“If I can find the time,” Matt said.
“Find the time,” Chad said.
“She’s really a very nice girl,” Daffy said.
Now, if you call our Susan and tell her, or let surmise, that my calling her was your and Chad’s idea, and I’m not thrilled about it, that just may allay her suspicions that I might have a professional interest in her activities, and this charade will not have been in vain.
“Ah,” Matt said. “Here comes the shrimp. Can we change the subject, please?”
“Take her to the Hotel Hershey,” Daffy said. “That’s romantic as hell.”
“All I want to do with her, Daffy,” Matt said, sounding serious, “is get her in bed. I didn’t say a word about . . .”
“You bastard!” Daffy said, smiling at him. “Now I will call her. Susan may be just the girl to bring you under control.”
Philip Chason, a slightly built fifty-five-year-old who walked with a limp, turned his three-year-old Ford sedan off Essington Avenue—sometimes called “Automobile Row”—and onto the lot of Fiorello’s Fine Cars.
It was one of the larger lots; Chason figured there must be 150 cars on display, ranging from year-old Cadillacs and Buicks down to junkers one step away from the crusher.
Chason was not in the market for a car. And if he was going shopping for one, he wouldn’t have come here. Joe Fiorello was somehow tied to the mob. Chason didn’t know exactly what the connection was, but he knew there was one. And Chason had a thing about the mob; he didn’t like the idea of them getting any of his money.
Chason had spent twenty-six years of his life as a Philadelphia policeman, and eighteen of the twenty-six years as a detective, before a drunk had run a red light and slammed into the side of his unmarked car. That had put him in the hospital for six weeks, given him a gimp leg that hurt whenever it rained, and gotten him a line-of-duty-injury pension.
After sitting around for four months watching the grass grow, Phil Chason had got himself a private investigator’s license, made a little office in the basement of his house, put in another telephone and an answering machine, and took out an ad in the phone book’s yellow pages: “Philip Chason, Confidential Investigations. (Retired Detective, Philadelphia P.D.).”
It was not a quick way to get rich in any case, and it had been tough getting started at all. But gradually jobs started coming his way. Too many of them were sleaze, like following some guy whose wife suspected he was getting a little on the side, or some dame whose husband figured she was.
He got some seasonal work, like at Christmas at John Wanamaker’s Department Store, helping their security people keep an eye on shoplifters and seasonal employees. And Wachenhut called him every once in a while to work, for example, ritzy parties at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or a big reception at one of the hotels, keeping scumbags from ripping people off.
Both Wanamaker’s and Wachenhut had offered him a full-time job, but the money was anything but great, and he didn’t want to get tied down to having to go to work every day, especially when the leg was giving him trouble.
He got some work from the sleazebags who hung around the courts and called themselves “The Criminal Bar,” but there were two things wrong with that: he didn’t like helping some scumbag lawyer keep some scumbag from going to jail, and they paid slow.
And he’d done a couple of jobs for Joe Fiorello before this one. Fiorello had called him out of the blue about a year ago, said he’d seen the ad in the yellow pages, and needed a job done.
Chason had told Joey his “initial consultation fee” was fifty bucks, whether or not he took the job. He knew who Fiorello was and he had no intention of doing something illegal. Joey had told him no problem, that he should come by the used-car lot and he’d tell him what he wanted done, and Chason could decide whether or not he wanted to do it.
What Joey wanted the first time was for Chason to check out a guy he was thinking of hiring as a salesman. The guy had a great reputation as a salesman, Joey said, but there was something about him that didn’t smell kosher, and before he took him on, he wanted to be sure about him, and how much would that cost?
Chason had told him it would probably take about ten hours of his time, at twenty-five dollars an hour, plus expenses, like getting a credit report, and mileage, at a dime a mile, and Joey thought it over a minute and then said go ahead, how long will it take, the sooner the better.
That time, Chason had found out the guy was what he said he was, what his reputation said he was, a hard-working guy with a family, who paid his bills, didn’t drink a hell of a lot, went to church, and even, as far as Chason could find out, slept with his own wife.
Chason couldn’t figure why a guy like that, who already had a good job as sales manager for the used-car department of the Pontiac dealer in Willow Grove, would want to work in the city for Fiorello. The answer to that was that he didn’t. The second time Joey Fiorello called Chason, to do the same kind of a job on another guy Joey was thinking of hiring, Chason asked him what happened to the first guy, and Joey told him he’d made the guy an offer that wasn’t good enough—the guy wanted an arm and a leg, Joey said—and that hadn’t worked out.
The second time had been like the first job. Only this time the guy was selling furniture on Market Street, and thought he might like selling cars. Another Mr. Straight Citizen. Wife, kids, church, the whole nine yards. And he either came to his senses about what a good job he already had, or somebody whispered in his ear that Joey Fiorello wasn’t the absolutely respectable businessman he wanted everybody to think he was. Anyway, he didn’t go to work for Fiorello Fine Cars, either.
This last job was something else. This one was a young guy, from Bala Cynwyd, who was a stockbroker. Chason thought there was something fishy about a stockbroker wanting to be a used-car salesman right from the start. Usually, it would be a used-car salesman trying to get into something more classy, like being a stockbroker, not the other way around.
Once he started nosing around, Chason thought he understood why. This guy was a real sleaze, too sleazy even to work for a sleazy greaseball like Joey Fiorello.
One of Joey’s salesmen, a young guy wearing an open-collared yellow sport shirt with a gold chain around his neck and a phony Rolex on his wrist, came out of the office with a toothy ‘Hello, sucker!’ smile on his face.
“Can I be of some assistance, sir?”
“Mr. Fiorello around?”
“Yes, sir,” the salesman said. “But I believe he may be tied up at the moment. Is there something I can do for you?”