George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

“You sick or somethin’? Your eyes don’t look right.”

“Need to talk to you, Dimitri. Need to tell you somethin’ now and get it out quick. Don’t stop me while I’m talking, ’cause I might not ever have the courage to tell it again.”

Karras regarded Wilson curiously. Wilson’s gaze was level and true.

“Say it,” said Karras.

By the time he was done, Wilson was sobbing. Karras’s shoulders had sagged and there were tears welled in his animal eyes. His lip was trembling, and his fists were balled and shaking at his side.

“Dimitri,” said Thomas Wilson. “I am so sorry for what I’ve done.”

Karras screamed. Wilson stood passively as Karras leaped toward him.

He’s going to kill me now, thought Wilson. He was strangely relieved. It surprised him for a moment that he was not afraid.

Wilson saw a white blur in the dim hall light. He saw nothing, felt nothing after that.

Boyle and Stefanos were at the bar drinking when Karras arrived, late in the afternoon, at the Spot. Stefanos was working on a beer, and Boyle was tipping a shot of Jack Daniel’s to his lips. Karras put his hand on Stefanos’s shoulder and nodded at Boyle. Stefanos turned his head; Karras’s face was tight-jawed and pale.

“Anything wrong?” asked Stefanos.

“Not a thing,” said Karras.

Boyle drank off the rest of his beer and stashed his Marlboro reds in the side pocket of his tweed while Stefanos went around the bar and grabbed a six-pack from the cooler. Mai made a couple of hash-marks on his tab. Stefanos, Karras, and Boyle exited and got into the Coronet 500 out on 8th.

The nursing home, a one-story, white-brick affair fronted by a flat, brownish lawn, was in the town of Greenbelt, in Prince George’s County. They signed in at the desk under the scrutiny of a chubby receptionist, who was eating a late lunch from a sectioned foam tray. Boyle had two cans of beer tucked beneath his raincoat.

They walked down a carpeted hall, the smell of soiled diapers cutting the still air. They passed a room where a woman sat with her face down on a table. A man’s gravelly voice came loudly from another of the rooms: “Nurse… nurse… nurse,” over and over again. The nurses on shift, black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, stood together at the end of the hall, conversing, ignoring the man’s plea. Television sets, the volume turned unnaturally high, blared from every direction in the home.

“In here,” said Boyle, and they followed him through an open door.

A heavy, shapeless old man was lying in a railed bed, his head elevated by pillows. He stared through a large window, shafts of sunset streaming across his body. Next to his bed was a small table on wheels, on which sat a tray of cold, untouched, pureed food. The stench of urine drifted off the bed. The room had the unmistakable smell of death.

“Uncle Jimmy,” said Boyle, and the man turned.

“Danny.”

Jimmy Boyle smiled. His face was fleshy, his jawline nearly invisible. Ashen baggage hung beneath his faded brown eyes. A thick hearing aid had been surgically implanted in one of his ears. His dome was covered with brown spots, and the strands of hair that remained were like brittle thread, both yellow and gray in the light.

“This is Dimitri Karras,” said Boyle. “And this is Nick Stefanos.” Jimmy Boyle looked directly into Karras’s eyes as he shook his hand.

“Good to meet you,” said Karras.

“And you.”

Jimmy Boyle made a tired gesture with his fingers. “Come on, fellas, have a seat.”

Stefanos pulled up the room’s sole chair, and Karras had a seat on the edge of the bed.

“It’s too crowded in here for me,” said Dan Boyle.

“Go ahead,” said his uncle. “Give us some time alone.”

Boyle kissed his uncle on the top of his head. Before he left he said to Stefanos, “I’ll be down in that sitting room by the reception desk.”

“Close the door on your way out,” said Karras. He couldn’t stand to hear the voice of that man, still calling for the nurses.

When Dan Boyle was gone, Jimmy Boyle said, “Well. Always nice to have visitors. Thanks for coming out.”

“My mother spoke of you often,” said Karras.

“Your mother was a fine woman.”

“Thanks. She said you were one of my father’s closest friends.”

“Going back to the Depression,” said Boyle. “We were a gang who all grew up in Chinatown together. Sons of immigrants, all of us. Your father and a kid named Billy Nicodemus, who was killed on the beach at Anzio, in the war. Joe Recevo, an Italian boy. Perry Angelos. Perry’s still around.”

“What happened to Perry?”

“He got rich. Opened a few carryouts and bought the properties early on. He’s got nine grandchildren or something, and he’s been with the same girl, Helen, for over fifty years. Perry always was the smart one of the bunch.” Boyle smiled weakly. “Didn’t look for trouble like the rest of us. But he’s a good egg.”

“Do you have children of your own?” asked Stefanos, who noticed the absence of cards, candy, and photographs in the room.

“I never married,” said Boyle. “Except for a spell when some pharmacist got me hooked on pep pills, I’ve always been fat. A helluva lot fatter than I am now. The ladies didn’t much care for men built like me, but the fact is I had my special preferences myself. I always did crave the company of colored women, see? But back then, well, you’d never think to bring a colored girl home to meet your father. Funny, here I am getting sponge baths from dark-skinned gals every day. What I dreamed of my whole life, right? Trouble is, I can’t get the equipment to come to attention anymore. But it’s still pleasant. I do look forward to those baths, every day.”

“Speaking of the nurses,” said Karras, “why don’t they respond to that guy yelling for them right now?”

“Ah,” said Boyle with a dismissive wave of his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with that guy. He’s just afraid to be alone. How a man faces death is as important as how he lives his life. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so,” said Karras.

“Sure you do. You’re your father’s son. And your father feared nothing, to a fault. Hell, Pete’s the man responsible for getting me my gold shield.”

“I heard something about it from my mother,” said Karras.

“There was this killer named Gearhart, a big dandy who worked for a loan shark named Burke. Pete tagged Gearhart as a killer and handed me the collar. I was made detective straight away.”

“Burke,” said Karras.

“You know the name,” said Boyle.

“I know that someone named Burke killed my old man.”

Boyle nodded. “Pete and Joey Recevo had both worked for Burke at one time, just after the war. Something bad happened between Pete, Joey, and Burke. Burke had your father’s leg busted up pretty bad, and then Pete was out. Big Nick Stefanos gave him a job in his hash house, over on Fourteenth. In nineteen forty-nine, your father died in a gun battle in Burke’s row house in lower Northwest. Joe died beside him. I always figured the whole thing had to do with Karras turning in Gearhart. And I felt plenty bad about that.” Boyle looked at Stefanos. “But then Costa, the little guy who worked with your grandfather, set me straight.”

“Costa?” said Stefanos. “When was that?”

“Right before he died from cancer, a few years back. I went over there to see him at his place. He wanted to get some things off his chest before he passed. He didn’t know if it was right to tell you. I was the regular coffee-cop at Nick’s Grill all those years, and he knew I was one of Pete’s old friends.”

It was warm in the room. Stefanos wanted a beer. He wanted to smoke a cigarette. He looked at Karras and for the first time noticed the skin scraped from the knuckles of Karras’s right hand.