“Uhh-h-h, what’s the story on Sam Brumshaw?”
“Somebody shot off the back of his head—close-range job, six inches, maybe. We got the slug—Heffernan-Reese .38, probably.”
“Why a Heffernan-Reese?”
“Ask ballistics—some sort of peculiarity with the bore etchings. What kind of gun you got?”
“I don’t. Guns are for shaky people.”
“And you ain’t shaky?”
“Only when I got a hangover.”
Curtin curbed the obvious remark. Instead, he said, “You were in the Walton Building for about five minutes. You spent five minutes hammering on Brumshaw’s door?”
“More like ten seconds. Then I went to the john.”
“And Gladys Hornsby waited for you?”
“She must have. She was in the hall when I came out.”
“Where’s the john?”
“End of the second-floor hall.”
“Which end?”
“West.”
Curtin nodded. “I was in there. Filthy place.”
“I’ve seen worse. Where do you get your information?”
“There was a guy hanging around the entrance. He knows you and the Hornsby cunt.”
“Who?”
“Punk named Joe Orlando. You know Joe Orlando?”
“Orlando—yeah, we’ve met socially.”
“Often?”
“Twice, as I recall.”
“Recently?”
“What’s ‘recently’?”
“Oh, last couple months.”
“All right, make it recently.”
“How did he get all busted up like that? He looks like he fell off the fucking John Hancock building.”
“Struck by an out-of-control Gambrello, as I understand it.”
“Yeah, them foreign sports cars are a menace.”
“What was Orlando doing at the Walton Building?”
“Browsing through a novelty shop. He saw you and Gladys Hornsby go in. Just happenstance.”
“When was Brumshaw shot?”
“Ten, ten-thirty, give or take.”
“Then he was dead for an hour or so before we got there.”
“That’s what the coroner says.”
“Who phoned the law?”
“Anonymous call—we get a lot of ’em—screwball stuff, mostly, but we gotta take a look.”
“So where do we fit in?”
“Maybe you don’t. You notice anything out of line while you were up there?”
“Yeah, there was one thing.”
“Okay.”
“The toilet didn’t flush worth a damn.”
Curtin’s hard gray eyes were frosty. He said, “Don’t be cute, Willow. I’ll hang your balls out to dry.”
The phone rang and Willow excused himself to take the call in his bedroom. Gladys Hornsby said, “Tutto?”
Willow said, “Uh-huh.”
“I’ve just had company.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A cop.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I told him that I’d gone to Sammy’s office to discuss a new contract. I said that you came along just to keep me company and that Sammy wasn’t in. Does that jive with your story?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Damn that Joe Orlando!”
“Uh-huh.”
“See you soon?”
“Uh-huh.”
When Willow returned to the living room the door was open and Lieutenant Buck Curtin was gone. So were Willow’s cigarettes. Willow shrugged, brewed a cup of instant coffee, drank half of it, rinsed the cup, and went directly back to bed. That way he’d get a chance to start this one all over again.
19
Thursday
The girl at the UBS switchboard told the caller that Mr. Joseph Orlando was busy in Makeup and could not be disturbed.
The caller inquired as to when Mr. Joseph Orlando would be available.
The girl said well, probably not until tomorrow morning because he’d be leaving shortly. Doctor’s appointment, she added.
The caller said oh, gracious, was Mr. Joseph Orlando ill?
The girl said that Mr. Joseph Orlando had been mugged on Tuesday.
The caller expressed shock and heartfelt regrets.
The girl thanked the caller. She wanted to know what this contact concerned.
The caller said that it had to do with a personal matter.
The girl asked if there was a message.
The caller said oh, yes, there was a message all right, and that it would be delivered to Mr. Joseph Orlando in person.
At exactly 5:02 P.M. Central Daylight Savings Time, the caller busted Mr. Joseph Orlando behind his right ear with a very stiff right hand, causing him to lurch forward with a sound like the mating call of a bull elk. Willow caught him under the arms, steadied him, hoisted him, spun him around, pinned him against the side of the white Corvette, and hit him in the mouth with a crisp left. This time Joe Orlando was permitted to sag to the ground at the door of his automobile. Willow looked down at him and said, “Joe, better times are coming but they ain’t got here yet.”
From his sitting position, Orlando stared blinkingly up at Willow, shielding his battered face with his hands, bleating, “Aw, give a man a chance, Willow!”
Willow dropped into a crouch beside him, seizing Orlando by the front of his fancy ruffled shirt. He drew him up very close. He said, “Now, looky, Joe, the very next time you try to implicate me in something I ain’t implicated in, you know what I’m gonna do?”
Orlando shook his head foggily.
Willow said, “I’m gonna feed your ass to that big Sicilian broad and she’s gonna bite your balls off, is that fucking clear?”
Orlando nodded, shuddered, spat blood, and said, ‘“I didn’t mean no harm, Willow! I was only there on accounta them pictures!”
“On accounta what pictures?”
“Them pictures Brumshaw had—them dirty pictures of Gladys.”
“Who told you about dirty pictures of Gladys?”
“She did—couple, three weeks ago. I wanted to get ’em back for her. I figured I’d wait until Brumshaw went out, and I’d kick his door in and grab ’em. Then I saw you and Gladys go up there. When you come out I stuck around, waiting for Brumshaw to go to lunch, and all of a sudden the cops got me and they wanted to know did I see anybody around there? What the hell am I supposed to do—lie to the goddamn cops? The big one, that Lieutenant Curtin, he’s a bad sonofabitch. Five years ago I seen him bust a guy’s jaw with a fucking tire iron, for no goddamn reason at all!”
“How long were you watching the Walton Building?”
“Since nine, when it opened.”
“Anybody else go up to Brumshaw’s office?”
“Yeah, some old nun.”
“How old?”
“Hell, I dunno—old is old.”
“What’d she look like?”
“The wreck of the fucking Hesperus.”
“Describe her.”
“How do you describe a nun? All you can see is a face!”
“Take a shot at it—fat—skinny?”
“Sort of skinny. She was wearing glasses and black gloves, that’s all I can remember.”
“What time was this?”
“Maybe an hour before you and Gladys showed up.”
“How long was she in the building?”
“Could of been fifteen minutes.”
“She was in Brumshaw’s office?”
“Sure, she was in Brumshaw’s office!”
“How do you know?”
“I went up to the second floor to use the washroom. Brumshaw’s door was closed, but I could hear ’em in there, hollering at each other. Boy, that washroom’s sure a mess.”
“Could you hear what they were saying?”
“The nun was cussing. Hey, for a nun, she cussed real go
od!”
“No doubt that it was the nun?”
“Had to be the nun—no other broads went in.”
“Was she carrying anything?”
“A black handbag the size of a Volkswagen.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all? Christ, it was bigger than she was!”
“Could there have been a green folder in it when she came out?”
“There could of been a green folder in it when she went in! You could of stuffed the Encyclopedia-fucking-Britannica in there!”
“But you didn’t see a green folder?”
“No green folder.”
“Did you tell the johns about this old nun?”
“Why, hell, yes, I told ’em! That Lieutenant Curtin had my ass to the wall and nobody messes with Lieutenant Curtin! Curtin hurts people! I told ’em I seen a nun go in and I seen a nun come out and that’s all I told ’em.” He coughed and sprayed the side of the white Corvette with blood. “Hey, Willow, can I go home now before I fucking bleed to death?”
Willow said, “Yeah, Joe, you can go home, just as soon as I tell you what you should do.”
“What should I do?”
“Well, Joe, what you should do is, you should stay the hell out of my life. You’re developing into a first-class nuisance.”
Orlando nodded wordlessly, and Willow got up to walk through the smoky late afternoon in the direction of his rusty Buick, the length of the UBS parking lot away. Behind him, he heard the Corvette’s door bang shut. He heard its engine snarl to life, roaring to full throttle. He heard rubber scream, ripping at the parking-lot concrete. Willow glanced over his shoulder. Joe Orlando’s white Corvette was bearing down on him at a high rate of speed. It was another dozen feet to the Buick and Willow negotiated that distance in three terror-stricken strides, throwing himself up and onto the hood headfirst, facedown, with an acceleration that would have turned Rickey Henderson green with envy. The Corvette rocketed by, its front bumper actually snicking that of Willow’s Buick. Joe Orlando’s Prince Valiant hairdo was sticking straight up like the ruff of an infuriated wolf, his battered face contorted into a mask of demoniacal hate. He whipped the expensive sports car through the gates of the parking lot, onto Ashland Avenue, and into the side of a passing garbage truck.
Willow, thoroughly mesmerized, shook himself out of it to climb into his Buick and guide the weary vehicle through dust, smoke, steam, shattered glass, garbage, and Corvette parts—carburetors, speedometers, fenders, driveshafts, steering wheels, and the like. Two burly black men were dragging Joe Orlando clear of the wreckage. He appeared to be all right, but his eyeballs were rolling around and around, each in a different direction, and a gearshift shaft protruded from low in the seat of his pants. Willow drove north on Ashland Avenue, listening to sirens screaming in the distance, frowning, shaking his head. Someone, possibly Winston Churchill, had said that he wouldn’t give a tuppence for a man who didn’t have a single-track mind. Which made Joe Orlando worth at least a shilling, probably a pound, possibly a ton.
20
Thursday
Willow’s twilight quest for Sister Rosetta began approximately one mile south of Gunnison Avenue, at the corners of North Austin Boulevard and West Irving Park Road. It stood to reason that Sister Rosetta would confine her drunken safaris to walking distances from her apartment, because she didn’t drive, her stops were too shortly spaced to warrant the summonings of taxis, and it was said that several people had starved to death while waiting for Austin Boulevard buses. Just how Sister Rosetta managed to cover her daily tavern-to-tavern routes on foot was a mystery to Willow—the woman was accident-prone, but the Good Lord protects infants, fools, drunks, and Democrats, and He’d seen to it that she’d traversed these distances unscathed. Willow sauntered into the Dragon’s Den, a gaudily lighted place, where a bald-headed man embraced him and kissed him tenderly on the throat. Being a private investigator and endowed with the keen deductive powers visited upon that breed, Willow arrived at the immediate conclusion that he’d entered a gay establishment. He knocked the bald-headed man flat on his ass and withdrew to beat a rapid retreat northward.
In the Apollo Lounge, no one had heard of a Sister Rosetta. The bartender said, “Naw, we don’t get no nuns in here—maybe a priest every blue moon, and there’s a Pentecostal preacher comes in couple times a week. He spoke in tongues the other night, but that happened right after somebody pissed in his beer glass, so it may of been just a fluke.” Willow nodded, bought a bottle of Kennessy’s Light Lager, popped some change into the jukebox, listened to “Mothers, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” and moved on.
At the Hermit’s Cave, Sister Rosetta was unknown, but Willow had three bottles of Kennessy’s Light Lager anyway.
At Mary’s Piano Bar there was no Sister Rosetta and no piano either, but Mary was on hand and she poured Willow’s Kennessy’s Light Lager and told him that she had a banjo player coming in from West Middlesex, Pennsylvania, in a week or two.
Bobo’s Dugout was virtually deserted, and the bartender didn’t know Sister Rosetta because he was just filling in for a few days, but Willow got involved in a baseball discussion with a corporation lawyer from Norridge and he didn’t get out of Bobo’s Dugout until four Kennessy’s Light Lagers later.
There was an arm-wrestling tournament in progress at Pete’s Place, and during his second Kennessy’s Willow was persuaded to substitute for a fat man who’d just pulled a groin muscle, this resulting in a three-hundred-pound truck driver from Westchester flinging Willow over the bar and against the cash register, and Willow got up and checked out.
At Millie and Jake’s Watering Hole, Willow asked about Sister Rosetta, and Millie turned deathly pale and so did Jake. Willow had just one Kennessy’s Light Lager at Millie and Jake’s.
At Webster’s Whirlwind a five-piece Dixieland group was heating up—Cotton Joe Clancy and his Delta Boll Weevils, all five being from Highland Park, Illinois—and as Willow finished his third Kennessy’s Light Lager, the boys lit into “Clarinet Marmalade,” this followed by “Wolverine Blues,” and Willow ordered another Kennessy’s, hoping that they’d do “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” They didn’t, but they played “Fidgety Feet,” which Willow enjoyed very much, and Sister Rosetta was nowhere on the premises.
In Larry’s Lariat the barmaid looked Willow over and wanted to know if he didn’t think he’d had just about enough and Willow said yes, he didn’t think that he’d had just about enough, and he downed two bottles of Kennessy’s Light Lager to prove it.
He was running short of possibilities, only two stops remained—the Tropical Tap and Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House. He staggered into the Tropical tap to find himself confronted by a blinding battery of brightly illuminated fish tanks. A vain attempt to focus on the finned denizens of these glass enclosures did strange things to Willow’s equilibrium, causing him to miss his target barstool by fifteen feet and sit heavily in the lap of a portly peroxide-blonde woman who stroked the back of his neck and voiced no objections whatsoever. The barkeep was a hulking, hairy creature who said, “Sister Rosetta? Sister Rosetta is barred from the Tropical Tap.”
Willow said, “Why zatt?”
The barkeep placed clenched fists on the bar, thrusting his shaggy head forward between cocked elbows, and Willow thought that he looked like a Mojave Desert vulture eyeing an exhausted jackrabbit. The big man hissed, “Why zatt? Well, I will tell you why zatt! Some sonofabitch ate my best piranha and I got a very strong suspicion it was Sister Rosetta, that’s why zatt!”
Willow said, “I see.”
The barkeep eyed Willow. He said, “You a friend of Sister Rosetta’s?”
Willow nodded.
The barkeep lofted a Shakespearean forefinger. He pointed toward the door. Majestically. He said, “Out!” Sonorously.
Willow came crashing into Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House on faltering legs, and Florence Gambrello rose from her table near th
e entrance to take him solicitously by the elbow. She guided him to a chair and seated him. She placed a hot hand high on his thigh. Very hot and very high on his thigh, Willow noted. Florence said, “Honey, I hope you’re sober by tomorrow night.”
Willow thought it was nice when someone cared. He mentioned this to Florence Gambrello. He said, “Florence, it’s nice when someone cares.”
Florence nodded. She said, “Florence cares.” She chucked him under the chin. She said, “When you’re drunk you don’t screw worth a damn.”
21
Friday
At seven in the morning his telephone ripped him from the womb of blissful sleep. He sat up in bed, fully clothed, rubbing his eyes, trying to remember who he was, where he was, and what the hell he was doing there. These questions answered more or less, he ran a check on his nightmare file and came up blank—too drunk to dream, apparently. His head throbbed and the taste in his mouth was something out of a headhunters’ bivouac area. The phone continued to ring, and Willow reached for it, cleared his throat, and said, “Gloph.” For seven o’clock on any of Willow’s mornings it would have been a meaningful remark. His hung-over condition taken into consideration, it was little short of profound. Gladys Hornsby’s voice was irately shrill and in its stridency Willow could detect touches of old Sister Rosetta. Gladys said, “Well, Jesus H. Christ, it’s about time!”
Willow said, “For what?”
Gladys said, “Last night I tried reaching you from eight until damned near midnight! Where the hell have you been?”
“I was out looking for Sister Rosetta. No dice.”
“Well, of course, no dice! She was here, dammit!”
“Here? Where’s ‘here’—where are you?”
“I’m at home—Lincoln Park West. Tut, try to wake up, will you?”
“But how did she find out you live on Lincoln Park West?”
“That new detective of hers, I suppose.”
“Yeah, her new detective—he’s a sharp article.” Willow was shedding his fog, a wisp at a time. “What did she want?”
“She didn’t ask for anything. She’s going to help me, she said—she’s going to see me through my difficulties. She went on and on about how I was her dead sister’s kid and I was all she had left and we had to stick together and all that old united-we-stand malarkey. Here’s the payoff—Aunt Rosie was at Sammy Brumshaw’s office yesterday morning!”
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