“She still have it?”

“Never takes it off.”

“How gruesome is that?”

“Tell me about it. And something else. It was in his jacket, in an envelope.”

“Go ahead.”

“Photographs.” His eyebrows rose. “Dirty photographs.”

“You give those to your mother too?”

“Shut up. No, them I kept.”

“Did you bring them with you?”

He sat still for a moment and then bobbed his head as he reached into his jacket and pulled out the envelope, old, worn, thickly filled. And here it was, now, in my hand, that selfsame envelope. The University of Pennsylvania School of Law. One of the many fine institutions of higher education that had rejected my application. So our dead Tommy G. was a law student, or a professor, or a clerk, or knew someone related to the school. That was one clue. But the other, more interesting clue was inside.

The first time I had opened the envelope was the night after my meeting with Joey Cheaps. This was just before McDeiss called me to the crime scene, when I still thought I could do something to get my client out of his mess. I had opened the envelope, pulled out the pictures, leafed through them quickly, looking for a clue as to who my client had killed twenty years before, looking for the face of a dead man.

But there was no face. No face at all.

And after moving through them once, quickly, I moved through them again, slowly, and then again, even more slowly, my astonishment growing by the second. They weren’t dirty, as my client had described them, they were anything but.

A single breast, soft and full. The curved arch of a foot. The taut lines of a neck. Fingers posed like dancer’s. A wisp of dark hair over an ear. And then, what was that, with the substance of flesh over long curving bone? A thigh? A hip? It was soft and smooth and supremely abstract. Oh yes, now I saw it, the arch of a back as it moved gently toward the shoulder.

In my hands were pictures of a woman’s body, perfect and strong, young, open. Pictures of a body only, no face, parts of the body separated into their own distinct curves and lines. A body, young and miraculous, universal, dividing itself until each inch of flesh became its own framed landscape with a mysterious, primal pull.

The rise of the clavicle. The run of the scapula. A distinctive mark on the areola of the right breast. The sharp climb of the calf.

They hypnotized me that first time I examined them, fascinated me still, and as I went through them now, once again, for the nth time, I found them burning themselves into my brain. Sitting on my beat up, old red couch, the lamp beside my head the only light in the apartment, a circle of brightness fell from the lamp straight onto the photographs and then through the photographs into a different time and place, into the very past.

Every inch of the woman was worshiped by the camera, every speck highlighted as if a marvel of nature. The landscape of these photographs was pristine. And they hadn’t just captured one woman’s body, they had captured the photographer too, his passion, his utter devotion. In every photograph, as clear as the woman’s flesh and bone, was the picture of an obsessive love guiding his eye as he made his study, like Ansel Adams, drunk with nature, capturing the unblemished beauty of a wildland at dusk.

The jut of the hipbone from the smooth line of her side. The sweet rippling ridge running through the narrow valley of her back.

I made the calculation. When these photographs were taken I was maybe nine or ten. I never had a chance. And yet, why did I feel, as I went through them, that I had missed my opportunity? Why did I feel the familiar pang of regret fostered by the sight of a woman whom I spy once in the street and who captures me wholly and who then disappears from my life without a trace. Some great gap existed in my life and these pictures somehow sounded out its depth. That was why I hadn’t given them to Beth. I was protecting them, and myself, at the same time.

One picture showed the woman’s torso, frontally, at ease, one leg languorously bent, a picture from the knees to the shoulders with the dark triangle, luxurious and mysterious, at its center. She was tall, thin, athletic, unselfconscious. Her hair was dark, her legs long, her breastbone high, her fingers delicate and smooth. It was intoxicating, that picture, that center, that mystery. I couldn’t turn away.

Was it poor dead Tommy G. with the suitcase and the ring who had taken these photographs? It seemed likely, yes. And so who was she to him? More than a model, that was clear. A girlfriend, still maybe pining for her lost love? A wife, still mourning her missing husband, still waiting for him to return? Well, he wasn’t returning, was he? Maybe I should find her, tell her what had happened so long ago, see if, maybe, she wanted to go out for coffee.

How pathetic was that?

Yet, still, there was something to it. Joey Parma had finally broken free of the world that had failed him as much as he had failed it, but I was still around to shoulder the burden of his past, and these pictures, that girl, was part of it. If I was to find out who had reached out from decades past to slit poor Joey’s throat, then I could find worse places to start than her. Worse places indeed.

Chapter 10

“I HAD SEEN her before,” said my father between rasps of breath. “But this time she walked by me. South Street. She walked right by me. And I smelled her. Christ, I can still smell her.”

I had fought to avoid it, this telling of my father’s sad lovesick tale. I had turned on the television, I had made calls from his phone, I had tried to start a conversation about the Eagles. In Philadelphia, if a guy comes at you with a shiv in his hand, demanding your wallet, just say something like “How about them Eagles,” and next thing you know you’ll be in a bar, drinking wits together, debating the merits of the stinking West Coast offense. But even the Eagles couldn’t derail my father. Once, when he started again with his story, I jumped out of my chair and intercepted the lovely Dr. Mayonnaise, whom I had been scheming to run into all night, and beguiled my way into escorting her downstairs to the cafeteria for a cup of joe, on me, no, no, I insist, please, you’re already doing so much for my father.

I carried the tray to a table in the corner and set out the cups and napkins and spoons like a fussy bald waiter at a French bistro. We talked about my father’s condition and then slipped into the short and imperfect histories two people give when they’re first eyeing each other. She winced when I told her I was a lawyer, but it was the kind of wince that let you know she didn’t really mind, that lawyerdom fit her notion of an acceptable vocation, not as good as an accountant but better than grave-robbing scum, which only showed how little she knew of the profession. Her name was Karen and she was from Columbus, Ohio. I had never before met someone from Columbus, Ohio, but I figured it must be very sincere out there in the heart of the heartland because Karen Mayonnaise was a very sincere person. She sincerely cared about being a doctor, she sincerely cared for her patients, she was sincerely concerned about the state of the world. But despite all that I kind of liked her and when she had to leave she gave me a smile that I took to be an invitation to call.

So I was feeling pretty cheery when I stepped back into my father’s room and sat down. And then he began again about the girl in the pleated skirt.

“Dad, really, I don’t want to hear it. Is that okay? I just don’t.”

He stayed still for a moment, breathing noisily in and out. I reached for the television remote control, hanging by a cord from the wall, but he yanked it away with surprising strength for a COPDer. “They’re going to kill me,” he said.