Past Due (4 page)

I
DIDN’T KNOW
what it was about hospitals that pressed their weight upon me with a physical force the minute I entered one, whether it was the information lady with her perky smile, the doctors walking casually among desolation and death, the smell, the stuffy framed portraits of long-vanished healers, the sick, the really, really sick, the smell. Did I mention the smell? You know what I mean, eau de mortality, a fragrant mixture of rubbing alcohol, ammonia, green beans, false cheeriness, false hope, urine and sweat and lime green Jell-O. Whatever it was, I had the usual mordant sensation as I walked into the lobby of Temple University Hospital smack in the middle of North Philadelphia. Or maybe it was the fact that my father was on the fourth floor. Any building that housed my father, whether the decaying little bungalow in which I was raised or the sprawling multilevel inner-city hospital in which he now lay, had the same effect on me, something akin to dropping down down in the deep sea and feeling my chest compress from the weight.

He had collapsed on the steps of his home away from home, the grand and glorious Hollywood Tavern, in his sad suburban enclave of Hollywood, Pennsylvania. There was blood coming out of his mouth and his breath was wet, and in the ambulance they had enthusiastically pumped him full of drugs. By some miracle he had
survived the trauma of the ambulance and, when he had been stabilized at Holy Redeemer Hospital, he had been transferred to Temple. The religious symbolism was deliciously inapt, but Temple was the only hospital in the area that performed the delicate yet brutal surgery his condition required. Now they were treating the pneumonia that had invaded his lungs and were waiting for him to gain enough strength so they could open up his chest and kill him proper.

“Hi, Dad,” I said with as much pep as I could muster.

“You’re back,” he said, matching my pep with his normal tone of bitter resignation. “You was just here. What, is your cable out?”

“Don’t be silly. I came to see you. But I do seem to remember the Sixers might be playing Orlando tonight. Do you want me to put it on?”

“What for? I seen enough gunners in the damn army to last me, I don’t need to see that Iverson bum.”

“He’s good. I like watching him play.”

He waved his hand in disgust. He could barely move, my father, lying on his bed, his face gray and drawn and unshaven, only sixty years old but looking like he’d already been buried twice as long. A clip bit into a finger of his waving hand, reading the oxygen level in his blood, now a paltry ninety-three percent. He barely had enough energy to breathe, sure, but he was never without enough energy to give the world a dismissive shove. “I seen Chamberlain play. Greer. Cunningham coming off the bench. After what I seen, he’s nothing.”

“So how are you doing?”

“I’m dying, how do you think I’m doing?”

“You’re not dying.”

“Yes I am, and it’s not such a bad thing neither. At least I earned it. I didn’t earn much in my life, but I earned this.”

I took off my coat, sat down beside his bed. “Nice to see you in a good mood for a change. What’s going on?”

“What the hell do you think is going on? I lie here and they stick things in me. Bloodsuckers, is what they are.”

“And you, of course, are being your normal, personable self.”

“You try smiling as they play voodoo with your body. If the sickness doesn’t kill me, they’ll do it themselves.”

I smiled indulgently. “Why so cheerful this evening?”

“They got this thing up my dick.”

“To help you pee.”

“Sixty years I didn’t need no help.”

“Want me to adjust it for you?”

“Stay the hell away from me, you bastard,” said my father. “So there’s that. And, I don’t know, I been thinking about things.”

“Oh, Dad, don’t do that,” I said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Especially here. No good can come from it. We’ve both made it this far precisely by not thinking of things.”

“And look where we are.” He tried to shift in the bed, struggled to take a breath. His face enlivened brightly with pain. “Hell,” he said.

“Why don’t I turn on the game?”

“I been thinking about things,” he said. “I been thinking about…things.”

“The Sixers?”

“A girl.”

“Should I turn it on?”

“A pleated skirt.”

“Ah yes, pleated skirts. I’ve always liked them myself. Very flattering to the hips.”

“I need to tell you.”

“Sure, Dad. That’s fine. But how are you feeling? It looks like you’re in pain. Are you?”

“What do you think? Whenever I breathe. I haven’t slept in days.”

I jumped up. “Let me find a doctor.” Before he could reply, I was out the door.

“My father’s in a bit of agony,” I told the nurse behind the desk. “You think he could be given something to ease it for a time, maybe let him sleep.” The nurse told me to wait a moment as she went off to find the intern, and I stood dutifully at the nurses’ desk, playing the part of the dutiful son, glancing uneasily at the door to my father’s room, just down the hall.

I didn’t want to hear that he had been thinking of things, my father. I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking about. And I really really really didn’t want to hear about the girl in the pleated skirt
that had suddenly popped into his consciousness as he stared un-blinking at his own mortality. The girl who got away, the girl who broke his heart, the girl, that girl, the girl, the one. It was all too sad and ordinary. It didn’t take much to imagine it all in one sad swoop. The shy glances, the sweet romance, and then the cheating, his or hers, it didn’t matter, the cheating and the recriminations, and then the breakup that left him sad and wounded, that left him weak and unguarded, like a boxer ready to fall into an exhausted embrace with the first girl who came along, even someone totally unsuited to him, even someone certifiable, someone like, well, like my mother, from which all his ruin and misery had come, including his only begotten son. No, I didn’t want to hear how with the girl in the pleated skirt everything would have been different, how with the girl in the pleated skirt life would have been more than a sad burden to be shouldered through to death. Because it wouldn’t have been different, my dad’s life, and we both knew it. My father was someone who trudged through life while others floated, a man who set a course of low expectations for himself and then mercilessly failed to meet them, a man who chose bitterness and anger because they just came naturally, dammit, and what do you know anyway, you little bastard.

“Are you Mr. Carl’s son?”

I pulled myself out of my self-absorption to see a set of scrubs and a chart and a woman wearing and holding them both. She was young and thin and her eyes, though tired, were very blue. And she was a doctor, Dr. Hellmann.

“Like the mayonnaise,” I said.

She smiled thinly as if she hadn’t heard that more than a thousand times before and then went right to the chart. “You said your father has been in acute distress, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“We don’t give opiates to COPDers.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s what your father has, it’s why he’s here. But there is something maybe I can prescribe to ease his pleuritic pain. It won’t put him to sleep, but it will let him sleep if the pain is keeping him up. I’ll need to talk to him first.”

“Sure,” I said as I followed her down the hall. “How’s he doing?”

“We’re waiting for the antibiotic to work.”

“Maybe you should pump in some Iron City. That’s his usual medication of choice.”

She looked at me with her eyes narrowed. “Is that a joke?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Try harder next time.”

“How long have you been on duty?” I asked.

“Thirty so far.”

“Maybe after thirty hours nothing is funny.”

“Maybe,” she said, as we reached my father’s door, “but I couldn’t stop laughing at the evening news. That Peter Jennings, he was just cracking me up. You, on the other hand…” She gave me a jolt of her baby blues as she backed into the room. “Wait here.”

I waited. She spoke to my father for a long while and came out, writing on the chart. “The nurse will be back in a moment with the Toradol,” she said. With a toss of her hair, she walked toward the desk without giving me another glance. Hellmann, Dr. Hellmann. Like the mayonnaise.

I stuck my head in my father’s room. “Good news, the nurse is going to bring you something for the pain.”

“It won’t do nothing,” he said. “Whatever they give me, it won’t work. Nothing works. It’s just something else to charge the insurance company.”

“I’m going down to the cafeteria to get a bite. You want anything?”

“Get me a beer.”

“I tried,” I said, “but the cute doctor said no way.”

“She ain’t that cute.”

“Remember old Doc Schaefer you took me to when I was a kid?”

“With the nose hair and the mole?”

“Well, she’s cuter than him. I’ll be right back.”

I went down to the cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee, a soggy egg salad sandwich, a bag of chips. I sat down at a table and had my dinner. I took my time, I was in no hurry. I chewed the egg salad very carefully. I ate the chips one at a time instead of in handfuls. I spent a long while deciding on which color Jell-O for dessert.

When I slipped back into my father’s room, he was lying peacefully, asleep, his wet breaths rising and falling softly like the waves of a distant ocean. I spoke to him and he didn’t respond, but I didn’t want to leave him just yet. I turned on the television. The Sixers’ game was in the third quarter, they were up by three. It looked to be a pretty good game, a game I couldn’t get on my currently cable-free TV. I sat back in the chair, propped my foot on my father’s bed, watched the telly, wondered when Dr. Hellmann might check back in so I could flirt a little more.

It was turning out to be a rather nice visit with the game on and my father asleep and Mrs. Parma’s signed contingency fee agreement in my briefcase. It had worked out just as I had hoped when I went to the nursing station to complain of his pain because I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t want to hear his story about the girl in the pleated skirt. There are some things a son just doesn’t want to hear from his father, and his story of the girl who got away was, I was sure, just such a thing.

And I was right, yes I was, right at least about it being a story I didn’t want to hear. But I was wrong when I thought I had dodged it, because my father, for some perverse reason of his own, which I was only to discover much later on, was determined that I hear it, every damn breath of it, and I would, yes, yes I would.

And in its own peculiar way, his story told me everything I needed to know about the plague that had reached out to kill Joey Parma, the plague of slavery to the past that had doomed Joey’s life, and maimed my own life as well.

“W
HAT ARE WE
supposed to do with this?” said Beth Derringer, from behind her neatly organized desk, holding the Parma contingency fee agreement in front of her like a floppy piece of moldy bologna. We were having a firm meeting, which meant that I had strolled into her office, the two of us comprising the whole of the less than prosperous law firm of Derringer and Carl.

“Investigate,” I said. “Isn’t that the first part of our three-part motto? Investigate, sue the bastards, collect gobs of money. I wonder what that would be in Latin.
Vidi, vici,
contingency fee?”

“Did you get a retainer?”

“Mrs. Parma is seventy-something, she can barely see, she lives off her husband’s Social Security. How was I going to ask for a retainer?”

“Victor,” said Beth, shaking her head, “we need money.”

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

“But we need it now. Immediately. We need money or it’s over. The rent is long past due, Ellie has been two weeks without pay. I just got off the phone with the bank and they won’t extend our line. We’re in trouble.”

“Let’s go out and get a drink.”

“This is serious.”

“That’s why I want to go out and get a drink.”

“Victor, you’re avoiding.”

“Of course I’m avoiding. What sane person wouldn’t avoid what I’m avoiding. I don’t have enough money. I’m not getting laid. I have a glove compartment full of traffic tickets and a date in Traffic Court, where I’ll most likely be stripped of my license. I’m stuck every night or so visiting my father in the hospital and watching him die. And did I mention they shut off my cable? How is it possible to lead a meaningful life, I ask you, without the Golf Channel?”

She looked at me with almost pity in her eyes.

“Yes, it’s true,” I said. “No Golf Channel.”

“How is he?”

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“They want to slice him open and chop up his lungs. But I’d rather talk about business. What about our accounts receivable?”

“The accounts receivable, I’m happy to say, grow by the hour. But receivables don’t pay the rent. Guy Forrest still owes us for his murder trial. Why don’t you give him another call?”

“He can’t be reached. Whatever he had he sold and put in a trust for his kids. He says he’ll pay us when he can, but who knows when that will be. Now he’s hit the road. Bali. Tibet. Off to find himself.”

“Wow,” said Beth, spinning in her chair. “That sounds nice.” She took a moment to imagine herself walking through an exotic marketplace, bargaining over batik, or hiking high into the Himalayas.

Beth was more than my partner, she was my best friend, and I loved practicing law with her, but our long-term goals were quite dissimilar. I had a fierce ambition to succeed and prosper and rise, which made our struggles all the more despairing for me. But Beth, Beth always had the attitude that she was just passing through. She didn’t seem to have long-term goals. She saw the legal profession as a helping profession, God help her, and was pleased to be of some use. But she could also see herself trying something else, going somewhere new, dedicating herself to some other life. She sometimes mused about the Peace Corps. Really, she did, which, like, boggled my mind. I mean, my life had turned bleak because my cable had been cut off. Cold showers, long hours, no golf on TV, porridgy gluck masquerading as dinner? Philadelphia was too tough
for me, how would I handle the Peace Corps? But she was right, I was avoiding, avoiding the whole precarious perch of our practice. For her, bankruptcy would have meant a new beginning, which I think she secretly found attractive. For me, the idea of bankruptcy was too brutal to even contemplate. If I wasn’t a lawyer, what was I? It would take some deep soul searching to figure that out and, frankly, I firmly believed my soul, like certain biohazard properties, was better left unsearched.

“Are you ever tempted,” she said, “just to go off and find yourself?”

“God no. I might succeed.”

“Yes, that would be frightening. And isn’t it weird to think that you might be somewhere out there to be found. Can you imagine the poor sap who goes off on a walkabout to find himself, climbs the highest peaks, the widest valleys, and when he gets to the final spot what he finds, instead of himself, is you?”

“We were talking about accounts receivable,” I said drily.

“I suppose we should cross Joseph Parma and his thirty-five hundred dollars off the list.”

“He was never good for it anyway.”

“So why’d you take the case?”

“He needed someone. But don’t put it all on me,” I said. “You brought in Rashard Porter.”

“Yes, that,” she said, nodding her head. “I know his mother, she’s a wonder, and he’s basically a good kid. But I got a retainer for that.”

“Three hundred dollars, which didn’t cover the arraignment.”

“She’s a single mother paying half her salary in rent. The three hundred itself was a struggle for her.”

“His suppression hearing is day after tomorrow.”

“How’s it look?”

“Not good. The joint they found lying next to him on the front seat was the size of a small dog. Mr. Magoo would have seen that spliff from across the street. But I have a plan.”

She sighed, turned again to look out the window, saw, I was certain, not the grimy strip of Twenty-first Street visible from her office but the great Plateau of Tibet at the base of the Himalayas.

“Without some paying clients,” she said, “we’re not going to survive through the summer.”

“Oh come on. We’ll make it, we always do.”

“Struggling to pay the rent was charming when we were first out of law school,” she said, “but it’s getting old.”

“Don’t go south on me, Beth. I have a hunch about the Parma case. I think there is money here.”

“You always think there’s money here, but it always ends up being there, not here. What was Joey’s nickname, Victor?”

“Joey Cheaps.”

“And he died owing us thirty-five hundred dollars. What makes you think a man whose life was so devoid of value he earned the moniker ‘Cheaps’ could suddenly become a cash cow in his death?”

“It’s that image from his story, the one I can’t seem to shake. A moonlit night on the waterfront. A man lies dead. Joey Parma holds a bloody baseball bat in his hand. And in the distance, Joey’s partner in crime is walking away with a suitcase full of cash.”

“Victor, wise up. The suitcase is empty. The money’s long gone. Cash gets spent, that’s the beauty of cash.”

“Maybe, but twenty years pass and then two goons show up, beat the hell out of Joey, and then start asking about the suitcase? That same suitcase? Joey was scared out of his wits, scared enough to call me, and then twelve hours later he’s dead. There’s a connection here between Joey’s death and that suitcase. I think it’s still around, I think it’s still in play. You find that suitcase, you find a murderer, Beth. A murderer with a pile of money.”

“And how do we do that?”

“McDeiss is looking into Joey’s homicide, but we know things he doesn’t know, things we’re not allowed to tell him. Maybe we should do what we can to help his investigation. Twelve hours passed from the time I met with Joey at La Vigna to the time of his murder. If we can suss out those twelve hours, we’ll be far on the road to finding our killer. We know Joey saw his mother in the afternoon. And we know he was one other place for sure.”

“Where?”

“Let’s go out for a drink. Let’s you and I step out for a drink at Jimmy T’s.”