The Wolves of Fairmount Park (23 page)

What was it Asa had said that night when they'd met Soap? That once Soap was there he wasn't in it anymore. Asa had stayed in it, though, sat there coaching Soap on what to say. Making things come out the way he needed them to, maybe. Soap, Darius, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else.

Twice he'd called Jelan and hung up before she'd answered.
Drove past her house, saw cars coming and going. Looked at the photographs and reports on Darius Williams. Made himself look. Taking it in. Trying to turn it into something he could use, that sick and helpless feeling. To see the truth of things. To make things right.

Brendan came out of the hospital to find his brother standing in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. His back was turned, working the lighter, and when he turned to face Brendan, Orlando wondered how he must look. Bad, he knew. Worse, even, than when they'd seen each other last. Orlando's face thinner, paler, with hollows under his eyes. Brendan stopped, sighed to himself. Orlando could see the effort it took for his brother to talk to him.

“Bren, how are you? How's Michael?”

“Good, he's looking good. Home tomorrow.” He shrugged, jiggled his keys. “Everything okay?”

Orlando smiled, trying to look nonchalant. “Yeah, good. Listen, did he say anything yet? About what happened?”

“He doesn't remember much of the day. He gets little bits and pieces. He says he remembers him and George were looking for someone. He's not clear, you know, whether he can't remember why or if little George never told him.”

“Looking for someone.”

“A girl, he says.”

“Sienna.”

Brendan dropped his keys. “What?”

“The girl, her name was Sienna.”

“How do you know that?” His voice was quiet, but he moved closer to his brother, kicking his keys under the car.

“Your keys, Bren.” Orlando bent to look, and Brendan caught his arm.

“Fuck the keys, Kevin. How do you know the girl's name? Why do you know that?” There it was again, his middle name. Orlando thought,
He doesn't even see me as a real person. Zoe was right.

“Why can't you call me by my right name, Bren?”

“Why can't you answer a simple question? Is this some kind of game to you? This is my son.”

“You think I don't know that? You think I don't want to help?”

“What do you mean, help? If you know something, we'll call the detectives. Otherwise, stay the hell out of it.”

“You think I can't do this?”

“Do what? I don't even know what the fuck we're talking about.”

“That guy, that crazy fuck who shot me. He thought I knew something. I just thought, you know. Maybe I do. Maybe at least I can get to the people who know.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Do you think the cops got it right? Do you think Darnell and those morons from Green Lane shot the kids while they were trying to buy drugs?”

“No, but I think they were looking for this girl and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. What are you trying to do?”

“I'm trying to find her.”

“Find her? Why?”

“I don't know. Hear what she has to say, I guess. I'm not sure. It's something about Parkman Jr. and the girl and his father. I don't . . .” He trailed off with a helpless gesture, lifting his arms and dropping them. “I know what you think of me. Kathleen, Michael, I can't think what they see when they look at me. And what the fuck good am I if I can't do something for Michael? For my own family.” He ran his hands through his hair, all yellow spikes and tangles, not entirely clean, Brendan thought, and saw him again as a little boy, standing on the stoop with a bruise on his face, his eyes red.

“Kevin, don't do this.”

“See? That's not even my right name, Brendan. You can't even say my name.” He shook his head then turned and walked off.

Orlando walked up Kensington in the rain, looking up at the underside of the El and the streams of water pouring off the tracks. It was the kind of hammering rain that wouldn't last, steaming when it hit the hot asphalt, and people hurried off the street into open doorways, the bar at the corner, the check-cashing place, some of them holding newspapers over their heads. A guy with broad shoulders pulled a red hood over his head and hunched in a doorway, watching the street. Two young kids took their turns handing him something that he palmed without making eye contact. One wore a sweatshirt with an air-brushed
image of Daffy Duck smoking weed, and the other had a yellow T-shirt with something printed on it in Gothic letters like an elaborate tattoo.

One of the kids crossed back over to the corner nearest Orlando, and he stuck his hand in his pocket and felt the tens folded there. When he got close enough to the kid that he could see his yellow T-shirt read
CREEPING DEATH
, he took his cash out of his pocket and held it close to his thigh. The kid made eye contact with him, held his hand out, and had taken the money when he stopped, close to the front of the check-cashing place, and pulled a cell phone out of a long pocket on his thigh and looked at it. He looked at Orlando for a beat, then stepped closer and handed him back the money.

Orlando looked at him and then down at the cash in his hand, and the kid backed away, holding his hands at his shoulders and flashing the palms up. His eyes went over his shoulder and Orlando turned to look across the street at the big guy with the red hood pulled up. The guy shook his head slowly. Once, twice, three times, his face expressionless.

The kid turned down the corners of his mouth and stuck his hands under his sweatshirt. “Sorry, little brother. What can you do?”

Orlando stuck the money back in his pocket but didn't move, looking at the kid and then back across the street. The guy across the street stood up slowly and put his hand on his hip. Up Kensington the doors opened on a maroon Olds with a custom paint job, and two tall guys got out and stood on the street. Both of them had on wraparound shades and jackets, one with oversized dreads pulled back with a bandanna, and
the other wearing a hoodie that shadowed his face. They stood by the car as if awaiting a bell.

The kid who had refused his money shook his head. “Get along, now. Live to fight another day.”

It took three hours to get to the prison where Derrick Leon was locked up. Danny had been out before, going along with a detective who was trying to get a confession on an old case from a convicted child murderer who was set for execution in a few days. The inmate, a former schoolteacher from Scranton named Baumgardner, was a shaking mess, sweating through his prison clothes, talking nonstop, smoking. Danny went with an older guy, Matt Gialdo, who had worked the case years before, and Danny mostly watched while Gialdo tried to establish enough of a rapport with Baumgardner to find out whether his case, a young Hispanic girl found in a cardboard box in Fairmount Park, was one he had done. It went nowhere. The guy was trying to work some scheme to get a few more days before his execution and strung them along for an hour, trying to get them to talk to the state's attorney to buy him some time and half-promising to confess to three more murders that might or might not include the little girl in the park.

Gialdo had worked hard for an hour and a half, listening to the crazy old bastard rant, alternately blaming the murders on a kid he'd abused from his neighborhood and then hinting there were more bodies. On the way back, Gialdo had stopped at a tavern on Route 30 and had two quick Scotches and then
walked off to a corner of the gravel parking lot and sobbed with frustration. Danny had driven home while the older detective snored in the passenger seat, but thinking the whole time of the image of him facing off into the trees, the tail of his rumpled coat shaking while he made terrible, strangled sounds into his fist.

The Leon case had made Danny. Derrick Leon started out in the drug business at thirteen, selling his brother's asthma medication cut into powder. He kept getting locked up and kept coming back out with more friends and a bigger crew that he put to work selling dope down on Fifteenth Street. He picked up his street name, Supremo, from the food market at Fifteenth and Wingohocking, the corner where he sat every day watching his crews sell Wet, what they called grass soaked in formaldehyde. But the more money he made, the more paranoid Leon got. He stabbed two of his own lieutenants because he thought they had designs on his corners, then used a hammer to kill a crackhead named Zumi who tried to pass off a xeroxed ten-dollar bill to one of Leon's runners. Derrick Leon was seen walking away with the bloody hammer. When a young cop pulled him over on Oregon Avenue in South Philly, Leon shot the cop in the face, then went home and killed his own pregnant girlfriend and his mother and disappeared.

The runner who got stuck with the phony ten was named DeAngelo Barnes. Leon had been hiding for two days when Asa put Barnes with Danny, and four hours later Danny walked out of the garage on Thompson with Derrick Leon in cuffs, and Danny got a promotion and a shot at the Violent Crimes Task Force. Danny could remember how scared Barnes was of Leon,
the kid sitting hunched on a stool in a diner on Germantown Avenue, trying to be invisible, while Asa coaxed him into telling his story to Danny so Danny could get Derrick Leon off the street and nobody else would get his brains beat out with a hammer in the middle of Seventeenth Street.

The prison administration building reminded Danny of a suburban vision of a fortress, a brown stone castle as imagined by somebody who normally designed office buildings and tract housing, maybe, and had the look of a large post office with turrets. Danny parked across the street and checked in. He was wearing jeans and a sport coat and checked his gun with the duty sergeant. There were forms to fill out and a few people to talk to. At the last second there was some question of whether he'd get in; some misfire in the bureaucratic mechanism had kept his name off the list of approved visitors. In the end, a pear-shaped woman in civilian dress gave him a short lecture on chain of command in the prison before he was allowed past the sally port and into a waiting room where he sat for thirty minutes and read a copy of
Correctional News.

He'd expected to have to get all the way out to SCI Greene in Waynesburg, where Pennsylvania kept its death row and most of its condemned prisoners, but Derrick Leon had been involved in an escape attempt and smuggling dope and had been transferred to Camp Hill, where he was held in segregation. When they brought him in, shackled and with leg irons, Danny saw the difference between three years inside and out. Leon's skin had gone ashy and gray, and he'd gained weight, gotten jowly and slack-eyed from the medication they used to control the most violent inmates. Danny had forgotten Leon's scar, a pale
line that ran from his right eye in an arc along his cheek. It looked like a frozen tear, suspended in its fall.

He moved slowly, wiping his mouth with his manacled hands before speaking, but his eyes glowed when he saw Danny, and he smiled and shook his head. “Detective Martinez. You come all the way out here to exonerate me of these charges?”

“Hello, Derrick.” He smiled in spite of himself. “How you making it out here? Staying out of trouble?”

“I shouldn't complain, but I do. I do.” He looked around him at the guards. “These country-ass rednecks out here all get nervous around a strong black man still has his power. Still has his mind.”

Danny could see Leon was, in fact, barely in control. His hands shook, and his eyes couldn't seem to settle on anything in the room. He'd look at Danny and then away, back over his shoulder.

“You still in touch with anyone from the neighborhood, Derrick?”

Leon lifted his chin and lowered his eyelids, affecting the bearing of the street king he'd been years before. “I hear things. People know who I am.”

Danny knew it wasn't unusual for bigger criminals, names, to still retain some authority on the street. It was an issue for the prisons, guys who were locked up but still moved drugs around or had people killed or messed with on the street.

“You still plugged in out there, Derrick? Still moving and shaking even from all the way out here?”

Leon let his smile fade away to a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He let his head hang. “Nah, not really. I can make things
happen inside here, but on the street I'm a ghost, tell the truth. I got a cousin came up a couple times, but everybody from my corners all locked up or dead now. Your boy seen to that.”

“My boy?”

Derrick Leon stared, seeing things that weren't in the room. “You know they moved up my execution? Ain't that a bitch? Nothing better to do than to run a man to the death house.”

“Well, you surprised?” Derrick had killed four people in twenty-four hours, the crackhead Zumi, another one of them the young cop, and Derrick's own mother and pregnant seventeen-year-old girlfriend. He had probably killed—or had ordered killed—at least six other people before that. It was tough, Danny thought, to know how much of drug-trade killing was the bloodless calculus of power and how much was just brutal paranoia and poor impulse control.

“Nah, that's what I'm saying, they got to bury me.” He smacked at his chest and the chains swung and rattled. “They can't have somebody around willing to stand up.”

“Derrick, you think you're here because what, you speak truth to power?”

Leon made a gesture, throwing it all away, and the chains on his wrists clanked and sang. “We know why I'm here, don't we, Detective? I mean, come on, give it up. I'm a dead man. There's no games to play with me.”

Danny shifted in his chair, felt the absence of his gun, a weightlessness at his right hip where he usually carried the holster clipped to his belt. “I drove a long way, Derrick. Say what's on your mind.”

“You go right now to my corners, what will you see? You'll see runners and dopers. Not a damn thing different 'cause I'm locked up.”