This time my uncle just shook his head in agreement.
“And Colin O’Shea was a part of this?” I said.
“He was one of them,” Keith said. “And once IAD got onto the case, he was the only one who didn’t come out and finally own up to what they’d done.”
“They cracked them?”
“Like fuckin’ walnuts, Maxey. All of them were suspended and eventually fired for what they did to the girl even though she wasn’t underage and she wasn’t around to dispute that it was consensual. But to a man, they all said they didn’t know where she’d gone or what happened to her.”
“All except O’Shea,” I said.
“He never admitted any part of it and was never seen in the city again.”
“Christ, IAD must have done some knuckle pounding,” I said. “Was this guy Fried the lead on the case?”
The table again went dead still. No one would look up from their whiskey. No sipping, no head shaking.
“And what else, Uncle Keith?” I finally said.
“Well, Maxey. You got somebody else over in that office that you have some recollection of from the past,” he said, looking up through those damn bushy eyebrows that had scared me as a kid. I waited him out. “Meagan Montgomery is her name now.”
“Meagan?” I said. “As in my ex-wife, Meagan?”
He nodded and said: “Yes. She would be the lieutenant for the unit now, after she caught the Faith Hamlin case and sent five cops down the slide.”
I let the vision of my wife of two years sit in my head, as it had too many times on the plane trip back here. The one memory I thought I could escape was dead in the middle of my investigation.
“Well,” I finally said. “I’ll bet she can cut some balls off over there, eh?”
The old men in the crew sighed their relief, and then a bit boisterously I lifted a toast to women lieutenants and we drank, yet again.
At the end of the night I promised Keith I would stop by the house to see my aunt and shook hands all around. My head was swimming with the booze and music and smoke and faces. Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had dropped. The air felt like a slap. When I tried to breathe deeply through my nose to sober myself I caught that old familiar feeling of the air crystallizing in my nose and my eyes started watering. February in the Northeast, I thought and pushed my hands into the pockets of my new coat. I took a cab back to the Gaskill. Last thing I needed was a DUI. I’d get the rental in the morning on my way to the police roundhouse and my appointment with the IAD contact. As I sat in the back of the cab I tried not to think of Meagan Montgomery and the possibilities.
I woke at nine in the big four-poster bed of the blue room and panicked in fear. I had no idea where I was. The thick comforter around me, dark maple wardrobe, a fireplace on the opposite wall. Gaskill. Philadelphia, Scotch whiskey. In seconds it tumbled into focus but I was still unsettled that it had taken longer to right myself than it should have. When I stood I felt uncomfortably old.
Thirty minutes later I was downstairs in the kitchen drinking coffee, eating one Guy’s fabulous omelets and scanning the first few pages of the Philadelphia Daily News. Guy was devilishly accounting his own story of booking the entire house to a contingent in town for the Republican National Convention a few years earlier and their slow realization after they arrived that his was a gay- owned and -managed establishment.
“Of course when they left the next day I charged them for the full four days and they paid without a peep.”
I got a cab to my rental and it took fifteen teeth-chattering minutes to get the heater up to speed. I was at the roundhouse near Franklin Square at eleven for an eleven-fifteen with Detective Fried and I parked in the visitors’ lot.
On the third floor there were few uniforms. Shirts and ties. Suit jackets. Secretaries and doors with brass nameplates. Pure administration. I’d worn my collared shirt. Guy had read the extra-close shave and hint of cologne and had lent me an expensive sweater. The cuffs of my pleated chinos came down far enough to disguise the black work boots that still had a manufacturer’s shine.