I watched all this as it played out, watched as the man in the boxy suit retreated back into his van and the two police cars pulled away. I closed the curtains and turned to the old woman, still propped up by the pillows, whose eyes, glistening with the light of the candle, were staring straight at me.
“What did your son do, Mrs. Kalakos?” I said.
“Only what I said.”
“You haven’t told me everything.”
“They are hounding him for spite.”
“Spite?”
“He was a thief, that is all.”
“The FBI doesn’t spend fifteen years searching for a common thief out of spite.”
“Will you help me, Victor? Will you help my Charlie?”
“Mrs. Kalakos, I don’t think I should get anywhere near this case. You’re not telling me everything.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Not after seeing that van.”
“You sure you not Greek?”
“Pretty sure, ma’am.”
“Okay, there may be something else. Charlie had four close friends from childhood. And maybe, long time ago, these friends, they pulled a little prank.”
“What kind of prank?”
“Just meet him, meet my Charlie. He can’t come into city no more, but he can be nearby. We set up meeting point for you already.”
“A bit presumptuous, don’t you think?”
“New Jersey. Ocean City boardwalk, Seventh Street. He be there tonight at nine.”
“I don’t know.”
“At nine. Do for me, Victor. As favor.”
“As favor, huh?”
“You do for me, Victor. Work it out, make deal, do something so my boy, he come home and say good-bye. To say good-bye, yes. And to fix his life, yes. You can work that?”
“I think that’s beyond a lawyer’s brief, Mrs. Kalakos.”
“Bring him home, and you tell your father after this we’re even.”
I thought about why the FBI might be so interested still in Charlie Kalakos fifteen years after he fled his trial. Charlie was a thief, had said his mother. And long ago Charlie and his friends had pulled a little prank. That van outside told me it must have been a hell of a little prank. Maybe there was an angle in Charlie’s long-ago prank and the FBI’s strangely keen interest in it for me to find a profit.
“You know, Mrs. Kalakos,” I said after I did all that thinking, “in cases like this, even when I take it on as a favor, I still require a retainer.”
“What is this retainer?”
“Money up front.”
“I see. It is like that, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
“Not only a Greek face but a Greek heart.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“I have no money, Victor, none at all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“But I might have something to interest you.”
Slowly, she rose from the bed, as if a corpse rising from her grave, and made her way creakily, painfully, to a bureau at the edge of the room. With all her strength, she opened a drawer. She tossed out a few oversized unmentionables and slid open what appeared to be a false bottom. She reached both hands in and pulled out two fistfuls of golden chains glinting in the candlelight, silver pendants, broaches filled with rubies, strings of pearls, two fistfuls of pirate’s treasure.
“Where did you get that?” I said.
“It is from Charles,” she said as she stumbled toward me with the jewelry dripping from her hands, falling from her hands. “What he gave me long ago. He said he found in street.”
“I can’t take that, Mrs. Kalakos.”
“Here,” she said, thrusting it at me. “You take. I have saved for years for Charlie, never touched. But now he needs me. So you take. Don’t spend until he is back, that is all I ask, but take.”
I let her drop it all into my hands. The jewelry was heavy and cold. It felt as if it held the weight of the past, yet I could feel its opulence. Like foie gras on thin pieces of buttered toast, like champagne sipped from black high heels, like tawdry nights and sunsets over the Pacific.
“Bring my son home to me,” she said, grabbing hold of my lapels with her hands and pulling me close so her foul, pestilential breath washed over me. “Bring my son home so he can kiss my old parched face and tell his mother good-bye.”
3
I walked to my office that afternoon with a light step, despite the pockets of my suit jacket being weighed down with plunder.
The offices of Derringer and Carl were on Twenty-first Street, just south of Chestnut, above the great shoe sign that hung over a first-floor repair shop. We were in a nondescript suite in a nondescript building with no décor to speak of and a support staff of one, our secretary, Ellie, who answered our phones and typed our briefs and kept our books. I trusted Ellie with our financials because she was a trustworthy woman with an honest face, the fine product of a strict Catholic upbringing, and because embezzling from our firm would sort of be like trying to cadge drinks at a Mormon meeting.
“Oh, Mr. Carl, you have a message,” Ellie said as I passed by her desk. “Mr. Slocum called.”
I stopped quickly, put a hand on one of my bulging jacket pockets, turned my head, and searched behind me as if I had been caught at something. “Did he say what he wanted?”
“Only that he needed to talk to you right away.”
I thought about the FBI in the van outside the old woman’s house and the inevitable phone call once they found out who I was. “That didn’t take long,” I said.
“He emphasized the right away part, Mr. Carl.”
“Oh, I bet he did.”
When I reached my own office, I closed the door behind me, sat at my desk, and carefully pulled out the chains and the broaches, the heavy mass of jewelry, letting it all slip deliciously through my fingers into a small, rich pile upon my desk. In the bright light of the fluorescents, it all seemed a little less brilliant, tarnished, even. I supposed the old lady wasn’t into polishing her son’s ill-gotten gains. Just then I had no idea how much it all was worth, and I wasn’t intending to swiftly find out either. The last thing I needed to do was draw attention to the jewelry, being that my legal title to what was undoubtedly stolen property could only be considered dubious. No, I wasn’t going to let anyone, not anyone, know about what the old lady had given me.
There was a light tap on my door. I quickly shoveled the swag into a desk drawer, closed the drawer with a thwack.
“Come in,” I said.
It was my partner, Beth Derringer.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Nothing.”
She looked at me as if she could see right through my lie. She tilted her head. “Where were you this morning?”
“Doing a favor for my father.”
“A favor for your father? That’s a first.”
“It surprised me, too. An old lady wants me to negotiate a plea deal for her son.”
“Do you need any help?”
“Nah, it should be easy enough, or would be if the FBI wasn’t suspiciously interested in the guy.”
“Did we get a retainer?”
“Not yet.”
“And you took it without a retainer? That’s not like you.”
“I’m doing a favor for my father.”
“That’s not like you either. What’s in the drawer?”
“What drawer?”
“The one you slammed shut before I came in.”
“Just papers.”
She stared at me for a moment to figure out if it was worth pursuing, decided that it wasn’t, which was a relief, and dropped down into one of the chairs in front of my desk.
Beth Derringer was my best friend and my partner and, as my partner, was rightfully entitled to one half of the retainer given me by Zanita Kalakos. I wasn’t pulling a Fred C. Dobbs here, I had not been driven mad by the sight of gold and was intending to stiff Beth of her fair share. But Beth’s ethics were less flexible than mine. If she knew what Mrs. Kalakos had given me, and the likelihood of from where it had come, she would have felt obligated to turn it all over to the rightful authorities. She was that kind of woman. I, on the other hand, figured the jewelry had been stolen long ago from the rich, who had already been reimbursed by their insurance companies, and so saw no reason to fight against my Robin Hood tendencies. Isn’t that how he did it, take from the insurance companies and give to the lawyers? So the jewels and chains would stay safely and secretly in my desk drawer until I found a way to turn them into cash, and I already had an idea of just how to do that.