Bitter Truth (20 page)

24

I
SPENT MUCH of the next morning inside my office, door closed, reading the news reports in the
Inquirer
and the
Daily News
about the shootout on the Schuylkill Expressway. The information was sketchy. The white van had been found deserted in Fairmount Park. Police were still searching for clues as to the identity of the hit men but there were still no suspects. Authorities had confirmed that Raffaello was inside the Cadillac when it was attacked and was now in a hospital in serious condition, but no one, for obvious reasons, would say where. The police would state only that Raffaello and the unidentified driver of the car were both cooperating. There were reports, though, of another occupant, a white male, tall, thin, in a blue suit, who may have fallen from the car near the zoo. My skin crawled as I read about the mysterious figure stumbling his way across the street. The sighting was made by a balloon vendor outside the zoo entrance but the police apparently were discounting the story. Still, it worried me, and I pored over the reports nervously looking for any other information.

After I had read the papers, twice, I began playing catch-up at the office, returning phone messages, responding to letters, filing motions to continue those matters that I didn’t have time to deal with just then, freeing up my afternoon and the many days to follow. I was, in effect, putting off the whole of my practice while I pursued my ill-starred quest for a chunk of the Reddman fortune. When I cleared my calendar for the next week, I took a deep breath, grabbed a file, stuffed it in my briefcase, and sneaked out of the office, heading for Rittenhouse Square. Before my dinner meeting with Caroline Shaw and Franklin Harrington I had some things I needed to check on.

Rittenhouse Square is a swell place to live, which is why so many swells live there. It is the elegant city park. There are trees and wide walkways and a sculpture fountain in the middle. Society ladies, plastic poop bags in hand, walk their poodles there; art students, clad all in black to declare their individuality, huddle; college dropouts looking like Maynard G. Krebs walk by spouting Kierkegaard and Mr. Ed in the same breath; hungry homeless men sit on benches with handfuls of crumbs, luring pigeons closer, ever closer. It is a small urban pasture, designed by William Penn himself, now imprisoned by a wall of stately high-rises jammed with high-priced condominiums: The Rittenhouse, the Dorchester, the Barclay. It was the Cambium I was headed for now, a less imposing building on the south side of the park, hand-wrought iron gates, carved granite facings, million-dollar duplexes two to a floor. A very fashionable place to die, as Jacqueline Shaw had discovered.

“Mr. Peckworth, please,” I said to the doorman, who gave me a not so subtle look that I didn’t like. I was dressed in a suit, reasonably well groomed, my shoes may have been scuffed, sure, but not enough to earn a look like that.

“Who then can I say is visiting this time?” he asked me.

“Victor Carl,” I said. “I don’t have an appointment but I expect he’ll see me.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure he will,” said the doorman.

“Do we have a problem here?”

“No problem at all.”

“I don’t think I said anything funny. Do you think what I said was funny or is it just the way I said it?”

“I did not mean in any way to…”

“Then maybe you should stop smirking and get on the phone and let Mr. Peckworth know I’m here.”

“Yes sir,” he said without a smile and without a look.

He called up and made sure the visit was all right. While he called I looked over the top of his desk. The stub of a cigar smoldered in an ashtray, a cloth-bound ledger lay open, the page half filled with signatures. When the doorman received approval for my visit over the phone he made me sign the ledger. A few signatures above mine was a man from UPS. “All UPS guys sign in?”

“All guests and visitors must sign in,” he said.

“I would have thought they’d just leave their packages here.”

“Not if the tenant is at home. If the tenant is at home we have them sign in and deliver it themselves.”

“That way stuff doesn’t get lost at the front desk, I suppose.”

The doorman’s face tightened but he didn’t respond.

While I waited beside the elevator, I noticed the door to the stairs, just to the left of the elevator doors. I turned back to the doorman. “Can you go floor to floor by these stairs?”

“No sir,” he said, eyeing me with a deep suspicion. “Once inside the stairwell you can only get out down here or on the roof.”

I nodded and thanked him and then waited at the elevator.

Peckworth was the fellow who had seen a UPS guy outside Jacqueline Shaw’s apartment when no UPS guy should have been there. He had later recanted, saying he had confused the dates, but it seemed strange to me that anyone would not remember the day his neighbor hanged herself. That day, I figured, should stick in the mind. On the elevator I told the operator I was headed for the eighth floor. It was an elegant, wooden elevator with a push-button panel that any idiot could work, but still the operator sat on his stool and pushed the buttons for me. That’s one of the advantages of being rich, I guess, having someone to push the buttons.

“Going up to visit them Hirsches, I suppose,” said the operator.

“Are the Hirsches new here?”

“Yes sir. Moved in but just a few months ago. Nicest folk you’d want to meet.”

“I thought there was a young woman living in that apartment.”

“Not no more, sir,” said the operator, and then he looked up at the ceiling. “She done moved out.”

“Where to, do you know?”

“Just out,” he said. “So you going up to visit them Hirsches?”

“No, actually.”

“Aaah,” he said, as if by not going to visit the Hirsches I had defined myself completely.

“Is there something happening here that I’m not aware of? Both you and the doorman are acting mightily peculiar.”

“Have you ever met Mr. Peckworth before, sir?” asked the operator.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well then that there explains it,” said the operator.

“I guess I’m in for a treat.”

“Depends on your tastes is all,” said the operator as the elevator door slid open onto a short hallway. “Step to your right.”

I nodded, heading out and to the right, past the emergency exit, to where there was one door, mahogany, with a gargoyle knocker. A round buzzer button, framed with ornate brass, glowed, but I liked the looks of that knocker, smiling grotesquely at me, and so I let it drop loudly. After a short wait the door opened a crack, revealing a thin stooped man, his face shiny and smooth but his orange shirt opened at the collar, showing off an absurdly wrinkled throat. “Yes?” said the man in a high scratchy voice.

“Mr. Peckworth?”

“No, no, no, my goodness, no,” said the man, eyeing me up and down. “Not in the least. You’re a surprise, I must say. We don’t get many suits up here. But that’s fine, there’s a look of desperation about you I like. My name is Burford and I will be handling today’s transaction. In these situations I often act as Mr. Peckworth’s banker.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well come in, please,” said the man as he swung the door open and stepped aside, “and we’ll begin the bargaining process. I do so enjoy the bargaining process.”

I entered a center hallway lined with gold-flocked paper and then followed Burford into another, larger room that had traveled intact from the nineteenth century. The room was papered in a dark maroon covered with large green flowers, ferocious blooms snaking their way across the walls. There was a dark old grandfather clock and a desk with spindly animal legs and an overstuffed couch and thick carpets and dark Gothic paintings of judges in wigs with a lust for the hangman in their eyes. Thick velvet drapes framed two closed windows, the drapes held to the wall with iron arrows painted gold. The place smelled of not enough ventilation and too much expensive perfume. On one wall was a huge mirror, oval, sitting like a giant cat’s eye in a magnificent gold-leaf frame.

Burford led me to the center of the room and then, as I stood there, he circled me, like a gallery patron inspecting a sculpture he was interested in purchasing.

“My name is Victor Carl,” I said as Burford continued his inspection. “I’m here to see Mr. Peckworth.”

“Let’s start with the tie,” said Burford. “How much for the tie? Is it silk, Mr. Carl?”

“Polyester, one hundred percent,” I said. It was a stiff black-and-red-striped number, from which stains seemed to slide right off, which is why I liked it. Wipe and wear. “But it’s not for sale.”

“Come now, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “We are both men of the world. Everything is for sale, is it not?”

“Yes, actually, that’s been my experience.”

“Well then, fine, we are speaking the same language. Give me a price for your one hundred percent polyester tie, such a rarity in a world lousy with silk.”

“You want to buy this tie?”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“One hundred dollars,” I said.

“A tie like that? You can buy it in Woolworth’s for seven dollars, new. I’ll give you a profit on it, though, seeing that you’ve aged it for us. Let’s say fifteen dollars? Who could refuse that?”

“Is Mr. Peckworth in?”

“Twenty dollars then.”

“I didn’t come here to haggle.”

“Thirty dollars,” said Burford.

“Let me just talk to Mr. Peckworth.”

“Well, forget the tie for the moment. Let’s discuss your socks. Tasty little things, socks, don’t you think? So sheer, so aromatic.”

“One hundred dollars,” I said.

“The thing about socks,” said Burford, “is you take them off, sell them, and all of a sudden you look more stylish than you did before. See?” He hitched up one of his pants legs. A bare foot was stuffed into a tan loafer. “Stylishness at a profit.”

“One hundred dollars.”

“That’s quite high.”

“Each.”

“Did you shower today, Mr. Carl?”

“Every day.”

“Then they wouldn’t quite be ripe enough for the price you are asking. But that tie, that is special. We don’t see enough man-made fibers these days. You don’t happen to have a leisure suit somewhere in the recesses of your closet, do you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Fifty dollars for the tie, but no more. That is the absolute limit.”

“Seventy-five dollars.”

Burford turned his face slightly and stared at me sideways. Then he took a thick roll of bills out of his pants pocket, licked his thumb with pleasure, and flicked out three twenties. He fanned the bills in his hand. “Sixty dollars. Take it or leave it,” he said, smiling smartly.

I took the bills and stuffed them in my pocket.

“Come now, come now,” said Burford. “Let’s have it. Don’t balk now, the deal’s been done, money’s been passed. Time to pay the piper, Mr. Carl.”

At the same time he was demanding my tie he stepped aside, a smooth glide slide to the left which I found peculiar. What that smooth step did, I realized, was clear my view of the large oval mirror so that I would be able to watch myself take off my tie. There was something so neat about that glide slide, something so practiced.

I turned toward the mirror and gripped the knot of my tie with my forefinger and started slipping it down, slowly, inch by inch. “Now that you’ve bought my tie, Mr. Peckworth,” I said to the mirror, “I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

For a moment I felt like an idiot for having spoken to a mirror but then, over an intercom, I heard a sharp voice say, “Take the tie and bring him here, Burford,” and I knew I had been right.

Burford stepped up to me and held open a clear plastic bag. “You’re such a clever young boy, aren’t you,” he said with a sneer.

I dropped the tie in the bag. “I try.”

Burford moved to the desk, where a little black machine was sitting. I heard a slight slishing sound and a thin waft of melting plastic reached me. “Yes, well, I would have paid you the seventy-five. I’ll take you to Mr. Peckworth.”

Peckworth was in a large garish room, red wallpaper, gold trimmings, the ceiling made of mirrored blocks. He was ensconced on a pile of pillows, leaning against steps that ringed the floor of what we would have called a passion pit twenty years ago. There were mounds of pillows and a huge television and a stereo and the scent of perfume and the faint scent of something beneath the perfume that I didn’t want to identify. On one wall was a giant oval window looking into the room in which I had taken off my tie, a two-way mirror.

“Sit down, Mr. Carl. Make yourself comfortable.” Peckworth was a slack-jawed bald man with the unsmiling face of a tax auditor, looking incongruous as hell in his pink metallic warmup suit.

I looked around for a chair, but this was a passion pit, no chairs, no tables, just pillows. I sat stiffly on one of the steps and leaned back, pretending to be at ease.

“I hope you’ll excuse the entertainment with the tie,” said Peckworth in a sharp, efficient voice. “Burford sometimes can’t help himself.”

“I hated to part with it for sentimental reasons,” I said, “but he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Peckworth didn’t so much as fake a smile. “It is nice to be able to mix business and pleasure. Unfortunately, we’ll lose money on the tie, but you’d be surprised how much profit we can earn from our little auctions. The market is underground but shockingly large.”

“Socks and things, is that it?”

“And things, yes.”

I imagined some room in that spacious luxury duplex dedicated to the storage of varied pieces of clothing in their plastic bags, organized impeccably by the ever-vigilant Burford, their scent and soil preserved by the heat-sealed plastic. The reheating directions would be ever so simple: (1) place bag in microwave; (2) heat on medium setting for one minute; (3) remove bag from microwave with care; (4) slit open bag with long knife; (5) place garment over head; (6) breathe deep. Follow the directions precisely and the treasured artifact would be as fresh and as fragrant as the day it was purchased. That’s one of the things I loved about Philadelphia, you could learn about some foul new pleasure every day of the week.