"To the wayward son, what took the money and run," he announced with a wink.
"Aye," said the others, and we drank.
For the next three hours we drank and they told old stories. Carefully and with loyalty to my uncle no mention was made of my father, the legendary one whose death would always remain a secret of the brotherhood of the blue. We drank and I described only the beauties of Florida, and their eyes went glassy with reverence of a dream of golf and sun. We drank and my uncle exhorted me to show the bullet wound scar in my neck and they toasted Mother Mary for bad aim and mercy. We drank and they bitched about pensions and union stewards and the job in general and when I found an opening and asked Keith about an IAD contact they stopped drinking.
"We got a guy there, I called and gave him a heads-up, Maxey," my uncle said. "His name is Fried. He got attached over there a few years back after blowing out his hip in a pileup with a fire truck responding. He was with the detective squad up in East Kensington. He'll give you what he can."
I nodded my head and watched the others doing the same, avoiding my eyes. I could feel the vacuum at the table.
"IAD and lawyers, Max," he said, echoing his words on the phone from Florida. "Can I ask what it is you're into, son?"
We leaned our heads in together and the others tried unsuccessfully to pay no attention.
"I'm actually checking in on a former cop, a guy from my rookie class, Colin O'Shea, from the neighborhood," I said. "Any recollection?"
Since I was a pissant kid I'd known my uncle's brilliance for names and descriptions. He was the human equivalent to getting Googled. When he hesitated I knew it wasn't because he was stumped. He was considering his answer as he looked around the table and caught the glances of his crew.
"That would be the O'Shea of the Faith Hamlin situation?" he said, now watching my eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "I did some research."
Now he and the rest were looking down into their drinks, uncle Keith shaking his big head.
"Not a good time for the department or the district, Maxey," he said.
"Tell me."
He brought his eyes up and started in, his voice low but his mouth stiffening with the distaste of the telling.
"Had to be four years ago, after you left, word goes out on a missing persons' report out of the district. A woman, middle twenties, ya know, kind that elopes to Atlantic City or something. At first nobody pays much mind."
He stopped to sip his special blend. The other guys are straight- faced, like a poker game, but when they follow my uncle's lead, you know they're all listening and agreeing.
"But this girl, people know. She was a kid from the neighborhood who was kind of an outcast. Connellys down on Tasker had taken her in from a relation when she was young 'cause they couldn't handle her. She was, you know, not really retarded, but slow. Kids her age avoided her. But she did know how to, you know, ingratiate herself on people, trying to get them to, uh, accept her I guess."
"An' not bad-lookin', neither," said one of the crew, a veteran who'd been introduced as Sergeant Doug Haas.
"Not that I was going to add that detail," Uncle Keith said, narrowing his eyes at Haas.
"What?" his friend said. "I'm lying?"
Keith turned away.
"The family understood this, her physical attributes, and tried to keep her in someplace low profile," he continued. "They got her a counter job, working the register at this little corner store on Fifth Street near Sinai Med Center. She did the overnight, selling coffee and smokes to ambulance drivers and such who worked late."
"And cops on the beat," I said.
"Yeah," Keith said, and the heads went down and shook together.
"So somebody gets the word when she goes missing and tongues are waggin' because these cops on the Charlie shift are always in the place and they aren't offering up much in the way of information, like on the last time they seen her and such, being that she just disappeared off the face of the earth in the middle of her shift and nobody sees anything."
He took another sip, getting to it more slowly than Uncle Keith was used to getting to it.
"The rumor ain't rumor for long. Word gets around that these four cops were passing her around, each getting a piece of it back in the storage room while each partner was watching the front."
"They said she liked to pay them back for protecting her," Sergeant Haas broke in again.
This time my uncle just shook his head in agreement.
"And Colin O'Shea was a part of this?" I said.
"He was one of them," Keith said. "And once IAD got onto the case, he was the only one who didn't come out and finally own up to what they'd done."
"They cracked them?"
"Like fuckin' walnuts, Maxey. All of them were suspended and eventually fired for what they did to the girl even though she wasn't underage and she wasn't around to dispute that it was consensual. But to a man, they all said they didn't know where she'd gone or what happened to her."
"All except O'Shea," I said.
"He never admitted any part of it and was never seen in the city again."
"Christ, IAD must have done some knuckle pounding," I said. "Was this guy Fried the lead on the case?"
The table again went dead still. No one would look up from their whiskey. No sipping, no head shaking.
"And what else, Uncle Keith?" I finally said.
"Well, Maxey. You got somebody else over in that office that you have some recollection of from the past," he said, looking up through those damn bushy eyebrows that had scared me as a kid. I waited him out. "Meagan Montgomery is her name now."
"Meagan?" I said. "As in my ex-wife, Meagan?"
He nodded and said: "Yes. She would be the lieutenant for the unit now, after she caught the Faith Hamlin case and sent five cops down the slide."
I let the vision of my wife of two years sit in my head, as it had too many times on the plane trip back here. The one memory I thought I could escape was dead in the middle of my investigation.
"Well," I finally said. "I'll bet she can cut some balls off over there, eh?"
The old men in the crew sighed their relief, and then a bit boisterously I lifted a toast to women lieutenants and we drank, yet again.
At the end of the night I promised Keith I would stop by the house to see my aunt and shook hands all around. My head was swimming with the booze and music and smoke and faces. Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had dropped. The air felt like a slap. When I tried to breathe deeply through my nose to sober myself I caught that old familiar feeling of the air crystallizing in my nose and my eyes started watering. February in the Northeast, I thought and pushed my hands into the pockets of my new coat. I took a cab back to the Gaskill. Last thing I needed was a DUI. I'd get the rental in the morning on my way to the police roundhouse and my appointment with the IAD contact. As I sat in the back of the cab I tried not to think of Meagan Montgomery and the possibilities. I woke at nine in the big four-poster bed of the blue room and panicked in fear. I had no idea where I was. The thick comforter around me, dark maple wardrobe, a fireplace on the opposite wall. Gaskill. Philadelphia, Scotch whiskey. In seconds it tumbled into focus but I was still unsettled that it had taken longer to right myself than it should have. When I stood I felt uncomfortably old.
Thirty minutes later I was downstairs in the kitchen drinking coffee, eating one Guy's fabulous omelets and scanning the first few pages of the Philadelphia Daily News. Guy was devilishly accounting his own story of booking the entire house to a contingent in town for the Republican National Convention a few years earlier and their slow realization after they arrived that his was a gay- owned and -managed establishment.