Trip Wire
Page 16
“It wasn’t, it wasn’t. I never bullshitted with you. Don’t you think I realized we didn’t have long? I just wanted to be with you for a while. I wanted to show you, even if Wilt didn’t see you for who you are, I did. Even if he didn’t love you . . . I did.”
Sim was pummeling the door now, kicking at it, grunting. Cliff made a crazed rush forward and threw it open.
But Sim was no longer there. Uncle Woody was. His camel hair coat parted like a theater curtain on the black heft of a sawed-off shotgun, which was leveled at Cliff’s heart.
Cliff gave me one last backward glance, and then raised the knife and stepped toward Woody, delivering himself.
The blast took Cliff’s arm off at the shoulder.
I dropped right where I was. Just fell on my ass, screaming out his name.
Once again, I had a friend’s blood on my shoes. Only this time I could take no refuge in memories from happier times in the past. Nothing existed now but the present moment.
CHAPTER TEN
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1969
Spirit-killing cold in Chicago. But I was warm enough. Ivy had given me a sheepskin coat for Christmas. Some Christmas it had been: Ivy, Woody, and me around that underdecorated tree, a tar baby angel watching o’er us as we opened presents in our bathrobes. I’d never been happier to see the holidays come and go.
I held on to Owen’s arm as we made our way along Clark Street. We were still friends, thank God. Maybe even closer than we used to be. But somehow we didn’t feel the need to talk as much as we used to when we were together.
Owen’s coat, I kept telling him, really wasn’t warm enough for Chicago winter. He didn’t seem to care that much. He wasn’t even wearing a hat. I guess the whiskey kept him warm, and besides that, he was always happy when he saw old Mae West movies. That’s how we’d spent Valentine’s Day, seeing the double feature at the Clark. I had no sweetheart and neither did he, so why not?
The commune murders and the August 4 debacle were still very much with me. A couple of pieces of the puzzle were still missing, and might remain that way forever.
I knew, for example, that the man who’d tied me up in the apartment had been Paul Yancy, the white member of August 4. He’d posed as a cop, taken the bomb shelter key. More than likely he was the one who drilled into Oscar Mobley’s safe and took all that money. But had Wilt promised that fortune to August 4, or had he had other plans for it? And was Yancy planning to turn it over to the remaining members of August 4? Or did he get greedy and decide to keep it for himself?
I spent a lot of time thinking about that money. Dirty money, Cliff said. How did it get so dirty? What was the prestigious Oscar Mobley doing that nobody but Wilton knew about? I couldn’t cast him in the role of a Mafia hit man or a sleazy blackmailer. But as one of the high-placed citizens above reproach who took bucks from a man like Henry Waddell? As Waddell himself had told me, anything was possible.
Last, Cliff died before I got to ask him something: If Wilton never cracked under torture, never told him where Alvin Flowers’s apartment was, how did Cliff track Alvin down and kill him? My best guess is that he didn’t.
I think the murder of Alvin Flowers was the one killing the cops really did commit. Just as Taylor had said. Maybe his article would be published and blow the lid off the whole filthy cover-up. Maybe. More likely, though, it would be seen as more left-wing conspiracy paranoia.
One thing involved no guesswork at all. I knew it for a fact and I had never wavered from it: Wilton wasn’t killed because he sold out Alvin Flowers. I now realized he was killed because he refused to sell him out.
Turnabouts. There was no end to them.
I live alone now and that’s kind of okay. I don’t mean literally alone. I’m back at Woody and Ivy’s place. But I have my own little universe there. My room, my radio, my books. I miss hearing laughter down the hall, passing a J back and forth, sitting down to meals with a crowd of pretty young people, striding on the street in formation with them, the mean north wind whipping hair into our eyes.
“Did you hear me, Cassandra?” Owen asked.
“No, sorry. I was somewhere else for a minute there.”
“I said, What are you smiling about?”
“Something that happened once. A bunch of us from the commune were on the street one day. This stoned-out young girl comes running up to us. She’s smiling like the Maharishi and her eyeballs are these whirling little pinballs. Anyway, she looks at us and says, ‘Oh, wow, man! You guys! You guys are beautiful, you know? You look like the Mod Squad.’ ”
“The what?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Owen. The TV series.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway, we start cracking up, right?”
“Why?”
“Because the kids in the Mod Squad are undercover cops. This spaced-out little hippie chick thinks we’re beautiful ’cause we look like the pigs.”
He tried gamely to share in the joke, but clearly it meant nothing to him.
In another minute, he asked, “Should we go right up here to Wells Street for a drink? Or should we walk back to my quarter and go to Otto’s, where the stout is better? Don’t you think?”
I took his raw, reddened hand and shoved it in his coat pocket. “Owen,” I said, “you’re the teacher.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have exercised the author’s privilege of intermixing fact and fiction. Some locales in Chicago—head shops, restaurants, book-stores, and so on—have been given slightly different names. Occasionally I have fudged the geography of some South Side and North Side locations. And Forest Street, where Cassandra lived as a child, is wholly imaginary.
About the Author
CHARLOTTE CARTER has worked as an editor and as a teacher. She is the author of the Nanette Hayes mystery series (Warner/Mysterious Press) and the novel Walking Bones (Serpent’s Tail). She is a longtime fan of mystery fiction and film noir. She lives in New York City.
Also by Charlotte Carter
Jackson Park
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Strivers Row/One World Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte Carter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Strivers Row/One World, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine, One World, Strivers Row, and colophon are registered trademarks, and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
One World Books website address: www.oneworldbooks.net
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, Charlotte (Charlotte C.)
Trip wire: a Cook County mystery / by Charlotte Carter.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Jackson Park.
1. Lincoln Park (Chicago, Ill.)—Fiction. 2. African American men—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Interracial dating—Fiction. 4. Women detectives—Fiction. 5. Communal living—Fiction. 6. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.A7736L56 2005
813′.54—dc22 2004052092
eISBN: 978-0-345-48200-6
v3.0