Page 3 of A Week Away
I was halfway across the room when Lydia stopped me. “Meeting Tuesday afternoon. There are a couple of cases Edwin and I are considering taking on. We’d like your input.”
“No business,” Dwayne said. “You promised.”
Ignoring him, she added, “And Dickie Keswick says ‘Hi’.”
“How exciting,” I grumbled. “Tell Dickie to fuck off.”
“Here, here,” Dwayne agreed.
I didn’t know what Dwayne’s problem with Dickie was, but I certainly didn’t need to hear from the guy. I’d let him interview me for a book he wrote about a member of the Chicago Outfit and I’d been sorry about it ever since.
“Don’t be like that,” Lydia said to me, seeming not to care about her husband’s opinion. “He wants to do a book on Danny Osborne. Which I think would be good for Danny, he’s been struggling since his release. You and Dickie may have to spend some time together.”
“I can’t tell you how excited I am.” I said, mostly because I wasn’t.
She was frowning at me and I doubted the conversation would improve, so it seemed a good time to slip away. The boy was only a few feet away, so I basically turned to him and said, “Hi. I’m Dom Reilly and you are?”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then said, “I’m Cass Reilly. You’re my dad.”
* * *
I suspected my heart stopped though I wasn’t sure. My breathing definitely did. I knew exactly who he was. After I bought Dom Reilly’s identification, I took at trip out to Detroit to make sure no one was looking for him. In the process, I spent some time sitting in front of the apartment building where the real Dom Reilly had lived with his pretty young wife and little boy of about four.
I remembered that I’d seen her walking the boy from the building to a waiting Cadillac. This was that little boy. Same black hair, dark eyes and button nose. Wary expression.
My heart started again and I knew I had to get him out of there. The only person who might have heard what he said was Lydia—well, maybe Dwayne. She already knew I wasn’t Dom Reilly and that this wasn’t my kid. Lord knows what Dwayne knew.
I grabbed the kid by the upper arm and hustled him out of the front door. We were on the stairs walking down to the courtyard, when he came out of shock and tried to pull away. “I can walk.”
But I didn’t let go until we were in the courtyard near the sidewalk at the front of the building. The sun had set an hour before and the courtyard lights had come on to show off our landscaping. There were benches in the back where we might have been more comfortable, but I didn’t budge. Keeping my voice low, I said, “I’m not your father.”
“Dominick Patrick Reilly, born at six-fourteen in the morning on February 13, 1954 at Detroit Memorial. Your father’s name was Patrick Reilly and your mother was Verna Keith. My grandpa and grandma. They died six years after you ran off, by the way, within twenty-four hours of each other. They couldn’t live without each other. I thought it sucked, but everyone said it was sweet. Romantic. Your Social Security number?—”
“You can stop.”
I stood there trying to decide what to do. It occurred to me I could just go along and say, ‘Ooops, you got me. I’m your dad. Now go away,’ but I knew that wouldn’t work. First, I doubted he would go away. And second, I couldn’t have him around my friends because he didn’t fit the stories I’d told. In my made-up biography, I left Michigan when I was twenty and never looked back. That was before this kid was born. I tell people I was married to a woman once, so I guess it’s possible I could have a kid by my imaginary wife, but he or she would be much younger than this boy. No, there was no way out of this without getting tangled up in my own barbed lies.
“I’m not your dad,” I said, again. It was the truth, and I hoped he’d accept it and go away.
“You are. You married Joanne Di Stefano on November 19, 1978. I was born five months later.”
“So you’re what? Seventeen? Does your mother know you’re here?”
He avoided that question—which told me she didn’t know—and asked his own, “You’re a gay? Is that why you left me and my mom?”
The party was still going on above us. It was now raining men loud enough that I didn’t think anyone could hear our conversation, but I didn’t want to find out I was wrong. I took the kid by the arm again and led him out onto the street. Then I steered him across Cherry Avenue to Bixby Park.
Less than a minute later we were in the park. We weren’t too far from a streetlight and a sign that told us we couldn’t legally drive around the park more than three times. At some point, it had a been an active pick-up spot. Might still be. Street signs didn’t always work.
“How did you find me?”
“Credit report.”
“Credit report? You’re a seventeen-year-old kid with access to people’s credit reports?”
When I was a PI in Chicago, I had a contact in the credit department at Carson Pirie Scott who’d run reports for me. I doubted this kid was that clever.
He looked like he didn’t want to tell me so I prompted him. “Come on, how did you get my credit report?”
