“You’re not wrong, partner,” Gene said. He smiled, but he was nervous. “Now why don’t you just go back and—”
“Then what’re you drinking with this piece o’ shit for?” Kilgallon nodded my way.
Gene’s eyes widened. “What’re you—”
“Nice to see you, too, Richie,” I interrupted. I’d called him that when he’d been watching his friends “interrogate” me about Marlon Shades, and had found out right away he didn’t like it. “Your glass is half empty.”
“Shut up,” he said. “No one’s talking to—”
“Or is it half full?” I lifted the O’Doul’s and poured it out, poured it into Kilgallon’s glass. “But hey, Richie, it’s completely full now.” I kept on pouring, and the liquid overflowed the glass onto the table and ran—it was my lucky day—right toward Kilgallon.
He just stared, didn’t even move, until the running stream of cold liquid hit his hand. Then he straightened up. “What the fuck are you—”
“Just tryin’ to help, Richie boy.” By then the O’Doul’s was gone and I’d grabbed one of Gene’s Miller Lites—the full one—and poured it out, too. The stream was more of a river now, pouring over the edge of the table onto the floor, and would have splashed on his shoes except he instinctively stepped backward.
“They’re right about you.” Killgalon spoke quietly now, almost under his breath. “You really are out of your mind.”
“People say that,” I said. Conversations were resuming all around the room. Probably most people couldn’t see what I’d done, but they saw Kilgallon step back from the table, and saw us talking more quietly.
He shook his head and started to turn away.
“Kilgallon,” I said. He turned back. “I’m gonna find out who killed that little guy from the park.” He stared, looking genuinely confused. “Just tell everyone,” I said, “that I know most of what happened that night at Lonnie Bright’s. And I’m gonna find out the rest of it.”
“I don’t know what your problem is,” he said. “But you—”
“I am the problem,” I said, “And there’s only one way to stop me.”
Kilgallon stared at me for a couple of heartbeats, then turned and wound his way back to the bar.
“Jesus,” Gene said.
Eddy stared at me. “You are crazy, man.”
“Maybe just a little,” I said, and stood up. I fished out a twenty to give it to Gene. But just then the waitress showed up, carrying a tray with our burgers—in three little red plastic baskets lined with thin waxed paper—and cottage fries. I grabbed one of the baskets. “Gotta run,” I told her, and put the twenty on the tray. “Take another beer for Gene out of here and keep whatever’s left. Sorry about the mess.”
I took my lunch, plastic basket and all, and left the tavern. That whole spilling thing was dumb, maybe. But when a small, innocent man gets beaten to death, just for helping you out, it can make you crazy. Besides, it impressed the hell out of Eddy and Gene.
* * *
SO IT WAS FRIDAY AFTERNOON and I was back in the Cavalier. I stopped at an Amoco station for a fill-up and a can of Pepsi and ate my lunch in the car, parked beside the self-service air machine. It was a surprisingly good burger, on dark rye bread with Cheddar, not too greasy. Actually, I’d ordered a plain bun … and no cheese. But it was tasty, nonetheless.
I left there and headed north on River Road, with no idea what to do until eight o’clock that night when I’d show up at Miz Becky’s Tap and bang around on the piano for a few hours and drink lots of nothing but ginger ale and coffee, and keep a careful eye out for any strangers who seemed overly interested in me.
If any showed up, they’d probably be men, not unlike the two men in the dark blue Bonneville that had been behind me, usually two cars back, all day—ever since I left the coach house that morning for police headquarters. They’d picked me up again when I left the gun shop parking lot, and they’d driven by a couple of times—never looking my way, of course—while I was eating what must have been Eddy’s cheeseburger and fries.
CHAPTER
17
A CELL PHONE WOULD HAVE BEEN HANDY, because I knew just the person to call about the two goons following me. But so far I’d managed to avoid the damn things, and avoid one more monthly dribble out of my so-called budget.
I could have had a more expansive budget, of course, but I’d have had to abandon my game plan … and work for a living. As it was, I had enough money for whatever I wanted, as long as I stuck to what I really wanted, which didn’t include a lot of stuff, and a house to store the stuff in, and a security system to keep the stuff from getting stolen. Most of it I’d never use, and most of what I did use would probably be to do things I didn’t really want to do, anyway.
My system—Barney Green called it “complete liquidity”—might have had a lot to do with Lynette Daniels having gone off to Taos. The thing is, I owned just about nothing, not even a credit card. The Steinway upright was mine, but all the other furnishings and appliances came along with the coach house I leased from the Lady. I did own my clothes, such as they were; and the Beretta, a nifty little semiautomatic handling .22 LR cartridges in a seven-round magazine. But that was about it. I called the Chevy Cavalier mine, but really I leased it from Barney, or from some trust he owned or controlled or something.
Complete liquidity. Or call it freedom, maybe. I got by.
Anyway, not having a portable phone, I kept driving and watching for a public phone in just the right sort of place. Nothing was turning up, though, and with the traffic signals and all the starting and stopping, I was afraid the two guys in the Bonneville would get bored and drop off. So I changed course and headed back south, and finally found what I was looking for, just south of O’Hare airport. It was a pay phone at the far end of a huge, half-empty supermarket parking lot, with plenty of empty space surrounding me and the Cavalier. The Bonneville stayed down at the other end, where all the cars were parked, and that suited me fine. If I was wrong about who’d sent the two men, I’d want lots of room between me and them after I hung up.
I punched out the number I wanted and, halfway through the second ring, someone picked up.
“Yeah?” A man’s voice, one I didn’t recognize. “Who’s this? Whaddaya want?”
“Good afternoon to you, too,” I said. “My name is Mal Foley and I’d like to speak with Mr. Hanafan.”
“Yeah? An’ what makes you think Mr. Han—” There was a silence while the man’s brain was probably shifting gears. “Ain’t no Mr. Hanafan here, so—”
“Breaker wants to fuckin’ talk to me, asshole.” You have to speak the language. “You don’t tell him it’s me, he’ll shove a pick handle up your—”
“Hold on.” There was silence then, and finally he spoke again. “How does he know you’re who you say you are?”
“Tell him it’s about a blue Bonneville and a couple of friends of his that used to ride around in a Jaguar till all the windows got broken out. Tell him—”
“Foley?” A new voice.
“Hi, Breaker,” I said. “How’s the porn business?”
“How’d you get this number?”
“I’m a private detective. Sneaking around, invading people’s privacy, that’s what I do for a—”
“Fuck that shit. What do you want?”
“Uh-uh, it’s what do you want? You send a couple smoothies like Mick and Fat Wilbur to tail me, you gotta know I’ll spot ’em.”
“They’re not that bad. They do fine with the ordinary asshole,” he said. I seldom knew, with Breaker, what to believe and what not to.
“I must be extrordinary,” I said. “So, what is it you want?”
“A meeting.”
“Why?”
“I got something to tell you,” he said, “and you’re gonna be glad I did.”
This time I knew not to believe him.
* * *
BREAKER CALLED his boys in the Bonneville and they led the way, sticking to side
streets once we got into the city. Fat Wilbur drove like the trip was a tryout for an action flick, with Mick slouched beside him—probably napping. I fell behind a few times because stoplights and school crossing guards slowed me down. They always waited, though, which they didn’t have to do. I knew the way.
Breaker’s place was still the warehouse on the near west side. But a new sign said his cover now was wholesale flowers, not the fruit and vegetable business he’d been hiding behind the last time we’d had dealings. In front of us a huge overhead door rose up, and I followed the Bonneville out of the midafternoon sunshine and into the building. The door rolled down on its tracks behind us. It was very dark, until I remembered to take off my sunglasses, and then it was only slightly better.
I stepped out of the car and into a huge cavern where the air was laced with the pleasant smell of flowers. Different kinds of flowers, that much I could tell, even if I couldn’t pick one scent from another out of the mix. Lilies? Maybe roses? And something that smelled green, like pine branches. The effect of the mixture of fragrances was strangely relaxing, physically soothing.
Maybe it helped keep Breaker sane—if you could call him that. He’d carved his own little niche in the city’s underbelly, and survived by keeping a comprehensive book on anyone who might help him or harm him, by watching his ass with a vengeance, and by having not a hint of a conscience to bother him.
I stood there beside my car. The cavern was an indoor trucking dock, over half a block long, with a concrete floor and brick walls. There were lots of windows, about twenty feet above ground level, but they were painted over and the only light came from the occasional bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, another ten feet above the windows. At the far end of the building, workers scurried around, unloading flowers from a truck—about the size of a UPS delivery van, but painted white.
Mick and Fat Wilbur got out of the Bonneville and we all stood and waited. Nobody said anything. Then, up on the wall to our right, a door opened. A man stepped out onto a small landing at the top of a set of iron steps, like a fire escape, maybe one and a half stories up. The stairway had no railing at all—not on the steps, not even around the landing by the door.
The man looked down at us. He was tall, broad, and very dark skinned, as dark as Yogi … or as Yogi had been. He turned and disappeared back through the door, leaving it open. I took that as an invitation and started toward the stairway.
“Stay right there.” That was Mick. His voice was as mean and thin as he was, and when I turned around I saw a little revolver in his hand.
“Hi,” I said.
Mick didn’t move a muscle, but Fat Wilbur grinned at me. He was obese and had thick black hair so loaded with grease that it stuck together in clumps, one of which kept falling over his forehead so he had to push it back—about every thirty seconds—and try to stick it to the mess on top of his head. You had to love a guy like that. “I seen you trying to keep up with me,” Fat Wilbur said. “You’re sure one pussy of a driver.”
The best I could think of was Takes one to know one, so I kept my mouth shut. Instead, I turned around and walked toward the iron stairway again.
“Hey!” Mick called. “I said don’t move!”
“Actually, what you said was ‘Stay right there.’” I kept walking. “I guess you could shoot me and then explain why to Breaker, since he’s the one wants to see me.” Mick was no genius; but he wasn’t stupid enough to pull the trigger, either. Besides, I’d done him a little favor once, right on this very spot, and he wouldn’t have forgotten.
Just then, though, the black man came out the high door again, and down the steps, wielding a hand-held metal detector as though it were a Star Wars wand. I stood still as he came up to me and ran the wand up my back from heels to head, down my front, up the inside of one leg and down the inside of the other, and finally once around the perimeter. He found my pen, my sunglasses, my belt buckle, my keys, and the change in my pocket. He even found a paper clip in my cuff.
I told him the clip was especially impressive and he seemed pleased.
“Thing can fuck up your credit cards, though,” he said, waving the wand.
“Not to worry.”
He followed me up the steps. I kept the back of my right hand in light contact with the brick wall beside me. The steps were wide enough, but the lack of a railing between myself and wide-open space was disorienting.
The door at the top was a metal door, with a peephole, no window. It opened from the inside with a panic bar, like a theater exit, and if you happened to be on the platform and someone inside pushed the door open hard enough, you’d be swept right off the platform and onto the concrete floor below. Just now, though, the door stood wide open.
Set into the wall to the right of the door was a picture window with one-way glass, so that Breaker could stand in his office, himself unseen, and look down over the entire space, from this end to the end where the white truck was being reloaded now, with boxes. I had no doubt Breaker was looking at me through the window. I paused on the last step before the metal-runged platform. “So,” I said, talking over my shoulder to the man behind me, “do I go on up and in?”
“Why the hell else you think the door’s open?”
“Maybe so Breaker can smell the flowers?” I said. “Or maybe—”
“Hey, Foley!” That was Breaker. “Get your ass in here!”
“I went up and into his office. The black man didn’t follow me in. He just closed the door behind me. If he went back down the steps, I couldn’t hear him.
I looked around. “My God, Breaker,” I said, “you’ve redecorated.” He was off to my right, sitting behind a desk made of chrome and polished wood. He had a phone to his ear and was writing something on a legal pad on top of the otherwise empty desk. He didn’t say anything into the phone, and he didn’t answer me. “I mean, not just redecorated,” I went on, “but remodeled, rebuilt. Or does the place just look bigger? Fresh flowers, matching sofa and chairs, indirect lighting, wood paneling. Damn, even some windows. Must be fluorescent lights behind them, though, right?”
He still didn’t answer, but gave me an irritated, why-don’t-you-shut-up-a-minute glare and waved toward one of two leather chairs facing his desk.
“I mean, where are the metal chairs? The cement floor with the gray paint chipping off? What happened to all the crap piled everywhere?”
“Goddammit, Foley!” he said, holding one hand over the phone mouthpiece and pointing at the chair again. “Sid-down!”
“Oh,” I said, “thanks.” But instead of sitting down I took a few steps on the thick carpet. “Actually, I think I liked it better the old way. It was more … you, y’know?” At a wet bar in the corner, in a cabinet above the sink, I found rows of spotless glasses. I tried the cabinet below the sink and it turned out to be a refrigerator. “Aah,” I said, taking out a bottle of beer, “Moretti. Some things haven’t changed.” I opened the bottle with the tail end of a corkscrew I found in a drawer and turned back to Breaker.
I hadn’t heard him set the phone down, but when I turned around he was leaning back in his executive’s chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring at me. Breaker himself seemed one of the things that hadn’t changed. Still the same half-ring of thick white hair, from ear to ear around the back of his head, and the same bald dome. Still the same round, monklike face. Still the patch over the right eye. And still the same gray, mean, decidedly un-monklike left eye. He didn’t look a day older than he had … what was it?… two years ago? Three? “You look good,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, you look like shit.”
“I must have an honest face,” I said, staring down at the man on the Moretti label, “because I feel like shit.”
He lowered his hands from his head and leaned forward across the desk. “That little prick from the park, he a friend of yours?”
“How do you know about that? What do you—”
He cut me off with a wave. “So, a friend of yours.”
“I barely knew him.”
“But still, a—”
“OK, OK. Sort of a friend. He was helping me. I liked him, goddammit, and I’m gonna find out who killed him.”
“What?” For an instant he looked surprised, but then he asked, “Who’d you talk to at Eleventh and State?”
“Guy named Theodosian. Violent Crimes investigator. He’s the one told me about Yogi.”
“Theodosian’s an asshole.”
“You probably say that about all your cop friends. He seemed—”
“He’s a goddamn prick.” He slid his cup around on the desktop, then looked up at me with a solemn, sympathetic smile, like an undertaker. “So, anyway, you planning on goin’ to your friend’s funeral?”
“I … I hadn’t thought about it.” That was the truth.
“When people die, friends go to their funerals. Dress up in suits; pay their respects; pray at the graveside.” He stared at me. “Shit,” he added, “did you even ask about a funeral?”
I couldn’t believe he was saying these things. “Jesus Christ, Breaker, you may look like Friar Tuck, y’know? But you’re not my fucking spiritual guide, or whatever.” I drank some beer, amazed at how pissed off I felt. “Like I said, I haven’t thought about it. If someone has a funeral for him, maybe I’ll go.”
“I wouldn’t plan on it,” he said.
“Why?”
“Nobody’s gonna arrange him a funeral.”
“Why? Because he was homeless? No money to bury him?”
“You hadn’t thought about it, huh?” He leaned toward me and smiled and there was no more monk now; just the mean bastard he was. “You never even thought of making sure your friend got a funeral.”
I stood up. “I’m on my way.”
“We been through this routine before, Foley.” The mean smile disappeared. “The door’s locked. You go when I say you can.”
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