Black Widower

by Thomas Laird

  “Vice cop?”

  “He had a really strange name. It was so odd I remember it.”

  “What was it?”

  She studied Leonard’s face again.

  “You really can trust me, Joellen.”

  “Sko-tadi. I think that’s how they pronounced it.”

  “And they were asking if he’d ever been in Plank before.”

  “Yeah. You think he might really be a suspect, Leonard?”

  “I don’t know. I fancy he might be, in fact.”

  The remainder of the drunks staggered and shuffled out of Tony’s entrance, and the two of them were all who remained in the bar.

  Leonard helped her clean off the tables, and he went into the heads and cleaned out the men’s and ladies’ johns for her, mopping up and the whole routine Joellen was paid to do, and she protested, but Leonard waved her off.

  “I was raised on this kind of slave labor in the Navy. I’m happy to help.”

  She stopped him and planted a peck on his cheek, just outside the restrooms, and then he felt emboldened enough to put his arms about her waist and to pull her tight to himself and Leonard gave her a proper kiss on the lips.

  She kissed him back with equal fervor.

  “We hardly know each other, Leonard.”

  He didn’t release her from the embrace, and Joellen didn’t struggle to be free. She kissed him flush on the mouth again, and this time there was tongue.

  Then they disengaged, and they finished the closing up ritual by turning off the lights. Joellen locked the front door. Her car was parked on the street in front, and Leonard’s truck was three spaces down. They were the only two vehicles out front of Tony’s.

  “Why don’t you just leave yours here, and we’ll go out to my place in the truck…Your sister mind you coming in so late?”

  “She knows I’m an adult, and she knows I work late, sometimes.”

  She got into the passenger’s side, Leonard started his old beater up, and they took off.

  He turned off the headlights, looked in her direction, and Joellen almost sprang over to him. They kissed, and it developed into a grope, and before either of them knew it, they were both naked as daybreak, and her legs were wrapped around his waist as they lay on the front seat of the pickup.

  “I’m not using anything,” he told her. “Is it safe?”

  “I’m on the pill. It’s okay.”

  The springs were noisy in the seater, but it seemed to simply rev the both of them up to a higher fever, and then they collapsed together at just about the same time.

  “Oh my God!” she heaved. “I’ve never done such, before!”

  “Neither have I…I mean never as sudden as all this.”

  “You’ll think I’m just a bar slut.”

  He took hold of her face.

  “I will never think any such thing about you, Joellen…You ain’t even told me your last name.”

  “It’s Warren, Leonard. Joellen Warren. I got rid of my married name when I divorced him.”

  “He must have been crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he let you loose. That’s why.”

  Then Leonard lowered his face onto hers. He discovered that they had never disengaged from their body-lock, and he also discovered that he was ready to go again and so was she. It was all in one heated, fluid continuum.

  Finally, the wildness subsided, and they sat up and got dressed. But he continually slowed the process by taking hold of Joellen and pressing their mouths, and as much of their bodies as they could, together.

  “We ain’t never going to get out of this truck, this way,” he smiled.

  Finally, they emerged, sweaty and spent, and he guided her to his hovel, first. He went in to retrieve the sawed-off canon, and then he walked her to the dock. He had one arm around Joellen, and the other carried the weapon.

  “Is the shotgun for her?”

  “Hell no,” he told her. “It’s for the reptiles, the gators. She won’t do us any harm. But they sure as hell might.”

  “I think I’m a little frightened, Leonard.”

  “Of which of them?”

  “Both, I think.”

  She tried to laugh, but it was aborted into a cut-off chortle.

  “We don’t have to go out here, Jo,” he said.

  “How’d you know that was what my friends call me?” she asked.

  “It just came right out of my mouth. Most of what’s happened between us tonight seemed as if it had a mind of its own.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  She squeezed Leonard suddenly, with both her arms.

  “We can go back, if you like,” he told her.

  The swamp and the end of the dock loomed before them.

  “Let’s keep going. But keep your eyes opened for the indigenous wildlife,” she smiled.

  They got halfway onto the pier when the usual fog began to shroud up before them.

  “Is this supposed to happen, Leonard?”

  “Every time.”

  She had both her arms around his waist, in a death grip.

  “I can’t breathe, Jo.”

  She loosened up a little on him.

  “Thank you,” he laughed.

  Then he took her face in his free hand and kissed her again, briefly.

  Her eyes widened a second time this night as she saw the thing take form. In seconds, there was a whirl of white before them.

  “There it is,” Leonard pronounced.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” she told Leonard.

  “Walk backwards. Don’t turn your backside to the water. Ever.”

  *

  Tare called the Chicago Public Library long distance and got hold of the reference table. He asked the library lady at the desk if they had Chicago phonebooks, and the woman snottily replied that of course they had such, and Leonard gave her the name and asked if there were any listings.

  There was one, and only one for that surname in a city of three million, Leonard was told, and the whole moniker was Derek Skotadi, and the library lady gave him the number that he was seeking, as well as the address.

  Now I have a name, Leonard thought. His name. A killer’s name. Wasn’t that what the Chicago police thought? It was sheer luck that Joellen had overheard those two drunken troopers shooting their mouths off about what Parisi rightly kept to himself, when Leonard talked to the Chicago detective.

  So what the hell was Leonard Tare of Plank, Louisiana, going to do about the situation?

  He told himself that it wasn’t his job, it wasn’t his place to get involved. And what if those cops got the wrong name? Or what if he wasn’t in fact the Lady in White’s killer? The man was just a suspect, and that was all he was.

  But hearing that Skotadi was a Vice detective, Leonard couldn’t see any other way that it worked out. The odd name. The fact that he was the only person in that gigantic metropolis with such an unusual appellation.

  Leonard drove into Plank and visited the minute little thing they called a library. He couldn’t find anything in the Webster’s dictionary called Skotadi—but then it was a proper name. He couldn’t figure out where this man came from, his ancestry, that was.

  So he asked the librarian in the mini stacks of Plank what she thought.

  “Might be Italian. Maybe Greek,” the seventy-ish biddy told him.

  She went looking for Italian or Greek references for him. This was her kind of thing, Leonard figured.

  She scoured the Italian book first. Nothing.

  Then it was the Greek reference book.

  “Here,” she said to Leonard. “Here it is.”

  She passed the hardcover over to him. He saw it plainly.

  “Skotadi: Darkness.”

  “Shit,” Leonard pronounced.

  “Young man,” the old woman scolded.

  Chapter 3

  I wait until three in the morning to catch Pastore at Britches. It’s where he hangs at this time of the early morning, wh
en the jerkoffs and the sleazes finally get the idea that it’s closing time. No more boobs until late tonight, so they head to whatever rat nest they inhabit.

  Lou is at the door. I flash my badge at him.

  “That don’t work here. You’re just an employee, remember?”

  My kick to his nuts takes him by surprise, and so do all the other heavy blows I let him have on the way down to the floor. He stays down with the help of two boots to the back of his massive neck.

  The joint is barren. The girls, the help, everyone’s departed. So that means Frank is back in his office getting a complimentary servicing from one of his other employees.

  I kick Lou in the neck one more time, in remembrance of what he called me:

  Employee.

  I walk quickly back to Pastore’s cubicle, and I open the door very impolitely. He’s alone.

  Then I show him the .38 police special, and he tries to get up.

  “What the hell’s this?” he demands.

  I come right up to the desk and thrust the butt of the handgun into his nose, and I hear the crunch of cartilage.

  He howls out as he’s thrust back into his chair, his nose destroyed, flattened, and bleeding.

  “When Lou wakes up, he can take both of you to the Emergency. They’ll fix the two of you up just fine.”

  “You nuts? What’s this?”

  “It didn’t take.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Skotadi?”

  He’s wheezing and bleeding all over his silk shirt, at the moment.

  “The torch didn’t torch. My house didn’t burn up, and I want my goddam ten K back, right now!”

  “Take that up with the arsonist.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  I crack him on the skull with the barrel, and it opens his forehead up.

  “Give me my money, Pastore!”

  “I don’t have that kind of—“

  I open up the other side of his head with the gun barrel. His face is covered in gore.

  “You better hurry up, or it’ll be too late for a trip to the hospital.”

  I cock the .38 and put the tip of the barrel on his bloody forehead.

  “All right! All right! Jesus Christ, let me get into the safe.”

  He stands up slowly and woozily, but I let him make his way to the wall on the right. He pulls off a calendar with a spread-eagled nude, and then he tries to do the combination, but it takes him three tries. But he finally pops it open, counts out the cash in hundreds, and he gives me my ten grand back.

  Then I see the snub-nosed .32 in his right hand that he must have grabbed from the safe.

  I beat him to the draw when I raise my own piece and I shoot him in the face twice, and I’m only six feet from him. He flies backward and hits the floor. I figure then that I’ll make it look like a burglary. It isn’t going to float that it’s self-defense. I get a paper sack off his desk, and I load some more money from the safe into the shopping bag, and I dump my ten K on top of the rest. There must be a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty thousand in this Walgreen’s shopping sack. It’s heavy.

  And now there’s Lou. Poor Lou. It’s already been a bad morning for him, and it’s going to get worse. He’s a witness. A loose thread. I walk out into the bar and find the ape stretched out face down, the way I left him. Then I stand over him and pump two more rounds into the back of his noggin. The booms roared back at me, the way they did when Frank Pastore came apart, a minute ago.

  But there’s no one but me still breathing in here, and I wait for the reverberations to cease. Then it becomes silent.

  I walk out of Britches clutching my new found wealth.

  As I get into my car, I remember I still have that goddam house to unload.

  And I remember I still have that torch man to deal with, before he might shoot his mouth off about the blown fire he was supposed to rig for me. He’s another loose thread. I can’t leave him around to drop any silver change on me.

  I have one other contact with the Outfit. His name is Paul Benedetti, and he’s no friend to Pastore. He likes to hang at his own club on the north side. It’s one of those so-called Italian-American deals.

  Paul doesn’t like to be called anything other than Paul. No nicknames for him. He’s a very formal kind of killer. He’s a made guy and, naturally, a Sicilian on both sides of the clan. I meet him at his cozy little establishment on Belmont and Kedzie around noon. I don’t have to work until four today, so I have time.

  I sit down opposite Benedetti at a booth toward the back where we can talk confidentially. I can’t keep killing crew members, I know, so I have to be very polite to this guy.

  “What can I do you for?” he smiles.

  He’s got two-toned hair, the gray comes up halfway on either said of his head. The top part is jet black. His face is leathery and lined, as if he spends too much time out in the sun, probably some beach in warmer climes than Chicago.

  “I need to find a fire-starter. I’m thinking of somebody in particular. Little mouse of a guy with a pencil-thin womb broom. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “You mean one of those skinny-assed moustaches?”

  He points to his upper lip.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’ll cost you.”

  “How much?” I ask.

  “Five thousand.”

  It’d be cheaper to just shoot him, too, but there’s been too much of that going on around me, lately.

  “All right.”

  His eyes flap wide open.

  “Jesus, business must be good in Vice.”

  “I won big at the track.”

  “What do you want burned? Your house?”

  “Something like that.”

  I show him the hundreds, and then he counts them on the booth’s table.

  “His name is Pete Andropolis, one of your fellow Greeks,” he smiles.

  Then he takes out a ballpoint pen and rips a piece of paper out of a small notebook he extracts from his sport coat’s pocket.

  “Here. Happy bonfires.”

  And he pockets the bills.

  *

  After my four to twelve, I visit Pete Andropolis. He lives in an apartment on the northwest side. I ring my way into the building by buzzing three other tenants, and I find his door on the third floor. I listen at the door, but I don’t hear anything. Then I take out the pick and pop his lock.

  When I walk in, the joint’s dark. I figure he must be in the bedroom. I quietly open the door, and there’s the weasel, on his back, snoring like a lion. No wonder he sleeps alone. It’s loud, in here.

  I take the pillow next to his head, and I shove it over his face. The legs come flying up at me, but they’re covered by a heavy wool blanket. I find his noggin with the tip of the barrel of the same .38 I used at Pastore’s place. It’s a throw-down and untraceable. I saved the piece for occasions just like Pastore’s and, now, Andropolis’s.

  I jam the barrel firmly against the struggling man’s forehead, and I pull twice, but this time the big sound is muffled, somewhat. And there’ll be no blowback of blood with the pillow, as well.

  The cloth of that pillow starts ablaze, but I tamp it out with the top of the torch man’s wool blanket.

  They can only hang you once for murder, the wisdom goes, and beyond all the gooks I killed in Vietnam, this makes four official homicides I’m responsible for. Not that it really matters, but I’m now an official serial killer. I wonder if Parisi and his buddy Gibron will start a profile on me. They may even go to Quantico for some professional advice from the FBI.

  But I doubt it. How they’re going to tie Jennifer to those Outfit slugs, I have no idea. If I were them, I wouldn’t see a connection. They like to connect the dots, but there aren’t any to connect—at least to my poor, dearly departed wife. They always look at the husband or the wife in domestic killings. It’s their first stop. I spent enough time with Homicide to know.

  They’ll think Pastore and his thug Lou were part of a robbery by
some other branch of the local wiseguys. They rip each other off all the time. There is no honor among these thieves.

  They’ll still come after me for Jennifer, but they haven’t got anything any grand jury would deem as evidence to tie me to that head that popped out of the bayou. How was that for a stroke of fate? What were the odds that some stumpjumper from Plank, Louisiana, would slit open a gator and out would flop Jennifer’s top knot?

  I think I’m good.

  But this goddam house remains on my plate. I can’t shoot or burn ‘Jennifer,’ or whatever it is in my place, either. Somehow Andropolis’s blaze never took. I waited two hours before I figured nothing was happening, that night. So I had to put all my junk back where it was in the house, and I went downstairs with a flashlight and I looked at the fuse box.

  When I got back after I took care of Pastore and the arsonist, I called an electrician as soon as I got home. He sounded concerned after I told him what I thought was going on in my electrical box, and he came over within a half hour.

  After he examined everything, he sat down with me at the kitchen table.

  “You’re very fortunate,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You have all the makings of an electrical fire. Could’ve destroyed the house. But I’ll take care of it, if you like. It’ll be expensive. Probably a few thousand dollars.”

  I didn’t feel like trying to burn the place down again. Too many people have already been involved. And, as I said, I can’t keep blasting. It’ll lower my odds of survival considerably.

  “Do your magic,” I told the electrician.

  His name was Bill, and I accepted his estimate as soon as he wrote it down for me on that kitchen table.

  I’m stuck with the house and with whatever it is that’s lingering inside it. I don’t get up and turn the water off, anymore. The dripping has become almost soothing.

  I never heard of any ghost in a story who was able to do physical harm to a living person. It seems like it doesn’t work that way. The dripping shower head can’t kill me. Christ, I probably just need a plumber.

  But I’ve made up my mind that I’m not going to let this house make me nuts.

  Maybe I got it all wrong. The crazy Catholics talk about demons and possession, and perhaps it’s something other than my former wife, in the house.