by Arlette Lees
The D.A. heard every word from his chair in the corner.
“As absurd as it seems, let’s give this man every opportunity to clear his name before he gets what’s coming to him. Fly that woman out from California and we’ll listen to what she has to say.”
Jeeter breathed a sigh of relief. Suzette shifted nervously in her chair.
Charleen Tate walked into the interrogation room two days later. She looked like a million bucks in her pink Chanel suit and triple strand of pearls. Awaiting her arrival were Sheriff DuBois, Suzette, the D.A. and Jeeter.
“Baby doll,” said Jeeter when she looked his way. “I’m so glad you came to clear things up.”
“Well,” said Étienne, “is this your husband?”
“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” she said.
“CHARLEEN! It’s me, Jeeter, the father of those sweet baby boys.”
Everyone in the room burst out laughing.
“Believe me, Sheriff,” she said. “when you win the lotto every Tom, Dick and Harry crawls out of the woodwork.”
The D.A. extended his hand. “So sorry to have inconvenienced you Mrs. Tate. I think we now have all the evidence we need.”
As she left the room she looked at Suzette and winked.
Out on Blood Bayou the moon turned the water to silver. Two skulls floated side by side downstream.
BRUISED
The digital clock read 3 a.m. when the phone jangled me out of my drug-induced sleep. Reaching for the receiver, I cursed, as I banged my bad knee on the nightstand. Mom’s brogue was as thick as potato soup in my ear.
“It’s Rory,” she said, softly rolling her R’s.
At the mention of my diminutive twenty-one-year-old sister, with her flying red hair and wild lifestyle, the pain in my shattered knee went into over drive. What now? A drunk and disorderly? Another DUI?
“Do we have to do this right now?” I croaked, through a haze of painkillers.
“She’s missing, Joey. And she’s pregnant.”
I squinted as I snapped on the bedside lamp and threw a T-shirt over the shade.
“I know. They’re talking about it in every bar on the strip. I wish she’d hooked up with some blue collar guy from the neighborhood, but no, it has to be some rich dandy in silk skivvies.”
“And a coward to boot, slappin’ her around so she can’t even hide the bruises.”
“Listen Mom, you think Stafford needs his ticket punched, call Pug. He’s the muscle in the family.”
I tapped a Camel out of the pack and lit it.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you’re the cop, Joey!”
“Remember my knee, Mom? The shotgun blast? The doc says I’m off that leg for six more weeks or I could lose it.”
“That would never have stopped your Da when he was on The Force. Listen, me boyo, Stafford is facing eighteen years of a rich man’s child support. He told Rory he’d have her down at the clinic if he had to drag her by the hair.”
Seemed reasonable to me, drugged up as I was.
“She’s a good Catholic lass, Joey.” I rolled my eyes. “This morning she went to have it out with Mr. Moneybags. No way that sweet girl could take care of her problem on Friday and face Mick at Sunday morning mass. Stafford says she never showed up at his place. He must think us MeFeeney’s were born yesterday.”
“I suppose you called the clinic.”
“I’m way ahead of you there. They never heard of her. Worse yet, she hasn’t shown up at The Emerald Isle all night.”
Not showing up at her favorite haunt gave me pause.
“I’m thinkin’ he really did her in this time,” said Mom. “Stories about this guy go back to when your Da was walking the beat.”
I rubbed my temples as the tumblers fell into place with an ominous click.
“Go back to bed, Mom. I’ll look into it.”
I punched out my smoke and burned my thumb. The ashtray tumbled upside down onto the rug. It was going to be one of those nights.
* * * *
Like a 1930s movie star, Colby Stafford lounged in the doorway of his upscale townhouse in a burgundy satin robe, a teenage blonde with a black eye draped like a wilted daffodil over his arm.
Colby was fifty-ish, clean-shaven and cologned. If you looked closely, you could see sins crawling beneath his skin like tropical parasites.
“Oh God,” he said, in a tone of casual dismissal. “Looks like Fannon McFeeney has sent the cavalry to look for little sister.”
He lit a lavender cigarette with a gold-tipped filter. The girl hovered over his shoulder. With a twitch of annoyance, he shrugged her away and she vanished with a pout.
“You got lucky tonight,” I said. “Mom was ready to take Dad’s service revolver and blow your prissy shit to kingdom come.”
“You get the same answer I gave her. I haven’t seen Rory in days.”
I glimpsed past him into the foyer. He didn’t stop me as I leaned heavily on my cane and limped past him. I grabbed a red purse off the entry table. Back on the stoop, I rummaged through the contents. It was full of Rory’s personal items...driver’s license...makeup...hair brush.
“Let’s start over,” I said.
Stafford gave a world-weary sigh and flicked the rest of his cigarette into the shrubbery.
“I lied. So fucking what? Rory kneed me in the groin when she found little Miss Tiffany in my bed. She left in a manic frenzy. That was about 10 p.m. That sister of yours is a poster child for ADD. She either needs to be medicated or zapped with a tranquilizer gun. Enough of her crap. I’m moving on with my life.”
“Now that you’ve got her in a family way? How noble of you.”
“Who says it was me knocked her up? It could be one of a dozen others for all I know.”
I couldn’t say if he was right or wrong, I just wanted to bust his face.
“DNA will clear that up fast enough,” I said.
I handed him my card. He examined both sides with carefully manicured fingertips.
“I see you finally made Lieutenant. I’m impressed.”
“Give me a call if your memory improves.”
As he slipped the card into the pocket of his robe, I saw a fresh abrasion on his knuckles, the kind you get when you punch someone in the mouth and catch an incisor for your trouble.
“Mind if I go in and have a quick look around?”
“Got a warrant? If you’re on active duty, I’m Peter Pan.”
“Got something to hide?”
“Nothing that would interest you.”
“How did you cut your hand?”
The skin tightened across his cheekbones and he blinked.
“That little mick?” he said, holding out his hand. “Tiffany had the audacity to contradict me, but she’s young enough to learn.”
“My sister was born talking back. She’ll never learn.”
We locked eyes. This time he didn’t blink.
“Just one last question and I’ll be out of your hair,” I said. “When Rory left here, was it on her own steam or feet first?”
I landed on my bad knee at the bottom of the stairs before I realized I’d been socked in the jaw. A howl ripped from my throat. My cane rolled into the grass. The door slammed behind me and the porch light went out.
I’d underestimated the enemy. He was not only quick, he packed an iron punch. In Dad’s day, I could have kicked in the damn door and shot him where he stood. Today you look cross-eyed at some murderous perp, you’re dragged in front of Internal Affairs.
Officially, I was home on medical leave. I’d never been here. That didn’t mean Stafford wouldn’t pay for this. It just wouldn’t be tonight. I pulled myself to my feet with a loud groan and pulled my cane out of the grass.
A neighbor stuck his head out of a second story window.
“Shut the fuck up or I’m calling the cops! People are trying to sleep here.”
A cold rain fell as I drove down the strip. The bars were closed and the Rescue Mission was lock
ed down for the night, its gold neon cross reflecting on the wet asphalt. There was no sign of Rory or her car, just a bum sleeping in the doorway of the pawn shop and a stray dog raiding a garbage can along the curb. My knee had ballooned to surreal proportions. The damp cold crept into my bones and I shuddered.
I collapsed in my easy chair with a brandy. Stafford had made an effort to wipe blood from Rory’s purse, but there was enough in the creases to warm the cockles of a lab tech’s heart.
But, was it her blood? It could have been Tiffany’s or even Stafford’s. I was contemplating my next move when Pug called.
“Mom’s been driving me nuts,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
“One of Vin’s boys found Rory’s car by the old slaughterhouse. It had a flat. There was blood on the steering wheel and a cell phone in the mud. They checked the abandoned building but came up empty.”
“Pug, Rory didn’t own a cell phone. Did you hit redial?”
“The battery’s dead.” He cracked his knuckles, same as when we were kids and he was up tight. “I brought Mom up to date. She expects the worst, but doesn’t she always. Who knows, this time she could be right.” I heard him take a pull on his cigarette and cough the smoke out. “God forgive me, but dealing with Rory is like trying to take a shit in an outhouse full of bees. You can’t get no peace.”
I smiled.
“You’re a real poet, Pug. I ever tell you that?”
I told him about my encounter with Stafford...the purse...the blood...the torn knuckles...the teen he was boinking. I sensed Pug’s wheels turning in the silence.
“Meet me at The Aces,” he said. “We’ll put two and two together.”
Pug, my younger brother, owns The Aces High Pub, a front for his gambling operation and other stuff I don’t want to know about. Mick, my older brother, is a parish priest at St. Finnbar’s. Me? I followed Dad into The Job after he took a bullet in the back a week before his retirement. That’s us, just a typical family in Little Ireland, east of the factories.
* * * *
I was in agony. I was out of pain pills and my knee was so swollen it refused to bend. As dawn broke with a rumble of thunder, I dragged into Dr.’s On Duty on my way across town.
An M.D., who looked like a high school student, drained a liter of suspicious green fluid off the joint with a needle the size of a garden hose. He gave me an ominous look, like in the movies when the doc is about to saw your leg off.
He walked to the phone.
“Who’s your doctor of record?”
“Look Doc, all I need is more pain pills.”
“Not from me,” he said. “You’re staying off that leg, right?”
“Absolutely.”
* * * *
Vinnie Natoli was sitting at a table with Pug. He hadn’t missed many meals since I’d seen him last. He had deep circles under his eyes and a few buttons missing from his vest.
“Well, if it ain’t Quasimodo,” he said, squinting through a toxic layer of cigar smoke. I hobbled across the room and eased painfully into a chair.
“We heard about the punk nailed you with the shotgun. Heard he was only seventeen.”
“His first caper didn’t go well. Until Father Nolan straightened out my shit, I was headed down the same dead end,” I said.
I leaned my cane against the edge of the table and stretched my leg out in front of me. Vin looked at me and waved his cigar.
“Don’t give me that shit,” he said. “You never would have iced the clerk at the Likkor Lokker. He got what he had coming to him.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “I was kissing the asphalt in the parking lot. My partner dropped him with a single shot through the left eye. Came out the back of his head, clean as a whistle.”
“You mean Deborah Moskawitz saved your sorry ass?”
“That’s the one.”
“She used to beat me up and steal my lunch in fifth grade. Turned me on.”
As Pug poured a round of eye-openers, I pulled Rory’s purse and the cell phone from inside my raincoat and set them on the table. Rain hammered the roof above our heads and a tree of lightning bloomed on the horizon.
“Vin’s got a dog in this fight too,” said Pug.
Vin downed his shot. He sat quietly flexing the muscles in his jaw.
“How so?” I said, detecting the shift in mood.
“I had a cousin,” said Vin. “Angie Milano. Guess who she was involved with when she vanished off the face of the earth?”
“Colby Stafford.” I lit a smoke and leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”
“Angie and Stafford got into it over something. I never knew what. He hit her in the head so hard she went deaf in one ear. The day she threatened to file a complaint she disappeared. She was only sixteen years old for crissake.” He swallowed hard to loosen the tightness in his throat.
“She’ll always be sixteen, if you know what I mean. That was seven years ago before you came on The Job. We never recovered so much as a tooth.” His eyes were sad and dark as Italian olives. “She ain’t the only girl dropped down the same black hole. You find so much as your sister’s fingernail, you’ll be the first who finds anything.”
“I ran his name when Rory started seeing him. How come he comes up clean?”
“He’s one of Supervisor Wright’s most loyal contributors. Wright makes sure that the missing girls go down as runaways. Stafford knows to pick them young and wild, so when they ain’t around no more, no one digs too deep. Angie gets buried in the cold case file with all them other missing girls.”
Pug cracked his knuckles and lit a cigarette from the cinder of the one before it. We sat silently for a beat or two, rain ticking against the window.
“We don’t close him down,” said Pug, “no one else will.”
Even if I trusted the veracity of Vin’s account, I was apprehensive at being sucked into the dark vortex of his reality. I wanted to think that I was removed...if only by a hair’s breadth...from the world of thugs, gamblers and Italian gumbas with ‘connections.’
I rubbed my tired eyes and shifted my knee to one more uncomfortable position.
“Let’s slow down a minute,” I said. “This is serious shit we’re talking here. No need to go off half cocked.”
“Slow down while he runs off to the Bahamas like he done when Angie went missing?”
I took an inventory of what we had...the pregnancy...the blood...Vin’s cousin...my sister...Stafford’s political connections with a less than sterling public figure. Then I asked myself if the world would be better or worse off if Stafford wasn’t in it.
“Stafford’s tough, or he wouldn’t still be around. He’ll have his guard up,” I said.
Vin hunched forward, conspiratorially.
“Just hear me out,” he said. “Every Saturday night at nine sharp, my nephew Gino picks Stafford up at the townhouse and drives him across the river to the Carnival Club. Let’s say tonight we put the limo at your disposal. Do whatcha gotta do, just don’t leave no evidence behind. Gino’s working his way through college and don’t need no complications in his life, like blood, hair, that kind of shit.”
I downed my shot and took a Trappist moment to clear my head. Vin thumped back in his chair and threw his hands in the air.
“Stop worrying for crissake! It’ll be dark and stormy. He’ll never see it coming.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tonight.”
Pug poured a second round of shots. I tossed mine back and felt it warm the edges of my healing ulcer.
Vin grew pensive.
“I can’t believe Rory’s gone,” he said. “She was the life of the party in our senior year at Finney. The nuns never knew what to make of her. I used to follow her around like a puppy dog. I wonder why she never gave me a tumble.”
Pug butted out his cigarette and shook his head.
“Listen Vin, the kid had lousy taste in men. You were too good a guy to make her list of losers.”
After a few more
shots, Vin rolled out the door into the rain. When he pulled away from the curb in his 1948 pink Caddy, he had a smile wrapped around his fat cigar.
Pug walked over and set an ashtray on the pool table where a leak had broken through.
“We’re going to have our hands full with Stafford,” he said. “We’re going to need Mick behind the wheel.”
I slowly stubbed out my smoke and limped over to where he was standing.
“I hate to get a priest mixed up in this,” I said.
Pug rested his elbows on the pool table, his blue eyes burning with intensity.
“So, we should use Vin and he calls in the favor up the road? You really want to get in that deep with the gumbas?”
“You have a point. I guess we clean up our own side of the street.”
I made it to the phone behind the bar. The fluid was building up on my knee again and I felt slightly disoriented. I punched in Mick’s number and his housekeeper, Mrs. Healy, answered. I heard her slippers pad away from the phone.
“Father McFeeney,” she called. “It’s trouble on the phone.”
He moaned sleepily.
“Pug or Joey?” he asked.
* * * *
By the time night fell, the streets were rushing with water. Shingles were blown from rooftops and broken branches littered the roadways. Mick looked the part of a proper limo driver in his priestly casuals and Gino’s shiny brimmed cap.
Mick’s nose was as flat as a boxer’s from all the scrapes he’d been in growing up on the streets of Little Ireland, and his beefy face was as knuckly as his fists. There wasn’t a wife-beater or gang-banger he hadn’t dumped on his ass.
Mick let me and Pug off a block up from Stafford’s townhouse, then circled back to make the pickup. I felt like a wreck, stumbling around on my cane, but without it I couldn’t even stand. My face burned with fever and I felt a vague disconnect with my surroundings, like I was walking in someone else’s dream.
