Trace Of Innocence. Erica Orloff
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driving the Sherman land tank, I see.”
“I can’t part with it—despite how much gas this thing guzzles. My uncle Sean left it to me when he went inside.”
“‘Inside,’” Lewis mused, as he climbed in the car Uncle Sean gave me when he drew thirty years for aggravated assault and murder—he’d not only killed his victim, but taken a hacksaw to him. “I do love how the Quinn family has such special euphemisms—like this party we’re going to.”
“What? It’s a Welcome Home party for my father. What’s wrong with that?”
“You mean a Welcome Home from Rahway Prison party. But no doubt your aunt Helen will make one of her wonderful cheesecakes for the occasion. I’m fond of the strawberry one. Very moist.”
“Lewis, it’s still a coming-home party, no matter where he was prior to actually coming home. Besides, this time was really stupid. A parole violation…busted at an illegal card game. I mean, come off it. You sometimes sit in with them, too.”
I started the car and pulled away from the curb, biting my lip in irritation for a minute. There was nothing I hated more than cops going after bullshit crimes when murderers and child molesters were a plague.
Lewis leaned back against the plush velour seats. “Well, all I can say is family parties with y’all is like stepping into a Scorsese film. I love bein’ around your relatives. They are quite entertainin’.”
I drove from Lewis’s place to JFK Boulevard and eventually steered my way toward Hoboken, coping with heavy traffic.
“But you know, Billie, I’ve still never understood how it is you managed to turn out…honest and law-abiding, if a little unusual around the edges.”
I shrugged, staring ahead at the highway. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, I know you’ve thought about it. You must have some explanation.”
I had thought about it. Endlessly. Until my head hurt, sometimes. My mother had disappeared when I was nine. The cops had bungled the case, more interested in focusing on my father—head of an Irish crime family—than in uncovering the truth. When her body turned up six months later—nothing left but bones and the shreds of her dress—they arrested the wrong man, eventually freeing him without the case going to trial when his alibi was airtight. He’d been sitting in county lockup the night of her murder, on a DUI charge.
“I don’t know, Lewis, I just wanted to solve murders. And if I became a cop, my family would have disowned me. So working for you is about as close as I can get to fighting the bad guys legally. Why did you go into forensics?”
“You know. An obsession with blood and guts. Liked to drive my mama mad with bring-in’ home dead animals.”
Of course, I knew Lewis’s reasons ran as deep as my own. He’d been at Tufts, bent on an academic career as a scientist and college professor when the bayous of Louisiana began giving up their dead. One by one, floaters came to the surface, women tortured and murdered by a serial killer. One of the dead was his childhood sweetheart. His path changed, and he never looked back.
The two of us drove through the streets of Hoboken to Quinn’s Pub, owned by my father’s brother, Tony. If “pub” conjures up images of darts and leather booths, that’s not Quinn’s. It’s a rough bar you don’t go to unless you know Tony—or can hold your own among the tough guys who hang there after long shifts driving cement mixers, or otherwise breaking their backs earning a living. It’s one of the last neighborhood places around. I parked the car around the corner on the street and the two of us made our way to the entrance. The sidewalks were already teeming with relatives and pals of my dad.
“Billie!” Tony threw his rock-hard, tattooed arms around me as we maneuvered our way inside, squeezing past the crowds. “Your dad’s at the tables. How you doin’, Lewis?”
“Fine, just fine,” Lewis said, smiling and taking a bottle of beer offered to him by Pammie, a waitress in skin-tight black jeans and a Quinn’s Pub T-shirt—black with a green shamrock embroidered on the chest. I saw her eye him flirtatiously.
I took Lewis’s other hand so I wouldn’t lose him as we snaked our way through the bar. We reached the back room, with its four pool tables. Dad was about to sink his last ball into the corner pocket. He let out a whoop when it went in, the ball spinning fast, and collected his forty bucks from his opponent. Then he spotted me and came over and planted a kiss on the top of my head.
“Billie.” He smiled and looked at me, then grabbed me in a hug. With Dad and me, we don’t have to say much. We know how we feel.
Dad stands about six feet tall—a good four inches taller than I am. We both have black hair, though his is now flecked with gray at the temples. We both have greenish-blue eyes. He has an olive complexion, though, and mine is pale with a smattering of freckles on my cheeks and nose. My nose turns up just a bit—and I look like a tomboy, with two deep dimples. Even though I’m twenty-nine, I still get carded when I buy beer at the grocery store.
“Good to see you, Daddy. Sorry I didn’t get you from prison today—I was knee-deep in analyzing a shipment of drugs found in someone’s trunk. Heroin. Street value near a million dollars. Uncle Tony said it wasn’t a problem to go get you.”
“Nah, not at all.” Dad shook his head in disgust. “Besides, it’s good to get that crap off the streets.” The Quinn family had its hand in bookmaking, a little loan-sharking and trafficking in stolen property—mostly pirated DVDs. Occasionally, a Quinn family member will fight violence with violence. But my father won’t tolerate drugs. Not just in my brother and me growing up, but in anyone who’s going to have anything to do with the Quinn family.
“Want to play a game, Lewis? A friendly wager?”
Lewis looked at me and grinned. My father had to serve a four-month sentence for parole violation. The entire time, Lewis had been practicing his pool game. He was hoping to actually beat my father, something he hadn’t been able to do since the day they met.
“As you so eloquently say, rack ’em up.”
The two of them bet twenty bucks each, which I held in my right front pocket to make it official, and soon they were playing hot and heavy.
Despite Lewis’s near-daily practice, he was still down two when we heard a commotion out front. Shouts rose above the usual din of the crowded pub, and I turned my head to see the crowd actually morphing, moving as it accommodated a growing brawl. A crowd in a bar fight seems to become a living thing.
“Christ, it’s Murphy’s boys,” my father said.
Lewis looked at me quizzically.
“Hand me that,” I said, gesturing to his pool cue. He did and I stood waiting. So did my father.
Within two minutes, the brawl had pushed its way into the pool room. I recognized three of my cousins and all five Murphy brothers going at it. One cousin connected with a solid left hook on the square chin of Pat Murphy, and let loose with a stream of expletives, ending with, “…that’s what you get for beating up a woman.”
That was enough for my father and me. I hoisted the pool cue and brought it down on the shoulder of Jimmy “Tank” Murphy. He turned to take a swing at me, but I held the cue like a bat and gave him a solid swing right in the ribs. He fell back against a pool table, grabbed a glass and threw it at my face. It missed and shattered to the floor. Next thing I knew, a striped pool ball barely missed my forehead. Chairs were overturned, more glasses broke, and I decided I’d had enough.
I looked around at the escalating fight and knew Tank was the key to it. Whenever the biggest, burliest, nastiest Murphy went down, the other brothers usually fell in line. Blood poured from Tank’s nose, but still he charged like a bull. I took the pool cue as he came at me and instead of swinging at his ribs, I lowered the cue and brought it up, with all my might, between his legs. He immediately collapsed as I connected with my intended pair of targets.
Slowly,