by L H Thomson
“Well I don’t want to hear about it,” she said, before waiting a few moments and adding, “just be sure to call me on Sunday and tell me how you are.”
Nora showed up after dinner. She had a key to the elevator, and walked into the elegant, modern-contemporary condo as we were retiring to the living room. She was a little taken aback. “Liam! Hi!” She looked at her father, then back at me. “Work?”
I nodded. “Something like that. Difficult case, and I need to stay away from my place for a few days.”
She took on a deadpan look. “You need to stay away from that dive forever. In fact, if you’re lucky, someone will firebomb it.”
I winced as I lifted a corner of my shirt and showed her the huge bandage. “Little late for that.”
Her hand came up to cover her mouth in involuntary concern and shock. “Oh Liam, I’m sorry! What happened?”
I filled her in on the day’s events and the four of us sat around their expansive glass coffee table. And the end of it, she couldn’t help but giggle.
“And then I come out with ‘you should firebomb the place.’ Fantastic. So what now? You can’t go home until....what? Johnny Terrasini’s dead? He rescinds the contract somehow?”
I said, “One or the other. Maybe both.”
“So what are you going to....”
“I don’t know yet. But I’ll think of something. In the meantime, my priority is figuring out who caved in Junior’s head.”
“Oh my!” said Brenda. “I think I’ll go get us all some more coffee.”
As she got up to leave, Ramon said, “When I was a cop, she never liked hearing the details so much. Who could blame her?”
“Not me,” Nora said. “I thought that stuff was neat until the first time I snuck a peek at some crime scene photos.”
The bleak reality usually led to people losing their illusions about the romantic nature of crime. That and their lunch, depending on the violence involved.
I told them I’d talked to guys in the pen who were as sick over what they’d done at the time they did it as onlookers afterwards. “Didn’t do much good for their victims, mind you,” I said.
Nora said, “You never should have been in there with those kinds of people.”
Ramon wasn’t so sure. “Quinn knows he fucked up, and that’s what got him there. There was a lesson in it.”
“Ramon Jesus Miguel Garcia de Soria, you watch your language,” Brenda said, as she rounded the corner of the couch with the coffee. “We all know Liam’s a good boy.” She smiled at me and it reminded me of my mom. “That’s why we always thought the two of you would make a good couple.”
Nora went three shades of red under that gorgeous Latin tan. I think I followed suit but it was hard to tell; I was too busy blushing to get up and check. “Mother…” Nora said, smiling but embarrassed.
“Really, Mrs. de Soria, we’re just good friends,” I said, conscious of how uncomfortable her daughter looked. I mean, no way an amazing woman like Nora goes for a bum like me.
Nora looked a little downcast at that, probably worried about hurting my feelings, I figured. But I knew the score.
“Well, I think you kids look good together,” Mrs. de Soria said, getting up to clean. “Come on dear, let’s leave them to talk.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d have gotten the feeling she’d just set us up.
Nora was silent for a second then took an absurdly loud slurp of coffee; I laughed at the sudden awkwardness of it.
“Sorry…,” she said quietly.
“I helped you change your pants when you peed yourself in grade school,” I said. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to be uncomfortable with you.”
She laughed, but blushed again. “Liam! Geez. You remember that? That’s terrible. I remember that. It must’ve been Grade Two.”
“Something like that.”
“Geez... how did we get so old so quickly?”
We sat there for a moment, thinking about the time that had passed. I said, “It’s like it was just last week you were getting thrown out of the junior high dance.”
“Hey, that wasn’t my fault,” she protested. “That was Debby Schonberg...”
“Oh please!” I rolled my eyes. “Are you still blaming Debby Schonberg for cutting in ...”
“She stole my dance with Matt! He’d been looking right at me, he was walking right towards me, and she just cut me off!”
“You probably shouldn’t have punched her in the nose over your dreamboat.”
“Don’t be jealous.. I saw him last year; he had one of those braces on his wrist for people who type too much.”
“Jealous? Of Matt Driscoll? Matty Baseball? Not even a little!”
“It was Matty Ballgame, not Matty Baseball,” she corrected.
And then we both realized what we’d been saying, and the implication just hung there in the air between us, like a neon sign no one wanted to read.
Finally, she said quietly, “When we were in school I always figured maybe you’d ask me out at some point. But you never did.”
The reason was easy to explain, if I could talk. But that was the problem; whenever Nora got personal, I got butterflies larger than the Goodyear Blimp. “I ... I guess I just...”
She waved me off. “Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago, you know? Hey we’re adults now. We make our own choices.”
What was she getting at? Had she wanted me to ask her out all those years ago? Or did she just figure I had a crush? “You know how much you mean to me,” I said, talking to my shoe tops, eyes so firmly lowered they practically burned a hole in the hardwood floor.
She grabbed my forearm by the wrist and squeezed. “Yeah, I do. You know I do.”
“So ... would you want me to ask you, you know, to maybe ...”
My phone rang. Christ, the timing. Davy.
“Quinn,” I said.
“Yeah, you know there are several other Quinns out there. You might want to use your first name sometimes, especially when you know from the number it’s me,” said Davy.
“You’re calling late.”
“Got a tip for you. You helped me track down Karen Flores and I don’t want you thinking I owe you nothing.”
“So shoot.”
“Heard one of the boys from homicide talking. They went over your soccer club’s headquarters tonight with a black light, and it was a hell of a mess.”
Police forensics used black lights to find blood spatter, which shows up clearly under ultraviolet.
“How bad?”
“All over the place, like maybe someone had their head gashed open there.”
“You heading over there?”
Nora grabbed my arm and gave it another squeeze then got up to leave, making a “I’ll call you” sign with her right hand.
“Uh huh. But don’t come tonight. There’s tape everywhere and it’s crawling with the boys. Leave it until the morning.”
“Got a weapon?”
“Nothing. Something wicked no doubt, but could it could’ve been just about anything heavy. They figured it took one or two blows, at most.”
“Like maybe someone just lost their temper?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“They arrest anyone?”
“I don’t think so. They’ll be locking it down tonight to preserve the chain of evidence. They probably won’t start interviewing people from the club until tomorrow morning, once the CSI guys are gone.”
It was a hell of a way to die, and Junior Flores deserved better. Now a whole lot people had questions to answer.
True to his word, the place had been vacated by the identification and forensics team by the time I reached the club. But there were still squad cars on scene, and the tape was still up around the main building.
Const. Mike Elland, a Fishtown guy, was one of those milling around.
“Mike.” I gave him a nod.
He looked puzzled. “Liam? I heard you was in jail.”
Davy hadn’t e
xactly advertised my release. The fact that I’d been convicted for forging Japanese masters was already shameful enough that he hoped his co-workers would just forget I existed. I couldn’t say I blamed him.
“Got out eighteen months ago. De Soria put a word in for me, and I’ve been working as an insurance investigator.”
“You don’t say?”
“Yeah. Junior Flores was a friend of mine, too.”
He looked down for a second, deferring to my potential grief. “I was real sorry to hear about him,” he said. “He was the class above me, right? So I kind of looked up to him there for a while.”
Didn’t we all? “He was good people,” I said. “He got over his shit, you know. That’s why his wife thought he’d been killed for some other reason.”
“She said that?”
I winced inwardly, but he added softly, “Don’t worry, Liam, I’m no chump. I’m not jumping to any conclusions.”
“Just go easy on her, okay? She watched him beat down a lot of demons, only for this to happen.”
“Okay.”
“Who’s the lead?” Every crime scene has a lead investigator, the guy who’s in charge.
“Rabinowitz. Works out of the one-seven.”
Shit. Rabinowitz was also a Mike — but his nickname was “Mad Mike” because of his long and inglorious history of abusing criminals’ civil rights in southwest Philly. He was none too fond of me.
“What the fuck are you doing at my crime scene?”
Speak of the devil. The voice came from behind me.
“Det. Rabinowitz. Though I’m thinking the county police might disagree, it’s a pleasure as always to...”
“Don’t Give me that shit, Quinn. I need your convict ass around here like I need a hole in the head. Elland, why are you talking to this…”
“But detective,” I offered, “if you didn’t have holes in your head, you wouldn’t be able to breathe. And to speak in such glowing terms.”
He didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he just glared at me.
“You always did think you were funny. I heard inside, you didn’t think it was so funny when those other fellas were getting to know you better.”
I don’t know what he heard -- I suspected nothing -- but when I was inside, my sweet virgin backside was protected by Benny Toes. Benny figured he owed me for a couple of early favors. We weren’t exactly friends, but he looked out for me.
But I let it slide. “It wasn’t so fun inside, but I did my time,” I said.
“I heard they gave you a P.I. license. I couldn’t believe it, but I’m guessing the fact that you’re sticking your nose in here...”
“Junior was a friend of mine,” I said. “That’s all this is about.”
“Figures: junkie hanging out with a con man. You two must’ve made quite the pair.”
“Glad to see you’re taking his murder seriously,” I replied, regretting the words the second they left my mouth.
“Hey!” He looked angry. “This is a warning, Quinn. Keep your nose out of my file. There’s guys in this town been stomped out for a whole lot less than the grief your mere existence causes me.”
He left us, walking over to his unmarked sedan in the lot.
“He’s a real charmer,” said his namesake. “It’s going to be a fun week around here.”
I gestured towards the main office. “So what’s the deal?” I didn’t reveal any of what Davy had told me; letting on that I had information that early would reveal my source to anyone thinking twice.
“Blood stains in the hallway, on the floor, walls, even some spatter on the ceiling.”
“Junior?”
“Won’t know until the DNA’s in, but that’s the working theory.”
I looked around, at the busy parking lot, the empty field nearby, the tape on the building. “Can’t see it being anyone else.”
“Try talking to the staff and players, which is what we been doing since last night. Can’t see anyone here killing him.”
I said nothing about the potentially million-dollar player deal the club had just around the corner. As I said, there are tactical advantages to keeping the police in the dark sometimes, and if they couldn’t figure that much out, they weren’t going to be much use anyhow.
Crck was talking to an officer in the parking lot, and I waited until the cop walked away before going over to him. He looked tired, hands rammed into the side pockets of a wrinkled brown trench coat, unbuttoned to showcase a dark striped tie, the knot hanging low with the night’s fatigue.
“Why am I not surprised to see you, Mr. Quinn?”
“I’d say this changes things for Junior’s widow, right?”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“Don’t think it’s going to make her any happier. It was never about the money.”
He blew out a lungful of stress. “I would guess you’re right about that, also.”
“So is it going to offend your professional sensibilities if I ask where you were last Sunday night?”
“Home, with my wife.”
“So you weren’t at the club at all?”
“Yes, Yes, I was here earlier for pre-season evaluations, of course, like everyone else. But I left before....”
He caught himself, suddenly worried perhaps about saying something innocuous that also made him look guilty. I finished the line for him. “... before Junior was killed?”
Crck looked twitchy. “Yes, well, this is what must be the case, as I believe I would have seen something, from the way police are acting around the offices.”
“And if I keep poking around, I’m not going to find you had some personal thing with him; like you don’t like Mexicans or something?”
That irritated him. “I lived under Khrushchev, Mr. Quinn. I know what it is like to be oppressed. So no, I do not have anything against Mexicans, or anyone else.”
“My apologies, Mr. Crck, just being thorough.”
“Hmmm.”
“Can you think of anyone else who might have had a problem with Junior, any little arguments? Anything?”
He looked pensive, and stroked his chin absent-mindedly for a moment as he tried to reconnect with a fragmentary memory. “There... there was something that night.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“About twenty minutes before I left, I thought I heard an argument outside in the hallway. But it was reserved, restrained. It wasn’t shouting.”
It was the first real lead anyone had offered. “Did you recognize either of the voices? If you heard them again could you....”
“One of them was muffled completely,” he said. “But one of them sounded deeper, a little angrier. I ... well, I could be wrong....”
“Mr. Crck....”
“I could be wrong, but it sounded like David B. Davidson.”
The agent? “And what were you doing that you didn’t go check out the ruckus?”
He looked down again. “I was ... indisposed. There is a great deal to be done in running a football club, Mr. Quinn. I know as an American...”
I put my hand up to stop him right there. “Hey, you’re talking to a guy whose father is Irish. He supports Celtic and St. Pat’s, and I’m a Union guy myself.”
That brought out a smile. “That is good to know, at least.”
“Anyone else here still?”
Crck said no, they’d all already gone home for the day. “The police have made it clear the club would be effectively shut down for the next few days while they examine things and interview everyone.”
The parking lot had gradually begun to empty, but the new Lexus SUV bucked the trend by swinging quickly in through the gates and finding a spot near the building, just in front of the yellow-tape barricade. Hip hop was blaring from the inside in what sounded like French.
Its engine cut out, and a moment later, Charity Amapikwe climbed out of the passenger seat, followed a moment later by the same tough-looking guy who’d hung around my conversation with Patrick.
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They made their way over to Rabinowitz and his small cadre of officers, and an animated-but-friendly conversation began. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about from thirty yards away, but I figured maybe Crck could help.
“Who’s the big guy?”
He sucked on his teeth again as if momentarily annoyed. “Francois Mpenge. Technically, he is supposed to play defense for us this season, but he is really just a glorified bodyguard for Patrick.”
“Trying to make him feel at home?”
“They were a package deal,” he said, again sounding unimpressed. “Mpenge’s resume says he’s thirty four, but like a lot of these African guys, I expect that is ... creative. He moves on the field like he’s forty. At any rate, we don’t usually carry squad players over age twenty-three.”
“So he’s bogus?”
He shook his head. “He’s got some skill and the clubs on his resume are all real. But we are a development club, semi-pro. He is a journeyman. And not the nicest guy, I don’t mind saying.”
That made sense if his real job was protecting their interest in Patrick. “Any fireworks between him and the mom?”
“Ithink so, yes.He and Charity are never apart, really.”
“So what makes you think he’s a bad guy?”
“The other players are terrified of him. And he’s never said a word to me. Not one. He just glares.”
“Friendly.”
The veteran Russian coach looked unsurprised. “Some of these African players ... they’ve been through too much. You know what things can be like over there. Things in Russia were difficult when I was young, but nothing like in Chad.”
“Think he’s got enough anger in him to knock Junior’s head in?”
At that, Crck looked sure of himself. “I don’t doubt it. You think he would even be here, helping Charity and Patrick, if he did not know what the boy is worth?”
“No father?”
“He died in some insurrection when Patrick was a child. Davidson brought them here as a package and said someone had to look out for them.”
“Why didn’t he take them straight to one of the major league clubs?”
“The boy is too young, too little experience. That was the conventional wisdom when he was phoning the clubs. Now they’re lining up with five-year contracts.”