Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [24]
“He just won’t take no for an answer,” she’d said.
“He’ll scare easily,” she’d said.
I turned the key and the Jeep went suddenly quiet. It was a sound that made me nervous. It made most cops nervous, and though I wasn’t a cop anymore, there was nothing like a quiet night to start me thinking. I’d put my time in with the Philadelphia Police Department, most of it spent right here in the 17th Precinct. I’d paid my dues and all I had to show for it was the Jeep and a pension that qualified me for food stamps and Section 8 housing. I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. I imagined Father Kane up there in the rectory sipping a hot toddy and thinking maybe he should call the cops about the guy in the lot, sitting in his car and chain-smoking.
My father had grown up in the same parish and he’d told me there had been a shallow pond in the small courtyard between the monastery and the old cathedral. The priests had kept swans there. On Sunday afternoons the parishioners would stand around the pond as solemnly as if they were still in church and watch the swans glide effortlessly over the clear water. Some of the women would bring stale bread from home to feed to the hungry birds. They’d keep it wrapped in a napkin in their purses until after mass when they’d tear it into small pieces the size of a host and watch as the long curved necks of the swans bent for the soggy bread, their heavy-lidded black eyes almost haughty as they fought for every scrap.
It’d been like that for years, my father had said, since before he’d joined the force, young mothers pushing their babies in strollers along the narrow path, the babies pointing with their chubby little fingers at the swans floating across the glassy pond. The kids would all be wearing red baseball caps, as if everybody expected their child to be the next great third-baseman for the Phillies. Even the old folks came out to see the swans, congregating around the pond when it was warm and sunny and the glare from the sun off the water brought them to tears.
But it wasn’t very long before the Inquirer ran the story of the dead swans. Some people in the neighborhood were calling it murder, as if killing a swan was the same thing as killing a person. To some it was worse. I guess it depended on who was doing the killing and who was getting killed.
Someone had come in the middle of the night with a crossbow and killed the swans, every last one of them, leaving their blood-stained bodies, impaled with arrows, for the children and young mothers and old folks from the neighborhood to find the next morning. Their white feathers were the color of rust, their wide staring eyes like glass.
My father had been the first responding officer and he’d called the detectives in as if it were an actual homicide. They never caught the guys and for a lot of people in Grays Ferry, including my old man, it was the last straw, time to get out. They could have dealt with the beer cans in the park and the dog shit and the garbage lining the streets and an occasional strong-arm robbery and the sirens at all hours of the night, but they couldn’t deal with butchered swans, not even in Grays Ferry.
That was the first time I’d heard my father refer to our square patch of neighborhood in Grays Ferry as Devil’s Pocket. I wasn’t sure what it meant back then. I am now.
A week later he was killed responding to a domestic dispute on Christian just off 25th and I knew we weren’t going anywhere. Devil’s Pocket would always be my home. They drained the pond and filled it in with gravel and turned it into a rock garden with a small fountain and a statue of St. Francis with the pigeons flocking to his outstretched arm and the water rolling gently off his back.
I went through four or five more cigarettes when I began to think that maybe Millie wasn’t going to show. It shouldn’t have surprised me. From what I remembered, she never was known for her punctuality. She wasn’t usually too hard to find though. There were