“Wow,” said Beth, spinning in her chair. “That sounds nice.” She took a moment to imagine herself walking through an exotic marketplace, bargaining over batik, or hiking high into the Himalayas.
Beth was more than my partner, she was my best friend, and I loved practicing law with her, but our long-term goals were quite dissimilar. I had a fierce ambition to succeed and prosper and rise, which made our struggles all the more despairing for me. But Beth, Beth always had the attitude that she was just passing through. She didn’t seem to have long-term goals. She saw the legal profession as a helping profession, God help her, and was pleased to be of some use. But she could also see herself trying something else, going somewhere new, dedicating herself to some other life. She sometimes mused about the Peace Corps. Really, she did, which, like, boggled my mind. I mean, my life had turned bleak because my cable had been cut off. Cold showers, long hours, no golf on TV, porridgy gluck masquerading as dinner? Philadelphia was too tough for me, how would I handle the Peace Corps? But she was right, I was avoiding, avoiding the whole precarious perch of our practice. For her, bankruptcy would have meant a new beginning, which I think she secretly found attractive. For me, the idea of bankruptcy was too brutal to even contemplate. If I wasn’t a lawyer, what was I? It would take some deep soul searching to figure that out and, frankly, I firmly believed my soul, like certain biohazard properties, was better left unsearched.
“Are you ever tempted,” she said, “just to go off and find yourself?”
“God no. I might succeed.”
“Yes, that would be frightening. And isn’t it weird to think that you might be somewhere out there to be found. Can you imagine the poor sap who goes off on a walkabout to find himself, climbs the highest peaks, the widest valleys, and when he gets to the final spot what he finds, instead of himself, is you?”
“We were talking about accounts receivable,” I said drily.
“I suppose we should cross Joseph Parma and his thirty-five hundred dollars off the list.”
“He was never good for it anyway.”
“So why’d you take the case?”
“He needed someone. But don’t put it all on me,” I said. “You brought in Rashard Porter.”
“Yes, that,” she said, nodding her head. “I know his mother, she’s a wonder, and he’s basically a good kid. But I got a retainer for that.”
“Three hundred dollars, which didn’t cover the arraignment.”
“She’s a single mother paying half her salary in rent. The three hundred itself was a struggle for her.”
“His suppression hearing is day after tomorrow.”
“How’s it look?”
“Not good. The joint they found lying next to him on the front seat was the size of a small dog. Mr. Magoo would have seen that spliff from across the street. But I have a plan.”
She sighed, turned again to look out the window, saw, I was certain, not the grimy strip of Twenty-first Street visible from her office but the great Plateau of Tibet at the base of the Himalayas.
“Without some paying clients,” she said, “we’re not going to survive through the summer.”
“Oh come on. We’ll make it, we always do.”
“Struggling to pay the rent was charming when we were first out of law school,” she said, “but it’s getting old.”
“Don’t go south on me, Beth. I have a hunch about the Parma case. I think there is money here.”
“You always think there’s money here, but it always ends up being there, not here. What was Joey’s nickname, Victor?”
“Joey Cheaps.”
“And he died owing us thirty-five hundred dollars. What makes you think a man whose life was so devoid of value he earned the moniker ‘Cheaps’ could suddenly become a cash cow in his death?”
“It’s that image from his story, the one I can’t seem to shake. A moonlit night on the waterfront. A man lies dead. Joey Parma holds a bloody baseball bat in his hand. And in the distance, Joey’s partner in crime is walking away with a suitcase full of cash.”
“Victor, wise up. The suitcase is empty. The money’s long gone. Cash gets spent, that’s the beauty of cash.”
“Maybe, but twenty years pass and then two goons show up, beat the hell out of Joey, and then start asking about the suitcase? That same suitcase? Joey was scared out of his wits, scared enough to call me, and then twelve hours later he’s dead. There’s a connection here between Joey’s death and that suitcase. I think it’s still around, I think it’s still in play. You find that suitcase, you find a murderer, Beth. A murderer with a pile of money.”
“And how do we do that?”
“McDeiss is looking into Joey’s homicide, but we know things he doesn’t know, things we’re not allowed to tell him. Maybe we should do what we can to help his investigation. Twelve hours passed from the time I met with Joey at La Vigna to the time of his murder. If we can suss out those twelve hours, we’ll be far on the road to finding our killer. We know Joey saw his mother in the afternoon. And we know he was one other place for sure.”
“Where?”
“Let’s go out for a drink. Let’s you and I step out for a drink at Jimmy T’s.”
Chapter 8
THEY SAY PHILLY is a city of neighborhoods, but it’s really a city of neighborhood taps. There they sit, one on every corner, with the same hanging sign, the same glass block windows, the same softball trophies, the same loyalty among their denizens. When you’re a Philly guy you can count your crucial affiliations on the fingers of one hand; you got your mom, you got your church, you got your string band, you got your saloon, you got your wife, and the only thing you ever think of changing is your wife.
Jimmy T’s was just such a neighborhood joint. When Beth and I stepped inside we were immediately eyed, and for good reason. We were strangers, we were wearing suits, we had all our teeth.
The dank, narrow bar was decorated like a VFW hall, Flyers pictures taped to bare walls, cheap Formica tables, a pool table wedged into the back, a jukebox in the corner with its clear plastic cover smashed. Someone had made an unwise selection, maybe something not sung by Sinatra. Workingmen of all ages slumped at the bar, leaned on the tables, wiped their noses, sucked down beers, complained about politics, the economy, the Eagles, the cheese steaks at Geno’s, the riffraff moving in from the west, their girlfriends, their wives, their kids, their lives, their goddamned lives. Before we stepped in, it had been sullenly loud, but the moment we opened the door it had quieted as if for a show. It didn’t take long to realize we were it. I figured we might as well make it a good one.
“You sure yous are in the right place?” said the bartender, a crag of a man with a great head of white hair and a missing arm. The thief, Lloyd Ganz, I presumed.
“We’re in the right place,” I said. “I’ll have a sea breeze.”
Ganz blinked at me. “Say what?”
“A sea breeze. It’s a drink.”
“Hey, Charlie,” said Ganz without looking away, “guy in the suit says he wants something called a sea breeze.”
A slim-jim at the end of the bar, long, brown, and desiccated, said in a rasp, “Tell him to drive his ass on down to Wildwood, face east, open his mouth.”
I turned away from the derisive laughter swelling behind me. “You don’t know how to make a sea breeze?”
“Are you really sure yous in the right place? We don’t got no ferns here.”
“Careful,” I said. “My mother’s name is Fern.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. Do you have grapefruit juice?”
“It’s late for breakfast, ain’t it?”
“Cranberry juice?”
“You kidding me, right?”
I let out a long disappointed breath. “Why don’t you then just inform me as to the specialty of the house?”
Lloyd Ganz blinked at me a couple times more. “Hey, Charlie. Man here wants the specialty of the house.”