Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [25]
I parked in front of a vacant lot on 24th and walked the rest of the way. I’d grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment and tapped it against my palm and peeled it open and lit up a cigarette as I walked down the dark street. I passed a couple of black-haired Asian girls leaning against a brand-new red Camaro. Their short skirts and high heels and red lipstick matched the car perfectly. They were a little out of their territory, I thought, and I wanted to say something to them. I wanted to tell them what could happen to a girl in a miniskirt and high-heel shoes and naked legs leaning against a red-hot Camaro. I wanted to tell them all that I’d seen but I knew it was no use. I’d never really been able to speak their language, and even if I said something, they wouldn’t listen.
Millie Price lived in one of those buildings where you ring the doorbell and they buzz you in. The problem was there were rarely any names under the mailboxes in the vestibule, and even if there were, it was often too dark to see. I struck a match and noticed that someone had wedged a crushed beer can into the door jamb. I pushed through and into the dark hallway and started up the stairs. I remembered Millie lived on the second floor but I wasn’t sure which apartment was hers. The door on the left had a peace sign spray-painted on it in a fluorescent yellow. The door on the right hung open a few inches.
I was starting to get a bad feeling. It was the kind of feeling cops get just before something bad happens, an intuition you develop after a few long years on the street. Some guys are just born with it. Either way, if you don’t develop it sooner or later, you might just find yourself dead.
And that’s how I found Millie Price, in a heap on the floor just inside her front door. She was wearing a thin leather jacket and jeans as if she was just about to go out. She probably heard the knock and opened the door and the gun was the only thing she saw. She was lying on her back with two bullet holes in the Snoopy shirt she was wearing under the jacket and a dark bloodstain spreading over two well-formed breasts. She was still as beautiful as I remembered.
I looked down at her, at the blood on her chin where it had spilled from her mouth and the blood pooling on the floor beneath her, and I felt a little ache in my own chest. I was thinking I should have felt something more, and maybe I would have if things had been different between Millie and me all those years ago. Now, she was just another corpse in an apartment on the border of Grays Ferry and Point Breeze, where stray corpses were becoming more and more common.
I phoned it in and Detective William Trask showed up in record time, only about an hour after the first uniformed officer arrived and handcuffed me in the backseat of his cruiser. I showed him my retired Philly Police badge but it didn’t seem to change his mind. It was for his protection and mine, he said. I didn’t think I had anything to fear from the police, so he must have been protecting me from myself.
While the steel bracelets were cutting into my wrists and my fingers were going numb, I thought about Millie, up there growing cold on her living room rug. She’d be going rigid by now. They could probably stand her up and lean her against the wall and fit her with the perfect size body bag and walk her down the stairs. I wiggled my fingers and fidgeted on the hard plastic seat, thinking now of all the prisoners I’d had in my backseat and how many times I’d told them to shut up and sit still and how many times they’d puked and pissed themselves along the way.
Just then, the door opened and Detective Trask yanked me out of