“Lou, you want to know about Lenihan, you oughta be talkin’ to Joe,” Vega said, and Lou’s ears pricked up.
“You knew Lenihan, buddy?”
“No, I didn’t,” Citrone said, and confusion creased the younger cop’s forehead.
“Sure you did, the other day…” Vega started to say, but his sentence trailed off.
“You’re mistaken, Ed.” Citrone looked at Lou. “Good meeting you.”
Vega fell silent as his partner walked away, then he slapped his cap on and gave it a twist. “Where we goin’ to lunch?” he asked.
“Where else?” Lou said, and after a backward glance at Citrone, he ventured into the storm.
Debbie’s Diner, with its aluminum sides, train-car shape, and familiar doughnut sign, had become a fixture in South Philly. The food was good, the prices cheap, and the only drawback to the diner were the mob killings that took place in its front parking lot, generally in odd-numbered years. The murders were of the old-fashioned variety; a single, accurate gunshot to a target selected by an organized crime family, not the scattershot drive-by that shredded kids in the crossfire and left Lou asking what had the world come to, whenever the killers acted so inhuman. But rather than scare the patrons away, the murders served only to authenticate Debbie’s, fazing neither the made men nor uniformed cops who ate there. Lou knew that as long as there was scrambled eggs with ketchup, there would be Debbie’s. And he was glad.
“Let’s sit here,” Lou said, and showed Vega to his favorite booth. He sat down and grabbed some paper napkins from the steel dispenser, leaving it rocking. “You wet, kid? You want a napkin to dry off?”
“No, thanks.” Vega shook his hair dry like a Newfoundland puppy, and the waitress came over, cute with a short haircut and a black uniform that fit just right.
“You guys ever hear of umbrellas?”
“No,” Lou said. “We hate umbrellas.”
Vega grinned. “It’s a cop thing.”
The waitress shook her head. Her lapel pin, in the trademark doughnut shape, read TERESA-THREE YEARS, her name and years of service at Debbie’s. Teresa was an infant by Debbie standards. “Two coffees, right away?” she asked.
“You’re a genius,” Vega said with a grin.
“Yeah, right. I should go on
Vega ran his hand over his hair and it popped back up like porcupine quills. “So, Lou, I don’t know anything about him. Never even met the guy. It’s an effin’ shame, what happened.”
“You hear anything about him? What’s the scuttlebutt?”
“There isn’t any.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Lou, I don’t know what my dad told you, but I only been in the district two months. I just got paired with Citrone.”
Lou nodded. “Citrone knows Lenihan, though?”
“You heard him. No.”
“I heard
“I musta made a mistake.”
Lou blinked. “I don’t think so, son, and I gotta know what you know. Lenihan got dead tryin’ to kill somebody I care about. I want to know why.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“You said Citrone knows Lenihan. What made you say that?”
Vega swiped his hair again and squinted around for the waitress. “Where’s that coffee?”
“Why’d you think Citrone knew Lenihan?”
Vega waved a hand, caught the waitress’s eye, and made a drinking motion. She nodded, grabbed the pot by its brown plastic handle, and scored two mugs on the fly.
“Ed, why did you think Citrone knew Lenihan?” Lou asked again, but the kid kept squinting at the waitress, avoiding his eye. “Ed?”
“Here’s the brew,” Vega said, turning around as the heavy mugs arrived and the waitress set them on the table with a harsh clatter.
“I was gettin’ the menus for you, Skippy.” She poured the coffee into one mug, then the next. Lou noticed a dark tattoo on her forearm, a Chinese symbol, and wondered when girls started getting tattoos. Right after they joined the police force, but before they started law firms? Lou watched the waitress walk away and saw with satisfaction that some things still remained the same.
Vega gulped his coffee and hunched over the table. “Mr. Jacobs, Lou,” he said, in a low voice. “My dad says you’re a great guy, so you’re a great guy, but I’m not about to go up against Joe Citrone for you. You understand?”
“I’m only asking for information.”
“Information is going up against Citrone, and I don’t know anything anyway, I swear.”
Lou sipped his coffee and looked at the kid’s face. “You’re afraid.”
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t work in clothes, kid. They’d make you in a minute.”
“I’m not afraid, there’s nothing to be afraid of. That I don’t want to fuck with Citrone? Nothing wrong with that, I’m new on the job.”
Lou edged over the table. “What’s the big deal? Citrone the President of the United States? Did I miss something when I was in the can?”
“Citrone’s the old man. He knows everybody.”
“Then he must know Lenihan, like you said the first time.” Lou held his coffee cup. “Kid, Lenihan was in business with two guys from the Twentieth. They were in it together, with a detective, Della Porta, who got it last year and who used to be in the Eleventh. You think Citrone knows something about it? He’s an old-timer, like you said.”
Vega stood up abruptly, reached in his pocket, and flipped open his wallet. “Don’t call me, don’t find me, don’t bother me.” He threw a creased five on the table. “Stay away from me. Stay away from my father.”
Lou rose, his knees creaky. “Listen, I just want to talk.”
“You heard me,” Vega said, and lumbered from the booth and out of the diner.
Lou watched him jog across the parking lot to his patrol car.
“What happened to your friend?” she asked. The waitress appeared and tugged a pad and a stubby pencil from a black apron.
“My friend? He had to see a man about a horse.”
“Wha?” The waitress scratched her head with her pencil.
“It’s an expression. Don’t you know that expression?”
“No. You wanna order?”
“Gimme three scrambled eggs and answer me this. You see a lot of cops in here, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever see a cop in here named Lenihan? He was from the Eleventh.”
“Lenihan? Isn’t he that blond babe from the newspaper?”
“Wha?”
Lou wiped his forehead, still damp. “Forget it. Did Lenihan eat here?”
“Sure.”
“Who’d he eat with?”
“Other cops.”
“Which other cops?”
The waitress shrugged. “How would I know?”
