Season of the Witch (19 page)

“With pleasure.”

McMahon pulled out a Miranda card and sailed into it with gusto. An officer came past me, dragging Steve in tow.

“She died slow,” he whispered to me as he went by, his voice a poisonous hiss, “Screaming and groaning, the damn little slut.”

By the time they pulled me off him, he was unconscious.

* * *

It was still raining when we buried Lena. Her parents had come, and were staring blankly and uncomprehendingly at the coffin. They had looked at me the same way they had when they first entered my office.
Who are you? Where are we? How did we get here?
Their eyes seemed to ask. Earlier, I had attempted the impossible, to answer those questions, to explain to them why Lena was no more. I told them she had wanted to clean up, but the city had beaten her. I wanted to say not because she was weak or foolish, because she was neither, but because she was just a fragile human being. Like Itchy or Harry, Eve or Longshot or me, and we are all unable to make the world work for us most of the time.

That is why some of us die broken and used up before our time. At least she had wanted to change, had found the desire to try to mend things before her demon had beaten her. I wanted to say all of these things, to make them understand how the great sad machine that we have made works. I wanted to tell them that it mattered that we have sympathy, even for those who are part of the sickness, and that we all live at each other’s mercy.

The answers never help—if they are, in fact, answers. So I stopped trying. Instead, I laid the flowers that I had brought with me on top of her wet coffin, and stood quietly by while the parents cried. A few people sat in the seats nearby, their heads bowed under dripping umbrellas. I saw that it was Rachel and her family. She was an attractive girl, with long brown, hair. She had a couple of lines in her face, but she had survived the hell that Lena had not—she had a life. So many never get there, so few from her former situation.

I stood apart from the rest and tried not to look too out of place. Rachel’s children sat mutely, staring straight ahead. The image came to me of her inching closer to me on the couch, and her child-like voice echoed to me:
 

Instead of the cross the albatross,

about my neck was hung.

I looked down at the flower-bedecked coffin. I hadn’t wanted her to end up this way, just another albatross for me. She deserved so much more than just to be remembered as a failure, as a junky.

I won’t, Lena, I won’t remember you that way, I promise.

By the graveside, Lena’s parents held onto each other, and the priest said what he had come to say. And the rain came down on us all.

* * *

It was evening, and I was tired, more tired than I had ever remembered being in my life. I wanted to recharge for a while in my office before making my way home. Cars hissed by as I crossed the wet street toward my office building. Every step seemed like a hundred yard dash. I practically limped into the cold lobby.

Francis appeared; enter stage left. I immediately reached for my gun, but I saw that he had both of his hands out and to his sides, wise guy fashion, to show that he was unarmed. There was a thick bandage on his left hand.

“Out of the clink already, Francis?”

“Hey, I didn’t do anything. Some crazy broad shot me is all. I had witnesses.”

We stood and looked at each other for a second. Then I remembered how tired I was.

“So? What is it you want?”

“Easy, mister. I got something for you.” He glanced at my gun hand and grinned broadly. “Hey, nothing like that. Mr. Ganato says you and him, you had a deal, so he sent me here to settle accounts with you.”

“Don’t bother. Any arrangement Ganato thinks we had, he can forget. Besides, he didn’t get his money back and he didn’t get Danny Weber. Those were his conditions.”

“Be that as it may, Mr. Ganato says to tell you that he is well satisfied with the way things worked out.”

“I didn’t have much to do with that.”

“Hey, mister, I don’t give the orders. Give a guy a break here.” With his wounded hand, he opened his jacket to reveal a fat white envelope in his inner pocket. With the other, he reached in and slowly drew it out and held it out to me.

“Do what you want with it. Go buy yourself a houseboat. Go to Mexico. Give it to the Salvation Army for all I care. But mister, I’m leaving it with you.”

I was too tired to argue. I nodded slowly and took the envelope from him, and tore one end open.

Ten thousand dollars , all in hundreds.

“Don Ganato now considers this matter closed.”

Then he shrugged, a bit like Harry might have. He gave me the gunman’s salute again, bang, you’re dead, and went out into the rainy night. A waiting car whisked him away. Through a fog of fatigue and pain, I watched the rain floating down outside. A sea of voices swam in my aching brain.

Itchy. Jasmine. Arrangement. Heroin. Albatross. Jerome.

As I made my way up the stairs, every fiber of my being seemed to ache, and for the first time I felt very old.

* * *

I was in my chair, looking out my office window at the rain, when Broom came in. He had decided to swing by after taking care of things down at the precinct. He coughed, shrugged and eased onto the couch that sat along the far wall of the office, sitting on its edge.

“Roland, I wanted you to know, we’ve got a good case on Big Daddy. The fingerprint was what did it; it was enough. I decided to use it to sweat the kid. He choked and spilled the whole thing when I got him into the interrogation room. He didn’t like the idea of doing hard time in Kilby Prison. He gave Big Daddy up pretty quick.”

He inspected his shoes for a few seconds, obviously choosing his next words carefully.

“This former boyfriend, Steve, says that he, Vince and Big Daddy were all present when they did the girl. We really tore that place apart. Big Daddy had a few kilos of smack at his place, in addition to the party favors we saw at the bust. They’re booking him now. Even if he manages to beat the rap on drug trafficking, he still goes down for murder. But he’ll probably go down for both. I’m sure the D.A. will want to play it that way.”

He grew somber, and his voice lowered.

“It looks like the boyfriend will walk, though, after thirty days in the Jefferson County Jail. He’s just a nobody anyway, just another user. I sure am sorry about the girl. But she’d been through a hell of a lot. She’d reached her limit; it was just too late for her. Sometimes it’s just like that, buddy. The good guys don’t arrive on the scene in time. But at least we can keep the bastards that sell the stuff off of the street for a while, right?”

“Somebody always wants that job, Les. There will always be more of them.”

“That’s why we’re here, brother.”

I nodded slowly. I realized that I owed him an apology for my blowup earlier.

“I’m sorry about what happened at Big Daddy’s; the last thing I wanted to do was louse up that bust.”

“Sorry for what? Little punk deserved what he got. And the bust is good. No worries there. As for Big Daddy, I wish it was that fat bastard on a slab, instead of the girl.”

“Still, Les, I should have gotten her out of there.”

Broom shook his head, and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked very tired, too. I wondered suddenly when he had slept last. After a few minutes he spoke again.

“Hey, Roland, you tried. Sometimes they don’t make it, despite all you can do. Hell, you know that. Look at Keeler. He was a good kid and an honest cop. Now he’s dead. It isn’t fair, any way you look at it, but that’s the way it is. It happens. We’re just lucky we still have you.”

Broom’s brow knitted slightly. I was worrying him again.

Broom sat back and his face relaxed. His expression became reflective.

“Roland, I remember a long time ago—before we were partners—when I was young and idealistic. Every day I would put on that badge, and I would look out my bedroom window, from my nice house up on a hill in the suburbs. The city lay out below me, and to me she was a lady, one that I had sworn to protect. I was a crusader in blue. It was my sacred duty.”

He rocked back in his seat, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling, into the past.

“I would kiss my beautiful wife as she lay sleeping, square my shoulders, leave my sunny little house and go to work. I would get into the car with my brave young partner, and we would go out to fight the good fight. We were two honest young cops, on a force of honest young cops. Those were good days. I had something to fight for, and I was on the right side.”

I said nothing, because Les wasn’t through.

“Now, things are different. How did they change? It seems like the cops are all crooked. My beautiful young wife is dead of breast cancer, and my old partner’s in a wheel chair with a bullet in his spine. I drove by that sunny little house on the hill last month. It’s boarded up, graffiti sprayed all over the walls. The whole neighborhood’s gone to shit. I looked for that young man, that crusader in blue. Didn’t see him. Not a sign.”

There was silence for a few moments.

“Is it . . . is it really that bad out there, Les? Have things really gone that far?”

Lester Broom hunched his huge shoulders and his gaze came back down to earth, back to the present. “It’s bad, but make no mistake. What has changed most of all is you and me, partner. That young cop, he had to see the truth about things around him. His hide got tough.” He thumped his chest. “He’s still in there, somewhere. But our business is human evil. I’m no philosopher. I don’t know much about God, either. But we make it our business to wade through the worst of it, so someone else won’t have to. Remember? That’s our duty.”

I closed my eyes and nodded.

“Our sacred duty.”

He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“Why don’t you come by my place later, partner. Give it a rest. It’s past time you dropped by for a visit. And it’s long past time you gave yourself a break.”

“I’ll do that. Visit, I mean.”

“Take it easy, Roland. I’ll see you around.” Broom called back as he went through my office door and started down the stairs.
 

I waited a few minutes after I heard his car pull away. Then I opened the desk drawer and reached inside. I had one last call to make before I called it a night.

* * *

It was freezing cold when I got to the North Side apartment building twenty minutes later. I went up to the brownstone and started to buzz, but thought better of it. I looked around in the darkness at the mail slots, until I found the one for number seven with the big pink “L” painted over it. I took the envelope that Francis had given me out of my inside pocket. After a minute, I took a pen from inside my coat, and in big letters on the outside I wrote,
Love, Danny.

I slid the envelope through the slot, and turned and walked off into the night.

Epilogue

And that’s the end. Harry, Eve and Danny, with their guilty plans, all dead. Keeler and Lena too. And Lena, who never harmed anyone, was down in the darkness with the bad ones. All of them were gone; they were no more. Longshot Lonnie was in the hospital, and Big Daddy was in jail, hopefully for good. Don Ganato, of course, was free and clear. They were the worst of the lot, those three, and they were alive to cause more sorrow for someone else on another day.

It would have been laughable, if not for all the dying. All of those men had been in love with Eve. Each of them had plotted and schemed ways to get their hands on Eve and the money. But most of them primarily wanted Eve. For her, it had been the money and nothing else. Hers was the most well-constructed plan. And none of the others could even see it.

It had been Eve all along who controlled them, who played Harry against Danny. She didn’t trust them and sent Hazelwood to discover their secrets, and later sent him to kill me when it seemed she could not control me. How had Eve met Hazelwood? Obviously they had connected after Hazelwood had busted Harry. Maybe she seduced him because he was stronger, better connected than Harry. And he had led her to his boss, Longshot Lonnie.

She had tried to pull me in, too. But when I had turned away from her beauty—the one weapon upon which she always relied—I became a danger that had to be removed. And for what? It had all been for money, one of the tired old reasons. It was ironic, when you considered that all of the men she manipulated and betrayed had simply wanted
her
.
 

I pictured her standing in the doorway of my office in her black negligee, her plans all coming together at last, success within her grasp—if only she could get me to come a little closer.

Had she been all malice, greed and deceit? Or was there some truth within her, some part of her reaching out like Lena had, trying to find something worth holding on to? If so, it disappeared when the lives of others ceased to matter to her. But the root of all the evil had been a simple human emotion. It was all due to that greatest, most awkward of things, the one that no one ever gets quite right or even understands—Love. It may break us into a thousand pieces, but we must have it or die.