by John Lutz
“You figure that’s what happened to Anthony?”
“I guarantee you. He’s forgotten all about Jake Blake. These days he thinks only about btu’s. Or whatever the hell engineers think about as they drive their Mercedes to the country club.”
“You sound a little envious.”
“Hey—there are days when I wish I’d gone into some nice dull business where a guy can make serious money.” He looked at his watch again. “And today’s one of those days. So listen, uh—whatever your name is, I gotta get back to work.”
Harper didn’t burden him with the name. “Thanks for your time,” he said, and went.
Out on the street, he paused to take out his notebook and write Anthony Markman next to Darren Snow. From what Oates had said, Anthony didn’t sound like a strong suspect.
But as long as Harper was going to be in St. Louis, he might as well check him out.
27
One of the lessons Harper remembered from his years on the NYPD was that if you were trying to catch a scumbag at home, early morning was the best time to do it. So he started off his first day in St. Louis by going to find Sylvester Simms.
He’d flown down from Chicago the night before and checked into a motel near the airport. It seemed to be in the flight path used by approaching planes, whose descending roar rattled the windows at regular intervals.
Harper called Laura, then Addleman, who said he’d see what he could find out about Anthony Markman. Then he set the alarm clock to wake him at six. It took ten minutes to figure out how to do that. Calling the motel desk and asking a mechanical voice for a mechanical wake-up call was not to be trusted. The campaign to eliminate personal responsibility and human contact from American life seemed to have taken care of the wake-up call. Oh, well, he’d probably be awake most of the night anyway, listening to jet engines.
He was awake only about half the night, and awake when the alarm by the bed began a high-pitched beeping he couldn’t figure out how to silence without finally disconnecting the plug.
Harper made breakfast a courtesy coffee and doughnut in the motel lobby, then went out into the gray morning and trudged toward his car. He took I-70 into the city and got off just north of downtown to look for the address Addleman had given him for Simms. This part of the city reminded him of Brooklyn. There were ugly public housing projects, fine old churches, and block after block of century-old row houses. Most of them were in pretty bad shape, but from time to time he passed a well-kept street where he knew that urban renovators like Laura and himself had been at work. Hope springing eternal.
Silky Simms’s street was not one of the better ones. The old redbrick apartment houses were dilapidated, with weathered wood that hadn’t been painted in decades and guttering that sagged and dangled where downspouts had been ripped away. Many of the buildings were boarded up. Trash was strewn over the sidewalks, graffiti over the walls. A group of children who’d gotten up early, or maybe had never been put to bed last night, were playing in a Dumpster.
The sun had risen, but the sky was still heavily overcast. It would probably start raining soon. Harper drove along slowly, trying to read the addresses on the buildings. He found he’d missed Simms’s address.
He parked his car at the curb and walked back. The reason he’d missed the address was that it wasn’t there anymore. The building that must once have had the number still stood, an empty shell. It had no roof, windows, or door. Nobody had lived there for years. Harper figured that Simms had never been near here; he’d probably picked the address out of his head at random. Addleman had gotten it from a probation officer’s report, and a guy like Simms wouldn’t want to make it easy for his PO to find him.
A honk made Harper look up. An old car, fully laden with passengers, chugged to a halt in front of the building next door. The building’s door opened and a young man in a crisp McDonald’s uniform came out. Keeping his head down, he hurried to the car and jumped in. With a puff of oily exhaust, the car-pool vehicle pulled away.
This was the kind of neighborhood where people who had jobs were furtive about going to them. On the stoop of the next building down, half a dozen homeboys were lolling. Fashionable young men with their baseball caps on backward and their baggy pants pulled down to show their underwear. They were staring contemptuously after the carpool vehicle. The kid in the McDonald’s uniform had moved too fast for them to do anything to him. Now their eyes turned to Harper.
He stood still and gazed expressionlessly back at them. After a while, they all looked away. They’d made him for a cop. Now it was safe for Harper to turn his back and walk to his car. As long as he did it quickly.
Getting into the car, he locked the doors before starting the engine and pulling away from the curb. Large raindrops began to splatter on the windshield. He had to fumble with the unfamiliar controls for a moment before he could turn on the wipers.
He’d only been bluffing with the homeboys, of course. If he were really still a cop, he’d be able to go into the nearest police station, flash his tin, and say he needed some help finding a local hair ball named Simms. But he and Addleman had agreed that be couldn’t risk any official contact. If word reached Frances Wilson, either through the media or through the law enforcement grapevine, that Harper was looking for the Celebrity Bomber, she was likely to charge him with interfering in an investigation. She might throw him in jail. Even castration was a possibility, Addleman said.
So Harper was on his own.
It was raining so hard now that he switched the wipers to the fast setting and turned on his headlights. He struggled through the crowded downtown streets until he reached I-64 and headed west. His next stop was Anthony Markman’s family firm. He’d found it in the phone book at his motel last night. There were no listings for Markman in the residence pages, which didn’t surprise him. You wouldn’t expect rich, important people to give their home numbers. But there was a Markman Manufacturing Corp. He was going over there now to see if Anthony Markman was the dull, prosperous middle-aged man whom Bill Oates imagined him to be. If he was, Harper could cross him off the list. Then he might drive over to the Illinois quarry where Amy Arthur worked. Unless he could think of some way to locate Sylvester Simms.
Traffic wasn’t heavy going out of downtown at this hour and Harper put on speed. He was pulling out to pass a truck when he saw the giant eagle.
The eagle was outlined in red neon, on a sign above the highway. It was flapping its wings so energetically that the wing tips almost touched at the end of the upstroke and the end of the downstroke. Its whole body quivered with the effort of its muscles. You almost expected it to get somewhere.
As he drew nearer, the flying eagle winked out, to be replaced by a perching eagle that was caged by a giant A, blocked out in rippling white lights. The sign was an advertisement for Anheuser-Busch. Harper remembered that the giant brewery and entertainment conglomerate made its world headquarters in St. Louis. The A went out and the eagle was starting to flap again as he passed under the sign.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The neon eagle had given him a start. It’d been an unnerving sight, especially through the blurs and streaks of a rain-spattered windshield, with the wipers seeming to beat in time with its wing-strokes.
But it had nothing to do with the constellation Aquila. That was too far-fetched to think about. Nor should he think it was some kind of omen, warning him he was getting close, telling him Silky Simms or one of the other two was the bomber.
Harper reminded himself that he didn’t believe in omens. Evidence was what interested him. He was a cop.
Used to be a cop.
Still was.
Sort of.
28
The address of Markman Manufacturing was on Macklind Avenue, which turned out to be in an industrial area on the city line. Harper’s car bounced over railroad crossings and splashed through dips and potholes. Macklind Avenue was in bad shape, probably because most of the traffic consisted of heavy trucks. The street
was lined with warehouses and factories. Thick power lines ran overhead. With the rain letting up, he was able to hear machinery whining, clattering, and pounding. Everything about Macklind Avenue spoke of honest toil. It wasn’t a pretty place, but it made a welcome change from the slum he’d just visited.
Markman Manufacturing was headquartered in an old brick building completely devoid of frills. But family pride was evident in the gold-on-black sign that spelled out the name and the legend, SINCE 1907.
Harper parked in a gravel lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. On the way to the door he passed a gleaming black Mercedes-Benz. The very car Bill Oates had pictured Anthony Markman driving.
A young blond receptionist smiled mechanically at him as he came in. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Yes, I’d like to see Mr. Markman.”
The receptionist frowned. Her mouth dropped half open, revealing a wad of green chewing gum on her tongue. “Mr. Markman?”
“The owner of the company?” Harper pointed at the sign bearing the company name, on the wall behind the receptionist’s head.
She actually turned to look at it. When she swung back to face him, the puzzled frown was gone and she looked alert and even wary, as if she thought he was trying to put something over on her.
“Sir, the owner of the company is Alexon Industries. There’s nobody named Markman here.”
“Really?” Harper considered for a moment. “Maybe you could find someone senior for me to talk to?”
“Someone senior?” she repeated.
“Anyone who’s been here a long time and might remember the Markmans.”
“All right,” she said doubtfully. “Please have a seat, sir.”
He thanked her and turned away. Markman Manufacturing didn’t go out of its way to impress visitors. There was a well-worn sofa facing a table with a few magazines on it. These were all issues of a trade journal called Canning and Bottling. The room smelled of machine oil and of coffee that had been sitting on the burner too long. When he looked back, the receptionist was on her feet, talking to an older woman. They kept glancing surreptitiously at Harper. Then the older woman went through a door that was mostly frosted glass. There had been black lettering on the glass long ago, but too much of it was worn away to be legible now. The sound of machinery was louder while the door was open.
Harper sat down to wait, wondering what kind of story he was about to hear. Probably the Markmans had sold out to a conglomerate, and Anthony was leading a life of leisure someplace like Santa Fe or Cape Cod. Which meant that finding him and eliminating him from the list of suspects would take longer and cause Harper more trouble.
The older receptionist came back through the door. There was a gray-haired man with her. She pointed Harper out to him and he approached, frowning.
“You’re the guy who’s asking about the Markmans?”
“Yes. About Anthony Markman, to be exact.”
The man reacted to the name as if he’d taken a sip of milk and found it sour. For a moment, he seemed too disgusted to speak. Then he asked, “Who are you, and why do you want to know?”
The tricky questions. Harper was leery about telling anyone else, particularly someone who appeared to be as hostile as this man was, that he was hunting for the Celebrity Bomber. So he said only that he was a retired policeman looking into an old crime, an assault on an acquaintance of Anthony Markman’s.
The man grunted. “This guy—he’s some showbiz type?”
“Yes. A comedian.” Harper was relieved that he didn’t want to know anything more about the case. “I just want to locate Mr. Markman so I can ask him a few background questions.”
“Can’t help you. Don’t know where he is. Don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”
His tone made it clear that he preferred the second possibility. Interesting. Harper relaxed a little. It was always easy to get people talking about someone they disliked. He said, “I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time, Mr.—?”
“Hayden. Chuck Hayden.” He reached in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. The shirt was an odd one. It would look like a white dress shirt when he had his coat on, but it had two flapped pockets and epaulets. Harper guessed that Hayden had been in the service once and still liked the military style. His gray hair was crew-cut. His gruff voice came up from deep in his chest. It was a voice that had barked a lot of orders in its time. But Hayden had a puzzled, melancholy air that suggested to Harper that people weren’t snapping to attention for the old man anymore.
Shaking out a cigarette, he said, “I don’t mind answering your questions, but I’ve got to have my morning butt at the same time. Can’t spend too much time away from my desk. Those bastards at Alexon probably have my chair wired. They know when I’m not there.”
“Sure.”
They went out into the parking lot. Hayden looked at the building as he lit up. “This used to be a good place to work. Lucas Markman, Tony’s father, was a fine man.”
“What do you do here?”
“We make machines that put caps and labels on bottles, put the bottles in six-packs. That kind of thing. You didn’t impress people at cocktail parties telling ’em what you did, but it was interesting work. Now it’s all changing. Computerization. Robotics. Alexon keeps sending us memos, talking about cyber-this and cyber-that. I’m just trying to make it to retirement before they replace me with somebody younger. Or an android.” Hayden gave a bark of laughter, then his expression sobered. “In the old days, when men retired, Mr. Markman used to give a dinner for them. In his own home. He’d make a speech. Present a gold watch. A man would feel like he’d done something worthwhile with his life. Now that’s all changed. Thanks to that little fucker Tony Markman.”
Harper smiled. “Seems like you’re putting an awful lot on him. It isn’t any one guy’s fault that times change.”
“No, but Mr. Markman never would’ve sold us to a conglomerate if he could’ve passed the company on to his son. But the only son he had was Tony.”
“And Tony wasn’t interested in engineering?”
“That’s the really sad part. Tony was a genius at engineering. A natural. From the time he was a teenager his father was bringing in gadgets he’d made. Tony had imagination. More important, he had persistence. Persistence you wouldn’t believe. He’d stick with something, keep trying till he solved the problem. And the solution would be something nobody else would’ve thought of.”
Harper felt a prickle at the back of his neck. For the first time it crossed his mind that Anthony Markman might—just might—be the bomber.
Hayden went on, “Tony was pulling straight A’s at the Washington University engineering school. But he dropped out. He’d been bitten by the showbiz bug. That’s what Mr. Markman used to say. Like it wasn’t Tony’s fault. It was some kind of virus that had infected him and eventually he’d get over it.”
“So his father didn’t oppose his trying to become a comic?”
Hayden lit a fresh cigarette. “Not at first. He told Tony to take a year and try to make a go of it. What could be more reasonable than that? But the year ended and Tony didn’t have anything to show for it, and he still wouldn’t come back to work. That was when Mr. Markman started to get mad. See, the way Tony was acting—it reminded Mr. Markman of Tony’s mother.”
“His mother?”
“Yeah. She was long gone by then, of course. Dragged Mr. Markman through a messy divorce, then went off and got herself killed in a drunk-driving accident. Tony was their only child, and she spoiled him rotten. I remember how Mr. Markman used to come in complaining how the night before he’d gone off to bed alone, leaving the two of them together watching David Letterman. They were always watching TV together. That’s probably how this damned showbiz craziness got hold of Tony in the first place.”
“What happened when Tony said he wanted to keep on working at comedy?”
“Mr. Markman simply wouldn’t stand for it. He told Tony to come back to the business or he’d
cut him off without a cent.”
“That’s pretty harsh.”
“Mr. Markman didn’t have much choice. He was getting older. His health was failing. There wasn’t much time to bring Tony into the business. Tony had to snap out of this showbiz dream right away.”
“The ultimatum didn’t work, did it?”
“Nope. Tony sent a postcard from North Carolina. He was appearing at stock car races. Things were starting to happen for him.” Hayden flicked away his cigarette. He didn’t light another. “That was the last Mr. Markman heard from him. Later, when Alexon Industries made an offer to buy the company, Mr. Markman accepted.”
The story seemed to have reached its tragic end, as far as Hayden was concerned. After a moment, Harper prompted, “What happened then?”
“Mr. Markman retired to Florida. Didn’t get to enjoy it for long before he died of a heart attack. The rest of the family has moved away or lost touch over the years. I guess they’re okay. Mr. Markman negotiated a good deal with Alexon.”
“And Tony didn’t get any of the money?”
“Hell, no. He didn’t even come to the funeral. Never contacted the lawyers. I guess he had some sense of shame after all. Look, I gotta get back to my desk.”
“Couple of quick questions. Was Tony interested in astronomy?”
“I wouldn’t know,” answered Hayden. Now that he’d vented his anger against Tony Markman, be seemed to be losing interest.
“How about eagles?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Hayden said again. “So long. Good luck finding Tony. No need to let me know if you do.”
Squaring his epauleted shoulders, the old soldier marched back into the building.
On the way back to the Interstate, Harper stopped off at a Bob Evans for a late breakfast. While he was there, he thought he might as well use his cell phone in the restaurant’s vestibule to check in with Addleman.