The Wolves of Fairmount Park Page 2

  They had had to get someone to unlock the chapel, which wasn’t usually open unless the priest from St. Josaphat was there to say Mass. Brendan’s partner, Luis, had looked at the Dominican janitor when he’d said that, and said to him in Spanish that he could get the goddamn keys or pack for fucking Santo Domingo, forgetting as he always did that Kathleen spoke Spanish, too.

  Wedged into the narrow pew now, she looked over at Francine Parkman, the mother of the other boy shot down on the curb on Roxborough Avenue. She was small and dark, with a brown line for a mouth and eyes with shadowed lines under them. Italian, or Puerto Rican, Kathleen thought. She had a trim waist, an expensive sweater that looked like cashmere. She looked, Kathleen thought, like money. Did that matter now, in the weak green light of the chapel? Were they supposed to be sisters now their two boys were shot down on the same street corner in the middle of the night? Already she had seen the way George Parkman had looked at them when the Parkmans had come in, their faces white, their eyes wild. Something ungenerous in the line of his mouth. Suspicion that Michael had gotten George Jr. into some kind of trouble?

  The door opened and they both turned to look, their bodies as tense as if they were condemned prisoners, wondering which of them would be the first to be taken out to some bullet-pocked courtyard. There was the doctor, his hair prematurely gray, his eyes infinitely tired, and behind him George Parkman, his expression blasted and empty. Kathleen turned to look at Francine Parkman, who threw up a hand in self-defense as they got closer. That’s what she would remember later, that small hand, sprinkled with minute brown freckles, the nails dark as blood, shuddering with the effort of holding back the terrible thing coming.

  Kathleen watched them go, their wracked bodies bent, their shoulders heaving, and wanted to ask, Is he your only child? It was insane, she guessed, but it was in her mind that they should have had more children, she and Brendan. That having one child had been a mistake. That to have one child was a kind of bet with God about the goodness of the world, a hope too fragile to hang so much happiness on. Hadn’t Brendan come home every night, his eyes full of the ways that people let each other down, slid backward into darkness? Their terrible needs and endless rage and desperation imprinted on his face, a terrible bone-deep knowing that soured his expression, rearranged his features so that when he walked in the door at the end of his shift, sometimes for a moment she didn’t know who he was.

  Brendan Donovan couldn’t find any place to be. He couldn’t stand to be in the room with Michael, hearing the buzz and clack of the machines and wanting to touch his son’s swollen face and trying to keep from breaking down. The place was full of cops, his friends and guys he didn’t even know, and there was comfort in that, but already there were questions about what Michael and the Parkman kid were doing in front of a dope house, and if there was one thing Brendan did not want to be it was the cop with the bad kid. He’d seen it, they all had, but that wasn’t how it was, and if he tried to tell them, grab one of the detectives and put him straight, he’d just get pissed off and forget himself and want to put a fist in someone’s eye.

  He paced, getting to know a little route from the ER to the front desk to the vending machines. He had just turned to walk back down the quiet hallway from staring at the candy bars he didn’t want when he saw the Captain moving up the hallway, nodding at him and talking out of the side of his mouth to a young Spanish kid in a rumpled suit who was carrying a notebook, and Brendan had to think about that, about his kid’s name and his name and Kathleen’s in the chicken scrawl of a homicide cop’s notes stuffed in a file somewhere, and their life reduced to a shorthand narrative passed from the cops to some bored ADA and then the newspapers and TV to circle back to him through family and friends.

  “Brendan.” The Captain put his hand on his arm, and Brendan nodded but couldn’t say anything. “I’m so sorry. How is Kathleen?”

  He cleared his throat and pointed down the hall toward where he’d last seen her, in the chapel with Francine Parkman. “She’s hanging in.”

  “I can’t imagine.” The Captain was tall, big across the shoulders, going bald now. He was a tough fucker, and the guys all liked him. A Jew among Irish and Italian Catholics, a guy who almost never raised his voice, almost never sounded like brass usually sounded, like they were trying to shut you down before you got a chance to say anything.

  Now the kid was putting his hand out. Brendan wondered if he was Dominican—he reminded Brendan of guys he knew from the neighborhood. Wide but not fat, muscled in his arms, with skin the color of milky coffee and the close-shaved head all the young guys had now.

  “Danny Martinez.”

  “Brendan Donovan.”

  The Captain put his hand on Martinez’s sleeve. “Danny is Violent Crimes. He’s the guy who put that Derrick Leon and his friends away.” Brendan remembered Derrick Leon, one of those scarred, wild-eyed gunmen who came out of the drug trade once in a while, moving up fast by killing everyone he knew, and Brendan remembered he’d been locked up but didn’t know who’d done it. This Martinez kid looked about twenty-two, and something about him was more bookworm than street cop. Little wire-rim glasses and a way of taking the room in from the corner of his eyes, though you never knew. The Captain turned back to Brendan.

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “They’re waiting on X-rays. He’s in, he’s unconscious, but they’re saying he’s got eye movement and that’s a good sign. He’s got a . . .” Brendan had to clear his throat again. He tapped his right temple. “He got hit in the temple, but it looks like the bullet didn’t penetrate the skull.”

  Martinez cocked his head. “Small caliber, like a .22 or something?”

  Brendan shook his head. “Haven’t seen the slug, but maybe. Maybe it was a misfire or ricochet or something.”

  “Yeah, the stuff we recovered at the scene looked to be all nine mil.” He flipped through the little book, checking. “ ’Course it could have been two guns, and we haven’t found all the slugs.”

  The Captain grabbed Brendan’s hand. “Michael’s a strong kid. And whatever he needs, you know he’s got it.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be back later. You need anything, you call me direct.” He let go of Brendan and touched Martinez on the sleeve. “We’re getting these guys. There’s no question about that. None. Danny is the best guy in Violent Crimes, and this is our first priority.”

  For today, Brendan thought. Today and maybe tomorrow and then some other piece of unsupportable horror would come their way and then that would be the priority and this would all fade. It would matter to his friends, to Shawn and Luis and the guys he knew and worked with. To him and Kathleen and whatever was left of Michael.

  He heard a strangled wail from down the hall and all three of them turned, watched as Francine Parkman bent double, ripped at her husband’s coat, her mouth wide. A line of spit hung from her lips, and for a minute Brendan thought she was going to sink her teeth into her husband’s arm.

  The Captain and Danny Martinez looked down, but Brendan kept watching. In uniform he’d have turned away, too. Left them in their terrible moment, averted his eyes and looked at the floor or just walked away, but this was different, because they were here together, him and Kathleen and these strangers and their dead son. What was happening was happening to them all.

  When they were done, the Captain off to wherever brass was always on its way to, and the kid back to the crime scene, Brendan went back into the chapel and sat down next to Kathleen and she picked up his hand and squeezed it and he nodded. He looked at her then and she raised her eyebrows and he shrugged. There was nothing to report, nothing to tell her. He didn’t know anything.

  It was the most profound truth he had picked up all those years riding in a Radio Motor Patrol car going out into people’s houses in the middle of the night or the middle of the day and listening to them tell their stories. Nobody knew anybody. Nobody knew the first goddamn thing about their wives or their husbands or their kids or thei
r friends. He’d look at Luis and they’d laugh or shake their heads or just stare into the middle distance and wonder at what people were capable of.

  To be fair, maybe he’d already known it. It wasn’t some cynical thing he’d broken his head against, this knowledge of the strangeness of life. It wasn’t like he’d gone out the first day starry-eyed and full of hope and he’d been blindsided by the terrible things people did to each other. He’d grown up with Maire and knew how she was and how no one had ever stepped in to stop her until his father had finally gotten him out of the house. They left Orlando there, all of four years old and already a sensitive and sad kid who knew too much about madness and fear and disappointment. Brendan would ask his father if they could go get him, but his father had tried to explain about the judge and custody and that Orlando wasn’t theirs to take, but it all confused him and he’d wake up in the middle of the night and listen to the quiet and think of his little brother, trapped in a haunted house with a mad drunk.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When Danny went to the station house off the river drive he’d been up twenty-four hours. His eyes burned, his mouth tasted of acid and coffee and mints, and he had stopped taking new facts in and was chewing on what he had learned. He hadn’t been pressed this hard in a long time, not since the last couple days he’d spent working Derrick Leon, and he sat down on the hard bench outside the Captain’s office while the old man finished a phone call. The sun was going down, and the house was fading around him. The place was hot as a sauna, and the pipes rang and clattered like it was an old submarine going deep.

  Danny remembered Derrick Leon and the high he’d gotten off those last hours and sticking a shotgun in Leon’s face in the garage on Thompson Street. The terrible parts, the crime scene on Second Street where Leon did his girlfriend and his mother or seeing the dead patrolman down on Oregon Avenue, the kid who had pulled Leon over and gotten one in the face—those things didn’t hit him until later. It was the parts that worked, getting the tip from Asa about the kid from Leon’s crew who had fucked up one too many times and was ready to give Leon up, all the parts fitting together and that sense of momentum. Getting the kid, DeAngelo Barnes, to point out the garage where Leon was hiding, Danny picturing him in there pissing in Coke cans and doing lines off the snapped-off rearview mirror from a junked Gremlin to keep his edge.

  Danny remembered the heat, even at four in the morning when they went in. The two of them bulked up in vests, him and John Rogan, standing in that strange, gauzy light from the sodium lamps that made everything on the street a sickly chemical orange. Blinking sweat out of his eyes while they stood at the side door and waited for the SWAT guys to give them the high sign. A three-legged dog loping across the street like some kind of omen. Then the locker room stink of the garage, Leon passed out on a wrecked couch, shirt and pants off, one hand jammed down his underwear. Danny didn’t handle a gun much, and when he did he was usually tense, but that night he’d felt bulletproof, untouchable. Big John fucked with him later, called him the Mountie, out to get his man. He had felt different that night, though, felt things he couldn’t say, even to John. Not even drunk. He’d felt like something wielded, something moving under power, an engine of justice setting things right.

  His mother had a picture of Danny walking out with Leon in cuffs that somebody from the Daily News had gotten. Leon’s head was turned, saying something to Danny, and Danny was smiling.

  The Captain motioned Danny in and hung up the phone as the younger man dropped heavily into a cracked wooden chair. The furniture at the station was ancient, crossed with red scars and scabbed with cigarette burns. Sometimes he’d try to conjure what the place must have looked like when it was first opened, but couldn’t get it clear. It felt like it had already been faded and misted with cobwebs the day they’d turned the lights on, like a reopened tomb.

  “Coffee?” The Captain pointed to a carafe on a low table against the wall, but Danny waved him off.

  “I haven’t had anything but coffee to drink in about a day. My ears are starting to ring.”

  The Captain sat down and lifted his hands. “What do we know?”

  Danny flipped through his book. “The kids were standing in front of the place on Roxborough, which the Fifth District had got numerous complaints about in the last two months. People coming and going at all hours, arguing, music, blah, blah.”

  “Dope.”

  “Fits the profile. Front windows boarded up. Front door reinforced. Anyway. Nine o’clock, give or take, a black or dark car goes by, make unknown. One of the neighbors, a guy just got back from Fallujah, says automatic weapon, but the other neighbors just say they heard a lot of shooting.”

  “From the house, or just the car?”

  Danny shook his head. “We’re still looking at the scene, but it looks like all the shots came from the street. There are casings only in the street. Bullets and holes in the house, plus a blood trail, inside. Two guns recovered from a bedroom on the second floor, but neither one looks to have been fired. Place was a mess. White residue on the kitchen table we’re having tested, but I’m betting comes back dope.”

  “Any chance the kids were inside and dragged out to the curb? Like they got hit inside when they were buying and the dealers don’t want them found in the house?”

  “Nah, no sign of that. The blood trail goes from one of the front windows out the back. The kids, I think they fell where they were hit.” He closed his book and looked off. “Couple weird things, though.”

  “I bet.”

  “Yeah. George Parkman, the kid who didn’t make it?” Danny frowned down at the Captain’s desk. “He had two handprints in blood on the sides of his face.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Never saw anything like that before.” He lifted his slender hands and laid them alongside his face. “I got a photo from the ME.”

  “The shooter? Touched the kid’s face? For some fucked-up reason?”

  Danny shook his head, widened his eyes. Who knew? “The car didn’t stop, that we know about anyway.”

  “So another person on the scene? Someone comes out of the house?”

  Danny screwed up his face. He didn’t like that.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, Danny.”

  “The kids are standing there on the stoop. Maybe working up the courage to go in.”

  “Maybe just came out?”

  Danny closed his eyes. “There’s nothing in their pockets, so no, they haven’t gone in yet. Money, but no dope. If you haven’t done it, I’m thinking it takes a lot of working up to knock on a door like that. While they’re standing there, here comes a car. Guy across the street says he can hear the radio in the car.” He lifted two fingers, the kids standing on the steps. His other hand slid by. The car. “The guys in the car come by, spray everything. The kids, the house, they don’t give a shit. Someone in the house gets hit. They grab everything, pick up whoever got hit, run out the back.” He opened his eyes. “Then the guys in the car throw a handful of bags out the window, like a calling card.”

  “Bags?”

  “Baggies. Decks.” The Captain nodded. The tiny glassine bags of heroin that got dealt out every day. In their hundreds, in their thousands. “These have a little gangster with a tommy gun printed on the side. Al Capone, they call it.”

  “Who deals that stuff?”

  “John Rogan says that’s Green Lane. So, if it’s all what it looks like, it was Green Lane who shot up the house.” The Green Lane crew. More dealers, bumping up against the Dominicans for the neighborhood, maybe.

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Green Lane is Ivan and Darnell Burns. Ivan’s locked up now, but his halfwit brother’s running everything. Him and a crazy kid named Trey King from West Oak Lane.”

  “You see them doing this?”

  “I wish I could say no. Ivan, at least he had some sense, but his brother?”

  “Great. The other guys, Tres Nortes?”

  “Yeah,
that’s Juli Mir, his cousin Teyo. Juli’s got connections with African smugglers. Everyone else is moving Mexican heroin these days.”

  “Does that matter? Is this about connections?”

  “Maybe. Probably, though? It’s just about the same old crap. Territory and customers. Money. Only the dealers use the word ‘respect’ a lot.”

  “So we’re going to see more of this shit.”

  “Yeah, that’s likely.”

  “And the kids?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time. The one kid—” Danny looked at his notebook. “Parkman Jr. Something like a thousand bucks in his pockets.”

  The captain cocked his head. “Jesus. So he was there to buy something. And the handprints?”

  “Someone else. Someone who saw it, standing there when the kids got shot.” He fished in his pockets, first one, then another, came out with a grainy print of a digital photo. He handed it to the Captain, who looked at it and gave the smallest shake of his head and seemed to Danny to slump a little more into his seat. The picture was of the slack white face of George Parkman, his hair rucked and red with his own blood. The colors exaggerated, the way they were in digital. The red bright and lurid, the one open eye a brilliant, unreal blue. The kid’s features were somehow both delicate and not wholly formed, the face of an adolescent boy. His eyes canted down, as if finally the dead are disinterested in life, or maybe embarrassed to be seen. On his cheek, a long, slender handprint in rust.