Past Due (6 page)

“Sounds to me,” I said, “like he was falling for a girl just like the girl that terrorized dear old dad.”

“Don’t it though. That last night, same call, same yes, yes, yes, and then he’s slapping the bar, hiking up his jacket, shooting his cuffs on his way out the door.”

“He say where?”

“He said he had a meet.”

“He say with who?”

“He said with money. Like that was ever a possibility with Joey. Poor sap. You know, he wasn’t a bad kid, but he never had a clue of what was what.”

I had a sudden thought. “Beside me, who did he owe the most?”

Lloyd leaned close. “What I heard, he was deeper than he ought to have been with Teddy.”

“Teddy?”

“Teddy Big Tits.”

“Are they?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Why was Joey borrowing money from some big-breasted loan shark?”

“Maybe for the wolf on the phone,” said Lloyd. “He was stupid enough, wasn’t he?”

“Where does Teddy drink?”

“The Seven Out, on Fourth Street. You know, Victor, them drinks you was making, us all remembering Joey, the toasts, it was almost nice.”

“Yes, it almost was,” said Beth.

“What do you think, Lloyd?” I said. “You got yourself a new specialty of the house?”

“Fugettabout it,” said Lloyd. “Guys don’t come in here for the fancy cocktails. They come in here to get blurry fast and cheap. Tomorrow it’ll be back to the wits.”

“Does that mean no ferns?” said Beth.

Lloyd snorted, took his rag to wipe the far side of the bar.

“Who was Joey meeting?” said Beth, softly.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it doesn’t sound right. That morning he’s scared witless and by nine-thirty that night he’s all gussied up for a big money meet.”

“Maybe he wasn’t as scared as he let on.”

“Or someone changed his mind. I’d sure like to meet that new girl of his. Maybe baby needed a new pair of shoes. And maybe Joey got a line on the suitcase. Whatever it was, it had something to do with the man Joey killed twenty years ago, I’m certain of it.”

“Who was he? Do you have any idea at all?”

“His name was Tommy,” I said, “and his initials were probably T.G.”

“How do you know that?”

“It has a ring to it, is all. But as to who he really was, I don’t have a clue.”

Except I was lying when I said that last little bit. Because I did have another clue. I had the envelope. And inside the envelope was something that would come to haunt my very dreams.

T
HE ENVELOPE.

It was yellowed, worn, one of its edges was ripped halfway down—twenty years will take its toll on even the finest bond—and on the top left corner was a dark black smudge over the preprinted return address: The University of Pennsylvania School of Law. Joey Cheaps had given the envelope to me at the same time he had given me the murder. And if I didn’t tell Beth about it, I had my reasons.

“You take anything off the dead guy?” I had asked Joey Cheaps. “Anything that could help us figure out who he was?”

“You think I would strip the dead like that, Victor? He was dead, there was blood. What do you take me for?”

I didn’t have to say anything, I just stared for a moment. Joey’s eyes peeled away.

“A watch I pawned over at the Seventh Circle on Two Street.”

“Dante’s place?”

“Yeah.”

“Brilliant.” Earl Dante then had been a lower-level mob guy with middling prospects, now he was
nùmero uno,
with a
pallòttola
next to his name. “Anything else.”

“A ring, gold, what I gave to my mom.”

“Jesus, Joey.”

“It was her birthday.”

“She still have it?”

“Never takes it off.”

“How gruesome is that?”

“Tell me about it. And something else. It was in his jacket, in an envelope.”

“Go ahead.”

“Photographs.” His eyebrows rose. “Dirty photographs.”

“You give those to your mother too?”

“Shut up. No, them I kept.”

“Did you bring them with you?”

He sat still for a moment and then bobbed his head as he reached into his jacket and pulled out the envelope, old, worn, thickly filled. And here it was, now, in my hand, that selfsame envelope. The University of Pennsylvania School of Law. One of the many fine institutions of higher education that had rejected my application. So our dead Tommy G. was a law student, or a professor, or a clerk, or knew someone related to the school. That was one clue. But the other, more interesting clue was inside.

The first time I had opened the envelope was the night after my meeting with Joey Cheaps. This was just before McDeiss called me to the crime scene, when I still thought I could do something to get my client out of his mess. I had opened the envelope, pulled out the pictures, leafed through them quickly, looking for a clue as to who my client had killed twenty years before, looking for the face of a dead man.

But there was no face. No face at all.

And after moving through them once, quickly, I moved through them again, slowly, and then again, even more slowly, my astonishment growing by the second. They weren’t dirty, as my client had described them, they were anything but.

A single breast, soft and full. The curved arch of a foot. The taut lines of a neck. Fingers posed like dancer’s. A wisp of dark hair over an ear. And then, what was that, with the substance of flesh over long curving bone? A thigh? A hip? It was soft and smooth and supremely abstract. Oh yes, now I saw it, the arch of a back as it moved gently toward the shoulder.

In my hands were pictures of a woman’s body, perfect and
strong, young, open. Pictures of a body only, no face, parts of the body separated into their own distinct curves and lines. A body, young and miraculous, universal, dividing itself until each inch of flesh became its own framed landscape with a mysterious, primal pull.

The rise of the clavicle. The run of the scapula. A distinctive mark on the areola of the right breast. The sharp climb of the calf.

They hypnotized me that first time I examined them, fascinated me still, and as I went through them now, once again, for the nth time, I found them burning themselves into my brain. Sitting on my beat up, old red couch, the lamp beside my head the only light in the apartment, a circle of brightness fell from the lamp straight onto the photographs and then through the photographs into a different time and place, into the very past.

Every inch of the woman was worshiped by the camera, every speck highlighted as if a marvel of nature. The landscape of these photographs was pristine. And they hadn’t just captured one woman’s body, they had captured the photographer too, his passion, his utter devotion. In every photograph, as clear as the woman’s flesh and bone, was the picture of an obsessive love guiding his eye as he made his study, like Ansel Adams, drunk with nature, capturing the unblemished beauty of a wildland at dusk.

The jut of the hipbone from the smooth line of her side. The sweet rippling ridge running through the narrow valley of her back.

I made the calculation. When these photographs were taken I was maybe nine or ten. I never had a chance. And yet, why did I feel, as I went through them, that I had missed my opportunity? Why did I feel the familiar pang of regret fostered by the sight of a woman whom I spy once in the street and who captures me wholly and who then disappears from my life without a trace. Some great gap existed in my life and these pictures somehow sounded out its depth. That was why I hadn’t given them to Beth. I was protecting them, and myself, at the same time.

One picture showed the woman’s torso, frontally, at ease, one leg languorously bent, a picture from the knees to the shoulders with the dark triangle, luxurious and mysterious, at its center. She was tall, thin, athletic, unselfconscious. Her hair was dark, her legs long,
her breastbone high, her fingers delicate and smooth. It was intoxicating, that picture, that center, that mystery. I couldn’t turn away.

Was it poor dead Tommy G. with the suitcase and the ring who had taken these photographs? It seemed likely, yes. And so who was she to him? More than a model, that was clear. A girlfriend, still maybe pining for her lost love? A wife, still mourning her missing husband, still waiting for him to return? Well, he wasn’t returning, was he? Maybe I should find her, tell her what had happened so long ago, see if, maybe, she wanted to go out for coffee.

How pathetic was that?

Yet, still, there was something to it. Joey Parma had finally broken free of the world that had failed him as much as he had failed it, but I was still around to shoulder the burden of his past, and these pictures, that girl, was part of it. If I was to find out who had reached out from decades past to slit poor Joey’s throat, then I could find worse places to start than her. Worse places indeed.

“I
HAD SEEN
her before,” said my father between rasps of breath. “But this time she walked by me. South Street. She walked right by me. And I smelled her. Christ, I can still smell her.”

I had fought to avoid it, this telling of my father’s sad lovesick tale. I had turned on the television, I had made calls from his phone, I had tried to start a conversation about the Eagles. In Philadelphia, if a guy comes at you with a shiv in his hand, demanding your wallet, just say something like “How about them Eagles,” and next thing you know you’ll be in a bar, drinking wits together, debating the merits of the stinking West Coast offense. But even the Eagles couldn’t derail my father. Once, when he started again with his story, I jumped out of my chair and intercepted the lovely Dr. Mayonnaise, whom I had been scheming to run into all night, and beguiled my way into escorting her downstairs to the cafeteria for a cup of joe, on me, no, no, I insist, please, you’re already doing so much for my father.

I carried the tray to a table in the corner and set out the cups and napkins and spoons like a fussy bald waiter at a French bistro. We talked about my father’s condition and then slipped into the short and imperfect histories two people give when they’re first eyeing each other. She winced when I told her I was a lawyer, but it was the kind of wince that let you know she didn’t really mind, that
lawyerdom fit her notion of an acceptable vocation, not as good as an accountant but better than grave-robbing scum, which only showed how little she knew of the profession. Her name was Karen and she was from Columbus, Ohio. I had never before met someone from Columbus, Ohio, but I figured it must be very sincere out there in the heart of the heartland because Karen Mayonnaise was a very sincere person. She sincerely cared about being a doctor, she sincerely cared for her patients, she was sincerely concerned about the state of the world. But despite all that I kind of liked her and when she had to leave she gave me a smile that I took to be an invitation to call.

So I was feeling pretty cheery when I stepped back into my father’s room and sat down. And then he began again about the girl in the pleated skirt.

“Dad, really, I don’t want to hear it. Is that okay? I just don’t.”

He stayed still for a moment, breathing noisily in and out. I reached for the television remote control, hanging by a cord from the wall, but he yanked it away with surprising strength for a COPDer. “They’re going to kill me,” he said.

“Who?”

“The doctors. With their knives. They’re going to slash out my lungs.”

“That’s the procedure. It’s lung reduction surgery. They explained it all, didn’t they? Something about tidal volume and residual volume. The upshot is that the surgery should increase the amount of useful air your lungs breathe in.”

“I know what they say. But they’re going to kill me.”

“Dad,” I said, “no, they’re not,” but even as I was saying it I was thinking that yes, yes they would.

“You should know about her before I die,” he said. “You need to. About her, about what we did, about what I buried.”

“Dad.”

“Dammit it, just listen for once in your life. Can you? Just listen without being a smart-ass? I don’t ask for much, do I?”

He was right, my father. He didn’t ask for much, he had never asked for much. That was maybe his greatest strength and greatest flaw. He had never asked for much and so was accepting of all that
he had never received. He had never asked for much from me and gotten exactly that. If I had a strength it was that I could accept the truth when it flopped into my face like a dead reeking fish. He never asked for much but he was asking for this, he was asking me to listen. And not just to listen, but to listen actively, to listen in a way that gave full expression to a story his weakened lungs wouldn’t allow him to flesh out by himself. I could do that. The least I could do for my father, my dying father, was to do that. And heaven knows the least from me was the most he could ever expect.

“All right, Dad,” I said. “Go ahead, tell me about her, tell me about the girl in the pleated skirt.”

“I had seen her before,” said my father between rasps of breath.

He had seen her walking down the street, on Locust or Spruce, always dressed prim and proper in an era where that stood out. And he had seen her drive by in the passenger seat of a long burgundy car with a high chrome grill, the girl staring forward, stiff and formal in that beast of a car, luminous, unobtainable. She was like something from a different era with her combed hair spilling behind out of a white hair band, her back straight, her pleated skirt.

Things were just starting to break down then, the social mores of his own boyhood. Hair was getting longer, kids were wearing dirty jeans and sandals, some just let themselves completely go and were proud of it. It was like clothes and hair and cleanliness, everything that once marked a man or woman, didn’t matter anymore. But for my father, they still did. My father was a throwback, like he too was from a different era, with his hair greased and combed back nattily, his pants pressed. Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Fabian, the Philly kids who had made it big on the left coast set the style and that was the way the boys on my father’s block dressed and acted before he did his tour in Germany. When he came back he saw no good reason to change. So he had noticed her when he had spied her, walking on the streets or driving by in that car, because of the way she dressed and the way she carried herself, like a dream from an age that was already passing him by. And of course, she had the face of an angel.

“But this time she walked by me. South Street.” South Street in the sixties. I hadn’t ever thought of my father cruising South Street in the sixties. By then the song had already been written, the song had already hit the charts:
Where do all the hippies meet? South Street.
Sure, but the conversion isn’t total yet. There is a clash of cultures, the old-style Philly boys and the new-style hippies, and it is that very clash that gives the street its frisson. Two very different generations cruising the same strip, eyeing each other warily with the future at stake. And then he sees her again.

“She walked right by me.” In her tight blouse, her pleated skirt, her long slim legs, a shimmering vision in white. “And I smelled her.” The cleanliness of her silky hair, the soft floral scent that stings him with its subtlety and sends him careening after her like a bee chasing a buttercup. “Christ, I can still smell her.”

He follows her, gains on her. He is a big man, my father, his body strengthened by his bout in the army, his skin dark from his work outside cutting suburban lawns for Aaronson. And he knows all the right lines, if he learned anything in the damn army it was the lines, the lines to give to the German girls hanging outside the base, the lines to lay on the neighborhood girls with their hair teased high. He has his lines ready, but when he finally reaches her, when she finally turns around as if to find the address she had passed, when finally he is there, with her, on the street, face-to-face, the lines all skitter and fly away, a frightened flock of birds.

He says something clever, like Hi. She looks through him, as he was certain she would, but then, she looks at him, directly, and he feels it, like he is back in the ring, boxing for the base team and getting a shot in the gut.

What’s your name? he manages to say.

None of your business, she says, but then a sly smile. What’s yours?

Jesse, he says.

Okay, Jesse. I guess I’ll be seeing you, Jesse.

Where? he says.

Wherever.

When I see you, what will I call you?

Whatever you want.

She nods at him and then walks past him and he watches her, watches her walk away, watches her stop, turn around, come back toward him, smile.

What do you want to call me? she says.

I don’t know, he says, flustered. Angel Face or something.

Oh, Jesse, she says, you can do better than that.

How about just Angel?

She sticks her chin out for a moment as she considers it, sticks her chin out and then a smile breaks through. Okay, she says. I’ll be seeing you, Jesse.

I’ll be seeing you…Angel, he says back to her. And as she walks away, her pleated skirt swaying with each step, he repeats the name to himself, again and again.

The next time he sees her she is not a pedestrian on the street, she is instead sitting once again in the long burgundy car, sitting up front, her back straight, her eyes forward. He shouts to her, but she doesn’t respond, doesn’t move a muscle, as if she hadn’t heard. Then he notices the old man in the backseat of the car, his great swath of white hair, his long pale face, his black eyes turned toward my father with a strange intensity as the car slides by and my father chases after it calling out, Angel, Angel, Angel.

I couldn’t sleep that night, there was something about my father’s story that rattled in my brain. Maybe it was the image of him, strutting down South Street, young and arrogant, full of life, still in the great human pursuit of something special around which to shape his life, something which he, sadly, never found. Or maybe it was the sight of him calling out after a woman, calling out like a lovesick puppy. Some people you can’t ever imagine other than as they are now, and my father, old and bitter, with a life restricted by his own failings, was just such a person. I couldn’t reconcile the man I had known my entire life with the young and questing hero of his story. But whatever my father was or had been, he was not prone to flights of fancy. So I had to wonder what could have changed him so irrevocably. And the only answer I could come up with was the answer he had apparently come up with too: the girl in the pleated
skirt, his Angel. Or maybe it was the sinister chap staring out at him from the back of the long burgundy car.

I climbed out of bed, went to my desk drawer, took out the envelope, turned on the lamp. The photographs, the sight of her limbs, her flesh, the arch of her back, the openness of it all. Whatever my father was feeling as he watched Angel drive away, the photographer was feeling when he took these photographs and maybe I was starting to feel as I pored over them, not only now, but the night before, and the night before that, and the night…

And I had a thought just then, a wild guess that made sense only while I felt myself still in the spell of emotions cast by my father’s story, the emotions evident in the photographer’s worship of his subject, in the emotions I felt as I stared ever deeper into the black-and-white world of this strange and wondrous body and felt something missing from my life. If it was the emotions stirred by that woman in the pleated skirt that ruined my father, maybe it was the emotions evident in these pictures that led this boy, this Tommy, to his murderous rendezvous with Joey Parma on the waterfront.

I didn’t know how to prove, one way or another, this wild speculation. I was waiting still on McDeiss with the information I had requested, whether or not it would lead to anything concrete. The number Mrs. Parma had given me was not listed in the reverse directories on the Internet and my calls were not being returned, no matter how often I left a message. The story of Joey Parma’s last night, told me by Lloyd Ganz, had only confused me further. I was at a loss, stumped.

And then fate did its dance with me, its lively little two-step, and a lovely woman with tawny skin and bright high heels stepped into my life and set me on a truly twisted trail to the truth.