by Ron Levitsky
Clearing his throat, he asked, “And what kind of little girl were you? Did you run around town kick-boxing all the boys?”
She laughed, her head thrown back, sending a ripple through her waves of hair. “I was a little tomboy, running barefoot in the cornfields.”
“Cornfields? I thought you lived in the Dominican Republic.”
“It wasn’t all ‘caña’—sugarcane. We lived up in the mountains. It was pretty there. The stars so close and bright, like you were living in God’s house. I don’t suppose you’d understand.”
Looking up into the stars, so dim and far away, he said, “I lived in God’s house too, but it wasn’t like that.”
“What do you—”
“Tell me more about your childhood.”
Lucila did, painting a picture with words as skillfully as she did on canvas, so that he saw her climbing up the tall palm trees to shake the coconuts loose, then scampering down and, with one swing of the machete, whacking a coconut in half, drinking the milk as it dribbled down her chin. That and the sweet smell of mango and papaya filled the car as it sped up the expressway.
After another fifteen minutes, Lucila exited onto Route 22, which, in turn, led to Green Bay Road.
When she clicked on her left-turn signal, Rosen said, “Keep going to Sheridan Road.”
“But Alvarez lives off Green Bay.”
“Go up Sheridan and double back across the tracks north of Alvarez’s street. That way we can see if he’s being watched.”
“Okay. You know, it’s Friday night. He may not be home.”
“Yeah, but his wife will. Without Alvarez around, she might tell us something.”
They turned up Sheridan and drove north into Highwood, along the east side of the tracks that ran through the middle of town. The streets were crowded with all sorts of people. Workmen heading for a corner bar elbowed past couples in suits and furs walking into some of the finest restaurants in Chicagoland.
Lucila asked, “Where do you want me to cross the tracks?”
“Another two blocks. Hold on. Isn’t that Alvarez’s truck?”
“Where?”
“We just passed it. It was parked in front of that tavern, the one with the redwood trim. Pull over anywhere.”
Andy’s looked like a million other taverns, with its neon beer signs and lottery advertisements in the window. Its inside was just as common—cigarette smoke, rickety wooden tables, a corner dance floor that nobody used, and a jukebox warbling about somebody’s broken heart. The joint was crowded, but no Alvarez.
A row of booths lined the wall to their left. Squinting through the fog of smoke, Rosen saw the Mexican sitting in the corner booth, near the kitchen door. He wasn’t alone.
Rosen slid beside Alvarez. Across the table sat Margarita Reyes and Chip Ellsworth. Gripping her handbag, Lucila stood over the girl.
Alvarez fingered an empty shot glass, beside which stood a bottle of Corona. “Get the hell outta here.”
Rosen said, “I’m glad you’re here, Chip. I need to talk to you too.” Before Alvarez’s right hand could slip from the table, Rosen grabbed it. “What’d you have there?”
“None a’ your Goddamn business!”
As the two men struggled, the small package in Alvarez’s hand tore open, and something crumbled onto the table.
Releasing the other man’s hand, Rosen asked, “Something you mowed today?”
Alvarez curled back in the booth. “Fuck you.”
“Dealing drugs to minors. That’s hard time.”
“I said—”
“I know what you said.”
Ita got up—not quickly, but as if she’d just finished chatting with a friend. “We’re leaving. C’mon, Chip.”
Rosen shook his head. “Chip stays. You can wait for him outside.”
“Wait? I don’t wait for men. I’ll see you around.”
Lucila bent toward the girl and spoke softly in Spanish. Rosen couldn’t follow what she was saying, but he understood the word “puta”—whore. Ita replied curtly, then sauntered across the room. The men at the bar turned their heads when she passed, and a few whistled. Before stepping through the door she tossed back her head, as if laughing at them all.
Rosen said to Chip, “You could do a lot better in your choice of friends.”
Chip looked down at his lap. Lucila sat beside him and reaching down, pulled up the boy’s hands, which covered something thick and folded. It was a business envelope with the Ellsworth-Leary logo in the upper left-hand corner.
“How much?” Rosen asked.
Opening the envelope, Chip fanned out five twenty-dollar bills.
Alvarez laughed. “Don’t say nothing, kid. They’re the ones in trouble, not us.”
“Really?” Rosen said. “We’re talking about dealing drugs.”
“So call the cops. Big fucking deal.”
“Maybe I won’t bother the police. Maybe I’ll just call Soldier instead.”
Chip’s eyes grew wide as a frightened horse’s. Alvarez, however, grew even cockier.
“Go ahead, call Masaryk. The kid knows the number. You want me to get you the phone?”
“No,” Chip said.
“Go ’head, call. What you think I got, man—shit for brains? You, lawyer, you’re the one who’s got shit for brains.”
Something was wrong. Alvarez should’ve been terrified of Masaryk finding out that he was supplying Chip with drugs.
Rosen asked, “You think Soldier will get you out of this?”
Alvarez lit a cigarette and took several deep drags. “What do you think, shit for brains?”
“Just like he got you out of trouble before—you and Chip. Is that why he arranged a high-priced attorney when Keller had you picked up?”
“Sure. We’re old friends, me and Soldier. Ask him.” He was chuckling, his eyes blinking away the cigarette smoke. “Now, get outta my way, cabrón. I got things to do.”
Lucila said, “You’re not going anywhere.”
Grinning, he looked her up and down very slowly. “Ven conmigo. Me gustas, chica. Te deseo.”
She pulled the gun from her purse. “You talk to me like that again, I’ll do more than what I did to your friends in the alley. You think I’ve forgotten about that.” She aimed at him from under the table. “How good would you be able to chase women ‘sin los cojones’? Should we find out?”
The grin fell like broken glass from his face. “Crazy bitch. You wouldn’t shoot me . . . uh . . .”
“In public?”
“Yeah, in public.”
“Why not? You know how hot-blooded we crazy Latin bitches are. But maybe if you start talking nice, I might calm down.”
“You ain’t—”
“Just answer Mr. Rosen’s questions. That’s all, ‘mojón.’”
Reaching very carefully for his beer, Alvarez gulped down half the bottle.
Rosen asked, “What happened the night Nina Melendez died?”
Chip blinked hard. “What’re you asking him about that? Bix killed her . . . that’s what everybody says. He killed her, didn’t he?”
“Why don’t we start with you? What were you really doing that night?”
“Just what I told you. Me and a couple guys were down in the ravines.”
“But you weren’t drinking?”
“Yes, we . . .” He looked at Alvarez, who shifted away. “All right, so we were smoking some dope. Everything else I told you was true. We were down in the ravines and didn’t see anything.”
“You bought the marijuana that night from Alvarez.”
“Yeah. Look, I told you what you wanted to know. Can I go now?”
Rosen turned to Alvarez. “That’s what you were doing in the park that night.”
The Mexican shrugged. “My crew and me, we worked late in the neighborhood—about 8:30. I took ’em to get a hamburger, we stopped for a beer, then I dropped ’em home and went to meet the kid and his friends in the park.”
“Taking the tru
ck; dumping the clippings in the corner of the park was a cover.”
“Yeah. If anybody saw me there and called the cops, the kids take off, and I get hit with a littering fine. Big deal.”
“I don’t understand. You were almost in Ellsworth’s backyard, selling drugs to his son. Weren’t you afraid that Masaryk would find out?” Before Alvarez could answer, Rosen half whispered, “Masaryk had to know . . . he had to.”
Alvarez gulped the rest of his beer, then leaned back contentedly. He sucked on his cigarette until the tip glowed. Dropped into the bottle, it hissed angrily like a trapped animal.
“Me afraid of Soldier, of anybody? Man, you crazy. He don’t fuck with me, and I don’t fuck with him.”
“But if he’d found out—”
“We’re men, not maricones. He goes his way, and I go mine.” Rosen shook his head.
Alvarez struck his fist on the table. “You think I’m afraid of Soldier? Hell, a few minutes after I took care of the kid and his friends, I passed Soldier on Green Bay. Did I give a shit that he was on his way home—that I just missed him?”
“He was on his way back to the Ellsworth estate?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“That must’ve been sometime between ten and ten-thirty, right?”
“Yeah, I guess it was around—” He stopped suddenly. “I’m through answering your questions.”
Lucila brought the gun over the table edge. “You’re through when we say so, ‘mojón.’”
Rosen glanced from Lucila to Alvarez. What had the Mexican said to her—“Te deseo.” “Te.” Finally, it was starting to make sense. Reaching across the table, he stuffed the packet of marijuana into the beer bottle.
“Okay, you can both go.” To Chip, “Don’t forget your money. Just leave the envelope.”
After Alvarez and the boy left, Lucila returned the gun to her purse. “Well, we got to talk to Alvarez, but I don’t see what good it did.”
Rosen picked up the empty envelope with the Ellsworth-Leary logo. He turned it slowly in his hands.
“What do we do next?” she asked.
“First we make sure the safety’s on that gun. You weren’t really going to shoot him.”
She clicked her tongue impatiently. “What are we going to do?”
He smiled. “Get something to eat. I’m hungry.”
“And then?”
“Then? Find a clean-cut young man in a white shirt.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Shifting Nina’s diary to his left hand, Rosen rang the Ellsworths’ front-door bell. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since he and Lucila had driven from her Logan Square neighborhood to confront Alvarez in a Highwood bar. Yet tonight he felt no safer standing alone in the middle of the Ellsworth estate. The porch lights barely illuminated beyond the front steps, so that house and lawn appeared as some great ship lost in the spindrift of an empty sea.
When the door finally swung open, Masaryk stood before him, the telegram in his hand. He wore a forest green cashmere sweater and tan slacks, like any gentleman lounging on a Saturday night.
“Eight forty-one—you’re late. Before coming in . . . well, you know the routine.”
While the other man frisked him, unbuttoning his shirt to check for a microphone, Rosen asked, “Anybody else home?”
“Byron and Kate are out for the evening—together, for a change. Chip’s gone too. All right, come on ahead.”
The foyer was illuminated by a crystal chandelier; on the cream-colored walls hung idyllic landscapes of shepherds with lutes and sheep bleating under sun-blessed skies. Masaryk led him on thick Berber carpet under a winding staircase and down a long hall, past glimpses of what appeared to be the rooms of a museum. Everywhere he saw paintings—along the hallway, the staircase wall, the rooms—as if the house were overripe with them, waiting for harvest.
Masaryk opened the last door on the left, and Rosen walked into a small room stinking of cigarette smoke. The walls were bare, in startling contrast to the rest of the house. The hardwood floor was also bare. In the corner to his left a leather chair had been arranged with a small table and lamp. A wooden desk faced the far wall. To his right, the sliding glass doors led into the backyard. A tall lamp stood in the corner diagonal to the leather chair. The only light came from the two lamps, which spread the illumination unevenly through the room, like a piece of bread that hadn’t been buttered properly.
Motioning Rosen to the leather chair, Masaryk sat at his desk. Lifting the telephone receiver, he pressed a button, then asked, “How does it look?” After listening for a minute, he hung up without saying good-bye. His face, barely distinguishable in the dimness, stared at the strip of paper in his hand.
“‘Know truth. Must see you Ellsworth house tonight 8:30.—Rosen.’ When I received your telegram this morning, I thought what a soldier always thinks—that somebody had died. I had to write lots of those during my career. Not the telegrams—they were sent by the Defense Department—but the follow-up letters to the family of the men in my unit who were killed. What do you say about men you hardly knew?”
Rosen shrugged.
“Really? I thought you’d be an expert. What did your telegram say—‘Know truth’? Those words have a deep spiritual ring.”
“I’m surprised you take them that way.”
“Why, because I’m a soldier? Did you know that Stonewall Jackson was a deeply religious man; that he led prayer meetings for his troops and believed that his cause was God’s?”
“God’s cause—destroying the Union to perpetuate slavery?”
“Jackson believed—that was enough for him. It made him the most brilliant commander of the Civil War, greater than Lee. That belief, that moral certitude, makes all the difference. All the great military leaders had it. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Patton, . . .”
“Oliver North.”
As Masaryk lit a cigarillo, his smile flashed, brief as the match’s flame. “Yes, Oliver North. We had to free American hostages and fight the Communists in Nicaragua, and he did something about both. He was a good soldier.”
“Not everyone agreed.”
“What do you expect from civilians responsible for defining military operations? It just became too complicated to be a soldier—wars became ‘police actions’ or ‘clandestine operations,’ with more rules about what you couldn’t do than what you could.”
“That’s why you left the army.”
Masaryk nodded. “Heading security for an international corporation like Ellsworth-Leary was like the army the way it used to be. Hunting down terrorists who’d kidnapped our executives, dealing with industrial espionage, sabotaging campaigns of political opponents—”
“Like playing war with the whole corporate world as your battlefield.”
“That’s right.”
Rosen shifted forward in his chair. “And when someone like me threatens your boss, a little bit of counterinsurgency. Like Guatemala.”
“You should read up on Stonewall Jackson or Patton. Maybe then you’d understand.”
Rosen opened the notebook. “I’ve been busy reading other things, like Nina Melendez’s diary. I assume you know about it.”
Masaryk smoked his cigarillo for almost a minute, then flicked the ash into a metal wastebasket beside the desk. “It shows that Bixby was after the girl. That he’d met her in the park at least once before. That he was the one who killed her. That everybody should be happy he’s dead. Don’t you think everybody should be happy?”
“You’re right about people assuming Nina was infatuated with Bixby. Obviously, she was talking about her teacher when she wrote things like, ‘Tonight at rehearsal he said Sarah and me we’re good enough to be professionals.’”
“If this is the great ‘truth’ you’ve discovered, I’m afraid you’ve wasted both our time.”
“Do you have children?”
“None that I know of.”
“I have a teenage daughter . . . well, you know tha
t. She’s a bright kid but in many ways a typical adolescent.”
Masaryk stubbed his cigarillo on the inside of the wastebasket. “Some people enjoy hearing about other people’s children. I’m not one of those.”
Rosen checked his watch. It was getting close to nine. He’d have to hurry.
“Teenage girls have their own way of talking. I was reminded of that several times the past two weeks, including listening to a conversation between my daughter and Nina. They kept mixing their subjects and confusing the antecedents.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Nina’s diary. I think she wrote the same way she talked. It doesn’t make sense any other way. Listen to this entry, which she wrote two days after the one I just read. ‘After rehearsal, he picked me up on his way home. We went to the park overlooking the beach. His eyes, so stern with everybody else, looked so gentle tonight.’”
Rosen stared at the other man. “Bixby lives south of the high school, but Nina lives north—as, of course, do you. Picking her up would’ve been out of Bixby’s way, but not yours. Besides, according to Sarah, Nina thought of the teacher as a ‘twerp.’ But ‘His eyes, so stern . . .’ and some of the other things she wrote in her diary fit you pretty well.”
Masaryk lit another cigarillo. “What happened to your theory about Ellsworth and the girl? Everything you said about me could equally fit him.”
Rosen checked his watch again. “At first I thought Ellsworth had bought the necklace for Nina, but the order was made by phone. You ordered it in Ellsworth’s name and, as head of security, took the package when it arrived at the office. All the time I thought that you were protecting the Ellsworths—trying to hide Byron’s affair with Esther Melendez and Chip’s use of drugs, even comforting Kate Ellsworth. In reality, you were using the Ellsworths’ wealth and power to protect yourself.”
Masaryk’s laugh came thin, vanishing almost before it began. “What’re you saying—that I killed the girl?”
Just then, someone knocked on the sliding doors. Rosen checked his watch—nine o’clock. Cocking his head, Masaryk dropped the cigarillo into the wastebasket and crossed the room. The slider whispered open and closed.