a coat and at least another pair of socks. I was freezing my ass.
The sky was solid gray and sat low over the city like a dirty tin bowl and I had to search to find the wiper knob on the rental car to clear the cold drizzle off the windshield. I got on Penrose Avenue and coming over the George Platt Bridge I could both see and smell the smoke and steam coming up out of the refineries below. I tuned the radio to KYW and listened to that familiar sound of a newswire machine chinking in the background and the patter of a deep-voiced announcer accompanying working folks through their day. I had spent my entire life in an intimate dance with this place. I should not have been surprised by the way I remembered the steps, both the easy ones and the moves that were ankle breakers, but I was.
I turned up Broad Street and saw both the day Tug McGraw led a World Series parade and the night I killed a maniac in an abandoned subway tunnel just below. Farther north I passed South Philly High and in my head found the smell of fresh-cut grass on the football field and three blocks later the odor of chemotherapy drugs dripping into my mother’s veins at St. Agnes Medical Center.
A horn blasted behind me and a taxi driver was tossing his hand up at the now green light. I ignored my instinct to flip him off and when I heard an advertisement for a coat sale at Krass Brothers I turned east and moved on into the old neighborhood. The years in Florida had thinned my blood if not my memories. February in Fort Lauderdale is eighty degrees and sun. I needed to get warm and I had work to do.
Before I’d left Florida I told Billy about my confrontation with Bat Man and his unfortunate sidekick and the warning about union organizing and the cruise ship workers. He didn’t seem concerned. I told him I didn’t have their names yet and he said he’d get them off the public records on the police run sheets and incident reports and then check them out.
When I’d told him I was going to Philadelphia the thought had silenced him in a way I’d never seen before. Billy is never stunned, by calamity or foolishness or the myriad whims of humans. He stared into my eyes as if he were looking for some truth in them and then quickly gathered himself.
“I w-will stay in closer contact with Mr. Colon,” he said. “You will do, my friend, what you need to do.”
He then helped me find a series of electronic clippings from the Philadelphia Daily News and the Inquirer databases on the disappearance of Faith Hamlin and the subsequent investigation of five police officers. Colin’s name and suspicion were prominent, especially after the others confessed and supposedly came clean. I thought I recognized two of the other names but couldn’t be sure.
Billy also found the present name and address of O’Shea’s ex- wife, through the divorce records he got from an attorney contact in Philly. With a name and date of birth, we found her address in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, across the river from the city. Then I called my uncle Keith. He was still a sergeant in the Eighteenth District and he was understandably shocked to hear from me.
“Jesus Christ, Maxey. Is that you? Where the hell are you, boy? You in trouble? Christ, we thought you fell off the fuckin’ edge of the world. You coming to town? You’re coming over to the house then, right? No. No. Better you come over to McLaughlin’s first. You know your aunt. We’ll have a couple before that whole scene. You know she still goes to visit that church your mother turned to in those last years and she says feels her sister there. Damn, Maxey, it’s good to hear your voice, boy.”
I hadn’t managed ten words. When he finally took a breath I told him I was coming in on business. I was working for a lawyer in Florida and did he know anyone in internal affairs that might help me out?
“IAD and lawyers, Maxey?” I could see him shaking his old Scottish head. “The devil and his henchmen. But for you, son, we can find someone maybe we can trust.”
I had planned to go straight to my uncle’s but on South Street I stopped at Krass Brothers. When I