The Sugar House

chapter 24

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN TESS MADE IT HOME. SHE had expected little in the way of a welcoming committee-Kitty and Tyner were at the opera, Crow had a gig, and Esskay went to bed pretty early, to prepare for the next day’s napping regimen.

But when she tiptoed into Kitty’s kitchen to forage for a snack, her stomach less than satisfied by a Roy Rogers pit stop near the state line, her father was sitting at the kitchen table. He had a can of beer open in front of him, and the radio was on-Stan the Fan, or one of those sports talk shows. He had sat like this in their kitchen at home many an evening. If you asked him what he was listening to, or why, he might not have an answer. As a child, Tess had found this odd. But as an adult, she had developed her own fondness for the jumble of voices on talk radio. There was a soothing rhythm in all that chat, a kind of white noise in the locals’ nasal accents.

“Mom kick you out?” she asked. Turn your fears into jokes, and life won’t be so inclined to provide the punch-line.

“I was waiting for you,” her father said. “Kitty left me a key. They’re going to be out late-”

“The opera, I know. Tosca.” She left out the part about how opera affected Tyner. Her father was almost as protective of his only sister as he was of his daughter. The difference being that he wholly approved of Tyner, an older man with a good income, and had yet to approve of anyone Tess had brought home.

“So, what’s up?” By turning her back on him and rummaging in the refrigerator, she was able to make the question sound almost casual. How was your day? Same old, same old. Got shot at, saved a woman’s life.

“You’ve got to stop what you’re doing.”

She froze, her hand wrapped around the upper portion of a bottle of Pinot Grigio, her face warm despite the cool air of the refrigerator. For a moment, she thought her father knew of her Philadelphia adventure. But how could he? The Inquirer would have a story tomorrow, given the prominence of the Whittaker family, but no one cared about her involvement. She was counting on the cops to misspell her name, counting on the reporter not to track her down, not tonight.

“Stop what?” she asked casually. “Drinking white wine? Hey, I had a hard day. You want another beer?”

“Arnie Vasso called me today. He said you’re making a nuisance of yourself. He said you’re annoying some people you’d be better off leaving alone.”

“I spilled a glass of water in his lap, that’s all.”

“I’m not talking about Arnie, and you know it. I’m talking about Nicola DeSanti. Whatever you’re doing, Tess, drop it. It’s not worth it. Not worth your time, and not worth Ruthie’s money. Tell your cop friend what you know, and get out of the way.”

She poured a glass of wine and sat down across from her father. No use putting the bottle back in the refrigerator. She knew she’d drain it before this night was through, maybe start on another one. “Get out of the way of what, Dad?”

“You did what Ruthie asked. You identified the dead girl. But there’s no connection between her and Henry dying, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone in my office. That’s all there is to it.”

Usually, it’s the liar who can’t make eye contact. But Tess thought it would break her heart to look into her father’s steady blue eyes as he piled fiction upon fiction.

“It’s not just Gene, is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean if Gene Fulton was in this alone, you wouldn’t be afraid. You could go to the boss, tell him that he’s helping Nicola DeSanti run a prostitution ring out of her bar. Because that’s what he’s doing, Dad, and you know it. So why can’t you turn him in?”

“I’m protecting you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Tesser!” She almost never used such language in front of her parents. Then again, her father seldom tried to bullshit her. Judith had been the one in charge of parental misinformation, running the gamut from “You’ll put your eye out” to “The boys won’t respect you if you do that.” Patrick had specialized in omission. He sought to protect her from the world by not telling her too much about it.

“Dad-why are you protecting Gene?”

It was his turn to look away. “You know, Gene and I go back a ways. We were never friends, but he’s one of the old-timers down there. He got divorced a couple years back, and the judge really soaked him on child support. On top of that, his wife took his kids to Georgia. So he has to pay all this money, and he never gets to see them.”

“Which is his justification for taking kickbacks from a small-time criminal. Does he get extra for chauffeuring the girls around, or does he provide that service out of the goodness of his heart?”

“It’s legit. It’s an escort service.”

“Dad, please.”

“Look, Tess, it’s not like she’s selling drugs, or killing people. The girls who work there, they’re free to choose what they do, you know? And they’re a helluva lot safer than they’d be on the streets, or hooked up with pimps. The old lady screens the customers, has guys take them to and from their appointments.”

“Gwen Schiller worked there. She’s dead.”

“Right. She went out on her own, and got killed by the first trick she turned.”

“Is that what Gene Fulton told you? Because it’s not true.”

“How do you know?”

But Tess wasn’t telling anyone what she knew, not anymore. For all she knew, everything she had told her father had gotten back to Gene Fulton. She was trying to remember now if she had told him about the phone logs, or her first trip to Philadelphia.

When her father spoke again, his tone was cajoling. “I’m not saying we’re not going to shut them down. I’m just asking you to get out of the way. Talk to your cop friend, the one in Homicide. He’ll pass it on to Vice. This doesn’t have to concern us.”

“And what do I tell Ruthie?”

“That accidents happen. That the past is the past, and we can’t do anything about it.”

She was holding the glass, but had yet to take a sip. It was cold, she felt the chill of the wine through her fingertips. It was the coldest thing she had ever touched in her life. Colder than snow, colder than the ice that skidded beneath her palms when her father had taught her to skate above the dam at Gwynn’s Falls. Falling is part of it, he had told her. You have to fall.

“Daddy-what does Gene have on you?”

The blood that swept across his face made him seem, for a moment, all of one color, the red of his complexion blending into his hairline.

“That’s a helluva question to ask your father.”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “But it’s on target, isn’t it?”

“Ancient history,” Patrick said. “Small potatoes.”

“Does Ruthie know the story behind these so very ancient, so very small potatoes?”

He nodded. Tess knew the price of asking another question, knew what she was giving up. But she couldn’t stop.

“What happened between you and Ruthie?”

An eternity passed in the next five seconds. Her father studied the top of his beer can. She swallowed some wine, noticing how tart it was, how sharp.

“We met about thirteen, fourteen years ago,” her father said. “She was a barmaid in a neighborhood joint, a place that catered to the shift workers in Locust Point. Actually had a seven A.M. happy hour, if you can believe it. But after all, that’s when those guys got off and they wanted what anyone wants when he finishes a long day at a hard job. They wanted a beer, they wanted to shoot pool, flirt with a pretty waitress. Play video poker. The usual.

“Ruthie was…a stickler. You know, she’s kind of churchified, active in her parish. She saw people getting addicted to the machines. Her dad had a problem that way, and it hadn’t made life easy on her family. So she decided to turn the owner in. She filed a complaint with me, asked me to keep it anonymous. Problem was, the guy who owned the place was a big contributor to a certain senator. The senator who happened to appoint me. Ditter asked me to look the other way. I did-I mean, it’s not like every bar in the city doesn’t pay on its video poker-and Ruthie ended up losing her job. Which she blamed me for, and I guess she was right. I got her a job at Spike’s, and she got back on her feet, went to school to get her accounting degree.”

“And what did you get?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you stay quiet as a favor to your pal, Senator Ditter, or was there a gratuity built in for you as well?”

Irish temper was a cliché Tess had never actually experienced. All the temper in her family had come down on the Weinstein side. Her father was a gentle man, hard to anger. So when he rose to his feet, his face now almost purplish red, and began jabbing his finger at her, she was undone by the sheer fact of his rage.

“You want to know what I got, for looking the other way? I didn’t get shit. But my daughter, who had decided the University of Maryland wasn’t good enough for her, that she had to go to some fancy private school, got a fake scholarship. Ditter set up a little fund, helped to pay your tuition the whole four years. That’s what I got. A college education for an ingrate of a daughter who’s incapable of ever doing anything just because her old man asks her to.”

“I had a senate scholarship,” she said. “Sleazy, but legal.”

“You got a kickback.”

Tess found her mind reaching back, trying to remember the financial aid package her family had pieced together so she could attend Washington College. She had gone after every little pocket of money, no matter how small-grants from the local chapter of the DAR, an essay contest sponsored by the VFW. Her father had told her the state grant was for students who had scored well on the PSAT, but just missed National Merit status. And she had believed him. She believed him because she was eighteen and relatively confident that she was the axis on which the world spun, that she was worthy of all good things that accrued to her.

“You see?” he asked. “You see why you can’t say anything? Gene was tight with Ditter, he knows what happened. He’ll take me down with him, if he suspects I had anything to do with this. You gotta stop.”

“But it’s not fair,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Tess.”

“What you did, what Gene is doing-it’s not the same. He’s taking a bribe from a pimp, and he’s going to go on doing it. You bowed to political pressure and were rewarded after the fact.”

“Once it’s in the newspaper, those are the kind of fine distinctions that will be lost, Tess. The statute of limitations may have run out on what I did, but the morality police can come for you anytime. Gene and I will both be fired, and no one will touch me, because I’ll be a snitch. I’ll be a fifty-two-year-old man, with no connections and no real skills. No one will hire me.”

“Someone-”

“No one, Tess. I can’t afford it. I can’t afford to lose my job. Don’t you get that? So unless you’re ready for your mom and me to move in with you, I’m begging you to drop this, before it’s too late.”

Tess thought of Philadelphia, of Pete and Repete, perched on her car like a couple of buzzards. She knew it was already too late, but she could not bear to tell her father this. Children protect their parents as surely as parents protect their children.

They do it the same way-by lying.

“Okay, Dad,” she said. “I won’t press the issue. I’ll tell Tull what I know, and then I’ll let the whole thing drop.”

Her father came around the table and hugged her. They were not a physical family, so it was an awkward, clumsy embrace, but no less sincere for its clumsiness.

“You’re a good girl, Tesser,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

Tess, her head bumping beneath her father’s chin, thought of how long she had waited to hear those words.

And how unfortunate it was that they had to come now, when she was lying through her teeth.