Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter Page A

his father
stay where they are, and Victor Kopec’s convertible stays where it
is too, untouched. It is there the next morning, and the morning
after that. And each morning Peter and his father walk past it and
the policeman sitting in the green sedan, and get into the Lincoln
and drive to school.
    And each afternoon, the man who brings Peter home
drives past it before he stops to let him out.
    On the third day the man turns the corner at the park
and suddenly speaks.
    "Uh-oh."
    Just that. Peter is in the back seat and pulls
himself up to see. There is a nest of police cars in front of his
house. An ambulance is in Victor Kopec’s yard. Lights are flashing,
doors are open everywhere—the police cars, the ambulance, the front
door to Victor Kopec’s house.
    The man who drives him home from school slows as he
comes to the house, trying to see inside. There are men with cameras
and flash attachments standing near the door, half a dozen policemen
in uniform holding them back.
    The car passes Victor Kopec’s house and stops. The
man who drives it looks back at Peter, not knowing what to do. "You
want we should go find your father?" he says.
    He thinks for a moment and then opens the door and
climbs out.
    "You sure you don’t wanna . . ."
    He closes the door and walks across the yard to his
house. The driver watches him a moment, undecided, and then heleaves.
    A colored man in a suit comes out of Victor Kopec’s
house and speaks to one of the photographers. "They was bleeding
in there like a pipe broke," he says.
    "Let somebody in," the photographer says,
asking a favor.
    The man in the suit shrugs, and all the photographers
go past him into the house.
    Peter fits the key into his front door and walks
inside. He goes upstairs and undresses, hanging his school clothes
over the back of his chair, and then putting on his sneakers and his
jeans and his jacket.
    He returns to the front steps and sits down to wait.
The police seem to be waiting too. Some of them are sitting on Victor
Kopec’s front steps, some are in the yard, talking to each other as
they hold back the neighbors. A police car appears, coming across the
park, lights on, and the policemen who are sitting down stand up, and
the ones holding back the crowd suddenly begin to push.
    "I want everybody in back of the sidewalk,"
one of them shouts, and the neighbors give ground, a foot at a time,
until they are off Victor Kopec’s lawn.
    The police car stops across the street. The back door
opens and an angry-looking man in a uniform climbs out, slams the
door, and walks through the neighbors to the front of the house. They
move for him; he is the chief of police. The boy recognizes him from
television; he is as famous as the president.
    The chief climbs the steps and stops there to speak
with a sergeant, looking around as he listens to the sergeant’s
report, then turns his head and stares directly at the house next
door—Peter Flood’s house—and then at Peter himself. Peter
stares back.
    The police chief turns and tells the sergeant
something else, pushing his finger into his uniform just below his
chin, and then walks into the house. The sergeant and some of the men
left outside give each other looks, and then follow him in.
    A moment later the photographers exit the house all
at once, as if they were blown out; some of them looking back where
they have been, some of them holding on to their hats. Peter hears
the chief’s voice, yelling at the policemen left inside.
    "I’ll throw you cocksuckers off the roof, you
let anybody in here," he says.
    Peter looks at the pitched roof and imagines it.
Policemen coming through the air. He does not think the police chief
would do that, but the policemen outside the house give each other
nervous looks now, as if they are not sure.
    The chief stays inside a long time—perhaps as long
as Peter’s father had—and then emerges, quieter now, angry in a
different way.
    "You find the body, Frank?" one of the
photographers