The Rosary Girls (9 page)

12

MONDAY, 6:00 PM

If J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life in coffee spoons, Simon Edward Close measured his in deadlines. He had less than five hours to make the deadline for the next day’s print edition of
The Report
. And as of the opening credits of the evening local news, he had nothing to

report.

When he moved among the reporters from the so-called legitimate press he was an exile. They regarded him the way you might a Mongoloid child, with looks of spurious compassion and ersatz sympathy, but also with an expression that said:
We can’t kick you out of the party, but please don’t touch the Hummels.

The half a dozen reporters lingering near the cordoned-off crime scene on Eighth Street barely gave him a glance as he arrived in his tenyear-old Honda Accord. Simon would have liked to be a little more discreet in his arrivals, but his muffler—which was attached to the manifold pipe by a recently performed Pepsi-canectomy—insisted on announcing him first. He could almost hear the smirks from half a block away.

The block was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Simon turned the car around, drove down to Jefferson, left to Ninth. Ghost town.

Simon got out, checked the batteries in his recorder. He smoothed his tie, the creases in his trousers. He had often thought that, if he didn’t spend all his money on clothes, he might be able to upgrade his car or his flat. But he always rationalized that he spent most of his time on the street so, if no one saw his car or apartment, they would think him in the chips.

After all, in this business of show, image was everything, yes? He found the access path he needed, cut through. When he saw the uniformed officer standing, behind the crime scene house—but not a solitary reporter, not yet, anyway—he made his way back to his car, and tried a trick he had learned from a wizened old paparazzo he knew from years ago.
Ten minutes later, he approached the officer behind the house. The officer, a huge black linebacker with enormous hands, held up one of those hands stopping him.
“How ya doing?” Simon asked.
“This is a crime scene, sir.”
Simon nodded. He held up his press ID. “Simon Close with
The Report
.”
No reaction. He could have just as well said,
Captain Nemo with the
Nautilus.
“You’ll have to speak to the detective in charge of the case,” the cop said.
“Of course,” Simon said. “Who would that be?”
“That would be Detective Byrne.”
Simon made a note, as if this information was new to him. “What is her first name?”
The uniform screwed up his face. “Who?”
“Detective Byrne.”
“
Her
first name is Kevin.”
Simon tried to look appropriately confused. Two years of high school drama, including the part of Algernon in
The Importance of Being Earnest,
helped somewhat. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I heard a female detective was working on this case.”
“That would be Detective Jessica Balzano,” the officer said, with punctuation and a narrowing of brow that told Simon that this conversation was over.
“Thanks so much,” Simon said, heading back down the alley. He turned, snapped a quick photograph of the cop. The cop got immediately on his radio, which meant that within a minute or two the area behind the row houses would be officially sealed.
By the time Simon got back to Ninth Street, there were already two reporters lingering behind the yellow tape across the access passageway—yellow tape Simon himself put there a few minutes earlier.
When he came strolling out, he could see the look on their faces. Simon ducked under the tape, tore it from the wall, handed it to Benny Lozado, a staffer from the
Inquirer
.
The yellow tape read: del-co asphalt.
“Fuck you, Close,” Lozado said.
“Dinner first, love.”

Back in his car, Simon rummaged his memory.
Jessica Balzano.
Where did he know that name from?
He picked up a copy of last week’s
Report,
thumbed through it. When

he got to the meager sports page, he saw it. A small quarter-column ad for prizefights at the Blue Horizon. An all-female fight card. At the bottom:
Jessica Balzano v. Mariella Munoz.

13

MONDAY, 7:20 PM

He found himself on the waterfront before his mind had the opportunity or the inclination to say no. How long had it been since he had been here?

Eight months, one week, two days.
The day Deirdre Pettigrew’s body was found.
He knew the answer just as clearly as he knew the reason he had

come back. He was here to recharge, to once again tap into the vein of madness that pulsed just beneath the asphalt of his city.

Deuces was a protected drug house that occupied an old waterfront building beneath the Walt Whitman Bridge, near Packer Avenue, just a few feet from the banks of the Delaware River. The steel front door was covered by gang graffiti and manned by a mountainous thug named Serious. Nobody accidentally wandered into Deuces. In fact, it had been more than a decade since the public had called it Deuces. Deuces was the name of the long-shuttered bar in which a very bad man named Luther White had been sitting and drinking the night Kevin Byrne and Jimmy Purify had entered, fifteen years earlier; the night that left two of them dead. It was on this spot that Kevin Byrne’s dark time began. It was on this spot he began to see.
Now it was a crack house.
But Kevin Byrne wasn’t here for the drugs. While it was true that he

had flirted with every substance known to mankind over the years in order to stop the visions rumbling in his head, none had ever taken control. It had been years since he had dallied with anything other than Vicodin or bourbon.

He was here to reclaim the mind-set.
He broke the seal on a bottle of Old Forester, considered his day. On the day his divorce had become final, nearly a year earlier, he and

Donna had vowed that they would have dinner, as a family, one night every week. Despite the many obstacles both their jobs tossed in the way, they had not missed a week in a year.

This night they had muddled and mumbled their way through another dinner, his wife an uncluttered horizon, the dining room chatter a parallel monologue of perfunctory questions and stock answers.

For the past five years Donna Sullivan Byrne had been the white-hot agent for one of the largest and most prestigious Realtors in Philadelphia, and the money had rolled in. They weren’t living in a row house in Fitler Square because Kevin Byrne was such a great cop. On his pay grade, they would have lived in Fishtown.

Back in the day, in the summer of their marriage, they would meet for lunch in Center City two or three times a week, and Donna would tell him of her triumphs, her infrequent failures, her clever maneuvering through the jungles of escrow, closing costs, amortization, arrears, and appurtenances. Byrne had always glazed over at the terms—he couldn’t tell a basis point from a balloon payment—just as he had always marveled at her energy, her zeal. She had come to her career well into her thirties, and she was happy.

But just about eighteen months earlier, Donna had simply shut down communication channels with her husband. The money still came in, and Donna was still an incredible mother to Colleen, still active in the community, but when it came to talking to him, sharing anything resembling a feeling, a thought, an opinion, she was gone. Walls up, turrets armed.

No note. No explanation. No rationale.

But Byrne knew why. When they had gotten married, he had promised her that he had ambitions within the department, that he was on a steady track to lieutenant, perhaps captain. Beyond that, politics? He had ruled it out within, but never without. Donna had always been skeptical. She knew enough cops to know that homicide detectives were lifers, and that you rode the unit right until the end.

And then Morris Blanchard was found swinging from the end of a towrope. Donna looked at Byrne that night and, without asking a single question, knew that he would never give up the chase to get back on top. He was Homicide, and that’s all he would ever be.

A few days later, she filed.
After a long, tearful talk with Colleen, Byrne decided not to fight it. They had been watering a dead plant for a long time anyway. As long as Donna didn’t poison his daughter against him, and as long as he got to see her when he wanted, it was okay.
This night, while her parents postured, Colleen had dutifully sat with them at their pantomimed dinner, lost in a book by Nora Roberts. Sometimes Byrne envied Colleen her inner silence, her cottony refuge from her childhood, such as it was.
Donna had been two months’ pregnant with Colleen when she and Byrne had gotten married in a civil ceremony. When Donna had given birth, a few days after Christmas that year, and Byrne had seen Colleen for the first time, so pink and shriveled and helpless, he suddenly could not recall a single second of his life before that moment. In that instant, everything else was prelude, a blurry overture to the duty he felt at that moment, and he knew—knew as if it had been branded onto his heart— that no one would ever come between himself and that little girl. Not his wife, not his fellow officers, and God help the first droopy-pantsed, sideways-hat-wearing, disrespectful little shit that came by for her first date.
He also recalled the day they found out Colleen was deaf. It was on Colleen’s first Fourth of July. They had been living in a cramped threeroom apartment at the time. The eleven o’clock news had just come on and there had been a small explosion, seemingly just outside the tiny bedroom where Colleen slept. Instinctively, Byrne had drawn his service weapon and made his way down the hall and into Colleen’s room in a three giant steps, his heart slamming in his chest. When he pushed open her door, relief came in the form of a pair of kids on the fire escape, tossing firecrackers. He would deal with them later.
The horror, though, came in the form of stillness.
As the firecrackers continued to explode, not five feet from where his six-month-old daughter slept, she didn’t react. She didn’t wake up. When Donna arrived in the doorway, and took in the situation, she began to cry. Byrne held her, feeling at that moment that the road in front of them had just been repaved with trial, and that the fear he faced on the streets every day was nothing by comparison.
But now, Byrne often coveted his daughter’s world of inner calm. She would never know the silver hush of her parents’ marriage, ever oblivious to Kevin and Donna Byrne—once so passionate that they could not keep their hands off each other—saying “excuse me” as they passed in the narrow hallway of the home, like strangers on a bus.
He thought about his pretty, distant ex-wife, his Celtic rose. Donna, with her mysterious ability to clog a lie in his throat with just a glance, her perfect social pitch. She knew how to reap wisdom from disaster. She had taught him the grace of humility.
Deuces was quiet at this hour. Byrne sat in an empty room on the second floor. Most drug houses were filthy places, littered with empty crack bottles, fast-food trash, thousands of spent kitchen matches, quite often vomit, sometimes excrement. Pipeheads didn’t subscribe to
Architectural Digest
as a rule. The customers who frequented Deuces—a shadowy consortium of cops, civil servants, city officials who couldn’t be seen cruising the corners—paid a little extra for the ambience.
He positioned himself cross-legged on the floor near the window, his back to the river. He sipped the bourbon. The sensation wrapped him in a warm amber embrace, easing the impending migraine.
Tessa Wells.
She had left her house Friday morning, a contract with the world in hand, a promise that she would be safe, that she would go to school, hang out with her friends, laugh at some silly jokes, cry at some silly love song. The world had broken that treaty. She was just a teenager, and she had already lived out her life.
Colleen had just become a teenager. Byrne knew that, psychologically speaking, he was probably way behind the curve, that the “teenaged years” began somewhere around eleven these days. He was also fully aware that he had long ago decided to resist that particular piece of Madison Avenue sexual propaganda.
He looked around the room.
Why was he here?
Again, the
question
.
Twenty years on the streets of one of the most violent cities in the world put him on the block. He didn’t know a single detective who didn’t drink, hadn’t rehabbed, didn’t gamble, didn’t frequent the whores, didn’t raise a hand to his children, his wife. With this job came excess, and if you didn’t balance the excess of horror with an excess of passion for something—even domestic violence—the valves creaked and moaned until you imploded one day and put the barrel against your palate.
In his time as a homicide detective he had stood in dozens of parlors, hundreds of driveways, a thousand vacant lots, the voiceless dead waiting for him like a gouache of rainy watercolor in the near distance. Such bleak beauty. He could sleep with distance. It was detail that sullied his dreams.
He recalled every detail of that sweltering August morning he had been called to Fairmount Park: the thick buzz of flies overhead, the way Deirdre Pettigrew’s skinny legs emerged from the bushes, her bloodied white panties bunched around one ankle, the bandage on her right knee.
He knew then, as he had known every single time he had seen a murdered child, that he had to step up, regardless how eroded his soul, how diminished his instincts. He had to brave the morning, no matter what demons tracked him through the night.
In the first half of his career it had been about the power, the inertia of justice, the rush of the capture. It was about
him
. But somewhere along the way, it became bigger. It became about all the dead girls.
And now, Tessa Wells.
He closed his eyes, again felt the frigid waters of the Delaware River eddy around him, the breath being wrenched from his chest.
Below him, the gang gunships cruised. The sound of the hip-hop bass chords shook the floor, the windows, the walls, rising from the city streets like steel steam.
The deviant’s hour was coming. Soon he would walk among them.
The monsters were sliding out of their lairs.
And as he sat in a place where men traded their self-respect for a few moments of numbed silence, a place where animals walk erect, Kevin Francis Byrne knew that a new monster had stirred in Philadelphia, a dark seraph of death that would lead him to an uncharted dominion, summoning him to a depth to which men like Gideon Pratt only aspired.

MONDAY, 8:00 PM
It is night in Philadelphia.

I am standing on North Broad Street, looking toward Center City and the commanding figure of William Penn, craftily lighted atop city hall, feeling the warmth of the spring day fading into the sizzle of red neon and long, de

Chirico shadows, marveling once more at the two faces of the city.

This is not the egg tempera of daytime Philly, the bright colors of Robert Indiana’s
Love
or the Mural Arts Program.This is Philly at night, a city rendered in thick, violent brushstrokes, an impasto of sedimentary pigments.

The old building on North Broad has witnessed many nights, its cast pilasters standing silent guard for almost a century. In many ways, it is the stoic face of the city: the old wooden seats, the coffered ceiling, the carved medallions, the worn canvas where a thousand men have spat and bled and fallen.

We file in.We smile at each other, raise eyebrows, clap shoulders. I can smell the copper of their blood.
These men might know my deeds, but they do not know my face.They think

I am a madman, that I pounce from the darkness like some horror movie villain. They will read about the things I have done, at their breakfast tables, on SEPTA, in the food courts, and they will shake their heads and ask why.

Could it be they
know
why?
If one were to peel back the phyllo layers of wickedness and pain and cruelty, could it be that these men might do the same if they had the chance? Might they lure each other’s daughters to the dark street corner, the empty building, the deep-shadowed heart of the park? Might they wield their knives and pistols and bludgeons and finally utter their rage? Might they spend the currency of their wrath and then scurry off to Upper Darby and New Hope and Upper Merion and the safety of their lies?
There is always a morbid contest in the soul, a struggle between the loathing and the need, between the darkness and the light.
The bell rings.We rise from our stools.We meet in the center.
Philadelphia, your daughters are not safe.
You are here because you know that.You are here because you do not have the courage to be me.You are here because you are afraid of
becoming
me.
I know why I am here.
Jessica.

MONDAY, 8:30 PM

Forget Caesar’s Palace. Forget Madison Square Garden. Forget the MGM Grand. The best place in America—some would argue, the world—to watch a prizefight, was The Legendary Blue Horizon on North Broad Street. In a town that had spawned the likes of Jack

O’Brien, Joe Frazier, James Shuler, Tim Witherspoon, Bernard Hopkins—not to mention Rocky Balboa—The Legendary Blue Horizon was a treasure, and, as goes the Blue, so goes Philly fisticuffs.

Jessica and her opponent—Mariella “Sparkle” Munoz—dressed and warmed up in the same room. As Jessica waited for her great-uncle Vittorio, a former heavyweight himself, to tape her hands, she glanced over at her opponent. Sparkle was in her late twenties, with big arms and what looked like a seventeen-inch neck. A real shock absorber. She had a flat nose, scar tissue over both eyes, and what seemed to be a perpetual game face: a permanent grimace that was supposed to intimidate her opponents.

I’m shakin’ over here,
Jessica thought.
When she wanted to, Jessica could affect the posture and demeanor of a shrinking violet, a helpless woman who might have trouble opening a carton of orange juice without a big strong man to come to her rescue. This, Jessica hoped, was just honey for the grizzlies.

What it really meant was:
Bring it on, baby.

The first round began with what’s known in boxing parlance as the “feeling out” process. Both women jabbing lightly, stalking each other. A clinch or two. A little bit of mugging and intimidation. Jessica was a few inches taller than Sparkle, but Sparkle made up for it in girth. She looked like a Maytag in knee socks.