Heart pounding, he got a sweaty grip on the bat and moved toward the back. He was midway through the dining room when a new idea struck him and his heart began to do a little dance. By the time he reached the closed door to his bedroom, it was obvious—he could sense it, he could feel it.
He could smell her perfume.
Whelan placed the bat on his mother’s great oak dining room table, then took hold of the doorknob and threw the door open with a bang.
Sandra McAuliffe gave a startled yell, put both hands to her mouth and jumped up from the edge of the bed, where she’d been sitting waiting for him. She blinked and gave him the startled green-eyed stare that made her look ten years younger.
“Jesus, Paul, you scared the hell out of me!”
“We’re even. Come here.” The room seemed to be full of her perfume. He kissed her and then grabbed her, and they held each other close in silence for more than a minute, and then she leaned back to look at his face.
“Oh, look at you. What happened to your face? Honest to God, Paul…”
“I had a complicated case.”
“A complicated case. I’m gone ten days and I come back to Paul Whelan looking like…”
“Ground chuck is what I’ve been told. Anyhow, it’s a long, unpleasant story.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure.” He looked at her and realized that he was grinning. “Right now, I’m fine. But we have to talk.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, and a wary look came into her eyes. She sat back down on the bed and Whelan settled in beside her and took her hand.
“It’s about your note.”
“I…I thought so.” She wet her lips and composed herself, and he could almost hear her telling herself it might be time to tough things out. She looked forty again, forty and a little bit tired.
He took her hand. “I’m not exactly sure where to start.”
She looked at him calmly and said, “Start with the first thing that comes to mind.”
“The first thing that comes to mind is that I missed everything about you that I could think of. Everything. And as soon as you were gone. I missed you as soon as you were gone. I missed you before the plane left.”
She blinked and looked away for a moment, then looked back at him with a shy smile. “This is a very good start.”
She leaned forward to kiss him and he held up one hand.
“Did you ever meet Michael Caine?”
“Think I’d be back if I did?”
“Exactly what I thought.”
In the morning, Whelan phoned Mrs. O’Mara and arranged to meet her at her shop. The CLOSED sign was still in the window, but she was there, her back to the door, dusting and arranging a table full of porcelain figures and china. Whelan pushed open the door, and she gave him a little look over her shoulder and said she’d be right with him.
She served him instant coffee. Hills Brothers instant, Whelan thought, and weak—light brown, like rainwater in a barrel, but at least it was hot. Outside, a low gray bank of clouds had darkened the day. The wind had picked up and there was just the faintest wet hint that snow would be coming soon. He sipped his coffee and waited as she bustled around the little shop, and when she was finally sitting nervously across from him, he told her everything he knew. She listened without interruption.
When Whelan finished, Mrs. O’Mara set her cup and saucer down on the little oak side table and gazed at him.
“Will she go to prison?”
“Who knows? My hunch is that she’ll spend the rest of her time in a mental hospital. She’s crazy, Mrs. O’Mara. It sounds like she’s been crazy all her life. I’m no doctor, but I think a sharp lawyer could make a case for her being out of her mind.”
“She was never happy when we were young. She was a moody girl. She was never satisfied, she would go on and on about how she’d be living someday in a fine house, she’d marry a man with money. The boys in the neighborhood weren’t good enough, you know. She’d be moving out and leaving it all behind. That’s why we were all amazed when she settled on Herb Gaynor. She broke off with him more than once, carried on with a lot of other boys while Herb was in the navy, and then she ups and marries him after the war. And now after all these years, I understand why.” After a moment’s silence she added, “If I was a good Christian woman, I’d feel sorry for her.”
She shrugged and gave Whelan a helpless look. “We were just like anybody else. I try not to think about the old days, Mr. Whelan, because it hurts me and because it puzzles me. I don’t understand. We were just like anybody else, a bunch of boys and girls like anybody else. We got older—we went to dances at the Aragon and over at Johnny Weigeldt’s, we went to the ball games and to the show. Like anybody else. But maybe we weren’t.”
“Most of you were. One of you was a psychopath. And from what I’ve been told, the Pollards would have been trouble anywhere.”
“They came from a bad home, those boys. The mother died young. I always felt sorry for them. Their father was like a madman when he had the drink in him.”
Whelan tried to think of something to say that would end the conversation painlessly. He set down his cup and was about to say he had to run when Mrs. O’Mara spoke again.
“Nothing ever turned out quite the way I expected. After the war, that is. Nothing turned out like I thought it would.”
“I know you lost someone in the war. Your life might have been different.”
She surprised him by smiling. “Was I that obvious? Like a giddy schoolgirl?”
“There’s not much about you that’s giddy.”
She looked at her hands. “Tommy was a wonderful boy. A popular boy, too. All the girls liked Tommy Friesl, all of them.” Mrs. O’Mara flashed him a quick look: he could have had his pick of them, she was saying. “We were going to be married when he came home, but like a lot of boys, he didn’t come home. It was four or five years before I could even take another man seriously, and I had my share calling on me. I’ve never forgotten him, or the way it felt to be in love for the very first time. But that was a long time ago. A long time ago.”
“Betty Henke asked about you. She wants to know that you’re all right.”
“That’s Betty. I am all right. John O’Mara was a good man, I was lucky. And now I’m a businesswoman.” She seemed to shake off her facial expression along with her mood, and her checkbook appeared in her lap without Whelan actually seeing her take it out.
“I asked Mr. Hill, that nice man, about your fees, Mr. Whelan.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I didn’t think you would tell me. You weren’t taking me seriously, you aren’t taking me completely seriously now.”
“Oh, sure I am. I—”
“Nonsense. You think I’m a batty old Irishwoman at the mercy of the cold hard world. You think I live on canned soup and go through the garbage cans in the alley for my clothes.”
“I do not.”
“Mr. Hill said your fees are high but fair, considering the quality of your work.”
“Hill said I’m high?”
“He did. Two hundred fifty dollars a day, he said.”
“Uh, that’s right.”
“Well, that’s high, isn’t it? But then you don’t work regularly, do you?”
“Not in the sense that…Not every week. I can go for a while without a case.”
“Well then, that explains why you’re so high, doesn’t it?”
“Uh, I’m about in the middle, when you compare me with other detectives and agencies.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Mr. Whelan. Now, about your expenses…”
“I don’t have any.”
She gave him a squint to see if he was mocking her.
“I don’t,” he repeated.
“How many days did you actually investigate? We spoke first on Wednesday.”
“Right. So four days, Mrs. O’Mara.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You did no work on Saturday or
Sunday?”
He shrugged. Nothing special, he thought: I spent two days unraveling your lies and figuring out who killed your brother, I wasted favors with Bauman, I found a dead man in a slaughterhouse, I fought off the Hound of Hell, I got the shit kicked out of me by a guy while his mother blasted away at me with a Navy .45. I had a very nice time.
“It was just a weekend, Mrs. O’Mara. I don’t do much on the weekends.”
“You must have done something, Mr. Whelan. You’re not much of a businessman, are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
She sighed and then wrote out a check with the rapid, assured movements of one who does it a great deal. She tore the check out of the book and handed it to him.
“You ought to find yourself a nice girl.”
“I think I have one. And she’s Irish.”
Mrs. O’Mara nodded slowly. “Well, isn’t that nice.”
Whelan looked at the check. There was an extra day’s fee in the total. “You’re no accountant, Mrs. O’Mara.”
“O’Mara was the accountant, Mr. Whelan, not me. I guess I owe you for not being entirely truthful with you. I just didn’t think anyone would pay attention to me.”
“Maybe you’re right.” He got up to leave. It took her a moment to move the cups and saucers out of the way, and he busied himself by looking around the shop. In one corner was a tiny rolltop desk that looked as though it had been made for a child. Whelan looked up and found her watching him.
“A sea captain’s desk, Mr. Whelan. It’s small because they had no room on board ship.”
“It’s wonderful. I’ll have to come by with my friend. She loves old things.”
He noticed a small figure on a shelf of ceramics. It was a toy soldier, a knight with a lance, once brightly painted but now battered and tormented by a child’s play and the world’s rough handling. It was priced twenty dollars. Whelan picked it up.
“I know an old cop who collects toy knights.”
“Ah, you can take that little man. My gift.”
“That’s very nice of you, Mrs. O’Mara.”
She bustled behind her tiny counter and came out with tissue paper and a small bag. When she’d wrapped the little knight, she handed it to him and they walked to the door. As he pulled it open, his gaze fell on a pressed wood chair very much like one that Sandra McAuliffe had in her living room. It was seventy-five dollars.
“Would you take sixty for the chair?”
“Sure. But then I’d have to charge you twenty for the little knight.” She smiled and she had a new look in her eye, the one that said he was no match for her.
“I’ll be back.”
“I’ll look forward to it, Mr. Whelan. Thank you for everything.”
He waved and stepped out onto Belmont. The sky was no lighter, the air no warmer. And he was hungry. But he had money in his pocket and his girl had come back, and it wasn’t turning out to be such a bad day.
He decided to take the long way home, up Western. His route took him past the modern police headquarters of Area Six, past the twin shopping malls, all of it built atop the bones and dead earth of Riverview Park. All that remained from that time were the cottonwoods that still lined the river, but Whelan could smell the smoke and oil of the old park and hear the thrilled screaming of the people on the roller coasters. And he had no trouble seeing the ghosts of a time when ten thousand people a night roamed the Midway and lined up for the rides at a nickel apiece and, for the briefest moment in time, convinced themselves that there was no Depression, no war, no tomorrow.
More from Michael Raleigh
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A killer terrorizes Chicago’s diverse Uptown neighborhood. Private investigator Paul Whelan’s specialty is tracking down missing persons, but when his good friend is found slain in an alley, Whelan is steered down a path of violence as he searches for answers.
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