“All right, mate,” he said as he tapped the point of his pen on the pad. “Usual rates. It might necessitate a quick jaunt to Georgia to track down his story.”
“Whatever you need to do. Oh, and Phil. He should know we’re looking. Don’t be too discreet. Let’s rattle his chain a bit and see how he reacts.”
“I’ll be a regular bull in his china shop, I will. That it?”
“Something else,” I said. “I want you to look into a guy name of Bradley Hewitt, a fixer of sorts. He has an in with the mayor and uses it for all sorts of business affairs. Find out what you can about him.”
Skink again started scribbling on his pad. “Any details. Addresses? Phone numbers?”
“No, but it shouldn’t be much of a trick to track him down. And also track down what you can about the life and history of a woman named Theresa Wellman. She and this Hewitt used to be an item. They have a kid together.”
“Which one does you represent?”
“The woman.”
“She have any money?”
“No.”
“How’d you end up on the wrong side of that one?”
“Beth,” I said with a shrug.
“Ah, that explains it.” He tapped his pad with the point of his pen, clicked it shut. “That it?”
I sat there for a moment. Was that it, really, or did I have one more thing to ask my private eye? The brown gloop and the pickle had eased the pain in my head, but they hadn’t done a thing for the burning on my chest. That morning I had made a quick check before I hobbled over to Skink’s. Plenty of names in the Philadelphia phone book, but not the right name. I could have called each and every Adair and asked if there was a Chantal in the family, but that seemed fishy, especially when they started asking why? Why indeed? Because I might be in love if I could remember who she was? And what if they said yes, they had a Chantal Adair, and I met her, and she had six teeth and looked like Moe from the Three Stooges, what then? I thought about it some more and decided. Skink was my PI, a hired hand, but he was also my friend and loyal as a Labrador.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Something personal.”
“Personal, huh?”
“Billed to my home, not the office.”
“Okay,” said Skink, “I understands. Usual fees?”
“I don’t get an insider discount?”
“My mother don’t get an insider discount. Go ahead.”
“Something happened last night.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember.”
Skink cocked his head.
“But something happened, and I need you to find someone for me. Discreetly, you understand?”
“It’s a woman, is it?”
“Isn’t it always? But I don’t want her to know I’m looking. Once you find her, let me know where she is and a little bit about her. Maybe take a picture. I’ll decide what to do from there.”
“You know, mate, it’s a bad idea to get a private eye messed up in your personal affairs. It can’t come to no good. In the end you never like what you find.”
“Just do it, Phil.”
“All right, then. What do you know about her?”
“I think she’s blond and sturdy and rides a motorcycle.”
“You think? You don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“I think at Chaucer’s, but a lot of last night is a blank.”
“How much is a blank?”
“Most all of it.”
“You been drinking much lately, mate?”
“Some.”
“Too much?”
“How much is too much?”
“The question is its own answer, innit? So’s if you don’t remember nothing, how do you knows something happened? How do you knows she wasn’t just a girl what you eyed in a bar and who turned you down?”
“Because I know, damn it.”
“All right, don’t get all huffy on me. I’ll do what I can. You got a name?”
“Yeah, I got a name.”
“Well?”
I stood up, shucked off my jacket, undid my tie. Skink stared at me with a growing horror on his face, as if I intended on doing a striptease with grinding music and pom-poms right there in the middle of his office. Gad, the very idea would fill me with horror, too. But it ended at the shirt. I unbuttoned it down to my belly, pushed the fabric aside to reveal my left breast.
Skink eyed my chest, raised his gaze to look into my eyes, eyed my chest again. “You get it last night?”
“I didn’t have it yesterday.”
“Nows I understand,” he said as he stood to get a closer look. “Nice job, classic look.”
“I don’t want a critique, Phil, just find her.”
He clicked his pen open. “Chantal Adair,” he said as he wrote, and then he tapped his pad with the pen’s point. “Piece of cake.”
Wrong.
13
You can tell a lot about a lawyer by how she tries a case. If you saw Jenna Hathaway in the street, you’d think she was quite wholesome and sweet, with a round angelic face and haunting blue eyes. Long legs, honey brown hair, a nervous mouth, a figure not quite willowy but willowy enough, she seemed the kind of tall, good-natured woman you could imagine sharing an ice cream cone with while taking a long walk in a fine summer’s mist. That was Jenna Hathaway in the street, or at a restaurant, or sitting on the porch swing drinking a tall glass of lemonade. But in court sweet Jenna Hathaway was an assassin.
I was sitting in the back of a federal courtroom watching as Jenna Hathaway cross-examined an accountant in a money-laundering prosecution. The accountant was impeccably dressed, what hair he had left was impeccably trimmed. He was obviously an important man with important clients who found refuge in the numbers that he used to define the world, but under the relentless assault of Jenna Hathaway’s questioning he was turning into another creature before our very eyes. It was like a carnival freak show. An accusatory question from Hathaway, a feeble objection from the overmatched defense attorney, a sneering response from Hathaway, an admonition from the cowed judge compelling the witness to answer, and then we all watched in horror as the accountant devolved ever further into a pale, quivering, fishlike creature that gasped for oxygen and flopped like a beached carp on the stand.
“My God,” I said to Slocum, who sat beside me on the bench as we both watched Hathaway work. “She should have been a gastrointestinal surgeon, the way she’s giving that guy a second asshole.”
“And he’s not even the defendant,” said Slocum.
“What’s her story?”
“A born prosecutor, never even flirted with defense work. Her father was a cop.”
“Here?”
“One of Philadelphia’s finest. Homicide, retired now. His daughter’s taken up the sword.”
“I wouldn’t want to be on her wrong side.”
“You already are,” said Slocum.
We must have been talking louder than we thought, because Hathaway stopped smack in the middle of a question and turned to stare at us. Her blue eyes focused on me, and I felt myself shrink beneath her gaze as if I had been dunked in an icy pond. She didn’t quickly turn back either. She kept staring so that everyone else in the courtroom, judge, bailiff, defendant, jury, the whole kit and caboodle turned and stared at me, too. It was all quite intolerable enough on its own, and then Slocum started laughing.
K. Lawrence Slocum was a solid, starchy man with thick glasses and a deep laugh who took inordinate pleasure in my humiliations. We were not quite friends, not quite enemies, we were simply professionals who worked the opposite sides of the same street. But I could trust Larry to hew to the highest standards of his profession, and he could trust that I wouldn’t even pretend to do the same, and with that understanding between us we got along surprisingly well. He had arranged a meeting between me and the intimidating Jenna Hathaway, the federal prosecutor with the strange, abiding interest in Charlie Kalakos. Hathaway, in the middle of a trial, had asked us to meet her in court, and so we had.