“Pop,” Frank was saying with his nice smile. His teeth were white and straight as a wall, like all American teeth. “You okay? Can you wake up?”
“Sure, sure.” Tony was awakening only slowly. It took him longer than when he was young. He pushed himself up in his seat in the cab, not knowing when he had slumped down, and shook off his slumber. “Okay, Frankie. Okay, Frank,” he said, correcting himself. His grandson didn’t like to be called Frankie or Little Frank anymore, like when he was a baby.
But suddenly Frank wasn’t smiling and the lawyer wasn’t laughing anymore. The cab pulled up at the curb outside his house, where a crowd had collected. Both Frank and Judy had turned toward his house, and they looked so sad. He craned his neck to see around Judy.
Pigeon Tony wasn’t at all surprised by what he saw, and he realized that this was both the blessing and the curse of old age.
Chapter 11
It was almost dark and the skinny South Philly street was too narrow for streetlights. Judy could barely see the plastic particolored beach chairs that sat outside each house on the sidewalk, in circles of three and four. Neighbors milled on the sidewalk but they were reduced to shadow figures, wearing pink-sponge hair-curlers and smoking cigarettes.
Judy threaded her way through the crowd with ease, as they congregated around Frank and Pigeon Tony, and when she got to the front, she looked up. The front door to Pigeon Tony’s row-house had been sledgehammered from its hinges, and splintered wood blanketed the marble stoop. The two front windows had been shattered, as if by a baseball bat, and lamplight blazed within. Judy stared at the destruction for a minute, uncomprehending, then reached into her purse for her cell phone.
“My birds! My birds!” Pigeon Tony cried, his voice quavering, and he scurried past Judy to the front stoop, barely grazing the wrought-iron handrail in his urgency.
Frank hurried right behind him but stopped to touch Judy’s arm on the way. “Listen, we get my grandfather out of here as fast as possible, understood?” he said in a low voice. “He’s in danger if he stays here tonight. He’ll put up a fight to stay, and I’ll tell him no. You back me up. Got it?”
“Sure,” she said, willing to take instructions from a client when she agreed with them. She had already opened her black StarTAC and punched the speed dial for 911 when a woman’s voice came on the line. “Hello?” Judy asked, and Frank snorted.
“Good luck,” he said as he hurried after his grandfather.
“I want to report a break-in,” Judy told her, and gave the address to the dispatcher, who promised that a squad car would be there as soon as possible. Judy palmed the cell phone with some anxiety. She was counting on the Philadelphia police, never a completely safe bet. The score could be Law 0, Old Italian Way 1 unless she did something about it.
She became aware of a tinkling sound and squinted to see a woman in a Phillies T-shirt sweeping shards of jagged glass into a long-handled dustpan. While Judy was touched by the gesture, she couldn’t let her finish. “I know you’re trying to help, but maybe you shouldn’t sweep now,” Judy said to the woman, as politely as possible. “The glass could have fingerprints on it, or other evidence. This is a crime scene, technically.”
“Oh, sorry.” The woman instantly stopped sweeping. Pieces of glass tumbled to a stop across the gritty sidewalk, catching the light from the window. “I didn’t know. You being a lawyer, you would know.”
Judy didn’t ask the woman how she knew about her, from TV or the South Philly network, which apparently was better than cable. “Where are the cops? Did anybody call the cops?”
“I don’t know. It’s a sin, what they did to that old man,” the woman said.
“Who did it?” Judy asked, though she could guess at the answer.
“I don’t know.”
Judy didn’t have to see her face to know she was lying. “You have no idea?”
“No,” the woman said, shaking her head.
“Do you know what time it happened?”
“No,” the woman answered, edging away.
“Did you hear anything? See anything?”
“No way.” The woman disappeared into the crowd, but Judy wasn’t giving up. She held up her hands, one containing her cell phone.
“Please! Everybody! I need your attention!” she shouted.
The neighbors, who had been milling around, stopped and looked at her. She couldn’t see their expressions in the dark, but she knew they were listening because they quieted suddenly, and a sea of Eagles caps, Flyers caps, and pink cotton hairnets turned in her direction. Cigarette ends like lighted erasers glowed next to the chubbier, more muted flames of cigars. Somebody chuckled in the back of the crowd, and somebody else shouted, “Yo! What you got in your hand, a bomb?” and everybody laughed, including Judy, who quickly slipped the cell phone back into her purse.
“Obviously, we have a problem here,” she shouted. “Somebody broke into Pigeon Tony’s house. Did anybody here see who broke the door and windows?”
The crowd remained mostly silent, although some people started talking among themselves and the same joker in the back kept chuckling.
“Look, somebody must have heard or seen something. It takes time to chop down a door and it makes noise to break a window. It had to have happened in broad daylight. Isn’t anybody going to help Pigeon Tony out?”
There was no answer from the crowd, which had started to scatter at the fringes. Somebody was still chuckling. Judy wanted to throttle him.
“Wait! Don’t go away. You’re all Pigeon Tony’s neighbors. You care enough about him to clean up the mess. Don’t you care enough to help him catch who did this?”
A murmur rippled through the dark crowd, which was growing smaller by the minute. Judy watched with dismay as the shadows disappeared into their rowhouses and shut the doors behind them. Suddenly the chuckling ceased and somebody shouted from the back, “Who the hell do you think did it?”
Judy took a deep breath. It was assumption-upon-assumption time again. “I think I know who did it. In fact, we all think we know who did it. But somebody had to see or hear them do it, to hold them accountable for it. So what we need now, what Pigeon Tony needs now, is a witness.”
The crowd quieted suddenly, and Judy understood why. There was something about the way the word rang out in the night that gave even her goose bumps.
“You know what a witness is, don’t you? I’ll define it for you, since I’m Pigeon Tony’s lawyer and it’s a highly technical legal term. A witness is somebody with the balls to come forward and tell the truth.”
The crowd laughed, this time with her, though Judy noticed they continued their defection. Only four shadows stood before her, and one had to stay because his beagle was rooted to a scent on the sidewalk.
“You don’t have to come forward now. You can call me anytime. My name is Judy Carrier, at Rosato and Associates downtown.” By the time she finished the sentence, all of the neighbors had gone, except the beagle owner, unhappy at the other end of the leash. “Nice dog,” Judy said.
“He’s a pain in the ass,” said the man, and tugged the beagle away.
Having accomplished nothing, Judy turned and went inside the house. She should have been prepared for what she’d find inside, but she wasn’t. The front door, or what was left of it, would have opened onto a small living room, with an old green sofa against the left wall, on which hung a large mirror and several framed black-and-white photographs. There would have been a wooden coffee table in front of the couch, and next to that, at one point, an old overstuffed wing chair, in the same dark green fabric as the sofa. But none of it was recognizable now, the violence well beyond vandalism.
The coffee table had been broken in the middle and looked as if it had been jumped on until its legs gave way. The sofa had been butchered, slashed this way and that, its green fabric rent into shreds. White polyester stuffing had been ripped out and strewn everywhere on the shredded couch and floor. The wing chair had been knifed to death, and somebody had taken a sledgehammer to its frame and splintered the wood as easily as the bones of a human skeleton.
Aghast, Judy looked at the wall. A single blow had shattered the mirror and it hung crazily by one corner. The
