He could no longer hold back. He buried his face in his arm and heaved and sobbed. Bill reached over and rested his hand on Jericho’s, while Louise got up and walked around to the hulking but shattered man, stroked his hair, and lay her head on his massive shoulder.
Bill understood that Jericho had more than loss to grieve. In due time, Jericho would need every ounce of his reinvigorated faith to bear the weight of guilt. Who knew better than Bill that carrying it was like dragging a piano? After they had found his brother’s body in the Delaware Bay, police photos of the scene showed it stuck among weeds, plastic bottles, beer cans, and the detritus of uncaring people. The trash branded on Bill’s mind was a reminder of how many lives he wrecked. Jericho would have more work to do than he realized. Not that I’ve been so good at it, Bill thought.
Matters were on Bill’s shoulders now. Even Henrietta might still be alive if Bill had done a better job regarding Eddie.
After Jericho cried himself out, he lifted his head and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Oh, man,” he said, “I never knew it would hit me like this.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Louise said. “Your divorce, suspension, now this. It’s a lot, even for a big guy like you.”
“I think I know who did this,” he said, “but I’ll let Sam Lanza work the case. Right now, I feel like wet spaghetti.”
“Eddie?” Bill said.
“Yeah, Eddie.”
“Good idea to let Lanza handle it. You don’t want to be exposed more than you are.”
“You, too, Bill. You should let Lanza handle Eddie.”
Bill shrugged, but there was no going back now.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bill got a friend to cover him at work and quickly agreed to Lanza’s request for the follow-up interview at the Roundhouse. Jericho was still in tatters and solving Henrietta’s homicide was bound to get close attention as she was in the law enforcement system. It made sense that one theory might be that the killer was some disgruntled ex-con. One like Bill?
He sat across from Detective Lanza. He went over the story again of how he and Jericho had stumbled onto the scene and Henrietta’s body, shot and bloody and dangling from Jericho’s SUV on Norris Street. The detective’s tone was friendly, inquiring, as if needing to master detail rather than lean against Bill’s narrative.
“So you and Jericho are old friends?” Bill asked during a pause in his questioning.
“Yeah. We worked the streets together until Jericho got his law degree and into the corrections end.”
“He’s a helluva guy,” Bill said.
“And you were a priest?” Lanza asked. His own West Catholic Prep conditioning made for a vague dissonance regarding the mild-mannered, ex-con, ex-Jesuit seated in front of him.
“No, not a priest, a Jesuit brother, a step before becoming an ordained a priest. I taught school as a Jesuit brother.”
“I pulled your rap sheet. Rape.”
“Yes.”
“So how did you hit it off with Jericho at Graterford?”
“He was troubled. I could see it. Not only drinking too much, I could see he was spiritually sick. That was my wheelhouse.”
“Spiritually sick?” Lanza thought everybody was spiritually sick, and the stain of so-called Original Sin barely laundered by vaunted baptismal waters.
“Yes, I gleaned it as soon as he told me he was a fallen-away Catholic. To say you’re an ex-Catholic suggests finality. To say fallen away suggests you may want to fall back in but need a shove.”
Lanza made a quick mental assessment of his own status, whether he was fallen away or an ex, but decided on non-practicing. “Then…?”
“I probed. I heard allusions to his drinking problem, to problems at home. I think he talked to me because of my Jesuit training.”
“And he looked up to you or what?”
“Nope. I was troubled in my own right.”
“How so?”
“Like you said, rape.”
“So, William…”
“Call me Bill.”
“Bill, somebody shot up Jericho’s girlfriend sitting in his car with tinted windows. Did the girlfriend and Crystal Lewis know each other?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Lanza asked, “Would anybody want to whack Jericho?”
“Probably everybody who did time under his watch.”
“How was he perceived at Graterford, I mean, I assume he was the man to all the cons, but how about the guards?”
“He didn’t have a reputation as a hard-ass, but you know, guards will pull shit on their own.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Some were bigger crooks than guys doing time. But Detective, listen, I don’t want to tell tales out of school. Jericho himself can give you a better idea what it was like.”
None of this was news to Lanza. This priest, or brother, or whatever, seemed to be hiding something.
“I see your record at Graterford was clean. How come you never got parole?”
“I applied every chance. I assumed the board had letters from Congressman Rogers. It was his niece I was convicted of raping.”
Convicted of raping. Not raped but convicted of. Like, the gun just went off. Criminals were all disconnected from their acts and their victims. “Pled down?” Lanza asked.
“There was consent, but she was under age.” Bill tore at a fingernail.
“That’s all for now. How’s Jericho doing?”
“Still pretty low. We’re doing what we can for him, but you know, time needs to pass.”
“Sometimes,” Lanza said. “Other times it doesn’t do shit. You can go…”
Bill got up to leave and faced Lanza to say goodby.
“…for now.” Lanza added.
Lanza wasn’t done with him. That was okay. Just so he didn’t get in the way.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Bill decided to walk the couple dozen blocks from the Roundhouse to Dirty Frank’s. The mid-December air was crisp and clear and city workers atop City Hall were decorating William Penn with a Merry Christmas sash and red stocking cap to cover his plain Quaker hat.
Bill had once hoped his vocation would lead to a life of passionate, magisterial, and transcendent faith and prayer. Instead, his passions expressed as desperate hunger for the mysterious otherness of the opposite sex and earthly euphoria of mainlined drugs. Why? Was he born like that, or did he make himself that way? Back when he was letting himself become seduced, he was willing to wrestle with himself, confident of God’s forgiveness. But then he got caught and convicted and became the author of all the disasters that followed.
At Market and Eighth Bill stopped in front of a window of Strawbridge & Clothier where an undraped mannequin caught his eye. He looked beyond his own reflection and gawked at the lifeless form, his eyes following its red-tinted lips down to its nippleless breasts and sexless crotch. How many times had he told himself that his fascination with the female form, that’s what it was to him, the female form, was natural, normal, and dictated by eons of evolution? Yes, he had fallen, and no, his prayers to subdue his cravings were not answered. Bill came to believe that if killing Eddie Matthews emerged in his mind, it was God’s voice, and good would result from cracking Eddie open and exposing the rot in his core. First Mikey, now Henrietta. Maybe Bill’s true vocation was to be an instrument of justice.
When he reached Dirty Frank’s, Louise was already there. He slid onto a stool, propped his elbows on the bar and cupped his chin in his hands.
“I need to drink,” he said, “that okay with you?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but you gotta pay. And don’t get sloppy.”
“Then start me with a double J&B, neat.”
“I know, I know. What’s up?”
“Nothing is up. Everything is down.”
“Mind if I have one with you?”
“One.”
She poured a shot for herself, knocked it back and poured another for Bill. “You know, you’re
not going to drown those devils inside of you,” she said.
“I know. I’m just trying to get them drunk so I can take advantage of them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Luca squeezed and sniffed the scrawny and overripe produce from the open-air bins of the Italian Market. Hawkers warmed their hands over fires in rusted barrels fueled with busted-up crates and pallets. Fruit at seventy-five cents the two dozen. The marketplace was permeated with the smoky odor of pine mingled with the aroma of fresh fish, clams, and oysters on beds of ice. Hundred-pound Italian cheeses dangled like ancient stalactites inside open doorways.
Eddie followed Luca dutifully as they meandered through the crowded market.
“We been thinking of what you said about Jericho Lewis, that he may be more valuable alive than dead,” Luca said.
“Yeah, at least for a while.” Eddie giggled at being on the team that would hog-tie the goliath. Put it to him. Maybe slice his flesh at the ankle and peel his skin up inch by inch. Eddie would take Polaroids, see they got into Graterford and shared among the guys. Jericho Lewis had never done anything to Eddie, at least that he knew about. It was the principle of the thing, the principle being that Jericho was a big deal and Eddie was not.
“Where’d you hear that stuff about food and documents and stuff?” Luca asked.
“I told you, from Mikey Osborne. Before I shanked him, I had to get to know him a little, you know, so I could get close to him.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“Only that he was glad him and I was finally friends, and he otherwise wasn’t scared of nobody because of what he knew.”
Luca halted his browsing and turned to face Eddie. “What did he say he knew?”
Eddie began to chafe. Luca was getting too specific. It was how cops worked: they’d nail you down on details then when you couldn’t remember them exactly the same way, accuse you of lying.
“I don’t remember exactly what. My only job was to get rid of him.”
“Anybody else ever talk about it?” Luca said, through gritted teeth.
“Hey, Luca, why you bustin’ my balls? You’re askin’ me about stuff I only heard about here and there.”
“Here and there, Eddie? Here and there? Let’s take a ride.”
They got into Luca’s Cadillac.
“Where we going?” Eddie asked, not liking Luca’s tone. Maybe he had gotten too cocky about the papers and it caused him to be disrespectful to the mob boss. He should know better. In the joint, the preeminence of shot-callers was clear and disrespect cost your life. They headed west on Washington Avenue.
At Twenty-third, Luca angle-parked in front of Capazolli Tile and Marble. He cut the engine and gave a quick toss of his head for Eddie to get out. He pointed to the rear of the lot and a warehouse with a locked iron door. Luca unlocked it and motioned for Eddie to go in. The storehouse of marble slabs and crates of tiles was dank, the light through dirty windows dim.
He turned on lights and led Eddie to a workbench with a telephone, a variety of saws, cutting equipment, and miscellaneous tools. He picked up the phone and pressed a button. “Get Angie and Paulie here right away.”
“What’s up, Luca? What’s this all about? Why are we here? Luca, you’re scaring me.”
“Shut up, Eddie, just shut the fuck up until I say you can talk.”
Luca pulled out a Lucky Strike and lit it with a gold-plated Ronson. “Have a seat,” he said, pointing to a rusty metal folding chair as he leaned against the workbench and calmly blew smoke toward a skylight dimmed by encrusted grime and bird droppings. Within twenty minutes the iron door squealed open and two men came in.
“You guys remember Eddie here? We need for him to remember stuff. See if you can jar his memory.”
Eddie looked up from his chair at the taller man standing beside him, then faced Luca.
“Luca, bro, you got this all wrong. I told you everything I know. We don’t need any rough stuff. Hey Luca, c’mon man, it’s me, Eddie!”
The shorter, stockier man retrieved a ball of twine from the workbench and tied Eddie’s feet at the ankles while the taller one grabbed Eddie’s arms, forced them back, and tied them at the elbows and wrists. Eddie winced.
“Awww, geez, Luca, you don’t gotta do this.”
He steeled himself to take a trimming. The ServMark documents were his lifeline. Without them, he was Eddie Matthews, Kensington street-punk and ex-con destined to knock over bodegas and roll drunks. But with them he could be somebody, score so big that he could sit on a Mexican beach with some babe, like that Louise from Dirty Frank’s, and sip neon-colored drinks with little umbrellas and cherries floating on foamy heads.
His mind was still in Acapulco when Big Angie delivered a right cross that fractured Eddie’s jaw and sent two teeth flying across the warehouse floor where they came to rest against a box of hijacked Tile City tiles. Blood filled his twisted mouth and spilled down the front of his ninety-dollar Ron Jaworski football jersey. Pain exploded in his head yet failed to impede his struggle to think of something palatable to say. The inner screaming was suddenly silenced when his lungs were vacated of every atom of oxygen by Big Angie’s fist buried in his solar plexus. He reflexively tried to open his mouth to suck in air, but the broken jaw shot a lightning bolt throughout his shaven skull.
On Luca’s sign, Big Angie stepped back. Luca bent down and grabbed Eddie by the chin and lifted his head to face him, transmitting furies of pain throughout Eddie’s neck and head. “So Eddie, what did you hear and from who?”
He tried to talk but couldn’t move his jaw. Blood still streamed down his chin and neck, painting the white number seven on his jersey a crimson red. His only operable speech apparatus was his tongue and the inside of his mouth, with which he managed to croak, “Nuh-thin.” and shake his head.
Luca stared at him a full minute, then stood straight and said to Paulie, “Cut him loose.” Then he said to Eddie, “You deliver that strunzo so I can bring him here. I’ll get it from him. You got two weeks.”
Eddie could only sit with his arms at his side and jaw too painful to close. Paulie picked him up by the collar and shoved him toward the door, through the alleyway, and out onto the street. Luca and his boys got into their vehicles and left Eddie standing alone on deserted Washington Avenue, its contractor showrooms having closed at 4:00. After steadying himself, Eddie began the long, slow shuffle home.
Despite his agonizing pain, he still found cause for glee. Luca had shown his hand. If ever Eddie thought ServMark was important to the outfit, he thought it more so now. In his mind, his documents just became worth an additional quarter million fazools.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It took four weeks for the medical examiner to release Henrietta’s body. Her two brothers and two sisters followed the hearse in a limousine. Bill, Jericho, and Louise were close behind in Louise’s Mustang en route to Saint Agatha Cemetery. Twenty-two cars formed the funeral train up Roosevelt, filled mostly with ex-convicts for whom Henrietta had been social worker, sister, nanny, and at times, Wicked Witch of the West. Virgin snow on the boulevard’s center islands resembled broad white arrows pointing Henrietta toward her permanent resting place.
Jericho’s grief seemed to have settled in as a leaden lump. Though functioning, he operated at half-speed and deferred to Detective Sam Lanza to finish up the work he and Bill had begun. In other circumstances, Bill would have tried to assuage Jericho’s troubles with talk of justice, or vengeance, for Henrietta, by nailing Eddie Matthews. But Bill’s own sense of justice was a Rube Goldberg contraption of emotions, stances, budding morality, need and guilt, albeit acutely felt. Still, when it came to Jericho, he tiptoed around the circumstances of Henrietta’s death. Any discussion of guilty feelings, which had long ago become furniture in Bill’s head, might only add to his friend’s. So when they had talked about getting Eddie Matthews, Bill only talked about it in the context of Mikey Osborne. Yet, Henrietta, even in her current incorporeal state, would appl
aud if somebody killed Eddie. So would Jericho. Bill had no doubt.
Cramped in the back seat so Jericho’s enormous size could shoehorn into the front, Bill said to Louise, “Does Deadly Eddie flirt with you at the bar?”
“A lot of guys come on, but yeah, sorta, at times.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Like I do with most other guys, I tell ’em don’t bother. I tell ’em I’m a lesbian. I tell ’em I blackmail cheating husbands and castrate pigs.”
“How would you be if I asked you to play a game with Eddie?”
“How do you mean?” Louise asked.
“You know, seduce. Jesus, Louise, you’re a woman. You know, feminine wiles.”
“There are no wiles with a guy like Eddie,” she said. “Only shears.”
“What are you saying, that he’s smarter?”
“Whoa! Now you’re pushing my buttons.”
“You’ll think of something,” Bill said.
“Maybe. Let me think about it.”
“Just don’t ever be alone with him.”
Jericho piped in. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I don’t think Louise should touch that guy with a ten-foot fork.”
“Give me a break,” Bill said. All I want her to do is soften him up a little. Maybe he’ll talk to her, you know, try to impress her.”
Bill turned back to Louise. “What did you mean when you said, ‘most other guys?’”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, signaling to turn into the cemetery.
“When I asked what you do with men who come on to you, you said what you do with most other guys. What does most mean? Who’s left over from most? Why not all?”
“Well, Bill,” she said, “I gotta keep my options open, don’t I? After all, what if I meet a cute guy like you?”
“There are no other cute guys like me. There is only me.”
They got out and joined the crowd congregating at graveside. Jericho stood stoically behind Henrietta’s family. He had been summoned to Harrisburg regarding his suspension. He told Bill he didn’t have a good feeling about it. Bill reminded him that no matter what, his best was still in front of him, that he was a very talented man with a huge heart, that opportunities to serve were ample but why not have a job where he made serious money to take care of his divorce obligations, provide for his kids, have time to read and think and maybe do a little writing? He told him maybe Henrietta’s death was God’s way of causing change, ending one segment of his life to start a new one. He would flounder until he found a new purpose, Bill told him. “You need quiet time, some solitude, some freedom from worries and obligations,” he said. “Otherwise, you won’t hear God’s voice when he speaks.”
I Detest All My Sins Page 6