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CHAPTER NINE

September 14, 1996

Saturday, early evening

W e ate Taco Bell in the car. I would have thought he’d be more careful of the car. It really was in beautiful condition, but I was getting the feeling in a year it would look a lot like his bedroom.

When I finished my grilled, stuffed chicken burrito, which I barely considered food, I said, “You mentioned your mother’s friend, Heather. They were together when your mom and dad met. I’d like to see her next.”

“I don’t know where she lives. She was never really around.”

“I found her in the phone book.”

“I don’t know her last name, so how do?—”

“I looked in your mother’s address book. The one with a koala bear on the cover.”

“You went in my mother’s desk? She’s going to be so pissed.”

“You went in your mother’s desk. You stole one of her illegally obtained credit cards. She’ll figure that out eventually.”

“She said I could use one in an emergency.”

I didn’t believe him, so I asked, “And what emergency are you experiencing? Exactly?”

He clamped his mouth shut as his face turned red. Then drove us to the Corktown neighborhood in downtown Detroit where Heather Szymanski lived. It was a silent half an hour and we passed through a number of neighborhoods featuring hundreds of political signs. Clinton seemed to be winning over Dole, while most of the other signs continued to confuse me. The names seemed to change a lot, probably local stuff I didn’t know anything about.

“What’s E?” I asked Cass.

“They want to have casinos in Detroit. My mom’s all excited.”

We drove down Rosa Parks Boulevard and turned onto Marantette Street. The house Heather lived in was two-stories and had once been a single family house. It was now divided into apartments. An extra door had been added on the first floor next to the original front door making it all look chopped up.

After we parked the car and Cass put his anti-theft bar onto the steering wheel, we walked up to the house. He looked around suspiciously—I think he was concerned about the neighborhood but he didn’t say anything.

The neighborhood didn’t look great. Which didn’t mean anything one way or another. I knew of a lot of neighborhoods in Los Angeles that looked fine even when they weren’t. What I did recognize was the fear of a suburbanite visiting the big city in Cass’s eyes.

I rang the doorbell, which we could hear quite well on the stoop. Seconds later, footsteps came down the stairs. Locks were opened. Three. Then finally, the door.

Standing there was a woman in her mid-thirties. She had long straight sandy hair, light blue eyes, and freckles on her cheeks. She wore a peasant dress that was years out of style and splashed with paint here and there. She looked from me to Cass, and then said, “Oh my God, Cass… is that you?”

He nodded.

“You look just like your dad.” Recognizing that was a sore subject, she mumbled the word, “Shit.” Then she looked at me and back at Cass.

“This is a friend of mine,” he said.

She looked worried. I decided to drop the Big Brother lie. I wasn’t convinced it worked. I said, “I’m kind of a private investigator. Cass wants to find his father. I understand you’re a friend of his mother, Joanne Reilly.”

“I was. But that was a long time ago. Cass, how can you afford a private investigator?”

Before he could stutter and stumble his way through that, I said, “There was a bit of money when his grandparents died. He just came into it.”

“Why don’t you come up stairs,” she said, stepping aside so we could get to the stairs. Once we were both past her, she shut and relocked the door. We went up the stairs, which were wooden and showed the effects of having been trod upon for about a century.

At the top of the stairs was another door, also with a lock. We walked through it, but Heather didn’t lock it behind us. We were standing in a kitchen that hadn’t been updated in decades. The appliances didn’t match. The stove was white and shaped like a Buick from the fifties, while the refrigerator was harvest gold. In the center of the room was a table and chairs.

On the right, there was a closed door which must have led to the bedroom and bathroom. To the left, pocket doors opened onto a large living room that took up half the floor. It was immediately obvious why she lived here. The room had been turned into an art studio. There were a couple of easels, one large, one small. Both had half-finished paintings on them. There was a table with brushes, glasses filled with mucky water, tubes of paint and dribbled paint all over it. A tarp had been put beneath the table and it, too, was covered in dribblings. There were finished paintings stacked against the walls, and several hung on the walls.

Heather’s style was colorful and abstract, flirting with geometric but never fully committing. It probably didn’t belong in a museum but looked like it might be at home above a sofa. Speaking of sofas, she had one shoved up against the large uncovered windows at one end of the room.

“I really have no idea what happened to Dom,” she said, without offering us anything to drink or even a seat.

“I’m hoping you can tell us about Dom and Joanne when you knew them. I understand you were with Joanne when they met?”

“I was. Joanne and I were pretty wild as teenagers. We loved disco music. I remember skipping school with her and going to a movie theater and watching Saturday Night Fever over and over again. We were younger when that came out though. By the time we met Dom, it was all about Donna Summer, I think. We loved her. ‘Last Dance’. We started going out a lot that year. To clubs and places. Joanne had gotten us fake IDs. In the daylight they were obvious fakes but at night… well, now I think they let us in because we were so young. We always had great clothes, great makeup, shoes that made us six feet tall. Joanne taught me how to shoplift so it was… Sorry Cass, I don’t mean to make your mother sound awful.”

“Stores charge too much,” he said with a shrug. “They factor it in.”

“That doesn’t mean?—”

“Was it always just the two of you?” I asked.

“Oh, no. Joanne knew how to make friends. We knew people everywhere we went. Boys mainly. Men, I guess I’d consider them now.”

“Do you remember any names?”

“Oh gosh. Well, Joanne’s cousin Luca Amato was around a lot. Hector Verde, of course. Allen something. He was sweet. He would always dance with me while Joanne danced with other guys. And Dom… of course.”

“So she met Dom and they became boyfriend and girlfriend?” I filled in.

She hesitated before saying, “Basically. It never seemed that serious between them, but then they got married.”

“And you stayed friends after the marriage? You gave her a baby shower?”

“At first it was all very exciting. Joanne had an apartment and a husband and a baby. It was very grown up. But then, well, apartments need to be cleaned, husbands fed, and babies… well, they need everything. I know her sisters helped a lot, and Dom’s sister, Suzie. Their parents, too. I even babysat a few times so they could go out dancing. But then I went to college and I didn’t have much time… and we grew apart.”

“You weren’t around much when Dom disappeared?”

“That was a strange time. Everyone knew about it and… well, it was like he died except there was no wake, no funeral, nothing. I went see Joanne once and she wasn’t very friendly. She criticized me for not being around, even though I was in college and did return her calls whenever… Anyway. I knew it was a bad time so I just let her say whatever. I tried calling a few weeks later. She just let her answering machine pick up. And then she never called back.”

“So you don’t know much about what was going on right before Dom disappeared,” I said.

“Not firsthand no. But…” She glanced at Cass before she went on. “I heard things. Everyone heard things.”

“What things?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I want to say.”

“You need to.”

“It can’t get back to Joanne. I don’t think she’d like our talking about this.”

I looked at Cass. Eventually, he said, “I won’t say anything. Promise.”

Joanne took a moment. And why wouldn’t she? Seventeen year-olds were hardly the most trustworthy people in the world.

“I don’t know anything. Not for certain. There’s always been a rumor that Joanne had Luca kill Dom. You could have heard that anywhere.”

“Her cousin, Luca?”

She looked at Cass again. The boy didn’t look happy.

“It’s a rumor,” she said.

“Is Luca in The Partnership?”

“That’s another rumor. Rumors aren’t always true. I mean, you just have to be Italian and people say you’re in the mob.”

That was true, not to mention Italians didn’t have a monopoly on organized crime.

“Do you know Luca well?” I asked Cass.

He nods. “My mom loves him.”

Heather was silent. Uncomfortably so. I asked her, “Do you believe Luca killed Dom?”

“I think he would have done anything Joanne asked. And, yes, I think she might have asked.”

I waited a bit, just to let that sink in for Cass. Then I said, “Well, we’ll get out of your way. Thank you. You’ve been helpful.”

The three of us clomped down the stairs, said goodbye—well, Heather and I said good-bye. Cass was growing more sullen by the moment—and then she locked the door up again. As we walked to the car, which was miraculously still there. I asked, “Do you want me to drive?”

He ignored me and got into the driver’s seat. I’d barely shut the door when he pulled away from the curb. I couldn’t believe he’d gotten the anti-theft bar off so fast.

“She’s a lying bitch.”

I assumed he meant Heather, though I suspected it was more true about his mother. I asked, “Which part were lies?”

“All of it.”

“Your mother doesn’t have a cousin named Luca?”

“He owns a trucking company. He’s not in The Partnership.”

Setting aside the stereotypical idea of a mobster owning a trucking company as a cover, I said, “Heather didn’t say he was in The Partnership. She said other people thought that. She was actually pretty nice about it.”

“My mom didn’t ask anybody to kill my dad, okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

We were back on a freeway pretty quickly. I really had no idea where we were. I was feeling pretty uncomfortable about that, and that I was in the company of a very angry teenager who couldn’t be rational when it came to his mother.

“Look, when you do this kind of investigation you have understand that you’re not necessarily going to find out things you want to know.”

“I know my mother didn’t have anything to do with it.”

See, not very rational.

“We know whoever killed your dad is violent and smart. So maybe we should stop. I’m not sure it’s safe to get too close to someone who’d do this. We could be putting ourselves in danger. We could be putting your mom in danger.”

He didn’t say anything. After a couple of minutes, I turned the dial on the radio. AM only. It must have been near the top of the hour since the news was on. Bob Dole was visiting Michigan. Someplace called Midland, which was presumably in the center of the state. They were planning to re-introduce the two-dollar bill. That didn’t seem like a great idea. They’d tried it around the bicentennial and nobody was much interested.

Cass reached over and turned the radio off. After a moment, he said, “Maybe it was Luca. But that doesn’t mean my mom had anything to do with it. Maybe he did it as a favor without her asking.”

“And she’s been covering it up for a decade? Doesn’t that make her just as guilty?”

“No. Not as guilty. Not really guilty at all.”

We parked in front of the house. I got the impression he wasn’t allowed to park in the driveway. He put the anti-theft bar onto the steering wheel and got out. I followed him up the lawn to the front door. After he unlocked it we went inside.

Cass walked directly over to the cabinet and opened it. I hadn’t realized that it was a liquor cabinet, fully stocked. He poured a highball glass full of something red and sticky. It looked like raspberry liquor—not Chambord, which came in a distinctive bottle, but some cheap knockoff.

He saw me looking at him, and asked, “You want some?”

“No thanks. I’m going to bed.”

It was barely eight-thirty.