He believed he already knew who had slept here, and that the man had just been found shot to death at the lakefront. This had been Casey Pollard’s room, and he would have bet his house that the short, skinny man with the bad leg found dead at the lake was Casey Pollard.
Now he rummaged through the small closet and the little musty pile of clothes on a chair for something else, something he hoped he’d find but did not. There was no overcoat, no snap-brim cap. He sighed.
Nothing is ever simple, he told himself.
He remembered the dark thought that had stolen into his consciousness just before he’d gone to sleep the previous night, a man in a dark coat, and something else. He shook his head.
What I don’t know would fill a book.
He was about to leave when he heard movement at the back of the house. He stood perfectly still, held his breath and listened, and stared at the door down the hall. For a long moment he remained motionless, waiting for the door to open, and then he moved toward it. He guessed that it led either into the basement or out onto the back stairs. The sound came again, a heavy padding sound, as though someone in stocking feet moved behind the door. He thought of the bloodbath in Fritz Pollard’s room and wondered if somebody was out there waiting for him with a large-caliber gun.
No, he thought. The shooter would have panicked, would have opened fire already. He would have taken me out as soon as I came in.
He sighed and moved toward the door. For several seconds he waited with his ear to the door, listening, and when it sounded as though the person on the other side was moving away from the door, Whelan yanked it open.
He saw the eyes before he could make out anything else, eyes like none he’d ever seen in his life, and they’d been expecting him. Seen in its entirety, it was a dog out of fantasy, a creature out of nightmare, part German shepherd, probably part werewolf, a huge animal, with the most enormous head he’d ever seen.
“Shit,” he heard himself say. Whelan heard the beast growl from deep in its great shaggy chest and then the dog was at the bottom step in a heartbeat. Whelan could see the mangy patches in the dog’s hide, he could smell its filthy yard smell. The dog filled the back stairway and covered the stairs in two bounds, snarling and dripping spittle and foam, and Whelan thought he would choke on his own heart.
The dog lost its footing at the top stair and thudded down several steps, its claws scratching at the wood, and then it righted itself and regained the top. Whelan slammed the door in its face and ran as the animal threw its body repeatedly at the door, as though this were a personal matter.
“Jesus Christ,” Whelan said through his teeth, and it did not surprise him at all to hear the doorjamb splintering and bursting open and the animal bounding toward him. There was no time even to turn around. He raced the beast through the hall to the shop in front. He moved behind the big oak desk and grabbed hold of the first heavy object he found, a cast-iron ashtray overflowing with Fritz Pollard’s spent smokes. Whelan swung round with the ashtray and brought it down just as the dog left its feet in a leap. The metal caught the dog on its snout and the animal fell on its side, yelping. Then it was up again, and Whelan hurled a table lamp at its head. The dog growled and bared huge yellow fangs, then came at him again, and this time Whelan grabbed the desk chair. Gasping for breath, he swung the chair in a high arc and brought it down on the animal’s skull, and the dog hit the floor with a crash that shook the room. Whelan raised the chair again and stared at the animal, which lay spent on the floor, panting. Blood showed along the side of the dog’s head. Whelan stepped back, still brandishing the chair and watching the dog. The animal followed his movements with one crazed black eye and began to get up.
“I’ll kill you, dog,” Whelan said, and hoped he sounded more convincing than he felt. He backed toward the street entrance.
The dog got up on its forelegs, then slowly raised its haunches and growled, watching him with its moist mad eyes.
Holding the chair in front of him, Whelan opened the door carefully. He took a last glance at the dog. It was up on all fours and showing fangs, and Whelan wondered if this was how Cerberus looked. He tossed the chair, slipped out through the door and slammed it behind him.
He made the call from a pay phone, told the detective who answered that Bauman would want to know about it. He declined the detective’s invitation to leave his name.
“He’ll know who it’s from.”
“All right, sir.”
“And they’ll need something from Animal Control.”
“Whaddya got there, rats or something? Rats at the body?”
“No, there’s a dog in the apartment. You’d have to see the dog. It doesn’t even look real, it looks like special effects from a movie. I think it’s the Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“This dog’s never met Bauman, sir.”
“This dog is special,” Whelan said.
The cop chuckled. “We gonna need those darts, tranquilizer darts like they use on Wild Kingdom?”
“No darts. Call in an air strike.”
He took a bottle of Gosser’s out of the refrigerator and drank it in the dark with the radio on low. He had all kinds of pieces now—the discharge papers and the man in the overcoat, and what all the players had told him, and he had the feeling it was all coming together, but he couldn’t quite see it yet.
Before he went to bed, he peered out onto the street and then went to the back of the house and looked out onto the yard and the gangway. He wondered if a figure in an overcoat had stood in the shadows and watched his house.
The small windup clock beside the bed said 6:41 A.M. and he already knew who was calling.
“Yeah?”
“‘Yeah’—that’s how you answer your phone now? Wake up, Whelan, and put your party manners on. So you found us another stiff.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m listening.”
“I had a hunch the guy at the lakefront was the brother of a junk dealer named Fritz Pollard. It made sense to me that he was staying with his brother, so I went out hunting, and what I found, you know about.”
“You touch anything? Take anything? Have a snack from the guy’s fridge?”
“What do you think?”
“What other hunches you got, Whelan? How much of this shit you think I’m gonna let you get away with?”
“You know what I’m doing.”
“Oh yeah, I know what you’re doing. You’re looking for a guy that’s been dead for ten years and you knew that days ago, so you’re playing with yourself.”
“One of these people—either the guy you found down at the lake or the person who murdered him—killed the man I’ve been looking for.”
“It was a hit-and-run. You’re seeing conspiracies where there’s just the same shit that happens every week, every day even.”
“Right, it’s all a coincidence. This guy died and his best friend went underground. Yeah, it’s all coincidence, like the guys who died after opening King Tut’s tomb. But I’m like you, Bauman: I don’t buy coincidence.”
“You’re gonna be in King Tut’s tomb, Sherlock, you keep gumming up this other thing.”
“What have you got that I’m ‘gumming up’? Just tell me that.”
He could hear Bauman sucking at one of the baby cigars, he could hear the wheels turning, there were always wheels turning in Bauman’s head. He knew what was coming next and it gave him enjoyment.
“This is mine, Whelan.”
“Absolutely. But it’s mine, too.”
“Nothin’ is yours. It’s all mine.”
“All right.”
“Anything you get, anything, it’s mine. It’s nobody else’s, not anybody. It’s all mine or you’re gonna wish you died of King Tut’s curse.”
“Deal.”
“I don’t make deals.”
“Figure of speech. I owe you.”
“Just don’t make a mess, Whelan.”
He went back to sleep for a while, and it was almost n
ine when he pulled himself together and made his circuitous way to the office. A dark blue Mercury was parked in front of the building when he went in. The driver was a burly man in his sixties with eyebrows like drugstore cotton. The man glared at Whelan through the windshield and looked away when Whelan paused at the door to the office.
The staircase smelled of perfume, a flowery, older woman’s perfume. The perfume trail led him to his own office, where he found a tall woman in an old-fashioned blue woolen coat standing in the hall. The woman held her purse in front of her with both hands and watched him warily as he ascended the stairs.
To put her at ease, he nodded and said, “Morning.” She stepped back from his door, and when he took out his keys and approached, she straightened.
“Mr. Paul Whelan?”
He recognized the voice, he’d heard it before, a cool, confident voice with musical notes. It went with the lively brown eyes and youthful complexion, but he had never seen this face before.
“Yes. Are you waiting to see me?”
“Uh, yes. If you’re not too busy.” And now he guessed her name, even as she was saying it. “I’m Betty Torgeson. We spoke on the phone…”
“Betty Henke,” Whelan said.
She gave him a polite half smile and nodded. “Once upon a time.”
He stared at her for a moment. And now I’ve met all the survivors, he thought.
“Come on in, Mrs. Torgeson. Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Just a couple of minutes. I should have called first anyway.”
“Why? Nobody else does.” He showed her into the room, pulled out a guest chair for her and opened a window to chase the stale air.
“We can split this,” he said, holding up his coffee. “I’ve got another cup somewhere. I can also offer you tea. I have tea bags, and my cooler makes hot water.”
“Thanks, but I don’t need anything.”
“Okay.” He settled himself in, flipped the top of his coffee and took a sip as he studied her. She perched at the edge of the chair as though ready to flee if this all proved to be a bad idea. Betty Henke wore her silver hair short and used very little makeup other than a light lipstick. It was a long face and she was a big-boned woman, not as delicately featured as Ellen Gillette Gaynor and not as feminine as Maggie O’Mara, but it was a lively face, attractive in other ways. Whelan suspected that they’d been quite a trio back in the halcyon days when they’d posed for pictures on the beach.
Whelan held up his cigarettes. “Cigarette?”
“No thank you, but you can. My husband smokes: I’m used to it.”
He lit a cigarette and raised his eyebrows. “And the vigilant-looking gentleman sitting out front in the Mercury would be the estimable Lars Torgeson?”
“You’re observant and you’re good with names.”
“He’s hard to miss—he’s right out there glaring at everybody who passes by. Looks like an old prize fighter.”
“He’s worried about me. He didn’t want me to come here. He wanted to come see you himself, but I’m a big girl and this is my problem.”
“What problem?”
She seemed hesitant, as though what she had to say embarrassed her. “You. Who are you, Mr. Whelan?”
“I’m who I said I was. Here, this is my card. You can check me out, call the cops. Area Six, Violent Crimes, they know me there. Or check on my license with the secretary of state.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to know why these things we talked about are of interest to you.”
“I told you that. I’m working for Mrs. Margaret O’Mara.”
“Yes, to find Joe. Joe is dead, Mr. Whelan. I told you that. I think you were looking for something else. And then, over the weekend, I read in the paper that they found a body…”
“Ray Dudek. You read about them finding the body of Ray Dudek, and the dead man was about the same age Dudek would be if he were still alive.”
She glared at him for a moment, her eyes reflecting a mix of fear and anger. “Yes. I read that story and I haven’t been able to sleep since. I can still see his face, I can see Ray Dudek’s face on the night he was killed. He’s dead, Mr. Whelan, that man they found is somebody else…”
“He had Ray Dudek’s discharge papers on his body.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I just know Ray is dead, has been dead for forty years almost…” Something in Whelan’s face seemed to bother her. She made an exasperated noise and leaned forward in the chair. “I know Ray is dead, Mr. Whelan.”
“You were there.”
“Yes. I mean, we were all there, all of us.”
Whelan pulled out the photo from his top drawer. “All of you—from this picture?”
She seemed to soften as she took the photo from his hands. She studied it for a long time, shaking her head softly and several times saying something to herself that Whelan couldn’t quite make out.
Eventually she let it rest on her lap and met his eyes. “So many of them are dead. More than you’d think. We aren’t that old.”
He decided he wouldn’t tell her about the Pollard brothers. It would serve no purpose. He wanted to take her back to that other night.
“Who was at Riverview that night, Mrs. Torgeson?”
“Just about everybody. We used it as a meeting place, Mr. Whelan. There were a couple of big halls attached to taverns that we went to to dance, but during the summer if the weather was nice, we went to Riverview. It only cost a nickel to get in,” she said. “It cost a nickel and there was a beer garden, and the rides and the freak show and the arcades. Rides and music and kind of a haze in the air from all the cigarette smoke, and you could smell the gasoline smell from some of the small rides.” Her voice had taken on a dreamy quality and she seemed to be watching a point somewhere off to the side of his office. “We didn’t even go together, we just met there, all of us.”
“Who? Who was there that night? Chick Landis?”
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“Either of the Pollards?”
She thought for a moment. “Fritz. I remember seeing Fritz. I…he wanted me to go out with him, but I was seeing a boy from work. But Fritz was there, he—we said hello, I think.”
“Casey?”
“He showed up later, after we heard about the—about Ray.”
“Who else was there? I think this is important, as unpleasant as it may seem.”
She gave him a sardonic look. “‘Seem’? Oh, it doesn’t ‘seem’ unpleasant, Mr. Whelan, it is. I was there while a friend of mine was murdered. I’ll never forget it—what would it say about me if I could?” Betty Henke looked around his office, visibly organizing her thoughts, and Whelan said nothing. Then she sighed and flashed a sad smile. “I never went there after that. Riverview. It was such a wonderful place, but…I never went there again.”
“That’s what Mrs.—that’s what Maggie O’Mara told me, Mrs. Torgeson.”
She gave him a long look and then straightened slightly. “Let’s see…who else was there? Michael Minogue. He was there because he was supposed to meet Ray. Joe Colleran was there, of course, because he and Michael were inseparable. They were all going out later, to look for girls.” She raised her eyebrows significantly but Whelan didn’t understand the emphasis. “Gerry Costello was there.”
“Herb Gaynor?”
“No. I mean, he was there but he wasn’t with us, he was working.”
“He was at the gate?”
“Yes. And…and the three of us, Mr. Whelan”—she tapped the picture of the three laughing girls on the beach—“we were all there, all talking about man trouble.”
Whelan straightened. “Man trouble?”
“Yes. I was trying to get rid of Fritz Pollard, and Ellen was having difficulties with Herb, who was a jerk even then.”
“And Maggie Colleran?” Whelan asked.
Betty hesitated for a moment, her brown eyes clearly showing a moment of panic, and Whelan realized she didn’t wa
nt to answer. Then she sighed. “She was trying to break it off with Ray Dudek, Mr. Whelan.”
Whelan looked at her and let her words hang there for a moment, played with his cigarette as he let them sink in.
“You didn’t know,” she said.
“No.” A dark weight settled on his chest and he strained to keep his voice neutral when he spoke. “Do you know why she was trying to get out of it?”
“Of course. Ray was trouble, he was just trouble for any woman unlucky enough to fall for him. He didn’t deserve to die that way, Mr. Whelan, but he was no good.” She shifted uneasily in her seat.
“I got the impression that he was a hard case. I’ve heard that he was quick to use his fists, for one thing.”
“Oh, he had a terrible temper, and he was fearless. Some of the boys like that, the war took it out of them. But it didn’t do a thing to change Ray, except maybe to make him more violent. The first week he was back, he was still in uniform, and he got into a big fight at a nightclub down on Wells Street. But that wasn’t all, Mr. Whelan. Ray was very manipulative, he was…we used to call it ‘on the make’; he was always on the make. For a way to make a buck, for a new girl.”
She looked down at the picture. “He was such a handsome boy, Mr. Whelan. And it wasn’t just his looks, there was something about him, something that suggested a wild, lost little boy, an angry little boy, and women just wanted to take him in hand and calm him down. He had to beat the girls off with sticks. I think we all had a crush on him at one time or another. I know I did, and Maggie. Even Ellen, before she was paired off with Herb. Ray Dudek always had a girl, but if you were his girl, you couldn’t count on being that for more than a few weeks.”
“Mrs. O’Mara didn’t actually tell me this, but I gathered that she liked a fellow who didn’t come back from the war.”
The Riverview Murders Page 22