Carlin Romano - Philadelphia Noir

I was starting to get a bad feeling. It was the kind of feeling cops get just before something bad happens, an intuition you develop after a few long years on the street. Some guys are just born with it. Either way, if you don’t develop it sooner or later, you might just find yourself dead.

And that’s how I found Millie Price, in a heap on the floor just inside her front door. She was wearing a thin leather jacket and jeans as if she was just about to go out. She probably heard the knock and opened the door and the gun was the only thing she saw. She was lying on her back with two bullet holes in the Snoopy shirt she was wearing under the jacket and a dark bloodstain spreading over two well-formed breasts. She was still as beautiful as I remembered.

I looked down at her, at the blood on her chin where it had spilled from her mouth and the blood pooling on the floor beneath her, and I felt a little ache in my own chest. I was thinking I should have felt something more, and maybe I would have if things had been different between Millie and me all those years ago. Now, she was just another corpse in an apartment on the border of Grays Ferry and Point Breeze, where stray corpses were becoming more and more common.

I phoned it in and Detective William Trask showed up in record time, only about an hour after the first uniformed officer arrived and handcuffed me in the backseat of his cruiser. I showed him my retired Philly Police badge but it didn’t seem to change his mind. It was for his protection and mine, he said. I didn’t think I had anything to fear from the police, so he must have been protecting me from myself.

While the steel bracelets were cutting into my wrists and my fingers were going numb, I thought about Millie, up there growing cold on her living room rug. She’d be going rigid by now. They could probably stand her up and lean her against the wall and fit her with the perfect size body bag and walk her down the stairs. I wiggled my fingers and fidgeted on the hard plastic seat, thinking now of all the prisoners I’d had in my backseat and how many times I’d told them to shut up and sit still and how many times they’d puked and pissed themselves along the way.

Just then, the door opened and Detective Trask yanked me out of the car, spun me around, and unhooked my wrists. He didn’t look happy, but as I remembered, William Trask never looked happy.

“What the hell, Seamus! How are you involved in all this?”

“Her name’s Millie Price. She’s an old friend.”

“Sure. How about the rest of it?”

“There’s nothing else to tell, Bill. You saw what I saw.”

“So you were paying a surprise visit to an old girlfriend and when you get here, she just happens to be dead. Shot to death with two large-caliber slugs at close range.”

“There’s a little more to it than that.”

“I’m listening.”

“She was supposed to meet me earlier tonight outside St. Gabe’s. She’d called me this afternoon, asked me to do her a favor, said an old boyfriend was hassling her. She wanted me to scare him off. Said it wouldn’t be a problem that he’d scare easy. She was going to pay me three hundred dollars.”

Trask pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. He lit one for himself and then mine with the same match.

“I think she got her money’s worth.”

Two techs from the medical examiner’s office carried Millie down the stairs in a gray body bag. They swung her onto a flimsy metal stretcher and wheeled her to the back of a darkblue van with tinted windows and a municipal license plate. One of the techs opened the door while the other rammed the stretcher into place. I thought I glimpsed the shadows of other black bags neatly packed inside the van. At least Millie would have company.

“Any idea who the boyfriend was?”

“None.”

“You wouldn’t be holding out on me now, Seamus Kilpatrick? You know better than that.”

“What reason would I have not to tell the truth?”

“That all depends on the nature of your relationship with Miss Price.”

“I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

“And before that?”

“We were friends. I knew her from the neighborhood.”

“For God’s sake, Kilpatrick, she was a stripper. What do you expect me to believe? You were members of the same book club. You met at the library every Tuesday afternoon.”

“She’s been out of that business for a long time.”

“She used to be married to Billy Haggerty? I suppose you knew that.”

I drew hard on the cigarette, letting the smoke drift and blow away like a bad dream.

“Of course I knew. That was over a long time ago too.”

“We’ll see.”

A young cop in a brand-new pinstripe suit came out and handed Trask a collection of crime scene photos. He thumbed through them as if they were a deck of playing cards, his face expressionless as he stared down at the lifeless body of Millie Price. He slid them into a manila envelope and pointed its sharp corner into my chest.

“You and I never had a problem, Kilpatrick, not when you were with the force and not since you left. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Am I free to go?”

“If you find something out, I’ll want to hear about it.”

I took one last drag on the cigarette and threw it past them into the street. I could feel the eyes of the detectives on my back as I walked away.

The Aramingo Club didn’t look like much from the outside. It was on the corner of 30th and Tasker, with a front door painted a dingy white and a lot of burned-out neon over blacked-out windows. It was the end of the line for aging strippers with a few good teeth left and maybe a set of implants they’d conned off some old horny gangster who didn’t want his wife to know he could still get it up. It was getting late and there wasn’t anybody collecting at the door and not many drinkers hanging around for last call.

I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, slid the pack of cigarettes in behind it, and waited for the bartender to notice me. She was a petite blonde in ’80s spandex, black and tight from her neck to her ankles. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a glass ashtray, doing her best to ignore me as her fingers moved the dead cigarette around in the bed of gray ash. When she was satisfied the cigarette had stopped smoldering, she took the long walk down to my end of the bar.

I ordered a beer and she put the glass down on a clean white napkin and I slid the twenty in her direction and told her to keep the change. She still wasn’t smiling but her eyes had grown a bit larger as if some of the meanness had been squeezed out of them.

“Big spender.”

“In exchange for some conversation.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Millie Price.”

I took a sip of my drink and looked at her through the glass. She had the body of a twenty-year-old and the face of a woman in her fifties, a woman who’d walked some hard miles. She looked like she could stand up to just about anything.

“She’s not your type.”

“Says who, Billy Haggerty?”

“What are you? A cop?”

“Not anymore. Millie asked me to meet her tonight. She never showed. I’d like to know what happened to her.”

“What makes you think something happened to her?”

“She’s dead. Shot twice. I found her in her apartment. The cops are there now and I don’t doubt they’ll soon be on their way here.”

She started crying. Not hysterical crying, no moans or loud sobs, just tears escaping from her reddened eyes and rolling down her face. Her mascara ran in a spiderweb of black lines under her eyes and she dabbed at it with a napkin from the bar. I offered her a cigarette from the pack and she took one with a trembling hand. She held it to her lips and I lit it for her and the smoke seemed to calm her nerves.