“And if it’s what it looks like? If the cops got it right and the kids were just standing there when those idiots from Green Lane rolled up?”
“But why there? Why were they standing there? Were they buying drugs? They were a long way from home in a shitty neighborhood.” He touched Orlando again with his terrible burning hand.
Orlando pulled back his hand. “They were a long way from wherever the fuck you live, but they were ten blocks from where Michael grew up. And Roxborough isn’t a shitty neighborhood. Yeah, there’s dope there, but there’s dope everywhere. You can score in this nice restaurant. Wherever you live, you can get high. I guarantee it. You think you got money, that makes you different? You live in a fucking dream world.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know about that. But this is a lot of money. For you. You can”—he lifted one shoulder—“I don’t know. Do whatever you want with that much money.”
“Kill myself, is what you mean.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I need some of it up front.”
“No. I’m not stupid. Nothing now.”
“How do I get my money, then?”
“You come to me. You tell me what you found out.”
“Yeah?”
“If I believe you, you get paid. That’s all. If you’re lying, I’ll know it.”
“Look, you know, you hired a psycho, but there must be investigators or whatever, people you can get who aren’t mental patients.”
“What would they do? They’d come to you. Or people like you. They’d try to find people you already know, whose phone numbers you already know.”
“What’s your wife or whatever think of this plan? She on board with you hiring a junkie to get into your son’s shit?”
“It’s not up to her.” The chin went up again, like a little kid holding his ground, but then the eyes shifted left and right, quick. “Anyway, she moved out. She’s at her mother’s.”
The money was already working in Orlando’s head, and something else, too. Something like the chance to do something for Michael. For his brother, Brendan. Or to show his brother something, maybe. He couldn’t bring himself to buy it completely, to think it would be amends for the embarrassment he’d caused his brother, but it was something, maybe.
And did the money mean he was going to get high? That much money might be a way out, too. Rehab, or something. A place to go, to take Zoe, someplace down the shore or out in the country where he could get clean, get right. It was a possibility.
He looked at Parkman again, who was clearly exhausted. Staring into the middle distance. The guy might be a crazy, angry fuck, but he’d lost his kid and was desperate and alone, and Orlando knew that feeling. He let a long breath go.
“I’m going to need to get in your house.”
“Why?”
“I need to see his bedroom. I need to talk to his friends.”
Parkman’s eyes widened—he hadn’t thought this far—but he took a pen out of his pocket and scribbled on a napkin and pushed it across to Orlando. An address and a cell number. “Fine. Whatever you need.”
“Gimme twenty dollars.”
Parkman stared hard at him but pulled his wallet out and handed him two tens. “What’s that for?”
Orlando stood up and tucked the bills in his pocket, knowing twenty dollars wasn’t money to this guy. “That’s my retainer.” He pushed the chair in and stepped back.
“Where are you going?”
“To buy drugs. With my retainer.”
. . .
Chris stood just inside the door at a strip joint on Second Street, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark at the entrance. The place smelled like perfume and cigarette smoke and beer, laced with the astringent smell of ammonia, as if somebody had been sloshing cleanser around every few hours. The music was loud and got louder when he moved down the narrow entryway and into the main room, where the bouncer nodded at him and held out a hand. The guy made a face and said something Chris couldn’t make out over the music, pointing discreetly at the bar lining the stage.
The ceiling was sprayed black, and the mirrored stage was set with blue Christmas lights that blinked out of sync with the music. There was a beat-down pool table and stains on the carpet you didn’t want to look at too close. There were two dancers, a short blond girl hanging back and moving her hips slightly to the beat while shaking her head in disdain, and one with red hair at the edge of the stage with the look of a trapped animal. Gerry Dunn was standing in front of the red-haired girl, holding the thong away from her hip with two fingers and angling to look inside while his brother Frank howled with laughter and thumped his hands together in a fair imitation of a drunken seal. The bouncer raised his eyebrows at Chris and moved closer to shout in his ear.
“Help me out here, man? I can’t have this shit in here.” He was apologetic, with a little whine in his tone. Chris fronted him blow and dropped a lot of money in the place every night, which meant he was always welcome, even if his friends got out of hand once in a while and had to be walked politely out to the curb. He made a face, letting the bouncer know he was doing him a favor. Like it should be an honor Chris and his friends spent their money here when they could go anywhere.
The place was almost empty in the middle of the afternoon, a few guys clumped up at the other end of the bar at a safe distance from where the brothers were acting up. A couple of businessmen, another neighborhood guy, all of them studiously not watching the Dunn brothers as they manhandled the girls and poured drinks into themselves with the determination of men at work.
Once when they were young, Chris had come on his brother Shannon and Gerry Dunn with a dog cornered in one of the abandoned factories along Jasper Street. They had long metal poles they’d scavenged from the buildings and were banging them on the blackened concrete on either side of the animal, driving it between them so that eventually it was frozen, one quivering foot raised in the air as if in deliberation. It was a small dog with a tangled red coat, and it had a long black streak down its side. Probably something Gerry and Shannon did, marking it as theirs to mistreat.
Chris thought the look in its eyes was the look of the girl at the bar now. Like shame and fear and a basic confusion about the situation and her part in it, and seeing his two friends at the bar, their hands out as if containing the girl by some energy field they generated, Chris had some confusion himself. Not liking to see the girl victimized, not liking to have to step in and control his friends, but all of that mixed up with being on the high side of the display of power the scene represented. If the two businessmen at the other end of the bar had tried some shit like this they’d be out in the alley with their hands folded behind their backs, suffering a swift kick in the ass to tell them not to come back. But this was Gerry Dunn, and Gerry Dunn did what he wanted, and part of that was being in Chris Black’s crew and fear was the lever under it all. Fear of what Chris Black might do, of what Gerry Dunn might be allowed to do, of all the money they spent and the dope they brought and the people who came around the club because Chris and his friends drank here, fear that all that money could be turned off like a hose.
He walked up behind Gerry Dunn and hit him hard on the shoulder, so that he turned fast, his hands up. Gerry smiled and hit him back, hard, screwing up his features like a little kid making a tough-guy face. The girl made her exit fast while the Dunns were distracted, and Chris called the bartender over and ordered more of the sweet, bright drinks they liked and threw money on the bar. He sat down with them and got into the flow of things. Another girl came out, this time with chalk white skin and black tattoos that were arcane symbols and letters like hieroglyphics written on her skin, and the music was Rob Zombie, “Pussy Liquor,” music that droned and buzzed inside him, communicated less by his ears than through the soles of his boots.
This girl didn’t care about Gerry Dunn; she was lost in her head, performing for somebody who wasn’t in the room. The lights turned her pallid body red, th
en blue, then a brilliant white that was almost hard to look at. There was a wan smile on her face like she was listening to a joke; she hung just out of reach, untouchable, her eyelids hanging half over her eyes in a pantomime of drowsy lust so that the boys beat the wood of the bar and howled. She did “Fast Car,” Wyclef Jean’s version, and then “Fuck U Gon’ Do Bout It” and “The Dope Show,” and the way she was, the way she moved her hips twisted the meaning of the songs so that it was all about the boys watching and the thing they wanted from her that they couldn’t have and anyway the wanting was better than the thing itself, even staring up at her, inches from it, aching, their pupils open so that Chris thought that to her they must look like a ring of reflective eyes, like animals circling her in the dark.
Danny sat up slowly, his neck stiff and a red pulse behind his eyes that made him sick. He was wearing only his suit pants and hadn’t gotten under the covers. He looked left and thanked God that at least he was alone.
He remembered Rogan talking him into last call at the Shamrock, and he remembered shots of Jameson’s. The good, eighteen-year-old stuff that went down like water. He remembered singing with John at the top of his lungs, banging on the bar. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” “I Fought the Law.”
He lurched to the bathroom and got sick, the pressure bulging his eyes as he emptied himself, then sat on the edge of the tub. He reached over and turned on the tap and drank from the faucet, lapping at the cold water, then rested his head on the cool white porcelain.
He forced himself up, dressed slowly, pausing after each item of clothing to pant like a dog, finally pulling on his tie and making for the door at almost three o’clock. He drove north from the river to Ridge and then followed it west until he came to Jelan’s street of low-rise apartments, parked, and counted doors as he walked.
Jelan opened the door as he approached, and he was unprepared for her, the fact of her, after conjuring her in his head the way she was at Roxborough. She was no longer that agile child, but she was still beautiful, and after he took in the lines at the corners of her eyes, the worry etched in her face by her younger brother, he had trouble keeping his mind on the task at hand.
“Danny,” she said and pulled him into the narrow hallway of the apartment. “Thank you.” He saw that her mother was there, a tall woman, a bright band in her hair. Proud in the way Jelan was proud, her head erect, her eyes bright. He had to keep reminding himself to say Soap’s right name. Darius. Soap was a gangbanger, a would-be player. Darius was a wayward kid, basically good, loved by his sister, his mother, aunts from Kingston and Saint Mary.
They told their story and as much as they knew of Darius’s life, though Danny could fill in more from his own experience. He knew how this thing was in the air for kids with time and not enough focus, and it was literally true that Soap—Darius—was a good kid, and he had trouble banishing the thought from his head as they talked that the kid was probably dead and Danny should have seen it coming. There were countless kids like Darius out there, and no one to care about them except their families. Anxious mothers and absent fathers; that part of the story as familiar as “once upon a time.”
Jelan’s apartment smelled like hair products, and her partner had a thick-waisted woman in a kitchen chair and was treating her head with some kind of brown foam. The two women, the one in the chair and the partner, a tiny woman with huge brown eyes and gold earrings like palm leaves, shook their heads and made affirmations of support while Jelan and her mother talked about Darius and his life. The lure of the street and his good-for-nothing friends. Danny made notes and tried not to look at Jelan too much and to remember why he was there.
She walked him to his car, wearing a purple smock and touching her head with the effort of making sure she had told him everything. He had to restrain the impulse to take her hand, but standing at the open door of the unmarked he touched her shoulder and said he’d find Darius, and she dipped her head.
“I told myself to think of him as lost when he took up with Darnell and Ivan. But I couldn’t.”
“I know. He’s your brother.” He thought of his own brother, Pete. Two years younger and a sniper in Iraq on his second tour. Sending Danny e-mails full of misspellings and impenetrable military jargon, digital photos of himself cradling a rifle and wearing blue wraparound shades. The memory triggering again in Danny’s mind the constant shift of pride and fear, the disappointment that he hadn’t gotten his brother to stay in school. Thinking more of Pete than Soap, he said, “How much can you protect them?”
She looked back up the street toward her apartment. “I always thought you were a good person, Danny. Even when we were kids.”
It caught him off guard, and he nodded and shrugged to keep himself from saying something stupid. About what he’d always thought of her. She smiled that knowing smile he hadn’t seen since they were teenagers, and an electric current ran along his jaw.
“You liked me. Then.”
He smiled, looked at his keys, his hands. When had he gotten this shy around women? Realized he hadn’t been on a real date in almost a year, asked a woman out, gone to dinner. He met them in bars. Saw a nurse from the ER at Penn University Hospital a few times, but that was mostly swapping war stories in a bar near the university after work. Talking past each other. Hurried sex in her car, reaching under her whites to grab at her, both of them giddy from long shifts and lack of sleep. Filling a need, really, and it drifted down to nothing after a few weeks.
Now he let himself take Jelan’s hand, slowly, letting something creep into it. Thought of different things to say, but then just nodded. When he stepped back and closed the door, she was looking at him intently, as if suddenly recognizing who he was.
Kathleen parked across from the hospital and walked through the cracked and canted lot, feeling the heat even as the sun began to lower in the sky. A group of neighborhood girls walked by her on their way to Ridge, dressed in shorts and sleeveless shirts, and it gave her a pang that Michael was missing these days, the start of summer. His older friends would be graduating in a few days, and Kathleen stopped to watch the girls go by, suddenly angry, wanting to go in and shake her son until he woke up, the way she’d done a thousand times, his long form stretched out, his pale legs exposed, the sheets wound around his torso. His face sweet in repose, mouth parted. When sleep was just rest, a few lost hours. Not a lost week, his face blank and empty and almost unrecognizable to her.
On the steps to the lobby she saw Jeannette Sullivan, watching the girls go by, her head tilted. She was wearing jeans and a top that looked too big, and she worked the tail of it in her hands. Kathleen stopped, and Jeannette turned and saw her and sat up straight as if caught at something. Kathleen noticed for the first time that Jeannette’s eyes were gray tinged with blue and that there was an intensity in her, a self-possession that would have captured her son, who loved passion in other people, was drawn to it like fire.
“Jeannette. You’re here early. How was school?”
The girl lifted one shoulder high. “I didn’t go.”
“Come on in and see Michael.”
“No.” She looked away up the street, her blond hair picked up in the wind. “See that girl, the one with the red shirt? She cheated on her boyfriend with a boy from Bala Cynwyd. I saw them down on Main Street. Just acting like, you know, whatever. And her boyfriend’s sister saw them. So he dumped her.” She looked down at her hands and tried to smooth the wrinkles she’d made in her shirt. “It’s just so stupid, all these games. To make someone jealous or whatever. Just to mess with people. To make something happen, and you have no idea what you even want.” Her voice skittered, broke.
Kathleen sat beside her on the hot concrete. She put her arm around Jeannette and the girl stopped moving and after a minute fat drops fell onto the backs of her long, freckled hands.
“We had a fight.” Her voice was small, a whisper, and Kathleen had to lean her head in to hear over the sounds of the cars, the hot breeze. “Michael and me. E
veryone is like patting me on the back because I visit Michael at the hospital and we’re such a great couple and all of that. And no one even knows it was my fault.” She pushed at her eyes with the back of one hand.
Kathleen waited. “Did you see Michael that night? Did you know what he was doing down there, Jeannette?”
“No. He told me Geo needed his help, but we were supposed to go to see that Jack Black movie. He wanted to tell me what they were going to do and I was just mad, okay? And I told him fine, whatever, all pissed. Go have fun with Geo. Like I care.” Her shoulders were shaking and Kathleen put her hand on her head and her crying got worse, became little shrieking hiccups. “Please don’t hate me. I didn’t know what they were going to do. Buy drugs or whatever ’cause I made Michael upset.”
“Geo is George Jr? They called him Geo?”
“Yeah, all of us did. Except Steve Chesna and those other retards, the ones who are always getting detention. They liked to mess with Geo.”
“Geo. I didn’t know that. Could those boys have had something to do with what happened?”
“Oh, no.” Jeannette raised her head, horrified. “No, they were just dipshits who liked to make trouble because Geo was, you know.” She shrugged. “He was different.”
“Was George Jr. gay, Kathleen?”
“Geo? No. That’s what Steve Chesna and his dipshitty friends thought. He was just, I don’t know. He was just different. Smart. He read books that weren’t assigned. He baked stuff for the bake sales and volunteered at a homeless shelter.” Kathleen went into her purse and fished for a tissue and unthinkingly put it under Jeannette’s nose. “He was seeing a girl. Marianne Kilbride. At least he was in the spring, then they, I don’t know. They broke up or something.”
“Did George use drugs?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. You can’t always tell that about a person, can you? He just kind of went his own way.”
They sat, and Jeannette leaned into Kathleen and she thought again about how it would have been to have a girl. After they’d had Michael she’d stayed home for a year and they’d struggled on Brendan’s salary. Things got easier when she went back to work teaching ESL for the archdiocese, and they just never made the room in their lives for another baby. The time went by and the moment seemed to pass. She touched Jeannette’s long hair and the girl’s eyes filled with tears again.
The Wolves of Fairmount Park Page 12