by L H Thomson
“Stay down, stupid man,” said the talkative one.
I was facing away from them and I frantically scrabbled through the pile of rain-soaked trash at the end of the alley, looking for a weapon under the half-shadowed street light, grit and wetness scratching at my cold hands, soaking my hair and back.
I felt the tap on my shoulder and came about fast, swinging the brick with all my strength just as the boxer wound up for another devastating body shot. The masonry caught him hard in the face, breaking his jaw, shattering the brick, and knocking him cold, faced down in the puddles and evening drizzle.
I was panting, struggling to my feet with all the will I could muster.
His friend realized what was happening too late, and by the time he’d trained the nine millimeter on me again, I was throwing back-to-back right hooks. The first one caught him in the side of the neck, putting him down to his knees. The second one laid him out on the puddle-strewn cement.
My knuckles were badly bruised and bleeding, maybe fractured. But the adrenaline was flowing hard and I could hardly feel it until I tried to dial Davy on my phone and had to switch hands.
“I’m on early shift....” He sounded half asleep.
“I need a cruiser here yesterday to pick up a couple of guys .... “ I looked down at the prone pair, “.... who just tried to mug me downtown.”
“Mug you? Seriously?”
“Seriously. Alley off Broad and Christian.” I stumbled down the alley towards the street. “I’m going to get out in the open here for a minute.”
“So this ain’t related to the case you’re working on and you ain’t holding out on me?”
I sighed, the stress of the moment starting to set in as the rain beat down. “Jesus … Look, my hand’s busted. Just send a car, okay wiseass?” I said.
“You need to stay there and give a statement to whoever picks them up.”
“You need me, I’ll be at Mercy hospital getting my ribs taped,” I said. “I think he broke a couple of those, too.” Did Davy snicker at that? I wasn’t sure. “That amusing to you?” I said, annoyed.
“Nah. I’m just surprised you finally found someone who could tag you,” he said.
“Had to happen sooner or later.”
“Maybe it if had been sooner, they would have knocked some sense into your thick head.”
He had me there. “Alright,” I said, “Let me know …”
He cut me off. “Yeah, that was the other thing I was going to mention: that fed Belloche was around the stationhouse asking questions about you. You’re better off giving him whatever it is he wants than having the screws put to you by that guy, Liam.”
He was probably right. But I also didn’t think the FBI agent would believe me when I told him I wasn’t really affiliated with Vin the Shin.
“I’ve got to see if I can figure out who killed Junior before I deal with him,” I said. “Look, if he comes back, try to keep him off my…”
“Whoah there,” Davy said. “I figure you’re trying real hard and all, but I ain’t done forgiving you completely yet for letting me down, okay? So keep the requests to a friggin’ minimum.”
That’s why they call it the City of Brotherly Love. “Fine. Look, just do me a solid and tell him I’m starting to get a handle on this whole thing. As soon as I’ve figured it out, he’ll be the first to know.”
He sounded hurt. “You’re getting somewhere on this thing and you’re going to tip him before Philly’s finest? What did some lousy fed ever do for you?”
“I said tell him he’ll be the first to know. I didn’t actually say he’d be the first to know.” Geez, Davy could push a point.
“Oh, so now you want me to lie for….”
“Jesus Friggin’ Christ, Davy,” I said, exasperated enough to blaspheme, and instantly glad my mom wasn’t around to cuff me. “It’s a friggin’ white lie to an FBI guy, to keep him from screwing things up.”
The line went silent for a second. I heard him exhale deeply, getting up the courage to say something. “Yeah… Look I’m sorry, okay? I just… you just piss me off so much … you let me down so hard, Liam.”
I didn’t know it before I went away, but Davy had sort of a hero worship thing for me. Needless to say, I’d shattered some close-held illusions. The weight of it all stood between us, right, then, as I stood in the rain and the dark, one busted hand at my side, a payphone in the other, the wetness running down from my soaked hair. “I know kid, I know. And you got to believe I’m going to keep trying to make it up to all of you. I’m not perfect; I’m a fuckup sometimes. But I’m not a bad person. You know that.”
There was silence again while he figured out what to say. A moment later, a siren kicked in, perhaps a block away, cutting through the white noise of the overcast evening. I said, “Look, your friends are here to take these two guys in, so I’ve got to make myself scarce.”
I guess that gave him a reason to sound exasperated again, although this time, he didn’t really sound like he meant it. “You’ve got to do things the hard way, don’t you? You couldn’t just go in to the station for a few hours …”
“I’ll keep you in the loop kid, don’t worry,” I said.
“Liam?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep your head down, okay? You ain’t bulletproof.”
I knew my mother would be worrying, so I stopped over to see her the next morning. She saw the tape on my hand immediately. Hell, she probably saw it before she opened the front door
She wanted me to come in and chat. She was quietly nursing her tea, sitting at the same off-white Formica kitchen table that had sat under our family’s kitchen window for as long as I could remember. I’d stopped by for a quick visit – and, I’ll freely admit, to ask her to throw a load of my stuff in her next laundry – and she’d guilted me into a half-hour chat about my life.
If you love your mother as much as I do – and I like to think that’s universal – then you know how excruciating she can be, like back when you were a kid and she’d lick a napkin to wipe something off your face, without giving you any warning.
“Your father thinks you should use your education, get into teaching art or something.”
“Ma, you know how I feel about that.”
“He’s not asking you to open another gallery or nothing, he just wants you to apply your education. You love painting so much, Liam. Why can’t ye make a livin’ at it?”
This was a sore point, because I’d been barred from painting for a full year after my release as a probation condition. I’d only recently taken up a brush again, and still felt uneasy when I sat down to compose, like a banker going back to his old branch after robbing it. I’d etched some things out, laid down some pencil work for a few ideas. But it just never felt quite right.
“Ma… I’m working on, okay? I know he means right by it, but it’s a real personal thing, my art. It’s not like boxing, where I can just turn off and hit the bag, follow patterns. Creating something’s not like that, it’s….”
She gave me a piercing stare and I realized the irony of that particular argument. “Okay,” I said, “so the insurance gig isn’t what he helped pay for.”
That made Ma look down at the table, a little sad. Wow, she could hammer someone with the guilt. “That wasn’t it at all, Liam,” she said. “He just wants you to do what he knows you love. He just wants you to be happy.”
She had me there. For a second. I tried to wriggle out, but I was like a rabbit in a moral leg hold. I said, “If he wants me to be happy, he has to let me make my own choices....’
Cue the takedown. She put a hand on my forearm and looked deep into my eyes, peering into my soul with angelic concern. “But he did, dear, and you made all the wrong ones.”
Bodyslam! Pinned.
The statement sat there between us for a few seconds, leaden as an anchor. But what could I tell her? That she was wrong?
“Yeah…. Well, let me think about it, okay Ma? I mean the insurance thing was suppo
sed to be about catching forgers ….”
“You know your brother Michael’s working for the commissioner of public works now. He can probably help you get work from the city.”
I had to chuckle at that. “I’m not letting Michael get me a job on the public dime, Ma. I like the insurance business. Like I said, at least sometimes it relates.”
“And how many art-related cases have you had in the last year?”
She had me there, too.
“Three.”
“Three. So it’s mostly just taking lumps from PMI’s worst customers.”
“Mostly. But Ma….”
“Yes, dear?”
“I do get to help a lot of people, too.”
And while I never like to make my mother feel bad, I knew she’d take that message back to my father, and maybe they’d both feel just guilty enough to quit bugging me about it.
CHAPTER 9
Karen’s little green house looked just as lonely at the shady end of the street as it had three days earlier. My news was no better today, either.
I couldn’t put it together how Francois had managed to get into the offices, have his altercation with Junior and get out with Junior’s body, all before David B. Davidson or Coach Crck heard anything and left their offices. It didn’t seem possible.
So while I was sure he was involved, I still didn’t know how or why he’d killed Junior. I had to assume it was either over the smuggling operation or Francois’ relationship to the kid, or maybe both.
“One thing I’m sure of, Junior was playing it totally straight,” I told her. Her neighborhood may still have been bleak, but she looked a little more cheerful -- or at the very least no longer torn by grief. “He overheard one of a couple of bad deals involving some bad people, and once I’ve got that all figured out....”
Her smile faded. “So you don’t have any proof yet of who?”
I stared at my shoes in self-consciousness, aware she deserved and wanted better.
“This is real important to me, Liam,” she said. “Lord knows, Junior and I was happy without much.” She got teary again, wiping it away with the corner of the sleeve of her home-knit pale green sweater. “I never asked for much in life. I never asked for nothing, really. So every minute I got with him, it was like a gift from God, you know? And it ain’t right what happened. It ain’t right for Junior and, damn I don’t care if this selfish no more, but it ain’t right for me, neither.”
Her conviction was strong and it gave me a shot, that little nudge we all need when things aren’t going so good, and it seems easier to just give up.
I didn’t ever plan to give up on Junior, but I’d be lying if I’d told her a solution was right round the corner. Instead, I tactfully changed the subject. “You got everything taken care of for the funeral?”
She nodded. “Next Monday at Santa Maria De Los Buenos Aires,” she said. “He’d want the service in Spanish, for family tradition. PMI called this morning, said they’d be paying out double because he was working at the time but his death was unrelated to his work. Believe that? An insurance clause working in someone’s favor for a change.”
And it would’ve been funny at any other time, too. Now, with the lamp light casting broad, thick shadows cross the tiny living room, it just made her home feel a little more empty, as empty as she felt every morning, waking up without Junior beside her.
After I left Karen’s, I nosed the beast towards South Philly to see if I could get a few minutes with my building’s super and find out if they ever actually planned to fill the hole in the wall.
I’d gone a couple of miles in the light traffic and was distracted, watching pedestrians on the nearby sidewalk. So it took a few blocks longer than it should have to spot the old station wagon following me. If someone was trying to look inconspicuous, they couldn’t have picked a worse car; the thing was a beast, a green-and-silver Pontiac from the late seventies that could have doubled for a twin-engine ski boat. The thing was so wide it had two time zones.
Naturally, it also handled beautifully. For a shot of pure mischief, I gunned the Firebird’s big engine and threw it into third gear, zipping in and around a handful of other cars.
The big station wagon dutifully tried to follow, but instead almost careened into the other vehicles and narrowly missed a few which were parked, too.
Whoever was following me wasn’t exactly the last cut from the FBI recruitment class. Aside from being visible from low Earth orbit, the guy was fighting the terrible steering on the thirty-five-year-old car, and more than a few other commuters had given him an unfriendly honk.
I took the next right and then another quick turn, behind a convenience store. A moment later, he took the first right, but missed the second, and cruised right past me. A few seconds after that, I was tailing him.
It didn’t last long. After a couple of blocks, he realized he’d lost sight of me and pulled his star destroyer over to the side of the road to try and get his bearings. He climbed out of the driver’s side, a short, balding man with a trenchcoat straight out of an old movie. He looked around nervously, standing on the hot, crack-repaired asphalt as if he’d been forgotten by a bus.
I pulled the beast up behind his car and got out quickly. As soon as he saw me, his eyes widened like satellite dishes and he scrambled to get back into the driver seat and -- old habits, I guess -- to fasten his seat-belt.
I strode quickly up to the door and opened it, then pulled the little man out and up to standing height. “Hey!” he said. “I got a license....”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you do,” I said, ignoring his fidgeting to quickly pat him down. There was a piece tucked into the small of his back, a .38 police special -- which is great, as long as the other guy isn’t wearing anything thicker than leather, or so my brother tells me. It’s why cops got rid of them years ago in favor of nine mils.
“You got a permit for this?” I said.
“None o’ your business. Hey, give that back!” he said. I held it out of reach and for a few seconds watched the surreal spectacle of the inept P.I. acting like a child in a keepaway game, unable to reach my hand.
I woke him up with a gentle slap. It probably wasn’t the nicest thing to do, but I needed to know who this guy was before another of Johnny or Francois’ boys jogged around the corner and tried to blow both our heads off.
“You know, following me isn’t the healthiest thing you could be doing with your time, Mr....” I reached inside his breast pocket and found his wallet, then pulled out one of his cards. “Mr...... Arven Matabanian?”
“Matabanian Private Investigations. And yes, I’ll thank you to return my gun, as I do have a permit, and to return my wallet. You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.”
“Why are you following me, Arven?”
He crossed his arms defiantly, but once again managed to look like a pouting eight-year-old. With a bad moustache.
“I ain’t telling you nothing, Quinn. I got my client’s confidentiality to think about, here.”
He was still nervous. I said, “So you’re okay with me calling my brother the cop and having them check out your story, perhaps find out why you’re following a guy around who has a contract on his head?”
He took a half-step backwards in surprise at that and almost tripped over a hydrant. “Hey, we don’t have to be getting official or nothing,” he said. “I’m working for Bentnall Building Management. They own the building you live in -- soon to be ‘lived in’.”
“Explain, you little weasel.”
“They figure you have a “high-risk” lifestyle, which is against a clause in your lease. So you’re responsible for the damage.”
This I didn’t need. As I may have already mentioned, I continue to owe the good people of the State of Pennsylvania some $200,000 for my court-ordered restitution. Another big bill wasn’t going to make life any easier.
“Alright, scram!” I said to the detective, letting go of his lapels. Matabanian climbed back into the station
wagon and leaned out the window, saying “when asked about his role in the explosion, subject became violent and accosted me....”
I faked towards the car and he cowered back into his seat and threw it into drive, gunning it into traffic and missing me by about a foot.
I pulled up my phone and searched Matabanian’s name, running three or four variations of the spelling before I found the right one. A handful of local references were accompanied by a couple of client complaints, a warning from the Better Business Bureau. Real charmer.
The trip over to my apartment seemed a waste of time, now, and more likely to end up with me being served papers than any good news. So I waited for a lull in traffic and pulled a u-turn, heading the nose of the beast back towards downtown and the offices of Philadelphia Mutual Insurance.
Predictably, within a couple of blocks, Arven’s enormous station wagon was back on my tail. He was nothing if not persistent.
It took me at least thirty seconds to shake him.
The issue of David Mince calling Nora was bothering the hell out of me, but I didn’t dare call her about it until she’d cooled off a little. I don’t know what he’d told her, but it was probably creatively designed to make me look as sociopathic as he.
Not that she’d buy it; Nora and I were peas in a pod from way back. But whatever he’d said, it had some kind of effect, if even Ramon thought she was ready to blow her top.
Instead, I figured I could take my mind off of it by concentrating on the case, and that meant getting back in touch with Alistair, the soccer agent. I was hoping he’d have found out more information from the African end and left it on my machine at the office. But I was out of luck. My message bank was as empty as the office.
Almost. Mike McGrath’s head poked around the corner of his Formica cubicle. “What’s up Quinn, you figured you try working for a change?”
Mike and I sparred over a couple of things. For one, he was from New Jersey and supported New York and New Jersey teams. For another, he was the firm’s senior investigator, but at least twice in the six prior months I’d effectively scooped his commissions.