Lucky Bones

by Michael Wiley

  ‘Could Oliver have known who you were before the party?’

  ‘What? I don’t think so.’

  ‘How close are you to Susan?’

  ‘She’s my cousin. I don’t get along so well with my family, but I always liked her.’

  ‘Why don’t you get along with your family?’

  ‘I don’t see how that has anything to do with getting my stuff back.’

  ‘What’s Susan’s last name?’

  ‘Centlivre. Why?’

  ‘I’m making a checklist. Who’s her?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her. Someone you know – someone Oliver thought might help you out. Seems to have money to throw around.’

  ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘Oliver’s phone. Funny story about how I got into it.’

  ‘Look, Jeremy did Susan’s party. He knew she’s my cousin and knew she had enough money to hold a birthday bash for herself. He thought she’d lend me the fifteen thousand if I asked. But I hired you to do a job. If you can’t—’

  ‘I can. But I could do it better if I understood what it’s really about.’

  ‘You know what it is,’ she said. ‘Find my stuff. Get it back for me. That’s all. Find it. Can you keep that straight?’

  NINE

  Kelson drove to his office. He took his Springfield from the bottom desk drawer. He unstrapped his KelTec from his under-desk rig. He released the magazines, rolled them in his palms, snapped them back, and returned the guns where they belonged. ‘Ask Dr P about it,’ he said. He stared at his bare desktop. ‘She’ll say, Sure, you got shot in the head – what do you expect? A little OCD never hurt anyone.’ He laughed then – at nothing, or at himself, he didn’t know.

  He took out his laptop and searched for Susan Centlivre. She ran a fragrance and candle shop called The Wick in Highland Park, twenty-five miles north of the city on the lakefront. Her Facebook page showed a wide-faced, longhaired woman who wore long batik dresses and liked horses. ‘The hippie cousin,’ Kelson said. He clicked through her photo albums – showing her on vacation at a house in the woods, made up in heavy rouge and period ruffles for a costume party, picnicking with longhaired friends in a field of wildflowers. Nine pictures showed her birthday party, including one with Genevieve Bower kissing her on the lips. ‘Because you never know,’ Kelson said.

  He dialed the number for the fragrance and candle shop.

  The woman who answered sounded vaguely British. ‘The Wick.’

  ‘Right. Can I talk to Susan Centlivre?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I thought you’d sound like a stoner.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Why do you talk that way?’

  ‘What way?’

  ‘Like you’re having tea with the queen.’

  The shop owner hung up.

  ‘Shit,’ Kelson said. He breathed deep, in and out. He made a mental script. Then he dialed again.

  ‘The Wick.’

  ‘Not quite Monty Python, but close.’

  She hung up.

  He waited five minutes and dialed once more.

  ‘The Wick.’

  ‘Hi,’ Kelson said, ‘my name’s Sam Kelson and I’m looking into the death of a man you recently employed for a private party. Jeremy Oliver.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘JollyOllie.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Someone shot him. It isn’t clear who or why.’

  ‘That’s terrible. But why are you calling me? I only had him play music—’

  ‘Did you know he hooked up with your cousin?’

  ‘Genevieve? I saw them talking at the party. What does she have to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know that either,’ Kelson said, ‘but I’m working for her. How did you end up hiring him?’

  She hesitated. ‘He DJ’d a party for my sister’s business. I liked his music.’

  ‘He play the Grateful Dead?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You know, the whole hippie-dippie thing.’

  ‘No, actually I don’t know.’ Her voice couldn’t sound less hippie-dippie.

  ‘Would you mind telling me where you’re from?’ Kelson asked.

  ‘I was born fifteen miles from here. I’ve lived here most of my life.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said, and, after they hung up, ‘a hell of a lot of good that did.’

  Twenty minutes later, DeMarcus Rodman called from the Rogers Park Branch Library and said, ‘You should see this. Neto’s burning up the keyboard – it’s like watching piano. The kid’s fingers are a blur.’

  ‘No trouble, then?’

  ‘Not unless watching Beethoven is trouble. They’ve got a table of something like ten computers. All these homeless guys and retired types plinking at the keys. Neto’s like Barry Bonds coming to the plate in peewee league. I mean, this boy’s on steroids.’

  ‘Anyone from G&G watching him work?’

  ‘Everyone’s watching – human fingers don’t move that way. But no one that looks like a problem.’

  ‘Does he know you’re there?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s in a zone, man. Marty could sit on the monitor, and the kid would brush him off like a fly.’

  ‘Good deal,’ Kelson said. Then he told Rodman about his conversations with Susan Centlivre and Genevieve Bower and his conclusion that the stolen shoes weren’t worth the fifteen thousand Oliver demanded for them.

  ‘Sounds like the Neto show is more exciting,’ Rodman said.

  ‘Call if anything happens – maybe Neto will sprain a finger or the keyboard will combust from the friction.’

  Kelson put away the laptop, turned his chair, and smiled at the picture of Sue Ellen, then made faces at the picture of the kittens. Sue Ellen’s frozen expression and the kittens’ frozen motion looked like life and death all at once – a girl and her pets caught in a crystal glacier where they could remain for hundreds of years – thousands – without losing their beauty. ‘Funny that way,’ Kelson told them.

  He was still staring at them ten minutes later, as if he could will them to blink, when his phone rang.

  Beatrice O’Malley was calling from the Auto Pound. ‘You like your engine parts blackened or just well done?’ she said. ‘’Cause Jeremy Oliver’s van’s got both.’

  ‘What happened?’ Kelson said.

  ‘Someone torched it. Behind a building on West Hubbard. We towed it in twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Wow. Any signs of violence?’

  ‘Sure, the fire beat the hell out of it. More than that, I don’t know.’

  ‘Can I come look?’

  ‘Forensics is coming later. They’ll take it downtown. If you want, you can have a peek, but you can’t touch.’

  The Central Auto Pound was located two levels below the surface streets on Lower Wacker. Beatrice O’Malley oversaw the operation from a white portable trailer behind a long white fence. If she walked out of the portable and looked up, she saw a sky constructed of steel beams and concrete. The place felt like a deep cave and smelled of auto fumes and engine oil.

  O’Malley walked Kelson across the lot to a pen and unlocked a chain-link gate. The burned hulk of a once-yellow Chevy Express cargo van stood alone in the pen. The tires were gone, the melted remains of synthetic rubber clinging to the wheel rims. The JollyOllie logo looked like phantom lettering. Someone had broken out the windshield, or maybe the heat had exploded the glass. The windows on the rear doors were gone too.

  ‘Looks like it got in a fight with a dragon,’ O’Malley said. ‘Remember what the lap dancers tell you – Hands off.’ She left him there and went back to the trailer.

  Kelson peeked in through the windshield. The seats and interior might once have been red, but only flecks and patches of pink remained, like grimy wounds, among the charred fabric and seat springs.

  Kelso
n moved around to the driver’s door. Somehow the outside rearview mirror had survived. He glanced into it and recoiled at the sight of the man who stared back, as if Jeremy Oliver – or Oliver’s killer – was ambushing him. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said to his reflection, and went to the back of the van.

  Through the broken rear windows, he saw the burned scraps of a digital mixer, four large speakers, coils of audio cable, an amplifier, and a turntable. He also saw the papery skeleton of a wooden crate large enough to hold a washing machine. Shoes – melted, swollen, twisted with strands of liquefied plastic that looked like wet glue – bulged from the sides and bottom. ‘Yeah,’ Kelson said, as if he’d heard bad news. He stuck his head through the window and breathed the stink of gasoline and burned plastic and rubber. ‘And barbeque,’ he said. ‘Burned leather?’

  He stepped outside the pen and called Genevieve Bower. She answered on the second ring, and he said, ‘Sorry. They’re gone. The cops impounded Oliver’s van – burned. The shoes were in it.’

  Genevieve Bower barely said, ‘Damn.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  He seemed to expect her next words. ‘Was there anything else in the van?’

  ‘His sound equipment.’

  ‘Anything of mine?’

  ‘Like what?’ he said.

  She faltered. ‘A thumb drive. Red.’

  ‘I don’t know. The van’s at the pound. It’s evidence – I can’t search it. I can’t even touch it.’

  ‘Look for a red thumb drive.’ A kind of pleading.

  ‘I can’t – I’m sorry.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘What’s on it?’

  Halting. ‘Videos.’

  ‘Of you and Jeremy Oliver?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What—’ But even his cross-firing brain told him to ask no more. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

  ‘Please.’

  He mumbled something about doing what he could, and they hung up. He stood alone, surrounded by rows of impounded cars on the grimy lot. Beatrice O’Malley was back in the trailer office. ‘Such a bad, bad idea,’ he said. ‘A dungeon, not a cave. Dragons, for God’s sake.’ He went back to the van – to the passenger side door, invisible from the trailer office. He touched the handle – and hesitated. Then he gripped it. The fire had melted something in the release mechanism. He yanked. The door opened.

  He checked the glove compartment, what remained of it. Oliver had stored a glass pipe, a pocketknife, a screwdriver, and a pack of condoms. No thumb drive.

  The center console produced another pipe, a filthy coffee cup, and, at the bottom, a bunch of quarters, dimes, and pennies. No thumb drive.

  Kelson got out, eased the door shut, and went to the back of the van. ‘Bad, bad, bad,’ he said. He pulled the back doors open, climbed inside, and shut them behind him. The stink of the fire cut at his nose and throat, but he lifted the lid off the shoe crate. The boards that rimmed the top of the crate crumbled. ‘Dammit,’ he said, and set the lid on the cargo bed. He dug a hand into the melted mess and jumble of shoes, poking his fingers into filthy holes filled with ash and flakes of strange substances, expecting – ‘nothing,’ he said. He dug his other hand in and crammed it into a melted crevice. The sides of the crate collapsed, spilling destroyed shoes across the back of the van. Kelson yelled – then, realizing that yelling made his situation worse, hissed. Nothing he could do to put the crate back together, so he rummaged through Oliver’s electronic equipment. ‘Worse and worse and worse.’

  No thumb drive.

  He climbed out of the van, shut the doors, and brushed the soot and grime off his pants and jacket. He left the holding pen, closed the gate, and snapped the padlock shut.

  He went into the trailer. A large man in a Chicago Blackhawks hat was hollering at O’Malley about a Lexus he’d parked in a fire lane only long enough to rush inside for a take-out order. O’Malley had crossed her arms over her chest the way she did when she wanted to build up maximum pressure before letting a jerk have it. Kelson tapped the large man on his shoulder and said, ‘You don’t want to do that.’ Then he smiled at O’Malley, said, ‘Thanks,’ and left.

  Sitting in his car, he dialed Genevieve Bower again.

  Her phone rang and rang, and when the call went to voicemail, he hung up.

  He drove back to his office under a graying afternoon sky, parked in the parking garage, went up to his desk, and called Rodman.

  Rodman and Marty LeCoeur were drinking beer at Silvana, a bar up the street from the Rogers Park Library. ‘Neto spotted us,’ Rodman said. ‘He sent Marty to get him a Red Bull. Then he kicked us out. G&G gave him a six o’clock deadline. He says he’ll meet us here at five. The kid is good – maybe even as good as he says. We’re going to get him drunk, and then he’s buying us rib eyes. Meet us at Gene and Georgetti at eight?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll pass,’ Kelson said. ‘That kid bugs me.’

  When they hung up, Kelson checked his pistols. He said good night to the picture of Sue Ellen, stuffed his hands in his pockets instead of petting the picture of Payday and Painter’s Lane, and left his office.

  As he drove his Challenger from the parking garage, he rolled down his window by the booth, and said to the attendant, ‘Never play with matches.’

  The attendant said, ‘One of these days you’re gonna let me drive that car.’

  ‘You’re my kind of man,’ Kelson said.

  He drove home through heavy traffic, talking to the people in the other cars – the ones who cut him off, the ones who let him in at a corner, the woman who stared at him a moment too long as they waited at a red light – as if they sat next to him in his passenger seat.

  When he let himself into his apartment, the kittens raced across the carpet and rubbed against his ankles. He lay down inside the door and let them crawl on to his chest and sniff his chin. They purred as they worked their little claws on his shirt and purred louder when he stroked their backs. ‘When all else fails,’ he said to Painter’s Lane.

  At five o’clock he felt an impulse to join his friends at Silvana for an evening of drinking and steak. He put on his jacket and started out the door. Then Painter’s Lane meowed at him, and he felt another impulse. He took off his jacket, went to the kitchenette, and poured a bowl of milk for her and another for Payday.

  He was sitting on the floor watching the kittens lap the milk when his phone rang.

  Caller ID said DeMarcus Rodman.

  Kelson answered, ‘Do a shot for me. If Neto’s paying, make it top-shelf.’

  Rodman said, ‘Turn on the news.’ In all the years Kelson had known him, Rodman had never sounded agitated. Now he sounded agitated.

  ‘What happened?’ Kelson said.

  ‘I don’t know. We heard it from the bar. It shook the damn walls. When we went outside, we saw smoke.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Kelson said. ‘Where? What happened?’

  ‘The library,’ Rodman said. ‘The goddamned library.’

  ‘What happened? Is Neto OK?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Rodman said. ‘I think he’s dead.’

  TEN

  Neto wasn’t dead.

  The blast had shredded the left side of his body. It had punctured his left eye. It had pocked his head and body with metal and molten plastic.

  ‘Very critical,’ said the doctors at the University of Chicago Trauma Center. ‘If he wakes up … we don’t know if he’ll wake up – we don’t know what will remain of him if he does – what function, what cognitive …’

  Two others died. ‘Neto’s one of the lucky ones,’ said a nurse, and Rodman had to hold Marty to keep him from punching her.

  The dead – a homeless man working at the computer two seats down from Neto, and a young mother at the computer between Neto and the homeless man. A baby girl in a stroller between the woman and Neto survived with only abrasions. ‘A miracle,’ the same nurse said. The mother’s body shielded her girl from the blast. It partly shielded Neto too.


  Including the woman’s baby, ambulances carried six people to hospitals around the city, the most critically injured to the Trauma Center. Now, Marty LeCoeur, Rodman, and Kelson had one of the internal waiting rooms to themselves. The lights were soft, the paint the golden color of an autumn sunset, the chairs upholstered in earth tones. The room seemed to whisper Peace, Patience, Forbearance. When the doctor left, Marty stared at the walls as if they were closing in on him and said, ‘Fucking makes me sick.’

  Then he called his brother, Neto’s father. He started gentle but in a minute was yelling into the phone, ‘You get the fuck down here now,’ and in the hush of the room the voice of Neto’s father – who’d kicked Neto out around the time of the Banco Santander Río trouble – came through the earpiece – ‘The hell if I will.’ Marty swore at the man, the man swore back, and when Marty hung up, he had tears in his eyes. He stared at Rodman and Kelson and said, ‘I’m his only family. We are.’

  ‘I don’t even like the kid,’ Kelson said.

  Marty glared at him.

  ‘Sorry. Anything you need. Anything I can do.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Marty said, and he wiped his glazed eyes with the back of his hand. ‘You can find out what the fuck happened.’

  After a while, Marty’s girlfriend Janet came. They went to a corner and mumbled, and she put a big paw on his little shoulder, but when they came back to Rodman and Kelson, she sat apart as if afraid she would break him if she got close. They all were quiet except when Kelson’s thoughts leaked out of his mouth.

  Just before midnight, the doctor returned. ‘We think we’ve stopped the internal bleeding,’ he said. He gave them the details about the procedures they’d performed – a whining blur of information that hurt Kelson to think about, and he told him so. ‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said. ‘So sorry.’

  ‘Everyone’s sorry,’ Kelson said. ‘Me. You.’

  ‘What fucking good?’ Marty said.

  ‘He’s stable for now,’ said the doctor, and added a string of clichés. Touch and go. Only time can tell. Resting peacefully. Looks like a fighter. Hope for the best.

  ‘I’m a numbers guy,’ Marty said. ‘Give me the numbers.’