Past Due (28 page)

I
STOOD AT
the door of the small Mount Airy house and straightened my tie, licked my teeth, shined my wingtips on the back of my calves. I felt like I should have brought along a bouquet of red roses and a box of chocolates.

Sylvia Steinberg.

She was Tommy Greeley’s girlfriend before his murder, she was Tommy Greeley’s lover for who knows how long. If it wasn’t Chelsea in the photographs then it had to be her. The long taut body, the smooth skin, the dark hair.

Sylvia Steinberg.

I had thought it would be a difficult feat of detection to find her after all these years, probably living in a different city, probably living under a different name, probably living the suburban dream and wanting nothing to do with her misspent past when she was the girlfriend of a cocaine kingpin. But sometimes fact-finding is ludicrously easy, all it takes is an attempt. Sylvia Steinberg was listed under her own name in the Philadelphia telephone directory, with a Mount Airy address. Mount Airy, where all the hippies who had congregated on South Street in the sixties had settled into their middle age, wearing their Birkenstocks, sitting on their porches, chewing their granola, passing back and forth their recipes for tofu turkey.

“Who?” had said Sylvia Steinberg on the phone. “You want to talk about Tommy? Why? I suppose. You know where I live? That’s right. Tomorrow at two. Come about then, why don’t you?”

And about then I had come, down to a quiet leafy street, a small green house with a great sycamore in front, a neat lawn, a dainty porch, a door behind which stood a month’s worth of erotic fantasies. I took a breath, calmed myself, knocked. Waited for the door to open, smiled when it did, identified myself, stepped inside as the door closed behind me.

When I left that little house in Mount Airy and started driving back to Center City, I was horrified and excited too. On the plus side, I finally knew who the woman was in the photographs, finally had a face with which to grace the perfect body. On the other side, I didn’t like who it turned out to be, not at all, and yet my hormones were splashing, yes they were, and I could feel the arousal in my gut.

“I loved Tommy Greeley, I suppose,” had said Sylvia Steinberg. “At least I thought I did.”

We were sitting across from each other at her kitchen table when she said this. A coffeemaker burbled on the countertop, a small plate of Oreos was set between us. And she was talking about Tommy.

“What happened between you two?” I said.

“Do you know the Yeats line? ‘Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. ’Well, the center couldn’t hold and so it fell apart.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You can only hide from the truth so long.”

“You’re talking about the drugs?”

“I should think that was part of it too. I didn’t know about his business when we first got involved and I never approved when I learned the truth. In fact, I refused to do drugs myself. A few hits and all the fears I was trying not to deal with would just flood over me. But still, I thought we could just get married, move to the suburbs, have kids, everything would be settled. As if I could separate the life I imagined from his rotten business, even if it was the business that would buy the house, the cars, the private schools. Can you
spell schizophrenia, Victor? Two separate worlds, which collapsed into each other when that FBI agent started nosing around like a rabbit, sniffing here, sniffing there. But by then, we were already crashing.” She laughed. “Tommy never knew what he was getting into when he made his little suggestion.”

The coffeemaker quieted, Sylvia pushed herself off the table, ambled over to the counter.

She had been a very pretty woman in her youth, you could tell by her lovely face, her dark hair, her smooth soft skin. As she was talking to me, I was examining her closely, trying to see in her the woman of the photographs. It was hard, but I could envision it, yes I could, so long as I imagined that thin lithe body had been swallowed whole by another. If Sylvia was that woman, she weighed about a hundred pounds more than she had twenty years before. I couldn’t help but do the math. Twenty years, one hundred pounds, five pounds per year at 3,500 hundred calories per pound. That would be a mere 50 excess calories a day: three ounces of Coca-Cola, four ounces of beer, or a single Oreo.

“Here we go,” she said, bringing over two mugs and the pot. “How do you take your coffee?”

“Straight.”

“Puts hair on your chest that way, I suppose.”

“I sure could use it.”

She poured, fixed up her mug with milk and sugar, sat down, took a pensive sip.

“You mentioned a suggestion,” I said.

“So I did,” she said, and as she smiled at the remembrance she popped an Oreo into her mouth.

Tommy Greeley, that scamp, that…that scamp. As I drove along the nicely serpentine Lincoln Drive, I couldn’t help but admire his gumption. A suggestion, Sylvia called it, slurring the g’s and overemphasizing the middle syllable just enough to indicate what the suggestion might have entailed.
Oh come on. Let’s just try it. Open your horizons. It could be fun. You never know.
No, you never do. The logic of it is inescapable, at least to the male of the species. I mean if two breasts to suckle and fondle, to rub your face between are the great obsession of the young, four would be the grand salami of boyhood
dreams, right? Four legs to caress, four lips to kiss, two belly buttons to lick clean, two tongues to suck their way across your flesh, four hands to explore, to massage, to tickle and pinch and grab. And the scent of it all, oh my, no thin solo but a veritable symphony. Tommy Greeley, that dog, that scamp.

Of course sometimes things don’t work out quite how you had planned.

“He brought her over,” said Sylvia. “A very pretty girl, quiet, strangely passive, besotted, it seemed, with Tommy. I had seen her before, knew who she was, had always thought her pretty. But this night she sort of glowed. Tommy opened a bottle of wine. We drank and talked and laughed, a sort of forced laughter. There were candles, if I remember, and incense. I felt like I was twelve again. Tommy was very charming, ever the ringleader. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl. She was so, so pretty. In the candlelight. We finished up one bottle, were on to the next, and I was feeling it, the alcohol, the tension, the expectation. And then he put his arm around me and kissed me. Right in front of her. A long passionate kiss. And I was embarrassed. I could feel the blood rising through my face, the prickly sensation, which was unusual for me, for I was not the blushing type. Then he took my hand. And we stood. And he led me through the hallway to the bedroom, his arm around my shoulders, like he was ushering me into a whole new world. And I looked back. And she was following, through the dark hall. She was holding a candle and following us, the candlelight dancing across her features, following us like a ghost.”

“And?”

“Well, yes, and. Definitely and.”

She laughed, a rich, good-natured laugh and I couldn’t help but laugh with her.

“I don’t think Tommy enjoyed it as much as he had hoped,” she said. “Oh, he made all the required gestures and sound effects, yes, snorting and neighing, a veritable barnyard of sounds, but eventually there was a touch of petulance to it all. He wasn’t at the center anymore, you see, he was simply one bend on a triangle, and felt maybe like a child who suddenly discovers that everyone in the world isn’t dancing to his tune, that there are other tunes being played.”

“And for you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right off, but then she didn’t have to. There was a footstep at the entranceway, the scrape of a key, the front door being opened, and then it all became clear as rain.

She had said she didn’t like smoking reefer, that after a few hits all the fears she was trying not to deal with would flood over her. And later, she had hoped her hoped-for marriage to Tommy Greeley would settle things. But some things are not so easily settled, and some fears are not so easily outrun. Especially when the fear is of the truth and the hard uncertain future that its acknowledgment would demand. I could imagine Sylvia Steinberg wrestling with her demon, chaining it tight, stuffing it into a dark corner to keep it quiet, glimpsing its face only in restless dreams or flights of drug-induced paranoia, winning the struggle, winning, until her lover comes up with a suggestion. A suggestion.
Oh come on. Let’s just try it. Open your horizons. It could be fun. You never know.
And there is alcohol. And there is candlelight. And there is a pretty girl along for the ride. And when the demon finally breaks free, smashing out of its chains with a startling ferocity, it is different than she ever expected. Bright not dark, soft not hard, warm not cold, and its embrace is not one of despair but of acceptance and ease that settles over the soul like a mother’s sweet breath.

The front door opened, the bustle of domesticity, the soft yapping cry of a baby, and then a woman came into the kitchen. She was tall, blond, with a thin, pretty face and a baby held at her hip. She leaned over and gave Sylvia a long kiss on the lips.

Sylvia made the introductions. I was Victor Carl, the lawyer asking about Tommy Greeley. The blond woman, whose nose wrinkled with distaste at Tommy’s name, was Louise. The baby, their baby, was Donna.

“Isn’t she cute?” said Sylvia. “Isn’t she just the cutest?”

“Yes she is,” I said, thinking it true so long as they kept the slobbering little bundle away from my suit.

“She’s been fussy,” said Louise.

“She’s just hungry,” said Sylvia, reaching out for the baby. “Aren’t you, sweetie pie. You’re just hungry, yes you are. But not for long. You don’t mind, do you, Victor?” she said as she unbuttoned her shirt.

“Not at all.”

The shirt opened, Sylvia flopped out her right breast. I got a good look before the baby latched on and began moving her tiny jaw in time with her desperate swallows.

“Is Sylvia being helpful, Mr. Carl?” said Louise.

“Very.”

“What is this all about?”

“I’m trying to find out why Tommy Greeley disappeared.”

“It will come to you, I’m sure,” said Louise. “It’s not so hard to figure out. I’m taking a bath.”

“Nice meeting you,” I said to her back as she walked out of the kitchen.

“What did she mean?” I asked Sylvia.

“She doesn’t think much of Tommy. The drug dealing, the parties in Atlantic City, the way he cheated on everyone. From all she’s heard she assumes he was asking for it a hundred different ways. But she never met him. There was a sweetness there, and an energy, and a brash confidence that was infectious. He seemed freer than other people.”

“Who was the girl?” I said. “The girl with the candle.”

“One of the people in Tommy’s other life. Her name was Chelsea. Ah, Chelsea. So pretty. I have to admit I fancied myself in love with her. I followed her around like a puppy for a while, which is sort of usual when you break through. Nothing came of it, of course, just a few nights without Tommy, which were very nice, lovely, yes, but nothing more. It would still be a number of years before I was ready to handle something serious.”

“Like Louise.”

“Yes, or like a few before her. But with Chelsea, a strange thing happened. Right in the middle of it, a man came to my apartment, rough-looking, with all this hair, his beard, wild eyes. He came to tell me, and this is what was so peculiar, he came to tell me that Tommy was cheating on me. Cheating on me with his wife. He wanted me to get all angry and to do something about it. But it turned out he was married to Chelsea. Which put me in a funny situation, since I had been with her too and wanted, desperately, to be with her again. The man seemed upset at my failure to react, when what I was really trying to do was hide my reaction at learning that my Chelsea was married to him.”

“Was he angry?”

“Oh yes. Quite. It was frightening, really. I tried to tell him he needn’t worry about Tommy, that Tommy was already infatuated with someone else, but he wouldn’t listen. Left very agitated.”

I leaned forward. “Who?”

“The man? I think his name was Donnie. Could that be it? I’m not sure.”

“No. Who was Tommy infatuated with?”

She pulled the baby from her breast, laid the infant on her lap as she placed her right breast back in her shirt and pulled out the left. By then I wasn’t so interested in the sight, by then I had seen what I needed to see, her right areola without a blemish or mark of any kind, to know that Sylvia Steinberg was not the woman in Tommy Greeley’s photographs. So who was? It seemed she was ready to give me the answer.

When the baby was happily sucking at the left breast, the baby’s jaw now moving more for comfort than hunger, Sylvia said, “I don’t know. By then we weren’t confiding in each other.”

“So how did you know there was someone?”

“We were still pretending to be together—it was easier not to talk about the things we were going through with each other, easier to playact, you see—but I could tell. He was distant, distracted, he took a lot of showers, and then he picked up a new hobby which was so unlike him.”

“A new hobby?” I said.

“Tommy was never one for introspection, so his new little pastime was very surprising.”

“What was his new hobby?” I said.

And then she told me, and that’s when I knew.

Lincoln Drive emptied onto Kelley Drive, which swept along with the Schuylkill River until it raced past the great brown art museum, sitting high and imperious, and spilled into the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The afternoon was getting late, rush hour was on, but I was driving against the main flow of traffic, slipping into the city, so the drive wasn’t an ordeal. Just a little stop and go, just enough time for me to put it all together. And I was, yes indeed, putting it all together. The luminous Chelsea. The furious Lonnie. The
mysterious love interest that had given Tommy Greeley his new hobby. Somewhere in that matrix lay the root cause of Tommy Greeley’s murder twenty years before, and most likely the killer of Joey Parma. Wasn’t it exactly Joey’s luck to somehow fall into the middle of that crew? And at the epicenter of it all, I could tell now with utter certainty, was the woman in the photographs, my photographs, that woman.