Shutter Man

by Richard Montanari

  ‘The Iraqis?’

  ‘I believe they are Turkish, but yes. That store right there.’

  ‘We don’t run in the same circles.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Byrne said. ‘It turns out they do have a camera on the outside of their business, and because of how many times they’ve been robbed, they subscribe to a rather pricey cloud service that records and stores their surveillance video off site. It turns out also that their exterior cam has a clear view of your front door.’

  Byrne reached into his suit coat pocket, took out the photocopy of the freeze-frame he’d gotten from Joe Sadik. He smoothed it on the counter. It clearly showed the man with longer hair holding the door to U-Cash-It open as the other man entered. In the corner was the date and the exact time.

  While Dennis LoConti looked at the photocopy, Byrne looked at Dennis LoConti. He saw the tic. Slight, but it was there. He could all but hear the air begin to leak out of this man’s game. LoConti knew these men.

  ‘You know, people who come in here are entitled to their privacy.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Byrne said. ‘But as you earlier noted, I’m with the homicide unit. These two gentlemen are not necessarily wanted for any specific crime. They’ve just come up as a part of a broader investigation.’

  It was Byrne’s oldest and best tap dance. He continued.

  ‘And as you’re no doubt aware, we have a pretty good DA’s office in this town. They’re aces at compelling people to discuss their clientele. Now, I’m not saying we should go that route. I’m saying that we’re just a couple of guys talking.’ He nodded at the photocopy. ‘Do you recognize these men, Mr LoConti?’

  LoConti looked at the paper, tapped his fingers. ‘I might have seen them.’

  ‘But you don’t know their names.’

  ‘Like I said, we get a lot of people.’

  ‘If these people conducted a transaction here at this exact time, would you have a record of it?’

  ‘Usually I would, but my computer is in for repair.’

  By way of illustration, he reached under the counter, picked up a power cord and a USB mouse, neither connected to a computer. It was hardly proof.

  Byrne thought about what he had, and whether or not a warrant could be cultivated. It didn’t seem like enough.

  He decided to hold the chit for a while, shake Dennis LoConti’s tree a little more. He handed him a card.

  ‘Give me a call the minute you get your computer back,’ he said. ‘Will you do that for me, Dennis?’

  LoConti took the card. ‘Sure thing.’

  Byrne held the man’s gaze until LoConti glanced away. There was a connection here, but Byrne couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He suspected these two men on the video were not merely check-cashing customers, so he doubted there would be any record of their visit on Dennis LoConti’s conveniently missing computer.

  Before stepping out of the store, Byrne turned back and said:

  ‘By the way, it’s Mr and Mrs Sadik.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people from the grocery across the street. The people who are keeping an eye on your business when you’re sleeping.’

  It was after four o’clock by the time Byrne arrived at the Rousseau house. He let himself in through the padlocked back door. The only previous time he had been in the house it had been teeming with crime-scene techs and investigators. He needed it to be silent.

  He sat in the kitchen with the lights off for a while, listening for house sounds, sounds that might have preceded the ruin of the Rousseau family.

  Had the killers come around to the back door? Had they knocked on the door, and had a member of the family, thinking it was a neighbor, simply opened it to them?

  According to her statement, Anne-Marie Beaudry said that when she entered the kitchen at 7.30 on the morning when the victims were discovered, the oven was set on low, and inside was an all-but-dried-out leg of lamb, wrapped in foil.

  Byrne flipped on the light. On the counter was a cookbook. A red ribbon place marker jutted from the top. He gently opened the book, and saw that the page was a recipe for apple turnovers. He glanced at the fruit bowl on the small table. It was full of Granny Smith apples.

  He envisioned the few moments before Laura Rousseau met her killer, standing right where he was standing, her thoughts consumed by this simple, everyday task. It would be her last.

  Mark’s room was a typical teenager’s room. Instead of rock star or hip hop posters, however, Mark’s posters were of athletes. Cole Hamels, LeSean McCoy, Usain Bolt.

  His daily journal was in a black lacquer box sitting on top of his dresser. Byrne opened the box. The journal itself was brown leatherette. Byrne could see traces of the black fingerprint powder.

  He took out the journal, opened it to the center and began reading.

  June 16. I started work today at the store. It was kind of slow in the morning, but by noon a few busloads of tourists showed up. I think they might have been Korean. Wherever they were from, they had a lot of money to spend. It was so funny to watch Dad try to figure out what they were saying. He always talks with his hands anyway, but watching him try to describe the Liberty Bell was a stitch.

  Somehow it got to be three o’clock, and neither of us had taken a break for lunch.

  I went down to the diner on Third Street, and guess who was there. I’m not sure there is a future for me and Jen. She might be a bit too serious for me.

  I think Mom might be the bravest person I know. It was amazing when she stood up to those people when she didn’t have to. When I asked her why she did it, she said it was about everyone else, and that sometimes you have to make a stand, even though it isn’t the easy thing to do.

  I was a little too young to understand that then, but I do now. If I can be half as brave as Mom, I will be happy.

  Byrne closed the journal. No matter how many times he did this simple but necessary task–more than one case had turned on a seemingly innocuous sentence in a diary or journal–he felt as if he were invading the victim’s privacy.

  Still, he took out a paper evidence bag, slipped in the journal. He made a note to remind himself to log the removal in the murder book’s chain of evidence. He’d read more later.

  Before leaving the house, he stopped in the kitchen. On the counter was a digital answering machine. He touched the button to play the outgoing message.

  They all answered together.

  ‘We are the Rousseau family!’

  Byrne knew the machine had been processed, and that it contained no messages. He played it again, unsure as to why. Perhaps it was because he wanted to meet these people, to experience something of them that was animate, something sentient and alive.

  He played the outgoing message one last time, and as he did, he found his gaze turning to the living room, and the large brown stains on the carpeting.

  ‘We are the Rousseau family!’

  He felt the old anger begin to rise. He did his best to bully it back. It had never helped.

  On the corkboard in the kitchen were photographs of Mark Rousseau at ten, twelve, and fourteen, the chronicle of him growing from a gangly pre-teen into a tall young athlete, on the way to becoming a man he would never live to be.

  As Byrne closed and sealed the door, he felt the weight of the journal in his pocket, haunted by those two lines Mark Rousseau had written:

  I think Mom might be the bravest person I know.

  It was amazing when she stood up to those people when she didn’t have to.

  15

  ‘I don’t want one,’ the old woman said. ‘I will say no more on the matter.’

  She crossed her thin arms over the front of her pilled blue cardigan and tried to make herself even smaller.

  Anjelica tested the water coming out of the faucet with the back of her right wrist. Tepid at best. She turned up the hot water, tried it again. Too hot.

  Perfect.

  Just hot enough to cook the old bird.

  She tur
ned it down, swirled the water with her hand.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you want one or not. You are going to have one,’ Anjelica replied. ‘And I’ll say no more on the matter.’

  ‘It isn’t my bath day.’

  ‘Yes it is, old woman.’

  ‘I didn’t take a bath last time.’

  ‘Last time my sciatica was acting up and I couldn’t lift you. Today it’s worse. You think you’re the only one with troubles? I’ve already let you slip a week and it is a day neither of us will get back.’

  ‘I know what day it is. You don’t have to tell me. I know what day it is because you’re wearing that perfume.’

  Anjelica almost laughed. She always wore perfume when she visited Tess Daly. The reason was simple. The old woman talked more than anyone Anjelica had ever met. More than even her own mother, who had been a non-stop chatterbox about everything and nothing.

  A year or so earlier, Anjelica got the idea to schedule the old woman to be her last stop of the day. She’d put on a little makeup, her best sweater, and perfume, telling the old woman that, as much as she would like to sit and chat, she could not do so because she had a date. At first it was clear that the old woman did not believe her, assuming–rightly so–that no one in his right mind would give a second look to someone like Anjelica Leary.

  But Anjelica stuck to her story, and eventually got the old woman to believe it was true. It was the only way to get out of her apartment at a decent hour.

  Truth be told, Tess Daly was a civilized enough sort at eighty-eight years. Anjelica more than once thought about what life might be like if she could hook her up with Jack Permutter.

  Two old birds, one stone.

  Twenty minutes later, the woman bathed and fed and planted in front of the television, Anjelica looked at herself in the mirror, straightened her blouse and skirt, both older than time.

  Like clockwork, she heard the TV in the parlor veer from an ad to: ‘This… is… Jeopardy.’

  She poured Tess Daly an inch of Jameson, returned the bottle to the small desk in the bedroom, locked the drawer, pocketed the key. If she didn’t, Tess would drink the whole thing.

  On this night, as with every other night she visited Tess Daly, Anjelica stopped for a hoagie at a small restaurant on Lombard, then headed back to her house, got into her robe, poured herself her own few inches of Irish and hoped for a good movie on TCM.

  She had little interest in films made these days, what with the superheroes and explosions and so-called romantic comedies. Hers was the era of her parents and her own young adulthood, the movies of George Cukor and Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra.

  As if by serendipity, tonight’s movie was Kitty Foyle. The 1940 film starred Ginger Rogers, in an Oscar-winning performance, as a hard-charging blue-collar Philadelphia woman from the wrong side of the tracks who found herself the object of affection of two different men: the wealthy cad, played by Dennis Morgan, and the idealistic young doctor, played by James Craig. A real tearjerker.

  Anjelica loved the old tearjerkers.

  As she settled into her chair and watched the opening credits, it occurred to her that she had not had a good cry–a real ten-Kleenex affair–in a long time.

  Almost forty years, if one were to count.

  Anjelica Leary counted.

  At just after eleven o’clock, she dressed in her nurse’s whites, ran a brush through her hair. Before leaving the house, she looked at herself in the mirror next to the door, wondering where the years had gone.

  Wasn’t it just yesterday she’d stood, slender and energetic and full of youthful promise, at her graduation from Temple University?

  She glanced at the small pill vial in her hand, thinking about the journey these pills had taken, and where they would go this night.

  Like Kitty Foyle, who had made the most important decision in her life while having a conversation with herself in the mirror, Anjelica made up her mind.

  ‘It is God’s work, it is,’ she said to the gray-haired woman in the mirror, knowing that the next time she saw this woman, the world would be different.

  The world would be better.

  She found Constantia sitting at the last booth in the small coffee shop at which they’d agreed to meet.

  Small talk made, they got to the reason for the meeting.

  ‘I can’t tell you how much this means, Mrs Leary.’

  Constantia Colfax was a scant twenty-five, friendly and outgoing in a way that Anjelica had never been. Even though the young woman had had as much life thrown at her as anyone, including Anjelica, she did not run for an amber vial, or a bottle, or any of the other things that made things worse. She stiffened her spine and moved on.

  ‘You must start calling me Anjelica. Mrs Leary is my mother-in-law, and she’s been in the ground for twenty years.’

  And good riddance, Anjelica thought, but kept to herself.

  ‘Anjelica, then,’ Constantia said. ‘It’s a beautiful name.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘As is yours.’

  Constantia lowered her voice, even though there was no need. ‘And you have no problem with signing in as me?’

  Anjelica matched the woman’s subdued volume. ‘None at all, love. I know you’d do it for me.’

  ‘I truly would,’ she said. ‘I hope it would be under happier circumstances, but you can count on me.’

  ‘Of course I can.’

  They’d met a month earlier at a NVA conference and, despite their difference in age, became fast friends. Constantia had never worked at this clinic. No one would be the wiser.

  There was no physician on duty at the clinic, but rather a rotating roster of doctors on call from nearby hospitals.

  ‘You don’t think we’ll get in trouble, do you?’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Anjelica said. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time.’

  At this, Constantia smiled. She was of an age and a temperament where the smallest assurance from someone Anjelica’s age would be enough to assuage her doubts about just about anything.

  ‘Do you have any new photos?’ Anjelica asked.

  Constantia lit up. ‘I do!’

  She rummaged in her purse, took out her iPhone, clicked it on. She turned the screen to face them both, tapped the photo app. A second later there was a photo of a smiling, round-faced girl wearing a bright green jumper.

  ‘Oh, the dear,’ Anjelica said.

  Another photo, this one of the girl in the tub, a crown of bubbles on her head.

  ‘And her doctor said it’s just a chest cold?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The poor thing,’ Anjelica said. Constantia’s daughter, Lucia, was asthmatic, and chest colds for her were potentially serious.

  ‘Well, if she takes a turn, you call me. I may be old, but I still have sway with the doctors at U of Penn.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Leary,’ Constantia said. ‘Anjelica.’

  Twenty minutes later, Anjelica stood in front of the dilapidated building generously called the 24th Street Clinic and Rehabilitation Center. Even out here, she could smell the frailty, the coarse odors of sickness. The smells did not bother her–you couldn’t do your job as an LPN for long if they did–but they still managed to get on her skin in a way that required showers that lasted until the water was cold. The showers had gotten longer and longer over the years.

  It all begins with a step, Anjelica thought. Step to the right, your life goes this way. Step to the left, it goes another.

  Step into the light, or into the darkness.

  To the Lord or to the Devil.

  Anjelica Leary made her choice, pulled open the door and stepped inside.

  16

  By the time Byrne reached the Penrose Diner, he realized he had not eaten all day.

  When he entered the restaurant, he looked in both directions. He had not seen the man in a year or so, and almost walked right by him.

  Graham Grande was a latent fingerprint examiner when Byrne first became a
detective, a man already nearing retirement, which was not mandatory at the time. Grande had come up before the FBI created the first databases, when the science of being a latent examiner was all about the long, tedious task of comparing fingerprints side by side on paper.

  Now in his eighties, he still showed up occasionally at the Survivors’ Benefits and other PPD charity functions. He looked frail to Byrne, but his eyes were clear.

  The two men shook hands. Byrne slid into the booth, ordered coffee, perused the menu. As hungry as he was, his nerves got the better of him. He put the menu away.

  He knew that Graham’s wife had been ill for a long time. He was almost afraid to ask. He wanted to enquire after her by name, but couldn’t remember it. He blamed himself for letting the time pass, for forgetting.

  ‘How is your wife?’ he asked, hoping it didn’t sound uncaring.

  Graham shrugged. ‘She has her good days and her bad days. We have her over to the Camilla House now.’

  Byrne knew that Camilla House was a long-term-care nursing home in West Philly, near Cobbs Creek.

  ‘Some days she’s sharp as a tack,’ Graham continued. ‘Remembers what I wore to so-and-so’s wedding in 1956. Other days…’

  The waitress brought Byrne’s coffee, topped up Graham’s cup.

  The two men talked about the job as it was in the day, the job as it was now. They talked about people they knew in common–fellow cops, lawyers, police support personnel–many of whom, Byrne was sad to notice, were gone.

  It was Graham who brought it around to the business at hand. He tapped the box sitting next to him in the booth. ‘You want this in here or outside?’

  Still the cop, Byrne thought. ‘I’ll get it before I leave.’

  Graham took off his glasses, wiped them with a napkin. It was a gesture Byrne remembered from back in the day.

  He put the glasses back on, lowered his voice.

  ‘Well, it was a job and a half to try to process this material without my kit,’ he said. Byrne had asked if it was possible to read prints off the items without using powder or tape. He knew there were other, less reliable methods. Graham Grande had never been one to turn down a challenge.