Authors: William Lashner
It was the last sentence of Detective Gleason’s that stuck in my mind for some reason. His voice, like I said, was deep and southern, and he gave that last word a melodious lilt that struck me as something strangely familiar.
I let it rattle around in my head as I drove Beth back to the office. She wasn’t so encouraged by our outing, Beth, and not so happy with me, I could tell, and I could tell why, too. She was like my seventh-grade gym teacher who told me, when I refused to climb the rope, that he didn’t like my altitude. Well, Beth didn’t like my altitude either.
“Dent’s dead,” she said, “his killer is killed, that line of inquiry is buried. It was a wild-goose chase from the start.”
“I like wild goose. A nice pudding and some cranberry sauce and it’s like we’re in the middle of a Dickens novel.”
“Not to mention the billable hours.”
“Not to mention.”
“We don’t have anything, do we?”
“I told you at the start it was useless.”
“But still you took his money.”
“It wasn’t his, but yeah, I took the money. And if it’s hopeless, it’s not our fault. He’s the one who killed his wife.”
“Did he? Are you sure?”
“In the eyes of the law and jury, that’s just what he did. But see, look at me, I can cheerfully say I don’t give a damn. I don’t have to believe in my client; I just have to believe in the legal tender he’s tendering. A lawyer is really nothing more than a mechanic. Bring in your life, with all its troubles, and I’ll open the hood, poke around, see if any of the legal tricks at my disposal can fix the problem. It isn’t personal, I don’t make judgments about the quality of the car. I just roll up my sleeves. When was the last time your auto mechanic took it personally when your engine needed a valve job? He shakes his head, sure, clucks his tongue, and says all the right things when he tells you the bad news, like an oncologist with really dirty hands, but trust me, he doesn’t take it personally. Instead he takes Visa or MasterCard.”
“I didn’t go to law school to be a mechanic.”
“Yeah, but Atticus Finch was fiction and Darrow is dead. Ow.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Your self-righteous whining is starting my tooth to aching.”
“Good. Want me to give it a twist?”
That’s how we left it, with my tooth throbbing and the cracks in our relationship starting to show. And the truth was, I didn’t understand for certain where the new tension was coming from. I was the same cynical, opportunistic asshole I had always been. Since when had it bugged her so?
I thought about that some, and then, back in my office, I thought some more about Detective Gleason. There was something in the story he had told, in that desolate building and futile department in which now he worked, something in the way he defended the killing of Red Rover, something in the way he protested Beth’s insinuations about Seamus Dent’s sexuality. And somehow it was all contained in that last sentence, in that very last word.
Do me a favor, little sister,
he had said,
and don’t.
Don’t. That’s what he said. Each time I held that word in my mind, it seemed to sing to me. And then, quick as a “Hey, baby,” I listened, and the raw possibility came clear.
So I called up Torricelli. Tommy Torricelli was a lunkhead, absolutely, and we weren’t exactly buddy-buddy, but he was the homicide detective who had investigated the Leesa Dubé murder, who had found the bloodied shirt and gun, who had concluded that François Dubé was the killer, who had testified convincingly at the trial in which François Dubé was convicted. He would be oh so delighted to learn that I was looking into his case. But before I told him that little gem, perfectly designed to make his day, I had a few other questions.
“How you doing there, Detective?” I said.
He wasn’t inclined to tell me. He wasn’t inclined to tell me anything except to get lost, which is exactly what he did. I had never worked one of Torricelli’s cases before, but we knew each other enough to be wary. I was acriminal defense attorney with sharp teeth and a well-honed shamelessness. He was a cop known to cross a line or three in order to get the results he was looking for. Not quite oil and vinegar, more like fertilizer and diesel fuel.
“I only called to say hello,” I lied, “and to give you some news that might interest you. But first I thought we’d gossip a bit.”
Torricelli lied back when he said he wasn’t one to traffic in gossip. Torricelli trafficked in gossip like I-95 trafficked in cars.
“I was just at the auto squad on Macalester,” I said. “Ran into Detective Gleason. How’d he end up in that backwater?”
He told me.
“Wow,” I said, acting surprised. “But they didn’t pull his badge?”
He told me that they hadn’t, that everything had checked out, but still the transfer.
“Well,” I said. “At least it turned out okay. What’s with those sideburns, though? Yeah, and that southern twang in his voice?”
He laughed and made a snide comment.
“Right,” I said, “more like South Street. You have any idea where he drinks?”
He gave me the name and a description of the place.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “I didn’t know they had a place like that outside of Memphis. You ever go down there, have a drink with him?”
He said no, he said they couldn’t drag his fat Italian ass into a place like that with a team of horses.
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
He growled something at me.
“You know, Detective, I’ve been thinking about you. We ought to have dinner sometime. Someplace nice. Candles and violin music. Someplace romantic that makes up a nice pasta fazool. My treat.”
He was quiet for a long moment and then let out an expletive I have tactfully deleted.
“And maybe we can talk about a new client I’ve just been hired to represent. François Dubé. Remember him?”
I held the handset away from my ear to save my eardrum the wear and tear as he told me, in his own way, that yes, he did remember François Dubé and how delighted he was that I had decided to take up his cause. That was one of my favorite things about my job as a defense attorney, the way I was able to create pleasant and meaningful relationships with the noble members of the city’s police department. But even as I suffered the detective’s abuse, I still felt the shivery thrill of discovery, the same thrill you get when you slide in the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was coming clear for me, the story of Seamus Dent, not all of it, I would learn more in the course of my investigation, but now maybe just enough was coming clear to get François Dubé that new trial he so desperately sought.
It was late already by the time I figured it out. Beth was gone, my secretary, Ellie, was gone, it was just me in the office, the sole representative of the law firm of Derringer and Carl, but I was enough. I sat in Ellie’s chair, took out a blue-backed document, rolled it into the typewriter my secretary used to fill the blanks in preprinted documents, hunted and pecked, whited out the mistakes, hunted and pecked some more.
And then I put on my jacket, stuffed the document into my jacket pocket, and drove out to the Great Northeast to have myself a drink in the shadow of the King.
King’s Dominion was not the kind of joint people stumbled into by mistake. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never find it, but then again you wouldn’t want to.
I parked in the lot of a small shopping center just off Roosevelt Boulevard. There was a Radio Shack, a T.J. Maxx, a dry cleaner, a vacant storefront, a CVS, a dollar store. Scintillating, no? The number I was looking for was taped onto a glass door next to the dollar store. I pushed open the door and was immediately hit by a deep throb of bass that resonated in my bad tooth. As I climbed the stairwell, I passed a series of signs tacked to the wall.
NO SNEAKERS
CHECK ALL GUNS
PEANUT BUTTER AND NANNER SAMMICH
—75¢
Not my kind of place, exactly. I just hoped they served Sea Breezes.
Beside the closed door at the top of the stairs, an old man sat on a stool, clipboard in hand. He was tall and stooped, his shoes were white patent leather, and it looked like a gray poodle was perched on his head. When I tried to walk past him, he shot out a bony arm and stopped me cold.
“What’s your song?” he said.
“I’m just here to see a Detective Gleason,” I said. “Has he shown up tonight?”
“Do I look like a matchmaker?” he said.
“Hello, Dolly,” I said.
“The name’s Skip.”
“Kept that from summer camp, did you? I like your shoes.”
“Dancing shoes. I know a guy what knows a guy what gets them direct from Hong Kong.”
“Maybe he can get me a pair.”
“You want a pair?”
“Nah. So is Gleason in?”
“Yeah, he’s in.”
I gave the old man a wink, and started again for the door, and again the bony arm barred my way. I looked at it for a moment and then at the old man.
“What, is there a cover?”
“No cover,” he said. “But it’s karaoke night.”
“Just my luck. I should have come tomorrow.”
“It wouldn’t do no good,” said the old man. “Here, every night is karaoke night. What’s your song?”
“I don’t sing.”
“Sure you do, if you want in. Everyone sings, at least once. Makes you part of the show, keeps it festive.” He cocked his head, the poodle shifted, his eyes brightened crazily. “It’s karaoke night.”
“I know ‘Feelings.’ Should I sing ‘Feelings’?”
He looked at me, looked at his clipboard, paged through the pages, looked back at me. “We don’t got it.”
“How about ‘Kumbaya’?”
He looked back at his clipboard. “We got ‘Kismet,’ we got ‘Kiss Me Quick,’ we got ‘Ku-u-i-po,’ which is pretty close, but no ‘Kumbaya.’ ”
“ ‘Satisfaction’?”
“None.”
“You don’t got much, do you?”
“Only everything he ever sung.”
“Ah,” I said. “Now I get it. Why don’t you pick something for me.”
“How’s your pipes?”
“Not so good.”
“Then stay with something low, something easy. I got one here that usually works for first-timers. There’s a slow part you can talk your way through.”
“Done.”
“What’s your name?”
“Franz.”
“Funny,” he said as he pulled a white slip from his clipboard, filled it out, handed it to me, “you don’t look like a Franz. That will be ten bucks.”
“Ten bucks a song?”
“Just for the first song. After that’s it’s free.”
As I pulled out my wallet, I said, “Good thing you boys don’t charge a cover.”
I stepped through the door and into a neon-lit room, ringed with everything Elvis. Velvet paintings glowing with black light, guitar clocks, gold records, ceramic busts, framed photographs from each Elvis era: Elvis impossibly young, Elvis impossibly handsome, Elvis impossibly svelte in black leather, Elvis impossibly bloated in a white jumpsuit. There were tables, about half full, in the center, bars around the edges, booths in the back. Waitresses dressed like schoolgirls with high hair carried drinks on circular trays. On a narrow stage in the front, a redhead in a ruffled shirt, looking a little like Ann-Margret, belted out the first verse of “Viva Las Vegas” as the words rolled up a television screen and the crowd hooted and clapped along.
A man in dark glasses greeted me with a bright smile. “Welcome,” he said in a deep voice. “Slip?”
I handed it over. He gave it a look.
“Good choice, Franz,” he said. “You want some company tonight?” He thumbed toward a trio of women at the bar with bouffant hair and low blouses. They were nice-looking women once, but once was enough.
“No thanks,” I said. “I already had my fiber today.”
I scanned the scene, found whom I was looking for in a booth in the back. He was sitting alone, hunched over a drink, something dark and almost gone in his glass. He wasn’t viva-ing to Ann-Margret. I wondered if my visit that afternoon hadn’t ruined his day. Knowing what I knew now, I didn’t doubt it.
Gleason glanced up when I sat down across from him, didn’t seem one bit surprised to see me. “How’d you find this place?” he said.
“Torricelli.”
He nodded, he understood. Torricelli hadn’t just told me about the bar, he had told me about the shooting, too. “I should hang up a sign,” he said. “Do not disturb.”
“You know that piece of gum you step on and can’t get off your shoe?” I said. “It ends up on your hand, your other hand, your nose. That piece of gum? That’s me.”
“I was thinking of something else that sometimes gets on my shoe. What do you want?”
“I want to know if you were the one to teach Seamus Dent karate.”
His eyes widened a bit, as if he were about to say something, but just then one of the waitresses with the schoolgirl skirt and high hair came to our table. Her eyes were rimmed dark, her lips were red as paint.
“Anything, boys?” she said.
“My treat,” I said.
“Wonder of wonders,” said Gleason. “I’ll have another bourbon, neat.”
“Can I have a Sea Breeze?” I said. “With lime?”
“Closest thing we have is a Blue Hawaii,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Vodka, pineapple juice, crème de coconut, and blue Curaçao.”
“Aloha,” I said.
“Thanks, Priscilla,” said Gleason before she swished away.
I raised an eyebrow. “Priscilla?”
“They’re all Priscilla,” he said. “How’d you know about the karate?”
“It made sense. From the stories I’d been hearing, Seamus Dent, big as he was, was never a fighter. Then suddenly he starts giving side kicks like he’s Jackie Chan. Somehow he learned. And then you have this whole Elvis thing going with the sideburns, the little southern twang you give your voice even though you grew up in Manayunk, not Memphis. And the way you described Seamus’s fight with that drug dealer. You seemed to even know the type of kick he used to send him to the ground. It just added up.”
“Aren’t you clever.”
“Well, you know. Deal with cops long enough, it rubs off.”
“Why the hell do you care so much about Seamus?”
“Because he testified against François Dubé.”
He stared at me for a while, saw something in my eyes that made him turn to look at the stage, where the woman was swinging her arms as she wailed the final chorus.
“She’s not bad,” I said. “And she does look a little like Ann-Margret.”
“But not the Ann-Margret of
Viva Las Vegas,
more like the Ann-Margret of
Any Given Sunday.
”
“Can’t have everything.”
Okay, folks,
said the DJ, the man who had taken my slip, speaking from off the stage, so his voice was like a disembodied presence.
Let’s hear it for the scintillating Elvira.
The audience cheered.
Next up, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, doing a little blues number from 1957.
A young man with blue-black hair in a duckbill and a face like a punching bag stepped up to the stage, took the microphone off the stand, cleared his throat, mumbled, “Let’s get it this time.” After a short blues intro, he started in with a gravelly rendition of “One Night.”
“It wasn’t like your partner was saying,” said Gleason after we both listened a bit to Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, who was not too awful at all. “There wasn’t anything sexual about it.”
“You don’t have to hitch up your pants and talk about the Eagles. It doesn’t matter much to me.”
“But see, that’s the thing. Everyone thinks they understand when they think the worst. But the worst isn’t always the truth.”
“So what was the truth?”
“He was a kid in trouble. I was trying to help.” Gleason finished off his bourbon. “And that, my friend, is the whole sordid story.”
There was something in his voice that didn’t seem to care whether I believed him or not.
“How’d you meet him?” I said.
“There was a killing in Juniata. We crashed a drug house, looking for a witness. Seamus was cowering in a room up the stairs, hugging his guitar. I put away my gun, asked him if he could play that thing. He showed me.”
Priscilla came back with our drinks. I told her to make up another round and to run a tab. Gleason took a gulp of his bourbon and winced, more from the memories, I thought, than the drink. The Blue Hawaii was cold and too sweet, but it looked good in the glass. The thing I love about a blue drink is that it isn’t pretending to be anything other than a prissy, made-up concoction for people who can’t drink their whiskey straight. A cocktail with the courage of its lack of conviction.
“Was Seamus good at the guitar?” I said.
“Better than good. You ever hear any recordings of Robert Johnson playing his old Kalamazoo archtop?”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand. Physically he was a mess, filthy, strung out, a black eye, but he could play some blues. So I took him out of there and bought him a cup of coffee. He told me all about the drugs, the things he had done with those friends of his, everything. It was a brutal, sad story, but I saw something in him. He was really sorry. In my racket it’s rare to see it like that, sincere and not put on as a show for a judge. So I got him treatment, got him a job running files. And when it started working out, I helped him even more. Let him stay at my place. We used to play guitar and sing together. Spirituals, believe it or not. I did what I could for him.”
“Like fixing his teeth.”
“God knows he needed it. I found a dentist to do it for free. Some guy who had come to the station, passing out his card, looking to do a little public service.”
“And the karate?”
“A boy that big, not able to defend himself. It wasn’t right. I asked myself, what would Elvis do? He’d teach him karate, so that’s what I did. I’m a third-degree black belt, I help out at an inner-city dojo on weekends. I brought him along. After enough years in homicide, you get tired of helping corpses. It was nice to help a boy with still some hope. And I was helping, I could tell. He cleaned up quick.”
How to get down with the King, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley.
There was clapping, whistles.
Next we have a first-timer. Let’s hear a warm welcome for Franz. Come on up, Franz, and do your thing.
“If he was so clean,” I said, figuring I could ignore the DJ, “what was he doing in the crack house where he was killed?”
Gleason closed his eyes for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“You ever find out?”
“I tried.”
Come on, Franz, no hiding. Let’s hear it for Franz, everybody.
The crowd started chanting, “Franz, Franz, Franz!”
Where are you, Franz?
“It’s hard to find the truth with a bullet,” I said.
“I didn’t go out there to kill that man, not that he didn’t deserve it. I was just looking for answers, but maybe, yeah, I was looking a little too hard. I saw Seamus’s body and I went a little over the edge.”
There you are, Franz. Sitting with our own Patrick Gleason.
Franz, Franz, Franz.
Come on down, Franz.
Gleason looked at the stage, then at me. “You’re Franz?”
“That’s my nickname in the lawyers’ bund.”
“It’s your turn then, big boy. Go on up.”
“I didn’t come here to sing.”
“You don’t have any choice,” said Detective Gleason. “Everybody sings. It’s karaoke night.”