Father's Day (9 page)

She quickly applied a smooth layer of bright red polish and clicked on an overhead fan.

“We can go outside for a minute and I can have a smoke while these things dry.”

Her client rolled her eyes and released a disgusted snort as they walked away. Lou winked at her.

“I already told the police everything I know.”

“I’m working for the family, Miss Barrett. I was asked to help find Carol Ann or at least find out what happened to her.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, sometimes people are kidnapped and sometimes they run away. Sometimes it’s a little of both.”

“And what do you think happened to Carol Ann?”

“I’m not sure. I hope you could help me find that out.”

“I’m surprised someone cared enough to hire a private detective to find her.” She pointed her finger in the air and twirled a dry lock of brown hair as if she was remembering a long-lost acquaintance. “I bet that someone is her mom, though I don’t know why she’d want to find her. She never helped her any of the other times.”

“What other times are we talking about?”

“The other times she ran away and the times she got in trouble.”

They smoked and talked and Lou noticed the array of earrings lining her left lobe. She pushed her hair back behind her ear, showing him that there was always room for one more piercing, one more place to stick a dirty needle, one more hole in her head. Her jeans rode low on her hips and her shirt barely reached her navel. Lou noticed the splash of color from a tattoo peeking out from under her waistband. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one and looked younger than that.

It didn’t really matter how old she was, he thought. Nobody acted their age anymore, anyway. Nobody admitted to it, either. Lou kept hoping that the world had changed, that this city was somehow different. But the tormented faces of its victims kept turning up, kept following him around, like a hitchhiker along the highway, through a cable wire onto a television screen, on the pages of newspapers and magazines, on the trail of a missing girl, even on the face of a daughter he’d never really known.

“What kind of trouble are you referring to?”

“With guys, you know. She was pretty and always had guys chasing her around. But, you know, they always seemed like the wrong kind of guy, trouble, like you said.”

“And she didn’t always know how to handle it.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She knew what he meant. They’d made their share of mistakes, immature, anxious mistakes. Some mistakes could be fixed and some couldn’t. Lou had spent his career posing as the fixer. For as many times as he tried, he more often failed.

“Never mind. I guess you and Carol Ann were pretty close.”

“We were best friends if that’s what you want to call it. We knew each other since sixth grade. That’s when Carol Ann transferred to John Marshall School. She went to Annunciation before that. We met on the first day. We were in the same home-room
and we always sat next to each other. I’d seen her in the neighborhood a few times but Catholic school kids didn’t associate with public school kids, not around here. We used to pull off the boy’s clip-on ties and push down the girls so their stockings would tear.”

She took a few thoughtful drags of her cigarette, blew the smoke out self-consciously.

“Carol Ann was different than the others though. She didn’t belong with them. Honestly, I think something happened over at Annunciation, something pretty bad that got her thrown out. I know her dad died. I think it had something to do with that. I asked her about it once and she got real mad, made me promise never to mention it again.”

“Why did you say that her mom doesn’t care?”

“She never did care. Carol Ann and Sarah argued all the time. They fought sometimes, too. She hit Carol Ann when she got upset and I don’t mean she spanked her. She punched her in the face. She’d knock her down and kick her. I saw them fight once when I stayed over. I’d seen them fight before but never like that. She sat on Carol’s chest and slapped her face harder and harder until I pushed her off. It was terrible. She made me swear never to say a word about it. I remember how thick Carol Ann wore her makeup for weeks.”

“Why’d they fight?”

“Carol and I would sneak out of our bedroom windows late at night. It was her idea. It was innocent enough at first. We’d walk around town, down to the minimart for sodas and pretzels and home through the park. We were never gone more than a couple hours. Then she showed up one night in a red Camaro with these two guys. Carol said they were college kids, home for the summer but even I wasn’t that stupid. They had long greasy hair, pulled back under black bandannas. They smelled
foul. Later, I found out why. It was speed. It made them crazy. They had dirty mouths. And they drove fast, faster than I’d ever gone before. And they were rude. You know what I mean. The type that just took what they wanted. They had their hands all over us and I just wanted to get out of that car.”

The cigarette between her fingers had burned out. She tried to relight it with a blue plastic lighter. She held it tightly in her fist and clicked it repeatedly while half a cigarette hung loosely between her lips. With each click of her thumb, a cold wind would extinguish the flame. She continued to snap away at the lighter in a frantic staccato rhythm and then threw it all to the ground in a gesture of supreme disgust.

“Hey, how is all this going to help you find Carol Ann, anyway?”

“I won’t know that until I hear the whole story.”

“Well, it was getting awfully late and I was getting worried. They wanted to stop at the store on Mulberry Street. They said they’d take us home right after that. When we pulled into the parking lot, it must have been around four in the morning. We went inside and I noticed Carol stuffing things into her purse. She grabbed cigarettes mostly, pill bottles, and razors. The boys kept the old man at the counter distracted. He probably thought they were going to hold him up. We all ran out the door and sped away. Carol Ann laughed and smoked the whole way home. The police were waiting for us, with Sarah on the porch. If Carol Ann’s father hadn’t been a cop, I bet they would’ve locked us up. They snatched us out of that car in a hurry. Sarah was mad. I saw hate in her eyes that night and I believe if the cops weren’t there, she might have killed us both.”

“You were with her on the night she disappeared, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, we were at a club called the Playpen.”

“Did she meet anybody special there or did anybody pay her any special attention?”

“There was a guy she was talking to for quite a while. He was big and scary, black hair and mustache and black empty eyes like a snake. I stood next to him for a second and those eyes were so wild and I thought they were dangerous, too. I told the police all about it.”

“Is there anything else you remember about his appearance?”

“He was wearing a brown leather jacket that was totally out of style and I thought he was a lot older than he looked or acted. It was too warm in there for a jacket like that anyway. He never took it off. When he reached for his drink I noticed a dark line of tattoos under his sleeve and when I looked more closely, I noticed them under his collar and on the back of his neck. His whole upper body must have been covered with tattoos. I don’t mind a couple of tattoos. Even I have one. But not like that, not all over.”

“It wasn’t Richie Mazzino? Was it?”

“You know about Richie?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t Richie, no.”

“Did Carol Ann have any tattoos?”

“No, she refused to get one. She said she hated them.”

“Do you remember anything the guy said?”

“I heard him offer to take Carol for a ride on his motorcycle.”

“Did she go?”

“I don’t know. We came in separate cars and I left before she did. She came directly from work and I had to leave early, so we met there.”

“Where does Carol Ann work?”

“At the restaurant with Jennifer but that wasn’t where she was coming from that night.”

“I thought you said that she was coming from work.”

“She was but Carol Ann had another job.”

“Another job?”

“She made me promise not to tell.”

“You didn’t tell the police?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Keeping secrets for Carol Ann Blackwell isn’t a good idea, Lisa, especially from the police. You’re not doing her any favors by keeping silent now. It’s time to tell the truth. Might just save her life.”

She dug out another cigarette from a crumpled pack. Lou blocked the wind with his back and lit it for her, lit one of his own.

“She worked in a massage parlor, to make extra money. They liked to call it the Spa. Jennifer worked there with her. It’s really called the Comfort Zone. That’s where they were coming from.”

“I see.”

“Are you going to help her, Mr. Klein? It seems like every man in her life tried to take advantage of her, you know. You seem like, honest, Mr. Klein, like you could help her if you wanted to.”

“I’m going to try.”

Lou thanked Lisa Barrett for the candid conversation and left her sucking hard on a the remains of her burned out cigarette, smiling timidly at him as he walked away. It was a sad, resigned smile that reminded him of his mother’s smile—a smile that said she’d given up. Lou thought about his mother’s smile and how beautiful it had been. She’d had a row of shining white teeth that sprung naturally from her face like a rising sun. It was only after she got the news that Lou’s father had been shot
and killed handling a domestic dispute up in Logan that the smile lost its shine, seemed to dry up and blow away.

She’d always be waiting for him on the front porch, waiting anxiously for her husband, waiting for her faithful watchdog to finish doing his business in the street and come home at the end of his shift, climb the stairs in his blue uniform, like some kind of blue knight coming to her rescue. Lou would wait with his mother, watch his stepfather hang up his clothes in the closet, and transform from cop to husband and father. He’d kept the gun in its holster, and the holster on the belt, and he hung it all from a brass hook at the back of the closet. He’d toss his hat onto the shelf. Lou was unsure, at times, where he fit in, how he was supposed to feel about this man, his mother’s new husband, the only father he would ever know. He found out on the day Reuben Klein didn’t come home and his mother clung to him silently, as if it would be on his strength she’d depend from then on.

Lou’s father, Reuben Klein, had been killed in the line of duty. The details of the crime said more about his life than it did his death. He was doing his duty as any other cop would have done, not just because it was the way he was trained but because of who he was.

His friends on the force called him “Rube.” Not as a slur, they just couldn’t imagine calling anyone “Reuben,” let alone a cop. And they all had nicknames, anyway. It meant you belonged. You were in.

He wasn’t dispatched by police radio. He’d heard a scream, a woman’s scream. A neighbor had described it as terrifying. Lois Plachik was being chased by her live-in boyfriend, a lowlife by the name of Ronnie Pitman, and she was running for her life.

Pitman was a meth addict, whose only ambition was to become
a member of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club. He’d grown up in Logan, on Crown Circle, idolizing one of the older guys from the block, a maniac known as “The Junkman,” who’d killed a cop during a traffic stop in Jersey and was doing life in prison at Rahway.

Lois Plachik had been four months pregnant with her second kid. Her blouse had been torn wide open and she held it closed as she’d come running down the front steps of her apartment building. Her nose had a line of blood running from one nostril into her screaming mouth, She ran right into the waiting arms of Officer Reuben Klein.

Rube held her in his arms, strong arms that folded around her, held her up. He’d pulled out a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the blood from her face. She’d smiled at him as if she’d finally found, in his arms, the safety she’d needed, the comfort she’d never had before.

But Rube had let his guard down and Ronnie Pitman had come from the side of the house, with a gun in his hand and Rube’s back to him. Pitman pressed the barrel of a thirty-eight snub-nose revolver against the back of Rube’s head, without warning, while he still held the trembling woman in his arms. He pulled the trigger and Reuben Klein’s brains were blown all over the sidewalk, over the cars parked along the street, and over the face of the woman he sought to comfort with his last dying breath.

When Lou had first heard the story of his father’s murder, he thought that must have been how his mother had first felt, escaping an abusive marriage with a young son she was desperately trying to protect, marrying this cop, this hard man, with the gentle brown eyes and soft voice.

Lou’s mother had told him once that someday he’d have to bury his father, that the Jews buried their own and the responsibility would eventually fall on him. Lou was never sure what
she’d meant, never understood it literally. Later, as he stood over his father’s grave, looking down at the simple pine box that held his father’s body, wrapped in a clean white sheet, his uncle Herman had handed him a shovel and told him to bury his father. He was fifteen years old and he was cold. The dirt was hard and heavy with frozen rain. He could still see it disappear into the black hole in the ground, still hear it land on the lid of his father’s coffin.

Vincenzo’s Pasta House was
on the opposite side of the mall. Lou walked through a long breezeway cut between the buildings like a tunnel of brick. The high walls and shadows were claustrophobic. He picked up his pace. The pavement was icy in places where the sun never reached and he almost went down.

Maggie appeared in the doorway of Vincenzo’s. “I thought you were shopping.”

“I got hungry and I stopped in here for a piece of pizza.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“Guess what.”

“What?”

“I got a job.”

“A job . . . in there?”