“Remember the young pup that escorted you down to the office?”
“The suit with the attitude. What was his name, Bernstein?”
“Berenson. Well right now, right this instant, Berenson’s enjoying the wonderful hospitality of Chinchilla, Pennsylvania, in Lackawanna County, reviewing their bench warrant procedures.”
“I hear Chinchilla has a wonderful Harvard Club.”
“You have something against Harvard?”
“Just the ivy-covered snots that go there.”
“Really? You know many Harvard graduates?”
“No. But I can imagine.”
“So it bothers you that graduates of Harvard Law are swooped up by the New York firms and given untold riches while you struggle to pay your bills?”
“Every minute of every day.”
“You ought to let go of that.”
“Why? If I have any power at all it derives from the keen edge of my bitterness. Give me all I want in this world and I would shrivel up and die, like a leech in salt.”
“I see your point, at least the part about you being a leech.”
“Where’d you go to law school, anyway?”
“Yale.”
“Well, bully for you. Who are we seeing again?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said.
He turned left off the boulevard, headed through some hard city streets, and then, suddenly, the signs changed, the edges softened, the roads turned downright leafy. He had driven me into the suburbs. The suburbs? Why would a city ADA be taking me into the suburbs?
It didn’t take much for me to lose my bearings as he weaved through a matrix of dark suburban streets. He was driving almost as if he were trying to confuse me.
“You know where we are?” he said.
“Not really.”
“Good answer.”
He coursed along a dark narrow road that had no street sign and then turned into a lot in front of a small row of town houses. Slocum parked. We both stepped out of the car. The town houses were cheap, temporary, a place inhabited by short-timers, by the recently divorced. There was a stillness in the air, like nothing happened here, ever. Slocum scanned the parking lot, half filled with cars but empty of people, and then headed toward one of the town houses. I followed.
The door was opened by a burly man in his shirtsleeves, blue suit pants, heavy black shoes, tie still tight, and a holster strapped around his chest. He nodded at Slocum, leaned out to make his own scan of the parking lot, and then stepped aside to let us in.
“You’re late,” said the burly man.
“He stayed past visiting hours,” said Slocum. “Probably going room to room giving out his card.”
The burly man laughed even as he took my arm and spun me around.
“What the—”
“It’s all right, Carl,” said Slocum. “Let him check you.”
I leaned against a closet as the man slid his hand up and down my pant seams, up and down my sides, my back, around my belt, all along my chest. When he was done he tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re all right.”
A voice from another room. “Remember, he’s a lawyer.”
“Right,” said the burly man, who immediately began to pat himself, looking worried, before he smiled with relief. “No,” he called back. “It’s okay, my wallet’s still here.”
That got a nice laugh from the other room.
The burly man led me through the narrow entranceway into a generically furnished two-story living room, where a man and a woman were lounging. A basketball game was on the television, the woman was staring at the screen of her laptop, the remnants of a take-out Chinese meal was scattered across the glass-topped dining table.
“Uh oh,” said the woman, still staring at the screen. “Trouble, serious trouble.”
“What?” said the guy on the couch, not looking away from the ball game.
“This bastard’s shooting.”
“Better get on that.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Hearts,” said the burly man, “on the Internet.”
“No, here. What is going on here?”
“Baby-sitting,” said Slocum.
“Who?”
“Yo, guys,” came a voice from the second floor, a strangely familiar voice. “Is there anymore of that shrimp pong ping crap?” I looked up just as an overweight man in boxers and a T-shirt ambled out of his second-floor room, scratched his balls, leaned over the balcony railing. “And I could use another beer, too, while yous at it.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Derek Manley.”
“Hey, Victor. How’s it hanging there, you little pistol?”
“Better than the last time I ran into you.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said, but he chuckled as he said it.
“You’re the one who wanted to see me?”
“Me and only me. I told ’em I needed a speak to a lawyer and the one I wanted to speak to was you.”
“Really? I’m almost flattered. And who are these guys?” I said, indicating the two men and woman who were baby-sitting.
“U.S. marshals,” said Slocum.
“Marshals?” I said. “Derek, I thought you were gonna kill yourself.”
“Who, me? What, are you crazy? I just told you I was looking for a way out.”
“And this is it?” I said.
“Yeah, how about them apples? I made like a Russian gymnast and flipped. Witness protection. Come on up, Victor, and bring some of that shrimp pong ping up with yous.”
Chapter
59
“HOW DO YOU like this setup?” said Derek Manley as we sat alone in his bedroom. It was a large room, furnished with a bed, a desk, a set of easy chairs, and a big-screen television. Everything a man could want except a telephone and a key. The windows, I noticed, were bolted shut and covered with metal bars. “I got three squares, I got a maid comes in once a day to freshen up the joint, I got the frigging U.S. marshals guarding my ass, I got Direct TV with, like, a hundred and fifty channels and Cinemax and Showtime.”
“HBO?” I said.
“Sopranos, baby.” He gave me a thumbs-up and then leaned forward, pointed to a fixture in the ceiling. With a remote control he turned on the television to some all-news-all-the-time station, leaned close, and lowered his voice. “They’re listening in so I gots to keep the TV on and my voice soft, but you want to know the truth, I get some of my best material for the feds from that show. Tony pots someone, the next day I tell it word for word to the guy asking the questions, only I put Philly names on it. It keeps them tapes rolling, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t be stupid, Derek. You have to tell the truth or they’ll spit you out.”
“I’m just giving them that stuff to keep it interesting, I’m giving them real stuff too. But in this place, it’s like I’m that broad what was wearing all the hankies and telling them stories to that big fat guy, trying to keep him interested enough so he wouldn’t whack her.”
“Scheherazade?”
“Gesundheit. Point is, I gots to keep them interested. Which brings me to that thing with Joey and me down by the waterfront.”
“Did you tell them about it?”
“Well, no, you see. All theys really interested in is the stuff I can give them on Dante. And who the hell wants to cop to a murder that no one knows shit about? But then this city DA got word that I had turned and he came over here with a copy of that deposition I gave to you, remember, that day you raked me over the frigging coals. He wanted to know the details. I told him I wanted to talk to a lawyer. When I said the word ‘lawyer’ he winced. When I gave him your name he had a conniption. It was quite a sight.”
“Why me?”
“Because of Joey. Because you said you was trying to find out what happened to him. You still taking care of him, so I thought for sure you was the one. So, Victor, I got a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“This is lawyer-client, right?”
“Tell me about that statue of limitations.”
“You know, you guys, if you’re going to talk about the law at least get the words right. Statute of limitations, all right. Statute. Say it after me. Statute.”
“Eat me.”
“Close enough. And the news is, Derek, there is no statute of limitations on murder.”
“Crap. This could throw off the whole deal. When I told them what I would tell them there wasn’t anything about no murder.”
“Let me show you something.” I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the photograph that Mrs. Greeley had given me, the photograph of her son, Tommy, with that smirk on his face. I handed it over to Derek. “Was that the guy with the suitcase?”
He looked at it, squinted his eyes, turned his head to take it in sideways. “It was a long time ago.”
“Was that the guy?”
“It’s hard to be sure, you know.”
“Was that the guy, Derek?”
“The prick with the suitcase? Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
I took the picture back, thought a bit. “Tell me what happened that night?”
“It was like you said. Joey got a little overenthusiastic with the baseball bat. Got him in the face. The guy went down. Boom.”
“Dead?”
“Sure.”
“You check his pulse?”
“I seen enough fish in the tank to know dead. He wasn’t moving.”
“Did you check his pulse?”
“No.”
“Put a mirror to his mouth to see if it fogged?”
“He wasn’t moving.”
“Did you have a stethoscope?”
“It was a rough-up, not a checkup.”
“You ever see a live possum?”
“No.”
“It’s because they play dead.”
“What the fuck you talking about, Victor? I never seen a dead one neither.”
“What did you do to the body?”
“We kicked it into the river.”
“Did you wrap it in chains? Did you weight it down with blocks. Did you stuff the body into a canvas duffel? What?”
“I told you, we kicked it into the river.”
“Just kicked it into the river.”
“Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”
“Your hit man technique stinks.”
“We was young.”
“You were stupid.”
“Go to hell.”
“You stupid son of a bitch, you stupid stupid son of a bitch.”
“Victor, why are yous coming down on me like this?”
“If you and Joey are going to spend your lives cursed because of a murder, you might as well make sure you commit it proper.”
“What are yous saying here?”
“Look, I think you’re in the clear. I think what you did is well beyond the limitations period.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said. Give me a few days before you say anything to anyone, all right, and by then I’ll know for sure. But you have to tell me something now. You have to tell me who it was who hired you to give that kid the rough-up in the park.”
He leaned forward, looked around, lowered his voice even more, so it was barely audible over the continuing screed of the television news. “All right. You sure you want to know?”
“Spill.”
“It was Deep End Benny.”
I just stared.
“Remember that picture you showed me in that deposition, the three altar boys? Joey, me, and some other guy? Well, the other guy was Deep End Benny. It was the three of us growing up, except Benny, he was a vicious little snipe, off the deep end, which was how he got his name. And that was before he got into crank. He hired us.”
“Where’s Benny now?”
“Dead. He built up a rep and started working for the boys. But he was too crazy even for them, too crazy for Scarfo. You had to be son of a bitch crazy to be too crazy for Scarfo. Shot through the head, tossed off a bridge, run over by a truck. They wasn’t taking no chances with Benny.”
“So why were you scared to tell me if he was dead?”
“Because Dante knew. He was still just a pawn boy then, Dante, standing like a nothing behind the counter in his shop, but he found out.”
“How?”
“Joey pulled a watch off the dead guy’s wrist. When he pawned it, Dante asked his questions. Joey didn’t know enough to say nothing. That was how Dante made his way to the top. He knew everything what was happening in the whole of South Philly because of who was pawning what.”
“But why would Dante still care if Benny was dead? I’m missing something here.”
“You ain’t so swift, is you, Victor? It wasn’t important right off, but Dante, he stored it away until it became something that he could use. And he’s been waiting, patiently, for a time to use it. Deep End Benny, he had a big brother, a wimp what meant nothing to nobody except to Benny when we was growing up, or even later, when this whole thing went down. But eventually, Benny’s brother, he made good, damn good. And when the time comes, Dante is going to take the info and turn it into a free pass out of whatever trouble he gets into with the law. See, here’s the thing. Our boy, our friend, the guy what Joey and me, we was altar boys with, it was Deep End Benny Straczynski.”
Chapter
60
IT WAS ALL coming into focus, what had happened twenty years ago and what was happening now, it was all coming into focus. The only question was what to do about it.
“I can’t tell you,” I said as Slocum and I drove back toward the hospital, where my car was parked. “We were lawyer-client.”
“Did he pay you?”
“I’m treating it as privileged. But he’ll tell you everything as soon as he can. I made sure of that. Do you have a meeting set up?”
“The feds are guarding their time like a jealous lover. But, day after tomorrow, McDeiss and I have been given a couple of hours to question him about twenty years ago.”
“Good. That should give me enough time to find out what I need to find out.” My query had been sent to California, but no telling how long before I heard back, and I had a quicker way of finding out the truth. “Make sure you ask him in detail about what actually happened to the body. And make sure you ask him who it was who hired him.”
“Interesting?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Will I want to hear the answer.”
“Oh, no.”
“Damn it. I got a big enough headache as it is. Did anything else happen up there? Did you say anything to get him upset?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. He looked a little peaked when he came down the stairs.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, yes.”
And Slocum was right, he did. Derek Manley was positively pale when he followed me down the stairs, his eyes bulging, his hand shaking ever so slightly. It was like I had passed him a virulent flu with the utterance of one simple word.
I had thought long and hard about whether I should pass that word along. I didn’t want to do Dante’s bidding, and I considered telling Slocum about what Dante had asked me to pass along before I climbed those stairs, but in the end I decided to handle it as I handled it. Whatever game Derek Manley was playing, he thought he could see all the angles. Dante was using me to tell him that there were angles he hadn’t anticipated, dangers he hadn’t sidestepped. It wasn’t up to me or Slocum or the feds to decide what risks Manley was willing to take. Derek Manley was a big boy, he was making the decisions, he should know the price he would have to pay, what precautions he would have to take. So after he had told me all I needed to know, and I told him what I thought had happened that night twenty years ago, I also told him I had a message from a friend, and I leaned over and placed my lips to his ear and whispered the single word.
His face, when he heard that word, was like a time-l
apse film of the wilting of a flower, an ugly bulbous flower, true, but still a flower, losing its bloom in the blink of an eye.
“Magnolia.”
It took me a while to figure it out. Was it code? Was there a particular tree? Was it the name of one of Manley’s strippers? Gentlemen, get ready to open your hearts and wallets for the jolt from Georgia, a walking heart attack who puts the hospital in Southern hospitality, the one, the only, Magnolia DeLight. It took me a while to figure it out, but I did, finally. And Manley himself had given me the clue. For Dante, in a desperate situation, would have threatened Manley at his softest point. And the only soft point Manley appeared to have was a son, in troubled health, stashed away somewhere in New Jersey. All it took was a quick look at the atlas and there it was, between Barrington and Somerdale, between Kirkwood and Runnymede, the little hamlet of Magnolia, New Jersey. Dante was threatening Manley’s boy, and he was using me to do it. But you tell me if Manley didn’t deserve to know.
“Where are you heading now?” said Slocum as he dropped me off in front of the hospital’s parking garage.
“Home. To sleep. Perchance to dream.”
“You sure?”
“I could use some.”
“Look, Carl, I respect that you promised Manley not to tell us what he told you. I don’t know if privilege is really attached, and we could probably get a judge to force it out of you except that we’ll hear it from the horse’s mouth soon enough. But whatever he told you, if it really did have something to do with that fire the other night, you should let McDeiss and me take care of it.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “You’re the pros.”
“Yes, we are.”
“And I’m basically a coward.”
“That’s one of the things I most admire about you.”
“Much appreciation,” I said, “though you shouldn’t slight my ignorance. That deserves your admiration too. Along with my general lack of physical prowess.”
“Not to mention you’re as ugly as the wrong end of a dead dog.”
“Thank you for that.”
“So you’re going to go home now, right?”
“Right.”
“To sleep?”
“Heaven knows I need it.”
“Good. I’ll be in touch.”
Past Due Page 38
