“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
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 cliche 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.
chapter 25
IN HER OFFICE THE NEXT MORNING, TESS CLICKED HER way to the
