Soul Murder
‘Is there anyone who can confirm that?’
‘My mother. Of course.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘No. Just her. I had nothing to do with Redwine’s death, so I didn’t take the precaution of getting five people to give me an alibi, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I didn’t ask whether you had anything to do with his death.’
‘Why else are you here?’
‘Listen, Mustafa, I’m sorry for your loss –’
‘That’s what people always say, when they don’t know what else to say.’
‘– but you being aggressive and giving me static isn’t going to help anyone here.’
‘Your father still alive, Detective?’
‘He is, as it happens.’
‘Then don’t tell me not to get aggressive. Not till it happens to you.’
Patrese reckoned Mustafa had a point. Best keep that thought to himself.
When it came to unsettling suspects, Patrese knew Beradino was a master. His trick – rather, one of his tricks – was to use their mood against them, as a martial arts practitioner will exploit his opponent’s weight and momentum to his own advantage.
If a suspect or a witness was calm, so too would Beradino be, looking to lull them into a sense of ever greater security until they, forgetting he was a cop rather than their best friend, let slip something they regretted.
If, on the other hand, they were upset, as Mustafa Bayoumi was increasingly becoming, Beradino would stoke the fires of their agitation as high as he could until they lost their sense of self-control – and again let slip something they regretted.
Beradino gestured around the room.
‘You only help Muslims?’ His tone was suddenly snappy, all reasonableness and bonhomie gone as though in a puff of smoke.
‘We help our community.’
‘You proselytize?’
Patrese knew what Beradino was thinking. Places like Homewood – poor, deadbeat ’hoods where those who didn’t seek their oblivion via the liquor store or the crack house were open to almost anything which promised to improve their lot – were fertile grounds for Islamic recruiters.
And everyone knew what they were like, because everyone had seen footage of the Nation of Islam: Farrakhan and his bow-tie-wearing, bean-pie-selling disciples who hated whites, Jews, women and gays.
‘We welcome those who choose to come to us. Your religion does the same.’
‘Our religion was what America was founded on.’
‘And what an unqualified success Christianity’s been, hasn’t it?’
‘What does that mean?’ Beradino was no longer acting annoyed, Patrese knew; this was the real deal. The two of them had long ago agreed not to discuss religion, because it always ended in arguments; Beradino the devout, Patrese the unbeliever.
‘Jesus died for your sins, right?’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘Then explain this to me. Either that was for everyone’s sins right up to the moment he died, in which case we’ve had two thousand years of some serious bad behavior left unchecked. Or he died for everyone’s sins then and for all time; in which case it hasn’t helped much, has it?’
Patrese almost laughed. It was a question he’d asked himself, and others, more than once, and no one – not teachers, not priests, probably not even the Pope himself – had been able to answer it properly.
‘Not to mention the impeccable behavior of priests up and down the country where young children are involved,’ Mustafa continued.
‘A few bad apples. Sinners, as we all are. Everyone in your culture’s perfect?’
‘I look around here, and I see people brought up to believe in the Christian faith. But I also know that, round here, all too often BC means before crack, and AD means after death. That’s not good enough. And it’s not good enough just to pray and hope everything will turn out all right. We have to go out and do the work.
‘And that work starts here. Islam prohibits drugs and alcohol. You stay off those, you can be a productive member of society. You turn to them, and you’re just waiting to die. And if the only way out of that is through Islam, then so be it. Because Islam places paramount importance on the education of our children. To be a teacher is a special calling. When I’ve finished my studies, I’m hoping to teach at the school we’re raising funds to build here; preschool to fifth grade.’
‘Somewhere to train the next generation of bombers?’
‘Not at all. A school where everybody has a strange name, so nobody feels alone. Muslim kids feel like outsiders in public schools. No matter how good those schools are, they can’t teach Islamic beliefs and morals. So we will. Kids hate being different; so we’ll make them not different. And you know why?’
‘I’ve no doubt you’re going to tell me.’
‘Because we have to do it ourselves now. Since 9/11, we haven’t been able to receive money from other Muslim countries, even from registered Islamic charities.’
‘That’s damn right. There’s a war on.’
Mustafa didn’t take the bait. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.
‘We relied on that money a lot; perhaps too much. That was one of the reasons why, before 9/11, we – the immigrant Muslims – didn’t really have that much to do with the black Muslims.
‘Then suddenly we couldn’t move for surveillance, police raids, airport searches, special registration, and so on. All the time, we had to prove our loyalty to the flag. Still do, every day. I look black anyway, but African-American Muslims sympathize. They know what it’s like; not from being Muslim, but from being black.’
He looked at Beradino first, then Patrese; two white men who he felt would never understand, not fully.
‘We’re all niggers now, basically.’
Thursday, October 21st. 10:26 a.m.
You’ve seen homicide division rooms umpteen times on the silver screen, and it’s one of the few aspects of police work that TV gets right. There really are desks piled high with report forms and coffee cups, and the detectives sitting at those desks really do crick the phones into their necks while pecking two-fingered at their keyboards.
Amidst the barely controlled hubbub of a major homicide investigation, Patrese read the poster above Beradino’s head for the umpteenth time that day.
The Fifth Commandment, Book of Exodus, 20, of THE HOLY BIBLE.
Then: THE OATH OF PRACTICAL HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION.
Beradino, who’d written the poster and had it typeset himself, had clearly never met a capital letter he didn’t like.
Homicide investigation is a profound duty, and constitutes a heavy responsibility. Just as there is no crime worse than taking someone else’s life, so there is no task more important than bringing to justice the people who crossed that line. As such, let no person deter you from the truth and your own personal commitment to see that justice is done. Not only for the deceased, but for the surviving family as well.
And remember – ‘you’re working for God.’
No, Patrese thought angrily; he was working for the city of Pittsburgh. There were times when Beradino’s incessant God-squadding really got on his nerves, and this was one of them – not least because he was pissed anyway.
Every cop knows that the first forty-eight hours after a murder are critical. If they haven’t got a good lead in that time, the chances of solving the crime are halved as evidence disappears, suspects flee, and stories change.
More than forty-eight hours after Michael Redwine had been torched, Patrese and Beradino had nothing.
Sure, they had an autopsy report, but that just confirmed Beradino’s findings – that Redwine, alive when the fire started, had died from smoke inhalation.
And sure, Mustafa Bayoumi’s alibi was provided by his mother, and her alone. But it was hard to see what they could do other than take it at face value. Yes, Sameera could have been lying – she’d said she’d do anything for him, after all – but to test that, they’d have to give her the full nine yards, on a hunch that was flimsy at best.
It didn’t take much imagination to see how carpeting a recent widow that way would look.
Because Patrese and Beradino had to accept Mustafa’s alibi, they had no probable cause to go search the house in Oakland for anything that might connect him to the fire. Even if they did get a warrant, and even if he had been involved, he was clearly a smart kid. He’d have ditched any clothing and other items that might have linked him to the blaze long before now.
That was how they consoled themselves, at any rate; because nothing and no one else in Redwine’s life seemed to point to any other suspects.
Every resident of The Pennsylvanian had been interviewed, as had all doormen, cleaners and maintenance workers; anyone with access to the building, in other words. No one had seen anything.
‘Either they’re on the level, or someone should win a damn Oscar,’ Patrese said.
It still didn’t answer what had started as the $64,000 question and was surely now into six figures – how had the killer got into The Pennsylvanian?
They retraced Redwine’s movements on the last day of his life. He’d been at Mercy in the morning, given a speech at a conference downtown after lunch, and been due to go to the opera – La Bohème – that evening. Nothing untoward.
They’d taken twelve officers from the regular police department and used them to turn Redwine’s life upside down. No friend, acquaintance or incident was deemed too insignificant or commonplace; everyone was followed up, checked out.
TIE, Beradino told the uniforms, TIE – trace, interview, eliminate as a suspect.
They found zilch. Redwine had been a regular attendee at church, done his part at charity fundraisers, and enjoyed hiking and fishing in his spare time. No embittered ex-girlfriends, no secret gay lovers, no outstanding sexual harassment cases. Even the professional jealousies were no more than the usual found among surgeons, which was to say at once endemic and excruciatingly professional.
All in all, no reason for anybody to have killed Redwine, let alone by such a horrific method as burning alive.
The fire had destroyed any physical evidence worth the name, so Patrese and Beradino could find no joy there either. Instant forensic breakthroughs were strictly the preserve of TV shows titled with snappy acronyms. Pittsburgh PD didn’t even have its own DNA lab. It had to use the FBI’s, which had a backlog running into the hundreds of thousands.
It couldn’t use private labs, as their results were inadmissible in court, due to concerns over accountability and maintenance of the chain of custody. Only government facilities were acceptable, though the technical standards at private labs were much higher; not surprisingly, perhaps, given that they were staffed by the best testers, many of whom had left the state sector because they wanted to be paid more, exacerbating staff shortages in public labs and increasing the backlog…
Franz Kafka was not dead, clearly. He was alive, well, and living in Pittsburgh.
Nothing of great value seemed to have been taken, ruling out burglary as a motive. Redwine was no serious collector of art, his TV set and computers were still in the apartment (though burnt to cinders, obviously), and everyone who knew him agreed that he never carried more than a hundred bucks or so in cash.
Every known arsonist within Allegheny County was interviewed, bar those already in prison. All of them had alibis for the night in question. Most said they’d pick easier targets than a portered apartment block, and that they certainly wouldn’t kill anyone in the process. Arson was a crime against property, not people.
Self-serving bullshit, Patrese thought, but anyway…
There was always the possibility that one of the uniforms had stumbled across the crucial bit of information without realizing it. Officers were human, not computers. Long days made them tired, repetitive interviews numbed and bored them. They could miss things and make mistakes, especially towards the end of a shift. But this was the same for every homicide investigation in history. Nothing you could do about it.
There are three nightmare scenarios for cops working homicide cases, and it looked very much as though Beradino and Patrese were facing one of them.
First, that they’d overlooked something so screamingly obvious that, if they ever did find it, they’d almost certainly be carpeted from here to Cincinnati and back again.
Second, that Redwine’s murder was a case of mistaken identity, and that in order to find the perpetrator, they’d need to discover first who he thought he’d killed.
Third, that the murder was the type of case that’s the absolute hardest to solve; a stranger homicide, where the connection between killer and victim is obvious only to one or both of them.
Killer spotting victim in the street; victim in the wrong place at the wrong time; victim who’d caught the attention of killer; and any or all of these happening for reasons unknown to the police, because they could simply have never imagined or reconstructed them, short of knowing each quotidian incident and occurrence in the lives of every single one of Pittsburgh’s citizens, and even the Soviet Union hadn’t managed such overwhelming control over its people.
Redwine’s ex-wife and sons had flown in from Tucson, their eyes rimmed red with tears and fatigue.
That was the worst part, Patrese felt; having to look these good people in the eye and say yes, we’re doing all we can to find the murderer, we’re following all lines of inquiry, we’re confident we’ll bring him to justice; when all the while he knew, and he knew they knew, that what he was really saying was this: we don’t have a damn clue.
Not a goddamn clue.
Thursday, October 28th. 3:51 p.m.
Flames leapt high and jagged around the burgers on the grill.
Crammed into a sweltering kitchen, wearing a ridiculous polyester uniform with her hair in a net as though she’d just been caught by a trawler, Jesslyn’s anger mashed in tight oblongs.
The interview had been bad enough. Kevin the manager had proved as snotty as he was spotty, sneering at her throughout it all with a contempt he didn’t even bother to disguise. Why did she want this job? Why had she left her previous employment? Did she have references? Had she ever worked in the fast-food industry before?
And on, and on, and on, when they both knew this was a minimum-wage job that almost literally a monkey could do, and here was Kevin treating it as though he were personally responsible for choosing the next UN Secretary-General.
She even had to work some Sundays, her religious convictions be damned. Not because Kevin had forced her to – she could have claimed her constitutional right to freedom of religion and threatened him with a lawsuit if he’d even tried – but because she’d done Sunday shifts at Muncy so she could preach in the chapel there. Her suddenly spending every Sunday at home would arouse suspicion in a moron, and Mark was certainly not that.
But even if she did find a way to tell him about Mara, she thought, he wouldn’t understand, not really. Prison was one of those things you could never explain. If you knew what it was like, you didn’t need to be told. If you didn’t know, mere words weren’t enough.
Prison was a pressure cooker, a place of white heat where life had a suffocating intensity. Friendships, still less love affairs, weren’t casual, to be picked up and put down whenever one felt like it; they were life-rafts of survival in a place that tried to crush the soul, raging torrents of defiance and pride in being human.
Within prison walls, the rules changed. What went on inside stayed inside. That was why Jesslyn was so careful to keep her two worlds apart. Mark had some of his colleagues over to dinner or Sunday lunch at their condo from time to time; she never did. Mark brought documents home, discussed work problems with her, gave her tidbits of department gossip; she never did any of that either. If he thought it weird, he’d long since accepted it as just the way she was.
And with Mara, who’d been such a bright shining Technicolor light in the pallors of endless institutional gray…well, Jesslyn had been honored, frankly, that Mara, beautiful, radiant, poised, fragrant Mara who somehow kept her poise and fragrance in those conditions, had chosen her when she could have had pretty much anyone.
And then she’d gone. Gone in stages, each of them more painful than the last.
First, Mara had called time on their relationship.
One day, just like that, out of the blue, Mara had said she didn’t want to go on with it. Jesslyn had been standing six feet away, yet she’d honestly thought Mara had hit her, such was the physical shock. She’d rushed to the restroom and brought up her breakfast. Food poisoning, she’d said, before going home. They wouldn’t see her cry on the prison floor; not then, not ever. Crying was weakness, and weakness was death.
In the weeks that followed, Jesslyn had begged, pleaded, reasoned, shouted and threatened, all to no avail. Sometimes she sought Mara out; sometimes she tried to avoid her. Each time she saw her, it felt as though someone had opened up a wound and started scraping salt into it.
Second, Mara had been released; back into the outworld.
If seeing her had been a torment, Jesslyn quickly realized that not seeing her was a hundred times worse. Even after their split, Mara had been the center of Jesslyn’s universe, the point around which she orientated herself and her days.
Now all Jesslyn had was the whisper of Mara’s name in corridor gossip, and the few of Mara’s keepsakes she’d managed to hold on to, inhaling their scent as though it were the breath of life.
Third, Mara had officially complained about Jesslyn’s conduct.
Briefly, surgingly, Jesslyn had hoped Mara had brought the complaints as some warped way of trying to keep Jesslyn in her life. But she could only fool herself for so long and, as the process had ground forwards, Jesslyn had let her feelings curdle towards hatred, if only in hope that it would harden into a carapace around her heart.
She’d always thought of Mara as the innocent victim of an egregious miscarriage of justice. Now, she’d forced herself to damn her as the devil incarnate, vile and evil murderess, fit only for an eternity in hell.
And finally, obviously, when Muncy had given Jesslyn her marching orders.
Jesslyn stared into the flames.
Stripe for stripe, burning for burning.
Was it fair, what had happened to her? Was it fair that murderers, rapists and pedophiles were walking the streets while she was here, frying burgers made of meat she wouldn’t give to a dog? Was it fair that she’d given twenty years of her life to trying to make the world a better place, and in return had been given half an hour to pack up and go?
It wasn’t just Mara she’d grown to hate, of course. It was everyone who worked the system for their own ends, and then blamed that very system whenever they didn’t have the courage to take responsibility themselves. It was lawyers who made people terrified of using common sense; it was media executives who broadcast whatever got them ratings, no matter the harm to those involved; it was judges who gave light sentences; it was doctors who kept alive people any decent society would have executed. It was all these parasites, and more.
Jesslyn sought solace where she always did, in the Book; Ecclesiastes 3: 3–8.
‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’
Saturday, October 30th. 9:32 p.m.
Patrese’s sisters had gone to dinner with Bishop Kohler. Patrese had turned down the invitation. There were probably ways of spending Saturday night which he’d find even less appealing than listening to Kohler mouth platitudes by way of trying to offer spiritual succor, but he couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.
Instead, he stood on the balcony of his apartment and looked down over the city.
He lived in a block called The Mountvue on Mount Washington, the hill on the city’s south side which rises so giddily that only cable cars can make the ascent. He paid $1,200 a month for the place, at least a third of which was surely for the vista over the city skyline, which would have made postcard sellers kill their grandmas.
Dusk was his favorite time; the moment when the city was held suspended in all its contradictions; halfway between day and night, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid.
The heart of downtown was called the Golden Triangle, sandwiched between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers and tapering to the point where the two met and joined the Ohio. On crisp fall evenings like this it did indeed seem golden, the sunlight making the thrusting skyscrapers glow as though in belief that the day to come would hold more than the day just passed.
There was the medieval castle of PPG Place, all battlements and crenellations; there the four interlocking silver octagons of the Oxford Center; there the tallest of them all, the USX Tower, a behemoth of exposed steel columns and curtain walls; there the Grant Building flashing P-I-T-T-SB-U-R-G-H in Morse code over and again; and there the blue light on top of the Gulf Building which signified that the temperature was falling.
Patrese loved this city. Always had, always would.
He loved the way Pittsburgh held high the best of American values: hard work, unpretentiousness, renewal. Time was, in the heyday of the steel industry, when it had been virtually uninhabitable: palls of smoke so thick that streetlights had burned all day; desk jockeys who’d left their offices for an hour’s lunch downtown and returned to find their white shirts stained black; rivers so choked with chemicals that they had burned for days on end.
One writer had called Pittsburgh ‘hell with the lid taken off’. He hadn’t found much dissent.
But by the early 1980s the steel industry had shut down, and now hillsides above the mill sites had grown lush and green again. Pittsburgh was a riot of hills and valleys, slopes, hollows, streams, gulches too. It spilled out cockeyed across the landscape’s folds, taking its cues from the terrain.
It was therefore a city of neighborhoods, little worlds of their own separated by earth or water and rejoined by bridges. Pittsburgh had more bridges than Venice, something of which the tourist board was inordinately proud; that, and the fact that the ’Burgh had been voted America’s Most Livable City.
That kind of shit was always double-edged, Patrese thought. The surest way to stop it being Most Livable was to attract all the people who came here because it was Most Livable.
There was a sudden explosion of light from below as the sun reached just the right angle to fizz off one of the plate-glass corners on PPG Place. Patrese didn’t know whether the architect had designed it so, but he caught his breath every time he saw it happen.
He just wished Pittsburgh looked as good in Homewood as it did from up here.
Sunday, October 31st. 9:24 p.m.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Father,’ I say, ‘but I have some sins I’d like to confess.’
Bishop Kohler turns to face me.
I see two competing strands of thought in his expression: the temporal, which says it’s late and he wants to be leaving; and the spiritual, which demands he give what succor he can to a sinner.