William Lashner - Marked Man

“Be like that, Victor, and I won’t tell you what else I have for those skatofatses .”

“Believe me, I don’t want to know. I’m going to have to tell your son about the threats, Mrs. Kalakos.”

She waved the gun a bit before shoving it back into the drawer. “Do what you must. But you tell him, too, that I take care of it for him, I protect him if police won’t. What next?”

“There’s a federal prosecutor who is causing problems. She’s the key in allowing Charlie to come home without being thrown in jail, but she is refusing to do anything unless Charlie gives her what she wants.”

“And what is it she wants?”

“She wants him to talk. To tell her everything.”

“No problem. I make him talk.”

“But she doesn’t want him to just talk about the Warrick Brothers Gang. She wants him to talk about before that, about what went down when that painting was stolen thirty years ago.”

She looked at me for a long moment, her moist eyes glittering in the sputtering candlelight. “Ah, yes,” she said finally. “That might be problem. You have friends, Victor? Old friends, from when you were child, friends that are closer than brothers, closer than blood?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Too bad for you. I had friends like that in old country, and Charlie, despite himself, he found such friends here. When they was just toddlers, they ran around with each other in the blow-up pools. Five closest friends in all the world. My Charlie, and Hugo, always running around like a crazy boy, all legs, he was, and Ralph Ciulla, big like man already at twelve, and little Joey Pride. And then, of course, Teddy, Teddy Pravitz, who was leader. Five neighborhood boys, always together, always. Once – and I tell you this so you know what it was – once a group from the Oxford Circle – you know this place?”

“Down Cottman?”

“Yes, exactly. Once a group boys came into our neighborhood looking for trouble. This was when my son Charles was in high school. The Oxford boys found little Joey Pride. Joey was a nice boy, but black and with a mouth on him, and they beat him bloody. Just for the sport of it, Victor. Animals. The police threw up their hands. What was to do? But Teddy, he knew what to do.”

“What was that, Mrs. Kalakos?”

“You want tea? I call down to Thalassa.”

“No thank you, ma’am. Really, I’m fine.”

“No, we need tea.” She opened her mouth wide and shrieked, “Thalassa. Come now.”

There was the sound of something dropping onto the floor below, a rustle, a sigh, weary footfalls rising up the stairs. The door creaked open, a withered face appeared.

“Victor, he wants tea,” said Mrs. Kalakos.

Thalassa turned her head to me, stared with unalloyed hatred.

“He likes sugar with his tea,” said Mrs. Kalakos. “And those round cookies.”

“Really, I’m fine,” I said.

The face slipped away, the door creaked closed.

“She good girl. Alas, her tea, it is thin like her blood. She saves her tea bags from cup to cup, as if tea were gold. We still have tea from when Clinton was president. Ah, Clinton, he was part Greek, he didn’t know it, but I could tell.”

“What did Teddy do after the beating?”

“Teddy, he was such a beautiful boy. So clever. He came to me, asked for keys to my car. I knew what he wanted, and so I gave to him. That boy was Greek where it counted. Off they went into the night, even Joey with his arm in sling, the five of them with their blood hot and their baseball bats, off they went. And they took care of it, Victor. It didn’t even matter that he was wrong boy. Those animals from Oxford Circle, they not come round no more. The boys protected each other, you understand? Such bond survives the years.”

“And these were the guys who pulled off the theft?”

She patted my cheek. “You smart boy. You sure you don’t want to date my Thalassa?”

“No, ma’am. But this is what I don’t understand, Mrs. Kalakos. I heard it was a crack team of professional thieves that robbed the Randolph Trust, not five schmoes from the neighborhood. So how did they do it?”

“They were not simply five schmoes from neighborhood, Victor. They were four schmoes and Teddy. That is difference.”

Just then the door creaked open, and Thalassa, with gray body hunched and gray head bowed, brought in a tray. Mrs. Kalakos was right, the tea was weak, and musty, it tasted as old as Thalassa looked, but the cookies were surprisingly delicious. I was on my fourth cookie when my cell phone rang.

I stood up, slipped into the dark corner of the dark room, flipped it open. “Carl,” I said.

“You free tonight, mate?” said the unmistakable voice of Phil Skink.

I looked at Mrs. Kalakos, sitting up now, her pale face bowed toward a porcelain teacup, steam rising around her sunken eyes. “Sure,” I said. “I’m in a meeting, but it won’t last much longer. What’s up?”

“I gots someone I wants you to meet.”

My heart skipped a beat. I could feel myself blushing in the darkness. “Did you find her?” I said. “Did you find Chantal Adair?”

“That’s what I wants you to tell me.”

“Where are we going, Phil?”I said as I drove us down Spring Garden Street toward the eastern edge of the city.

“I just wants you to check someone out,” he said.

“Is it her?”

“Don’t know, does I? I put out the word, quietly like you asked, and this came back my way as a possibility. Things, they are not exactly as you’d expect in one way, and then” – he laughed – “in another way they’s exactly as you’d expect.”

“Did you take a picture? I might not want her to be the one, if you get my drift. Did I tell you I have a thing about mustaches? Big, thick mustaches? I don’t like them on women. I don’t like them on men either, actually, but on women they give me the creeps.”

“Look, mate, if she’s the one whose name you got scrawled on your chest, you’ll like the looks of her, don’t be worrying about that. But I gots some other pictures, too. You want to see them first?”

“Sure.”

“All righty,” he said. “Pull over there.”

I edged the car to the side of the road, stopped behind a parked van, put it in neutral and left the engine running. Skink turned on the overhead light and took an envelope out of his suit pocket.

“There was no Chantal Adairs listed for Philly, South Jersey, or Delaware,” he said, “but I found us a few C. Adairs, with no first name given. Usually an initial instead of a first name is a lady trying not to look like a lady in the book in case a predator is stalking, you got me? So I checked out thems that I could. Found one in Absecon, one in Horsham. Take a peek and see if a face rings a bell.”

He passed me over the first of the photographs. A color shot, a little grainy and taken from pretty far away. It wasn’t the clearest photograph, but right off I could tell that the woman in the picture was not whom I was looking for. She was older, much older, with steel gray hair that matched her walker.

“Is this a joke?” I said.

“Don’t know what you are into these days, mate, now, do I?”

“Who else?”

The next photograph was of a younger woman, hugely pregnant, holding a young child on her ample hip. She had a pretty face, though, despite her evident maternity, and I squinted to see if it was familiar.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I ever saw her before.”

“Don’t think so neither, since her name is Catherine.”

“Then what was the point of showing me the photograph?”

“I just wanted you to know they ain’t too many of these Chantal Adairs out there. So you won’t be sniffing up your nose at who we’re seeing tonight.” He switched off the light. “Let’s get a move on.”