William Lashner - Past Due

I banged on the door. It was late and he was most likely asleep and so I banged hard enough to shatter his slumber. Through the little glass peephole I saw a light switch on, then be blocked by a peering eye.

“Oh,” said Jeffrey Telushkin when he finally opened the door. “It’s you.” He was wearing pajamas and a robe, his hair was mussed, his little beady eyes red beneath his round glasses. He wrapped his robe more tightly around himself. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Is it too late for a visit?” I said.

“What do you want?”

“A dance?”

“Are you serious?”

“No, just tired. Do you still have a contact in the FBI?”

“Maybe.”

“A contact you trust, a contact who can move quickly on evidence you give to him.”

His eyes narrowed behind his thick lenses and his lips curled in curiosity. “Yes, I do.”

“Don’t get too excited, we’re not getting married here.”

“What do you have?”

I handed him the leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies. He looked at it for a moment and started to open it.

“Don’t,” I said. “Treat it like you would a fragile piece of evidence. Put it in a bag and give it to your contact to take down to the lab. Have them check the inside for fingerprints, especially the pages where the silk marker sits. Then compare what they can lift to some old prints you might still have hanging around.”

“Old prints?”

“You know.”

His head jerked up. “Is he alive? Have you found him?”

“That’s why I came here,” I said. “For you to tell me. The person whose prints are in the book is named Eddie Dean. He’s living for the time being in a rented town house on the southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square.”

“Does his reappearance have something to do with the eminent jurist whose relationship to these matters we discussed?”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“But his involvement could have far-reaching consequences. Any revelation would have national importance. It is most vital.”

“Not to me. But if you’re going to move on Eddie Dean, you better move fast.”

He turned the book over in his hands, the eyes behind his thick glasses glistening now with excitement. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll be quick as snakes.”

“I bet you will. Call me when it’s done. But be warned. He has a goon with him, name of Colfax, so if you find a match, you might not want to show up alone.”

IT WAS JUSTafter eleven when I finally got to the office after Lonnie Chambers’s funeral, a faint dusting of Lonnie still on my shoulders. It had been an almost touching ceremony at the burned-out building that had once been Lonnie’s shop, what with the howl of the motorcycles, the roar of the boom boxes, the belch of the beer cans in tribute before one of the motorheads had taken the urn with Lonnie’s remains, opened the top, tossed it high into the air so that the metal dropped into the burned-out hulk of his shop and his ashes fell upon the mourners and the neighborhood where he had worked and died. And then had come the guitar. Soft chords, a simple progression, A to D to E to D back again to A, over and over again, played as slowly as a dirge, before a voice started and others joined, singing slowly and softly as if the most solemn hymn.

Wild thing,

You make my heart sing,

You make everything

Groovy.

Wild thing.

I had stood off to the side for the whole event, conspicuous in my suit, and after the strains of “Wild Thing” disappeared, replaced by something loud and Metallica played from a boom box, I was about to turn and leave when I saw Chelsea come my way. She was crying and smiling at the same time.

“He loved that song,” she said.

“How are you doing?”

“Better. Thank you. I still miss him, I think I’m going to miss him for the rest of my life. There’s a hole in my heart.”

“Is someone helping you deal with what happened?”

“I’ve been on the phone.”

“I meant someone trained in grief counseling.”

“Cooper’s very advanced.”

“He’s a convicted felon, Chelsea.”

“Which makes him a perfect adviser for me, right?”

I must have showed my chagrin at the loose remark because Chelsea, also a convicted felon, put a hand to my cheek.

“I’m going out there for a while,” she said. “I’m leaving this afternoon. He’s spent the last twenty years working through his past, the good and the bad, the mistakes, the waste. You know, he was planning to run away, they both were, he and Tommy. But Cooper in the end decided not to. He decided to face up to what he had done and suffer the consequences with the rest of us. And through it all he’s been a rock. I think he can help me finally find some peace.”

“Did he help Lonnie?”

“For a time, but in the end Lonnie didn’t want to be helped. Did you think about what I said at the fire?”

“The dead rising?”

“Yes. Cooper thinks that’s what’s going on.”

“So do I. If it’s true, it’s being taken care of while we speak.”

“By who?”

“Remember a little FBI guy named Telushkin?”

She wrinkled her nose with disgust and then turned toward the burned-out building. “You know when I was with Lonnie, I was never really with him. He wasn’t the key to my past, and I couldn’t see him as part of my future, and so I let the present slip away from us. When I think back, I think I failed him. I think I failed everyone. Myself too.”

I thought of telling her it was all right, I thought of giving some false comfort, but the thing about Chelsea that I admired most of all was that she didn’t want false comfort, she wasn’t looking for an easy way out of her sadness. So I gave her a hug instead.

“Good luck,” I said. “I hope your friend helps.”

“You know what Cooper says? He says if you can’t accept your past, understand it, even love it, if you can’t do that, then you become its slave. You spend your life either running from it or toward it, but either way you are running.”

Was there an answer in that? If there was I couldn’t yet see it, all I could see was the sad woman beside me and the desolation behind me and in front of me a pack of frightened rabbits running for their lives.

Beth was supposed to have joined me at the funeral, but I didn’t blame her for missing it. She had never met Lonnie and had apparently traded the funeral for another hour of sleep, but I was anxious to see her now. I had much to tell her, we had much to figure out together. Things were absolutely coming to a head. I was waiting still for word from Telushkin, but I wasn’t holding my breath. The prints would confirm my suspicions and the FBI would pick up Dean and with him in jail I could start to tie that bastard to Joey Parma’s murder. I was counting on Beth and Phil Skink, what I considered my brain trust, to help me figure out how.

“She’s not in yet,” said Ellie, my secretary.

“Was she supposed to be in court today?”

“It’s not on the schedule.”

“Maybe something popped up. Why don’t you call her cell and if that’s not answering, call her home, see if she’s sick.”

“Will do, Mr. Carl. There’s someone waiting for you in your office.”

“Waiting for me? Who?”

“He didn’t give his name.”

“And you let him into my office?”

“You don’t pay me enough to have tried to stop him.”

I eyed my office door nervously. “What is he wearing, a suit?”

“A sport coat, a green sport coat. Bright, very bright. The jacket I mean.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “I see. And I don’t blame you.”