Quinn Gets His Kicks

by L H Thomson

  Finding out what happened to him wasn’t going to pay down my state-ordered restitution any faster; but it had to be done: Junior’s story needed an ending.

  CHAPTER 2

  Someone once said “you can’t go home again,” and I suppose it’s true, because your home always changes a bit from the way you remember.

  It’s never as great it was when you were a little, little kid, and you came down on Christmas morning to that one perfect gift, blown away that your old man would go to the trouble of setting it up for you. And it’s never as tense as it was when you were a teenager, and your family just didn’t get you, and you just didn’t get them, and dinner ended in a screaming match and someone storming out.

  But it’s still home, even if it’s ever changing. It can’t stay the same. That’s life. That’s progress. But it’s home.

  Take Fishtown: my parents still live in the same neighborhood they moved to over thirty years ago, and things were different then. Not the place so much, because it was already blanketed by tall, skinny attached row houses and narrow streets, wood siding hues of dark green and dark red, cars parked where anyone could find a spot. It had been since before the turn of the twentieth century.

  No, Fishtown is different because the people are different. When I was a kid, people didn’t mix so much. If you asked my ancient jailhouse pal Joey Beans about it – a wiseguy from the old days – he’d have pointed in each direction and said “ovah theyah, youse got the eye-talians, and they’re mostly from Joysey. The Micks live over theyah, and the blacks are all on the nawf side.”

  And twenty years ago, he’d still have been right. But now, people mostly got along, mixed neighborhoods. At the worst, they kept to themselves.

  Sure, it’s Philly ... so nobody gets along that well. But it’s not for the old, stupid reasons no more. It’s not because they don’t know better.

  Some people will complain; change makes them nervous, insular. They say there are too many.... well, pick a subsection of society, I guess. Fishtown is where people go when they’re cheap, or low-rent, but not down-and-out poor. It’s a mix of middle-class, new immigrants, college kids, old goombahs and paisans, and enough former residents of the Emerald Isle to fill out my family tree fifty times over.

  Of course, I had a string of more legitimate reasons for not wanting to hang around so much. Almost everyone within four blocks of my parents’ little brown-and-white house knew my Ma and Pa, and they all knew about me going up for forgery.

  So there were distrustful glances tossed my way whenever I was around ... and that was just from family.

  Or, leastways, that’s how it felt. Maybe it wasn’t the weight of their stares on my back so much as the burdens of my own failures, going from a promising young artist to gallery entrepreneur to convict in a matter of four years; but either way, having family meant coming home from time to time, even if it wasn’t as good as the best of the old days.

  My father’s favorite watering hole, the Druid tavern, was consistent at least. It hadn’t changed in decades, a slab of grey concrete on a street corner, inn-style. I think Marty, the old barman, gave up on decorating back in the days of the Broad Street Bullies and Nixon. The red velour upholstery was cracked, burned and patched, and if you rang the nicotine out of the carpet, everyone inside would’ve died from second-hand smoke.

  For a lot of locals – particularly a lot of cops -- it was just their kind of joint.

  My father had a regular stool at the bar, as did two of my brothers; he was camped out there when I showed, sipping a bottle of his beloved Straub.

  “So what brings you slumming back to the neighborhood kid?” he asked. “Been so long, I thought we was too low rent for you these days.” He took another swallow. “Geez, Marty, I wish I could still light up in here.”

  This was total bull, of course. I’d missed one Sunday dinner.

  The tall, stooped barman just shook his head negatively but didn’t say anything. “Yeah, Yeah, I know,” Pa said. “Come on, let’s get out on the patio, get some sun while I have a smoke.”

  We beat a retreat for the glass doors at the front of the room. The “patio” was actually an extended piece of sidewalk roped off with orange tape. But seeing as how it kept all the smokers and the litter in one place, no one ever complained. In Philly, that much civility is practically praiseworthy.

  He pulled out a pack of Winston and lit one, exhaling with over-dramatized pleasure. “Hits the spot.” He smiled and jiggled his head in a moment of pure joy as the nicotine kicked in, then tapped off the first ash. “So what’s up?”

  “Junior Flores.”

  “Get out! I haven’t heard anything about him in... geez, it’s got to be a decade. How’s he doing?”

  “Not so good. Someone beat his head in down an alley downtown, two nights ago.”

  He exhaled slowly this time, the weight of the moment catching him. “That’s a shame. He had real potential, that kid. He might have been a better fighter than you.”

  In local youth athletic circles, only my father could have been delusional enough to see me as a better fighter than Junior; but I don’t doubt this helped him maintain the illusion that my choice to quit was a terrible betrayal. To my father, everything in my life had been downhill since the end of my boxing career, the one son who hadn’t gone according to plan.

  “He was married to a local girl, Karen Riley.”

  He thought hard for a second. “Don’t remember her.”

  “Nice girl. She’s having a hard time believing he was mixed up with drugs again, but he had some smack his pocket, Davy says.”

  He was thoughtful again. “Then maybe someone done him a favor. I don’t know. That ain’t much of a life, doing that stuff.”

  “Problem now is, I’m the one who has to tell her that the people he worked for won’t cover his insurance, because he died on his own time and not while working.”

  He sucked about a third of the cigarette down in one deep puff then released a stream of blue haze. “And you want me to make it easy for you somehow, to tell her he was just a junkie? Can’t do it, kid. Sorry. That one ain’t ever going to be easy. You just got to tell her.”

  “Great.”

  “So you guys stayed in touch?”

  “Sort of.” I didn’t want to tell him we’d become friends after prison reacquainted us.

  “You okay?” Dad took another swallow of Straub.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

  “They catch who did it?”

  I shook my head. “But it’s strange, you know. I mean, when I was small, and you were teaching me how to be a cop, you told me not to believe in coincidences; and there’s a kid at the soccer club where he was working. They say he’s a future great pro. Millions of dollars are being waved around. It’s possible Junior heard something he shouldn’t, or saw something he shouldn’t.”

  “Hmmm.” He didn’t elaborate.

  “What?”

  “Well, it just seems this one is for the right reasons is all,” he said. “It’s not like you’re going to get a commission from a junkie’s widow. I kind of wonder if you’re looking for an excuse to remember him nicer, though; like maybe you’re looking for a conspiracy that just ain’t there. Don’t ignore coincidences, by all means. But these things usually are what they are.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with my thirty-year cop dad about whether I was being emotionally irrational, or whether insurance investigators are worthy individuals. I said, “Wouldn’t matter if she was loaded. Probably not going to matter much anyway. The junk Davy found in his pocket saw to that.”

  He sniffed and took another swallow of beer. “You’re working with your brother? Your mother’ll be pleased, seeing as how you don’t come around so much no more.”

  Again: one Sunday dinner missed, in a year. One.

  “Yeah. I guess I figured maybe giving it time, spending less time in the neighborhood … I thought it would get people focusing on other people’s mistakes f
or a bit, you know?”

  He half-glanced at me, just quickly enough for me to know he was skeptical. My father was never the greatest poker player – lots of tells. “People here got long memories, Liam. That gallery case didn’t hurt, though, made you look real good. And the kid you got the job working here Sundays, Shawn? Nice kid. Marty really took a shine to him.”

  “That’s what I mean. People are concentrating on the good I done recently, not the past. But if they see me hanging around every day, then it’s just a reminder…”

  I meant it, too. Even at the Druid, I could feel a tension, people I knew from around the neighborhood glancing my way occasionally when they thought I wasn’t looking.

  He took a last drag off the smoke, then tossed the butt to the concrete and stepped on it. “Yeah I guess I get that. It’s just a hard sell for your mother, that’s all.” He nodded towards the pub. “You going to stay for a full beer?”

  My hackles had been raised by the soccer club’s obvious internal politics; but ultimately, there was nothing to suggest it had anything to do with Junior Flores’s death. So the less I liked it, as I angled the Firebird back towards South Philly, the more I had to concede my father was right: telling Karen would have to be like tearing off a bandage, quick and blunt, minimizing the impact, a sharp and debilitating dose of reality.

  She looked even rougher a day later, like she’d aged a decade in hours, sallow rings under her red, tear-drained eyes. She still looked better than when she’d been a junkie, but not by much.

  “So that’s it?”

  I’d filled her in on the position of the club’s insurer. “Yeah, pretty much. They say he wasn’t covered because it didn’t happen at work.”

  If she’d been shaken by it, I couldn’t tell. She was already so broken. Instead, she lit a smoke then crossed her legs under her so that she was sitting yoga-style on the ratty old couch, her bones barely holding up her weary self.

  “I don’t care about the money,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just know this is bullshit.” She rubbed her nose subconsciously with the back of her hand. “I knew Junior like I know myself, okay? And this was so past him, man. Like, so past him. Junior hadn’t just kicked the junk. He’d really grown as a person, changed. He understood why he was addicted, how he created and maintained his own anxieties as an excuse to shoot dope.”

  She inhaled deeply, exhaled with a sigh then expertly flicked the ash into the ashtray on the coffee table. “It just doesn’t make sense. The more I think about it, Liam … it just ain’t right.”

  “Maybe he was buying for someone else.”

  “No. No, I can’t see any situation where he’d do that.”

  It usually didn’t seem to make sense to those left behind by damaged people. But she had a point. “Autopsy said he hadn’t used in a long time.”

  Karen looked over at me quickly on that. “You see? That’s what I mean. It doesn’t fit.”

  “Police are suggesting he had the urge again and this was his first buy. They figure something just went wrong.”

  “No way. Besides, when was the last time you ran into a heroin dealer who had to beat someone’s head in?” she suggested. “Does that make sense to you? I mean, every dealer I ever dealt with had some sort of weapon, so they’d have capped a guy, not beaten him. And besides, junkies aren’t usually fearsome, just pathetic.”

  I had a flash of memory, of Junior in front of Liberty Hall, his arms thinner, not emaciated but definitely strung out, cracked plastic sandals on his callused feet.

  With people who were strung out, guys selling hundreds of dollars’ worth of product at a time didn’t have to grab the nearest blunt object -- and that was another issue: we were still waiting to hear about the forensics report to see if they could pinpoint a murder weapon.

  Karen took a hard pull on the cigarette, a sudden spark on inspiration behind her tired eyes. “You know what? Junior only ever bought off one guy. Guy runs a house just off South 20th.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Hardaway. I don’t know if that’s a first or last. Probably last, like the ball player. He’s also a user, so maybe … if Junior was buying for or from anyone, it would be him.”

  “You want I should talk to him?”

  She smiled. “You’re a good man, Liam Quinn.”

  “I’m trying, kid,” I said. “I’m trying.”

  Karen said Hardaway held court at a draught bar just off West Ritner. If I thought he was going to stand out in the crowd, I was sorely mistaken. The interior of the dingy dive looked like a furlough day from the local house of corrections, and everyone momentarily stopped when I entered, their hackles up.

  A background like mine has its ups and downs. After three years in the pen, I’m pretty comfortable staying invisible in these kinds of places. That’s the upside. I looked around quickly without making eye contact then sauntered over to the bar.

  The downside? The downside usually makes itself known within the first minute or so.

  He was about six-foot-eight, like someone gave King Kong a bottle of Nair and told him to have at it. He strode over in a black muscle shirt and positioned himself between me and.... well, everything, really. The guy blocked out the room lights.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “I’m sure someone in here does,” I suggested.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” he eloquently replied.

  In prison, you learn real quick that the Alpha males want to test out any new meat, find out how pliable it is. The only thing to do is reject the testing process with a firm and decisive statement of intent.

  So I kicked him in the nuts as decisively and firmly as I could.

  The giant’s eyes bugged out and he dropped to his knees. I hit him on the chin with an uppercut, the square point recoiling off my hand with sweet-spot precision, the cluster of chin nerves doing their job and sending him to dreamland. He crashed backwards, unconscious.

  The room was quiet again for a moment, the giant flat on his back. I waited, anticipating an equal and opposite reaction, my middle knuckle already starting to hurt. But it was obvious the big man didn’t have many friends or, if he did, they weren’t feeling too brave, because within a couple more moments, the volume was back up to normal.

  I walked over to the bar. “Rye and Ginger.”

  The barkeep looked at the prone man. “I’d throw you out for scrapping, but everyone in here hates that asshole. When he wakes up he’s going to feel as stupid as he looks.”

  I tipped my glass to him. “Much obliged. Just came in for a drink is all.”

  “That’s the funniest drink.”

  “Eh?”

  “‘Cause we actually had a waiter here once whose name was Ryan Ginger. I think he lasted three months before the jokes drove him to the edge.”

  I sipped on poor Ryan’s folly and surveyed the room. The place was a mish-mash of scumbags; but as with prison, they’d each gathered in their own areas. The bikers were dominating the pool tables; the young jock types were by the shooter bar, trying to pick up on women.

  The only unaffiliated guy was sitting in the back corner in a booth, reading a book quietly. Based on the name, I’d expected a black guy. Instead, he looked like a desperate suburban high school kid, copping a bleached Eminem haircut, white t-shirt and those dumb-ass baggy jeans kids seem to love right now.

  When I was a kid, we had parachute cargo pants. Now that was style.

  In a place like this, you expect a guy to look around occasionally, get his safety bearings. But his eyes never left the book. Physically imposing he was not. But he didn’t seem worried by his surroundings, neither.

  After a minute or so, I ambled over. “Good read?”

  He looked briefly down over the top of it then went back to its pages, ignoring me.

  “You Hardaway?”

  That got his attention. He lowered the book. “Who’s asking?”

  “Frie
nd of Junior Torres.”

  He immediately went to bolt, leaping for the edge of the booth. But I blocked his path. “Easy, easy man. I’m not five-oh. I’m just a friend of his.”

  He eyed me wearily. “Then you best not block my path again. If you ain’t the man, you ain’t shit to me,” he said.

  “And if I were a cop I would be shit to you?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, pretty much that’s it exactly. You’d be shit to me. But no one likes to step in it, right?”

  “I don’t suppose so.”

  “So what you want?”

  “It’s about Junior.”

  “Yeah? So what about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  His brow furrowed and for a split second, he looked genuinely sad. Then he put his game face back on. “Life’s shit. What that got to do with me?”

  “You sell him the smack he had in his pocket?

  That genuinely took him aback. “What the fuck you talking about man? I ain’t sold that shit in years.”

  “For real?”

  He pulled out the toothpick he’d been chewing. “Man, fuck you. I got to fucking repeat myself? I stopped selling the junk when I quit it. I got a boy now, a wife and kid.”

  “But you’re still...”

  “Just the chronic man. Fuck. That’s old news, man. Shit, Junior doing smack was old news. He fixed his shit up, too. You any kind of friend, you know that’s for real.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure as he paid for my fucking ride out back when he was on it. Sure as I helped him fix that piece of shit Ford he was always driving as payback.”

  “Payback? From a dealer? Why so guilty?”

  He replaced the toothpick with a fresh model, and chewed thoughtfully, his eyes on the table top. When he spoke, his eyes were still somewhere else, distant. “It ain’t nothing, man. We all had other things we wanted to do … you know?”

  Charming, a drug dealer with a conscience. I played the sympathy card, “Yeah, well, I’m looking into his death for his wife, so if you hear anything...” I left my card on the table.