by Thomson, Lh
I understood. Vin the Shin was telling me I didn’t have a leg to stand on.
“One thing I would suggest, kid, is getting out of that apartment. It didn’t take us too damn long to find it. Dumb as my nephew is, I’m sure one of his guys can use Google, and one of the other ones can read it to him.”
After we got off the phone, I watched the rest of Conan and put my swollen right hand in some ice. The knuckles were raw and one had split the skin, leaving a smear of blood that ran up my middle finger, like an angry salute.
Two hours later I got to the Druid. It was only eight o’clock, but the joint was humming already. Even the regular bar stools were crowded out. I saw my father by the near wall, with his cronies, and after he gave me a congratulatory backslap, I whispered in his ear for a second and caught him up to speed.
I spotted Nora across the room, in the far corner, with a small group using the broke-down old player piano as a rest area. “Liam!” she exclaimed, coming over to hug me. “I heard you did good!”
Marty the bartender was busy wiping down the bar. I told him to expect a little help. “You mentioned you needed a hand.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got a kid coming over tomorrow. His name’s DeShawn. Nice boy but not the brightest candle on the cake, you know.”
“DeShawn? Don’t sound very Irish,” said Marty.
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Your last name is DiSilvio. What are you worrying about?”
He thought about it. “I guess you got me there. Kid can work every weekend?”
“Every one. Hard-working kid, Marty. Just needs a break. Easily led on by the bad kids.”
He thought about it some more. “Sure. Okay, I’ll give him a shot.”
About ten feet away, Alison and Leo were talking to my brother Andy, who’d made a rare appearance, collar and all. I motioned for the two of us to go over and join them, and when Fiona the waitress went by, I bothered her for a pint of Smithwicks.
“Andy,” I said, giving him a brotherly nod. “Isn’t tomorrow your work day?”
“Oh very funny you are; a regular Shameless O. Tool.”
Alison laughed daintily, bell-like, and tossed her chestnut-auburn hair. “What does the ‘O’ stand for?”
Andy downed the last of his beer then used the empty glass as a pointer. “In Liam’s case it’s “Oh my God, what a useless twat I am.”
I nodded towards him. “You can see why he’s a man of the cloth, with that mouth.”
Andy, without missing a beat, liberated a new half-pint from Fiona’s. “Well,” he said, “I should damn well hope so.”
My father quietened everyone. “All right, all right, you heathens,” he said. “I just wanted to announce that thanks to my boy Liam, that bastard Pat Delaney won’t be getting out again for a very long time. So I want us to raise a glass.”
He did, and the rest of the room followed suit.
“Speech!” someone yelled from the back.
“Yeah, come on jailbird,” someone else called out, to laughs.
I pretended to wave them away, but they persisted, which set the stage pretty well.
“Okay, settle down,” I said. “Settle down. Geez, what a bunch of useless drunks you are!”
The room erupted in laughs again, glasses clinking, more than a few being tipped and drained.
“I just want to say I couldn’t have figured out Pat’s connection without help from everyone who was at the DeGoey Fine Arts Gallery when it was robbed, and I particularly want to thank Alison Pace, the gallery’s manager,” I said.
She got a polite round of applause and raised an embarrassed half-wave in my direction.
I continued. “As for the missing painting, the Vermeer, that was a different matter,” I said.
She looked puzzled. “What to do you mean?”
“Well, indirectly, that one was on you,” I said.
A murmur went around the room, and Alison looked genuinely puzzled.
“Liam, I don’t know what you think you’ve figured out, but I didn’t steal that painting. And I didn’t hire anyone else to, either.”
I smiled. “I know. But your boyfriend Leo did.”
Again, a gasp went around the room. Alison took a reflexive half-step away from him.
Leo looked around for a moment, confused. Then he faced me. “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”
Following our short earlier discussion, my father had three of his friends blocking the exits. But Leo didn’t bolt. He must have figured that without the painting having been recovered, he couldn’t get caught, with an accomplice who was already in jail.
“When we first talked,” I said, “you mentioned you were involved in three cases in the last nine months that were so big they put Walter Beck on the front page.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So one of those three cases was the armored car heist pulled off by Pat Delaney and his partners.”
He snorted. “Coincidence. You got nothing.”
“Coincidence? So it’s also a coincidence that Delaney’s cellmate was knocked off yesterday by the guys he worked with on the armored car heist, and that they were then recovered with the money? That’s coincidence?”
“It would seem so.”
“The first time we talked, you said you didn’t know anything about art other than what Alison told you. And yet you were also cheating with the girlfriend of the guy who owned the Vermeer, Paul Dibartolo, who I saw coming out of your place. Another coincidence?”
Now he was getting nervous, so I continued. “When Pat Delaney’s men robbed that place, they wanted one thing: the train station locker key he had unwittingly hidden in Polly Clark’s frame of a forged painting, not knowing she was about to give that painting to … an interested third party, to complete a theft of his own.
“It was literally the key to millions of dollars for them. But instead of getting in and out as quickly as possible, Delaney’s men stopped in the gallery and grabbed one other painting – the one painting your girlfriend, the gallery manager had told you about, that you knew was valuable. Your own words.”
Leo wasn’t sure what to do. “You can’t prove any of this. You’ve got nothing, Quinn,” he said.
“Yeah? Well, I wondered about that. I wondered how it was that Pat Delaney could have found out about the gallery having the Dufresne and set up the robbery without help from someone on the outside. And you were sleeping with Paul Dibartolo’s girlfriend as well, so you knew what the Vermeer was worth. I also know Polly Clark doesn’t visit anymore, but she was in this up to her eyeballs, which meant there had to be a go-between. So my dad called a friend of his at State Corrections and had a check on Pat Delaney’s visitor list over the last month. Who do you think the only visitor’s name to come up was?”
Now he knew he was done. But he could also see three old, retired cops blocking the doors, and Leo surprised me: he pulled a pistol from his waistband, raising it with both hands. In the absent-minded fearful disconnection of the moment, I realized it was a Glock, like my brother Davy’s service piece. Geez. Everyone and anyone was packing these days.
“Everybody get the fuck down!” he screamed, swinging it towards both sides of the room.
You never saw thirty-five people duck and drop so quickly.
But Nora was still standing next to him. In his panicked rage, Leo had forgotten about the women on either side of him. “Oh the hell you don’t!” she said, nailing him with a hard right hand. Leo’s eyes rolled back, and he stumbled a bit, glassily.
“You bastard,” said Alison, coiling back a punch of her own, “we’re through.” And she nailed him with a straight cross that could have dropped a bull elephant.
The gun dropped out of his limp hand, Leo’s eyes rolled back, and he crashed to the old red carpet with a thud.
Out!
The room erupted in applause, a cheer going around, people gathering near. Several of the younger working guys got in close, and one of them
produced cuffs, pulling Leo’s hands behind him. Even as they pulled him to his feet, he was still having trouble holding consciousness.
I looked at the two women. “Geez. Remind me never to piss the two of you off,” I said.
Alison was sort of bouncing, jumping up and down in one spot from excitement, clutching her fist at the same time. “Ow, ow, ow, ow! Leo, you bastard, ow! We are SO through.”
Marty said from behind the bar, “I’ll get you some ice for that, hon.”
My father was standing beside me and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Just remember this incident with regards to all women and it will stand you in good stead when you finally get married,” he said.
Nora snorted. “Quinn, married? Never happen. He’s got these blind spots about women …”
I gave myself a self-pitying sigh. “This is the part of the story where the hero gets picked on by everybody who cares about him, right?”
Nora leaned over and gave me a kiss on the forehead then whispered, “Don’t worry Liam. You know when we mock you, we mock you with love. And besides, Alison’s sort of the hero here, let her bask.”
My brother Davy leaned over my other shoulder and said quietly, “Yeah… nice job, sport. You let a woman win the big fight for you.”
Ain’t that just like family, to be so appreciative and supportive?
Yeah. And ain’t that just like Philly? City of Brotherly Love, they call us. Millions of people, some getting along, some not. And I did my part; I’m not going to run up the Museum steps and raise my arms or nothing, because …well, because it’s been done. I’m just stuck in the middle, waiting to find out if a painting will turn up once the guy who stole it is in jail.
If it does, I’m a step closer to paying my dues, making things better; one step closer to righting the wrongs in my past, maybe getting back some brotherly love of my own.
And that’s a good place to start.
THE END
Liam Quinn Returns in “Quinn Gets His Kicks,” available now!
From LH: Thanks for reading “Quinn Checks In.” If you enjoyed it, please help me out by leaving a review.
Also by LH Thomson:
Quinn Gets His Kicks
Quinn Goes West
Quinn and the Vanishing Bride
Quinn Gets the Blues
Quinn & The Dead Man’s Daughter
Buried in Benidorm
Vendetta in Valencia
Suicide in Salobrena
Revenge in Ronda
Maximum Max: The first three Max Castillo Stories
Terrible People Doing Terrible Things
The Antique Hunters
The Process Server
The Rough Side
