Pulse

by Michael Harvey

  “I hear you. First fucking grade, right?”

  “Wait till some poor bastard shows up for the prom.”

  Tommy laughed, the tension draining from his voice. “Come on, let’s go in and I’ll apologize.”

  Barkley shook his head. “Go home. Make your kids breakfast and grab some sleep. I’ll take care of this.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll pull some of them files before I go.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m gonna crash on a cot in the back after I talk to this guy.”

  “What about the reporters?”

  “I’ll talk to ’em at some point. Why don’t I swing by the house this afternoon? We can pick up the pieces then.”

  “Thanks, B.”

  “Tell Katie I said hey. And give those girls a kiss for me.”

  Barkley watched Tommy go down the hall and wondered again if it wasn’t time to start looking for a new partner. Tommy was like a brother, but maybe that was the problem. He shook his head and walked back into the interrogation room. Toney took a final drag and crushed the remains of his cigarette into an ashtray.

  “Your buddy head out?”

  “He’s been at it all night. Listen, I’m sorry . . .”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Let’s start over. You want some coffee? Something to eat?”

  “I’m good.”

  “There’s a bakery around the corner. Guy opens at five. Beautiful blueberry muffins. Still hot and everything.”

  “I’m good.”

  “All right.” Barkley pulled out a chair and sat down again. “Tell me about your photography.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you want to tell me.”

  Toney shrugged. “It’s not like your pal said. No skin mags, nothing like that. I had an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, for Chrissakes. I’ll send you the pamphlet.”

  “Any girls from the street in the exhibit?”

  “The girls were the exhibit. People love it. Living on the edge and all that stuff. That’s why I have the studio down there. I live like they live. So they trust me. They open up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Lot of pain, Detective. Lot of pain.”

  “You got the photos, Mr. Toney?”

  “Right here.” Toney opened his jacket. He had a manila envelope tucked against the flat of his stomach. “Before I show them to you . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “I was listening to the radio on the way over here. Heard the name of the kid who got killed.”

  “Harry Fitzsimmons.”

  “Yeah. Football player from Harvard. That’s all they gave out.”

  “What about him?”

  “I knew him.”

  Barkley felt the skin under his left eye pucker. “How’s that?”

  “I knew him. Not well, but I actually saw the kid yesterday morning. Early. Him and his buddies were at a diner in Harvard Square.”

  “Small world.”

  “You think I didn’t think that?”

  “Relax, Mr. Toney. Stuff like this happens all the time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “More than you imagine. You get any names?”

  “Of what? His buddies?”

  Barkley nodded.

  “Neil Prescott was one kid. He’s into cameras. I was helping him pick out some lenses. You know, make a buck or two.”

  Barkley wrote on a pad of paper—tight, coiled lines of cursive. “So you know Prescott?”

  “Just through the cameras. How do you know him?”

  “Have you spoken to Prescott?”

  “When? Since this happened?” Toney shook his head.

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “The other kid he was with was named Sanchez. Zeus was the first name, I think. Something like that. They told me they might be headed down the Zone. Few beers, some laughs. Fuck me, I shoulda stopped ’em.”

  “Not your fault, Mr. Toney.”

  “Still feels like shit, you know?”

  Barkley stopped writing and flipped the pad over. “Let’s see the photos.”

  Toney pushed across the envelope. Barkley took out the photos and laid them down in a row on the table.

  “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

  “I snapped these from my window.”

  “Overlooking the alley?”

  “I heard some yelling and running so I looked down and seen the two of them. Black kid and a white kid.”

  “Definitely black?”

  Toney touched one of the pictures. “You tell me.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “These two are circling each other. Looks like a fistfight. I got cameras everywhere in the place, so I grab one.”

  “You said it was a studio. You live there or something?”

  “I got a pullout bed I make up in the back. As you can imagine, a lot of my work down there is at night.”

  “Sure, sure. So you see these two. You yell down, tell ’em to stop?”

  “You know how many fights I see in that alley every week?”

  Barkley shrugged like What’s a guy to do. At the end of the day that was why people went to the Zone. To sit in the shadows and watch. “Go ahead, Mr. Toney.”

  “So I see them down there and I just pop off the shots. Bang, bang, bang.”

  There were five photos in all. The first two showed a white man with his back to the camera faced off against a black man. The pair were shoved up next to a Dumpster almost directly beneath Toney. In the third and fourth shots, the white man was on one knee, the black man swinging his arm down, a knife clearly visible in his right hand. In the last photo the white man’s shoulders were turned toward the camera, one arm obscuring his face, the rest of his body lost in the thick back and shoulders of his attacker.

  “Did you know it was Fitzsimmons?” Barkley said.

  Toney shook his head. “I only saw what I saw through the viewfinder. Whole thing lasted less than ten seconds. As I snapped the last one, I did yell something.”

  “Why then?”

  “Dunno. Guess I registered the knife. Anyway, the black guy just took off running. I leaned out and saw the white kid was holding his side up against the Dumpster so I went into the hall and started yelling for help.”

  “And?”

  “You can yell a long time in that building and never see a soul.”

  “You call the police?”

  “My phone’s out so I ran down two flights to a pay phone and called from there. By the time I got back to my apartment, there were people in the alley trying to help the kid, so I popped off some more shots. Then you guys showed up.”

  “Why didn’t you come down when we were on scene?”

  “I could talk to some cops or go in the darkroom and develop film. Which would you rather I did?”

  “Fair enough.” Barkley tapped the face of the black man, caught in a random bloom of light. “I assume you don’t know this guy?”

  “I’d only be guessing.”

  “Welcome to the world of police work, Mr. Toney.”

  “I think the pictures are enough, don’t you?”

  Barkley turned the photo over and stood up.

  “You know I could have sold these for some coin to the Herald.”

  “I appreciate that. Give me five minutes and we’ll get you a ride home.” Barkley collected the photos and left the room. There was a young uniform standing in the hall outside.

  “Couple newspaper guys are up front.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Charlie. Charlie Herbert.”

  “Charlie, take this guy out the back and make sure the press doesn’t get a sniff.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Barkley scribbled out a few lines on a piece of paper and tucked it in the uniform’s hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “Name and address of the guy in that room. After you drop him off, I want you to call down to the ph
one company. See if his line’s in service. If it’s out, find out when and what’s the problem. All right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get going, Charlie. And remember, no press, especially the cameras.”

  Herbert went into the room. Barkley walked down to the can. He washed his hands and face and quick shined his shoes with a paper towel. Then he ran a hand over the top of his tight Afro and wiped the fatigue out of his eyes. Barkley adjusted the knot in his tie and gave himself a final look in the mirror. Shit. Sidney Poitier had nothing on him. Richard Roundtree, neither. He left the bathroom, swinging both arms loose and easy as he strode down the hall to meet the press.

  20

  DANIEL SAT on a bench in the basement of Boston City Hospital and stared at the entrance to the tunnel. He’d spent six months here as an eight-year-old and knew there was a passageway that burrowed under Albany Street, connecting Boston City to the morgue. Now he was staring down its mouth, gaping wide and stinking of urine. A woman approached, pushing a sheeted body on a gurney. She considered Daniel with the disconnected eyes of a prison guard before ducking into the tunnel and quickly sinking from sight. Daniel thought about Heracles and his trip to Hades, Cerberus and the river Styx. Was there something of Charon in the woman’s flat-paneled gaze, the coin already in her pocket, slipped from under the tongue of the Bostonian lying perfectly still and perfectly dead under the woman’s starched sheet? Daniel wondered why he wondered such things and figured he was in shock. Probably had been since the alley. And now he was here.

  They’d given him a long-sleeved T-shirt at the police station. It was cheap and anonymous and itched his neck, but it covered up some of the blood and that was good. The attendant who’d set him on the bench and told him not to move appeared on the horizon. He carried a uniform appropriate to the setting and task—blue scrubs, gloves, even a mask. Why the mask? Daniel wondered, but slipped it around his neck, pulled on the scrubs, and followed the attendant to one of several doors cut at regular intervals down both sides of the hallway. The attendant opened it and stepped aside. Daniel had told the cops he wanted to go in alone, but they said that was impossible. The attendant would wait by the door. Daniel had fifteen minutes.

  He circled the room, clinging to the plastered walls like he was afraid the floor might tilt and suck him into its center. Light arced from an overhead lamp, spitting shards that glanced off the steel legs and grooved runnels of the examining table. A plastic bucket of water and a sponge sat on a stool next to the table. Daniel moved toward it.

  The air felt cold and stuck to his skin. He picked up the sponge and plunged it into the bucket, feeling it swell as it soaked up the warm water. Daniel washed his arms to the elbows, then his face and neck. He stripped to the waist and scrubbed his brother’s blood off his chest, water streaming down the contours of his body and forming puddles at his feet. The attendant was watching but never moved from his post by the door. Daniel let himself look at Harry for the first time, face framed over the top of the sheet, feet out the other end, knobby lumps of flesh. Here was the prime of life, everything ahead and about to happen, decaying from the inside out. Daniel could feel it nest in his belly, smell it on his skin, cloying and impossible to scrape off no matter how many buckets of water they brought, no matter how many times he scrubbed.

  He plunged the sponge into the bucket and squeezed it dry. Then he started. Daniel washed his brother’s arms and hands first, running fingers along the small joints. He dabbed at Harry’s face—eyelids, nose, cheeks, all cold to the touch, frosted in death. Daniel ran the sponge across Harry’s stubbled scalp and watched the water sluice down his face and catch on his lips. They’d already processed the body for evidence and examined the wounds, photographed them, measured them, touched them. All that remained was the coroner and his tools—knives, saws, and rib cutters. They’d gut Harry, weigh whatever needed to be weighed, bag whatever needed to be bagged. And so on.

  Daniel let the sponge fall from his hand and slumped to the floor, pressing his face up against the dark glass of his soul.

  Two boys sit on a subway car, snaking somewhere beneath the tangled city. Daniel is just nine and wears a blue hospital bracelet around his left wrist. Harry is twelve and pulls out a folding knife to cut the bracelet. Daniel watches it fall to the floor of the streetcar. The driver calls out his stops in a voice that bleeds through a tinny speaker—Government Center, Park Street, Boylston, Arlington. People shuffle on; people shuffle off. Furrowed faces, Boston eyes, features carved from hard wax melting into soapy smiles when they see the two boys together. Daniel had emerged from his coma a week ago. That morning someone from the state arrived with a pile of paperwork and his ticket out. Harry insisted the brothers be allowed to take the T to the group home where they’d stay until something better came along. Harry’s demand provoked a flurry of meetings, but the brothers didn’t give a damn. In the end, they got their way.

  The train rumbles out of Arlington and Harry looks down as Daniel looks up. He can see Harry thinking, even at that age, literally see his brother’s thoughts as they whirl and hiss and sort and shape into words.

  “I love you most,” Harry says as the streetcar creaks around a curve and comes to a stop in the breathing darkness. Daniel smiles. It’s the game their mother used to play on the T when she was wearing her high heels and her dress made of shiny silver scales, when she was cooked in a cake of makeup and rouge and lipstick, when she was dropping the boys off at the apartment of a woman they called their aunt but really wasn’t. Mom always started. Daniel always went next. Now, his mom was gone. But the game runs on.

  “No, I love you most,” Daniel says.

  “I love you most.”

  “I love you most.” Daniel’s voice feels small as sin and big as fear. He digs into his brother’s shoulder as the overhead lights in the car flicker and they start to move again.

  “I love you most, bud. I’ll always love you most, and that’s all there is to it.” Harry draws him close and holds him, not giving a damn what anyone on the Green Line thinks cuz that’s Harry.

  “I love you most,” Daniel mumbles.

  “Nope, I love you . . .”

  They rumble through Copley that way, then Auditorium, and, finally, Kenmore. The two boys get off the streetcar, still playing their game, the “I love you”s more like a string of prayer beads now or a meditation, each boy lost in his thoughts, their thoughts the same while the ghost of their mother dodges their footsteps and touches their cheeks. And so it went. And so it goes.

  Daniel opened his eyes, the chemical air of the room dry at the back of his throat. The attendant was gone, nothing there but an empty chair and a wedge of yellow gleaming wicked beneath a crack in the door. Daniel knew where the attendant was—outside in the alley, in the early morning blush, enmeshed in a web of pulse and shadow, sharing a cigarette with a woman who worked in the hospital. The man was married, but Daniel could still feel his desire for her, hot and slick and blind and desperate. Daniel got to his feet and stood over Harry, hovering close enough that he could have felt a breath stirring on his brother’s lips. Or maybe a word.

  “You loved me most,” Daniel said. “And we both know it.” He climbed onto the table and curled up next to the sheeted body, drifting among the soft lights, words and memories sparking and dying in his head. When he finally left the room, he knew better than to look back. In the hallway he took a seat on the floor and hardly breathed, mumbling “I love you most” and wrapping himself in his new life, stitched as it was from the sins of the past.

  The attendant returned from his smoke and they walked silently to the reception area, neither looking at the other. Daniel took off the scrubs and tossed them in a bin. Then he was on the flat sidewalk, head back, staring at the curved lines of the building outlined in a predawn light streamed with pinks and purples and rivers of black. The great aloneness was coming, a crushing wave that would only grow as he ran.

  Daniel turned and started down the
street. At the end of the block, two cops waited in a car.

  21

  THEY DROPPED him in the middle of Kenmore Square at a little after six. Two men and a woman were sleeping in the shelter of the bus station. One of the men was using his backpack as a pillow while the woman rested her head against his side. The other guy was bundled up in a camo jacket on a wooden bench, his nose pressed against a concrete pillar. Two more packs were stowed under the bench along with a guitar case and a tiny dog that looked like Toto. Daniel watched while an MBTA driver with a thick Italian face walked over and kicked one of the guys in the head. The guy rolled onto his back so his soft belly was exposed. The driver kicked him again, this time in the ribs, and left. The woman got busy organizing their things while Camo Jacket smoked a cigarette. Eventually, the trio cinched up their packs and picked their way through the square, Toto happily at their heels.

  Daniel took his time climbing the stairs to his apartment. He sensed the space was empty even before he pushed in the door and lingered on the threshold, smelling the cold char of the fireplace, noticing the slant of morning light across the books on the shelves, listening to the pad of cat’s feet on rubbed planks of wood.

  He walked back to his room and sat on the bed. Daniel knew he should sleep and knew he wouldn’t. In the tiny bathroom across the hall he showered, turning on the water as hot as it would go and standing under the spray and steam. He found a pair of scissors in the medicine cabinet and hacked at his hair until the floor around him was covered with curling piles of locks. Back in his room he changed into fresh clothes. The gun he’d found outside Latin School was still at the bottom of his book bag. He pulled it out and gripped it, pointing it at himself in the mirror. The gun knew death. Daniel could feel the knowing in his hand and it comforted him—something found even as everything else was lost. He stuffed the gun back underneath his books and returned to the front room, stretching out on the couch and closing his eyes. Harry lived in the space between thoughts, filling the void with grief that swelled and streamed like a heavy sea. When Daniel opened his eyes again, his face stared back at him from the ceiling, curling a lip before turning away.