“But there’s work to be done here.”
“I have work, too, and I can’t drop it. It’s about Trish. She’s still missing, and I’m going to help find her.”
In the background, Judy’s eyes flared, and Bennie’s eyes narrowed.
“So it’s not a case. Weren’t you the one telling me you were so inundated with work? Now you can take a day off?”
“I know, I am inundated. But I can’t turn my back on this girl.”
“Your clients are firing you. Is this why?”
Mary felt stricken, wondering how she’d found out.
“I know what goes on here, DiNunzio. It’s my firm.”
“They’re firing me because they think I turned my back on Trish.”
“And you’re doing this for them?”
“No.” Mary shook her head. “I’m doing it for me.”
“Either way, it’s unprofessional and dangerous. Mancuso was in the Mob.”
“I’ll be careful.” Mary reached for her bag. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
“Don’t go. Your place is here.”
“I have to.”
“Are you walking out on me?” Bennie looked as angry as Mary had ever seen her.
“I have to go, Bennie.”
“But I forbid it.”
“I’m sorry.” Mary locked eyes with Bennie, in an interoffice version of the age-old struggle between parent and child. “I have no choice.”
“You always have a choice.” Bennie stiffened. “If you go now, then don’t come back.”
No. Mary felt stricken.
Judy yelped, “Bennie, really? She’s just doing what she thinks is-”
“Enough.” Bennie raised a hand, never taking her eyes from Mary. “DiNunzio, you’re either an associate here or you’re not. If you are, you’ll stay. If you’re not, you’ll go. For good.”
Mary didn’t know what to say. She felt her chest tighten but she couldn’t speak. She didn’t want to cry. She had worked for Bennie for as long as she could remember, but she couldn’t turn her back on Trish, not again. She looked from Bennie to Judy and back again, then decided. She slipped her bag on her shoulder, turned, and left the office without another word.
“Mary!” Judy called after her.
But she didn’t look back. She hurried down the hall, her eyes filling with tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
M ary grabbed the stiff hand strap as the Yellow cab lurched down Market Street and around City Hall in stop-and-go traffic. She had to pick up her car from the impoundment lot; she’d need it for her next move. The morning rush hour was coming on, and the sky was clouding up, as if heaven and earth were on nasty parallel tracks. Mary tried not to take it as a bad sign. Or maybe you saw bad signs everywhere after you’d walked out on your life.
“Reg?” she said into the cell phone, having finally reached Brinkley. “First, I want to explain about last night, about me and Bobby Mancuso.”
“No need.”
“I dated him in high school, and that’s it. I would’ve mentioned it to you but didn’t get the chance, and it’s kind of personal. It really didn’t-”
“No matter, thanks for the tip,” Brinkley said coldly, so Mary moved to her next point.
“Anything new on Trish?”
“No.”
Mary could’ve guessed as much. She’d been checking online like a fiend. “I assume Ritchie and his father didn’t tell you anything last night.”
“Can’t go into that. By the way, I hear you talked to the feds.”
“I thought it would help the cause. I hope that was okay.”
“Sure,” Brinkley said, but Mary wasn’t convinced.
“Did you learn anything from Mancuso’s autopsy?”
“I can’t discuss that with you.”
“I swear, Reg, the more I know, the more I can help.”
“Don’t help. Sorry. Listen, I gotta go.”
“But what about Trish?”
“Mary, we’ll follow up.” Brinkley’s tone softened a little. “We’ll do our job. Go back to work. Make like a lawyer.”
Gulp. Mary pushed those thoughts away. “Just tell me, what did the trace evidence show? I would assume there’d be dirt on his shoes, threads on his clothes, stuff that would show where he’d been and where the house could be-”
“That’s for us, Mary.”
“The feds know who Cadillac is, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
“Please, God in heaven, don’t go anywhere near the Mob.” Suddenly Brinkley sounded like himself again, her pal of old. “If anything happens to you, your mother will never forgive me.”
“Okay, but I thought of something else.” Mary had a new idea this morning. “A good place to look around would be his old friends. Trish’s diary doesn’t mention any old friends, but everybody has old friends. He needed a friend, that’s what his sister told me. If he were going to confide in someone about his house, obviously it wouldn’t be someone in the Mob. It could-”
“Mare, I gotta go. Stay out of it. We’ll find Trish, one way or another. See ya.” Brinkley hung up, and the cab stalled past the federal courthouse, heading east toward the Delaware River.
Mary pressed the button to end the call, feeling suddenly at a loss. She inched farther from Bennie, Judy, and her job, and watched traffic fill Market Street. She was unsure where she was going, even where she’d been. A white SEPTA bus rocked side to side in front of the cab, then took a right turn, unblocking the orangey sun that rose at the end of Market, bathing the street momentarily in a golden light. She squinted at the momentary brightness, then held on tight as it flickered away, thinking to herself.
And planning her next move.
Half an hour later, Mary had parked outside the main entrance of her old high school, St. Maria Goretti. The school occupied a three-story yellow-brick building in the heart of South Philly, at Tenth and Moore Streets. It had since been renamed Neumann-Goretti High School, having merged with its brother school, but it was housed in the same building, remarkably unchanged paneled windows with steel sills and a bank of stainless-steel-framed glass doors. A tall concrete statue of St. Goretti watched over Tenth Street, and Mary hurried past her up the steps, an unexpected lump in her throat as she pulled open the door and stepped inside.
The school was smaller than she remembered, but it smelled the same, an overheated mix of city street, floor wax, and drugstore hair product. It was characteristically quiet because classes were in session; an empty, glistening corridor with tan floor tiles extended ahead of her and to her left. The cinderblock walls had been repainted beige, and the lockers that lined the hall were a matching color. Inside was the same as when she’d been here, except that the walls had been white, and when she turned the corner she stopped short at the sight of the old school uniform, displayed in a glass case, as if she herself were an artifact.
Mary felt a pang, standing there in the fluorescent lights, eyeing the heavy blue jumper with the SMG emblem displayed next to a set of four ribbons, each a different color. The ribbon used to be fastened to the uniform at the underarm, to hold her locker key in her jumper pocket, and they all used to twirl it endlessly, a Goretti trademark. For a minute, she couldn’t leave, standing in front of herself, her emotions rushing back at her, all the joy and shame of her senior year.
Then she straightened up and willed the feelings away. She had to get to work.
Not long after, Mary was sitting in the cozy Development Office, at a spare desk near a turquoise tin of imported almond biscotti, neat piles of the school’s promotional materials, and a coffeemaker. Carolyn Edgar, the development officer, was an attractive middle-aged woman with a warm smile, a chic brush of grayish-blond hair, rimless glasses, and a camel-hair sweater she wore with herring-bone slacks. Mrs. Edgar was new to the school, and her position hadn’t existed when Mary had gone here, before God needed marketing.