Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 123, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 751 & 752, March/April 2004

And If He Sees His Shadow by Jeremiah Healy

Jeremiah Healy, author of 13 novels featuring the protagonist of this story, John Francis Cuddy, also writes legal thrillers under his pseudonym Terry Devane. The third and latest Devane novel, A Stain Upon the Robe, features attorneys Mairead O’Clare and Sheldon Gold as they become involved in Boston’s priest-rape crisis. The book has been optioned by Flatiron Films, and “Terry”/Jerry will be the American Guest of Honour at the 2004 Toronto Bouchercon.

I parked my aging Honda Prelude on a side street, and while the six-paneled wooden door in the slumping brick building displayed the right address, I had a feeling that the insurance agency probably fronted on the main drag. Turning the corner, I could see tarnished chrome handles standing out from two glass doors, the words THOMAS G. FLAHERTY — INSURANCE — ALL KINDS emblazoned in peeling silver letters at eye level. I took a breath and pulled on the closer handle.

A string of sleigh bells rang out. We were a lot closer to Easter than Christmas, though, so I assumed the low-tech warning system was a year-round thing.

Inside the doors were clear glass partitions, what seemed a secretarial or clerical area to the right, a more executive office to the left. The wood paneling on the wall was separating at the ceiling, and the only light at seven P.M. came from one of those green-shaded, fluorescent desk lamps everybody had when I first entered insurance investigation after Vietnam.

Tommy Flaherty rose from behind the desk and lamp. If I hadn’t known this was his place of business, I’d have been hard pressed to recognize him.

When Tommy had worked as a claims investigator for me at Empire Insurance, he’d been slim with a full head of wavy Black-Irish hair and a certain flair for fashion and humor. The man who came around the desk tried for the old smile, but there was no spark to it, and the weight he’d added and the hair he’d lost couldn’t save the stained business shirt and poorly knotted tie.

“Hey, John Francis Cuddy,” Tommy said, a damp right hand pumping mine. Concave steel splints kept his left ring finger straight. “Jeez, it’s good to see you.”

“Same, Tommy.”

“Sit, sit.” He waved me to a client chair, padded with good leather once, but either so old or so neglected that little puffs of white stuffing oozed from cracks in the seat cushion. Tommy brought a bottle of Jim Beam out of his bottom desk drawer, two short glasses already resting on some papers in front of him.

One of the glasses looked as though it had been there awhile already. “Just a splash for me, Tommy.”

“Aw, come on, John. We haven’t seen each other in how many years?”

I didn’t want to tally them. “Tommy—”

“Hey,” he said, pouring liberally into both glasses, an ounce or so more for the one closer to him. “You heard the joke about the three seminarians?”

Tommy, Tommy. “Will it get us closer to why you wanted to see me?”

“Spirit of the season, John. Spirit of the season.” His right hand shook a little as he passed my glass across the desk. “The head of this seminary’s worried that his place is turning out incompetent priests, right? So, the monsignor decides to call the three students at the bottom of the class into his office, give each one a pop quiz.”

Tommy gulped some of his bourbon without offering a toast. I sipped mine, the burn feeling pretty good.

As though it wouldn’t be a totally wasted evening with a former coworker on what looked to be the downslope of his life.

“Well,” Tommy putting down his glass, “the guy gets the first kid into his office and says, ‘All right, my son, what is Easter?’ And the kid, surprised, replies, ‘Why, Monsignor, Easter is that holiday in the early winter when we decorate pine trees and exchange gifts.’ The monsignor goes, ‘No, you idiot! Pack your bags and get out.’ ”

Tommy coughed a little, taking another gulp of bourbon like it was offered water. “So the guy gets the second kid into his office, and asks the same question, and this kid, also surprised, says, ‘Why, Monsignor, Easter is that holiday in the midsummer when we have picnics and shoot off fireworks.’ And the monsignor — getting kind of pissed now that his suspicions are being confirmed — says, ‘No, you idiot! Pack your bags and get out.’ ”

Seeing a certain pattern developing, I said, “Tommy—”

“—So the guy calls in the third seminarian, and asks him the question. And this kid, seeming kind of disappointed, says, ‘Why, Monsignor, Easter is that holiday in the early spring when we celebrate Christ being crucified and taken down from the cross...’ And the head of the seminary’s starting to think things maybe aren’t so hopeless after all as the kid goes on to say, ‘...and He’s buried, and on the third day He arises from the dead to walk out of His tomb...’ And just as the monsignor’s about to tell the kid he can return to his studies, the third seminarian finishes by saying, ‘...And if He sees His shadow, He goes back in, and we have six more weeks of winter.’ ”

Tommy Flaherty laughed so hard I thought he’d need a Heimlich maneuver, which I wasn’t sure worked on bourbon.

“Well, John,” around a choking sound, “what do you think?”

“Good one, Tommy. Now what do you need me for?”

The choking, and the laughing, stopped pretty much at the same time. “Ah, the truth is, I’ve got kind of a problem.”

“What kind, Tommy?”

“You stayed up on the insurance industry after you left Empire?”

The company had made all of us get private investigator licenses while we worked there. I’d opened up my own shop, and did occasional insurance-claims work, even a few cases for Empire itself. “Some.”

“Well, I have to tell you, John, I got sick of it. Not that you didn’t train us all real good. Hell, I never felt more... professional than when I worked for you back there. Only thing was, I never made any money at it, and so when this uncle of mine wanted to retire to Florida, I took over his agency here.”

I thought I knew what was coming next. “Bad timing.”

“Huh, tell me about it. First, I got eaten alive by all the companies offering their employees health insurance during the boom times. Then I couldn’t get the poor slobs covered once they were laid off in the recession. The big agencies are all doing radio and TV advertising for the auto-liability market, and John, I can’t compete with them on discounts.”

“Which leaves you...?”

“...the life and homeowners policies, but now most of the working stiffs get some kind of group life coverage through the job with premiums that I also can’t touch. And a lot of mortgage banks now dictate what kind of homeowners, ‘oh, and by the way, we offer it for just a little money and a check mark in that box on the form.’ So, what was I supposed to do?”

Uh-oh. “You borrowed from your accounts?”

“Worse.” Tommy tossed off the rest of his drink. “I borrowed from a shark.”

Swell. “Somebody you knew beforehand?”

“Uh-unh. Got a... referral, like.”

“Let me guess. You’re not keeping up with the payment schedule.”

“Keeping up?” Tommy tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite come off, so he poured himself another few ounces of bourbon. “John, the weekly vig amounts to fifty percent of my weekly take.”

The interest, or “vigorish,” on whatever he’d borrowed. “Are you covering at least the vig, though?”

“Most weeks, yes.” Tommy held up his left hand, waggled it in a way that caused a wave of pain to cross his facial features. “Last week, no.”

“The shark broke your finger.”

“Not Tedesco himself. It was this half-colored enforcer he’s got, wears his hair like an Afro, probably trying to get in touch with his ‘darker’ side.”

“Tommy?”

“Yeah?”

“Another racial slur, and you’ll be talking to yourself here.”

“Aw, jeez, John. I’m sorry, I forgot how you were about that kind of—”

“Tommy, what do you think I can do for you?”

He breathed out deeply, a little foulness reaching me even four feet away. “You know why DuPage — the enforcer — broke this finger?”

“Seems pretty clear. Start small, work his way up the—”

“No, John. I mean this finger.” Tommy held up his left hand again, pointing with the index finger on his right to the splinted one. “He was sending me a message. Break the finger with the wedding band on it, guess what he breaks next?”

“Another husband part.”

“Or the ‘wife part.’ ” Tommy’s eyes began to fill. “You never met Hildy, I don’t think.”

Hard for me to say. When my wife, Beth, died from her cancer, a lot of the Empire people paid their respects, but I wasn’t exactly focusing on them, and it was long enough ago any—

“John?”

“Sorry, Tommy.”

“I was getting a little worried about you there.”

“I’m okay. And no, I don’t think I ever met Hildy.”

Tommy blinked away a tear. “She’s the kind of woman, a guy like DuPage gets a look at her, he’d—”

A knock on the glass doors. Tommy jumped in the swivel chair and lurched behind him toward a floor safe, the kind you’d see in an old Wells Fargo office. I looked toward the front of the building.

A couple, maybe Latinos, middle-aged and dressed for church, were peering in, their expressions showing uncertainty.

I turned back and saw Tommy sliding something with a walnut butt into the safe.

“Jesus, Tommy. You still have a permit for that?”

“Kept it up after I left Empire. Smith & Wesson revolver.” He almost seemed relieved by who was knocking. “Clientele I got, there’s always cash coming in to pay last month’s premium. Or the month’s before that.” Tommy wiped his hands on his thighs and squirreled away the liquor bottle. “Look, John, I need to try and sell these people a homeowners’ policy. How’s about you go upstairs, talk to Hildy awhile?”

“Tommy, I—”

“No more than ten, fifteen minutes. Swear.” Then, in a lower voice. “Please?”

If I were in his position... “Okay. She know who I am, at least?”

“Yeah,” said Tommy. “I told her you were coming by, and you can use that door there, goes right up to our apartment.”

As I opened the interior door, some light from the stairway tumbled out and across my face. I turned to close the door behind me, Tommy sprinkling some Spanish words into his greeting for the couple he was ushering back to his desk. I could see my silhouette from the waist up fall across the wall over his safe, and I wondered how many more weeks of winter Tommy Flaherty would be facing.

“Be a dear and hand me those Players, would you?”

I reached over to the kitchen counter from my aluminum-and-acrylic chair and picked up a distinctive teal-and-white pack of what felt like cigarettes, especially since a Bic lighter rested next to it. A portrait of an old-time sailor appeared on the cardboard with a “NAVY CUT” caption beneath the face, and the word “Legere” in the lower right-hand corner of the pack.

“You could toss them to me,” said Hildy Flaherty from the other side of the Formica table, “but it would be ever so much nicer if you brought one over and lit it.”

I hadn’t been real comfortable entering her kitchen from the stairway. Partly it was that she held a cordless hair dryer the size of a ray gun in her right hand, but mostly it was that Hildy’d remained in her robe — a padded-shoulder, belted model — while receiving her husband’s guest. And she had an array of small photos in front of her, all with the same blue background, like an eyewitness scanning mug shots.

“I’m still waiting for that cigarette.”

Hildy watched me as she moved the snout of the nearly silent dryer down her long, curly hair, the left hand raking behind it like Harpo Marx over his strings. The hair was dishwater blond, the eyes a green I couldn’t put a shade-name to. Heavy breasts pressed with enough definition against the fabric of the robe to tell me that Hildy wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and when she crossed her legs, I made sure my eyes stayed on her face.

Which seemed to make the woman smirk. “God, what does a girl have to do to get a... light from you?”

I slid the pack and the Bic over the Formica to her. “I don’t believe in contributing to other people’s bad habits.”

“You Americans,” said Hildy, a sexual heaviness from her bust — or her butts — melding into her voice. “Always the world’s... chaperones.”

More smirk on that last word.

I said, “Canadian?”

“You got that from the cigarettes?” she said, bringing one to life.

“No.”

“That French word — ‘legere’? — means ‘light.’ ”

“Just your accent.”

Confused now behind a cloud of smoke. “You could tell I’m from Toronto?”

It came out “Trannah.” I said, “Your lack of accent, really, sounding American except for the ‘you Americans’ part.”

Setting the Bic and the pack on the table, Hildy leaned forward, the lapels of the robe bowing in a way that suggested she was aware of it without having to look down at them. Then she passed her free hand over the photos. “Pick your favorite.”

“They’re upside down to me.”

“Which can be interesting, in and of itself.”

When I didn’t pick up on that, Hildy made a ceremony out of turning each photo around so I could see them all. Seven head-and-shoulder shots of her — identical shots, actually, except that one captured her current hairdo while the others had slightly blurry versions of radically different styles.

Hildy said, “My salon can do that with this new computer-camera they have. It really shows you a lot of choices.”

“Sometimes too many options can be a burden.”

Hildy cocked her head, then pointed to a photo with the hair cut to maybe two inches all around and permed. “I like this one, but I really do care which you’d choose. I think you’re way more clever than poor Tommy.”

I felt a sudden need to defend him. “He was a good investigator for me.”

“Yeah, well,” Hildy, rolling her shoulders like she’d just awakened, “he’s a lousy salesman for me. I mean, look at this place, would you?”

“We all do what we can.”

Hildy sent out a plume of smoke through her nostrils. “Tommy doesn’t ‘do’ enough. Spends all his time on this broken-down agency, seeing his ‘prospects’ at night — which is a pretty good word for them, ‘prospects.’ Like he’s panning for gold by a stream in the Yukon. Only Tommy swirls through a ton of dirty sand for every nugget he finds, and even that’s not enough.”

I wasn’t sure how much of Tommy’s loan-shark troubles he’d shared with his wife, including the implied threat to her, so I moved to safer ground. “You work yourself?”

A shake of the head, which seemed to remind Hildy to continue drying her long hair. “Too complicated, work permits or green cards or whatever your government requires.”

Didn’t sound like she’d explored things very deeply. “You help Tommy down in the office, then?”

A grunt that I took to be a disgusted laugh. “You see all those desks opposite his?”

“I did.”

“Papers piled on them, telephones and so forth. But why would you suppose he has the ‘prospects’ come in at night?”

“Because they do have jobs during the day?”

“Oh, John, a dig nicely done.” Hildy made her hair shimmer like a waterfall under the dim light of the overhead fixture. “But clever as your reply might be, you’re only partly right. The real reason poor Tommy has the bloody beggars come in at night is so they can’t see that he can’t afford any girls down there to help him during the day.”

I closed my eyes just a moment before opening them again. “He’s on his own.”

“Yes. Oh, I do help him when I can, though. Like with his loan.”

Steady, boy. “His... loan?”

“Yes. The pinhead was owing his ‘carriers’ or whatever those companies are called, and so he had to borrow. Only no self-respecting banker would ever lend on this decrepit operation, so Tommy needed a deep pocket less... discerning.”

Hildy Flaherty had enjoyed some education above the border, but knowledge and wisdom didn’t always come packaged together. “And you found that pocket for him.”

“Let’s just say a friend of mine did.”

Which made her friend Tommy’s referral. “Who?”

“I’m afraid my lips are sealed. Confidentiality and all that.”

I was about to say something I’d probably have regretted when Tommy poked his head through the kitchen doorway. He grinned at his wife, then said, “John, you can come back down now.”

Hildy swung her hair around slowly. “You sell those people?”

“Not tonight, but they’ll be back.”

“Yeah, right,” said Hildy Flaherty, going for another cigarette. “On the twelfth of never.”

“So, John,” said Tommy from his chair across the desk. “What’d you think of Hildy?”

“Attractive woman. Weighs her options before choosing one, too.”

“Weighs...? Oh, you mean the hairstyle thing. Yeah, she’s got an appointment tomorrow afternoon. Likes to look good for going out at night with her friends.”

“Her friends?” was past my mouth before I could yank it back.

“Yeah,” Tommy now rallying to defend his wife to me. “I’m stuck here most nights seeing customers or prospects, but that’s no reason Hildy shouldn’t enjoy her life some, is it?”

“No.” I shifted in my chair. “Tommy, back to this shark?”

“Tedesco. Lou Tedesco. He works out of a bar off Dot Ave.”

Dorchester Avenue. “Just what do you think I can do for you?”

Tommy’s eyes got bright for a moment, maybe seeing he could close some sort of sale that night. “Go talk with him for me. Show the guy I’ve got some solid people on my side.”

“Why would this Tedesco care about that, Tommy?”

“I don’t know if he would, but jeez, John, do I have a choice? I mean, I hear these guys got guns, big ones.”

I thought about Tommy’s wife and her “choices.” And about the other choices he’d already made. “I’ll give it a try.”

Then I got out of there as Tommy Flaherty thanked me and just before he could start crying or resume drinking.

The wind was coming off the water and up her hillside, but it had lost most of its punch by the time it reached the row of granite stones in front of me. I stopped at Beth’s.

John, good to see you.

“And you.”

Any plans for Easter?

Beth and I used to have a big feast with an Italian-American family we’d grown up near in South Boston. But most of that clan had passed on, and many of the rest had moved on.

John?

“Sorry. I’ve got a case that’s making me zone out a little.”

How so?

Watching the gulls wheel and scream by the shoreline, I went over it for her. Tommy, his wife, his debt problems.

A hesitation. Then, What are you going to do?

“Talk to the police, talk to the shark.”

Toward offering him what?

I came back to her stone. “That’s the part I haven’t worked out yet.”

As the waitress served Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi her coffee, I reached for the tab. Leaving a five to cover my hot chocolate as well, I said, “Thanks for agreeing to this on such short notice.”

Alongi — fiftyish, trim, and studiously attractive — looked over the rim of the thick porcelain cup, standard diner-issue. “Lieutenant Murphy in Homicide vouched for you, kind of.”

“We’ve known each other a long time.”

“Murphy said, ‘Cuddy’s a Boy Scout, but the only thing he knows how to tie in knots is his own—’ ”

“I get the picture.”

Alongi gave me a nice smile as she lowered her coffee back to its saucer. “So, you’re wired into Homicide at headquarters, what do you need an area detective for?”

“Her ‘area.’ Specifically, a certain bar.”

“Being?”

I named it for her. Alongi leaned back in the booth. “Let me bet a long shot here. Lou Tedesco.”

“You should play the lottery.”

“I do, but Tedesco’s a little easier to predict. He muscling one of your friends?”

“Through a valued associate.”

“DuPage.” Alongi nodded to herself. “He must have a second name, but I’ve never heard anybody use it. And I don’t know about the ‘valued’ part.”

A first ray of hope. “What do you mean?”

“Word on the street is master and pit bull aren’t getting along too well.”

“Reason?”

“Don’t know. So far as I can tell, their operation runs pretty smoothly, which probably means pretty profitably, too.”

“Is Tedesco connected?”

Alongi grew a little straighter on her bench seat. “You asking me that because of his last name or mine?”

“Both.”

A hint of smile again as she took more coffee. “Murphy said you were frank to a fault.”

I waited.

Alongi gestured with her cup. “To save you having to repeat your question, no, Tedesco’s an independent. After the Angiulo Brothers went down in that FBI mega-case, things got kind of loosey-goosey in their old spheres of influence. Lou sensed a niche and filled it.”

“You know them to use violence?”

“What, Tedesco and DuPage?”

“Our current topic of conversation.”

“Tedesco, no. Oh, he might belt some poor guy while DuPage pinned the pigeon’s arms, but Lou fancies himself more the managerial type. DuPage, now, is a different story. Mostly his hands, but word also has it that if he were to open that trenchcoat he always seems to be wearing, you might see an Intratec Tec-9 hanging from a strap.”

Semiautomatic nine-millimeter, thirty-some rounds and nearly as big as Hildy Flaherty’s hair dryer. Which made me think of her husband’s finger, and also gave me an idea. “You ever collar these goons?”

“No. Never caught them dirty on the sharking or the weapons stuff.”

I thought over what Alongi had told me. “Without an arrest, it seems kind of odd that you’d know Tedesco by his first name but not DuPage.”

She slid out from her side of the booth. “Not so odd, since Lou and I went through high school together.”

“Oh,” I said.

Rising from the bench seat and smoothing down her skirt, Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi looked at our tabletop. “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine, now, you want to grow up like Captain Midnight.”

It took me a day to get the supplies I wanted from both a medical supply house and a friendly firearms dealer, so it wasn’t till the following evening that I entered the bar Tommy Flaherty had given me as Tedesco’s place of business. If the ceiling had been higher, and the furniture better, you’d might have thought you’d been transported to the lobby of the United Nations.

A black jazz group was gamely trying to play dance music in a corner, Caribbean-American from the accent of the lead singer. Some Cambodian faces sat as far across the room as possible from some Vietnamese ones. Several conversations in what I took for Arabic were flourishing at the bar, and another I knew to be Spanish bubbled up from behind me. A couple of patrons glanced at my right hand, some even making way for me as I edged to the closest tender.

His face and accent suggested Pakistani as he asked if he could help me.

“I’m looking for Lou Tedesco.”

Neither the face nor the accent changed, but a little catch caused his next two words to stumble a mite. “He is... not a man I know, sir.”

“You know DuPage?”

“Sir, I can provide you a drink, or—”

“—I can ask each of your customers if they know my friends. How would that be for business, do you suppose?”

A resigned tone now. “You are police?”

“If I were, could you have pushed me this far?”

The keep nodded, then pointed to a stool while his other hand picked up a phone from below the bar.

You saw him on the street, you’d give him a wide berth, because he’d perfected the walk.

A man in a modest Afro, with barely tinted skin and a belted trenchcoat, came out from a narrow hallway in the back. His hips rolled in a cock-of-the-roost way, his strides more like struts. As he saw me, there was no recognition in his face, but he unbuckled the belt of his coat anyway.

When the man drew even with me, I waited till he opened his mouth before jumping in first. “You wear that thing inside, too?”

DuPage just eyed me, a tiger shark’s stare from a loan shark’s muscle. “The hell are you to care, Slick?”

“John Francis,” I said, using a slight alias. “And I’d like to see Mr. Tedesco.”

“And why would that be?”

“How’s about we all three go over that together?” DuPage signaled to the bartender, just an ambiguous wave, but the keep picked up the phone again.

“Okay, Slick. Hold it right there.”

We’d gotten about two-thirds of the way down the narrow corridor in the back of the bar. I was about to speak when DuPage followed up with, “You play patty-cake with that wall.”

He spread-eagled me against the crumbly plaster, frisking me efficiently. I wasn’t wearing a gun, and I’d taken my investigator ID out of my pocket as well. DuPage was even polite enough to let my right hand alone.

After finishing, he nudged me along the corridor till we reached the door at its end. He knocked in a staccato code, then opened it and waved me over the threshold.

The office had probably been a storeroom at one time, given the heating and venting ducts running overhead and the concrete floor echoing a little beneath my heels. The desk looked even worse than Tommy Flaherty’s, and I had the feeling the man behind it wasn’t heavily into appearances.

Lou Tedesco was strong through the neck and shoulders, like he might have done some football or weightlifting, but the pleasures of conspicuous consumption had taken their toll via the jowls and wattles hanging over an open-collared sport shirt. His fingers were pudgy, too, and I guessed the three rings on his left hand hadn’t ventured over their knuckles since a good fifty pounds ago.

Without rising, Tedesco said, “You wanted to talk to me, so talk.”

There was a chair too shabby for the lounge out front, and I sat in it. DuPage slid up against the wall, arms parting the trenchcoat and taking out cigarettes.

Distinctive pack, too. Teal-and-white cardboard.

I spoke to Tedesco. “A friend of mine told me you might be able to help out with a loan.”

A shrug that didn’t come from ignorance. “You got friends, I got friends. Sometimes we do favors for our friends, am I right?”

“You loaned this particular friend some money, and he’s having some trouble paying it back.”

DuPage lit up, blowing his smoke out the corner of his mouth farther from me, so as not to blur his line of sight. Tedesco waved a hand in front of his face long before any smoke could have reached him.

Then Tedesco shrugged again. “This economy, it’s tough for everybody.”

“Except not every creditor breaks bones.”

DuPage spit a bit of tobacco onto the floor. Tedesco frowned but didn’t speak.

From the wall, the enforcer said, “That what somebody did to you, Slick?”

I raised my bandaged right hand gingerly, the gauze covering everything up to the wrist like a white boxing glove. “Burn, actually.”

DuPage huffed out some more smoke. “Somebody be doing their collecting with fire now?”

“You moron,” said Tedesco. “Who you ever hear collected using fire?”

DuPage bristled. “Was the reason I asked.”

“Yeah, well, how’s about next time you think first, huh?” Tedesco turned back to me. “Those cancer nails haven’t destroyed what little brains you started the game with.”

Marilyn Alongi had said all was not hearts and flowers between the two.

Tedesco stayed focused in my direction. “Look, the bartender, he tells me your name’s ‘John Francis.’ Is that square?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mr. Francis, let me tell you something, then. All those people you saw out there in the lounge, how many of them you think a bank’s gonna lend to, huh? I can tell you. Zero. Half of them are illegal, and the other half’re running from something in their own country more than to something over here. But they’re in the States now, so they need money to grease the wheels. I loan it to them, and these clients are grateful, refer me other business. They’re so grateful, in fact, they pay their loans back to me, so my houseboy here don’t have to go out cracking heads.”

If DuPage bristled before, he nearly boiled over now. “I been telling you, Lou, you don’t—”

“It’s ‘Mr. Tedesco,’ we got business people in front of us. You don’t show me no respect, how you expect they gonna?”

Tedesco did that last in street-black dialect. DuPage’s nostrils were flared wide in a way that I didn’t think had to do with the cigarette smoke now belching from them.

The fat man said, “How many times I got to give you a lesson before it sinks in?”

DuPage said, “Lessons, they something runs both ways.”

Tedesco bit back his reply, then turned to me. “Mr. Francis, what I’m saying here is that I run a business, strictly business, so if your friend says—”

“Is it strictly business for DuPage here to refer you clients that he’s sleeping with?”

A leap of faith, but the only card I had to play.

Lou Tedesco’s face grew red. “What?”

Glancing up at his enforcer, I said, “Well, to be technical, DuPage is sleeping with your client’s wife, but that’s how you got the referral.”

Tedesco’s face turned toward DuPage as it veered toward purple. “You’re hosing one of my—”

“Slick here don’t know what he’s talking about.”

I said, “There another reason why you smoke her brand?”

“Say what?”

I pointed to the nearly-gone cigarette in his hand. “Players Light, from Canada.”

Tedesco’s voice had a grinding quality to it. “You sonofabitch, you just started smoking those wolf turds and told me—”

DuPage dropped his cigarette to the floor, mashing it out with the toe of his shoe. “I do what I want.”

Tedesco screamed. “You stone-stupid half-breed, you don’t stamp your butts out on my floor! I told you once, I told you a hundred times.”

DuPage flapped open the right side of his trenchcoat, the belt flailing in the air. “I give you a hundred times of something.”

The Tec-9 chattered through most of its clip, though thanks to the initial report inside the enclosed room, I didn’t hear the slugs that followed. Tedesco shuddered in his chair like an urban cowboy riding a mechanical bull. Staying seated myself, I brought my right hand up slowly. When I gauged that DuPage realized he should save a few rounds to share with the eyewitness, the little derringer under my bandages hiccuped four times against my palm. DuPage slumped into the wall behind him before sliding down it, his torso trailing a smear of blood from a through-and-through wound.

Then I remembered to breathe again. That acrid smell of cordite filled my lungs with memories, none of them especially happy ones.

In the lounge, the three of us sat at the table the Cambodians had been using. Lieutenant Robert Murphy had his back to the office area, the medical examiner’s people not yet having released the bodies from the crime scene. A gold pen nearly disappeared in Murphy’s large black hand as he jotted notes on a little spiral pad such as a journalist might use. Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi didn’t have to take any notes, since there wasn’t any crime in her area beyond the killings themselves.

“Just so we have it straight,” said Murphy, his pen coming up and tapping against his collar stay under a stylish tie, “you called me, I gave you Alongi, and you spoke to her before coming here, all over Tedesco and his sidekick muscling one of your friends.”

“Right. Tommy Flaherty.”

“And despite the fact that this friend of yours owed the late Lou some considerable bread, instead of just throwing you out on your ass, DuPage and Tedesco get into a name-calling contest with each other.”

“The effect I have on some people.”

Alongi said, “Lieutenant, I did tell Cuddy there was some kind of hassle brewing between the two of them. I just didn’t know what.”

Murphy hooded his eyes to slits. “And you, Cuddy, just had to stir the brew, huh?”

“I really wasn’t involved in their give-and-take.”

He reached down, came up with two Evidence baggies, each containing a firearm. “DuPage gave to Tedesco, and DuPage took from you.”

The little derringer I’d bought didn’t look like much next to the Tec-9. “A pepperbox, four twenty-two caliber hollow-points.”

Alongi said, “They were enough.”

“Look, folks, I didn’t come here to kill anybody. I was just trying to help a friend.”

The lieutenant closed up his pad. “Why don’t we all pay a visit to your Mr. Flaherty, then.”

I said, “Might want to call first.”

Alongi said, “I tried twice. No answer.”

As the three of us rose from our table, the M.E.’s people cleared the back corridor, wheeling a gurney holding a filled body bag, some bulk slopping over the edges.

Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi clucked her tongue off the roof of her mouth. “And to think, I nearly went to the prom with that guy.”

“Looks pretty dark in there.”

I said, “Lieutenant, he keeps it pretty dark.”

Murphy turned to me, then spoke to Alongi. “Side door?”

“I knocked. No answer.”

As Murphy said, “Batting a thousand,” I thought I caught something move in the dim light inside, near Tommy’s desk. Then I saw the movement again and identified it.

“Lieutenant, there’s somebody down in there.”

“Where?”

I pointed. “Bare legs, rolling a little on the floor.”

Alongi said, “Side door’d be easier to force.”

Murphy said, “Let’s hit it.”

When we arrived at the door, I looked to Murphy, and he nodded. I cocked my right foot over the door knob and kicked out, just below the lock. The jamb splintered enough for me to shoulder through it.

“All right,” said Murphy. “I’m in first, Alongi behind me. Cuddy, you wait till tomorrow. Got it?”

We both nodded as Alongi drew her Glock and Murphy unholstered his own.

I followed them, close enough to Alongi to touch her shoulder blades. Even without having smelled it within the hour, there was no mistaking the cordite pong still hanging in the air. The smell got stronger as we reached Tommy’s office up front.

Dim light spilling from the doorway to the couple’s second-floor apartment showed us an image I still can’t shake.

Tommy Flaherty, on his knees, cradling Hildy’s head in his lap and stroking her hair. He’s keening softly, almost to himself. There are irregular blotches on her robe and flesh, like somebody’s slapped a brush — saturated with red paint — four or five times against her. On the floor to Tommy’s right lies his Smith & Wesson four-inch; on the floor to Hildy’s left, her cordless hair dryer.

Since the revolver was within Tommy’s reach, Murphy edged over to it, Alongi covering him. With his foot, the lieutenant slid the gun away like a soccer player in slow motion. Then Murphy let his own weapon slump down against the outside of his thigh.

He said, “What happened here?”

Tommy clenched his jaw, then managed, “I was over... by the safe... Closed a policy, putting the cash inside... A door opened, and I looked up, and it was DuPage, against the wall there.”

My eyes went up above the safe. Jesus.

Tommy howled like a dog locked in a shed. “Only it wasn’t DuPage, it was his shadow... And after I turned with the revolver and fired, it wasn’t even his shadow, jeez, it was Hildy’s, with her robe like his coat — the belt and all — and her hair dryer like a machine gun, and... and...”

Tommy Flaherty just stroked the hair of his dead wife, the style fresh from the salon, her probably just wanting his take on it after shampooing. Only the style she’d chosen from among the photos I’d seen was the two-inch all-around perm.

A lot like an Afro, at least in silhouette.

Sergeant Detective Marilyn Alongi said, “Mother of God.”

I thought, “And if he sees his shadow...” but kept it to myself.