Past Due (34 page)

A line of cars was stopped at a traffic light close to the green. A kid in one of the cars yelled out “Fore.” Someone on the practice green yelled back “Five.” Mr. Greeley shook his head before standing up straight and watching me approach. He eyes narrowed when he saw my face.

“I thought we were done,” he barked.

“Just one more question.”

“I’m putting here.”

“Is that what you call it? Just tell me this, Mr. Greeley. When do they come? I’m talking of the bottles of gin, the ones your wife keeps in the china hutch. Her birthday? Her anniversary? When?”

He stared at me and then stared over my shoulder and then glanced around as if he was under an intense surveillance.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said lowly.

“Twenty years worth of gifts, twenty bottles of gin. When do they come?”

“What do you know about anything, you little bastard?”

“I know enough to stir things up. I know enough to ask everyone here if they knew what your successful son was up to before he disappeared. I could ask the neighbors too. I could spend days and days asking questions.”

“This is none of your damn business.”

“When do they come, Mr. Greeley?”

He stared at me for a long moment and I could see just then, beneath the old man’s veneer, the ferocious Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story. He would have scared me then, thirty years ago, but it wasn’t thirty years ago and he didn’t scare me a whit and, when he saw that, something went out of him.

“Christmas, all right?” he said, softly.

“Okay,” I said.

He glanced around once more. “Now get the hell out of here and leave us alone.”

I felt bad about the whole thing, about the wound I had
opened, so I did as he said and started walking away, and then I thought of something else. I stopped and turned around.

“Mr. Greeley,” I said. The old man stared at me with a fierce hatred. “Was your son allergic to peanuts?”

“No,” he said, a glint of triumph in his eye.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Check the records. He wasn’t allergic to nothing.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing but fish.”

It was a warm day, the sun was shining, yet as I walked away from the putting green and then across the eighteenth fairway toward the parking lot, I couldn’t suppress a shiver. It wasn’t proof, there was nothing substantial I could take to Slocum or McDeiss, but, son of a bitch, just then I felt for a moment as if I were in the middle an old George Romero movie, where the dead had come ravenously to life.

It scared the hell out of me, all of it, yes it did, and that was still a few hours before the big silver gun was pointed straight at my chest.

“W
E JUST WANT
to talk, Sully,” I said in the kitchen of his apartment, the bottom floor of a shabby three-decker in a part of Brockton called the Lithuanian Village, my hands raised, standing between Kimberly Blue and the revolver James Sullivan held in his right hand and aimed at my heart.

I wasn’t standing between Kimberly and the gun out of any chivalric impulse, she was just better at ducking behind me than I was at ducking behind her. For a moment, as we jockeyed for position away from the gun, we were like a pair of vaudevillians trying to get the other to go first through the booby-trapped door. After you, no, after you, no, I insist, no, age before beauty, no, pearls before swine, no. We jockeyed and jostled as Jimmy Sullivan looked on with confusion, until our positions settled with me in front. “We just have a few more questions,” I said after my last attempt to gain some cover was parried by the surprisingly quick Kimberly Blue.

It was what she had found at the library, on the microfilm machine, reviewing past issues of the
Brockton Enterprise
, that had sent us back to Sullivan. “He was a basketball star at Cardinal Spellman,” she told me. “There’s dozens of articles about him from junior high on. He broke all his school’s scoring records, was the top prospect in the whole area. The headlines were all,
SULLY LEADS SPELLMAN OVER FATHER RYAN
, or
SULLIVAN HITS
37
AS SPELLMAN ROLLS
. There were
articles talking about his being heavily recruited at U. Mass and some of the big-ten schools. Iowa. Illinois. All the I states. But that was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before the accident,” she said, handing me a photostat.

And that was what we had come to Jimmy Sullivan’s house to ask about, the accident. But he wasn’t happy to talk to us, not happy at all. Maybe what cued me to that was the fierce fear in his herky-jerky eyes when he saw us at the door of his apartment. Or maybe it was the way his mouth twitched when he asked what the hell we wanted, or the jut of his jaw as we told him. Maybe it was all those subtle signs, but what cinched it was the not so subtle sight of the gun.

“I don’t have what you’re looking for,” said Sully.

“Then why are you pulling a gun on two unarmed strangers?” I said. “Why do your eyes wheel with terror whenever the name of an old friend, twenty years gone, gets mentioned.”

“I told you to go on home.”

“We’re not here to hurt you. Whatever you’re afraid of, it is not us.”

“I got enough troubles without the ones you’re bringing.”

“We only want to hear about Tommy.”

“I’m done talking.”

“People are dying in Philadelphia over this story.”

“Shut up.”

“Three deaths already, three people somehow connected to Tommy Greeley. In just the last few weeks.”

“You’re bullshitting.”

“See this scrape on my head. I was there when the last one was killed. His building blew up with him inside. I almost caught it too. And I wasn’t part of what went down twenty years ago.” I stopped, watched as the fear flooded his eyes. “But you were, weren’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“It’s coming to a head, Jimmy. Whatever has been festering beneath the surface for twenty years has erupted. And it’s not going to stop at the Philly city limits.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Just the truth, Jimmy. About you and Tommy.”

“Get the hell out of here,” he said. “Please,” but as he made that final plea he backed away from us and the gun dropped to his side. I heard Kimberly release a breath from behind me.

“Put it away, Sully,” I said. “We’re not the ones you’re afraid of. Put the gun away and we’ll go out and have ourselves a couple of beers and we’ll talk. And you might be surprised, whatever has got you so spooked, I think we can help.”

He ended up taking us to a jauntily named joint called Café Lithuanian Village, a boxy place with opaque glass blocks for windows and a handwritten sign outside that said all you needed to know about the place.
DOORS WILL BE LOCKED AT
1:00
AM. YOU MUST BE IN BY THEN. NO EXCEPTIONS
. Whatever the law said about closing time, drinking at the Lit was an all-night affair. The place had a pool table, shuffle bowling, a little Budweiser fixture where the Clydesdales went round and round, and its very own weather system. Cloudy today, cloudy tomorrow, one hundred percent chance of clouds for years on end. Everything in the place had marinated in nicotine for decades.

“So what do you think of the Lit?” Sullivan said when we were finally seated, three abreast, at the U-shaped bar.

“It’s brown,” I said.

“It is that.”

A squat man behind the bar, in a black
LIT MOB
T-shirt, gave Kimberly a long look and a martini, gave Jimmy and me each a bottle of Bud. I put a twenty on the bar. He took my money, dropped a pile of lesser bills in front of me. I took a long pull.

“We used to come to this place as kids,” said Jimmy, looking down at his beer as he spoke, his voice flat. “Fifteen we were getting served. Six-ouncers for twenty cents. The Lit. Just down the bar there’d be a cop in uniform getting his belts in. We’d nod to each other. I won’t bust you if you don’t bust me. Brockton, man. What a place to be from. You’re way too pretty for this place.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Not you.”

“Me?” said Kimberly. “Don’t you think my eyes are too close together?”

Without raising his head or looking at her he said, “No.”

“And my mouth’s a little too small?”

“Too small for what?”

“I don’t know. Just too small.”

“No, it’s not too small. You’re goddamn perfect.”

“I didn’t think you noticed me at all.”

“I’ve got a pulse, don’t I? If there was any traffic in the place you’d stop it.”

“That’s so sweet,” said Kimberly, beaming. “You are so sweet. Didn’t I tell you he was sweet, Victor?”

“Sweet,” I said.

“What is it you guys really want?”

“We just want to hear about you and Tommy,” I said. “Why don’t we start with the accident that gave you your limp.”

He lifted his head. “What do you know about that?”

“Just what we read in the
Brockton Enterprise.
Prep star arrested at hospital. The only question I have is whose idea was it in the first place, yours or Tommy’s?”

He sat for a moment, took a drink from his beer. “His,” he said finally. “I can truthfully say every bad idea I ever had in my entire life was his.”

“T
OMMY TOLD ME
it was easy money. We cased it one night, the next we got high and went out to do it. Drove the van up, snapped the chain, opened the gate, went right in. Stealing those motorcycles was the simplest thing.”

“Why would you put yourselves at such risk?” Kimberly asked. “Tommy was headed to an Ivy League school, you were bound for glory on the basketball court. You guys had everything going for you.”

“That was the point. It wasn’t the first job we ever did, the bike thing, believe me. But everyone wanted something from us. He was his mother’s prince, I was, like, the coach’s dream on the basketball court. But we also smoked pot, screwed all the loose girls we could find, stole stuff. It was a way of keeping a part of ourselves for ourselves. And then we stole the bikes.

“We used a board as a ramp, loaded the van. One bike fell off the ramp, dented the gas tank, made all kinds of racket. Scared me shitless, but Tommy just shrugged and took another one. Three bikes. All loaded up, we replaced the chain and were gone. Done. Except Tommy wanted to test the merchandise.

“We filled up a gas can at a station and drove out to D.W. Field Park, by Cocksucker Cove—named for obvious reasons—and took out two of the bikes. When we kicked them up, God, they were
screaming. I showed him how they worked, this is the gearshift, the clutch, the gas, the break. He was still trying to figure it all out when I stomped into first and blasted out. It wasn’t long before Tommy caught up. No helmets, no nothing, we just rode. The wind blasting our teeth. On a lark, we turned off road and started riding on the golf course, across the fairways, tearing up the greens. Nothing felt better then tearing up them greens. Too bad it wasn’t Thorny Lea.

“Next thing I know I see Tommy atop the big hill by the stone observation tower. I rode up after him and right away I knew what he had in mind. This was the sledding hill. He wanted to go down. Hell if I was going to let him go first. I shot past him and then I was flying. The path dived down and I did too. But when I landed I landed wrong. Put down my foot to catch my balance, my knee locked and that—and that was the end of the leg.”

He lifted up his beer, looked into it as if looking for something he had misplaced long ago, took a long drink from the bottle. It was hard to watch, the way he drank, with his eyes closed, as if trying to pull something from the bottle.

“By the time Tommy came up to me I was screaming, the leg was flopping and bleeding. He did what he could, but what could he do? He tried to lift me up so I could walk, but I couldn’t move. Bones were shattered, I was bleeding and in shock. So he took off his jacket and wrapped it around the leg and sped off with his bike.

“It took me about a minute before I realized, with this demented certainty, that he wasn’t coming back. I was still high, and that’s the way you think when you’re high, but it was also Tommy, and I knew Tommy. He’d just leave, I figured, and hope the situation would go away. I screamed for help—nothing. The bugs started coming, crawling on my face and hands, lapping the blood. I tried to drag myself to help, but the bones were moving around in there. I was sure I was going to die, to bleed to death. And then something big and black flew down and settled beside me, its head bobbing like it was ready to tear me to pieces, like I was already dead. I laid back, gave the hell up.

“That’s when Tommy showed up again, that son of a bitch. I was never so happy to see anyone in my life, ever. He showed. With his father, who Tommy hated. They made a stretcher out of something
and carried me back along the path to a clearing where a car was parked. They put me in the backseat, still lying down. They drove me to the hospital. And as we’re driving, they’re talking to me about what I ought to do, Tommy and Tommy’s dad. I’m passing out from the pain and they’re talking like two lawyers. I should just say I fell at my house, they told me. I was a big basketball hero, they wouldn’t do anything much to me. There was no reason to get everyone in trouble.”

“So what did you do?” said Kimberly.

“What they said to do. He was my friend, squealing wasn’t going to help my leg. And they were right. Cops found the crashed-up bike, the busted lock at the bike shop, figured out what had happened, and even so I only got six months’ probation. Everyone figured it was a prank and that I had paid enough with the injury, which I suppose I had. My leg was so broken up I never played again. That was college for me. I just didn’t have any interest after that.”

“What about Tommy?”

“Nothing. He came to visit me in the hospital and slipped me a couple hundred, my share of the money for the two bikes he sold. I didn’t see him much after that. He said it was safer if we didn’t hang out together. Safer for him, he meant. He went off to his college in Philadelphia and that was it, the end of Tommy Greeley in my life.”

“But it wasn’t the end, was it?” I said.

“Sure it was.”

“No,” I said. “Not by a long shot.”

“How do you know?”

“By the fear in your eyes.”

He shrugged, finished off his beer.

“Go ahead, Jimmy,” said Kimberly.

“All right. What the hell. This is now five, six years after. It took me a while to come to grips with everything, it took years. I was a mess, but then I got hold of myself. I got off the drugs, stopped smoking, I lost weight. I found a job working this giant copier at some big company, making nothing, ten grand a year, but it was something. I even got a girl, a nice girl that I knew from high
school. I was making a life, not what it would have been before the accident, but a life. And then, out of the blue, Tommy calls.

“I been hearing about Tommy, his mother had been bragging, how he’s now in law school, how he’s doing so well, how he got involved in some business and was already making real money. Tommy was Mr. Success.”

“How did that make you feel, hearing that?” said Kimberly.

“How the hell do you think? But I was dealing with it. And then Tommy calls. Says he’s going to send something up. Something that will be worth my while. Along with some instructions. And he does. UPS. I sign for it. A big brown box.”

“What was inside?” says Kimberly.

“You have to understand, I was getting things together. I was making a new life for myself. I was getting close to happy. There is something very soothing in diminished expectations.”

“What was inside?”

“A small boom box, with a selection of tapes. I thought it was a strange gift. Why was he sending me this? But there wasn’t tapes in the tapes. Instead there was newspaper balled up, and nestled in the newspaper were glass vials. I knew what was in them right away, and I could tell the weight too. He had sent me ounces. Eight of them. Half a pound. You know how much half a pound of coke was worth in those days? I did, I had bought enough grams in the bad times. I was never much for math but drugs sharpen your arithmetic, no doubt about it. Grams were 75 bucks a pop. Twenty-eight grams to an ounce, so an ounce was worth $2,100. Eight ounces was worth $16,800. And you know what I paid up front for it all? Nothing. Nothing.

“He sent up a letter with some names and his instructions. He told me how to prove up the quality with methanol and a spoon. And he told me how much to take out as my cut. He was setting me up in business. His business. Tommy Greeley thought he was doing me a favor. He was going to make me rich, the son of a bitch. There was a guy in a bar. The name was in the letter. He tested it and bought three. A few of the other names came through. One bought two. Two more bought one each. It was so damn easy.”

“You said there were eight ounces,” said Kimberly. “You only told us about seven.”

“I had to test it, didn’t I? And then I had to test it some more. I ended up doing the whole eighth myself. And with some of the cash I bought myself a new car. Why not, right? So what I sent down to Tommy wasn’t as much as I was supposed to send. But he didn’t seem to care. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, and he sent up more right away. Federal Express this time. Next thing you know I was in the business. But I was using now and, after my girl left because of the drugs, I was spending even more money trying to live the life, getting farther into debt. I owed him five, I owed him ten, fifteen. It didn’t matter because he kept on sending stuff up. Eight ounces at a time. Then a pound. I had so much stuff I had to front people myself, and not everyone was paying everything they owed, so I grew deeper into Tommy’s debt. Twenty. Twenty-five. I quit my real job. How could I spend nine to five making ten a year when I owed Tommy Greeley thirty thousand dollars?

“As the quantities grew, he started sending up a courier, a motorcycle guy, who would drop off the stuff and remind me, to the dollar, of how much I owed. Thirty-five. Forty. Where was I ever going to find that kind of money outside the business? I was trapped. But still, from Tommy, it was like, whenever. No pressure from him to pay what I owed. Until it was no longer whenever, until it was right fucking now.”

“When was this?”

“Just before he disappeared. He phoned me late one night. He was at a pay phone, that’s what he used for business, and he said he needed the money I owed. By then it was like seventy-five grand and there was no way. ‘Don’t say you can’t,’ he told me, ‘after all I’ve done for you.’ How could I respond to that? He told me to open an account and put all my cash in the bank. Then sell my car, my stereo, whatever I had, and put that in too. Get checks for everything so there won’t be a trail. And then collect all the money I was owed. Hire a thug if I had to and collect it. Give a discount for checks and put everything in the bank. And when you’ve got everything, wire it to an account. He gave me the number. It was something offshore, I think. I thought of just stiffing him, wondered what he could do about it, but then I remembered the motorcycle guy. So I did as he said. I sold my car, moved the merchandise I had, collected what I
could. It wasn’t much. I ended up with about twenty-five thousand and I wired twenty of it to that account.”

“You kept five for yourself?” said Kimberly.

“Yeah, I mean, yeah. And I’m glad I did. Because that was the end of the line. No more shipments, no more deals. I was left with the five thousand, sure, but no car, no job, and an addiction I couldn’t afford to feed. I tried to keep the business going, tried to find a supplier, but what the hell did I know, really? I ended up going to Cambridge and working out a shipment from an under-cover cop and that was the end of that. Seven years. A third off for good behavior, a third off for parole, but still.”

“You ever talk to Tommy after that call?”

“No.”

“Ever hear from him?”

“No.” But when he said it his gaze slid down to the empty bottle of beer in his hands, and his knuckles were white.

The fear, where did that come from? I wondered, as I ordered us another round. The one thing I still couldn’t quite figure was why he was so spooked at seeing us. Why had we frightened him so? Why had he thought it necessary to draw a gun? I thought back over it all and I remembered what he had said the first time he saw us.
You don’t look like arm breakers,
he had said. And how he made sure to tell us there was nothing here for us. And how he said, when he saw us at his house, that he didn’t have what we were looking for. What did he think we were looking for? And then it hit me.

Lawyers are, at heart, archaeologists. Our job is to excavate history, to burrow into the dirt and pull out our shards of evidence. With enough shards you can reconstruct the pot, with enough pots you can reconstruct the past. We send out our document requests like telegrams to the past; what we get back are boxes. And somewhere in those boxes lay the outlines of our most precious tool: the story. Some lawyers see the cardboard cubes being wheeled into their offices and they cringe at the thought of all that paper to review, but not me. For me, each box represents a square plot of land at an ancient site, something to be dug into, sifted, organized, reviewed. And believe me when I tell you this, there is always a box.

“Let’s hear the rest,” I said.

“I didn’t leave anything out.”

“Oh yes, you did. Tell us about the box.”

He startled for a second. “How did you know?”

“It’s my job to know.”

“Fucking lawyers.”

“Yes we are,” I said.

“What did he send you, Sully?” said Kimberly.

He paused for a moment, looked at Kimberly’s wide eyes and small mouth, took a sip of his fresh beer. “A big tool locker,” he said finally. “Red and black. Padlocked shut.”

“When?”

“After I wired the money. He told me to bury it somewhere. That someone would come looking for it someday and until then to just keep it safe.”

“And you thought Kimberly and I were the someones he referred to?”

“Yes.”

“But you were scared. You pulled a gun on us. You were frightened, so you didn’t keep it safe, did you?”

He didn’t answer.

I lowered my voice. “It’s all right. What else could he have expected. You were strung out and broke and you thought there might be some drugs inside, didn’t you?”

“If I was strong enough I wouldn’t have been in that mess in the first place.”

“So you opened it.”

“Snapped the lock.”

“What was inside?”

“Crap. Nothing. Books, pictures, crap.”

“But it’s not the crap that has you so scared, is it, Sully? What else was in the locker? Drugs?”

“No.”

“Money?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“A hundred thou.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yeah.”

“And you took it.”

“I was going to put most of it back.”

“But you didn’t.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you pissed it away.”

“Yeah. Maybe I did. Some. Most. And the rest I gave to my new girlfriend to stash. For when I got out.”

“And did she.”

“I don’t know. That was the last I ever saw of her.”

“Good choice.”

“Well, you know, she seemed pretty reliable with money. She was a stripper.”

“It’s amazing how that works. And since then every stranger who stepped your way made you jumpy. Every stranger might be the stranger who would ask for the box, and open it up, and see what was missing, and look to get it back.”