by Joe Gores
“You know, honey, maybe Randy’s right. Maybe you’re treating the Grimes thing a little too much like just a game…”
And he, pretentious asshole that he was, had said, “You know that all investigations are just a game, sweetie—move, countermove, just like chess.”
And she had died. And Albie had died.
Sometime, maybe, someone else would die. Oh God, please let him find someone else he could make die…
9
Next morning, Dain caught the Cicero bus three stops short of the First Chicago Bank of Commerce, stood right behind the driver talking to him under the sign that said DO NOT TALK WITH DRIVER WHEN THE BUS IS MOVING. Nothing. A bill changed hands and Dain got off at the stop beside the bank.
Meg Crowley, in uniform and with her citation pad sticking out of a back pocket, turned from the counter with a coffee and turnover to cannon into a man just emerging from the rest room. Hot coffee cascaded down the front of his shirt.
“No milk or sugar next time,” said Dain with a wry grin.
Meg already had set her turnover and empty coffee cup on the corner of a table and was ineffectually dabbing with paper napkins, trying to blot up the stain; he was a hunk. They sat beside a window that needed washing. He told her about the missing heir he was that close to finding, son of a woman dying in Bangor, Maine. He described Zimmer, with attache case…
“I remember him!” exclaimed Meg suddenly, her face lighting up. She laughed. “I’ve got a Mick temper on me, and he jaywalked right in front of me as if I didn’t exist…”
The postman looked like a ferret but was worthless. He had no fixed schedule for picking up the mail from the drop-box on the corner, couldn’t remember his pickup on that particular day, and only saw letters, not people on his route. A dead man walking.
The next morning, twenty bucks bought Dain three blocks’ worth of conversation with the doughnut truck driver who delivered to Karl’s Koffee Kup Kafe just short of the midblock alley. He had seen nothing, or if he had, didn’t remember it.
Chuck Gilette was a sandy-haired kid who delivered coffee and Danish from Karl’s to offices around the neighborhood. He wanted to go to college but his grades weren’t all that good so his salary and the tips he made went into the old college fund.
For Chuck, also, the missing heir and his dying mum.
“Sure I remember him, Mr. Dain. He sort of darted into the alley just as I came out of Karl’s, so I had to make a move…” He sprang backward in demonstration, like a batter getting brushed back by a close pitch. “The cap flew offa one of the cups, hot coffee all over my hand.” He grinned sheepishly. “I started to cuss him out, but he didn’t even know I was there.”
A $50 contribution to Chuck’s go-to-college fund.
Pablo Martinez, sneaking a cigarette behind the greasy spoon, got uneasy when Dain showed him a $20 bill.
“Four day’ ago you come down the alley,” Pablo accused.
“I’m not la migra,” said Dain quickly. He described Zimmer, his clothes, face, the attache case in his hand. “I want to know if he walked past you last week and where he went…”
The man Pablo had bought his green card from had assured him it was so close to genuine it would pass any immigration scrutiny, but Pablo was not convinced. As a short-order cook illegally in the country, he had learned to be a pessimist.
“I doan see nothin’, man.”
Dain gave him the twenty anyway. Pablo’s reaction had confirmed he’d seen Zimmer passing by.
The black teenager who washed down the haberdashery windows each morning was on break, so Dain went through the motions with his other possibles even though reasonably sure someone had been waiting for Zimmer in a car at the end of the alley.
The five secretaries who went for coffee at 9:30 each morning were like the three monkeys: hear no, see no, speak no.
The old woman who hung out of her third-floor window had seen nothing she could remember on the day in question.
The florist truck driver, intercepted on his route, said he only remembered cars that he was able to look down into from his truck’s height advantage and see women’s legs.
“Saw a broad driving a 280Z stark friggin’ naked, once.” He was gesturing, excited. “Saw another broad giving a handjob to a guy in a Caddy Seville once, he was stopped for a red light on South State Street, middle of the friggin’ day…”
Colorful, but about as useful as the wino in the alley.
When he got back to the haberdashery, Dain found Zeke White stacking sweaters in a row of bins across the back of the store. The place smelled of wool and leather and shoe polish. Zeke had bright eyes with almost bluish whites, a high-bridged nose more Hamitic than Bantu, and hands too big for the rest of him, hands like those of 49er wide receiver Jerry Rice. He wore his hair buzzed, with his initials shaved into one side. His jeans were baggy, his hightops red with the laces undone.
“I saw you doing the windows four mornings ago.”
“Zmah job, man,” said Zeke with great economy of speech.
Dain described Zimmer. Zeke kept folding sweaters. “I’m trying to find out if he came down the alley one day last week when you were washing the windows.”
“Didn’t see the dude, man.”
Dain took a flier. “Maybe getting into a car?”
Suddenly Zeke started to laugh, a big deep man’s laugh though he was still just a teenager.
“Blonde in a red Porsche,” he said. “Parked in the alley. Car was a beater, real muddy, she took a lot better care of herself than she did of that car. I’m doin’ the store windows, all of a sudden she come outten there like she be drivin’ the Batmobile. Was a cat with her but I couldn’t see him ‘cause he was on the other side of the car, y’dig?”
“Sure,” said Dain.
“Dude put his hands on her down where I couldn’t see, an’ she slam on the brakes so hard he hit his head on the dash.” He gave his booming laugh again. “Man, she tell him, You put yo hands on me again I don’t want you to, you gonna need a plastic dick t’piss.”
The woman? Really blonde, platinum like, man, with a really pretty face messed up with too much eyeliner an’ mascara, real red lipstick, didn’t really need it all, sure, it made her sexy, but also made her sorta… cheap like. Which she wasn’t.
“She winked at me, man, when she said ‘bout him pissin’. She call him sweet thing, but she doan really mean it.”
Another $50 for Zeke. He was worth it.
* * *
So… a blonde in a beat-up old Porsche almost certainly had been waiting in the alley to pick Zimmer up after the theft of Adelle Lorimer’s bonds. Like the Wizard of Oz with the cowardly lion, she’d given Zimmer his courage.
Jeri Pearson? Platinum didn’t fit her hair color, exotic didn’t fit her face. But she might know the exotic blonde—probably her successor with Jimmy Zimmer, maybe the one-night stand at his apartment before the bluenose had gone to the cops.
Meanwhile, it was Friday. Dain flew back to San Francisco for the weekend. He was missing Shenzie and the summer fog, and he had to analyze all of the data he had gathered.
Wearing only an old pair of blue cotton workout briefs, Dain was using a coiled spring exerciser with all five stainless- steel coiled springs in place. Through the open loft windows came cold wet foggy night air, the wash of small oily waves against the pilings beneath the pier, at intervals the far sad cry of the Alcatraz foghorn.
For the twentieth time without pause, Dain brought his arms down from straight overhead with agonizing slowness against the tension of the opening springs. When the arms were straight out from his shoulders at either side, the fully extended springs were stretched across the back of his shoulders and neck.
Dain gasped out, “What… do you think… cat?”
Shenzie, who was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him, said meowr and batted Dain’s hand lightly with one paw.
Dain’s arms started slowly back up. His face was contorted with effor
t, his torso flushed with blood. The pale pock scars on his shoulder, chest and neck were very visible. As the spring contracted above his head, his lats sprang out on the sides of his body in a tremendous V-shape spread.
When the springs were finally closed, he let out a gasping breath that carried “Twenty” with it.
He lay down on the floor parallel to the bed, his head to ward the head of it, his feet pointed toward an artist’s portable easel with a 19-inch by 24-inch sketching pad open on it. The hand-lettering in Sharpie permanent marker on it said:
LAW SCHOOL
former profs
former students
APARTMENT
landlady
tenants
OFFICE
exec secretary
receptionist
other secretaries
BANK
teller
meter maid
postman
doughnut truck
delivery boy
short-order cook
window washer
secretaries
old woman
flower truck
Dain, still panting, began to do twisting crunches, hands locked behind his head, shoulders off the floor, bicycling with his legs, twisting to touch each elbow to each opposite raised knee. He did fifty on each side without stopping, letting his eyes sweep across the drawing pad open on the easel with each rep.
When he was finished he bounced to his feet, went to the board, with the Sharpie drew a line through every item under each of the headings, save one. Sweat formed a wet circle around his bare feet as he stood there on the plank floor.
“Cat, we have to find out who the peroxide blonde is.”
Shenzie yawned prodigiously, but had nothing to say. He began giving himself a professional wash job on the edge of the bed. Dain tapped the unlined item on the drawing pad—exec secretary under OFFICE.
“Only one easy shot left, Shenz.”
He phoned an airline, made a reservation for Chicago, then got down to do clap-hand push-ups, giving a sharp shove as he came up off the floor at each rep so he could clap his hands twice before his body started down again. Despite his grunts and the sweat rolling off him, they looked effortless. The only other sounds were the waves breaking against the pilings fifty feet below, and the occasional muffled bellow of foghorns.
Shenzie padded the length of the bed to the bedside table, curled himself around the telephone as if Dain’s call had made it warm, and went to sleep.
10
Chicago, like San Francisco, is a town where umbrellas routinely get turned inside out when it rains. Monday evening was blustery and Dain was relying on a rain slicker and rain hat as he entered the Sign of the Trader, just inside the West Jackson Boulevard entrance to the Board of Trade Building. He went through the heavy wood and glass door, the noise hitting him like a subdued echo from the trading pits that had closed several hours before. He tossed his rain-wet slicker over one of the coatracks lining the coatroom.
The bar/restaurant was dark-lit, richly appointed, with deep carpets and leather-lined booths and heavy wooden chairs and tables for the diners. Indirect pastel lighting enhanced the look of a never-never land where no opening bell ever rang—an effect negated by the strip of green electronic futures quotations running endlessly around the room just below the ceiling. Snatches of conversation flowed around him as he tried to pick Jeri Pearson out of the traders, runners, and company people crammed three-deep at the bar.
“I hear you sucked some gas this morning,” said a sandy-haired man to a beautiful brunette in her early twenties.
“I didn’t give much back,” she objected. “Maybe a K.”
“I made twenty-three K today,” said sandy-hair. He still wore his sweat-soaked trading jacket.
She chuckled. “Good. You can pay for the drinks.”
Dain spotted Jeri at one of the tables set back from the bar. The tide of milling humanity swirled him that way; he slid in opposite her. She had a lush body and a dissatisfied face. She caught the sleeve of a passing waitress.
“Bloody bull for the gentleman!” she yelled over the din.
The waitress nodded and moved on.
“Thanks for meeting me!” Dain boomed.
She shouted something back that contained “… mystery man…” and “… intrigued” in it.
He nodded as if he had understood. She stood, leaned down so her face was close to his ear and she could speak normally.
“Now you’re here to hold the table, I’m going to the little girls’. I’ll be right back.”
It was interesting that Jeri had chosen this place when he had called her for a meeting. Very public, very noisy, both of which would discourage not only intimacy, but questioning as well. Interesting, too, the trip to the ladies’: a chance to report to Maxton by phone that Dain had arrived?
“Seven-twenty a bushel?” said a twangy voice above him. “The guy is nuts. Me, I’m dreaming of beans in the teens, like the drought year of eighty.”
The voices moved off. “Dream on. The bottom’s going out of soybeans when the new Ag report comes out.”
Jeri slid in across from Dain just as the waitress set down his drink—a bloody mary with a shot of beef bouillon in it.
He lifted it to toast her, somebody jammed an elbow against his hand in passing, spilling the squat heavy glass across the tablecloth, moved on without apologizing. Dain set about wiping up his spilled drink with the cloth napkin.
“Quite a place!” he yelled politely. “You come here often?”
Helping with her own napkin Jeri shouted back, “Used to!”
Dain leaned toward her so he was speaking almost into her ear as she had done to him earlier.
“So what happened to you and Jimmy?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.” She tried to pull back from him, but he had one big hand clamped around her forearm.
“The fat born-again in his apartment building knows.”
“That bitch!” She tried to wrest her arm back from his grip. Dain was unmoving. She jerked her head. “C’mon, let’s get the hell out of this dump.”
“Your place or mine?” asked Dain without humor.
Despite the thunderstorm, Jeri’s one-bedroom, forty minutes from the Loop by bus, had been close and humid after being closed up all day. The rain had stopped, so Dain had thrown open some windows and sat on the couch with his feet on the coffee table while Jeri had made drinks.
Jeri came out of the bedroom, her steps languid; she had changed into a negligee that showed her dark nipples and pubic triangle through the thin shimmery material. She was carrying a little glass vial in one hand, a single-edged razor blade in the other, was performing meaningless little dance steps to some inner music. She plopped on her knees between the coffee table and the couch, beside Dain’s extended legs.
“Gonna do me a little itsy-bitsy line,” she said. “You interested?” Her voice was clear, but her movements liquid.
Dain answered only with a slight negative movement of his head, watched moodily as she chopped and rowed the coke. She used a plastic straw cut in half to snort the first line. She shook her head, then giggled and reached up to knock a fist gravely on his temple.
“H’lo! Anybody home in there?”
Dain was silent, waiting her out. He couldn’t afford to feel anything for Jeri Pearson. He needed to use her and lose her. She shook her head as if in wonder.
“Life of the party. When he first walked inna Maxton’s, I thought, Mr. Stud has come to town…”
She stopped and rubbed some of the coke on her gums. She giggled. She started to cry. Then her face smoothed out. She giggled again. She leaned back against his outstretched legs.
“You aren’t interested in me, are you? Jus’ in what I can tell you.”
“Tell me what happened to you and Jimmy. You and Jimmy were good together.”
“Jimmy?” A giggle. “Somebody t’do, that’s all.” She sat with her head
down, staring at the coke on the coffee table. “Not a nice girl, that’s me. Nice girls don’t work for Maxton.”
“Why not?”
“Work for Maxton, gotta give him head under his desk when he’s on the phone.” She started to cry again. She leaned forward to snort the second line on the glass tabletop. “Was in love with him. Maxton. He dumped me. For an exotic dancer.”
“Exotic dancer?” asked Dain. “Peroxide—”
“Try whore instead.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, leaned back against his legs again. “No peroxide. Black-haired bitch, I could kill ‘er! Real long black shiny hair down to her ass. Real pretty, goddam her, jugs out to here…” She pantomimed in front of her own perfectly adequate breasts. “She an’ couple others p’formed at the Christmas party…”
“That’s when Maxton dropped you for her?”
“Chrissake, you aren’t listening!” She peered at him blearily. “That’s what he does. Focuses all that power… all that drive… all that energy on a girl ‘til her panties get wet. At first he just needs you so fuckin’ bad you feel you’re the most special woman in the world. Then he drops you an’ makes you feel like shit on a stick… worse than shit on a stick, ‘cause he’s furious with you ‘cause he ever wanted you…”
“So he’d dumped you before the Christmas party.”
“Two months before. Christmas party was first time I saw her—one took my place.” She looked owlishly at him. “Firs’ time Jimmy saw that slut; too…”
Dain’s eyes had gotten sharp and bright, but his voice was very soft, almost insinuating.
“Tell me about her and Jimmy.”
Her eyes teared up. “Two weeks after the Christmas party he dumped me for her. Ever’body dumps poor ol Jen.”
“Do you remember the dancer’s name?”
“No.”
“Or where Maxton hired her from?”
“No.”
“Could you find out?”
“Why should I?”
When he didn’t answer, she struggled to her feet, swayed, caught her balance, and looked down at him with bleary eyes, her negligee open so her naked body was on display.