I knelt down next to Patrick. He was dead, and probably had been before I even got back to the room. The wounds were terrible. Black blood pooled in weeping oval slits all over his neck and upper chest. His face was worse, with long rips across his jaw and cheekbones, the skin flayed open away from the bone underneath.
None of those wounds killed him. He had been stabbed through both eyes with that long, slender knife, penetrating deep into the brain. I hoped it had been an instant, painless death.
I pulled a sheet over Patrick’s remains as reverently as I could. When I stood up, I bumped into Anne, who had been standing inches behind me, one hand covering her mouth and nose, the other still holding my gun. She was staring at the dark stains that were already seeping through the sheet, so I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her away. With one arm around her waist, I guided her gently away from the body and tried to gently take my gun out of her hand. She resisted me at first, but reluctantly let it go.
We crossed the room to the couch where she pulled away from me and hugged herself tightly, her hands locked around her biceps in a white-knuckled grip. She was shaking, struggling not to make a sound, while tears made silent tracks down through the crease of her nose to her lips. Not knowing what else to do, I took a step towards her, but she turned her head and moved back.
I’ve seen a lot of grief over the years and decades and it never changes. Even after all this time, I can close my eyes and be right back at Maggie’s bedside the moment she died. I watched Anne struggle under the weight of it and felt small and helpless.
We stood like that for as long as it was bearable. Eventually I walked back into the bedroom, both to give Anne some space and also to look for something that I didn’t want to find. I stepped respectfully around Patty and the bed and moved closer to the window.
I know I hit the thin one twice, and even though he didn’t drop, he bled. As I expected, there were dots and strings of blood on the floor where he had been standing. The blood felt sticky when I dipped a finger into it, and when smeared against my thumb, left a black smear. Normal blood looks black if it’s thick enough, but if you smear it flat when it’s fresh, you’ll see that it’s really a shockingly bright red. This blood stayed black.
I sniffed at my fingers and quickly blew the bitter stink out of my nostrils. It made me want to spit. Patty had said it was bags. His peculiar ability to know things, to sense them, had never once let me down. Looks like he went out with an unbroken record.
Over by the wall, Big and Tall’s handiwork was clear. The contents of the top two drawers were scattered all over the floor. The drawers themselves were tossed to the side, and I could see where the rails had been pulled completely out of the dresser, wood screws and all.
I remembered him telling Skinny that he had “found it.” On the ground, lying in the broken glass and wood splinters, were all of Patty’s remaining possessions. A picture of his departed wife Hazel, broken. His Victory Medal and Purple Heart. His wedding ring. A dozen ribbons in a medal box. Some change and a couple of pens.
Looking through the remainder of my friend’s life, I could tell that these were things that other people had decided to keep for him, once he was put in this place. Patty didn’t care about medals. Except for the wedding ring, all of this stuff would have been stored away in an attic somewhere and only taken out at someone else’s request.
The picture of Hazel would have been displayed, rather than packed in a drawer, and there would have been a pile of old drawings and knickknacks made by his great-grandkids kept close at hand.
The last time we spoke, ten years ago or more, Patty didn’t have any more interest in the war than I had. We talked about the Packers, his great-grandkids, our mutual friends, and then his great-grandkids some more. Whoever packed this drawer saw Patty only as a vet, something that probably would have surprised the old man.
The only other thing on the floor was an old wooden La Prosa King cigar box. It was empty, but Patty had glued felt down on the bottom of the box, and I could see the dents where something heavy had lain for many years. I brought the box out into the living room.
Blue lights were strobing against the hallway walls as police cruisers pulled up to the nearby private drive, reserved for ambulances and other emergency vehicles that made their too-frequent trips to the home.
Anne was sitting on the couch, a wadded up tissue in one hand. Her eyes were cold and hard now, furious. “Why?”
I wish I could have told her I didn’t know, because I knew damn well that being connected to this in any way was going to make me a target for her anger. But it was better that she was angry at me instead of being eaten up by the thought that her grandfather had been brutally murdered for no reason. “You ever see what was in this box?”
“That? They killed him for a souvenir? It was just a goddamn piece of metal he picked up in the war! He said it reminded him of his last big fight. It was worthless. Why would they want that?” It was more of a challenge than a question.
Faint sirens filtered in through the broken glass in the other room, growing louder by the second. “It was a piece of metal, right? Curved like a one-quarter of a flat ring, about six inches long? Kind of like a metal ruler, but curved. And it had two sharp spikes sticking out from the back?”
Before I could say anything else, the front door slammed back against the wall and two police officers entered the room with their weapons drawn. They took one glance at the two of us, and then both of them swiveled to point their guns at me, the guy with the blood all over his shirt.
“On the ground! Now!”
Hands out and fingers spread, I got down on my knees, then on the ground. I said, slowly and clearly, “I have a weapon behind my back, under my shirt, and a license to carry in my wallet.”
“Mike, he’s okay, his grandfather knew my grandfather. He came here with me,” said Anne. “He’s … he’s in there,” she said, pointing at the bedroom. She turned away and her shoulders shook, fury melting into grief in the space of a heartbeat.
“Both of you stay here.” The officer that Anne had spoken to walked to the bedroom, while his partner kept me covered. He came back a minute later and nodded to his partner, who removed my pistol and wallet. He looked at my ID and my concealed carry license, and then backed up.
“Okay, sir,” he said, “you can get up now.”
I stood up, and both men holstered their weapons.
Anne’s friend held out a hand. “Sorry, but you can’t be too careful these days. Mike Miller.” He had a round, boyish face and a mustache that looked like he spent a lot of time on it. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. I shook his hand.
“Abe Griffin. I understand. Better safe than sorry.”
“Dispatch said shots fired, that was you?”
“Yes. I fired at the man who killed Patrick.” I chose not to mention that Anne had also fired a shot.
“Hit him?”
I forced myself to keep looking at his eyes and not look away. “I don’t know. But he ran away under his own power.” Yes, Officer, I shot him dead in the center of his chest, but he didn’t even fall down, please lock me up for being crazy.
He turned to Anne. “Annie, are you okay?” She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Can you tell me what happened?”
When she spoke her voice was low and steady. I didn’t know if it was strength or shock that I was seeing, but knowing who raised her, I suspected the former.
“We were talking to my grandfather and there was this crashing sound from the parking lot. Abe went to see what it was, and as soon as he was gone two men broke in and…” She stopped and ran a hand hard over her eyes. “And attacked my grandfather.”
“You remember anything else?”
“No. Mike, they killed him for nothing! He’s just an old man in a nursing home, why would they do that? He didn’t have any money or jewelry or anything! They just killed him and grabbed whatever they could out of his dresser.”
Mike hugged her hard, which I don’t think is standard police procedure.
“You want to stay with us tonight? April can make up the guest room. She’d love to see you.”
Anne shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m okay. Really.”
He looked at her, clearly unhappy, then at me. I shrugged.
“Alright, but call me if you need anything, okay?”
“I promise.”
We spent the better part of an hour giving our statements while the small room filled up with uniforms of all kinds. Local cops, state troopers, medical examiner’s office, paramedics, photographers, the whole circus had come to see Patty “Cake” Wolinsky, lying on the floor in his hospital pajamas. It was a lesson that I had already learned when Maggie died. There is no dignity in death.
They let us go, even though I raised a couple of eyebrows with my lack of a telephone number, cellular or otherwise. If not for Anne’s roots in town, I would have spent the night in jail, at least.
The parking lot was a nightmare of rotating and flashing lights of every color, painting the busy, serious folks rushing around in lurid, disco colors. I walked over to the remains of my faithful truck, now surrounded by photographers and automotive forensics guys like ants on a grasshopper.
“This your truck?” asked an unsmiling man holding a camera the size of his head.
“It was.”
“Yeah. Sorry, but you’re not getting it back for a while. We’re going to impound it for the investigation. But we’ll contact you when you can pick it up.”
“Sure. You mind if I get my bag out of it before I go?”
“Sorry, man. No can do.”
I nodded, unsurprised.
“I’m so sorry about your truck, Abe,” said Anne from right behind me.
I turned to face her. “Not your fault.”
“Let me drive you home. You’re stranded out here, without even a change of clothes. It’s the least I can do.”
“That’s kind of you, really. But you’ve been through a lot tonight and it’s a long drive. You wouldn’t make it back until tomorrow morning at the earliest. I think you should go home and get some rest. Don’t worry about me, I’ll get home fine.”
“Please? I really don’t want to go and sit at home by myself right now, okay? Since your truck is all smashed up, I’ll drive you home. I want to.”
The entanglement of obligation. The sticky, unbreakable bonds of helping or being helped. These are exactly the things I didn’t want.
“Okay. Thanks.”