Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  “Tosca’s,” said a voice.

  “Let me talk to table nine,” I said.

  “One’a moment. I see if it available.”

  About a minute later I heard a familiar voice, older and softer, peppered with an Old World accent. “Table nine,” it said.

  “He says he got the money by stealing six cars off a Mercedes-Benz lot. He said he got you your share through Dante.”

  “Go on.”

  “He says he was going to resell the guns to some white supremacist group out in Allentown for a big profit.”

  “You believe him?”

  “He says he was on his own. I don’t think he whacks off on his own.”

  “I don’t think so neither. He ever had a bright idea it’d be beginner’s luck. You find out who he was with.”

  “And then we’re even and I’m through, right?”

  “It’s so hard to quantify human relationships, don’t you think?”

  “I hate this.”

  “Life is hard.”

  There was a firm click. I stood in the phone booth and tried to take a sip of the coffee but my hand was shaking so much it spilled on my pants. I cursed loudly and shook my pants leg and wondered at how I had made such a mess of everything.

  7

  “IT’S THE ASIAN RADISH that makes this dish truly memorable,” said Detective McDeiss as he skillfully manipulated the bamboo chopsticks with his thick fingers. On the little plate before him, tastefully garnished, were two tiny cakes, lightly fried. Hundred Corner Crab Cakes with Daikon Radish and Tomato Pineapple Salsa ($10.00). “The Asian radish is subtler than your basic American radish, with a sweet and mild flavor when cooked, like a delicate turnip. The pineapple salsa is a nice touch, though a little harsh for my preference, but it’s the radish that adds that touch of excitement to the fresh crab. I detect a hint of ginger too, which is entirely appropriate.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.

  “Oh, I am. It’s not too often I get to eat at so fine an establishment. More wine?”

  “No thank you,” I said. “But please, help yourself.” The last was a bit gratuitous, as the detective was already pouring himself another glass from the bottle. Pouilly Fuissé 1983 ($48.00).

  “Normally, of course, I wouldn’t drink at lunch, but being as the trial was recessed for the day and I’m off shift, I figure, why not?”

  “Why not indeed?”

  McDeiss was a big man, tall and broad, with the stomach of a football lineman ten years gone from the game. He dressed rather badly, a garish jacket over a short-sleeve shirt, a wide tie with indifferent stripes choking his thick neck. His bulbous face held a closed arrogant expression that seemed to refute any possibility of an inner life but the thick lines in his forehead rose with a cultured joy as he tasted his crab, his lips tightened, his shoulders seemed to sway with a swooning delight. Just my luck, I figured, offering to buy lunch for the only five star gourmand on the force. Susanna Foo was elegantly decorated with fresh flowers and mirrors and gold-flocked wallpaper; no Formica tables, no cheap plastic chopsticks, everything first class, including the prices, which made me flinch as I saw the wine drain down his substantial gullet. Even though I fully intended to bill Caroline for expenses, I was still fronting our lunch money.

  “We were talking about Jacqueline Shaw,” I said. “Your investigation.”

  He finished the last of his crab cakes, closed his eyes in appreciation, and reached again for his wineglass. “Very good. Very very good. Next time, maybe we’ll try Le Bec-Fin together. They have an excellent price-fixed lunch. Do you like opera, Carl?”

  “Does Tommy count?”

  “Sorry, no. Too bad that. We could have such a nice evening, just you and me. Dinner at the Striped Bass and then orchestra seats to Rigoletto.”

  “You’re pushing it, McDeiss.”

  “Am I? Jacqueline Shaw. Hung herself in the living room of her apartment at the south end of Rittenhouse Square. Quite a place, if a bit overly baroque in decoration for my palate. Everything seemed to be in order. It was very neat, no clothes lying around, as if she was expecting guests to show up at her hanging. She had been depressed, she had tried it before.”

  “How?”

  “Too many pills once. Slit her wrists in the bathtub when she was a teen. She was a statistic waiting to be rung up, that’s all. Ahh, here’s my salad.” Fresh Water Chestnut and Baby Arugula Salad with Dry Shrimp Vinaigrette ($8.00). “Oh my goodness, Carl, this dressing is delicious. Want a taste?”

  He thrust at me a forkful of greens thick with the vinaigrette.

  I shook my head. “Do you think the mother arugula gets upset when the farmer takes her babies?”

  McDeiss didn’t answer, he simply turned the fork on himself. As he chewed, the lines in his forehead rose again.

  “Who found her?” I asked.

  “The boyfriend,” said McDeiss. “They were living together, apparently engaged. Came home from work and found her hanging from the chandelier. He left her up there and called us. A lot of times they cut them down before they call. He just let her hang.”

  “Was there a doorman? A guest register?”

  “We checked out all the names in and out that day. Everything routine. Her neighbor, a strange player named Peckworth, said he saw a UPS guy in her hallway that day, which got us wondering, because no one had signed in, but then he came back and said he was confused about the day. We checked it out. She had received a package two days before. Not that this Peckworth could have been any kind of a witness anyway. He’s a real treat. Once that was cleared up there was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious.”

  “Did she leave a note?”

  He shook his head. “Often they don’t.”

  “Find anything suspicious in the apartment?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Candy wrappers or trash that didn’t belong?”

  “Not a thing. Why? You got something?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. The lady had a history of depression, history of drug abuse and alcohol abuse, years of failed therapies, and she was getting involved in some hippie dippy New Age chanting thing out in Mount Airy.”

  “That’s the place for it,” I said.

  “It all fits.”

  “What about the motive?” I softened my voice. “She’s a Reddman, right?”

  “Absolutely,” said McDeiss. “A direct heir as a matter of fact. Her great-grandfather was the pickle king, what was his name, Claudius Reddman? The guy on all the jars. Well, the daughter of this Reddman, she married a Shaw, from the Shaw Brothers department stores, and their son is the sole heir for the entire fortune. This Jacqueline was his daughter. There are three other siblings. The whole thing is going to be divided among them.”

  I leaned forward. I tried to sound insouciant, but I couldn’t pull it off. “How much is the estate worth?”

  “I couldn’t get an exact figure, only estimates,” said McDeiss. “Not much after all these years. Only about half a billion dollars.”

  Three heirs left, half a billion dollars. That put Caroline Shaw’s expected worth at something like one hundred and sixty-six million dollars. I reached for my water glass and tried to take a drink, but my hand shook so badly water started slopping over the glass’s edge and I was forced to put it back down.

  “So if it wasn’t a suicide,” I suggested, “money could have been a motive.”

  “With that much money it’s the first thing we think about.”

  “Who benefited from her death?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Oh come on, McDeiss.”

  “It’s privileged. I can’t talk about it, that’s been made very clear to me. There was a hefty insurance policy and her inheritance was all tied up in a trust. Both were controlled by some bank out in the burbs.”

  “First Mercantile of the Main Line, I’ll bet.”

  “You got it.”

  “By
some snot name of Harrington, right?”

  “You got it. But the information he gave me about the insurance and the trust was privileged, so you’ll have to go to him.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Look, let me warn you, there was political heat on this investigation. Heat to clean it up quickly. I’ve always been one to clean up my cases, check them off and go onto the next. It’s not like there’s not enough work. But still I was getting the push from the guys downtown. So when the coroner came back calling it a suicide that was enough for me. Case closed.”

  “But even with all the heat, you’re talking to me.”

  “A good meal, Carl, is worth any indignity,” but after he made his little joke he kept looking at me and something sharp emerged from the fleshy bulbs of his face.

  “And you think something stinks, don’t you?” I said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Not for the baby arugula. Where’d the heat come from? Who called you off?”

  He shrugged and finished his salad, poured another glass of wine, drank from it, holding the stem of the glass daintily in his sausage fingers. “The word on the Reddmans,” he said rather mysteriously, “is that it is a family dark with secrets.”

  “Society types?”

  “Not at all. Best I could tell they’ve been shunned completely, like lepers. All that money and not even in the Social Register. From what I could figure, you and I, we’d be more welcome in certain social circles than the Reddmans.”

  “A Jew and an African-American?”

  “Well maybe not you.” He laughed broadly at that and then leaned forward and twisted his voice down to a whisper. “The Reddman house is one strange place, Carl, more a huge stone tomb than anything else, with tilting spires and wild, overrun gardens. Veritas, it’s called. Don’t you love it when they name their houses?”

  “Veritas? A bit presumptuous, wouldn’t you say?”

  “And they pronounce it wrong.”

  “You speak Latin?”

  His broad shoulders shrugged. “My mother had this thing about a classical education.”

  “My mother thinks classical means an olive in her gin.”

  “Well, this Veritas was cold as an Eskimo’s hell,” said McDeiss. “As soon as I got there and started asking questions I could feel the freeze descend. The dead girl’s father, the grandson of the pickle king, the word on him is he’s demented. They lock him up in some upstairs room in that mansion. I had some questions for him but they wouldn’t let me up to see him, they physically barred me from going up the stairs, can you believe that? Then, just when I was about to force my way through to get to his room, a call came in from the Roundhouse. The family, through our friend Harrington, had let it be known that they wanted the case closed and suddenly the heat came down from City Hall. See, Carl, money like that, it is its own power, you understand? Money like that, it wants something, it gets it. I never got a chance to see the old man. My lieutenant told me to check off the case and move on.”

  “And so you checked.”

  “It was a classic suicide. We’d seen it all before a hundred times. There wasn’t much I could do.”

  “No matter how much it stunk. I need you to get me the file.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “I’ll subpoena it.”

  “I can’t control what you do.”

  “How about the building register for the day of the death?”

  He looked down at his salad and speared a lone water chestnut. “There’s nothing there, but okay. And be sure to talk to the boyfriend, Grimes.”

  “You think maybe he…”

  “All I think is you’ll find him interesting. He lives in that luxury high-rise on Walnut, west of Rittenhouse. You know it?”

  I nodded. “By the way, you find any Darvon in her medicine cabinet?”

  He looked up from his salad. “Enough to keep a football team mellow.”

  “Ever wonder why she didn’t just take the pills?”

  Before McDeiss could answer the waiter came and whisked away his plate, with only the remnants of the dry shrimp vinaigrette staining the porcelain. In front of me the waiter placed the restaurant’s cheapest entree, Kung Pao Chicken–Very Spicy ($10.00), thick with roasted peanuts. In front of McDeiss he placed one of the specialties of the house, Sweeter Than Honey Venison with Caramelized Pear, Sun-Dried Tomato and Hot Pepper ($20.00). McDeiss picked off a chunk of venison with his chopsticks, swilled it in the garnish, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, carefully, mashing the meat with Pritikin determination, his shoulders shaking with joy.

  While McDeiss chewed and shook, I considered. Through his patina of certainty as to the suicide I had detected something totally unexpected: doubt. For the first time I wondered seriously whether Caroline Shaw might have been right about her sister’s death and it wasn’t just that McDeiss had doubts that got me to wondering. There was money at stake here, huge pots of money, enough to twist the soul of anyone who got too close. Money has its own gravitational pull, stronger than anything Newton imagined, and what it drew, along with fast cars and slim-hipped women, was the worst of anyone who fell within its orbit. Just the amount of money involved was enough to get me thinking, and what I was thinking, suddenly, was of Caroline Shaw and that manipulative little smile of hers. And there was something else too, something that cut its way through the heat of the Kung Pao and slid into the lower depths of my consciousness. Just at that moment I couldn’t shake the strange suspicion that somehow a part of all that Reddman money could rightfully belong to me.

  McDeiss had told me I should talk to the boyfriend, this Grimes fellow, and so I would. I could picture him now, handsome, suave, a fortune-hunting rogue in the grandest tradition, who had plucked Jacqueline out of a crowd and was ready to grab his piece of her inheritance. He must be a bitter boy, this Grimes, bitter at the chance for wealth that had been snatched right out of his pocket. I liked the bitter boys, I knew what made them tick, admired their drive, their passions. I had been a bitter boy once myself, before my own calamitous failures transformed my bitterness into something weaker and more pathetic, into deep-seated cynicism and a desperate desire to flee. But though I was no longer bitter, I still knew its language and could still play the part. I figured I’d have no trouble getting Grimes to spill his guts to me, bitter boy to bitter boy.

  8

  I SAT DOWN AT THE BAR of the Irish Pub with a weary sigh and ordered a beer. As the bartender drew a pint from the keg I reached into my wallet and dropped two twenties onto the bar. I drank the beer while the bartender was still at the register making my change, drank it like I was suffering a profound thirst. I slapped the glass onto the bar and waved to the bartender for another. Generally I didn’t drink much anymore because of my drinking problem. The problem was that when I drank too much I threw up. But that night I had already spent hours searching and asking questions and looking here and there, and now that I had found what I was looking for I was determined to do some drinking.

  “You ever feel like the whole world is fixed against you?” I said to the bartender when he brought my second beer.

  It was a busy night at the Irish Pub and the bartender didn’t have time to listen. He gave a little laugh and moved on.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” said the fellow sitting next to me, the remnants of a scotch in his hand.

  “Every time I get close,” I said, “the bastards yank it away like it was one of those joke dollar bills tied to a string.”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” said the man. With a quick tilt of his wrist he drank the last of his scotch.

  The Irish Pub was a young bar, women dressed in jeans and high heels, men in Polo shirts, boys and girls together, meeting one another, shouting lies in each other’s ears. On weekends there was a line outside, but this wasn’t a weekend and I wasn’t there to find a date and neither, I could tell, was the man next to me. He was tall and dark, in a gaudily bright short-sleeve shirt and tan pants. His features were all
of movie-star strength and quality, his nose was straight and thin, his chin jutting, his eyes deep and black, but the package went together with a peculiar weakness. He should have been the handsomest man in the world, but he wasn’t. And the bartender refilled his glass without even asking.

  “What’s your line?” I asked, while still looking straight ahead, the way strangers at a bar talk to one another.

  “I’m a dentist,” he said.

  I turned my head, looked him up and down, and turned it back again. “I thought you had to have more hair on your forearms to be a dentist.”

  He didn’t laugh, he just took a sip from his scotch and swirled it around his mouth.

  “I was that close today, dammit,” I said. “And then it happened like it always happens. It was a car accident, right? A pretty ugly one, too, some old lady in her Beemer just runs the red and bam, slams into my guy’s van. Lacerations from the flying glass, multiple contusions, a neck thing, you know, the works. I send him to my doctor and it’s all set, he can’t work, can’t walk or exercise, he’s stuck in a chair on his porch, wracked with pain, his life tragically ruined. Beautiful, no?”

  “You’re a lawyer,” said the man as flatly as if he were telling me my fly was unzipped.

  “And it set up so sweet,” I said. “Workman’s comp from the employer and then, wham, big bucks compensatory from the old lady and her insurance company. The insurance was maxed out at three hundred thou but we were going for more, much more, punitives because the old lady was half blind and should never have been out on the road, was a collision waiting to happen. She’s a widow, some Wayne witch, rich as sin, so collection’s a breeze. And I got a thirty-three-and-a-third percent contingency fee agreement in my bank vault, if you know what I mean. I had picked out my Mercedes already, maroon with tan leather seats. SL class.”

  “The convertible,” said the man, nodding.

  “Absolutely. Oh, so beautiful that car, just thinking about it gives me a hard-on.”

  I finished my beer and pushed the mug to the edge of the bar and let my head drop. When the bartender came I asked for a shot to go with my refill. I waited till the drinks came and then sucked the top off my beer and waited some more.