I gave him my cell number. He didn't write it down but I got the impression he didn't need to. He stood up and so did I. He was four inches shorter, but the difference didn't seem to phase him like it did some men.
"We'll see, G," he said and then turned and walked away, the others following. Their hands were all back in their pockets, and when they got to the end of the alley they turned left and headed west.
I stayed in the neighborhood, driving, watching, grinding the possibilities. If anyone could get a tip on the hundreds, the local crew trying to keep their pledge to the off-limits zone might. Then again, they could be playing me. I cruised past a dusty playground. The concrete basketball court was empty and unlined, the iron rims bent like the tongues of tired dogs.
I thought of the street games I'd found soon after I'd moved out of South Philly to the town house up near Jefferson Hospital. Down Tenth Street was a one-court park that held a competitive game on the weekend. I'd been playing there for a month, getting into more and more games when the regulars figured out I was willing and able to play defense and could pull a rough rebound as well as anyone on the court. I was often the only white guy there and they started calling me Bobby Jones after the 76ers defensive star.
One Saturday a group of challengers rolled in swaggering. One called game before he was even past the fence and everyone started posturing and trash talking and making their side bets.
When it came time to pick up, the local guy who had next let me sit until his final choice and then made his play: "We take the old white guy make it easy on your ass an' you buck up the bet another Jackson." The new man looked at me, snorted and peeled off another twenty-dollar bill.
I had learned over the years that as the minority on the ball courts the best tactic was to stay obscure, keep your mouth shut, and do the quiet things that win games and keep you playing. The real players are not dumb. They like to win. They'll pick you to play for their own purposes, regardless of color.
We won by six and I had only one basket but more assists and rebounds than anyone else on the court. After the game the local guy winked at me but never said a word. He collected his cash and I assume split it with his boys later. I picked up my ball and went home to get ready for a night shift.
I'd lost my bearings on my trip to the past and looked up at the street sign to realize I was driving east. It was late afternoon, the temperature had crawled up near eighty and I decided to stop in at Kim's. Maybe I was hoping to run into McCane, find an excuse. But the bar was nearly empty. The same young bartender had an old Don Henley tune turned up on the jukebox and I sat in McCane's seat. She brought me an ale.
"Good memory," I said, putting cash on the bar.
"You and the good 'ol boy from Moultrie," she said. "Where is your buddy, anyway? He don't usually miss the TNT movie. Likes all those old ones, you know, like High Plains Drifter and Catch-22 and stuff."
I noticed the sound on the corner television was muted. Henley was singing about all the things he thought he'd figured out that he'd have to learn again. She had the air conditioning turned up high and the lights already low.
"Did you say Moultrie?" I asked. "I thought he was from Charleston?"
"Might have been. But he sure knows about the state pen near Moultrie," she said, working the glassware under the bar even though there wasn't a soul drinking but me.
"Said he was a bull there and I should know. My daddy did some time there when I was a kid."
I wondered why McCane had skipped this part of his resume, not that we were on reminiscing terms.
"Must have been before I met him," I said.
She poured another beer from the tap and took my empty. I watched the lights playing in the bar's back mirrors through my second and left her a five-dollar tip on the way out the door. When I got to the truck I called Billy.
"Did you ever do a full dossier on McCane?" I asked, and it must have been in my voice. Billy was usually steps ahead of me and I had a feeling it got to his pride when he wasn't.
"No. I just verified that he works for the insurance company. Why? You find out he belongs to the Klan or something?"
Billy is not usually a vindictive person.
"We need to track his work background," I said. "He told me he had been a cop in Charleston and Savannah, but we need to find out if he ever had any connection with the state pen near Moultrie."
Billy was quiet on the other end, spinning the information in his head, frustrated by the lack of logic.
"You want to connect the dots on this one for me?" he finally said.
"It might be nothing," I said. "But let's check."
Old cop thinking. Someone lies to you, there's a reason, even if it's a lie by omission. Maybe McCane just didn't include it because being a prison guard isn't exactly a revered position in law enforcement. Maybe there was more. Maybe I was paranoid. I drove north up the oceanside highway, watching the surf work at the Florida sand. Maybe I was back in the game.
20
When I got to Billy's apartment, he was still in his back office, working the computers. I opened a beer and watched over his shoulder while he ran his fingers over the keyboard, popping up government websites and directories. He'd run McCane's dossier and there were some major gaps in it, and that often meant that the person you were trying to track had either spent time in the system, or was in law enforcement, or had somehow had his history expunged. Billy had then called a prosecutor friend in Atlanta who lowered his voice when Billy asked him if Frank McCane's name and the prison at Moultrie rang any bells. He asked Billy not to use him as a source, but told him the story.
"McCane was a d-dayshift guard at the prison and had b-been there for several years. After a change in the governor's seat, there was a c-crackdown on the Department of Correction's internal system, which had been rife with abuse," Billy said. "McCane had b-been the unofficial head of a shakedown club among the guards."
"So he was indicted?"
"Not exactly." Billy said. "When they backed him into a corner with proof, he made a d-deal with the governors office, t-turned over information on the warden and gave up his job. The only s-stipulation was lifelong p-probation. He could no longer w-work for the state, and if he was ever arrested on the outside, they'd re-file the whole l-load of charges from the p-prison on him."
"So he moved out of the state, gave up public police work and went with the insurance job," I said, putting the obvious into the air. "Your friend give any details on what McCane specialized in during this stellar career?
"Very little," Billy said. "He's a state p-prosecutor. It's a political year in Georgia. N-No one's going to b-be in the mood to hang their butt out."
I drained the beer and went for another. Billy declined to join me and I changed my own mind on my way to the refrigerator. The Moultrie prison was stuck in my head from a Philadelphia case, and I was trying to dig it out of its place in the past. I started a pot of coffee.
"Can you find a Philadelphia Inquirer archive on the box?" I called back to him while the coffee was brewing.
"Sure. What are we looking for?"
"Name of an inmate. A guy we tried to help out after we broke a car theft ring. The bust went bad and a port officer got killed. This guy was a locksmith at the time and he ended up on the rotten end of a murder charge."
"They would have done a news story at the time?"
"I hope so."
While Billy clicked at the computers, I sat at the kitchen counter telling him the story, unraveling a day at a Delaware River port warehouse in a time before I was a completely disillusioned police detective.
A handful of us had been assigned to an auto theft task force that was working with Customs on the theft and importation of cars and trucks from the northeast to Haiti and the Caribbean.