“Page twenty-seven?” said Beth.

“Sonny Corleone,” I said, “a bridesmaid, and a door.”

Dean barked out a laugh at that. “Well, I’m delighted you’ve come too, Miss Derringer. The room needs some brightening, but I thought I was dealing just with Victor.” He swiveled to look at Kimberly. “My staff didn’t inform me you were on the case too.”

Kimberly’s face turned red.

“She didn’t know,” said Beth, “but helping each other on our cases is what it means for us to be partners. Although I am puzzled as to exactly what this case is?”

“Why, it’s a case about a debt.”

“More than that, isn’t it?” I said.

“Oh, there is always more. Here, there is betrayal, deceit, murder, the usual, but it’s still about a debt.”

“You’re talking about Joseph Parma’s murder,” I said, nodding.

“Yes. I suppose. That too. I am told, Mr. Carl, that you come bearing gifts. How fared Mr. Manley? Did you dig the dirt?”

“I found some assets I believe I can seize to start to pay off the note.”

“I hope you found more than mere assets.”

I tried to read his mask of a face, but it was impossible. Still I knew exactly what he had wanted from the deposition, and it had nothing to do with an apartment in New Jersey owned by Derek Manley’s girlfriend or a car stashed somewhere at his strip club.

“Manley was part of it too,” I said.

“Did he admit it?”

“No, but his reaction was clear as a confession.”

“And who else? Did he name names?”

“He said he was doing a favor for a friend, but he wouldn’t divulge who.”

“Not unexpected. Start seizing his property, bit by bit, and see if that pricks his memory.”

“That won’t be so easy. Mr. Manley has an ally. A mobster. He is protecting Manley and he already tried to scare me off the case.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“Enough to stop.”

“Not yet.”

“Good. You are as I expected you to be. When things grow difficult for Mr. Manley, tell him I’ll trade the note for a name. That might open his lips.”

“What’s this all about, Mr. Dean?” said Beth. “Why do you care what happened to Joey Parma, or what Joey Parma and Derek Manley might have done twenty years ago? What is your stake in all this?”

“It’s about living up to an oath,” he said. “It’s about not forgetting the past. It’s about paying one’s debts. Hamlet, I suppose.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sit down, all of you.” He glanced around him. “Kimberly, Colfax, make yourselves comfortable. This may take a while. I have a story to tell. Sit down, please.”

Dean moved toward the fireplace and leaned on the mantel. Beth and I took seats beside each other on a stiff blue couch. Kimberly Blue curled into a wide aubergine wing chair to the right of the fireplace while Dean, with a careful impassive gaze, watched her every movement. Colfax remained standing by the door, guarding the exit.

“Good, now, are we, all of us, comfortable?” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth, inhaled, blew out a plume as if he were about to give a soliloquy on a great stage set to a packed house of adoring fans. “A long time ago,” he said, “I had a friend. His name was Tommy Greeley.”

Tell me why I wasn’t surprised.

Chapter 21

“TOMMY GREELEY WAS the kind of friend you only find when you are six or seven and then only if you are very lucky,” said Eddie Dean. “We were a unit, he and I. Fric and Frac, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Eddie and Tom.

“This was in Brockton, Massachusetts, where I grew up, famous as the Shoe City of the World. We played baseball in the church yard like we were Yastrzemski and Fisk. We hung out by the railroad tracks. We swam at the lake. We spent long summer days in a tree house we hammered together deep in the park. He was closer to me than my family, closer to me than my own skin. I would have done anything for him and he me. When Frankie McQuirk took a shot at me it was Tommy who stepped in and got the broken nose. No big thing, but the kind of thing you never forget. Never.

“He came from a difficult family, nothing that ended up in the paper, but it had its effect. The Greeleys were rich by Brockton standards, country club people. They belonged to Thorny Lea Golf Club, where the boys I grew up with could only hope to caddie, and they lived in a huge stone house on Moraine Street, the best street in town, and on the best part of Moraine too, just north of West Elm. But when you stepped in the house it smelled wrong, like some crime had just been committed. The mother was cold, distant, more interested in her martinis than her son. And the father, Buck – everyone called him Buck – was big and bluff with a bright streak of anger at everyone and everything, an anger that grew to monstrous proportions when the shoe manufacturer Buck worked for went bankrupt and Buck found himself on the street, looking for work in an economy that was shedding jobs by the thousands.

“One afternoon – we were about eight by then – Tommy came out to the tree house with a black eye and split lip. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened but he didn’t have to tell me, I knew. It was Buck. The violent undertone of his bitterness, which had been there all along, was finally unmasked. And right after that, Tommy’s mother left the house, moved up to Framingham where she had a sister. And she didn’t take Tommy with her. The maternal instinct was not strong in Mrs. Greeley, killed off, I suppose, by massive quantities of gin.

“That beating was only the first Tommy took that summer at the hands of Buck – God that name, how purely it fit the hulking brute. It got so bad, Tommy took to hiding in that tree house in the woods and I, with my mother’s permission, hid out with him.

“One night, in the park, we built a fire. We smeared lipstick on our faces like war paint. We concocted a strange Indian ceremony. And then we swore each other an oath. That we would be friends for life, together forever, the brotherhood of the woods. That we would take care of each other no matter what. That if something happened to one, the other would chase the wrongdoer to the ends of the earth to see justice done. This last bit was insisted on by Tommy and I understood exactly what it was about: Buck. Tommy wanted protection, for himself and his mother, if something happened to him, and he thought that in some strange way I could give it. But Buck was a big, hard man and I knew I could never do a thing against him. Still we sliced our palms like in the movies and clasped hands and, with solemn voice and full heart, I promised to protect him with my life.”

He looked down at his right hand, stroked something on his palm, as if stroking out a memory.

“What happened?” said Kimberly, leaning forward now, sitting on the edge of the wing chair.

Eddie Dean turned his face to her, that same careful, impassive gaze directed her way, as if this story had some special meaning for her, as if it was directed at her and her alone. And then, as much as it was possible with that face of his, he smiled.

“Nothing. Buck found a job of sorts and Tommy’s mother moved back and the danger in the Greeley house receded. Six months later my father was transferred to the West Coast office in Sacramento. And so we moved. And that was the end of it. I never saw Tommy Greeley again.”

I cocked my head, looked at Beth, looked back at Eddie. “So?”

“So, a couple years ago I was having my…” Eddie Dean took a long drag from his cigarette, another quick glance at Kimberly. “Episodes. I made too much money too quickly and found too many ways to spend it. There was a fire – we’re in Richard Prior territory here – a fire which paradoxically saved my life, and I ended up where all the foolish rich end up, in rehabilitation. It’s the same old story. But in this program, you were supposed to tally up all the obligations that you failed in the past, as a way to gain a grip on how you ended up addicted in the first place. Step seven it was. And that’s when I remembered my oath with Tommy Greeley. Friends for life, together forever, the brotherhood of the woods. So I started looking for him.