by Thomas Laird
I have to be gone by three.
I’m working the afternoons, and there’s a rumor that they want to give me a partner, but it hasn’t happened and I think I know why. The grapevine is saying I offed Jennifer, and the cops downtown, led by Parisi and his partner, have fanned those flames. They’d bleeding lynch me if they could, but we have a pretty good union that forces them to show cause, so right now I’m still flying solo and I haven’t been transferred to parking and traffic.
I get a phone call at my office around 9:00 P.M. from the real estate woman, Gail Adams. She sounds upset as soon as I hear her voice.
“There’s a big problem,” she tells me.
“What?”
“The wife of the guy freaked out when she used the bathroom.”
I don’t answer.
“She said something was in there with her.”
“In where?” I ask.
I already know the answer.
“In the john. She swore there was something in there with her. And when I went in, there was nothing, except the water was dripping from the shower head.”
“There was no one in that house when I left. My wife is dead. I live alone.”
“I understand. But the lady was hysterical. She insisted there was some kind of presence in the bathroom with her.”
I try to come up with an explanation, but there is none.
“I’ll take care of it. Give me a few days before you schedule another walk-through, okay?”
She agrees and then hangs up.
I get home a little after twelve-thirty. I leave the car in the driveway, and then I rush inside.
The realtor told me she turned off the water before they left, but it’s dripping from the shower head again.
But there’s no sign of Jennifer or her ghost or whatever it was that I thought was going to leave me the hell alone.
Why’s she starting up again? They found her body, or at least her head, and I thought maybe she’d rest in peace or whatever it is that happens when you leave this life. There is no heaven or hell, and certainly there is no God, or at least He’s not they guy you think he is. He’s something like what the God of the Deists, the founding father types, believed in. He created this mess, and then He took off for parts unknown, and now He doesn’t give a flying turd what happens to us, the poor dicks who remain on this damned cinder.
What am I supposed to do now? Have a séance? Bring in Harry Houdini and speak to the spirits of the dead? Bullshit. I think I might find an arsonist and burn this bastard of a house down and collect the insurance.
But arson is tricky. I know some of the fire inspectors in the city, and they’re very good at catching torchers. They almost always find the accelerant that was used to burn the bitch down, and that leads to indictments, and the CFD, the fire department, has a very good won-lost record when it comes to catching the bad guys.
There are experts who do work for the Outfit, our version of the Mafia, but they’re very expensive. They do shit with the electricity, I hear, to make it look like faulty wiring.
I’ve got smoke detectors, but I think the batteries are shot because they’ve been beeping on and off the last few days. So all I’d have to do is take the batteries out now so the beeping doesn’t wake me up every fifteen minutes, and then I could slip them back in before the house burner did his thing.
I know a few of the Italians who hang out in Cicero. I’m on their payroll, as a matter of fact. I get a few thousand a month for letting their tittie bar customers get oral in the back while the strippers work double-duty between the poles and the poles they’re servicing on the side.
Frank Pastore is my contact with the boys. He owns a joint called Britches in Cicero on 22nd Street. He runs whores, too, but they don’t operate out of the tittie bar. They run out of a phone service that caters to the fancy downtown hotels.
I try to sleep tonight, but I’ve got one eye opened and my ears tuned in to hear if it’s going to pull an encore for me, here and now. But the night goes by quietly and slowly, and I doze off, just before dawn.
I drive over to Pastore’s joint on 22nd Street around noon so I don’t bother him during his busy times—late afternoons and nights.
I see him at the bar as soon as I enter Britches. He’s trying out a few wannabe strippers by the bandstand. When he sees me coming, he tells the broads to go have a smoke somewhere else. They walk out the door, three of them, wearing their pasties and g-strings, purses in tow.
“You aren’t afraid you’ll get busted for public indecency with those bitches out front of your establishment in broad daylight?” I laugh.
Pastore is a tall wop, maybe six-six. Big for a full-blooded Sicilian who’s a made man. He has blond hair, though, which is unusual for southern Italians. He has Hollywood good looks, and I’m amazed he’s got any mileage left on his prick. He partakes of all his female help, in front of the bar and behind it, and with the sweeties who thrash around on those silver poles on stage, beyond the bar where we sit on high stools.
“Free advertising, Derek. It’s capitalism at its best and cheapest……What do you need, my friend?”
“I need an arsonist.”
Frank looks around as if he’s worried we’ll be overheard.
“You wouldn’t be wearing a wire, would you, Derek?”
“I need an arsonist to do a job for me, personally.”
“I’ll still need to have Lou check you before we go into my office. Sorry.”
He yells out for Lou, and a guy who dwarfs the six foot six Sicilian comes loping out of the darkness at the far end of the establishment, as if he came out of some damned cave back there.
“In the john. Pat him down for a wire,” Frank orders.
“Ain’t he a cop?” Lou asks.
Lou has sandy-colored hair hanging down, all stringy, from the sides of his melon-shaped head. Frank has no problems with rude behavior in Britches, and Lou’s the marshal.
We go into the boss’s personal shitter, and I have to strip down. He even checks inside the cheeks of my ass and between my legs. Lou is very thorough.
Then he escorts me to the office.
The door shuts behind me, and the boss is sitting at his spacious desk.
“Why do you need a burn?” he demands.
“I need to unload my house, and the wiring’s bad and it’ll cost me a fortune to fix it. And then I want to get married again, and she doesn’t want to live in the old place. You know, too many bad memories.”
“Yeah. We were all sorry to hear about your wife. Shitty way to go, no?”
“Yeah, thanks. But we all got to keep moving, right?”
“That’s the truth, Derek. But this kind of thing costs, you understand.”
“Sure. I know. How much, you figure?”
“You want a pro’s pro, no less than ten thousand. And for that, you don’t get pinched for arson, and neither does the burner.”
“I guess I could handle that.”
“Cash, Derek. No checks, no credit.”
“I got some money saved.”
“Good. Why are you really going to torch your own place? I have to know, since I’m involved in this thing, here.”
I look around his office. Frank Pastore is a very orderly criminal. Things are all kept in their neat little containers, everywhere I look.
“The goddam house is haunted.”
He laughs out loud, but then he sees the stony look on my own face.
“Jesus Christ! You’re serious?”
I don’t reply.
“Whatever, I guess,” he pronounces, finally.
Then he looks into a little black book that he takes out of his back pocket.
“Write down a phone you want him to call. You can’t call him. Ever. And you can’t speak of this shit with me again. Ever. You understand?”
I nod.
“Good. I get the money, I take my slice and give him his. Then he’ll let you know when it’s going to happen. He’ll need to get into your pl
ace before he does it, of course. It will look absolutely accidental.”
I get up and shake hands with him, and then his office door magically opens and his gorilla, Lou, escorts me out of Britches.
I’ve got thirty K in my savings, and I was planning on a trip to Lake Tahoe with Carrie for our honeymoon, but I think I can still swing Tahoe with the twenty G’s left over. And maybe I’ll make it back with the insurance and by selling the lot once the place is gone.
And Jennifer, or whatever it is, will be gone with this house, I’m thinking. It’s like the rules, isn’t it? When the house goes, the haunting’s over. No place for the bitch to hang her ghostly hat anymore, no?
It’s the only shot I’ve got left. I know that realtor’s never coming back into my place, and if I get another agent, that shit’s going to keep on happening, and once a property gets a reputation like the one it’s getting right now, the place will become unsellable. If I don’t invest the ten K, I’ll lose a lot more.
I pay Frank the cash, two days later. We’re in mid-November, now, and the weather’s turning. The burner wants to come over and see the house.
He never gives me his name, naturally, and he doesn’t say anything as he enters the place about 8:45 P.M. on a Wednesday night. He looks around for about forty minutes while I wait in the living room. I hear the water go on in the bathroom about ten minutes into his visit.
“You need a plumber. Something’s dripping in the crapper,” he says.
“I know.”
“But I guess it won’t matter soon, anyway.”
“Yeah. Sure. You done?”
He’s a little mouse of a man, with a tiny black pencil moustache. He looks like a well-scrubbed rodent.
“Where’s the fuse box?”
“In the basement.”
I show him the door downstairs, and then I flick on the lights for him.
He’s down there for a half hour or so. He was carrying what looked like a small tool pouch with him when he arrived.
Then he emerges from the cellar.
“Done?” I ask.
“Get any shit you want to save and put it in the trunk of your car. You’re going to wait until you see it really go up, from outside, before you make the call from a phone booth. Forget the neighbors. Tell the cops and the firemen you tried to wake them up and use their phones, but they wouldn’t answer the door. So you ran down to the gas station and used theirs. You follow?
“Got any animals?”
“No. It’s just me.”
“Get what you want and get it out real quick.”
He bolts out of the house without another word. It’s 9:25. I need to get some papers and valuables together and into the car, and I need to move the vehicle onto the street before the torch’s magic show really gets going good.
The neighbors won’t be an issue. They’re both old farts on both sides, and they’d snore through the Chicago Fire. This blaze will be contained by these four walls.
I put the batteries back into the fire detectors, upstairs, here, and in the basement. I’m sure the batteries are depleted, because as soon as they were inserted, the bleating warning beeps started up. I’ll have to live with the sound until I run outside and head for the gas station payphone.
I’ll wait until I can smell it and perhaps see the beginnings of flames tearing through the flooring. First, I scurry about, gathering anything I want to take with me. The clothes will have to remain or it’ll appear suspicious.
“I hope you like fire!” I yell out, to no one.
I wait to hear if the dripping starts up in the john again.
I’d be interested to know what the weasel-like torcher is thinking on his drive home, right now.
I sit down on the couch in the living room, and I wait to smell the first odor of my bonfire-to-be.
I want to see if Jennifer really comes wafting out here when she smells it, too.
It’s all been in my head. The dripping, the presence, all of it. One great hallucination. That’s all it ever was. No ghost. No haunting. Just my brain backing up with a bunch of bullshit guilt. It’s all just a result of some echo in my head that tells me I was a very bad boy.
Some childish crap you never get rid of, no matter how much you understand what the real world’s like.
Chapter 2
Leonard has had enough of the Lady in the Lake, so he goes out for a howl in Plank, and the only place to bay at the moon late at night is Tony’s, a tiny honkytonk on the outskirts of the flyspeck town. All the locals tie it on at Tony’s because the next closest place is in Claremont, fifty miles down the highway. Tony’s has a jukebox, but no live entertainment, because all the bands play in Claremont. And some of the time, the owner, Tony, pulls the plug on the juker when there’s college or pro football on his cheap shit portable 19- inch color TV set—which is most of the time during football season.
Leonard is no fan of football, although he played in high school. He was a linebacker and a guard, mostly because he liked smacking people. The score of the game, who won or lost, didn’t matter as much to him as how many opposing players got carted off the field as a result of a head-on collision with Leonard Tare. Still, he made All- Bayou Conference in his senior year.
He’d had a gutful of that misty presence on his dock, and now he was beginning to believe she was scaring off the gators, his one big source of income. With the bills for the windows and the air conditioning and the new shingles he’d just purchased for his roof, he’d need the bucks to make ends meet. And the ‘little lady in white’ was shooing off the critters that would pay for all his improvements.
The bar maid at Tony’s was new. Leonard hadn’t seen her before, even though his last appearance at this honkytonk had to have been three months ago, he figured. It had always been some fat woman named Ella. She’d probably got canned by Tony for giving free drinks to her cronies, Leonard thought.
The new one’s name was Joellen, and he took to her the first time she let him see her pearly white teeth. Her smile was as big as her face, and the rest of her was too good looking to be wasting her time behind this slab of oak, pulling beers from the tapper.
“You live around here?” she asked as she laid a cold one on a coaster in front of him.
There were maybe eight patrons left inside Tony’s. They were supposed to close at midnight, but it was well after one, Leonard saw by the clock over the rows of whiskey bottles behind Joellen.
She was a chestnut- haired beauty, she was, and the first thing Tare noticed was that her ring finger was unoccupied.
“I’m Leonard Tare. Been living here for a long time. When’d you show up and brighten this dump up?”
“About a month ago, I guess. Got divorced. Living here with my sister until I can get situated properly.”
“So you’re the one who’s new around here,” Leonard grinned.
“I think I heard some folks talking about you.”
“Who might these folks be?” he wanted to know.
He didn’t like loose talk, and he liked loose mouths even less.
“They didn’t say anything bad about you. In fact, they were talking about what you did in that Vietnam War. Said you were a hero or something.”
“Bullshit…Excuse my French.”
“That’s all right. They were talking about this haunted dock you’re supposed to own, too.”
“That part’s true,” he had to admit.
“It really is haunted?” Joellen blurted.
“Something ain’t right, out there.”
Her eyes were wide with incredulity.
“You wouldn’t be fooling me about it, would you, Mr. Tare?”
“Mr. Tare was the old man. I’m Leonard.”
She laughed at the ancient joke. Leonard’s cheeks were beginning to color, but there was no way to hide the blush from her. She was standing right in his line of fire.
“I’d be happy to introduce you to her. Any time.”
“I might just take you up on that, Leon
ard.”
“When do you get out of here?”
“About an hour, I’d guess. These geezers are all snooted up, and Tony told me to close no later than one-thirty.”
“I can take you out there tonight, if you’re not all tired out from work and all.”
“No. I’m just perking up. I’m a night person by nature…Hold on, got a customer calling.”
She walked down to the other end of the slab, nodded at the order with her gorgeous grin, and then she fetched another draft of Old Moose Piss, or whatever it was they served in this sewer. Leonard couldn’t keep his eyes off her, and she ambled back to him, directly.
“I hope I don’t get you in trouble by your talking to me.”
“Tony’s gone home. I’m the queen of the taproom,” she giggled.
“You get to close up, then.”
“I do, and I’m about ready to start the last call. It’s one-twenty.”
“I can help you get them out of here,” he told her.
“That’s all right. They’re all regulars, and they’re well-trained.”
He thought he could sit on this stool and stare at Joellen all night long.
“Who was it that was telling these tales on me?”
She scrunched up her lips in deep thought.
“It was two State cops. They had more than a few after their shift, and they were headed home after going over to your place, they said. They were there when you called them about the body of that poor woman. I guess she’s the ‘lady on the dock,’ don’t you think?”
“Could be. I suppose. I don’t know who else it would be.”
“These two troopers were all lubricated and saying stuff they probably shouldn’t.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t want to sound like a gossip, Leonard.”
Several of the old codgers were finding their ways to the exits, now. Joellen bade them a goodnight.
“Your secrets are safe with me, Joellen.”
She scanned Leonard’s face.
“I know…They were talking about some cop in Chicago that the Homicides from up there were asking about—they wondered if this Vice policeman had ever been in Plank before was what the Chicago guys wanted to know, and the State guys from here told them they’d never seen him in these parts.”