William Lashner - Past Due

“No.”

“Did you ever find out how many campuses they were recruiting on?”

“I think just Penn.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t require someone with red hair.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just a story I read a long time ago. For some reason, Kimberly, Eddie Dean wanted you. Not someone like you, but you. The other interviews were a sham. They were just saying next, next, until you came in the door. But why, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Why do you think?”

“No idea. But they must need something you have, or something you know, or someone. There’s a reason, and my guess is, Kimberly, when we figure that out we’ll be ten steps closer to finding the truth behind this whole stinking mess.”

“So what should I do, V?”

“Cancun is supposed to be nice this time of year, and if I thought you were in any real danger I’d tell you to stock up on Lomotil, lather on the sunscreen, and go. But Eddie Dean needs you. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s going to keep paying you an absurd sum to get his coffee until he decides it’s time to tell you what he wants. And when he does Kimberly, do yourself a favor and give me a call.”

After she left, I dropped back into my bed, turned my gaze upon the pictures on the wall, and tried to make some sense out of the night.

First there was Lonnie. I had been looking for someone with a motive to do Tommy Greeley harm and Chelsea had given him to me. Lonnie, who had found out about the continuing relations between his wife and Tommy Greeley. Lonnie had been watching over Tommy the night he was killed. It wouldn’t take much for Lonnie to take himself out of the scene and leave Derek and Joey free to do their dark deed. He better than anyone knew what was in the suitcase, he surely would have known a place to hide it while he was in prison. And, best of all, if he had it, from the look of him he hadn’t spent its contents, he had kept it hidden, where it waited still for someone sharp and resourceful enough to unearth it and make it his own. Lonnie Chambers, my oh my.

And then there was Eddie Dean. I had wondered what his angle was from the start, the childhood oath was too much to believe, and now I knew. He was seriously broke and in deep trouble. And how did he know about the suitcase? Chelsea had clued me into that, I believed, at the Continental. Tommy Greeley said he had a friend from out of state who would launder and then stash the money for him, an old friend, from out of state. Eddie Dean, I’d bet. He had probably been there that night twenty years ago, on a boat in the river, waiting, waiting for Tommy Greeley and the suitcase full of cash. In fact he might even have been close enough to hear Manley say, “Get him, Cheaps.” That explained how he knew Joey was involved, how he got Derek Manley’s name, and how he got mine. Now, desperate to pay back an impatient loan shark, he had used me to find a murderer hiding a suitcase full of money that could maybe save his life. Eddie Dean, that son of a bitch.

It was a neat theory about what had happened twenty years ago and what was happening now, but it had holes. Like who had killed Joey Parma? And what connection, if any, did Justice Jackson Straczynski, or his wacko wife, have to the disappearance? And what the hell was Kimberly Blue doing in the middle of everything? And what about the pictures?

I stood up from the bed and walked over to the wall of photographs, my photographs. They were once Tommy Greeley’s, created by him as a memorial to his desire, but now were mine, along with the strange fascination they carried like a virus. I rubbed a finger along a knee, a clavicle, the bumpy route of her vertebrae. It was almost as if I could feel the bones beneath the soft taut skin of the photograph. If they weren’t of Chelsea, then maybe they were of the other woman in Tommy Greeley’s life, his girlfriend, that Sylvia Steinberg. I couldn’t shake the sense that these photographs had something to do with Tommy Greeley’s murder. I’d have to look her up, Sylvia, yes I would. Stop over. Give her a look-see. Maybe I’d have better luck with her than I had with Chelsea. Boy, I sure hoped so.

After it had become clear that nothing would happen that night between Chelsea and me, after I had seen her naked torso and realized the pictures were not of her and then had tried my best to keep it going, kissing her chest, her side, rubbing her thighs through her pants as I nuzzled her ear, after I had tried and failed, we lay together on the skewed cushions of my couch, both of us seemingly puzzled and tired but not particularly upset. She didn’t tell me, “There are pills for that now,” for which I was hugely grateful. And for my part, I didn’t embarrass myself by telling her it never happens to me because it just had, hadn’t it? Instead, quietly, I untangled myself from her limbs, opened the fridge, got us each a beer, watched as she sat upright on the couch and tugged her shirt over her shoulders and buttoned up.

She was lovely, so lovely, and just then I felt my erection stir because I was looking at her not as the woman in the pictures, an image which she couldn’t live up to, but as a beautiful woman buttoning her shirt on my couch. Is there anything sexier than a beautiful woman buttoning her shirt on your couch? But then it was too late to make another play, the relief on her face was palpable, and I wondered just then why she had been willing in the first place and so when I handed over the beer I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Because you reminded me of him and with him I always just agreed. With him I was helpless to refuse.”

“Who?”

“Tommy.”

“I remind you of Tommy Greeley?”

“Oh, Victor, yes. Of course you do. The spitting image.”

I blew wetly out my lips. “Maybe its just because I’ve been asking questions about him.”

“No, it’s more. It’s everything. You even look like him, tall and lanky. His hair was longer but he had that same flat mouth, the same eyes with the touch of hurt in them, puppy-dog eyes. And he was both funny and serious and irreverent all at the same time, just like you. But it’s something else. You carry the same sense of having been wronged a long time ago, of needing to overcome a disadvantaged start, a hunger to make something glorious of the future. And a crushing disappointment.”

“Disappointment?”

“Oh yes.”

“Disappointment with what?”

“With everything you each never had, and your failed search for the one thing that would make everything better.”

“And what’s that?”

“The one thing?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Victor,” she said, standing now, placing her bottle on the coffee table. “You really do need to meet Cooper.”

But it wasn’t the enlightened Cooper Prod I ended up meeting the next afternoon, it was the freaking prince of darkness.

“THEY WANT TObuild a mall here,” said Earl Dante as we sat side-by-side on a bench at Penn’s Landing overlooking the wide gray Delaware River. A stiff breeze blew in from the water, but Dante’s waxy gray hair didn’t budge. “And that of course is just what we need. More malls.”

“Isn’t this too public a place for a meeting?” I said.

“They have a photographer across from the restaurant where I eat. They have an unmarked sedan following my car. They are parked in front of my house, snapping photos of my wife. Public is all I have left.”

“Where’s the car now?”

“Wilmington. I took a Camry here. I cannot fully express the humiliation of being under constant surveillance, but that word comes close. Camry.”

“What color?”

“Does it matter?”

“Just curious.”

“Blue.”