“What number?”
“He had a number where he could be reached if I needed him. I was to leave a message and then he would get back to me. Made me memorize in case something happened with my heart like the last time.”
She recited it to me. I took out a piece of paper and had her recite it again.
She sighed, took a sip from her wine. “Tell me, Victor, what kind of trouble was my Joey in this time?”
“It was about something he did long ago, that’s all I know.”
“Is that why he was killed?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Parma. I don’t know why he was killed. He might simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Joey was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that’s no reason to be dead, is it?”
“No, ma’am.”
She picked up the framed picture of the three altar boys. “Take this.”
“No, Mrs. Parma. I can’t.”
“Take this. You remember him.” She jammed the framed photograph into my hands. “Take. Look. They killed the boy too, not just the man. Everything he ever was, it fell to the ground with the blood. The man, to be truthful, wasn’t worth much, even I’ll admit that, but the boy. Like marzipan. He would run from his father, snuggle on my lap, bury his head in my neck. The warmth of his tears, his sweet tears. You do me favor, Victor?”
“Anything.”
“Find out what happened to my boy.”
“I don’t know if I can, Mrs. Parma. The police-”
“I don’t want to hear about police. What have police ever done for my Joey. You done, you the only one. You find out what happened to my boy. You.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good. And when you find who did it, you let me know, okay?”
“I will.”
“You let me know and I take care of it. Like I took care of Joey Senior. Just get me the name, Victor. My knives are sharp. Whoever it is I’ll cut off his balls, slice them thick, fry them with garlic, feed them to the rats.”
“Mrs. Parma.”
“I shock you, maybe, Victor? He was my boy. You know what is vendetta?”
“Yes, I do. But-”
“What is wrong, Victor? You think I’m not entitled?”
“Of course you are entitled. And no, Mrs. Parma, you don’t shock me. It is just that I think we can do better than feeding the rats.”
“What are you saying, Victor?”
I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out an envelope. “Have you ever seen, Mrs. Parma, a contingency fee agreement?”
Chapter 6
I DIDN’T KNOW what it was about hospitals that pressed their weight upon me with a physical force the minute I entered one, whether it was the information lady with her perky smile, the doctors walking casually among desolation and death, the smell, the stuffy framed portraits of long-vanished healers, the sick, the really, really sick, the smell. Did I mention the smell? You know what I mean, eau de mortality, a fragrant mixture of rubbing alcohol, ammonia, green beans, false cheeriness, false hope, urine and sweat and lime green Jell-O. Whatever it was, I had the usual mordant sensation as I walked into the lobby of Temple University Hospital smack in the middle of North Philadelphia. Or maybe it was the fact that my father was on the fourth floor. Any building that housed my father, whether the decaying little bungalow in which I was raised or the sprawling multilevel inner-city hospital in which he now lay, had the same effect on me, something akin to dropping down down in the deep sea and feeling my chest compress from the weight.
He had collapsed on the steps of his home away from home, the grand and glorious Hollywood Tavern, in his sad suburban enclave of Hollywood, Pennsylvania. There was blood coming out of his mouth and his breath was wet, and in the ambulance they had enthusiastically pumped him full of drugs. By some miracle he had survived the trauma of the ambulance and, when he had been stabilized at Holy Redeemer Hospital, he had been transferred to Temple. The religious symbolism was deliciously inapt, but Temple was the only hospital in the area that performed the delicate yet brutal surgery his condition required. Now they were treating the pneumonia that had invaded his lungs and were waiting for him to gain enough strength so they could open up his chest and kill him proper.
“Hi, Dad,” I said with as much pep as I could muster.
“You’re back,” he said, matching my pep with his normal tone of bitter resignation. “You was just here. What, is your cable out?”
“Don’t be silly. I came to see you. But I do seem to remember the Sixers might be playing Orlando tonight. Do you want me to put it on?”
“What for? I seen enough gunners in the damn army to last me, I don’t need to see that Iverson bum.”
“He’s good. I like watching him play.”
He waved his hand in disgust. He could barely move, my father, lying on his bed, his face gray and drawn and unshaven, only sixty years old but looking like he’d already been buried twice as long. A clip bit into a finger of his waving hand, reading the oxygen level in his blood, now a paltry ninety-three percent. He barely had enough energy to breathe, sure, but he was never without enough energy to give the world a dismissive shove. “I seen Chamberlain play. Greer. Cunningham coming off the bench. After what I seen, he’s nothing.”
“So how are you doing?”
“I’m dying, how do you think I’m doing?”
“You’re not dying.”
“Yes I am, and it’s not such a bad thing neither. At least I earned it. I didn’t earn much in my life, but I earned this.”
I took off my coat, sat down beside his bed. “Nice to see you in a good mood for a change. What’s going on?”
“What the hell do you think is going on? I lie here and they stick things in me. Bloodsuckers, is what they are.”
“And you, of course, are being your normal, personable self.”
“You try smiling as they play voodoo with your body. If the sickness doesn’t kill me, they’ll do it themselves.”
I smiled indulgently. “Why so cheerful this evening?”
“They got this thing up my dick.”
“To help you pee.”
“Sixty years I didn’t need no help.”
“Want me to adjust it for you?”
“Stay the hell away from me, you bastard,” said my father. “So there’s that. And, I don’t know, I been thinking about things.”
“Oh, Dad, don’t do that,” I said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Especially here. No good can come from it. We’ve both made it this far precisely by not thinking of things.”
“And look where we are.” He tried to shift in the bed, struggled to take a breath. His face enlivened brightly with pain. “Hell,” he said.
“Why don’t I turn on the game?”
“I been thinking about things,” he said. “I been thinking about… things.”
“The Sixers?”
“A girl.”
“Should I turn it on?”
“A pleated skirt.”
“Ah yes, pleated skirts. I’ve always liked them myself. Very flattering to the hips.”
“I need to tell you.”
“Sure, Dad. That’s fine. But how are you feeling? It looks like you’re in pain. Are you?”
“What do you think? Whenever I breathe. I haven’t slept in days.”
I jumped up. “Let me find a doctor.” Before he could reply, I was out the door.
“My father’s in a bit of agony,” I told the nurse behind the desk. “You think he could be given something to ease it for a time, maybe let him sleep.” The nurse told me to wait a moment as she went off to find the intern, and I stood dutifully at the nurses’ desk, playing the part of the dutiful son, glancing uneasily at the door to my father’s room, just down the hall.
I didn’t want to hear that he had been thinking of things, my father. I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking about. And I really really really didn’t want to hear about the girl in the pleated skirt that had suddenly popped into his consciousness as he stared un-blinking at his own mortality. The girl who got away, the girl who broke his heart, the girl, that girl, the girl, the one. It was all too sad and ordinary. It didn’t take much to imagine it all in one sad swoop. The shy glances, the sweet romance, and then the cheating, his or hers, it didn’t matter, the cheating and the recriminations, and then the breakup that left him sad and wounded, that left him weak and unguarded, like a boxer ready to fall into an exhausted embrace with the first girl who came along, even someone totally unsuited to him, even someone certifiable, someone like, well, like my mother, from which all his ruin and misery had come, including his only begotten son. No, I didn’t want to hear how with the girl in the pleated skirt everything would have been different, how with the girl in the pleated skirt life would have been more than a sad burden to be shouldered through to death. Because it wouldn’t have been different, my dad’s life, and we both knew it. My father was someone who trudged through life while others floated, a man who set a course of low expectations for himself and then mercilessly failed to meet them, a man who chose bitterness and anger because they just came naturally, dammit, and what do you know anyway, you little bastard.