“But what could he possibly have against Meredith?”
“Thomas,” I said. “Specifically, Thomas’s ‘engagement’—whether or not there ever really was one has become unimportant. What’s important is that if Meredith had become more trouble to Thomas than she was worth, it could have been Alexander just as easily as Thomas who decided to take matters into his own hands.”
Her look was incredulous, though whether that was owing to what I had said or the mere fact that I had said it was hard to tell.
She said, “That’s even crazier than your idea that Thomas killed Meredith. Where’d you come up with a screwy thought like that?”
I told her about the call Alexander Wayne had paid me.
“I admit it’s pretty … odd,” she said when I had finished. “But it doesn’t prove anything.”
“I agree. But it’s enough to make a fella curious, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well …”
“Here’s something else that’s curious: A few minutes before Wayne turned up at my door, someone tried to flatten me out with a very large and very unfriendly-looking car.”
“Good God,” Dianna gasped. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I went into my Spider-Man act and escaped unharmed. But here’s the curious part: Not ten minutes after my near-miss, Wayne shows up, visibly upset, and not only orders me to stay away from his son but also orders me to order the cops to stay away. Then he drives away in a car that could—could—be the car that I almost got a close-up view of the underside of. Then I come over here and you tell me that Thomas once had a girlfriend who died in an automotive accident of some sort. Like I said, curious.”
“But like I said, people find what they want to find where they want to find it. Everything you’ve said could just be coincidence. It doesn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with Meredith. Anyone could have killed her.”
“You’re right about the first, wrong about the second. I’ll bet money that Meredith was killed by someone she knew, or who knew her, and for a reason. She wasn’t robbed; her purse was missing, which may or may not mean anything, but she was wearing a gold ring that no self-respecting robber would have left behind. She wasn’t raped. The cops haven’t located her car, which indicates one of two things: Either she was attacked at Point A and transferred by her attacker to Point B, which a mugger wouldn’t bother with. Or she met her killer at Point A and voluntarily rode with him or her to Point B, where she was killed. Plus, Meredith was beaten to death—I’m sorry, but there’s no pleasant way to phrase it. It wasn’t a case of being hit over the head too hard by a purse-snatcher. It wasn’t a case of a mugger getting carried away when his intended victim fought back. It was a case of somebody taking a stick or a bat or a pipe and beating a young woman to death, then concealing the body. Murder. So it couldn’t have been just ‘anyone’ who killed Meredith, Dianna. It was someone, someone specific.”
By the time I wrapped it up she was crying again. Jennifer, Koosje, Dianna … do I have a way with women or what?
CHAPTER TWELVE
The two staircases at the front of my apartment building are open. They are slabs of exposed-aggregate concrete set in shallow iron boxes mounted in an iron frame. That’s why it was easy for them to get the jump on me.
I had returned home late, after leaving Dianna Castelli. I had found a parking space in the minuscule lot next to the building, so there was no need to cross the no-man’s land that the city maps call Decatur Street, no occasion to dodge careening cars.
I had one foot on the bottom step and the other in midair between that step and the next one up when something—an arm, I guess, I don’t know—shot through the opening between the two steps and went around the back of my ankle and pulled forward, sending me backward to sprawl, dazed and bruised and breathless, on the sidewalk in front of the stairs.
And then they were on me.
There were three of them, darkly menacing figures illuminated only slightly by the stray light from the street and the pale yellow lamps on the front of the building. One of them kicked me in the ribs, and not gently. Another aimed at my head but got my shoulder instead. The first of them, having had such good luck with my ribs, aimed another shot, this time at my groin. I got my legs up in time and deflected the kick. Then I kicked back, and sent the off-balance attacker staggering down the five steps that lead to the lower-level apartments, which sit halfway below ground. The attackers had hid in the darkness of the kind of dugout walkway in front of the garden-level apartments.
That left two—the other kicker and the third attacker, who seemed to be holding back for some reason.
The kicker had hold of my left arm, so I rolled to my left, toward him, and put as much of the momentum as I could into a right to his breadbasket. He whuffed satisfyingly in the darkness and loosened his grip on my arm. I tightened my grip, however, on one of his arms and rolled back to my right, pulling him down over me, off of the sidewalk and into the mucky yard in front of the building.
I clambered to my feet, breathing hard, and faced the third attacker, who backed up a couple of steps.
But the man I had thrown over was behind me now, and not hurt as badly as I might have hoped—obviously, for I suddenly felt a sledgehammer blow between my shoulder blades, sending me to my knees. I was able to turn just enough to see the attacker, silhouetted against the leaden gray of the night sky, raise his arms, fists interlocked, to deliver another piledriver. I went forward from the knees, flattening myself against the cold, wet pavement, and the man staggered over me.
I rolled onto my back and tried to get up. But the first man, the one I had thrown down the stairs, was back. He landed on me like a ton of bricks, or two hundred pounds of bricks anyway, and my head slammed against the concrete and I saw stars even though it was a cloudy night.
The next thing I knew I was on my feet, sort of, propped between the two men I had tussled with, my back against the rough brickwork of the retaining wall in the long dugout under the stairs. If I let out a shout, one of the garden-level tenants might at least look out his peephole to see what the commotion was. The nearest door was only five or six feet away. But a meaty forearm across my windpipe made the shouting-out proposition difficult at best.
The third man had moved in, now that there was little danger of my harming him. He was a small man, skinny, I would have bet, under the bulk of the oversized raincoat he wore, and several inches shorter than me, though I’m not especially tall. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, but even so I could see his face clearly in the light of the yellow lamp next to the nearby door. His face was long and thin, and his features suggested mixed blood—predominantly black, but also Latin or Indian or even Asian. Thin wisps of dark hair circled his mouth and trailed down his chin in a poor imitation of a goatee. His voice was as wispy as the would-be beard and his smile was a sneer when he said, “I dint think you’d be so feisty … Ned.”
Ned? Ned? Who—
“An’ I dint think you’d be so aj-eye-ul either, Ned,” the little man was saying. The little man with the big car, I thought. Thinking was all I could do at the moment, and I was doing it furiously—or trying, too. Most of my brain was on coffee break and the rest of it was doing its imitation of plum pudding.
The little creep smiled into my face for too long a time. I smelled cheap, heavy cologne and whiskey and tobacco and marijuana. I saw the shallow pockmarks that marched from his left cheek across his wide nose and onto his right cheek. And I saw, an instant before he delivered it, the punch he sent into my gut. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, thanks to the creep’s friends. Luckily, with no weight behind it, the blow wasn’t much worse than being hit by a flying marshmallow.
“Now you listen to me, Ned,” the creep breathed into my face. “You’ve annoyed a friend of mine. A very good friend. Unnerstan?”
He seemed to expect a reply, so I grunted, which was the best I could do under the circumstances.
“Good,” he lisped. “My
friends and me, we’re here to ask you to quit annoying my friend. Unnerstan? Else nex’ time we gonna have to be more … per-sway-sive.” His oily eyes left my face, drifted hazily, even lovingly, to the men on either side of me. Then his right knee shot up between my legs and the dim yellow lighting suddenly went very bright and white. I doubled involuntarily, or tried to—the men holding me were better prepared for the blow than I had been, and they held me. Long enough, at least, to take and throw me to the pavement, hard. I lay there, retching. One of them aimed a kick at my head. This time it connected.
It was a long time before I could get in touch with my brain to get in touch with my arms and legs to see about moving. When we all got together, it was all we could do to get me over onto my back, where I lay looking at the underside of the concrete-and-iron walkway that fronted the second-level apartments. My apartment was on the second level. My door was almost directly overhead. But it might as well have been on Saturn.
I got onto my side and slithered over to the foot of the stairs from the dugout to ground level. I figure they called these lower apartments “garden level” because when you look out your window you’re on the same level as the garden. Relying heavily on the handrail I pulled myself into a sitting position on the bottom step. Neither my aching gut nor my aching head seemed convinced that this was at all the thing to do, but the rest of me was convinced that it would rather die in bed than there on the cold, cold ground, and if the longest journey must begin with a single step, I figured, the step I now sat on was it.
Ned.
The delicate little violet had called me Ned, and the only Ned I knew was Ned Brazda, the too-cute pseudonym I had invented when I called on Meredith’s friend Jahna Johansen. Too cute by half, I reflected ruefully. When in doubt tell the truth. Or at least learn to lie better. Jahna Johansen hadn’t bought my goods. Perhaps she had never been taken in, perhaps it had come unraveled when she looked out her window and saw me in consultation with the cop in front of her building. Didn’t matter. It would have been an easy thing for her to get the license plate number from my car as I drove away and turn the number and my description over to her scrawny friend. Whose friends weren’t so scrawny.
I pulled myself to my feet and dragged myself all the way up to ground level before I had to rest again, leaning against the railing until the screaming pain in my outraged muscles faded.
I wondered if I had spoiled Jahna’s “party.” If she had thought I was a cop, or working with the cops, and if she thought we were interested in her and her two-bit prostitution scene, she might have been scared enough to cancel tonight’s festivities. I hoped so. There’s nothing worse than being invited to a party and feeling too lousy to go.
The thought cheered me up enough that I was able to get up the next flight of stairs and get my front door open and collapse onto my sofa without throwing up even once.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I planned to sleep in. I felt entitled. Someone else had other plans.
“Someone else” came tiptoeing into my room on dainty, little size-twelves that must have been shod in solid concrete. According to the clock at my bedside, it was just a few minutes before eight a.m. With effort, I pulled myself into a sitting position, my back against the sofa back of the pull-out bed, and reached for the .38 that I had left on the bedside table before falling—plummeting, rather—to sleep the night before. I held the gun in my lap, aimed at the doorway.
The figure that hesitated there almost literally filled the doorway.
I said, “ ’Morning, Tom.” It came out a croak.
The big man said, “How come you don’t answer your door?”
“Because I didn’t want to see anybody. No offense. Take a pew.”
“Huhn?”
“Sit.”
He looked around. The room isn’t large, but it was crowded. The sofa bed, when folded out, does a good job of taking care of most of the available floorspace. There’s the desk chair, of course, but to unfold the bed I have to shove the chair all the way forward into the kneehole of the desk and, well, you’d have to be even skinnier than the little creep I’d encountered last night to slip in there. My unannounced guest settled for planting a buttock on the edge of the desk, one foot up on the edge of the bed. I didn’t mind. Not enough to muster the energy to complain.
His name was Tom Carra and he was a hood, a foot soldier in the Mob’s Omaha corps. Omaha is an offshoot of the Chicago and Kansas City operations. It’s small but profitable. Gambling, drugs, women, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. As the defense budget joke goes, “A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Three or four years ago I’d been swept up into the middle of a wee bit of a power struggle amongst the Omaha bosses. Tom Carra had enlisted me. It’s no immodesty to say that yours truly was the deciding factor in the outcome of that power struggle. And it’s no exaggeration to say that if I hadn’t acted then the way I did, Tom Carra would today be lurking around on the bed of the Missouri River, not in my bedroom.
“Jesus Christ,” the hood said, “what happened to you?”
I looked down. My chest and belly were bare above the sheet. Both were liberally sprinkled with bruises and scrapes, many of which were already turning interesting shades of yellow, green, and blue.
“Pretty, aren’t they. Part of a whole collection I started last night. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, Tommy, would you?”
“Huhn?”
“Shoulda known. You know anyone called Jahna Johansen?”
His eyes went around the room a little before coming back to me. “This is like a joke, right?”
“Yeah, it’s like a joke, except jokes are funny. Jahna Johansen’s some kind of penny-ante hooker. She organizes entertainment for the convention trade.”
The big man shook his head. He had heavy, looming features, a dark beard that showed through his skin even at eight in the morning, and smooth olive skin stretched across the craggy, almost lumpy contours of his face. “Must be indie,” Carra said sagely. “Too little for the big guys to fuck with.”
“So to speak. The girl’s got a friend, though, a skinny little runt who could be Prince’s stand-in.”
“I used to have a dog named Prince.”
“I used to have a tennis racquet named Prince. This joker’s maybe five-five, five-six. About yea big around. Little bit of fuzz here.” I traced around my mouth with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. “Kind of whispers everything.”
Carra was nodding. “Yeah, I know who you mean. Queer little pipsqueak. I don’t know his name, though.”
“Could you find out?”
“Maybe.”
I sighed. “What do I have to do?”
The hood spread his hands. Each palm was the size of a dinner plate. “Hey, just stop by the house some time when you got a minute.”
“House? What house?”
He rolled his eyes. “The house. The boss’s house.”
“Tarantino?”
Carra nodded.
Paul Tarantino was in charge of the Omaha operation. I had never met him. He came up from Chicago several months after my involvement with the local kids’ ruckus. I had done my bit, and then the Grim Reaper had done his bit, and the upshot was that the torch got passed anyhow. The best laid plans, and like that.
“What’s Tarantino want with me?”
Tom Carra shrugged. “I don’t get paid to ask questions, Nebraska. The boss sends word he wants to talk to me, I go. I don’t ask how come. Then he says do I know a private cop named Nebraska. I says yes. I don’t ask how come he wants to know. Then he says I should look you up and invite you—invite, he says—to come by the house ‘at your convenience.’ I don’t ask how come he—”
“I think I’ve got the idea now, Tom, thanks. Tarantino wants to see me and you don’t know why.”
His hands fanned again. “That’s it.”
There was no bad blood between me and Tarantino. No blood of
any kind, as far as I knew. Except that, in a way, the mobster owed me a favor. Second-hand, you might say. Thanks to me, Tarantino’s predecessor, Sal Gunnelli, had died in bed rather than being usurped, thus greasing the way for Tarantino to succeed him peaceably, easily. While it was too much to hope that the man was eternally in my debt, I couldn’t imagine Tarantino bearing me any ill will. And I figured my “invitation” would have been far more forceful if Tarantino had something in mind deleterious to my wellbeing. So what the hell.
“What the hell,” I said to Carra. “Tell him I’ll be out later this morning.”
Carra nodded and made for the day.
“Hang on a minute. You didn’t take my lock out, did you?”
The big man smiled and patted a pocket of his sport coat, which jangled like a set of keys. “Would I do a thing like that?”
“Later this morning” turned out to be about as late as you can get and still have morning. I was moving none too rapidly, thanks to the combination of the beating I had taken and the muscles I had exerted trying to avoid said beating. No morning fast-walk for me today. Simply showering, shampooing, and shaving were difficult enough. I managed it with frequent rest stops on the toilet seat cover and the edge of the bathtub when the room started spinning too annoyingly.
I had a couple of cups of coffee and three aspirin for breakfast. I always take aspirins in threes. The theory is, I’m too absent-minded to remember to take two every four hours, but not so absent-minded that I can’t get the average to work out to two every four hours. Besides, I hurt all over.
I tried calling Donna Berens, to see how she was faring after her little bender the night before, but the line was tied up. Alive, at least, I figured.
Elmo Lammers called from Chicago. He hadn’t had any luck tracing the number from Meredith’s Rolodex. And it bugged him. You could hear it in his voice. “Man, whoever’s got that number does not want you to know about it.”
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 17