Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  “He’ll be with yous in a minute,” said the secretary, flashing the quickest smile I had ever seen, more twitch than anything else, before going back to her nails.

  Thanks, doll.

  It was the dust, maybe, that got me to ruminating. I remembered when my office was dusty, when the cleaning ladies knew not to care, when the quiet of my phones was loud enough to leave me shaking my head with despair at the future. There was a stretch of time in my life when I wasn’t making any money as a lawyer and it had been a bad stretch. Now, with the steady stream of mob clients coming through my door and dropping on my desk their cash retainers, dirty bills bound with rubber bands, my coffers were filled, my offices were dust free, my phones rang with regularity. But what about the future? Raffaello, my patron, had given up and was selling out. I was designated to set up the meeting with Dante that would, in effect, cut me out of the loop. No more of those fat cash retainers. It was what I wanted, actually, out. The game was getting too damn dangerous for a lightweight like myself but, still, I couldn’t help wondering what would it be like when the game was over. Would it be back to the old life, back to dusty offices and quiet phones and a meek desperation? Or would the grand possibilities that had opened for me in the case of the Reddman demise save me from my past? A million here, a million there, pretty soon I was dust free for life. Maybe I should stop chasing the ghost of dead doctors and get back to work.

  I was thinking just that thought when Carp came out of his office to greet me. He was short and square, with a puffy face and small eyes behind his Buddy Holly glasses. He wore gray pants and a camel’s hair blazer. Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: never hire a lawyer in a camel’s hair blazer; all it means is he isn’t billing enough to afford a new suit.

  “Mr. Carl?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Yes,” I said, popping out of my chair and reaching for his hand. “Thank you for seeing me. Call me Victor.”

  “Come this way,” he said and I did.

  “If you’ll excuse my office,” said Peter Carp after he was situated in the swivel chair behind his fake wood Formica desk. He indicated the mess that had swallowed his blotter, the files strewn on the floor. “It’s been a killer month.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, and I did, more than he could realize. This was not the desk of a lawyer over-loaded with briefs and motions and trial preparations. There was something too disorderly about its disorder, too offhand in its messiness. My desk was much like this in my less prosperous times, cleared only when I actually had work that needed the space to spread itself out. One brief could take over the whole of a desktop, but the books and copied cases and documents would be in a rough order. Only when I had nothing pressing would my desktop carry the heaping uneven pile of junk paper currently carried by Peter Carp’s. I had put on my sharpest suit for this meeting with what Angelo Karpas had described as a big-time lawyer and now I regretted that decision. Down and out was the way to play it with Peter Carp.

  He took his glasses off, wiped them with his tie. Turning his bare and beady eyes to me, he said, “Now, what is it about my father’s medical practice that you’re so interested in, Vic?”

  “In a case I am working on I found a receipt for a medical procedure he performed in 1966. I’d like to know what it was all about.”

  I reached into my briefcase and pulled out the invoice and handed it to him. He put his glasses back on and examined it.

  “Mrs. Christian Shaw. I don’t recognize the name.”

  “She recently died,” I said. “I represent her granddaughter.”

  While continuing his examination of the receipt he said, “Medical malpractice?”

  “Hardly. The old lady was almost a hundred when she died and her body just expired. I expect your father performed noble service in allowing her to live as long as she did.”

  “He was quite a good surgeon,” said Carp. “Never once sued in his entire career.” He looked nervously at me and then back at the invoice.

  “Did your father sell his practice?” I asked.

  “Nope. He worked until the very end, which is exactly how he wanted it.”

  “What became of his records, do you know?”

  “Tell me what kind of case you’re representing the granddaughter in.”

  “Nothing too extravagant.”

  “Lot of money at stake?”

  “I wish.”

  “Trust and estates?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Because that is one of my specialties. Trust and estates.”

  Wills for widows and orphans at a price, no doubt, with Peter Carp conveniently named as executor. I shook my head. “Nothing too complicated or lucrative, I’m afraid.”

  “Because if you need any help on the intricacies of Pennsylvania trusts and estates law, I’d be glad to help.”

  “All I really need to know, Mr. Carp, is if your father’s records are still available.”

  He looked at me and I looked at him and then he turned his attention to the invoice and flicked it once with his finger. “I’m not sure the records that are available go this far back,” he said, “and even if they did, to find something this far back would take a lot of man hours.”

  “I’d be willing to help you look.”

  “And then there is the question of confidentiality. Without a waiver it is not really proper to hand over the information. And Mrs. Shaw would appear to be in no condition to grant a waiver.”

  Did I have the same clever gleam in my eye, sitting in my office, plotting how to grab a few bucks here and a few bucks there whenever opportunity reared its shapely neck? If I did, I never before realized how transparent it was, and how ugly. Looking at Peter Carp for me was like looking at an unflattering snapshot and wincing. “I’m sure, Mr. Carp, that if the records are available we could work something out.”

  “Exactly how much are we talking about?”

  “Let’s find the records before we discuss details.”

  “I suppose there would be no harm in looking,” he said with a smile. His tongue darted quickly out of his mouth, wetting his thick lower lip. “You wouldn’t have any trouble, would you, in making the check out to cash?”

  “None at all,” I said.

  “Well then, Vic,” said Peter Carp. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  The Carp estate was in Wynnewood, an old suburb not too far from the western border of the city. Old stone houses, wet basements, tall trees growing too close to the sidewalk, planted fifty years before as seedlings and now listing precariously over the street. Carp took me to a decaying dark Tudor on a nice wooded plot of land going now to seed. “This was my father’s house,” he said, “but I live here now.”

  The inside was dark and dusty, half empty of furniture. Paint peeled from the wood trim in strips and the wallpaper was faded and oily. It felt like the place had been abandoned years before. Carp’s father had evidently maintained it well but after his death his son had done nothing to the place except sell off the better pieces of furniture. I wondered if this was what Dr. Wesley Karpas had in mind when he changed his name to Carp and sought to rise in society, this decrepit and rundown house, this money-sucking semifailure of a son.

  He took me downstairs to a basement area and pushed open a door that was partly cobwebbed over. Inside the doorway was an old doctor’s office, white metal cabinets with glass fronts, an examination table, a desk. Still scattered about were strange metal instruments sitting in stainless steel pans. In the corner were piles of medical journals. The place was full of dust and the leavings of animals and with the pointed metal instruments it looked like a discarded torture chamber.

  “My father stopped his surgical practice when he turned sixty,” said Carp, “but he saw patients as a GP in his home office until the final stroke.”

  Through the examination room was another room, a waiting room of sorts, with a door to the backyard where the patients would enter. And then, in another room, off from the waiting room, w
ere boxes piled one atop the other and file cabinets lined up like a row of soldiers at attention.

  “He kept his files religiously,” said Carp, as he climbed over the boxes, heading for the file cabinets. “Every so often he would clear out the files of patients he no longer saw and put them in boxes, but he made sure to keep everything. I would tell him to throw the stuff out but he said you never know, and look how right he was.”

  Carp opened one of the file cabinets and searched it and shook his head.

  “It’s not in the cabinets,” he said. “Why don’t we start looking through the boxes together? Each box should be labeled with the letters of the files and year they were taken out of the main cabinets.”

  I removed my suit jacket and laid it carefully over a chair and then started at the boxes, shoving cartons here and there in search of the elusive “S.” We found two cartons with “S” files, one cleared from the cabinets in 1986 and one from 1978. Carp, refusing to let me so much as peek inside for what he claimed were reasons of confidentiality, examined each and declared there was no file for Mrs. Christian Shaw in either. After thirty minutes more I found a box labeled “Re-Th, 1973” and Carp told me to stand back as he took a look inside.

  “I don’t see anything for a Mrs. Christian Shaw here,” he said.

  “How about Faith Reddman Shaw?”

  “Reddman, huh.”

  “A distant impoverished line from the Pickle baron.”

  “No Faith Reddman Shaw, but here’s something.” He took a file out and spread it open atop the box. “When exactly was the date of that invoice?”

  “June 9, 1966.”

  “Yes that’s it, and the amount?”

  “Six hundred, thirty-eight dollars and ninety cents.”

  “All right, that’s it exactly, but you had it wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “The patient. It wasn’t this Mrs. Christian Shaw, she was just the party billed for the service. The patient was a Kingsley Shaw.”

  “What was the procedure?”

  “Nothing too serious,” he said. “Just two minor incisions, a few snips of the vasa deferentia and then a few sutures to clean up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A vasectomy. My father gave this Kingsley Shaw a vasectomy in June of 1966. Apparently it was a clean operation with no complications. No big deal. Why, is this Kingsley Shaw anybody?”

  “No,” I said. “Nobody at all.”

  After I had written out the check to cash for a thousand dollars, I asked Carp if I could use the phone. I picked up the receiver, turned my back to the hungry eyes of Peter Carp, and called my apartment.

  “Hi,” I said when Caroline answered.

  “That cop, McDeiss is looking for you,” she said. “He called your office and he just called here.”

  “You didn’t tell him who you were, did you?”

  “No, but he says if you get a chance you should show up at Front and Ellsworth, by the hockey rink. Do you know where it is?”

  “I can find it. Thanks. Let me ask you something, Caroline. What’s your birthday?”

  “You getting me a present?”

  “Sure. Just tell me.”

  “June 11,” she said.

  “What year?”

  “Nineteen sixty-eight. Why?”

  “Not important. If McDeiss calls back,” I said, “tell him I’m on my way.”

  40

  WHEN I GOT TO THE Ralph R. Rizzo Sr. Ice Skating Rink at Front and Ellsworth there was already a crowd behind the yellow tape. Across the street from the tape was Interstate 95, which hacks through the eastern edge of Philadelphia like a blunt cleaver. The ice rink, with its facade of blue-and-white tile, was squeezed beneath the elevated highway and beside the tiled building was an outdoor roller rink, this too in the highway’s shadow. Between the two rinks was a wedgelike opening with a solitary bench and in that opening five or six cops mingled around a large black thing that sat squat and smoldering. Parked on Front Street were two fire trucks, lights still flashing. Firemen, in black slickers, huddled with one another, smoking cigarettes.

  The crowd behind the yellow tape held the usual crew of wide-eyed onlookers who congregate with a sort of muted glee at the situs of a tragedy. They shook their heads and cracked wise out of the sides of their mouths and shucked their weight from one foot to the other and fought to keep from laughing because it wasn’t them this time. Along with the onlookers were a few parasitic reporters, asking questions, and the inevitable television cameras readying the live feed for their insatiable news machines.

  “What happened?” I asked one of the onlookers, an old man, thin and grizzled with suspenders and a black beret.

  “Cain’t you smell it?” said the old man.

  I took a sniff. The dirty stink of burned gasoline and something sickly sweet beneath it. “I’m not sure.”

  “They burned a car, is what they did,” he said, “and they was some fool still in it when they did it. Now he ain’t but bar-be-cue.”

  “Pleasant,” I said over the quiet guffaws that rose around us. I edged past him toward the yellow tape and called a uniformed cop over.

  “I’m here to see McDeiss,” I said. “He asked me to come on down.”

  The cop gestured his head to the group of cops under the highway and lifted the tape. Like a boxer sliding into the ring I slipped beneath the yellow ribbon and headed across Front Street.

  It was clammy and cool beneath the highway and the stink I had smelled from across the street hung heavy as a fog. The smoldering shape was a car, dark and wet, with its trunk unlatched, and I could make out some red beneath the carbon black. It had been a convertible and the fire had devoured the canvas top so it looked a sporty thing, that flame-savaged car. A Porsche, a red Porsche, and I started getting some idea of who it was who might have been bar-be-cued.

  McDeiss was off to the side, in front of the skating rink, interviewing a kid, taking notes as the kid talked. I waited for him to finish. When he sent the kid running off down Front Street, he turned and saw me standing there. “Carl,” he said with a smile. “Glad you could make it. Welcome to the party.”

  “A real hot spot,” I said.

  “We got the call about an hour and a half ago,” said McDeiss, walking back to the burned-out hulk of the Porsche. I trailed hesitantly behind him. “A car was burning underneath the highway. The uniform guys showed up and called the fire guys. The fire guys showed up and sprayed down the flames. When they popped open the trunk to make sure everything was out the fire guys saw what was inside and called us.”

  “And since you guys are the homicide guys, I guess we know what was in the trunk.”

  “You want to see?”

  “I think not.”

  “Come on, Carl, take a look. It’ll do you good.”

  He reached back and took hold of my arm and started pulling me toward the burned Porsche, toward the rear, with the trunk lid ominously open, toward whatever lay singed and dead inside.

  “I really don’t think so,” I said.

  “I know a great restaurant just a block up on Front,” said McDeiss, pulling me ever closer. The open trunk loomed now not ten feet away. “La Vigna. Maybe after our visit you can take me out for lunch.”

  “I’m quickly losing my appetite.”

  “You should know what you’re dealing with here, Carl, before we talk,” said McDeiss.

  We were slipping around the side of the car now, McDeiss moving quickly, yanking me along. “I get the idea.”

  “Take a look,” he said, and then he spun me around so that I almost fell into whatever it was that was in that trunk.

  “Arrgh,” I let out softly, closing my eyes as my stomach heaved.

  A few of the cops standing around the car laughed among themselves.

  “Take a good look,” said McDeiss.

  I took a breath and smelled that nauseating smell and my eyes gagged open, ready to spy whatever was there in the trunk.

&
nbsp; It was empty. Well not exactly empty. There was the charred remains of the carpet, and strange pools of incinerated liquid, and miscellaneous car-type tools lying around, and the smell, sickening and strangely sweet, like a marinated beef rib left way too long on the grill, but the main event, the body, was gone. In its place was an outline drawn in chalk, an outline of a man on his side, a somewhat corpulent man, with his arms bound behind his body and his knees drawn tight to his chest.

  “The ambulance guys already took him to the morgue,” said McDeiss.

  “You’re a bastard,” I said, stepping away from the car.

  He opened his pad and started reading. “Male, mid-thirties, average height, mildly obese, hair dark brown, eyes indeterminate because they burst in the heat. His hands were tied behind him, his legs were bound together, a gag was stuffed in his mouth. There were no evident wounds, so he apparently burned to death, though the coroner will be more specific. His pants were pulled down and we found the remnants of legal tender deep inside his asshole, specifically a five, a ten, and two ones.” McDeiss closed his pad and looked at me. “That’s seventeen dollars, Carl, a paltry sum, denoting a notable lack of respect for the victim.”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You ever see this Porsche before?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s registered to an Edward Shaw. It was Mr. Shaw who was in the trunk. And the funny thing is, this Edward Shaw is the brother of Jacqueline Shaw, the woman whose death you were asking me about just a few weeks ago. So what I want to know, Carl, is what the hell is going on here?”

  I looked at McDeiss and then back at the burned wreck of a German luxury sports car. “It looks,” I said slowly, “like someone is killing Reddmans.”