Father's Day (4 page)

A paramedic ran into the deli carrying two canvas bags the size of suitcases, as if he was in the airport running to catch a flight. The ambulance crew followed pushing a stretcher. Once she’d been lifted onto the stretcher, the paramedic inserted a tube down Sarah’s throat and attached it to a large plastic bag. He pulled up her sweater and attached her to a heart monitor. They strapped her down and wheeled her out. Lou had the bottle in his hand, reading the label. He wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping.

He stood outside the Regal Deli, watching the red flashing lights fade down the street. Lankenau Hospital was only a few miles away. They’d be there in minutes. He leaned against his
car and lit a cigarette. The cold felt good against his face. Judy came out, a bulky down coat over her waitress uniform and apron. She looked over at Lou. She pulled a pack of Newports from her pocket. Lou blocked the wind with his back and lit her cigarette.

“That’s too bad about your girlfriend. She going to be all right?”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Sorry I asked.”

“Hey, thanks for the help in there.”

She nodded, ran across the lot, and jumped into a red Buick. The cigarette came out the window as she sped past him, a noisy muffler blowing exhaust behind her. In the confusion, Lou failed to see the black BMW parked on the street, with Tommy Ahearn in the driver’s seat.

Lou followed Haverford Avenue
east into the city, through Overbrook, into the heart of West Philadelphia. He drove past Morris Park. It looked the same, an oasis of grass and trees surrounded by an urban desert. The old wooden swings were still hanging at the top of the hill, their rusty chains and steel frames black against the darkening sky. He drove past St. Lucy’s. Father Barone had died around the same time as his mother; natural causes, the paper said. He circled around onto Malvern, driving through the scarred neighborhood, a place where he’d lived and worked. Now he felt out of place, a stranger. He tried to focus on the green street signs, past Wynnewood and Lebanon. He turned a dark corner and stopped.

He parked across from the Rusty Nail saloon. The Rusty Nail was a Pagan hangout, a hole in the wall small enough to make three people into a crowd. It was one long, narrow room with three tables for two on one side and a row of three-legged barstools on the other. In the back, an undersized pool table sat on a crooked wooden floor, spotted with burn marks where
players rested their cigarettes between shots. Two creaking ceiling fans spun overhead like rusty airplane propellers. The windows were painted shut with a coat of thick black paint. A heavy wooden door opened right onto the sidewalk. It was dark in there, a moving, living darkness. There was only one way in and one way out.

Lou walked up to the Rusty Nail as if he owned the joint. That was the only way to walk into a place like that, looking to pull somebody out of there and pump him for information, looking for answers and willing to do just about anything to get them.

He’d read about the place in the paper a few times.
The Enquirer
or the
Daily News
would run a special about crime in the streets, about a neighborhood under siege. Every day the headlines told the story—crack cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth; drug dealers operating under the nose of the police; people shot dead in front of the place; the stench of rotting flesh in a Dumpster behind the building.

Fifty-third and Lancaster was especially notorious for it. The thunder of gunshots rumbled between a patchwork of dilapidated buildings, apartment complexes where the bullet holes riddled the brick and etched a decaying mosaic of life on the street.

The shooters and the dead weren’t really people, though—not in this city, not according to the police, not according to the mayor and the city council or the gaggle of reporters who followed them around and printed lies as if it were truth, talked about jobs, and education, and opportunity. To the businessmen walking the cleanly swept streets of Center City, they were fodder, a news blip, human refuse.

The real people, the people who had to live in that neighborhood, the people who went to work every day, who sent their kids to public school and stayed home at night, knew enough to
stay away. They took cover when the midnight sun burned over the bar and the natives inside grew restless.

Even the cops stayed away. There was rarely a blue uniform in sight, no ambitious young police dogs walking a beat down that dirty street. They knew better, too. It was one of the first things they learned if they wanted to stay alive.

The Pagans were an outlaw motorcycle gang that operated in the Philadelphia area. They trafficked in speed, were hired for their muscle and for murder. Inside was a loosely knit group of toothless black beards with beer bellies and cheap tattoos. They were breaking into the heroin trade, big-time, marking their territory with street corner beatings and an occasional drive-by. Competition from the Bloods and the Kings and the Blue Dragonz, was heating up. There was a turf war brewing on the streets of West Philly. Winner take all.

The night was getting colder. Lou could feel it bite his ears and his nose, could feel his fingers grow numb. It was cold enough to turn the stagnant pools of water in the street into a thin sheet of black ice. He zippered up his jacket, turned his back to the wind, and lit a cigarette. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the Rusty Nail, not a sidewalk like the ones he ran on as a kid, like the ones he remembered in South Philly, on Ninth St. near the Italian Market and then later, in Overbrook, where he moved with his mother. This one was wide and dark, bloodstained, a highway where people burned out and died.

He paused in the doorway and glared at the bartender, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark. He drew an assorted collection of leers from the peanut gallery. The air inside was heavy with smoke and stunk of body odor, urine, and cheap perfume. In most places like this it was tough to tell the women from the men. They had faces like bulldogs, their bellies swollen with beer. They were also public property. They belonged to the gang, used as prostitutes, traded like used cars, tossed into the pot like a
poker chip in a card game. Lou hoped Carol Ann Blackwell hadn’t unwillingly become one of them.

Richie Mazzino sat near the back of the bar, perched on a bar stool, gripping a tall-neck bottle of Budweiser. He had long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and a tuft of dark hair under his lower lip. He was tall and lanky and his face had that skeletal look, sunken eyes and protruding jaw as though the skin was pulled thin over a lot of hard, jutting bone. The bartender pointed him out.

They called him Mazz. He was born and raised in South Philly but got most of his schooling in Graterford Prison. He’d come up through the ranks, running numbers and dealing drugs in his teens, committing robberies and burglaries in his twenties, and eventually doing hard time. There were more than a couple of murders with his signature on them but nothing anyone could prove. So he was a free man, for now.

Lou pointed at Mazz with an outstretched arm and gestured with a curling index finger, which even Mazz couldn’t help but understand. It was the way mothers called their errant children and punks called their fickle girlfriends. At this particular moment, he was calling Mazz out. Mazz knew it and so did everyone else.

He rose stiffly off his stool and slowly sauntered toward the door. Lou leaned his shoulder against the open door like he had all the time in the world. He wasn’t foolish enough to take more than a couple of steps inside. Pagans liked to use knives. They lurked in the darkness like a pack of hyenas. He could get stabbed a dozen times and never know where it came from. The crowd of cutthroats parted like the Red Sea and opened a path for Mazz to navigate. Lou kept his left hand low in the pocket of his black leather bomber, feeling for the Glock on his belt.

Mazz stepped outside and the door swung closed behind him.

“My odds seem to be improving, Mazz,” Lou commented, flicking the butt of a cigarette across the cold pavement and into the street.

“Who the hell are you and how do you know my name,” asked Mazz, growing agitated as he felt an interrogation coming on. “You’re a cop and I don’t like cops.”

Lou took a half step closer and came up alongside him, speaking with slow deliberate words.

“My name is Lou Klein. I used to be a cop but I’m not anymore. I’m trying to help out an old friend. Just answer some simple questions and I’ll disappear.”

“You got the wrong guy.”

Mazz’s tight-lipped sneer was frozen on his face. Deep furrows flexed across his forehead. He had been in similar situations and was a cool customer.

“I don’t think so. I’m looking for your girlfriend.”

“Which one,” he laughed, raising the bottle of beer to his lips.

“My understanding is that you’ve been seeing a lot of Carol Ann Blackwell lately. I was hoping you’d know where she was.”

It came out as a statement, not a question. Lou had learned to sort lies from the truth a long time ago. He only asked questions he already knew the answer to. That was rule number one.

“I have no idea.” Mazz emptied the bottle in two long gulps. “I need another beer. See ya.”

Mazz hesitated a second and turned back toward the door. Lou’s arm came up against the door at the same moment. Mazz took a swing with the empty beer bottle but Lou already had his wrist. He tried to pull away. Lou stepped under the arm and spun Mazz’s face into the cement wall. He pinned Mazz’s arm behind his back, leaned in close, with all his weight. Mazz felt Lou’s hot breath against the back of his neck.

“Behave yourself, Mazz.”

Lou stepped back and uncoiled Mazz from the wall. He still
had an iron grip on the wrist and turned it violently to the outside. Mazz crashed to his back. Before he could scramble to his feet, he was looking down the barrel of a Glock.

“Listen, Mazz. I’m looking for Carol Ann Blackwell. That’s it. She hasn’t been home in a week. Her mother’s worried about her and I don’t blame her. Even you must have a mom, Mazz. If you’re not mixed up in it, then tell me. I’ll believe you. If you know where she is, it would be in your best interest to tell me. I don’t have a problem believing she climbed on the back of that bike of yours, ready to ride off into the sunset.”

Mazz’s eyes were riveted on the gun aimed at his chest. He lay on his ass, double-parked on the sidewalk like a wind-blown piece of trash. He spit the words out like a hungry mute.

“I don’t know where she’s at. I told you already. The chick’s fucking nuts, crazy, you know. I can’t control her and neither can anyone else. Ask her mother. Ask her old man. They’ll tell you the same thing.”

“They seem to think you had something to do with it.”

“They would.”

“Why? If you cared for Carol Ann so much, why would they think you’d hurt her?”

“I was trying to protect her.”

“Protect her from what, from herself?”

“From them.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not saying another fucking word. I could get in a lot of trouble for talking to you.”

Lou grinned. His eyes squinted into black slits. He wasn’t sure himself if the edginess in his voice was all an act, an old policeman’s ploy, or real emotion, seeping through the cracks. Mazz wasn’t sure either. Lou took a deep breath, put the gun away. He reached out, took Mazz by the hand, and helped him up. They walked to the corner and Lou offered him a cigarette.

“Why does Carol Ann Blackwell need protection? Does it have something to do with Vincent Trafficante, her mother’s new husband, or his boy, Tommy Ahearn? I already ran into him. He’s a real charmer.”

“Let’s leave it at this. Vince is the fucking man around here. I wouldn’t mess with him. He’ll squash me like a bug, and you too.”

“But his wife came to me. Why would she do that?”

“You should be asking yourself that question. Maybe Vince doesn’t know about it.”

“He does now. Ahearn followed her, crashed our little party.”

“Vince isn’t going to like it.”

“That’s what Ahearn said. What is Vince to you, anyway?”

“I drive one of his trucks. He pays my fucking salary and that’s all I’m going to say.”

Mazz threw the cigarette into the street. He glanced warily over his shoulder and bolted to the door of the bar. He was scared, and it wasn’t because of the roughing up he got. He was scared for the same reason Sarah was scared, Lou thought. A black BMW with dark tinted windows cruised slowly past him. He couldn’t see inside.

He jumped back into his car, listened to the heater whine under the dash. He was cold and tired. He caught a glimpse of himself as he adjusted the rearview mirror, seeing the red-rimmed eyes and runny nose, thoughts rising to the surface, the same thoughts that had been haunting his dreams. A burning, unyielding sense of regret that had always seemed to surface when he was behind the wheel, driving through the cold Philadelphia night.

They surfaced now, memories of a failed career, a failed marriage, a life on the rocks. He’d been driving the same black
Thunderbird for the past ten years. The V-8 under the hood still purred like a kitten as it cut through the darkness. He’d picked it up at a sheriff’s sale. The car was part of a drug forfeiture case he’d worked with the narcotics division at the DA’s office. It had gotten him out of a few tight spots and didn’t owe him a dime. A more than generous gift, he thought, from an appreciative public, that he so dutifully served for twenty years of his life.

After twelve years with the Philadelphia Police Department and another eight with the District Attorney’s office, the black Thunderbird was about all he had left. A host of excessive force allegations, the usual suspects taking it on the chin, bought him his share of ten-day suspensions. One wrong move had cost him his job.

It was more than ten years ago but he remembered that night as if it was yesterday. A call had come over the radio for officers to respond to a quiet middle-class neighborhood in the Northeast, where residents heard screams. This was a place of tree-lined streets and picket fences, a place where you raised your kids, went to church, and played little league ball. Nobody screamed unless their boy hit a home run. Lou had been cruising Frankford Avenue in an unmarked, looking for a quiet spot to enjoy a smoke, behind an office building or a bank parking lot, maybe close his eyes for a while. He was at the house in minutes.