Meryl Streep had nothing on south Philly girls.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, addressing her remarks to Judge Gipson. ‘My apologies to Mr Carter and to the court. It seems I misread my notes. I’m afraid I have the worst handwriting possible. The note I read was not about stolen cameras, but rather about an in camera meeting with Judge Drotos earlier today.’ She paused, held up her legal pad, glanced at Carter. ‘You’re right, Mr Carter. There weren’t any cameras in that safe.’
Carter looked at his feet.
‘But how could you possibly know that?’
It took the jury less than an hour to return a verdict of guilty on all four counts.
By the time Jessica stepped through the back door at DiBlasio’s, they were all there.
Her husband Vincent, her daughter Sophie, her son Carlos, her father Peter.
Jessica had grown up a few blocks away. Lucio DiBlasio had catered her wedding, had always treated her as a daughter, or at least a favorite niece. Whenever she stopped in for bread after Mass at St Paul’s–DiBlasio’s stayed open until 1.30 on Sundays to accommodate noon Mass–she always left with a treat. She loved Lucio and Connie DiBlasio like family.
It was one of the reasons she had lobbied long and hard to get the case. Once she got it, she knew it would be a challenge to keep her emotions in check, especially after watching the surveillance video of Earl Carter assaulting Lucio DiBlasio.
Distancing was something she’d learned from her years on the street as a police officer. If you let every abused kid, every elderly person who was pushed to the ground and robbed get to you, you could not do your job in the cold, rational manner it called for. You would last two weeks.
When she got to the more deliberate and seemingly less volatile world of the DA’s office, she thought it would be different. It wasn’t. The victims were the same, the bad guys were the same; it was only the process that changed.
Now she was surrounded by the aromas of her childhood. Prosciutto and soppressata, pecorino and sharp provolone, sheet pizza with oil and garlic, the simmering sauce for the frutti di mare, the baccalà.
She hugged her daughter, kissed her husband, hoisted her son into the air.
‘You won, Mom,’ Carlos said.
Jessica wanted to be humble, to say it was the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that had won, and that she’d had a lot of help, not only from the police officers involved and the team of DA’s investigators, but from twelve jurors whose hearts were true and purpose noble.
Who was she kidding? Her son was seven.
‘Yes, I did, honey. I won.’
‘And I helped.’
‘You sure did.’
They high-fived.
One by one, the entire DiBlasio clan came over, each giving Jessica a grateful hug. When Connie DiBlasio hugged her, both women broke into tears. Not very professional of Jessica, but she didn’t care.
After everyone raised a glass, and emptied their cups, Lucio began to make the refill rounds with his gallon of vino di tavola.
Then, without warning or probable cause, something came over Jessica. Something that had been building a long time, ever since she first set foot in the district attorney’s office. She grabbed Vincent and planted a big, wet, sloppy, long kiss on his lips. It all came out of her. The anticipation of this trial, the stress of hoping she could and would do right by one of her father’s oldest friends, the release of hearing those words: guilty on all counts.
She looked over at her children. Sophie was staring at her phone, rolling her eyes. Carlos was covering his.
The kiss got a standing ovation.
‘Wow,’ Vincent said.
‘Believe it,’ Jessica said. She looked over her husband’s shoulder, out the window, at their new SUV parked in a dark corner of the parking lot. ‘I need you to help me with something in the car.’
Vincent, being the great detective he was, caught on quickly. Before he could say another word, Jessica kissed him again. This time it was shorter, but fraught with urgency.
When he pulled away, he said: ‘I think I should get some body armor.’
Jessica smiled, took his hand. ‘There won’t be time, Detective Balzano.’
There wasn’t.
12
The park was quiet. Byrne sat on the bench next to the small com munity garden.
He had found himself coming here more and more often lately, although he could not quite pinpoint why. There were times when the traffic was heavy on the side streets, which made it hard to think, but even then he found a way to step inside himself and visit the places he needed to visit.
Then there were times, like now, when the city was asleep, and the only sound was the wind rustling the leaves.
Woodman Park, he thought. He thought about the long road it had been for this green space to become what it was today.
He thought about the house that had once stood here. It had been a time of turmoil, a time of apprehension and fear. Perhaps he’d believed that he could save the place. Not the structure, but the very essence of this spot on earth.
Having been raised Roman Catholic, he knew he was supposed to believe in redemption. Little by little, through his time on the police force, witnessing the worst of human behavior, that belief had eroded. Recidivism for violent crime was at an all-time high. There seemed to be no redemption in the harsh solitude of prison life.
Were they going about it all wrong? Byrne knew it was not for him to say.
But now, sitting here in this beautiful space for which he had lobbied long and hard, a space that had arisen from the ashes of the chamber of horrors that once stood here, he felt, once again, that redemption was possible.
But redemption for whom?
He looked at the box next to him on the bench. The items inside brought him back to that day, the day Catriona Daugherty had been killed.
Over the nearly four decades, he had thought of her many times, thought of seeing her in the square that week, thought of her small form lying beneath the trees in Schuylkill River Park.
Byrne opened the box, looked at the .38 in the bright moonlight. He thought about the first time he had seen it, the day Dave Carmody had jumped on the Dumpster and taken it out of the wall behind the bricks. Byrne had known next to nothing about firearms at the time, but he knew it was a fearsome thing, a thing to be respected.
At this thought, a shadow came up on his left. He turned, looked.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I had a feeling I was going to see you.’
He had first met the cat under rather bizarre circumstances. They had both been standing next to the old house, unaware of the other’s presence. At that moment, the chimney began to crumble–having years earlier lost its tuck pointing–and a few bricks tumbled off the roof onto the cat’s head, knocking him cold.
Byrne had taken the cat–whom he immediately named Tuck–to a vet, and over the course of the next few weeks nursed him back to health. He supposed he knew early on that he didn’t own Tuck, nor was it the other way around. Tuck belonged to this place, even though the structure was long gone. Over the past six months, as Byrne visited this green space, the cat had shown up a few times.
Oddly enough, he seemed to know when Byrne most needed a friend.
Tuck jumped onto the bench, nuzzled Byrne’s leg.
‘Good to see you, buddy,’ Byrne said. ‘I’ve got something for you. I think you’re going to like it.’
When he knew he was going to come here to think, Byrne stopped at Ippolito’s Seafood on Dickinson Street and picked up a quarter-pound of sushi-grade tuna.
As he unwrapped the treat, Tuck jumped onto his right shoulder in anticipation. When Byrne put the paper on the bench, the cat was on it in a flash. He grabbed it, sprinted over to the hedges near the back of the lot and made short business of the fresh fish.
‘None for me, thanks,’ Byrne said. ‘I’ve already eaten.’
A few minutes later, the cat trotted to the edge of the lot, turned at the hedg
erow, licked his lips one more time and disappeared into the darkness.
The night once again fell quiet.
Byrne thought of the last hours and minutes of Des Farren’s life, of his part in that day, the events that were set in place; of how the lifting of one’s hand in anger could echo across decades, and how, in those moments of madness, lives were forever changed.
13
Billy looked at the rows and rows of photographs, each one a patchwork of features: eyes, noses, mouths, ears, chins. On many of them–most, in fact–there was a name or a word, something that would help identify the subject of the picture, or clarify Billy’s relationship to the person.
On the wall dedicated to his first life there were three pictures of a man named Joseph Mula. Joseph Mula, in all three pictures, wore a white rayon smock and creased gray trousers. In each photograph there was a black Ace comb sticking out of the smock’s chest pocket. Joseph Mula had a crew cut, narrow shoulders and small hands.
But no face. Try as he might, Billy could not see the man’s face. Even though Joseph Mula had cut Billy’s hair every six weeks or so between the ages of five and ten, Billy could not remember anything about his face. Instead, he remembered the smells. Barbicide disinfectant, Aqua Velva, Brylcreem.
Above Billy’s headboard were three rows of photographs of family he’d never met, the extended clan Farren. For many years he scanned the old photographs, looking for himself in their faces. He once thought he recognized one of them as his aunt Bridget, only to learn that the woman in the picture had died ten years before he was born.
In this room, the only picture of his father, Daniel, was a clipping from an old newspaper article. Billy had cut out the eyes one night. He did not remember why.
His was a ghost world.
He’d once waved to himself in a mirror.
Over the years, Billy had met only a handful like him, those who had crossed over and returned, people who came back with an ability and a deficit, those who found a blank spot where something used to be.
When his second life began, he spent more than two years trying to regain his strength, a painful, exhausting regimen. During those years, often long into the night, he read everything he could get his hands on, spending many hours in the library selecting books.
As he came to understand the shadows, his face blindness, he read books on his condition, and was surprised to learn how many people had some degree of the affliction, including Dr Oliver Sacks and artist Chuck Close.
In the end, Billy found it far easier to be alone. He slept in the same room he had slept in as a boy, a cluttered warren beneath the tavern his parents had once operated. The echoes of all the people who had been patrons of The Stone, in its almost seventy years, were still present. Billy heard them in the night: the din of arguments, the clink of glasses raised in tribute, the tinkling of the bell over the front door signaling an arriving or departing customer.
Sean had moved out years ago, and now slept at the long-shuttered body shop on Wharton, a business once owned by their late uncle Patrick. Heavenly Body was no longer open to the public, but Sean sometimes did chop work for friends, and maintained a small, ever-changing fleet of stolen vehicles, all at some stage of repair and repainting.
Both Billy and Sean knew that there was a chance the black Acadia SUV had been identified, or soon would be. In the next few weeks they would chop it for parts. There was a recently repainted white Econoline van ready to go.
As Billy prepared to leave for the day, he stood before the large poster next to the door, as he always did. The reproduction was of a painting called Deux hommes en pied by the French painter Edgar Degas. Depicted in the painting, the title of which translated as ‘Two Men Walk’, were two men standing side by side. The man on the left was fully rendered. Perched on his left hand was a green parrot. The man on the right–despite the fact that his vest and coat were both painted in the impressionist style–had no face.
Some said that Degas never finished the painting, having just begun to sketch the man’s face. Others said he deliberately obliterated the man’s features.
Billy had never seen anything in his life to which he related more. It was how he saw the world, a blank and featureless place, obscured by bright light.
The painting was in a museum in Troyes, France. When all five lines were drawn, and the fever lifted, Billy intended to make the trip and stand in front of the painting. He wondered if, after all this time, just by virtue of the miracle that awaited him, the man on the right would have a face.
Maybe the face would be his face.
The Queen Memorial Library was a small branch of the Free Library located in the Landreth Apartments for senior citizens on Federal Street between 22nd and 23rd.
Billy sat, as he always did, at the table nearest the door, watching her.
Her name was Emily.
Emily was a graceful, pretty woman in her mid-twenties, with soft hair to her shoulders, the color of warm butterscotch. She had long, elegant fingers, a ready and genuine laugh.
For a long time Billy did not know she was legally blind.
One of her jobs at the library was checking books out for patrons, and that consisted mostly of swiping the item beneath the bar-code scanner, bagging the books and sending the customer off happy. Because the Queen Memorial was located in a senior center, a certain proportion of visitors had some visual problems, and therefore there was a section devoted to Braille, large-print and audiobook editions.
Initially Billy had begun visiting the library to spend time with a reference book on the collected works of Edgar Degas, specifically the page that held a color plate of Deux hommes en pied.
One day, on a whim, he stopped at a florist on Federal and bought Emily a single white rose. He walked back and forth in front of the library for an hour, only to throw the rose in the trash and go home.
This happened three days in a row.
On the fourth day he hiked his courage, again bought a rose, entered the library, walked up to the counter and gave it to Emily.
‘This is for me?’ she’d asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How lovely.’ She sniffed the rose, smiled. ‘I adore white roses.’
This confused Billy. Before he could choke the words, he said, ‘How did…’
Emily laughed. Billy saw all of it. The small smile lines next to her mouth, the way her face lit up. Somehow her face was crystal clear to him.
‘How did I know it was a white rose?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
Emily leaned in across the counter and whispered conspiratorially, ‘I’m not really blind, you see. It’s just a ruse to get sympathy and government benefits.’
Billy considered himself lucky that she couldn’t see the confusion that dashed across his face for a moment. She was kidding, of course.
‘I know by the fragrance,’ she added.
‘Different roses smell differently?’
‘Oh my, yes.’
Over the next few months, on Billy’s weekly visits, he would sit with her as she ate her lunch. She explained how, in general, roses with the best scents were darker colors, that they tended to have more petals, and those petals tended to have a downy texture. She explained how, to most people, a ‘rose’ fragrance was to be found on pink and red roses. One day he brought her a yellow rose, and she explained that there were notes of violets and lemon in the fragrance. Orange roses, she said, often smelled of fruit, and sometimes clove.
For more than three months, Billy did not miss a week.
It was here that he filled the hours between the money collections he and Sean made. Here was where he rediscovered Jack London and Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Here was where he learned the true nature of his condition. There were no cures here. There were just stories.
One day, at lunch, Emily surprised him. They were sitting on the stone bench near the library entrance.
‘I’m sure you have your pick of women,’ she’d said. ‘Why do
you want to spend your time with a book mouse like me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Handsome men get to pick and choose.’
Billy felt himself begin to redden. His face felt hot. ‘Why do you think I’m handsome?’
She touched his face, running her fingers on either side, from his forehead, lightly over his eyes, his cheekbones, to his lips and chin.
She sat back. ‘I can see you.’
They fell silent for a few moments. Billy watched her. He found himself not looking at her name tag, her ivory cardigan sweater and white blouse, or the way she would put her hair behind one ear. He actually saw her. He had no trouble recognizing her face. The sensation was odd and disorienting, the way he imagined it felt when a person with a hearing disability put in a hearing aid for the first time and heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Many times he’d waited for her across the street, and followed her as she made her way home with her white-tipped cane. She lived only two blocks away, on Oakford Street, but Billy never ceased to be amazed at how she did it. As often as he watched her walk home, he would park across the street from her row house and watch her windows, the soft shadows cast on the blinds. She had two cats, Oryx and Crake, and often left lights on for them.
On this day, Billy just watched her at the counter. They had a date for lunch the next day, and somehow he would find the courage to ask her.
14
Nail Island was a small nail salon and spa located across the street two doors west of Edwin Channing’s house. The white brick facade had two windows with hot-pink canvas awnings. The front windows boasted the salon’s services: manicures, pedicures, waxing, tinting.
When Byrne and Maria Caruso pulled up out front, Byrne noticed the surveillance camera above the front door, which was the reason for their visit. He looked across the street and tried to gauge the angle, wondering if the camera’s field of vision would include the area in front of Edwin Channing’s house.
When Maria had spoken to the owner of Nail Island, the woman told her that the camera was indeed hooked up to a DVR, and that the recordings were kept for a week.
Shutter Man Page 11