me, her only response. I picked up my drink and moved out to the patio where I stood at the railing in the high ocean breeze and looked out on the black water. The moon was down. I could see a few dots of light far out from shore, boats at anchor or trolling so slowly they appeared stationary. I sat in the lounge chair and closed my eyes. I was trying to remember the kiss in the elevator but visions of Ashley twisting under the tree canopy and the black- stained butcher stump and Nate Brown standing high in his skiff kept invading my head. I could hear the tinkling of glass and china inside and the low voices of Billy and McIntyre in conversation.

Then the lights went out and I heard Billy step to the door.

“Can I get anything for you, Max?”

I could tell from the cleanness of his words that he must have still been just inside and that it was too dark for him to see my face.

“No thanks, Billy. I’m fine.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I’ve given it some thought.”

“All right. We’re going to bed.”

I had always thought there should be more joy in such a statement. But what did I know?

“Good night,” I said.

I sat for a while, thinking of my friend. I wondered if he stuttered when he was in the arms of his lover, in the darkness of his room. If he couldn’t see her face, could he whisper his words without hesitation? I suppose it didn’t matter. In the arms of a lover your faults and failures were supposed to be inconsequential. Sometimes you’re supposed to be a hero. Even if your armor is somewhat tarnished. But I knew that was fantasy too.

I sat listening to the surf eighty feet below and the sound of water took me again to that jumpy place in between dreams and consciousness.

It must have been a dream because I could see my breath billowing out like thin smoke in the freezing air. But I could hear the voices of men screaming as clearly as if they were standing below on the sand looking up. I had never heard men scream before that day, not with such panic and helpless ache.

It must have been a dream because I could see the woman, really only a girl, not much older than I was as a second-year patrolman. She was standing on the outside ledge of the Walnut Street Bridge, leaning out over the water forty feet below, her arms reaching back to the cold concrete abutment. She had tossed her coat into bridge traffic before we could cordon off the area, and it lay there now with a brown stain of a tire tread across the back. I was watching her hands, gone white with the cold and fear. Her long fingernails were blood red in contrast as they dug into the gray stone.

It must have been a dream because I could see Sergeant Stowe in front of me and my partner, Scott Erb, who had first spotted the commotion and wheeled the patrol car up the bridge access lane into one-way traffic. We’d run up within fifteen yards of the woman before she stopped us with a wordless look of such desperation it was like taking a punch to the heart.

Now Sergeant Stowe was talking to her but she refused to see him. She kept looking down into the half-frozen water, the skin on her face stretching so taut across her bones that I could see the blue veins below the surface.

We had never seen a jumper actually go, Scott or I, though we’d been called to a few attempts on the Ben Franklin. I sneaked a look at the current below. The distance was not great. Both of us had jumped off higher points into the Schuylkill off the old Girard railroad bridge as kids. But this was mid January and the river was running hard and cold with chunks of gray ice spinning on its surface and its white banks closing in with hardening edges.

The sergeant was still talking when the scratching sound stopped him. It was the girl’s nails. Maybe she was trying to change her mind as they dug into the concrete, red slivers splitting off as they scratched against the weight of her body pitching forward.

And that’s when the men below screamed. And that’s when Scott peeled off his thick blue police jacket and went over the side after her. And that’s when I followed my friend.

When I hit the water it seemed oddly thick. The impact was hard, but dull through my heavy shoes, and when I looked up into the bubbles and light from below the surface, the water looked green and boiling. I rose with the buoyancy of my jacket and broke the surface and that’s when the cold bit my chest and refused to let me draw air. I was panicking, but looked around and found Scott and he was already to the woman, trying to get a grip on her sweater and turn her on her back. I finally gasped for a breath and it felt like a razor going down my throat but I started swimming.

I know it had to be a dream, but I could hear Scott’s voice saying “I got her, I got her,” though his lips were like two hard lines and not moving. I swam to them and got a fist of the sweater and started pulling and kicking and I could see the snow covered bank but my clothes were heavy and my free hand was starting to feel like a solid mitten. I saw Scott start to lose his grip and slip back and I yelled for him to hang on, goddammit, hang on, but his eyes were starting to glaze. His blue shirt was pasted to his skin and he said he was losing his arms and I told him to keep kicking. The cold had left my own limbs nearly numb and I could feel it creeping toward my heart but I could also hear someone yelling now from the bank. Sergeant Stowe had scrambled down from the bridge and was up to his waist in the water and reaching out. I took a few more slapping strokes and now he was only six feet away. I was still hanging on to my partner and the girl but losing them both when through the numbness of my legs I felt my foot kick the bottom. I had to make a decision. We were too close to give up.

I’m not sure if I was even thinking but I got behind both of them, took as deep a breath as I could, and went under. I planted my legs in the hard mud, tried to concentrate on the feeling I still had in my shoulders and then drove the pile up with as much force as I could.

The effort pushed me deeper and I hung there, my energy spent, a darkness closing in from all sides. From inches below the surface of the water, I could see the sergeant’s face shimmering through the current. Bubbles from my own lips began to rise and the ice seemed to close in, going black around the edges when he bent and got me by the jacket and yanked me up onto a slab of ice. Several men were around us now and one had thrown his coat over Scott, who was on his knees looking down at the woman stretched out on the snow. Her eyes were closed and her face was inhumanly pale. A snowflake landed on her lips and refused to melt.

I crawled over to her and put my hand under her neck and tilted her head back. I fit my mouth over hers and blew air into her lungs and it came back warm. I waited, pinched her nose with my frozen fingers and blew again. The third time she coughed and shuddered and then threw up a handful of river water onto the snow, and then another, and another, and then she curled up into fetal position and continued to gag. Another bystander draped his overcoat on her and then the professional voices of the paramedics were shouting their way through the circle.

When I woke the warm ocean breeze had kicked up but my arms were covered in goose flesh and Billy’s patio felt chilled in the wind. I rubbed my hands over my face and I was out of the dream but could remember every part of that rescue nearly a decade ago.

Sergeant Stowe and Scott and I were wrapped in emergency thermal blankets and watched as the paramedics loaded the woman into a rescue basket and carried her up the embankment to the ambulance. A freelance photographer caught the scene, the three of us, hair plastered and tinged with ice, all soaked and shivering and looking up the hill. The photo ran on the front page of the
Daily News
the next day with a headline:
PHILLY’S FINEST BRAVE FROZEN SCHUYLKILL TO SAVE PENN STUDENT.

A cutline gave our names and a brief description of the time and location of the incident. The woman was described only as an eighteen-year-old freshman at the university. There was no story since it was the newspaper’s policy not to do stories on suicide attempts. Their rationale was that publicity might encourage others to make such attempts. It always seemed to me a naive logic, that someone would look at a story of suicide and say, “Hey, there’s an idea.” But it also seemed an incomprehensible world where an eighteen-year-old would decide there was nothing left in it for her.

Of the three heroes that day, the sergeant was soon promoted, Scott left the force for engineering school, and I went on to the detective unit where I fell on my face.

The girl lived but we never heard from her. Maybe she resented our interference. Maybe she went back home, recovered, turned her life around. I didn’t think of the incident often, but more than once on the edge of my dreams I have tasted her cold lips, blown air into a dark throat and felt my own warm breath come back to me.

CHAPTER 23

T
he sound of water pulled me all the way back into the world. The surf below was so clean and uniform, each wave crested and then ripped down the sand with a sound like paper tearing. I listened for a few minutes and then got up and went to bed. There were no sounds from the other rooms and I lay on top of the covers in the guest room for a long time, staring at a dark ceiling and thinking about the taste of Richards’ kiss, and thinking about Megan Turner and how I’d let her go without a fight. Sometime late in the night, my memories let me sleep.

Billy’s girlfriend was gone by the time I got up and made my way to the coffee pot. Billy was out on the patio, the sliding doors opened wide to the ocean and the rising heat. The AC was kicked up to accommodate the fine paintings and fabrics. It was Billy’s way of enjoying both worlds and to hell with the cost of electricity. He was sitting in the morning sun, a laptop popped open on the glass-topped table. He was holding the
Wall Street Journal
folded lengthwise once and then halved again, reading it like a subway commuter. But he was wearing a pair of shorts and an open white linen shirt and his bare feet were propped up on a chair.

“And how’s the market today?” I said, knowing his early morning inclinations.

“The w-world is a new and wonderful p-place,” he answered, peeking up from his paper, a satisfied schoolboy look on his brown,
GQ
face.

Billy had somehow foreseen the tumble of technology stocks, and those clients who trusted him, and most of them did, let him put their substantial gains in commodities before the fall.

“Sleep well?” I said.

“Very w-well. Thank you.”

The sun was throwing a wide sparkle on the dimpled Atlantic and the sky was stealing some of the blue from the Gulf Stream.

“I thought I might go out today and buy a new canoe,” I said. Billy nodded.

“B-Back to the sh-shack?”

“Why not? Can’t live with my attorney forever.”

We both listened to the sea for a long minute.

“Your p-portfolio is d-doing well. You c-could afford a reasonable p-place on the beach.”

I let the thought sit awhile as I watched the broken line of early boats making their way east, out past the channel marker buoys and onto the horizon where their fiberglass superstructures stuck up small and white against the sky.

“You d-don’t have to keep h-hiding out there,” he finally said and the sting of the logic, the harsh taste of the truth gathered at the top of my throat.

“Oh, so I could hide up here in a tower like you, Billy?”

He turned and stared out at the ocean, a look of thoughtful recognition on his dark face but not a glint of offense. He was a black man who grew up on some of the hardest streets in urban America. He’d made his way past a million slapdowns from subtle to raw to get out of the ghetto, get through law school, gain the respect of his profession and make it to a place where he made his own choices. He made no apologies or excuses for those choices. It was that truth that made our friendship work.

He went back to his paper. I went back to my coffee. We both let the truth sit there for a while.

“Y-You th-think it’s done?” he finally asked. “The killing?”

“It’s officially done,” I answered. “Sometimes that’s enough.”

“Enough f-for who?” he said, looking at me like a lawyer who knows too much about his client to let it pass. He let me stare at the ocean. But his patience had limits.

“What are you d-doing with the knife?”

I shouldn’t have underestimated Billy’s ability to put the signs together.

“He’s a hunter,” I said. “Knows the wilderness. Knows animal tendencies. Thinks like one himself.”

“Yeah?”

“Bait,” I said.

I could feel Billy’s eyes on the side of my face.

“Hunters use it, and they are also susceptible to it,” I said. “They’ll bait their quarry, but they’ll also enter into places they know their quarry is, even if it’s dangerous, because that’s where the goal is. It baits them.”

“So w-what’s the b-bait. The knife, or you?”

I wasn’t sure of the answer. My hunch was the knife. But I needed to be attached to it. The killer was too afraid of the cops. He might be an animal, but he wasn’t a stupid animal. Even a brash hunter won’t expose himself too much. But this one had already been bold enough to come into my space, creep my shack, leave a violent piss marking on my territory by smashing my canoe.

Billy’s eyes were still on my face.

“S-So you d-don’t think it was Ashley?”