Her lips and tongue are still stained cherry red.
CHAPTER TEN
I STAY AT THE GARBAGE house, in my old room, tossing and turning on the bed. Try as I might to not think about the dead guy chilling in the freezer two floors below me, all I can imagine is Janssen’s dead eyes staring up through the floorboards, begging silently to be discovered.
He deserves a better burial than being shut in an ice chest, no matter what he did in life. And God knows what I deserve for putting him there.
Since I can’t sleep anyway, I open up the file the Feds gave me and spread the pages across my mattress. It gives me Janssen’s girlfriend’s name—Bethenny Thomas—and some sketchy details about her statement that night. Nothing all that interesting. I picture her, pressing an envelope of cash against Anton’s chest. And then I picture myself, leaning over Janssen, my bare hand reaching for him, fingers curling.
I wonder if I’m the last thing he saw, a gawky kid with a bad haircut, fifteen years old at the time.
I flop onto my back, scattering papers. None of them matter. They don’t add up to Philip’s murderer. No wonder the Feds are confused. All they want to know is what this big secret is Philip had, but it isn’t here. It must be maddening to get so close to solving something and then have a new mystery on top of the old one. What was Philip’s big secret, and who killed him to protect it?
The first part is easy. I’m the secret.
Who would kill to protect me?
I think of the figure in the oversize coat and the red gloves. Then I think about her some more.
The next morning I pad downstairs and make coffee, never having managed more than a little fitful sleep. Somewhere in the night I determined that the only way I am going to be able to figure out anything is if I start looking.
I figure the best place to start is Philip’s house. The cops might have already gone through it, and so might the Feds, but they don’t know what they’re looking for. Of course, I don’t know what I’m looking for either, but I know Philip.
And I’m on a deadline.
I drink the coffee, take a shower, put on a black T-shirt and dark gray jeans, and go out to my car. It doesn’t start. I pop the hood and stare at the engine for a while, but diesel cars aren’t really my area of expertise.
I kick the tires. Then I call Sam.
His hearse pulls into my driveway not long after.
“What did you do to her?” Sam asks, petting the hood of my car and looking at me accusingly. He’s wearing his weekend attire: a shirt with Eddie Munster on it, a pair of black jeans, and mirrored aviator sunglasses. How his parents don’t see that he wants to work on special effects for movies, I don’t know.
I shrug.
He pokes around for a couple of minutes and tells me I need to replace one of the fuses and probably the battery, too.
“Great,” I say, “but there’s something else I need to do today.”
“What’s that?” Sam asks.
“Solve a crime,” I say.
He tilts his head, like he’s considering whether or not to believe me. “Really?”
I shrug. “Probably not. How about committing a crime instead?”
“Now, that sounds more like you,” he says. “Any particular one you had in mind?”
I laugh. “Breaking and entering. But it’s my brother’s house. So it’s not that bad, right?”
“Which brother?” he asks, pulling the sunglasses down his nose so he can peer over them and raise a single eyebrow. He looks like a cop in a bad TV show, which I think is what he’s going for.
“The dead one.”
He groans. “Oh, come on! Why don’t we just get the key from your mother or something? Doesn’t his apartment belong to you guys anyway? Next of kin and all that.”
I get in on the passenger side. The fact that he’s trying to think of an easier way to get in is close enough to assent for me. “I think it belongs to his wife, but I really doubt she’s going to come back to claim it.”
I give him directions. He drives, shaking his head the whole time.
Unlike Bethenny’s fancy apartment building with the doorman, Philip lived in a condo complex that looks like it might have been built in the 1970s. When we pull up, I hear the distant sounds of jazz on a radio, and I smell frying garlic. Inside, I know, the condos are huge.
“I’m going to wait in the car,” Sam says, looking around nervously. “Crime scenes creep me out.”
“Fine. I won’t be long.” I can’t really blame him.
I know there’s a security camera, since I saw the pictures it took of the red-gloved woman. It’s easy to disconnect on my way to the door.
Then, as I pull out a stiff piece of metal from my backpack and squat in front of the knob, my nerves get the best of me. I’m not sure I’m ready to confront my brother’s empty home. I take a couple of deep breaths and concentrate on the lock. It’s a Yale, which means I have to turn it clockwise and the pins will have beveled edges. The familiar work is a welcome distraction from my thoughts.
Picking locks isn’t hard, although it can be annoying. Normally you stick a key in the keyway, it turns the pins, and bingo, the door opens. When you’re picking a lock, the easiest thing to do is scrub over the pins until they set. There are more sophisticated techniques, but I’m not the expert my dad was.
A few minutes later, I’m inside.
Philip’s apartment has a stale rotten-food smell when I open the door. There’s still police tape up, but it comes away easily. Other than that, the place just looks messy. Take-out boxes, beer bottles. Stuff a depressed guy leaves out when he has no wife and kid around to object.
When Philip was alive, I was afraid of him. I resented him. I wanted him to suffer like he’d made me suffer. Looking around the living room, I realize for the first time how honestly miserable he must have been. He lost everything. Maura ran off with his son; his best friend, Anton, was killed by our grandfather; and the only reason a crime boss he’d worked for since he was a teenager didn’t kill him was because of me.
I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks—cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up. He called it his second smile. It was a brand, marking Philip as belonging to the Zacharovs, marking him as an insider, a killer. He would walk around with his collar open, a swagger in his step, grinning when people crossed to the other side of the street. But I also remember him in the bathroom of the old house, tears in his eyes as he took a sharp razor to the swollen, infected skin so he could darken his scars with fresh ash.
It hurt. He felt pain, even if it’s easier for me to pretend he didn’t.
There’s a chalk outline of his body on the carpet and deep brown stains around a chunk of rug that’s been removed—I assume for forensics.
I walk through the familiar rooms, trying to see what’s out of place. Everything and nothing. I have no idea what Philip moved around before he died—I was in the house enough to know where things were in general, but not enough to memorize details. I go up the stairs and into his office—basically a spare room with a bed and a desk. The computer is missing, but I figure the Feds took it. I open a few drawers, but there’s nothing more interesting than a bunch of pens and a switchblade.
Philip’s bedroom is strewn with clothes that he obviously just dropped onto the floor when he took them off, and maybe occasionally kicked into piles. There’s broken glass chunks near the baseboard, including the jagged bottom of a highball glass with some brown fluid dried inside.
His closet is full of his remaining clean clothes and not much else. In one of his shoe boxes I find foam cut to accommodate a gun, but the gun’s gone. There’s a rattling assortment of bullets in another.
I try to think back to when we were kids, when Dad was alive. I can’t remember any of Philip’s hiding spots. All I remember is Dad coming into my room to get—
Oh.
I walk into Philip’s son’s room. His bed is still pushed against one wall, covered in stuffed animals. The drawers of the dressers are open, although some of them still have clothes in them. I can’t tell if Maura left the room like this or if this is the result of cops pawing through everything.
The closet door is standing ajar. I carry over a mushroom-shaped stool and hop up onto it, reaching up to where I keep my bookmaking operation in my own dorm room, up to the shadowy recesses of the closet above the door. My hand connects with a piece of cardboard. I rip it down.
It’s painted the same light blue as the wall. Nearly impossible to find just by looking, even with flashlights. Taped to the back is a manila envelope.
I take the whole thing back out into the room, where my movements have made the sailboat mobile over the toddler bed dance. Glassy-eyed bears watch as I fold up the brass tab and slide out a bunch of papers. The first thing I see is what looks like a legal contract granting Philip Sharpe immunity for past crimes. It’s detailed—there are a lot of pages—but I recognize the signatures in the back. Jones and Hunt.
Behind that, though, I see three pages in Philip’s looping handwriting. It’s an account of whose ribs he cracked to make sure that Mom’s appeal went through. I don’t know what it means to find this here—whether it’s with these other papers because he never gave it to the Feds or if it’s here because he did.
All I know is that this could get Mom sent back to prison.
All I know is that Mom would have never forgiven him.
I push that thought out of my head as I walk back toward the living room, tucking the envelope into the waistband of my jeans and pulling my T-shirt over it. On the coffee table is a big brass ashtray, empty of all cigarette butts but one. As I walk closer, I notice it’s white with a gold band. I recognize it.
It’s a Gitanes. The brand Lila smoked when she came back from France all those years ago. I pick it up and look at it, see the imprint of lipstick. The first thought that occurs to me is that I didn’t know she still smoked.
The second thought is that I have already seen that the Feds took stuff from Philip’s apartment. I assume the ashtray is empty because the forensics team already took all the butts, along with the chunk of rug, Philip’s computer, and the gun. Which means Lila came later.
The door opens and I spin around, but it’s only Sam.
“I got bored,” he says. “Besides, you know what’s creepier than walking around your dead brother’s apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.”
I grin. “Make yourself at home.”
He nods toward my hand. “What’s that?”
“I think Lila was here,” I say, holding up the remains of her cigarette. “She used to smoke these. The lipstick looks right.”
He looks a bit stunned. “You think Lila killed your brother?”
I shake my head, but what I mean is that I don’t think that the cigarette proves anything. It doesn’t prove that she did and it doesn’t prove that she didn’t.
“She must have been here after the place got swept for evidence,” I say. “She came in here, sat on this couch, and smoked a cigarette. Why?”
“Returning to the scene of the crime,” Sam says, like he’s a television detective.
“I thought you liked Lila,” I say.
“I do,” he says, and suddenly looks serious. “I do like Lila, Cassel. But it’s weird that she was in your brother’s house after he was murdered.”
“We’re in my brother’s house after he was murdered.”
Sam shrugs his massive shoulders. “You should just ask her about it.”
Lila loves me. She has to; she’s been worked to. I don’t think she would do something that would hurt me, but I can’t explain that to Sam without explaining the rest. And I won’t tell him about the envelope.
I don’t want to even think about those three pages and what they might mean. I don’t want to imagine my mother being the woman in the red gloves. I want the murderer to be someone I have never met, a hired gun. So long as it’s no one I know, I am free to hate them, at least as much as I hated my brother.
Back in the car I get Sam to drive me into the parking lot of a large supermarket I spot on the way to the highway. Behind the store is a sad stretch of trees and several large Dumpsters. He watches while I fumble through my backpack for matches and make a small fire as discreetly as I can, adding scraps of nearby debris, the immunity agreement, and Philip’s scrawled confession. When it’s hot enough, I drop the cigarette butt into it.
“You’re destroying evidence,” he says.
I look up at him. “Yeah?”
He smacks his hand into his forehead. “You can’t do that! What do those papers even say?”
Sam, despite everything he’s seen, is a good citizen.
I watch the edges of the paper curl and the filter smoke. I knew Philip had bargained away his own secrets—and mine—but I never thought he’d bargain away Mom’s, too. “The papers say that my brother was a hypocrite. He was so pissed off that I’d dare betray our family. Turns out he was just mad I did it first.”
“Cassel, do you know who killed him?” There’s something odd in Sam’s voice.
I look at him and realize what he’s thinking. I laugh. “They found video footage of a woman entering his apartment the night of his death. So not me.”
“I didn’t think it was you,” he says too quickly.
“Whatever.” I stand. I honestly don’t blame him for being suspicious. “It’d be okay if you did. And thanks for being my wheelman.”