His father still had the quizzical look, as though still unconvinced that Frank had made the connection.
“Where’s your truck?”
Tom Kearney lowered the frying pan and returned to the range. “Up at Judith’s.”
“Oh.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you mean that?”
“What?”
“That ‘Oh’ of yours.”
Frank grinned. “Just happy to see you in town. I ran into Judith the other day, coming out of Dean and DeLuca. She seemed happy too.”
“Really?”
It was clear, the way his father asked, that Judith Barnes’s being happy was important.
“Getting serious, Dad?”
Tom Kearney cocked his head, and his eyes drifted off into mid-distance somewhere above Frank’s head. “Yes,” he said slowly, “yes, it is.” He set the frying pan down and leaned back against the counter. A man coming to a conclusion he’d been working on, thinking about, but not putting it into words. “For a while after Maggie’s death…” he trailed off. “No… for a long time after… I prided myself for getting on with my life. I fixed up the millhouse, got into serious cabinetry. Got to believing I didn’t need anybody…”
“Then Judith?”
“Then Judith.” Tom Kearney nodded. “You live long enough, you get to know something about yourself. I’m one of those people who has to share. If we don’t… if we can’t… there’s something good in us that atrophies. It just withers away.”
He stood there, thinking about that, then turned and picked up the frying pan.
“Scrambled? Or fried?”
Frank sat at the harvest table, sipping coffee, and watched his father at the stove. He traced the ancient scars in the tabletop with an index finger.
Been what? Five? No… six months.
Six months since the early-morning phone call and the strangled words. Then the long weeks later, watching his father grit his way through physical therapy. During those grueling sessions, Frank understood how a younger Tom Kearney had gutted it through World War II-jump school at Fort Benning, parachuting into Normandy, and, finally, in muddy combat boots and no longer young, drinking captured champagne in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.
Fast forward-the murder of Mary Keegan, the frantic search for her killer, and the lives that search changed. Among them Judith Barnes’s and his own father’s.
“Hello, furry one.”
Tom Kearney looked down at Monty. The big cat had come out of nowhere and was winding around his legs.
“A little egg?”
Monty sat staring raptly at Frank’s father.
With one hand, Tom Kearney found a saucer in a nearby cabinet and, with the other, deftly scooped up a heaping tablespoon of scrambled eggs.
“He won’t eat eggs,” Frank said.
Monty was into them before Tom Kearney could get the saucer on the floor.
Frank shook his head. Cats.
His father had moved easily. No left-side dragging. The stroke might as well have not happened. Except that it had. And it had brought with it a sense of mortality closing in.
It’s not all bad-knowing how near death always is. We’re here. Then we’re not. And the world moves on-
Frank realized he’d missed something his father had said. “What?”
“Skeeter Hodges.” Tom Kearney put the plates on the table. He pulled up a chair opposite Frank and sat. “Tell me about it,” he said, cutting into a sausage. “Begin at the beginning.”
“Hoser and I got the call… Friday night… about eight…”
Bayless Place… flashes of blue and red… the Orioles… Teasdale… isn’t one bunch of gang-bangers, it’s gonna be another… Pencil Crawfurd in the ICU… Marcus and Skeeter’s mother…
His father listened, interrupting only to ask an occasional question.
Frank finished. Tom Kearney sat quietly, somber, reflective. Frank remembered his father’s days presiding in court.
“The seventies and eighties in this town were awful,” Tom Kearney said. “I thought we were on the edge of anarchy. If it had been any other city but Washington, the place would have been under martial law. I thought things had gotten better. But they haven’t. We’ve given birth to a lawless culture. It’s passed on from generation to generation… like a family business. Brutal, unforgiving enterprise. You make a wrong decision and you get a nine- millimeter retirement or life in an eight-by-ten cell. The ones who succeed… who make it big… become even more deadly than their parents.”
“Survival of the fittest,” Frank mused. “Criminal Darwinism at work.”
Tom Kearney shrugged and rolled one hand in a gesture of futility. “Now, the numbers business doesn’t surprise me. You let politicians play with numbers, it’s turning the proverbial fox loose in the henhouse.” He got up from his chair, unfolding slowly to stand. He reached for Frank’s empty plate, stacked it on his own, and made his way to the sink.
“Fella with the lathe said he’d meet me at the flea market.” Tom Kearney said. “He ought to be there by now.”
Like so many mushrooms, the Georgetown flea market sprang up on Sunday mornings in a school parking lot on Wisconsin Avenue, just across from the Safeway. From Frank’s house, it was a good walk: up Thirtieth to R Street, past Katharine Graham’s home, Oak Hill Cemetery, Montrose Park, and Dumbarton Oaks.
At the market, his father went off to deal with the fella with the Shaker lathe, leaving Frank to wander through the aisles of vans. Canopies stretched out from them, over everything from honey, tomatoes, and home- baked breads to chandeliers, wicker chairs, and Bavarian beer steins.
He stopped to admire a bowling trophy awarded to one Norville “Splits” Casey in 1939. A nearby cigar box filled with marbles caught his eye. He picked out a marble and held it up, taken by a white ribbon twisting through the clear green glass.
“That there’s a corkscrew.” The speaker, a stocky older woman with short white hair, in red slacks and a Carolina Panthers T-shirt, held a Marlboro in the corner of her mouth.
“See how it cuts through the middle? That’s why they call it an auger. Augers go through the middle of a marble. When the corkscrew is on the surface, they call it a snake.”
“Akro Agate?” Frank asked.
The woman squinted at Frank through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Yeah. Akro. You know marbles?”
“Some. How much for the box?”
He found his father, standing by the Shaker lathe, handing a check to a grizzled man in a red tank top.
Tom Kearney smiled. “Joe here’s going to deliver it, aren’t you, Joe?”
Joe nodded. “Wednesday, Judge?”
“Wednesday’s fine.” Tom Kearney stowed his checkbook away. He pointed to the cigar box under Frank’s arm.
“What do you have there?”
“Marbles.”
Tom Kearney acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He nodded approval. “Man can’t have too many marbles. You ready to head home?”
For several blocks, the two men walked in silence.
“I’ve been thinking,” Tom Kearney finally said.
“Marbles? Shaker lathes?”
“Hodges… the numbers. Fifteen hundred cold cases?”
“Yessir?”
Tom Kearney shook his head. “My years in court… for a while, a long while, I thought I’d seen it all. Took
