The skin Gods jbakb-2

by Richard Montanari

  She had never seen him at the stop before. He was nice looking, older-the whole world was older-but he had a friendly face. And he looked pretty cute fumbling his way through the book. He glanced up, saw her watching him. She signed: "Hello."

  He smiled, a little self-consciously, but was clearly excited to find someone who spoke the language he was trying to learn. "Am… I… that… bad?" he signed, tentatively.

  She wanted to be nice. She wanted to be encouraging. Unfortunately, her face told the truth before her hands could form the lie. "Yes, you are," she signed.

  He watched her hands, confused. She pointed to her face. He looked up. She rather dramatically nodded her head. He blushed. She laughed. He joined in.

  "You've really got to understand the five parameters first," she signed, slowly, referring to the five basic strictures of ASL, that being handshape, orientation, location, movement, and nonmanual signals. More confusion.

  She took the book from him and flipped to the front. She pointed out some of the basics.

  He skimmed the section, nodding. He glanced up, formed a hand, roughly, into: "Thanks." Then added: "If you ever want to teach, I'll be your first pupil."

  She smiled and said: "You're very welcome."

  A minute later, she got on the bus. He did not. Apparently he was waiting for another route.

  Teaching, she thought as she found a seat near the front. Maybe someday. She had always been patient with people, and she had to admit she got a good feeling when she was able to impart wisdom to others. Her father, of course wanted her to be president of the United States. Or at least attorney general.

  A few moments later, the man who would be her student got up from the bus stop bench, stretched. He tossed the book into a trash can.

  It was a scorcher of a day. He slipped into his car, glanced at the LCD screen of his camera phone. He had gotten a good image. She was beautiful.

  He started the car, carefully pulled out into traffic, and followed the bus down Walnut Street.

  5

  The apartment was quiet when byrne returned. what else would it be? Two hot rooms over a former print shop on Second Street, nearly Spartan in furnishings: a worn love seat and distressed mahogany coffee table, a television, a boom box, and a stack of blues CDs. In the bedroom, a queen-size bed and a small, thrift-store night- stand.

  Byrne flipped on the window air conditioner, made his way to the bathroom, split a Vicodin in half, swallowed it. He splashed cool water on his face and neck. He left the medicine cabinet open. He told himself it was to avoid splashing water on it, thereby avoiding the necessity to wipe it down, but the real reason was that he wanted to avoid seeing himself in the mirror. How long had he been doing that, he wondered?

  When he returned to the living room he slipped a Robert Johnson disc into the boom box. He was in the mood for "Stones in My Passway."

  After the divorce, he had come back to the old neighborhood: the Queen Village section of South Philadelphia. His father had been a longshoreman, a Mummer of citywide fame. Like his father and uncles, Kevin Byrne was, and would always remain, a Two-Streeter at heart. And although it took a while to get back into the rhythms of the neighborhood, the older residents wasted no time in making him feel at home with the three standard South Philly questions:

  Where you from?

  Did you buy or rent?

  Do you have any children?

  He had thought, briefly, of plunking down a chunk for one of the recently rehabbed homes at Jefferson Square, a newly gentrified area nearby, but he wasn't sure that his heart, unlike his mind, was still in Philadelphia. For the first time in his life, he was a man untethered. He had a few dollars put away-over and above Colleen's college fund-and he could go and do whatever he pleased.

  But could he leave the force? Could he turn in his service weapon and badge, turn in his papers, take his retirement ID, and simply walk away?

  He honestly did not know.

  He sat on the love seat, ran through the cable channels. He thought about pouring himself a tumblerful of bourbon and just riding the bottle until nightfall. No. He wasn't a very good drunk these days. These days, he was one of those morbid, ugly drunks you see with four empty stools on either side of him in a crowded tavern.

  His cell phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket, stared at it. It was a new camera phone that Colleen had gotten him for his birthday, and he wasn't quite familiar with all the settings yet. He saw the flashing icon and realized that a text message had come in. He had just gotten a handle on sign language, now there was a whole new vernacular to learn. He looked at the LCD screen. It was a text message from Colleen. Text messaging was the hottest thing among teenagers these days, but especially for deaf teenagers.

  This was an easy one. It read:

  TY 4 LUNCH:)

  Byrne smiled. Thank You For Lunch. He was the luckiest man in the world. He typed:

  YW LUL

  The message meant: You're Welcome Love You Lots. Colleen messaged back:

  LUL 2

  Then, as always, she signed off by typing:

  CBOAO

  The message stood for Colleen Byrne Over And Out.

  Byrne closed the phone, his heart full.

  The air conditioner finally began to cool off the room. Byrne considered what to do with himself. Maybe he'd take a ride down to the Roundhouse, hang around the unit. He was just about to talk himself out of that idea when he saw that there was a message on his answering machine.

  What was it, five steps away? Seven? At the moment, it looked like the Boston Marathon. He grabbed his cane, braved the pain.

  The message was from Paul DiCarlo, a star ADA in the district attorney's office. Over the past five years or so, DiCarlo and Byrne had made a number of cases together. If you were a criminal on trial, you didn't want to look up one day and see Paul DiCarlo enter the courtroom. He was a pit bull in Perry Ellis. If he got you in his jaws, you were fucked. Nobody had sent more killers to death row than Paul DiCarlo.

  But the message Paul had for Byrne this day was not good. One of his quarry, it seemed, had loosed itself: Julian Matisse was back on the street.

  The news was impossible, but it was true.

  It was no secret that Kevin Byrne took a special interest in cases involving the murders of young women. He had felt this way ever since the day Colleen was born. In his mind and heart, every young woman was forever somebody's daughter, somebody's baby girl. Every young woman, at one time, had been that little girl who learned to hold a cup with two hands, had learned to stand up, sea-legged, five tiny fingers on the coffee table.

  Girls like Gracie. Two years earlier, Julian Matisse had raped and murdered a young woman named Marygrace Devlin.

  Gracie Devlin was nineteen years old the day she was killed. She had curly brown hair that fell in soft ringlets to her shoulders, a light dusting of freckles. She was a slight young woman, a freshman at Villanova. She favored peasant skirts and Indian jewelry and nocturnes by Chopin. She died on a frigid January night in a filthy, abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia.

  And now, by some profane twist of justice, the man who took her dignity and her life was out of prison. Julian Matisse had been sentenced to twenty-five years to life and he was being released after two years.

  Two years.

  The grass had only grown fully on Gracie's grave this past spring.

  Matisse was a small-time pimp, a sadist of the first order. Before Gra- cie Devlin, he had spent three and a half years in prison for cutting a woman who had refused his advances. Using a box cutter, he had slashed her face so savagely that she had required ten hours of surgery to repair the muscle damage, and nearly four hundred stitches.

  Following the box cutter attack, when Matisse was released from Curran-Fromhold prison-after serving only forty months of a ten-year sentence-it didn't take long for him to graduate to homicide. Byrne and his partner Jimmy Purify had liked Matisse for the murder of a Center City waitress named Janine Tillm
an, but they were never able to find any physical evidence tying him to the crime. Her body was found in Harrow- gate Park, stabbed and mutilated. She had been abducted from an underground parking lot on Broad Street. She had been sexually assaulted both pre- and postmortem.

  An eyewitness from the parking lot came forward and picked Matisse out of a photo lineup. The witness was an elderly woman named Mar- jorie Samms. Before they could find Matisse, Marjorie Samms disappeared. A week later they found her floating in the Delaware River.

  Supposedly Matisse had been staying with his mother after his release from Curran-Fromhold. Detectives staked out Matisse's mother's apartment, but he never showed. The case went cold.

  Byrne knew that he would see Matisse again one day.

  Then, two years ago, on a freezing January night, a 911 call came in that a young woman was being attacked in an alleyway behind an abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia. Byrne and Jimmy were eating dinner a block away and took the call. By the time they reached the scene, the alley was empty, but a blood trail led them inside.

  When Byrne and Jimmy entered the theater, they found Gracie on the stage, alone. She had been brutally beaten. Byrne would never forget the tableau-Gracie's limp form on the stage in that frigid theater, steam rising from her body, her life force departing. While the EMS rescue was on the way, Byrne frantically tried to give her CPR. She had breathed once, a slight exhalation of air that had gone into his lungs, the existence leaving her body, entering his. Then, with a slight shudder, she died in his arms. Marygrace Devlin lived nineteen years, two months, and three days.

  The Crime Scene Unit found a fingerprint on the scene. It belonged to Julian Matisse. With a dozen detectives on the case, and more than a little intimidation of the low-life crowd with whom Julian Matisse consorted, they found Matisse huddling in a closet in a burned-out row house on Jefferson Street, where they also found a glove covered in Gracie Devlin's blood. Byrne had to be restrained.

  Matisse was tried and convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in the state penitentiary at Greene County.

  After Gracie's murder, Byrne walked around for many months with the belief that Gracie's breath was still inside him, that her strength impelled him to do his job. For a long time, he felt as if it were the only clean part of him, the only piece of him that had not been sullied by the city.

  Now Matisse was out, walking the streets, his face to the sun. The thought made Kevin Byrne sick. He dialed Paul DiCarlo's number.

  "DiCarlo."

  "Tell me I heard your message wrong."

  "Wish I could, Kevin."

  "What happened?"

  "You know about Phil Kessler?"

  Phil Kessler had been a homicide detective for twenty-two years, a divisional detective ten years before that, a loose cannon who more than once had put a fellow detective in jeopardy with his inattention to detail or ignorance of procedure or general lack of nerve.

  There were always a few guys in the Homicide Unit who were not very good around dead bodies, and they usually would do whatever they had to do to avoid going out to a crime scene. They made themselves available to go get warrants, round up and transport witnesses, work stakeouts. Kessler was just this sort of detective. He liked the idea of being a homicide detective, but the actual homicide itself freaked him out.

  Byrne had worked only one job with Kessler as his primary partner, the case of a girl found in an abandoned gas station in North Philly. It turned out to be an overdose, not a homicide, and Byrne couldn't get away from the man fast enough.

  Kessler had retired a year ago. Byrne had heard that the man had late- stage pancreatic cancer.

  "I heard he was sick," Byrne said. "I don't know much more than that."

  "Well, the word is he doesn't have more than a few months," DiCarlo said. "Maybe not even that long."

  As much as Byrne didn't like Phil Kessler, he didn't wish such a painful end on anyone. "I still don't know what this has to do with Julian Matisse."

  "Kessler went to the DA and told her that he and Jimmy Purify planted the bloody glove on Matisse. He gave a sworn statement."

  The room began to spin. Byrne had to steady himself. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

  "I'm only telling you what he said, Kevin."

  "And you believe him?"

  "Well, number one, it's not my case. Number two, the Homicide Unit here is looking into it. And three, no. I don't believe him. Jimmy was the most stand-up cop I ever knew."

  "Then why does this have traction?"

  DiCarlo hesitated. Byrne read the pause as meaning something even worse was coming. How was that possible? He found out. "Kessler had a second bloody glove, Kevin. He turned it over. The gloves belonged to Jimmy."

  "It's pure fucking bullshit! It's a setup!"

  "I know it. You know it. Anybody who ever rode with Jimmy knows it. Unfortunately, Conrad Sanchez is representing Matisse."

  Jesus, Byrne thought. Conrad Sanchez was a legend in the public defender's office, a world-class obstructionist, one of the few who'd decided long ago to make a career out of legal aid. Now in his fifties, he had been a public defender for more than twenty-five years. "Is Matisse's mother still alive?"

  "I don't know."

  Byrne never got a handle on Matisse's relationship with his mother, Edwina. He'd had his suspicions, though. When they were investigating Gracie's murder, they obtained a search warrant for her apartment. Matisse's room was decorated like a little boy's room: cowboy shades on the lamps, Star Wars posters on the walls, a Spider-Man bedspread.

  "So he's out?"

  "Yeah," DiCarlo said. "They released him two weeks ago pending the appeal."

  "Two weeks? Why the hell didn't I read about it?"

  "This is not exactly a shining moment in the commonwealth's history. Sanchez found a sympathetic judge."

  "Do they have him on a monitor?"

  "No."

  "This fucking city." Byrne slammed his hand into the drywall, caving it in. There goes the security deposit, he thought. He didn't feel even a slight ripple of pain. Not at that moment, anyway. "Where's he staying?"

  "I don't know. We sent a pair of detectives out to his last-known, just to show him a little muscle, but he's in the wind."

  "That's just great," Byrne said.

  "Listen, I've got to be in court, Kevin. I'll call you later and we'll plot a strategy. Don't worry. We'll put him back. This charge against Jimmy is bullshit. House of cards."

  Byrne hung up, rose slowly, painfully to his feet. He grabbed his cane and walked across the living room. He looked out the window, watched the kids and their parents on the street.

  For a long time, Byrne had thought that evil was a relative thing; that all sorts of evil walked the earth, each in its own shoes. Then he saw Gra- cie Devlin's body, and knew that the man who had done that monstrous thing was the embodiment of evil. All that hell would allow on this earth.

  Now, after contemplating a day and a week and a month and a lifetime with nothing to do, Byrne had moral imperatives in front of him. All of a sudden there were people he had to see, things he had to do, regardless of how much pain he was in. He walked into the bedroom, pulled open the top drawer of his dresser. He saw Gracie's handkerchief, the small pink silk square.

  There is a terrible memory in this cloth, he thought. It had been in Gracie's pocket when she was murdered. Gracie's mother had insisted Byrne take it the day Matisse was sentenced. He removed it from the drawer and-her screams echo in his head her warm breath enters his body her blood washes over him hot and glossy in the frigid night air-stepped back, his pulse now slamming in his ears, his mind deep in denial that what he had just felt was a recurrence of a frightful power he believed was part of his past.

  The prescience was back.

  Melanie Devlin stood at the small barbecue on the tiny back patio of her row house on Emily Street. The smoke rose lazily from the rusting grill, mingling with the thick, humid air. A long-empty bird feede
r sat atop the crumbling back wall. The tiny terrace, like most so-called backyards in Philly, was barely big enough for two people. Somehow she had managed to fit a Weber grill, a pair of sanded wrought-iron chairs, and a small table on it.

  In the two years since Byrne had seen Melanie Devlin, she had gained thirty pounds or so. She wore a yellow short set-stretch shorts and a horizontal-striped tank top-but it was not a cheerful yellow. It was not the yellow of daffodils and marigolds and buttercups. It was instead an angry yellow, a yellow that did not welcome the sunshine but rather attempted to drag it into her shattered life. Her hair was short, perfunctorily cut for summer. Her eyes were the color of weak coffee in the midday sun.

  Now in her midforties, Melanie Devlin had accepted the burden of sorrow as a constant in her life. She did not fight it any longer. Sadness was her mantle.

  Byrne had called and said he was in the neighborhood. He had told her nothing further.

  "You sure you can't stay for dinner?" she asked.

  "I have to get back," Byrne said. "But thanks for the offer."

  Melanie was preparing ribs on the grill. She poured a good amount of salt into her palm, sprinkled it on the meat. Then repeated it. She looked at Byrne, as if to apologize. "I can't taste anything anymore."

  Byrne knew what she meant. He wanted to establish a dialogue, though, so he responded. If they chatted for a while, it would make it easier to tell her what he had to tell her. "What do you mean?"

  "Since Gracie… died, I lost my sense of taste. Crazy, huh? One day, it just disappeared." She dumped more salt on the ribs, quickly, as if in penance. "Now I have to put salt on everything. Ketchup, hot sauce, mayonnaise, sugar. I can't taste food without it." She waved a hand at her figure, explaining her weight gain. Her eyes began to swell with tears. She wiped them away with the back of a hand.

  Byrne remained silent. He had observed so many people deal with grief, each in their own way. How many times had he seen women clean their houses over and over after a loss to violence? They fluffed the pillows endlessly, made and remade the beds. Or how many times had he seen men wax their cars beyond reason, or mow their lawns every day? Grief stalks the human heart slowly. People often feel that, if they remain in motion, they might outrun it.