Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [23]
“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.
I raised the glass of whiskey and held it up in front of me. Johnny did the same. We nodded and drank. I wished him a happy birthday and went out the door with the bell ringing in my head.
I took 27th Street through the heart of Point Breeze and onto Grays Ferry Avenue and then onto 30th, where I pulled into the lot at St. Gabe’s. There was a church, a monastery, and a school, all made of redbrick and jagged gray stone, the three buildings surrounding a parking lot and a deserted playground. At night, the shadows from the old church spread across the lot and the nuns would creep to their second-story windows and peer out at the sun sliding behind the gray skyline, and in the darkness it wasn’t unusual to see a car pull in and park at the far end of the lot. St. Gabriel’s seemed to be looking down on the entire city of Philadelphia with a weary eye.
Millie Price had asked me to meet her there at ten. I was early.
I looked across the lot at the flimsy wooden backboard and the rusty rim clinging to it. The metal pole swayed in the cold wind. The concrete that held it in the ground had long since turned to dust and been blown away. A wall of chain link made the whole place look like an old prison, where inmates might have come out into the cold air once a day and stared at the broken basket and laughed like crows at a rankled scarecrow. And the crooked weather vane sitting at the top of the arched steeple of St. Gabe’s would point down at them and laugh back.
The diocese had planted trees along a narrow strip of lawn bordering the playground. Thin dogwoods that bloomed in spring, the delicate white flowers emerging shyly for the first few years and then going into a kind of permanent hibernation, the dried bark peeling away and exposing the speckled, wind-blown skin beneath. They stood like that year after year, leafless and gray, their thin, petrified branches frozen in place.
I’d pulled my ten-year-old Jeep Cherokee into the lot. It was navy-blue, with an exhaust system that made it sound like a tank. The front wheels grinded as I circled toward the back. It had been making that same noise for two months. I’d taken it to Eddie’s garage earlier that day and he’d told me it needed bearings on both sides. It was a three-hundred-dollar