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CHAPTER ONE

September 13, 1996

Friday night

T helma Houston, Gloria Gaynor, Chic, The Bee Gees, Bette Midler’s Divine Miss M . Junior had put them all and more onto two mixtapes, which were blaring out of our new Pioneer component stereo system. That, and a Jello mold, had been his contribution to our housewarming party. Well, there were also the striped bell-bottom pants he’d chosen to wear.

“What was he thinking?” my much younger, much prettier partner, Ronnie, asked after he’d dragged me into our newly painted deep-green home office. I was leaning on our partners desk. The party had begun an hour before at seven and had just been highjacked by our former roommate and now tenant, Junior Clybourne. “I never said anything about a seventies theme. Who has a themed housewarming party? It’s about how pretty our kitchen is, not the freaking nineteen seventies.”

The apartment was full of friends and clients, mostly Ronnie’s, though my boss, Lydia Gonzalez, was there with her husband, Dwayne.

“And why did he bring food?” Ronnie went on. “I told him we had it handled.”

“I’m sure he’s just trying to be nice.”

“A Jello mold? A Jello mold is nice?”

A Jello mold was also more sixties than seventies, but I decided not to bring that up since it wasn’t a themed party anyway. “At least it’s not the kind with olives and Spam.”

“What? Olives? Spam—oh God, that’s disgusting! Why would anyone…? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“It’s a great party. People are having fun. Everyone loves the apartment.”

“Condo.”

“Co-op. Don’t count your chickens,” I said. The building was currently a co-op, though Ronnie had every intention of getting on the board and taking it condo, which would very nearly double its value. We’d lived there nearly a month, part of me was surprised he hadn’t done it already.

“So, who’s the kid?” he asked in a gossipy voice.

“What kid?”

“The one in living room hovering by the ficus.”

“You don’t know him? I assumed you?—”

“No clue.”

“Well, I don’t know him.

“You’re sure?”

With a leer, I asked, “Are you afraid I’m going to leave you for a younger man?”

“Always.”

He wasn’t. He knew how much I loved him. He’d just taken to teasing me about our age difference and how he was getting ‘too old’ for me.

“In that case, I’d better get out there and introduce myself.”

I kissed Ronnie and then kissed him again. Part of me didn’t want to leave that moment. I pulled myself away and walked out of the office. In the dining room, Ronnie’s friend Doug, whose commitment ceremony we’d gone to at the end of July, waylaid me.

“This place is amazing. I love these old Spanish buildings. This is a George Riddle, right?”

“Maybe? Ronnie’s the one who knows those things.”

“I think our house was designed by an architect who worked with him. Or for him? I haven’t been able to prove anything, but I’m sure of it.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Junior doing some disco moves. I decided I had to get as far away from him as possible, so I said, “Ronnie’s down the hall in the office. Maybe he’s got some ideas on how you can find out.”

I squeezed Doug’s upper arm—I noticed he’d been going to the gym—and moved on. When I was back in the living room, the boy was still there by the ficus. Alone. It seemed odd that he was alone.

Wearing a pair of baggy jeans and an over-sized tomato red hoodie. He was young, small, and had a shock of black hair hanging over his left eye. His skin was dark enough to make me wonder if he was Mexican, and he hadn’t quite learned the art of shaving. But that wouldn’t explain his standing alone; a lot of our guests were at least part Mexican-American and several spoke Spanish. If he crossed the border yesterday he would still be welcome in this room.

So why did he look so lost?

I was halfway across the room when Lydia stopped me. “Meeting Tuesday afternoon. There are a couple of cases Edwin and I are considering taking on. We’d like your input.”

“No business,” Dwayne said. “You promised.”

Ignoring him, she added, “And Dickie Keswick says ‘Hi’.”

“How exciting,” I grumbled. “Tell Dickie to fuck off.”

“Here, here,” Dwayne agreed.

I didn’t know what Dwayne’s problem with Dickie was, but I certainly didn’t need to hear from the guy. I’d let him interview me for a book he wrote about a member of the Chicago Outfit and I’d been sorry about it ever since.

“Don’t be like that,” Lydia said to me, seeming not to care about her husband’s opinion. “He wants to do a book on Danny Osborne. Which I think would be good for Danny, he’s been struggling since his release. You and Dickie may have to spend some time together.”

“I can’t tell you how excited I am.” I said, mostly because I wasn’t.

She was frowning at me and I doubted the conversation would improve, so it seemed a good time to slip away. The boy was only a few feet away, so I basically turned to him and said, “Hi. I’m Dom Reilly and you are?”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then said, “I’m Cass Reilly. You’re my dad.”

* * *

I suspected my heart stopped though I wasn’t sure. My breathing definitely did. I knew exactly who he was. After I bought Dom Reilly’s identification, I took at trip out to Detroit to make sure no one was looking for him. In the process, I spent some time sitting in front of the apartment building where the real Dom Reilly had lived with his pretty young wife and little boy of about four.

I remembered that I’d seen her walking the boy from the building to a waiting Cadillac. This was that little boy. Same black hair, dark eyes and button nose. Wary expression.

My heart started again and I knew I had to get him out of there. The only person who might have heard what he said was Lydia—well, maybe Dwayne. She already knew I wasn’t Dom Reilly and that this wasn’t my kid. Lord knows what Dwayne knew.

I grabbed the kid by the upper arm and hustled him out of the front door. We were on the stairs walking down to the courtyard, when he came out of shock and tried to pull away. “I can walk.”

But I didn’t let go until we were in the courtyard near the sidewalk at the front of the building. The sun had set an hour before and the courtyard lights had come on to show off our landscaping. There were benches in the back where we might have been more comfortable, but I didn’t budge. Keeping my voice low, I said, “I’m not your father.”

“Dominick Patrick Reilly, born at six-fourteen in the morning on February 13, 1954 at Detroit Memorial. Your father’s name was Patrick Reilly and your mother was Verna Keith. My grandpa and grandma. They died six years after you ran off, by the way, within twenty-four hours of each other. They couldn’t live without each other. I thought it sucked, but everyone said it was sweet. Romantic. Your Social Security number?—”

“You can stop.”

I stood there trying to decide what to do. It occurred to me I could just go along and say, ‘Ooops, you got me. I’m your dad. Now go away,’ but I knew that wouldn’t work. First, I doubted he would go away. And second, I couldn’t have him around my friends because he didn’t fit the stories I’d told. In my made-up biography, I left Michigan when I was twenty and never looked back. That was before this kid was born. I tell people I was married to a woman once, so I guess it’s possible I could have a kid by my imaginary wife, but he or she would be much younger than this boy. No, there was no way out of this without getting tangled up in my own barbed lies.

“I’m not your dad,” I said, again. It was the truth, and I hoped he’d accept it and go away.

“You are. You married Joanne Di Stefano on November 19, 1978. I was born five months later.”

“So you’re what? Seventeen? Does your mother know you’re here?”

He avoided that question—which told me she didn’t know—and asked his own, “You’re a gay? Is that why you left me and my mom?”

The party was still going on above us. It was now raining men loud enough that I didn’t think anyone could hear our conversation, but I didn’t want to find out I was wrong. I took the kid by the arm again and led him out onto the street. Then I steered him across Cherry Avenue to Bixby Park.

Less than a minute later we were in the park. We weren’t too far from a streetlight and a sign that told us we couldn’t legally drive around the park more than three times. At some point, it had a been an active pick-up spot. Might still be. Street signs didn’t always work.

“How did you find me?”

“Credit report.”

“Credit report? You’re a seventeen-year-old kid with access to people’s credit reports?”

When I was a PI in Chicago, I had a contact in the credit department at Carson Pirie Scott who’d run reports for me. I doubted this kid was that clever.

He looked like he didn’t want to tell me so I prompted him. “Come on, how did you get my credit report?”

“My mom works for this lawyer. He does collections. He buys people’s debt, and then she calls them up and makes them pay. I have to pay room and board, so I work there on weekends catching up the filing and stuff. I went on my mom’s computer and ran the report. She can’t remember her passwords so she writes them down on a Post-It and puts them in her desk drawer. It wasn’t hard.”

I thought about all the information he’d gotten from the report. My address first and foremost. He knew I owned the co-op with Ronnie and that we’d taken out a small mortgage of fifty thousand—at one of the two banks in California that will write a mortgage on a co-op—to redo the kitchen and bathroom. I had tried hard for a long time to keep anyone from having my information. Now I was out there. Now people could find me. Or, rather, they could find Dom Reilly. I’d thought his name would keep me safe. I’d been wrong.

“You know that’s illegal. Running my credit report,” I said.

“Most of the things people want to do are illegal.”

“Speaking of illegal… Your mom charges you room and board at seventeen?”

“That’s not illegal. She’s teaching me responsibility. And it’s more than you ever did.”

“I’m not your father.”

“Stop saying that,” he said loudly enough that I was glad I’d pulled him into the park.

I had to tell him the truth. Or at least something like it. “I bought your father’s information from a guy in Reno. Birth certificate, baptismal and confirmation certificates. High school diploma. And a Michigan driver’s license which he kindly put my face on.” I took a breath. I didn’t really want to say this, but I had to. “I paid extra because he said your father was on the bottom of Lake Erie and wouldn’t be using his identification.”

For a brief moment he seemed to take it in, then reject it. “That’s not true. You’re lying. You’re my dad.”

“I was told he crossed someone in the Detroit mob. The Partnership.”

“That’s not true either. No one ever said anything about my dad being in the Mafia.”

“I didn’t say he was in it. I said he pissed someone off who was.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“Okay. What do you remember?”

“Nothing. I was four.”

“What have people told you?”

“My mother said he just left. She came home one day and he was gone. His stuff was gone. She’s never heard from him again.”

“Stuff includes his important papers?”

“I guess.”

It was an important point. The documents I had were originals. And that meant that I very likely had the important papers Dom Reilly disappeared with. Or possibly, Dom Reilly disappeared and then someone got rid of the papers. Though that didn’t explain how they got from Detroit to Reno.

I could see that Cass was making his own calculations, struggling to keep believing I was his father. I tried to nudge that along.

“Do I look like your father?”

“I told you, I don’t remember.”

“Your mother doesn’t have pictures of your dad?”

“She was mad at him for running off, so she got rid of them.”

“You’ve never seen a picture of your dad?”

“No, I have. I have other relatives. It’s just been a long time.”

He was looking closely at me. Trying to figure out if I actually looked like the pictures he’d seen somewhere a long time ago. My guess was I didn’t since he was starting to crumble.

“He’s not in Lake Erie. He can’t be.”

“He might not be. That’s just what I was told.”

The trouble was, if I was using his identity, living as him, then what was he doing? Who was he pretending to be? The most likely answer was no one.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Breakfast. Eastern time.”

That had to be fifteen, sixteen hours. A long time for a growing boy. “Come on,” I told him and then led him across the park to the Park Pantry. When we got inside the restaurant, we were led to a teal-colored booth on the Broadway side. The waitress, whose sister worked the breakfast shift, put menus in front of us.

Cass didn’t pick his menu up. He just sat there looking out the window. I scanned my menu, but I knew what I wanted: a chicken Caesar. I probably should have eaten more at the party. There was, after all, a ton of food sitting on my dining room table. But I was here and not there so I might as well eat.

“You really think he’s dead?”

“I do.”

“Shit.”