Richard Montanari (13 page)

    'He
was a longshoreman, too,' Fishing Hat said then, crooking a thumb at his buddy.
'Back in the day, we were all over.
All
over. Oregon Avenue, up to South
Street, Front Street, Third Street. Not like now. Now I got a lawyer living
next door to me. A
lawyer.
There goes the neighborhood.'

    Jessica
made a few more notes as Cardigans looked closely at Byrne. 'You look familiar,'
Cardigans said. 'You ever work the docks?'

    'My
father did,' Byrne said. 'Thirty-five years.'

    Cardigans
snapped his fingers. 'Paddy Byrne.'

    Byrne
nodded.

    'You
look just like him.' He turned to Fishing Hat. 'Did you know Paddy?'

    Fishing
Hat shook his head.

    'This
guy was a legend on Pier 96.' He turned back to Byrne. 'How is he these days?'

    'He's
good,' Byrne said. 'Thanks for asking.'

    'So
how come you didn't follow in his footsteps? Get an honest job?'

    'The
docks are too dangerous for me,' Byrne said. 'And I prefer a higher class of
criminal.'

    Cardigans
laughed. 'Yeah. You're Paddy's boy.'

    'So,
what else can you tell me about this other victim?' Jessica asked, trying to
bring the conversation back around.

    Both
men shrugged in tandem. 'Not much, 'cept that it was a woman,' Fishing Hat
said. 'They locked the place up for years. Guy who owned it couldn't even go
back in there. Said he was afraid of ghosts or something. He sold it to some
guy from Pittsburgh, who sold it to someone else.'

    Jessica
looked around. 'What's the neighborhood, guys?'

    'Some
say Queen Village but they don't know shit.'

    'What
do
you
say?'

    'We
say Pennsport. Because it
is
Pennsport. We're south of
Washington,
for Chrissake.'

    'Did
a detective talk to you guys about that case back in '02?' Jessica asked.

    'Just
me,' Cardigans said.

    'Do
you remember their names? The detectives?'

    Cardigans
shook his head.

    'He don't
remember his kids' names,' Fishing Hat said. 'And he's only got four of 'em.'

    'Did
you know the victim?'

    'No.
I heard she was a real hot number, though. Damn shame.'

    The
information would be easy enough to find, but probably wasn't relevant. Jessica
thanked the two men, got their contact information - names, addresses, phone
numbers - and gave them both a business card, along with the standard request
for them to call if they thought of anything else.

    'You
come back anytime,' Fishing Hat said. 'We always have time to talk to pretty
young girls.'

    Jessica
smiled.
Pretty young girls.
She'd come back tomorrow.

    They
each had a case on which they were working. Both cases had stalled, and there
was no worse feeling for a homicide detective than the sense that an
investigation was slipping away from them. While Byrne made calls to the four
witnesses he needed for the grand- jury probe of Eduardo Robles, just to keep
the pot simmering, Jessica looked up some addresses, trying to align the
witnesses in another case.

    Two
weeks earlier a gun had been left at the scene of a drug- related homicide. The
weapon had been traced back to a woman named Patricia Lentz, a known drug
addict and prostitute.

    The
Lentz apartment was on North 19th Street near Cecil B. Moore. When Jessica and
Byrne arrived, they found the door open, TV blasting, something burning on the
stove. The first floor was a haze of vile smoke, a landfill of soiled
mattresses, broken furniture, spent crack vials and empty liquor bottles.

    They
found Patricia Lentz passed out beneath a pile of clothing in the basement. At
first Jessica did not think she was going to find a pulse. But the woman had
just passed out and, once she'd been revived by paramedics, was taken into
custody without incident.

    Whereas
the suspect was in custody, her apartment had not yet been cleared. Jessica was
quite familiar with the layout of these row houses and knew there were two more
rooms upstairs. While Byrne turned the barely coherent woman over to the
uniformed officers for transport to the Roundhouse, Jessica continued upstairs.
She cleared the first small bedroom, and the bathroom. When she walked into the
second bedroom she found there was a closet. She eased open the door.

    Jessica
froze. There, on the floor in front of her, partially hidden by a plastic
garbage bag bursting at the seams with rotting trash, was a little boy. No more
than two years old. A dark-haired little boy dressed in a ragged T-shirt and
diaper. It appeared that he had crawled beneath the garbage for warmth.

    Reaching
down into the closet, she picked up the boy. He was shivering with fear,
miserable in his soiled diaper. There were rashes on his arms and legs.

    'It's
okay, little man,' Jessica said. 'It's okay.'

    On
the way out of the house, Jessica found a pile of papers on a card table near
the front door. They were mostly unpaid bills, flyers for pizza and Chinese
takeout, shut-off notices. Also on the table was a photograph of an infant
lying on a dirty bed sheet. Jessica could not mistake those eyes. It was the
little boy she had in her arms. She flipped the picture over. It read
Carlos
age three months.

    His
name was Carlos.

    Jessica
brought the boy back to the Roundhouse to await a representative from the
Department of Human Services. She had stopped along the way and bought diapers,
wipes, lotion, powder. It had been a long time since she had done these things
with Sophie, but it was like riding a bike: she hadn't forgotten.

    Cleaned
up, shiny and combed, Carlos sat at one of the desks, on top of a pile of phone
books, secured to the chair with an empty ammunition belt. Someone found a
Philadelphia Eagles child's sweatshirt. It was a little too big, so they rolled
up the sleeves and Scotch-taped them gently around the boy's wrists.

    The
boy's mother, Patricia Lentz, was booked on first-degree murder charges, and
the case was a lock. They had the murder weapon, ballistics matched, and Lentz
would not be coming back for a long time. Carlos would have children of his own
by the time she got out.

    'What's
going on with Carlos?' Byrne asked, bringing Jessica back to the present and
the new case at hand.

    Jessica
had to take a second. The last thing you wanted to do in this room, even with
your partner, who knew you better than anyone in your life, was display any
emotion besides anger.

    'Nothing,'
Jessica said. 'They still haven't been able to find Patricia Lentz's sister.
Word is that she's an even bigger crackhead.'

    Jessica
knew it was no secret, especially to Kevin Byrne, that she and Vincent had been
trying for two years to have another child. Sophie was now seven, and the
longer they waited, well, all the books said you really didn't want too much of
an age gap between siblings. The very notion of undertaking the monumental task
of adopting Carlos was, of course, a ridiculous idea. During daylight hours,
anyway. But when Jessica lay awake in the middle of the night it all seemed
possible. Then the sun would come up again and she realized it would never
happen.

    'How
is he doing?' Byrne asked.

    'Good,
I guess,' Jessica said. She really didn't know if that was true or not, but it
was the only answer she had.

    'If
you want, we can stop in at the Department of Human Services and check on him.'

    The
sooner Jessica let go, the better it would be. Still, she knew what she was
going to say. 'Sure. That would be good.'

    Before
they could discuss it further, Nicci Malone poked her head into the duty room.
'Kevin, you have a call.'

    Byrne
crossed the room, hit a button, answered. A few moments later he pulled out his
notebook, wrote something in it, punched a fist through the air. It was clearly
good news. Jessica needed some good news.

    Byrne
hung up, grabbed his coat. 'That was the ID Unit.'

    The
ID Unit processed latent fingerprints.

    'Are
we on?' Jessica asked.

    'We
are,' Byrne said. 'Our cleanshaven dead man has a name. Kenneth Arnold
Beckman.'

    The
Beckman house was a gaunt and peeling postwar row house on West Tioga Street,
in the Nicetown area of North Philadelphia. Nicetown was a blue-collar section
of the city that was slowly recovering after three decades of slow decline, a
slide culminating in the Tastykake company moving out of the area in 2007. At
one time it was rumored that Trump Entertainment would be building a casino on
Hunting Park Avenue. It never happened. The only gambling being done in
Nicetown these days was among those residents and store owners debating whether
or not to hang onto their property.

    Before
leaving the Roundhouse, Jessica asked Josh Bontrager to run a check on Kenneth
Arnold Beckman. Bontrager would call if there was anything to report.

    Jessica
rang the bell three times before noticing that there was a wire hanging out
from the bottom of the rusted panel. The bell didn't work. A quick look at the
crumbling porch, with its leaning support pillars and brickwork desperately in
need of tuck pointing, explained why. She knocked on the door, gently at first.
The second time she knocked harder. Eventually they heard the deadbolts begin
to turn. There were three of them.

    The
woman who answered the door was a hard forty. Her platinum hair was perm-fried,
her make-up looked like it had been applied with a paper towel. She wore black
Capri pants and battered pink running shoes. A lighted cigarette hung from the
corner of her mouth.

    Looking
Byrne up and down, she tossed a sideways glance at Jessica.

    'Are
you Mrs. Beckman?' Byrne asked.

    'Well,
now,' she replied. 'That would depend on two things, wouldn't it?'

    'And
what would those two things be?'

    'Who
you are and what the fuck you want.'

    
Oh
boy, Jessica thought. We've got a real charmer here
.

    Byrne
took out his ID, badged the woman. She stared at it far too long. Jessica
figured this was an attempt on the woman's part to establish some sort of power
dynamic. What the woman didn't know was that Kevin Byrne could outlast a
glacier. She looked at Jessica, raising a painted-on eyebrow. Jessica reached
into her pocket, showed the woman
her
ID. The woman sniffed, turned back
to Byrne.

    'Well,
that answers one of my questions,' she said.

    'May
we come in?' Byrne asked.

    The
woman blinked a few times, as if Byrne was speaking another language. 'Can you
hear me?' she asked.

    'Ma'am?'

    'Can
you hear my voice?'

    'Yes,'
Byrne said. 'I can hear your voice.'

    'Good.
I hear you too. We can talk right here.'

    Jessica
sensed Byrne's gloves coming off. He pulled out his notebook, flipped a few
pages. 'What's your first name, ma'am?'

    Pause.
'Sharon.'

    'Is
your husband Kenneth Arnold Beckman?'

    The
woman snorted. 'Husband? That's one way of putting it.'

    'Are
you married to him, ma'am?'