TWENTY
Jessica pulled up in front Byrne’s apartment building. It was only 6 p.m., but it was already dark.
‘You hungry?’ Byrne asked.
‘I’m okay. Vince is cooking for the kids. I’ll eat later.’
‘Coffee?’
Jessica glanced at her watch. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get a lot of sleep tonight anyway.’
‘Drop me by my car,’ Byrne said. ‘I have a few boxes I want to bring up.’
Jessica took the steps to the second floor, walked down the hallway to the last apartment. Byrne’s door was ajar. She pushed it open, entered, closed the door behind her.
Byrne was in the small kitchen, making coffee. The apartment looked exactly the same as it had the last time Jessica had been there, maybe five months earlier, right down to the same magazines in the same places.
‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ she said.
‘It’s a process.’
Byrne walked into the living room with two mugs of coffee. He handed one to Jessica. She blew on it, sipped. It was good. ‘What’s all this?’ she asked, gesturing at the small dining room, which had boxes stacked floor to ceiling.
‘I moved all my crap out of storage,’ Byrne said. ‘I was paying two hundred a month to keep a bunch a junk I don’t need anymore. I donated most of it. This is the stuff I couldn’t part with. I’ve got five more boxes in my car.’
On top of one of the boxes on the dining-room table was a framed eight by ten photograph, a picture of a younger Kevin Byrne standing next to a heavyset black man. They were in front of Downey’s on Front Street. Jessica picked it up.
‘Did you know Marcus Haines?’ Byrne asked.
Jessica had heard the name, but never met the man. She knew that his picture was on the wall in the lobby of the Roundhouse, the wall dedicated to fallen officers. ‘No,’ Jessica said. ‘Never had the honor.’
Byrne took the picture from her. ‘Marcus was a piece of work, Jess. A true character. Great cop, lousy at everything else. Married three times, three alimonies, always looking for an angle to make a buck. At the end of the month he was always in the hole.’
‘He was in homicide?’
‘Yeah. When my old partner Jimmy had his first heart attack, he was out for six months. I partnered with Marcus for a while. We worked a few cases, closed a few cases, knocked back a few cases of Jameson.’
‘Why do I feel a story coming on?’
Byrne smiled, sipped his coffee. ‘If you insist.’ He leaned against the wall. ‘So, one August night we get this call, a domestic gone bad. DOA was the boyfriend, and it looked like the girlfriend was good for it.
‘We get there, and the job is laid out by the numbers. It’s like there was a tag on everything. Body, killer, weapon. Everything but motive, but that wasn’t a mystery. The woman is sitting on the couch, the boyfriend is on the floor, brains on the wall. The responding officers said the gun was on the floor at the woman’s feet. Open and shut, right?’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘I take it all in, and I look a little more closely at the woman on the couch, and she is stunningly beautiful. Coffee-colored skin, amber eyes. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five. But all of that was beneath a layer of crack. It was clear she was on the pipe, and she looked all beat to shit.’
Byrne propped the photograph on the windowsill.
‘Marcus walks in, and all of a sudden it’s like he’s seen a ghost. Mumbling, walking in circles, clicking his pen. He takes me into the kitchen, lowers his voice, says, ‘Kevin. I know her, man. I know her.’ He goes on to tell me that he’s been seeing this girl, that he met her on a job a year earlier when the girl’s mother was shot in West Philly, and he walked her through it all, held her hand at the trial, and one thing led to another. He asks me what I can do for her, seeing as how I caught the case.’
Jessica considered the options. There were only a few, none of them good. ‘What could you do?’
‘Yeah, well, I had no idea. I walked back into the room, looked at her on the couch, and immediately saw the next two decades of her life, how she would look after twenty years in Muncy.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I interviewed her. She said that her boyfriend would usually come home drunk, beat on her, night after night. Went on for almost a year. She showed me her left arm where he broke it. Never healed right. She said she told him a week earlier, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever did it again she was going to get a gun and kill him. She said he laughed at her, said when he came home that night, he started to push her around, and she just pulled a .38, drew down and popped him. Single shot, center mass. One dead a*shole to go.’
‘But she wasn’t assaulted that night.’
‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘There wasn’t a mark on her. She could have walked away, but she didn’t. And you know how a jury was going to see it.
‘So I look out the window, and I see CSU and the ME’s office show up. I tell Marcus to go down there and stall them. I also told him to call paramedics. When he leaves I go back over to where the girl is sitting, and I ask her to tell me what happened one more time. Very carefully.’
Jessica knew what Byrne meant. Sometimes the good people, the citizens, needed a little help remembering.
‘Right at that moment she completely shuts down, so I told her how it went down. I told her that her boyfriend came home, roaring drunk. He started pushing her around. She told him to stop. He hit her in the face, and that’s when she picked up the gun. Then he picked up a baseball bat, came at her again, and that’s when she fired.’
‘What did she say?’
‘At first she didn’t say anything. I think she was still a bit in shock. I told her that she had to decide if that’s what really happened, because any second there were going to be a dozen people in her apartment and then there would be no going back.’ Byrne picked up the photograph again. ‘After what seemed like a full minute, she looked up at me and said, “Ain’t got no bat.”
‘When I told her I would take care of that, she looked straight at me, and it all fell into place. She glanced at the body on the floor, then back at me. I knew what she meant. I crossed the room, crouched down. The dead man was wearing a ring on his right hand. I got down, pulled off the ring, put it on the same finger on my hand, walked back to where she stood. She nodded, then closed her eyes.’
Jessica knew what was coming next. It wasn’t going to be pretty.
‘I hit her, Jess. I meant to pull it, but I didn’t. She went down. A few seconds later I slipped the boyfriend’s ring back on his hand. I knew that CSU would be able to match the mark on her face with the ring, and that they would also find trace evidence of the girl’s skin on it. I also knew that I could spin the two rookies who responded if it came to that. There had been no pictures taken at that point. I’d get a bat into evidence.’
Jessica had a thousand questions, but she just listened. Byrne had to play this out.
‘By the time paramedics showed up, the girl had come around. As they were wheeling her out, she looked up, directly at me. The left side of her face was completely swollen. Our eyes met, and I couldn’t tell if she remembered what we talked about. If she didn’t remember, or she suddenly decided she still loved this dead f*cker, she might bring charges against me. But when they wheeled her by me she reached out a finger, and ran it along the back of my hand. And I knew. I knew it was going to be all right. For her, anyway. I wasn’t so sure about me.’
‘What do you mean?’
Byrne looked up, out the window, at the traffic crawling up the street. A light snow had begun to fall. Byrne didn’t respond. Jessica waited a while, moved on.
‘What happened to Marcus?’ Jessica knew Marcus Haines was on the wall at the Roundhouse, so this story was not going to have a happy ending.
‘A month later Jimmy came back, and I didn’t work with Marcus again. Not on the line anyway. Marcus went to the Fugitive Squad. I ran into him one night at Bonk’s. He was hitting the Jameson hard. Told me the affair with the girl was over. Three weeks after that I got loaned out to Fugitive to serve a warrant on a couple of bad actors.
‘Marcus took the door – my door. He didn’t make it three feet before they opened up. He took the first two in the vest, but the third was a head shot. Clean hit. Died on his feet. Never got off a single shot.’ Byrne took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. ‘Those rounds were meant for me, Jess.’
Jessica gave the gravity of the moment a respectful pause. ‘What about the young woman?’
‘She gave her statement, the DA looked it over, never brought charges. Went down as a justifiable.’
Byrne ran his finger over the surface of the photograph.
‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Jessica asked.
Byrne said nothing for a few seconds. ‘What I did was wrong.’
‘No, what you did was right. At that moment, it wasn’t about procedure. It was about right and wrong. We all have to make those calls.’
‘I know. But when I hit her, I really hit her. It all came out of me. I hit her hard because she was stupid, because she was on the pipe, because she hooked up with loser after loser, because she was beautiful, because I can’t change a f*cking thing about this city, no matter how hard I try.’
Jessica knew she had to say something. She couldn’t just leave it like this. She tried to bring the conversation around to the present.
‘We’ll get this guy, Kevin. We’ll get him off the streets, and it will make a difference.’
Byrne reached into his pocket, took out a single key. ‘Here.’
Jessica took the key from him. ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s the key to this apartment. It occurred to me that the only other person with a key is Colleen, and she doesn’t even live in this city anymore. I want you to have it.’
Jessica was more than a little moved by this. She hoped it didn’t show. ‘I promise not to drop it in any high-crime areas.’
‘I appreciate it.’
Jessica slipped the new key onto her key chain, pulled on her coat, opened the door, turned. ‘You sure you’re okay?’
‘Top of the world.’
‘Right,’ Jessica said. ‘How come all Irish cops quote Jimmy Cagney?’
Byrne smiled, but it was sad.
‘Call me if you need me,’ Jessica said.
Byrne didn’t respond. Jessica hadn’t expected him to.
When she stepped through the doorway, she turned one last time. Byrne was still at the window, the old photograph in hand, looking out at the silent, snow-covered street.