Past Due

by William Lashner

  “Will this do?” I said to her after I dropped the precious little paper on her desk.

  She picked it up, examined it closely, let an expression of wonderment lift her features. “How’d we get this?”

  “A retainer. For a collection case.”

  “We don’t do collections anymore.”

  “I made an exception. It has something to do with Joey. We’ll both be working on it, doubling up the billables.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If you and I, with a steady effort, can’t blow out this retainer before the first of the month, then we ought just give up law and become orthodontists.”

  “How very nineties of you, Victor.”

  “Why don’t you take this to the bank and then pay Ellie and Skink and the landlord. And if there is still something left over, maybe I can pay the cable bill. I miss my ESPN. This is just the start, Beth. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”

  When I returned to my office, my expression was suitably somber, the tone of my voice was suitably businesslike. “All right, Miss Blue. We have decided to accept Jacopo’s representation.”

  “Oh, Victor, thank you. I am so relieved.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that you are. Tell your boss that I am on the case. I’ll confess judgment right away, just like the note provides, and I’ll set up an expedited deposition of Mr. Manley and I’ll have him in here within the week and I’ll ask him all I need to ask him. Tell your boss I am on the case and I will take care of everything.”

  Chapter

  16

  I WAS FEELING chipper about things when next I visited my father. I had actual leads in the Joey Parma investigation, I had a paying client in Jacopo Financing, and, for the first time in weeks, there was money in my bank account. Not enough, yet, to get the cable back on, but it was close. I could barely suppress my excitement.

  Let me tell you something true: There’s not much in this life that can’t be cured by the cable guy.

  And then to top it off, I had engineered another run-in with Dr. Mayonnaise, the chance meeting in the hospital halls that was not chance at all. But I did it subtly, oh so subtly.

  “What are you doing on this floor, Mr. Carl. You’re father’s on four.”

  “This isn’t the fourth floor?”

  So we had gotten to talking and, since she was new in town, we had gotten to talking about restaurants.

  “You know a good Chinese place?” she had asked.

  “Sang Kee Duck House,” I said. “In Chinatown.”

  “Do they serve anything besides duck?”

  “I think so. You want to, maybe, I don’t know, maybe, try it sometime?”

  “With you?”

  “That would be, sort of, the point.”

  “I suppose.”

  Is that a ringing affirmative, or what? So I was feeling pretty damn chipper when I sat down beside my father in his hospital room.

  “You look like crap,” I said.

  “It’s not getting better,” said my father.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “She’s going to try a different antibiotic.”

  “I’m sure that will work.”

  My father just grunted. He was sure it wouldn’t, his natural pessimism demanded nothing less than despair, and, as was often the case with my father, maybe it was warranted. His oxygen absorption level had dropped to ninety-one percent and his breaths were coming faster now, even with the plastic tube feeding oxygen into his nose.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m going out with that doctor.”

  “It won’t go nowhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “She ain’t your type.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “First, she’s a doctor, so she’s too damn good for you. Second, she’s from Ohio.”

  “Nice,” I said, though, as usual, I worried that he was right.

  “Did I tell you how I found her?” said my father.

  “Who? The doctor?”

  “The girl. The pleated skirt. Did I?”

  “No, Dad,” I said, settling in, resigned to hearing more. “You didn’t.”

  “It was the car,” he said. The long burgundy car. My father roams all over the city, looking for it. He has a motorcycle, my father, he had seen Marlon Brando in The Wild One and he liked the look, so out of the army he took what pay he had saved and bought a motorcycle. It was a used 1951 Indian Roadmaster Chief, I knew, because it had been a part of my childhood, the motorcycle, sitting amongst the weeds in the backyard, a rusting relic of a faded past collapsing in on itself. But then, in my father’s youth, it is bright blue and killer loud and perfect. Sitting on its wide black-leather seat, hands gripping the handlebars, he tears through the city, street by street, canvassing the possibilities, searching for a car.

  He doesn’t spy it parked outside at the curb like any common family sedan, no. But he gets lucky one evening, sees it out and about, the long burgundy car with the high metal grill. A Bentley Mark VI, impeccably maintained. He follows it back to its lair on a small fashionable street not far from Rittenhouse Square, a spacious garage attached to a double-wide town house with a big red door.

  “And once I knew where he lived, it wasn’t nothing to ask around.” The old man is well known in that part of the city, with his fancy Bentley and his colored chauffeur and his secretary. The old man’s money is inherited, his great interest is in collecting collectibles, little things with much value, stamps, coins, rare manuscripts, and, so they say with their snide smiles, pretty secretaries that are maybe more than secretaries.

  “But I didn’t believe that none,” my father said. “I seen her eyes, her angel eyes.”

  So he waits for her. He gets off work early, cleans himself up nice and sharp, Brylcreems his hair back, takes the bike down to that fancy street, parks smack in front of the house, and waits. And waits. He sees a curtain twitch, someone knows he’s there, good, he figures. And he waits, waits until darkness falls and the streetlights start to glowing and night covers the city like a blanket. It is midnight when he leaves, but the next evening he is back, parked in the same spot, waiting. Waiting.

  “And then I saw her.”

  The big red door opens, she steps out, closes the door carefully behind her. She is dressed again all in white, but there is none of the brash confidence in her face now. She is nervous, worried. She walks toward him, glancing back once and then again at the house. A curtain is pulled slightly aside. The old man is watching, my father knows, and my father doesn’t care.

  You can’t be here, she tells him, her gaze down at her feet.

  I came for you.

  You have to go.

  Come out with me.

  I can’t. I have to go back.

  Tomorrow night, then, he says.

  No.

  I won’t go until you agree.

  She raises her face. Her eyes are red, and there is a darkness on the ridge of one cheek. A bruise? he wonders.

  I can’t, she says.

  Tomorrow night.

  Not here, she says.

  I’ll park around the corner. Tomorrow night.

  She doesn’t say anything, she stares at him for a moment and then moves her head slightly, an almost imperceptible nod. Before he can respond, she turns back to the house, runs back across the street, up the steps, through the big red door. Gone.

  But the next night, as he promised, he is waiting around the corner, waiting for her, and as she promised, she comes. She doesn’t say a word, she simply climbs onto the seat behind him, grabs him around the stomach, leans her chin on his shoulder. Together at last, they roar off into the night.

  “And that’s how it started,” said my father, lying on his bed in the hospital, his eyes closed, either from the pain of his condition or the sweetness of his past.

  “Did you see her a lot?” I said.

  “It went fast. I knew places to dance, to drink. She liked to drink.”

  “And when your dat
es were over?”

  “I took her back.”

  “To the house. To the old man?”

  “Yes. Back. By ten. Every night.” And every night he shudders as he watches her walk along that same narrow street, up those same stone stairs, through the same red door, into the blackness of the old man’s house. Whenever he asks about the old man, she won’t answer. She is his secretary, is all she says. The bruise? She was clumsy. The reason she only would meet him around the corner? She likes to maintain her privacy. He begs her to quit, to get a new job, to do something else, someplace else, so they can be together alone, without her fear. She only shakes her head sadly, shakes her head and says it is time for him to take her back. Back to the house. By ten. Back to the darkness. The old man. Every night. Until one night.

  “I did it on purpose,” said my father.

  They are drinking, dancing. She is holding him close. He can feel her body pressed against his, her breasts, her knees. Her flesh and bone seem to melt, to mold into his so that nothing can fit in between. She leans her head on his shoulder. Her eyes are closed, her breath is warm on his neck. There is a clock on the wall. He knows it is time to leave, they have to leave now to make her curfew, but he doesn’t tell her. They continue dancing, song after song as the minute hand spins its way slowly on and the hour slips past ten.

  When she notices, finally, he expects her to be scared, distraught, angry. But she simply blinks and swallows and asks for another drink. And it is that easy, like stepping over a line painted on the road, crossing the line and not looking back. That night he doesn’t take her to the old man’s house. He takes her to his apartment, a small walk-up hovel in a failing North Philadelphia neighborhood. The place is just off Broad Street, not six blocks from the very hospital where now he lay, fighting for his life.

  He closed his eyes in the hospital bed and remembered, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth, the way her tongue brushes his, gently at first and then more roughly, more urgently. This he didn’t tell me, this he didn’t have to, its reality lived in the very pain scrawled across his face. She unbuttons her shirt, steps out of her white pleated skirt, unhooks her garter. Even as he lay there, struggling for breath, his emotions leaving him unable to speak, it was not so hard to see. The first time with a true love is different in every way from what my father had experienced in those brothels in Germany, or the quick blow jobs from local girls between the trash cans in North Philly alleys.

  He let out a soft gasp. “Perfect” is all he said. “Perfect.”

  And it was, it always is, in the remembering. And in the quiet after, as her head rests on his chest and she murmurs in her sleep, he knows this is what he wants, my father, the feel of his angel’s hair on his chest, the feel of her body leaning upon his, rising and falling with each delicate breath she takes, the taste of her tongue still intoxicating his brain. This is what he wants, all he wants, for the rest of his life, forever.

  “Oh God,” he said, remembering, perhaps, his prayer as he lies awake through the night with her, staying awake to savor it all, desperate not to lose a second. He had never been a religious man, my father, he always claimed he left the mumbo jumbo to his own pious father, a cobbler who spent his life pounding on the last or praying at the neighborhood shul, but here, now, in this room, this bed, with his true love sleeping on his chest, he prays. My father prays that this night, this perfect night of true and unyielding love, will never end. My father prays that he and this girl, this angel asleep on his chest, will be together, forever.

  “Oh God.”

  My father lay on his hospital bed, alone except for the son who never forgave him for being what he had become, lay with his eyes closed remembering, I was certain, remembering his prayer and the night God failed him for the final time.

  Chapter

  17

  WHEN I WAS a kid, we used to head out to the creek by the railroad tracks, catch crawfish, stick them in a cup, prod and poke them for no better reason than to satisfy our sad, sadistic impulses. That’s sort of the idea behind a legal deposition.

  “I understand, Mr. Manley,” I said, “that you own a partial interest in a strip club on Columbus Boulevard called the Eager Beaver.”

  Derek Manley sucked his teeth. “Just a small piece.”

  Derek Manley was quite a big man to own only a small piece. Tall and thick and looking like he had swallowed a basketball, he leaned heavily onto the oaken table of our shabby little conference room, his meaty hands rubbing one against the other. He had the air about him of a guy who had secrets, who had connections, who lived life hard. And to say his bulbous nose was mottled was to say Hoffa was hard to reach. His nose was a Jackson Pollack painting.

  Manley sat beside his lawyer, a small bespectacled man named John Sebastian, who looked like a scared lion tamer sitting next to his big cat, unsure what unspeakable piece of horror his pet would unleash next. Beth and I sat across from them, perfect prodding position. Between us was a pitcher of water and a fetid plate of Danish. At the head of the table, taking down every word, was our court reporter, a nice old lady with blue hair and fast hands.

  “How small a piece of the club do you own?” I said.

  “Just enough sos I can tell the girls I’m an owner,” said Manley.

  “Be specific, Mr. Manley. How much stock?”

  “Who knows from numbers. Ike said I would get a third of everything, but that’s been a third of nothing. And that was before the IRS started chewing on his butt.”

  “Is the club liquid?”

  “We got ourselves a liquor license, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “If you requested Mr. Rothstein to buy you out, could he accommodate you immediately?”

  “Nah, the club ain’t got no cash flow. Truth be told, a club like that is worse than a boat. I thought the only thing swallowed more money than a vagina was a boat until I got involved with Rothstein and his club. But I never done it for the money, I only done it for the girls.”

  “And how did that part work out for you, Mr. Manley?”

  “Don’t answer that,” said John Sebastian.

  “Not so good,” said Manley, ignoring his lawyer, as clients are wont to do. “A couple of hand jobs is all.”

  “Keep quiet, Derek,” said Sebastian. “I object to the question. The purpose of this deposition is to search for assets, nothing more.”

  “On advice of counsel,” said Manley, “I ain’t gonna say nothing more about the hand jobs. But is that what yous looking for, Victor? Would that make yous happy? He leaned forward, raised an eyebrow. “Ever see that Esmerelda down at the club? They call her the Brazilian Firecracker. That I can maybe set up, but the money, forget about it. By the way, I got regards from a mutual friend. Earl? Earl Dante? He said I wouldn’t have no trouble here. Sos I don’t understand why yous coming down so hard.”

  “That was off the record,” said Sebastian.

  “Like hell it was,” I said.

  “Let’s go off the record and talk this through,” said Sebastian.

  “Absolutely not. Keep typing, Mrs. Mumford. Your client just mentioned his connection to an alleged organized crime figure. I take his mentioning that connection as an implied threat and believe any such implied threat should be on the record.”

  “Well, ain’t you the blue-nosed son of a bitch,” said Manley. “I was just passing on a hello.”

  “And thank you for that,” I said. “Now, there’s a Cadillac registered in your name. Where is that located?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I lost it.”

  “A black 2002 Eldorado? You misplaced it?”

  “One day it’s there and then I can’t find it no more. The day before I lost my keys. The next day I lost my reading glasses. Funny, ain’t it?”

  “I’m sure the judge will find it hysterical too. But you do own the Lincoln you drove up in today.”

  “Well, that one, you can check the papers,
it don’t belong to me. It belongs to my girlfriend.”

  “What about the luxury apartment you live in on the waterfront?”

  “My girlfriend’s.”

  “And the time share in Florida?”

  “Same.”

  “This is the girlfriend who works as your secretary?”

  “Office manager.”

  “You must pay a hell of a wage.”

  “Actually, the wage ain’t so much, really, but the benefits…” He waved his thumb at me.

  “What about Penza Trucking?” I said. “You own that, don’t you?”

  “Not really no more. It’s the bank what owns it now, with the thing mortgaged like it is up the wazoo. First Pennsylvania gave me this loan yous got without any security. Things was a little more flush then. They decided I was good for it. Too bad for them, huh?”

  “Is there anything more?” said Sebastian. “It’s been four hours already. I think we’ve covered everything.”

  Beth leaned toward the lawyer, opened her eyes wide, and said, “Are you sure you’re not the singer John Sebastian?”

  “Positive,” he said.

  “Woodstock?” she said. “The Lovin’ Spoonful? ‘Summer in the City’? Ring a bell?”

  “Stop it now,” said John Sebastian.

  I looked around. It was time. Manley was hot, his lawyer was bothered. The whole deposition had been leading to this moment. Sometimes you get right to the point, sometimes you dance around a bit, get everyone hot and bothered before you spring, with an innocent tone of voice, the crucial question. By then the guard is lowered, by then sometimes, against all odds and counter to all intentions, the truth slips out.

  “All right, Mr. Manley,” I said. “Just one more topic. You started with Penza Trucking when?

  “Geez, I was just a kid. Seventy-eight, seventy-nine.”

  “And what was your position?”

  “I drove. Penza, what owned the place, always hired young kids ’cause he could pay ’em squat.”