stepped out into a puddle of slush in my Docksides, I made a mental note to hit the Army/Navy on Tasker for some boots. In the store the terse, clipped speech—“Whattaya, forty-two long?”—caught me off guard at first. South Florida isn’t exactly Southern, but I hadn’t realized how much of my own whipcrack city-speak I’d lost. When I told the guy, “Something warm but I’m not going skiing,” he tried to get me into a knee- length cashmere. When I told him I wasn’t working for the stock exchange he pushed a three-quarter leather on me.
“Hey, I’m takin’ my pops to the Flyers’ game here!” I said, trying to regain a bit of Philly speak.
He found me a tan, goose down waist-length with cloth elastic cuffs. I thanked him very much.
“Yo, I thought you was just offen’ your yacht or somethin’,” he said, looking without shame at my shoes.
I got a pair of lace-up work boots on Tasker and then drove through the neighborhood.
The streets seemed too narrow, the stoplights too frequent. People on the sidewalks had their heads down in the sleet, not that I would recognize anyone. On Tenth I got caught behind some joker double-parked but I just sat there five doors down from the house I grew up in the next block past Snyder. I waited, looking at the old stoops and the front window of the house where a kid I knew named Fran Leary used to live. It was still ringed in Christmas lights. A young guy wearing the same leather coat I’d just turned down came out of a doorway and waved at me before he got in to the double- parked car and pulled away.
I moved up until I could see the cut-stone steps and the wrought iron rail that led up to the house I grew up in. The second-floor window that looked out on the street was to my room, where I had spent nights reading books and fantasizing about Annette the cheerleader and listening to the Allman Brothers Band on a tinny old record player. It was also the place where I cowered and tried to ignore the sound of my father’s heavy, drunken steps and the sharp snap of a backhand and the muffled protests of my mother. I was one hundred feet away but did not want to see my front door and feel the ugly memories that I’d closed behind it. I had seen both of my parents die in that house. My father, a broken and shamed former cop, fell to a slow and deserved poisoning. My mother, who came home from the hospital to die, convinced that God had filled the hole left by her treachery with cancer.
I turned east instead and then up Fifth and past South Street to the Gaskill House, a bed and breakfast where I’d reserved a room. The place was a redone coach house built in 1828 just a block from Headhouse Square. The manager of the Gaskill had befriended me when I was walking a beat there by showing up with hot coffee at eleven o’clock each night at the corner of Third. His name was Guy and now, years later, he met me at the door with a handshake and what may have been the same huge ceramic-and-steel coffee cup.
He was envious of my winter tan and Florida address. I was, as always, envious of his collections of antiques and the stone and wood eat-in kitchen down on the basement level of the house.
“Your friend Mr. Manchester called and faxed three pages for you, Max,” Guy said. “I put them in an envelope on your bed upstairs. We got a cancellation so I’ve given you the blue room at the top.
“Remember, breakfast eight to ten,” he said as I climbed the stairs.
The room was done in Colonial-era furniture, poster bed, writing table, a small fireplace on the west wall. The thick comforter and window treatments were blue and muted yellows and dark burgundy, colors you rarely saw in Florida. I pulled out some paperwork and sat at the desk and called Colin O’Shea’s ex-wife. I’d put off contacting her until I got here, not wanting to give her an easy excuse to dismiss me. She was now listed as Janice Mott. It was past five when I called and introduced myself as a private investigator from Florida, which at least keeps people on the line if only for the sake of curiosity.