glass.
My father had been the first responding officer and he’d called the detectives in as if it were an actual homicide. They never caught the guys and for a lot of people in Grays Ferry, including my old man, it was the last straw, time to get out. They could have dealt with the beer cans in the park and the dog shit and the garbage lining the streets and an occasional strong-arm robbery and the sirens at all hours of the night, but they couldn’t deal with butchered swans, not even in Grays Ferry.
That was the first time I’d heard my father refer to our square patch of neighborhood in Grays Ferry as Devil’s Pocket. I wasn’t sure what it meant back then. I am now.
A week later he was killed responding to a domestic dispute on Christian just off 25th and I knew we weren’t going anywhere. Devil’s Pocket would always be my home. They drained the pond and filled it in with gravel and turned it into a rock garden with a small fountain and a statue of St. Francis with the pigeons flocking to his outstretched arm and the water rolling gently off his back.
I went through four or five more cigarettes when I began to think that maybe Millie wasn’t going to show. It shouldn’t have surprised me. From what I remembered, she never was known for her punctuality. She wasn’t usually too hard to find though. There were only a couple places to look. I decided to hang in there a little longer, nurse one more cigarette and then take off. Millie had my cell number and could have called if she was going to be late. But Millie was never known for her consideration either. She’d been working behind the bar at the Arramingo Club for a long time. She lived only a few blocks away on Catherine. That’s where I was headed.
I parked in front of a vacant lot on 24th and walked the rest of the way. I’d grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment and tapped it against my palm and peeled it open and lit up a cigarette as I walked down the dark street. I passed a couple of black-haired Asian girls leaning against a brand-new red Camaro. Their short skirts and high heels and red lipstick matched the car perfectly. They were a little out of their territory, I thought, and I wanted to say something to them. I wanted to tell them what could happen to a girl in a miniskirt and high-heel shoes and naked legs leaning against a red-hot Camaro. I wanted to tell them all that I’d seen but I knew it was no use. I’d never really been able to speak their language, and even if I said something, they wouldn’t listen.
Millie Price lived in one of those buildings where you ring the doorbell and they buzz you in. The problem was there were rarely any names under the mailboxes in the vestibule, and even if there were, it was often too dark to see. I struck a match and noticed that someone had wedged a crushed beer can into the door jamb. I pushed through and into the dark hallway and started up the stairs. I remembered Millie lived on the second floor but I wasn’t sure which apartment was hers. The door on the left had a peace sign spray-painted on it in a fluorescent yellow. The door on the right hung open a few inches.
I was starting to get a bad feeling. It was the kind of feeling cops get just before something bad happens, an intuition you develop after a few long years on the street. Some guys are just born with it. Either way, if you don’t develop it sooner or later, you might just find yourself dead.
And that’s how I found Millie Price, in a heap on the floor just inside her front door. She was wearing a thin leather jacket and jeans as if she was just about to go out. She probably heard the knock and opened the door and the gun was the only thing she saw. She was lying on her back with two bullet holes in the Snoopy shirt she was wearing under the jacket and a dark bloodstain spreading over two well-formed breasts. She was still as beautiful as I remembered.
I looked down at her, at the blood on her chin where it had spilled from her mouth and the blood pooling on the floor beneath her, and I felt a little ache in my own chest. I was thinking I should have felt something more, and maybe I would have if things had been different between Millie and me all those years ago. Now, she was just another corpse in an apartment on the border of Grays Ferry and Point Breeze, where stray corpses were becoming more and more common.
I phoned it in and Detective William Trask showed up in record time, only about an hour after the first uniformed officer arrived and handcuffed me in the backseat of his cruiser. I showed him my retired Philly Police badge but it didn’t seem to change his mind. It was for his protection and mine, he said. I didn’t think I had anything to fear from the police, so he must have been protecting me from myself.
While the steel bracelets were cutting into my wrists and my fingers were going numb, I thought about Millie, up there growing cold on her living room rug. She’d be going rigid by now. They could probably stand her up and lean her against the wall and fit her with the perfect size body bag and walk her down the stairs. I wiggled my fingers and fidgeted on the hard plastic seat, thinking now of all the prisoners I’d had in my backseat and how many times I’d told them to shut up and sit still and how many times they’d puked and pissed themselves along the way.
Just then, the door opened and Detective Trask yanked me out of the car, spun me around, and unhooked my wrists. He didn’t look happy, but as I remembered, William Trask never looked happy.
“What the hell, Seamus! How are you involved in all this?”
“Her name’s Millie Price. She’s an old friend.”
“Sure. How about the rest of it?”
“There’s nothing else to tell, Bill. You saw what I saw.”
“So you were paying a surprise visit to an old girlfriend and when you get here, she just happens to be dead. Shot to death with two large-caliber slugs at close range.”
“There’s a little more to it than that.”
“I’m listening.”
“She was supposed to meet me earlier tonight outside St. Gabe’s. She’d called me this afternoon, asked me to do her a favor, said an old boyfriend was hassling her. She wanted me to scare him off. Said it wouldn’t be a problem that he’d scare easy. She was going to pay me three hundred dollars.”
Trask pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. He lit one for himself and then mine with the same match.
“I think she got her money’s worth.”
Two techs from the medical examiner’s office carried Millie down the stairs in a gray body bag. They swung her onto a flimsy metal stretcher and wheeled her to the back of a darkblue van with tinted windows and a municipal license plate. One of the techs opened the door while the other rammed the stretcher into place. I thought I glimpsed the shadows of other black bags neatly packed inside the van. At least Millie would have company.
“Any idea who the boyfriend was?”
“None.”
“You wouldn’t be holding out on me now, Seamus Kilpatrick? You know better than that.”
“What reason would I have not to tell the truth?”
“That all depends on the nature of your relationship with Miss Price.”
“I haven’t seen her in ten years.”
“And before that?”
“We were friends. I knew her from the neighborhood.”
“For God’s sake, Kilpatrick, she was a stripper. What do you expect me to believe? You were members of the same book club. You met at the library every Tuesday afternoon.”
“She’s been out of that business for a long time.”
“She used to be married to Billy Haggerty? I suppose you knew that.”
I drew hard on the cigarette, letting the smoke drift and blow away like a bad dream.
“Of course I knew. That was over a long time ago too.”
“We’ll see.”
A young cop in a brand-new pinstripe suit came out and handed Trask a collection of crime scene photos. He thumbed through them as if they were a deck of playing cards, his face expressionless as he stared down at the lifeless body of Millie Price. He slid them into a manila envelope and pointed its sharp corner into my chest.
“You and I never had a problem, Kilpatrick, not when you were with the force and not since you left. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Am I free to go?”
“If you find something out, I’ll want to hear about it.”
I took one last drag on the cigarette and threw it past them into the street. I could feel the eyes of the
