Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [26]
“What the hell, Seamus! How are you involved in all this?”
“Her name’s Millie Price. She’s an old friend.”
“Sure. How about the rest of it?”
“There’s nothing else to tell, Bill. You saw what I saw.”
“So you were paying a surprise visit to an old girlfriend and when you get here, she just happens to be dead. Shot to death with two large-caliber slugs at close range.”
“There’s a little more to it than that.”
“I’m listening.”
“She was supposed to meet me earlier tonight outside St. Gabe’s. She’d called me this afternoon, asked me to do her a favor, said an old boyfriend was hassling her. She wanted me to scare him off. Said it wouldn’t be a problem that he’d scare easy. She was going to pay me three hundred dollars.”
Trask pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. He lit one for himself and then mine with the same match.
“I think she got her money’s worth.”
Two techs from the medical examiner’s office carried Millie down the stairs in a gray body bag. They swung her onto a flimsy metal stretcher and wheeled her to the back of a darkblue van with tinted windows and a municipal license plate. One of the techs opened the door while the other rammed the stretcher into place. I thought I glimpsed the shadows of other black bags neatly packed inside the van. At least Millie would have company.
“Any idea who the boyfriend was?”
“None.”
“You wouldn’t be holding out on me now, Seamus Kilpatrick? You know better than that.”
“What reason would I have not to tell the truth?”
“That all depends on the nature of your relationship with Miss Price.”
“I haven’t seen her in ten years.”
“And before that?”
“We were friends. I knew her from the neighborhood.”
“For God’s sake, Kilpatrick, she was a stripper. What do you expect me to believe? You were members of the same book club. You met at the library every Tuesday afternoon.”
“She’s been out of that business for a long time.”
“She used to be married to Billy Haggerty? I suppose you knew that.”
I drew hard on the cigarette, letting the smoke drift and blow away like a bad dream.
“Of course I knew. That was over a long time ago too.”
“We’ll see.”
A young cop in a brand-new pinstripe suit came out and handed Trask a collection of crime scene photos. He thumbed through them as if they were a deck of playing cards, his face expressionless as he stared down at the lifeless body of Millie Price. He slid them into a manila envelope and pointed its sharp corner into my chest.
“You and I never had a problem, Kilpatrick, not when you were with the force and not since you left. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Am I free to go?”
“If you find something out, I’ll want to hear about it.”
I took one last drag on the cigarette and threw it past them into the street. I could feel the eyes of the detectives on my back as I walked away.
The Aramingo Club didn’t look like much from the outside. It was on the corner of 30th and Tasker, with a front door painted a dingy white and a lot of burned-out neon over blacked-out windows. It was the end of the line for aging strippers with a few good teeth left and maybe a set of implants they’d conned off some old horny gangster who didn’t want his wife to know he could still get it up. It was getting late and there wasn’t anybody collecting at the door and not many drinkers hanging around for last call.
I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, slid the pack of cigarettes in behind it, and waited for the bartender to notice me. She was a petite blonde in ’80s spandex, black and tight from her neck to her ankles. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a glass ashtray, doing her best to ignore me as her fingers moved the dead cigarette around in the bed of gray ash. When she was satisfied the cigarette had stopped smoldering, she took the long walk down to my end of the bar.
I ordered a beer and she put the glass down on a clean white napkin and I slid the twenty in her direction and told her to keep the change.