My Brother's Keeper (2 page)

And even in sleep, he stood over the freshly dug grave and listened, thinking he heard movement, thinking this wasn't a dream at all.

And then the scream would reach him, shrill and animal-like, calling out to him in a wailing echo that trailed off and went silent, night after night, the eyes of a child staring at him out of the darkness, out of the earth, always those same pleading eyes meeting his, her mouth sealed shut as if her lips had melted together under a layer of wax.

He recognized the face but it had been so long since he'd seen her. He'd hoped he would have forgotten. It seemed now that the chapter of his life that had defined him as a cop and her as one of the nameless victims had been suddenly reopened, the wound still not healed. But she did have a name. It was Catherine Waites and she'd been nine years old. And just lately, he'd begun thinking of her again, becoming obsessed with the dreadful event that had brought them together and the terrible confusion that followed.

The district attorney had called it a miscarriage of justice. Lou believed that also but for very different reasons. And even after his dismissal from the Philadelphia Police Department and the long separation from his family and the inevitable divorce, he still believed it. But now he wasn't remembering it right, not seeing it as it had actually occurred. His thoughts had become tangled in false memory and it was slowly suffocating him.

He recalled the face of Catherine Waites in vivid detail: the diminutive features, the slim freckled nose and dull green eyes like dusty emeralds, the reddish-blonde hair the color of honey. And yet she would sometimes drift away from him, a fading, elusive image that would escape from his mind's eye and hang just out of reach like some dim, night-time shadow.

Shaken from sleep, lying awake in his bed or more often on the couch, he tried to remember the details of that night so long ago but he couldn't seem to remember the scream. Because there wasn't one or it was a silent scream, if that's even possible. Maybe it was better that way, better to forget, better that he roll over and wish it all away.

He'd awakened cold and stunned in the night heat of a Philadelphia summer, with the air like vapor, smelling of something old, something stagnant like dirty water in the street. He'd bolted upright, the face still flashing before him, the dream replaced by the overwhelming silence of his mother's house, where he'd come back to live only a year ago, where he'd hoped the dreams would finally stop. But he'd been wrong. They hadn't stopped. They'd followed him home like a faithful dog, waiting at the edge of the bed for him to drift off.

He'd sit there in the dark, asking himself if he'd really heard the scream at all. Though it had sounded so real, how could he have heard it? What he remembered most about that night was the quiet, the overwhelming stillness that preceded his discovery of Catherine Waites pinned to the ground, a thick hand pressed ruthlessly over her lips, preventing her from uttering a sound. He was seeing it so often now, hearing it almost every night: an uninterrupted scream that would sometimes take on a musical quality, one long note that seemed to go on and on, the ringing in his ears continuing even after the screaming stopped. He would cover his face and close his eyes and if he had to go on hearing it, he thought, he would go crazy.

But even with his eyes closed, the fear he'd seen in the girl's eyes was still there. And every day that fear became all the more real as if it was a thing unto itself, a living thing that could take on any shape it desired. And that fear lived in him as well. And though he wasn't the victim, it became more than he could bear. For in the dream, the face of the child was transformed into the face of his own daughter, her eyes turned to him, beckoning him to save her, to either be saved or helped to die, knowing her life could never be the same.

And then the guilt would come, in waves like a typhoon over an unprotected beach, coming during those waking moments when he'd asked himself how self-pity came to replace the iron will he'd once admired most in himself, remembering a time when he'd worn the uniform of the Philadelphia Police Department with pride, when he'd pin a badge to his chest and fit a gun into the holster on his hip and wouldn't dare feel sorry for himself. It was possible, he feared, that his will had been permanently broken and that Lou Klein, the man, and Lou Klein, the cop, had become two very separate people, one estranged from the other.

There had been other dreams as well: dreams of falling, dropping out of the sky from some unimaginable height, unable to catch his breath as the ground came up to meet him. And dreams where he was running, his feet heavy and unwilling to obey the command of his whispering voice to move faster, faster. Running for his life, he thought now. He'd been dragging himself along a dark city sidewalk, clinging to a chain-link fence that seemed always to have him boxed in. He recognized the place. The basketball courts at Eighth and Locust, where he'd played in the Police League on Sunday nights. Though, thinking about it now, it could have been any playground in the city.

It could have been Parkside, where he'd played as a kid with his friends from Wynnefield. It could have been on Diamond, where in his last year as a cop he'd seen thirteen-year-old Sheila Foster take her last breath, bleeding out from a stray bullet while she watched her older brother dunk the ball for her cheering girlfriends.

He thought it strange that as the dreamer he was a witness to these events and not a participant, though he often awoke gasping for air, his heart pounding like a drum. These dreams weren't so hard to figure out. He'd always preferred to objectify his emotions, crumple them up like a scrap of paper and toss them into the garbage where they belonged. There were so many things he was running from, so much of his past closing in on him, the past and present on a collision course.

And now that he'd stopped running there was only the screaming child left to his dreams, though her face would no longer be that of a child, not after all these years. It would be a young woman's, maybe nineteen years old, the same age as his daughter, her hair a dirty blonde or frosted silver, her eyes opaque against the lightness of her hair. But it was that scream, real or imagined, that was a constant reminder of the incident that changed his life, ending his career as a cop. A call for help that pushed him over the edge.

The truth of the matter was that he'd saved a girl's life. There was always that. With four or five blows from a retractable steel baton he'd reduced a sexual predator into a drooling cripple. But something had happened in him as well, some change. Lou Klein had gone from being a policeman, a father and a husband, to someone else. What or who that someone else was, he still wasn't sure.

It had begun as a routine call in a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Somebody had called 911 and said they'd heard a scream, maybe the scream Lou had heard in his dreams. He'd never know. He'd been close by and he'd responded as most cops would, regardless of the fact that it had already been a very long day and he was exhausted and the insomnia that gripped him now had begun to take hold even then. He'd responded because he had to, because his conscience told him to, though he hadn't been dispatched. It wasn't his call. He could have turned down the volume on his police radio, parked behind some abandoned building and let his eyes drift shut until the end of his shift.

He had even thought about it for a second. Why not? he asked himself. After the way he'd been treated by the department, passed over for promotion, the worst assignments, pressure from above. They'd been trying to push him out for a long time and they'd made his life miserable in the process. So why go the extra mile? Why do anything at all if he didn't have to?

But he did answer the call and even as he'd searched for the address in the dark and double-parked his police car on the street, he'd had a premonition. This was the type of call that came back to haunt you, the wrong place at the wrong time, the type of call where cops got hurt. It was a feeling that stuck with him, a feeling he couldn't put his finger on, a vague apprehension that seemed to crawl around in the back of his head telling him that this day would end badly. And end badly it had.

He'd climbed the front steps of a small brick colonial and knocked lightly on the door. The shades were drawn down over the front windows. He tipped up the lid of the mailbox and reached inside, hoping to find an envelope with a name on it. There was nothing. He did find the front door slightly ajar and he entered cautiously, fingering the padded grip of his duty weapon and then unsnapping the retention strap on the holster. This shouldn't be happening, he thought. Not here. If someone had screamed, it was probably a cheerleader rooting for the local high-school football team. Anything else just didn't make sense.

Northeast Philly was a section of the city where many of the cops chose to live, a place of extended families where grandmothers could still walk to the Mayfair market and grandfathers sat at the Frankford Diner passing around pictures of their grandchildren. Pictures they kept on the front of their refrigerators: their children's children in various stages of development, smiling toothless smiles, bar mitzvah pictures and graduation pictures, all held together by an assortment of magnets they'd brought up with them from Florida, plastic-coated magnets advertising the local plumber, a landscaper, a funeral home.

As he made his way through the house, through an outdated kitchen to the back door, he was already talking himself out of it, hoping the only thing he'd find was an old alley cat rummaging through an open garbage can. On the back porch there were open garbage cans and he had seen a cat peering at him from the shadows. The yard was surrounded by high green bushes in a perfect square. And in the grass, not far from the set of steep wooden steps, he'd seen her.

In a fleeting instant all his fears seemed drawn together into a great black hole. There was a moment of hesitation followed by a realization that he no longer had the luxury of delay. He forced his mind to focus. He had no time to think. For Catherine Waites, with whom he would be inexorably linked from that point forward, time was running out as she lay on her back, stunned as a fawn in a lion's jaw.

How many times had he relived it? As many times as she must have in the years following? He doubted it. All he saw at first was the broad back of a man, a monster with no neck and a bald, dimpled head and legs like tree trunks that seemed to blot out the girl's body. His hand was over her mouth, leaving only those wide glassy eyes looking for somewhere to go, looking at the darkening sky as if it could bear witness to the crimes against her, looking to the sagging porch and to the bushes and to the fence behind the bushes and then to him.

If his presence had elicited some faint glimmer of hope in those eyes, she didn't show it. Nor had she given him away. If he'd contemplated what he was about to do, he might have taken some other course of action. He couldn't remember how many times he'd hit the man. He'd approached silently from behind and struck without warning, aiming for the back of the man's head, shiny with sweat. The doctors at the hospital said it was a miracle the man was even alive. But Lou hadn't seen him as a man. He was more like an insect beneath his shoe, a parasite, and if there were such a thing as miracles, Lou thought, that thing would have died right then and there.

His name was Stegman and when they wheeled him into the courthouse, paralyzed from the waist down, and the charges against him were dropped by the state because of alleged police brutality, Lou knew he could no longer participate in the broken system of justice he'd been a part his whole life. His badge and gun had already been taken from him but that had been a mere formality, a symbolic gesture that meant nothing to him then and even less now. He'd been emptied, his soul still lost in that backyard. And if any part of him had survived it had been lost in that courtroom. He'd kept a partial pension but the chapter of his life as a Philadelphia police officer was over.

TWO

C
ars flew down Remington Road, avoiding the traffic on Haverford Avenue. They did it every morning, trying to beat the rush into the city. Jimmy Patterson and the other residents of Remington Road, people who had lived on that street their whole lives, who'd inherited homes from their parents and were raising their own kids on that very same street, were sick of calling the police and asking why there were so many cars going down their street, a narrow winding road in a residential neighborhood. They were sick of the cops' condescending attitude, telling them there was nothing they could do and that no laws were being broken. They'd hang up the phone in disgust and look out their front windows at the cars zipping by, coming dangerously close to the line of parked cars on both sides of the street. They'd look nervously at their children waiting for the bus.

The procession of bumper-to-bumper traffic moved along like a long passenger train snaking from one stop to the next. The school bus would come slowly down the street and cars would squeeze past it, ignoring the flashing red lights and the blinking stop sign and the group of irate young mothers huddled together on the cracked slate sidewalk who would hold their coats tightly across their breasts and shake their fists in the air. Then they'd throw their cigarettes down and watch them bounce off the weathered pavement and fall into the trickle of water backing up in the gutter, the sewer grate blocked by a pile of wet brown leaves. They'd wave to their children as the bus drove away, trying to get a last glimpse of them, all hats and gloves behind the fogged windows.

It wasn't just happening on Remington Road. It was happening in every neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Jimmy had come out that morning and discovered his car had been sideswiped, a long, thin scratch across the driver's side door. He'd have to report it to the police if he planned on filing a claim with the insurance company. By the time the cops arrived he'd be two hours late for work and rush hour would be over and there would be no sense in complaining about the speeding cars because they'd be long gone.