Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (121 page)

“He’s good,” Byrne said. “I told you that he’s moving to the Northeast, right?”

“Yeah,” Jessica said. “Can’t believe he’s leaving South Philly.”

“Neither can he. Later in the evening I’m having dinner with Colleen. Victoria was going to join us, but she’s still in Meadville. Her mother’s not well.”

“You know, you and Colleen are welcome to come over after dinner,” Jessica said. “I make one hell of a tiramisu. Fresh mascarpone from DiBruno’s. Trust me, it’s been known to make grown men weep uncontrollably. Plus, my Uncle Vittorio always sends a case of his homemade
vino di tavola.
We play the Bing Crosby Christmas album. It’s a wild time.”

“Thanks,” Byrne said. “Let me see what’s up.”

Kevin Byrne was as gracious at accepting invitations as he was at avoiding them. Jessica decided not to push. They fell silent again as their thoughts, like those of everyone else in the PPD this day, went to Walt Brigham.

“Thirty-eight years on the job,” Byrne said. “Walt put a
lot
of people away.”

“You think it was someone he sent up?” Jessica asked.

“That’s where I’d start.”

“When you talked to him before you left, did he give you any indication that something was wrong?”

“Not at all. I mean, I got the sense that he was a little depressed about retirement. But he seemed upbeat about the fact that he was going for his license.”

“License?”

“PI license,” Byrne said. “He said he was going to look into Richie DiCillo’s daughter’s case.”

“Richie DiCillo’s daughter? I don’t know what you mean.”

Byrne gave Jessica a quick rundown on the 1995 murder of Annemarie DiCillo. The story gave Jessica chills. She’d had no idea.

AS THEY DROVE
across town, Jessica thought about how small Marjorie Brigham had looked in Byrne’s embrace. She wondered how many times Kevin Byrne had found himself in that position. He was intimidating as hell if you were on the wrong side of things. But when he brought you into his orbit, when he looked at you with those deep emerald eyes, he made you feel like you were the only other person in the world, and that your problems had just become his problems.

The hard reality was, the job went on.

There was a dead woman named Kristina Jakos to think about.

30

Moon stands naked in the moonlight. It is late. It is his favorite time.

When he was seven, and his grandfather was taken ill for the first time, he thought he would never see the man again. He had cried for days, until his grandmother relented and took him to the hospital for a visit. On that long and confusing night, Moon stole a glass vial of his grandfather’s blood. He sealed it tightly and hid it in the basement of his house.

On his eighth birthday, his grandfather died. It was the worst thing that ever happened to him. His grandfather had taught him many things, reading to him in the evenings, telling him stories of ogres and fairies and kings. Moon remembers long summer days when families would visit. Real families. Music played, and children laughed.

Then the children stopped coming.

His grandmother lived in silence after that, until the day she took Moon to the forest, where he watched the girls play. With their long necks and smooth white skin they were like the swans in the story. That day there was a terrible storm, thunder and lightning crashed over the forest, filling the world. Moon tried to protect the swans. He built them a nest.

When his grandmother learned of what he had done in the forest she took him to a dark and frightening place, a place where other children like himself lived.

Moon looked out the window for many years. The moon came to him every night, telling him of its travels. Moon learned of Paris and Munich and Upsala. He learned of the Deluge and the Street of Tombs.

When his grandmother took ill, they let him come home. He returned to a quiet and empty place. A place of ghosts.

His grandmother is gone now. Soon the king will tear everything down.

Moon makes his seed in the soft blue light of the moon. He thinks about his nightingale. She sits in the boathouse, waiting, her voice stilled for the moment. He mixes his seed with a single drop of blood. He arranges his brushes.

Later he will dress in his finery, cut a length of rope, and make his way to the boathouse.

He will show the nightingale his world.

31

Byrne sat in his car on Eleventh Street, near Walnut. He’d had every intention of making it an early night, but his car had brought him here.

He was restless, and he knew why.

All he could think about was Walt Brigham. He thought about Brigham’s face as he talked about the Annemarie DiCillo case. There had been real passion there.

Pine needles. Smoke.

Byrne got out of his car. He was going to head into Moriarty’s for a quick one. Halfway to the door he decided against it. He walked back to his car in a sort of fugue state. He had always been a man of instant decision, of lightning reaction, but now he seemed to be walking in circles. Maybe the murder of Walt Brigham had gotten to him more than he realized.

As he opened the car he heard someone approaching. He turned around. It was Matthew Clarke. Clarke looked agitated, red-eyed, on edge. Byrne watched the man’s hands.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Clarke?”

Clarke shrugged his shoulders. “This is a free country. I can go where I want.”

“Yes, you can,” Byrne said. “However, I’d prefer it if those places were not around me.”

Clarke reached slowly into his pocket, pulled out a camera phone. He turned the screen toward Byrne. “I can even go to the twelve hundred block of Spruce Street if I feel like it.”

At first Byrne thought he had heard wrong. Then he looked closely at the picture on the cell phone’s small screen. His heart sank. The photograph was of his wife’s house. The house where his daughter
slept
.

Byrne slapped the phone from Clarke’s hand, grabbed the man by his lapels, slammed him into the bricks of the wall behind him. “Listen to me,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

Clarke just stared, his lips trembling. He had planned for this moment, but now that it had arrived he was completely unprepared for the immediacy, the violence of it.

“I’m going to say this once,” Byrne said. “If you ever go near that house again I will hunt you down and I will put a fucking bullet in your head. Do you understand?”

“I guess you don’t—”

“Don’t talk.
Listen.
If you have a problem with me, it is with
me,
not with my family. You do not
fuck
with my family. You want to settle this now? Tonight? We settle it.”

Byrne let go of the man’s coat. He backed up. He tried to control himself. That would be all he needed: a citizen complaint against him.

The truth was Matthew Clarke was not a criminal. Not yet. For the moment Clarke was just an ordinary man riding a terrible, soul-shredding wave of grief. He was lashing out at Byrne, at the system, at the injustice of it all. As misplaced as it was, Byrne understood.

“Walk away,” Byrne said. “Now.”

Clarke straightened his clothes, made an attempt to restore his dignity. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“Walk away, Mr. Clarke. Get help.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to own up to what you’ve done,” Clarke said.

“What I’ve
done
?” Byrne took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “You don’t know anything about me. When you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, and been the places I’ve been, we’ll talk.”

Clarke glared at him. He wasn’t going to let it go.

“Look, I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Clarke. I truly am. But there isn’t—”

“You didn’t know her.”

“Yes I did.”

Clarke looked stunned. “What are you talking about?”

“You think I didn’t know who she was? You think I don’t see it every day of my life? The man who walks into the bank during a robbery? The elderly woman walking home from church? The kid on a North Philly playground? The girl whose only crime was being Catholic? You think I don’t understand
innocence
?”

Clarke continued to stare at Byrne, speechless.

“It makes me sick,” Byrne said. “But there’s nothing you or I or anybody else can do about it. Innocent people get hurt. You have my condolences, but as callous as it may sound, that’s all I’m going to give you. That’s all I
can
give you.”

Instead of accepting this and leaving, it appeared that Matthew Clarke wanted to take matters to the next level. Byrne resigned himself to the inevitable.

“You took a swing at me in that diner,” Byrne said. “A sucker punch. You missed. You want a free shot now? Take it. Last chance.”

“You have a gun,” Clarke said. “I’m not a stupid man.”

Byrne reached into his holster, took out his weapon, tossed it into his car. His badge and ID followed. “Unarmed,” he said. “I’m a civilian now.”

Matthew Clarke looked at the ground for a moment. In Byrne’s mind it could still go either way. Then Clarke reared back and hit Byrne in the face as hard as he could. Byrne staggered, saw stars for a moment. He tasted blood in his mouth, warm and metallic. Clarke was five inches shorter and at least fifty pounds lighter. Byrne did not raise his hands in defense or anger.

“That’s
it
?” Byrne asked. He spit. “Twenty years of marriage and that’s the best you can do?” Byrne was baiting Clarke, insulting him. He couldn’t seem to stop himself. Maybe he didn’t want to. “
Hit
me.”

This time it was a glancing blow off Byrne’s forehead. Knuckle on bone. It stung.

“Again.”

Clarke ran at him again, this time catching Byrne on the right temple. He came back around with a hook to Byrne’s chest. And then another. Clarke nearly came off the ground with the effort.

Byrne reeled back a foot or so, held his ground. “I don’t think your heart is in this, Matt. I really don’t.”

Clarke screamed with rage—a crazed, animal sound. He swung his fist again, catching Byrne on the left side of his jaw. But it was clear that his passion, and strength, were waning. He swung again, this time a glancing blow that continued past Byrne’s face and into the wall. Clarke screamed in pain.

Byrne spit blood, waited. Clarke slumped against the wall, spent for the moment, physically and emotionally, his knuckles bleeding. The two men looked at each other. They both knew this battle was winding down, the way men have known for centuries that a fight was over. For the moment.

“Done?” Byrne asked.

“Fuck … you.”

Byrne wiped the blood from his face. “You’re never going to have this opportunity again, Mr. Clarke. If this happens again, if you ever approach me again in anger, I will fight back. And as hard as it may be for you to understand, I’m as mad about your wife’s death as you are. You don’t want me to fight back.”

Clarke began to cry.

“Look, believe this, or don’t believe it,” Byrne said. He knew he was reaching. He had been here before, but for some reason it had never been this hard. “I’m sorry about what happened. You’ll never
know
how sorry. Anton Krotz was a fucking animal, and now he’s dead. If there was something I could do, I would do it.”

Clarke glared at him, his anger subsiding, his breathing returning to normal, his rage falling back into the dominion of grief and pain. He wiped the tears from his face. “Oh, there is, Detective,” he said. “There is.”

They stared at each other, five feet between them, worlds apart. Byrne could tell the man was not going to say anything else. Not this night.

Clarke picked up his cell phone, backed his way to his car, slipped inside, and sped off, fishtailing for a moment on the ice.

Byrne glanced down. There were long streaks of blood on his white dress shirt. It wasn’t the first time. It was the first time in a
long
time, though. He rubbed his jaw. He had been punched in the face enough in his life, starting with Sal Pecchio when he was about eight years old. That time it had been over a water ice.

If there was something I could do, I would do it.

Byrne wondered what he’d meant by that.

There is.

Byrne wondered what Clarke had meant.

He got on his cell. His first call was to his ex-wife, Donna, under the pretense of saying “Merry Christmas.” Everything was fine there. Clarke had not paid a visit. Byrne’s next call reached out to a sergeant in the district where Donna and Colleen lived. He gave a description of Clarke and the car’s plates. They would dispatch a sector car. Byrne knew he could have a warrant issued, have Clarke picked up, could probably have a charge of assault and battery stick. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Byrne opened the car door, retrieved his weapon and ID, headed for the pub. As he stepped into the welcoming warmth of the familiar bar, he had a feeling that the next time he confronted Matthew Clarke it was going to turn bad.