“It’s a lot harder than it looks.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know those lines I had in
Kill Game 2
?” Cahill asked.
“What about them?”
“I think we did thirty takes.”
“How come?”
“You have any idea how hard it is to say ‘these scumbags are ours’ with a straight face?”
Jessica tried it. He was right.
* * *
AT NINE O’CLOCK, Nicci walked into the Homicide Unit, turning the head of every male detective on duty. She had changed into a sweet little black cocktail dress.
One at a time she and Jessica went into one of the interview rooms, where they were fitted with wireless body microphones.
EUGENE KILBANE PACED nervously around the parking lot of the Roundhouse. He wore a powder-blue suit and white patent-leather loafers, the kind with the silver chain across the upper. He lit each cigarette with the previous one.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” Kilbane said.
“You can do this,” Jessica said.
“You don’t understand. These people can be dangerous.”
Jessica glared at Kilbane. “Um, that’s pretty much the
point,
Eugene.”
Kilbane looked from Jessica to Nicci to Nick Palladino to Eric Chavez. Sweat gathered on his upper lip. He wasn’t getting out of this.
“Shit,” he said. “Let’s just go.”
45
KEVIN BYRNE UNDERSTOOD THE RUSH OF CRIME. HE KNEW WELL the adrenaline surge of larcenous or violent or antisocial behavior. He had arrested many a suspect still in the flush of the moment and knew that, in the grip of that rarefied feeling, criminals seldom considered what they had done, its consequence to the victim, its consequence to themselves. There was, instead, a bitter glow of accomplishment, a feeling that society had prohibited this behavior and they had done it anyway.
As Byrne prepared to leave his apartment— the ember of this feeling igniting inside him, against his better instincts— he had no idea how this evening would conclude, whether he would end up with Victoria safe in his arms, or with Julian Matisse at the end of his pistol sight.
Or, he was afraid to admit, neither.
Byrne pulled a pair of workman’s overalls from his closet, a grimy jumpsuit belonging to the Philadelphia Water Department. His uncle Frank had recently retired from the PWD, and Byrne had gotten the overalls from him once when he needed to go undercover a few years earlier. Nobody looks at the guy working on the street. City workers, like street vendors, panhandlers, and the elderly, are part of the urban curtain. Human scenery. Tonight Byrne needed to be invisible.
He looked at the figurine of Snow White on his dresser. He had handled it carefully when he removed it from the hood of his car, placing it in an evidence bag as soon as he slipped back behind the wheel. He didn’t know if it ever would be needed as evidence, or if Julian Matisse’s fingerprints would be on it.
Nor did he know which side of the legal process he would come down on by the time this long night was over. He put the jumpsuit on, grabbed his toolbox, and left.
* * *
HIS CAR WAS bathed in darkness.
A group of teenagers— all about seventeen or eighteen, four boys and two girls— stood half a block away, watching the world go by, waiting for their shot at it. They smoked, shared a blunt, sipped from a pair of brown-paper-clad forties, snapped the dozens on each other, or whatever they called it these days. The boys competed for the girls’ favors; the girls primped and preened, above it all, missing nothing. It was every urban summertime corner. Always had been.
Why was Phil Kessler doing this to Jimmy? Byrne wondered. He had stopped at Darlene Purify’s house that afternoon. Jimmy’s widow was a woman not yet beyond the reach of the tendrils of grief. She and Jimmy had divorced more than a year before Jimmy’s death, but she had not stopped caring. They had shared a life. They shared the lives of three children.
Byrne tried to remember what Jimmy’s face looked like when he was telling one of his stupid jokes, or when he got really serious at four in the morning, back in his drinking days, or when he was interrogating some asshole, or that time when he dried the tears of a little Chinese kid on the playground who had run right out of his shoes getting chased by some bigger kid. Jimmy took that kid over to Payless that day and hooked him up with a new pair of sneaks, out of his own pocket.
Byrne couldn’t remember.
But how could this be?
He remembered every punk he had ever arrested. Every single one.
He remembered the day his father bought him a slice of watermelon from a vendor on Ninth Street. He was about seven years old; the day was hot and humid; the watermelon was ice cold. His old man had on a red-striped shirt and white shorts. His old man told a joke to the vendor— a dirty joke, because he whispered it out of Kevin’s earshot. The vendor laughed high and loud. He had gold teeth.
He remembered every fold in the bottom of his daughter’s tiny feet on the day she was born.
He remembered Donna’s face when he had asked her to marry him, the way she cocked her head at that slight angle, as if skewing the world might give her some sort of insight into his true intentions.
But Kevin Byrne couldn’t remember Jimmy Purify’s face, the face of a man he had loved, a man who had taught him just about everything he knew about the city, the job.
God help him, he couldn’t remember.
He looked up and down the avenue, scanning his three car mirrors. The teenagers had moved on. It was time. He got out, grabbed the toolbox and a clipboard. He felt as if he were swimming in the overalls, due to the weight he had lost. He pulled the ball cap down as low as he could.
If Jimmy were with him, this would be the moment he would flip up his collar, shoot his cuffs, and declare that it was
showtime y’all.
Byrne crossed the avenue and stepped into the darkness of the alley.
46
THE MORPHINE WAS A WHITE SNOWBIRD BENEATH HIM. TOGETHER they soared. They visited his grandmother’s row house on Parrish Street. His father’s Buick LeSabre rattled gray-blue exhaust at the curb.
Time toggled on, off. The pain reached for him again. For a moment he was a young man. He could bob, weave, counter. The cancer was a big middleweight, though. Fast. A hook to his stomach flared— red and blazingly hot. He pressed the button. Soon the cool white hand gently caressed his forehead . . .
He sensed a presence in the room. He looked up. A figure stood at the foot of the bed. Without his glasses— and even they did not help much anymore— he could not recognize the man. He had for a long time imagined what might be the first thing to go, but he had not counted on it being memory. In his job, in his life, memory had been everything. Memory was the thing that haunted you. Memory was the thing that saved you. His long-term memory seemed intact. His mother’s voice. The way his father smelled of tobacco and 3-IN-ONE Oil. These were his senses and now his senses were betraying him.
What had he done?
What was her name?
He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember much of anything now.
The figure drew closer. The white lab coat glowed in a celestial light. Had he passed? No. He felt his limbs, heavy and thick. The pain stabbed at his lower abdomen. The pain meant he was still alive. He pressed the pain button, closed his eyes. The girl’s eyes stared at him out of the darkness.
“How are you, Doctor?” he finally managed.
“I’m fine,” the man replied. “Are you in much pain?”
Are you in much pain?
The voice was familiar. A voice from his past.
The man was no doctor.
He heard a snap, then a hiss. The hiss became a roar in his ears, a terrifying sound. And there was good reason. It was the sound of his own death.
But soon the sound seemed to come from a place in North Philadelphia, a vile and ugly place that had haunted his dreams for more than three years, a terrible place where a young girl had died, a young girl he knew he would soon meet again.
And that thought, more than the thought of his own death, scared Detective Phillip Kessler to the bottom of his soul.
47
THE TRESONNE SUPPER CLUB WAS A DARK, SMOKY RESTAURANT on Sansom Street in Center City. It was formerly the Coach House, and in its day— somewhere in the early 1970s— it was considered a destination, one of the tonier steak houses in town, frequented by members of the Sixers and Eagles, along with politicos of varying degree of stature. Jessica recalled when she, her brother, and their father had come here for dinner when she was seven or eight years old. It had seemed like the most elegant place in the world.
Now it had become a third-tier eatery, its clientele an amalgam of shadowy figures from the worlds of adult entertainment and the fringe publishing industry. The deep burgundy drapes, at one time heralding a New York City chophouse ambience, were now mildewed and grimed with a decade of nicotine and grease.
Dante Diamond was a Tresonne regular, usually holding court at the large, semicircular booth at the back of the restaurant. They had run his rap sheet and learned that, of his three trips to the Roundhouse in the past twenty years, he had been charged with nothing more than two counts of pandering and a misdemeanor drug possession.
His most recent photograph was ten years old, but Eugene Kilbane was certain he would know him on sight. Besides, in a club like Tresonne, Dante Diamond was royalty.
The restaurant was half full. There was a long bar to the right, booths to the left, a dozen or so tables in the center. The bar was separated from the dining room by a partition made of colored plastic panels and plastic ivy. Jessica noticed that the ivy had a thin layer of dust on it.
As they made their way toward the end of the bar, all heads turned toward Nicci and Jessica. The men scoped Kilbane, sizing him immediately, cataloging his position on the food chain of power and masculine impact. It was immediately clear that in this place, he was perceived as neither a rival nor a threat. His weak chin, destroyed upper lip, and cheap suit pigeonholed him as a loser. It was the two pretty young women with him who gave him, at least temporarily, the cachet he needed to work the room.
