Tommy & Francesca
No, thanks,” said Tommy, and he picked up a moving box in one corner of the mostly empty office and put it down in the opposite. That didn’t feel like progress, but it was at least an action. Moving into his new digs might have been stressful and he was making it up as he went along in the spare space he had leased. Stressful was not his resting state.
“Come on, honey,” said Francesca, “let me help you set up your base of operations.”
“I have a base of operations? Sounds impressive. You do realize it’s me, the dog, and nothing on my appointment calendar for as far as the eye can see.”
“Let me help, would you?”
How did it come to pass that pleading, imploring, auditioning was becoming her default mode of communication with him? She had never adopted such poses in her entrepreneurial ventures or with Anthony or even as a child with her mom and dad. At her age she didn’t expect to grow accustomed to it. Relationships evolve over time, proceeding naturally if not logically through stages, she supposed, and it was unfair and foolish to compare the past to the present, or Tommy to anyone else. And yet, was she needy with regard to him or was he resistant with regard to her, or was it a little bit of both? Bookmark this topic for the next session with her therapist, she thought.
“I don’t think I can afford your pay grade.”
And without further ado, there it was again: the money subject.
“Hey, the price is right. I’ll do it pro bono, Mr. Ex-Detective Man, sir.”
She reminded him—wasn’t this obvious to him as it was for everybody else?—she was gifted when it came to selecting furniture, hanging pictures, painting, all the design choices, the personal stamp touches that make a space come to life. Nice little office that this potentially was, five hundred square feet, it would pose no great challenge for her. She could follow through on punch lists like nobody else. Take paint, for instance. To her, paint was magical, how swiftly and dramatically it could transform the mood and tone, and she enjoyed the process, from mixing colors to drop cloths to donning a dapper painter’s cap. She was going to push back on his no, thanks as gently as she could. He didn’t mean to brush her off. She had to believe that.
His attention was snagged by the painter image. “Wait, you paint, like, rooms?”
“Wise ass, and yes, I can handle a brush.”
“Wonders never cease with you, Frankie.”
“Yeah, and don’t forget it, buddy.” So much for gentle pushback.
She was thinking modern, fresh, clean. Like that. He was thinking dark, old, shadowy. Dark green lampshades. Heavy crimson drapes. Like that.
“Tommy, let me put your personal stamp on the place.”
He cocked his head, a gesture he would never resort to during an interrogation, which was when he was low-key and blank. “Frankie, let me get this straight. You want to put my personal stamp on my place?”
“Okay, that sounds weird, but you know what I mean. Let’s look at this pragmatically: this is how you will present yourself to a prospective client. Light and transparent, or shady and brooding? Door Number One, Door Number Two? For somebody in trouble, what does she need from you to instill confidence and trust?”
“Why do you say she?”
“Good question, don’t know why. You busted me.” He did that more often than she could have expected.
“Is this your idea of an intelligence test?”
“Stop it, would you?” Because it pretty much was kind of a test.
“Put it that way, Frankie, I’d say he or she would feel more confident dealing with somebody used to the dark, which is where all the bad news lurks, under the stairwell, in the attic, down in the basement. How about that for my personal stamp?”
He was making a good point. They were standing in a sixth-floor office in the dismal, dark echoing hallways of a building downtown, an edifice that came complete with a groaning, quaking elevator. All the hallways were missing was a haunted house pipe organ. His business address was gloomily ideal, and gloomy was perfect for a PI’s digs—or so he presumed. Corporate sparkle and gleam probably wasn’t high on the must-have list for some hypothetical client of Tommy’s who was desperate for investigative services. As for the current state of emptiness of his office proper, there were two boxes and two dining room chairs Tommy appropriated from his apartment and positioned on the parched bare wood floor, which virtually grumbled for sanding and polishing or at the very least for coverage. A beat-up wooden desk with one drawer was left behind by the previous tenant, and it was where he expected to park himself. He’d need a file cabinet, as soon as he had any files to file. Frankie had the right Persian in storage and that would hit the sweet spot between unexpected artistic statement and seriously moody self-assurance bordering on the upside of arrogance.
“I am happy for you, Tommy.”
“I know you are, Frankie.”
Their dog had a prominent, prospective role to play, too. A private investigator might benefit from the presence of a large, sweet dog, which Dickens was, lying there under the windowsill on his dog divan, because sleeping was his preferred mode of being. Well, that and gobbling up treats and playing with a ball, any ball, anytime, anywhere. A double message of a sweet dog, one who also looked like he was not to be toyed with—unless you had some freeze-dried liver to distribute, in which case you two could commune.
If Tommy and Francesca were formally engaged to be married, wearing rings to advertise the future, they were hardly swept up in frantic wedding stage panic. Wedding planning was, to both of them at their age, the essence of overdetermined. Destination nuptials in Mexico or Italy? That would be a long shot. Maybe they should elope, Hawaii or Vegas, be done with it all by getting down to the real business of making a life together, till, you know, as the traditional wedding vows stipulated, time and mortality did with them what they will. It seemed like they had recovered mostly from their fight at the gala, if it was a fight, and it seemed that it was. It was certainly not not a fight.
Such a bizarre night all the way around, the gala, from risky tux to risky Philip to the upsetting aftermath in the strange unconfirmed, vague news involving Bishop Mackey. As a matter of fact, Philip had called Francesca a couple of days after the gala to make a lunch date, and she accepted. She was surprised to hear from him, and to hear him say he could use with talking to a friend, things were strange in the diocese. She had not mentioned this social development to Tommy, not yet. And Philip had not mentioned it to Ruth, either. Perhaps because it didn’t qualify as a social development and because she was waiting for the right uncharged moment to do full disclosure. And this moment, as Francesca and Tommy discussed setting up shop, didn’t appear to qualify.
Frankie tried to change the mood by making what she hoped was a lighthearted suggestion. “Let’s get a graphic artist to stencil a big eyeball on the door right over Tommy Thomas Private Investigator, you know, like in the movies.”
“Eyeball’s nice. You and your movies. I don’t miss those black-and-white old warhorses. But I was thinking Saint Jude Investigations. Lost Causes Our Specialty.”
She was thrilled for one reason in particular. The our in “our specialty” seemed hopeful for the two of them. She was reading too much into what he said. She had a tendency to do that. But she wouldn’t hit that hopeful note yet, too premature.
“It’s certainly got a ring. Kind of Catholic-sounding, no? You good with that? While I’m thinking about it, you also need a big old desk and a bookcase and some lamps and a couch and a few real chairs and this cool little wet bar I saw in a catalogue. Stock a few bottles of bourbon, you’ll be all good to go.”
“I gotta get better on the computer and that tech stuff.”
“Your landline is hooked up—do we need to hire you a secretary?”
There she was, getting ahead of herself, but she meant well, he figured. “Let’s wait till the phone’s ringing off the hook, give it, I don’t know, a day or two.”
“With your reputation in town, you’ll be swamped by clients in no time, you wait and see.”
“Cheating wives and embezzling bookkeepers, missing cats and persons, the disappeared last will and testament—the sad sack human race is full of opportunities. You got child custody cases and insurance fraud cases and restaurant employees carting rib eyes out the back door…”
“And you can do surveillance and conduct interviews, investigate corporate defalcation, all the good stuff, and you’ll be great at this. And I can help however you need. Spreadsheets are my life. And think what fun we could have doing stakeouts.” She couldn’t control herself.
“No one ever had fun on a stakeout, trust me. No one.”
He pulled out an envelope from his coat pocket. He was proud to show her what it contained. His state license to legally conduct business as a private investigator had arrived.
“When did you get this?”
“Not long, couple weeks.”
“You didn’t think to tell me?”
“The letter came in, like I said, the other day. In fact, I just told you.”
This brought up a host of questions for her, being Francesca. “You going to carry a gun?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Not all the time, unless I need it.”
“So you are going to carry.”
“I got a concealed carry permit, so sure, when appropriate.”
“And you don’t want me involved?”
“I don’t get involved in your business.”
New argument. “Never was informed you wanted to be.”
“Always nice to be asked.”
“Okay,” she said, moving fast, sensing this was an opening she needed to take at this delicate point in their relationship. “I’m asking you to get involved in my business, someday, when the time is right.” How much did she need to spell out? If she offered too much she’d sound desperate. If she offered not enough she’d sound like an ice queen.
“Someday, Frankie?” They both knew what that meant: the indeterminate future, which is exactly what she was not interested in anymore.
“You know what I mean.” Desperate or ice queen. Both lousy options. Tommy had another valid point. She had one, too.
“Someday I’ll think about it.” To him, sometimes it already felt like it was too late.
“Why do I get the feeling we continually come to some sort of crossroads every other day, Tommy?”
“Crossroads, man. Let’s not get dramatic.”
“You know how I love hearing that word, dramatic. Do you love me?” Escalation seemed on the docket.
“Talk about being dramatic. Of course, I do, of course.” Too fast, his response, reflecting his positioning, not his resolute, felt commitment.
Maybe she was too old to get serious about Tommy, maybe she’d been through too much. Could she give her heart to anybody again—as in any man in the world? And even if they were engaged, maybe he was too far along in his life, too fixed in his ways, to get serious about a woman like her.
“Do you want to know if I love you, Tommy?”
“It’d be good to be reminded from time to time.”
She believed she reminded him every single day, by word and by deed, to invoke the language of her Catholic catechism that instructed her in grade school, faith and works, faith and fucking works. “Consider yourself reminded.”
“Of what?”
Here is when somebody like him needs assurances. Here is when somebody like her needs self-assurance.
She changed subjects: that might get them through this. “You do your Italian homework for tomorrow night?” They took a weekly class together at the community college: Intro to Italian Conversation 101. Once a week was not enough for anyone to get adept at a language, and not advanced enough for her to formally review all the grammar she took for granted. Once a week, however, was enough for them to put a stake in the ground of doing something together.
“Forgot.”
“You want some help, work together on the assignments?”
“Nope.”
“Italian’s harder than people think. They think because you can do some stupid Italian accent, it must be an easy tongue to master. And you know what? They have two past tenses. You’d think one would suffice. And then there’s the subjunctive, the congiuntivo, it’s giving me, even me, trouble, all over again. I suspect the hypothetical and contrary-to-fact grammar would give you trouble.”
“So you’re implying I am not comfortable with the hypothetical, the contrary-to-fact, the contingent, the prospective, what you said. As if I were ever able to do that with you, Frankie.”
This was going nowhere. “I’m going to take off now, meetings. You’re going to be great at this private eye biz. See you for dinner?”
“You tell me.”
“I say yes,” she said, firmly.
“I’ll pick up something for dinner. You feel like fish?”
Her shoulders slumped.
“Salmon’s in season,” he said, “saw some line-caught in the Mulvaney’s case…”
She straightened up. “Don’t, okay? Just don’t, all right?”
Her weird, unprovoked, as far as he could ascertain, intensity ensnared him. “You all right?”
She couldn’t explain herself. “I don’t want you to get any fucking fish. Do I have to explain everything?”
No, but it would be good if she could explain something. “I got it,” he said. “Okay. Chicken?”
She couldn’t tell him that she didn’t want to take any chances anymore, not with the fish. She changed direction again. “I do think you could use a rug in your office.”
He studied anew the potential layout of the room. He concluded that her judgment was astute, he could use a rug, even an expensive Persian like hers, which would likely cost, knowing her, more than a year’s detective’s salary. He got his point across by a shift in his shoulders, by a tilt of his head.
They were getting somewhere after all. Because she didn’t respond to his tacit acceptance of the rug, either. Her business career had taught her if you have to talk through everything, walk through every step of your thinking, process each and every shading and nuance, you are effectively in retreat, and you have nothing worth negotiating in the first place. Every great deal is a leap of faith, on both sides.
“Frankie, don’t take this the wrong way, but you think like a guy. You can’t help trying to fix shit.” He meant that in a good way, mostly, he would swear, but didn’t.
In a sense, he may have been largely correct, that she did think like a guy, because for one thing she didn’t press him to say more about what thinking like a guy meant. If she pushed back, she might have said it was only around him where she thought like a guy. If Tommy brought out aspects of herself she was previously unaware of, that might qualify as a good thing, no? Her beleaguered therapist might breathe a sigh of relief if her client astonished by ceasing to process every single jot and tittle, the imaginary, the projected, the mental scraps, minutiae—the subjunctive of life.
“What if I said you think like a woman?” This might have been entertaining, under other circumstances, specifically not those involving her and him. They had a chance if they could get through moments like this.
“That’s what great detectives do, think like a woman, or even average detectives like me.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short. You’re slightly above average in the gumshoe department.”
“Detectives ask follow-up questions to follow-up questions, you assume nothing in evidence, you probe and you prod and you poke around some more, till you get to the truth of the crime, the facts, the guilt and the innocence. The obvious never is. If it were, there wouldn’t be a need for a detective. The art of detection would be irrelevant if there were no artists of concealment. Criminals and detectors of criminality or innocence—joined at the hip.” He was having fun, too. Moments like these, he had no question that they had a chance.
“Didn’t know you were so good at talking dirty, Tommy.”
“Stick around, baby.”
“That’s the whole plan.”
They both had a lot to learn about each other, and she caught herself wondering if they would.
—
That afternoon, long after Francesca went home with Dickens the dog, Tommy had a meeting with somebody he wasn’t expecting who knocked on the green smoked-glass door. Once inside, the conversation got off to a fast start. Tommy didn’t have a great deal of practice or patience with the red tape of small talk. The man introduced himself.
“Forgive appearances, setting up shop.” He sat behind the battered desk, and the potential client took a dining room chair in front. “Lot of Fitzgeralds in town,” he said, not that that was news to him, or anybody within a hundred-mile radius.
“Tell me about it,” said Matty.
“I’m pleased to meet Paddy Fitzgerald’s son and Father Philip’s brother.”
“That a problem for you, Mr. Thomas?”
“Tommy, and not at all. Francesca referred you?” He didn’t mention that she left a while ago, or that she was planning to come back someday with a rug he could never have afforded to buy.
“My sister-in-law Frankie said you might be able to help, whatever I had going on, not that I gave her details.”
Funny thing, she didn’t mention. Tommy concealed his bewilderment. His bewilderment reserves were severely diminished after all his years on the job. He believed he had seen, well, everything.
“You heard Frankie and I got engaged, right? Is that a problem with you or the Family Fitzgerald?” He had asked her father for his approval, and came away from the meeting almost certain he had received it. Big Mimmo was a hard read, but Francesca said that was the Full Scalino: large-scale, lockdown, plausible deniability. The most he ever gave anybody.
“None of us’ll ever get over Anthony, but Frankie is entitled to her own life, and if she’s okay with you, which she obviously is, you’re okay by me.”
They got down to business. Matty was a high school teacher and he was being effectively dismissed as a result of his refusal to sign the bishop’s strong-arm contract. He was one of twenty or so teachers who wanted to put up a fight.
“I heard about Mackey. Sounds like you need a labor lawyer, not a PI.”
“Probably. Only right now, I need information.” He and his colleagues wanted the dirt on the bishop and on the business affairs of the diocese.
“Talking hardball? You think Mackey’s shady? You heard he’s pretty dinged up, right?” To Tommy, Matty’s proposal sounded harebrained, impractical, and pointless, but he was going to be polite to his future relation—though what that relation technically was, he had no idea. Sort of a brother-in-law?
“But he’s making decisions.”
“Not drawn naturally to the soiled laundry, but let’s keep talking.”
Matty was ready to comply.
“Tell me again, how did my name come up with Francesca?”
“I wrote her an email asking if she knew anybody like you, investigations. I didn’t tell her much.”
“This conversation will be between us, then, as in confidential.”
“There’s another thing, too. Totally different thing, since you don’t seem to be all that interested in helping me with the bishop.”
“I want to help, but don’t see how snooping into the bishop’s private life is going to be useful for you, or me.”
“And who knows, this other thing could be a little more serious. Some-body downloaded some nasty stuff onto my computer.”
“Everybody watches porn, so I’m told, not my thing. Nothing to be ashamed of, and I don’t think you can get fired from a Catholic school for that—at least for now.”
“You don’t get it, it’s not mine. I didn’t download it. Someone got access to my computer. Which I can explain. And it’s not that kind of porn, it’s the really bad kind. I deleted it all, but nothing is ever permanently deleted, so I hear, and tech is over my head. There’s one more thing, too.” Matty told Tommy about the selfie Terry sent him.
“You got a lot going on there, my friend. About this Terry? She a colleague? Your wife find out about her? I don’t sit in judgment of anybody. You know, if you need marriage counseling…”
“You’ve got this all wrong, she’s a student.”
“So she’s not an adult?”
“She’s in high school, or was in high school.” Matty reached for his phone. “Do you want to see it?”
“You didn’t trash it?”
“Is that the right thing to do?”
“Put your phone down. I absolutely do not want to look. In fact, all you’ve told me is that a student of unknown age sent you a selfie that you considered to be, let’s call it inappropriate. But you didn’t give me any more detail than that, okay? You’re certainly not offering to distribute to me a photo of a child, a selfie whose content may or may not be a concern, am I clear?”
Tommy asked for more background, and when Matty finished providing it, the PI wished he hadn’t and that Frankie had never encouraged her oddball, troublemaking brother-in-law to walk into his unfinished office. He loved the work she once told him he was born to do, but this was going to be a test. Of what, as of yet undetermined.
“Matty, upon reflection, the men’s room is right down the hall.”
“Good to know. What are you talking about?”
“The men’s room is right down the hall, turn right out the door, easy to find. Go find it. If you wish, you can enter in your password and leave the phone on the desk while you’re gone let’s say for the next ten minutes.”
When Matty returned, in ten minutes, Tommy had come up with a few ideas and a lot more questions.