The Wolves of Fairmount Park Page 6

  He had thought of his kid as an oddball, a loner, but there were a lot of kids there and only some of them were obvious losers. A girl with a shaved head and a fringe of hair at the front sat next to a big kid in a leather jacket and gripped his hand while tears rolled down her face. When he stared too long at them, the big kid looked in his eyes and cocked his head, calling him out. Jesus. Was this red-faced slab of a kid friends with George Jr.?

  There were also nice-looking kids with open faces, though, kids who could be cheerleaders or jocks and who wore dresses or jackets and ties, and he wondered how they knew his son and why they were there. Was it some kind of admission of guilt, the cool kids having somehow gotten George Jr. into something that got him killed on the steps of the dope house?

  When he couldn’t stand to be out in front of everyone anymore he walked back through to where there was an old-fashioned drinking fountain and conical paper cups, and he filled one and stood looking at some ancient print of Cork that was so dark all he could make out was there were cows in it, or maybe small, misshapen horses. He became aware of someone standing at his elbow.

  He turned to see a big man in an ocher sport coat holding out his hand, and he stood for a minute before taking it. The man had red hair that curled in on itself like cheap carpeting and a pink face with broken veins across the bridge of his nose, and he smelled like something sweet that might have been wine.

  “Mr. Parkman. I’m Abbott Collins.”

  George stood there for a minute, trying to remember, and it came to him in a rush. The private detective his former partner Joe Reese had recommended.

  “Right, right, sorry.” He shook the man’s hand, his grip too tight. Something his father had passed to him and automatic now. The detective nodded.

  “No apologies, Mr. Parkman. This is a black day.” The man had a strangled voice, as if he’d burned his throat. “All my sympathies, sir.”

  “Thank you.” He wondered what was next. Joe Reese had said he’d put the guy in touch, but George hadn’t expected the man to show at the viewing, for Christ’s sake. “Joe said you helped with something. Employee theft or something?”

  “Yes, that’s one thing I’ve done. I guess he thought you’d want someone looking into George Jr.’s death. Someone besides the police.”

  “The police.”

  “Yeah, they’re working it, to be sure, but there are so many rules for them, you know?” He moved in, too close for George, who retreated toward the wall and almost unseated the picture. “A cop, he has to ask permission for everything. Things that should take a week take two. Things get lost in the shuffle, in the paperwork.”

  “You don’t like the police?”

  “No, no, not at all. I was a cop, eight years homicide. The cops are good, they just don’t have, you know, the freedom of action that a professional would have.”

  George pronounced his words with the drunk’s exaggerated care. “Freedom of action.” He liked the sound of that. It called up images of this hulking fucker in his cheap coat slamming some smart-aleck kid against a brick wall in an alley and cutting off his wind until he told them who did this to his son.

  “Can I ask, sir, what the detectives have said? What they’ve told you about Brendan Donovan, for instance?” The man turned and George turned with him to see them, the Donovans, Brendan and Kathleen, coming in now from the entryway and talking softly to some people they knew in the back of the room.

  “They haven’t said anything. I talked to the one guy, a detective, I can’t remember his name. He wants to talk to me again. He didn’t really tell me anything.”

  “Nothing about Brendan Donovan, or his brother?”

  George turned to the man Collins, had to keep himself from grabbing his sleeve. “Tell me.” He searched the man’s face with his eyes.

  “Abbott,” said the man. “Call me Abbott.” He took a card out of his pocket and gave it to George, who crushed it in his hand.

  “Tell me what about Brendan Donovan.” He let that get out louder than he intended, and the larger man took his arm and led him into a darkened corner. George craned his neck to keep an eye on the Donovans. Collins leaned in and cocked his head.

  “Brendan Donovan has a brother, a junkie. They didn’t tell you that. The kid’s been arrested a half-dozen times. They pick him up, he skates. Because someone steps in for him.” Collins pushed his head over twice, fast, pointing out Brendan. “The kid, they call him Little Brother on the street, ’cause he’s a cop’s brother.”

  George’s eyes narrowed, and he drew his mouth down. “You’ll look into this for me, then?”

  “Of course.”

  “A junkie.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find out. Do what you have to do.” George wiped at his face, feeling the booze sweat at his hairline. He had failed his son, had failed to toughen him to the world, to drive a steel spike through his center so that he could stand up for himself, and he had been caught up in something, driven to his death somehow, and this, this was what George Sr. could do now.

  He could bring rage. He could let this man loose on the world to bring whoever had brought his boy low to some kind of rough and terrible justice. The alcohol worked on his head and he wanted to shout, to raise the detective’s hand and point him out to the milling, aimless crowd of mourners. This man is my champion.

  “And the junkie brother?” Collins smiled, his teeth uneven, crowding his mouth.

  “What about the brother?” George watched Brendan, his mask of concern looking more and more like a smirk to the mourning father.

  “He lives two blocks from where young George died.”

  George opened his fist, took the card and smoothed it in his hands, stared at the type, saw the perforated edge where it had been torn, so he knew it had been printed at home. A cheap card for a cheap, thuglike detective who would be his device, the mechanism that would transfer his fury to the world and make it pay for everything that had gone wrong.

  “Two blocks.”

  “Not even.”

  George stepped back into the room, and everyone turned to him. Francine narrowed her eyes at his dry, appraising stare. He looked from face to face, and they all seemed unconscious, their gazes slack and sorrowful. He was aware of Collins standing beside him, and they were hunters together. He wanted another drink, would have it.

  He went to his son and looked down at the slight reed of his body. A blue blazer and tie he’d have never worn in life. The boy’s slender hands now carved from pale wax. George Sr. turned and looked out at the crowd with something that was forming into hate. He kept one hand on the lip of the box, as if it helped him to claim his place in the chapel. He wanted to tell them something, make a speech, declare his intent to find and punish. Someone in this room, he wanted to say. Someone in this room.

  CHAPTER

  6

  It was quiet on the street, and there was a haze that obscured the end of the block and muffled faraway sounds, gave Orlando a feeling of being on a stage, even walking down Cecil B. Moore to Mexican Bob’s house. When he got there he waved at the camera at the top of the door and LaDonna buzzed him in.

  Mexican Bob was sitting in his chair, a red leather chair that he loved, that made him feel, he would say, like a Captain of Industry, which Orlando said he most definitely was, there being no one more industrious than the working thief with a jones. He was bleary-eyed and quiet this morning, and LaDonna took him coffee and pointed at the cup to offer Orlando some, and he smiled but waved her off.

  Mexican Bob grabbed at her and she danced away into the kitchen, a red knit dress and perfect hair, despite it being so early in the morning when the streets were full of zombies clutching coffee cups and marching in their grim trains of the near-dead to work in the mausoleums down on Broad and JFK.

  Orlando loved to watch them, Mexican Bob with his limpid eyes and the cascading mustache of a nineteenth-century cavalryman, his wasp-waisted love hovering at his shoulder. They had met in prison, wh
en LaDonna was Levar and using all her guile to stay ahead of the tier gangs, and he wooed her and brought her home and paid for her surgery. It was one of those stories, beautiful and strange and transgressive, that cracked him open and made him love all of the doomed strangers in his world, even the ones that pointed guns at him or beat him with pool cues when they caught him unawares, nodding in the street on his way home in the middle of the night.

  They were waiting for Arthur, an Afghan vet who came home from Parwan with metal in his knees and a drug habit. Arthur was supposed to have the keys to a warehouse on Front Street with a bunch of snowmobiles, and Bob said they’d go look and see what could be done. To move them meant borrowing or stealing a truck and he wasn’t sure, but if they could bring it off it’d be a couple thousand apiece and would take the edge off for a few days.

  Orlando didn’t really know Arthur but had seen him around, and he seemed put together, his shit still relatively squared away for a full-on junkie, maybe the residue of the military. Tall, broad-shouldered, with short hair and a lot of bad road and long nights stored up in his eyes.

  Bob’s cell buzzed on the table, and when Bob just stared at it, Buddha-like in his chair, his arms holding his cup on his chest, LaDonna came in shaking her head and picked it up. She started to say hello but whoever it was cut her off, and she listened intently for a moment, then passed it to Bob, who frowned and fit it to his ear.

  “Go.”

  He looked up while he listened, then hauled himself up out of his chair. He went to the front door, parted the curtains, and looked out at the street.

  “Yeah, I see him.” There was more talk from the other end that registered as a buzzing noise for Orlando. “Yeah, he has the look. Shit.” He closed the phone.

  Orlando raised his eyebrows.

  Bob threw the cell phone onto the seat. “That was Arthur, there’s a cop outside. Maybe a cop. He looks the part, but I don’t know.”

  Orlando went to the window, hanging back but angled to see the street between the parted curtains. He tracked slowly parallel to the glass, seeing the street in little slices until he came to a battered Volvo station wagon with a wide swatch of duct tape over the rear bumper. In the driver’s seat was a big man with short hair, sipping coffee. He was too far away to see much, but Orlando got the vibe off him and shook his head.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “Well, discretion is the better part of not getting sent to the can.”

  “Okay, you got warrants out?”

  “LaDonna?”

  She leaned her head in from the kitchen. “No, hon. No paper out on you now.”

  Orlando looked philosophical. He squinted an eye at the floor. “Okay, I’ll go down and cut up Ridge, you come out and go back, hook around Montgomery. He’ll follow one of us if this is anything.”

  “That’s it? One of us gets picked up?”

  “You don’t want him coming in here.” Orlando swept a hand around the apartment. A long row of radios sealed in cartons, boxes of sneakers, three televisions taken from a motel in Pennsauken, the cables still hanging where they had been cut.

  “No.”

  Orlando raised his eyebrows.

  “LaDonna?” Bob waited by the door, got a reversible jacket from a peg on the wall. “Hon, you got my bail money?”

  “Always.”

  “Okay, I get picked up, I’ll call you.” She came out, gave him a peck on the cheek. “And call Tricia, tell her she’ll have to pick up Patrice at day care.”

  “She’ll love that.”

  “Well, she is the boy’s mother. If I’m under charge it will be every woman for herself.”

  Orlando went out first, watching the guy in the Volvo for any sign that he was interested in them. When he hit the street he heard the door open again behind him, and Bob moved fast to his right. Orlando took his time, meandering along past the shops, looking in the windows.

  Orlando hummed to himself as he made his way past the parked cars. “Transatlanticism,” by Death Cab for Cutie. It gave him a cadence, let him borrow the measured pace of the music to keep himself from running. He tried to see the car with the cop in the reflections of windows, but he couldn’t get the angle, and he just paced off the steps until he thought he must be even with the car and turned away from the buildings on his left and set out off the curb, as if he were just heading east across the street.

  He had time to take in that the Volvo was there, parked at the curb in front of a record store he’d been in a few times, and that the guy wasn’t in the front seat anymore. He slowed and crossed the street, stepping up onto the curb and trying to look back down the block toward Bob’s, and when he snapped his head forward there was the guy.

  He was big, wide across the shoulders and with a paunch and loose skin around his jowls, crazy red hair that was wires and spikes, and that was as much as he got before the guy clocked him, hard, with an elbow that caught him across the windpipe and doubled him over with no air in his lungs and a bright pain across his neck and chest so intense he felt like he must be giving off sparks.

  He went over hard and opened his mouth, trying to drag air into his throat, but it was like dredging mud and nothing would come. He put a hand out and the guy took it, as if for a second it was a misunderstanding or an accident and he was going to help, but the guy just jerked his arm out straight and used it like a lever to push him back against the passenger door of the Volvo.

  Orlando straightened up and the guy opened the back door and shoved him in, holding his head down the way cops always did, though up close this guy didn’t seem like he was actually on the job, and Orlando had never been thrown into the backseat of a Volvo station wagon by a cop. There were beer cans on the floor that rolled under his feet and a smell of mildew as if the windows had been left open in the rain.

  The guy crowded in next to him, Orlando massaging his throat and finally getting a rasping gust of air into his lungs. The guy watched him choke for a minute, breaking off to look up and down the street, to see if they were being watched. His eyes were bright, the skin of his brow beneath the red hair a stark white, and the guy was nodding, as if he were having some kind of dialogue in his head.

  “You’re Orlando Donovan.”

  It wasn’t a question, and Orlando backed up against the door and nodded, coughing and rubbing at his neck.

  “Brendan Donovan’s brother.” The guy cocked his head, appraising. “Yeah, I can see it. They used to call you Little Brother, right? That was your name?”

  Orlando extended his neck, opening his swollen airway. “Yeah,” he croaked. “Some people used to call me that.”

  “Your brother keeps you out of the shit, huh?”

  Orlando made a face. “What? Brendan?”

  The guy shook his head, then gave Orlando an open-handed slap that caught him across the temple and rang in the car. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Shit. I’m not lying. I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  The detective raised a fist this time but telegraphed it, and Orlando could roll with the blow as the guy tried to hit him hard in the chest. It hurt, but he let himself bounce off the door and it didn’t land the way it might have if the guy weren’t so wired that Orlando didn’t see it coming. He had been hit before, by people who knew what they were doing.

  “You’re a junkie, and your brother keeps you from getting locked up for all the shit you do.”

  “You’re out of the loop, man. I don’t see Brendan anymore. I just did a month in Northeast Philly. If anyone’s looking out for me, they suck at it.”

  “You cannot lie to me, understand?”

  “Okay, okay.” Orlando held up a hand and looked around, watching people go by on the street. If he just pushed open the door, would this lunatic chase him down? “You’re not a cop, are you?”

  The guy leaned in and squeezed Orlando’s knee hard. Orlando screwed up his face and leaned into it, trying to give the guy nothing.

  �
��Close enough, shitbag. Close enough.” The detective went into his jacket and came out with a small black gun. This time he was fast. The gun was out, and Orlando had the time to think magic trick, and the guy backhanded Orlando across the temple and he went out.

  When he came to himself the car was moving and his hands were cinched together with flexcuffs in front of his chest, the whiplike ends smacking his face when he lifted his hands to touch his forehead and find the tender egg-shaped lump there. He was jammed down onto the narrow floor space and he tried to pull himself up but his body was slow and his head pounded in a way that made sparks and lines arc across his eyes.

  “Don’t move around too much, you’ll puke.” The guy turned his head slightly to talk to him, and the car swerved and then took a hard left that pinned Orlando against the seat for a minute.

  Orlando slowly pulled himself up, using his pinioned hands and grabbing a frayed seat belt. There were cans and bottles beneath him that matched sore spots on his legs and hips.

  “Yeah, sorry I gave you that smack, but that’s what happens.”

  Orlando didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing or saying to the guy, but he worked on clearing his head and getting up high enough on the seat so he could see where they were.

  “When I ask you questions, just answer, okay? Don’t fuck around or back-talk.” The guy sounded like he was trying to be friendly, warning him about some situation that was beyond his control. “That’s what happens. People want to act up and things get out of hand. I just, you know,” the guy went on, looking back over the seat again. “I’m Collins, by the way.” He sounded so normal now, Orlando half expected him to reach around to shake hands. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter who I am. It’s the people I represent you have to worry about.”