Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (114 page)

At midnight this tin soldier will open the snuffbox and meet his goblin. At that time, in that concluding moment, there will be just be him and Moon. There will be no other soldiers to help, no

paper lady to grieve. The fire will be terrible and he will shed his tin tears.

Will it be the fire of love?

Moon holds the matches in his hand.

And waits.

18

The crowd on the second floor of Finnigan’s Wake was fearsome. Assemble fifty or so cops in one room and you had the potential for serious mayhem. Finnigan’s Wake was a venerable institution on Third and Spring Garden streets, a celebrated Irish pub that drew officers from all districts, all parts of town. When you retired from the PPD there was a good a chance that your party would be held there. As well as your wedding reception. The catering at Finnigan’s Wake was as good as anywhere in the city.

This night it was a retirement party for Detective Walter Brigham. After nearly four decades in law enforcement, he was turning in his papers.

JESSICA SIPPED HER
beer, glanced around the room. She had been a police officer for ten years, the daughter of one of the most renowned detectives in the past three decades, and the sound of dozens of cops swapping war stories in a bar had become a lullaby of sorts. More and more she was beginning to accept the fact that, regardless of what she thought, her friends were, and would probably always be, fellow officers.

Sure, she still talked to her old classmates from the Nazarene Academy, and sometimes some of the girls from her old South Philly neighborhood—at least, those who had moved to the Northeast like she had. But for the most part, everyone she relied upon carried a gun and a badge. Including her husband.

Even though it was a party for one of their own, there was not necessarily a sense of unity in the room. The space was dotted with clusters of officers talking amongst themselves, the largest being a faction of gold-badge detectives. And although Jessica had certainly paid her entrance fee into that group, she was not quite
there
yet. As in any other large organization there were always internal cliques, subgroups that banded together for a variety of reasons: race, gender, experience, discipline, neighborhood.

The detectives were gathered at the far end of the bar.

Byrne showed up at just after nine. And even though he knew just about every detective in the room, had come up the ranks with half of them, when he walked in the room he chose to stake the near end of the bar with Jessica. She appreciated it, but she still sensed that he would rather be in with that pack of wolves—old and young alike.

BY MIDNIGHT, WALT
Brigham’s party had entered the serious drinking stage. Which meant it had entered the serious storytelling stage. Twelve PPD detectives bunched around the end of the bar.

“Okay,” Richie DiCillo began. “I’m in a sector car with Rocco Testa.” Richie was a lifer out of North Detectives. Now in his fifties, he had been one of Byrne’s rabbis early on.

“This is 1979, right around the time those little battery-operated portable televisions came out. We’re up in Kensington,
Monday Night Football
is on, Eagles and Falcons. Close game, back and forth. About eleven o’clock we get this knock on the window. I look up. Chubby transvestite, full regalia—wig, nails, false eyelashes, spangle dress, high heels. Name was Charlise, Chartreuse, Charmoose, something like that. Used to call him Charlie Rainbow on the street.”

“I remember him,” Ray Torrance said. “He went about five seven, two-forty? Different wig for every night of the week?”

“That’s him,” Richie said. “You could tell what day it was by the color of his hair. Anyway, he has a busted lip, a black eye. Says his pimp beat the shit out of him, and he wants us to personally strap the asshole in the electric chair.
After
we cut off his nuts. Rocco and me look at each other, at the TV. The game is right at the two-minute warning. With the ads and shit we’ve got maybe three minutes, right? Rocco is out of the car like a shot. He brings Charlie around the back of the car, tells him we’ve got a brand-new system. Real high-tech. Says you can tell the judge your story, right from the street, and the judge will send a special squad to pick up the evildoer.”

Jessica glanced at Byrne, who shrugged, even though they both had a pretty good idea where this was going.

“Of course Charlie
loves
this idea,” Richie said. “So Rocco takes the TV out of the car, finds a dead channel with just snow and wavy lines on it, puts it on the trunk. He tells Charlie to look right at the screen and talk. Charlie fixes his hair, makeup, like he’s going on the
Tonight Show
, right? He gets up really close to the screen, tells all the sordid details. When he’s done, he leans back, like all of a sudden a hundred sector cars are gonna come screaming down the street. Except, right at that second, the TV speaker crackles, like it’s picking up another station. Which it is. Except there’s a commercial on.”

“Uh-oh,” somebody said.

“A commercial for StarKist Tuna.”

“No,”
somebody else said.

“
Oh,
yes,” Richie said. “Outta nowhere the TV says, loud as hell, ‘Sorry, Charlie.’ ”

Roars around the room.

“He thought it was the fuckin’
judge
. Off like a shot down Frankford. Wigs and high heels and sequins flying. Never saw him again.”

“I can top that story!” someone said, shouting over the laughter. “We’re running this sting in Glenwood …”

And so the stories ran.

Byrne glanced at Jessica. Jessica shook her head. She had a few stories of her own, but it was getting late. Byrne pointed at her nearly empty glass. “One more?”

Jessica glanced at her watch. “Nah. I’m out,” she said.

“Lightweight,” Byrne replied. He drained his glass, motioned to the barmaid.

“What can I say? A girl needs her beauty sleep.”

Byrne remained silent, rocked on his heels, bopped a bit to the music.

“Hey!”
Jessica yelled. She rammed a fist into his shoulder.

Byrne jumped. Although he tried to mask the pain, his face betrayed him. Jessica knew how to throw a punch. “
What
?”

“This is the part where you say, ‘Beauty sleep? You don’t need beauty sleep, Jess.’ ”

“Beauty sleep? You don’t need beauty sleep, Jess.”

“Jesus.” Jessica slipped on her leather coat.

“I thought that was, you know,
understood,
” Byrne added, treading water, his expression a caricature of virtue. He rubbed his shoulder.

“Nice try, Detective. You good to drive?” It was a rhetorical question.

“Oh, yeah,” Byrne answered by rote. “I’m good.”

Cops,
Jessica thought. Cops could always drive.

Jessica crossed the room, said her good-byes and good lucks. As she neared the door, she caught Josh Bontrager, standing by himself, smiling. His tie was askew; one pants pocket was turned out. He looked a little wobbly. When he saw Jessica, he extended a hand. They shook. Again.

“You doing okay?” she asked.

Bontrager nodded a little too forcefully, perhaps trying to convince himself. “Oh yeah. Fine. Fine. Fine.”

For some reason Jessica was already feeling motherly about Josh. “Okay, then.”

“Remember how I said I had heard all the jokes already?”

“Yes.”

Bontrager waved an inebriated hand. “Not even close.”

“What do you mean?”

Bontrager stood at attention. He saluted. More or less. “I’ll have you know that I have the distinct honor of being the very first
Amishide
detective in the history of the PPD.”

Jessica laughed. “See you tomorrow, Josh.”

On the way out she saw a detective she knew from South showing a picture of his infant grandson to another cop.
Babies,
Jessica thought.

There were babies
everywhere
.

19

Byrne made himself a plate from the small buffet, put the food on the bar. Before he could take a bite, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, saw the boozy eyes, the damp lips. Before Byrne knew it, Walt Brigham had him in a bear hug. Byrne found the gesture a little strange because they had never been that close. On the other hand, this was a special night for the man.

They finally broke, did the manly, postemotional things: cleared throats, straightened hair, smoothed ties. Both men stepped back, scanned the room.

“Thanks for coming, Kevin.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it.”

Walt Brigham was as tall as Byrne, a little round-shouldered. He had a thicket of pewter gray hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, big nicked hands. His ocean blue eyes had seen a lot, and all of it floated there.

“Can you believe this collection of thugs?” Brigham asked.

Byrne looked around. Richie DiCillo, Ray Torrance, Tommy Capretta, Joey Trese, Naldo Lopez, Mickey Nunziata. All longtimers.

“How many sets of brass knuckles you figure there are in this room?” Byrne asked.

“Counting mine?”

Both men laughed. Byrne ordered a round for the two of them. The barmaid, Margaret, brought over a pair of drinks Byrne didn’t recognize.

“What are these?” Byrne asked.

“These are from the two young ladies at the end of the bar.”

Byrne and Walt Brigham looked over. Two female patrol officers—fit and pretty and still in uniform, somewhere in their mid-twenties—stood at the end of the bar. They each raised a glass.

Byrne looked back at Margaret. “You sure they meant us?”

“Positive.”

Both men looked at the concoction in front of them. “I give up,” Brigham said. “What are they?”

“Jager Bombs,” Margaret said with a smile, the one that always signaled a challenge in an Irish pub. “Part Red Bull, part Jägermeister.”

“Who the hell drinks this?”

“All the kids,” Margaret said. “Gives them a boost so they can keep partying.”

Byrne and Brigham looked at each other, mugged. They were Philly detectives, which meant they were nothing if not game. The two men raised their glasses in thanks. They both downed a few inches of the drink.

“Holy
shit,
” Byrne said.

“Slainte,”
Margaret said. She laughed as she made her way back to the taps.

Byrne glanced at Walt Brigham. He was handling the strange potion with a little more ease. Of course, he was knee-shot drunk already. Maybe the Jager Bomb would help.

“Can’t believe you’re putting in your papers,” Byrne said.

“It’s time,” Brigham said. “The street is no place for an old man.”

“Old man? What are you talking about? Two twenty-somethings just bought you a drink.
Pretty
twenty-somethings, at that. Girls with guns.”

Brigham smiled, but it sank fast. He got that remote look all retiring cops get. The look that all but shouted
I’m never going to saddle up again.
He spun his drink a few times. He started to say something, checked himself. Finally he said, “You never get them all, you know?”

Byrne knew exactly what he meant.

“There’s always that one case,” Brigham continued. “The one that won’t let you be.” He nodded across the room. At Richie DiCillo.

“You’re talking about Richie’s daughter?” Byrne asked.

“Yeah,” Brigham said. “I was the primary. Worked that case for two straight years.”

“Oh, man,” Byrne said. “I didn’t know that.”

Richie DiCillo’s nine-year-old daughter Annemarie had been found murdered in Fairmount Park in 1995. She had been attending a birthday party with a friend, who was also killed. The brutal case had made headlines in the city for weeks. The file was never closed.

“Hard to believe all these years have passed,” Brigham said. “I’ll never forget that day.”

Byrne glanced over at Richie DiCillo. He was telling another of his stories. When Byrne had met Richie, back in the Stone Age, Richie was a monster, a street legend, a drug cop to be feared. You said the name DiCillo on the streets of North Philadelphia with a hushed reverence. After his daughter was killed he got smaller somehow, an abridged version of his former self. These days, he was just going through the motions.