Whaley caught his breath, then went on: “When I told Mora that he was going to get charged for the murder, he rolled over on this Reggie Mabry character. He didn’t seem to care about Mabry, something about bad blood between them-hard to understand with him rattling off in Spanish-and when I asked for a description and where he lived, it matched exactly what the Moss kid had said the shooter looked like. Undercover car wasn’t in there looking for him two hours and he popped up.”
“Good job, Chuck. I now need you to come help us work this murder scene. Looks like it’s going to be another long night.”
[TWO]
Seventeenth and Chancellor
Center City, Philadelphia
Monday, December 17, 8:05 A.M.
As Matt Payne went out the front door of Little Pete’s while sipping a to-go cup of coffee, he suddenly felt a bit nostalgic realizing how many times, after a long night of drinking, he had walked the few blocks from his apartment at Rittenhouse Square to the diner.
And, thanks to Five-Eff tearing down the building for something shiny and new, Pete’s is going away.
He glanced across the street at the Warwick Hotel.
I hope that place never disappears.
Payne snugged his cap down against the blowing snow. He turned and walked toward South Broad.
His mind flashed to the previous week, when he and Amanda had seen Melody Gardot perform in the Warwick’s jazz bar. And thinking of Gardot made his mind flash to when he was driving Amanda in his 911 to drop her off at work at Temple Hospital and he had just vented about the crumbling of the city.
–
“This place is collapsing both physically and, even worse, morally,” Payne said as Amanda had reached up to change the radio station.
“It is sad,” she said as she tapped the radio’s memory button labeled 1, setting the tuner to the 88.5 frequency, the University of Pennsylvania’s WXPN.
A sultry voice singing “La Vie en Rose” softly flowed from the Porsche’s high-fidelity speakers.
“Ah,” Amanda said, her tone brighter. “Our hometown girl Melody Gardot. She’s an example of what makes this city great. I love her cover of this far better than Edith Piaf’s original.”
She turned up the volume and sang along, “‘Quand il me prend dans ses bras / Il me parle tout bas, / Je vois la vie en rose.’”
Matt glanced at her and smiled warmly.
“Very nice,” he said.
After the song ended, she turned down the volume.
She looked at Matt and said: “‘When he takes me in his arms / And speaks softly to me, / I see life in rosy hues.’”
Matt, braking as the traffic light cycled to yellow, then red, smiled and nodded, then said, “Gardot’s version is beautiful, but I actually like Satchmo’s take on it better than Piaf’s.”
“That’s because you can understand Louis Armstrong singing the English lyrics,” Amanda said, her tone playful.
“Exactly,” Matt said, and then sang, not anywhere near on key, “‘Give your heart and soul to me / And life will always be, / La vie en rose.’”
He leaned over, kissed her on the neck-then playfully squeezed her thigh.
“Life in pink,” he said. “I think I like the sound of that.”
“Mind out of the gutter, Matt! You are shameless!”
He grinned, clearly unrepentant.
Amanda went on: “It actually translates more to ‘Life through rose-colored glasses,’ you know. Don’t be such a Neanderthal.”
She was shaking her head but grinning.
He pointed at the radio.
“But look at that, getting back to my complaints about this place.”
“Look at what?”
“I mean, look at her. There’s a genuine success story. Gardot grew up here, raised in large part by her Polish grandmother while her mother traveled for work as a photographer. Their family had no money. Had to bounce from place to place. But they scraped together enough so that she could start taking music lessons when she was nine.”
The light cycled to green, but Matt had to wait while what appeared to be a homeless male slowly pushed a battered grocery cart covered in a tarp out of the crosswalk.
He continued: “By the time she was sixteen, she was playing piano in Philly clubs on the weekend. She was working hard to get ahead-and studying fashion design at Community College on Spring Garden Street-when a hit-and-run driver turned her world upside down.”
“She was riding a bicycle, if I remember,” Amanda said, nodding gently as she looked out her window.
“Which offered zero protection,” Matt picked up, “and she was left with broken bones and brain damage that made it difficult to even talk. Stuck on her back in a hospital bed for a year, she had to relearn everything. That was when?”
“Maybe ten years ago? When she was nineteen.”
“Amazing. There she was, unable to sit at a piano, not to mention play. She began by humming, then later singing, and then taught herself to play guitar. When XPN heard recordings of the new music, the station aired them. And now? Now she’s an international artist, with gold- and platinum-selling albums, even a Grammy nomination.”
Matt paused, then grunted.
“There she’d been a year in bed,” he finished, “recovering from broken bones, broken brain, broken everything. Except no broken spirit. You don’t see her standing on the sidewalk corner, needle tracks on her arms, blaming The Man for holding her down.”
–
Payne approached South Broad.
He heard his cell phone Ping! and saw the text from Daquan Williams: “I got real trouble. It’s about Pookie. Can you come talk? I’m at work. Daily Grind diner. Broad/Erie.”
Payne turned on Broad and saw City Hall ahead. He knew that when William Penn had put charcoal to paper in 1682 and mapped out what would become the City of Philadelphia, Penn had put City Hall at its exact center.
Payne looked up at the historic building-the country’s largest municipal building, larger than the U.S. Capitol-his eyes going all the way to the bronze statue of Penn standing atop its dome, keeping vigil over his city.
Wonder what ol’ Willie Penn would think of this place today? And all that’s gone on in the chambers below his bronze boots?
Bet he’d shove a bronze boot up their collective corrupt asses if given the chance. .
Payne glanced around at traffic.
Fat chance finding an empty taxi in this weather.
And my car is at Amanda’s.
He looked back at City Hall.
Well, at least the place has one good thing going for it-the subway.
Hell, just take it.
Payne texted back: “Be there shortly.”
—
Payne impatiently squeezed past the small groups of passengers that had just gotten off the subway train cars of the Broad Street Line, and moved with purpose down the tiled concourse toward the exit.
He then took the steps, two at a time, up to street level, then started across the deep gray slush of snow and melted ice that covered the sidewalk.
At the newsstand shack on the southeast corner of Erie and Broad, he quickly tugged a newspaper from a stack topped with a chunk of red brick, stuffing it beneath his left arm, then peeling from his money clip a pair of dollar bills. He handed the cash to the attendant-a heavily clothed elderly black man with leathery hands and a deeply wrinkled face and thin beard-and gestured for him to keep the change.