Not many cops could say the same.
He and Patrese had been partners for three years – itself a vote of confidence in Patrese’s ability – and in that time they’d become friends. Patrese was a regular guest at the condo in Punxsutawney which Beradino shared with his partner Jesslyn Gedge, a warder at the State Correctional Institute in Muncy. Both Beradino and Jesslyn had been among the mourners in Saint Paul’s.
‘But since you’re here,’ Beradino continued, ‘make yourself useful. We just got a case. Domestic dispute, shots fired, man dead. Zone Five.’
There are six police districts in Pittsburgh, numbered with the complete absence of discernible logic that’s the hallmark of the true bureaucrat. Zone Five covered the north-eastern corner of the city; East Liberty, East End and Homewood.
Nine times out of ten, an incident in Zone Five meant an incident in Homewood.
Homewood was Pittsburgh’s pits, no question. Homicides, aggravated assaults, weapons and narcotics offenses, prostitution arrests; you name it, there were twice as many in Homewood as in any other neighborhood. It was one of the most dangerous places to live in all of Pennsylvania, and that was saying something.
It was half an hour from police headquarters on the North Shore to Homewood. Patrese and Beradino drove there in an unmarked car; no need for lights or sirens, not when the victim was dead and the uniforms had the scene secured.
You could always tell when you were getting close. First came one splash of gang graffiti, then another, and within a couple of blocks these bright squiggles were everywhere: walls, houses, sidewalks, stop signs.
Our turf. Back off.
Then the pockets of young men on street corners, watching sullenly as the cop cruisers came past; then the rows of abandoned buildings, swallowing and regurgitating an endless stream of vagrants, junkies and whores; then the handful of businesses brave or desperate enough to stay: bars, barber shops, convenience stores, fast-food joints.
Wags from out of town liked to call Patrese’s city ‘Shitsburgh’. He usually jumped down their throat when they did – he loved this city – but when it came to Homewood, even Patrese was forced to admit that they had a point.
Tragedy was, it hadn’t always been like this.
A century and a half ago, Homewood had been the place to live. Tycoons like Westinghouse and Frick had kept estates here. Businesses boomed, a trolley system was built, and people couldn’t move in fast enough.
And so it stayed till after the Second World War, when the city planners decided to build the Civic Arena downtown. In doing so they had to displace thousands of people, mainly poor black families, who’d been living in the Lower Hill District nearby. Most of them moved to Homewood; and, sure as sunrise, most of Homewood’s whites upped sticks and left, fleeing to suburbs further out. The few middle-class blacks who could afford to follow them did.
Then came the riots, here as everywhere else during the civil rights era. With the riots came drugs and gangs with names that sounded almost comic: Tre-8s-Perry and Charles, Sugar Top Mob, Down Low Goonies, Reed Rude Boyz, Climax Street.
Nothing comic about what they did, though. Not then, not now. Drugs and guns, guns and drugs. It was a rare gangbanger who died of old age.
Up ahead, Patrese saw a crowd of people spilling from the sidewalk on to the street. A handful of cops held them back. Across the way, two more police cruisers were pulling up. The officers held themselves tense and watchful, as well they might. Cops here were the enemy, seen as agents of an alien and oppressive ruling class rather than impartial upholders of law and order.
Patrese and Beradino got out of the car. A few feet away, a young man in a bandana and baggy pants was talking urgently into his cell.
‘Yo, tell cuz it’s scorchin’ out here today. And this heat ain’t from the sun, you know wha’ I’m sayin’?’
He stared at Patrese as he ended the call, daring Patrese to challenge him. The police call it eye fucking, when an officer and a criminal stare each other down. As a cop, you can’t afford to back away first. You own the streets, not them.
Patrese and Beradino pushed their way through the crowd, flashed their badges at one of the uniforms, and ducked beneath the yellow-and-black stretched taut between two lampposts.
It was a three-story rowhouse, the kind you see all over Homewood, set slightly up from road level with a veranda out front. Every homicide cop with more than a few months’ experience had been inside enough of them to know the layout: kitchen and living room on the ground floor, couple of bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor above, and an attic room with dormer windows under the eaves.
A uniform showed Patrese and Beradino upstairs, briefing them as they climbed.
The deceased was J’Juan Weaver, and he’d been no stranger to the police, the courts, or the prison system. He’d lived in this house with Shaniqua Davenport, his girlfriend, and her (but not his) teenage son Trent.
Shaniqua and Weaver had been running for years, though with more ons and offs than the Staten Island ferry. Before Weaver had been a string of undesirables, who between them had fathered Shaniqua’s three sons. Trent was fifteen, the youngest of them. His two elder half-brothers were both already in jail.
You’d have been a brave man to bet against him following suit, Patrese thought.
The uniform showed them into one of the bedrooms.
It was twelve feet square, with a double bed in the far corner. Weaver was lying next to the bed, his body orientated as if he had been sleeping there, with his head up by the end where the pillows were.
The shot that killed him had entered at the back of his head. Patrese could see clips of white bone and gray brain matter amidst the red mess.
Weaver had been a big man; six two and 200 pounds, all of it muscle. There were a lot of sculpted bodies in Homewood, most all of them from pumping iron while inside. Free gym, three hots and a cot; some of them preferred to be inside than out.
‘Where are the others?’ Beradino asked.
The uniform showed them into the second bedroom.
Shaniqua and Trent, both cuffed, were sitting next to each other on the bed.
Shaniqua was in her late thirties, a good-looking woman with a touch of Angela Bassett about her and eyes which glittered with defiant intelligence.
Trent had a trainer fuzz mustache and a face rounded by puppy fat; too young to have had body and mind irrevocably hardened by life here, though for how long remained to be seen.
They both looked up at Patrese and Beradino.
Beradino introduced himself, and Patrese, then asked: ‘What happened?’
‘He was goin’ for Trent,’ Shaniqua said. ‘He was gonna kill him.’
That was a confession, right there.
‘Why was he going to kill him?’
Silence.
An ambulance pulled up outside, come to remove Weaver’s body. Beradino gestured for one of the uniforms to go and tell the paramedics to wait till they were finished up here.
Trent looked as though he was about to say something, then thought better of it.
‘We got reports of an argument, then shots were fired,’ Patrese said. ‘That right?’
‘That right.’
‘What was the argument about?’