Past Due

PAST DUE BY WILLIAM LASHNER WILLIAM MORROW, 480 PAGES, $24.95 WONDER WHAT I'd think of Victor Carl if I met him on the street. Or in a bar. Or in his ratty, little legal office on 21st St. in Philadelphia. Most of his acquaintances—does this man have friends?—are pretty divided about him. His wisecracking surface transparently tries to cover his scummy underside. But if you look long enough, and if you can stand being around him long enough, you see that the scumminess is trying to hide something else. You wonder what it is. Victor does too.

Like William Lashner's previous three novels featuring Carl, this one depends much more on the character of the small-time lawyer than on the gloriously convoluted plot. If in the later chapters Lashner lets the plot wrest control from him, the first half of the book is his finest writing to date and the funniest, loaded with the kind of asides that leave you snorting through your nose.

Strangely, Carl moves back closer to his roots here, as if his moderately successful suburban excursion in last year's Fatal Flaw was a passing aberration (though Carl does refer to its characters offhandedly in the new tale). This is hardly his first reinvention. After the fiasco of his initial case, Hostile Witness, he was reduced to running legal errands for the Philadelphia mob. In his second, Veritas—close to a masterpiece of legal/hardboiled/gothic genre blending—he lucked into a payoff of frightening proportions that should have set him off for life, but which he never mentions again.

These days, Carl is marginal at best—close to bankruptcy, obsessed that his cable tv has been shut off and unable to collect from various deadbeat and slimeball clients. When one of these down-and-outers, Joey Cheaps, is found with his throat slashed on a South Philly pier the day after relating an interesting tale of his past to Carl, he vows to find his killer. Why? Because dead or alive, Joey is his client. Because of old connections. Because there could be a big payoff, somewhere, somehow, for one Victor Carl.

Understanding that these various motives coexist in Carl is the key to his character. A man who consistently lets the obvious steamroller him, he remains open to the finest nuances of intuition. Petty, greedy, underhanded, an admitted physical coward, he'll risk his life for a concept of honor that makes others scratch their heads. Carl's a walking contradiction who consistently misinterprets his own motives. But he's also an intensely believable and, at the deepest level, almost admirable human being.

As in his previous two cases, Carl has to dig deep into the past to understand the workings of the present. Tracking down an unexplained disappearance two decades old, he must confront a state supreme court justice and his supremely self-centered wife; unravel the history of an Ivy League law school drug ring; track down a suitcase of (maybe) cash; prowl a stripped, abandoned luxury liner; find the face to match the nude photos of glorious female body parts; try to make sense of the world's youngest, sexiest and ditziest corporate vice president; duel with an assistant DA and a police detective who find his very existence a calamity; get threatened, mugged and mashed as routinely as Tonto (with no Lone Ranger to revive him); and employ the services, once again, of the engagingly unlikely Phil Skink, private investigator:

"Phil Skink was a long walk off a dank pier. Phil Skink was ugly as a Salisbury steak, but his teeth were pearly. He smoked cigars that smelled like the New Jersey Turnpike. He bought his suits wholesale from a guy named Harry... Just by looking at him you would never figure he was smarter than you, but he was, guaranteed."

In between, Carl spends his time with his bitter, previously taciturn father, dying at Temple Hospital, as he tells Victor the story, which his disaffected son really doesn't want to hear, of the magical love that ruined his life.

Past Due is missing two of Lashner's greatest strengths: his courtroom and sex scenes, both of which have a power in the earlier books that's central to both plot and character. And I wish Carl were more overtly appreciative of his wonderful partner, Beth Derringer. He refers to her as his "best friend" and puts himself at risk to rescue her, but most of the time she's little more than office furniture stacked in his mind's storeroom.

On the other hand, I was glad to see Lashner return to the physical sense of Philadelphia that he covered so fully in the first two books but abandoned in Fatal Flaw. The climactic mob-vengeance scene on a deserted Navy Yard pier in Veritas—reissued in paper, for some ungodly reason, as Bitter Truth—has never been topped for sheer pulsating imagery.

He loves the streets, the restaurants, the neighborhood bars, the back alleys and the little guys who crawl out of them. I recognized the house on Rittenhouse Square rented by the mysterious Jacopo Corporation as the office of the doctor who regularly kept me sitting for hours in her waiting room, sick as a dog, when I was a teenager. The city mansion where Carl's father learned more than he ever needed to know of his true love's character could well have been the home of my own first love.

Contrast Lashner's deep-seated sense of place with Philadelphia lawyer/author Lisa Scottoline's lack of understanding of the city (and human behavior, legal motivation or much of anything else, for that matter).

Part of my problem with the plot may be that I figured out some of the key relationships early on. That also happened in Fatal Flaw, but there the emphasis was on shyster Carl's slow apprehension of a kind of vice so totally foreign to him that he could not grasp it.

Despite these reservations, this is a hell of a book. Even the excesses of contrivance spring from the excesses inherent in characters whose personal loyalties range from zero to absolute. I'm not sure you could say Victor Carl has grown with time, but he continues to unfold. And in the end, without giving anything away, I can tell you that he gets to pay his bills.