by Thomson, Lh
“And if it’s not about the insurance damage that also means it’s not about an oversized claim. That means someone had a market for the one work. Makes it even less likely anyone there that day was connected.”
Clinton was asking some of the same questions I’d been asking for two days.
I wasn’t getting anywhere with them, either.
The phone rang just after I’d gotten home. I was sitting on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island, watching a politician on TV explain why America’s economic problems were the fault of the unionized working man – and apparently failing to notice the bit where greedy bastards were stealing all the money.
I answered. “Quinn.”
“And is this how you answer the phone? So rude and abrupt like?”
It didn’t do to be abrupt with Maureen Dahmnait Iris Quinn.
“Ma…Sorry, I…”
“Oh, sure and you’re sorry today. But you weren’t sorry enough last night to call and tell me you were missing dinner yourself.”
My mother had been in America since age fourteen, but she still had a slight Derry lilt to her tone.
I needed this like a tax hike. “Ma, I’m sorry, really…”
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Look in the mirror, because we had your favorite, chicken and dumplings.”
She knew exactly where to hurt a guy. “Dumplings… really?”
It just came out, instinctive like.
“Don’t worry. I saved you some in a microwavable dish, although it’s not as good as when it’s fresh.”
“Awww… thanks, Ma. I love you.”
“I love you, too, dear,” she said. “What was so important that you couldn’t be here to have dinner with your family? And to miss church, no less!”
“I told Dad, I had to work,” I said, regretting it instantly. They bickered constantly, and she’d be using that little piece of information against him later, probably after he got home late from the pub.
Then I’d be hearing it back from him, at length, probably with one of my older brothers chiming in as a way to suck up to my father.
“Oh you did, did you? Well we’ll be having words when he gets home tonight.”
Yeah. Great. “Ma…”
“Don’t ‘Ma’ me, Liam Conor Sean Quinn. I was really disappointed! Davy finally seemed like he might open up and talk to you again and you decided not to show.”
Yeah, when pigs flew. She wishfully thought he might change his mind just about every week.
“Ma, I could come home with St. Peter’s halo and…”
“Liam, don’t blaspheme.”
“Ma….”
By the time we got off the phone after twenty minutes, she’d not only gotten me to practically sign a contract in blood that I’d come to Sunday dinner the next weekend, she’d also managed to load up on the guilt by pointing out how proud she was of my success with PMI.
Yeah, I know. She’s a great mom.
And that got me thinking. The news had finished in the background and the sports had come on, including a preview of the next Union game.
It occurred to me that a kid like DeShawn, with some problems… well, he might just have a mom who’d wanted to know about his time hanging around David Mince, a mom who’d want to keep him out of trouble, if she knew what he was getting up to when he went a half-hour out of town every other weekend to work.
It was early evening, but I gambled I could get hold of Terence Bryson. I fished his card out of my wallet. A few minutes later, I was pulling him away from the T.V.
“You realize the Phils are on, right?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, Mr. Bryson. Do you have a home address on DeShawn Ellis?
He sighed. “Give me a few minutes.”
Ellis lived in West Philly. The building looked illegal – several outside windows were boarded up. I did a walk around – I like to know where I might find myself stuck – and it looked like the back door was sealed shut, too, which was definitely against fire code. The balconies were half hanging off the building and several were full of debris and trash.
Surprisingly, the lobby was nicer. It may have been illegal and neglected, but the residents were obviously keeping the inside of the former tenement in as close to passing condition as possible.
Mailbox 312 had half a name tag sticker, but enough to identify it as the Ellis family’s place. I walked up the three short flights cautiously; West Philly can be tough as the best of times, and you never knew who you might run into in a big building, bolting down a flight of stairs at top speed.
The plaster on the corridor walls was flaking, patched over and mottled; a remnant of the building’s best days, probably back just after the Second World War. The tenants had valiantly tried to mask it with bright white paint, but like the rest of the building it was never going to look optimistically new again; the blemishes ran too deep.
I knocked on their door. A young girl of perhaps four or five in white pajamas answered. “Mom!” she yelled, without asking me who I was. She walked back into the apartment leaving the door open a crack. Then I heard her mother’s hurried voice. “Tonya, what did I tell you about leaving that door open?”
She peeked through the crack, obviously surprised by me. “Can I help you mister?”
“Mrs. Ellis? My name is Liam Quinn. I’m working for the folks over at the stadium, in Chester.”
“You want to talk to DeShawn? He’s not here.”
“No ma’am … actually, I was hoping to talk to you.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “So if I call the folks at the Stadium, they’ll know who you are?”
“Ask for Terence Bryson. He’s the security guy.”
She nodded. “I met him when I took DeShawn down for his interview.” She opened the door, eyeing me with wary attention. “I guess you should come on in.”
Mrs. Ellis led me into a small, plain two-bedroom. The living room was neat and tidy, with family pictures the main decoration, a pair of small couches and an armchair. There were some toys by the coffee table, and she shushed her daughter towards them. “Sweetie, you pick up your stuff and take them to your toy box.”
“You have a lovely home, Mrs. Ellis.”
She looked unimpressed. “I guess. We try, but I guess you saw how the building is.”
“Tough getting some landlords to do their job.”
“Uh-huh.”
The little girl was standing behind her mother’s leg now, half peeking around at me, and she smiled and grabbed her doll, along with its bright pink house, and headed down the adjacent corridor.
“Now what can I do for you, Mr. … sorry, what did you say the name was again?”
“Quinn, Ma’am, Liam Quinn.”
I filled her in on her son’s recent troubles. “I think this other kid David Mince has been filling your son’s head with a lot of pretty dangerous stuff. He might even have involved him in the robbery and he’s definitely using him for muscle.”
To say Mrs. Ellis appeared unhappy would be understatement. She looked like … well, an angry mom. And everyone – but everyone – knows what that can be like.
“Where you say this boy David is?”
“Mrs. Ellis…”
She turned her head slightly, haughtily, as if measuring up her next necessary step with a wary eye. “Mr. Quinn, my boy is a good boy. He’s just a little slower. He’s not simple, he just takes a different view of things, and takes a little longer to get there, that’s all. And every couple of years there’s some other boy, usually an older boy, who takes advantage of him. But I don’t let that go by. Maybe I should speak to his mother...”
“No, ma’am, please. What I need you to do is simple: forbid him from working at the stadium anymore.”
She looked a little embarrassed. “Look, my husband passed away last year, and I have two other children to raise. We need his income in the household, Mr. Quinn. I wish I could say it wasn’t so, but right now…”
I’d hoped she
would just agree to keep him away, and remove all of Mince’s influence. Then something struck me. I grabbed a piece of scrap paper from inside my wallet and passed her the address. “Have him meet me here next Sunday, and I’ll have a better job for him. It’ll pay the same, or better, but he won’t have the travel costs.”
She took the address. “You sure?”
“Mrs. Ellis, like I said: I already have enough evidence to pass on to the police so they can nab David Mince. So I have no reason to make it up. Just have him come around 6 p.m. Okay?”
I figured she was about a decade older than me, but the toll of raising three kids in a tough town had taken its toll; she might’ve been younger, maybe even younger than me. “Mr. Quinn…. Okay. I’m going to call your Mr. Bryson tomorrow morning and check up on you, but if you’re straight up, we’ll take you up on that.”
Things were looking up. I might have just solved two problems in one, I thought. It hadn’t helped me find the forger or the painting, but it was one less headache.
Chapter Seven
Clinton Dufresne was either a hell of an actor or had no idea who’d hit the gallery. And I didn’t get the sense that anyone else there that day had been involved, either.
But he did put the focus back where it belonged, on the lone element of the robbery that seemed inexplicable: replacing a forgery hanging on the gallery wall with the real thing.
There had to be a hell of a motive: beyond staging the Vermeer theft, the thieves had also robbed Vin the Shin in order to get the original back, which was either the bravest thing they could ever do or the dumbest. In my eyes, it verged towards the latter. But either way, there had to be a big payoff for a man – any man, no matter how crazy – to cross the local head of the mob.
But why? Why stage a robbery to return a valuable painting?
The only two people I figured might have the answer were Pat Delaney and his old lady, Polly. He was going to be behind bars for a few years, which left me with one option. I had to find the woman. I had the name Polly and that she worked out of Jersey. If she spent a lot of time in Philly, then Camden or Cherry Hill seemed likely.
I tried the path of least resistance first, stopping by the public library and searching the newspaper database for terms like “convicted”, “forgery”, “personation”, and the name Polly. Sometimes the papers find something interesting in a case and, as a course of the trial, pick up personal information about the accused.
No such luck. I didn’t doubt she had priors if she hung around with Pat, but they weren’t for anything worth making the evening news. I wasn’t sure where to take it next; I knew a few street-level guys – associates of Danny Saint, mostly – but they weren’t into that level of business.
So I reluctantly dialled a number I hadn’t dialled in four years.
“I don’t recognize this phone, so I’m expecting a quick explanation of who you are and how you got this number.” His voice was terse, professional, upper crust New England accent.
“It’s Quinn.”
The line was silent for a few moments. “Well. This is a surprise. I didn’t expect to get a chance to thank you for…”
“Forget it.” I didn’t want to get into anything personal with him. Ellis March was the guy who introduced me to the world of forgery and knew everyone who was anyone in the game. He was also a deadly manipulator.
“But you could have made your life easier and your stay shorter if you’d named a few names.”
“Maybe. Forget it. We’ll say you owe me a favor.”
He was silent again. Ellis was like that, always composed, thinking a step ahead. “You wouldn’t be calling, I’m guessing, unless you wanted to cash that favor in.”
“It’ll be the only call.”
“I’m a little hurt by that, but I suppose…”
“Skip it. Skip the dramatics. One favor. I need a name and address. First name is Polly, works in oils, lives in Jersey. Oh, and she’s…”
“British, yes, I know. Polly Clark. She has an art store in Camden.”
He even had the address, an older neighborhood in a town full of lousy old neighborhoods.
“If you need anything else….”
“Don’t call me,” I said, before hanging up.
Her art store was in a small, aging strip mall, next to a bakery that had grease and dirt caked onto the window panes and looked like it hadn’t opened since the Nixon administration. The cracks in the parking lot asphalt were being filled in by grass, another of several suggestions the mall had seen much better days.
Polly was behind a throwing wheel against the front wall when I walked in, up to her elbows in muddy, wet clay. “Hi!” she said. “I’ll be right with you.”
“No rush,” I said. “Just browsing.”
I walked along parallel to the wall, admiring a series of oils. Her work was eclectic, impersonal, like someone trying to prove a point with flash over substance. Some featured thick strokes that left swirling waves of texture clumped above the surface; others were so delicate and fine, it was difficult to tell which medium had been used.
It was easy to see why she’d been a good forger. It was a hodgepodge of some of the most-taught approaches to putting oil on canvas.
“Do you see anything you like?” she said, wiping her hands and forearms off with a damp cloth and then drying them on a towel. She walked over and stood next to me when I reached the largest.
“Good eye,” she said. “That’s one of my favorites. I turned down five thousand for it just last week.”
I looked around the place; the room was cruddy, and dusty, a labor of love long gone wrong, abandoned by the public. I doubted there was toilet paper in the bathroom, let alone five thousand worth of anything.
“Really? Five thousand? Because to me, it’s derivative of a Manet nature scene, to the point where you even seem to have adopted some of his brush stroke.”
Her face hardened. “You police?”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, sure! No one comes in my store talking about technique like that unless they’re someone I already know, or they’re a cop looking to hassle me. And I don’t know you, which leaves ...”
“I’m a private insurance investigator. And a former art student.”
“Yeah, well then maybe you should fuck off. I don’t have to talk to you.”
I gave her my best look of irritation. “You don’t even know why I’m here.”
“I don’t want to know,” she said, her slight British accent still intact after being in Philly and Camden for several years. “Can’t be anything good.”
“Really? A guy showed up at my store asking questions, I’d want to know why.”
“So you’re curious. Again: why the fuck should I care?”
I didn’t have many cards to play. If she was involved, perhaps fear would shake something loose. “Oh, I don’t know.... maybe because Vin the Shin is after the same answers I am. If I was in your boat, and I was maybe just a little involved, I’d want to take advantage of any opportunity presented to extricate myself.”
That shut her up as she thought about things. “I know the name. But I don’t know him and I don’t have nothing to do with him.” It came out as “nuffink.”
She was going to play dumb, which was a shame. “Polly, who do you think gave me you? He’s already on to you, whatever you and Pat Delaney are up to.”
Clark laughed at that one. “Really? You think I’m still with that waste of space? You really are barking up the wrong tree, mate. I mean, yeah, I did a job for Terrasini once. But that was two years ago, and I never even met the man.”
“And Pat? Have you seen him since? If you’ve been visiting him in jail, I’m going to find out.”
She sneered. “I told you, I haven’t talked to him since he went away. He was a real tough guy, you know?”
I didn’t get the implication. That he was knocking her around? In the Delaney household that was practically a given.
“So are you sc
ared of him? Is that it?”
She laughed at that, too. “He’s inside. What have I got to be scared of?”
“You tell me.”
She stared at me silently for a minute, her mouth a grim line. “Yeah, all right, I’m scared of him. You happy? But I haven’t seen him, and we’re not together.”
“Have you heard from him at all? Or about him, from any of his old friends?”
“Pat isn’t the kind who’s real sentimental about his friendships. Look, are you going to leave me alone? Because I don’t have to talk to no one.”
“Like I said, Vin the Shin might be interested in that.”
“Yeah, well, over to you.”
“Maybe Pat’s buddies from the heist would want to know what you’ve been up to.”
That got her attention and she turned to me look at me quickly, betraying her curiosity. She said, “You don’t read the papers much, do you?”
“What, the bit about them both disappearing in the river? Yeah… I don’t put too much stock in that.”
“No?”
“Well, considering I went part of a round with Teddy Allison the other night, and he went down real solid when I hit him, I have a hard time believing he was a ghost.”
Her face deadpanned again. “Yeah, I’m supposed to believe that, am I?”
I studied her. She was in her mid-twenties, much younger than Pat, pretty, but overweight and out of shape, lines around her eyes betraying tensions and problems that weren’t supposed to wear down people her age.
“But you do believe me, don’t you Polly? Because if you didn’t already know they made it out of the river, you’d have been shocked when I suggested they did, or worried.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And you’d have been shocked or worried because you and Pat are up to something. I got to figure if I’m looking for you, and they’re looking for me? Well at the end of that line somewhere is the money missing from that armored car heist. If they made it out, the money might have, too.”
