I hopped right up, and told Jewels that I’d be back, and went to the front with the waiter. He directed me to a phone that was off its cradle. I picked it up, and spoke.
“John Trait.”
“John.” The voice was weak and shuddering, but it was unmistakably David DeGrabber. “I need you to pick me up.”
“Did the car break down? Where are you?”
“I’m at a phone between Pershing and Ashland.” He shuddered hard, and asked, “How long will you be?”
“Dave, what are you doing down in the Southside?” He grumbled, or groaned, so I skipped it. “Give me time to pay, and find a cab.” I looked at my watch. It read 12:34. “Probably forty minutes.”
“Good.”
“Where’s your car?” I wanted to know.
Another shudder. This time I felt like it might be chattering teeth. “Uncertain. Hurry, please.”
I told him I would, and hung up.
Making my way back to the table I found another confrontation in progress. This time a man stood over Jewels with a grumpy face. I knew it wasn’t usually like that, because I knew him.
“Hey, Jeff, what’s-”
Jeffery Adams, cousin to, and business partner with my Mary Carter, stopped me talking by emptying the last of my drink into my face. It had been such a shock that no reflex to close my eyes had fired. I wiped my face, and considered if I needed to sock him at the first available opportunity, but by the time I got my eyes clear again he had already stormed off. I had more pressing matters to attend to, anyway. I finished my clean up with a napkin from the table as I explained.
“I’ve got to take a rain check on the ice cream, Jewels. Do you have a way home?”
“I’ll manage,” she said, standing and pulling her dress skirt down.
I looked her over, there with no coat, no bag, and no money, and decided that her idea of manage and mine didn’t match up. I counted out some bills, guessing at the upper limits of dining possibilities, and left them on the table, and told her,
“I’ll get you home, but we have to go pick up DeGrabber. Come on.”
She sucked up to my side, and let me walk her out.
After midnight on Saturday morning was an easy time to get a cab downtown, and we were in one in no time. It cost me up front, once I gave the directions to such a rough part of town. Soon enough we were on our way. Even in the cab, the cold had set in, so I gave Jewels my jacket, and she returned some of the warmth by sitting close. The streetlights became more infrequent as we made our way south and toward the river, to the street Dave had specified. I peered out the window, and instructed Jewels to do the same on her side, as we approached the spot. No Dave.
Right in the middle, between Pershing and Ashland, I told the cabbie to let us out, and to wait.
“I don’t even see the phone,” I thought out loud to Jewels as she got out onto the curb with me. “We’ll just be a minute,” I told the driver, and shut the door.
No sooner than the door made its thunk sound, the cab roared away.
I might have expected it, given that he already had his money, but it still made me curse under my breath. I rubbed my arms to try to get some heat into them, and told Jewels,
“Let’s find Dave.”
With no objection, we began to stroll west down the sidewalk, since that happened to be the way we’d been facing. In a few steps she offered a suggestion.
“Let’s ask that man, over there.” She pointed.
I hadn’t even noticed a man. I was looking for a long legged guy in a blue blazer, but there by a trash can, huddled near the door of a five and dime, was a bum trying to sleep, wrapped in a tattered piece of blue tarp.
As we got closer I tried to work out how I would go about stirring the poor specimen, and where I would start my bidding for information. It can be tricky with the homeless, because you can’t always bet on them being all there upstairs. This fellow looked like a sure candidate for some sort of psychosis, because his bare foot protruded from the tarp, meaning he could possibly be entirely unclothed.
It was time to poke the bear. I positioned Jewels behind my hip, to guard her from any caged animal situation, and was just about to make my gentle, but deliberate, move, when two things happened at once.
The first, on its own, might not have been any more than a fleeting curiosity. It was that I noticed the exposed foot was very clean. The second thing, much more shocking, was the voice that came from the tarp.
“Thank you for coming so quickly, John.” It was David DeGrabber.
I stood in shock. Jewels made a sound behind me, like she couldn’t figure it out either. As is ever his way, Dave proceeded to operate as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He got to his feet, making it look labored, keeping the tarp around himself. It didn’t go to the ground when he stood, and with all the ankles and shins I could see, it was clear that he had no pants.
“Where are your clothes?” I wondered.
He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again, biting off a shudder. I noticed his lips were purple.
“How long have you been out here?” I wanted to know.
He started down the sidewalk, back the way we came, and filled us in.
“I estimate that I’ve been out of the water for just under two hours.”
“The water?” I exclaimed. He stopped.
“Where is your car?” he asked.
“The cab took off. He didn’t like the neighborhood.”
Dave huffed, and started walking again. I followed up on my previous question. “What’s this about, out of the water?”
This time his teeth chattered hard for a moment, before he got them under control, and he said,
“This evening I have met with a few prominent crime bosses. Five heads of prominent outfits, and three smaller operations.”
“Gosh, Dave. What in the world for? You can’t just go knocking on those doors.”
He tilted his head, and disagreed.
“I was reasonably received, until a southside group decided I had asked enough questions for the evening. It seems my reputation had preceded me this evening. They threw me into the river,” he said plainly.
Dave was leading the way toward an E-train, so he had his back to Jewels and I. We gawked at each other freely at the revelation. In a moment I had more questions.
“How did you get out? Did they not tie you up? Where’d you find the dime to call?”
Dave stopped and turned around to us. He looked pitiful, standing there barefoot, presumably totally naked, and with his alway messy hair looking disarranged by even his middling standards. He bit back another shiver, and said,
“I swam. They did, indeed. I found a dime and two pennies on the street, near a drain.” He turned back and pressed on, adding, “I am very cold.”
He stayed very cold for another hour, which is how long it took us to get to the train, wait for it to come around, take it back up to the loop, and hail a very late night cab back to the office.
During the wait for the train, he asked for an update on my evening with Jewels, which began awkwardly, as she was sitting right there, wearing my jacket, but I obliged. Since I had the whole story, and so Dave didn’t have to tip-toe to be sure to get the end, like I had at dinner, he posed questions to Jewels directly.
“Why did you not tell Mr. Barbingola of what you saw when he questioned you and the other women?” he asked.
Jewels turned it over for a moment, as if she hadn’t even thought about why she hadn’t. Either that or she needed time to cook up a story. She answered.
“I guess I didn’t want to believe it myself. It’s so outrageous. I was afraid too, that with nobody to back me up, they might think I had made it up, or that I’m in on it somehow.”
Dave didn’t press on that, and instead asked another.
“Have you told this to anyone else, at all, besides John and I?”
“No, sir,” she said meekly.
“You didn’t give the details to Sa
ndy?” I asked.
She said she had not. The train pulled in and we boarded.
I already mentioned the rest of the trip back to the office. Dave exited the taxi, and headed up, and I paid the driver, and gave him extra to take Jewels to wherever she needed to go for the night. She said goodbye, thanked me for the meal, and squeezed my arm, and left. I admit, a charming girl, anyway you slice it. I’d even forgot to take my jacket off her, but then it wasn’t worth screaming down the street for. How hard could she be to find? I watched the taillights turn the corner, feeling that was the minimum of my obligations, at least to my fleeing coat, and then went inside and climbed the stairs.
The still tarped form of Dave standing in the dark corridor in front of our office door, startled me for an instant, then I grinned.
“No keys, huh?”
He didn’t respond, only stepping aside so I could work the door lock.
Inside, with the radiator cranked to the max, and Dave now clothed in a pair of custodial coveralls and standing by it, I mentioned the elephant in the room.
“Where’s the car?”
He was rubbing his cheeks with his hands, trying to get some feeling back into them, and stated,
“I parked it at a station by the park.”
“The park?”
“Grant Park,” he mumbled.
“Grant Park, huh? They threw you in around that latitude?”
“Yes, John,” he said, in an even lower voice.
I was incredulous.
“Dave, you were miles down river.”
He rolled his shoulders, and got snippy.
“It seems so, John. And what of it?”
“Well, what for?” I held my hands out. “Did you learn anything worth taking a midnight swim for?”
Deciding that his backside had cooked long enough, he turned around to let the front have some time, and spoke to me by way of the wall.
“I found out that no other organizations are experiencing the same rate of slayings in any of their enterprises. It appears to be strictly Mr. Barbingola’s difficulty. Possibly some personal vendetta, but then that doesn’t necessarily rule out professional executors of it. Where are you going?”
While we’d been speaking, I found a sweater in the bottom of my deep desk drawer and put it on. I told him,
“I’m gonna go pick up the car, if it’s still there. I assume you left the key in it.”
As I pulled the office door to behind me, I heard him make some offer to come along, but he needed to warm up, and I honestly didn’t want his company just then.
What a reckless thing to do. Even though he can be uncouth, to say the least, he is my friend and partner, and to go around knocking on one mobster’s door after another, is a good way to get one’s self thrown into the river. He was lucky they had only tied him up, opting to save a bullet. He never has given me a lesson on any escape artist tricks, so I’m not sure that he actually has any. I guess someone tied a bad knot.
I found the old sedan at the station by the park; it being one we frequent. Sure enough, the key was in the ignition. The glove box was open as well, meaning that Dave had been especially absent minded that day, or someone had been through the car for something to take, had doubtless seen the key in it, and then decided they’d rather not borrow the headache or eyesore. I stamped on the gas a few times, fired it up, and drove back the way I’d come from.
My watch said 4am by the time that errand was done, and I pulled up to the curb in front of our office. I went up to get Dave to take him home, but found our space empty. Figuring my going for the car was worth a morning’s rent, I drove it home to my place, parked it in the spot that I seldom have equipment to use, climbed the stairs, got inside, and hit the hay.
8
The next morning, or I guess later that morning, it can be tough to say when you go be bed as the sun comes up. Whatever, Saturday morning, when the alarm rang, I got up and readied myself to head to the office. While doing so, I fought with whether or not I should call at Barbingola’s and find out if Jewels had made it back safely. I ultimately decided against it. For all I knew she could have gotten herself my cab fare back and then some. Her own supposition, that the gang might think her involved in the motel killings, wasn’t just hot air either, and until we knew more, I thought it best to keep things to ourselves, for fear that Barbingola’s violent streak might rear its head again.
With my overcoat, for later, over my arm, I moved on from those thoughts, and headed down to the sedan and drove to the office. I put it in the spot around back when I got there, and entered the building. Sid sat at his station, with a radio playing, eating a melon with a spoon.
“Morning, Sid,” I said. “When Dave gets here, will you tell him his car is around back?”
He swallowed a lump of melon, and informed me that,
“Dave’s already come and gone. He said to tell you he’d be back after lunch with a plan though.”
A partial night's sleep must have done wonders for Dave. I headed upstairs and opened up shop, wondering what my partner had cooking, which was always a hopeless exercise. In the meantime, I set a page in my machine and tapped out an itemization of the night before, making sure not to be too specific with the who’s and the where’s. Just as I finished the sheet and pulled it out, a hard knock came at the door. I went to it.
“Take it easy! I’m coming,” I stated through the door, over the angry rapping. I opened up, and Jeffery Adams, from the night before, burst in.
My girlfriend’s cousin is about my age, maybe a year or two younger, and on the slight side of regular in build. And though I had never considered it until last night, when he’d put my drink in my face, he posed no physical threat to me, whatsoever. Despite that, he held his finger up to my nose, and backed me clear back to my chair. As I retreated, he seethed at me, saying,
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, Trait. Here, I thought you were a stand-up fellow, but no. To think you’d have the gall to take that whore to Williams’, where people know me, and Mary, both. Spending your allowance, too, I suspect. I’m telling her everything, and I want you to know it, too, pal…”
I’d attempted to lodge a few protests, but couldn’t get a word in. On that part about the allowance, I chuckled, and lowered myself into my seat. He kept on, but I ignored him. I had my phone off the hook, dialing a number. He must have gotten to a part that needed comment, because he was yelling,
“Well?” so loudly, that I could hardly hear when Mary Carter came on the line.
“Hold on just a second,” I told her, and covered the transmitter, and raised my voice. “Will you shut up, and sit down?”
He stamped around on our rug, but lowered the volume, so I went back to the call.
“Miss Carter, I know you’re at the office, but can you spare a minute?”
“Of course, I can, silly. I’m just straightening up my desk,” she beamed.
“I won’t keep you long. Listen, your cousin’s here, at the office, trying to get himself rearranged,” I explained sweetly. “He saw me last night, working a female lead at Williams’, and must feel compelled to defend your honor. He also takes issue with the spending habits I have with my allowance. Now, I didn’t know I was getting an allowance, but if I’m supposed to be, then I have to stand by my God given right to financial liberties.”
For a second she didn’t respond, and then burst into laughter so heartily that I pulled the phone away from my ear. Jeffery was right there, and heard it too. After a moment, once the hilarity died down, I brought the phone back in, and asked,
“So, it’s all up to you. You can straighten him out now on the phone, or at the office Monday.” I leveled my eyes at Jeffery, and added, “Or, I can clean his clock. Like I said, it’s up to you.”
I held the receiver out to my guest, and informed him,
“She wants to talk to you, Jeff.”
To show what a good sport I was, I even got up and let him have my chair. I even insisted. Who knows how
long it might take her to get him on the right page. I waited close by, standing over him, being only a little menacing.
In no more than three minutes, Jeffery passed the handset back to me, and I held it to my ear.
“Everything ship shape?” I asked her. She said it was, and that Jeffery had something he needed to say to me. We said goodbye, and I placed the phone back on its cradle. I crossed my arms, and gazed down at Jeffery, smugly. He looked smaller still, but met my eye, and spoke softly.
“I’m sorry, John. I shouldn’t have lost my head in the restaurant like that.”
“No, Jeff. You shouldn’t have. What if that girl had been somebody? A murderer, or a bank robber. You could have bungled the whole thing. You were lucky I’d already gotten everything out of her when you came along, or I might have stayed sore.”
He dropped his eyes, and nodded his head at my scolding. He looked back up, after a short lull, and reiterated,
“It won’t happen again, John.”
Now I was starting to feel strange about brow beating a grown man, so I gestured for him to skat. He got up, and went to the door himself, while I got myself settled back behind my desk. Then something occurred to me. My words caught him halfway out the door.
“Jeff.” He stopped and listened. “How’d you know what that girl does for money?”
He gave me the deer in headlights, and sputtered,
“Uhm, I have to go meet Jennifer for lunch. See you around, John,” and scurried out.
If you want to keep score, Jennifer is Jeffery’s wife, but then we must make of that what we will, since he didn’t say how he knew Jewels.
There’s not much to tell about the rest of my morning. As I could have predicted, Mary called again, around eleven, to say we should have lunch together, but really it was just for a more in depth briefing on my run-in with Jeffery. I accepted, as a good man must, and let her pick me up in her car, so that Dave’s sedan would be handy if he came back needing it. We had pizza. I bought, spending none of my nonexistent allowance.
Returning to the office, around one, I came upon a busy scene. Sid looked ran half ragged, and a wash of voices emanated from our open office door upstairs. I went in, and the first thing that met me was a wall of cheap perfume odor. There, inside our little office, some sitting, but most standing, were about one dozen streetwalkers. A few of them had no business in direct light, especially in their work clothes that they were all marginally clad in. A look around the perimeter of the room showed a few new male faces, as well. They were obviously the girl’s handlers. A regular platoon, from the Barbingola girls department.
Work at Odds Page 6