Shutter Man

by Richard Montanari

  10

  Anjelica Leary caught the number 40 SEPTA at the corner of 24th and South. She only had the four blocks to go, and thought about walking, but her sciatica was acting up, she’d forgotten her umbrella and it looked like rain.

  If it wasn’t one thing, it was everything else.

  There was a time when nothing could have stopped her, a time when she took in the waists of her dresses and slacks instead of letting them out, a time when she would leave the house on a sixty-degree day without a sweater.

  There was even a time, in her sixty-eight years, when she would field the advances of the corner boys, turn around and throw them back a line, cutting them off at the knees.

  Now she seemed to be cold all the time. The corner boys were old men.

  She mercifully found a seat at the front of the bus. There was something sticky on the floor, a small shiny pool of brown. She had to sit with her feet to the side, but it was better than treading whatever this was around with her all day, especially on her nurse’s whites, about which she was fastidious. She often thought that there were two things people remembered about you: your shoes and your breath. Her work shoes were always gleaming white, even in dead of winter, and she would buy breath mints before she’d buy food.

  The man next to her smelled of garlic and gasoline.

  Good Lord, she thought. Was there ever a longer day?

  Anjelica noticed that someone had left the two front sections of the Inquirer on the seat to her left. She discreetly picked them up, folded them and slipped them into her tote. She still liked to read the paper, but hadn’t subscribed in years. Every penny saved.

  While the bus waited to get around road construction, Anjelica glanced at her watch. She was ten minutes away from being late. If there was one thing in which she took pride–and, indeed, insisted upon in everyone she knew–it was punctuality.

  As a home health-care worker she had done many jobs over the years. General care, medication management, respiratory therapy, wound management. Sadly, the days of lugging big oxygen tanks or oxygenators up the stairs were behind her. She was, though, still a licensed practical nurse in fine standing, and with that came a number of responsibilities not listed on the job description. These days, in addition to wellness checks, checking vitals and adjusting meds, she had become much more than a care-giver to the twenty or so patients on her rounds. Somehow, despite her efforts to resist, she had become a confessor, a confidante, a co-conspirator in all manners of the heart and eternal soul.

  And, mostly, a friend.

  When she’d left the clinical environment of the U of Penn and begun home health-care work twenty-two years earlier, she’d found herself caring too much, even more so than she had in hospital work. In a large hospital, it never got quiet enough to dwell too much on your emotions. Most of the time people were discharged–mostly head first, but sometimes feet first–before you got too tangled. As hard as she tried, she could not completely wall her heart from the trespasses of her patients. Some of them had even called her at home, in the middle of the night, but only because she had given them her number.

  Jack Permutter was eighty-one years old, a widower half his life, having never remarried after his wife Claudia died of colon cancer at forty-three. Anjelica herself was twice married, but had long since considered that she was the type of person who fell hard only once, and that was enough. She often thought she had been luckier than most in this.

  Her first husband Johnny, the love of her life, had treated her like a queen, had never missed an anniversary or a birthday; an emerald-eyed charmer who took her down the shore every year on their wedding anniversary, treating her to a weekend in Ocean City and seaside dinners of crabs and beer.

  Johnny got his cancer from asbestos and wasted away to nothing within three months, leaving this earth a husk of the young man she’d met and fallen for at the age of fifteen at a block party in Point Breeze. He was thirty-three.

  She’d looked long and hard for a replacement, had even taken to the Center City hotel bars one summer, but there were none who made her shine like Johnny. None ever would. For a long spell all the men seemed to be either too old or too young.

  Her second husband, Tom Leary, had been a mistake. A nearly fatal mistake: an ill-tempered drunk who more than once raised a hand to her. Anjelica had married him out of sheer loneliness. And the health insurance, truth be shouted. It was one of the reasons she still kept his name. The marriage lasted less than three years. The bitter taste lingered still.

  If she saw Tom Leary on this day, she wouldn’t piss on his head to put out the fire.

  She got off the bus at 20th Street, walked the half-block to Rodman Street. The rain held off until she stepped inside the apartment building. Tiny blessings.

  By the time she reached the second-floor landing, she had already begun to prepare herself for Jack Permutter. The truth was, he was no more special in God’s eyes than any other of her patients. In fact, he could be downright irascible much of the time, but never mean. It was just that he’d found a way to steal into her heart when she wasn’t looking. One of the reasons was that he did something not one of her patients over the past twenty-two years had ever done.

  He always made her lunch.

  The official diagnosis–one of them, anyway; he also had prostate cancer–was chronic pulmonary obstructive disease.

  Anjelica knocked twice, then twice again. It was another of her affectations when it came to Jack. He had come to expect it. Once, when she forgot, he didn’t come to the door, and she feared the worst. She then remembered the signal, waited ten long minutes on the steps, then retried. Two knocks. Two knocks. He answered.

  They never spoke of it.

  On this day Jack opened the door looking measurably worse than he had three weeks earlier.

  ‘Hey, Annie.’ His smile brightened his face, the hallway, the day.

  Jack Permutter was one of the two people she let call her Annie.

  ‘Hey yourself, sailor.’

  ‘Where’s your umbrella?’

  ‘Left it at home.’

  Anjelica stepped fully inside, unbuttoned her cardigan. Jack helped her off with it. He smoothed it, hung it on a hook behind the door, closed and latched the door.

  Anjelica was a keenly observant person, and had always had the ability to take in a place in its entirety in a glance, not missing a detail. She always knew what to expect at Jack Permutter’s small, cluttered place, but it always tugged at her heart. The house smelled of old age and malady. Ointments, unwashed clothes, mildew, the sweet, doughy redolence of budget microwaved meals.

  The table next to the bed was crowded with pill vials, dust bunnies, half-full bottles of water. Some of the bottles were so old, so many times refilled, that Anjelica wondered if the brands were still available.

  Whenever she could she would buy a few bottles of water and try to sneak them onto the end table, even going so far as opening them, dumping out a few inches, hoping Jack wouldn’t notice. She had many times tried to explain to him that bottles could only be refilled so many times before they became more bacteria than water, but to no avail.

  She listened to his heart and lungs, took his blood pressure and pulse.

  When they finished, Jack quickly buttoned his shirt, right down to the cuffs. He was a shy man, not particularly vain, but because of his feelings for Anjelica, the indelicacy of sitting without a shirt on for even a few moments made him uncomfortable.

  Anjelica made busy work of her notes, checked the oxygen supply. All was as it should be.

  ‘I made some lunch,’ Jack said. ‘If you’re hungry.’

  It had gotten to the point where Anjelica didn’t eat breakfast on the days when she knew she was going to see Jack. In the three years she had been caring for him, he had never failed to make her lunch. Most times, as today, it was a simple affair: canned soup, lunchmeat on house-brand white bread, a pair of cookies at the end, instant coffee in rinsed plastic cups.

  All
the time she’d known Jack, she’d never seen, or heard of, anyone else visiting this house. There was no residue of acquaintance. Jack Permutter was alone in this world.

  ‘Starved.’

  As always, he held the chair for her, then slowly stepped across the small kitchen, retrieved the pot from the stove. He ladled soup–America’s Choice Chicken Rice–into their bowls, returned the pot, then reached into the refrigerator and took out two plates, already prepared with sandwiches and potato salad.

  About halfway through lunch, he asked:

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I met the mayor?’ He dabbed his lips with a powder-blue paper napkin. ‘It was Wilson Goode in those days, not like now.’

  Whenever Jack began a sentence with Did I ever tell you, the answer was always yes. That was the truth, at any rate.

  What Anjelica always said was:

  ‘No. I don’t believe you have.’

  ‘Mind you, I was a young man then, I was a sailor, fit and strong. There was this time…’

  Anjelica smiled, and took a cookie from her plate.

  After leaving Jack Permutter’s home and company, Anjelica had just one more patient to see, a woman named Sarah Graves. A retired schoolteacher, Sarah was eighty-five, and in addition to her hypertension and anemia, she was recovering from an arterial valve replacement.

  Unlike Jack Permutter, Sarah rarely spoke, rarely tried to engage Anjelica in even casual conversation. Despite Anjelica’s many attempts to involve her, she could see the woman slipping slowly from this life to a place deep inside where no light could enter, a dark place of the heart.

  Anjelica saw a stalled life everywhere she looked: bookmarks unmoved in her bedside reading, towels at precisely the same angle on the towel racks, the TV channel unchanged.

  When taking Sarah’s blood pressure, Anjelica would often look at her face, see the young woman inside, the bright and energetic woman who taught grade-school children for more than thirty years. When Anjelica had begun to care for her, two years earlier, Sarah had told her that she still dreamed of one day visiting 41 Brighton Square in Dublin, the birthplace of James Joyce.

  That dream had died, along with the will to sleep in its embrace.

  As Anjelica prepared to leave, she looked at the woman sitting by the window, so small and frail in the pale afternoon light.

  She wondered if she would stop by for her next visit and find the place empty, the bedcovers gone, the closets and cupboards cold and hollow, the only warmth left the threadbare afghan over Sarah’s thin legs, the only trace of a life the faint smell of lilac, a brittle silence.

  She slipped out, softly closing the door.

  Anjelica Leary knew all about death, having long ago made her bargain with it. Death was not a great horned beast. Death was a thing that stepped silently from the shadows, in the blackest wood, and stole your final breath.

  11

  Jessica sat at her paper-besieged desk, in her cardboard-box-besieged office. She’d made ten phone calls in ten minutes, managing to spread that morning’s Inquirer across her lap to catch the olive oil and vinegar peppers she would surely spill from her hoagie while she tried to set a speed record for lunch.

  Now all she had to do was write and rewrite her closing argument.

  She had one more witness to call: the criminologist who had processed the clothing at the lab, who would testify that Earl Carter’s DNA as well as Lucio DiBlasio’s blood were on all three items.

  Game. Set. Match.

  Jessica took a big bite from her sandwich, wiped her hands, turned to her laptop. She sensed a presence at the door to her office. She turned to see it was Rodney Coyne, Judge Gipson’s clerk.

  She tried to say something but was thwarted by the hoagie. Rodney understood. He’d seen many an ADA eat on the run. Sometimes literally while running.

  Jessica scratched a word on her legal pad: Plea?

  Rodney shook his head. ‘Better.’

  He worked the moment for all it was worth.

  ‘Hoffman is putting Carter on the stand.’

  In direct examination of Earl Carter, Hoffman–who was surely allowing Carter to take the stand against his best interest–began by eliciting the boilerplate background information on the defendant. Jessica felt like stipulating it all, but that, of course, was never done.

  As expected, Carter was the son of an absentee father and an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother. He was beaten repeatedly and often by her series of alcoholic, drug-abusing boyfriends, got into trouble in his early teens, did a bunch of time in juvenile facilities only to graduate to felonies in his late teens, spending eight of the ten years of his twenties in either Curran-Fromhold or the state equivalent.

  In just under thirty minutes, Hoffman rested.

  Before her cross-examination of the defendant, Jessica had the mannequin returned to the courtroom, specifically to a point just behind Earl Carter’s left shoulder. It produced better-than-expected results. More than once Carter turned his head, as if someone was gaining on him.

  Jessica stood at the table, flipped a few pages in her legal pad. Finally she introduced herself and read from the list of items taken from the back room at DiBlasio’s.

  ‘Among other items there was stolen a Dell Inspiron laptop computer, a Grundig shortwave radio, and a pair of women’s rings.’

  She put down her pad, retrieved two large photographs, walked them over to the easel, displayed them. One photograph was of an older-model Grundig Satellit 700 radio sitting on a desk in the back room of DiBlasio’s, right next to the safe. The other, taken in situ by CSU, was of the radio on the floor of the closet at Earl Carter’s apartment, right next to the recovered clothing.

  She pointed at the photographs. ‘Do you recognize this item, Mr Carter?’

  Carter cast a quick glance at the easel, back, smirked. ‘Looks like two items to me.’

  ‘I assure you it’s the same item.’ Jessica said. ‘This radio was found in your apartment on the day of your arrest. Can you tell us how it came to be in your possession?’

  Carter pointed at the easel. ‘That radio?’

  ‘That very one.’

  ‘I bought it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘From some guy.’

  ‘My question was where, not from whom, Mr Carter,’ Jessica said. ‘But I’ll work with you on this. Where, and I mean exactly where, were you standing when you allegedly bought this radio?’

  ‘On Fourth Street.’

  ‘Fourth and what?’

  Carter looked at the ceiling for a few seconds, cooking his answer. ‘Diamond.’

  ‘Which corner?’

  ‘Which corner?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There are four of them, if memory serves.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Someone on the jury coughed. If someone on the jury coughed, it meant they were sick or not buying it. Jessica chose the latter.

  ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Remember how much you allegedly paid for the radio?’

  ‘Maybe fifty or so.’

  Jessica mugged. ‘Not bad for this model in such good shape,’ she said. ‘Now, who’s the guy who allegedly sold it to you?’

  Another shrug. ‘Some guy, you know? There are all kinds of them people around there.’

  Jessica raised an eyebrow, glanced at the jury, back at the defendant, thinking: Please say the word.

  ‘Them people?’ she asked. ‘Who is them people?’

  Carter tried to stare her down. He was a lightweight. In her time on the street, Jessica had learned how to stare down a fire hydrant. She’d learned from the best, Kevin Byrne.

  ‘Thieves,’ he said, perhaps believing he’d covered himself. ‘That’s who them people is.’

  ‘I think we’re getting somewhere, Mr Carter,’ she said. ‘What you’re telling the court is that you admit that when you purchased this radio, from a person unknown to you, you were aware that the merchandise might have been stolen. Is that correct?’

  �
�I didn’t ask the man if it was stolen or not.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Jessica said. ‘Seeing as how them people can be.’

  Rourke Hoffman hadn’t moved this fast in years. ‘Objection.’

  ‘Withdrawn.’ Jessica took a few moments, tapped the photograph of the radio in Carter’s closet.

  ‘If we can locate this mystery thief, perhaps we can locate some of the other items that were stolen from the safe at the same time. Items, the people will freely concede, that were not found in Mr Carter’s possession that day.’

  She picked up her legal pad, referred to it once more. ‘Those additional items being a Dell Inspiron laptop computer, three hundred dollars in American Express travelers checks, two women’s rings, one emerald, one ruby, two Nikon DSLR cameras—’

  Carter let out a snort of laughter.

  Jessica stopped reading, looked up.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I say something funny?’

  Carter shook his head.

  ‘Weren’t no damn cameras. That’s an insurance scam right there,’ he said. ‘Y’all ought to be looking into that, not me.’

  Jessica felt a staccato heartbeat in her chest, the kind that started fast and sped up, the same one she recalled from her days as a police officer when she had a suspect on the ground, cuffs locked.

  Breathe, Jess.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Could you repeat that?’

  Carter’s eyes went cold, flat-lined. Jessica saw that the judge was about to instruct the defendant to answer. She held up a finger.

  ‘Thank goodness we live in a country where proceedings like this are preserved for posterity.’ She crossed over to the court reporter.

  The reporter, trying to keep her smile in check, read:

  ‘“Weren’t no damn cameras. That’s an insurance scam right there. Y’all ought to be looking into that, not me.”’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jessica returned to the state’s table. She went for the nomination. Hapless, sincere, with a grace note of compassion.