“Hey, I’m takin’ my pops to the Flyers’ game here!” I said, trying to regain a bit of Philly speak.
He found me a tan, goose down waist-length with cloth elastic cuffs. I thanked him very much.
“Yo, I thought you was just offen’ your yacht or somethin’,” he said, looking without shame at my shoes.
I got a pair of lace-up work boots on Tasker and then drove through the neighborhood.
The streets seemed too narrow, the stoplights too frequent. People on the sidewalks had their heads down in the sleet, not that I would recognize anyone. On Tenth I got caught behind some joker double-parked but I just sat there five doors down from the house I grew up in the next block past Snyder. I waited, looking at the old stoops and the front window of the house where a kid I knew named Fran Leary used to live. It was still ringed in Christmas lights. A young guy wearing the same leather coat I’d just turned down came out of a doorway and waved at me before he got in to the double- parked car and pulled away.
I moved up until I could see the cut-stone steps and the wrought iron rail that led up to the house I grew up in. The second-floor window that looked out on the street was to my room, where I had spent nights reading books and fantasizing about Annette the cheerleader and listening to the Allman Brothers Band on a tinny old record player. It was also the place where I cowered and tried to ignore the sound of my father’s heavy, drunken steps and the sharp snap of a backhand and the muffled protests of my mother. I was one hundred feet away but did not want to see my front door and feel the ugly memories that I’d closed behind it. I had seen both of my parents die in that house. My father, a broken and shamed former cop, fell to a slow and deserved poisoning. My mother, who came home from the hospital to die, convinced that God had filled the hole left by her treachery with cancer.
I turned east instead and then up Fifth and past South Street to the Gaskill House, a bed and breakfast where I’d reserved a room. The place was a redone coach house built in 1828 just a block from Headhouse Square. The manager of the Gaskill had befriended me when I was walking a beat there by showing up with hot coffee at eleven o’clock each night at the corner of Third. His name was Guy and now, years later, he met me at the door with a handshake and what may have been the same huge ceramic-and-steel coffee cup.
He was envious of my winter tan and Florida address. I was, as always, envious of his collections of antiques and the stone and wood eat-in kitchen down on the basement level of the house.
“Your friend Mr. Manchester called and faxed three pages for you, Max,” Guy said. “I put them in an envelope on your bed upstairs. We got a cancellation so I’ve given you the blue room at the top.
“Remember, breakfast eight to ten,” he said as I climbed the stairs.
The room was done in Colonial-era furniture, poster bed, writing table, a small fireplace on the west wall. The thick comforter and window treatments were blue and muted yellows and dark burgundy, colors you rarely saw in Florida. I pulled out some paperwork and sat at the desk and called Colin O’Shea’s ex-wife. I’d put off contacting her until I got here, not wanting to give her an easy excuse to dismiss me. She was now listed as Janice Mott. It was past five when I called and introduced myself as a private investigator from Florida, which at least keeps people on the line if only for the sake of curiosity.
“I was a Philadelphia officer with your ex-husband, Colin. We actually grew up close to each other in South Philly,” I said, a dose of familiarity.
“If Colin has debts, Mr. Freeman, I have no idea where he is. I haven’t seen him in years,” she said.
I could hear kids in the background. I thought I was going to lose her.
“No, ma’am. I know where he is. I just saw him two days ago,” I said quickly, taking a chance, a gamble, that she would care.
She lowered her voice.
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“No, Mrs. Mott. He’s all right. He kind of got jammed up down in Florida and I’m, uh, trying to find out more about his, uh, domestic background.”
Once again, I knew I’d used the wrong wording.
“He never hit me, Mr. Freeman,” she said, the words now almost a whisper.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mott, he…”
“Colin never physically abused me when we were married,” she said.
The statement held both a sense of strength and apology.
“I know they called it domestic abuse, but it wasn’t physical.” She hesitated. “It was a way out.”
A way out, I thought. She’d already left him by the time O’Shea got caught up in the disappearance of Faith Hamlin.
“I, uh, really don’t know anything about the details of your past relationship, Mrs. Mott,” I said. “But honestly, that is the area I’m trying to explore,” I said.
“To help him or hurt him, Mr. Freeman?”
She was smart and blunt. And she would see right through any bullshit answer I might toss her.
“Honestly, I don’t know, Mrs. Mott,” I said, and waited.
“Colin does have that effect, doesn’t he?” she said.
“Confusion,” she answered her own question. “It’s his stock-in-trade.”
She agreed to meet with me, in a public place. Her son had an ice hockey game at three the next day. Meet her there, with identification, and we could talk. No promises.
I pulled around to the back of McLaughlin’s at eight. It was already dark and I had missed the transition from daylight. There was no fade of color, no blue to disappear, no rose-tinged cloud of sunset. The gray had simply turned a deeper gray and then been overtaken by the dusty glow of city light. The sleet had turned to light snow and up in the high streetlights it drifted down and swirled in whatever wind current caught it off the buildings. It turned to slush on contact with the concrete and car tires slashed through it on the street. I was hatless and shivered and then heard the music in McLaughlin’s buzz against the window and went inside.
The place was full and conversation was battling with an Irish melody on the speakers, neither winning. For someone used to the natural humidity of the subtropics, the hot, dry air was enough to make you want to drink just to dehydrate. It was a cop bar, dominated by clean-shaven faces, working men’s clothing, the pre-game show to the 76ers game, an appropriate locker room level of loud voices and the guffaws of a joke badly told. The few women present were older wives and the young ones’ impressionable girlfriends.
I spotted my uncle at a table in the back. He was flanked by a couple of cronies his own age. As I worked my way back I saw his eyes pick me up halfway and make a decision before the smile started. He was out of his chair, rattling the pitcher and glasses on the table with his girth before I reached him.
“Christ in heaven, Maxey boy,” he said, embracing me with his stovepipe arms and wrapping me in the smell of cigar smoke and Old Spice aftershave.
“You are as skinny as a fuckin’ sapling, boy,” he said, standing back at arm’s length. “And dark as a goddamn field hand.” A few heads turned, but not for more than a look. My uncle was an old- timer. Gray-haired and thirty years with the department, his language and his political incorrectness was grandfathered in. He introduced me to his friends, both with over twenty years themselves, and we sat. There was a pitcher of beer on the table with a frozen bag of ice floating in it. An open flask of what I knew was Uncle Keith’s special blend of Scotch stood as its companion. He poured shots all around and raised his own for a toast.
“To the wayward son, what took the money and run,” he announced with a wink.
“Aye,” said the others, and we drank.
For the next three hours we drank and they told old stories. Carefully and with loyalty to my uncle no mention was made of my father, the legendary one whose death would always remain a secret of the brotherhood of the blue. We drank and I described only the beauties of Florida, and their eyes went glassy with reverence of a dream of golf and sun. We drank and my uncle exhorted me to show the bullet
wound scar in my neck and they toasted Mother Mary for bad aim and mercy. We drank and they bitched about pensions and union stewards and the job in general and when I found an opening and asked Keith about an IAD contact they stopped drinking.
“We got a guy there, I called and gave him a heads-up, Maxey,” my uncle said. “His name is Fried. He got attached over there a few years back after blowing out his hip in a pileup with a fire truck responding. He was with the detective squad up in East Kensington. He’ll give you what he can.”
I nodded my head and watched the others doing the same, avoiding my eyes. I could feel the vacuum at the table.
“IAD and lawyers, Max,” he said, echoing his words on the phone from Florida. “Can I ask what it is you’re into, son?”
We leaned our heads in together and the others tried unsuccessfully to pay no attention.
“I’m actually checking in on a former cop, a guy from my rookie class, Colin O’Shea, from the neighborhood,” I said. “Any recollection?”
Since I was a pissant kid I’d known my uncle’s brilliance for names and descriptions. He was the human equivalent to getting Googled. When he hesitated I knew it wasn’t because he was stumped. He was considering his answer as he looked around the table and caught the glances of his crew.
“That would be the O’Shea of the Faith Hamlin situation?” he said, now watching my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “I did some research.”
Now he and the rest were looking down into their drinks, uncle Keith shaking his big head.
“Not a good time for the department or the district, Maxey,” he said.
“Tell me.”
He brought his eyes up and started in, his voice low but his mouth stiffening with the distaste of the telling.
“Had to be four years ago, after you left, word goes out on a missing persons’ report out of the district. A woman, middle twenties, ya know, kind that elopes to Atlantic City or something. At first nobody pays much mind.”
He stopped to sip his special blend. The other guys are straight- faced, like a poker game, but when they follow my uncle’s lead, you know they’re all listening and agreeing.
“But this girl, people know. She was a kid from the neighborhood who was kind of an outcast. Connellys down on Tasker had taken her in from a relation when she was young ’cause they couldn’t handle her. She was, you know, not really retarded, but slow. Kids her age avoided her. But she did know how to, you know, ingratiate herself on people, trying to get them to, uh, accept her I guess.”
“An’ not bad-lookin’, neither,” said one of the crew, a veteran who’d been introduced as Sergeant Doug Haas.
“Not that I was going to add that detail,” Uncle Keith said, narrowing his eyes at Haas.
“What?” his friend said. “I’m lying?”
Keith turned away.
“The family understood this, her physical attributes, and tried to keep her in someplace low profile,” he continued. “They got her a counter job, working the register at this little corner store on Fifth Street near Sinai Med Center. She did the overnight, selling coffee and smokes to ambulance drivers and such who worked late.”
“And cops on the beat,” I said.
“Yeah,” Keith said, and the heads went down and shook together.
“So somebody gets the word when she goes missing and tongues are waggin’ because these cops on the Charlie shift are always in the place and they aren’t offering up much in the way of information, like on the last time they seen her and such, being that she just disappeared off the face of the earth in the middle of her shift and nobody sees anything.”
He took another sip, getting to it more slowly than Uncle Keith was used to getting to it.
“The rumor ain’t rumor for long. Word gets around that these four cops were passing her around, each getting a piece of it back in the storage room while each partner was watching the front.”
“They said she liked to pay them back for protecting her,” Sergeant Haas broke in again.
This time my uncle just shook his head in agreement.
“And Colin O’Shea was a part of this?” I said.
“He was one of them,” Keith said. “And once IAD got onto the case, he was the only one who didn’t come out and finally own up to what they’d done.”
“They cracked them?”
“Like fuckin’ walnuts, Maxey. All of them were suspended and eventually fired for what they did to the girl even though she wasn’t underage and she wasn’t around to dispute that it was consensual. But to a man, they all said they didn’t know where she’d gone or what happened to her.”
“All except O’Shea,” I said.
“He never admitted any part of it and was never seen in the city again.”
“Christ, IAD must have done some knuckle pounding,” I said. “Was this guy Fried the lead on the case?”
The table again went dead still. No one would look up from their whiskey. No sipping, no head shaking.
“And what else, Uncle Keith?” I finally said.
“Well, Maxey. You got somebody else over in that office that you have some recollection of from the past,” he said, looking up through those damn bushy eyebrows that had scared me as a kid. I waited him out. “Meagan Montgomery is her name now.”
“Meagan?” I said. “As in my ex-wife, Meagan?”
He nodded and said: “Yes. She would be the lieutenant for the unit now, after she caught the Faith Hamlin case and sent five cops down the slide.”
I let the vision of my wife of two years sit in my head, as it had too many times on the plane trip back here. The one memory I thought I could escape was dead in the middle of my investigation.
“Well,” I finally said. “I’ll bet she can cut some balls off over there, eh?”
The old men in the crew sighed their relief, and then a bit boisterously I lifted a toast to women lieutenants and we drank, yet again.
At the end of the night I promised Keith I would stop by the house to see my aunt and shook hands all around. My head was swimming with the booze and music and smoke and faces. Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had dropped. The air felt like a slap. When I tried to breathe deeply through my nose to sober myself I caught that old familiar feeling of the air crystallizing in my nose and my eyes started watering. February in the Northeast, I thought and pushed my hands into the pockets of my new coat. I took a cab back to the Gaskill. Last thing I needed was a DUI. I’d get the rental in the morning on my way to the police roundhouse and my appointment with the IAD contact. As I sat in the back of the cab I tried not to think of Meagan Montgomery and the possibilities.
I woke at nine in the big four-poster bed of the blue room and panicked in fear. I had no idea where I was. The thick comforter around me, dark maple wardrobe, a fireplace on the opposite wall. Gaskill. Philadelphia, Scotch whiskey. In seconds it tumbled into focus but I was still unsettled that it had taken longer to right myself than it should have. When I stood I felt uncomfortably old.
Thirty minutes later I was downstairs in the kitchen drinking coffee, eating one Guy’s fabulous omelets and scanning the first few pages of the Philadelphia Daily News. Guy was devilishly accounting his own story of booking the entire house to a contingent in town for the Republican National Convention a few years earlier and their slow realization after they arrived that his was a gay- owned and -managed establishment.
“Of course when they left the next day I charged them for the full four days and they paid without a peep.”
I got a cab to my rental and it took fifteen teeth-chattering minutes to get the heater up to speed. I was at the roundhouse near Franklin Square at eleven for an eleven-fifteen with Detective Fried and I parked in the visitors’ lot.
On the third floor there were few uniforms. Shirts and ties. Suit jackets. Secretaries and doors with brass nameplates. Pure administration. I’d worn my collared shirt. Guy had read the extra-close shave and hint of cologne and had lent me an expensi
ve sweater. The cuffs of my pleated chinos came down far enough to disguise the black work boots that still had a manufacturer’s shine.
I checked in with the IAD assistant and waited uncomfortably in an anteroom for Fried. There was a large corner office that I knew would belong to the lieutenant. The door was shut. I didn’t have to make out the name on the brass plate. I paced, fidgeting, and realized I was surreptitiously looking for a flash of blonde hair.
“Mr. Freeman?”
I turned on the male voice, wishing it quieter, questioning why I hadn’t set this up as an outside meeting.
“Rick Fried,” the man said, shaking my hand in a strong grip. “Good to meet you. Come on in.”
I followed the back of Fried’s suit into a small office and since he hadn’t closed the door, I did. He slipped his coat off and hung it on the back of his chair before sitting.
“Your uncle speaks very highly of you, Mr. Freeman. And when Sergeant Keith speaks, the smart ones around here listen.”
“He’s a good man,” I said.
“One of the best,” Fried answered, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling back his sleeves, just us working guys here. It was probably a technique for IAD interviews. He was younger than my uncle, older by ten years than me, at least that’s what I was telling myself.
“He tells me you’re a P.I. in Florida now.”
I nodded.
“Nice tan.”
I nodded again.
“OK. The sarge says you’re working something on our former Mr. Colin O’Shea and I gather it’s gotta be on the defense side, Mr. Freeman, ’cause I see that someone from the, uh, Broward sheriff’s office has already made some inquiries on Mr. O’Shea.”
“You handle them?” I said.
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