I Detest All My Sins

by Lanny Larcinese

  “Give me seventy-two hours. I’ll put out an all-points-bulletin to shot-callers in every yard in the Keystone State. Somebody will know how to find this Eddie. And we’ll find that Ginger too. Anything else?”

  “One more thing. During discovery on your food case, did the name William Conlon ever come up?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you take the deposition of ServMark’s CEO Gary Bigelow?”

  “We got it already.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Can’t tell you,” Dupree said.

  “How about his driver, Willie?”

  “Should I?”

  “He did time with Eddie Matthews.”

  “Strange coincidence,” Dupree said.

  “The wild west, it’s a small world, isn’t it?” Lanza said. He thanked Dupree and let himself out of the office to descend the long, dark staircase. He was unsure if he gave Dupree Williams anything Dupree didn’t already know. He couldn’t trust that Dupree would help to identify Ginger or find Eddie. When all is said and done, Lanza thought, we’re on our own.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Bill said little, other than things like, “Would you like Chinese tonight?”

  He allowed for as much solitude as possible and took it as hopeful that Louise didn’t ask him to leave. Nor did he try to coax her to talk, or do anything really, and though he knew time would help, he had no idea how much she would need in order to recapture enough of her old self to resume her place in the world. It wasn’t until her sixth day at home that he glimpsed a flicker of life when her icy, almost-catatonic demeanor cracked and gave way to a faint smile at the sight of two cardinals gamboling in the climbing ivy outside her kitchen window.

  When Detective Lanza showed up at the door and in so many words demanded to see her in spite of Bill’s reassurances that she was home, he had to retrieve her from her bedroom.

  “There’s a detective downstairs, the one who investigated when Peter Jambalaya’s friend got killed. I had reported you missing. He wants to see you.”

  She didn’t say much to the detective, but put on a pleasant face, as if she knew the cop might be trouble.

  “Bill and I had a terrible fight and I went to stay with my sister in Detroit. I was angry. I didn’t want to talk to him. I’m sorry if I caused any trouble.”

  She needed a full day to rest after putting on the act, and Bill didn’t think that Lanza bought it.

  Other than run errands and tending to her needs as best he could, Bill’s solitude in the top-floor bedroom also turned him inward. It was impossible to witness her damage day after day and not consider his role in it. His mind was a split-screen with an abject Bill Conlon lying face down in stockyard glop on one side, and a sneering, puss-encrusted Eddie Matthews on the other. The Bill side felt like the weight of a truck snapping his spine. The Eddie side, like dynamite with a fuse burnt low.

  He picked up his missal in hopes of finding a passage out of his conflict and misery, but it had become as useless as a white cane in a room with no walls. Instead, he lay on the bed with his interlocked fingers shielding his eyes as if trying to hide from himself. His only relief was thinking about Louise’s recovery. It was the only way he could sleep and the only modicum of peace he could find.

  When he awoke from a fitful night of the ninth day after he brought her home, he thought to make her blueberry pancakes—her favorite pre-derby meal when she skated for the Quaker City Queens. He wanted her to remember that Louise Bearden, the five-foot three spitfire to whom other ponytails were levers to send the competition crashing to the floor and fracture a clavicle or two.

  As he passed her bedroom on the second floor and saw she wasn’t in it, he hoped she was in the kitchen, looking out the window for birds splashing in the birdbath he had brought home, tiled with little pieces of mirror and boldly colored cobalt, amaranth and yellow tesserae. But she wasn’t there either.

  He opened the back door to the small yard. Not there. He opened the front door expecting she may be sitting on the house’s little porch, finally able to let in a bit of world. But no Louise. Did she go for a walk? He looked down Day Street toward Thompson to where the car was parked, but it was gone.

  He ran back into the house. He yanked open the top desk drawer. His .357 revolver and Jagdkommando knife were missing.

  Eddie tucked the ServMark file folder under his arm as he knocked on the manager’s door while digging for the keys to his shabby room. He had retrieved the extra copies of the bid documents and closed out his safety deposit box. If he got cash from Luca, he wasn’t optimistic, or because Louise knew where he lived and other reasons, it was time to move on. It had already been days since he let her go, but he was confident of his total dominion over her. After all, she really dug him. He feared her less than being discovered by Luca’s gang. She’d never go to the cops, especially with his name tattooed above her tits.

  “Anybody come around?” he asked the manager. He had been checking daily since the fiasco at Suburban Station.

  “Yeah,” the manager said. “Some woman who said she was your friend. Said she left her purse behind. It was okay, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Eddie said, but was too preoccupied to recall whether Louise left a wayward purse.

  But that sealed it. After he made the call to Luca, he would search out another room, get away from South Philly altogether.

  He let himself in his room and stood over the table, studying the remaining copies of the Lysco and other bids ServMark had used to rig their own. The ServMark file folder with the handwritten note from its Marketing V.P. strengthened his case. He thought of the grist Arneson at the Daily News could make of it.

  His mind was half way between self-satisfaction for having engineered the whole thing, starting with Mikey Osborne, and anxiety that he was failing to monetize it, when a sudden excruciating pain in his right hamstring caused his leg to collapse and sent him crashing to the floor. As he fell onto his back and yelled in pain, Louise’s face suddenly loomed over him with the barrel of a revolver pressed hard against his forehead.

  With her other hand, she reached under his leg and pulled out the dagger with his blood running down its tri-edged blade and dripping from its pointed tip.

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” she hissed.

  He gripped his hands around his wounded leg and said, “What…what…”

  She slapped him with the revolver and reached for the roll of black electrician tape she brought.

  “What…what…”

  She hit him in the forehead with the butt of the gun. He wasn’t knocked unconscious but couldn’t put words together. All he could do was moan and clutch at his leg.

  She unspooled eight inches of tape and taped his mouth. His moans became muffled noises exiting his nose. She hit him once more, rolled him over, and taped his hands behind his back. She rolled him over again and retrieved the knife. He watched in horror as she wiped the blade on his pants and studied it under the lamp. She knelt on one knee and bent over him. As her loose jersey fell away from her chest, he saw his name tattooed in blue ink, but his eyes followed the blade as she poised it above his left quad. Starting at his knee, she lightly drew its point across his pants as if it was a quill, her voice repeating each letter as she lightly stenciled, L-O-U-I-S-E.

  “Louise!” she screamed and plunged the knife deep into his thigh.

  He reflexively drew his legs up and kicked as if treading water, with only screams transmitted through bones of his skull available to express the excruciating pain.

  He dimly saw her walk to the nightstand, grab the pint of whiskey, then go to the sink and rinse out a glass. She poured two inches into the tumbler and sat at the chair next to the desk and watched and sipped as he squirmed and moaned.

  He wasn’t used to being this helpless and had no memory of enduring so much pain—even as a ten-year-old boy when his father had pulled both his arms out of their sockets when Eddie attempted to defend his mother against one
of the old man’s beatings.

  He watched Louise open the door to the padded closet where he had so gleefully imprisoned her. By now his vision was strobe-like as his eyelids fluttered. She turned him around and dragged him into the closet, shoulders and head first. Before he lost consciousness, he saw her go back for the knife and pull the revolver from the waistband of her jeans. She yanked the string to the closet’s hundred-watt bulb that she had once used for light and heat, its penetrating beam the last thing Eddie would ever see.

  Bill thought of Louise as a lightning rod to his life. All the electric storms surrounding it passed harmlessly to the ground through her. But when she disappeared for the second time, he wondered what there was about him that attracted so much trouble.

  His worst fear was that she went back with Eddie. By now so drawn to her former captor, healthy or not, she couldn’t live without him. He didn’t know how to cope with the thought that when he killed Eddie, it would cause her deep pain. It was too much to bear, and for the first time since Mikey Osborne took a shiv to the throat, the thought of killing Eddie became untenable. Maybe the better path was to sacrifice his own redemption for Louise’s well-being.

  As he sat in the dark sipping a scotch and tabulating the moral balance sheet of his life, he heard a shuffling at the front door. He cocked an ear, his spirits rising to think it might be her, but in the same moment falling, afraid it might be police with news that they found her body, another suicide because of him.

  Before he got to the door, Louise came crashing through, startling the both of them as she pulled up nose to nose with him.

  “This,” she said, and held up a baggie in front of his face.

  He took it from her and walked to the lamp to inspect its contents. They appeared at first to be a piece of bloody sausage and large capers. As he studied it under the light, a chill ran up and down his limbs as it became clear what the bag contained: it was a penis and testicles.

  “Jesus Christ, Louise, what is this?”

  “Eddie,” she said.

  “Did you…did you…did you…?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Jesus! How? When?”

  “Earlier,” she said, “with these.” She took the revolver and knife out of her pocket.

  “Oh my God! Did anybody see or hear you?”

  “I doubt it. I knocked him out first then put a pillow over his face and shot into it.”

  “They’re going to know it was you!”

  “I don’t think so. I told the manager I needed to get my purse. He didn’t know who I was. He never saw me before. I wore the hooded jacket and a wig and sunglasses. I returned the keys back through his mail slot and tossed the fake stuff.

  She was calm, but by now his hands began to shake. “Here,” he said, “take some of this.” He handed her the open bottle of scotch.

  “I don’t need it, but looks like you do.”

  “We have to plan. We better get rid of this,” he said, pointing to the bag with Eddie’s body parts.

  “Go ahead. I wanted you to see them. I wanted you to know I put an end to it. I wanted you to know this fucking tattoo doesn’t mean anything.”

  He picked up the baggie with his fingertips. She followed him into the kitchen. He ran the cold water in the sink, turned on the garbage disposal, and poured the bag’s contents down the spitting hole, the disposal’s hum dropping in pitch as it ground down Deadly Eddie’s reproductive organs. He let the water and disposal run long after the material was minced and drained into the public sewer system, then run more as he tossed in a pound of hamburger chased by a gallon of bleach.

  He turned to look at her watching him work. She was leaning against the doorway with arms folded, and for the first time in a long time, life in her eyes.

  “They’re going to come after you,” Bill said. “I’ll cover for you. I’ll say we were together all day. I’ll get rid of the knife and the gun. Did you leave any clues? Did anyone see you leave after you…after you…”

  “Not that I know of. I wiped the place down real good. If they find any trace of me, I’ll say he was a customer at Dirty Frank’s and I dated him once. I left the back way, through the alley. If they catch me, I’ll do my time. It was something I had to do.”

  “Don’t talk that way! If you hadn’t done it, I would have. The only time I want you to do is together, with me.

  He put his arms around her, pulled her to him, pressed her head tight against his shoulder, and said, “The sonofabitch had it coming.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  Driving up Walnut through the slums of West Philadelphia brought Lanza memories of bodies bleeding in the street and everything that went with it; hysterical mothers and widows collapsing behind crime scene tape, mind-numbing follow-up of investigation and paperwork, biting his tongue and clenching his fists at all the prevaricators and clowns and bad actors. On many of the corners of the same ’hood that now whizzed by on his way to meet Paulie Spano in Upper Darby.

  Most cases got solved. Somebody knew somebody who knew something and sooner or later, some somebodies were coaxed into talking. Almost always, killing was about something stupid, like a fifteen-dollar unpaid debt or wearing a nice jacket with a fur collar or the most common motive of all in a community unsure if its standing, disrespect.

  By now, Sam was above the mere doing of his assigned job, and the prospect of landing a pair of prize marlins like Luca Cunnio and Gary Bigelow instead of the catfish swimming the sewers of his usual beat would show the Philadelphia Police Department that Sam Lanza was no fucking clod sticking gloved fingers into bullet holes.

  As he hit West Chester Pike he had the final part of the scheme planned out, courtesy of the surprise phone call from the late Angie Graziani’s fellow goofball, Paulie Spano.

  The Llanerch Diner was the designated rendezvous. When he got there, Sam, who had a cop’s memory for faces, hardly recognized him. Paulie must have begun growing his beard and full mustache as soon as Angie got ventilated in the phone booth in South Philly.

  “You sure you’re Paulie?” Sam said. “I can’t even see your mouth through that thick mustache.”

  Paulie wanted to come in from the cold. He had walked away from his rented house on Porter Street with nothing but a suitcase the very hour word got out that Angie caught it.

  “Yeah, but I wish I wasn’t. I’m hoping you could put me in witness protection. There’s no place around here I can stay alive for long. I might have a chance in a place like Iowa Falls.”

  “That costs a lot of money. What do you have to sell?”

  “What do you need?” Paulie asked. “Or maybe I should say who do you need?”

  “Luca Cunnio and Gary Bigelow from ServMark Corp. By the way, who shot the twink?”

  “Angie did,” Paulie said.

  Naturally he would say that, but by now the twink or Thunder Woman or Jericho Lewis’s girlfriend was yesterday’s news compared to a big deal like a mob-infested, state-wide food bribery thing.

  “You don’t think that fingering the twink’s killer is enough to get you into witness protection, do you? Besides, some of the witnesses say it was you.”

  “What do you think?” Paulie asked.

  “It was you. I could take you in right now with what I have. But I won’t.”

  “It would be a death sentence, even in jail,” Paulie said.

  “Exactly. That’s a good place to begin. You owe me your life.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “How good is your memory?” Lanza asked.

  Paulie arched his eyebrows. “As good as it needs to be.”

  Sam laid out his case, the kind of testimony he would need for conspiracy, bribery, bid-rigging, extortion and crimes enough to send Luca and Bigelow up the river until the Rapture. He didn’t tell Paulie what to say, he only outlined the legal elements of each crime. He knew Paulie would find a way to make their truths his own.

  “We’ll meet again,” he said to Paulie. “I want t
o keep going over this stuff, then put it on tape.”

  Lanza didn’t have jurisdiction, but Paulie’s information buried in the file under the guise of a homicide investigation would sooner or later get noticed.

  “You’ll be turned over to the task force. They’ll grill you more than a forty-ounce well-done T-bone, and you better hold up. It’s the only way you’ll get witness protection.”

  “Fine, and all I have to do is stay alive in the meantime.”

  “That’s on you, Paulie. I’m no guardian angel.”

  Lanza’s name came up on the Homicide assignment wheel when they got the call about a dead body in an apartment house at Broad and Snyder. The last thing he wanted was another case. The Luca thing was taking so much time. This would put him further behind on his unsolved cases and bound to draw more criticism.

  The blue uniforms were knocking on apartment doors when he got there. He took shallow breaths as he ascended the stairs to the dead man’s apartment. He never got used to the unique revulsion of corpse-stink. On the way, he overheard snatches of tenant buzz. Usual stuff, nobody heard much, saw much, or knew much. This was South Philly. They could never be sure it wasn’t a mob hit. The prudent thing was to act stupid.

  As soon as he walked into the dead man’s apartment, he saw the body on its back with its upper half in a closet and head in a pool of caked blood and brains. It had been dragged across the room and placed there. He guessed from the maggots that death had occurred about four days ago.

  The closet was weird, with handcuffs and ropes dangling from a bar and decorated better than the rest of the apartment. Sam surmised some kind of sadomasochistic triangle gone wrong. This should be an easy case.

  But when he knelt down and looked closely at what had been a face and recognized Eddie Matthews, he concluded karma visited Deadly Eddie with a really bad attitude. The pillow with blood and brains on one side and burn marks and stippling on the other lay next to Eddie’s head, and had obviously been used to muffle the single gunshot to his face. His legs were a mess too, with blood caked on one thigh and pooled under the other. The thigh looked like a knife wound. This was a mob hit, and looked like torture was part of the fun. Maybe Eddie tried to stiff Luca or one of his minions.