Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

Flashing images:

Eleanor’s printout of fifteen hundred unaccounted-for deadly sins.

The M.E. tech wrenching Skeeter Hodges’s broken-headed body out of the car.

“Every so often something happens that holds up a mirror that you see yourself in.”

“What do you see?”

“A guy who thinks he’s a professional, who wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in the rest of the department.”

“You’re being hard on yourself.” Kate leaned forward, her voice now softer.

“No. Just realistic.”

She shook her head. “You aren’t a realist, Frank. You and Jose-two peas in a pod. Two idealists. Two crusaders out for cosmic justice.”

“Cosmic justice?”

“Something that will make everything right for everybody all the time.”

Frank laughed. “You are absolutely full of shit.”

“Am I?” She leaned further forward. She put a hand on Frank’s forearm. “Why’d you become a cop?”

She has a way of bringing you face to face with truth, he’d told his father once.

And that’s why she’s a good lawyer, his father had said.

“Why’d you become a cop?” she repeated.

“I told you before.”

“Once more, come on.”

“Kate-”

“Once more, Frank. Say it.”

“To keep bad things from happening to good people,” he recited.

It was something he had said to himself coming back from Vietnam. That’d been a long time ago. Some things change as you get older. This hadn’t been one of them. Once he’d said it, he couldn’t get away from it. It had stayed with him all that time. And with any luck, it would probably last out his run.

Kate studied him thoughtfully for several moments, then: “Why?” She asked tentatively. As though it had come from a partially formed thought.

“Why?” Frank felt that she had opened a door into darkness.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, now sounding more certain of herself. “Why do you care?”

Frank’s eyes drifted out to Massachusetts Avenue and Third Street. A bicycle messenger weaved his way through cars stopped at the traffic light. Over at Schneider’s, a truck driver loaded cases of beer onto a handcart. The bicycle messenger ran the red light, crossed Mass Avenue, and disappeared up Third, ignoring the “Do Not Enter” sign.

Frank realized Kate was watching him, waiting. Part of him stayed with her, while another part went off searching for something coherent. Anything that’d make sense to Kate and to him.

Images-

Slapping sounds of bullets hitting flesh… bodies ripped apart… muddy boots protruding from ponchos… the putrid odor of death…

He zoomed in across Mass Avenue. The beer guy unloaded the last case, cocked the handcart back, and wheeled it into Schneider’s.

“You see how little it takes to kill somebody. How one instant, life is there. The next, it’s gone. Just… gone…” Frank snapped his fingers. “Life shouldn’t go away like that. It oughtn’t be there for the taking.”

Kate sat silently. “You’re in homicide,” she finally said. “When you go to work, the bad thing has already happened. Somebody’s been killed.”

“You can’t stop the last bad thing. But maybe you can the next bad thing.”

He put his hand to work straightening the napkin beside his plate. “And there’s this indictment sitting in our office. Fifteen hundred cases where we haven’t caught somebody. We’ve been hiding the truth. Hiding it from the public, hiding it from the mayor, hiding it from ourselves.”

Frank paused. An ambulance, sirens screeching, made its way east on Massachusetts Avenue.

She smiled. “You know, you’re very handsome when you’re passionate.”

“I thought I was very handsome all the time.”

He felt her nudge his leg with her foot.

“Let’s go,” she said. “It has been a long time.”

“Your place or mine?”

Kate got up quickly. “Mine. It’s closer.”

Still savoring Kate’s warmth and traces of her perfume, Frank fit his key into the lock and turned. He pushed the door open and stepped into the entryway.

It took a second for him to realize that the alarm had been switched off. At the same time, he heard the sound of metal sliding on metal. Reflexively, his hand moved inside his jacket.

His father stood in the kitchen doorway down the hall. He held a frying pan in one hand.

For a frozen moment, the two men faced each other.

Tom Kearney broke the spell. “Breakfast?” He smiled and waggled the frying pan. “Beat you to the draw.”

Frank felt the tension between his shoulders disappear, and he eased the Glock back into its holster.

“What’re you doing here?”

His father gave him a longish look. “Shaker lathe. Remember?”

Shaker lathe? Shaker lathe? His father might as well have been speaking Swahili.

Tom Kearney still held the frying pan up. “You’re not the one who’s supposed to be getting short-term memory loss. You and Kate,” he prompted, “weekend before last…”

It came back: The old stone millhouse his father had converted into a woodworking shop. Outside, the waterwheel slowly turning. Inside, he and Kate stood watching his father at a router, cutting a precise channel through a thick cherry post. Overhead, the massive oak shaft groaning and creaking as it turned the web of pulleys and leather drive belts. On a low bench, a chest of drawers in progress.

Kate had mentioned the absence of electric tools. That led his father off on a tutorial about nineteenth-century cabinetry. And Kate had said something about Hancock, Massachusetts, and the Shaker village. And then his father…

“Oh,” Frank said, putting the memory together, “oh, yeah.”

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.