away. More and more since then, Alvin had worked his own beat, both at work and in his life, and now, as he thought of it, Frank found that he couldn’t blame him in the least.
He stood up and walked out onto the small porch. It was barely large enough to hold a single wrought-iron chair, but it sometimes felt like the only place in the city he still enjoyed. From its high perch, he felt that he could look down and take it all in with just enough distance and perspective to see it with more clarity. He’d spent hours in the little chair, thinking of his father, his daughter, his wife. The old man was always there, preaching to high Heaven about goodness and salvation. But where had the old man’s wife gone to? Why had she left him with two boys and a clapboard church with a congregation so poor they often put bags of peas or berries in the collection box? At times, as Frank thought about it, he felt that he could grasp it. He could remember his mother’s drawn, dark, infinitely unhappy face, stripped by his father’s rigid saintliness, withered away so completely by it, that she’d sometimes seemed little more than a naked carcass, something the birds had picked to death. “Well away, Mother,” he thought now. “Well away from him.”
But he and Alvin had had to stay, and he remembered how, after his mother’s departure, the old man had grown more and more intemperate in his sermons, more and more frantic, desperate, frenzied. Sunday after Sunday, he’d whipped the dusty congregation into a rage for glory. Even Alvin had taken up the trumpet by then. And so it was only himself, shifting on the bench, silent among the howling host of believers who swayed and wept and cried out for redemption.
Sheila had been his redemption, and he could remember the touch of her long brown legs as if they were still wrapped around him. Her warm breath had redeemed him, and the feel of her fingers as they pulled at his hair. During those long, twining nights, he had not been able to imagine that he would ever lie down next to her without desire. And yet, as the years had passed, so had their passion, until, in the end, it was only the house they shared, little square rooms with pictures of seascapes hanging from the walls. Only their house, and their daughter.
She’d been born only a few years after their marriage, and he had named her Sarah as a last concession to his father: Sarah, after Abraham’s faithful and long-suffering wife. Her birth had transformed him, or had at least made him feel transformed. He’d discovered something hidden in himself, an immense and primitive capacity for love. It was as if she possessed a density which nothing else possessed, not his wife or his work, or anything else imaginable. He came to realize how small women lifted huge trucks off the shattered legs of their children. There was something primordial in the bond between a father and his daughter, and he had felt it more powerfully than he had ever felt anything before, and when, year by year, it began to slip away, he felt as if he were slowly being drained of some essential force.
And yet, it had, in fact, slipped away. Slowly, her moodiness had overwhelmed her, and he could not change it. By the time she was nine, she played almost entirely alone. By eleven her eyes had taken on a strange, unfathomable vacancy. By thirteen he had lost her. And three years later she was dead.
He did not know why. The school psychologist had called it “congenital loneliness,” as if, by giving it a name, he had solved the mystery. But it remained a mystery to Frank, one that sank into him like water into the open veins of broken wood. For two years he’d thought of almost nothing else, thought about it as his cases lay unsolved on his desk, as his esteem in the department shrank to nothingness.
Now, it seemed to him, he had only the city and its unending streets. From his position on the small porch, he could see the skyline as it rose like a wall of stars against the night. There was still a kind of magic in its life which appealed to him. There was something wondrous in the concentration of so much humanity in such constricted space, and it was this amazing compression which created the wild, insatiable energy of the streets, an energy which spilled into them each summer night and held there, hour after hour, as if certain that the life which generated it could go on this way forever. At times, as he stood alone on the porch, gazing out at the glittering city, Frank thought that he could actually comprehend its people, as if the diverse and hidden forces which drove them forward were the product of a single, central longing that, by some tragic and mysterious code, urged one man to save his brother, and another to destroy him.
6
Frank awoke early the next morning, just as the first gray light had begun to inch its way into his room. He showered, dressed quickly, then headed for his car. The early morning traffic was lighter than he’d expected, and because of that he found himself alone in the detective bullpen. He pulled out the lab report and read it once again. He was still reading it when Asa Brickman, the head of Homicide Division, walked up to his desk.
“Morning, Frank,” he said.
“Morning, Asa.”
Brickman nodded toward the lab report. “That about the girl over on Glenwood?”
“Angelica Devereaux,” Frank said.
“Yeah, that one. Gimme.”
Frank looked at him, puzzled. “You want to read it?”
Brickman laughed. “Naw, I don’t want to read it,” he said. “I want to give it to somebody else.” He reached down and took the edge of the folder in his huge black hand.
Frank did not release it. “Why?”
Brickman shook his head. “Oh, come on, Frank, you know when a rich white girl like this gets wasted, we got to jump on it fast.”
“I am on it.”
“We’re talking old-time white money here, Frank. This Devereaux piece is not just some whore in a back alley.”
Frank said nothing. He still did not release the folder.
Brickman let it go and straightened himself. “You going to give me shit on this?” He looked at Frank menacingly. “We’re talking old white money, goddamnit.”
“That what you are, Asa?” Frank asked. “Old white money?”
Brickman sighed heavily. “Yeah, right. And don’t I look it?” He shrugged. “Look, the fact is, the bluebloods’ll be watching us on this one. I want my best men on it.” He smiled knowingly. “And your record’s spotty to say the least, my man. Know what I mean?”
“I have a feeling about this one, Asa,” Frank told him.
“A feeling?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean? You got something on this case already?”
Frank shook his head.
“Then forget it,” Brickman said. He reached for the report again, but Frank did not let it go.
Brickman’s voice hardened as he once again released the folder. “What the fuck you think you’re doing, Frank?”
“I want this case.”
“Since when does it matter to you what case you’re on?”
“Since right now.”
“You got some connection to it?”
“No.”
“Some special expertise, something like that?”
“No.”
“Any reason I could give for keeping you on it? I mean one that would hold up on the top floor?”
“Nothing. Just a feeling.”
Brickman stared at him quietly. “You know Harry Gibbons?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you say he’s the best detective in Homicide?”
“Yeah, I guess he is.”
“Takes these special goddamn courses all the time, right? Goes to night school? A real top-gun?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Just like the Mounties, always gets his man.”
Frank nodded.
