Lockington had given Devereaux a sidelong glance, noting that the big Cajun had been mesmerized. Bobbie Jo had closed out her set with “Fool Number One” and she’d bowed, waving a temporary bye-bye before stepping down to sit at the bar with a cork-tipped cigarette and a double hooker of Chivas Regal, flicking a few glances in Devereaux’s direction. The lights had come up, the bluegrass group had piled noisily onto the stage, shattering the spell, cutting loose with “Black Mountain Rag.” Lockington had turned to Devereaux. “Sounds like brain surgery with no anesthetic.”
Rufe had said, “Yeah, but can’t that Pickens woman sing up a storm?”
“She can, and that ain’t all. She’s giving you the eye.”
Devereaux had nodded. “I just struck up an acquaintance with her. She’s friendly people.”
“Maybe you can score.”
Rufe’s smile had been enigmatic. “A man doesn’t know if a man doesn’t try.”
Lockington had said, “Well, far be it from me to foul the wheels of progress.”
They’d shaken hands and Lockington had driven back to the Shamrock Pub, feeling slightly brushed off. Baseball hadn’t been mentioned.
That’d been how they’d closed out.
When Lockington had entered the Shamrock Pub, there’d been a fat woman in a bright yellow coat parked at the bar. She’d borne a strong resemblance to a school bus. Lockington had taken a seat a dozen barstools to her north. She’d glared at him. She’d snarled, “Get away from me, you slavering beast!”
Lockington had said, “Ma’am, if I get any further away from you, I’ll be out in the parking lot.”
The fat woman had said, “Oh, dear God, is there no peace?” She’d stormed out of the Shamrock Pub, slamming the door. Vic Zileski had been working the bar. Vic hadn’t said anything.
Neither had Lockington.
15
It was Wednesday, cloudy, still unseasonably warm, late May by the calendar, mid-August according to the thermometer. Edna Garson hadn’t come around on Tuesday evening, and Lockington had experienced no profound regrets on that score. Not that he didn’t think the world of Edna—she’d provided solutions to more than one of his problems, but the problem she’d solved first was the problem she’d solved with alarming frequency, and Lockington was closing in on forty-nine years of age. He’d enjoyed their passionate interludes, he’d indulged with reckless abandon, but the piper must be paid, and on mornings following such sessions he was listless and aching from stem to stern. It wasn’t one of those mornings.
Moose came in at nine. Lockington said, “You look better.”
Moose said, “Yeah? Than what?”
“Than you looked yesterday.”
“I feel better than I did yesterday—there ain’t much that fifteen hours in bed won’t cure.”
Lockington said, “If you’re sleeping, that is.” It was an unfortunate remark. Moose Katzenbach’s bed was empty now.
They sat around the office, Lockington pondering recent events, Moose struggling with the Chicago Chronicle chess problem. After a while, Moose closed the newspaper. He said, “Chess is for the fucking Bolsheviks.”
Lockington said, “It’s their game. In Russia they teach chess to third-grade kids.”
“And we don’t.”
“Of course we don’t—we don’t even teach our kids to read and write.”
“That’s true, but why don’t we?”
“Because we’d be infringing on their civil rights.”
“The Bolsheviks don’t got no civil rights.”
“Which is why their kids can read and write.”
The office door banged open and Information Brown was standing on the threshold. Lockington motioned him into the office but Brown shook him off. “No time, Lacey. So far, all I got is that Devereaux’s wake is gonna be at Olenick’s on North Clark—eight o’clock tonight. Closed casket—cremation tomorrow morning.”
“Who’s paying the freight?”
“Christ, I dunno—the Agency, I suppose.”
Lockington nodded. “Anything else?”
Brown said, “Yeah—no hoopla, no flowers, no ceremony.” He closed the door, heading up the steps to Randolph Street.
Lockington’s half-smile was tight. That’s the way Rufe would have wanted it—no hoopla, no flowers, no ceremony. Someone had said that the greatest knowledge man can hope to acquire is that life is utterly meaningless, and Lockington was certain that Rufe Devereaux had subscribed to that theory.
They drifted back into silence, Lockington welcoming the respite, considering the phone call from Sgt. Joe Delvano—wondering who was behind the shabby attempt at trickery. Had the press gotten into the Devereaux murder? Lockington didn’t think so. The press would’ve handled it differently, charging into the affair like a herd of stampeding buffalo, trampling everything in its path. Then who—the CIA? Probably not, but he had a hunch that he’d be hearing from those fellows shortly—they worked slowly but they worked thoroughly.
Lockington dredged up what little he knew of the past, looking for a link to what little he knew of the present. He found a maybe—Rufe Devereaux had seemed reasonably confident that he could take Bobbie Jo Pickens to bed. When Rufe had blended a few drinks with an attack of hot drawers, he was usually entertaining delusions of grandeur, but there was a possibility that he’d made out, and any old possibility beat hell out of no possibility at all. Lockington said, “Moose, do you know where the Club Howdy’s located?”
Moose squinted. “I’ve heard of it—northside somewhere, I think.”
“Yeah, it’s a hog trough on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue just south of Diversey.”
“Shitkickers’ joint, ain’t it?”
“Country music, yes.”
“What about it?”
“Take a run up that way—see if you can talk to a Bobbie Jo Pickens. Tall, blonde woman—she probably owns the place.”
“Okay, what should I talk about?”
“Rufe Devereaux—find out how well she knew him. Tell her he’s gone west, and that his wake will be held at Olenick’s tonight. Get her reaction, if any.”
Moose nodded, finding his hat, going out, coming right back in. He dropped an envelope on the desk. “Mail for the day.” The phone rang. Moose grabbed it and handed it to Lockington. He said, “It’s for you.”
Lockington said, “You didn’t answer the sonofabitch—how do you know it’s for me?”
Moose said, “Gotta be for you. Who’d be calling me?”
Lockington said, “You got a lousy attitude.”
Moose went out.
Hector Godwin was on the line. Hector said, “Mr. Lockington, I visited your office yesterday morning, remember?”
Lockington sighed. “Vividly.”
“Are you armed, Mr. Lockington?”
“Occasionally.”
“How quickly can you get here?”
Lockington said, “Well, that would depend on just where ‘here’ is.”
Hector said, “I live at Seven twenty-eight Laurel Lane in Batavia.”
Lockington said, “I might locate Laurel Lane if I knew how to find Batavia.”
“It’s just forty or so miles southwest of Chicago. This is of the utmost urgency, Mr. Lockington!”
“You’ll have to take that just a step further.”
“You’ll recall that I’ve been under observation by outer-galactic beings.”
“Uhh-h-h, yes, I believe you mentioned that.”
“They’re here, Mr. Lockington!”
“They are?”
“Yes, there’s a spaceship in front of my house!”
“What color?”
“Silver gray. Most of them are silver gray.”
“Most of them?”
“I haven’t seen all of them, Mr. Lockington.”
“Have you contacted the Batavia police?”
“I have, and they’ve informed me that parking on Laurel Lane is perfectly permissible!”
“Well, He
ctor, I don’t know exactly how to advise you on this. I’m at least an hour from Batavia—probably longer.”
“My God, they’re leaving the ship!” Hector’s voice had risen a couple of octaves. “They’re crossing my lawn—the bastards are walking on my geraniums—!” The line went dead.
Lockington never heard from Hector Godwin again.
There’d be times when he’d wonder about that.
16
The envelope on Lockington’s desk was a cheap manila three-by-five-inch with a shiny tin clasp—nothing distinctive about it, it was of a type readily available in office supply shops and drugstores. It’d been addressed in sprawling black ballpoint, its upper left-hand corner blank. Lockington studied the postmark. It was smudged, but he could make out Chicago, Illinois. He balanced the envelope on the palm of his hand, then shook it briskly. It didn’t rattle, jingle or tick, and it weighed no more than an ounce. He pinched the flaps of the clasp together, opened it, and tilted it over the desk. A depleted book of matches skidded out to tumble on the green blotter pad. The envelope wasn’t empty and he freed its remaining contents—a slim sheaf of United States currency. He riffled rapidly through the money, his eyes widening. Ten one-hundred-dollar bills—probably more money than he’d handled at one time since the day of his birth.
He counted again. He’d been right the first time—one grand. He folded it, placing it under the baseball encyclopedia in his bottom desk drawer. Then he concentrated on the empty matchbook. It was glossy white with bold red-block lettering: CLUB CROSSROADS—AUSTINTOWN, OHIO. There was a telephone number in smaller print.
He sat at the desk, frowning, tugging at an ear, staring into space. Apparently something was expected of him, a service had been paid for in advance. Prepayment by whom, and for what? And Austintown was in Ohio, obviously, but where in Ohio?
He picked up the telephone, signaling for an operator. The area code for Austintown, Ohio, please. I’ll give you the number of Ohio information, sir. She gave him the number and he rang it. What city, sir? Austintown—I’d like to have the area code number for Austintown. One moment, pleeyuz—Austintown is listed in the Youngstown directory. The Youngstown area code number is two-one-six—do you have the number of your Austintown party, sir? Lockington said yes, thanking her.
Youngstown, Ohio—Lockington had heard of it. He’d known a bartender who’d been from Youngstown—Whitey Greb, who’d worked at Imogene’s Interlude on North Cicero Avenue until Imogene had been busted for peddling her ass. Whitey had been homesick and he’d talked incessantly about Youngstown. It’d produced steel and lots of it, a prosperous city. Then, almost overnight, the steel mills had moved or folded. Union demands had become insatiable, driving the cost of making steel higher than the stuff could be sold for, and Detroit’s automobile manufacturers had turned to Denmark, Sweden and Japan, washing fifteen thousand Youngstown jobs down the drain. A city with a diversified industrial base might have handled such a kick in the economic groin, but Youngstown had been founded on steel, it’d made steel and steel only, and the area was still in a state of paralysis, according to Whitey Greb.
Lockington shrugged, turning to the telephone, dialing 1–216, then the number on the Club Crossroads matchbook. He heard one ring before a recording cut in, a sultry female voice. “Hel-lo, there! Club Crossroads opens at six pee-yem, seven days a week! You’ll just love our headline attraction, Pecos Peggy and the Barnburners! Come visit us soon, won’t you?” The answering device snapped off and Lockington hung up to lean back in the swivel chair, certain of one thing—the envelope had been mailed by Rufe Devereaux.
It’d been established that Rufe had flown into Chicago from Cleveland, and Whitey Greb had mentioned that Cleveland was just sixty-eight miles from Youngstown—an hour’s drive, give or take. For reasons as yet unknown, Rufe Devereaux had gotten his ass in a sling in Youngstown or its environs, he’d been tracked to Cleveland and intercepted in Chicago. He’d been in danger and he’d known it, otherwise why the Keystone Cops chase on the Kennedy Expressway and why the peek-a-boo routine prior to his arrival at the International Arms Hotel? If the Club Crossroads matchbook hadn’t been a cry for help, it’d certainly been a plea for vengeance, indicating a starting point—square one: the Club Crossroads in Austintown, Ohio.
Pecos Peggy and the Barnburners—the names smacked of country entertainment, and Rufe Devereaux, a Louisiana man, would have gravitated toward it. He’d thrived on the stuff and the knock-down, drag-out places where it could be found—the atmosphere had been an elixir. Not so in Lockington’s case—country music joints spooked him. He had no objections to the average two-fisted workingman’s taverns—these were predictable to an extent, but the country dives were explosive without cause. One midnight in a Chicago cesspool called Dixie Central, he’d watched a big hillbilly rip a toilet from the floor of the men’s room, then heave it through a plateglass window into the middle of North Austin Boulevard. When the police had arrived and subdued the miscreant, they’d inquired as to why he’d done it. The big guy had thought it over and said, “Wall, goldang iffen I know why—it juss seemed lak th’ thing to do at th’ time.”
Lockington checked his watch—going on four o’clock. He kicked off his shoes and hoisted his feet onto the desk, tilting his head to a comfortable angle, permitting his eyelids to droop and close. “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”…Shakespeare. Lockington dozed off, wondering how Shakespeare would have fared in Chicago, deciding that he’d have despised it.
So did Lockington.
17
The harsh jangle of the telephone startled Lockington. Moose Katzenbach said, “Hey, Lacey, that Club Howdy ain’t no roach ranch! It’s a swanky-tonk!”
Lockington said, “The last time I saw it, it looked like the south end of a northbound gut wagon.”
“Not now! Paneling, chrome, red leather, white tile floors, clean as a pin—strictly top drawer!”
“You get hold of the Pickens woman?”
“Yeah, but I had to wait to do it. This one sleeps late!”
“Sorry, I should have thought of that. She stays up half the night—the place is open till three in the morning. What’d she have to say?”
“About what?”
“About Devereaux.”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
“Sure, I asked her, but she never heard of Devereaux.”
“The hell she didn’t.”
“Seemed level—she just gave me one of them long, blank stares. There’s a fine-looking woman, Lacey—tough, but she got class.”
“Don’t get class confused with poise. She’s in show business—she gotta have poise. Same thing goes for Siamese cats.”
“Okay, so it’s poise—ain’t no way I’d kick her outta bed!”
Lockington yawned. “Well, what the hell, it was worth a shot.”
“We talked for maybe an hour. Like you said, she probably owns the place. She bought me a couple drinks, and when she raised a finger, that bartender jumped about forty feet!”
“Didn’t she want to know who you were?”
“Yeah, and I showed her my old police badge—told her that I was a cop, checking Devereaux’s background. I said that we’d heard that he’d been a regular at the Club Howdy.”
“Did it fly?”
“I think so. She told me that she’d had a phone call from the police—a Sergeant Delvano in the superintendent’s office. I never knew no Sergeant Delvano, did you?”
“No. What’d Delvano want?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Okay, Moose, thanks. Call it a day—no reason to come back here—the fucking Martians already got Hector Godwin.”
Lockington dropped the phone into its cradle. So much for his missing link. He’d leave it in the water. An open link could double as a hook.
18
At 6:45 on that cloudy and rapidly darkening evening, Lockington drove north on Clark Street. Wrigley Field loomed
on his right and he stared glumly at the gaunt floodlight towers that were being erected on the grandstand roofs, far from operational now, but they’d be functioning in August. Night baseball in Wrigley Field—a sacrilege of unthinkable proportions, like a dice game smack dab in the middle of Vatican Square.
Olenick’s Funeral Home was located a few blocks north of Wrigley Field, up toward Irving Park Road. Lockington knew the place and a swatch of its history. In the good old days, Scarface Al Capone’s loyal hoodlums had been laid out in grand style at Olenick’s. Al’s disloyals had been buried along the eastern banks of the Fox River—not all of them deceased at the time of interment, it’d been rumored.
He swung west across southbound Clark Street traffic to pull into Olenick’s blacktopped parking lot, this maneuver arousing the ire of a creature in a maroon Cadillac. She clamped down on her horn and shook a fist in Lockington’s direction. He shrugged it off. Rare had been the day when he hadn’t had some sort of run-in with a Chicago fat woman. He parked his car, pausing to study the Olenick building before getting out—red brick desperately in need of tuckpointing, cracked stained-glass windows, cobwebbed concrete walks bordered by untended densiformis, much of it browning with blight, dying. He counted a dozen or so automobiles in the Olenick lot, most being older models, but none within five years of Lockington’s wobbly Pontiac Catalina.
Being a detective, and gifted with the excellent peripheral vision demanded by his profession, Lockington had spotted a tavern half a block to the south, a dingy, ramshackle, gray-shingled structure, Helga’s Place, wedged into a row of small shops, the majority of these having been vacant for years. The neighborhood had gone completely to hell, and to walk its streets was to invite sudden disaster of one sort or another, but Lockington had time, he had a thirst, and he had a .38 police special, so he hiked the few doors to Helga’s Place. Under normal conditions it was a joint he wouldn’t have been caught dead in, but circumstances have a knack for altering cases. The dilapidated tavern was all but deserted, its bar splintered, its stools teetery, the woman on duty two or three sheets to the wind. He took a seat and ordered Martell’s with a water wash. The barmaid, an aging, bony female in a baggy green jumpsuit, studied him with suspicious bloodshot eyes. She said, “Martell’s? Martell’s what?”
The Devereaux File Page 5