Brighton

by Michael Harvey

  “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, listening 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.

  “Let’s go. Infield.” Jimmy Fitz wandered out from the shadow of the batting cage, a ball in one hand and a fungo bat on his shoulder. “Tarpey, first base. Doucette, second.” Their coach waved at the empty diamond. “You all know where you’re going. Get out there.”

  Kevin slapped his glove against his leg as he ran out to short. Fitz stood at the plate, Brighton’s catcher, Gerry Sullivan, beside him.

  “Once around,” Fitz said and lashed a ball down the third-base line. Joey Nagle backhanded it and fired a strike to first.

  “Nice,” Kevin yelled, even as a second ball rocketed toward him. Kevin took three steps to his right, angling back as he ran. He caught the ball deep in the hole, planted his right foot, and threw in one motion. Their first baseman, Brian Tarpey, dug out the ball on a short hop, pointed his glove at Kevin, and fired the ball back to Sully.

  “Get two,” Fitz grumbled, tossing another ball in the air and driving it between first and second. Kevin knew his coach’s infield routine and was already on the move. Tommy Doucette caught the ball on what should have been the outfield grass (if Tar Park had any grass) and pivoted. The second baseman knew not to wait on Kevin and fired a strike to the bag. For an instant, it looked like the ball was headed to left field. Then Kevin glided across, catching it with a backhanded sweep of his glove and rifling a throw to first. The ball ping-ponged back to Sully, who threw down to Kevin at second. Kevin turned and fired the ball to third, over to first and back to home. Jimmy Fitz had another ball in his hand and tapped out a grounder to first. And so it went. The ballet of baseball. Kevin followed with hands, feet, and mind—his world reduced to the breath in his ears, the blur of a batted ball, and five kids in an infield, sharing one heartbeat.

  Kevin stepped out of the box and stared at the ghosts manning his empty infield. To grow up in Brighton was to be tethered to the past. Some tethers swung tight and fast, a vicious, self-destructive arc that took the measure of anyone who got in the way. Others wheeled far and wide, sweeping up new friends and family, money, power, even infamy. But all held this place at their center. A tangled, grasping place. A place of dark and light. Kevin walked back down the first base line, took a seat on the bench, and cracked a beer. Maybe he thought he’d broken his tether, maybe he was a goddamn fool.

  A couple drifted into the park, a pair of bulldogs on leash. They let the dogs ramble and settled in the outfield grass, bundled close together, bodies mingling one into the other. Kevin’s eyes crossed the street and found the darkened windows of his great-uncle’s old apartment. Shuks had driven Kevin to New York that afternoon, then kept tabs on him growing up, all the way through college and even when he’d moved back to Boston. They’d meet up here and there over the years, a beer, coffee, the newspaper—just like their mornings at the cab office when Kevin was a kid except now his grandmother hung over every word in every conversation and they never laughed when they were together. Not once. Kevin had noticed the weight loss and graying, first around Shuks’s eyes then the touches in his cheeks. At the end, the boxer’s hands shook as he sipped his coffee and made scratch marks in his racing form, Kevin at his elbow, always and forever the acolyte-in-training. The call came a year after Kevin’s parents passed. Shuks had gone to the doctor in the morning about an x-ray. It was a hot summer day and the Sox were playing a rare double-header against the Indians. After his appointment, Shuks packed up a ham and cheese sandwich and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. He sat on the bank of the Charles and smoked a Lucky. Then he took off his socks and shoes, filled up his pockets with rocks, and walked into the water. On the day of his funeral, Kevin sat alone at the back of a church in Newton and watched McNamara’s boys wheel the coffin past. He cried that day for the first time since his grandmother. He cried because he’d loved the old man in a simple, spare way that was impossible to measure in the fashion people liked to measure such things. He cried at the passing of a generation and because already he couldn’t hardly remember what Shuks looked like. And he always thought he would.

  A car door slammed in the lot behind him. Kevin glanced over as a black man pulled a bat and bag of balls out of the trunk. His kid, maybe ten and wearing a Red Sox warm-up jacket, was already running toward the diamond in loose, loping strides. The dad set up his kid on the mound. The two of them talked for a while, dad showing the kid all the good stuff—how to grip the ball, push off the rubber, arm angle. Dad trotted back behind home plate and crouched. The kid tugged at his hat, pounded the ball twice in his glove, and leaned in for an imaginary sign. Kevin leaned in with him, watching quietly. The kid wound up and threw, the ball skipping in on two hops, dad fielding it cleanly. Kevin smiled softly without hardly realizing it.

  “Am I fucking dreaming?”

  Kevin jumped in his skin and turned. He hadn’t seen Finn McDermott since that Saturday morning behind the Jeff. As is usually the case with guys, decades didn’t seem to matter.

  “Finn, what’s up?”

  “Kevin Pearce, as I live and fucking breathe. You thinking about pulling out the glove?”

  “Sox could use it.”

  “Tell me about it.” Finn took a seat on the bench. “What in Christ brings you back here?” The kid who used to worry about love handles now had a full bay window hanging out over his belt. Too many draft beers and bowls of chowder thick with pepper and cream. Too many cheap cigars. Too many nights on the couch. Too many fucking doughnuts.

  “I was in the area. Figured I’d stop by the park.”

  “Memories, right?” Finn crossed his legs at the ankle and leaned back, folding his hands over his swollen belly like it was an unborn child. “Somebody told me you work for the Globe?”

  Kevin was surprised Finn knew what he did for a living. Hell, Kevin was surprised Finn was still alive. “Yeah.”

  “You cover sports?”

  “Nah, I do mostly investigative stuff.”

  “No shit. Anything I heard of?”

  “I won the Pulitzer Prize for a story I did in Brighton. That’s why I’m back.” Kevin felt his cheeks flush as he mentioned the prize. Finn took no notice.

  “I scalp tickets and sell T-shirts down at Fenway. Had to put my time in, but I got a primo spot in front of the Cask. Right next to the sausage and peppers guy.”

  “Nice.”

  Finn uncrossed and recrossed his feet. “Yeah, it’s pretty sweet.”

  Kevin picked up the six-pack by an empty plastic ring. “Beer?”

  Finn waved him off, then took one anyway, draining half of it in one go and finishing with a wet belch. “You seen Bobby?”

  “Is he around?”

  “Bobby’s always around.” Finn stuck out his lower lip and creased his eyes into twin folds of fat. “Why you asking?”

  “Asking what?”

  “’Bout Bobby?”

  “I don’t know. Like to see him, I guess.”

  “Bobby and I are tight, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “He runs Fingers’s book. I help him out.”

  Bobby the bookie. Kevin knew about it. Still, it was a hard thing to hear. When they were kids, Bobby was the guy who held the world in his hands. And Kevin never thought it could be any other
way. The black kid was done with the mound. Now he was at the plate, a bat on his shoulder. Dad was tossing balls in the air and the kid was whacking them into the backstop.

  “Fucking hey.” Finn shook his head. “Never see that back in the day. Not at Tar Park.” He waited for a grunt of assent, but none was forthcoming so he finished his beer, tossed the can, and climbed to his feet. “Well, I gotta hit it. Swing by my spot. Give you a deal on a jersey.”

  “By the Cask?”

  “Right.”

  “Tell Bobby I said ‘hey.’”

  “You know it’s funny I saw you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I was going through some old shit last night and came across something.” Finn pulled out a wrinkled photo. It was a picture of Finn, Bobby, and Kevin in the bleachers at Fenway.

  “Yankees,” Kevin said. “We sat three rows off the bullpen.”

  “Bobby almost got a ball.”

  “Yeah.” Kevin went to give back the picture. Finn refused.

  “Keep it. I got a ton of them old shots.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why not? You don’t get back much.” Finn leaned in and touched Kevin lightly on the shoulder. “And, hey, I’m sorry about your grandmother.”

  “Long time ago, Finn.”

  “Still, I never got to see you or nothing.” He produced a business card from another pocket, turning it over once or twice in his hands before passing it along. “Bobby works construction during the days. Call ’em and they can usually tell you what job he’s on. And congratulations on that prize.”

  “Thanks. I’ll catch you later.”

  Finn nodded, both men acting as if they saw each other every day, instead of every other decade. Kevin watched him shamble across the park, then sipped at his beer and studied the old photo, wondering what he was doing here and why Brighton still held him in its grip.