Past Due

Chapter 9

THE ENVELOPE.

It was yellowed, worn, one of its edges was ripped halfway down – twenty years will take its toll on even the finest bond – and on the top left corner was a dark black smudge over the preprinted return address: The University of Pennsylvania School of Law. Joey Cheaps had given the envelope to me at the same time he had given me the murder. And if I didn’t tell Beth about it, I had my reasons.

“You take anything off the dead guy?” I had asked Joey Cheaps. “Anything that could help us figure out who he was?”

“You think I would strip the dead like that, Victor? He was dead, there was blood. What do you take me for?”

I didn’t have to say anything, I just stared for a moment. Joey’s eyes peeled away.

“A watch I pawned over at the Seventh Circle on Two Street.”

“Dante’s place?”

“Yeah.”

“Brilliant.” Earl Dante then had been a lower-level mob guy with middling prospects, now he was nùmero uno, with a pallòttola next to his name. “Anything else.”

“A ring, gold, what I gave to my mom.”

“Jesus, Joey.”

“It was her birthday.”

“She still have it?”

“Never takes it off.”

“How gruesome is that?”

“Tell me about it. And something else. It was in his jacket, in an envelope.”

“Go ahead.”

“Photographs.” His eyebrows rose. “Dirty photographs.”

“You give those to your mother too?”

“Shut up. No, them I kept.”

“Did you bring them with you?”

He sat still for a moment and then bobbed his head as he reached into his jacket and pulled out the envelope, old, worn, thickly filled. And here it was, now, in my hand, that selfsame envelope. The University of Pennsylvania School of Law. One of the many fine institutions of higher education that had rejected my application. So our dead Tommy G. was a law student, or a professor, or a clerk, or knew someone related to the school. That was one clue. But the other, more interesting clue was inside.

The first time I had opened the envelope was the night after my meeting with Joey Cheaps. This was just before McDeiss called me to the crime scene, when I still thought I could do something to get my client out of his mess. I had opened the envelope, pulled out the pictures, leafed through them quickly, looking for a clue as to who my client had killed twenty years before, looking for the face of a dead man.

But there was no face. No face at all.

And after moving through them once, quickly, I moved through them again, slowly, and then again, even more slowly, my astonishment growing by the second. They weren’t dirty, as my client had described them, they were anything but.

A single breast, soft and full. The curved arch of a foot. The taut lines of a neck. Fingers posed like dancer’s. A wisp of dark hair over an ear. And then, what was that, with the substance of flesh over long curving bone? A thigh? A hip? It was soft and smooth and supremely abstract. Oh yes, now I saw it, the arch of a back as it moved gently toward the shoulder.

In my hands were pictures of a woman’s body, perfect and strong, young, open. Pictures of a body only, no face, parts of the body separated into their own distinct curves and lines. A body, young and miraculous, universal, dividing itself until each inch of flesh became its own framed landscape with a mysterious, primal pull.

The rise of the clavicle. The run of the scapula. A distinctive mark on the areola of the right breast. The sharp climb of the calf.

They hypnotized me that first time I examined them, fascinated me still, and as I went through them now, once again, for the nth time, I found them burning themselves into my brain. Sitting on my beat up, old red couch, the lamp beside my head the only light in the apartment, a circle of brightness fell from the lamp straight onto the photographs and then through the photographs into a different time and place, into the very past.

Every inch of the woman was worshiped by the camera, every speck highlighted as if a marvel of nature. The landscape of these photographs was pristine. And they hadn’t just captured one woman’s body, they had captured the photographer too, his passion, his utter devotion. In every photograph, as clear as the woman’s flesh and bone, was the picture of an obsessive love guiding his eye as he made his study, like Ansel Adams, drunk with nature, capturing the unblemished beauty of a wildland at dusk.

The jut of the hipbone from the smooth line of her side. The sweet rippling ridge running through the narrow valley of her back.

I made the calculation. When these photographs were taken I was maybe nine or ten. I never had a chance. And yet, why did I feel, as I went through them, that I had missed my opportunity? Why did I feel the familiar pang of regret fostered by the sight of a woman whom I spy once in the street and who captures me wholly and who then disappears from my life without a trace. Some great gap existed in my life and these pictures somehow sounded out its depth. That was why I hadn’t given them to Beth. I was protecting them, and myself, at the same time.

One picture showed the woman’s torso, frontally, at ease, one leg languorously bent, a picture from the knees to the shoulders with the dark triangle, luxurious and mysterious, at its center. She was tall, thin, athletic, unselfconscious. Her hair was dark, her legs long, her breastbone high, her fingers delicate and smooth. It was intoxicating, that picture, that center, that mystery. I couldn’t turn away.

Was it poor dead Tommy G. with the suitcase and the ring who had taken these photographs? It seemed likely, yes. And so who was she to him? More than a model, that was clear. A girlfriend, still maybe pining for her lost love? A wife, still mourning her missing husband, still waiting for him to return? Well, he wasn’t returning, was he? Maybe I should find her, tell her what had happened so long ago, see if, maybe, she wanted to go out for coffee.

How pathetic was that?

Yet, still, there was something to it. Joey Parma had finally broken free of the world that had failed him as much as he had failed it, but I was still around to shoulder the burden of his past, and these pictures, that girl, was part of it. If I was to find out who had reached out from decades past to slit poor Joey’s throat, then I could find worse places to start than her. Worse places indeed.