Marked Man (15 page)

I don’t normally take
a taxi to work, being that my office is only a few blocks from my apartment and that I am so tight with a buck, my wallet squeaks when I walk. So on the morning after my disturbing visit to Beppo’s Tattoo Emporium, I didn’t take much notice of the battered old taxi passing down my street. When the taxi stopped and backed up toward me, I figured the cabbie needed some directions. I stepped off the curb, leaned into the window, and felt a shiver of fear when I saw Joey Pride, his right hand on the wheel, his blue captain’s hat pulled low over his brow.

“Get in,” he said.

“That’s sweet of you, Joey, really, and I appreciate the offer, but my office is only a few blocks—”

“Shut up and get in.”

I took a step back. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“You’re right to be scared, Victor,” he said as he turned his face in my direction, “but however scared you are, you not half as scared as me.”

His eyes, peering out from beneath the brim of his cap, were moist and red. Fear, like pain pure, rippled the flesh between his eyes. He was right, he was more scared than I, at least he was until he showed me the gun, held unsteadily in his left hand. A revolver, small and shiny, aimed through the open taxi window smack at my forehead.

“Get in the back. I got something to show you, something that will get you scared good and proper.”

“Is that the gun you killed Ralph with?”

“Don’t be a donkey. I didn’t kill Ralph. I loved the man. That’s what
we need to talk about. Now, get the hell in the cab. I got something to show you. Something it’s worth your boy Charlie’s life to see.”

I thought about it a moment, considered running to get the hell out of there. In a split second, I imagined it all—my briefcase flying, the soles of my shoes hammering the pavement, my suit jacket fluttering behind me like a cape—the whole scene came clear. But something was missing. And I suddenly knew what it was and why. Joey Pride wasn’t shooting at me in my imagining because Joey Pride wasn’t out to kill me in real life. The gun, too small and of the wrong caliber to have killed Ralph Ciulla, was just another element of his fear, not of mine.

“All right,” I said. “Put the gun away and I’ll get in.”

The gun disappeared. I looked around before slipping into the rear of the taxi. The cab slowly drove off and turned left.

“I’m the other way,” I said.

“I know.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Around,” he said, as he snatched a small silver flask to his lips.

“Shouldn’t there be a Plexiglas barrier between the passenger and the driver?” I said. “I’d feel more comfortable with a Plexiglas barrier.”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

However beat the cab was on the outside, on the inside it was worse. The vinyl of my seat was mended with silver duct tape, the walls of the doors were stained with the sweat and grime of thousands of indifferent passengers. The cab smelled of gasoline and grease, of smoke and bleach and boredom. It had the pinched feel of a soul that had been waiting too long for not nearly enough.

“The cops called you out to Ralph’s house the night he got hit,” said Joey.

“That’s right.”

“What they want with you?”

“They found my card in Ralph’s wallet. They wanted to know what I knew.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Just that the three of us had met that afternoon.”

“You gave them my name?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thank you for that, you little snake. What they say about me?”

“They want to talk to you, to ask some questions. A detective named McDeiss. He’ll give you a square deal.”

“He’ll get me killed, is what he’ll do.”

“Who’s after you, Joey?”

“I told Ralph to be careful, that we were stepping back into it all. But he always thought he couldn’t be touched.” He snatched another drink from the flask. “You should have seen him play football for good old Northeast High. He played huge.”

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Yeah. We’re all sorry, but that’s not helping Ralph none, is it? Who’d them cops think done it?”

“They don’t know. But it looks like Ralph knew who killed him.”

“Of course he did. The ghosts have come back, boy. Avenging ghosts from Nightmare Alley.”

“And you think a bullet from that little gun will stop a ghost?”

“Don’t know, never shot one before.”

He took a drink from his flask, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The car swerved before righting itself. The drinking didn’t seem to be helping his fear or his driving.

“You spend all of Ralph’s cash yet?” I said.

“How you know that was me?”

“Nothing else was stolen but the money clip. No ring, no watch. You were the only one who had seen the cash in the money clip.”

“I took the money ’cause I knew I’d be running and I’d need it. Ralph would have understood. But I didn’t shoot him.”

“Of course you didn’t. You were old, easy friends. You finished each other’s sentences. You couldn’t have hurt him.”

“He was more a brother than my own brothers.”

“You came to his house after the murder, saw him dead on the floor, panicked, took the money and ran. A few minutes later, you stopped at a pay phone and called it in to the police. But what I don’t understand, Joey, is why you ran. Why not call from the house, wait for the cops, tell them what you knew, save yourself from being on the run?”

“You just don’t get it. I ain’t running from the cops, fool. That’s what I wanted to tell you. There’s something after me.”

“The ghosts?”

“Laugh all you want, but they’re after me, they are. And it ain’t just me that needs to be running. When I took the money, I took this, too.”

He reached a hand back and handed me a piece of notebook paper, folded in half, badly creased and spotted with blood. Carefully, using only my fingertips, I unfolded it, read what was scrawled in a thick black marker.

“Where did you get this?” I said when I had started breathing again.

“It was right on top of Ralph when I found him.”

“Left by the guy who killed him,” I said.

“You catching on,” said Joey.

I looked again at the sheet and the rough printing on its face, among the creases and spatters of blood:

WHO’S NEXT?

“Can I take this to the police so they can get it processed for prints?” I said.

“Do what you want, boy. I done my duty to Charlie by giving you the warning. Rest is up to you. But the killing won’t stop with Ralph. We’re cursed, all of us.”

“All of who?”

“You know, the five of us. That’s who the message is for. Ralph and me, Charlie, too, and the others.”

“Hugo and Teddy?”

He didn’t answer, he just took another swig.

“What did you guys do that’s got you so spooked? What happened thirty years ago? Do you think the painting is cursed?”

“Not the painting, just us. Teddy was giving us a way to save our lives, that’s what we thought. That’s what he said.”

“In the bar, when he came back into town?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened in the bar that night, Joey?”

“He rubbed our faces in our own damn crap, that’s what happened,” said Joey. “He told us he was ashamed of us. That we had let life happen
to us in the worst possible way. Right there, in that back booth, he told us we was a bunch of losers going nowhere but to the corner tap in hopes of drinking enough to forget all we hadn’t done with our lives.”

“That was pretty harsh,” I said.

“But it was the truth. We were failures, all of us. We told him we had our reasons for the way things had turned out, but he didn’t want to hear it. Told us that nothing consumed a man’s soul more than the easy excuse. And then he put the lie to them excuses, Teddy did, starting with Charlie.”

“What about Charlie?”

“He said Charlie let his mother rule his life like a dictator because it was easier than stepping out and making decisions on his own. He told Ralph he threw his money away on women so that he wouldn’t have to see if he could really make it on his own. And that Hugo quit school not to take care of his family but because no matter how hard it was hauling those sacks of cement, it was easier than matching his brain up against the suburban kids who thought a college education was a birthright.”

“What about you, Joey?”

“Said that me going crazy and getting myself hauled up to Haverford State was a ready-made excuse for not even trying. Called me crazy as a coward.”

“What did you guys do?” I said.

“We went after him, we all did. I even tried to slug him, but not because the son of a bitch was insulting my integrity. I wanted to slug him because he was right. We were, the four of us, drowning in our excuses, even as we drowned our sorrows in our beer. When it all calmed down, he said he had learned something out there in California. He had learned that we had to do anything necessary to take hold of our dreams, and sometimes that meant taking hold of our lives and becoming something new.”

“Something new?”

“That’s what he said, and then he started talking crazy talk. About ropes and apes and supermen. He said we were hovering over some great hole—an abyss, he called it—and we could either go back to the failures we was or go forward and become something new. He said the only
answer was to cross that abyss with a rope. But not any rope. He said we was the rope. He said we had to climb over the losers we had become in order to get to the other side. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it felt true, you know what I mean? It was like a part of the Bible I never heard before.”

“And what was there on the other side?”

“Our fool’s dreams, made real.”

“Someplace over the rainbow.”

“Sure, but then he described them to us in a way that made us believe it all could happen. Hugo was a business school graduate, running some huge company, flying about in the corporate jets, letting the congressmen and senators wait for him in his outer office while some lackey shined his shoes. And Ralph had his own shop, taking orders from all over the country, never touching the metal himself. And his secretary was way hot, and Ralph was banging her on his desktop every lunch hour. And Charlie was running free like a feral cat, doing whatever the hell he wanted, and his mother was happy about it, because he had finally become a man.”

“What about you, Joey? What were you doing on the other side?”

“I was driving the fastest rod on the East Coast, going town to town, racing and winning on makeshift tracks, with my own garage and a staff of forty mechanics to keep my baby humming. And, you know, the way he was telling it, he made it come alive. I could see it there, my future, shimmering in the distance. It was dazzling. I could see it clear, just there, beyond the horizon. I still can.”

“And all you needed was a way to get there.”

“That’s right. And then Teddy, he gave us the way. He said we needed something that purified and burned at the same time, an opportunity clean enough and hard enough to transform our lives. And he said he might have the right opportunity in mind.” Joey took a long drink from his flask. “And he did, didn’t he?”

“The Randolph Trust job.”

“Had it all worked out from the start. And when he was through preaching to us, we was converts, all of us. It didn’t take too much convincing after that to get us on board.”

“The power of Nietzsche.”

“Who?” said Joey.

“Some German philosopher. All that stuff about the abyss and the rope, it came from him. Friedrich Nietzsche, the patron saint of disaffected adolescents who want to cast off their chains and become supermen.”

“How’d it work out for that Nietzsche fellow?”

“Not too well. He declared God dead, had sex with his sister, went insane.”

“Was she hot, at least, his sister?”

“She looked like a turnip. How did Teddy light on the Randolph Trust as the means to perfection?”

“Never knew. This your spot here?”

I looked up. We were on Twenty-first Street now, my street, pulling up to the front of my building. And there was someone waiting by the door. Someone familiar. I squinted at her for a moment before I recognized her.

“Damn,” I said.

“That’s the word for it.”

I shook my head, tried to move from the next crisis back to the current one. “Joey,” I said, “I have to go. Thanks for the ride.”

I opened the door, slid out of the taxi, leaned in the cab window. “You never said why you were cursed?”

“And I never will neither.”

“You see them around, Hugo and Teddy?”

“Hugo left the city a long time ago, I haven’t seen him in the flesh since. And Teddy, that sweet-talking son of a bitch disappeared right after the robbery.”

“Disappeared?”

Joey let out a soft whistle, like the wind flying across a plain.

“You should turn yourself in, Joey, answer their questions.”

“No, sir. I’ll end up just like Ralph, I do that.”

“When I give them the note you found with Ralph’s body, I’m going to tell them how you showed up, took the money, made the 911 call. They’ll still be looking for you, but you won’t be a suspect.”

“Do what you gotta do.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Drive around, pick up fares, support myself like I always done, and sleep in the cab until it blows over.”

“Get rid of the gun.”

“Right,” he said as he took another swig.

“And that’s not helping either. Listen, how can I get in touch with you?”

“Call your father.”

“My father?”

“I’ll check in with him now and again. We could always trust your father.”

“Be careful.”

“You, too, Victor.”

“Joey, one thing more. What was Teddy’s dream? Did he ever say?”

“He was heading for the other side of the world, he was. Said there was a girl he was going to chase. And about that note. Tell the cops they won’t find nothing of interest on it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because ghosts don’t leave no prints.”

Ghosts. I was surrounded
by ghosts, or at least those plagued by them, because when the haunted man in the cab drove away, I turned to face the haunted woman waiting for me in front of my office. She was wearing the classic Philly combo: red high heels, blue jeans, tight black shirt. My first thought was how damn pretty she was, so pretty it was hard to tear my gaze away. My second thought was how the hell I was going to get rid of her.

“You promised,” I said.

“I promised I wouldn’t call,” said Monica Adair.

“This is worse. Monica, it wasn’t a date. Really. It wasn’t.”

“Okay, I buy that now. It wasn’t a date.”

“I didn’t mean to lead you on.”

“I know.”

“Good, I’m glad that’s clear. Then what are you doing here?”

“Can we talk, like, privately?”

I looked around. Pedestrians were sparse. “This isn’t private enough?”

“Not really. I have a legal question.”

“Monica, this is crazy. Stop it now. I feel like I’m being stalked.”

“Maybe I’m a little confused. You are a lawyer, right?”

“Yes, I’m a lawyer.”

“Then why won’t you talk to me about an important legal matter?”

I closed my eyes. “What kind of matter?”

“Do you always talk about important legal matters on the street?”

“With people who aren’t clients, sure.”

“How do I become a client?”

“Pay a retainer.”

“How much?”

“Depends on the case.”

She opened her bag and reached in, and as she searched, she said, “Do you take small bills?”

“What kind of legal matter is this, Monica?”

“Can we discuss this upstairs, in your office? Please?”

Beaten, finally, and wanting to get the spectacle off the street, I led her through the dirty glass door, up the wide stairs, past the accountants’ office and the graphic-design office, and into our suite.

Ellie smiled warmly at Monica. “I see you found him, Miss Adair.”

“Yes, Ellie, thank you,” said Monica.

“Good luck.”

I gave my secretary a wary look as I led Monica into my office. When I had her seated, I stepped back out.

“Ellie, do me a favor and call Detective McDeiss. I need to hand over some evidence to him as soon as possible.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Carl.”

“And ask him if he could set up a meeting with Mr. Slocum and that fed, Jenna Hathaway, for this afternoon, okay?” I paused, thought about something. “Ellie, why did you wish our Miss Adair good luck?”

“She said she’s looking for her sister. I hope she finds her.”

“Right,” I said.

“Are you going to help her, Mr. Carl?”

“I think she’s a little beyond my help, Ellie. Thank you, and let me know right away when you hear back from McDeiss.”

When I returned to the office, Monica was standing behind my desk, leaning back, arms crossed, examining the framed photograph of Ulysses S. Grant hanging crookedly on the wall. “He looks like my Uncle Rupert,” she said.

“He looks like everybody’s Uncle Rupert,” I said. “Can we get started? I have a busy day and it’s already taken a turn for the worse.”

She winced at that, slightly, nothing big, but a wince just the same. I watched her as she moved away from the photograph and sat in the client chair in front of my desk. She was twisting her lips, as if she
were trying to figure out why I was being such a jerk. Good luck to her. I wasn’t quite sure why myself, though there was no doubt that I was.

“All right, Ms. Adair,” I said.

“Oh, we’re all formal now, are we?” she said with a slight smile.

“Yes, that is what we are,” I said. “So what can I do for you?”

“I want to hire you.”

“To do what?”

“To find my sister.”

I sighed for effect. “This sister who disappeared before you were born.”

“That’s right. I want you to find Chantal.”

“I’m not a private detective, Ms. Adair. I can refer you to one if you’d like.”

“I want you.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. It’s not what I do.”

“What do you do, Victor?”

“I primarily defend people accused of crimes.”

“And that’s more important than finding a missing girl?”

“No, and it’s not more important than being a teacher or a doctor, or even dancing with my clothes off, but it is what I do.”

“Why are you so mean to me?”

“I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just trying to be honest.”

“But you’re being mean.”

“What do you want from me, Monica?”

“I want to see it.”

“See what?”

“The tattoo.”

“Gad, no. Forget it. There is no way.”

“Please.”

“Absolutely not. I’m starting to get very uncomfortable here. I’m sorry I can’t help you with your sister, but right now this meeting is over.”

“Every place I go, I check the phone book,” she said. “Every day I look her up on the Internet. Just to see if there’s anything going on with a Chantal Adair. I know it’s silly, she won’t have the same name if she was taken, but I do it. There are a couple Chantal Adairs out there.
I keep track of them all. They’re not the right ages, but still I feel close to them, as close as family.”

“Monica, you’re starting to weird me out.”

“Is that so weird?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it is. You know those guys who sit all alone in some laboratory, listening in on the static, waiting for a message from outer space?” she said. “That’s me, that’s my life. I’m all alone with my dog and my gun, waiting for a message from my sister. And there’s been nothing. Nothing.” Pause. “Until last week.”

I leaned forward, my interest suddenly piqued. “Really? What happened last week?”

“You,” she said.

It was only then that it dawned on me, with heartbreaking clarity, that I was dealing with a higher level of insanity than I had heretofore previously thought. And I sensed its root cause, too.

We all suffer, from time to time, the spiritual unease that flickers like a faint flame before being doused by a nice chardonnay or a ball game on the tube. What is our purpose? What is our destiny? Is there more to life than this bland string of continuous sensation? We try to stifle our questions with money or love, with sex or politics or God, we try to plaster over the hole as best we can until the very end, when the light dims and the plaster shatters and we’re left alone to wrestle with our doubts through to our final, painful breath. But hey, that’s half the fun of being human.

Yet here, sitting across from me, was a woman who had no existential hole to fill. She had been taught, from her earliest moments on earth, that her life contained a singular purpose. She was conceived and raised and carefully trained to fill the gap created by the loss of her sister. And she had succeeded in her own strange way. Chantal was a precocious little dancer with a pair of ruby slippers, and so Monica became a dancer herself, using her sister’s name as she strutted in red shoes of her own. Chantal loved animals, so Monica owned a maniacal guard dog with a taste for smoked flesh. Chantal had been killed or abducted, and so Monica guarded Chantal’s replacement with a dog and a gun and a series of locks, no doubt, on her door and her heart.
No word had been heard from Chantal in decades, and so Monica dedicated herself to listening for a voice in the ether. If you think it’s tough being born without a purpose in your life, imagine how tragic it must be being born with one.

“Monica, you must know that I am not a message from your sister.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But I do. This is all just a sad misunderstanding. The tattoo was a mistake, and telling you about it was even worse. I’m sorry.”

“Can I see it?”

“No.”

“Please?”

She stared at me with her big blue eyes, the simple, faithful eyes of a baby or a pilgrim. I think maybe those eyes were the reason I had been treating her so badly. They seemed to need too much of me, pleading for me to fill a want I could neither fathom nor satisfy. Her parents must really have done a job on poor Monica. And, in turn, I had been a jerk. I felt ashamed.

“If that’s what you want,” I said. “If that will end all this.”

“Yes, it is what I want.”

I stood up from my desk, walked around it, closed the door and pressed the button on the knob. I sat on the front of my desk and shucked off my jacket. I stuck my finger above the knot of my tie. When I gave it a tug, it slipped down a bit. I tugged it again.

With the tie completely undone and hanging loosely from my collar, I unbuttoned my shirt, slowly, all while she was closely watching. It must have been a strange reversal for her. Now she was in the small locked room, waiting with bated breath as someone else stripped. I had the urge to warn her against being handsy, but the seriousness of her expression stopped me. She was not a drunken frat boy urging the girls on the balcony to lift their shirts, she was the devout, waiting for a glimpse of the miraculous.

I pushed away the edge of my white shirt. She leaned forward, her eyes widened, she tilted her head. “I thought it would be bigger,” she said.

“I get that a lot,” I said.

As she leaned her head still closer to get a better look, she reached out her hand and gently traced the name with her finger.

I pulled back a bit and thought about stopping her, but it felt so strange and comforting, her soft flesh brushing my still-wounded skin, that I let it go on. And when she leaned yet more forward and drew her face closer to the tattooed heart, I found myself waiting, expectantly, for the soft kiss of devotion.

A sharp knock at the door.

She pulled back. I almost clocked her with my elbow as I hastily clutched the front of my shirt together.

I jumped off the desk and said loudly, in a voice strangely high-pitched, “Yes?”

“Mr. Carl,” said Ellie from the other side of the door. “Detective McDeiss called and said he was sending an officer over to pick up the evidence and take a statement. He also said that Mr. Slocum is in court today, and A.U.S.A. Hathaway told him—and this is a quote—‘I never want to see his ugly face again.’”

“Ouch,” I said. “Okay, thank you, Ellie.”

“Do you need anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”

We looked at each other, Monica and I, and then we both turned our heads away in embarrassment. We had let something go a bit too far, and we both knew it. I started buttoning my shirt. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“Well, that’s that, then,” I said as I went to sit behind my desk and started retying my tie. “You can see it’s just a silly tattoo and it has nothing to do with your sister.”

“I suppose.”

“It was actually nice meeting you, Monica, and I wish you luck in the future.”

“That means you’re not taking the case.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Finding a missing person, especially one missing for decades, is not really my thing.”

“And you won’t be coming back to the club?”

“No, it’s not my kind of thing either.”

“So no more dates.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“Oh, right. I guess that’s it, then,” she said, standing. “By the way, the Hathaway you’re meeting with today, is that the police detective?”

“No, she’s a prosecutor. Why?”

“Because it was weird hearing the name. The police detective who was investigating Chantal’s disappearance was a Detective Hathaway.”

My hands suddenly grew clumsy and the knot I was tying disintegrated.

“My parents still speak very highly of him. Detective Hathaway spent years looking for Chantal. He and my parents became very close. It was like he was one of the family.”

“You don’t say.”

“We haven’t seen him in a while.”

“How old are you, Monica?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And your sister disappeared how many years before you were born?”

“Two. Why?”

“Just thinking, is all.”

“Thank you for showing me the tattoo, Victor. I don’t know what it means, but I won’t annoy you anymore, I promise.”

I watched as she turned around, as she turned the knob, as the button popped and the door opened. I watched and I thought and I tried to make sense of everything.

“Monica,” I said before she was out the door. She turned around again, and she had that look of need and expectation on her face. “Maybe I ought to meet your parents. What do you think?”

My God, she had a beautiful smile.