Father's Day (11 page)

“Politicians and policeman, too?”

“That’s not very nice. He’s a businessman.”

“Shut up, Jennifer. You have a big mouth,” Ahearn said, stepping into the room.

“You shut up, Tommy. You don’t seem to mind my big mouth when you’re trying to get a piece of ass.”

Tommy Ahearn was much as Lou remembered, a man of few words and plenty of action. He was tall, at least six-three, and solid. In a white sweatsuit and sneakers, he was like a refrigerator with legs, wide across the shoulders, flat and hard across the chest. His arms seemed to hang to his knees.

“Get up and wait in the other room.”

Ahearn barked the orders and Jennifer did a slinking shuffle toward the door like a dog cowering under its master’s command. She had the nerve to hold her ground but not the muscle. Lou put in his two cents.

“You have a talent for sneaking up on people but you’re not much of a ladies’ man.”

It didn’t take much to get Ahearn mad. His face was red, his jaw tight. He had a short fuse. Lou was feeling his feet again and if Ahearn’s rage brought him any closer, he’d take a shot and land one right on his simian jaw. The pounding in Lou’s temples was visible under one long, blue vein that crossed his forehead and ran down his cheek. Ahearn sauntered forward with aimless guile. A voice from the corridor interrupted his approach and quickly brought Tommy Ahearn and his animal instincts to an abrupt halt.

“That’s enough, Tommy. Have Jennifer mix us a couple martinis and see if our guest would care for anything.”

It was said in a tone that demanded obedience.

“I didn’t realize that I was a guest. Do all your guests leave with a knot on their head?”

“Please excuse the rough treatment. Tommy just assumed you were an intruder. I am sorry. I don’t believe we have met. My friends call me Vince. I own this place.”

He shook Lou’s hand and smiled like a politician meeting his constituents at the polls, as though a handshake and a smile
alone would make everything else all right. His fingernails were manicured and coated with a clear polish. He wore a gold pinky ring and a gold Rolex watch on his left hand, which he brought together with his right in an assuring squeeze. The caps on his teeth sparkled and the thousand-dollar suit was freshly pressed. He was good at selling himself. His delivery was smooth. He didn’t need to remind anybody of the threat behind his every word.

“Lou Klein. Your front door was locked but I noticed the side door open and thought I’d take a chance.”

“A chance with your life, my friend.”

Issuing threats had become routine to Vincent Trafficante. He made it sound amenable, like an invitation to your own funeral. He could be a minister of death and make it sound like a benediction. He reminded Lou of his brother-in-law, who still speaks of his sister’s purity after her second marriage and third kid. Speaking with Vincent Trafficante was like talking to a priest in a confessional. God listens while the priest laughs, but Vince, just like God, knows the score, knows that everybody lies and is willing to forgive, in exchange for obedience.

“Perhaps I did misjudge the risks.”

“Tommy did tell me a little about you, Mr. Klein. You’re some kind of private detective, I take it. Hired by my wife?”

“It seems to be common knowledge.”

“Tommy says you met with her last night, at a diner in Over-brook, where she was taken ill.”

“She’s worried about her daughter.”

“Our daughter, Mr. Klein. Carol Ann has been like a daughter to me since the day I married her mother. I know that you were acquainted with Sarah’s husband, Sam. You served together on the force. I respect that. But there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“I keep finding that out, Mr. Trafficante.”

“Please, call me Vince. What you don’t know is that I am
Carol Ann’s biological father. There’s no sense in trying to hide that fact now. The relationship between Sarah and me goes back quite a way, even before she was married to Sam Blackwell. I believe that knowledge is what drove him to suicide. And I would hope, Mr. Klein, that the memory of your friendship with Sam won’t cloud your judgment of me, or Sarah, for that matter.”

“My only consideration is for the girl, Vince. We’re all adults here. We make our beds and we sleep in them. But we shouldn’t go around screwing up the lives of our children.”

“Point well taken, Mr. Klein. And Carol Ann is also an adult. She’s nineteen years old. If she were a juvenile, it would be a different story. She can come and go as she pleases.”

“Then you have no objection to me trying to find her? I’ve known Sarah a long time, too, and I’d like to help her, if I can.”

“I think you’re wasting your time. But I have no way of preventing you.”

“Let me ask you a question, Vince. Since we’re being candid, is there any truth to the rumor that Sam Blackwell was on your payroll while he worked for the department?”

“I’m not in the business of tarnishing reputations, Mr. Klein—not Sam’s, not mine or Sarah’s, not the Philadelphia Police Department’s, not even yours. I will say this. When Sam Blackwell died, his wife got what was left of a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy after the government and the bill collectors were done with it. She got one-quarter of a police pension that was pretty shitty to begin with. If it wasn’t for me, they’d be living in the projects, section eight housing with the riffraff living next door. I take better care of my people than the City of Philadelphia. I treat my people like family. Can the city say the same? I hope that answers your question.”

“I think I understand.”

“Good. Mr. Klein, you’re a good sport and I find your sincerity
endearing. Please visit us at the house, be my guest for dinner. As soon as Sarah is well, we’ll call.”

Vince smiled and Lou returned the smile, rubbing his jaw as if the shot he took might have loosened a few teeth. Vince even helped him on with his jacket. Twenty years earlier, Lou might have pulled a sawed off shotgun and ventilated the walls of Vince’s Comfort Zone and decapitated his goon. But he’d become more methodical, more calculating, began believing the sound of his own excuses.

Night had settled in
. Lou reached his car in the darkness. The only light came from a full moon that hung languidly between high black clouds. His head was still pounding, his pulse amplified, beating between his ears. The strength in his legs kept him upright. The ride back was long and slow. He found himself closing one eye to correct the double vision. The blanket of darkness distorted what he saw, blurred the edges of his awareness.

He stopped at Heshy’s on the way home for a cup of coffee and satisfied his sweet tooth with cold strawberry jam, spread thick over a piece of rye toast. He’d parked up close where he could see his car through the windows. Leaning both elbows on the counter, he lit a cigarette and dropped the match into a blue plastic ashtray. Heshy poured coffee, black as mud, into a brown ceramic cup. He never looked up.

“A little late in the day for coffee, Lou.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“So, it’s not exactly fresh. The way you look, it couldn’t hurt.”

A newspaper sat half open, propped against the register. Lou cocked his head sideways to read the headlines, a direct quote from Inspector Carl Amodei, head of detectives. “Another Dead Girl” said it all. They’d found another girl along a jogging trail in Fairmont Park. The woman who called it in couldn’t speak English and it took them awhile to figure out what she was saying. She’d had her Akita and her seven-year-old grandson out for a run. It had been a cold morning but the sun was shining and there was no wind. The seven-year-old would throw a tennis ball and the dog would bring it back. When the dog didn’t come back, the boy got a glimpse of what it was digging at.

It was a body of a woman, twenty-one years old, that had been there about three days, face up in the tall grass. She’d been raped and knifed to death, seventeen stab wounds to her chest, neck, and face. She was a student at the Philadelphia College of Medicine, less than a year from graduation. Her parents in Pakistan still hadn’t been notified. The police were asking for the public’s help.

The story underneath it was equally graphic. The
Daily News
was living up to its reputation. “Underworld War Brewing,” announced the headline in bold letters across the bottom half of the page. An unidentified man was found at mile marker seventy-two of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, handcuffed to the steering wheel of a 1977 Corvette Stingray and set on fire. According to sources at the scene there wasn’t much left of him by the time rescue arrived. The car belonged to Vincent Trafficante and was reportedly stolen from his South Philadelphia home.

Lou grabbed the paper, folded it twice, and tucked it under his arm. The corpses were lining up fast. He put three dollars down on the counter.

“Hey, Hesh. Maggie’s been bugging me about her getting a part-time job. You think you could find something for her to do
around here? I can’t imagine it’s going to be permanent. Pay her whatever you can afford. And if you need me to subsidize her wages, that’s okay, too.”

“No problem, Louis. I need the help. I could just never find anyone who wanted to work. Judy is old school. But the kids, they don’t want to work.”

“Thanks, Hesh. I’ll bring her by tomorrow.”

Lou walked out, fumbling with his keys, trying to keep the paper from blowing away. It had started snowing again, one of those snow squalls that could drop a quick inch and disappear as fast as it came. It covered everything in a downy white blanket, the street, the cars, the garbage piled on the sidewalk, the dead trees that hung out over City Avenue, their branches threatening to snap and fall into the road. It took him about eight tries to get into the space in front of his house, backing up and pulling forward until the tires rubbed against the curb.

A pillow and folded blanket sat rolled up and waiting on the end of the couch. He wrapped himself up in it like a hobo under a pile of newspapers in the park. His body was exhausted but his mind wouldn’t turn off. He couldn’t get comfortable. He changed positions, thought of all those nights he was able to fall asleep sitting up in the driver’s seat of a squad car, his eyes closed, his head rolling around on his shoulders as if his neck were a loosened spring. He rolled onto his back with his eyes open in the dark and stared at the ceiling as if it were an endless black sky. He tried to fit the few pieces of the puzzle together. The soles of his feet ached and his ankles throbbed. He fell asleep before the picture came together.

Lou wasn’t much of a morning guy. He preferred to lie in bed, watch the morning news, sip coffee, and smoke. Too many police roll calls and twenty years on the night shift had poisoned him to the hours just after dawn. Insomnia had been a family curse.
His father would stay up half the night, on his days off, watching movies, drifting between worlds in his recliner, never resting, the whites of his eyes showing under his fluttering eyelids. It was a poor excuse for sleep. He’d suspected that his father stayed awake because his dreams were worse than his waking memories. He preferred to fight the fatigue all day. When Lou finally joined the force himself, his suspicions were confirmed.

He channel surfed out of habit, a remote in one hand, an oversize coffee mug in the other, a cigarette dangling carelessly from his mouth. His fingers couldn’t move fast enough to erase the successive visual images of human freakdom flashing on the screen. Ricki featured a chick impregnated by her basset hound. Rosie adopted Siamese twins from Nicaragua. Sally showed sexually active seniors stripping at Scores, and Maury filmed gays in the military, conducting same-sex marriages on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Hostages married their kidnappers. Children sued their parents. Housewives got implants. Prison inmates lobbied Congress for pornography in their cells

Maggie made a fresh pot of coffee and refilled his cup. She slid his feet to the floor and sat at the edge of the couch. They both stared blankly at the morning news team smiling at them through porcelain veneers and bright blue contact lenses. It was an age of information overload, instant access, indoctrination disguised as current events. The market crashed, the races clashed and the cameras rolled. Police brutality on the streets of Philadelphia was the main story, followed by a child abduction in Detroit. Miners were trapped under two hundred feet of solid rock in West Virginia and their air was slowly running out. Lou noticed his daughter holding her breath.

He called Mitch. He wasn’t surprised to find Mitch doing exactly the same thing that he was, only Mitch was getting paid to do it. Mitch was a morning person, a nine-to-fiver who forgot what it was like to sit on a stake out at four in the morning.
They briefly exchanged pleasantries before getting down to business.

“You got a name on the human torch?”

“We’re working on it. Why don’t you come down and sit in on the autopsy? I’ll give you an hour, if you can drag yourself out of your crib and away from the tube.”

“I’ll change my diaper, shave my legs, and be right down. Hey, you get a make on the cuffs? Any prints?”

“They’re clean, Lou. Smith and Wesson stainless, police issue.”

“I’ll hurry.”

Lou had smelled burning bodies before. It was nothing like being at a barbecue. On one of his first calls as a rookie patrolman, he was sent to a garbage fire between two apartment buildings in Germantown. The tenants would pile up the green plastic bags and the rats would tear them open. A ladder truck beat him there and was already putting it out when he pulled up. Gray smoke billowed from between the buildings. The smell was horrendous.

He poked through the debris at the bottom of the pile until he hit something solid with the tip of his boot. It was a naked girl, about twelve years old from the size of her, black as coal. He’d learned later from the medical examiner that she’d been raped, stabbed, and strangled and was still alive when she was set on fire. It would take two weeks for them to identify her, two weeks for someone to come forward and report a twelve-year-old child missing. Welcome to police work.