by Tom Fowler
“I don’t think they light the tires until they’ve thrown a few around you.”
“You know what I mean, though.”
I nodded. “I do.” Vinnie was wise to stay out of the drug business. His budding loan shark career, though, had me worried. Loan sharks hired legbreakers to collect debts. Sam didn’t look the part, but anyone with a suit, menacing stare, and tire iron could fake it. I had an idea who offered Vinnie this chance to branch out, but I felt sure he wouldn’t confirm it for me.
“What are you into now?” Vinnie said. He ate his pizza as we talked but remembered enough of his Roland Park manners to chew with his mouth closed.
“My parents made me get a job helping people,” I said.
Vinnie laughed, then took a drink of his soda. He laughed some more. “Man, funny shit. What the fuck do you know about helping people?”
“More than you might think.”
“So what goody-goody job are you doing?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
Vinnie stopped eating and stared at me. “A PI? You?”
“I was almost as surprised as you.”
Vinnie looked at me for a few more seconds, then scarfed down another bite of pizza. The smell of the barbecued chicken stirred my hunger again. Sushi never filled me. “What do you want, C.T.?”
“Alice Fisher owes you a lot of money.”
“You think I know who she is?”
“Come off it, Vinnie. I’ve known you long enough to know you don’t forget names, especially when they’re on the wrong side of your balance sheet. Alice Fisher.”
“OK, so I know her. She owes me money. You gonna pay off her debt?”
“No,” I said. “She’s working on it. I came to ask you to give her a break. She’s trying to give up gambling, so she can focus on paying you off. She’ll never be able to manage more than the juice if she keeps making and losing bets.”
“She don’t lose all her bets.” Just like the Vinnie of old, his private school education ran and hid when he was in a mood about something.
“But she loses enough of them.”
“I’m glad she wants to pay me but why would I want her to quit?” Vinnie said. “The longer she has to pay me just the juice, the longer she pays me, period. Why the fuck would I want her to stop? Not good business.”
“Can you go easy on her?” I said. “A favor for an old friend?”
Vinnie chuckled and shook his head. “We weren’t that tight.”
“Think about it, at least.”
“I did. Answer’s no.”
I shrugged. “All right.” I got up from the booth.
“You gonna fight me over this?” he said.
“Don’t you mean fight your midget?” I said.
“You know what I mean. I might like you, but I don’t like problems.”
“I’m not looking for trouble, Vinnie.”
“It’s Vincent now.”
“Of course it is,” I said.
How was I going to deal with Vinnie? So far, he hadn't sent the big guns after Alice Fisher. Maybe she paid enough to keep them at bay. Perhaps Vinnie didn't like the idea of sending a legbreaker to menace a woman. I wondered if Alice used makeup to hide a black eye from her husband, friends, and coworkers. Vinnie wanted Alice to pay him, including taking new bets. Hell, in his place, I would want her money, too. I was sure any reservations he harbored about sending legbreakers after women didn't apply to nosy detectives.
Vinnie ran a numbers racket, and said he branched out into loan sharking. It meant he had to be operating with the blessing of Tony Rizzo, if not his protection. Tony ran what passed for organized crime in Baltimore. He owned an Italian restaurant in Little Italy called Il Buon Cibo, and it earned its name. Tony had been friends with my parents for years, which meant my mother didn't know he was a gangster. She would have disowned him after a fierce bout of sniffing and tsking if she had.
I would talk to Tony if I had to. In the meantime, I decided to call Joey. "Can't get enough of me?" he said when he picked up.
"People your size don't come in small doses," I said.
"You're hilarious. What do you need?"
"Remember Vinnie?"
"Serrano? What about him?"
"I hear his bookie business has taken off since college. He has someone take a lot of his bets for him now. You have any idea who it is?"
"Do you think I'm the type to place a wager with a bookie? Gambling is illegal."
"Forgive me for offending your upstanding tendencies,” I said.
"He has a girl take bets, I think. Don't know her name. Why?"
"Our suspicion about drugs turned out to be gambling, and the bookie turned out to be Vinnie. He's squeezing her dry."
"She been beat up yet?" Joey said.
"She hasn’t said so. If Vinnie's giving her time to avoid a beating, he won't wait forever." I remembered Alice telling me about Paul’s black eye. Vinnie or one of his goons struck me as the likely source.
"Sounds like you need to poke around Mr. Serrano's gambling empire some more."
"I think I do."
"Be careful, C.T.,” said Joey. “Vinnie's changed since you left. He's more ruthless than he used to be."
"He killed anyone?"
"No one’s ever proven anything."
"Right,” I said. “I'll be careful."
Vinnie's phone records were as easy to get as Alice Fisher's. I exported my findings and sorted by the frequency of calls. Vinnie only talked to one woman every day: Margaret Madison. I jotted her information down and did a background check on her. The lovely Ms. Madison had been arrested twice, both times for assault and battery. She had a history of fights in school and had been expelled from two colleges: one for fighting and one for being a degenerate gambler. Vinnie found a girl who could take care of herself.
To get to Vinnie, I needed to find out more about Margaret Madison. Maybe I would even place a wager. If Vinnie used her to handle betting, she had to be smart and capable. The fighting arrest and expulsion meant she liked to fight; she didn’t have to be any good at it. I would have to follow her around and see how she handled herself. Maybe I should have invested in a trenchcoat and fedora after all. For all my talk to my father about how hackers were the new detectives, I had used a lot of old-school detective work so far, and I felt sure the trend would continue.
Somewhere, my parents had to be smiling.
Margaret Madison's MVA records said she drove a late-model Acura SUV and lived in Canton Square. I sat in my Lexus in a parking lot across from her house. A quick check of the alley behind the rowhouses showed her Acura sat on her parking pad. She could have been out—many places were an easy walk from Canton Square—but I saw two lights on inside her house. I played with the apps on my smartphone while I waited for something to happen. How did detectives do this in the days before smartphones? I couldn't imagine sitting in a car, drinking stale coffee, and doing a crossword puzzle or even worse, a word search.
When I considered downloading an app to help me gouge my eyes out, one of the lights in Margaret's house went off. A minute later, she walked through the front door. She had a jumpsuit on and a light jacket zipped halfway up overtop it. From my perch across the street, I thought I could see the bulge of a gun under her coat. Margaret headed up the street. I gave her a head start, then got out of my car and followed her on foot.
Three blocks later, she met a man in an empty parking lot. I stood behind a parked van. Margaret and the man talked for a minute. Then he became dissatisfied with the progress of the conversation. He took a swing at her, which she sidestepped. A punch, a kick, an elbow, and a knee later, Margaret had taken the man to the ground. She stood over him with her foot on his throat. I couldn't hear what either of them said, but he nodded a few times. She removed her foot and kept walking. I let her go about 50 feet farther before I stepped out from behind the van.
As soon as I did, someone shoved something into my back. It felt like a gun barrel.
"What do you think you're doing?" the voice said.
Chapter 7
The thing pressed into my back felt like a gun through my coat, but my dearth of experience at having artillery shoved into my back meant I lacked the means for a comparison. I felt my heart start to thump in my chest. This reminded me I needed to pick up the guns I purchased and had to wait for. Not as if having one of them on me would make a difference right now. Sudden movements were not my friend.
“You deaf?” the voice said. It was rough and unfriendly.
“If I were, asking me wouldn’t be very effective,” I said. I raised my hands so they were about even with my shoulders. I cursed this blasted case to myself. There had to be a better career choice than private investigator for someone with my skill set, antipathy toward work, and general lack of interest in my fellow man.
“Ah, a wiseguy. Well, Mr. Comedian, what were you doing following that lady?”
“I just stopped to see the fight. It’s not every day you see a girl beat up some guy in parking lot.”
“Uh-huh. So that’s the reason you got out of your car a minute after she left her house?”
“Coincidence.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” The voice sounded vaguely Italian, like an accent lurked below the surface, beaten down by years of disuse. “Now, you gonna tell me what you’re doing here?”
Vinnie had to have some backing or at least a blessing from Tony Rizzo if he loan-sharked in Baltimore. I was already in a bad spot here, so I took a chance. “Tony sent me.”
“Tony?”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re the deaf one. I said Tony sent me.”
The muzzle or whatever had been pressed into my back, fell away, and gave me an opening. I spun around, slamming my left fist into my assailant’s hand. The gun clattered to the pavement. My right fist hit him smack in the left ear. He grunted in pain and put his head against his shoulder. While he was stunned, I gave him a solid kick in the solar plexus, and when he bent over from it, I booted him hard in the face.
He fell to the sidewalk. I kicked the gun away from him. So far, we hadn’t drawn any attention, but the situation could change quickly. Of course, people in Baltimore might have been so used to seeing violence on their streets to simply shrug and keep going. I looked down at my assailant. He held his hands to his mouth to stem the bleeding. He was bald, a little shorter than I, but wider. I spared a quick glance over my shoulder. Margaret Madison was gone.
“Who hired you?” I said.
He mumbled something I couldn’t hear past the hands covering his face.
“Who hired you?”
“Go to hell,” he said. I kicked him in the groin. The goon took his hands from his face and covered his family jewels. Watching him fold in half on the ground felt satisfying. “Does someone always watch the girl?”
He grunted a few times. “Go to hell,” he said again.
This wasn’t going anywhere. I wouldn’t shoot him for the information, nor would I torture him for it. “Yes or no. I won’t care who sent you if you answer my question.” Before he could wish me a fourth extra crispy afterlife, I gave him a sharp kick in the gut. “You’re running out of hands to cover all these injuries.”
The goon gasped for a few breaths before he nodded. “Sometimes . . . depends what . . . she’s doing,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. I put a glove on, picked up the gun, and dropped it down a nearby sewer grate. I left my assailant to gasp and writhe on the ground while I walked up the street a few blocks. After about ten minutes, I gave up. Margaret Madison had disappeared somewhere. Maybe she saw her protector accost me and went into hiding. Or she picked another parking lot to part some poor sap from a few of his twenties and a few of his teeth. Regardless, I didn’t see her anywhere, so I turned around.
When I got back near the spot of my assault, the goon had left.
Had I been more of a traditional detective, I would have known what to do next. Instead, I had no idea. Alice Fisher got in over her head with Vinnie, who didn’t want to give her a chance to breathe. Paul Fisher worked overtime at his job for reasons unknown and was not cheating on his wife so far as I could tell. From the glimpse of them in their home, they looked like a happy couple.
Why, then, did Paul work so much overtime?
What if the happiness proved to be a façade? If so, it had been a damn convincing one. Alice seemed spooked, both by my unexpected arrival and Paul asking her about juice, so her weird behavior could be explained. Paul, however, struck me as a devoted husband. Maybe he didn’t know his wife behaved strangely, but I felt it more likely he did know and chose to ignore it, especially with a guest in the house.
I drove back to Digital Sales. Talking to Paul may not have been the best of ideas. After all, it wasn’t my place to tell him his wife was a compulsive gambler who owed the bulk of her annual salary to a bookie who—oh, by the way—happened to dabble in loan sharking and employed some legbreakers. This information might stretch the limits of his devotion.
When I walked into Digital Sales, Sally Willis smiled at me again. She wore the same kind of top as the last time I saw her. “Not going to ask if I’m carrying a gun?” I said as I stopped at her desk.
“I can tell you aren’t,” she said, flashing a grin. “What brings you by?”
“What goes on at the far end of the building on the first floor?”
“Is this related to your case?”
“I think so.”
“That’s the repair lab. We have full and part-time technicians there who fix copiers and office machines.”
I frowned. “I would imagine a technician gets paid significantly less than an account manager.”
“I’m sure they do.” Now Sally frowned. “Is this about Paul Fisher?”
“How come you don’t like him?” I said.
“Is it relevant to your case, too?”
“At this point, anything I can learn is relevant to my case.”
Sally sighed. “I don’t know. He just . . . rubs me the wrong way. Like, he makes himself out to be a loving husband, and he flirts with everyone here.”
“He flirts with you?”
“He tried to,” Sally said. “I put a stop to that.”
“Maybe he’s simply friendly.”
“Maybe he’s a creeper.”
“Do you flirt, Sally?”
“Not here. I don’t think it’s professional in the workplace.”
“Do a lot of the men here try to flirt with you?”
“They pretty much all stop and talk to me.” She blushed and pushed her glasses farther up on her nose. “I don’t know why, really.”
“Maybe you’re simply friendly,” I said.
Sally started to say something and paused. “I am friendly,” she said after a second.
“Maybe Paul is, too.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“And maybe the men here stop and talk to you because you wear your shirt buttoned as low as possible without them being able to read your cup size.” She looked up at me and frowned. “Which I would guess at 36C, for the record.”
Sally buttoned a button. “That’s just how I dress.”
“You work in a building I’m guessing is predominately male?” She nodded. “You’re an attractive girl, Sally, and you seem very outgoing. Your boss probably hasn’t said anything about the way you dress because he likes the view when you lean down.”
Sally blushed again. “You’re wrong, you know,” she said.
“About what?”
“I’m a 34C.”
“Closer inspection might have enabled me to be more accurate,” I said.
“I’m sure it would have.”
I couldn’t read her expression, so I moved on. “Do you know how late Paul works when he’s in the repair lab?”
“It’s after I leave. His timesheet usually says seven-thirty or eight.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll come back then. Thanks.”
&nbs
p; I sat in the parking lot at Digital Sales at 7:25. There were a few cars near the main entrance, right under a light stanchion, so I parked close to them. A couple guys who looked to be fresh out of college came out at 7:35. Paul Fisher left at 7:45. I got out of my car and walked to his. He did a double-take when he saw me. “Trent, isn’t it?” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Trent isn’t my name,” I said. “Well, it’s my middle name, but it’s not what I go by.” I took out my wallet and showed him my ID. “We should talk.”
Paul frowned and crossed his arms under his chest. “Why did you come to our house the other night?”
“I really can’t say. I need to ask you a question.”
“So you’re going to ask me a question and not answer mine?”
“Nature of the business. Why do you work all this overtime? You have a good job, Alice works, you’re not underwater on your house . . . why all the late nights?”
“I have my reasons.” Paul said. His gaze flittered away from me. “We have some bills we need to pay.”
“I’m sure you do. Anything you can tell me about them?”
“Who hired you?”
“Who hired me is one of those things I can’t tell you. I’d appreciate it, though, if you kept this little chat between us.”
“You don’t want me to tell Alice?” he said.
“I work in a pretty confidential business,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to mislead you the other night.” I wasn’t the least bit sorry, but I hoped a calculated apology might get me past Paul’s guard.
“We all do what we have to do,” he said, “including working overtime.”