The Wolves of Fairmount Park (29 page)

Danny had been going through old files, talking to older homicide guys he knew and Drug Enforcement agents, connecting dots in a chart in his head. He talked to Frank Keduc about the dead Somali and two beat cops from Kensington about the Dunn brothers. After three hours in cold cases, he called Matt Gialdo, and the retired detective had Danny come out to his house, a neat little three-story house in Mt. Airy.

It was raining when he pulled up, but Gialdo was in the open door of the garage. Danny remembered him as a fastidious guy. All the homicide guys he knew were dudes, dressed sharp,
were
sharp, but even in that company Gialdo stood out. His family was from Trinidad, which threw everybody who thought he'd be Italian when they heard the name. He had a way of changing the feel of a room, the temperature, just by focusing on a suspect. Danny had watched him close, had seen him get confessions, it seemed, just by listening intently, nodding his head when he heard the truth. It was something he did with his eyes, some wordless transaction between him and the people he talked to that eliminated bullshit as an option.

There was a tarp spread out on the floor and motor parts
neatly arrayed under a work light. Matt pointed to a little sports car under another tarp.

“MG. I bought it ten years ago, but now I have the time to spend on it.” It was the kind of meticulous job Danny could picture Matt doing. “It keeps me from driving Dessie crazy.” Matt walked past the tarp and started running his hands along a row of cardboard file boxes. He lifted one and set it aside, then pulled one along the floor and spun it to face Danny.

“DeAngelo Barnes.”

Danny knelt down. “Do you remember it?”

Matt Gialdo looked away. “Summer of 2002. They found him in the river near the boathouses. Two coeds from Princeton down to practice rowing. Crew, I guess they call it, when it's kids from Prince ton. He was shot once, up close.” He tapped the side of his head. “His mother called me every day for six months. After I heard about DeAngelo giving up Derrick Leon, I spent a lot of time looking at how Leon could have had it done, but I couldn't see how. Leon had already killed all his friends out of paranoia, so who was left that would care enough to kill DeAngelo because he had given up Leon? I think everybody I talked to was glad Leon was off the street.” He looked at the box. “I talked to him. To Leon. And he gave me that smile, that crazy smile? So I knew he knew something, but he never said. He was so crazy he wasn't making a lot of sense anyway.”

Neither of them touched the boxes. The recall was standard, Danny knew, for homicide guys. They'd be able to tell you chapter and verse on unsolveds from ten, fifteen years before. He knew he was already doing it, just in his time. You take things out
once in a while, dust them off, look at them from different angles. After a while they stay in your head.

Danny was thinking of his kid from the river. Soap Williams. “Anything, you know, stand out?”

Matt touched his stomach, his chest. “He had these holes. Holes, not gunshot. From some kind of long knife. A bayonet, the coroner thought.”

Danny went into his pocket and pulled out his notebook. He had a sketch he'd made of Soap's body, a crude rendering of a featureless body. Alongside the head was an arrow pointing slightly up, the angle of the shot that had killed him. On the torso were three spots he'd inked in, and the notation
long knife, military?

He thanked Matt Gialdo and loaded the case into the backseat of his car, squinting through the light rain. “I'll copy a few things out and get them back to you.”

The older detective shook his head. “It doesn't matter. Mrs. Barnes died a year ago. His sister moved, somewhere out west, but I don't hear from her. I don't think anybody much remembers DeAngelo but me.”

The rain stopped, and the sun poked holes in the clouds. It got hot, and just as fast, unbearably humid. Orlando walked south and west, stopping to look back, zigzagging at the corners and alleys. Still not sure whether it had all happened the way he remembered. Audie acting so weird, and the Irish guy, who definitely had a gun because he'd shot that tall black kid with it. If
the kid hadn't pulled up and unloaded, Orlando knew he'd be dead back in that alley. He'd gotten a pretty good look at the shooter with the rifle and didn't have a clue who he was, or why he'd want to help Orlando, so it must have just been something between the Irish guy and the shooter with that enormous goddamn machine gun. A nice-looking guy, he'd have said, with neat features and wild braids and wearing a bright print shirt.

At a little park in Northern Liberties he tried to jump a chain between two posts and went over hard. He got up fast and moved away from the street, limping. He couldn't remember the name of the park, which was just a couple of green blocks with a little playground and some trees. He and Zoe had watched a movie there the summer before. A crazy Western with Gregory Peck, all lurid, dense colors and people so in love they had to shoot each other to escape it. He limped to the center of the park and dropped to his knees between two small trees. Two women were setting up lawn chairs a few feet away, wearing sunglasses and tank tops. One of them cradled a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.

He pulled himself into a sitting position, tried to seem harmless or normal while he planned what to do, where to go. The women looked at each other, and the woman with the baby went into a complicated-looking backpack studded with pockets and got out a bottle while he tried to avoid their eyes. He drew up one knee stained with dirt and grass, his eyes going to the edges of the park. He couldn't stop looking at the baby's fragile head out of the corner of his eye, the weight of it in its mother's slender hands.

Something was jabbing him through his pants, and he reached
in and pulled out the little lightsaber keychain he'd taken from Geo's room. He held it in his hand, putting his fingers against his chest and feeling the air and blood moving through him. So it had been Audie who warned him about talking to the wrong people, and Audie himself turned out to be the wrong people. But did Audie give him up to the Irish killer for money? Or did he get in trouble, too? And acting to protect himself and Fran, he'd given up Orlando?

He looked at the keychain in his palm. It all had to do with the kid, and asking questions. That's why he'd been shut down, and why people were trying to kill him now. The Irish guy had talked to him when they'd been high back at the house in East Falls, about the people dead in the river. It wasn't some kind of dope dream; the guy had put people in the river, and that's where Orlando would have gone. Dead, into the van, with a bullet in his head, and then into the river somewhere, down with the river silt to wash away, his bones to become ash sifted by the current.

What else had the guy said, back in the dope house? Nothing he could remember. He remembered the tall, angry Puerto Rican kid with the bushy 'fro, and the other guy, Asa, the red-haired guy who told the kid to let him in. The kid not liking it, but doing it. If he could overrule the angry kid, outrank him, then he owned the place and the kid just ran it. He'd been there before, Orlando, with Zoe, and they didn't like the place, didn't like the angry kid, but he'd never seen Asa there before.

He watched some people carrying gardening tools to a little community plot, squinting skeptically at the new sun. Moving through the little furrows and bending to the green shoots in
the orderly rows. He got to his feet, slowly, feeling his skeleton through his skin, feeling like he didn't belong there. Thought about how he'd look to the people coming down in their rubber boots with their kids to plant cauliflowers and squash. He had that feeling he'd had before, of wanting to explain himself, but why, and who would want to hear it?

He started jogging, feeling like bones wrapped in the thin sheet of his skin, every footfall an electric shock that ran through him, a little wave of pain communicated through his slight frame from his feet to his head. He was sick, he was hunted, and for what? Zoe was right, it was all for his brother, wasn't it, really? Nobody was paying him and nobody cared. It was a show he was putting on, to get something from Brendan. To be treated with respect, to be worthy of respect and love? Is this what it took? And was it worth it? For the first time he let himself worry about Zoe. Let himself wonder if she was safe. If it was smart for him to even go to her. He was already moving, though; he'd have to find her, talk to her, tell her to get away. With no one he could trust to carry the message, he'd have to tell her to her face.

He ran north, cut right to find an open road. He came out at a little island in the street at Second and Girard, a shard of concrete pointing south and clotted with green bushes. He puked, bent double, his hand on the cool stone base of a statue of a tall man on a horse. The figure held a lance that towered over Second Street, and his horse was canted back as if about to rear, but the man, helmetless, looked serene, almost happy, ready to move alone against whatever was arrayed against him in the blocks south of Girard Avenue.

Orlando dropped to his knees, then pulled his shirttail out
of his pants and bent to wipe his face clean with shaking hands. He stepped out of the bushes and sat hard on the curb, noticing a kid was sitting in the shadow of the statue, selling water bottles from a cooler full of melting ice. The kid looked at him for a minute, his expression mournful, and then he held a bottle out to Orlando, who waited a beat before taking it.

“I can't pay you. I got nothing.”

The kid shrugged. He had one of those kid faces that was already a thousand years old. A line of constant worry above his brows and eyes so full of disappointment it looked like there was room for nothing else. Then the boy let a smile break through, and it was like watching a swimmer break the surface of a dark lake. “Everybody's got something.”

Orlando stuck his hand in his pocket and came up with the keychain. He looked at it for a minute, then held it out on his palm, and the kid looked at it, too. He lifted one eyebrow, then went into his own pocket and came out with the same lightsaber keychain, his in royal purple.

The kid looked down the block, then knocked his hand against Orlando's in salute and put the chain away. Orlando nodded and stood up and started walking away.

The kid called to him. “How we doing?”

“Same as always.”

“That bad?”

The kid sat back down, and Orlando held up the bottle, walking west toward Zoe and the apartment, picking up speed as he went. He needed to see her face and hear her voice. He saw a trolley moving west, and he started to run.

.   .   .

Brendan's cell phone rang, a number he didn't know, but when Orlando started talking he tagged Luis on the shoulder and they went across Roxborough fast, lights and sirens, and called an ambulance. It came over the radio a second later, a woman lying in the street a block off Green Lane. The guys who picked it up first requested an additional unit to deal with the crowd, and they pulled up to see a few kids from the neighborhood clustered at the curb, and two old Polish ladies Brendan had seen around before who were shouting at the kids to stay back. Luis called in while Brendan got out and looked for the girl and his half brother.

She was young, with long black hair. Pretty, before whatever had gotten to her. He realized he'd seen her before, in the hospital room where they'd taken Orlando when he'd been shot. She was lying on her side, cradled in his half brother's arms, her body absolutely slack in the boneless way of people who are unconscious. Her face was slick with sweat and there was a froth on her parted lips. His brother was sobbing, lowering his head to hers, a trail of spit from his mouth, and he was saying something Brendan couldn't understand. He put one hand on his brother's arm, gently, so that he would let Brendan get close enough to hear the faint whistle of her breath and see up close her skin leached of blood. He gave Luis the high sign, and his partner hit the mike on his shoulder and put a rush on the ambulance while the first two guys on scene pushed the kids and old ladies back into a rough loop, half on the curb and half in the street.

Brendan turned, shifted his body slightly to see her face in profile, and remembered her from the hospital room. He swore under his breath and put his hand to her throat to find a slight, rapid pulse there, like a faint code transmitted by her failing heart. He looked around at the crowd and the buildings nearby, saw the open door, and ran up the stairs till he reached the third landing and looked into the tiny apartment, the carpet thin as dust, the kitchen table with its veneer peeled up in one corner. Took in the open glassine bag on the table, kept moving through the apartment, banging open the bedroom door, pulling the shower curtain off its gaping rings. Swearing at his grieving brother, at the poor, dying girl in the street, at his son, at his own failed luck at being tied by blood to all this self-destruction and bad judgment and pain. As he came back down he could hear the ambulance coming closer, the shriek and whine of the siren hitting the hard surfaces of the narrow streets.

He got back to the street out of breath, just in time to see Orlando struggling with Luis and one of the guys from the other RMP as the ambulance guys got to work. Mouth open, his face contorted and terrible, he was trying to get to Zoe, and Brendan caught his arms and pulled him close, taking in the bruises and scrapes on the kid's face, the rank smell of him, the water streaming from his eyes and nose. He was still talking but the words seemed random and it was impossible to make any sense of it and Brendan didn't think it mattered. Orlando windmilled his arms over Brendan's shoulders, pushing, screaming, finally dropping to the ground to beat at his own face with his hands. The old ladies crossed themselves, and the kids looked at each other, eyes wide.

Brendan put one hand on Orlando's shoulder, hard, as if anchoring him to the curb. He saw the white soles of Zoe's feet, her shoes neatly peeled off as she fell, as if she'd kicked them off and let herself settle flat into the asphalt between two parked cars like a child playing dead. Luis brought a blanket from the car and covered her legs, and Brendan let Orlando put one hand out to touch the edge of it, work it in his fingers while they waited for the ambulance to move her. He talked to the crew and told his brother her pulse was still there, she was still alive, but his brother looked up at him with such concentrated misery in his eyes he doubted himself and wanted them to check again. The ambulance guys fetched some bags and an orange composite board, and Brendan moved his brother back to stand upright.