by Thomson, Lh
“So why didn’t you mention him?”
He drained his glass and took a deep breathe. “Some things are best left in the past and he’s one of those things. We wasn’t partners for too long, let’s put it that way.”
“So you had a falling out?”
He stared at me sideways again. “What, you want to analyze my feelings, Liam? Leave it be, okay?”
When my father wanted to stop talking about something, he made that pretty obvious, too. Besides I had more pressing issues than my father’s ex-partner – like why someone would return an original painting to a gallery at the same moment they were busy stealing a classic Vermeer worth millions, thirty feet across the room.
Chapter Six
I was working on the speed bag, hands moving in a blur, pace increasing steadily as my bicep muscles strained and the sweat began to form, the city lights shining bright at night through my apartment window.
The phone rang.
I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I hoped it was Nora. She’d been on my mind pretty much non-stop since the soccer match, and I knew she’d had as good a time as I had. I grabbed the cordless.
No such luck.
“Mr. Quinn? It’s Jeffrey… Jeffrey Tills? From McFinnigans, at the stadium?” Like a lot of kids, his voice trailed up at the end, a subconscious tendency towards insecurity that made every statement sound a little like a question.
“Hey Jeffrey. Where are you?” I wanted to dominate the conversation, use his nervousness to pin him down for a meeting.
“I… uh…what?”
“Where are you? We should get coffee and talk in person.”
“I’m… I’m at home with my parents.”
“Okay. Is there a coffee shop or something near you?”
“Uh.... yeah. Yeah! It’s, like, six blocks south of here…”
He gave me address, and twenty minutes later we were sitting across from each other in the back corner booth, away from the big windows at the front of the place. The young man’s eyes scanned the room every few seconds, although it was empty except for the counter clerk.
“Nervous?”
“Yeah. I guess, maybe. My friends don’t really come in here.”
“So you consider David Mince a friend?” I nodded towards his arm. “That burn doesn’t look particularly friendly.”
His eyes were still nervous, but Jeffrey was inquisitive, too. “How did you know that was a cigarette burn? Were you really in jail?”
“Nothing exciting or glamorous about it. Prison is hell, man. The worst. I keep in pretty good shape and I’ve been training as a fighter for a lot of years, but I had to watch myself every second, Jeffrey.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything. I said, “Another thing you get to recognize in jail is when someone has what they call “dead eyes,” when they’re a real sociopath, and the most dangerous.”
“Like David.”
“Exactly like David. When he burned you with that cigarette, was DeShawn there?”
He nodded.
“Is he sort of slow?”
“DeShawn doesn’t realize when things are serious. He’s kind of like a big kid. I don’t think it’s his fault or anything. He was just born … you know, delayed.”
“And they helped someone rob the restaurant?”
He nodded again.
“How do you guys know each other?”
“We all go to school together. Well, sort of. We’ve all been going less lately.”
“You go back a ways?”
“Yeah.”
“David’s always been the leader?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Did he make you get a job at the stadium?”
He shook his head. “No, I started working there first. He and DeShawn, they only came on after I started there. I… I guess I didn’t see what he was like, not at first.”
“But then you started seeing problems?”
“The till came up short a bunch of times, always when David was on. And I caught him spitting in the soup of the day. But he straight up told me that DeShawn would do anything he asked him to do, that they were like brothers, and that if I said anything, he’d have me put in hospital.”
“Were you there when the robbery happened?”
“No,” he said sullenly. “David tried to bring me in and I said I was going to go to the cops. That’s when he got DeShawn to hold me down and he burned me.”
“David had older friends who picked up the beer?”
He nodded again. “David had a copy of my key to the storage area made. Then they hid out in the restaurant, so they wouldn’t have to swipe their security cards to get in again. He said his older brother is in a gang.” He looked up nervously at me. “If they knew I was talking to you…”
I raised my palm. “Don’t worry, okay? You won’t have to talk to me again until after it’s been dealt with. Just pretend we didn’t talk.”
He gave a smile of half-reassurance and nodded. I got up to go.
“I’ll get back to you, Jeffrey. You know where I am if you need me.”
He smiled again, but didn’t say anything. At the counter, I grabbed another small coffee. Then I headed back into the tepidly warm city night.
One of the great joys of being a freelancer is that I don’t have to punch in at the office. It lets me get out and get things done early on a Monday, when the rest of the public isn’t there to form queues and things.
And it’s especially quiet at the library – not that it’s ever that loud there, but the parking situation is definitely better early in the week. Again, I could sit at home and tap the library’s newspaper database. But there’s something to be said for getting out and meeting people. It breeds empathy and is good for the soul.
Pat Delaney was semi-famous in Fishtown. He was eight or nine years older than Davy and me, in my eldest brother Andy’s class in school. Not that Pat was big on the spirit of education – if Jeffrey Tills thought he was having attendance problems, he just had to talk to Pat on visiting day to get an idea of where dropping out of school could lead you.
Of course, Pat never had it easy; his father was Gerry Delaney, a cold man. He wasn’t a big guy, just strong as iron from working the docks his whole life, a seething bundle of jail tats with a scowl and a goatee. He had as violent a cruel streak as ever crossed the ocean to make a buck. My father had arrested him a bunch of times over the years and there was no love lost between the two families. But Pat ran away from home in junior high, and was living off petty crime from then on, in and out of the joint constantly.
So he had a fairly big -- if generally unimpressive -- collection of newspaper appearances over the years, beginning with an assault conviction at eighteen in which he’d gotten two years for smashing another kid in the face with a half-full vodka bottle.
People see other people get hit with bottles in the movies and they think it’s no big thing; but bottle glass is thick and heavy, and you’re lucky if all it does it shatters and cuts you up horribly. If it doesn’t, it breaks every bone in your face.
The kid in question, Lucas DeLeeuw, was Amish and on “Rumspringa”, a period where Amish kids leave the nest to test out the larger society. The kid needed forty-three stitches and suffered a broken cheek bone, after Delaney ran into him in Washington Park and demanded his wallet. And after that, there was no doubt about whether he’d want to stay in the city.
It wasn’t Philly’s proudest moment. The newspaper clip had ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of the kid: with friends just a month before the attack, blonde and curly haired, innocently smiling; and a year later, outside court, a sullen, broken individual, with sunken eyes and pronounced cheekbones, his emotional security as shattered and jagged as the scar that ran down his jawline, from his ear to his chin.
After that, Delaney had moved on to a check kiting, a liquor store robbery and then finally, at forty-two, two years earlier, Delaney had gotten out from his latest period of federal time and proceed
ed to try to knock over a Brinks truck with his two friends. All told, he’d spent twenty of the prior twenty-five years in jail.
The clips from his trial suggested Mr. Keller was off a little: Delaney had gotten seven years for the robbery, the mandatory minimum, and not a full ten years, a “dime,” as he’d suggested.
The judge in the case, a noted lightweight when it came to sentencing, had said he didn’t believe Delaney’s story that most of the money had washed away in the Delaware along with his two friends, because a distant bridge camera showed them loading objects into the car. But he still gave him credit for not actually succeeding, a move the district attorney’s office publicly denounced.
It vowed to appeal the sentence, but it looked like it had gotten lost in the shuffle, because there were no more clips after the initial conviction.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ve done time, so I have sympathy for how young people can get excited, and caught up, and make mistakes. But Pat wasn’t a bonehead; he was a vicious by-product of a vicious household, and he was best kept inside.
If his old crew was still around and up to no good? The next time I ran into them, I wouldn’t forget to keep my back to the wall.
As likely as it seemed that Pat Delaney was involved, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that the gallery owner DeGoey or his crooked business partner Dennis Hecht were somehow as well. Then there was another player: the artist, Clinton Dufresne, who’d both been there on the day of the robbery and was the subject of the thieves’ sleight-of-hand.
Dufresne worked and sold art directly from his loft downtown. At 6’7, he’d been an NCAA first-team small forward for St. John’s, but had given up basketball to pursue his art, first via a degree in architecture, then as a rising star in the local fine arts world, in small surrealist and modern oils, as well as clay sculpture.
The elevator opened directly into his large, open-concept space — yet another factory conversion — and Dufresne greeted me with a confident handshake. He reminded me vaguely of a young Sidney Poitier, with that same intensity, only Dufresne also wore small round Lennon specs and had a small goatee, like a bigger, stronger Sean Combs. The glass in them seemed thin, and I wondered whether he had bad eyesight, or just his own sense of style.
“I was surprised when you called me, Mr. Quinn.”
“Just routine. I’m talking to everyone who was there.”
“I’m glad. It’s easy to be sensitive in this town…”
“How you figure?”
“Well,” he said, “you know. Philly cops and the black community have some history.”
True enough. “You grew up here?”
“Yeah, north side. My parents have a little book store and coffee shop off East Wadsworth, the Island Sun.”
“Jamaican?”
He laughed. “Jah, mon.” Then he dropped the pretense. “But that’s their generation, not mine.”
The loft was an impressive blend of his pieces and art he loved, an eclectic jumble of modern and surreal, from the ribbon-like spiral light fixture to the free-form sofa, to the pop-art cartoon mishmash that hung above his desk like an explosion of Roy Lichtenstein worship.
He was relaxed, comfortable. But I think he noticed my awe at his taste and collection.
“Let’s go get a coffee downstairs,” he said, before gesturing around him. “It’s a little less ... work down there.”
In the cafe, we grabbed a Formica booth by the tinted front window. He nursed a black coffee while I filled him in – generally – on what I knew. I didn’t mention the thieves messing around with his picture.
It turned out I didn’t have to.
“That’s the one thing,” he said. “That was the one thing was really strange about the whole robbery: my work was crooked. When we were all done and they’d fled with the Vermeer, it was sticking out like a sore thumb.”
“Not the only thing, surely?” He looked puzzled. I said, “The fact that they didn’t steal anything other than the one painting.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess.” He squinted, the puzzling nature of it hitting him. “What’s that about?”
He would notice his own work, of course. I sure would have. But he was also the only other person other than myself who’d thought it significant, and that suggested he wasn’t involved. A good thief might, as they say, help you look for the wallet he stole; but he never leads you towards his own back pocket.
I asked, “So what were you thinking took place, Mr. Dufresne?”
He thought about it for a minute. “From the sound, I’d say they switched paintings.”
I smiled. “But they didn’t, right?”
Dufresne grinned broadly. “Yeah... I’m not so overloaded with projects that I don’t recognize my own brush strokes. It was the real thing, for sure.”
“You checked closely?”
“Right after the robbery.”
“And when you first entered the gallery?”
He squinted again. “I don’t understand the question.”
“Was there anything amiss with your piece when you first came in.”
Dufresne was thinking hard. “I ... don’t...”
“You’re not sure, are you?”
He shook his head, looking a little worried. “I didn’t look closely. I just noted its excellent show position, and that got me thinking I could convince DeGoey or Alison Pace to carry a couple of more pieces. I guess I got distracted by business. Mr. Quinn ... what the hell is going on?”
“Not sure yet ... and it’s Liam.”
The waitress came over and he ordered us another round of coffee. “But ‘not sure’ means you have some idea,” said Dufresne.
“I have ... the beginnings of an idea,” I said. “What I do know is that the picture you saw after the robbery was the original – but they did switch it, for a copy that had been hanging in its place.”
Dufresne had a sudden look of shock on his face, like someone realizing they’ve just missed an essential appointment, or a family member’s birthday. “My gallery, it was hit a couple of years ago. We thought it was just a smash and grab for cash ...”
“They didn’t take anything else?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t think so, but...”
Dufresne looked embarrassed. I tried to comfort him.
“Look, Clinton: you have to realize that the guys who do this for a living ... well, they’re like expert handwriting forgers, ensuring the right weight on every loop, the right lean on every letter. They’re meticulous down to the brush stroke, down to every flake of paint they can replicate.”
“Sounds almost like you respect them.
I smiled awkwardly. “My former trade. I served three years for forging Japanese masters.”
For a second, it was like he was looking right through me. Then he said, “And they let you be an investigator? After you did time?”
I nodded. “A friend of a friend.”
“Huh.” The look on his face wasn’t one of admiration.
“That doesn’t sit right with you.”
He shook his head. “Not really. I’m proud of myself for doing well. But I see a lot of other young dudes who haven’t made it yet, who haven’t risen above the tough lot they were handed in life. And if they made that one mistake, and went up for forgery? Wouldn’t anyone be giving them a job as an investigator afterwards, Liam.”
What was I going to do, argue with him?
“You’re right,” I said. “Look, I grew up in Fishtown in the bad old days, when it was the white trash equivalent of west Philly. Wasn’t any gentrification back then, and those boys were tough. So I didn’t get a silver spoon in my mouth. I also know it’s a lot worse for minorities. I can’t change that. But just so you know: it wasn’t racism, it was nepotism. My boss is my best friend’s father, and he helped me get my license when it was initially rejected.”
He looked down and shook his head. “Look man, I’m sorry if I got hot over it, but you know the history. Race has been a tough di
viding line in this town, a deadly one.”
“Hey, I’m no dummy. I know I got breaks. But I also work real hard to make the most of them.”
Dufresne smiled. “I’m sure you do.”
“I did when I was a forger, too, which is why I know you shouldn’t beat yourself up. Every line, every daub, every crease. They’re that good.”
He sighed. “Easy to say, man. But I exhibited a fake of my own painting for over a year. That kind of thing could make me a laughingstock. Now I wish I’d just sold the damn thing when I had a chance.”
That was interesting. “You had offers?”
“Yeah, two potential buyers. One was a call-in that didn’t want his employer identified...”
I interrupted. “And the other was a young British woman, mid-20s?”
His eyes widened. “How...?”
“The first buyer was a gangster who wanted the painting. Don’t ask which one; it wouldn’t be good for your health to know. The second was the girl who painted the copy for one of his associates when you wouldn’t sell.”
Wistful, Dufresne downed another swallow of coffee and slumped back in his seat. “And I turned down all that cash,” he said.
“There’s an upside,” I offered.
“Oh?”
“Well, sure. You have the real one back. Put it in a safety deposit box, and the next time someone offers more than you think it’s worth? Take the money.”
“Guaranteed to keep hoodlums off my back?”
“Absolutely. Or so I’m told.”
I finished off my coffee and got up to go. “Look, if you think about anything else that might help ...”
“Sure, sure...” Then he looked puzzled again. “That thing you said, about the Vermeer being the only painting taken, that’s interesting.”
“How so?”
Dufresne downed his coffee and got up to join me. “Well, if it was just about the value of the paintings, they’d have stolen as many as possible, and they wouldn’t have taken a copy of my work. That means it wasn’t about hurting DeGoey. The best way to do that would’ve been to strip the place clean. He couldn’t have handled the insurance losses.”
