Brighton (7 page)

IT HAD
taken Bobby Scales less than twenty-four hours to discover the name of the man who’d run out of Mary Burke’s apartment. Curtis Jordan was black and lived somewhere in Fidelis Way. Bobby didn’t know the exact address, but Fidelis wasn’t that big of a place. He parked across the street from the projects and walked down the block until he found an empty doorway with a view.

The wake was this afternoon. Funeral, tomorrow morning. Bobby wouldn’t be there. He’d already said his good-byes to the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother. Now, it was all about protecting her grandson. Bobby had talked to Mary Burke many times about what would happen after she died. Neither of them expected this. But Bobby was ready to hold up his end.

He leaned a shoulder against the jamb, arms folded across his chest, and considered his options. If he knew about Jordan, Kevin probably did as well. Even if he didn’t know, someone, someday, would whisper the name in his ear. And then what? Bobby felt a cold flutter in his chest. All things being equal, he’d be happy turning Jordan over to the cops. But where would that lead? Bobby had a friend inside Station Fourteen, a mick cop
named Quigley. He could see Quigley’s face now, a long stretch of pale marble, studded with black eyes and cracked in all the places you’d expect.
Take care of it yourself, Bobby,
Quigley would say.
That’s the way you handle these sorts of things. We understand it. The D.A. understands. Everyone understands.
Quigley had a point. If Bobby didn’t take care of it, who would? Kevin would. And that could never be. Still, it was a bridge to cross. A turn in the road. A running jump off a fucking cliff. Bobby looked up. A streetcar rumbled past, and he caught a flash of brown hair. Bobby knew that head, the angular features and slouched walk. He hustled across Commonwealth Avenue and up a short hill. Kevin was maybe twenty yards ahead, moving quickly, eyes on the pavement, right hand in his jacket pocket. Bobby was about to yell when Kevin turned a corner and disappeared into the projects. Bobby began to run.

Curtis Jordan was sitting behind a long wooden desk when Kevin pushed in the door. Jordan’s eyes swiveled left, right, then reached behind Kevin before relaxing.

“You a long way from home, white bread.”

Kevin inhaled the room in huge, heaving gulps. A stack of money on the table. A gun beside it. Jordan’s fingertips humming, but not yet moving for the piece. There was a scattering of other objects on the table, but they all faded to black once he saw it, a pale gleam caught in a slash of light from the window. Kevin pulled out the shiny twenty-two and watched the barrel shake as he raised it. Until the very end, he thought he’d just talk. Ask why. Try to understand. Then he saw his grandmother’s pendant
on the desk and his world went red. Curtis Jordan swung his piece up as Kevin started to squeeze back on the trigger. The gun flew out of his hands and there was a blast in his ears, followed by a second. Jordan was jerked from his seat, like a puppet being lifted by some huge invisible hand, except this puppet fell back to earth in a bloody, boneless heap. Kevin got a glimpse of blank eyes peeking back at him from under the desk. Then he was being dragged down the hallway, feet skipping across the ground as he went. It was Bobby, a black revolver in his fist, sticky gray tape wrapped around the grip and the muzzle pointed to the ceiling. He pulled Kevin through a set of fire doors and glanced up and down the stairwell. Kevin twisted free and sprinted back down the hall, Bobby hissing at him to stop.

A slick of blood was already creeping across the tiled floor of the apartment. Kevin almost slipped as he scrambled behind the desk. It was layered with the cash, a set of keys, and two bottles of pills. The pendant had rolled off the desk and into a corner. Kevin grabbed it, wiping off a tiny necklace of blood with his thumb. Then he picked up the gun he’d dropped.

Curtis Jordan’s body was all twisted up under the desk, one arm flung over the top of his head like he was trying to scratch his opposite ear. Kevin rolled the body onto its back and took a good look, carving the image onto the surface of his brain in quick, deft strokes. Then he dropped to a knee, pressed the gun against Jordan’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. The twenty-two barely made a sound and left behind a dry, puckered hole. Kevin stuck the gun in his pocket and ran out of the apartment, straight into the hollow gaze of a black girl. She was standing stock-still in the middle of the hallway, a finger in her mouth and pink and white bows in her hair. Their eyes locked for a moment before Kevin
sprinted for the fire doors. Bobby pulled him down two flights and into the basement of the building. The hallway smelled like stale piss, and a dark slick of grease ran along the base of the walls where rats had rubbed themselves against the yellow brick. Bobby pointed to what looked like a janitor’s closet.

“There’s probably a sink in there.”

“I had to get the gun.” Kevin pulled out the twenty-two. Bobby stashed it inside his jacket.

“We can’t be here when the cops arrive. Now, go wash up.”

Kevin looked down at his hands. They were smeared with blood. He also had some rimming the soles of his shoes.

“Now, Kevin. Go.”

He walked into the janitor’s room and turned on the faucet. The pipes groaned and the water ran like rust. Kevin waited a few seconds and it began to clear. Somewhere in the distance, a police siren howled. All told, they’d been in the building less than seven minutes. In other words, a lifetime.

AT LEAST
he wasn’t taking a leak. Kevin had read somewhere that’s what Mike Royko was doing when they told him he’d won the Pulitzer Prize. True or not, it’s one of those stories print reporters love to tell. Kevin’s moment wasn’t nearly as memorable. Just standing in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. The woman in front of him was eating an Egg McMuffin and talking on her cell phone, telling her friend that no, she hadn’t slept with Joey DeTucci and that Cindy was a fucking bitch who was going to get her ass kicked across Chelsea if she didn’t shut her fucking mouth. The guy behind him was thumbing through the
Herald,
breathing garlic and peppers down Kevin’s neck and pushing up against his shoulder every chance he got. That’s where he was when he got the call from his boss at the
Globe
.

“Done deal,” Jimmy Edwards said, laughing his fat man’s laugh. “Done fucking deal.”

Edwards was a member of “The Cabal,” a group of newspaper editors who made it their business to sniff out the Pulitzer’s annual list of nominees. This year Edwards had done one better. It wouldn’t be official for another few days, but he’d gotten the word from a source Edwards called “bulletproof.” Kevin turned
off his phone just as it buzzed again. He’d moved somehow, at least two feet out of line. The ranks had already closed, Mr.
Herald
’s newspaper firmly tucked up against the sloping back and greasy hair of the girl from Chelsea. People in line stole quick glances Kevin’s way, anticipating his counterattack. After all, he’d put in his time, shuffling forward a foot or two every couple of minutes for the better part of an hour. And yet he felt none of the unarticulated and consuming rage that was the province of Boston and its proud inhabitants. Instead, he wandered ten more feet, then twenty, past the end of the line and out the door. So what if he didn’t have a valid driver’s license from the Commonwealth? He was the Pulitzer Prize winner for best investigative piece of the year, 2001. That would be the first line in his bio. The first sentence in his obituary. His career would never be the same. His life, forever changed. At least that was the hype. Why, then, didn’t he feel any different? Or, for that matter, anything at all?

HE DROVE
west on Soldiers Field Road, the Charles River twisting and turning alongside, afternoon sun glancing daggers off his windshield. Kevin exited at Market Street and climbed the long hill toward Brighton Center. He’d avoided driving through the center for more than two decades and wasn’t sure why he was making the detour now. The storefronts of his youth had mostly disappeared, Woolworth’s and Brigham’s gone, five or six bars and half as many packies history. There were still plenty of places to get lit, but they looked cleaner now, safer, gentrified. And probably not nearly as much fun. Kevin drove past Daniel’s Bakery, where his sisters had spent their youth frosting cakes for minimum wage. Next to it was an Indian take-out place that had once been the Blue Bayou. Kevin had been a month shy of eleven and hanging around outside the Bayou one Sunday afternoon when Shakey Callahan walked in and fired a gun between Sean Bryant’s legs. Bryant pissed himself and fainted dead away off his bar stool. Shakey rifled Sean’s pockets, left a few dollars on the bar for the tab, and walked out whistling. After the cops left, Kevin and his pals snuck into the bar and took turns sticking their fingers in the bullet hole Shakey had left
in the stool’s green padding. All in all, not bad for a Sunday. Just past the Indian joint was Mandy and Joe’s deli, Fleet Bank, and a CVS. Kevin pulled into the bank’s parking lot, slid a
MEDIA
placard onto the dashboard, and walked into the CVS for a pack of gum. He listened from the next aisle as an old man explained to a female clerk how he had to put a two-by-four under the toilet seat to prevent his balls from taking a bath. He was unbuckling his pants to show off the low-hangers when Kevin left. Outside, traffic was snarled for a block and a half. People leaned on their horns and hollered at anyone who’d listen while no one went anywhere. Kevin walked over to the cause of the tie-up—a homeless man wrapped in a long rubber fireman’s coat and lying on his side in the middle of the street. A woman came out of the CVS, took one look, and crossed at the light. More people walked past as Kevin rolled the man over. He was wearing leather suspenders with no shirt under the coat, and his eyes were nailed wide open.

“You okay?” Kevin said.

“I don’t know.” The man blinked once and looked at Kevin as if to say “What next?” Just then a siren whooped, traffic cleared, and a squad car pulled up. A cop with a meaty Irish face got out, took one look at the man on the ground, and started cursing. Kevin was pushed to the periphery of the crowd and watched as an ambulance arrived. The homeless man departed on a stretcher, waving at his fans and trying to shake hands with the cop. There was a pleasant buzz now, everyone happy to have another person’s misfortune to talk about. That much, at least, hadn’t changed. Kevin walked back to his car and drove down Parsons Street, headed toward Electric Avenue. Already he had a headache.

Electric Avenue bellied up to the Mass Pike before curling off into a dead end that was more of a mercy killing. Kevin parked in front of the main office for L&G Radiator and listened to the cars whistle overhead. He walked past two boarded-up buildings, three cats, and a rat that looked like it could eat the cats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Kevin stopped in front of a skinny three-decker, shoehorned between a factory that made screen doors and an abutment for the highway. A Puerto Rican leaned his head out of a second-floor window and asked if Kevin wanted to buy some rum. Kevin said no. The Puerto Rican told him to come back on Sunday when the packies were closed and he’d give him a deal. Kevin walked up three steps of poured concrete and knocked on the door to the first-floor apartment. She opened it on the chain and stared out at him.

“Yeah?”

“Gemele, it’s Kevin. Kevin Pearce.”

A child yelled for mom from somewhere behind her. Gemele Harper unchained the door and left it open. Kevin followed her in. Gemele was small but sturdy. And she needed to be. She lived with her four kids, aged twelve down to six, in a one-room apartment with a kitchenette and table in one corner and a foldout bed in the middle. Three of the kids were sitting around the table, watching Kevin from under sleepy eyelids. The youngest, a girl named Natalie, sat on the far side of the bed, scribbling with crayons on the wall.

“I got to be somewhere at five.” Gemele sat down heavily.

“Who takes care of them?”

Gemele nodded at the oldest girl. “Tasha handles it.”

The apartment smelled like burnt grease and smoke. A length
of electrical cord ran from a space heater at the foot of the bed, up and under the covers.

“That’s dangerous as hell, Gemele.”

“It’s unplugged.”

“But you use it in the winter?”

She pushed a look toward the radiator, a cold lump of steel squatting in the corner. “No heat coming up most nights. You rather they freeze to death? What do you want, Kevin?” He hadn’t seen her in a while, but her voice was already stretched thin, nearly transparent.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“Here’s fine.”

Kevin hesitated.

“They know about their daddy. Know what he did. Know what he didn’t do.” Gemele nodded again at the oldest. “Tell him about your daddy.”

Tasha stood up like she’d been asked to recite in school, feet shuffling and fingers scratching her palms in nervous energy. “My daddy’s name was James Harper. He was sent to prison for killing a woman named Rosie Tallent. He was in prison for . . .” Tasha squinted hard and looked at the ceiling as she counted on one hand. “. . . two or three years, I think. Then they killed him.”

“Stuck him in the neck with a screwdriver,” Gemele said and waited for Tasha to continue.

“My daddy was innocent. He was framed because he was a black man. And that’s just how it was.”

Kevin looked at Gemele and back to Tasha. Then at Gemele again.

“You got a problem with that?” she said.

“What do you think?”

“Not a word that’s not true.”

“And you think it helps?”

“You know why?”

“Because otherwise James never lived at all?”

“For a white boy, you get it. A little bit, anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“You know how I feel, Kevin.”

“Yeah.”

“So why did you come here? Not to hear my girl recite her family history.”

He sat down on the bed.

“Kevin?”

“What?”

“Lift up your goddamn head.”

He did.

“You’re one of the finest men I know, and the only reason my James ever got a bit of justice from this state. Didn’t save him, but it might save them.” She glanced again at the circle of eyes staring back at her from around the table. “So whatever you have to say, you can say it here. And it’s all right.”

“Thanks, Gemele. This isn’t bad.”

She waited.

“I won a prize today.”

“That’s what you want to tell me?”

“I won the Pulitzer Prize. I won it for James’s story.”

She smiled—a crooked, broken thing that always caused a tightness in his chest even though he never knew why.

“Your family must be proud.”

“I guess.”

“Congratulations on your prize, Kevin. You deserve it.”

“Thanks. Listen, when they announce this, there might be more publicity. They might revisit the case. Want to interview you.” Kevin’s voice dropped. “Maybe the kids.”

“We live in peace with it all, don’t we?” Varying degrees of nods from around the table.

“All right.”

“What else you got to tell me, Kevin?”

“How do you know?”

“It ain’t hard. Now, what else?”

“When I get the prize—I think it’s a certificate. When I get it, I’d like you to have it.”

Gemele moved her lips, but didn’t speak. She drifted that way sometimes, a lot like his mom when he was a kid. Kevin had always thought of it as damage. Or maybe just damage control.

“If you don’t want all the trouble,” he said, “that’s cool. I just thought . . .”

She laid her hand flat on his. It felt warm and fine and strong. “Come here.” She led him to a small pantry off the kitchen. Up on the shelf were a few boxes of mac and cheese, some canned goods with white labels, and a massive jar of peanut butter. She reached behind them and pulled out a red scrapbook with
MEMORIES
in peeling gold script across the front.

“I keep this back here. Figure I’ll give it to Tasha when she gets a little older.” Gemele opened the book. Inside was a couple of old snapshots of her and James and a sheaf of newspaper clippings. Kevin picked one up. The headline read:

HOW DID SUFFOLK COUNTY CONVICT AN INNOCENT MAN OF MURDER? SLOPPY POLICE WORK AND A WEAK DEFENSE CONSPIRE TO SEAL ONE MAN’S FATE
.

Kevin’s story followed. A Sunday piece, longer, stitching together the entire case—from the time James Harper was arrested, through his trial, conviction, and, finally, the morning he was shanked inside a segregation unit at Walpole state prison.

“If you want to give me your prize, I’ll put it in here. Kids will have it long after I’m gone.”

“That’d be great.” He slipped the clipping back into its place and pressed the pages shut. “I’ll call you about the media and stuff.”

“Be happy, Kevin. You saved a man’s life.”

“I wish that were true.”

“You saved James.” She picked up the scrapbook. “And you gave him back to us. Come on, say good-bye to the kids.”

Kevin stepped out of the airless flat and blinked against the late-afternoon sun. It was April and the wind blew up out of nowhere, collecting in the high pockets of the trees, then descending like a hawk, talons stretched, raking his face with the final, frozen lashes of a New England winter. Kevin jammed his hands in his pockets and wrapped his coat around his ribs. They’d found Rosie Tallent’s body in a cardboard box in Allston, about a mile from where Kevin was standing. She was eighteen but had lived a lot longer than that. Her hands and feet were bound with rope. There was a gag stuffed in her mouth and a length of thin packing wire wrapped around her neck. The wire, however, wasn’t what killed her. It was the three stab wounds to her chest and side. To make sure, the killer popped her once in the head with a thirty-eight. He’d taken her purse, including cash totaling less than a hundred
dollars, as well as a few small articles of clothing. In 1997, the investigation wasn’t much. The cops focused on James Harper almost from the start. He was estranged from Gemele at the time, knew Rosie, and had a record, mostly minor drug offenses and two convictions for assault. They were both barroom fights, but the D.A. didn’t care. James was a violent offender. He was black and, according to the prosecution, had no alibi for the night of the murder. So James got his half-day trial and pulled a life sentence. That is, until he caught a screwdriver in the neck. Kevin met with James seven times before he died. Twenty-three hours of interviews. Kevin also talked to three of James’s friends. They claimed they were with James at a Dorchester bar called the Pony Room on the night of the murder. None of them had ever been interviewed by the police or called to testify by James’s lawyer. When Kevin asked why, the defense attorney said they all had criminal records and would have done more harm than good. What the defense attorney didn’t know was that the Pony Room had a security tape no one had ever asked for and no one had ever seen. Kevin finally got hold of it six months after James died. The tape was time-stamped on the night of the murder and showed James Harper drinking in the bar from six
P.M.
until close. According to the court transcript, Rosie Tallent was killed around ten
P.M.
that night, her body found a little after midnight. Kevin published his stories less than a year after the funeral. Too late for James, but they gave Kevin the Pulitzer anyway.

He drove back up the hill into Brighton Center and bought beer at Dorr’s liquors. The old man behind the counter used to let him buy there when he was thirteen. Back then, a six-pack was an adventure. They’d drink in the muffled depths of December, three or four of them huddled against the elements, listen
ing to Led Zep and sharing a single pair of gloves to keep the cans from freezing to their hands, talking about girls and sports, boasting, arguing, laughing, bullshitting. They drank fiercely, shooting beers and swilling hard stuff whenever they could get it, instinctively understanding the escape offered, first to their fathers and grandfathers and now to them. Kevin put the six-pack on the seat beside him, drove past McNamara’s funeral home, and dropped into Oak Square. He’d played a childhood’s worth of games at Tar Park, but it was nothing he recognized. The rocks and weeds were gone, replaced by a green carpet of grass and smooth brown dirt. A clean white rubber crowned the pitcher’s mound. Kevin left the beers on a bench and walked onto the field. The batter’s box was lined in chalk, the clay red and yielding. He dug in, right foot first, then left, and looked down at home plate.