“Yeah.”
Captain Wise led the way and motioned his men aside. He reached down and pulled back the tarpaulin which had been tossed over the bodies. “This what you’re looking for, Joe?”
The lower torso, pajama clad, stuck out from beneath a small body wearing white pajamas with round, smiling yellow moon faces. Face down in earth softened by morning mist, then slightly hardened by the sun. The head of the child on top seemed peculiar; it had swelled to twice normal size as the result of the brain having been penetrated by a foreign object. A bullet in the head causes various fluids to flow; the child’s head was bloated as though air had been blown unevenly into a balloon. There wasn’t very much blood, just a thick, dark, wormlike mass at the base of the skull on the right side, site of penetration, and a few trickles down the thin neck. The pale-blond hair lifted in a breeze, then settled back into place. The huge head was slightly to one side and the face had turned the color of a bruise; the features were swollen and distorted.
The face of the younger child was covered by his brother’s body. There was a strong, peculiar yet familiar odor. Captain Wise said, “Dog shit, Joe. The smaller kid is laying with his face in dog shit.”
Automatically, my hand began to massage the biting pain in my stomach. “Captain, can they be turned over yet? I mean, that’s their
father
in my car. It’s bad enough without him having to see them like that.”
“Give it five minutes more, Joe.” He put a hand on my arm and we turned away from the bodies. He spoke while looking down at his well-polished shoes. “What’s the story with the parents?”
There wasn’t very much to tell, and when we circled back the bodies had been placed on their backs, side by side.
“Can’t they wipe the kid’s face, for Christ’s sake, before the father sees them? I mean, dog shit in the kid’s mouth.”
Chris Wise jabbed at the smaller child with the tip of his shoe. A few pieces of dried-up brownish substance slipped down along the kid’s head. Then Chris wiped his shoe along the length of the kid’s pajama leg, making sure his shine wasn’t ruined. Which is one of the things I never learned to do in four years of homicide work: to treat a dead human being as an object, an end product of someone’s rage or craziness or greed or jealousy or revenge or whatever the hell else. Which is one of the reasons why I have ulcers.
Chris finished wiping his shoe on the dead kid’s body, then watched me with that tight close smile of his. “Want me to comb their hair too, Joe? Maybe I should travel with a cosmetic kit.”
George Keeler looked up blankly when I approached my car. “What happened here, anyway? Boy, lots of cops, huh?”
“George, would you come with me for a minute? George, there’s been an accident. It’s very bad. Both of your boys.”
George Keeler stared at me for a split second, then yanked his arm free. He spun around wildly, then lunged to where they waited for him, just behind the bushes. George stood over them, stared down at them. He stretched his arms out in an empty, meaningless gesture, then dropped to his knees. He looked up at the circle of men who watched him. Who stood and watched him and weren’t doing a goddamn thing for his boys. He flung himself over the small bodies, protecting them from view, covering them, hiding them from the expressionless stares. He grabbed the smaller, Georgie, by the shoulders and tried to pull him into a sitting position; he began to shake the body; he began gasping and yelling.
“Help them. There’s something wrong with them. My God, help them, don’t just stand there staring, there’s something the matter with my boys. Georgie! Terry! Help them, help them!”
It took two other cops besides me to pull his child’s dead body from his grasp and to drag George Keeler to the ambulance.
“Heart attack, heart attack,” the white-faced young intern muttered. He jumped into the ambulance and instructed a uniformed cop to help him with the oxygen mask.
Captain Wise placed himself between the intern, who looked terrified, and George Keeler.
“You goddamn fuckin’ fool, this man’s hyperventilating. You give him a whiff of oxygen and he’s dead.
Asthma,
dummy, he’s having an asthma attack.”
The intern was stricken by the terrible possible consequences of his near-mistake. His face and mind seemed to go blank. Chris Wise turned him around and shoved him back toward the ambulance, and apparently the intern remembered what to do. He emerged to give George a shot of adrenalin.
Within a few minutes, the loud wet sucking sounds eased and George was breathing easier. He suddenly pushed the intern back and reached out to me. I helped him up and the pressure of his hand was numbing.
“We gotta tell Kitty,” George Keeler said. “Oh my God Almighty, we gotta tell my poor Kitty.”
We practically burst into the apartment, a flying wedge of policemen, but Kitty Keeler didn’t seem to notice. She leaped from her chair, mouth opened, eyes wider and seeing only her husband. She reached out for George, her bracelets clanging and sliding up her slender arms. She grabbed at his sleeves, then at his shirt front.
George Keeler turned away; looked over his shoulder; over her head; looked at the ceiling, the floor, the walls, anywhere, at anything but at his wife.
“George,” she called to him. Finally she pounded his chest with a clenched fist. “What’s wrong, George? What’s the matter? My God, George, Georgie, talk to me!”
He inhaled slowly and steadily to the fullest capacity of his lungs. Then, arms dangling at his sides, he looked directly at his wife and in a terrible voice he told her, “They’re dead, baby. They’re dead. Both boys. Both of them. They’re dead.”
Kitty shook her head slowly from side to side and said, “Don’t say that. Don’t say a stupid thing like that. What the hell’s the matter with you, to say a dumb stupid thing like that? Don’t say that.
George!”
He stood against her onslaught of fists and words and protests, and his mouth kept moving, saying the same words, over and over again.
“They’re dead, baby. They’re dead.”
Mary Hogan was a small pear-shaped woman whose delicate features bore a striking resemblance to her daughter’s. There was some confusion as to who had directed that Mrs. Hogan be picked up from the Bronx bakery where she worked and brought to the Keeler apartment. The reason was obvious: it was felt that Kitty Keeler might be needing her mother.
Mrs. Hogan brought a Father Kerrigan from St. Simon Stock along with her. He was one of those Irish priests of indeterminate age: perpetually boyish, smooth-cheeked, tenor-voiced, a few silver speckles in his blond-red hair. He kept informing everyone that Mrs. Hogan was hard of hearing, and would we speak carefully, she was good at lip reading.
George Keeler came from the bedroom and went directly to his mother-in-law. She virtually disappeared from sight in his embrace, and the one muffled cry came from him. She carefully disengaged herself and studied his face with great intensity. Her eyes, obviously from years of serving partially as her ears as well, were sharp, somewhat glassy, but whatever tears they contained were frozen inside her sockets.
“George,” she said in a soft flat brogue, “where are they? Where are my little ones? George, what’s happened here?”
Kitty Keeler staggered into the room. Her face had gone dead white. She pushed George aside, pointed at the small stiff-backed woman and said to her husband, “What is
she
doing here? What the
fuck
is
she
doing here?”
While Mrs. Hogan could not see what her daughter had said, she felt the impact of her anger. As though believing that no one could hear her unless facing her, she waited until her daughter turned to her and then, softly, almost in a whisper, she said, “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.
What have you done?”
T
IM NEARY HAS BEEN
one of my closest friends from the time we were kids playing street games in the north Bronx. After high school, while I was learning how to lay lines for the telephone company, Tim was spending three years at a seminary learning that he didn’t really want to be a priest. We came into the department together; Tim passed every promotion exam right at the top of the list. He’s a very deliberate, careful guy and we trust each other completely. With a few reservations.
Sometimes what Tim Neary doesn’t say is more important than what he does say.
“What’s this thing look like, Joe?” That’s what he said.
“How is this thing going to bounce on me?” That’s what he didn’t say.
“It’s a little early to tell, Tim.”
The Keelers were sitting on the bench in the squad room. Catalano was keeping himself between them and anyone else in the squad, as though the Keelers were his private property.
“Jesus, Joe, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time.”
“Want me to run over to Peck Avenue and tell those kids that their timing was pretty bad?”
“Don’t be a goddamn wiseass, Joe. I don’t need that right now.” Then, as though he just thought of it, as though it wasn’t of great importance to him, he said, “How about that other matter, Joe? You come up with anything?”
I reached inside my jacket without answering him; handed over my report with a shake of my head.
“Shit. Nothing? Nothing at all?”
“Give me a little time, Tim.”
What Tim had assigned me to do was to get information of an incriminating nature on the District Attorney of Queens County in order to force him off the primary ballot for the upcoming mayoralty election. Tim’s wife is a law partner of the campaign manager of the D.A.’s rival. Tim and I are both eligible to retire at half pay on November 28 of this year. Twenty years down the drain. Or whatever. Tim has a big future promised if the right man wins. He is also certain that my future, left in his hands, if the right man wins, will be nothing short of terrific.
Of course, Tim ignores facts that don’t fit with his plans. He considers it no big deal that my wife and I have sold our home in Queens; bought a condominium in Florida, where my wife is waiting for me to join her come the end of November. She fully expects that I’ll pack up and leave the two-room apartment we took on a short-term lease in one of the old buildings near the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. And go down to Florida. And take a job in her brother’s construction company. Her brother, as far as I’m concerned, is a crooked, smug, stupid bastard who thinks the same of me. I’m not sure how all of this came about. It just seems to have happened, according to a plan worked out so long ago I can’t remember when it wasn’t part of our understanding. Once the girl was married, and she was last year, once the boy graduated high school and was set in college, which
he
was, once my twenty years were in, that would be it. All set. The rest of my life. Except that now that it was practically reality I have been taking a good hard look at what the rest of my life would be with brother-in-law Fred, and I don’t like it. At all. And another strange thing. After twenty-three years of marriage, of living with Jen and the kids, this was the first time I’d ever lived alone. In my whole life. I had gone from my parents to the Army to Jen. Now I wasn’t accountable, in any way, to anyone. I had thought I’d be lonely. Jen thought I’d be lonely.
The funny thing was, I wasn’t lonely at all.
“All right. Let’s take a statement from the parents, Joe. We’ll talk about the other thing later.”
In a monotone, Kitty Keeler answered Neary’s questions. She stared at the reels of the tape recorder on the desk and seemed to pace herself to the slow revolutions. She repeated what she had already told us. That she had last seen her sons between one and one-thirty this morning. Had taken sleeping pills; showered; gone to bed. Woke up at seven-thirty. The boys were gone.
“I thought George had the boys. I thought—” She didn’t cry or anything. She just stopped speaking.
She had changed; she was a different version of the same woman. She seemed translucent. Her paleness had gone almost to the bones of her face. Her cheekbones seemed to shine and protrude through the tightly stretched skin. She reminded me of a small, shining, transparent glass animal: fragile, breakable, easily shattered. And yet she had a curious strength, directed toward her husband.
George Keeler, in his grief, seemed to bloat and swell; the lines of his body became indefinite and unclear. He turned to his wife, his face totally trusting and dependent. Kitty took control of both her husband and herself with a hard tenderness, direct and businesslike and effective. It was a surprise, this tough concern for George. She had been totally uncaring of him earlier. Before the bodies of their children had been found.
“Mr. Keeler, do you have any idea, at all, who might have done this to your sons?”
A wildness came into George Keeler’s voice. He waved his arms in front of him as he spoke, then stared at his hands, which trembled violently.
“Look at that,” he said, needing to account for his hands. “The adrenalin shot makes them shake like that.”
His wife reached over, touched his arm, her fingers closed on his wrist. Her touch settled him. He told his story for a second time in almost the exact same phrases. He had come over to the apartment after Kitty called him; searched briefly; called the police. He raised his arms in a terrible, empty gesture, then let them fall heavily onto his thighs.
“And then he took me to that park.” Keeler looked at me for confirmation. “And then I saw them. The boys. I saw them. My boys.”
His meaty shoulders heaved forward, his hands dangled and shook between his knees. He began to gasp for air.
Kitty Keeler reached into her husband’s pocket, then adjusted the nebulizer. She instructed George firmly and patiently; directed his breathing, his inhalation of medication. There was an oddly maternal quality in her way of handling him; she had an assurance, a willingness to be leaned on; her strength seemed to expand as his need increased.
“Could someone take us to my brother’s house now?” she asked Neary.
Catalano moved toward the Keelers, comforting arm extended.
“Sam, tell Tom Flynn to drive the Keelers. Where is your brother’s house, Mrs. Keeler? You said Yonkers?”