Past Due (35 page)

He drained his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he drank.

“In all those years, anyone ever come asking for it?” I said.

“No. Not until now.”

“You mean us.”

“Not just you.”

Kimberly and leaned forward and stared at him. “Go ahead, Sully,” she said.

“I got a call, not too long ago. Just a call. A voice I didn’t recognize. It asked about the package I was keeping safe. I said I don’t know what he was talking about. It asked again, told me to think back twenty years. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. The voice told me to expect a visitor. That’s all I heard, and then you guys showed up.”

I looked at Kimberly, whose wide eyes were now wide with the big questions. Who had known? Who had called?

“The voice,” I asked, all the while watching Kimberly’s expression, “was it British?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

And Kimberly’s pretty wide eyes widened even farther. “Colfax?” she said.

“Who?” said Jimmy.

“That’s right,” I said.

“How’d he know about it?” she said.

“Who?” said Jimmy.

“What did you do with the other crap in the toolbox?” I said.

“Left it there,” said Jimmy.

“In the box?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it now?”

“Buried. I moved it to the basement of the place I live at now.”

“Let’s dig it up.”

“No. They might come for it.”

“Tell you what, Sully. I’ll take it off your hands, which will be a relief for you. And I can work it so you never get that visitor you’ve been fearing.”

“You’re full of shit. You can’t do that.”

“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “I can walk through walls.”

“Now I know you’re full of shit.”

“Trust me.”

He laughed a sad, rueful laugh. “Do I got any choice?”

“Let’s go dig it up,” I said.

And we did.

F
LYING HOME TO
Philadelphia I was trying to read a play I had picked up in the airport bookstore, a thrilling tale of murder by poison, of ghostly apparitions, of madness and vengeance and the madness of revenge. I figured if Eddie Dean was reading
Hamlet,
I ought to brush up on it too. The misty night, the father’s ghost, the poetry of death. It was more thrilling then I had remembered it, but even so I found it hard to keep my focus. I was reading
Hamlet,
yes, but what I was seeing in my mind’s eye was the arrogant visage of Tommy Greeley, the smirk that seemed to say,
Aren’t I something?
Oh yeah, he was something all right.

Whatever I had thought of Tommy Greeley before my trip to Brockton, however much I might have identified with him in his rebelliousness, his irreverence, his striving to rise above his family’s dysfunction, my opinion had changed completely after hearing Jimmy Sullivan recite the sad story of his withered life, and the friend, who was no friend, who had done so much to destroy its promise. Some of what Tommy had done to him was done out of malevolence, I could feel that, maybe an unconscious jealousy of a friend who had already achieved success, but there was something else at work too, something almost worse. Carelessness. A carelessness, I supposed, that defined everything about Tommy Greeley’s life. He had been careless about one friend’s basketball career, careless
about another friend’s marriage, careless about all the lives he was destroying with his drugs as he built his fortune. Just utter carelessness with other human beings. And when his carelessness had put him in danger, he had found the most careless way out.

Kimberly Blue was seated next to me in the plane, absorbed in her own reading. We were on the early-morning flight. I was anxious to get back to the office, to do some work and send a query off to California before I visited my father that night. She had to hurry back and see a man about a boat.

“A boat?”

“Something for the boss. External relations. Just a party thing, he said.”

“But he’s out of money.”

“There’s always money for a boat, V.”

So there we were, on the early flight home, our carry-ons stashed in the overhead compartment, along with the tool locker dug up from Jimmy Sullivan’s basement the night before. I watched Kimberly concentrate on the volume on her lap and as I did there was something about her that reminded me of the photographs. The line of her neck as she bent toward the book, the shape of her hand, the wisp of hair that covered her ear. I knew it was a trick, a transference from one woman to another, and I knew why it was happening. But still, it had its effect, the similarities, and I felt a wave of emotion toward her, a strangely paternal emotion.

“How’s the reading material?” I said.

Before she raised her head, she carefully put her finger on the page of the notebook on her lap, a notebook full of diary entries twenty years old that we had found in the locker.

“Gad, V. She can’t even blow her nose without writing all about it. And she goes on and on about the sex, like no one’s ever hooked up before. Talk about a slut. I’ve gotten to the part about the veil we found.”

“Interesting?”

“Yuck.”

“All right, I don’t want to know.”

“But between all the sex stuff, you can tell she really was struggling. Caught between two men, a husband she loves and a man
with whom she is sexually obsessed. She hasn’t decided yet what to do. It’s like she has to work it out on the page first. Are you going to read it?”

“Absolutely not. I’ve had enough experience with her writing to last me.”

“But see, V, I was right about her all along, wasn’t I?”

Yes, the notebooks for which Alura Straczynski had been desperately searching, the missing pieces of her solipsistic opus, were in the locker, along with all kinds of other stuff of varying levels of interest for me—a college yearbook, a fencing trophy, a Leica camera, snapshots of friends, a financial ledger, the yucky silk veil, a book of selected poems by Lord Byron, and a how-to book, a cheap-looking paperback from a publishing company called Loompanics Unlimited.

I had taken a special interest in the snapshots. Barbecues, parties, days at the beach, a lot of good-looking young folk having a rich old time. Most of the people in the pictures I had never seen before, but I did recognize a few, absolutely. Lonnie, poor dead Lonnie, here much younger but still with the beard and the motorcycle style, gazing at Chelsea, lovely Chelsea, with her arm around a man I recognized from the photo Mrs. Greeley had given me. Was that the triangle that took Tommy down? Or was it the other triangle, the one Kimberly was reading about in the notebooks? There was also a picture of Sylvia Steinberg, young, thin, absolutely stunning, her gaze cast not at the camera or her boyfriend but at Chelsea. There was a stiff shot of Jackson Straczynski, posed and serious in a suit, his hair long, his tie thick. There was a strange man, short, dark, husky, whose image was ubiquitous in the photographs. His dark eyes burned at the camera even as his mouth attempted a smile. The other partner, Cooper Prod, I assumed. And in almost every shot, of course, there was Tommy Greeley himself, standing tall, smiling slyly, the life of the party. But the party was running out of time.

The objects in the tool locker spelled out with utter clarity the last desperate days of Tommy Greeley. His drug empire was collapsing, the dogged Telushkin was doggedly pursuing him, indictments were as certain as the sunrise. Tommy Greeley, in the midst of a torrid affair with his best friend’s wife, had decided on a drastic course
of action. That Loompanics book we found was entitled
How to Disappear and Never Be Found
, and for Tommy it had provided a blueprint. He would run away, run away with her, take what money he could and start a new life as someone else, still rich, but now out from under the shadow of his criminal past.
He was always one for slipping out of trouble,
had said his father. Chapter Four of
How to Disappear and Never Be Found:
“Creating a New Identity.”

Eddie Dean.

That was the possibility that appeared to me from a great distance at my father’s bedside. That was what my query to California was all about, to see if there ever was a real Eddie Dean and, if there was, to learn whether he had died an untimely death, leaving a birth certificate and Social Security number for an old friend to use in making his escape, just as explained in Chapter Four. But if that was the case, how had Tommy Greeley survived his encounter with Joey Cheaps? I had a theory about that too.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be able to show Joey Parma or Derek Manley the picture I now had of Tommy Greeley. Joey Parma had told me he had killed the man with the suitcase and so I had assumed that he had killed Tommy Greeley. But what if it wasn’t Tommy Greeley holding the suitcase. What if he had gotten wind of the betrayal and given the suitcase to someone else to hold, had set someone else up to take the beating? Maybe he had learned something that made him suspicious, maybe he had been hiding, using the other to make sure it was safe. How characteristic of our Tommy Greeley would that be?

There was no proof. He could have told his friend Eddie Dean about the locker sent up to Boston. The allergy to fish might be a coincidence. He could have arranged for his special gift to be sent to his mother every Christmas before his murder, the twenty bottles of gin representing the bitterness carried like a seething wound in his breast. There was no proof, but if Tommy was truly killed at the edge of the Delaware River, then who had been using Tommy Greeley’s past to wreak his revenge?

“How did Colfax know about the stuff Tommy gave Jimmy?” said Kimberly.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Maybe it was just someone else with a British accent. There are a lot of those in the world.”

“Do you really think that’s it?”

“I don’t know, V. I don’t understand anything.”

I hadn’t told Kimberly about my suspicions. She was too close to Eddie Dean, she would tip my hand. I thought it better to get the proof from California first, and then let the police handle it, but still I had my concerns. “I want you to be careful, Kimberly. Very careful.”

She turned to stare at me.

“Let’s just assume,” I said, “we don’t know anything about anybody. It’s safer that way. Have you thought any more on why you got this job?”

“Maybe they saw something in the interview.”

“Maybe they did.”

“I have talents.”

“I’m not saying you’re not qualified. Or that you’re not doing a great job. And I’m not saying that if they were picking on looks alone you wouldn’t have snagged it easy, being you are fabulous-looking, no doubt about it. But I want you to be careful.”

“What do you think is going on?”

“I’m not sure. Not yet, at least, though soon I will be, you can count on it. But believe me when I tell you this, there is something not right going on and it is rooted in the past and it is going to end very very badly.”

“So, V,” said Kimberly, her eyes turning suddenly bright. “You really think I look fabulous?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and her bright smile at my compliment was both touching and a little sad.

She went back to her reading and I began to think about her. Why again had she been hired? What did she know that Eddie Dean, a stranger with a mangled face who had the same allergy to fish as had Tommy Greeley, would find valuable? I looked at her again, saw again the same angles and lines of the pictures on my wall. She was reading Alura Straczynski’s journal and so in my mind’s eye she was somehow taking on Alura Straczynski’s shape. Look at her, the way her neck stretched, look at the shape of her ear,
look at her hand, sitting on the page, the way it curled, the length of its fingers, the shape of its thumb. I had seen it before, I had a picture of that very same hand.

“Oh God, how disgusting,” said Kimberly. “TMI.”

“Excuse me?”

“Really now, is this something the world needs to know? The sensation of it, the taste of it, the burning as it slid up her throat. Some things are best left unsaid, believe me. I mean, do we really need to know every last detail of this? Do we really care that she woke up that morning bowing and scraping to the porcelain god?”

C
OMING HOME FROM
Brockton, I shouldn’t have been surprised, what with the specter of Tommy Greeley’s resurrection still haunting me, to see my dying father come heartily back to life.

“Where you been?” he asked, sitting up in his bed, free of the respirator and mask, with only the small plastic canula feeding oxygen into his nose. “That doctor was looking for you.”

“I was away, on business. What happened?”

“I don’t know. It started working.”

“The drug?”

“Yeah, the drug. That Primaxin thing. It finally kicked in. Working like a charm.”

“Apparently so.” I checked the monitors. Oxygen rate a robust ninety-four percent, respiratory rate a leisurely sixteen, heart rate down to well under a hundred. I took another look at his face to make sure I wasn’t in the wrong room. No, it was him, my dad, who was stomping on death’s welcome mat just two nights before, now looking surprisingly vigorous. And what was that right there, on his face? Oh my God, was that a hint of a smile?

“They took me off the respirator last night. Now if they take this pipe out of my prick I could walk out of here.”

“What about the operation?”

“I thought you was here to cheer me up.”

“You don’t look like you need cheering up. Did they say anything about the operation?”

“Right after they’re done with the drug. Sit down.”

I pulled a chair over. He reached out, put a hand on my arm. I gave his paw a wary glance.

“How you doing?” he said.

“Fine,” I said.

“Really. How’s it going, son?”

“Fine.”

“We don’t talk enough.”

“Yes, we do.”

“No, we don’t. Tell me about your life. Tell me about your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations.”

I took his hand off my arm. “Hey, Dad, you’re creeping me out.”

“Am I?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Am I?”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

Something in my face must have been quite hysterical because he broke out into a wet bout of laughter.

“Okay,” he said as his laughter dissolved into a fit of coughs. “Yeah, I’m kidding.”

“It was just a joke?”

“Got ya, you little bastard.”

I did a little shaky thing, like I was skived to the bone. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

“You know, life would be an all right thing if they could pull a plastic snake out of your throat every night.”

“But just remember,” I said, “no matter how good you feel right now, things will eventually turn to shit.”

“I know it.”

“That’s just the way of it for us.”

“You’re preaching to the converted.”

“Good. Just so long as we’re clear.”

“We are. So”—he again put his hand on my arm, gave me a wink—“how’s the love life?”

“Stop it,” I said, even as his laughter began again.

It only took the dinner tray to sour his mood. Salisbury steak, overcooked peas, something blue. He dropped his fork with disgust.

“I can’t stand it in here no more,” he said. “They should just sharpen their damn knives and get it over with.”

“Don’t worry, they will.”

He let out a hearty curse. Now that was my dad.

“So what happened?” I said.

“I told you. The drug.”

“No, with the girl. In that room. With the old guy.”

“Curious, are you?”

“Yeah. You know. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“So have I. For a lot longer than you.”

“Okay. So what happened?”

“I told you,” he said. “She kissed me. She put her hand on the back of my neck, pressed me toward her, and she kissed me. And, son of a bitch, I kissed her back.”

He kisses her back. Her hand at the back of his neck, his eyes closed, the softness, the wetness, the warmth of her mouth. He lets the electricity slide through him, numb him, he loses himself in the moment and lets the moment expand until it stretches out in four dimensions and he is adrift in the sensation, no here nor there, no then, just now, just her, just the feel of her hand, the pressure of her lips, the silvery slickness of her tongue. Until she pulls away, and he opens his eyes, and he falls back into the bloody hell of that treasure room, with the old man dead at his feet.

He sees it all again, the confrontation, the box of coins slamming into the old man’s scalp, the old man dropping to the floor. My father is in a panic, his mind races out of control. What to do? Where to run? Who to tell?

What have you done? he says to her. What are we going to do?

But he slows down when he sees her pretty face, the sharp blue of her eyes, the calm of her features.

“It was like she was taking a walk in the park,” he said. “It was like nothing had happened.”

I know where the jewelry is, she says.

What are you talking about?

I know where everything is, she says.

Do you realize what you’ve done?

It was an accident, she says. You know that. Jesse, it was an accident.

They’re going to catch us and kill us, he says.

No they won’t.

They will.

They can’t. We were never here. We have alibis.

Who?

Each other. Jesse. You and me. You promised we’d be together forever and now we will. Now we have no choice. Darling.

She steps toward him and he steps away. He stares at her, this woman, his love, this stranger. He stares at her even as she reaches out to him.

“It was like I never seen her before. ‘Who are you?’ I said to her.”

Who are you? he says.

Jesse, she says, her eyes brightening. Listen to me. Pull yourself together. Jesse. Listen. I know where everything is.

I don’t want anything from here, he says.

But of course you do, she says, reaching down to take hold of the box of coins, which she clutches to her chest. We deserve this, she says. Still holding on to the box she reaches up and grabs a fistful of pearls. He owes us this. We can’t begin with nothing.

Stop, he says.

We need this to get started with our lives. We can’t begin with nothing.

No, he says.

I can’t begin with nothing.

Don’t, he says.

But she does. She pulls down more pearls, she grabs a handful of diamond-encrusted broaches, jade figurines, beautiful ivory carvings. Her arms are filled with the old man’s treasures, all of it smeared now with the old man’s blood.

Stop, he says. But she doesn’t stop, and with each piece of treasure she pulls from the shelves it is as if she is yanking the dreams straight from his chest, handful by handful.

He finally stops her physically, takes control of himself and then control of her, grabs her by the shoulders, spins her around so she is facing him.

Stop, he says again. We can’t take anything. We have to clean everything. Do you understand?

And maybe she does, or maybe she is just frightened by what she sees in my father’s eyes, for her face turns as pale as the old man’s and, still with all the treasures in her arms, she backs away.

He looks around, grabs a throw from off one of the chairs, begins wiping the room, cleaning what blood he can off the shelves, the chairs, the table. He takes the objects from her arms, one by one, wipes them, replaces them, one by one, while she looks on, quiet and pale, as if the shock of what she has done has finally hit her. He takes the objects from her one by one and she lets him.

But when he tries to take the box, she holds fast, clutches it to her chest and won’t let go.

We need to leave, he says.

Okay.

We can take nothing, he says.

Okay.

Give me the box.

Okay, she says, but she won’t let go, she holds tightly to the box, the very box with which she shattered three lives, and he doesn’t have the heart to wrench this final scrap of wood from her grasp.

He takes a last look around, a last look at his dearest dreams lying shattered on the bloody floor, and switches off the light.

“We stepped outside the room,” he said, “and closed the door behind us. I used the throw to wipe away our fingerprints as we went. We slipped out the mud room window, out into the night. And we went home.”

Home, home to his one-room apartment in North Philadelphia, where just that morning he had felt the infinite promise of the future pour through him. He lies in his bed, with his love asleep by his side, her head resting on his chest, feeling the tickle of her hair as he prayed he would feel each night for the rest of his life. But now the room feels small, cramped, the walls are closing in on him.

She groggily opens her eyes, she smiles at him, that same lovely
smile that just hours before had been able to light the darkest corners of his heart. Together forever, she says. Just like we promised. And then her eyes close and she falls back to sleep and in her slumber she looks so much like an angel, his Angel, that to look at her physically hurts.

“But the box,” whispered my father, his eyes now closed, his voice faint. “The damn box.”

It is still there, the wooden box with Atlas on the lid. It sits on the bureau, atop the bloody throw, the box glowing in the moonlight. And it is as if the box itself is sucking the promise from the room, and, along with the promise, the very air. The weight of her head on his chest is constricting his breathing. He’s having a hard time breathing. He coughs, he fights for breath.

“Are you okay, Dad?” I said, as my father struggled to catch his breath.

He didn’t answer, he was lost in the memory, his heart rate soared.

I shook him softly. “Dad?”

His eyes popped open. He startled at the sight of me. “What?”

“Dad? Should I get a nurse?”

“No,” he said, coughing again. “I’m all right,” he said, gasping still for breath.

“Dad?”

“I was just remembering,” he said. “Remembering the way I felt that night in my room. The way I felt ever since.”

“And how was that?”

“Like an animal,” he said. “Like an animal caught in a trap. Waiting to be put out of my misery. Waiting for the blessing of a shot to the head.”