asked how it was all going and she just says, ‘We’re all so happy he’s home.’”
“Yeah,” said one of the guys on the other side of the table, “apparently she was
“They were bound to hit the rocks anyway,” said Stash. “Paulie, he’s been catting around for years.”
Tim had learned a long time ago not to say never. A dick could make a fool out of a lot of men. But still.
“Now what kind of bullshit is that?” asked Giles, who’d been quick to defend Paul last time, too.
“No bullshit to it. You know Beata Wisniewski?”
“Any relation to Archie?” Tim asked.
“His daughter.” Archie had been a captain who ran the Eighteenth District in the North End. There’d been stories for decades about drugs and cash disappearing from the dope-slangers out there. Plenty of defense lawyers told the same tale: A client who’d been dealing a pound ended up getting charged with selling six ounces. That was still enough to catch real time, but none of the dealers complained in court that the coppers had pinched their coke and were selling it themselves. If that was what was going on out there, and the PDs were pretty much sure of it, the captain figured to be getting some. Otherwise, he’d have gotten rid of the bums long before. But that was the days of yore by now.
“She become a cop, too?” Tim asked.
“Got into the academy straight out of high school, on some kind of waiver,” said Stash, “long time after that was supposed to have stopped. Good-looking girl, too. Big but fit. She rode with me right after she started on the job. About six months in, Cass pled guilty and she was freaked out about it. Apparently, Cass and her, they’d been tight at one point.”
On the other side of the table, a dark guy circled his thumb and forefinger and poked his other index finger through, as if he knew something. Stash shook his head uncertainly.
“She left the job after a few years when she got pregnant,” said Stash. “Married to a training officer, Ollie Somebody, who had a big bottle issue. Guy used to try to smack her around and of course she’s sober, and trained, and big, and apparently she put the asshole in the hospital twice. But finally she decides life’s too short. Anyway, Roddy Winkler’s got a son used to live in the same building she moved into. This would be just after Paulie started making real dough. And the kid, Roddy’s son, he was also a lawyer, and he said he saw Paul leaving her place in the early a.m., more than once.”
“Jesus,” said the Mexican-looking character on the other side of the table, “I’m liking this story less and less. Not only is Paulie steppin out, but he’s poking his brother’s old girlfriend.”
“Brother had to say go for it,” said the guy who knew the neighbor.
“Weird shit,” said the man next to Tim. There was a brief discussion then about the number of guys who wanted a chance with the Doublemint Twins.
“Early a.m.?” said Tim, going back to Stash’s story. “Don’t you think Sofia would notice the other side of the bed was a little cool?”
“Fuck do I know?” asked Stash. “Wifey must have been traveling.”
“There’s two kids at home.”
“I’m just telling you what Winkler’s son said. You know, I bumped into him at Roddy’s and he says, ‘I got something’ll tickle you about your old partner.’ He said Paul was turning up every once in a while until she moved out two or three years ago.”
“Like for a decade?” Tim asked. This was cop truth, third-rank hearsay which was valid until it was disproved.
“So Paul’s president of the state senate by now,” Giles said, “and the press never picks this up?”
“Everybody likes Paulie. They only throw mud on the ones they don’t care for. ’Sides, for all I know, they looked and never got anything they could print.”
“What line of work was she in, this Beata?” asked Tim. “She go back on the job?”
“Too smart for that. Sells real estate, I’m thinking. Commercial property.”
The hand was over and Stash looked at Tim and just heaved his thick shoulders. Don’t blame him, he meant.
Tim went back to use the facilities, as usual, then stopped at the bar and had one more pickled egg. The heartburn would be hellacious later, but you had to live a little.
This business about Paul was a surprise, but it made the end of the Gianises’ marriage make a little more sense. On the one hand, it really had nothing to do with what Tim was up to. On the other, you could never tell what got passed along as pillow talk.
He went to the public library in Grayson. They were closing libraries all over town, but this one was still bustling, patronized by lots of folks in his age range, and moms with kids too young for school. It had the sterile functional look of a lot of stuff built in the sixties, modern without a lot of frills. He found Beata Wisniewski’s business address on the Internet, and a smiling photo of her on the real estate brokerage’s website. As advertised. Good-looking girl, blonde with a little help for Mother Nature, but Tim never met a woman, his own Demetra included, who was blonde at age sixteen and didn’t regard it as her God-given right to maintain the same hair color for the rest of eternity. He called the brokerage. The secretary said Beata was out on a showing until 3, and Tim went over to the office, which was right on the east side of Center City near the U Hospital. This was an area where Tim wouldn’t go without his sidearm when he was a cop, and now it was all hip young folks. The real estate agency had apparently been situated here for a while, a three-story building with a gated lot. Ng could have gotten him the make of the car she owned, but he figured he knew who he was looking for, and as it turned out, it wouldn’t have been hard to spot her anyway. A big black Audi with the vanity plate BEATA pulled into the lot about 3:45. He got out of his car, limping toward her. The spring day had gotten windy.
She was pretty much a Brünnhilde type, just big everything, not overly heavy, still nice-looking with her blonde hair upswept for a professional effect, and more than six feet tall in her high heels. She was wearing a light coat and had her briefcase under her arm, but she troubled herself for a quick smile when he came toward her. He extended his hand.
“Ms. Wisniewski? Name is Tim Brodie. Knew your old man a little bit.”
She stopped moving and her bluish eyes approached absolute zero. Her jaw set like a linebacker’s.
“This is private property,” she said. “Next time you show your face here, I’ll call the cops and you can tell them about the good times you had with my father.”
Driving away, Tim tried to rewind the interlude frame by frame, hoping to determine when the ice storm had set in. Was it mentioning her dad? But he was pretty sure it was his own name that had chilled her. Which meant she knew who he was. Which meant in turn that the story about Paul and her had to be true.
Just on a hunch, he decided to sit on her house. Given how unstrung she’d appeared, she might need some smoothing.
He returned to the library. He put the cell phone listed on the brokerage website into a reverse directory, but the billing went to the office. The Tri-Cities’ white pages online showed a T. Wisniewski on Clyde, which was about three blocks from the realty office. He used the street maps on the assessor’s website to get the property identification number for that address, then confirmed with a different listing that Beata Wisniewski received that real estate tax bill. By 5:30 p.m., he’d driven out to the string of three-story row houses. Daylight saving had started and the young inhabitants were strolling in the mild night, a good half of them walking their dogs.
He circled for quite some time. About 6:30, he saw the Audi go down the side street, and he reached the alley soon enough to see the vehicle pull into a garage. He drove past slowly and glimpsed a splinter of Beata through the rear fence. It took a while until somebody pulled out of a space within sight of her front door, but Tim parked then and waited. He had no idea where Paul had camped out. But he’d seen lots of guys chucked out by their wives, and most didn’t go far from home, not so much to be contrary as to consolidate whatever they had left. About half an hour after the sun had gone down, a little past 8:30, a light popped on in what he guessed was Beata’s living room. Seconds later a car pulled up a few spaces in front of him. It was a gray Acura like the one he’d seen in Sofia’s garage back in February. Leaving the vehicle, a man actually ran the first couple of steps as he made his way down the block. Tim thought he recognized who it was as the fella passed under the streetlights, but the guy was on the move, and Tim saw poorly in the dark. He took a few photos during the instant the man appeared again beneath Beata’s porch light. He was in her house only a second before emerging, lugging a huge suitcase, with Beata right behind him. They jumped in the Acura and were gone.
