Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [5]
I took him home to my latest cheap house on one of those narrow one-way streets without trees—this shitty apartment next to the JC Chinese restaurant. I go to sleep and wake up smelling chop suey. It’s the kind of street where you hear Mexican music playing and jacked-up cars revving at all hours. I don’t mind. I usually sleep through anything, like a dead person. Junk lines my street—crushed Red Bull cans and empty Corona bottles, dirty diapers, and abandoned condoms. Like the rest of the city, South Philly changes from block to block and I happen to live on one where the shades are always drawn shut with yellow miniblinds and the windows sport signs reading, Se cuarta a renta. But the apartment is dirt-cheap and I have lived in worse places.
Johnny had a bike of course, and insisted on taking it inside with us. He didn’t stay the night, which I appreciated. He came back to the bar the next night. I took him home again. He had a tongue ring, which I also appreciated. This went on for a while, not long, maybe three weeks, and always with that stupid Raleigh bike, and then one night when he wasn’t at the bar, I brought someone else home and Johnny showed up at my door, ringing the bell again and again until I answered, and bleated, “But you don’t understand. I love you!”
I told him to get real, get lost, and get a new dive bar to hang out in—try the Royal or Pope’s—not Ray’s anymore. He called me a fucking bitch. I pushed over his bike and he squealed like an adolescent girl, picked up the bike, and pedaled furiously away in his high-top Converse sneakers, never to be heard from again.
Except he had come back.
I consider my next move. I imagine the Inquirer headline: Stupid Bartender Murdered by Moron. As if on cue, the moron walks in.
Tony has changed into yet another Eagles jersey. He seems glad to see me awake. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you, but I figured we’d get lots more done if you wasn’t running loose.” His eyes are bloodshot, but instead of smelling like booze, he smells like Old Spice.
He turns on the big-screen TV plastered next to the family portrait and turns it to the classics sports channel, the one that replays old football games where you already know how it all ends and who wins. “Now, I’m going to pull off this tape and it’s going to hurt, so I’m sorry about that. Don’t scream.” He rips the tape off in one quick motion, taking half my lip with it. I scream. “You’ll scare the dog!” he says. The dog is stretched out across the floor on its back, snoring. He pushes the volume up on the TV so that Howard Cosell’s nasally voice booms out into the room. I am going to die listening to Cosell announcing a bygone two-point conversion. “My ma is down the shore, but she’ll be back before too long, so we got to figure this out quick.”
Maybe if I stall long enough, Granny’ll rescue me. That’s assuming she isn’t an accomplice in whatever this mess is. I’ve seen plenty of these South Philly old ladies, sweeping up the sidewalk in front of the house early in the morning with their teeth still sitting in a jar by the bed. Cross them, and they’ll cold cock you in a second with the broom or whatever else is handy.
Tony picks up a red spiral journal from the doily-covered coffee table. “Johnny wrote a lot about you. I just need to know where the key is. He writes that he’s left it with someone he trusts. Well, I can’t find it here, and believe me, I’ve looked under every doily and cookie jar in the place.”
“I barely knew the kid. We maybe hung around once.”
He frowns. “Oh yeah? Does this sound like you?” He flips to the middle of the book and reads a description of my apartment with the rusty kitchen sink and the rats scrabbling in the walls. He describes what I look like in bed and the color of the mole under my right arm. Tony snaps the books shut and pushes