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. She still wasn’t smiling but her eyes had grown a bit larger as if some of the meanness had been squeezed out of them.
“Big spender.”
“In exchange for some conversation.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Millie Price.”
I took a sip of my drink and looked at her through the glass. She had the body of a twenty-year-old and the face of a woman in her fifties, a woman who’d walked some hard miles. She looked like she could stand up to just about anything.
“She’s not your type.”
“Says who, Billy Haggerty?”
“What are you? A cop?”
“Not anymore. Millie asked me to meet her tonight. She never showed. I’d like to know what happened to her.”
“What makes you think something happened to her?”
“She’s dead. Shot twice. I found her in her apartment. The cops are there now and I don’t doubt they’ll soon be on their way here.”
She started crying. Not hysterical crying, no moans or loud sobs, just tears escaping from her reddened eyes and rolling down her face. Her mascara ran in a spiderweb of black lines under her eyes and she dabbed at it with a napkin from the bar. I offered her a cigarette from the pack and she took one with a trembling hand. She held it to her lips and I lit it for her and the smoke seemed to calm her nerves.
“What about the baby?”
“What baby?”
“Millie had a baby, a little boy about two years old.”
“I never knew. Where’s Billy Haggerty?”
“He’s not the father.”
“Then who is?”
“A guy named Nathaniel. He lives down in Point Breeze.”
“Millie’s boyfriend is from Point Breeze?”
“Yeah. Billy was furious when he found out. He’s still furious. It’s one thing when you find out your wife’s been running around with another guy. It’s another thing when you find out he’s black. I thought something like this was going to happen.”
“Where does this Nathaniel live?”
“Twenty-second and Moore over the laundromat.”
“Do you know where Billy is?”
“Haven’t seen him all night. If he’s not here, he’s at the Golden Rose.”
“Thanks.”
The tears began to flow again and she reached out and took a long drink from my glass. The cigarette had gone out and she drew on it, frantically trying to bring it back to life, and when she couldn’t, she threw it down on the floor.
“You know, I talked to Millie last night. She said she talked to a guy she used to know a long time ago. She said he was real nice and that they might have had something together once and maybe they could get it back. She said that when she spoke to him she heard something sweet in his voice like maybe he was hoping for the same thing. She wanted to get away from this place, away from the Arramingo Club, away from Grays Ferry, away from Billy Haggerty, away from this whole life. She was hoping he could help her. She said he used to be a cop.”
She turned her back to me and lifted her eyes just high enough to see my face in the mirror behind the bar. “Now would you please get the hell out of here.”
I parked behind Lanier Playground and hurried across the crumbling asphalt. As I ran across it, I couldn’t help but think that this had become a wasteland, a memory of a long abandoned dream for so many kids that would take a miracle to resurrect. It was dark, the spotlights broken by those same kids-they used them for target practice, throwing pieces of broken pavement like stones from a slingshot until the area was in total darkness.
I got halfway across when I heard them, five or six figures silhouetted against the concrete ledge, the light from the Golden Rose casting distorted shadows over the sidewalk. Haggerty was there, strutting back and forth like an alpha male while his pack of wolves sat before him, tuned to his every word, his every move. He saw me too and a snicker of recognition snaked across his lips as I emerged from the darkness.
“Seamus Kilpatrick. What the fuck are you doing here? Did someone call a cop?”
His gang laughed in unison, up on their feet now, the rusty chain-link fence like an iron curtain between us.
“Did you have to kill her, Billy? Was it because she went out and got herself a boyfriend? Was it the kid, Billy? Or was it because she came to me for help?”
“You think I killed her? Jaysus, Kilpatrick. You are a piece of work. You think I give a shite about that whore, Millie Price? She could have taken that kid of hers and gone down into the gutter to live. That’s where she belonged.”
“Where’s the kid, Billy?”
“How the hell should I know? You got it all wrong, as usual, Kilpatrick. You’ll never learn. Trying so hard to be something you’re not.”
“And what’s that?”
“A fucking martyr. A pathetic fucking martyr. But even a dumb shite like me knows there’s no such thing as a live martyr.”
I came around the fence and Haggerty’s gang circled us. I recognized most of them. Jimmy Connors and Chris Dougherty looked inseparable, as if they were still sixteen and just snuck out of the house with their father’s quarts in their pants. Denis McNulty was the biggest of the crew, leaning against the fence with the fingers of one meaty paw hooked onto the chain link.
“I don’t presume to judge you, Billy Haggerty. But don’t expect me to agree with your way of thinking.”
“You always pick the wrong side. Don’t you. Deny your people, your family. This is your fucking home, Kilpatrick, and you won’t lift a finger to save it. Just don’t get in our way. We’ll show you no mercy.”
“You can’t build a wall down the middle of this neighborhood, Billy.”
“Watch me.” His finger was pointed at my chest as if it were a loaded gun. “And one more thing you’d want to know before you leave. I have from a reliable source that not only has this rooster Nathaniel Jeffers been banging my ex-wife, word is he’s the trigger man what put down your old friend, Charlie Melvyn. Now ain’t that a kicker, boyo?”
Chris Dougherty crossed himself and they all laughed and my fists went white at my sides. I looked at Billy Haggerty and our eyes locked and at that moment it was like no one else in Grays Ferry mattered, like it was just the two of us and we were telling the whole world to go fuck themselves. Not knowing where else to look, I turned my gaze to the Philadelphia skyline in the distance, the dark sky behind it like a black veil.
