A way out, I thought. She'd already left him by the time O'Shea got caught up in the disappearance of Faith Hamlin.
"I, uh, really don't know anything about the details of your past relationship, Mrs. Mott," I said. "But honestly, that is the area I'm trying to explore," I said.
"To help him or hurt him, Mr. Freeman?"
She was smart and blunt. And she would see right through any bullshit answer I might toss her.
"Honestly, I don't know, Mrs. Mott," I said, and waited.
"Colin does have that effect, doesn't he?" she said.
"Confusion," she answered her own question. "It's his stock-in-trade."
She agreed to meet with me, in a public place. Her son had an ice hockey game at three the next day. Meet her there, with identification, and we could talk. No promises. I pulled around to the back of McLaughlin's at eight. It was already dark and I had missed the transition from daylight. There was no fade of color, no blue to disappear, no rose-tinged cloud of sunset. The gray had simply turned a deeper gray and then been overtaken by the dusty glow of city light. The sleet had turned to light snow and up in the high streetlights it drifted down and swirled in whatever wind current caught it off the buildings. It turned to slush on contact with the concrete and car tires slashed through it on the street. I was hatless and shivered and then heard the music in McLaughlin's buzz against the window and went inside.
The place was full and conversation was battling with an Irish melody on the speakers, neither winning. For someone used to the natural humidity of the subtropics, the hot, dry air was enough to make you want to drink just to dehydrate. It was a cop bar, dominated by clean-shaven faces, working men's clothing, the pre-game show to the 76ers game, an appropriate locker room level of loud voices and the guffaws of a joke badly told. The few women present were older wives and the young ones' impressionable girlfriends.
I spotted my uncle at a table in the back. He was flanked by a couple of cronies his own age. As I worked my way back I saw his eyes pick me up halfway and make a decision before the smile started. He was out of his chair, rattling the pitcher and glasses on the table with his girth before I reached him.
"Christ in heaven, Maxey boy," he said, embracing me with his stovepipe arms and wrapping me in the smell of cigar smoke and Old Spice aftershave.
"You are as skinny as a fuckin' sapling, boy," he said, standing back at arm's length. "And dark as a goddamn field hand." A few heads turned, but not for more than a look. My uncle was an old- timer. Gray-haired and thirty years with the department, his language and his political incorrectness was grandfathered in. He introduced me to his friends, both with over twenty years themselves, and we sat. There was a pitcher of beer on the table with a frozen bag of ice floating in it. An open flask of what I knew was Uncle Keith's special blend of Scotch stood as its companion. He poured shots all around and raised his own for a toast.
"To the wayward son, what took the money and run," he announced with a wink.
"Aye," said the others, and we drank.
For the next three hours we drank and they told old stories. Carefully and with loyalty to my uncle no mention was made of my father, the legendary one whose death would always remain a secret of the brotherhood of the blue. We drank and I described only the beauties of Florida, and their eyes went glassy with reverence of a dream of golf and sun. We drank and my uncle exhorted me to show the bullet wound scar in my neck and they toasted Mother Mary for bad aim and mercy. We drank and they bitched about pensions and union stewards and the job in general and when I found an opening and asked Keith about an IAD contact they stopped drinking.
"We got a guy there, I called and gave him a heads-up, Maxey," my uncle said. "His name is Fried. He got attached over there a few years back after blowing out his hip in a pileup with a fire truck responding. He was with the detective squad up in East Kensington. He'll give you what he can."
I nodded my head and watched the others doing the same, avoiding my eyes. I could feel the vacuum at the table.
"IAD and lawyers, Max," he said, echoing his words on the phone from Florida. "Can I ask what it is you're into, son?"
We leaned our heads in together and the others tried unsuccessfully to pay no attention.
"I'm actually checking in on a former cop, a guy from my rookie class, Colin O'Shea, from the neighborhood," I said. "Any recollection?"
Since I was a pissant kid I'd known my uncle's brilliance for names and descriptions. He was the human equivalent to getting Googled. When he hesitated I knew it wasn't because he was stumped. He was considering his answer as he looked around the table and caught the glances of his crew.
"That would be the O'Shea of the Faith Hamlin situation?" he said, now watching my eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "I did some research."
Now he and the rest were looking down into their drinks, uncle Keith shaking his big head.
"Not a good time for the department or the district, Maxey," he said.
"Tell me."
He brought his eyes up and started in, his voice low but his mouth stiffening with the distaste of the telling.
"Had to be four years ago, after you left, word goes out on a missing persons' report out of the district. A woman, middle twenties, ya know, kind that elopes to Atlantic City or something. At first nobody pays much mind."
He stopped to sip his special blend. The other guys are straight- faced, like a poker game, but when they follow my uncle's lead, you know they're all listening and agreeing.
"But this girl, people know. She was a kid from the neighborhood who was kind of an outcast. Connellys down on Tasker had taken her in from a relation when she was young 'cause they couldn't handle her. She was, you know, not really retarded, but slow. Kids her age avoided her. But she did know how to, you know, ingratiate herself on people, trying to get them to, uh, accept her I guess."
"An' not bad-lookin', neither," said one of the crew, a veteran who'd been introduced as Sergeant Doug Haas.
"Not that I was going to add that detail," Uncle Keith said, narrowing his eyes at Haas.
"What?" his friend said. "I'm lying?"
Keith turned away.
"The family understood this, her physical attributes, and tried to keep her in someplace low profile," he continued. "They got her a counter job, working the register at this little corner store on Fifth Street near Sinai Med Center. She did the overnight, selling coffee and smokes to ambulance drivers and such who worked late."
"And cops on the beat," I said.
"Yeah," Keith said, and the heads went down and shook together.
"So somebody gets the word when she goes missing and tongues are waggin' because these cops on the Charlie shift are always in the place and they aren't offering up much in the way of information, like on the last time they seen her and such, being that she just disappeared off the face of the earth in the middle of her shift and nobody sees anything."
He took another sip, getting to it more slowly than Uncle Keith was used to getting to it.
"The rumor ain't rumor for long. Word gets around that these four cops were passing her around, each getting a piece of it back in the storage room while each partner was watching the front."
"They said she liked to pay them back for protecting her," Sergeant Haas broke in again.
This time my uncle just shook his head in agreement.
"And Colin O'Shea was a part of this?" I said.
"He was one of them," Keith said. "And once IAD got onto the case, he was the only one who didn't come out and finally own up to what they'd done."
"They cracked them?"
"Like fuckin' walnuts, Maxey. All of them were suspended and eventually fired for what they did to the girl even though she wasn't underage and she wasn't around to dispute that it was consensual. But to a man, they all said they didn't know where she'd gone or what happened to her."
"All except O'Shea," I said.
"He never admitted any part of it and was never seen in
the city again."
"Christ, IAD must have done some knuckle pounding," I said. "Was this guy Fried the lead on the case?"
The table again went dead still. No one would look up from their whiskey. No sipping, no head shaking.
"And what else, Uncle Keith?" I finally said.
"Well, Maxey. You got somebody else over in that office that you have some recollection of from the past," he said, looking up through those damn bushy eyebrows that had scared me as a kid. I waited him out. "Meagan Montgomery is her name now."
"Meagan?" I said. "As in my ex-wife, Meagan?"
He nodded and said: "Yes. She would be the lieutenant for the unit now, after she caught the Faith Hamlin case and sent five cops down the slide."
I let the vision of my wife of two years sit in my head, as it had too many times on the plane trip back here. The one memory I thought I could escape was dead in the middle of my investigation.
"Well," I finally said. "I'll bet she can cut some balls off over there, eh?"
The old men in the crew sighed their relief, and then a bit boisterously I lifted a toast to women lieutenants and we drank, yet again.
At the end of the night I promised Keith I would stop by the house to see my aunt and shook hands all around. My head was swimming with the booze and music and smoke and faces. Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had dropped. The air felt like a slap. When I tried to breathe deeply through my nose to sober myself I caught that old familiar feeling of the air crystallizing in my nose and my eyes started watering. February in the Northeast, I thought and pushed my hands into the pockets of my new coat. I took a cab back to the Gaskill. Last thing I needed was a DUI. I'd get the rental in the morning on my way to the police roundhouse and my appointment with the IAD contact. As I sat in the back of the cab I tried not to think of Meagan Montgomery and the possibilities. I woke at nine in the big four-poster bed of the blue room and panicked in fear. I had no idea where I was. The thick comforter around me, dark maple wardrobe, a fireplace on the opposite wall. Gaskill. Philadelphia, Scotch whiskey. In seconds it tumbled into focus but I was still unsettled that it had taken longer to right myself than it should have. When I stood I felt uncomfortably old.
Thirty minutes later I was downstairs in the kitchen drinking coffee, eating one Guy's fabulous omelets and scanning the first few pages of the Philadelphia Daily News. Guy was devilishly accounting his own story of booking the entire house to a contingent in town for the Republican National Convention a few years earlier and their slow realization after they arrived that his was a gay- owned and -managed establishment.
"Of course when they left the next day I charged them for the full four days and they paid without a peep."
I got a cab to my rental and it took fifteen teeth-chattering minutes to get the heater up to speed. I was at the roundhouse near Franklin Square at eleven for an eleven-fifteen with Detective Fried and I parked in the visitors' lot.
On the third floor there were few uniforms. Shirts and ties. Suit jackets. Secretaries and doors with brass nameplates. Pure administration. I'd worn my collared shirt. Guy had read the extra-close shave and hint of cologne and had lent me an expensive sweater. The cuffs of my pleated chinos came down far enough to disguise the black work boots that still had a manufacturer's shine.
I checked in with the IAD assistant and waited uncomfortably in an anteroom for Fried. There was a large corner office that I knew would belong to the lieutenant. The door was shut. I didn't have to make out the name on the brass plate. I paced, fidgeting, and realized I was surreptitiously looking for a flash of blonde hair.
"Mr. Freeman?"
I turned on the male voice, wishing it quieter, questioning why I hadn't set this up as an outside meeting.
"Rick Fried," the man said, shaking my hand in a strong grip. "Good to meet you. Come on in."
I followed the back of Fried's suit into a small office and since he hadn't closed the door, I did. He slipped his coat off and hung it on the back of his chair before sitting.
"Your uncle speaks very highly of you, Mr. Freeman. And when Sergeant Keith speaks, the smart ones around here listen."
"He's a good man," I said.
"One of the best," Fried answered, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling back his sleeves, just us working guys here. It was probably a technique for IAD interviews. He was younger than my uncle, older by ten years than me, at least that's what I was telling myself.
"He tells me you're a P.I. in Florida now."
I nodded.
"Nice tan."
I nodded again.
"OK. The sarge says you're working something on our former Mr. Colin O'Shea and I gather it's gotta be on the defense side, Mr. Freeman, 'cause I see that someone from the, uh, Broward sheriff's office has already made some inquiries on Mr. O'Shea."
"You handle them?" I said.
"Nope. The lieutenant does all outside agency contacts," he said.
Fried was reading from a lined check-out sheet stapled to the front of a file on his desktop. It was lying on top of a second folder.
"Well, I wouldn't say 'defense,' detective. I'm in a sort of neutral position," I said. "I was asked by a friend to offer an opinion because I knew O'Shea, years ago."
"Yeah, right, you two graduated academy together," Fried said, unconsciously, or maybe not, touching his fingers to the second file. "You two ever work the streets together?"
I knew the IAD game. Even if this guy was a friend of my uncle's, his whole existence in this job was give-and-take. Info for info.
"We ran across each other. He was from the neighborhood," I said. "Know what I mean?"
In South Philly, mention of the neighborhood still had a sense of being synonymous with a tribe of sorts. I was here on my uncle's honor. It snapped Fried back.
"Yeah, well, the file's pretty straight up on O'Shea," he said, handing it across his desk.
"Had some complaints. He was written up for excessive use of force. Then he and a couple others out at the Tenth got stopped on a drunk and disorderly, their sergeant handled it, kept it off the books, warned them to clean it up. But O'Shea stayed on the bottle. Another excessive a year later. Then his wife throws a domestic- abuse charge at him."
"Any of these excessive-force complaints involve women?" I said, looking through O'Shea's stats. High number of arrests. Most in districts I remembered as being high-crime spots.
"Naw. Lowlifes mostly. Drug collars on the street. One was a group thing where the bang squad went in on a house full of gang warrants and the hard boys started crying about being beaten afterwards. But I got the feeling that O'Shea didn't exactly shy away from a little extracurricular activity."
"You guys ever do any psych screens on him?" I said.
"Not if it isn't in there," Fried said.
I closed the file and put it back on the desk. As I did I glanced at what I was sure was my own file.
"I don't see anything in there about the Faith Hamlin case," I said, nodding at O'Shea's jacket folder, making the accusation that Fried was holding out on me as bluntly as I could.
The detective laced his fingers and sat back in his chair, like mention of the case had not surprised him.
"That's all part of an ongoing investigation, Mr. Freeman. "It's not public information."
I lowered my voice and leaned forward just as far as Fried had moved back.
"Oh, I thought my uncle's word carried more weight than that. There was once a brotherhood and even you guys were part of that," I said, watching his eyes, their movement, center to right, center to right, giving him away.
He finally leaned in.
"Your uncle doesn't have the power to hire and fire, Freeman," he said, showing his allegiance was with his paycheck. "My boss is where she is because of the Hamlin case. She took those guys down, and I'm not saying they didn't deserve it, but as far as she's concerned, the real perp got away."
"O'Shea," I said, without having to.
Fried nodded and le
aned back again.
"Now, you got anything on him from Florida that's gonna help her nail his ass for the killing of Faith Hamlin, I'm more than happy to forward that information along, Mr. Freeman."
I sat back as well, more than happy to increase the personal space between us. Fried didn't know that I had once been married to his boss. Uncle Keith had been more circumspect than that.
I stood up and offered my hand.
"If I should come across anything that I think you can use, Detective, you'll be the first to know," I lied. "I appreciate the time."
"Hey, any friend of the sarge. Maybe I'll catch you out some night, buy me one," he said, just one of the boys again.
I grinned the guy grin while he showed me out. In the hallway I found myself shaking my head and thinking some line about six degrees of separation. My ex-wife and now my ex-lover had swapped notes on O'Shea and his connection with the disappearances of Faith Hamlin here, and about the disappearances of the women in Florida. They both had the guy's ass in their rifle sights. I figured I knew that Sherry Richards's motive was this hell-bent desire for justice for the victims. Meagan's I was equally sure of: a premier scalp on her already extensive collection, a step up her ambitious ladder to who the hell knew where, and yet another man-challenge to conquer. I didn't think either had mentioned my name or my intimate connection to both of them.
"Don't tell me that God has a plan, Mamma," I whispered to a pale empty wall. "Or he is one bizarre poet."
I was waiting for the elevator when I heard her call my name and there was no denying the voice.
"Max?"
I looked back down the hall toward IAD and she was standing in a cerulean-colored suit that I could only imagine her coming up with when the dress code said blue. Even from here I could tell the high cut of her skirt was not regulation. Her head was angled slightly with a questioning look and her honey blonde hair took advantage of the tilt to cascade down over one shoulder. She had called out my name once like that when we were married, late one night while she tried to sleep after a SWAT shooting she'd been in on. Her voice had sounded like she'd needed me, so I'd held her in our bed until she stopped shivering. But the next morning she had no recollection of it and I had been wrong about the needing.
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