Free Blood of My Brother by James Lepore Page B

pictures was of Jay and Dan sitting at a fire on a beach at the Jersey shore, the light from the flames dancing in their eyes as they smiled at the camera. The picture of his two sons that Dan kept on the top of the filing cabinet behind his desk was not there, but Jay expected to find it somewhere in the office.
    Taking a deep breath, he sat in the tired leather armchair behind Dan’s desk and confronted the boxes. On top of the middle box was a Seizure/Return notice from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, indicating the date the
enclosed materials had been taken, the date they were returned, and the word Zero under the heading Items Retained . The “enclosed material” had been crammed randomly into the boxes, and the first thing Jay did was separate the contents into three piles: client files, banking, and miscellaneous. It did not surprise him that there was no Donna Kelly among the fifty or so client files. Most of Danny’s client information he kept on scraps of paper that he threw away as soon as the case was over. Really important data made its way into the small address and date book that he kept with him at all times, and which was not, according to Dan’s mom, among the items sent north by the Florida police. There was no record of a recent deposit of twenty-five thousand among the banking documents, some pages of which seemed to be missing, which was not unusual for Dan, who looked on record keeping as something people took much too seriously.
    Dan’s business account had just under two hundred dollars in it. He had no receivables, and bills due totaling around two thousand dollars, including two months’ rent at six hundred per month. Jay closed up the boxes, sat back, and lit a cigarette. It was a cold, damp Sunday afternoon. Below him, Market Street, raucous during the week, was quiet. Before leaving, he went through the closet, the filing cabinet, and the desk, where, in a bottom drawer, he found the framed picture of Dan’s boys—Dan, Jr. and Michael—wearing Yankee caps, smiling shyly at the camera. The glass facing was cracked diagonally. As Jay began to remove the photograph, he felt the cardboard backing begin to move and, slipping it from the cheap metal frame, he found a thick envelope between it and the boys’ picture. In the envelope was eleven thousand dollars in cash, in hundred dollar bills, and a piece of lined notepaper, on which was written, in Danny’s handwriting, “If you find this, give it to my boys. Don’t pay my
debts with it.” Smiling, Jay put the envelope in his jeans pocket, and the picture in one of the boxes.
    He loaded the boxes, wall hangings, and books into his Saab, and headed to the Colonnade Towers, twin, glass-skinned high-rises only a mile or two away, built at the edge of Jay and Dan’s old neighborhood after the Newark riots. He parked in the underground garage, rode the elevator to the tenth floor of Building A, and let himself into Danny’s apartment with the key given to him by Mrs. Del Colliano. Leaving the door open—the apartment was hot and stuffy—he went around opening windows and drawing curtains, and then sat in an overstuffed chair and looked through the living room’s glass wall down into a section of Branch Brook Park that contained an old-fashioned circular reservoir, empty since before he was born, where he and Danny had played endlessly as boys. His reverie was broken by a deep voice, quite nearby.
    “Excuse me, young man, do I know you?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Jay, getting to his feet. “Are you Bill Davis? I’m Jay Cassio, Danny’s friend.”
    Jay’s interrogator, a black man in his sixties, with short salt-and-pepper hair—more salt than pepper—and a thick, neatly trimmed mustache of the same mix, said nothing. About six feet tall, wearing a dark cardigan sweater buttoned over a substantial potbelly, he stood in the doorway and stared at Jay, whose appearance, he suddenly realized, was not one to inspire