Bitter Truth (43 page)

Inside were packets of letters, each yellowed and brittle, tied together with pale ribbons that had once held color but no longer. One by one I stuffed the bundles into my pack. Among the letters was a small book of scaling brown leather. I opened it to the title page.
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau. I took that too. Beneath everything was a heavy old envelope, tied shut with a string. The words on the outside, written with a masculine hand, read:
To My Child on the Attainment of Majority
.

I stuffed the envelope into my pack with the rest of the stuff and headed out the door.

48

I
WANTED TO talk on the drive home, I was so excited I was bursting with talk. The whole chilling story of the Reddmans and the Pooles was coming clear and more than ever I was certain that the sad entwining of the fates of those two families was at the heart of the plague that was presently afflicting the Reddmans. We were close, so close, to figuring it all out and to taking the first steps toward retribution, as well as toward a lucrative lawsuit. I wanted to talk it out, desperately, but just as desperately Caroline wanted silence.

“Are you all right?” I asked after three of my conversational gambits had dropped like lead weights in a pool of silent water.

“No,” she said.

“What can I do?”

“Just, just shut up,” she said.

Well at least she knew what she wanted.

So, as we drove in silence out of the Main Line and toward the city, I considered to myself what we knew and what we still needed to learn. Claudius Reddman had stolen the company from his friend Elisha Poole, had embezzled sums which he used to buy up a portion of the stock, and then, after reducing the company’s value with his thievery and through production holdbacks, had purchased the balance of the shares for an amount far below their true value. In the process of making his fortune he had ruined his friend, driving him to drink, to poverty, to suicide, and Reddman knew all he had done, too, because right after Poole’s death, either out of guilt or a misplaced magnanimity, he brought Mrs. Poole and her daughter to live in the shadow of his wealth and grandeur, in the shadow of Veritas. Is it only a coincidence that shortly thereafter tragedy began to stalk the Reddmans?

Charity Reddman was murdered and buried in the plot behind the house, alongside the statue of Aphrodite. Who killed her? Was it Christian Shaw, disposing of his inconvenient lover, as Caroline believed, or was it maybe Mrs. Poole, wreaking her husband’s revenge? And the Reddman tragedies didn’t stop there. Hope Reddman died of consumption, which might have been poisoning instead. Christian Shaw was killed by his son with a shotgun blast to the chest. Claudius Reddman’s lungs filled with tumors and his muscles grew wild with palsy. How much of this tragedy was just the natural order of things and how much was bad karma and how much was directly caused by the Pooles? We as yet had no answer and probably would never find one, but if we only reap what we sow then Claudius Reddman’s harvest was appropriately bountiful. But it hadn’t ended with his death.

Somewhere along the line, it appeared, Faith Reddman Shaw sought to make amends. We knew that she had examined her father’s old journals and discovered his crime. Was it after this discovery that she found Emma Poole and brought her to the luxury apartment in Philadelphia to live out her life? Was it then that she found Harrington, Emma’s grandchild, lost in an orphanage, and brought him to the estate to be raised as one of her own? Was the purpose of the Wergeld Trust to ease her family’s conscience? Conciliation, expiation, redemption she had said she was seeking, and it appeared she had been seeking it actively. But still all this had failed, somehow, to stem the curse, because someone had hired Cressi to kill Jacqueline and probably Edward too. Their deaths might be all tied up with Edward Shaw’s gambling debts, true, both killings ordered by Dante to collect on his loan, but after visiting the house of Poole I suspected it had more to do with the ugliness of the Reddman past than anything in the present. So who was ordering the killings? Harrington, the only known surviving Poole? Robert Shaw, knocking off his siblings to increase his inheritance with which he could play the market, showing himself as ruthless in matters of business as his great-grandfather? Kingsley Shaw, carrying out the deranged commands of the voice of the fire? Or was it maybe Faith Reddman Shaw herself, coming back from the dead as her son had claimed, sacrificing her grandchildren one by one as bloody final acts of reparation for her father’s crimes?

Something Caroline had said nagged at me. “Where was Nat tonight?” I asked. “You said he wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t. I don’t know where he was.”

“Was he at Jacqueline’s funeral?”

“Of course.”

Nat, the estate’s gardener and caretaker, was missing. It was not like Nat to miss a Reddman funeral. More than anyone he seemed to know the family’s secrets and I wondered if perhaps his knowledge had proved deadly. A shiver crawled through me just then and I had the urge to stop the car and spin it around and return to Veritas. He was there, I would have bet, in Faith Reddman Shaw’s overrun garden, lying there now just as peacefully as Charity Reddman, the two of them stretched before the statue of Aphrodite, with the mingled ashes of Faith and Christian Shaw ensconced in its base. There was a killer on the loose and its thirst knew no bounds and I was certain now that Nat had also suffered its vengeance. I would have stopped the car and turned around and checked on my certainty myself except that whoever had done it was still there, waiting, waiting for us.

“I want to go someplace where no one has ever heard of the Reddmans,” Caroline said, breaking her long quiet. “Someplace where I can drink wine all day and let my hair grow greasy and no one would ever notice because the whole countryside is full of greasy drunks. France maybe.”

“Last time it was Mexico.”

“Well this time I mean it.” She took out a cigarette, lit it with my car’s lighter; the air in my Mazda grew quickly foul. “It’s all gotten way out of control. I’m through.”

“What about the one good thing in the Reddman past you’ve been looking for? How can you give up before you find it?”

“It’s not there. There’s nothing but cold there. All I want is to get as far from it all as I possibly can.”

“It’s getting worse, Caroline. Whatever is happening to your family is growing more and more brutal.”

“Let it. I’m getting out.”

“So that’s your answer, right, run away. Sure, why not? Running is what you’re best at. Quit on our investigation just like you quit on your movie.”

“Who told you that?”

“Kendall.”

“She talks too much.”

“You have your story pat, don’t you? A happy childhood, a loving home. If something went wrong in your life then it could only be because you were a failure, unworthy of the love of your mother, your father, of Harrington. That’s why you trashed your movie before it was finished, why you flit from interest to interest, from bed to bed. You do everything you can to maintain your comfortable self-image of failure. It’s the one thing you truly can control. ‘Look at the way I branded my flesh, Mommy. Aren’t I a screw-up?’ ”

“France, I think. Definitely France.”

“What then could be more terrifying than learning that maybe it’s your family that is screwed up to hell, that maybe your home wasn’t so loving, that maybe you’re not to blame for everything after all. What could be more terrifying than realizing that success or even love might actually be possible for you.”

“Give it a rest, Victor.”

“Look, I don’t want to find the answers more than you do. I was doing just fine before you came along. You’re the one who says she needs saving. The answers we’re finding could give you what you need to save yourself, but you have to do some of the work too. You tell me it’s hard, well, sweetheart, life is hard. Grow the fuck up.”

“Hide out in France with me, Victor.”

I thought about it for a moment, thought about all I had wanted at the start of everything and suddenly I felt a great swelling of bitterness. “It must be nice to have enough money to run from your life.”

She took a deep drag from her cigarette. “Trust me, Victor, it’s no easy thing being born rich.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s hard work, but the pay is great.”

“You don’t know.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Come to France with me.”

“What about the lawsuit?”

“Screw the lawsuit.”

“We’re so close to figuring it out.”

“Is that what it’s all been about? The lawsuit? Is everything we’ve gone through together just that?”

I glanced at her cool face in the green glow of the dashboard’s light. What I noticed just then was how childlike she was. “I like you, Caroline, I care for you and I worry about you, but neither of us ever had any illusions.”

After ten minutes of silence, which is a heavy load of silence, she simply said, “I have some things to pick up at your place, Victor, and then, please, just take me home.”

I parked on Spruce, not far from my apartment. I took my pack from the car and Caroline and I walked together up the dark street. In the vestibule, while I was unlocking the front door, I sniffed and raised my head and sniffed again.

“Do you smell that?”

“It smells like a garbage dump on fire,” she said.

Acrid, and deep, like the foul odor of burning tires. I opened the door and stepped inside. The smell grew.

“What is that?” I said. “It’s like someone forgot to turn off a stovetop.”

As we climbed the stairs the stench worsened. It was strongest outside my door. I went on a bit and sniffed the next doorway.

“Dammit, it’s my apartment.”

With fumbling fingers I tried unsuccessfully to jam the key into my lock, tried again, finally got it in, twisted hard. I felt the bolt slide. I grabbed the knob, turned it, and threw open the door. Smoke billowed, with a fetor that turned my stomach. I flicked on the light. The air was hazy with the noxious smoke and through the haze I could see that my apartment had been trashed, tables overturned, a bureau emptied, cushions from the couch thrown about. I dropped my pack upon the mess and rushed around the room’s bend to search for the fire in the kitchen. When I made it halfway through the living room and finally had a clear view of the dining room table I stopped dead.

Peter Cressi was sitting at the table, leaning back calmly in the miasma, the metal box we had exhumed from Charity Reddman’s grave in front of him on the red Formica tabletop. Coiled on top of the metal box was a fat black cat. One of Cressi’s hands was casually scratching the fur along the cat’s back, the other was holding an absurdly large gun.

“We was wondering when you was gonna get back here, Vic. I mean what kind of host are you? No matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find yous liquor.”

Caroline rushed out from behind me. “Victor,” she said, “What is it? What?” and that’s all she said before she stopped, just behind me, so that Cressi, had he wanted to, with that gun and a half of his, could have taken us both out with one shot.

“Well, look who’s with Vic,” said Cressi. “Isn’t this convenient? We was looking for you too, sweetheart.”

The sight of Cressi pointing that gun at me was arresting enough, but it wasn’t he alone that had chilled my blood to viscid. Sitting next to him, elbows on the table, a small pile of ashes resting before him on the Formica like a charred sacrifice, was the source of the nauseating smoke polluting my apartment. It was an old man with clear blue eyes, hairy ears, a stogie the size of a smokestack smoldering between his false teeth.

Calvi.

49

C
ALVI,” I SAID.

“Who was you expecting?” said Calvi, the cigar remaining clamped between his teeth as he spoke. “Herbert Hoover?”

He was a thin wiry man with bristly gray hair and hollowed cheeks and a bitter reputation for violence. The word on Calvi was he talked too damn much, even with that voice scarred painful and rough by decades of rancid tobacco, but Calvi didn’t only talk when there was a more efficient way to communicate. Once, so the story went, he had drilled a man who was skimming off the skim, drilled him literally, with a Black & Decker and a three-quarter-inch bit, drilled him in the skull until the blood spurted and the dumb chuck admitted all and pled for mercy. The downtown boys, they laughed for weeks about that one, but after that one no one dared again to skim the skim from Calvi.

“I heard you called,” said Calvi. “What was it that you wanted, Vic?”

I glanced at Cressi, pointing his gun now at my face, and realized in a flash that I had been all wrong about everything, had trusted wrong and suspected wrong and now was face to face with the man who was behind all the violence that had been unleashed in the past few weeks. Calvi had returned to Philadelphia to wrest control of the city from Raffaello and the one man who could pull me out of what it was I had fallen into, Earl Dante, knew exactly how wrong I had been.

“I just called to say hello,” I said. “See how the weather was down there.”

“Hot,” said Calvi. “Hot as hell but hotter.”

“So I guess you’re up just to enjoy the beautiful Philadelphia spring?”

“I always liked you, Vic,” said Calvi. “I could always trust you, and you want to know why? Because I always understood your motives. You’re a simple man with a simple plan. Go for the dough. The world, it belongs to simple men. I send a guy to you I know he stays stand up and does his time with his mouth shut. No question about it because you know who is paying and it ain’t him, it’s me. And you know what, Vic? You done never let me down.”

“How’s my case going?” asked Cressi. “You got it dismissed yet?”

“That was a lot of guns you were buying, Pete,” I said. “And the flamethrower doesn’t help. But I’m moving to suppress the tapes and whatever else I can.”

“Atta boy,” said Peter.

“You know why I’m here, don’t you, Vic?” said Calvi.

“I think I do.”

“I want to apologize about you being in the car with that thing on the expressway. It couldn’t be helped. But you understand it was only business. No hard feelings, right?”

“Could I afford hard feelings right now?”

“No,” said Calvi.

A gay, friendly smile spread across my face. “Then no hard feelings.”

“You’re exactly what the man, he meant when he said the simple will inherit the earth,” said Calvi. “Let me tell you, when my turn comes, it will be very very profitable. And you, my friend, will share in those profits. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I can count on you?”

I looked at Cressi with his gun and smiled again. “It sounds like a lucrative arrangement.”

“Exactly what I thought you’d say. And I’m taking that as a commitment, so there’s no going back. Now I understand you’ve been in touch with that snake Raffaello.”

“It was only because he was checking up on me after the thing with the car,” I blurted. “I don’t know where he is or what he is…”

“Shut up, Vic,” said Cressi with a wave of his gun and I shut right up.

“We need to meet, Raffaello and me,” said Calvi. “We need to meet and figure this whole thing out. Can you set up this meeting for us, Vic?”

“I can try.”

“Good boy, Vic,” said Calvi. “We’re not animals. If we can avoid a war all the better.”

“I think that’s what he wants too,” I said. “He told me he’s ready to step aside as long as there’s no war and his family is guaranteed safety.”

“He’ll turn over everything?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Everything?”

“So long as you give the guarantees.”

Calvi took the cigar out of his mouth for a moment and stared at it and for the first time a smile cracked his face. “You hear that, Peter,” he said. “It’s done.”

“It’s too easy,” said Cressi, shaking his head.

“I told you it would be easy,” said Calvi. “This never was his business. He was a cookie baker before he came into it. He never had the stomach for the rough stuff. He had the stomach he would have killed me rather then let me slink off to Florida like he did. I ain’t surprised he’s on his knees now. You’ll set up the meeting, Vic.”

“Now?”

“Not yet,” said Calvi. “I’ll tell you when. Sit down.”

“Why don’t you let her go while we talk,” I said, gesturing to Caroline, still standing behind me, quiet as a leg of lamb. Her face, when I looked at her, was transfixed with fear and I couldn’t tell just then if she was more terrified of the sight and size of Cressi’s gun or of the cat lying atop the metal box.

“She stays,” said Cressi.

“We don’t need her to speak to Raffaello,” I said.

“She stays,” said Calvi. “No more discussion. Sit down, missy. We all got to wait here some.”

Cressi gestured with the gun and I pulled out two chairs from the table, one for Caroline and one for me. Carefully I placed her in the chair to the left and sat in the chair directly across from Cressi. Calvi was to our right and the metal box from Charity Reddman’s grave was on the table between us. The black cat jumped off the box and high-stepped to the end of the table, sticking its nose close to Caroline’s face. Her body tense and still, Caroline shut her eyes and turned her face away.

“What, missy, you don’t like my cat?”

Caroline, face still averted, shook her head.

“She has a thing about cats,” I said.

“It’s a good cat. Come on over, Sam.” The cat sniffed a bit more around Caroline and then strolled over to Calvi, who stroked it roughly beneath its neck. “I named it after a fed prosecutor who’s been chasing me for years. I named it Sam, after the fed, and then took him to the vet to get his balls cut off. Very therapeutic.”

Cressi laughed.

“While we’re waiting,” said Calvi, “maybe we can take care of some unfinished business.”

Cressi leaned forward and lifted the lid off the metal box. “Where’s the rest of the shit what was supposed to be inside here?”

Caroline, her face still tense with fear, looked up with surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“Whatever it is I’m talking about I’m not talking to you,” snapped Cressi. “Vic knows what I’m talking about, a smart guy like him. Where’s the rest of it, Vic?”

“I don’t understand.”

Cressi reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. “A certain party what had been paying us for our services has requested we recover this here box and its contents, which are listed right here in black and white. The photographs and documents about some trust and old pieces of diary, they’re in here, all right. But the piece of paper, it lists other stuff that ain’t and so maybe you know where that other stuff, it went to, Vic.”

“Who’s the certain party?” I asked, wondering who would be so interested in the contents of the secret box of Faith Reddman Shaw.

“Not important.”

“It’s important as hell.”

“Give him what he wants, Vic,” said a scowling Calvi, his voice ominously soft. The cat’s black fur pricked up and it jumped off the table. It hopped to one of the couch cushions on the floor and curled on top of it. When it was settled it watched us with complete dispassion. “Give him the hell he wants and be done with it.”

“There’s a doctor’s invoice of some sort,” said Cressi, reading from the list.

I looked at Cressi and his gun and nodded. “All right,” I said. I stood and went over to the corner and found my briefcase among the scattered contents from the closet, the case’s sides slashed, its lock battered but still in place. I opened the combination and took out the invoice and handed it over.

Cressi examined it and smiled before placing it in the box. “What about some banking papers that are also missing?”

“They’re not here,” I said. “But I’ll get them for you.”

Cressi slammed the butt of his gun on the table, the noise so loud I thought the monster had gone off. Caroline inhaled a gasp at the sound of it. “Don’t dick with me, Vic.”

“I don’t have it here. I swear.”

“Where is it?”

“I’ll get it for you,” I said, not wanting to tell them anything about Morris.

“Go on, Peter,” said Calvi, staring hard at me through the smoke of his cigar.

“A three-by-five card with certain alphanumeric strands, whatever the fuck that is.”

“Also someplace else,” I said.

Cressi glared at me. “What about this key it says here?”

I reached for my wallet, took out the key that had opened the breakfront drawer at the Poole house, and handed it over. Cressi examined it for a moment.

“How the fuck I know it’s the right key?”

“It’s the right key,” I said.

“Is that it?” said Calvi.

Cressi nodded and put the list back in his jacket.

“It’s very important, Vic, now that we’re partners,” said Calvi, “to keep this party happy. It’s not so cheap making a move like we’ve made here. You just can’t bluff your way through. Even with a cookie baker like Raffaello, you have to be ready for war, and war’s expensive. This party’s been our patron and we keep our patron happy. You’ll get the rest of that stuff for us after the meeting.”

“No problem.”

“Good,” said Calvi. “I think, Vic, you and me, we’re going to do just fine together. You and me, Vic, we have a future.”

“That’s encouraging,” I said. I was referring to the fact that I might actually have a future outside the range of Cressi’s gun, but Calvi smiled as if he were a recruiting sergeant and I had just enlisted.

“You want a cigar?” said Calvi, patting at his jacket pocket.

“No, thank you,” I said as kindly as I could.

“Now we wait,” said Calvi.

“Where’s yous liquor?” said Cressi. “We was looking all over for it.”

“I don’t have any,” I said. “Just a couple beers in the fridge.”

“We already done the beers,” said Cressi. He turned to Calvi. “You want I should maybe hit up a state store?”

“Just shut up and wait,” said Calvi.

Cressi twisted his neck as if trying to fracture a vertebrae and then leaned back in silence.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“It’s need to know,” said Calvi. “You think you need to know?”

I shook my head.

“You’re right about that,” said Cressi.

And so we sat at the table, the four of us, Calvi leaning on his elbows, his head in his hands, sucking on his stogie, Cressi, Caroline, and I asphyxiating on the foul secondhand smoke, none of us talking. The cat licked its fur atop the cushion. Every now and then Calvi sighed, an old man’s sigh, like he was sitting by the television, waiting to be called to the nursing home’s evening program rather than waiting to set up a meeting to take control of the Philly mob. I could feel the tension in Caroline as she sat beside me, but she was as quiet as the rest of us. I laid a comforting hand on her knee and gave her a smile. The silence was interrupted only by Calvi’s sighs, the scrape of a chair as we shifted our positions, contented clicks rising from the throat of Sam the cat, the occasional rumble from Cressi’s digestive tract.

Our situation was as bleak as Veritas. Someone had paid Calvi to kill Jacqueline and Edward and, now, to get the contents of the box. Who? Who else had even known that I might have it? Nat had learned we were digging. Had he told someone? Was that the reason he was missing? Was that the reason he was murdered, too, because he knew about the box and someone was determined that no one would ever know? Whom had he told about our nocturnal excavations? Harrington, the last Poole? Kingsley Shaw? Brother Bobby? Which was Calvi’s patron, ordering Calvi to kill Reddmans for fun and profit while building up his war chest? And why did the patron care about a box buried in the earth many years ago by Faith Reddman Shaw? Unless it wasn’t buried by Faith Reddman Shaw. And whoever it was, this patron had also paid to kill Caroline, or else why would Cressi have been searching for her, and once the bastards killed Caroline they would have no choice, really, but to kill me too. I was the man who knew too much. Which was ironic, really, considering my academic career.

A peculiar sound erupted from Cressi’s stomach. “I must have eaten something,” said Cressi with a weak smile.

“It’s hot down there,” said Calvi, and I thought for a moment he was referring to Cressi’s stomach but he was off on a tangent of his own. “Hot as hell but hotter. And muggy, so there’s nothing to do but sweat. What did that snake think I was going to do, learn canasta? What am I, an old lady? You know when they eat dinner down there? Four o’clock. Christ, up here I was finishing lunch at Tosca’s around four o’clock and waiting for the night to begin. At four o’clock down there they’re lining up for the early birds. They’re serving early birds till as late as six, but they line up at four. And lime green jackets. Explain to me, Vic, sweating in a restaurant line in lime green jackets.”

“I understand Phoenix has a dry heat,” I said.

“White belts, white shoes, what the hell am I supposed to do down there? Golf? I tried golf, bought a set of clubs. Pings. I liked the sound of it. Ping. Went to the course, swung, the ball went sideways. Sideways. I almost killed a priest. What the hell am I doing playing golf? I went fishing once, one of them big boats. Threw up the whole way out and the whole way back. The only thing I caught was a guy on the deck behind me when a burst of wind sent the puke right into his face. That was good for a laugh, sure, but that was it for fishing. You know, I been in this business all my life. Started as a kid running errands for Bruno when he was still an underboss. You stay alive in this business, you do a few stints in the shack, your hair turns gray, you’re entitled. Up here I was respected. I was feared. Down there I was a kid again, surrounded by old men with colostomy bags on their hips and old ladies looking to get laid. I was getting high school ass up here, down there ladies ten years older than me, nothing more than bags of bones held together by tumors, they’re eyeing me like I’m a side of venison. They got walkers and the itch and they want to cook for me. Pasta? Sauce Bolognese? Good Italian blood sausage? Shit no. Kreplach and kishke and brust. You ever have something called gefilte fish?”