Philadelphia Noir

by Carlin Romano

“Her name’s Millie Price. She’s an old friend.”

  “Sure. How about the rest of it?”

  “There’s nothing else to tell, Bill. You saw what I saw.”

  “So you were paying a surprise visit to an old girlfriend and when you get here, she just happens to be dead. Shot to death with two large-caliber slugs at close range.”

  “There’s a little more to it than that.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “She was supposed to meet me earlier tonight outside St. Gabe’s. She’d called me this afternoon, asked me to do her a favor, said an old boyfriend was hassling her. She wanted me to scare him off. Said it wouldn’t be a problem that he’d scare easy. She was going to pay me three hundred dollars.”

  Trask pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. He lit one for himself and then mine with the same match.

  “I think she got her money’s worth.”

  Two techs from the medical examiner’s office carried Millie down the stairs in a gray body bag. They swung her onto a flimsy metal stretcher and wheeled her to the back of a darkblue van with tinted windows and a municipal license plate. One of the techs opened the door while the other rammed the stretcher into place. I thought I glimpsed the shadows of other black bags neatly packed inside the van. At least Millie would have company.

  “Any idea who the boyfriend was?”

  “None.”

  “You wouldn’t be holding out on me now, Seamus Kilpatrick? You know better than that.”

  “What reason would I have not to tell the truth?”

  “That all depends on the nature of your relationship with Miss Price.”

  “I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

  “And before that?”

  “We were friends. I knew her from the neighborhood.”

  “For God’s sake, Kilpatrick, she was a stripper. What do you expect me to believe? You were members of the same book club. You met at the library every Tuesday afternoon.”

  “She’s been out of that business for a long time.”

  “She used to be married to Billy Haggerty? I suppose you knew that.”

  I drew hard on the cigarette, letting the smoke drift and blow away like a bad dream.

  “Of course I knew. That was over a long time ago too.”

  “We’ll see.”

  A young cop in a brand-new pinstripe suit came out and handed Trask a collection of crime scene photos. He thumbed through them as if they were a deck of playing cards, his face expressionless as he stared down at the lifeless body of Millie Price. He slid them into a manila envelope and pointed its sharp corner into my chest.

  “You and I never had a problem, Kilpatrick, not when you were with the force and not since you left. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Am I free to go?”

  “If you find something out, I’ll want to hear about it.”

  I took one last drag on the cigarette and threw it past them into the street. I could feel the eyes of the detectives on my back as I walked away.

  The Aramingo Club didn’t look like much from the outside. It was on the corner of 30th and Tasker, with a front door painted a dingy white and a lot of burned-out neon over blacked-out windows. It was the end of the line for aging strippers with a few good teeth left and maybe a set of implants they’d conned off some old horny gangster who didn’t want his wife to know he could still get it up. It was getting late and there wasn’t anybody collecting at the door and not many drinkers hanging around for last call.

  I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, slid the pack of cigarettes in behind it, and waited for the bartender to notice me. She was a petite blonde in ’80s spandex, black and tight from her neck to her ankles. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a glass ashtray, doing her best to ignore me as her fingers moved the dead cigarette around in the bed of gray ash. When she was satisfied the cigarette had stopped smoldering, she took the long walk down to my end of the bar.

  I ordered a beer and she put the glass down on a clean white napkin and I slid the twenty in her direction and told her to keep the change. She still wasn’t smiling but her eyes had grown a bit larger as if some of the meanness had been squeezed out of them.

  “Big spender.”

  “In exchange for some conversation.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Millie Price.”

  I took a sip of my drink and looked at her through the glass. She had the body of a twenty-year-old and the face of a woman in her fifties, a woman who’d walked some hard miles. She looked like she could stand up to just about anything.

  “She’s not your type.”

  “Says who, Billy Haggerty?”

  “What are you? A cop?”

  “Not anymore. Millie asked me to meet her tonight. She never showed. I’d like to know what happened to her.”

  “What makes you think something happened to her?”

  “She’s dead. Shot twice. I found her in her apartment. The cops are there now and I don’t doubt they’ll soon be on their way here.”

  She started crying. Not hysterical crying, no moans or loud sobs, just tears escaping from her reddened eyes and rolling down her face. Her mascara ran in a spiderweb of black lines under her eyes and she dabbed at it with a napkin from the bar. I offered her a cigarette from the pack and she took one with a trembling hand. She held it to her lips and I lit it for her and the smoke seemed to calm her nerves.

  “What about the baby?”

  “What baby?”

  “Millie had a baby, a little boy about two years old.”

  “I never knew. Where’s Billy Haggerty?”

  “He’s not the father.”

  “Then who is?”

  “A guy named Nathaniel. He lives down in Point Breeze.”

  “Millie’s boyfriend is from Point Breeze?”

  “Yeah. Billy was furious when he found out. He’s still furious. It’s one thing when you find out your wife’s been running around with another guy. It’s another thing when you find out he’s black. I thought something like this was going to happen.”

  “Where does this Nathaniel live?”

  “Twenty-second and Moore over the laundromat.”

  “Do you know where Billy is?”

  “Haven’t seen him all night. If he’s not here, he’s at the Golden Rose.”

  “Thanks.”

  The tears began to flow again and she reached out and took a long drink from my glass. The cigarette had gone out and she drew on it, frantically trying to bring it back to life, and when she couldn’t, she threw it down on the floor.

  “You know, I talked to Millie last night. She said she talked to a guy she used to know a long time ago. She said he was real nice and that they might have had something together once and maybe they could get it back. She said that when she spoke to him she heard something sweet in his voice like maybe he was hoping for the same thing. She wanted to get away from this place, away from the Arramingo Club, away from Grays Ferry, away from Billy Haggerty, away from this whole life. She was hoping he could help her. She said he used to be a cop.”

  She turned her back to me and lifted her eyes just high enough to see my face in the mirror behind the bar. “Now would you please get the hell out of here.”

  I parked behind Lanier Playground and hurried across the crumbling asphalt. As I ran across it, I couldn’t help but think that this had become a wasteland, a memory of a long abandoned dream for so many kids that would take a miracle to resurrect. It was dark, the spotlights broken by those same kids—they used them for target practice, throwing pieces of broken pavement like stones from a slingshot until the area was in total darkness.

  I got halfway across when I heard them, five or six figures silhouetted against the concrete ledge, the light from the Golden Rose casting distorted shadows over the sidewalk. Haggerty was there, strutting back and forth like an alpha male while his pack of wolves sat before him, tuned to his every word, his every move. He saw me
too and a snicker of recognition snaked across his lips as I emerged from the darkness.

  “Seamus Kilpatrick. What the fuck are you doing here? Did someone call a cop?”

  His gang laughed in unison, up on their feet now, the rusty chain-link fence like an iron curtain between us.

  “Did you have to kill her, Billy? Was it because she went out and got herself a boyfriend? Was it the kid, Billy? Or was it because she came to me for help?”

  “You think I killed her? Jaysus, Kilpatrick. You are a piece of work. You think I give a shite about that whore, Millie Price? She could have taken that kid of hers and gone down into the gutter to live. That’s where she belonged.”

  “Where’s the kid, Billy?”

  “How the hell should I know? You got it all wrong, as usual, Kilpatrick. You’ll never learn. Trying so hard to be something you’re not.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A fucking martyr. A pathetic fucking martyr. But even a dumb shite like me knows there’s no such thing as a live martyr.”

  I came around the fence and Haggerty’s gang circled us. I recognized most of them. Jimmy Connors and Chris Dougherty looked inseparable, as if they were still sixteen and just snuck out of the house with their father’s quarts in their pants. Denis McNulty was the biggest of the crew, leaning against the fence with the fingers of one meaty paw hooked onto the chain link.

  “I don’t presume to judge you, Billy Haggerty. But don’t expect me to agree with your way of thinking.”

  “You always pick the wrong side. Don’t you. Deny your people, your family. This is your fucking home, Kilpatrick, and you won’t lift a finger to save it. Just don’t get in our way. We’ll show you no mercy.”

  “You can’t build a wall down the middle of this neighborhood, Billy.”

  “Watch me.” His finger was pointed at my chest as if it were a loaded gun. “And one more thing you’d want to know before you leave. I have from a reliable source that not only has this rooster Nathaniel Jeffers been banging my ex-wife, word is he’s the trigger man what put down your old friend, Charlie Melvyn. Now ain’t that a kicker, boyo?”

  Chris Dougherty crossed himself and they all laughed and my fists went white at my sides. I looked at Billy Haggerty and our eyes locked and at that moment it was like no one else in Grays Ferry mattered, like it was just the two of us and we were telling the whole world to go fuck themselves. Not knowing where else to look, I turned my gaze to the Philadelphia skyline in the distance, the dark sky behind it like a black veil.

  “One more for the road, boys?”

  They all shuffled back inside the Golden Rose and left me alone on the deserted sidewalk.

  I walked a few aimless blocks until I found myself in front of the twenty-four-hour laundromat with its fluorescent lights shining through the glass and the dryers whirring inside and a fat old black lady thumbing the pages of a worn newspaper on the bench. The stairwell to the second floor smelled like piss but it didn’t matter. I reached around to the small of my back and pulled out the Glock that had been gathering dust in a drawer since the day I left the Philadelphia Police Department. I took a deep breath and kicked in the door.

  I was face-to-face with Nathaniel Jeffers. He didn’t move. He was younger than I thought he’d be but not childlike in his appearance. He had short cropped hair over a broad forehead and a thin mustache and the body of an athlete. I pointed the gun at his chest, holding it with two hands, my arms thrust out in front of me, my grip beginning to tremble. The look in his eyes seemed to say that he knew why I was there, that he knew it wasn’t because of Millie Price or their son or Billy Haggerty or all the bullshit that defined him as black and me as white. It was because of Charlie Melvin, and Nathaniel Jeffers knew it.

  “Did you kill Charlie Melvyn?”

  “Who?”

  “The old man in front of the barber shop.”

  His lips were sealed firmly across his face but I had my answer in the way he stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and the way he shrugged his shoulders and ground his teeth. He was a typical Philly liar, I thought. The truth made him squirm.

  My fingers curled around the trigger and the hammer slowly lifted from its seat, and in my mind I heard the voice of Johnny Izzard telling me how once I pulled the trigger, everything would change, my legacy with the Philadelphia Police Department, the reasons I became a cop, and the reasons I left. But it was too late to think about regrets. I owed this to Charlie Melvyn.

  I adjusted my aim and fired. The blast stung my ears and Nathaniel Jeffers jumped back onto a dingy yellow couch. The sound of that single gunshot was so loud I thought it would wake the entire neighborhood. A door opened in the hall and out stepped the boy as if the sound of gunfire was a sound he’d become accustomed to. He had waves of curly black hair and sleepy eyes and caramel-colored skin. He ran to his father and dropped into his arms.

  I’d fired wide and the bullet had lodged in the wall, a crack in the plaster spreading from floor to ceiling like a fault line. I heard the sirens already, wailing in the distance, coming closer with that sense of urgency like they knew what they’d find when they got there.

  “You better take the boy and get out of here. Billy Haggerty is coming for you.”

  “This is my territory, my house. He know better than to come down here.”

  “No, I don’t think he does.”

  I turned and went out the door and down the steps and onto the street, the gun still in my hand. Billy Haggerty and his boys were on the corner. They were drunk and Denis Mc-Nulty had a large rock in his hand. He wound up like a Major League pitcher, took a couple of steps, and hurled it through Nathaniel Jeffers’s second-floor window. The sound of breaking glass on the street accompanied the crescendo of blaring sirens. Three squad cars converged from different angles and the officers jumped out with guns drawn. A crowd was forming on both sides of the block.

  I was pointing with my free hand at Billy Haggerty and his thugs, trying to tell the cops what was happening, but they wouldn’t listen. They were screaming at me to drop the gun and then I felt the first bullet crease my shoulder, the initial burn, my collar bone shattering like a broken twig. The next bullet caught me just above my left hip and spun me around and knocked me to the ground.

  I lay on my back, staring up at the clear night sky and the flashing red and blue lights from the police cars, and suddenly, there was Johnny Izzard. He’d heard the sirens and was now emerging from the crowd on the corner, ignoring commands from the police to get back. My legs were numb and I tried to lift my head and I felt Johnny take my hand. I heard him call my name and his voice seemed to come from a long way off, as if I was dreaming and couldn’t shake myself awake. And in the dream I saw myself in the early days with the department and even before that, at the vigil over my father’s casket at St. Gabe’s and the baseball games he’d taken me to at the Vet, climbing all those stairs up into the nosebleed seats. “Just us and the pigeons,” he’d say. And then I saw the blood-soaked body of Millie Price and the sleepy eyes of her son and I felt like I was floating and I felt a sudden shudder of cold.

  I opened my eyes and Johnny was still there, his bony grip harder on my hand; he was saying my name but I couldn’t hear him. I saw his lips moving and I tried to smile, that awkward, boyish, embarrassed smile I had, and Johnny was shaking his head and saying, “Seamus. Seamus. Seamus.”

  PART II

  CITY OF OTHERLY LOVE

  ABOVE THE IMPERIAL

  BY DENNIS TAFOYA

  East Falls

  Jimmy Kelly started making lists of the things he stole. He came out of the Staples on Germantown Avenue with one of the composition books like the kind he’d used at St. Bridget’s and a box of plastic Bics, so when he got back to his apartment he smoked a joint and tried to remember everything he’d boosted. He sat in the old split-open chair that had been there when he moved in, ropes of batting spilled like blue gut around his feet.

  He drew spira
ls to start the cheap pen, then wrote, 8/22, two books, borders chestnut hill, and, 8/24, crackers, p-nut butter, acme. After he’d filled a page he started over, made columns first and went back to June, when he’d walked away from the Youth Study Center on Henry Avenue. He took his time, clicked the pen against his teeth. Listed headphones he’d taken from a stereo store downtown, six DVDs from a bin at a video store way out Ridge Avenue somewhere.

  It became his project. He’d fill his coat, stuff things into his pants, then scurry back to the apartment over the Imperial Gardens and add to the list. He never got caught. If things looked too dicey, he’d move on because there was always more to steal. He kept it out of the neighborhood, mostly, and took what was easy rather than what he wanted. He took gum and a Mounds bar from a CVS, a yellow sweater with a golf club over the heart from a thrift store in Germantown. Walmarts and Kmarts were too risky, big chains with too many cameras. Once in the Plymouth Meeting Mall he’d dumped everything in the bathroom and walked out with a guy in a red blazer right behind him. But he never got tagged.

  One September night he burned a couple of joints and went downstairs, two bottles of blue nail polish that he’d lifted from a bin at the Rite Aid in his pockets. He dropped down the narrow stairs, his feet bouncing, the muscles in his legs quivering. His friend Jesús had a black Epiphone bass that was called a Nikki Sixx Blackbird, and sometimes Jimmy would put his hands on it while Jesús plucked the wound metal strings. When he was high the feeling in the wires and cords in his legs was like that, a resonant buzzing and snapping that made him smile and put pictures in his head of running through alien landscapes populated by shiny, sexed-up female robots.

  In front of the Imperial people came and went with their orders or guys would walk out picking their teeth and patting their bellies, like it wasn’t enough to be full, you had to put on a play about it for your friends. He wanted to ask them why they did it, but half of life seemed like that to Jimmy, like people didn’t want things as much as they liked to dance and sing about how much they wanted them. Jimmy’s theory was that was why people liked movies and videos, because everyone was starring in their own movie all the time. When he’d first escaped from the Youth Study Center up on Henry, he’d spent three days hiding at the movie house at the end of Main Street in Manayunk just going from theater to theater and there was always some scene where a guy is about to take on the bad guys, or just lost his wife, or his best friend, or his dog or something, and the music that’s supposed to make you cry is going and the guy’s just barely holding it together. People loved that moment, Jimmy thought, and they wanted it in real life too.