Carlin Romano - Philadelphia Noir

I nodded, though I hadn’t seen her victory.

“So she was really getting rough. And then she fucking-”

“We don’t have to talk about this anymore,” I said, trying to be the sweet girl my mother remembered.

“She pulled my top down. I kept telling them I wanted to stop. But they were yelling so loud. And Adam was cheering me on. It was so-” Aja’s voice seemed to swell with tears, but her eyes remained empty.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and we were quiet for a moment. The din of the visiting room filled the space between us.

“But Jess was my best friend,” she said. I had come to be good to her, yet I wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her teeth chattered.

My brother was able to convince the police that he hadn’t done it. But he not only needed an alibi, he also had to rat out the Gutter Boys, with whom he’d apparently tried to go into business. Tried, I say, because he was such a crummy drug dealer that he had to steal to make up for what he couldn’t sell. Dahani told the police what he knew about the small operation, and after that, a couple of Jeeps slowed down when he crossed the street, but he didn’t turn up in the Schuylkill or anything. He got his old job at the video store back, but he got fired after a couple of months, and then our VCR disappeared. After two weeks in a row when he didn’t come home, and my mom had called the police about sixteen times, she changed the locks and got an alarm system.

Sometime after that she looked at me over a new tradition-a second nightly beer-and said, “Nzingha, I know we should have talked about this as soon as I knew what was going on with your brother. But I didn’t want to say anything because I know that you love him.”

The scandal didn’t break the pool. They held a floating memorial service for Jess and hired a real security company. The scandal did, however, break the news of the pool to the neighborhood. But at $1,400 a year, none of the black folks we knew could afford to join it anyway.

Grays Ferry

Since Charlie died, I’d been spending a lot of time at Johnny Izzard’s. I’d walk through the front door of his tailor shop and that bell he still had hanging over the door would ring and Johnny would look up from behind the counter and smile out of the corner of his mouth. I’d told him more than once to keep the door locked at night. Point Breeze alone seemed to be averaging a couple murders a week. But he didn’t listen.

He’d be fiddling with a pair of trousers on a wooden hanger, running his hands gently down one leg at a time, the soft cool fabric sliding between his bony fingers as he adjusted the hem with a few straight pins between his lips and his glasses sliding down his nose. I’d lean on the counter and watch him work and when he was done, he’d pull out a bottle and a few glasses and start to pour. We’d pick up where we left off, the conversation always turning to our old friend Charlie Melvyn and the barber shop he had on Tasker Avenue and the way he died and whether he was better off dead than alive.

The barber shop had been boarded up like many of the storefronts in that neighborhood. Since then, I’d been getting my hair cut at the Gallery Mall by a twenty-something girl with breast implants, a tattoo of a snake on her neck, and a man’s haircut of her own, parted on the side and trimmed neatly around the piercings in her ears.

Johnny’s tailor shop was a little farther up on 25th and tonight we were celebrating his eightieth birthday. Johnny’s son had been trying to get him into one of those assisted living places out in Delaware County, get him a nice clean room with a view of the Lexus dealership across the street and a rotating shift of nurses and aides to take his pulse and do his laundry and wipe his ass. I think he was actually considering it.

“Look what the cat dragged in. My, my… another Irish cop with a bad attitude. You come to roust me, officer, or just steal my liquor?”

“Ex-cop, Mr. Izzard. With a capital X. I’m not playing that game anymore.”

“It was fun while it lasted, though. Wasn’t it?”

“It had its moments.”

“You smell nice. You got a date?”

“Meeting an old friend.”

“A woman?”

“She asked me to do her a favor. That’s it. It’s not what you think.”

“It never is.” Johnny’s eyes lit up, a greenish tint coming through the clouded glasses like dusty emeralds. He unplugged a hot iron that sat on an ironing board behind him. Next to that was an old sewing machine that rested on black iron legs with a heavy square pedal the size of a sewer grate and a black spinning wheel and a sewing needle secured to a silver arm like a glistening metal spike. Johnny ran his hand over his bald, chocolate-brown head, wiping away a layer of cold sweat. The wrinkles around his eyes smoothed out as his smile softened.

“He was like a father to you, huh?”

“Yeah, he was.”

“Still ain’t over it?”

“Are you?”

“We lookin’ at the same thing, right? But we don’t see it the same.”

“How do you see it?”

“After Chawlie died, I was angry. We both were. But I’m trying to think what Chawlie would want us to do?”

“Charlie didn’t die, Johnny. He was murdered.”

“And you think I don’t know that. But if he’s looking down on us right now, what’s he thinking?”

“He knows I’d like to catch the guy that shot him.”

“And do what with him? Lock him up? And for how long? What good will it do?”

“Maybe I’ll save the taxpayers of Philadelphia the expense of a trial.”

“You don’t mean that, son.”

“I’m starting to think I do, Johnny.”

“And what if it turns out to be some sixteen-year-old kid?”

“So be it.”

“You changed that much? You really that hard? What, Chawlie Melvyn gets killed and suddenly there’s no hope left in the world? You know, son, when I’m talkin’ ’bout carryin’ out the wishes of the deceased, I mean more than just buryin’ him next to his mother or crematin’ him and dumpin’ his ashes into the Delaware River or puttin’ a tombstone on his grave the size of the goddamn Washington Monument.”

“I heard George Washington had over two hundred slaves. Did you know that?”

“Don’t change the subject, son.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Only two hundred?”

“Maybe more.”

“What I’m sayin’ is that Chawlie didn’t die in vain. He didn’t believe that and neither should you. That’s the truth.”

“If you saw his blood on the sidewalk, Johnny. It was there for days, like a black stain.”

“Chawlie was fightin’ a war, Seamus. Like a lot of us are. Like you are. Otherwise, we’d pick up and go. It’s a war of attrition, son. Chawlie was just hangin’ on and then he saw the chance to do somethin’ real. He died savin’ a bunch of kids who’d never have learned what Chawlie Melvyn was all about. He put himself in the line of fire. It wasn’t an accident, what he did. He saw a gun and chose to shield those kids. He was willin’ to die saving someone else. That means somethin’.”

“You mean he’s a martyr?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Well, the cemetery is full of them, Johnny.”

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, not looking at each other but aware that we were both thinking the same thing. Charlie’s barber shop had instilled itself in our common memory, a dream of a better time when the old men sat around that place telling stories about how great Philadelphia used to be, about South Street in the summer, about the fish market and the Phillies and the old singers that stopped coming around and the prostitutes on Lombard and how many more dead cops there were with each passing year and that if they didn’t get out of Grays Ferry soon, they’d end up dying there, and how nothing would ever be the same unless someone did something about it.