Past Due (25 page)

I
WAS LYING
in my bed, alone, my head turned toward the photographs pinned to my wall, my mind not quite pinned to anything at all, but instead floating free with thoughts puzzled, prurient, and strangely paranoid, when the doorbell rang.

I wasn’t just then in the mood to receive visitors. I still was half drunk, half dressed, half erect, fully confused, and mortified. Let’s just say it hadn’t gone as well as I had dreamed with Chelsea.

I rolled out of bed, made my way stiffly to the living room, grunted a “What?” into the intercom.

“Is that you, Victor?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No.”

“Do you have, like, a minute?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You’re not going to invite me up?”

“Who is this?”

“Helloo? Jammy, V, who do you think?”

“I should have known,” I said, and I should have, since every
sentence ended with a question mark. I looked around at my apartment in disgust, figured it didn’t matter, and then buzzed her in.

I took off my suit pants, slipped on a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt. I closed the bedroom door firmly behind me and started cleaning up the living room, putting the cushions back onto the couch, dropping the half-empty beer bottles into the blue recycling bin, tossing into the hall closet the clothes I had stripped off with hopeful abandon just a few dozen minutes before—my suit jacket, my tie and shirt, my belt.

I gave the living room a quick appraisal and, just as the first knock at my door came, I spotted something. Black and thin, like an accusing finger reaching over the edge of the couch.

I stepped over to it. It was a thin black strap. I lifted it up and with it came the whole of a lovely black bra. She had forgotten it, or couldn’t find it, when she dressed to leave. Taking it off had been the highlight of my day, my year, and yet that very act had sabotaged everything.

I had led Chelsea up the stairs by her hand. She was strangely passive, it was like when we first kissed on the stoop, like she was allowing me this. Normally that would have stopped me, I don’t like to be allowed to do anything, but in my current state, still brazened by alcohol, still sexually charged, still in thrall to the pictures of the younger Chelsea pinned to my wall, I didn’t care that she was merely allowing me. Merely allowing me was enough.

I led her up the stairs, led her into my apartment, kissed her hard and long, led her to the couch. That led, of course, to the aforementioned tender kisses, the aforementioned soft caresses. I moved my hand through her long black hair like I would move it through a basin of water and then I brought the hair to my face and smelled its freshness, its organic herbalness. I closed my eyes and I saw her body, her younger body, naked, taut and lithe, I saw it as clearly as if the photographs were pinned beneath my eyes. And then I couldn’t help myself even if I had wanted to. If you leave a greyhound on a metal run it will head off into a sprint with such abandon it will literally break its neck. The aforementioned frantic unbuttoning, unbelting, the aforementioned long, languorous licks of the neck and collarbone as I undraped the frilly white shirt from her shoulders. I
bowed down to kiss the tops of her breasts, the same breasts from the pictures of which I had been staring at relentlessly ever since they came into my possession. I fumbled at the clasp behind her back, as I always fumbled at the clasp behind the back, and then the bra suddenly loosened and she herself raised her hands and pulled it over her shoulders and her breasts, her breasts came free.

And they were beautiful, gorgeous, ripe, perfect. And not the same. No, not the same. The nipples were smaller than those in the pictures, the areolae lighter. And yes, unblemished. Unblemished. Not the same at all. And something went out of me then, and everything sagged, my emotions, my hurry, my obsession, my lust. Everything sagged, yes everything did. And that had been the end of that. No lead in the pencil, no toothpaste in the tube. Time to hire the limo.

There was a second knock at the door. I searched quickly for someplace to hide the bra, jammed it under one of the cushions of the couch, and then let Kimberly Blue inside my apartment.

She sat down on the couch, right upon the cushion beneath which I had stashed the bra. She seemed troubled, did Kimberly, quiet, without her normal brassy confidence. I sat down across from her and tilted my head to get a good look at her.

“Nice place,” she said, as she perused my digs with cautious eyes.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Well, it could be a dec setup if you would, like, decorate or, even better, clean.”

“But that would be so out of character.”

“Two words, V. Merry Maids. They come in, do a quality job, when you come home the place is good to go.”

“How do you know so much about Merry Maids?”

“That was one of the primary employment opportunities I was looking at for after college.”

“At the vice presidential level?”

“More like entry level.”

“And then Eddie Dean came along.”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’ve been away.”

“You and Eddie?”

“And Colfax, too. San Fran. The city of lights.”

“I thought that was Paris.”

“I don’t know, San Fran was pretty bright. Mr. Dean had business out there he had to handle.”

“And he took you along?”

“I think he likes having me around.” She looked around nervously, bit into one of her cuticles. “Anything new on Tommy Greeley?”

“Just that he was sleeping with the wife of one of the guys he was selling drugs with.”

“Who?”

“A guy named Lonnie Chambers.”

“Did this Lonnie know Tommy was hooking up with his wife?”

“Yes.”

“You think he was the one who set Tommy Greeley up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pretty good reason, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. You know I am always glad to see you, Kimberly—”

“Really?”

“Sure. But I’m a little tired right now. Why don’t we meet up tomorrow afternoon at my office and we can go over everything then.”

“I know where your office is, V. I could have gone there if I wanted to. I wanted to talk to you someplace not at the office.”

“Oh?”

“Someplace private.”

“Oh.”

“I overheard something.”

“Oh. I see.” And I did. Kimberly was troubled, and there was something else I noticed now in her eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. She was scared. I stood, went to the fridge, pulled out a Rolling Rock long neck, popped the top with an opener.

“How are you doing, Kimberly?” I said as I handed her the bottle.

“I’m not sleeping with him,” said Kimberly.

“I believe you.”

“He’s yucky, you know what I mean? That face.”

“I was wrong to even bring that up. I was a jerk to think it. And even so, it’s none of my business. Whatever you do is none of my business, and I was wrong to imply what I was implying. But you should be careful around him, and especially around that creep Colfax.”

“Oh, Colfax is all right. He’s a sweetie.”

“No he’s not. Deep down I’m a sweetie, you just haven’t seen it yet. But Colfax, deep down, is Jack the Ripper.”

“What’s really going on here, V? Do you have any idea?”

“Some, but not much. Why don’t you tell me what you heard.”

“It’s nothing, really. Mr. Dean had a meeting with a couple of men and it got a little heated. I was in the other room so I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like one of the other men was pressuring Mr. Dean for some money and he was telling them to calm down, that he was on it, and that he’d have what he owed in a short time.”

“So our Eddie Dean is not as rich as he lets on.”

“He sounded scared, V. You know how he always has this droll, laconic thing going on? Well, here he sounded scared. And there was something else. He said he had a big deal going down in Philly and it was only a matter of time before he had the money. But V, all he does here is sit in the house building some wooden model of that ship of his, the one rusting down in the harbor? There is no big deal going down. The only place I can figure where he might be trying to get some money is from Derek Manley, but it sounded like he needed a brutal piece of change. Does Derek Manley have anything like that?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought. Poodles. I’m going to lose my job, aren’t I?”

“Is that all you’re worried about, Kimberly? Your job?”

“Ayeah. Helloo. Remember Merry Maids? What do you think that would do to my nails? But that’s not all. Am I, like, in trouble? Should I be scared?”

“Why ask me?”

“Because you know more than you let on. See, V, I know how much I don’t know, I know how much I don’t do. I’m the vice president of what? Of getting coffee and keeping the help in line? The
job’s a joke. But it pays. And I hope maybe it will lead to something better. I have skills, I could be good at something. Something. But this is where I’m at now and I am asking you, should I be scared? Am I going to get in trouble? Should I stick it out and see where it goes or should I maybe hop a plane to Cancun.”

“Tell me about how you got this job?” I said.

“The position was just posted on the job board, like hundreds of others.”

“So why’d you apply to this one?”

“Well, it was, like, made for me, you know? They wanted a marketing major, which I was. They wanted someone who could speak Spanish, which I can.”

“Really?”

“My dad was at the store all day, but he paid this nice old Mexican woman to look after me. I sort of picked it up.”

“Does Spanish come in handy working for Jacopo?”

“Not yet.”

“What else?”

“They wanted someone with experience designing ad campaigns for clothing lines.”

“Let me guess. You happened to have had some experience in that very same field.”

“My senior marketing project.”

“But Jacopo doesn’t sell clothes.”

“No.”

“Did you ever find out how many campuses they were recruiting on?”

“I think just Penn.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t require someone with red hair.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just a story I read a long time ago. For some reason, Kimberly, Eddie Dean wanted you. Not someone like you, but you. The other interviews were a sham. They were just saying next, next, until you came in the door. But why, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Why do you think?”

“No idea. But they must need something you have, or something you know, or someone. There’s a reason, and my guess is, Kimberly,
when we figure that out we’ll be ten steps closer to finding the truth behind this whole stinking mess.”

“So what should I do, V?”

“Cancun is supposed to be nice this time of year, and if I thought you were in any real danger I’d tell you to stock up on Lomotil, lather on the sunscreen, and go. But Eddie Dean needs you. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s going to keep paying you an absurd sum to get his coffee until he decides it’s time to tell you what he wants. And when he does Kimberly, do yourself a favor and give me a call.”

After she left, I dropped back into my bed, turned my gaze upon the pictures on the wall, and tried to make some sense out of the night.

First there was Lonnie. I had been looking for someone with a motive to do Tommy Greeley harm and Chelsea had given him to me. Lonnie, who had found out about the continuing relations between his wife and Tommy Greeley. Lonnie had been watching over Tommy the night he was killed. It wouldn’t take much for Lonnie to take himself out of the scene and leave Derek and Joey free to do their dark deed. He better than anyone knew what was in the suitcase, he surely would have known a place to hide it while he was in prison. And, best of all, if he had it, from the look of him he hadn’t spent its contents, he had kept it hidden, where it waited still for someone sharp and resourceful enough to unearth it and make it his own. Lonnie Chambers, my oh my.

And then there was Eddie Dean. I had wondered what his angle was from the start, the childhood oath was too much to believe, and now I knew. He was seriously broke and in deep trouble. And how did he know about the suitcase? Chelsea had clued me into that, I believed, at the Continental. Tommy Greeley said he had a friend from out of state who would launder and then stash the money for him, an old friend, from out of state. Eddie Dean, I’d bet. He had probably been there that night twenty years ago, on a boat in the river, waiting, waiting for Tommy Greeley and the suitcase full of cash. In fact he might even have been close enough to hear Manley say, “Get him, Cheaps.” That explained how he knew Joey was involved, how he got Derek Manley’s name, and how he got mine.
Now, desperate to pay back an impatient loan shark, he had used me to find a murderer hiding a suitcase full of money that could maybe save his life. Eddie Dean, that son of a bitch.

It was a neat theory about what had happened twenty years ago and what was happening now, but it had holes. Like who had killed Joey Parma? And what connection, if any, did Justice Jackson Straczynski, or his wacko wife, have to the disappearance? And what the hell was Kimberly Blue doing in the middle of everything? And what about the pictures?

I stood up from the bed and walked over to the wall of photographs, my photographs. They were once Tommy Greeley’s, created by him as a memorial to his desire, but now were mine, along with the strange fascination they carried like a virus. I rubbed a finger along a knee, a clavicle, the bumpy route of her vertebrae. It was almost as if I could feel the bones beneath the soft taut skin of the photograph. If they weren’t of Chelsea, then maybe they were of the other woman in Tommy Greeley’s life, his girlfriend, that Sylvia Steinberg. I couldn’t shake the sense that these photographs had something to do with Tommy Greeley’s murder. I’d have to look her up, Sylvia, yes I would. Stop over. Give her a look-see. Maybe I’d have better luck with her than I had with Chelsea. Boy, I sure hoped so.

After it had become clear that nothing would happen that night between Chelsea and me, after I had seen her naked torso and realized the pictures were not of her and then had tried my best to keep it going, kissing her chest, her side, rubbing her thighs through her pants as I nuzzled her ear, after I had tried and failed, we lay together on the skewed cushions of my couch, both of us seemingly puzzled and tired but not particularly upset. She didn’t tell me, “There are pills for that now,” for which I was hugely grateful. And for my part, I didn’t embarrass myself by telling her it never happens to me because it just had, hadn’t it? Instead, quietly, I untangled myself from her limbs, opened the fridge, got us each a beer, watched as she sat upright on the couch and tugged her shirt over her shoulders and buttoned up.