Текст книги "The Echo Man"

Автор книги: Richard Montanari

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Chapter 103

    Monday, November 8

    Byrne sat in the small lunch-room at the back of the Roundhouse. The four-to-twelve shift had already come and gone and were out on the street. Byrne, who had been on administrative leave since the shooting, sat by himself, a cold cup of untouched coffee in front of him.

    When Jessica entered the room and approached him she saw something else on the table. It was Byrne's fifty-cent piece.

    'Hey, partner.'

    'Hey,' Byrne replied. 'You finish that FAS?'

    A Firearms Analysis System form was a trace request sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

    'All done.' Jessica slid into the booth across from Byrne. 'You heading home?'

    'In a while.'

    They sat in silence. Byrne looked tired, but not nearly as tired as he had looked recently. He'd gotten the results from all his follow-up tests. There was no tumor, nothing serious. They said it was a combination of fatigue, poor diet, insomnia, with a Bushmills chaser. Jessica glanced at the menu displayed over the counter in the corner, and thought about how eating in this place might be part of the problem.

    Byrne looked up, at the scarred booths, the plastic flowers, the line of vending machines against the wall, at the place to which he had come to work for more than twenty years. 'I didn't do my job, Jess.'

    She'd known this was coming, and here it was. Everything she planned to say vaporized from her mind. She decided to just speak from her heart. 'It wasn't your fault.'

    'I was so young,' Byrne said. 'So arrogant.'

    'Christa-Marie confessed to the crime, Kevin. I wouldn't have handled it any differently. I don't know any cop who would.'

    'She confessed because she was ill,' Byrne said. 'I didn't dig any deeper. I should have, but I didn't. I turned in my report, it went to the DA. Just like always. Boss says move on, you move on.'

    'Exactly.'

    Byrne spun the coffee cup a few times.

    'I wonder what her life would have been like,' he said. 'I wonder where she would have gone, what she would have done.'

    Jessica knew there was no answer to this, none that would help. She waited awhile, then slipped out of the booth.

    'How about I buy you a drink?' she said. 'It's fifty-cent Miller Lite night at Finnigan's Wake. We can get hammered, drive around, pull people over, do some traffic stops. Be like old times.'

    Byrne smiled, but there was sadness in it. 'Maybe tomorrow.'

    'Sure.'

    Jessica put a hand on Byrne's shoulder. When she got to the door she turned, looked at the big man sitting in the last booth, surrounded by all the whispering ghosts of his past. She wondered if they would ever be silent.

Chapter 104

    He found her behind the hotel. She was sitting alone on a stone bench, on her dinner break, an untouched salad next to her. When she saw Byrne she stood up, hugged him. He held on as long as she wanted.

    She pulled away and turned, brushing off the bench for him. Ever considerate, Byrne thought. He sat down.

    They were silent for a few moments. Finally Byrne asked, 'You doing okay?'

    Lucy Doucette shrugged. 'Just another day in the big city.'

    'Did you have any problems giving your statement?' He had put out the word that she was to be treated with kid gloves. The report back was that she had been. Byrne wanted to hear it from her.

    'Yeah,' she said. 'But if I never go back to a police station for the rest of my life, that will be okay with me.'

    'About that other matter,' Byrne said, referring back to Lucy's detainment for shoplifting. 'I talked to the DAs office, and to the owner of the store on South. It's all smoothed over. Just a big misunderstanding.' Because Byrne had intervened before Lucy was charged there would not be a record.

    'Thanks,' she said. She looked at Byrne, at the bench, at the surrounding area. 'Where's your man bag?'

    'I'm not carrying it anymore.'

    Lucy smiled. 'Were you getting grief from your fellow officers?'

    Byrne laughed. 'Something like that.'

    A wink of silver caught Byrne's eye. It was a small heart-shaped pendant around Lucy's neck.

    'Nice necklace,' he said.

    Lucy lifted the heart, ran it along the chain. 'Thanks. I got it from David.'

    'David?'

    'David Albrecht. I went and saw him in the hospital.'

    Byrne said nothing.

    'We're kind of in this thing together, you know?' Lucy said, perhaps feeling the need to explain. 'I guess he's going to be okay?'

    'The doctors say it looks good.'

    Lucy dropped the pendant, smoothed it against her uniform. 'He's got some offers on his movie, you know.'

    'I heard that,' Byrne said. 'So, are you guys an item?'

    Lucy blushed. 'Oh please. We're just friends. We just met.''

    'Okay, okay,' Byrne said.

    'Gosh.'

    Two young women walked by, no more than eighteen or nineteen, smartly dressed in their crisp new Le Jardin uniforms. They eyed Lucy with something akin to awe.

    When they passed, Lucy looked at Byrne. 'Rookies.'

    They sat in thoughtful silence. The autumn sun warmed their faces.

    'What are you going to do, Lucy?'

    'I don't know,' she said. 'Maybe go home for the holidays. Maybe go home for good.'

    'Where's home?'

    Lucy Doucette looked up at the hotel, down Sansom Street, then over at Byrne. In that moment, for the first time since he'd met her, she looked a lot more like a woman than a little girl.

    She said: 'A long way from here.'

Chapter 105

    Friday, November 12

    The women sat around the small table, a game of gin rummy in progress in front of them. Between the ashtrays, Styrofoam cups, cans of Diet Pepsi and Diet Mountain Dew, the bags of pork rinds and barbecued chips, there was hardly room for the cards.

    When the petite young woman in the oversized blue parka walked into the room, Dottie Doucette stood up. Dottie was terribly thin. She looked older than her forty years, but a light had come back to her eyes, her friends all said. It was faint, they averred, but it was there.

    When Lucy hugged her mother, Dottie felt as if she might break.

    Lucy wanted to ask her mother about George Archer. She had talked to some of the women who had known her mother when they were younger, and she'd learned that Dorothy Doucette had gone out with George Archer a few times. That was probably when the man had put his eye on Lucy. Lucy knew that her mother felt guilty for so many things. Dottie Doucette did not need this burden now.

    Dottie let go, wiped her eyes, reached into her pocket. She showed Lucy her chip. Six months sober.

    'I'm proud of you, Mama.'

    Dottie turned toward the women at the table.

    'This is Lucy, my baby girl.'

    The women all fussed over Lucy for a while, and Lucy let them. She'd stay on for a month or so, taking a room at a boarding house in town, in exchange for housekeeping duties. From the moment she got off the bus, she knew that she would not be staying forever, just as she knew that in many ways she had never left. Not really.

    Her mother slipped on the pilled sweater that was draped over the back of the folding chair. Lucy recognized it as one she had stolen from the JC Penney's a long time ago. The sweater was getting on in years. Her mother needed a new one. Lucy promised herself she would buy it this time.

    'Take me for a walk?' Dottie asked.

    'Sure, Mama.'

    Out in the lobby, Lucy helped her mother on with her boots. As Lucy was tying the laces, she glanced up. Her mother was smiling.

    'What?' Lucy asked.

    'I used to do the same thing for you when you were small. Funny how life comes full circle.'

    Yeah, Lucy thought. Life's hilarious.

    They walked, arm in arm, down the path that led to the town park. The temperature was falling. Lucy bunched the sweater around her mother's neck.

    Winter was coming, but that was all right. In the end, Lucy Doucette thought, the sunshine was inside. And now that she remembered everything, she could begin to forget.

Chapter 106

    Thursday, November 25

    She had cooked for twenty. like many Italian thanksgiving gatherings, the meal began with a full pasta course. This time, Jessica and her father made Jessica's grandmother's fresh ravioli, the filling a delicate and savory balance of beef, pork, and veal.

    For the first time, Sophie helped serve.

    By six o'clock the men were sprawled around the living room, snoring away. Tradition called for them to be awake by six-thirty and ready to take part in Round Two.

    At ten after six, Jessica opened the front door. South Philly was alive with the holiday. She looked left and right, didn't see Byrne's car. She wanted to call him, but she stopped herself. He had a standing invitation every year, and this year he'd said maybe. With Kevin Byrne, when it concerned events like this, 'maybe' usually meant no. But still.

    Jessica was just about to close the door when she looked down. There, on the front steps, was a small white package. She picked it up, closed the door, walked over to the kitchen. She slit open the Scotch tape with a knife. Inside was a ball of yarn. Green yarn. When Jessica brought it into the light she saw that the yarn was the same shade as the oddly constructed cable knit sweater that Kevin Byrne had been wearing around the Roundhouse of late, a sweater, he told her, that had been knitted for him by Lina Laskaris's grandmother, Anna.

    Jessica checked on her family. The men were still in a turkey-and– Chianti-induced coma; the women were doing the dishes and sneaking cigarettes out back. Then Jessica walked upstairs into the bedroom, closed the door behind her.

    She unspooled the yarn, brushed back her hair, gathered it. She took the yarn, tied her hair into a ponytail, checked herself in the dresser mirror. The autumn had long since taken back the highlights bestowed by summer. She turned to the side, and for a moment had a memory of her mother tying back her hair with green yarn on her first day of school. How much youthfulness the world had then, how full of energy it had been.

    She could use some of each.

    As the new mother to a rocketing little two-year-old-boy, Jessica was going to need all the vitality and vigor she could muster. The papers had come through a week earlier, and Carlos Balzano was at that moment downstairs charming the entire family.

    Jessica looked one final time at the yarn in her hair. In some ways, it was just as good as the original.

    No, she thought as she turned out the light and descended the steps. In some ways it was even better.

Epilogue

    For every light there is shadow. For every sound, silence. In this massive room the silence was complete. Considering that there were nearly twenty-five hundred people in the Verizon Center, it was all the more profound.

    The last note of Sinfonia Concertante sifted through the hall, and the applause began.

    As the conductor turned to the audience, Byrne saw people noticing Christa-Marie, heard their whispers. The story had broken wide a few weeks earlier, the account of Christa-Marie's innocence in the murder of Gabriel Thorne. Byrne could not imagine the courage it had taken for Christa-Marie to come to this place on this night.

    Soon the applause turned from the stage and was offered to the woman in the tenth row. A soft spotlight found them. The conductor walked to the footlights and bowed. The orchestra rose to its feet.

    Byrne didn't know how much time together they had left, but he knew that he would be with Christa-Marie until the end. More than that, he wondered how it sounded to her. He wondered if it sounded the same, if it meant what it had meant twenty years ago when she had been the brightest star in the heavens.

    Kevin Byrne took Christa-Marie's hand and held it as the applause grew, the sound echoing across the deep chasms of memory, the vast and merciful landscape of time.

Acknowledgments

    Special thanks to:

    Meg Ruley, Peggy Gordijn, Jane Berkey, Christina Hogrebe, Don Cleary, Mike McCormack, Kristen Pini, and the great team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

    Kate Elton, Susan Sandon, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, Jason Arthur, Rob Waddington, Emma Finnigan, Claire Round, Glenn O'Neill, and everyone at Random House UK.

    Darin Brannon, Tara Klein, Francis Gross, Jane Sembric, Ray Villani, Douglas Bunker, Diana Richardson, Sandra Brancaleone, and Tacy Dooley.

    Jennifer Kallend at the Curtis Institute of Music; Evan Evans at Le Meridien Philadelphia; Emily McCarthy at Ritz Carlton Philadelphia; Frank Thompson at Sheraton Society Hill.

    Gino Rafaelli for his kindness and time, and the librarians at the CH-UH libraries for putting up with my many requests.

    Detective Eddie Rocks, Sgt. Joe Rosowski, Lt. Edward Monaghan, and the brave men and women of the Philadelphia Police Department.

    Mike Driscoll and the staff at Finnigan's Wake; Patrick Ghegan, Dom Aspite, Joe Sickman, Bob Mulgrew, A1 Kurtz, John Dougherty, Vita and Adjani DeBellis, and the rest of the Philly crew.

    My father, Dominic Montanari. Nine and change, Pop.

    The city of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for letting me create hotels, institutions, and townships, and for letting me move streets, buildings, and neighborhoods. I promise to put everything back where I found it.