Eddie turned to Bill. “So you’ll never guess who’s dating that broad at Radiant Hope, Jericho Lewis hisself. Ain’t it a small world? Looks like the outside world is just as small as it was in the joint.”
“Really?” Bill said. “Well good for him. Am I supposed to do something with that?”
“I figured since you and him was pals and all, you know, you’d like to know.”
“I told you, we had some conversations in Graterford. We weren’t pals.”
“You sayin’ you don’t know whether he thinks I offed Mikey Osborne?”
“Why would you worry about it one way or the other? You’re paroled, that’s all that counts.”
“You don’t get it, do you? If he’s still digging away about it, who knows what guys may come forward and pin it on me? Next thing you know, my parole is yanked.”
“Want me to talk to him?” Bill said.
“Could you pump him? Don’t forget, he’s them and us is us.”
“I never forget that, Eddie. I never forgot it inside the walls, and I don’t forget it now. I know you think he and I were pals, but I knew him, that’s all. Big difference between knowing somebody and being their friend.”
“Yeah, look at you and me,” Eddie said.
Bill let that hang and said, “What do you want me to pump him about?”
“Whether he thinks I whacked Mikey Osborne, and if so, what’s the evidence?”
“Did you?”
“I’ll never tell.”
“I was hoping you did,” Bill said. “That fucking kid undermined me all the way. He claimed he knew things but all he did was work against me. If you didn’t do it, then I guess I should thank somebody else.”
Eddie sat up straight on the stool and smiled at Bill. He put a finger up to the corner of his eye, to the fifth teardrop. “This is my most recent one,” he said, “see what I’m sayin’?”
Bill nodded and pictured Eddie lying on a slab under a sheet with a tag on his toe. The teardrop tats would show up better on pallid skin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Eddie couldn’t help his implied boast about Mikey Osborne. He had been so clever, the way he shanked Mikey, using the Pierrot toothbrush handle filed down to a point. He had learned to weaponize Pierrots at West Penn. Unlike the basic Oral-B or Crest, Pierrot used a particular polyethylene, which gave it strength and flexibility as a shank. It wouldn’t snap when it hit bone. Though Mikey’s jugular would present no such resistance, Pierrot was the instrument of choice in Eddie’s circle. So when Eddie and eight other guys surrounded Mikey and began singing Happy Birthday for his twenty-fourth, Mikey was taken by the convict camaraderie. He let his guard down and didn’t run or make a scene. He was laughing just as Eddie executed a lightning left to Mikey’s neck with the sharpened Pierrot, and followed it up with two more thrusts before the birthday boy knew what hit him. It happened so fast the well-wishers had time to walk away before the dying Mikey dropped to the dirt.
But no toothbrush was going to bring down Jericho Lewis. The motherfucker was so big only a bullet to the head would do. Any other part of his body could probably absorb a few rounds without serious damage. How to get close enough to do it? Maybe while he sat in his car.
He picked the broad up on Fridays, right? It could work.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bill and Jericho stood at the curb beside the Koronios Meat Wagon on the Temple University campus. Jericho was downing his third gyro with extra tahini. Bill moved olives and feta around an aluminum container with a plastic fork as he told Jericho he didn’t need more proof that Eddie killed Mikey, but the lawsuit, and now Jericho’s fortunes were getting in the way of getting Eddie. “Uh-huh, uh-huh” seemed the best Jericho could do. Also, “That fucking pig.” His Expedition had broken down and caused him to miss a hearing about his case in Harrisburg.
“The IG may see it as dodging the hearing. You don’t know how these guys think,” he said to Bill.
“You should make a deal,” Bill said.
“You’re right, it’s nothing but trouble. Henrietta is picking it up from Pep Boys in about an hour. I’d get an Escalade, but Crystal would be thinking I had money. The price of poker would go up.”
“No, not that kind of deal…”
“What? What kind of a deal?”
“With Eddie. He tells you why he killed Mikey and you promise him you won’t bring any heat.”
“Oh yeah, that. He’ll want more than my reassurance. But one day you’re convinced Eddie killed Mikey and the next day not so sure. You need to make up your mind.”
Jericho’s remaining gyro disappeared in two bites.
“I know, but I want to hear it from him. Tell him you don’t need for him to suffer any consequence, tell him you were pulled off the food case before you got suspended and that you didn’t get suspended because of it. Tell him it was just as well since Mikey was about to get you into trouble over the food contract. I mean, c’mon, man, work with me here.”
“You want me to make Mikey the bad guy and Eddie the good guy? Make me puke, why don’t you? Hey, it’s time for my class. Sit in on it?”
“I’ll donate my body to science if I want to be a case study,” Bill said.
“You don’t have to be. Just sit in. They’ll think you’re an intellectual night watchman. Then we can walk back to Radiant Hope. Henrietta should be back with my car by then. We’ll give you a ride to your girlfriend’s.”
They strolled into the small classroom. Jericho took a seat behind the desk to review material. Graduate students meandered in and unhitched and unzipped backpacks to extract pens, notebooks, and designer water. They were an eclectic mix of recent graduates and older people, probably employed in the criminal justice system and looking to beef up their bona fides. The latter group was Jericho’s favorite; work and school, probably a family, world-wise, hard-nosed, seeking practical solutions to actual problems. The younger, recent graduates were pains. Heads filled with idealistic ephemera, yet whose preoccupation with eternal verities was important. At least when tempered by the notion that evil was real. The emphasis on which Jericho saw as an important part of his teaching mission.
Sitting in back, Bill saw what Jericho had meant. But unlike him, Bill was more taken by the younger group. There was something about their unalloyed idealism and zeal, undeterred by the realities of real-world opposition, indifference, turf battles, budget constraints, and yes, evil. They roiled Bill’s heart, conjuring the gleam in Dennis’s eyes when he talked about being a fighter pilot, of landing his plane on a carrier deck at night, of being the tip of the spear, fighting for his country and for what was right. What was right, never a simple matter. Not to Bill, anyway.
Jericho parried and thrust with the students’ assertions about rights and duties. Bill thought it strange that Jericho didn’t discuss practical areas of administrative concern like budgets, personnel, and logistical challenges. Perhaps being caught up in the food problem caused him to avoid it. More abstract talk from the idealistic students brought Bill’s thoughts back to Dennis. He swallowed hard and tried to stuff painful memories back into the closet.
By 3:30 p.m. the sinking December sun cast long shadows on narrow Norris Street and the side entrance to Radiant Hope. Deadly Eddie sat parked in his Toyota near Fifteenth. His heavy-lidded eyes didn’t wander from the side-view mirror as he screwed a suppressor onto the .22 Sig Saur and played with the radio dial, trying to pick up Howard Stern’s patter through static from New York.
At 3:45 p.m. Jericho’s gray Ford Expedition slowly crept by. Eddie immediately got out of his car to meet it down the block at Radiant Hope. He held the .22 inside his half-zipped jacket. He tugged the hood low over his forehead and looked up and down the block. Barren. Too bad it wasn’t darker. But so what? If he was seen he’d run onto Broad, ditch the hoodie, and pick the car up later. His hand was steady. This was just another task, though the pay was pretty good; two grand for a minute’s work.
He arrived
at the Expedition just as it turned onto the apron in front of him. He waved it by. As he sauntered past he casually glanced over his right shoulder. Lewis wasn’t getting out and Eddie couldn’t see through the tinted windows. He bent down and tied a shoelace. Still, no one emerged from the Expedition or came out of the building. He couldn’t wait.
With the .22 held behind his leg, he turned and walked back to the Expedition. He looked a final time up and down the block. The door to the SUV still wasn’t opening, but he saw the dim outline of Jericho’s head through the window. Was he combing his hair? He held the pistol up to the window and squeezed off five quick rounds through the glass and watched the figure slump forward. Before he took off running, the door opened and Henrietta fell half way out of the vehicle, head and neck spitting blood and a hairbrush and contents of her purse spilling among the weedy stubble growing in the concrete’s cracks. What the hell was this? What was she doing in the Expedition? He stowed the gun under his hoodie and scurried back to his car. He backed onto Fifteenth and headed south toward Center City.
As he left Norris Street on one end, Bill and Jericho turned onto it from Broad and immediately faced Henrietta dangling out of Jericho’s SUV, still held in by her fastened seatbelt. By now dusk, the blood, broken glass, and the contents of the purse weren’t immediately visible as Bill reflexively grabbed Jericho’s arm at the site of Henrietta slumped like a discarded rag doll.
“Oh my God!” Jericho yelled, breaking free from Bill’s grasp and running the last twenty yards to Henrietta’s body. “What…? What…?” He blanched as he put his arms around her torso and sat her upright. Bill stood helplessly by as Jericho ran his fingers through her bloody, matted hair, examined the still-bleeding hole in her neck, the puncture wound in her left cheek, and the glassy look of open eyes drained of spirit. He looked up and down the street as if it might offer an explanation. Then he looked at Bill.
“Who could have done this?” he blurted.
Bill looked at the corpse, then deep into his friend’s eyes. “I don’t know.” By now he had noticed the spent shells and Henrietta’s untouched wallet among the purse’s spilled contents. Life in the yard had taught him that the usual motives for murder; money, sex, revenge, needed another category, inexplicable. Who could explain a compulsion to kill derived from an insane view of the world? But whether a usual motive resulted in Henrietta’s slaughter or some arbitrary imagining, risk now charged the air like a lightning strike. “We have to call the police,” he said, as his friend moaned, “Oh no, oh no, oh no!”
Jericho unbuckled her seatbelt, lifted Henrietta’s body out of the car, and laid it on the ground. He got down on his knees and felt her heart. He began to rhythmically press down on her chest. Bill put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Don’t,” he said, “she’s gone.”
The halfway house side door at first cracked, then burst open as Albert rushed out and down the stairs, a look of horror on his face as he saw Jericho on the ground, rocking Henrietta’s body in his arms. “What happened?”
“She’s been shot,” Bill said. “Did you hear anything?”
“My God, no,” Albert said. “Is she…is she…?”
“Yes,” Bill said. “Call the police. Now!”
Moments later, two cars from Temple’s police department and four cars with sirens came screeching around the corner. The uniformed cops moved Bill and Jericho away from the body and cordoned off the scene. Within minutes, Homicide arrived. It was Sam Lanza.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Jericho Lewis, how you doing, man?” asked the detective. His gaze dwelled on his old friend for only a few seconds before he put on glasses and scanned the scene. His collar was scrunched by the rolls on his neck and the small knot on his loose tie revealed a collar button unable to reach the hole on the other side. Down his shirt, his belly strained at the buttons. He was mildly surprised to see his former partner from their beat days yet wasn’t—ten years in Homicide had minced credulity into oatmeal and resignation lined Sam’s face like a stoic Indian chieftain’s.
“This was personal, Sam,” Jericho said. “She’s my lady friend. Some sonofabitch killed her.”
“You and Crystal aren’t together anymore?”
“We’re separated, working on the divorce. She’s with somebody else now.”
“What happened here?” Lanza asked.
Bill explained what they saw when they came back from Temple.
Lanza peered at him over his glasses. “And why are you here?” When Jericho introduced Bill the night of the fights, he had only introduced him as a buddy.
Jericho interjected, “He helps me.”
“Helps? How? Staff?”
“He helped me in the yard, helped me get off the sauce and get my head straight about other stuff. Bill here was a convict but paid his price a thousand times over. Might still be paying,” he said, turning to Bill, “right Bill?”
“Nice to see you again, Sam,” Bill said. He offered his hand. Lanza accepted the handshake but never took his eyes off Bill’s.
“Isn’t it usually the other way around, you know, where the deputy warden helps the convict get his head straight?” Lanza said, turning to Jericho.
“Bill had been a Jesuit seminarian and teacher,” Jericho said.
“They send you up for that these days?”
“Sam, we’ll talk about that later, in private, okay?”
“Just as well,” Lanza said, “we got work to do until the crime scene people and coroner get here. Sorry about this Jericho. You know how it is, the best thing we can do is catch the sucker who did this.”
“And hope he winds up at Graterford,” Jericho said, grinding his teeth.
“Yeah, look, you and your friend here give us your statement. I’ll call you after that for a follow-up.”
Detective Parish drove Bill and Jericho to the Roundhouse, the police headquarters building with self-described architecture. Their statements were simple and brief, not much to tell.
“Come home with me tonight,” Bill said to Jericho. “Stay with me and Louise. As long as you’d like.”
Jericho’s car was impounded for forensics. Parish dropped them at Louise’s house. Jericho’s usually rapid gait of tiny steps now shuffled like a zombie’s. Bill put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. When they walked into the house, Louise stood on her toes and reached up to wrap her arms around Jericho’s neck. Bill saw her look of deep sorrow as she hugged the big man. Bill wanted to be supportive too, yet anything he said might add to Jericho’s likely sense of guilt from knowledge that the shots were meant for him. Nor did Bill want to spread paranoia or fear to Louise. He was ready to put his own needs aside and make room for Jericho’s grief, but that didn’t mean abandoning them. He could no more abandon Eddie than abandon breathing, and what to most resembled patience, for Bill was barely controlled impatience. Getting Eddie was still paramount. Just not right now. But soon.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I send you to do a simple job and you murder an innocent woman?” Luca shouted at Eddie. “What are you, an animal? Or just stupid?” He pounded the desk, sending telephone and pens flying.
“I’ll get him next time.”
“Don’t be such a fucking chooch! He’ll be on the lookout. The cops can put two and two together. What if they find out it was you who killed the woman, like somebody saw you drive away?”
Eddie sat unfazed.
“I have my own reasons to get Lewis, independent of the food thing.” He let it dangle. Luca was speechless for a moment.
“What food thing? What are you talking about?”
“It’s why you wanted Mikey Osborne gone, wasn’t it? You know, the food thing.”
“Look at me, Eddie. You better tell me what you know or I’ll give you transfusions to keep you alive while we slice up your body and mail the pieces to your mother.”
“Don’t get all medieval on me, Luca. Alls I meant was I got to know Mikey well enough to find out that some kind o
f fix was in to supply the prison system, and that he could prove it.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“He had some papers hid away that he said would prove the scam. He bragged they were his protection,” Eddie said, barely able to constrain a giggle. “But they didn’t protect him against us, huh Luca? Some protection!” He let go an uncontrolled, high-pitched laugh like a malevolent circus clown.
“So what happened to these so-called papers?”
“Beats me. I assume they emptied Mikey’s cell right after I emptied his veins. I wouldn’t know if they found papers, a key, or what.”
“Well, forget about any food thing. You just concentrate on putting a pill in Lewis’s fat head.”
“Maybe that’s not the best thing. Maybe we should get holt of him and work him over, see what he knows. I’ll deliver him to you live for the same price as dead.”
“Let me think about it,” Luca said.
To kill Jericho Lewis was a matter of a few gunshots at an opportune time; to take him alive would require an Abrams tank. Shit. He should have asked for more money for Plan B. Depending what Jericho knew, it would help Eddie put a price tag on his ServMark bid documents. Either way, Bill Conlon was the bait.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jericho needed to talk. Louise had poured another pot of water into Mr. Coffee and punched the button for brew. Bill’s eyebrows were furrowed. Louise sat coddling her mug in both hands as she bobbed approval, tsked, raised her eyebrows, and shook her head as she followed Jericho’s narrative about the joy of Henrietta’s love and the pain and stupefaction at her shocking death.
“We didn’t go together all that long,” he said, choking back tears, “but she was so easygoing and didn’t mind that I wasn’t divorced, yet and stuck by me after I got suspended and promised to help with money if I needed it and said I was all that mattered and…and…”
I Detest All My Sins Page 5