An Echo of Death

by Mark Richard Zubro

  I examined the activity at the intersection ahead. Cars streamed by on La Salle Drive moving to or from Lake Shore Drive. Traffic continued to flow heavily. La Salle Drive was one of the major entrances to the Drive for people who’d spent some time on the Near North Side of Chicago enjoying the plethora of shops and restaurants available.

  As we neared the light, it changed to red in our direction. Scott swung out into the emptying southbound lanes and maneuvered into the intersection. The cars starting up from our left and right stopped abruptly. Horns blared, but we raced across La Salle. Once again, our pursuers jumped into the southbound lane, but they were too far behind and, after we passed, the traffic flowed forward from both directions. Our attackers ran up against a wall of moving protective autos. I heard the crunch of metal on metal.

  I looked back. They’d tried to force themselves through the traffic. I hoped they’d had a multi-vehicle, traffic-snarling accident.

  Scott didn’t spend much time on La Salle Drive. Within seconds, we were on the grassy area of Lincoln Park, moving rapidly north and west toward the zoo.

  I stood up facing backward and felt the racing wind on my back. I could see brake lights still jammed together at the intersection, but we were too far away for me to pick out the car that had been chasing us.

  I turned back to Scott.

  “This horse isn’t going to be able to keep this up much longer,” he said. “She’s old, and I’m sure she hasn’t gone this fast in a long time.”

  “We’ve got to find someplace to hide and call the cops. They have to believe us now.”

  “They’ll believe the gunshots,” Scott said. The horse had slowed to a trot. “Into the zoo?”

  “No. I don’t know my way around.”

  Lincoln Park Zoo was the most-often-visited zoo in the country and one of the few that was still free. I hadn’t been since my parents took me when I was five. I barely remembered it. I didn’t want to be driving a horse and carriage around aimlessly in an unfamiliar environment.

  “We’ll leave the horse and carriage in the park. If they find it, they’ll have to guess whether we’re in the zoo or back into the neighborhoods.”

  Scott drove about half a block past the exit to Dickens Street. He tied the horse to a tree on the east side of the road. Ducking behind cars and keeping to shadows, we raced back.

  Seeing no traffic on Dickens or Marine Drive we ran west. At Clark Street we stood in a shadow until all traffic had passed. Of course, we didn’t see a cop car. We burst across the street and tore down the block toward Lincoln Avenue.

  A car turned from Hudson Street onto Dickens and began to cruise slowly toward us. I shoved Scott into a shadowed doorway. We froze while the car passed. It turned out to be a Toyota Tercel with two women in the front seat. So far I hadn’t noted any of our nemeses being women.

  “Where the hell are we running to?” Scott asked.

  I drew deep breaths. “Call the cops?”

  “I don’t see a phone booth. Can we afford to be in one spot for too long?”

  “No.” I glanced both ways down the street. No cars were coming. “Maybe we can get a cab on Lincoln Avenue.”

  We dashed west on Dickens to the corner. For the moment, Lincoln Avenue was devoid of traffic.

  “We can’t stay out in the open like this,” Scott said.

  We ran west and at Oz Park cut across it toward the northwest. At the corner of Webster and Halsted, we stopped for a second.

  “Traffic coming from both ways,” Scott said.

  Quickly I looked for a place of refuge. A doorway loomed several feet away. “There,” I said and ran in. I opened the door. We stumbled down several stairs but landed standing in the middle of a tile-covered lobby. Each of three walls had one couch with ripped dark-red vinyl cushions. The fourth wall had a reception desk.

  No one stood at the desk, but I heard cheerful humming coming from somewhere farther inside. I glanced out the windows that you had to look up to see out of from the sunken lobby. I thought I saw a dark sedan like the one that had been chasing us. I slunk across the lobby and tried the door that I assumed led to the rooms. It was locked.

  I ran up to the counter of the reception desk and banged the little bell. It gave off a tiny ching. The humming stopped. A perfectly immense woman emerged from behind a six-foot switchboard.

  She eyed us carefully. “You look like hell,” she stated. She leaned her bulk against the counter from the other side. She could easily have wrapped us both in her fond embrace and had room for one more. Her gray hair was pulled straight back, but left to dangle in wisps of curls at her neck. The color of her eyes was lost behind thick glasses, through which she inspected both of us in turn.

  “I’m Edna,” she said. “I own the hotel. You boys look like you need some help.”

  I didn’t want to make long explanations, nor take her into our confidence. “We need a room,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Fumbling with forms and keys took several minutes. I must have glanced anxiously at the doors and windows every few seconds. If Edna noticed, she made no comment. I gave her cash for the room. She gave us a key from a row of mailboxes behind her. Before we left, she winked at us and told us to have a good time.

  The key let us through the lobby doors. We walked down faded red carpeting, up a set of creaking wooden stairs, and down faded brown carpeting to a room at the end of the hall.

  The room had one regular-sized bed with a salmon-colored chenille bedspread. The carpet was murky green. Two identical pictures of bubbling waterfalls were bolted to opposite walls.

  “What is this place?” Scott asked.

  I looked at the key. “Says the Luxor,” I said.

  “Never heard of it.”

  But I had. Scott hadn’t grown up in Chicago and wouldn’t be expected to know, but I did. The Luxor had a reputation in the gay community as a place you could take a prostitute for an hour or two. Look up the word “sleaze” in the dictionary, and you’d find a picture of the Luxor Hotel. Supposedly, there were sex orgies on the roof on hot summer nights. Jockstrap parties on New Year’s Eve which could set up a call boy’s reputation for years. A Monday-afternoon lavish buffet for the transgender denizens of the hotel and their friends. A leather dungeon where home movies of S/M activity were shown continuously. We had seen absolutely no signs of this tawdry activity as we crossed the lobby. Rotten luck.

  I explained about the Luxor’s reputation to Scott and finished, “No one would look for us here. We’ll be safe for a while.”

  Scott wandered into the bathroom and returned instantly, shaking his head. I decided not to ask what he’d seen.

  “We’ve got to call the cops,” he said.

  “Our enemies could be listening on police scanners, figuring since we’re good citizens, the logical thing to do would be to call the police. Even if they didn’t get here first, all they’d have to do would be to wait until the cops left, and move in. We need to be very careful. Maybe I can call Joe Quinn and explain what happened. They must have gotten calls from people about the traffic problems, and someone must have reported the gunshots. If I call him direct, we won’t have to worry about their putting it on the police radio.”

  “They’re probably looking for us for stealing the guy’s carriage,” Scott said.

  “They aren’t going to put us in jail for that.”

  It took nearly fifteen minutes of transferring around for me to get hold of Joe Quinn.

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “If you really wanted to find out,” I said, “you could check the phone records at Eleventh and State and pinpoint the origin of this call. Could you just listen for a minute?”

  “What the hell happened outside your building?” he asked.

  “We’re scared,” I said. “We aren’t at home. I don’t think that’s safe right now. We don’t want anyone to find out where we are.”

  “Nobody’s going to get the phone records to be ab
le to trace the call and even if they could, only I know it’s you calling from this number. The person who owns it would be on the screen or printout.” As I hesitated he said, “That’s as much assurance as I can give.”

  “Okay,” I said and gave him our location.

  Quinn added, “Nobody’s going to follow me to where you are. We need to talk. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “We’re the ones who called you, remember? We want to report this. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said.

  It took forty-five minutes for Quinn and Bolewski to show up. Quinn’s attitude remained reserved, but I thought willing to listen. Bolewski managed to keep his annoyed-with-us snarl under control. “Hell of a hiding place,” Bolewski said.

  I stifled my urge to tell him that if he’d feel better we could move to the Ritz. I didn’t want to antagonize him.

  We had to tell the story three times. They interrupted incessantly with questions.

  After we finished explaining, Quinn said, “We were late getting here because we checked the reports about what happened outside your apartment house this morning. The guy from the carriage-rental agency was angry at his driver, the horse, and you.”

  “I’ll buy his goddamn horse and carriage if he wants,” Scott said.

  “You may have to,” Quinn said.

  “Also, the media got hold of the story. I don’t know if you were recognized, but nobody is going to be able to keep the name of Scott Carpenter out of the papers if he’s connected with a police matter.”

  “We had to take the horse to escape,” I said.

  “Not about the horse,” Quinn said. “About the guns, shots, and car chase. We had three fender benders, mostly from people gawking at you guys racing down the street. According to witnesses, the guys chasing you didn’t get out of traffic until you’d disappeared into Lincoln Park. Said it was quite a sight to see. Whoever the bad guys are, they left some very steamed and frightened motorists at the La Salle and Lake Shore Drive intersection. One guy wanted their insurance information. He got a gun shoved in his face. It’ll make all the newscasts. The reporters talked to the eyewitnesses to try and get quotes on camera. They didn’t know who you were then, but they will after it’s been written up in the police reports.”

  “So where do we stand?” I asked him. “We’re afraid to go back to our place. We can’t stay away forever.”

  “Maybe Carpenter can afford to buy you some protection.”

  “We can’t live with this kind of danger forever,” I said. “It must have something to do with Glen Proctor’s murder.”

  We spent an hour going around on that one again.

  At the end I said, “Look, the second time, outside our building, obviously they were not afraid of recognition. The question is, why not? They were professionals who didn’t have to worry?”

  “Wouldn’t professionals only take a sure shot in a not-so-public place?” Scott asked.

  The cops gave us blank looks. Quinn was nice enough to say, “We don’t know.”

  Bolewski said, “We know something strange is going on. You explained all your logic. I think you know something and you aren’t telling.”

  Scott and I began protests, but Quinn raised his hand. “Something is not right here,” he said. “You guys haven’t committed a crime, so we aren’t arresting you. The only way we can get information is from you, and you claim you don’t know anything. We tried calling other airlines, but none of them has a record of Glen Proctor flying on them anytime in the past two weeks. We’ll keep trying to track him down. We’ll also go over the statements of everybody who saw anything outside your place, but if their descriptions are anything like yours, we won’t have much.”

  He was referring to our unhelpful eyewitness view of our pursuers. We hadn’t had time to examine our attackers, so we hadn’t been able to give very good descriptions. I felt foolish, scared, and angry.

  “And you’ll talk to all the neighbors,” I said. “And to the Proctors again?”

  “You heard me talk to Mr. Proctor,” Quinn said. “As far as he knows, Glen is in Mexico.”

  “He probably didn’t involve his family in whatever he was doing,” I said.

  “We don’t know if there was something he was involved in,” Quinn said.

  They left after promising to have the local police district give special attention to this street. This meant cop cars would drive down the street more often. Fat lot of good that would do.

  The cops left at eleven. We decided to stay at the hotel. It was certainly an unlikely spot for us to be. Not a permanent solution, but it would be as safe as any place for the moment. I found that I was completely exhausted. I checked the sheets on the bed; they were grayish but clean.

  Scott yawned and plopped down on the bed. “I really screwed up,” he said. “If I hadn’t invited Glen Proctor in, none of this would have happened. The murder, the danger to us, trouble with the police, the fight we had. I’m really sorry, Tom.”

  “We’ve had fights before,” I said. “We’ve always gotten through them. I was pretty scared a bunch of times in the past few hours. I was glad you were with me. I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.”

  In minutes we slipped under the covers. He lay looking at me with his head propped up on his hand and elbow.

  With my fingertips, I caressed his hand that lay on the puce-colored sheet. “What I really want to know is where you learned to drive a horse and buggy that way.”

  “I’m a farm boy,” he said. “I grew up around horses. I did chores until I went to college.”

  “I knew that,” I said. “That still doesn’t explain the Roman charioteerlike expertise.”

  While Scott may have grown up on a farm and been superinvolved in athletics since he was nine. He had attended the University of Arizona on a baseball scholarship. He’d graduated cum laude with a degree in math.

  “You never drove a carriage like that on the farm,” I said.

  “We had trucks,” he admitted, “but I figured I’d ridden horses often enough, and we used to play in an old buckboard out in the barn. Wasn’t much really to grab the reins and go. I guess I didn’t really think much about it.”

  Scott reached up and flicked off the two lava lamps on the headboard. We moved closer together.

  “I’m still scared.” Scott’s voice murmured against my shoulder.

  “Me, too,” I said. I held him tight. Usually I can’t fall asleep wrapped in his arms, but I was tired, and the warmth and closeness after our adventures felt better than usual. I fell asleep almost instantly.

  When I woke up, it was still light. It sounded as if a large chorus was singing ribald songs at the top of their lungs right outside our door. Scott still slept. His ability to sleep through tremendous noise amazes me. I tried rolling over and going back to sleep, but the singing continued. Finally I swung my legs out of bed. I picked up the phone to call the lobby. The noise stopped abruptly. I was too awake to fall back to sleep soon. I called Lester. We needed help, money if we were going to hide out here, maybe a change of clothes. I knew I could trust him.

  Lester said, “I have an appointment set up for you with Jason Proctor, head of Proctor International, father of Glen.”

  “How’d you manage that on a Sunday afternoon?” I asked.

  “I have an enormous number of contacts. I made a lot of money for many people, as well as myself. I only had to call in one marker. It was simple.”

  “What’s up?” Scott asked.

  I told him about the meeting. Then told Lester what had happened. He hooted loudly when I told him where we were. All he said was, “Both of you are going to need a change of clothes. I can get you clean linen and shirts,” Lester said. “They won’t be perfect fits, but they’ll do.” He agreed to drop them off, along with offering us his car. We didn’t want to risk returning to our place.

  After I hung up, Scott asked, “Do we dare go back to the penthouse?”<
br />
  “Not-nice people might be watching,” I said.

  “Why don’t they just arrest the people watching our apartment?” Scott asked.

  “It’s not illegal to sit in a car or be on the street. If we could identify them, it would be different. You can’t just yank people off the sidewalk because they look suspicious.”

  I told him about Lester bringing us clothes and letting us use his car.

  “We could rent a car,” Scott said.

  “We don’t know what kind of connections these people have,” I said. “If they have access to credit-card computers, they’ll be able to pick up our trail.”

  “They can’t have that kind of power.”

  “I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “We can’t walk to Lake Forest,” Scott said. “Hell, if it was Monday, I could just go to my bank, withdraw a bundle of cash, and go buy a new car.”

  “I think the banks are closed tomorrow,” I said. “it’s Columbus Day weekend. “I don’t have school tomorrow either.”

  Scott sighed. “This is getting far too Byzantine,” he said.

  “I want to take as few risks as possible.”

  Lester showed up a half-hour later with clothes and a car. “I love this place,” he said. “It brings back fond memories which I have no intention of ever telling anyone about.”

  In the lobby, Edna gave us a smile and a wave. Outside, the mist and drizzle of earlier had given way to heavy gray clouds and occasional tendrils of fog lurking about the crumbling entrance to the hotel. October was giving its best indication that it was more than ready to ooze into a bleak and dank November.

  4

  We took Lake Shore Drive to Sheridan Road and on up through the luxury homes that lined the North Shore most of the way to Waukegan. To our east we caught occasional glimpses of the fog-enshrouded lake joining the dark and sodden clouds pouring their gloom toward civilization. Wisps of fog brushed against the Baha’i Temple as we followed the curve of the road into Wilmette. Most of the trees were bare by this time in October, but their number and thickness spoke of tree-lined streets. We passed Tudor, Georgian, and Queen Anne homes of immense size celebrating the wealth of the inhabitants. Luxury mansions and their now-denuded foliage rose in gothic splendor on both sides of the road. The mostly dormant but verdant well-manicured foliage meant that hordes of landscapers could look forward to years of work.