She laughed. “My God, you get more cynical every day.”
“It’s just that over the years I’ve learned that most people in prisons deserve to be there.”
“I don’t believe that of François.”
“And you could tell by looking in his eyes.”
“Yes.”
“See, but you can’t. That’s just the way of it, Beth. He might be innocent, he might be guilty, he might be a saint, he might certainly be a sinner, but whatever he is, you can’t tell by looking in his eyes. The eyes aren’t the window to the soul, they are just sacks of jelly.”
She stayed quiet for a moment, unhappy, I could tell, with her cynical partner.
“You want to stop for lunch?” I said.
“And charge it to the client?”
“Sure, but we’ll consult about the case over Cokes and a burger. I could use a burger.”
“Victor.”
“All right, no lunch, but we still have one more visit.”
“Where?”
“The intersection of Whitaker and Macalester, just next to Juniata Park,” I said.
“What’s there?”
“Someone who might know how Seamus Dent was killed.”
The sergeant sat hunched at his desk, heavy eyebrows raised wearily. He looked as tired as the entire squat brick building, swamped as it was with a steady torrent of crime. There are twenty thousand auto thefts a year in Philadelphia, twenty thousand a year, every year, year upon year. And against all odds, the great majority of these cars are recovered. What condition they are recovered in is another story, but they are recovered still, and the center of this Sisyphean effort is the Philadelphia Police Department Auto Squad.
“Did you file a report with your local district?” said the sergeant when he saw us walk in the door.
“No,” said Beth.
The sergeant breathed in heavily. He seemed too exhausted to get upset at this failure of protocol, too exhausted even to shrug. “You have to file a report with the local district.”
“I don’t want to file a report,” said Beth.
“You don’t got no choice. It’s procedure.”
“But my car wasn’t stolen.”
The sergeant scratched his nose with his thumb. “This is the auto squad, lady,” he said. “We don’t do televisions.”
“My television wasn’t stolen either.”
The sergeant wiggled his eyebrows. They looked like caterpillars sliding along a pale leaf. I almost felt sorry for him.
“The way I remember it,” I said, leaning on his desk, “it was Who on first, What on second, and I Don’t Know on third.”
“Mister,” said the sergeant, “I might have some idea of what you’re talking about, except I don’t speak Greek.”
“I’ll make it easy on you.” I slowed down my speech, as if I were talking to a Frenchman. “We’re looking for Detective Gleason.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so from the start?”
“You didn’t give us a chance,” said Beth. “Is he in?”
“Yeah,” said the sergeant, picking up his phone. “Elvis is in the building. Who’s looking for him?”
“Tell Detective Gleason that Victor Carl is here for a visit. That will be sure to make his day.”
14
“Hey, hey, hey,” said Detective Gleason, not deigning to rise from behind his desk and greet us. “My old bad-luck charm, Victor Carl, here to ruin an already lousy day.”
“How have you been, Detective?”
“Taking care of business,” he said, his voice deep and slightly southern. “I haven’t seen you since you called me a liar on the stand in the DeStafano murder trial.”
“Nothing personal,” I said. “Just doing my job.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “Nothing personal on my side either, when I called you a scum-sucking piece of crap with his head up his ass, to that reporter waiting outside the courtroom.”
“I wanted to thank you for the plug,” I said. “They spelled my name right, which is all I care about. You’re looking swell.”
“I got lucky. After ten years of humping homicide, I finally pulled a cushy spot here in the auto squad. Two years to my twenty, and then I can sit back, smell the roses. Can’t you see how happy I am?”
“You’re positively glowing.” Except he wasn’t, was he? Beyond the false smile, I could sense something defeated in him. He was a tall, thin man with arrogant sideburns that tapered wide at the base, but there always seemed to be something anxious in the surface of his hatchet face. With his bulging eyes, he had never presented the cocksure arrogance of the usual homicide dick. Instead he had the perpetually startled expression of a man who had just accidentally swallowed a squirrel. And it looked as if the squirrel had finally gotten the best of him.
“Can we sit?” I said.
He stared at me as he rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and I caught a brief whiff of something sweet, sweet as bourbon. The thing about Gleason was that, despite his dated style and startled expression, he had always been a pretty sharp cop, first on vice and then at homicide. But there was something going on with him now, something not right. Maybe he had started drinking and that had thrown him off his game, or whatever had thrown him off his game had started him to drinking. It didn’t matter much, did it? He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and then pointed at a couple of chairs in front of other desks.
I pulled two around to face him, and we sat. “Detective Gleason, I’d like you to meet Beth Derringer.”
“Hello, little darling,” he said. “How’s the world treating you?”
“Other than the fact that I’m not little and not a darling,” she said, “it’s treating me just fine.”
“Relax,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing. Prickly, isn’t she?”
“Beth’s my partner,” I said.
“Well, that explains that. So who are you here for today, Victor? Another drug dealer? Another leg breaker? Or is some hard-luck angel looking to slime his way out of grand theft auto?”
“Today it’s your garden-variety murderer,” I said.
“Homicide’s in the Roundhouse.”
“We’re in the right place.”
“Is that so? The perp anyone I know?”
“François Dubé,” said Beth.
Did something flit through his eyes at the name, some fearful sense of recognition? Or was I only imagining it? It wasn’t easy to tell with his strangely haunted expression.
“I remember the Dubé case,” said Gleason, leaning back in his chair, crossing his hands over his chest. “Wife killer, tried about three years ago. Went down hard, I believe. Life. That was Torricelli’s case. Talk to him.”
“But Seamus Dent was yours,” I said.
It looked for a moment as if the squirrel he had swallowed was trying to scamper back up his throat. “There’s no connection,” said the detective.
“Sure there is. Seamus Dent testified at the François Dubé trial, put the defendant smack at the scene of the crime.”
“Oh, yeah, right. There might have been something about that in the file. But it didn’t have anything to do with what went down with the kid.”
“What did go down, exactly?” I said.
“Not totally clear. It happened in a crack house in Kensington, one of the floaters that flit from abandoned house to abandoned house. There was a rip-it-up about something. One rumor said it was over territory, another said it was over money, another said it was over a girl. Or maybe it was just because. There’s always a reason, isn’t there? It’s hard to find out what’s happening when the only witnesses are addicts, who scatter like cockroaches at the first pop of pistols. But we got a pretty good description of the fight before the shot.”
“Who was arguing?”
“The victim, Dent, and some self-styled gangster and rap impresario, went by the street name of Red Rover. There were hard words, hard knocks. Then, as Red Rover took a swing, Dent side-kicked him in the face. Hurt him bad, but not bad enough. On the floor now, Red Rover rolled over, pulled a Glock 9 from his belt, and shot Dent in the forehead. Western Unioned him to Nothingville.”