by David Archer
“Shut up, you’re the fool,” Mike said. “I heard this from an adult. If you dig a hole and keep on digging, you’ll get to China.”
“Okay, you got a shovel. Prove it.” The two boys had wanted to dig up some worms for fishing in a nearby creek, but, what were a few fish, when, with a little more digging, they could get a trip to China out of the deal. They looked around at the ground near Mike’s home in the Pine Barrens and spotted a patch where the soil did not seem to be quite so hard.”
“China, here we come,” Mike enthused as he began shoveling.”
“Fat chance,” Donnie continued to jeer.
China turned out to be a little ways off yet, but the boys did find something even more startling. Police would later identify the body as belonging to one Michael G. Firenze.
Chapter 10
If she’s bad, he can’t see it,
She can do no wrong.
Turn his back on his best friend
If he put her down.
—Percy Sledge
“So how was dinner with the couple from Hell?” Arlene asked when Frank and Sadie returned to relieve her of her babysitting duties.
“It was very nice, thank you,” Sadie told her sister. “Don’t look so surprised.”
“That Evelyn is really quite a painter,” Frank said. “She even had a copy of that one that got stolen the other day.”
“Oh really,” Arlene said. “And how do you know it’s not the stolen painting itself?”
“Hardly,” Frank replied. “Both she and Ernie admitted it wasn’t a very good copy. In fact, if you ask me, she was a little ashamed of it.”
“Funny about that,” Sadie observed. “She had other copies of famous paintings, like the Parliament on fire—remember that one from the Art Museum? They were all right on the money, as far as I could tell, not that I’m some famous art critic.”
“Yeah, I guess that is a little odd,” Frank agreed, then moved the thought to the farthest recesses of his mind as Her Royal Majesty, Juliet Camilla Mueller, awoke from her nap with a squall that could probably be heard clear out to the elevators.
“Uh-oh, somebody’s wet, I bet,” Sadie observed.
“Don’t look at me, I’m dry as a bone.” Frank said as he put up his hands in a defensive gesture.
“Jonathan, my dear, can you hold off on that next drink for a moment?” Debbie Sanderson asked her husband. “I think we need to have a serious talk, and the less drunk we are, the more likely we are to remember what we said.”
“I don’t think I like where this is going,” he grumbled.
“Oh, it may not be as bad as you think. Let’s face the fact: we shouldn’t be married anymore. There, I said it. I think you know that as well as I.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stick with a sham marriage? You know, we see whoever we want on the sly and maintain the façade. Could be less expensive and less stressful in the long run.”
“Yeah, about the expense and the stress, I think I’ve worked out a reasonable solution. If we can agree, here and now, we can cut your brother vultures out of the deal. Please, hear me out,” she added as she raised a finger when she saw Jonathan open his mouth. “You get to keep the house and the winter retreat in Hilton Head, okay? You keep your two cars and I keep my one. All I ask is that you buy me a nice townhouse in Georgetown, give me a reasonable monthly allowance and remember me in your will—details to follow” Jonathan was all smiles now. This was sounding exactly like the pre-nup he had so stupidly failed to get all those years ago. “Oh, right, I almost forgot the most important thing: you buy me that painting.”
“What, that ‘Sailor’s Delight?’ What makes you think I have it to give you?”
“You don’t, Dearest, but, you see, I succeeded where you failed. I have a seller who is willing to let it go.”
“Yeah, but for what price? I offered that old bat two million quite a while ago and she promptly wished me a speedy trip to Hell.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” she chided him. “You’re jumping to conclusions. There’s a new bat in town—not so old, by the way—who’ll let us have it for a million five. Think you can swing that?”
“Absolutely. Consider it done. Now, let’s talk about that other stuff…”
“Let me ask you, before we actually do the deal,” the seller said to Debbie. “Just what do you plan to do with the piece once you have it? Once word gets out it’s been stolen, you won’t be able to sell it or even show it without taking a considerable risk.”
“I just want it for myself, that’s all,” Debbie replied. “When I was little, my mom was too poor even to buy me a rag doll. As soon as I came into money, I went to F.A.O. Schwartz and bought a Raggedy-Ann doll, just like they had in their display window all those years ago. I still have the doll today. She’s been my favorite keepsake ever since. Now, just like the painting, I could get nothing if I tried to sell her, even at a yard sale, but why would I ever want to? It’s the same with the painting. It’s enough for me just to have it. Maybe when I’m dying, I’ll give it back anonymously. You know, leave it in a big basket outside the Art Museum door one dark night. I have no children to leave it to, so why not? Just let me have a few years of the comfort it will bring me. That’s all I want.”
“I hate to sound like I’m beating a dead horse,” Arlene told her brother-in-law in a private moment at the next Sunday brunch, “but I can’t let go of the notion that Ernie’s wife was involved with the theft.”
“What, you mean the painting?”
“Yeah, that one. Stop and think a minute, Frank. Okay, somebody managed to make off with the original, but there had to be a very good copy to put in its place, that no one would discover until the trail had gone cold. Where’d the copy come from, Frank?”
“Not from Evelyn, I’d say. Keep in mind, I saw the copy she made. I even checked the painting out in an art book later. Hers is way off the mark.”
“The one you saw was way off the mark, and maybe on purpose. Suppose she made another one that was, let’s say, a lot more congruent. You and Sadie both said she’s very skilled. Call me crazy, but I think there may be something to this.”
Frank reached into his pocket and pulled out his detective’s badge, then slid it across the table to Arlene.
“Maybe you should be the one to wear this,” he said.
“No, please, do not think for a minute I’m interfering with your case,” she protested.
“It’s not my case.”
“Well, whatever it is, don’t you think there might be something to this?”
“You don’t care for Ernie’s wife, do you.”
“Beside the point. I think you ought to look into this or tell someone else to.”
“Okay, I will admit you made some interesting points, but, keep in mind, I was just over to their place. Apart from the art she painted herself, they barely have a pot to piss in. If she did steal the painting, then where’s the money or the painting, for that matter?” At that point Frank’s eye fell upon the nearly-empty box of pink bubble-gum cigars they had passed out when Juliet was born. There were two left. He took one and held it out toward Arlene. “I would say you’re close,” he told her as he pushed the souvenir a little closer to her face, “but no cigar,” he added as he abruptly yanked it away.
“You know, I don’t blame the guy one bit,” Frank told Biggie Hilton as they were taking a long lunch at Aunt Sally’s Lawndale Ribs and Chicken. “If I were Fenwick, I’d hang up my spikes, soon as I could. Cold cases, man, they’re the worst.
“I hear ya,” Biggie agreed between ribs. Their colleague, Randy Fenwick had just about had it with the blind alleys and chimeras of clues that never amounted to anything. He put in for retirement the day of his 55th birthday.
“You know, when I think back on it, the only cold case I ever came close to solving was the beatnik bandits of Day Street, back when I was a patrolman, and that was just a fluke. Hadn’t been for Ernie, I never woulda caught those guys. Nobody woul
d of.
“I sorta remember hearing about that caper a while ago. What was it again?”
Frank went on to tell his partner about the spectacular Brinks truck robbery that had netted the masked thieves over three million in cash. After they got away clean, no one could find a trace of the money. The three robbers had all gone to Penn and worked out this very elaborate scheme during their senior year.
Pretending to be the young punks their parents’ generation so disliked, they had apparently turned on, tuned in and dropped out. All three of them took cheap efficiency apartments on Day Street in the Fishtown neighborhood where Frank, Ernie and their friend Greg would come to patrol, after they joined the force.
One of the dropouts found work as a shoe clerk. Another cooked burgers for a fast-food place, while the third found work as a pump-monkey at a nearby New Jersey gas station. They never were seen together in public, and, apart from their all having left the same college at the same time, seemed to have nothing in common.
Following the robbery, the perpetrators had gone on selling shoes, flipping burgers and pumping gas for a month…a year…two years after the fact. Then, come tax time of the following year, all of them filed perfectly satisfactory tax returns, reflecting that each of them had hit a lottery jackpot: one in New York, one in Maryland and one in Massachusetts—any lottery but the Pennsylvania Lottery. Uncle Sam got his cut, and the Commonwealth got its, so, as far as anyone could see, everything was A-OK. It was Ernie who noticed the three lucky winners had used the same tax preparer, who, by the strangest coincidence, had done time in his past for some less-than-acceptable bookkeeping.
What had raised Ernie’s curiosity was a conversation between Greg Martin and his girlfriend at the time. He, like Ernie Campanella and Frank Mueller, was newly-enrolled in the police academy, while she was a clerk in the Philadelphia IRS office. The two of them were discussing her favorite subject: why Greg was so cheap.
“It’s not that I don’t want to get you nice things and stuff,” Greg explained. “Trouble is, I’m poor.” He had a point. When you subtracted out the costs of maintaining his LP, novelty hat and porn collections, he did not have a whole lot left to throw around.
“Maybe you should move to Day Street. That seems to be the luckiest street in the city,” she advised him.
“What makes you say that?” Greg asked her. She told him about the extraordinary coincidence of three lottery winners—from three different lotteries, no less—all living on Day Street. Normally IRS clerks were not supposed to talk about that kind of thing, but she was willing to bring up any topic that might serve to prime the pump. Sadly for their budding relationship, all that came of it was that the garrulous Mr. Martin passed the story on to his two buddies. Frank had shrugged it off as a coincidence, but, for Ernie coincidence as a concept of belief had bitten the dust shortly after Santa Claus.
“So, you’re saying Ernie Campanella really cracked the case?” Biggie asked Frank.
“He sure did. I ended up doing all the grunt work to verify the phony lottery wins and such, but he was the one who gave me the key. I always try to think back on that whenever he starts acting like a real dick, which, actually hasn’t been the case so much lately. I’d say it was his super sleuthing that got me my shot at detective.”
“Why didn’t he take the credit, I wonder?”
“One, he was a drunk. The powers that be weren’t about to let him advance. Two, he was a friend. He knew if he couldn’t hog the glory, he wanted to pass it to me. Ernie’s the real detective. I’m just some guy who caught a break.”
“Yeah, well, catching a break is how we close a lot of our cases. Am I right or wrong?”
“Right as rain,” Frank replied with a smile. Then his face froze. Of course, that was i!. Evelyn Campanella had taken a cue from the beatnik bandits of Day Street. He was willing to bet the rent.
It took a good deal more of what Frank called the grunt work to solidify his case. What made the work all the more tedious was that he knew he could not call on Ernie for his insight. Smart as his friend was, Frank believed he was absolutely incapable of seeing what the love of his life had been up to. Frank later learned that Saul Klein had run up some gambling debts he couldn’t pay off and was in serious trouble with a loan shark. Suddenly the trouble had vanished. He looked at before and after photos of Sarah Klein’s face and knew she had a good bit of work done. Where had the money come from for that? He later found out that the couple, who had been counting solely on Medicare and Social Security to see them through their old age, suddenly had prepaid life insurance policies on each other, and for a goodly amount.
Ernie and Evelyn continued to live in the same small apartment in The Northern Liberties and drive the same car that Ernie had bought used before they were married. On their last vacation, they went to Cape May, not Paris or Monte Carlo. Clearly, she had not made her move yet.
With the cooperation of the investigating detectives, Frank had been given access to the case book. He saw where Mickey Firenze—whom Frank knew by reputation—had been fingered as a suspect, then had turned up strangled to death in a shallow grave in New Jersey. The good news was that the M. E. found some DNA under the victim’s fingernails. The bad news was it was nobody “in the system.” Surely a little girl like Evelyn could not have strangled him. Mickey Firenze knew how to take care of himself, if it came down to that. The murderer had to be some character who could take care of himself even better. Frank felt the dead thief had something to do with the caper, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Had there been an arrangement and a double-cross, or did Firenze represent the competition? Then it came to him. Of course, who else could it be?
“Guys,” he told the detectives on the case, “if Firenze’s killer is not in our system, how about you get samples from the people in the Art Museum’s system? I don’t know, but there might be a connection.” Of course he knew, and there was.
We got you for felony murder, Mr. Jones, they had told the guard. Play ball with us on the art theft and we’ll bump it down to manslaughter. We’ll even throw in a recommendation of clemency for your partner, but the two of you are going to do time. Question is, they asked him, how much time are you two ready to do?
There was one more deal the detectives agreed to make, but not with the suspects.
“Please, for the love of God,” Frank had begged them, “when you bring them in, keep my name out of this.”
The D.A. offered Evelyn what clemency he could, which was a good deal less than she could have had if she had told them what she did with the painting. She was totally forthcoming on everything else. She had known about Mickey Firenze, but only after the fact. If the cops didn’t ask her about that part, which, fortunately they did not because Jones had already copped the plea, she wasn’t going to elaborate on it.
Once Evelyn had painted, then secreted away the excellent copy of “Sailor’s Delight,” she went to work on the sloppy one, which she made good and sure that, not only Cynthia Fabietz, but several others of her classmates and her then boyfriend, to boot, all got a good look at. In the end, the red sunset did not work as a red herring, but it was a nice try.
When he had a moment alone in the employees’ kitchen, Nate had emptied out the coffee cans and filled them with de-caff. He knew good and well that the slackers on the midnight shift spent more time asleep than awake despite several mugs of serious coffee. Just to make good and sure, he had snuck back into the kitchen and emptied a few Nembutal capsules into the pot that was presently sitting on the burner.
Evelyn, with her expertise in electrical engineering was easily able to foil the electronic security and in such a way that it would not be at all apparent it had been tampered with. The exchange had gone off without a hitch. On that great come-and-get-it day, she and Nate would split the proceeds, fifty-fifty, which they did. She had already showed him how to set up a Swiss bank account, so his share looked to be as safe as hers—especially since no thieving greaseball was go
ing to get his hands on it.
But she steadfastly refused to give up her buyer. She had been moved by the pathetic little girl that still lived within the obscenely rich gold-digger. She truly wanted to believe that, some day, the lady would give the painting back.
Because she was so helpful on everything else, Evelyn did not get the twenty years they could have given her. Because she was being so mule-headed about the most important thing, she did not get the three years she could have settled for. She got ten.
The news hit Ernie like a thunderclap. Once he got it into his stubborn head that his cherished wife was going away for a long, long time, he fell off the wagon and fell hard. In a drunken rage, he followed the detectives who had officially made the bust, and, when the opportunity came, smashed his car into theirs.
“Suck on that you asshole mother-fucks!” he yelled at the two semi-conscious cops. This was a violation so gross that even Spanky Kashuba—a guy who believed in Ernie—would have needed to take drastic action. As it was, James Maddox considered the day he gave Ernie Campanella the sack just about the happiest in his entire life.
Ernie sat alone at the smallest table in the darkest corner of the bar, which was just fine. The last thing in the world he wanted was company. After he had finished off his third beer-and-a-bump, he quietly began singing as tears rolled down his cheeks.
“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
Epilogue
That Ernie was able to visit his wife in prison, instead of residing in one himself was the result of a deal the Philadelphia Police Department had cut with him, following his assault on the two detectives. In exchange for their dropping all criminal charges, Ernie had to accept without protest termination with prejudice. That included forfeiture of all benefits and pensions, as well as mandatory counseling for anger management.