by Thomas Laird
I have to stifle a laugh, but Doc remains composed.
Karen Turner is a pretty woman, somewhere in her fifties. Lean, in-shape, athletic in appearance. She’s preserved well enough not to still be a widow after ten years, and I’m wondering why she’s currently single. She seems attractive to me. Age doesn’t bother me, with a woman. It’s whether or not she has a sense of humor and whether she has the glow of aliveness in her eyes. Karen has the light show in her wolf-like gray orbs.
“I don’t mean to speak badly about my daughter, Irene, but she’s a bit past eccentric. I don’t know how reliable she is as a source of information about Jennifer or about anyone else, the kid was always a bit daffy, if you catch my meaning. And she loves that goddam dog just a little too much. I can barely stand to visit her for more than a few minutes. I get sick of her talking to the damn dog as if it’s a child instead of a pet.”
“She seemed very concerned that Jennifer’s husband might have meant her grievous harm,” Doc tells her.
“I can believe that much. Derek is no damn good, and Jennifer knew how I felt about him from the beginning. I told her he was a player and a sneak, but she would have none of my opinions on him. She was madly in love, but you could see plainly that he was someone with an eye for playing out of bounds with other women. Perhaps you’ll think I’m being vain, but I think he tried to flirt with me, on more than one occasion.”
“He tried to put a move on you? Really?” Doc smiles.
“Is that so unbelievable, Detective Gibron?”
She has her back up, and Doc is aware.
“Not unbelievable at all. It’s just that it takes a little nerve to hit on your bride’s mom,” Doc says.
“You mean it takes balls. You don’t have to dance around with words with me, Detective.”
Doc eyes her with a glimmer of mirth in his eyes. I’m starting to think I’m number three in a crowd, suddenly. Something’s going on between them. Maybe it’s chemistry.
But then it looks like Karen’s remembered why we’re here.
Her face darkens, and she begins to well up at the corners of her eyes.
“He’s killed her, hasn’t he.”
It’s a statement, not a question.
“There’s nothing that substantiates that,” I tell her. “We’re just in the initial stages of looking into the possibility, but with a potential murder, the longer we wait, the harder it is to locate the killer. I’m sure you understand. Missing Persons will exhaust every possibility before they call it homicide. I wouldn’t think the worst, Mrs. Turner. She may very well turn up. It’s only going on a month.”
“You know about the insurance?” she asks us, her eyes staring down at her splayed fingers atop the coffee table in front of her and Doc.
“Yes, we know,” I answer.
“You could call that motive, yes?”
“If we had a body, we would.”
“How long before she’s considered legally dead?” Karen asks us.
“It’s usually seven years,” Doc explains. “But probate can occur much sooner than that, if there are grounds.”
“Then he could get the insurance money much sooner than seven years,” she says.
“Possible,” I say. “But unlikely. He’d have to show cause that she’s deceased by presenting some evidence the court would affirm. Look, Karen, I don’t see the cash as a reason to murder your daughter. I would think something else was going on.”
“Yes,” she replies. “He’d do it out of sheer meanness. He’s an evil person. I already told you that. I can see that in his glance, too. He’s capable of violence. He was a soldier in the Vietnam War, and he had stories. We all heard the stories. Derek didn’t back away from telling us his grand exploits in combat. He said he killed people, over there.”
“I was there, too.”
“Did you kill anyone, Detective Parisi?”
I stare away from her.
“It was war.”
“But Derek liked to boast about it. I think he enjoyed the shock effect it had on anyone who had to listen to him. Get a couple of belts in him and he was John Wayne without the subtlety.”
“But it doesn’t necessarily mean that he stayed homicidal when he came home. I’ve only pulled the trigger in straight-up self -defense, on the job. Most of us know the difference between combat and what we called The World.”
“Then why the hell are you here?” she demands.
“We’re not saying you’re wrong,” Doc says sadly. “We’re just trying to find any evidence we can, either way. I know you have personal misgivings about Skotadi, but we’d have to back up a theory in a court of law. I know you understand.”
She looks back down at her spread-out fingers.
“Is my little girl dead?”
“We don’t know,” I answer. “But we’re going to damn-well find out.”
*
“I thought she was hot,” Doc says as he drives us back to Headquarters in the Loop.
“Don’t shit where you eat,” I remind him.
The Eisenhower is choked with very pissed off drivers. Traffic is clogged, and it’ll be an hour before we get back to our offices. It has chilled down nicely, the last few days in early October.
“You think he might’ve done it for the loot?” I ask.
“I think there’s a strong possibility he might have reckoned all the tropical pussy he could’ve found on the beaches somewhere very warm. Where they have those little damned umbrellas on all those drinks that you suck down while looking for dorsal fins out in the salt water. Sure. But I think the mother could be right. Derek Skotadi is definitely bent. I think he’s capable. And only a coward tells stories to the women he cares about. Hell, you don’t speak that shit to anybody. That’s why you got on the jet to come home. To jettison that crap forever. Nobody but true rear echelons tell war stories, Jimmy. Living that horror was plenty, but you don’t have to re-live it, except inside yourself, occasionally.”
Doc fought in Korea, but I haven’t heard a single tale of any bugles and Chinese charges, to date.
“You liked Karen, didn’t you.”
“Yeah. She was choice. But you’re right. You do not mix business and pleasure, as you learned, not so long ago.”
He’s referring to a woman I used to see, but he’s doing it gently. He knows it’s still a very sore point in my head.
“She has to have had friends. We need to see who else was in Jennifer’s life. She had a job. She must have had relationships at work. There are no other close relatives in the area, so calling some aunt from Green Bay, Wisconsin, ain’t going to do us any good. What about Skotadi’s neighbors, Doc? And where the hell was he the day she went off the radar?”
*
The old man in the bungalow knows nothing and sees nothing, and he even looks like Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes. He’s a double for the actor, John Banner, I think his name was. He lives on the right as we’re facing Skotadi’s home. We come to talk to Oscar Janssen when we’re sure Skotadi is on shift.
We talk outside because the old guy doesn’t want us in his domicile. So we stand on his front porch. It’s private enough because there’s no one on the street or sidewalk at 10:20 A.M. It’s sunny, and there’s only a very calm breeze blowing out of the northeast. That’s the wind called ‘The Hawk’ and it brings dead cold to inland Chicago in the depths of winter.
“I go to bed early and I get up early and I mind my own business,” the geezer says.
He has to be in his early eighties.
“I don’t know this man and I rarely ever even see him. He must lead strange hours. I know he’s a policeman, like you two.”
“Have you noticed him not coming home for any length of time? You must hear the car going in and out,” I counter.
“He goes out and he comes in, and then there is this woman.”
“You mean the redhead?” Doc asks.
“I don’t know hair. I just know it isn’t the woman he lives with—until r
ecently. Did he divorce his wife? Did they separate? The other one was here for a pretty long time. But I pay no attention to the neighbors and I hope they do the same for me.”
I ask him if he heard anything unusual on the night of Jennifer’s disappearance.
“I don’t remember September. I don’t remember what happened last night, either.”
“Are you afraid to say anything because he’s a policeman?”
I can see Doc’s query has penetrated the bullshit exterior of the old man’s face. It hit home, and there’s a look of fear on his moon visage, right now.
“We’re not going to tell him you said anything,” I promise.
“All you policemen stick together,” he insists.
“Not when it’s a missing woman or maybe even a murder, we don’t,” I tell him.
He starts mulling something inside his head.
“I liked the first one. She said hello to me. Last winter she shoveled the sidewalk in front of my house, and I never even asked her to. And she did my steps, also.”
We wait for it.
“That night he went out very late, but I was in bed and I didn’t see anything. Nothing. And I didn’t hear anything except the sound of the car being backed up on his driveway. And then there was nothing and I went back to sleep. I’m telling you the truth about this because she was nice to me, once.”
We talk to the old lady on the left of Skotadi, but she invites us in and insists she make us coffee, which comes out of the kitchen in a pot with three mugs and a plate full of homemade oatmeal cookies. Doc talks a mug and a cookie, but I abstain.
We sit in Gladys Ostrowski’s living room on a leather couch, and the tiny, bent old woman sits between us. The chairs are too loaded down with books and magazines for us to be able to use them. But the straight-backed chairs are the only cluttered items in an otherwise immaculate front room.
“I liked the wife. I do not like Mr. Skotadi,” she says flatly after taking a sip of her coffee. Doc is munching on his oatmeal cookie.
I should have asked for a Coke, but the old girl doesn’t look like the soda pop type.
“Do you see them very often?” I ask. Doc’s still got his mouth full.
“Not so much,” Gladys retorts. “But she smiled at me every time she saw me outside. He never even looked my way. Not once. He seems very aloof. Very snotty, actually.”
I ask her about the night in question. She begins to try to recall that date, and then it comes to her.
“Yes! I remember that particular night because my water heater went out and I had no hot water and I had no idea how I was going to take a bath in the morning. So I called the plumber in the morning, and he came out and put in a new one that same morning…Oh! The night before I heard his car pulling out of the driveway, but I can’t see the driveway from my house—it’s on Oscar’s side. He’s a very strange old man, isn’t he?”
I smile at her.
Doc continues to chew and sip. We’ll need to make a fast food run after this.
“You didn’t hear anything else? Anything out of the ordinary?” I ask her.
She looks over at Doc.
“Those oatmeal cookies are my grandmother’s recipe. Everyone raves about them. I can’t keep them in the house at Christmas.”
We nod, say thanks, and leave.
“So he did leave, on that night. But neither of them heard anything strange. No screams, no crying out.”
I’m driving, this time. Doc is digesting the cookies. He ate three. Now we’re headed to our usual, White Castle.
“Not so odd when you see both of them have central air conditioning and that it was hot as hell on that night, high seventies at midnight. I recall the radio giving us the temperature when we were out on the street, on midnights that night.”
“So all we got is that he went out. We have no idea where, or whether or not she was in that car with him,” I affirm.
“She could’ve been in the goddam trunk, Jimmy,” Doc says as he stares out the passenger’s side window.
We try to follow the money, but we come up empty on Skotadi’s credit cards. There were no transactions for that date in September or for the next day.
But he did withdraw four hundred in cash the day before Jennifer Skotadi went missing.
“Why would he need four Cs?” Doc wonders aloud.
“Maybe he was taking a drive.”
“But he was back at work the next night. That gives him a little more than twenty-four hours to come and go, if he really went anywhere at all. Jimmy, maybe this babe is just shacked up with another lothario and we’re spinning our wheels.”
“You think so?” I ask.
We’re in my cubicle of an office. It’s little bigger than a postage stamp in here, but it’s got that terrific view of Lake Michigan in front of us, out the big, rectangular piece of plate glass. The tiny quarters have only the one perk.
“Christ, no. That son of a bitch killed her.”
Chapter 10
Carrie wakes up in the middle of a bad dream. Some kind of shroud has settled over her like a mist that clings too tightly, and she wakes up with a yelp. She turns to him, but he’s gone because he’s working that awful midnight shift, and he won’t be home until eight or nine, and she’ll be on her way to work downtown by then.
The dream is terrifying because there is someone else in the bedroom with her when there couldn’t possibly be. It is at the foot of the bed, but then it begins moving all about her, as if this nightmare is suspended in the air, like a floating white mist. But it becomes more corporeal, more real, as it descends down onto her.
She doesn’t believe in ghosts, in spirits, in anything supernatural, including God. She’d given Him up long ago, back when she was a teenager and when he delivered no cure for her adolescent acne or when he ignored her pleas for certain boys to take notice of her. The acne was taken care of by a dermatologist, and when her breasts bloomed and the rest of her body followed suit, getting males to notice her was no longer a problem. Hence God became unnecessary, as well.
But this is something substantial, something concrete. It is not just ephemera. It’s in the room with her.
And just as suddenly as she feels the urge to scream out loud, the delicate filament that has entrapped her evaporates, and she is alone in the room.
It has a scent. She thinks she knows the perfume, but she can’t recall the brand. She doesn’t wear cologne or anything else, and Derek’s wife had left nothing behind her when she disappeared. Either that or Derek has thrown all Jennifer’s toiletries in the trash before she’d moved in with him.
Carrie rises and heads into the bathroom. She opens the shower door and turns on the water to heat up. Then she sits on the commode. When she finishes, she gets up and brushes her teeth. She checks to make sure the towels are clean. Derek uses towels until they stink and become stiff from overuse. But they are recently hung on the rack, and they smell freshly laundered.
The steam rises from over the top of the shower door, and she knows the supply of hot water in this house is nowhere near endless. She has to bathe while she still won’t be shocked by a cold spray.
Carrie feels that someone else is in the bathroom with her, but when she steps into the shower, no one else is with her.
She figures it’s a sort of hangover from her bad dream.
*
“I can’t stay here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded when I arrived home around eight and found her still there.
“There’s something wrong in this place. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I feel uneasy in here. It’s as if your wife is still around, somewhere. It’s as if I can feel her…presence. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t stay in this house any longer, Derek.”
I wake up that same night, and I see by the red digital numbers of the bedside clock that it’s three-thirty, and it’s still very much dark outside.
I hear the water running in the john. It sounds like the sh
ower. My eyes flutter into focus, and then I get up and slog in exhaustion toward the sound.
I flip the light on, and I see the steam rising from inside the glass door. I click on the light for the stall, and then I slowly head toward the shower door.
I yank it open, my fists balled and ready to pummel anyone who’s in there.
But the water is running, and there’s no one inside. I took a shower after Carrie left, and I know I didn’t leave the water running. At least I don’t think I did. And after all this time, no way would there be enough hot water to create all this steam.
I yank off the water, and I slam the door shut. Then I walk over to the sink and turn the faucet handle for cold water. I splash some liquid onto my face. Then I grab over at the towel rack and seize something to mop my face with. When I’m done drying my face, I look up at the mirror over the sink.
A shadow darts from side to side, behind me. I blink, and then I whip around.
Nothing.
I manage to look into the mirror again, but this time all I see is my own image.
That dark figure has disappeared.
I stumble back into the bedroom and collapse on the mattress, but I can’t slow the thumping in my chest. I think I’m having a seizure, a heart attack, a stroke. Something lethal.
I should call for an ambulance. But then I roll over, and my chest palpitations seem to ease off. My breathing regulates, and I’m able to sit up.
This is what they call the power of suggestion. Carrie got me thinking there was actually someone in this house before I got home, and I transferred that shit and now I’m seeing shadows in the mirror.
It’s all bullshit. Just bullshit. A trick of the mind. Maybe Carrie wants to mess with me because I can’t marry her because everyone thinks Jennifer’s gone AWOL, but I know better. The alligators and I know where she really is. She’s dead. Eaten. Gone forever.
There was nothing in that goddam mirror but a hallucination. My mind is working overtime, what with the IA investigation and with Parisi and his partner latched onto my ass.
Then there’s my hang-up with the redhead who I should probably dislodge forever. I should let her stay gone. Consider all this a stroke of good luck.