AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I give him directions. He drives, shaking his head the whole time.
Unlike Bethenny’s fancy apartment building with the doorman, Philip lived in a condo complex that looks like it might have been built in the 1970s. When we pull up, I hear the distant sounds of jazz on a radio, and I smell frying garlic. Inside, I know, the condos are huge.
“I’m going to wait in the car,” Sam says, looking around nervously. “Crime scenes creep me out.”
“Fine. I won’t be long.” I can’t really blame him.
I know there’s a security camera, since I saw the pictures it took of the red-gloved woman. It’s easy to disconnect on my way to the door.
Then, as I pull out a stiff piece of metal from my backpack and squat in front of the knob, my nerves get the best of me. I’m not sure I’m ready to confront my brother’s empty home. I take a couple of deep breaths and concentrate on the lock. It’s a Yale, which means I have to turn it clockwise and the pins will have beveled edges. The familiar work is a welcome distraction from my thoughts.
Picking locks isn’t hard, although it can be annoying. Normally you stick a key in the keyway, it turns the pins, and bingo, the door opens. When you’re picking a lock, the easiest thing to do is scrub over the pins until they set. There are more sophisticated techniques, but I’m not the expert my dad was.
A few minutes later, I’m inside.
Philip’s apartment has a stale rotten-food smell when I open the door. There’s still police tape up, but it comes away easily. Other than that, the place just looks messy. Take-out boxes, beer bottles. Stuff a depressed guy leaves out when he has no wife and kid around to object.
When Philip was alive, I was afraid of him. I resented him. I wanted him to suffer like he’d made me suffer. Looking around the living room, I realize for the first time how honestly miserable he must have been. He lost everything. Maura ran off with his son; his best friend, Anton, was killed by our grandfather; and the only reason a crime boss he’d worked for since he was a teenager didn’t kill him was because of me.
I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks—cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up. He called it his second smile. It was a brand, marking Philip as belonging to the Zacharovs, marking him as an insider, a killer. He would walk around with his collar open, a swagger in his step, grinning when people crossed to the other side of the street. But I also remember him in the bathroom of the old house, tears in his eyes as he took a sharp razor to the swollen, infected skin so he could darken his scars with fresh ash.
It hurt. He felt pain, even if it’s easier for me to pretend he didn’t.
There’s a chalk outline of his body on the carpet and deep brown stains around a chunk of rug that’s been removed—I assume for forensics.
I walk through the familiar rooms, trying to see what’s out of place. Everything and nothing. I have no idea what Philip moved around before he died—I was in the house enough to know where things were in general, but not enough to memorize details. I go up the stairs and into his office—basically a spare room with a converted crib and a desk. The computer is missing, but I figure the Feds took it. I open a few drawers, but there’s nothing more interesting than a bunch of pens and a switchblade.
Philip’s bedroom is strewn with clothes that he obviously just dropped onto the floor when he took them off, and maybe occasionally kicked into piles. There’s broken glass chunks near the baseboard, including the jagged bottom of a highball glass with some brown fluid dried inside.
His closet is full of his remaining clean clothes and not much else. In one of his shoe boxes I find foam cut to accommodate a gun, but the gun’s gone. There’s a rattling assortment of bullets in another.
I try to think back to when we were kids, when Dad was alive. I can’t remember any of Philip’s hiding spots. All I remember is Dad coming into my room to get—
Oh.
I walk into Philip’s son’s room. His bed is still pushed against one wall, covered in stuffed animals. The drawers of the dressers are open, although some of them still have clothes in them. I can’t tell if Maura left the room like this or if this is the result of cops pawing through everything.
The closet door is standing ajar. I carry over a mushroom-shaped stool and hop up onto it, reaching up to where I keep my bookmaking operation in my own dorm room, up to the shadowy recesses of the closet above the door. My hand connects with a piece of cardboard. I rip it down.
It’s painted the same light blue as the wall. Nearly impossible to find just by looking, even with flashlights. Taped to the back is a manila envelope.
I take the whole thing back out into the room, where my movements have made the sailboat mobile over the toddler bed dance. Glassy-eyed bears watch as I fold up the brass tab and slide out a bunch of papers. The first thing I see is what looks like a legal contract granting Philip Sharpe immunity for past crimes. It’s detailed—there are a lot of pages—but I recognize the signatures in the back. Jones and Hunt.
Behind that, though, I see three pages in Philip’s looping handwriting. It’s an account of whose ribs he cracked to make sure that Mom’s appeal went through. I don’t know what it means to find this here—whether it’s with these other papers because he never gave it to the Feds or if it’s here because he did.
All I know is that this could get Mom sent back to prison.
All I know is that Mom would have never forgiven him.
I push that thought out of my head as I walk back toward the living room, tucking the envelope into the waistband of my jeans and pulling my T-shirt over it. On the coffee table is a big brass ashtray, empty of all cigarette butts but one. As I walk closer, I notice it’s white with a gold band. I recognize it.
It’s a Gitanes. The brand Lila smoked when she came back from France all those years ago. I pick it up and look at it, see the imprint of lipstick. The first thought that occurs to me is that I didn’t know she still smoked.
The second thought is that I have already seen that the Feds took stuff from Philip’s apartment. I assume the ashtray is empty because the forensics team already took all the butts, along with the chunk of rug, Philip’s computer, and the gun. Which means Lila came later.
The door opens and I spin around, but it’s only Sam.
“I got bored,” he says. “Besides, you know what’s creepier than walking around your dead brother’s apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.”
