Past Due

by William Lashner

  I flexed a finger and Skink slunk out of the courtroom.

  “It’s private enough,” I said.

  She looked back at the empty spot where Skink had been sitting. Now convinced, she opened her portfolio and rummaged around and came out with a stenographic pad, the pages of which she flipped through before finding what she needed.

  “Joseph Parma,” she said softly.

  I stared at her for a long moment. “He was a client.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  “Mr. Parma died ten days ago,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Murdered.”

  She stretched her mouth as if she had just knocked over a vase. “Sorry about that. Such a thing. Brutal, eh?”

  “Yes it was.”

  “They find out who did it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We might be able to help.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Maybe we should talk someplace more private, do you think?”

  “If you know anything about the murder, you should tell the police. Did you know Joey?”

  “Me, personally? No. Though I heard he was quite a quality fellow. But we were just kind of wondering if maybe you had any sort of conversation with Mr. Parma before he died?”

  “He was a client.”

  “Helloo. I know. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “I can’t tell you anything he told me. He was a client.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s, like, a rule.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s a stupid rule.”

  “Tell the Supreme Court.”

  “Why would I tell them?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Do you think that question is appropriate?”

  “I was just wondering?”

  “I’m twenty-one.”

  “And already a vice president.”

  “Doesn’t that totally rock? Isn’t that just the best?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Right now I have to be upstairs in another courtroom. Why don’t we meet next week in my office, we’ll talk about everything, Joey Parma, the company you work for, and your boss.”

  “I’m not allowed to talk about him, remember?”

  “Sorry, I must have forgotten. And you said you also had a case for me?”

  “Yes, Victor, we have a case we’d like you to handle.”

  “And it involves Mr. Parma?”

  “Indirectly.”

  “If I do elect to take the case, I’ll need a retainer.”

  “Orthodontia? Are we talking orthodontia here, Victor?”

  “Talk to your boss, he’ll know what I’m talking about. My office, Monday. Let’s say ten?”

  “Fine. I have the address written down here somewhere.”

  “See, I told you you didn’t need my card.”

  I walked with her down the aisle and held the courtroom door for her. She gave me a smile and shook my hand. Her skin was remarkably soft and there was an awkward moment, as if she thought we should air kiss or something. The firm and distant business handshake was not yet part of her repertoire, but the blinding smile certainly was. She grasped her portfolio to her chest like a high school girl before starting down the hallway.

  I was watching her leave as Phil Skink sidled up to me. “Who’s the twist?” he said.

  I handed him her card.

  “Nice-looking thing, no doubting that,” he said.

  As she continued down the hall one of her heels wobbled and she almost fell before catching herself. Without looking back she continued on.

  “She’s twenty-one,” I said, “and a vice president.”

  “They’re minting them vice presidents younger and younger these days, ain’t they.”

  “Seem to be.”

  “You ever been a vice president, Vic?”

  “Not even of the chess club in high school.”

  “So what’s our little miss vice president of?”

  “Follow her and find out.”

  “Ah, it’s like that, is it?” he said. “You owes me three-fifty for today.”

  “I know.”

  “And this’ll be more.”

  “I’m good for it.”

  “I hopes so, Vic. A man gots to eat.”

  I gave him a quick glance, up and down. “From what I can tell you’re doing fine. But as for the girl, don’t let her know what you’re up to. Find out what you can about her and her employer. I put her off a bit so you would have some time. Let me know before ten on Monday morning. She mentioned Joey Cheaps.”

  “The one what got his throat slit down by the river?”

  “Our vice president seems to think she knows why.”

  “Interesting. And if she does?”

  “I know an old woman who is sharpening her knives.”

  Chapter

  13

  “OSSOBUCO,” SAID DETECTIVE McDeiss, his rich voice rolling over the rounded syllables like a thick gravy. “I like the sound, the way it falls trippingly off the tongue. Ossobuco. The name, if you are interested in these things, which I am, is derived from a Tuscan rendering of the Milanese dialect. Osso for bone. Buco for the cavity within the bone holding the marrow. Ossobuco. Ossobuco. You can’t say it without smiling. Give it a try, Victor.”

  “Bone hole.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “Can we go over what you found now?”

  “What’s your rush?”

  “Don’t you have to get home? Isn’t your wife waiting on you?”

  “Not tonight. She has her book club meeting.”

  “What are they reading?”

  “The usual crap, father has an insidious disease, mother brings the family together for one final Christmas, heartwarming redemption for all. But they’ll be talking for hours, that’s the way it is with her ladies and their book club. They might even talk about the book. So you see, Victor, there is no reason to rush.” He leaned over, refilled my wineglass with dark red wine. “Sit back. Enjoy yourself. It’s not every day we sup in a place such as this.”

  McDeiss was right about that. We were in a large expense-account restaurant with a sharp wooden bar stocked with well-dressed business types and valet parking out front. I had checked all the restaurants with a Seventh Street address to find the place that McDeiss had not so subtly referred to, a place that served a killer ossobuco, and that place turned out to be the Saloon. Wooden walls, deep chairs, fresh linen tablecloths, a menu with prices that could blanch asparagus without the boiling water. It was McDeiss’s show and so I let him order, a Caesar salad for two, due ossobuchi, and a liter of Chianti.

  When the waiter brought the main course, McDeiss rubbed his thick hands together. Two large bowls with a circle of risotto and in the middle, sitting within a pond of rich wine reduction, the veal shank, a well-browned snap of bone surrounded by a thick wheel of meat.

  With his fork, McDeiss pulled a small section of meat off the bone, swirled it in sauce, brought it carefully to his mouth. His eyes widened and his head did a little dance as he swallowed. And then he looked at me and said, in a voice overcome with joy, “Ossobuco.”

  “Did you taste the lemon zest?” he asked, after our plates, empty of all but the bone and a smear of sauce, had been whisked away from the table.

  “Is that what it was?” I said, trying not to show how much I enjoyed the entrée. “I thought the wine had gone sour. Can we do this now?”

  “You’re so anxious,” he said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Why don’t we discuss it over coffee and dessert?”

  “You want dessert after all that?”

  “There is a mixed fruit tart I have my eye on.”

  “No wonder your knees shoot off fireworks when you kneel.”

  “Are you calling me fat?”

  “Let’s just say you have a physical presence.”

  “Damn right, I do. In my job that
’s an asset. Nothing like a big sweaty black man leaning over a suspect to get a tongue to start wagging.”

  “Can I get you gentlemen anything further? Coffee perhaps?”

  “Two coffees,” I said. “And the fruit tart my friend has his eye on.”

  “Very good.”

  “And perhaps an aperitif,” added McDeiss, “just to settle the stomach.”

  I thought about saying something, the price of the dinner was rising with every word and the bill would come barking like a rabid Chihuahua when my statement arrived at the end of the month. But then I figured if I was facing bankruptcy, and I surely was, I might as well enjoy the fall.

  “Make that two,” I said.

  “Very good.”

  “All right, Detective,” I said after the waiter left. “Let’s have it.”

  He leaned forward, his elbows heavy on the table. “The information you asked for wasn’t easy to get. The files from two decades past are in external storage. I had to send an intern to do the search, it took him three days.”

  “Okay, so the dinner’s paid for.”

  “Unidentified floaters approximately twenty years ago. The time frame was loose, so I gave us four years of leeway on either side, eight years total. We came up with four bodies. Of the four, one was female, one was a child—an unidentified child, is that lousy or what?—which leaves us two. One was a black man of approximately sixty years of age. I have a picture, but that doesn’t sound like who you’re looking for. The other was a white man approximately twenty to twenty-five years of age, hauled out of the Delaware, not far, as a matter of fact, from where we found Joseph Parma. No identification was on the floater’s person.”

  “Do you have a photograph?”

  “Yes, but you won’t like it. His face was missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Taken off, most likely by a boat propeller, and his teeth were smashed too.”

  “Good God.”

  “Fingerprints gave us nothing, and this was before DNA, so identification proved impossible.”

  “Do you have the file?”

  He reached beneath the table, opened his briefcase, took out a stack of files. He slid a thin manila folder across the table to me like he was dealing giant playing cards. “I anticipated your interest and made a copy for you. Don’t open it here, even a bad photocopy of the photographs could put a passerby off his appetite.”

  I pushed the file to the side of the table and left it there. “What about the missing persons?”

  “Same eight-year time period. Only unsolved missing persons with the name of Tommy or Thomas or Tom. You’d think that would be rare enough, but you’d be wrong. Seventeen. I brought them all. I think I have a few that might interest you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thomas McNally, small-time bookie and numbers runner, just by chance happened to grow up on the same block as Joey Parma. Left his mom one night, said he had a date. Mom was excited. Thomas McNally didn’t date much and I suppose this date wasn’t so successful. Never returned.”

  I took the file, gave it a quick glance. It didn’t feel right. Whoever the Tommy was whom Joey Cheaps had killed, he had certainly not been small time, not with that suitcase, not with that money. Besides, the initials were wrong, and if the kid had grown up on Joey’s block, Joey would have recognized him for sure. “Who else?”

  McDeiss tilted his head and closed one eye. “You don’t like that one?” He took out another file, opened it. “Tommy Barone, age fifty, very connected, a right-hand man to Scarfo when Little Nicky still ran things. A long record of violent offenses, did a stint in a federal prison. Left one night to meet the guys and play a little high-stakes poker. His regular game at some dusty storefront men’s club right up the street here called the Sons of Garibaldi. Barone was a good card player, supposed to have been lucky, but not that night. Never returned.”

  Some middle-aged mobster, not even close. “Who else?”

  McDeiss ran his tongue up and down the inside of his left cheek. It looked like a hamster was doing calisthenics in there. He leaned down and took out another file. “How about this. Tom Grand, seventeen, turned tricks on Twelfth and in Fairmount Park, at the bathrooms. He was reported missing by some of his fellow hustlers, who hadn’t seen him working the park for a while. A few weeks before, he told them he had a sugar daddy that was keeping him fat and then he disappeared. Never found.”

  That didn’t seem right either. The intials worked, T.G., and he might have been able to steal the money, who knows what goes on between a hustler and his sugar daddy, but what about the pictures of the naked woman? Tom Grand? Don’t think so. “Who else?”

  “Who else? Is that what you’re asking? Who else?”

  Just then the waiter came with our coffee cups, two little aperitif glasses, and a bottle of Courvoisier. While a busboy poured the coffee, the waiter filled our fancy little glasses with the golden brandy.

  McDeiss picked up his glass. “To Victor Carl, a son of a bitch who is holding out on me, as usual.”

  We both drank to that. Lovely.

  “If you give me more information,” he said after he put his glass down, “maybe we could move this parade along.”

  “Just give me a brief rundown of the rest.”

  “This isn’t right. You have information that might be of material interest to a current homicide investigation.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “You’re playing games with me, boy. I don’t like games.”

  “Oh, look, Detective McDeiss, they’ve brought your tart.”

  The waiter laid out a small tart covered with glistening slices of bright fruit.

  McDeiss picked up his fork as if to threaten me and then attacked the tart instead. The tension in his face eased as the fruit and the custard and the pastry mixed together in his mouth.

  “Well what exactly is it you’re looking for?” he said calmly after finishing. He took his glasses out of his pocket, put them on, peered at me over the frames for a moment, and then went quickly through the files. “Is it the baker, never showed up for his morning bake? Is it the family man with three children and a load of debt? Is it the truck driver on a haul from Maine to Florida? Is it the law student who slipped away from his failing grades? Is it the mysterious handyman who just showed up one day and then two months later was gone? Is it the podiatrist who broke into his—”

  “Where was the law student a law student?” I said.

  McDeiss stopped, gave me a careful look, went back through the files until he found what he was looking for. “University of Pennsylvania.”

  “What was his last name?”

  “Greeley,” said McDeiss.

  “That’s the one,” I said, my hand out for the file, which he ignored.

  “Tommy Greeley,” he said, reading now. “Twenty-four. A third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania. Reported missing by his mother in Massachusetts, a place called Brockton. Hadn’t been to school in weeks when the report was filed. Lived alone. No sign of him at his apartment. The girl that was supposed to have been his girlfriend, according to his mother, didn’t even know he was missing. School said he was failing out. It looked like life wasn’t working out for him and so he just up and ran away. It happens.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You want to see?”

  “Yes.”

  He took off his glasses, handed me the file. “You sure the guy you’re looking for isn’t that Tommy McNally? He seems a more likely candidate. I figured if Joey Parma was involved it had to be a lowlife that was missing. Not a law student, for God’s sakes.”

  “Are you implying, Detective,” I said as I examined the file, “that not all lawyers are lowlifes?”

  “There are a few I’ve met that seem decent enough. Mostly retired folk.”

  The file contained write-ups of the mother’s initial report and the cursory follow-ups done by a police detective. Once he found the girlfriend’s evident lack
of interest and the failing grades, the detective figured he had figured it out. No reason to listen to the harping of a distraught mother in a distant state when there were more pressing matters. Not much there, to be sure, but this was my boy, Tommy Greeley, I could feel it. The initials matched the ring, the Penn Law connection was clear, and there was a girlfriend—I leafed through the file—a Sylvia Steinberg. I made a mental note of the name. But how would a law student end up with a suitcase stuffed with money? How would a law student be so calm and cocky under the pressure of a midnight rough-up? There was something missing still, a second shoe that needed to drop.

  “So, Carl,” said McDeiss, “you think maybe this missing Greeley and the floater without the face are one and the same?”

  “They seem to match up,” I said.

  “Yes they do. And you’re interested because…”

  I raised my hand to catch the waiter’s attention. When he looked my way I pretended to scribble and he nodded.

  “You’re not going to tell me,” said McDeiss.

  “Can I keep this?” I said.

  McDeiss took off his glasses, looked at me for a moment, and then shrugged. “A twenty-year-old missing persons file? Knock yourself out.”

  As I continued looking through the file I said, “You get anywhere on Joey yet?”

  “We’re getting somewhere.”

  “You should know I now represent Joey’s mother and am investigating a possible wrongful death claim against his killer. Anything you can tell me about the status of your investigation would be most welcome.”

  “I knew you chased ambulances, Victor. I didn’t know you chased coroner’s vans too.”

  “I find my business where I can and sometimes where I can is at the morgue. Funny how that sort of puts us in the same boat. Any leads?”

  “Some.”

  “Fibers on the body?”

  “Gray polyester from the interior of a car.”

  “Make?”

  “Late-model Toyota.”

  “That narrows it down like not at all. Have you gotten around to tracing the phone call he got at Jimmy T’s before he stepped out for his meet?”

  McDeiss’s eyes bulged and his cheeks swelled and he looked for a moment like he swallowed his tongue.