I tried the bell again and then sat in my car and listened to the radio long enough to convince myself that Wayne—either Wayne—wasn’t going to put in an appearance any time soon. I hit the steering wheel in frustration and self-anger—what was one more bruise?—and jammed the car into gear.
I had better luck on my next stop: Jahna Johansen was home. I put a finger over the lens of the fisheye peephole-viewer in her door and leaned on the bell, so she either had to ignore the bell or open the door to see who was calling. She opened the door.
“Fuller Brush man,” I said.
She didn’t believe me, or she already had all the brushes she could use. Anyhow, she tried to close the door but I expected it and leaned in at the same time she did, only harder. She stumbled back into her apartment and I stepped inside.
“Oh,” I said, “did you want this closed?” I slammed the door shut.
“What do you want, you son of a bitch,” she snarled. It didn’t work, the snarl. Not with her high-pitched girlish voice.
“Why do people keep calling me that today, I wonder.”
“Fuck off.”
“Gee, nobody ever ’splained it like that before. Get away from that phone, blondie, I’m not in the mood.”
She looked at me and drifted away from the telephone that rested on a parsons table between two armchairs, but drifted back and ended up in one of the chairs.
“What’re you so steamed up about, Ned?”
“Not bad,” I said, “but too late. The light, conversational tone, I mean. You should have tried it first, before ‘you son of a bitch’ and ‘fuck off.’ Now it lacks sincerity.”
“Screw you.”
“See? That’s sincere. You also shouldn’t have told your boyfriend the name I gave you, since obviously you knew I had pulled it out of thin air. Your friend couldn’t resist using it when he and his pals were stomping on me last night. When he called me Ned I knew who had sicced him on me. Though not why. I mean, where did I drop the cake?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was good. She didn’t look away or look down or blink or blush or anything; she just lied right into my face, and even at that she didn’t frost over with the hard, unblinking stare of inexperienced liars. Her gaze was forthright and open and, yes, honest.
“I keep running into that today, too. Did you think I was joshing you about the goddamn phone?” Her fingers had been doing the walking toward the instrument, so I snatched it off the table and unplugged the cord from the base of it and set it back down, throwing the cord on the carpet. “Now we won’t be interrupted while you tell me your friend’s name.”
She looked away from me and crossed both her arms and her legs.
“Fine,” I said. There was a cheap Jefferson secretary against the wall by the door. I went to it and lowered the writing surface and started in on the four little drawers.
“Hey!” Jahna Johansen belted out.
I got lucky on the second drawer, before the woman was on me. I pushed her and she sat down on the floor and I inspected my find, a little address book with a gray fake-leather cover. Its flimsy pages bore some conventional name-address-and-phone number entries, but mostly telephone numbers with nothing more than initials against them.
“Gimme that, you bastard!” the woman bellowed.
“Eventually.” I slipped the book into my jacket pocket. “I figure I just have to go through this book line by line, number by number, until I find the man I’m looking for. I just hope you’re smart enough to not have any of your clients in here, because of course I’m going to tell everyone I call exactly how I got his number.”
She closed her eyes, hard, and balled her fists, hard, and seemed to be holding her breath. I opened the door.
“Goddamn it,” she said in a burst of air. “Shit.” She looked at me. “If I tell you his name will you give me the book?”
“No. If you tell me his name and where I can find him and you don’t tell him about this little tête-à-tête and he turns out to be the one I want … then I’ll give you the book.”
Her eyes became slits. Yesterday I had thought Jahna Johansen a pretty woman, maybe even a beautiful one. Not today.
I said, “And you can start it all off by telling me what tipped you to me. Professional curiosity.”
Jahna considered it, her eyes in motion, trying to find the hidden trap. There wasn’t any, but untrustworthy people can’t trust anybody.
“You said you got my address out of the phone book,” she finally said. “I’m not in the phone book. Then I saw you out front talking to that cop.”
It’s always the little things that’ll trip you up. For want of a shoe, and so on.
“Fair enough,” I said. “You’re off to a good start, Jahna. Don’t lose your momentum.”
The eyes were still restless in their slitted sockets. This time they were looking for the way out. There wasn’t one. She said, “How do I know I can trust you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How?”
Jahna Johansen rolled up onto hands and knees and pulled herself heavily onto the sofa. “Shit,” she repeated, scanning the room, as if an alternative lay there forgotten. Then her eyes came back to me. “His name’s Aurelio,” she said reluctantly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Thomas Wayne came home late that afternoon I was waiting for him. He jockeyed his ugly little BMW into the wide driveway as the overhead garage door swung upward automatically. He paused for the door. Then he goosed the gas pedal and bumped the sawed-off car inside.
Between the pausing and the bumping, I got my Impala peeled away from the curb across the street and into the driveway, and when Wayne put his car in the garage I nosed in after him, right on his tail, the front end of my car jutting eighteen inches into the garage, in case he got the bright idea to hit the garage-door closer button in his car and shut me out.
But Wayne was fresh out of bright ideas. He staggered out of the BMW and fixed me with a malevolent red-eyed stare and climbed over our bumpers without a word, and without bothering to close the door on his car. I did it for him, and followed him through the side door into the house, since he had thoughtfully left that door standing wide, too.
The side door opened to a small utility room containing washer, dryer, half-bath, and a coat closet. Beyond that was an airy eat-in kitchen done in pale blues and yellows. Thomas Wayne sat at a large round table under a low-hanging ceiling lamp in front of a picture window that looked out upon the backyard, or would have if the translucent curtain liners hadn’t been pulled. His suit jacket lay in a heap on a sideboard behind the table. His tie was loosened and his collar was open and his left hand was wrapped around a green bottle of beer. He lifted the bottle in a sarcastic toast when I entered the room.
“Welcome, detective,” he said with drunken, too-precise diction. “There’s more where this came from.” He jerked his head to indicate the yellow side-by-side refrigerator in a corner of the room.
I had had worse offers. I got the beer, Moosehead, got the cap off, and propped myself in a right angle of the kitchen counters. The beer was cold and flavorful. Most mass-market beers not only taste alike, but they taste like water. I like something with a little character to it. Increasingly that means paying a premium for imported beers or paying a premium for domestic beers from microbreweries, and good luck finding them at your local liquor mart.
I said, “Before we were so rudely interrupted …”
Wayne laughed. It wasn’t an amused laugh, of course, but a half-drunk, half-mad cackle. He swigged a mouthful of beer and swallowed it, belching silently. “That’s good,” he said. “Almost funny.”
“That means so much, coming from you. What was the big idea sucker-punching me and taking off like that?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t feel like talking to you.”
“I guess not.” I took down some beer. “Didn’t it occur to you that you were merely delaying the inevitable? Or did you really think I would give
up and go home?”
He looked away from me and at his bottle, whose label he began stripping away with a thumbnail. “There’s always hope,” he mumbled.
I studied him for a minute, gauging the wind, sizing up the audience. That afternoon I had come at him hard. That was partly my mood, partly my strategy. Soften him up. Now, though, Wayne had done his own softening up, using grain alcohol, and I suspected the hard-boiled routine would be no more successful now than it had been earlier, except I would beware of flying briefcases.
“Believe it or not, Thomas, I’m trying to do you a favor.”
His red eyes moved under heavy brows from the bottle to my face and back again just as quickly and his brown mustache twitched. “Thanks,” he said tonelessly.
“You’re welcome. See, a girl has been killed. And there are questions that have to be answered.”
“I answered them. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“No, but I’m not the only one interested in the answers. The next people who come around with questions, they won’t be as professional as the cops or as pleasant as me.”
He needed half a minute or so for that to penetrate. Then he looked at me. “What the hell does that mean? What ‘next people’?”
I drank slowly. I had his attention, now I wanted to hold it. When I finished swallowing I said, “Do you know who Meredith’s father is?”
Wayne sighed dramatically, flapped his arms, and crossed them. “We’ve been through all this, haven’t we?”
I ignored it. “The name Berens is a contracted and Anglicized version of the name Berenelli. Meredith’s father’s name is Michael Berenelli.”
“Rooty-toot-toot for him.”
“If the name Michael Berenelli doesn’t mean anything to you, I suggest you stop by the public library sometime when you’re sober and look him up in The Reader’s Guide or The New York Times Index. He’ll be in there. There’ll be lots of references. And cross-references to organized crime.”
It had the desired effect, even if the audience was two-thirds drunk. Wayne’s mouth opened and closed again and his eyes widened enough for me to see just how bloodshot they really were, which made my own eyes tear.
“Meredith’s old man is one of the top crime bosses in Chicago, which makes him one of the top bosses in the country. He and his friends, and he has a lot of friends, are real eager to find out who beat up his daughter.”
A minute or so later Wayne found words, but even so the best he could do was, “You’re kidding.”
“About which part? Michael Berenelli being a Mob chief? Go look it up. Berenelli and his friends wanting the hide, or other anatomical parts, of whoever killed his kid? What do you think?”
Whatever he thought, he took quite a while thinking it. That was okay with me. Most people do a better job of scaring themselves than you or I could ever hope to do. I sipped at my beer and listened to the refrigerator hum and let the seconds pile up on each other. Finally Wayne said, shakily, “I didn’t have anything to do with Meredith’s death. You have to believe me …”
“Not really,” I said casually. “And even if I do believe you, Berenelli and friends aren’t liable to accept it on my say-so alone.”
“Oh, Christ.” He crossed his arms on the dining table and rested his forehead against them.
Nice work, Ace, I told myself. You got a drunk on the ropes. Now for some fun.
I said, “Okay, Thomas. If you didn’t do in Meredith, then who?”
“I don’t know,” he said to the table.
“Who else would have a motive?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. Then he raised his head an inch. “What do you mean, who else?”
“You’ve got a motive, Thomas. We’ve been over that ground, and I’m sure the police took you over it again. The question is whether that motive was sufficient. You say not. Okay. So give me an alternative. Who else?”
“I don’t know.” He came upright and pounded the table hard enough to upset the beer bottle. It danced and he made a grab at it, but his reflexes were dulled by the liquor I suspected he had been putting down all afternoon, and all he managed to do was knock the bottle off the table and onto the floor. It bounced once on the linoleum and rolled toward me, dribbling a trail of juice as it came. I reached down and picked up the bottle and set it on the counter. Not as smooth, or as painless, as I make it sound, which only goes to prove what a perfect guest I really am.
“How the hell would I know?” Wayne was continuing. “I didn’t even know what her real name was, or who her father was, or even that she had a father.”
“Everyone has a father, Thomas. It’s a prerequisite.”
“You know what I mean. I didn’t know that much about her—you know, her past or whatever. I don’t know who might have had it in for her. And anyhow, why’s everyone so certain it was murder? Couldn’t it just as easily have been an accident?”
There were half a dozen reasons, already discussed, that said no. But I didn’t bother illuminating them for Wayne. Instead I said, “Sure. It could have been an accident. It could be that you and Meredith met somewhere Sunday night—”
“Wait a minute …”
“—to discuss your … difference of opinion. About this famous engagement.”
“There was no enga—”
“You said tomato and Meredith said tomahto and things got hot.”
“You’re a goddamn liar!”
“And you hit her. We’ve seen your temper.”
We saw it again. Drunk or no, he came up fast, fast enough to upset the chair he had been sitting on, and covered half the distance between us. He’d have covered the other half, but I had his beer bottle from the countertop, holding it like a truncheon. He saw it and hesitated.
“I’m not in the greatest shape,” I admitted, “but I’m sober.”
Wayne took my meaning, snorted a curse at me, burped, and returned to his chair, righted it, and sat.
“You hit her,” I repeated, replacing the bottle where it would be near to hand. “You miscalculated—you hit her too hard. She was dead. You panicked. This would be even worse for your career than the maybe/maybe-not engagement, especially if you envisioned a career outside of the private sector.” I took a sip of beer to give him time to protest. He didn’t take advantage of it. “Rattled, you decided to try and make it look like Meredith had been the victim of a mugger. You beat up the body, hid it, ditched her car somewhere. Then you came home and went to bed and went to work the next day like nothing happened.”
The thing was full of holes big enough to steer an ocean liner through, but Thomas Wayne wouldn’t know and I didn’t care. I was just making a hook and seeing if he would put himself on it.
“Anyone can understand an accident,” I said avuncularly. “Covering it up afterward, well, you’ll have to pay the piper for that, but believe me, a charge of manslaughter or whatever they may bargain down to is a lot smoother than first-degree murder, which is what they’re looking to pin on you. That’s assuming you last long enough to end up in the lap of justice.”
He closed his eyes and slunk down in the chair and rested his head against its high back. “I told you,” he said dully, “the last time I saw Meredith was a week ago Monday.”
“Uh-huh,” I said noncommittally.
“It’s the goddamn truth.”
“The truth is, you stick with that line and you’ll swing. Come clean and you might have something resembling a chance.”
He opened his eyes. “What, the only way I can avoid burning for something I didn’t do is to confess to something else I didn’t do? What kind of witch-hunt is this? Besides, do you expect me to believe that whatsisname, Meredith’s father—”
“Berenelli.”
“—that you’re going to tell him I killed his daughter by accident and he’s going to say, ‘oh, all right,’ and that’ll be the end of it? Jesus Christ, man, the way you tell it I’m as good as dead already. Why should I confess to something I didn’t do?”
He was good.
I said, “Berenelli doesn’t know about you. But he will; the connection between you and Meredith is there, it’s real, and it’s only a matter of time before his people find it.”
“I thought you were his people.”
“You flatter me. Or you insult me; I’m not sure which. I’m still working for Donna Berens, but her interests are the same as her ex-husband’s. Namely, identifying Meredith’s killer. The police and I both require something that we call evidence; for Berenelli and his people, circumstantial evidence will do just fine. And in that regard, Thomas, you’re the man of the moment.”
“Great. Is there any beer left?”
I checked. There was. I gave him one.
“Let’s say you didn’t kill Meredith.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“Berenelli’s going to see it the same way I outlined the other day, and he’s not going to bother about investigating further. That’s why you’ve got to help me do the investigating first. Give me something I can give Berenelli to take the heat off of you. Understand?”
“I’m drunk,” he said sourly, “not stupid. But what can I tell you? The only thing that’d help me is to be able to prove I couldn’t have killed her, and I can’t. Not unless the coroner’s report comes in saying that Meredith died before eleven-thirty or twelve Sunday night. ’Cause after that I’m unaccounted-for, I think is how the cops put it.”
“I know all that.”
“And from the way they were going at me last night, I think they think that’s not going to happen. I think they expect the coroner to say she died later than that. And then they’re going to charge me.” He sighed mightily. “Maybe I won’t post bail. At least I’ll be safe in jail.”
“What’s the matter with you, didn’t you ever watch The Untouchables? The only way you’ll really be safe is if a more likely candidate emerges.”
“Like who?”
We weren’t to that point yet.
I said, “Shortly before you gave me a bellyful of briefcase, I said I wanted to talk to you about a girlfriend you had who had been killed. I understand it was some kind of automobile-related accident.”
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