by Jim Stevens
“No.”
I believe I just found my starting place.
“I’ll be in touch.”
I make my way down the flight of stairs. At the stairwell door which leads back into the club, I insert one of my business cards against the locking catch. I test the door to make sure it will open next time around, close it gently, and make my way back down the narrow hallway. When I reach the bar, I find Tiffany having a grand old time. She’s sipping a martini, while three or four guys are chatting her up. Alix Fromound is back-to-back with her; the same as they were the night Tiffany took a header off the barstool. Alix has only one guy talking to her. Tiffany is definitely ahead in tonight’s popularity contest. A number of other well-dressed friends are yipping and yapping, playing with their cell phones, or bouncing to the music; a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
“Oh, Mr. Sherlock,” Tiffany says seeing me approach.
“What’d you find out?” I ask.
She pulls me close to her, “Monroe is no longer seeing Alix,” she says in all her glory. “He dumped her ass.”
“I meant about Bruno the bartender.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“Did you ask?”
“They said he hasn’t been here all week,” Tiffany says. “But it’s okay, this new guy makes a much better Cosmo.”
Good to know my assistant has done such a thorough job in her assignment. “I need you to help me,” I have to yell since the music has been pumped up to its highest decibel level.
“You see someone you like? I can run interference for you if you want.”
“No. thanks. I need you to watch a door for me.”
“It’s not the men’s room door is it?” she asks.
“No.”
I tell the current Tiffany fans she will return in a few minutes and pull her off the barstool. “Come with me.”
I lead her down the way I came until we reach the narrow hallway leading to the door I just jimmied. “All you have to do is stand here and if anybody goes in that door you call me on your cell phone. Can you do that?”
Tiffany has to think it over, “Probably.”
Not the answer I wanted, but it will have to suffice. I leave her at the head of the hallway, walk to the stairwell door, open it, remove the card, and close the door gently. I walk down the stairs until I reach the bottom floor.
With my penlight flashlight, which all good detectives carry at all times, I slowly proceed down a dark, dank, moldy basement hallway. I listen carefully, but all I hear is myself. I come to an old pump in the center of a large room. It’s attached to a four-foot high pipe, which comes down from the floor above and runs the entire length of the building. I remember what the nice lady librarian told me. Some of it is starting to make sense.
I backtrack, find the stairway, and climb up one flight. On this floor I don’t have to use the flashlight. There are a number of hanging light bulbs, the old kind, not the new LEDs, to illuminate my way. The hallway is somewhat clean, as if people use it just often enough to keep it that way. I step gingerly. A whoosh zips by my head faster than an arrow from Robin Hood's bow. I stop. A few seconds later, I hear a faint plop somewhere in the distance. I reach up, lay my hand on a horizontal iron pipe running a foot off the ceiling, and wait. It takes maybe a minute before I feel the vibration. I hear another whoosh and feel something shooting down the pipe at a breakneck speed. I follow the pipe down the hallway until it branches off and disappears into the interior of the building. I keep walking and come to a heavy metal door. It’s the kind they used to use in speakeasies with a metal slide right at eye level. Another whoosh is followed quickly by another plop.
The doorknob has no dust. I consider entering, but everything changes when the next thing I hear is my cell phone ringing. I get it out of my pocket by the third ring. It’s so nice not having to listen to Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift or whatever ringtone my kids put in when I’m not around.
“Is somebody coming?” I ask right away.
“No, Mr. Sherlock,” Tiffany says.
“Then why did you call me?”
“Because I’m, like, really bored doing this,” she says. “Can I go back to the bar and party now?”
The doorknob twists on the speakeasy door. I take off running down the hallway. Somehow I find the button to break the phone connection. I hear the door creak open. I take the first left, find an unlocked room, go inside, and stop breathing. I hear footsteps go up the hallway then come back down the hallway at a slower pace. I wait until I hear another creak, wait a little longer, and find my way back to the stairway. I go up the stairs to the floor where I began.
Tiffany’s back on the barstool having her usual great time. When she sees me, her first comment is, “You didn’t have to hang up on me. It was a simple question. You could have just said ‘no’.”
“Sorry, Tiffany,” I apologize. “Three ninjas were coming after me with Samurai swords to cut me up into human sushi when you called.”
“There’s never a good excuse for being rude, Mr. Sherlock.’”
No one listens to me.
I survey the bar scene and feel as out of place as a fat girl in a bulimia ward. “By the way, Tiffany, what did you want to talk to me about?” I finally say.
“Oh,” she says, “that can wait. I’m having too much fun right now.”
I make my way out of the bar area, through the dancing mob, out the first door, and back to my buddies manning Zanadu’s eye of the needle. “Arson,” I ask the big guy, “remember that guy a couple of hours ago, carrying a metal briefcase? He was short and had a little ponytail hanging down the back of his neck.”
“Yeah.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know him, Sterno?”
“Some supplier.”
“What does he supply?”
“Supplies.”
“He’s not very friendly,” Arson tells me as he unhooks the rope and allows two hot girls to go inside.
Well, it’s nice to know his rudeness wasn’t merely for my benefit. “You know his name?”
“No.”
“How long does he stay?”
“Not very long,” Sterno says.
“How long?”
“Fifteen minutes, maybe.”
“You know what’s in his case?” I ask the two.
“Maybe limes,” Arson says. “Or something like limes.”
“That would certainly make for an interesting twist in the case.”
The boys don’t get my humor.
“Does he always have the case with him when he leaves?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
The guy’s got to be a bag man, one of those guys who collects the cash derived from an illegal enterprise—like selling hard drugs—and giving it to his superiors.
I don’t go back inside Zanadu. I can only take so much techno rap music or whatever it is they’re playing. Instead, I walk around the outside perimeter of the building. On the west side there’s a loading dock, with three spaces for semi-trailer trucks. The three roll-up doors look like they haven’t been opened since the British invasion, the one the Beatles started, not King George III. The rear of the building backs right up to the Chicago River; there are no entry or exit points here. I quickly realize the need for the basement pump and the plumbing line running from it.
There's no way I can work my way around the building from here, so I have to backtrack. I walk back across the front entrance, around the line of waiting customers, and get to the east side of the building. This is the side used for the workings of the club, where I entered the day we came to pick up the security DVDs. There’s a door marked Employees Only, two loading dock doors, both open and obviously both used frequently. There's also a separate door leading to an open maintenance room and a wide hallway, which leads to a large walk-in freezer on the left and the same size refrigerator on the right. I stand across the way, maybe fifty feet back. With the two loading d
oors open, the action inside the hallway is easy to see. Cases of beer and liquor are transferred, trash is deposited into dumpsters, and plastic trashcans of empty glass bottles are dumped, quite loudly, into huge separate containers. I’m so happy the Zanadu recycles, but they really should swap out those light bulbs in the basement for some more efficient LEDs.
One person I recognize. He’s young, Hispanic, and wheeling a cart full of ice from the freezer. It’s Bruno’s barback. His face looks like someone who had just gone three rounds with Mike Tyson. “Hey,” I yell walking towards him. “What happened to you?”
“No hablo Inglés.”
Yeah, right.
I’m less than a few feet from him. “You didn’t look like that the other night.”
“Nada, señor,” he says. “Nothing. No, nothing.” And the iceman goeth.
I would have chased him, but a Non-Brink’s, Brink’s truck pulls up and backs into the last loading dock spot. There’s no company name or logo on its side panels. Out of the hallway comes Mr. DeWitt, the Behemoth without his comic book, and Slimy Guy, the ultimate arbiter of who enters the hallowed halls of Zanadu. He’s rolling a cart full of two-foot high metal boxes in front of him.
As they approach the truck, a guard exits the passenger side door with his gun drawn. He walks to the back of the truck and unlocks the rear door. Three metal boxes are loaded into the truck. The guard marks his manifest. Mr. DeWitt signs the sheet and takes a copy. The driver locks the door, holsters his gun, climbs back into the front seat, and off he goes. As if on cue, as soon as the armored vehicle leaves, a limo takes its place.
The Behemoth and Slimy Guy wheel the cart back into the building. A few seconds elapse while Mr. DeWitt waits on the open dock. Satisfied with what he sees or doesn’t see, he bids goodnight to a worker passing by with a slight wave, walks down the steps, and enters the back of the limo, opening the door for himself.
This is the signal that it’s time for Sherlock to go home and go beddy-bye.
I go back to the front entrance, cut into the front of the line. “Name’s on the list,” I remind Arson and Sterno, who hate my sudden capability of going to and fro, and re-enter the club. I find Tiffany at the bar. She's smack in the middle of three guys vying for her attention. “Tiffany, I’m going home.”
“Bye.”
I wave.
“Oh, Mr. Sherlock,” I hear before I’m out of earshot.
“I forgot to ask you something,” Tiffany says, loud enough to be heard over the musical clatter.
I walk back to her and lean in. “What?”
“Do I look thinner to you?”
“Is that what you wanted to talk about?” I break the rule of answering a question with a question, but since this is Tiffany, I give myself a lot of leeway.
Tiffany tosses her long hair back, one of her better flirting moves to keep the boys around her interested. “This afternoon they must’ve scrubbed off at least a pound of exfoliated skin and I just wondered if I looked thinner to you?”
I have to be careful answering this question. “It’s hard to tell, Tiffany, when they only take a little off the top.”
CHAPTER 8
“Wait.”
“What for?”
“I’m having trouble breathing.”
“Why?”
“I think I’m coming down with asthma.”
“I don’t think so, Jack,” I tell my detective friend. “It’s a condition you only get when you’re a kid.”
“I’m a late bloomer, Sherlock.”
We sit in a dumpy restaurant, not far from a Westside station. There’re a number of swarthy, slovenly, mean guys in the place; each of which Jack seems to know well. I’m hoping Jack will buy me breakfast. I need every dollar Mr. DeWitt gave me. “We had another O.K. Corral shootout last night,” he tells me between bites of his grits. “Four down, two critical, three wounded. A sleeping kid took one in the leg from a stray bullet into his apartment”
There’s a major drug war going on in Chicago. It’s so rampant and widespread that the Mayor is seriously considering calling out the National Guard.
“I heard a good idea the other day,” Jack says. He talks to decompress from his very stressful job. “Every bullet you buy should cost a thousand dollars.”
“And what would that accomplish?” I ask.
“No more innocent bystanders.”
I eat my scrambled eggs, while Jack runs at the mouth a few more minutes. When he takes a break, I ask, “You ever hear of a guy named D’Wayne DeWitt?”
“DW 2.”
“Who?”
“DW 2,” Jack says. “That’s what we called him.”
“He hired me last night.”
“Are you that hard up, Sherlock?”
“I’m in pretty bad shape.”
“You might want to reconsider your client base.”
“Who is he?”
Jack pushes his empty plate away and sips his coffee. “Usual story started out running a corner. As his contemporaries or competition got busted, shot up, or killed, D’Wayne moved up the ladder. In a business of dumb guys, he’s smarter than most. He got to the point where he was pulling in some pretty heavy coin. But a couple of rocks got waylaid, some narc buries a tracer in one, and while DW 2 is out driving his silver Escalade, whammo, he’s pulled over, rousted, and busted.”
“They bust a guy that big over a couple of crummy rocks of cocaine?”
Jack burps. “Didn’t make much sense to me either. They gave him three years and he was out in eighteen months.”
“D’Wayne’s running a nightclub now. He’s gone straight.”
“Nobody who runs a nightclub has gone straight, Sherlock.”
“He says somebody is trying to kill him.”
“If that’s a surprise to you,” Jack says, “you should find another line of work.”
“I’ve been trying to find another line of work,” I admit, “but I can’t do anything else.”
“From what you’re telling me, you’re not too good at this either.” Jack pushes himself away from the table. “You got any money?”
He doesn’t give me enough time to lie.
“Use some of it to buy the breakfast.”
As we walk out of the place, I mention, “You know you’re not wheezing anymore. Maybe the time you spent with me cured you of your asthma?”
Jack stops. He pulls the front of his shirt out of his pants, pushes his belt down, and reveals his very fleshy muffin top. “Okay, then Doc,” he says using both hands to point his navel out at me like it was a Cyclops’s eyeball, “does this look like melanoma to you?”
“No, dirty lint.”
---
“Remember the other day when I asked you if you thought I was as self-centered, selfish, spoiled rotten, and egotistical as Alix Fromound?” Tiffany asks as we sit in her Lexus.
“Yes.”
“And you said it was all relative.”
“Yes.”
“Is that like aunt or uncle relative?” she asks.
“No, Tiffany,” I explain. “I used relative as a term of comparison. Compared to Alix, you’re not self-centered.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Tiffany, what’s this all about?”
I see a meter maid pull up behind us and stop. “We have to move,” I tell my assistant.
Tiffany puts the Lexus into drive and we cease being double-parked across the street from Zanadu’s valet station. An empty limo is parked at the stand. “Go around the block,” I tell her. I turn around to keep an eye on the limo until Tiffany turns at the corner.
“Mr. Sherlock, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
This is frightening on more than one level.
“What about, Tiffany?”
“About my life, my aura, my place in the universe.”
“And …”
“I’m not sure I’m where I want to be.”
“Neither are most people i
n life,” I try to reassure her as we pull back into the double-parked spot we just left.
“How about your aura, Mr. Sherlock. Do you know where you are?”
“My life is such a mess, Tiffany. I wouldn’t know my aura if it hit me up side of the head.”
“So, it’s all relative? She asks.
“There he is,” I interrupt the conversation when I see Mr. Ponytail, with metal case in hand, coming out of the club and getting back into his limo. “Get ready.”
The limo pulls out. “Let him get a head start,” I tell Tiffany. “Stay back. Don't get too close.”
We follow our fine-coiffed friend to where he gets on the Eisenhower Expressway and heads west. “This is kinda fun,” Tiffany says as we cruise along.
We travel about ten minutes. “He’s getting off up here,” I warn her.
We’re out of the city and in Oak Park. The limo exits on Harlem Avenue, and goes right. It continues to Madison Street and takes a left. Less than a mile later we’re in Forest Park. A lot of parks in this area of Chicagoland. A mile or two later, he takes a right, goes three doors down, and pulls into a driveway in River Forest. “Stop right here, Tiffany.” She pulls up a half a block away and cuts the motor off.
Mr. Ponytail gets out of the limo and locks it electronically. He picks at his fingernails as he walks down the driveway and steps into the back door of an old wood frame house.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I remark.
“What doesn’t?” Tiffany asks.
“He didn’t take the case in the house with him.”
“I don’t get it,” Tiffany says.
“Neither do I.”
We sit in the car for a few moments while I contemplate what I don’t understand. Tiffany’s patience wears out quickly. “Where to next?”
“Back to the club.”
“That’s the spirit, Mr. Sherlock. Party, party, party.”
---
After Tiffany tosses her keys to the valet, she proceeds past the loser line, heading straight for Arson and Sterno. At some point, she realizes I’m not behind her. She stops, does a one-eighty, and sees me heading for the east side of the building. “Mr. Sherlock, where are you going?”
“This way, Tiffany.”