The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  “Just because the guy’s got an agenda doesn’t mean the case is no good. You know that’s what they’ll say. Criminals flip on each other. And we help them do it. Christ, Danny, it’s what we do every damn day. Derrick Leon was a cop killer.” Through the phone Danny could hear John moving, his voice getting low, like he was afraid someone else would overhear. “If you start opening up old shit? Get defense lawyers opening up old cases? Man, that’s a place nobody wants to go.”

  “Are you going to back me on this, John? I need to know where you are.”

  “I think all that boy-wonder shit messed with your head. You don’t have the years in yet, and you think it was all too easy for you, and maybe you’re right. But these are good cases against bad guys. We sent Derrick Leon to death row and the fucker belongs there. I’ll tell you something else, Danny. My name’s on those cases, too.”

  “I just, I don’t know.” There was a long pause. “I want to talk to the Captain about this.”

  “Are you sure you have enough to do that?”

  “I just want to talk to the man.”

  “Yeah? Then ask yourself this, kid. Does he want to talk to you?”

  . . .

  Orlando was standing at a pay phone in Chinatown, one of the last ones in the city, it seemed like. For a while he had tried to get a stolen pay card to work, but it was bullshit. He had finally taken a pipe to a Coke machine outside a muffler place and run away with a couple of bucks in quarters.

  “Bob, man, how’s it going?”

  There was a long pause. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, man, don’t—”

  “I wish I knew who this was, on the phone, but I don’t.”

  “Bob, wait.”

  “If I knew who this was, I’d tell him to get his head out of his ass and stop pestering people before he gets a tire iron wrapped around his nuts.”

  “Jesus, don’t say—”

  “But who this is I have no fucking idea, so I got nothing to say.”

  The phone went dead. He stood back with the receiver in his hand for a minute before smacking it down hard on the cradle. He turned and was rocking on his heels, trying not to freak out any of the nice Chinese ladies on their way to work, when he saw Parkman Sr. come out of a place down the block between a restaurant with an aquarium in the window and a place full of that Hello Kitty stuff that was like crack for preteen girls.

  Orlando moved fast, catching him as he stood in the street with his keys, looking up at the coiled eels moving languidly at the bottom of a murky tank.

  “Mr. Parkman.”

  He looked up startled, as if caught at something. He took a few steps farther down the block, then turned and grabbed Orlando’s jacket.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Whoa. Hands off.” Orlando smacked at the hand and Parkman released him, but poked him hard in the chest.

  “What the fuck did you take from my son’s room?”

  “Nothing. What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, come on. I’m not a mark, junkie. Just give back the stuff you took and I won’t call the cops.”

  “Look, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Why the fuck would I take anything when you’re going to pay me?”

  “Yeah, I’m not paying you shit now, am I? That camera alone is worth almost four thousand bucks.”

  “Camera?”

  “Please, you can’t even lie right.” He turned and started walking again, shaking his head. “I would think that would be the one thing you’re good at.”

  “Mr. Parkman, just wait, just wait, okay? I’m telling you this is important.”

  Parkman stopped but didn’t turn. Orlando caught up and talked to his side, just as happy not to be in the man’s eyes. “I didn’t take a camera, okay? If the camera is missing, it was taken before I got there. Or it’s just somewhere else, at your son’s school or something.”

  “Without the case? Please.” He didn’t turn but kept looking down the block. It was like a movie where two spies are talking, hoping not to be seen in conversation. “Look, this was a mistake. I just wanted to figure out what the truth was, but I don’t think you know the difference.”

  “Wait, when did you notice it was missing?”

  “Just stay away from me and stay away from my home. And my son’s friends.”

  “His friends? Did someone say something?”

  The older man kept walking, dropping his head and holding his hands up. Orlando turned and drifted back toward Race. He turned to see the restaurant where Parkman had been eating, but it wasn’t a restaurant. The restaurant’s entrance was a few steps from the street in a little alcove. The door he’d come out of was red and flush with the wall, and next to it was a small, cracked window with neon ideograms and a small sign in English that read MASSAGE.

  CHAPTER

  14

  The lights in the parking lot came on silently, glowing a faint green and then brightening, though Danny thought the light they gave off added a kind of yellow haze so that nothing in the lot was any clearer for the electricity expended. Across Lincoln Drive the woods were almost black in the oncoming night. It was late, and there were gaps in the traffic, and in the long silences he could hear things moving. Leaves rattling, a stick breaking with a pop that echoed off the closed face of the building. What could be out there in those woods? What animals were big enough to make that much noise so close to the city? He was sitting on the hood of his car staring hard into the pockets of black shadow in the trees when the Captain came out and stood, his keys in his hand and his briefcase under his arm. He took his hat off when he saw Danny sitting there, showing his thinning gray hair in tight curls, a rivulet of sweat disappearing into his collar from behind his right ear.

  “Danny, what’s up?”

  “You didn’t return my call, so I thought I’d sit out here awhile.”

  “It’s been a bitch of a day. Want to go get a drink?”

  “I just want to make sure we’re doing everything right.”

  “So do I, Danny. We all do. But that’s not always possible.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t think I feel good about—”

  The Captain shook his head, putting his hat back on. “I know what you think. I talked to John Rogan.”

  “So you took John’s call.”

  “He’s your friend. I’d like to think I am, too.”

  Danny stood up, swaying a little. “I don’t think Darnell Burns shot those kids.”

  “If that’s true, his lawyer will make the case at trial. That’s what he gets paid to do. That’s how all this works.” He laid a hand on his neck and suddenly looked ten years older, the hairs on the back of his hand tipped with white. “We don’t have to say what we think. What we suppose. We have a gun that did the shooting in the living room of one suspect, marked up with the prints of another suspect. We have confessions—”

  “The confessions are bullshit.”

  “We have confessions from the suspects. Statements they signed. Of course they wish they hadn’t signed them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true.”

  “Asa Carmody. He set this all up somehow.” Danny sat back on the car hood, looking distracted. “I can’t . . .” He looked into his hands. “I can’t get it all straight, but I know none of this is how it looks.”

  “Are you all right, Danny?”

  “There’s a kid going in the ground tomorrow, a kid I talked to. The brother of a friend of mine. I was this close to him. Like we are now. Across the table. I keep trying to remember the look in his eye. I can’t prove anything.”

  “Then that’s the case you should be working, right? You think this Carmody is the man pulling the strings, make that case. But I think you should go home now. I think you should get a drink and let it all go and come at it fresh tomorrow.”

  “You know how it is? I keep seeing him in my mind’s eye, you know? The kid. Trying to remember exactly what he said. How he said it. Wondering if he
was trying to signal me or something.”

  “Go home, Danny.”

  “I can’t look at her. I can’t face the family.”

  The captain closed the gap between them, put his hand on Danny’s arm. “Let it go, son. You start waiting for certainty, you’ll never leave the house. These people you’re worried about? Darnell and his friends? These are not good people. They’ve all been locked up a dozen times. Whatever you’re trying to protect them from they already chose for themselves. Over and over. We ask questions, we listen to the answers. Sometimes the answers aren’t what we want.”

  Asa looked out at American Street from the office window of an old garage he’d bought from a cousin who’d moved to Tucson. The place was empty but for a few tables, a broken-back couch, a mattress on the floor in front of him, the ancient blue steel desk he sat at now. He watched the trolley go by, looking small and antique, wondering how the hell it could make sense for the city to run the damn things.

  He liked American Street up here, north of Diamond on a block of garages and closed shops. It was wide, the neighborhoods running flat and empty north and south, and he could see for blocks. Anybody who wasn’t about his business would stick out. On the desk a police scanner chattered, the sound muted.

  Through the open office door he could see the two cases lying in a square of sunlight—the silver case with his money and the black case with the bullet hole through the middle. Asa stuck his thumb in his book, a slim, greenish thing with a broken spine he’d picked up from a table on South Street ten years before. The Science of Getting Rich. There were flags of red tape protruding from some of the pages, places where Asa had underlined passages, and he was trying to memorize the whole thing in little chunks.

  He looked at the street and murmured to himself. “All force begins to be exerted in that direction, all things begin to move toward you.” He opened the book again, glanced at the page, and closed it. “Desire is a manifestation of power. All the promises are unto them that believe, and them only.” He laid the book down and drummed his fingers, then picked up a bulky, rust-browned screwdriver from the desk.

  He crossed to the case with the dope, sticking the screwdriver under the hasp and prying it off the case with a dry crack so that pieces of black plastic catapulted into the dark corners of the garage. Inside were flat, dusty bricks wrapped in brown plastic. Asa imagined, as he always did when he saw bundled dope, some little clearing in a sandy place. Dirty dun-colored buildings teeming with women in white cotton, kneading a wet slurry with small brown hands in an oppressive heat. Men slouching in doorways, automatic rifles hanging on long straps. The men in sandals, the women barefoot. Radios going, hissing out some tinny rendition of old Europop. The men smoking and looking bored, trying to maintain that casually brutal distance that gunmen all work to project. The women chatting to each other; it’s just work in the heat. Nearby men weigh money, the way they do in the bulk dope trade—stacks of bundled currency cycled through grimy old scales while a long man with a milky eye makes notations on a clipboard. The women talk about their children, boyfriends, they push at their lank hair with the backs of their tiny hands in unconsciously erotic gestures, and in Asa’s mind they’re a confusion of vaguely Asian and nonspecific Latin women in their twenties wearing white cotton undershirts, so that the natural eroticism of the women is all mixed up in his head with the vaguely arousing vision of money stacked in bundles, so much massed that it’s lost its reality as currency and become something that generates a kind of energetic heat, like an atomic pile. Somewhere nearby is a man, sitting in the shade in a wicker throne, wearing sunglasses and a brilliant guayabera shirt. A dog sits at his feet, tongue going in the heat, and the men all know better than to make eye contact with the man in the guayabera, and the women pause from the work to arch their backs and lower their long black lashes.

  He closed the case again, getting the sour smell of dirt and the faintly vinegary smell of the dope itself. There was music coming from the street, and he straightened, walked up the stairs to look out the small, streaked windows over the garage doors in time to see Chris pull his Navigator into the driveway in front of the old bays. He saw him turn the key but let the music play out a little. “The Beast” by Tech N9ne, Chris trying to get an edge off the music. To be hard, about business, whatever that meant to a kid like Chris. Probably some gilt-edged dream from a Dre video of wearing silk and drinking Cristal from the bottle. He moved his head for a minute, then finally shut it down and got out, pulling his T-shirt down in the back over the pistol and reassuring himself it was there. Asa smiled.

  He stood at the top of the open stairway to the old parts loft and let Chris come in slowly and look around before announcing himself by banging the rail so that the tall kid jumped a little and backed up.

  “Man, boss. Scared the shit out of me just then.” Chris shook his head.

  “How many times I told you not to call me that?”

  “Okay.” He dropped his head, and Asa wondered again about how easy it was to break Chris Black. His brother Shannon had been unbreakable, was always ready with “fuck you,” or to go at anybody, anytime. He’d crack bones in his hands beating their heads in. The downside was he was insane. Could only get the outline of an idea, not take a job on as his own. You told him to collect, he came back with money every time, but he smacked people around, touched other people’s women, showed the cops his ass and took whatever he wanted wherever he was.

  Shannon didn’t listen, couldn’t learn anything. He’d fuck with people, think he was being clever and coy and tell everyone his business without realizing he’d done it. He’d been locked up a dozen times, had that jailhouse radar for being disrespected that did not serve when the job called for more than smacking somebody and taking their money. It wasn’t worth cleaning up after him after a while, and when he turned up dead it was no surprise. Everybody he’d ever met, Asa knew, wanted Shannon Black dead, at least a little.

  His little brother Chris didn’t have the heart. He’d make slight moves in that direction, but it wasn’t his nature and there wasn’t anything you could do about that. Once again, Asa’d have to work with the materials at hand. It was what the great men did, all the ones he taught himself about and tried to emulate. He’d read a book about survival, all about how when the shit comes down the ones that make it are the ones who keep thinking, keep adapting, and Asa liked that because he knew he was one of those types. Since he was a little kid, he’d been the one who made it, kept thinking, kept figuring it out. Made the most of his opportunities. He’d always done it. He’d do it now.

  Ken McBride worked at a quick-lube place on Lancaster Avenue, down the street from the school. Orlando used the last of his quarters getting out there on the bus. He walked in, aware suddenly of how he might not look too bad on a pay phone in Chinatown, but out on the Main Line he stood out like a sore junkie thumb. He straightened his collar before walking in and asking for Ken. Maybe he got a lot of guys coming around that looked like Orlando, ’cause the girl behind the counter didn’t seem to notice him. She yelled into the back, and the kid came out, smiling when he saw who it was.

  “Orlando, right? You all right, man?”

  “Yeah, yeah, just been a little, um. Under the weather.”

  “Got it.” Shit, he probably did.

  He asked if he remembered seeing Geo with a camera and Ken said sure.

  “He was always filming stuff. His band. The kids at school. Marianne.”

  “Do you know if he gave it to anyone? Or sold it or something?”

  “I don’t know, man. I didn’t see him that much in the last couple months. Gimme a minute, okay?” He disappeared into the back for a minute, then went outside through one of the bays, already talking on a cell phone. Orlando walked out and stood in the sun, spooked a little by the trees and grass and knife-edge flower beds at the curb.

  “You know, this is like the nicest garage I’ve ever seen.” He saw a woman in a suit talking on an iPhone. Started
adding up things in his head; what he could get for her bag, her phone. The chain around Ken’s neck, the little TV on the counter inside. It was the calculus he did all day. He couldn’t shut it off.

  Ken hung up, his eyes narrowed at something he’d heard on the phone. “Main Line, man. You got to keep it nice out here.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I talked to Marianne, she said that little rat Ryan has a really nice camera that looks a lot like the one Geo had. I called the little fucker.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s with the camera? You think he filmed something?”

  “I don’t know. I think maybe he sold it.”

  “For dope.”

  “I don’t know, but it’s just weird.”

  The phone rang again, and Ken put it to his ear.

  Asa sat down on the stairs above Chris, looking down. “When are you going to tell me what happened on Broad Street?”

  “It was fucked up. The guy opened up on us. I guess he wanted the money without giving up the product.” Chris had run this line in his head a hundred times before coming to see Asa and sold it to himself with conviction, but here he was now in the king’s court and it sounded thin, even to him.

  “But you . . . persevered, huh?” Asa said, reaching for the two-bit word. One of those things he did to keep Chris off balance. Showing off from those fucking books he was always carrying around. “Kept your head and came out with the money and the man’s things, yeah?”

  Chris was wide-eyed, expecting anything but praise. “That’s right.”

  “You were lucky to get out.”

  “They shot Gerry. And Frank.”

  “Uh-huh. The OK Corral. I heard about it. You get away clean?”

  “Yeah. I think so. I don’t think, I mean, it was Frank’s car, and I dumped that in Jersey.” Actually, he’d left the car about a block from his mother’s house in Fishtown. ’Cause how the fuck was he going to get back from Jersey, and Asa would never know, so fuck him.