Harry popped his leg out from under the sheet and banged his shin on a chair. At some point during his and MK’s marathon lovemaking session the squeaking of the bed had gotten so loud that they worried people would hear it in Philadelphia, so they had dragged the mattress onto the floor. The floorboards squeaked too but not with the same amplitude.
MK came in with two mugs of tea. “I have to go and work a shift that I know is going to be horrible. For that I blame you.”
“So you’re saying that time with me is horrible?”
MK sighed and leaned in for a kiss. She spoke while her lips were still touching Harry’s. “Last night was wonderful.” She sat back up and sipped her tea. “I just don’t know how I’m going to make it through the day. What time did we… give up?”
“The experience transcended time,” Harry said, blowing the steam off his mug.
“I really have to go,” MK said standing.
Harry grabbed her hand and pulled her close, or as close as two mug-holding people can get. “Call in sick.”
“Can’t,” MK kissed.
“Then call in well.”
“‘Call in well’?”
“Yeah, just phone the hospital and say, ‘I feel too good to come in today’.”
“I don’t think my contract has well days.”
“It should. Sick days just promote untruthfulness.”
“When you start a hospital – call me. You, I’ll work for.”
The tea mugs found the floor and the two tumbled into an embrace that MK finally had to forcibly push away from. “No no no.” She stood quickly and when Harry playfully reached for her she said “no” again and pointed at him as if he was a naughty dog. Harry sat back and she relaxed. “Tonight?”
“Oh yes,” Harry said. “Where?”
“Same exact place,” she said and then with great effort she ran out of the room.
* * *
After the Second World War, the sleepy town of Hazelton, Pennsylvania became the retirement home to many of New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia’s crime bosses. Even in retirement the old wise guys could cause trouble. In the 1970s Hazelton became known as Mob City with arson being the intimidation of choice. An emergency task force was put together in 1976 after the Hazelton sheriff and two state police officers’ homes were firebombed, leading to the death of the sheriff. No one higher up than the local punk, who said he was paid one hundred bucks to throw the Molotov cocktails through the windows, was ever convicted.
Today the official word is that Hazelton is a safe place to live but when you ask locals that were around in the seventies about the incidents, the most common answer you get is, “I don’t want to talk about it”.
* * *
Harry walked into the state police headquarters in Hazelton. The building was a brown rectangle that looked as if it had been designed by an architect trained in alphabet blocks. The cops that worked there called it the Cub Scout Den or The Den for short. The reception was devoid of any furnishings that weren’t hard, ugly, and uncomfortable. Harry was wondering if Californian police stations were as spartan when Cirba appeared from inside dressed in a grey business suit.
“Well, well, well, Trooper Cirba in civvies.”
“I’m about to be named the lead detective in a murder investigation, Mr Cull. The Big Hat gets in the way when I’m using my magnifying glass.” He extended a visitor’s badge.
As he pinned it on himself, Harry asked: “Am I re-hired?”
“We’ll see,” Cirba said. “We gotta talk to the cap.”
Inside, the barracks was no more stylish. Periodically, a potted plant adorned a desk but by and large this wasn’t a place meant to impress, it was meant to intimidate.
Cirba knocked on a door with “CAPTAIN S. N. KUTTER” painted on the glass, and waited.
A voice shouted, “Come,” and they entered the room. Captain Kutter was a large Polish man, bald on top with short cropped white hair on the sides. He wore oversized bifocal glasses that didn’t distract from the large scar that ran diagonally across his cheek.
He was on the phone and motioned for them to sit as he finished.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said into the receiver without enthusiasm. “OK, keep me posted.” He hung up and stood. Ed and Harry started to rise but he motioned for them to relax.
“Captain Kutter, this is—”
“Harry Cull,” the captain interrupted. “I know Mr Cull.” He extended his hand and Harry shook it.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said, “have we met?”
“Oh no,” Kutter said, sitting. “But I’m familiar with your work. I read most of your reports when you were with the Philly Organized Crimes unit.”
“I didn’t realize that information was public record.”
“It’s not but your old supervisor, Stanton, he and I shared information. I’m a valuable source of intel, being the police chief of Mob City.”
“I didn’t realize Hazelton still had that moniker.”
“It’s not anything like the seventies but we still experience little stuff, like pitz boxes. But if you let the little stuff go then things can get out of hand.”
“‘Pitz boxes’?” Harry asked.
“Pitz is what we call pizza around here. You know the boxes that pizzas come in?”
Harry nodded.
“Well, if you have a pizza shop you buy them in bulk and they cost like twenty-five cents a box, then one day a wise guy will insist you buy his boxes at a dollar and a half a box. If you say no, you have to replace your front window every week – or worse.”
“Let me guess. The store owners are scared so they claim that the dollar fifty boxes are better.”
“That’s right and everyone in my county pays a buck too much for their pitz.”
“How many pizza shops can there be?”
“In my jurisdiction? Ten thousand.”
“Really?” Harry asked incredulously.
The captain nodded. “Do you think those asses you see in the Laurel Mall get that fat all by themselves? They’ve got support, son. But we’re not here to talk about pitz with scamutz.”
“‘Scamutz’?”
“That’s what they call cheese around here.”
“This place is strange,” Harry said.
“That’s no lie,” the captain and Cirba said in unison.
“Cirba tells me you’ve been working with him on this.”
Harry looked to Ed, who nodded, “Yes.”
“You got any ideas?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m not asking for proof, Mr Cull, I’ll take hunches.”
“I know what you’re looking for, sir. We have men with motive and men with opportunity – other than that I got no hunches.”
“You want to get these men in here and have a sit down with them?”
“That’s what I do, sir,” Harry said.
“All right. You’re on the payroll. We don’t pay like Wall Street, or Philly for that matter, but you’ll be on—”
“Sir,” Harry interrupted, “I’m committed to this. Whatever you pay anybody else is fine.”
“From what I’ve read, you’re better than anyone else.” Captain Kutter extended his hand and Harry shook it. “Cirba, you’re in charge. Let me know what you need.”
Harry and Ed were almost at the door when the captain said: “Mr Cull.”
Cirba heard the tone that meant he wasn’t invited and kept going. Harry came back in the room and stood with his hands behind his back.
“Sir?”
“Mr Cull, I know a lot about what went on in Philly when you were lead interrogator down there. I remember that it cost you personally. Was there ever any resolution to that?”
Harry looked at his feet and said: “No, sir.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Now, I’m not making any judgements, you understand, but as I said, I was privy to what went on with the Organized Crime Squad down there and I just want to stress that – up here – we stay on the legal side of the line. Understood?”
“Yes sir,” Harry said and left.
* * *
The Pocono Shotgun Shootings Team was set up in the corner of the Major Case Room. Cirba introduced Harry to a young trooper named Gostigan who was sticking photos of victims and “persons of interest” onto a large whiteboard. When it was done Harry drew what looked like the Eiffel Tower on the board with a dry erase marker.
“What the hell is that?” Cirba asked.
“It’s an oil rig, or it really should be a fracking pod.”
“Is that what they look like?” Gostigan said.
“Well, no but I just put it there ’cause I have a feeling this fracking stuff is part of the puzzle.”
“Anything else we need up there?” Cirba asked.
Harry toyed with the idea of taping up the drug baggie he found at the old stone quarry fracking site, but remembered it wasn’t found legally and decided against it.
“The board isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know,” Cirba announced. “Harry and I are going to look through the lawyer Sweeney’s papers. Gostigan, you interview next of kin.”
* * *
About fifteen miles outside of Jim Thorpe, Cirba pulled off the Turnpike into the small town of Lehighton. In a strip of four shops consisting of a drug store, a hairdresser, and a taxidermist, the trooper parked outside a little restaurant called Hunky’s.
“I thought we were going to sift through legal papers?” Harry said.
“Have you ever had a pierogi?” Cirba asked opening the door.
Harry got out of the car but didn’t follow the trooper to the restaurant. “No, but I’d rather get started on the paperwork thing before I get dragged into one of your epicurean adventures.”
Cirba ignored him and went inside. After standing his ground for a full minute, Harry followed the cop. Inside, Hunky’s was decorated like an Eastern European nightmare. All of the wood, the bar, the stools, the chairs, and the support pillars reaching up to the ceiling were rough cut. The stools and chairs were draped with animal skins of several species, mostly deer and bear but Harry wouldn’t have been surprised if testing discovered puppy as well. Cirba was involved in an energetic embrace that could easily have been mistaken for an assault.
When the clinch finally stopped Cirba said: “Harry, this is Bartek, the finest chef west of Warsaw.”
Bartek was so huge that he made Cirba look small. He covered his face in embarrassment then engulfed Harry’s hand in a shake. “Any friend of Officer Ed is a friend to me,” he said in a Polish accent.
Cirba walked up to the window and pointed his electronic key at the car and locked it before he sat on a chair covered with what must have once been an abominable snowman.
“Seriously, Ed,” Harry said, taking the chair opposite, “we’re not being paid to have lunch.”
“Relax, Cull. For crying out loud, you’re on the payroll for like an hour and already you’re getting conscientious about the taxpayer’s dollar.”
“That’s right, and I also would like not to be fired before the sun reaches its zenith on my first day.”
Bartek came to the table and dropped two steaming mugs. “Tea, for two.”
Harry was about to ask for milk but saw Ed drinking with a satisfied sigh. Above him Bartek was waiting for a review.
“Hmmm,” Harry said after his first sip. “What is this?”
“Raspberry tea; I grow the raspberries myself.”
Cirba didn’t need a menu. “We’ll have pierogies, followed by gulasz and, if we have time, pear naleśniki.”
Bartek hurried off to his kitchen.
“If we have time?” Harry complained. “We don’t have time for the first thing.”
“Relax, super civil servant man, we don’t have a warrant yet.”
“Huh?”
“For Sweeney’s files. It’s tricky with a lawyer because of attorney/client confidentiality.”
“The man was murdered.”
“Yes, but not by all of his clients. The innocent ones, which may be all of them, expect privacy as afforded to them by that pesky constitution.”
“But a man was shot in the face.”
“That’s exactly what I told the judge this morning. He thinks it’ll be OK and we should get it before one o’clock, so I thought this might be our only opportunity sip raspberry tea and eat pierogies.”
“Now that you have explained it to me – let’s eat. But how late do you think we’ll be working tonight?”
“Why, you got a hot date? Oh, you got a hot date. Has the MK detente morphed into an alliance?”
Ed didn’t need Harry’s expertise in body language to deduce the correct answer. Harry was saved having to participate in an interrogation by the arrival of the food.
Harry was stuffed after the first course. A pierogi is a Polish dough pillow filled with cheese and mashed potatoes fried in onions and butter. After that came gulasz, a hunter’s stew comprising cabbage, sausages, and other meats that Harry could only guess at. It tasted out of this world, or at least out of this continent.
Ed was trying to force him into ordering the fruit-filled pancake when his phone rang. He answered it and said: “Thanks,” and hung up.
“No time for naleśniki, Bartek, we got a warrant.”
* * *
Cirba had trouble finding parking in front of the attorney’s office building. There were three empty spaces across the street in front of the court house but they were for judges. Cirba explained that the Big Hat is big but not as big as a judge’s robe. They found a “no parking” space around back that wasn’t in front of a fire hydrant. As they were walking around the side of the building Harry spotted a thin man who, when he saw Harry and Cirba, adjusted his glasses as if he wanted to hide his face. His other arm he pressed against his right chest.
“Hi,” Harry said as he walked by.
The man ignored him.
Cirba hadn’t noticed and kept walking, but Harry stopped and said: “Hey, you.”
The man pivoted and said: “You a cop?”
“Actually, no,” Harry replied.
The skinny guy turned and ran.