“Naw, I gotta go with y’all. Mr. Woody said I should stay close.”
We waited downstairs while he dressed. The street had that enchanted feel to it, soft, heaven-sent snow beginning to blanket everything. But that’s the kind of weather that’s dangerous in Chicago. While you’re distracted, thinking how lovely it is, the whole city shuts down, traffic paralyzed, kids lost in snowdrifts, old people dying in their lonely rooms, riots over the last quart of milk at the corner store. We’d had a blizzard last year that blew every other one off the books.
Taylor and I watched as Cliff and the child made snowballs and frolicked in that Norman Rockwell kind of way.
“Go long!” Cliff shouted to Jordan as he backed away, lengthening the distance between them.
Taylor gave me a cigarette. “So we’re okay again? Friends?” he asked. “Or do you still think I’m ripping you off?”
“I guess we’re okay,” I said. “Anyway, what difference does it make what you write about us?”
“Far out. Do you think your grandparents would talk to me, too? You know, background stuff.”
“Jesus. How long is this article going to be?”
Before he could answer, I heard Cliff’s insistent cry. We looked up the block to see him signaling madly. Taylor took off, with me not far behind.
Cliff was scratching and pawing at a parked car, wiping at the coat of snow on the windshield.
“Goddamn,” Taylor said. “It’s Dan’s car.”
The driver door wasn’t locked. Some loose coins and an empty cigarette pack were on the floor in front; a few old newspapers, candy wrappers, a tire iron, and a dented thermos on the backseat.
“Try the trunk,” I said.
Taylor worked at the lock with one of my bobby pins, but he couldn’t manage to spring it. We searched for a sharp instrument to try jimmying the lid, but the snow hid all the usual street detritus. Finally Cliff took the tire iron and hacked at the trunk until the lock popped.
Taylor’s voice was agonized: “Jesus! No!” he cried, and let the tire iron fall at his feet.
Rank air shot out at us like a hand from the grave. Jordan tried to step closer, but Cliff prevented him. I saw him scoop the boy up roughly and send him running.
Inside the trunk, Barry was folded into himself like one of those trick collapsible cups. He was blue-gray with death. His lips were horror-show black, and so was the hole under his ear. I fell away from the sight of him, screaming. Cliff held me fast in his arms. The tighter the better, I thought, because otherwise I just might break apart.
Sim was rushing toward us by then.
“Never mind!” I shouted at him. “Get Woody! Just go!”
2
“Nice of you to bring us in on this one,” Detective Norris said. “I hear you think you know more about police work than we do.”
I offered no lip. In fact, I was prepared to be downright contrite, until he snarled at me, “What you ought to be thinking about is getting yourself a lawyer.”
“Why? I didn’t kill Barry. And I’m not the narc who let my snitch get killed, either.”
“Keep it up. Bury yourself some more.”
“Why not just frame Dan Zuni for it? It worked the last time.”
“You meddling little snot. You’ve interfered with this investigation from the word go. I’m coming after you. I don’t care how connected your nigger granddaddy is.”
There. It was said. I grinned at him, picturing him with his eyes gouged out.
Taylor was staring at Norris with loathing. “I heard what you said. I’m a witness, man.”
“You better shut up, sonny, if you don’t want to find yourself in lockup for the night,” Norris answered.
“Intimidation, too. Just you wait,” Taylor said. But Norris never heard him. He had turned and walked back to the Volvo.
Jack Klaus was on the scene as well. He was keeping his distance from me. I saw him exchange a few words with one of the men from the medical examiner’s office as he and another guy lifted Barry’s body into their van.
“I guess we’re the main attraction at the carnival again,” I said to Taylor. “But what do you care? You’re probably thinking about that Pulitzer you’re going to win.”
“Why don’t you cut it out, Sandy? How’d you like me to write about your asshole behavior? And how totally wrong you were about shit.”
“What shit?”
“You keep saying that nobody is out to get the rest of us. Even after you got jacked in the apartment, you refused to believe we’re all at risk. You said the murders were all about Wilt. Everything that’s happened was just about him. Well, what is this? A coincidence? Your little theory is shit, isn’t it? There is some crazy out there who wants to kill everybody who lived in that apartment.”
“No, Taylor, there isn’t.”
Klaus walked up then. No greeting. All business. “They need your statements. They’re going to take everybody in.”
“Fine,” I said. “Who gives a fuck? I’ve got a statement you all can take right here.” My voice was loud and belligerent, like a thousand fed-up women I’d seen drunkenly telling off some man. Norris snapped to attention.
Cliff stepped up close to me, tried to take my hand. “You’d better be cool, Sandy. Don’t make it any worse. Please.”
I shook him off. “It’s okay,” I said. “First of all I’ve got a question for Massa Norris.”
“You speak when you’re spoken to,” he said, fuming. “You don’t have a question for nobody.”
“Yeah, I do. How’s Annabeth Riegel doing? She tell you everything you need to know?”
Klaus and Norris exchanged looks, but neither said anything.
“What kind of trip are you on, Sandy?” Taylor asked. “What does Beth have to do with anything?”
“Beth gave you a nice interview, huh, Taylor?” I said. “I can imagine. And then she got out before you tried to contact anybody from her family. She split in a real hurry. But not because of that fight we had. And not because she was so terrified of getting got by the big bad serial killer. She had to get out before you realized she was phony.”
“Phony?”
“You heard right. Annabeth was some kind of plant, Taylor. She’s a police informant. The Riegels who have all the money, the ones who live in Kenilworth—they don’t know Beth from Janis Joplin. My aunt Ivy made a couple of phone calls to some of her lady friends. One of them is on some committee with Mrs. Riegel, and she has no daughter. Beth is not the heiress to a meat-packer’s fortune. If she’s not a cop herself, then she’s a police spy, and a damn good one.
“Not only was she tracking every one of us, her job had her dealing with freaks day and night. She might overhear just about anything. I bet she was real curious about the haps at Rising Tide. You guys are always doing exclusive interviews with fugitives the FBI is looking for, people going underground, or their comrades or their families. You write about people who cook acid and speed. You’ve got sources inside the police department telling you about the bad shit the cops pull on us. You must have been a gold mine of information.”
I gave Norris another million-dollar smile. “You’re not writing anything down,” I said. “Don’t you want to get my statement right?”
Jack Klaus would not meet my eyes.
I looked at Norris again, using my words as if they were spitballs. “You’ll correct me if I get anything wrong, won’t you, Norris?”
No answer.
So I kept going. “Who owns that farmhouse that was supposed to belong to Annabeth’s father? Is that a property the bank took away from some poor dairyman? Or maybe the FBI uses it for interrogations. Do they take people up there to sweat them? Come on, Norris, you can tell me. Am I being too fanciful here? Maybe it just belongs to your old aunt Ethel, huh?”
I turned to Taylor then. “You know what my aunt would say if she could see you now, Taylor? ‘Close your mouth, dear, before you start catching flies.’ ”
He began to sputter
. “You’re telling me that Beth—I mean, all that time—everything she said—”
“Yeah. All lies. The only thing she didn’t lie about was being an actress. Pretty brilliant acting, the way she was all worried about where Dan was, when she knew all along the police had him. Dan was just a pawn in some big game. The real target of whatever the game was, was Wilton. That’s who Beth was really watching. Except I don’t know why.”
“That’s right,” Norris said. “You don’t. You don’t have the answer—for a change.”
“Maybe not. Not yet. But let’s hear your answer to this, you bastard. You know very well who killed Wilton and Mia. And if you say you don’t, you’re a damn liar. Go ahead, deny it.”
Jack looked genuinely shocked at that last bit. He waited for Norris to speak, incomprehension in his eyes.
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” Norris crowed. “It’s time for you to shut your fat mouth.” He beckoned to a couple of uniforms. “Put her in that unit over there,” he said, “before I knock her down. Take them all in.”
Jack Klaus was white with tension, and feeling very caught, I imagined. He didn’t dare take my side against Norris. But on the other hand he must have known I’d tell Woody how he let Norris treat me.
Following the boss’s lead, the cop in the blue zippered jacket handled me as roughly as he could. He didn’t really hurt me, but when he shoved me into the cramped backseat of the squad car, the snow that had collected on his fake fur collar splashed me and I let out a cry.
Not a cry of pain, though. Like I said, I wasn’t hurt. I had just realized something that made too much sense not to be right. I knew then that the man who had tied me up in the apartment had been wearing a Chicago PD uniform.
3
I was all swollen, my throat sore, eyes burning. I sat in the back of the Lincoln, between Taylor and Cliff. Uncle Woody rode up front, next to Sim.
I guess it was kind of funny. Cliff, Taylor, and I had done nothing wrong. We merely reported finding a dead body. But Dan Zuni, supposedly a murder suspect, had probably been much better treated than we were. Hour upon hour at the station house, we were given no food, nothing to drink, no air, no breaks, and made to stand for long periods or sit on back-killing hard benches. I bet they’d have kept us all night—hell, if Norris had his way, they’d have just taken us out and shot us—if Woody and his attorney hadn’t shown up.
Woody took us to the all-night diner on Belden. There was a trippy symmetry in that. The Belden Deli was exactly where we were headed that morning, before Cliff spotted the Volvo.
We ate like wolves. I polished off three waffles and enough sausages to fill a sidecar. Taylor finished an enormous hot roast beef platter and then, while he waited for a second one, tried to interview Woody. I thought at first that Cliff was too shell-shocked to eat, but when his bacon cheeseburger was set in front of him, he devoured it just as greedily as the rest of us were eating, and followed it with two helpings of cherry pie.
Over coffee, I put the picture together for Woody and the others. The cops, ably assisted by Annabeth Riegel, were running some kind of surveillance operation on us, with special focus on Wilton. I remembered that Jack Klaus, that first day I’d gone to see him, had called Annabeth just “Beth.” He’d shortened her name in the same overly familiar way he always called me Cass, like my family did, like he knew me. That had stayed with me ever since, way at the back of my mind.
The night of Wilton’s and Mia’s murders, the cops pulled Dan Zuni in for questioning; they knew he was innocent, but for some diversionary reason, they decided to keep him under wraps, pretend they were still hunting for him over the next three days. That same night, they picked up Barry Mayhew, only they let him go. Because he was a known informant and they had other plans for him.
“And how did he get hold of Dan’s car?” Taylor asked.
“That’s no longer a mystery. The explanation’s pretty simple. Dan just lent it to him that morning, and none of us knew about it.
“At any rate, a couple of days later Barry was bopping around the South Side. I spot him and think he’s hiding Dan. But that isn’t it. He’s probably doing drug business. He’s in hot water with the police. They’re using him to gather evidence against some bigger fish. Could be he was wearing a wire or setting them up in some other way. But his South Side drug connections were onto him, and they killed him.”
Woody was watching me, his eyes narrowed. Trying to prevent him from asking me about drugs and the South Side, I started talking faster. “I’m speculating here,” I said. “But it does add up, right?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said, “it does. But it doesn’t seem like Barry’s got much to do with the Wilton thing. So go back to him and Mia.”
“Right, Wilt and Mia. A nice white girl from a good family and the son of a prominent black attorney—true, they’re not Mayor Daley’s kids, but there’s got to be some pressure on the cops to solve the case. Why haven’t they made any progress? Because they already know who killed them. They’re just waiting to make an arrest, stalling.”
“Stalling for what?” Cliff said.
“I don’t know that yet. I only know it’s tied in with the reason they were spying on Wilton. They’re about to drop a big bomb. And they must be close, damn close to doing it. That’s why Norris is so furious at me for getting in their way.”
“You say the police must know Wilton was carrying on some kind of monkeyshines up in Michigan,” Woody said. “How do you figure that?”
“Because of the keys. Some key on Wilton’s key ring opens something up in Kent.”
“Lot of trouble to go to for house keys,” he said. “Why not just break down the door or go in through a window?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the key isn’t for the house. Maybe it’s a safe-deposit box at the local bank. Who knows? I just know the man who assaulted me and took those keys was a cop.”
“You’ll never be able to prove that, Cass. You didn’t see him. Besides, anybody could’ve been wearing a jacket like you talked about.”
“I know. But I’ll bet anything I’m right. Who else could have had such an easy time of it? Just slip into the building and wait for one of us to show. For days after the killings, there were uniformed officers all over the neighborhood. One of them was told to get those keys, but not to hurt anybody in the process.”
I don’t know if Woody was buying everything in my version of events, but at least he was firmly back on my side. And he was in a cold rage about Norris being so filthy to me. I knew he would figure a way to get even with him, which made me really happy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MONDAY
1
“What is this place?” Sim asked.
“The Wobbly hall,” I said.
“Wobbly?”
“Industrial Workers of the World. They’re anarchists. You know—Joe Hill and all that.”
He still had no idea what I was talking about.
“Like a labor union, but more than that. It’s complicated. Just wait down here. I won’t be long.”
On the way up the stairs, I thought about the Halloween party Nat had taken me to at the hall. I went as Emma Goldman. We drank jug wine, listened to Paul Robeson 78s, and sang “Solidarity Forever” about a hundred times.
The place was as ghostly as ever. Glorious old bowed windows, greasy with dirt, looking onto Lincoln Avenue. Rickety wooden chairs thick with dust in neat rows facing a makeshift stage. Except, few of the meetings or events at the hall drew enough people to fill even a quarter of those seats.
Nat was standing across from his friend Torvald at one of the long tables. They were collating mimeographed pages. Tor saw me before Nat did, and raised a welcoming hand.
Nat stared at me for a long moment. There didn’t seem to be much anger in his eyes anymore. What was I seeing there instead? Perhaps just indifference.
I kept a few feet of space between us. “Hi.”
He didn’t respond right away. But then he sa
id, “Tor, can you excuse us for a minute?”
“No, don’t,” I said. “I was hoping to talk to both of you.”
That made Nat a little suspicious. “What about?”
I handed over the single sheet of stationery I’d found in Wilton’s copy of the Fanon book. “Any idea what this is?”
He looked for a minute at the two black fists in the logo, then up at me. Then he passed the paper to Tor.
“August 4,” Torvald said.
“What?”
“The August 4 Committee.” I guess he thought that was an explanation.
“They’re Vietnam vets. They’re a service organization for guys who come home from ’Nam.”
“Is that all?” I said.
Tor cast a quick look over at Nat before speaking again. “Not exactly.”
Nat spoke up finally. “They’re a covert group, Cassandra. They organize to get black soldiers to desert or defect to the Cong.”
“I see. So what does that word under the drawing mean—Turnabout?”
“I don’t know. What are you doing with that flyer anyway? You about to take up arms now?”
“No. I—I found it.”
“And that’s all you came here for? Satisfy your curiosity?”
“No. Not really. I have more than that to say to you.”
He waited. But I didn’t speak up. “Guess you don’t have more to say, after all.”
I looked at Tor then. “Maybe you could give us a minute alone.”
He backed away.
“You’re making this hard, Nat. Which I understand. I do, really. But I’m trying to do something here that’s pretty important.”
“Trying to find out who did Wilton in.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head in disgust. And for a second there, my fondest wish was to be a Bengal tiger, because I’d have leapt on him and clawed him to death. But I managed to push that impulse down. My God, I thought I had stopped resenting poor Nat for being alive. I guess I hadn’t yet.
“Look, Nat. I actually just want to ask you to forgive me.”
“That was nasty, the way you acted, Cassandra.”
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