The Wolves of Fairmount Park (15 page)

“Look, I just . . .” Parkman shrugged. “I didn't know Collins was crazy.”

“Okay.”

“Let me just, I don't know. Let me buy you lunch.”

“Nah, we're cool.”

Parkman opened the door and got out. He was tall, big across the shoulders. He put out a hand. “Just give me a couple minutes, okay?” After a minute he dropped the hand and looked down, stealing glimpses like a guilty dog. Orlando shook his head.

They went to Le Bus on Main Street in Manayunk, a place the older man had clearly been before. Orlando glanced at the menu
and put it down, then turned his head to watch the street, keeping the guy in the corner of his eye. The guy put the menu down with a decisive slap, then watched the waitress as she moved around, snapping his head up to call her over, like
don't waste my fucking time
.

When she came over, the man pointed at Orlando and did the headshake thing again, as if he came from a planet where that was how they communicated their primary needs. Orlando shrugged and ordered tea, and the guy put in some kind of complicated salad order with dressing on the side. The guy kept looking around the room, as if for people he knew, and Orlando frankly watched him now, since the guy was looking everywhere but at him.

Finally the guy flicked his eyes over Orlando and then locked his hands behind the chair, pushing out his chest. The guy looked prosperous, with an expensive haircut and clear blue eyes and one of those watches that has a bunch of dials, but Orlando recognized the manner—guarded, surreptitious, impatient—as junkie, and wondered if he was an alcoholic or had some other jones that came out to play when he was alone.

“You know what happened.” Orlando just stared, and the guy said, “To my son,” after a beat, and Orlando dipped his head.

“I'm sorry.”

“Well, yeah, thanks.” Because what else was Orlando going to say? Parkman looked around the room, sheepish, like a kid caught stealing, and then he said, “You know, that guy, Collins? I didn't know he was crazy.”

“Yeah, you said that.”

“Well, I didn't. And I didn't send him to do, you know,
that
.” Fast, like he was spitting, and his lips were twisted like the words were bitter in his mouth. Pointing vaguely at the hump of bandages on Orlando's shoulder.

“He said he'd look into it. I had no fucking idea he'd do . . .” He shrugged, waved a hand at Orlando sitting there in his mold-green OR scrub shirt. “He thought you knew something.”

“I got that.”

The waitress brought bread and the guy tore it with his hands. Took a long sip of red wine that left a dark mustache that the guy licked at.

“But, you know.”

“What?”

“You know why we had to ask, right?”

And that was why they were here. Sorry my crazy fucker friend tried to punch your ticket, but, while you're bleeding, just what the fuck do you know, anyway? Orlando smiled, and the guy hung his head, doing the whipped dog look again. Orlando saw that for the money and the expensive haircut and the nice distressed-leather shoes, this guy was one button to press after another, and it was like recognizing a long-lost relative. Another member of the tribe.

Orlando said, “I told that crazy fuck, and I'll tell you, I don't know anything. I haven't seen Michael in like two years.”

“But they were there, a block away. George Jr. and Michael.”

Orlando shook his head. “I don't know anything about that, mister.” He lifted his hands. “I'm sorry about what happened to your boy, but I got nothing for you.” He dropped his hands to the table and pushed forward to stand up, but the guy put a
hand on his, and the touch was like being burned, Parkman's pink hand hot as the top of a stove.

“Okay, wait.”

Orlando sagged back into the chair. He said, “Look, the cops got somebody for this. It was on TV.”

“Was it them? The papers said the one was, you know. Had an alibi. So did they really do it?”

Orlando shrugged. “I don't know. I told you. Look, this was my brother's kid got shot, you don't think I'd tell you if I knew? You don't think I'd tell my own brother?”

“Okay, all I'm saying is look at it, okay? The cops, they got a million things to do. I deal with the city all the time and it's just a bunch of bureaucrats. They get the wrong guys, they get the right guys, do they even give a shit?”

Orlando sat and looked across the table, and Parkman's eyes were suddenly rimmed with pink.

“All I'm saying is,” but then the man shrugged and wiped at his eyes and sniffed. He lowered his head and fat tears dropped onto his slacks, darkening the khaki. Orlando waited, and then Parkman started talking, his head still down. “I was thinking, I don't know him. I don't know my own son. I want you to find out about him because I don't know anything about it. Was he on drugs? Was he just doing something stupid, because he was, I don't know, weird?” He lifted his head and looked hard at Orlando. Looked around him and said in a low voice, “You're a drug addict. Collins didn't lie about that.”

“No, he didn't.”

“You know these people. You know the people at that house and the people who shot at them. You can tell me if my son was
buying drugs. Or using drugs. He hung out with all these weird kids, with makeup on and crap. I don't know. I tried to get him into sports, he wouldn't do it. You know what to look for and I don't know the first fucking thing about any of it.”

Orlando shook his head, looked out at the street. He could smell rich food and it was making him queasy and he'd have to get moving soon. “Mister, I don't know what to do for you.”

“I'll give you twenty thousand dollars.” They looked at each other, and Parkman was looking defiant, his chin up, as if he'd been dared to do something stupid. He'd surprised himself, Orlando could see. It was plain on his face he hadn't meant to offer that much money. Then he shook his head, reconciling himself to what he'd promised.

“Twenty thousand dollars?”

“I need to know about my son. I need to know what happened.”

“And if it's what it looks like? If the cops got it right and the kids were just standing there when those idiots from Green Lane rolled up?”

“But why there? Why were they standing there? Were they buying drugs? They were a long way from home in a shitty neighborhood.” He touched Orlando again with his terrible burning hand.

Orlando pulled back his hand. “They were a long way from wherever the fuck you live, but they were ten blocks from where Michael grew up. And Roxborough isn't a shitty neighborhood. Yeah, there's dope there, but there's dope everywhere. You can score in this nice restaurant. Wherever you live, you can get
high. I guarantee it. You think you got money, that makes you different? You live in a fucking dream world.”

“Look, I'm sorry. I don't know about that. But this is a lot of money. For you. You can”—he lifted one shoulder—“I don't know. Do whatever you want with that much money.”

“Kill myself, is what you mean.”

“If that's what you want.”

“I need some of it up front.”

“No. I'm not stupid. Nothing now.”

“How do I get my money, then?”

“You come to me. You tell me what you found out.”

“Yeah?”

“If I believe you, you get paid. That's all. If you're lying, I'll know it.”

“Look, you know, you hired a psycho, but there must be investigators or whatever, people you can get who aren't mental patients.”

“What would they do? They'd come to you. Or people like you. They'd try to find people you already know, whose phone numbers you already know.”

“What's your wife or whatever think of this plan? She on board with you hiring a junkie to get into your son's shit?”

“It's not up to her.” The chin went up again, like a little kid holding his ground, but then the eyes shifted left and right, quick. “Anyway, she moved out. She's at her mother's.”

The money was already working in Orlando's head, and something else, too. Something like the chance to do something for Michael. For his brother, Brendan. Or to show his brother
something, maybe. He couldn't bring himself to buy it completely, to think it would be amends for the embarrassment he'd caused his brother, but it was something, maybe.

And did the money mean he was going to get high? That much money might be a way out, too. Rehab, or something. A place to go, to take Zoe, someplace down the shore or out in the country where he could get clean, get right. It was a possibility.

He looked at Parkman again, who was clearly exhausted. Staring into the middle distance. The guy might be a crazy, angry fuck, but he'd lost his kid and was desperate and alone, and Orlando knew that feeling. He let a long breath go.

“I'm going to need to get in your house.”

“Why?”

“I need to see his bedroom. I need to talk to his friends.”

Parkman's eyes widened—he hadn't thought this far—but he took a pen out of his pocket and scribbled on a napkin and pushed it across to Orlando. An address and a cell number. “Fine. Whatever you need.”

“Gimme twenty dollars.”

Parkman stared hard at him but pulled his wallet out and handed him two tens. “What's that for?”

Orlando stood up and tucked the bills in his pocket, knowing twenty dollars wasn't money to this guy. “That's my retainer.” He pushed the chair in and stepped back.

“Where are you going?”

“To buy drugs. With my retainer.”

.   .   .

Chris stood just inside the door at a strip joint on Second Street, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark at the entrance. The place smelled like perfume and cigarette smoke and beer, laced with the astringent smell of ammonia, as if somebody had been sloshing cleanser around every few hours. The music was loud and got louder when he moved down the narrow entryway and into the main room, where the bouncer nodded at him and held out a hand. The guy made a face and said something Chris couldn't make out over the music, pointing discreetly at the bar lining the stage.

The ceiling was sprayed black, and the mirrored stage was set with blue Christmas lights that blinked out of sync with the music. There was a beat-down pool table and stains on the carpet you didn't want to look at too close. There were two dancers, a short blond girl hanging back and moving her hips slightly to the beat while shaking her head in disdain, and one with red hair at the edge of the stage with the look of a trapped animal. Gerry Dunn was standing in front of the red-haired girl, holding the thong away from her hip with two fingers and angling to look inside while his brother Frank howled with laughter and thumped his hands together in a fair imitation of a drunken seal. The bouncer raised his eyebrows at Chris and moved closer to shout in his ear.

“Help me out here, man? I can't have this shit in here.” He was apologetic, with a little whine in his tone. Chris fronted him blow and dropped a lot of money in the place every night, which meant he was always welcome, even if his friends got out of hand once in a while and had to be walked politely out to the
curb. He made a face, letting the bouncer know he was doing him a favor. Like it should be an honor Chris and his friends spent their money here when they could go anywhere.

The place was almost empty in the middle of the afternoon, a few guys clumped up at the other end of the bar at a safe distance from where the brothers were acting up. A couple of businessmen, another neighborhood guy, all of them studiously not watching the Dunn brothers as they manhandled the girls and poured drinks into themselves with the determination of men at work.

Once when they were young, Chris had come on his brother Shannon and Gerry Dunn with a dog cornered in one of the abandoned factories along Jasper Street. They had long metal poles they'd scavenged from the buildings and were banging them on the blackened concrete on either side of the animal, driving it between them so that eventually it was frozen, one quivering foot raised in the air as if in deliberation. It was a small dog with a tangled red coat, and it had a long black streak down its side. Probably something Gerry and Shannon did, marking it as theirs to mistreat.

Chris thought the look in its eyes was the look of the girl at the bar now. Like shame and fear and a basic confusion about the situation and her part in it, and seeing his two friends at the bar, their hands out as if containing the girl by some energy field they generated, Chris had some confusion himself. Not liking to see the girl victimized, not liking to have to step in and control his friends, but all of that mixed up with being on the high side of the display of power the scene represented. If the two businessmen at the other end of the bar had tried some
shit like this they'd be out in the alley with their hands folded behind their backs, suffering a swift kick in the ass to tell them not to come back. But this was Gerry Dunn, and Gerry Dunn did what he wanted, and part of that was being in Chris Black's crew and fear was the lever under it all. Fear of what Chris Black might do, of what Gerry Dunn might be allowed to do, of all the money they spent and the dope they brought and the people who came around the club because Chris and his friends drank here, fear that all that money could be turned off like a hose.

He walked up behind Gerry Dunn and hit him hard on the shoulder, so that he turned fast, his hands up. Gerry smiled and hit him back, hard, screwing up his features like a little kid making a tough-guy face. The girl made her exit fast while the Dunns were distracted, and Chris called the bartender over and ordered more of the sweet, bright drinks they liked and threw money on the bar. He sat down with them and got into the flow of things. Another girl came out, this time with chalk white skin and black tattoos that were arcane symbols and letters like hieroglyphics written on her skin, and the music was Rob Zombie, “Pussy Liquor,” music that droned and buzzed inside him, communicated less by his ears than through the soles of his boots.