“Stop here, Abdi,” I said, in front of the credit union. “Marge is in trouble.” I called her back, and the line rang and rang and went to a recording. I tried again. I tried a third time. Then I did something I had not done in forty years. I looked up the number of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police on my flip phone, and I asked for the Elder Abuse Unit. A detective named Naomi Reyes came on in two rings. I told her everything in four minutes, flat and clear, the way I used to report a bad ladle at the mill. She said, “Mr. Dombrowski, stay with your driver. Do not go home. I am sending a car to Bloomfield now.”
Abdi took me to a diner on Butler Street and bought me a cup of coffee with his own money, which I will never forget. We sat by the window with our hands around the cups. Twenty minutes later, Detective Reyes walked in. She was a short woman of forty with a long black braid and a calm face, and she slid into the booth beside Abdi and put a recorder on the table. “Mr. Dombrowski, your sister in law is safe,” she said. “She is at Allegheny General, being examined, but she is safe. We found her in the back bedroom of her house in Bloomfield. Her son had locked the door from the outside.”
I put my cup down. My hand was not steady. “Kevin?” I asked. “No,” she said. “His employer.” She opened a notebook. “The man who runs Golden Path Senior Transport is Vincent Pelligrini. He has a history in three counties. The scheme is simple and very profitable. He finds elderly people with assets, he finds a relative in debt, and he gets the relative to forge a power of attorney. Then he moves the older person into a facility he controls, and bleeds the accounts.” I thought of the word he used, and the way it fit. Marge, Helen sister, locked in her own bedroom.
A cab driver kept his meter off, a sister confessed on a telephone, and Tuesday rides became free for every senior in Polish Hill.
“Kevin owes Mr. Pelligrini ninety one thousand dollars in gambling debts,” Detective Reyes went on. “Pelligrini told him that if he delivered you to Golden Path, the debt would be forgiven, and he would also receive a share. When Marge found out, she told Kevin she would go to the police. So he took her phone. She managed to get one call out to you today, from a bathroom, while he was in the shower.” She looked at Abdi. “Mr. Hassan, I understand you were the one who warned Mr. Dombrowski. That may have saved his life, or at least his house.” Abdi shrugged his big shoulders and smiled.
They found Kevin at four in the afternoon, sitting in his Silverado outside the Dobson Street house, with his forehead against the steering wheel. He had not gone in. When the two police officers walked up to his window, he held out his keys, and he began to cry. Detective Reyes told me later that he said only one sentence. “Please tell Uncle Frank I am sorry. I could not do it.” I thought about that for a long time. A man can do a great many wrong things, and still, at the door, turn out to be Helen nephew.
I went to see Marge at the hospital that evening, in my good coat. She lay in the bed with her gray hair undone and her hands trembling on the blanket, and when she saw me she began to weep. “Frank, I signed it,” she said. “He told me it was only so you could be moved to a nicer place. I was afraid of him. Frank, I am so sorry. I should have called you the day I knew.” I pulled up a chair and took her hand. “Marge, Helen would say you did the best you could with the son you had,” I said. “And she would say that you did the right thing at the end.”
Vincent Pelligrini was arrested at his office on Banksville Road that Friday. The Golden Path vans were impounded, and eleven families came forward with their own stories. He is serving fourteen years in a federal prison. Kevin cooperated with the whole case, wore a wire for a week, and received a sentence that included restitution and three years of supervised probation. I wrote him a letter at the county jail and told him that when he came out, a cup of coffee would be waiting on Dobson Street, and that Helen chair would be empty, but he could sit in it.
The gas checks I took out of the credit union in January. Not for myself. I called Abdi on the telephone and said, “Meet me at the cab stand. I have a proposition.” We sat in his Yellow Cab with the heater on, and I told him I wanted to buy him a van, new, with a wheelchair lift and a pine tree on the mirror, and that every Tuesday it would carry any senior in Polish Hill to the Giant Eagle, free of charge. He stared at me for a long moment. “Mr. Frank, I cannot accept this,” he said. “That is too much.” I said, “Abdi, you kept the meter off.”
Dombrowski Tuesday Rides began in February, with one van, one driver, and a hand lettered sign in the window of the church hall. By summer we had three vans. Abdi four grown children came to work for the company, one at a time, and the laugh you could hear from the curb was now the laugh of a business owner. I sat in the front seat every Tuesday, with the window cracked, and I introduced myself to every person who climbed aboard. Old men, old women, the newly widowed, the ones who had been told to give up their keys.
On the third Tuesday of May, Marge came out of the church hall, in a new blue coat, and climbed up into my van. She sat beside me. We rode in silence down Brereton Street and turned onto Dobson. In front of the rowhouse a black Silverado sat at the curb. Kevin climbed out, in a clean shirt, with a paper bag in his hand. He held it up like a boy. Inside were two pieces of kolbassi from the church sale. “Uncle Frank,” he said, and I held out my hand, and I took the bag, and I told him it was good.