by L H Thomson
“Man, like I said, fuck you.” But he put the card in his pocket.
“Good talking to you, Hardaway.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything, instead holding his paperback at table-level and keeping a wary eye on me as I left.
The day had been revealing. If Junior wasn’t using, then someone had planted that baggie and syringe. And that meant it wasn’t just a robbery or a grudge.
Someone had murdered him and tried to cover it up.
I sat in my dreary three-room apartment, nursing another drink as the paint peeled slowly around me and the wallpaper slumped with resignation.
I’d tried taking out my frustrations on the speed bag, but given up after five poorly timed minutes of flailing. My boxing skills were going south about as quickly as my prospects for finding a decent place to live.
The phone rang twice before I reached it. “Yeah, Quinn,” I said, punctuating it with another slug of scotch.
“You sound grim.” Nora’s voice always sounded strangely hopeful.
“Yeah, well... you know the deal, kid: too much work, not enough time.”
“Sounds like you need a break.”
“I need an island. But a few hours off work would be good, too.”
“Then how about we grab dinner? There’s a new meatball sub place near that loft you used to rent.”
Despite being tall, thin-waisted, wide-hipped and beautiful, Nora could put food way like a starving African kid at a refugee mission. Her coppery ringlets of hair and Latin tan marked her as a model or television personality, but she’d chosen instead to become Associate Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A meatball sub sounded awfully tempting. Everyone thinks in Philly we eat nothing but greasy cheesesteaks... and much of the time, they’re right, because a good cheesesteak is a thing of beauty, like a Rodin or a Monet. But nothing beats a decent meatball sandwich when you’re feeling rundown.
It’s comfort food.
So there we were an hour later, at a restaurant/take-out nook called Rizzolo’s, Nora sucking back a piece of red onion stuck to her otherwise perfect white teeth as we lounged in a booth.
She swallowed an enormous bite of sandwich then belched.
“Charming.”
“Did I tell you, or did I tell you?” she said.
She was right; the meatballs were tangy without overpowering, the sauce was sharp, the cheese and onions melting into it like an orgasmic river of gastronomic indecency. There may be no finer meatball sandwich on the eastern seaboard.
Nora wiped up some sauce with a French fry, ensconced in a daydream. I watched her absent-mindedly nibble, the hard overhead neon tubes reflecting the darkness of her deep green eyes.
“You look serious.”
She snapped out of it. “Hmm? Yeah, I guess. You seeing anyone?”
The question caught me off guard. “Heh?”
“You know, seeing anyone? Dating?”
I shook my head.
She chewed on her lip for a split second, nervous. “I’ve been seeing this stockbroker. Friend of my boss.”
“Sounds....well I guess we all figure a stockbroker’s less than a barrel of laughs. But what do I know?”
She didn’t exactly shout me down. “No, he’s charming enough, I guess. He’s just...I don’t know. Different worlds.”
She looked genuinely bothered by it. But I’d held a torch for Nora since we were kids, and I knew her options were near-unlimited. The two things combined to sap my sympathy. “What, guys aren’t chasing you the way they used to?” I said.
It was supposed to be funny but it just came out wrong. She looked irritated.
“Your advice is really helpful. I suppose I should have known better that to look to the terminally single for a shoulder.”
“So what’s the deal? I thought you really like this one.”
“Yeah. Yeah, me too. I don’t know, Liam, he just wasn’t.... I don’t know. He wasn’t....”
In my dream version, she looks right at me and says “She wasn’t YOU, Liam,” then wraps her arms around my neck.
“...he wasn’t right,” she said, ending her thought and my hopes in unison.
After dinner, we were walking out to the car in a gathering rain when my phone rang. Davy was outdoors somewhere, raising his voice to be heard above the weather and traffic.
“So I promised I’d call you when the medical examiner’s report was done,” he said.
“And?”
“Look, you got to promise you’re not going to get all overexcited, all right?
I crossed myself. “Shoot.”
“Junior wasn’t killed in that alley,” Davy said. “He was struck somewhere else and the body was moved there.”
I thought about it for a second, the line silent. The rain spattered off the sidewalk and nearby cars rolled through the deepening puddles. Then, he said, “Liam, did you hear me?”
“Yeah. I’m just thinking about my next step.”
“Let me help: Go home,” he said. “Leave this one to the experts in blue.”
There didn’t seem much point in arguing. Davy never seemed happier when he was hearing more from me.
Nora flagged a cab while I said goodbye to my brother. “Sure I can’t drive you home?” I asked her.
“Nah. You’re way down south, I’m on the northeast side of downtown. Doesn’t make sense.”
“You can’t let me be a little chivalrous?” I said.
She looked at me quizzically then, the rain speckling her beautiful dark skin as the cab pulled up to the curb, black puddles streaked yellow with reflected luminescence. “I think you could be a lot chivalrous, if you ever put your mind to it,” she said.
I stared deeply into her eyes then. “Takes the right person, as well,” I said.
“Liam...” She took a half-step forward.
The cab horn honked, snapping us out of it. “I... have to go. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” she said, climbing in.
A second later, she was gone.
South Philly has developed a truly lousy reputation. One favorite nickname is “Filthydelphia.”
It’s a crying shame, and it’s not fair. A few bad blocks of projects and everyone gets tarred as a criminal. But really, it’s all just about trends.
You see, back in the days of the old nightclubs, when the Philly branch of the mob controlled the town, south Philly was the city’s heartbeat, the place where everyone went to get things done. Frank Palumbo’s supper club was the place to see the best acts, grease council palms, and do some neighborhood business. People would gather around those long, white-linen tables, salesgirls mingling with trays around their necks bearing cigarettes and nuts, and the stage would light up with some of the biggest acts, folks right off CBS Radio or the Sullivan Show.
Palumbo was practically the city’s godfather, although he was rarely implicated in any wise guy business. He had a private phone line put in at the club without the feds knowing, so that neighborhood guys could talk without being wiretapped. Apparently, Frank didn’t give much thought to what they were talking about. He just figured it was civil for a grown man to be able to have a private conversation.
He made millions, and he gave millions of dollars back to the people, into everything from food kitchens and the boys and girls club, to re-election campaigns for some of its most prominent political glad-handers.
This was a time of big deuce coupes and white tuxedos, guys with stogies and dames half their wives’ ages, of Cab Calloway and Billie Holliday swinging on stage, the post-prohibition era, when a man with a liquor license and a hot act could carve out an empire, and the Coca-Cola era, when everything began to shine like the tailfins on a red ‘50s Chevy.
But times sure do change.
Palumbo’s burned down years ago, and most of the old neighborhood bosses went up for racketeering. The closest thing to a memorial is a park they named after the old man around the corner. The crime in Philly was spread across a thousand small p
layers and dozens of anonymous big-money operators, most of whom never even visited the city.
In the meantime, as the Old Town got a facelift and Fishtown became trendier, South Philly slipped backwards. Jobs were lost in Brewery Town, and people moved up the main line towards newer opportunities. All those old walkups were just more cheap housing for slumlords, grass growing long around their crumbling brick bases. The neighborhood slowly became poorer and more desperate; more windows were broken, more dumpsters burned.
Much of it was reclaimed as projects in the early ‘70s and then later, new wealthier suburbs began to spring up, but it still has its share of problems – at the very least in perception.
The building I rented in was pre-First World War, an old three-story cement bunker. I had the first-floor unit, which meant double locks on the balcony doors, but a shorter walk with groceries -- assuming I couldn’t persuade the roaches to carry them in for me.
It needed a few licks of paint. A small lobby in front of the main door had eight brass mailboxes. A half-flight of stairs led up to the first floor; my apartment was first on the left.
Inside, a single bulb lit the whitewashed interior hallway, a bachelor style suite with an open kitchen/sitting room/bedroom concept. The only other two rooms were a walk-in closet and an almost equally small bathroom.
It was cheap, and home until I could save enough money for a down-payment on my own place. I still owed the courts more than $200,000 for my restitution, but that was an improvement over six months earlier.
I tossed my phone, wallet and keys on the coffee table, then turned on the TV, the nightly news coming on. I walked over to the balcony door and slid it open, hoping to get some fresher night air into the place.
The hand grenade arced gracefully over the balcony rail and rolled to a stop at my feet. It took me a split-second to realize what I was looking at and I frantically grabbed it and threw it back towards the street.
It blew a few feet away from me, shock and heat followed quickly by darkness.
CHAPTER 3
I was dreaming. The images were a jumble, but Nora was there … briefly. It was nightmarish, Johnny Terrasini’s muscle trying to gun me down in Little Africa, the sociopathic kid David Mince who I’d accidentally hooked up with local criminals; a stolen painting and two drowned hoodlums.
When I came to, I was on crisp hospital bed sheets, a catheter in my right arm with a saline drip.
“Morning idiot,” said Davy, who was sitting in uniform beside my bed. My father and mother were at the foot.
Mom said, “Davy, be nice.” She smiled sweetly at me. “Nora was here too, but she couldn’t stay, and they had you on painkillers.”
I tried to move and felt a sharp pain in my side. I lifted the sheet, and a half-foot wide bandage covered my ribs.
“You lost some blood,” my father said. “But they mostly wanted to make sure you didn’t get any shrapnel, internal like.”
I was still dazed, and a little confused by the painkillers. “What happened?”
“You tell us,” Davy said. “The official verdict right now is that someone tossed a hand grenade through your balcony window.”
“That would be about it, then,” I said.
“Got any idea who might be that pissed at you?” Davy said. “I was going to vote for a family member but one of us would’ve been more direct and just punched you.”
I wasn’t sure if he was concerned or just working. The way he’d been lately, it was hard to say. A voice from the doorway interrupted.
“I don’t think he has too many doubts about who it might have been, do you, Liam?”
He was medium height, non-descript brown hair above a string tie and a steel-grey suit. A fed?
“You’re talking about the Terrasinis?”
He smiled. “That’s one way of putting it. They don’t seem to like you too much anymore.”
“It’s a complicated family,” I said. “I doubt even one of them gets to claim they’re acting on behalf of everyone else. But hey: aren’t we all that way?”
The fed snorted, then pulled out his badge and flashed it at me. “If they do anything at all and you’re involved, we want to hear about it from now on,” he said. “We have to assume, given your present circumstances, that they’ll be in touch again.”
He was really laying on the Jack Webb “Dragnet” impression.
I didn’t really have the strength to argue. But if he thought I was going to tell him about any conversations I might happen to have with Vin the Shin or his semi-psychotic nephew, this guy was kidding himself.
He also liked to talk. “Word on the street is that Johnny Terrasini is upset with you, Mr. Quinn. That means you could be of value to us. And thanks to the state board of pardons and paroles, we have the jurisdiction to ask for your assistance. So the bureau will be taking over the investigation of this little incident.”
They could ask all day. I might even outwardly agree; it would certainly make my folks happy, I thought. But there was no way this guy was getting help from yours truly. I had to live in this town.
The operative term being “live.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” I said.
“When was the last time you heard from Johnny Terrasini?”
“Never, directly. He had some business with a guy named Dennis Hecht…”
“We’re aware of Mr. Hecht.”
“Then you’re aware he was at a gallery heist end of last year….”
“We know the background, Mr. Quinn. What we want to know is why he waited this long to take a shot at you.”
“He didn’t.”
“What? It’s been nine…”
“No,” I interrupted him. “He didn’t take a shot at me. He threw a grenade through my window.”
He squinted hard and tilted his head with a look of rakish disgust. “Very funny. I heard that about you. I heard you like hanging out with wiseguys because they think you’re funny.”
That one had me squinting. “Huh?”
“In the pen, you spent a lot of time around with a couple of them: Joseph “Joey Beans” Toscatelli and Benjamin “Benny Toes” Valiparisi…”
Benny Toes, looking out for me again. Great. “Prison’s an interesting place,” I said. “Makes for strange politics. We haven’t kept in touch. Look, Mr. …”
“Belloche, Francis Belloche.”
“Mr. Belloche, if you know about either of those guys, you know Joey died three years ago, and Benny’s never getting out. I’m not a mobster. But I am tired as hell, and I need some rest…”
My mother took a few steps from her silent perch near the end of the bed. “That will be all for now then sir,” she said, in a voice that suggested even the toughest fed shouldn’t trifle with her. “My boy needs some sleep.”
He smiled and fished in his pocket.
“You do that. And when you’ve had a chance to think about who you need on your side, you can reach me here.” He placed his card on the bedside table; it was plain white, with a government logo, followed by the three capital letters, FBI, and “Federal Bureau of Investigation” in small print. Below, it simply said “Francis Belloche, Investigator,” followed by a series of contact numbers.
That afternoon, Ramon Garcia de Soria stopped by. “You need to get out of here, Quinn,” he said. He was standing beside my hospital bed looking nervous, like someone in there might pass on a fatal germ.
“I know, I’m taking up space.”
“Not that. It’s just too easy to find you if someone wanted to finish the job. Word will get out soon that they missed. All sorts of lowlifes wouldn’t mind scoring some credit with Johnny T.”
I showed him the bandage. “They didn’t miss. They just weren’t careful about it. Besides, the feds know about it, which means Johnny T knows about it.”
“You need to lay low. Why don’t you get out of town for a few days?”
“Can’t. Working on a case.”
“Well, you can�
�t stay with your parents. He’ll have eyes on them.”
“I’ll find something,” I suggested. “Don’t sweat it; these things tend to work out.”
“Don’t be silly. You’ll stay with Brenda and me at the condo. They’re not going to rush the place, so even if he tracks you down, worst case scenario is he ambushes you in the street and there are a few cases of collateral damage; but my wife’s china is safe.”
He jokingly underplayed the risk in helping me, but Ramon was a pretty smart guy. A condo with a private elevator was a heck of a lot safer than me strolling around south Philly.
“Okay. I’ll grab some stuff and stop over later,” I said. “Don’t do anything special...”
“Are you kidding? If I don’t tell my wife and give her three hours to make the spare room look nice, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Can I bring something?”
“Only your patience. She’s going to talk your ear off.”
By that evening, I was having dinner with the Garcia De Sorias. I’d called my mom and told her I’d be out of touch for a couple of weeks.
“What’s wrong?” she’d immediately said. “I know you Liam, you’re not a trip person. Is my boy in more trouble? You should be resting…”
“No, it’s not that ma. It’s nothing, just some light work out of town,” I lied.
“Don’t you lie to your mother,” she said. “Sure and you’ve offended some crazy criminal again, and you’re going out of town to cool off.”
She’d had that strange “mom sense” since I was a kid, a psychic ability to cut through my bull.
“Ma...”
“Well, all I can say is that I’ll be happy when you learn from your brothers and get nice, normal, safe jobs.”
“Ma, Davy is a cop.”
“And so was your father for thirty years, so don’t you be saying anything bad about the force.”
“No, it’s just....”
“Now don’t you give me any more excuses.”
“I won’t, Ma. But I have to do my job.”
