The Brothers

by Michael Bronte

  Chapter 2… The Mercedes

  “Is he dead?”

  Most of the brothers were standing around the car while their spouses stood off to the side. “He’s not moving,” said Ducky. A couple of the guys pounded on the passenger side windows, but the big Mercedes was impenetrable.

  A brother they called Bapple asked, “Why the hell are the doors locked? In my car, when you put the thing in park the doors unlock automatically.”

  “Unless you push the lock button from inside,” another responded.

  Harry came up behind the crowd, and, seeing him, the brothers stepped aside. No one said a word. He stood there for some seconds, his face drained of all color. “Is he....”

  “He hasn’t moved since we got here,” said Ducky. “We’ve already called 9-1-1.”

  Inside, Hutch was sitting upright but leaning to one side, the only discernable detail visible through the reflection of the street lamp being that his cell phone was lying on the passenger seat. The silence among the brothers was deafening, so much so that the simultaneous arrival of a police car, an ambulance, and the passenger van that was to transport them for the evening sounded like an invasion. The van passed and pulled up in front of Slick’s about two blocks down Newberry Street. Harry stayed where he was, looking like he’d turned into a statue. Ducky took a spot beside him while a police officer and two EMTs stepped up to the Mercedes as red blips of light from the ambulance peppered them mercilessly.

  “Step aside, please,” the officer said firmly. “What do we have here?” His nametag read E.J. Nekel.

  Harry’s mouth didn’t move—or maybe it couldn’t—and Ducky said, “We’re all here for the college reunion weekend and we were waiting for our friend to show up.” He pointed at the car. “We found him out here like this. The car is locked.”

  Just then, Monica stepped up beside Ducky and the officer did a double take. “ADA Brimton, are you part of this gathering?”

  “I am,” she replied. She took Ducky’s arm and said, “This is my husband, Richard.” She glanced at Fish, but a smile for her earlier ruse didn’t quite make it. “Can you get in there?” she asked, indicating the car.

  Officer Nekel took a look at the car and said, “These things are not easy to get into.” He went around to the passenger side and flipped on a flashlight while the EMTs unloaded a stretcher bed. “I think this car has a keyless entry system. We probably need to call a locksmith to get in.” Nekel shined his light on Hutch’s body. “Does anyone know if he—”

  “Break the damned window,” Harry called loudly from the other side of the car. “We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, okay, and he’s our friend. We may not have time to wait for any damned locksmith.” The other brothers piled on, raising their voices at Officer Nekel.

  Nekel glanced at ADA Brimton as if he was looking for permission.

  “Well officer?” she questioned.

  Guessing that was permission enough, Nekel took a stance next to the rear window on the passenger side. A moment later, glass was shattering into thousands of little crumbs and Nekel was inside and stretching across Hutch’s body to unlock the driver’s side door. An EMT moved in and it wasn’t long before the look on his face confirmed what everyone feared.

  Officer Nekel turned to ADA Brimton. “Ma’am, is this a crime scene?”

  Monica looked at Ducky, and then squarely at Harry. “I don’t know. Is it?”

  Neither man spoke, and it was evident that Ducky expected Harry to answer the question as he stepped away from the car and moved to his wife’s side. She was no longer Monica now, but ADA Brimton. Harry’s eyes were frozen in their sockets as he tried to comprehend the reality of what just happened. He, Harold B. Curlander—nicknamed Dirty Harry—from Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and R. Todd Hutchinson from Boston, Massachusetts, had been roommates and best friends at John Adams College from the first day they’d pledged Zeta Chi in their sophomore year. That was thirty-three years ago. Hutch dead? It had to be a dream. The thought repeated over and over inside Harry’s head and surely, he reasoned, he’d wake up soon and find that it was just a terrible prank that old Hutch had cooked up just to scare the shit out of him. Fucking Hutch; he’d probably been planning this for months. Harry refocused and examined the faces of the other brothers. Some of them were engrossed in hushed conversation; others were speaking in low tones with Officer Nekel. None of those worried visages gave the slightest indication that this was some sort of sick practical joke. As Harry’s eyes settled once more on the slumped over body inside the Mercedes, it was obvious that it was not.

  Monica and Ducky were both staring at him, and he remembered that she’d asked him a question. Is this a crime scene? He tried to turn away from Hutch’s body but found that he couldn’t, his eyes jumping from spot to spot inside the Mercedes. “Maybe the old boy had a heart attack,” someone said, but instinctively Harry knew that wasn’t the case. Hutch had been an athlete at John Adams, that long hound dog face of his mirroring the long, coordinated body of a power forward on the basketball team, a body that Hutch had kept in shape twelve months a year by running and biking for miles when he wasn’t on the hoop court. Now, as painful as it was, but looking at Hutch slumped over in the driver’s seat, Harry could see that Hutch was still as trim and probably almost as strong at fifty-two as he was at twenty-two. Heart attack: no way.

  Harry’s eyes continued to move through the interior: Starbucks coffee cup sitting in the cup holder; cell phone charger cord dangling from the center console; cell phone sitting face up on the passenger seat along with a crumpled up bag which could have contained a snack from Starbucks or anyplace else. Nothing else seemed out of place; the car was spotless, inside and out. Hutch was wearing black trousers which even from a distance looked to be quite expensive, along with a black knit sports shirt under a grey and black tweed blazer, simple and classy attire. Like his own hair and most of the brothers surrounding the car, Hutch’s hair was peppered with grey. It was well-manicured, and it looked like he hadn’t lost a single strand of it.

  Then, Harry heard the word: suicide. Who dared to utter it he did not know, and he purposely did not turn to find out for fear that he’d punch someone. His blood boiled as the word echoed in his head and it almost made him sick. He was sick, and his mouth had a vile, sour taste that carried all the way to his stomach. Harry wondered where Hutch’s wife was, and how Hutch’s three kids would react to the news. Who was going to tell them? It shouldn’t come from the cops, he determined instantly. It should come from one of them, the brothers, himself probably, and already the words were lining up in his head.

  Harry turned toward Monica Brimton. While being a small town attorney didn’t qualify him as an expert on crime scene procedure, he did know two things. First, if there was any suspicion whatsoever that the victim—what a cold word that was; his spine shivered by merely thinking it—did not die in a completely obvious accidental manner, the scene needed to be secured. Second, along with a crime scene investigator, it could be important to get the district attorney on the scene in case search warrants were needed. No investigator wanted evidence to be determined inadmissible in court if the situation led to that. In this case, the DA had already arrived.

  “There’s no way in a million years Hutch would commit suicide,” Harry said in a voice loud enough to register with whoever had uttered the word earlier. His eyes darted toward the group of brothers, but no one admitted to it. Ducky had his arm around Monica, holding her close in a similar pose to the other couples gathered around, but it was obvious that Harry was talking to her.

  “I know what it looks like,” Monica began, immediately regretting the words as Ducky gave her glare. “I mean, I know you guys were close and all, but you hadn’t seen each other in years. How do you know what was going on with him, his health, his life? When was the last time either of you saw him?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?�
�� Harry answered indignantly. “I knew this man like I know my own brother. He was the best man at my wedding. But to answer your question, the last time I saw him was a couple of years ago, in Boston. This was no suicide, and this was no heart attack. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “So would I,” Fish called out from the crowd of brothers.

  “Yeah, no way,” said Fighting Al, piling on.

  Monica shot a glance at Officer Nekel who was clearly deferring to her. She nodded at him and pulled her cell phone from her purse.

  “Everyone stay where they are and don’t move your feet,” Officer Nekel called out. “We need to establish a core area where any possible evidence might be located. I will instruct you on how to move away. ADA Brimton, would you mind calling for an investigator while I secure the scene?”

  “I’m already on it,” she responded and she stepped away from Ducky to make her calls.

  Officer Nekel cleared the area and backed up his squad car, lights flashing, to create a barrier to the Mercedes. He strung some yellow tape between a couple of parking meters, and Harry and the rest of the brothers gathered in a tight circle across the street. The early evening air was cooling quickly as a late spring breeze carried the smell of frying onion rings past their noses; Harry thought he was going to be sick.

  Fidgeting, he shuffled his feet while the other brothers went through various nervous gesticulations of their own. The half dozen wives present took the hint and gathered by the passenger van that sat waiting a few doors down the street. Harry looked at the faces of the Zeta Chi brothers that surrounded him. Even without speaking they seemed to shed their politeness and the raw personalities that he’d known thirty years earlier bubbled to the surface. There was Ducky, real name Richard Swan, soft and amiable on the outside, fiercely competitive and uncompromising on the inside, probably why he’d gone through two marriages before Monica. Fish was Donald Fischer, smart and analytical, one of the best to ever come out of Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene. Fish had made a nice living as a mechanical engineer since their years together at John Adams. Fighting Al was just that, also an attorney, a litigation guy Harry remembered, his personality perfectly suited to what he did for a living; real name Albert Fiorello. Bones was Crawford Koch, ran his own company manufacturing fiber optic cable. Zen Master was Dave Zacek, owned half a dozen Papa Pete’s pizza franchises in Philly. Stokes was Steve Sergeant. Harry knew he lived in Providence but wasn’t sure what he did for a living. He did know, however, that there wasn’t anyone more loyal to Zeta Chi than Stokes, who’d been the fraternity Number One during their senior year. Spike had been their social chairman, crazy fucker, real name Jimmy Wurfel. Harry wondered if he’d changed at all. Didn’t look like it. In addition, off in the distance there was the Inevitable Doctor Stuart Eisenberg, inevitable because Doc’s father was a doctor, his uncle was a doctor, his grandfather was a doctor, what else was he was going to be, Doc always said. Billy Apple, or Bapple, was present, as was Eddie Benton, also known as the Bambino.

  Harry noted that some of the other brothers had already begun walking back toward Slick’s, most of them shaking their heads. It was signal enough that they’d determined that there was nothing they could do. Wondering if he should make an attempt to assemble everyone, he decided they were all big boys and girls, they were all perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what they wanted to do from this point on. Indeed someone called back that it was time to head to the alumni reunion dinner for all those who were still going to go to it; they were already late.

  Fish came over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I think most everyone’s decided there’s nothing they can do here except go to this reunion thing and have a couple of hundred drinks.”

  Zen Master came up as well. “You coming, Harry?”

  Harry glanced at Ducky and Monica, figuring that as the ADA she would wait along with Officer Nekel for a CSI to show up, and that Ducky would wait with her. “I think I’ll wait here for a while and catch up with you later, okay? Let me have your cell phone number.”

  “Sure, no problem,” said Fish, then he and Zen Master turned and made their way to the van.

  Harry looked away from the big Mercedes and said to Monica, “You wouldn’t mind if I hung around for a while, would you?”

  “Of course she wouldn’t mind,” Ducky answered for her.

  “Officer?” he questioned to Officer Nekel.

  “As long as you don’t go past the yellow tape, I guess you’re free to do whatever you’d like,” Nekel confirmed.

  “Good, then,” said Harry as he eyed Ducky and Monica. He really didn’t care if they minded or not, and he needed to find out what happened to Hutch.