Father's Day (8 page)

“Do you think he knows where she is?”

“I think she ran away, Lou, to get away from him. I think she hooked up with Richie and his biker buddies, hoping they could help her. Now that Richie’s dead I don’t know what she’ll do. Did you talk to her friends?”

“Not yet. I’ll need to talk to Vince as well.”

“Let me talk to him first, Lou. See if I can’t smooth things over.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Lou.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

“Lou, be careful.”

He walked out and met up with Mitch, who was at the nurse’s station, leaning over the counter talking to Betty. Betty was smiling and Mitch was twirling a pencil between his fingers. They said their good-byes and took the elevator down to the main floor. They stood in the parking lot and smoked. The sleet had stopped.

“Let me ask you a question, Mitch. Anything turn up on the murder weapon that killed Mazz?”

“Yeah. Forensics pulled a forty-caliber bullet out of him after it used his brain as a pinball machine. Ballistics has it now. You carry a forty, don’t you, Lou.”

“Yeah, I do. And so does every cop in the city of Philadelphia. You want to see it?”

“Not just yet but thanks for the offer.”

“How about the body, Mitch, find anything on it?”

“Funny you should ask. Mazz was clean but stuffed down between the front bench seat of the truck was a pack of matches from the Comfort Zone Spa, a massage parlor, Sixty-fourth and Pine, only about fifteen minutes from here.”

“When did you plan on telling me that little detail?”

“You didn’t ask. And Lou, I was just wondering. When were you going to get around to asking if we’ve made any progress on your mother’s murder?”

“Have you?”

“No.”

Lou sat in his car while Mitch pulled away. He rolled down the window and lit one of those cigars from Mitch’s office. The smoke was heavy and hung in the air. The cigar had the aroma of smoked wood and the sharp, full-bodied taste of strong Nicaraguan tobacco. He rolled the cigar in his mouth, taking long drags, pulling the smoke in. Mitch’s words had cut him. Sarah’s words had poured salt into the wounds. It was what she’d said about Sam Blackwell. Vince’s money was like a virus in the water supply. Everyone who had filled their cup from that well was contaminated, including Sam Blackwell. It shouldn’t have surprised him. Everybody seemed to be on the payroll. Maybe that was the difference between them, Sam’s inability to resist temptation. But were they really that different?

Sam had come to Overbrook about a year after Lou, another South Philly transplant. Sam’s mom was divorced, as Lou’s had been, and he’d moved in with his grandparents on Meridian Avenue, just two doors down.

Lou’s mother had met and married a man, ten years older than she was, a cop and a Jew, who’d bought a house there and moved into it with his young wife and her son. There weren’t many Jews left on the force in those days. They were the last of a dying breed, first-generation Americans raised by the veterans of World War II.

The Klein family history was a simple one. Lou’s grandfather had lived in a village called Bernsk in Lithuania. He’d joined the Russian cavalry and fought the Germans in World War I, often with nothing more than a sword after the ammunition
had run out. He’d defended his village from bandits that rode in on horse back from the eastern provinces. He’d smuggled his family out on a merchant ship with the help of his wife’s brother, who was able to bribe the ship’s captain. Once in America, he’d joined the United States military and went back to Europe to fight the Germans again, this time in France and Italy. He’d gone back with one thing in mind—he needed to finish the job he’d started.

He’d spent his entire life fighting, but in the years to come, the grandchildren of these men would be going to college, becoming doctors and lawyers, running away from the crime in the cities as their parents had fled the violence of Europe. They were moving up and out. Cops had become strictly working class. Nobody wanted to get their hands dirty anymore.

Overbrook wasn’t the easiest place to get along in. Lou saw himself as an outsider, the product of an Italian mother and a Jewish stepfather. The mixture of languages and aromas floated down the slate sidewalk like ghosts from another world, a world where being half-Jewish or half-Italian meant you were a whole lot of nothing. He’d never be accepted by either side. So, he’d started hanging with the black kids whose families were moving into the neighborhood in droves, filling up the schools where enrollment was down, bringing a new energy to the playground. Lou ended up spending most of his time on the basketball court, where he earned acceptance and respect. He still had the jumpshot to prove it.

Lou didn’t know what to expect from the new kid on the block. They had a lot in common but why would it make a difference. If Sam had felt sorry for him, Lou wouldn’t have wanted his friendship. If he’d challenged him, Lou would have fought back. But it was more like Sam felt sorry for himself and that did make a difference.

They’d become friends, inseparable at a time when not having
a friend willing to back you up could mean the difference between a punch in the face and a total beat-down. They’d played on the football team through high school. They’d swim together at Cobbs Creek, occupying their summer days crashing into the cold water, still swollen from the spring rain. They’d ridden their bikes together on a dirt track behind Karakung Little League Field, building ramps from cut up portions of plywood stolen from a construction site nearby. It was around that time they’d decided they wanted to be cops. It was also the time they’d first faced the fact that they were infatuated with the same girl.

Her name was Sarah Powers back then. They’d followed her home from school every day down Woodbine Avenue, a long line of wide-eyed boys who’d follow her for the rest of her life. She’d become used to it, used to the attention, the looks from men and boys alike, looks she’d learned to take for granted.

Lou’s chances with Sarah had never developed into anything but an occasional meeting behind the old Stegmair building or a walk in Morris Park, hidden behind a row of towering pines. The few times they’d been together, he’d come away feeling that Sarah Powers was dangerous, would always be dangerous for any man who fell for her, who lost control and put himself in the palm of her hand. He saw it coming; he’d sensed that she’d squeeze the life out of Sam Blackwell. He’d always regretted not telling Sam what he thought. It was the only thing he’d kept from him. He’d felt guilty about it then. He felt guilty now.

Sam had married Sarah a month after they’d graduated from the police academy. It had seemed like such a good plan in the beginning, both of them deciding to join the force, live the life, and it almost worked. But things started to unravel, just as Lou had feared. The badge turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Although he’d never told Sam the truth about him and Sarah, never told him that they’d been together, if only for a
few fleeting moments that had never amounted to anything, he believed Sam must have known and didn’t care or simply refused to face it. As the years went on, it had become harder to affix blame to those things that appeared to be out of his control. If he was going to blame anyone, it would be himself.

He took another long drag off the cigar, held it up in front of him, like some kind of connoisseur savoring a glass of fine wine. He examined the dark skin, rolled it between his fingers, gauging the ring size, the length. He flung it out the car window and watched it skid across the icy parking lot.

It was just after
noon when Lou got back. He found Maggie curled up on the couch with a gallon of chocolate ice cream on her lap and a silver spoon in her hand. He’d always kept a carton in the freezer. Ice cream was a custom at bedtime when Maggie was small—a substitute for a baby’s bottle, milk to make her sleep. As she got older, it became a form of bribery. It also worked wonders on a hangover. He’d gotten the idea from his father, who’d taken him to the Dairy Queen on City Avenue every Wednesday night in his police car, even in the winter after football practice, when he and Sam would wrestle in the backseat.

“Early start?”

“Yeah, I had a date with an irate cop and a frustrated housewife.”

“Which was worse?”

“I managed to keep them apart.”

“Why’s that?”

“Mitchell would try to pump her for information. That wasn’t going to work. She’d clam up and I’d never get anything out of her.”

“So you think the girl’s mom is lying.”

“Let’s just say, she’s being less than honest. She gives the story in bits and pieces. I have to drag it out of her. She’s dealing with a guilty conscience and I know firsthand what that can do.”

“What do you have to be guilty about?”

He came up behind her and stroked her hair as he had when she was a child, playing with her ponytail, tickling her face with it.

“By the sound of it, you have her condemned already. Why are you so suspicious of everyone?”

“It’s what twenty years as a cop will do to you.”

“Don’t give me that. You were probably like that your whole life.”

“And what makes you think you’re so smart.”

“I keep my eyes open, and my ears, too.”

“Too bad I didn’t teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

She turned her face toward him, opened her mouth wide, and shoveled in a heaping tablespoon of ice cream. She wiped the brown mustache from her lips with her sleeve. The flannel shirt she was wearing was her father’s. They sounded like two disgruntled cops walking the same beat for fifteen years. He reached a hand in her direction.

“Partners?”

She grasped his hand and shook it with all the strength she could summon.

“Partners.”

Lou started a pot of coffee and threw a frying pan on the stove. He was hungrier than he first thought and decided on omelets for lunch, with plenty of American cheese, onions, and
green peppers and double orders of rye toast slathered with butter. For dessert, he carved a cantaloupe into thin slices and they ate them with their fingers. They ate in silence and used paper towels for napkins.

There was still plenty of time to pay a visit to Carol Ann Blackwell’s two friends. They’d been with her on the night she disappeared. They both worked in a small strip mall just off McKean. Lisa Barrett worked in a nail salon and Jennifer Finnelli worked as a waitress in a fancy Italian restaurant called Vincenzo’s, on the street side of the mall. Vince owned the restaurant. He probably owned the whole mall, the stores, the land, and every person in it. Maggie asked if she could come along, hit a couple of stores while he interviewed the girls. He didn’t see why not.

Franklin Plaza was a circle of stores with a large parking lot in its center. There was a Super Fresh at one end, with its shopping carts scattered around the lot at awkward angles. Once an hour a pimply-faced kid in a green apron and visor would collect them in a long train and push them to the side of the building. The Applebee’s at the other end competed with a True Value for parking. A Hallmark Store, a Manhattan Bagel, and a Radio Shack squeezed between them. A common canopy covered a concrete sidewalk that wrapped around the entire complex. Shoppers walked from one establishment to another. Elderly men sat talking and smoking on benches bordering the brick storefronts while their wives walked with the hustle of excited schoolchildren, their bags tucked securely under their arms, their mouths moving a mile a minute.

Lou parked outside a clothing boutique advertised by two buxom female mannequins dressed in halters and spandex. They were posed provocatively in a full-length picture window. Lou caught one staring at him and he winked back as Maggie made for the entrance.

He walked into Nigel’s Nail Salon, where an exceedingly thin Korean girl with straight black hair to her shoulders and a phone wedged up against her ear, motioned for him to take a seat while she scribbled into an appointment book. She was immaculately groomed and her sticklike legs, one crossed over the other, poked out from behind the glass table where she sat. Her toenails were bright red, a platform shoe with a six-inch heel dangling from a tiny foot. Lou raised a magazine in both hands and sat like a parishioner with a prayer book. As he casually turned the pages, he noticed that most of the ladies pictured in
Ladies Home Journal
looked more like girls than grown women and most seemed consumed with parading their own brand of sensuality.

He paused at a picture of a middle-aged woman looking especially bright-eyed, chasing a cocker spaniel puppy through a pasture of high flowing grass. Her honey blond hair sparkled in the sun and flew in the wind, and she looked like she was floating on air. The words at the bottom of the page touted a vitamin pill that proclaimed to have harnessed the fountain of youth and was supposed to cure everything from arthritis to diabetes. He looked up and was surrounded by women, awkwardly close together, and stuffed into Sunday school chairs set in a square. The air was heavy with polish and urethane and he was the only one who seemed to mind.

He rose suddenly, as if to make a hasty escape, and absently let the magazine slide to the floor. With all the eyes in the place riveted on him, he approached the preoccupied young lady posing as a receptionist and asked to speak with Lisa Barrett. She pointed with long, curled fluorescent nails toward a table at the rear of the shop.

A bucktooth brunette sat at the table, operating a nail file like a buzz saw. She was holding the hand of a grossly pale, overweight woman with skin like chalk. The woman wore blue
eyeshadow and mauve lipstick and her nose wriggled like she was constantly on the verge of an explosive sneeze. Her hand looked like a sponge bloated with water. Her hair curled up over her head in a beehive. Fat hung in folds of dimpled flesh on the back of her arms as if it might break the arms of the chair and spill onto the floor like a gallon of milk.

“Excuse me, Miss Barrett. My name is Lou Klein. I called earlier and they said that you would be free around lunchtime. I hoped to ask you a few questions about a friend of yours.”