by L H Thomson
“And the Europeans?”
“A little more cautious, but we’ll see.”
The pair had finished talking to the officers and a few moments later were back in the Lexus, rolling out onto the road.
I noticed they didn’t stop to talk to Crck. “They’re not big communicators, I take it.”
He smiled wryly. “We’re just a stopping point for Patrick. He has big things ahead of him. Right now, they need us to showcase him against up-and-coming kids his age. But he’s going to be in the English Premier League or Serie A pretty soon, you watch.”
I stifled a chuckle. As a former boxing prodigy myself, I could attest there were a whole lot of pleasantly deluded coaches out there absolutely convinced their kid was a can’t-miss prospect, guys who thought I was the next Ray Mancini. History suggests that we can never be sure.
“That’s a lot of pressure on a kid his age,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said looking off vacantly for a moment before turning back to me. “But think about it from in his shoes: he saw his father killed, he grew up in violent, abject poverty. Compared to that, professional football should be easy.”
As I drove back into south Philly, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Crck’s confidence was designed to shield him from guilt, to protect his own conscience from the fact that he was treating a fifteen-year-old like a piece of auction cattle.
I turned on the radio to give my brain a break from the tension; the local NPR station was talking about the heyday of the Philly nightclub scene, when joints like Palumbo’s and his other place, The Click, competed with the Trocadero and the Casablanca for the 1940s nightlife dollar. Then there was the obligatory discussion of people stopping by Pat’s late at night for a steak sandwich wit’ onions and wiz.
Some people, they got Bluetooth in their car, so they listen to iTunes or something. Me? I’ve got the Firebird, and that means I’ve got Notooth – which is to say, AM radio and, when I’m very, very lucky, a little FM for more than five minutes before it cuts out.
Fortunately, along with my finely honed skills as a boxer and later as a painter of exquisite oils, I’m also quite the audio jockey – I’ve found that smacking it two or three times often works. Who knew boxing and technology had so much in common?
Before heading back into the Old City to the Garcia De Sorias’ condo, I figured I’d cruise by my apartment and see what the crime scene looked like. I pulled over across the road and parked. I got out and looked over the car’s roof towards the building, caught aback by the damage.
The grenade had blown huge chunks of brick away from the front, exposing a hole directly into the kitchen and part of the living room, and ripping off a corner of the balcony. Two yellow piece of police tape could barely be seen through the hole, slapped up inside the apartment like a cross to signify a hazard.
I checked the news on my phone – I’d finally relented and bought a smart phone, but vowed to Nora and everyone else I’d never learn to ‘text’ – and the Inquirer was reporting it as a gas explosion. The feds had been working on the story, I guessed, anxious to keep the media away from anything involving Johnny Terrasini.
My phone rang. Synchronicity.
“Quinn.”
It was Vin the Shin, never a guy you want calling.
“Mr. Terrasini.”
“Kid, you know how to fuck up something special, don’t you! I don’t know what to do with you.”
I said nothing … because I had no clue what he was talking about.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No sir. Got to admit, I figure it’s about Johnny, because he damn near killed me yesterday.”
He chuckled at that and said something to someone in the background. “The boys are having a good laugh at how pissed off my nephew is going to be youse’re still healthy.”
“I thought your nephew had agreed…”
“He was bein’ a good kid and listening to his uncle… despite the fact that he’s a complete wackadoo.”
“So what happened… if you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Terrasini.”
He inhaled deeply, as if warding off the ponderous stress caused by someone else’s stupidity. “I ain’t sure yet, which is never a situation I like, as you’re aware. But we’d better talk.”
My turn for a deep, cleansing breath. “You got a spot, Mr. Terrasini?”
“You feel like a steak sandwich?”
CHAPTER 4
There are little things about Philly that only locals can tell you. For one, when a guy Vin the Shin’s age – somewhere north of seventy – says he wants to go for a “steak sandwich at Pat’s”, he doesn’t mean a New York-style open face, and he doesn’t mean a Chicago-style closed. And he sure as heck doesn’t mean a California-style “caramelized onions and garlic on a rosemary mayo” crap burger, neither.
He means chopped sirloin steak, with onion.
I know what you’re thinking: that’s a cheesesteak, right?
Wrong.
A cheesesteak, the staff at Pat’s used to tell people a few decades back, is their chopped steak, with cheese added.
“But Quinn,” you might say, “that’s not a chopped steak. Everywhere else on God’s green Earth, that’s a cheesesteak.”
True. But everywhere else on God’s green Earth didn’t actually invent the sandwich. Pat’s did, back when TV was still a pipe dream. And calling a Pat’s Steak Sandwich a mere “cheesesteak”, to an older guy like Vin the Shin, is like telling a Brit he has a funny accent.
It was a “steak san’ich wit onions ‘n whiz” for the longest time: a chopped sirloin sandwich with onions, then cheez whiz smeared on top.
But times change. A few decades after Pat’s opened in the thirties, Geno’s up the street started selling sandwiches as well. Now, both places – and everyone else on the planet – calls them cheesesteaks.
Pat’s adapted; they still call the basic product a steak sandwich, but in the way that most people don’t order just a plain hamburger, the original steak without cheese doesn’t get much love.
Unlike the bulk of their clientele, we didn’t line up outside, or loll around on the wide red wooden benches. We parked – his driver conspicuously keeping the limo across the street, next to an empty lot and in the shadow of a mighty wall of graffiti art as his other side of muscle went and got our food.
Eating cheesesteaks in the back of a limo with Vin the Shin. Swell.
“So I had my guys make some calls in the twenty minutes it took us to get here,” he said. “Youse don’t mind eatin’ here, right?”
“No, Mr. Terrasini. I always liked Pat’s.”
He was enthusiastic. “That’s real Philly right there. If I could still get the creamed spinach from the old Automat on Chester too, I’d be in Heaven.” The oversized, elderly gangster looked genuinely wistful for a second, thinking back. “Anyhows, I got to checkin’ on why my nephew has his nuts in a bunch, and the word is out you got involved in his business again. That’s not something I like to hear, kid.”
I didn’t say anything, puzzled. In the months since the gallery job that first upset Johnny T, I’d handled a handful of routine insurance cases, with nothing remotely larcenous about any of them.
Vin the Shin sensed my confusion. “You’re going to have to figure out what it was, then. Either way, he figures this makes his earlier agreement to leave you alone null and void. And since he ain’t inclined to listen to me no more….”
He left it hanging there but the implication was obvious. “You can’t keep him from clipping me. Nice to know at least, Mr. Terrasini.”
The elderly gangster shrugged. “I did what I could, kid. Tell you what: you figure out what he’s up to and let me know, maybe I can pull your fat out of this one, eh?”
Of course, in the family business, this meant I’d owe him a favor, which wasn’t my preference. Up until that point, we were basically even.
His man came back with our sandwiches. Vin the Shin
took a large, cheez whiz-laden bite out of his, munched for a few seconds, then swallowed. “Chow down kid. You never know when it might be your last,” he said.
In boxing, misdirection is as important as how hard you can hit. In amateur boxing, where points are everything, it’s the more important of the two.
To get a guy to drop his guard sufficiently to hit him where it hurts, a good fighter develops feints: small movements designed to fake the opponent into opening himself up. A great fighter can psych out his opponent in short order if he can keep tagging him early.
I was as stumped that afternoon by Johnny Terrasini’s outburst as I’d been over lunch, and I decided to stop hurting my noggin and direct my attention back to the case at hand, and finding Junior Flores’s killer. The manager’s assertion that he might have heard Davidson’s voice wasn’t a dead cert that he was there the night Junior was killed, but it sure made it more likely.
So I tried a feint.
Crck had given me Davidson’s phone number and the agent picked up on the second ring. I pulled the Firebird over to the side of the road. After we’d exchanged introductions, I asked him directly, “So I hear you were hanging out in the offices a few hours before they figure Junior Flores was killed.”
He took the bait like a slimy catfish straight out of the Delaware River, bristling as he said it. “Yeah, so? My client was there too, along with twenty-odd other players, Mr. Quinn. He’s there working on his game every day, and that means I’m there just about every day also.”
“You’re that close to young Patrick? How touching.”
“Be as sarcastic as you want, Mr. Quinn, but I love that boy like he was my own son.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he has a special place in your wallet.”
“You think I’d risk his interests, or mine, by getting involved in anything like a murder?”
As a sports agent – and a successful one, with the reputation of a hungry shark – I didn’t doubt David B. Davidson would get involved in that and more if he figured there was a big buck in it. But it didn’t help to get any more insulting than I’d already been.
“So you didn’t see or hear anything on the night? What time did you leave?”
“About… nine o’clock, I’m going to say?”
“And the kid was still there?”
“Yeah, he’d finished up his medical stuff an hour earlier and was waiting with Francois for his mother to come back and pick him up, but she was late.”
“They were both just hanging around the hallway?”
“Nah. They were in the back office; Crck let the kid use it as sort of a hangout pad, for when he needed some peace and quiet. He’s got a couple of beanbag chairs in there, and an Xbox, some of his mementoes.”
“Pretty special treatment for a kid his age.”
“Like I said, we all realize what a big future he has. None of us are going to jeopardize that.”
“So there was nothing on the night out of the ordinary?”
“No.”
“So you didn’t get in an argument…”
I could practically hear his eyes rolling over the phone. “I’m sure Crck told you I had an argument with the kid, but it was nothing. I just wanted him to focus harder on training, is all. He can’t be dogging it just because he knows I’m going to land him a great deal.”
If he was lying, he was good at it…. Which, as an agent, was probably true. “Was Junior there when you left?”
“Yeah, he’d just gotten there. He was painting the wall outside Crck’s office, and I think he was embarrassed by the raised voices, because he…hey, wait a second….”
“You got another call?”
“No, no. I just remembered: there was an argument in Crck’s office, too. I think he was talking to the blond kid, the defender. Simon, or … Sam! Sam was it. Sam Prince. Patrick said he’s going to Texas A&M next year on a partial soccer ride.”
Crck had conveniently omitted the kid’s presence. That didn’t reflect well on the old Russian.
“Cops talk to Prince?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “Look, Quinn, I got to go. If I think of anything else I’ll call you okay?”
“Yeah, but if…”
Click.
People tended to hang up on me quite a bit.
I couldn’t get Crck on the phone, but Mike Ehlers had helpfully taken the young defender’s number. It was a landline, and a reverse directory search online coughed up his address, a ritzy townhouse in northwest Philly. It wasn’t the best neighborhood but it was pretty … and pretty expensive. These were newer showhomes and townhomes, small yards designed for professionals who spent their spare time out on the town.
It was a nice piece of real estate for a 19-year-old kid playing amateur soccer, anyway.
After the short drive, I parked across the street. I waited until a few cars passed, then walked over. A small white van from the gas company was parked outside, and I nodded to the gas guy as he walked by me. He tipped his hat and smiled.
I walked up to the townhouse door and had an unsettled feeling, but I knocked and waited.
Nothing.
I knocked again and peered through the screen. “Sam Prince? You home?”
That gas guy’s smile was irritatingly wide, and I could sworn I’d seen it before. In fact, he was just downright familiar. Where had I seen the guy?
The gallery case. He was one of Johnny’s crew, the guys who had chased me through….
Shit. Got to move.
I was ten paces towards the sidewalk when the town house blew. One second the street was silent save my footfalls, and the house was a solid mass of cream-colored wood siding. The next, it fractured, torn apart from the inside out by a ball of black-and-orange flame, the wooden walls cracking like an egg, stringy wooden chunks of building hurtling towards the street, glass showering me, wooden shrapnel covering everything, smoke and dust billowing out.
The concussive force blew me off my feet and I landed face down just over the curb, in time to see the van clearing the end of the street and turning left into traffic, car alarms along the street firing off in unison.
They’d thrown a blanket over me insisting I might be in shock, and I sat on the bumper of the ambulance, sipping a hot coffee while the attendant picked wood splinters out of my back and hair.
I didn’t argue. As police cordoned off the street and the fire crew worked on dousing the last of the hotspots in what was left of Sam Prince’s townhouse, it gave me a few seconds to collect my thoughts, staring at my shoes throughout.
Whatever else, I now knew how I’d gotten involved in Johnny Terrasini’s business again. The big question was why. It had to have had something to do with the kid, as Patrick was the club’s only tangible asset, and with Sam Prince, as that blast was no accident.
“What’s wit’ you and explosions?”
Davy.
I said, “I don’t know, I guess I’m just trying to find ways to spend more time with you.”
My mother actually drummed the Philly accent out of her kids – with ironically Irish-flavored instruction – but we tended to lapse when we were insulting each other, or freaked right out. Or both.
Which, with me and Davy, seemed to be much of the time.
“You know, the boys quite understandably don’t have a lot of fucking confidence in you to start with,” he said. “You keep showing up before us at crime scenes, things are going to get ugly eventually.”
He meant they’d arrest me. But I already knew that. Heck, they’d have arrested me the first day I got out, if they had the chance. I wasn’t just a convict; I was a convict with two cops in the family. They saw that as taking a special kind of arrogance, which wasn’t really true; I just sort of fell into it, was all.
I didn’t wait for him to ask what happened. “It was house of a kid who plays for that club I’m looking into.”
“So this is tied to Junior?”
“Somehow, yeah.” I kept the info about Patrick to myself
once again. If Francois was involved and police made too much noise, he’d probably disappear rather than be deported – or maybe just flee the country himself, if he was inclined.
Davy waited for me to elaborate before adding a flourishing “Annnnnd…..”
I threw up both hands. “You got me.”
“Yeah, and ain’t I lucky for it. You know, when I was younger and I didn’t know all the dumb shit you got up to, I was a lot happier.”
I said, “When you were younger, I was a lot happier too.” Then I winced, realizing in his book I hadn’t really earned the right yet to joke back at him. He was still embarrassed by me among his colleagues.
“Yeah, very fucking funny Liam. Now you want to tell me what happened….”
A voice interjected from around the corner of the ambulance. “Yes, Mr. Quinn, perhaps you can tell us both what happened.”
Belloche. The bureau was keeping close tabs on me, evidently.
Before I could say anything, Davy surprised me. “Just so’s you know, Agent Belloche, my brother had come here to interview today’s lone victim so far; so as much as he’s a fuckup, this ain’t on him.”
“And who might this be on, Officer Quinn? Might your brother know that?”
“Hey, with all due respect to fellow law enforcement, Liam’s the one what told us about this being a hit in the first place, and not just a gas leak.”
It was the closest he got to brotherly love under the circumstances..
Belloche smiled though thin lips, tiny dark gaps between small teeth. “I don’t doubt Mr. Quinn was once again just doing his job,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, however, Mr. Quinn that your job has involved two explosions in a week.”
Across the street, the medical examiner’s office was loading a bodybag into the back of a van. “It’s unfortunate for Sam Prince,” I suggested. “You look the same as you did yesterday.”
The bureau man smiled like a crocodile. “Thus it was, thus it will always be, Mr. Quinn. Perhaps you have more to tell me today, if we want to avoid another little incident like this?”