Shutter Man (14 page)

By the time Byrne reached the Penrose Diner, he realized he had not eaten all day.

When he entered the restaurant, he looked in both directions. He had not seen the man in a year or so, and almost walked right by him.

Graham Grande was a latent fingerprint examiner when Byrne first became a detective, a man already nearing retirement, which was not mandatory at the time. Grande had come up before the FBI created the first databases, when the science of being a latent examiner was all about the long, tedious task of comparing fingerprints side by side on paper.

Now in his eighties, he still showed up occasionally at the Survivors’ Benefits and other PPD charity functions. He looked frail to Byrne, but his eyes were clear.

The two men shook hands. Byrne slid into the booth, ordered coffee, perused the menu. As hungry as he was, his nerves got the better of him. He put the menu away.

He knew that Graham’s wife had been ill for a long time. He was almost afraid to ask. He wanted to enquire after her by name, but couldn’t remember it. He blamed himself for letting the time pass, for forgetting.

‘How is your wife?’ he asked, hoping it didn’t sound uncaring.

Graham shrugged. ‘She has her good days and her bad days. We have her over to the Camilla House now.’

Byrne knew that Camilla House was a long-term-care nursing home in West Philly, near Cobbs Creek.

‘Some days she’s sharp as a tack,’ Graham continued. ‘Remembers what I wore to so-and-so’s wedding in 1956. Other days…’

The waitress brought Byrne’s coffee, topped up Graham’s cup.

The two men talked about the job as it was in the day, the job as it was now. They talked about people they knew in common – fellow cops, lawyers, police support personnel – many of whom, Byrne was sad to notice, were gone.

It was Graham who brought it around to the business at hand. He tapped the box sitting next to him in the booth. ‘You want this in here or outside?’

Still the cop, Byrne thought. ‘I’ll get it before I leave.’

Graham took off his glasses, wiped them with a napkin. It was a gesture Byrne remembered from back in the day.

He put the glasses back on, lowered his voice.

‘Well, it was a job and a half to try to process this material without my kit,’ he said. Byrne had asked if it was possible to read prints off the items without using powder or tape. He knew there were other, less reliable methods. Graham Grande had never been one to turn down a challenge.

‘How did we do?’ Byrne asked, not really wanting to know.

Graham leaned forward as if he were on a witness stand, a place that had become a second home to him over a forty-year career in law enforcement. ‘Not good. I can tell you that there are prints on both items, though.’

Byrne felt his heart sink. He had hoped Graham could pull any latent or patent prints off the items without disturbing anything. ‘You couldn’t process them?’

Graham shook his head. ‘Not without my kit.’

‘So if another examiner were to process these items, he would have no way of knowing they’d been looked at before?’

‘Not unless he was a mind-reader.’

‘No problem, Graham,’ Byrne said. He let the information settle. ‘So tell me, how are things going? You making the bills?’

‘Retirement sucks,’ Graham said. ‘Don’t do it.’

Byrne pushed an envelope across the table.

‘What’s this?’ Graham asked.

‘For your trouble.’

Graham lifted the flap, dropped it. ‘It’s too much.’

‘Well, if you can’t use it…’

Byrne made a slow-motion, half-hearted attempt to grab the envelope. Graham snatched it in a flash. He was still pretty quick.

‘I never said that.’

When Byrne reached his car, he put the box on the trunk, looked at the items inside. The dark glasses and the SEPTA pass. He had not given the .38 to Graham to examine. Processing an old pair of sunglasses and a forty-year-old bus pass was one thing. Processing something that might have been used in the commission of a crime was another.

Byrne knew that his prints were on Des Farren’s glasses and bus pass. He remembered Jimmy handing him the glasses and the pass that day in the park. He couldn’t remember if anyone else touched them.

But why were they in this box? Why weren’t they, along with the .38, at the bottom of the Schuylkill River?

Byrne decided to drive to the Platt Bridge. He’d make up his mind when he got there whether or not to throw the box over the rail.

By the time he turned on to Market Street it came to him.

Hazel
, he thought.

Graham Grande’s wife’s name was Hazel.

Every night, Billy walked the city.

For every face he could not recognize, he was doubly blessed by his clear memory of place. If he had once been anywhere in the city, he could remember the route.

He knew every dip and rise on the avenue, every turn of a side street. He knew the curbs, the cracks, the steel grates that ventilated the SEPTA cars rumbling beneath his feet. He knew every slash of graffiti, every car sitting up on blocks, every shuttered store.

Billy always walked quickly, hands in pockets, his worn boot heels soft on the hard pavement, his pace in steady syncopation with the night rhythms of traffic and traffic lights.

On some nights he began where this life began, at Carpenter Street, and headed east. Some nights he strolled up to Market Street, and walked river to river, then back.

His drive was boundless, often lifted by the thought of the people who had walked these streets over the years, the decades, the centuries, their energies still in the very cobblestones beneath the pavement.

Whenever he passed people on the street, he looked at their faces, cataloguing their features, filing them away, adding and subtracting them, putting them in columns. He knew it was possible, even likely, that he saw many of the same people every night. People often went to the same places at the same time, for work, for entertainment, for obligations, for the need.

Sometimes people looked at his face and nodded. Billy never knew if they were doing so because they knew him, or if it was some kind of courtesy. He did not see much courtesy or respect these days, so he suspected the former.

As he walked across the city, and entered the dens where the monsters lived, he made hard eye contact. With some of the men – men who walked their own routes – he entered a silent contract, a pact that said:
If you do not lift your hand to me, I will do you no harm
.

On Sunday nights, when he reached St Patrick’s, he would stop. There he would kneel at the side of the church, take off his coat and place it on the ground. As he had done once a week for as long as he could remember, he would remove a few threads from the lining, take a lighter from his pocket and burn them on the steps, releasing the essence of all he had fought and defeated.

On this night he told God of his transgressions, of his mortal sins, of the old man, of the family. He could not see their faces, but he could feel his heart heavy with their burdens, which were now his own. So many over the years, and yet his heart was not yet full.

As he strode back to Devil’s Pocket, the place of his birth, the feelings got stronger.

Something was happening
.

It felt as if it was all coming to a close, a time of transfiguration. He felt as if his third birth was coming, and it would be as different from his second life as his second life had been to his first, those idyllic ten years when he had been safe in his father’s house, fettered by love, a time before these past twenty-six years of darkness.

Something was happening.
 

There were two more lines to draw and the square would be complete – unbreakable, unshakeable, the same from every direction, a perfectly contained palindromic world where there would be no questions, only answers, a place where every face he saw would be different and remembered.

Just before midnight, he found himself across the street from Emily’s apartment, watching her shadows grow and recede on the sheer curtains. He’d only seen her in and around the library, and often wondered what would happen if ever he crossed the street, walked up the steps and knocked on her door.

Maybe one day, he thought.

One day soon.

‘Where’ve you been, boy?’
 

‘I’ve been walking, Móraí.’
 

‘Where did you go?’
 

‘I walked river to river.’
 

‘Our Desmond used to walk.’
 

Billy knows this, of course. ‘Did he now?’
 

‘Oh yes. Once he walked from City Hall all the way to the museum.’
 

Straight down the center, Billy thinks. Billy has done it himself.
 

‘Straight down the center of the Parkway.’
 

Just before dawn, Billy sat on the roof of The Stone, looking out over the Pocket. He sipped from a bottle of Tullamore Dew. It was his favorite time of day, a time when everyone saw the world as he saw it.

As the first dawn light began to paint the sky, he heard the groan of the rusted iron access ladder leading to the roof. He drew his Makarov, held it at his side.

Before the intruder was visible, Billy heard:

‘It’s Sean.’

He eased the Makarov back into his pocket. ‘Okay.’

‘We cool?’

‘We are.’

Sean climbed onto the roof, sat down on a crate, looked out over the streets. Before long, he reached into his pocket, retrieved his vial, hit the meth. He then lit a cigarette.

‘Remember the time we found Uncle Pat up here?’ Billy asked.

Sean laughed. ‘Oh yeah. We caught that beating afterwards,’ he said. ‘How old were we then?’

Billy thought about it. To him, time was a piecemeal cloth marked only by the seasons, by the scars on his hands and face. ‘I think we were eight or nine. Something like that.’

Sean held out a hand. Billy passed him the bottle of Tullamore Dew. Sean drank from it, passed it back. ‘We hit those houses that night, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where were they?’

‘Cinnaminson,’ Billy said. He could not remember the faces of the people he had seen this very night, but he could get in a car and drive to the house they had visited all those years ago.

It was a time in their lives when their father, Danny, and their uncle Patrick were teaching them the finer points of residential burglary, often driving to middle-class neighborhoods in New Jersey, staking out houses. When the adults were certain the dwellings were unoccupied, they would boost the boys into first-floor windows.

‘That’s
right
, Cinnaminson,’ Sean said. ‘We got those Atari 5200s.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Man, I loved those things. Bet you they’re worth a bundle now.’

That night, after getting back to The Stone, Billy and Sean had gone to the cellar to hook up the game consoles. As usual, after a score, Patrick had been pumped full of adrenalin. He picked up a woman at the bar and brought her to the roof.

Sean hit his vial again, shook it off. ‘What was her name?’

‘The girl with Uncle Pat?’

‘Yeah,’ Sean said. ‘Was it Cindy? Sandy? Wendy?’

‘Mindy,’ Billy said. ‘Mindy Meeks.’

Sean shook his head. ‘How the fuck do you remember this shit?’

Billy shrugged. His ability to read faces was the exact opposite of his ability to remember names and locations. ‘Do you remember what we called her after that night?’

Sean thought for a moment. ‘No.’

‘Squeaky Meeks.’

Sean howled. ‘That’s
right
.’

‘We called her that because she made those mouse noises when she was doing the dirty up here with Uncle Pat.’

‘Squeaky Meeks,’ Sean said. He stubbed out his cigarette, looked at his watch. The streets below were starting to come alive. Lights blinked on in the condos at Naval Square.

‘I’m going to head back to the shop, get some sleep,’ Sean said. ‘You good?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We’ve got work to do later.’

‘I know.’

As Sean made his way down the iron ladder, Billy looked out at the neighborhood, at the massive South Street bridge, the dark, churning river. He’d been born here, had lived here most of his life and knew in a way that transcended all rational thought that, like his uncles Patrick and Desmond before him, it would be in the shadow of the spire that he would die.

The Pocket buried its own.

They had arrived in New York City the day before, spending the night in a rundown hostel in a part of town known as the Bronx.

They spent what they had on train tickets to Philadelphia, and a pair of sandwiches that were mostly fat and gristle.

They had become man and wife on the ship, married by a man who said he was a proper Lutheran minister, a man who required no papers or proof of age, just a pint of bitters. The certificate looked real enough.

As they walked from the train station, they asked after the Irish neighborhoods, if one were to be found.

There was only one place, Máire learned. Not an official neighborhood, but more of an enclave.

It was called Devil’s Pocket.

After months of cold-water flats, shared bathrooms, and food on the dole, they found a modest row house on Montrose Street, complete with rattling windows, leaky roof and thin walls. Liam scrounged scant work on the coal piers on the river, while Máire worked as a domestic and housekeeper in some of the mansions surrounding Rittenhouse Square.

It was on a Fourth of July in the park that they slipped into the trees and made scandalous love, all while the fireworks painted the sky above them.

Clothes returned to modesty, Liam held her.

‘There’s more here for a man like me,’ he said. ‘More than the black lung and fatty beef and patched trousers.’

At that moment, Máire wondered what he saw when he looked at her, if the glamour could any longer grip a man as powerful as Liam Farren.

She doubted, but she hoped.

For weeks they rummaged the landfills and trash bins, and with a jar of glue lifted from the hardware store and nails pulled and straightened from the abandoned lumber at construction sites, they had some wobbly but workable furniture.

They decided to open a shebeen, a small tavern in the front room of the row house. If they kept the light low – which was no great hardship, seeing the cost of electricity – the shabbiness of the furnishings might be overlooked.

Three weeks later, with only the bottles collected from friends, and a pair of old doors on saw horses, The Stone was open for business.

Máire styled the tavern as she knew them to be in Ireland, where the shebeen was, in many ways, the social center of the neighborhood. It was much the same in Philadelphia, even down to the laws that mandated closing of the doors on Sundays.

Soon after opening, to gather the Sunday trade, they established a Sunday drinking club, which was private and therefore not subject to law.

At first, the only people to come to The Stone lived on the block. Many nights there were only three or four of the local boys. No matter how clean Máire kept the place, there was always something to do.

After the first year, however, it became known throughout Schuylkill and Grays Ferry as a meeting place for mutual-aid societies, immigrant networks and ward politics.

While Liam Farren was tolerant of the bluster, it was to the darker side of things he was drawn, darker even than backroom political dealings.

As the war in Europe drew to a close, Liam’s two best friends were the Malone brothers, Matthew and Kyle. The Malones were known for their ability to stay a stride ahead of the law, as foul as they might run of it. Matthew, the bigger of the two, was known to keep a small hatchet in a sheath on his belt. His brother, having learned a trade in the fisheries of County Down, preferred his
Jowika
, the two-bladed knife he seemed to carry in his hand at all times.

Each evening Liam and the Malones would meet at The Stone and go forth into the night, returning before dawn. Most mornings Liam would awaken Máire with strong tea and toast, often with a sack full of jewelry and coins.

As Liam slept through the day, Máire tried to wrest the blood from his shirts with bleach. Almost every noontime – save for Sundays – would find her in the cellar, her knees astride a utility basin.

While Liam served three months for breaking and entering a house in Fitler Square, Máire missed her curse. She was finally with child. At just the same age as her mother and her mother’s mother, and all the women before them.

Eight months later brought Desmond. Desmond was born with a spell. On that night Liam went on a terror. A terrible beating came to any man who dared cross him. The morning found him with damaged hands, and a scar across his stomach he would carry until the day he died.

When Máire regained her strength, she searched far and wide for her real son, certain that the boy in her house was a changeling, a burden given to her for her lethargy in blessing the child. She became adept in sneaking into houses all over Devil’s Pocket.

She did not find her son.

In the boy’s sixth week she took a piece from her grandmother’s cloth coat and burned it on the front steps of the row house, held the boy above it. He did not respond.

Within two years she had two perfect boys, Daniel and Patrick. Fine and strong and pink, born one year apart to the day, the
samhain
, November Eve.

After the war, there was money to be made and money to be had. The front room of the row house was no longer fit or big enough to handle the trade, so Máire found some local tradesmen who, for the cost of their pints every night until the job was complete, remodeled the space, knocking out walls and building a suitable bar with a rail. She found a man to make a neon sign at cost, and it went over the front door, facing the avenue.

Late in August 1952, a few days before Labor Day, Liam and the Malones were out. There were just three locals at the bar. Cal Murphy, who at eighty had taken up residence on the first stool most nights, and had become the de facto mayor of The Stone, was on his third pint.

Margaret, the woman who tended bar three nights a week, wiped down the counter while Máire sat at a table trying to find money for their suppliers.

At just after ten o’clock the door opened, drawing Máire’s eye. Two young men walked in. Each in their late teens, one was short and portly, the other taller and hungry-looking. They did not have to announce their intentions for Máire to know their mission.

The chubby one drew a small silver pistol from his pocket and threw a lunch sack on the counter. ‘Put the money in there,’ he said to Margaret.

No one moved.

Máire glanced at the door to the back room. She both hoped and feared that Liam would step through. Hoped because he would know what to do. Feared because this boy might get spooked and pull the trigger.

Liam did not appear.

‘Do you know who this is you’re stealing from?’ Cal Murphy asked.

The young man put the pistol to Cal’s head, pulled back the hammer.

‘Did I ask you a
question
, old man?’

Murphy remained silent, but didn’t take his hard gaze from the boy with the gun. The chubby one withdrew the gun, walked to the bar. He motioned for the taller boy to stand behind Murphy.

With the barrel of the gun the chubby one nudged the empty sack closer to Margaret. Margaret looked at Máire. Máire nodded.

Keeping her eyes on the boys, Margaret opened the register and put the money in the sack.

‘The coins, too,’ the chubby one said.

Margaret complied.

‘And we’ll have that box you keep below the bar.’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Margaret said.

The tall one drew a knife from a sheath on his belt, lifted it high in the air and brought it down through the back of Cal Murphy’s hand. The old man shrieked in agony. The tall one withdrew the knife, wiped it on Cal Murphy’s shirt.

‘The next one is going in his throat,’ he said.

Margaret again made eye contact with Máire. Máire again nodded.

As Máire tended to Cal Murphy’s hand, Margaret reached under the bar, took out the strongbox, opened it. Máire knew the exact contents. Three hundred six dollars and fifty-five cents. The barmaid put it all in the sack.

As quickly as they had come, the boys were through the door and gone.

Three days later Máire returned from the market to find a crudely made sign on the front door of The Stone:

Closed for Repairs
.

Odd, that, she thought, wondering where the money was going to come from for these repairs, and how they could afford to forgo three days’ earnings, especially now that they had lost three hundred dollars to thieves.

She walked around to the back, came in through the kitchen. Because they were closed, the only thing on the stove was a pot of soup for their tea. She put down her bags, pushed through the door into the bar.

There were five of them in the room. The Malone brothers, Liam, and young Danny and Patrick.

Behind the bar were a pair of tall wooden crosses, fashioned from two-by-six lumber scrapped from the demolished houses on Stillman.

The two boys who had robbed the tavern were bound to the crosses, stark naked as the day, their mouths gagged with oily rags. Máire saw the long red welts down their arms and legs. The chubby one had a gaping wound on the right side of his waist, more than a pound of flesh missing. It had been crudely stitched using Máire’s leather punch and twine. She could smell the infection.

In the center of each of the boys’ chests was drawn a dartboard in black paint.

Every so often Kyle Malone would down a shot of whiskey, walk around the bar, pick up four darts. One by one he fired them at the boys’ chests. Each bull’s-eye brought a cheer from the others. They all took turns, even the boys.

The games went on long after Máire turned in for the evening.

On the third day, the sign came down from the door, the crosses disappeared and The Stone reopened for trade. No one enquired after the boys.

When the two detectives assigned to the robbery case stopped in, they drank for free and lamented the state of a world where hard-working men like Liam Farren fell prey to the criminal element.

A week later, while washing the bar towels in the cellar, Máire saw the four pieces of lumber, dismantled, stacked in the corner.

The wood smelled of bleach.

It would not be the last time they were used.

As Danny and Patrick grew toward adolescence, they watched out for Desmond, but Desmond did not make the rounds with them.

Patrick became quite the ladies’ man, staying out till all hours, a woman in every ward, many of them married. He was once caught in the act, and the husband who’d found them raised a knife to him. The man walked with a cane for a full year, and never lifted his eyes as he crossed Montrose Street.

Danny married Deena Finneran and the celebration raged for four days, drawing guests from as far away as Ohio. Deena was radiant.

The Devil’s Pocket Boys grew in reputation and lore. In Dundalk, Máire had never locked the door to her house, and she saw no reason to start here. While much of the neighborhood and the city proper fell victim to crimes both grand and small, no one dared steal anything from clan Farren.

The black news came as a telegram. After serving just two months of a ten-year sentence for manslaughter, Liam Farren crossed paths with a Romani gang in Graterford prison. The tale was told that, on the final day, he gave as good as he got but was overpowered in the prison yard and felled by a
chivomengro
.

Liam Michael Farren was dead.

That night Máire took his clothes down to the river underneath the South Street bridge and washed them until every stain was gone and his shirts were gleaming white. She stayed until dawn, her tears falling into the Schuylkill.

She thought about her grandmother, a small but fierce woman walking the countryside in County Louth. Her grandmother had once said that she had been cursed as a girl by a
púca:

Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat
.

May the cat eat you, and may the devil eat the cat.

Máire believed that when her firstborn son was spirited away, leaving her with a changeling, the curse had come back.

Indeed, Máire Farren came to know, it had never left.