Sheer Gall

by Michael A. Kahn

  Keeping my voice neutral, I asked, “How did you know I was here?”

  He chuckled and gestured toward the small television set above the bed. “Turn on your TV. Turn on the radio. You’re the lead story, Rachel.” He peered out the window. “Look down below.”

  I joined him at the window. In the parking area below were four television news vans, each with a satellite dish tilted skyward. I stepped back from the window. “Good grief,” I murmured as I sat down on the bed.

  “Actually, it’s good news for you, Rachel.”

  I looked up at him, puzzled. “How?”

  “The publicity will put pressure on the police. Capable, motivated police detectives are a scarce resource. This will force the department to allocate some of that resource to your case. Second, and more important, it ought to deter any second attempts. You’re in the spotlight, which makes it far too risky.”

  “Great,” I said glumly.

  There was an electronic chirping sound from inside Napoli’s suit jacket. “Excuse me,” he said, reaching inside the jacket to remove a portable flip phone. “Yes?” he said into the phone. “Fine, Holly. Tell them I’m leaving now. I should be there in fifteen minutes.” He flipped the phone closed. “I’m afraid I have to go, Rachel.”

  I looked up at him, torn between my urge to probe his Douglas Beef connection and my longing to withdraw completely from this mess, to get back to my life and let Jonathan and the police sort through the debris. After a moment’s hesitation, I yielded to the latter.

  “Thanks for stopping by, Bruce.”

  “Certainly.” He paused. “I want you to know that we at Tully, Crane appreciate the efforts you’ve made on behalf of Neville McBride.”

  I shrugged. “It’s more on behalf of Sally Wade.”

  “Nevertheless, Neville has been a direct beneficiary. Assuming that this morning’s criminal act was somehow connected with your investigation—an assumption that seems reasonable—you’ve been injured in the line of duty, so to speak. Accordingly, I’ve instructed our accounting department to make the necessary arrangements with the hospital to have all bills for your care and treatment sent directly to Tully, Crane & Leonard.”

  I was taken aback. “You don’t have to do that, Bruce.”

  He smiled magnanimously. “It’s the very least we can do, Rachel. We’re still old-fashioned enough at Tully, Crane to view our fellow partners as members of an extended family. This is our way of saying thanks for helping one of ours.” He held his hand out. “My best wishes for a speedy and full recovery.”

  I shook his hand silently, struck by the insincerity of his little homily.

  ***

  I spent the rest of the afternoon dozing off and on. Jonathan Wolf dropped by after services. Somewhat awkwardly, he offered me the guest room in his house when I was released from the hospital.

  “That’s sweet,” I told him, “but I’ll be okay. Your client has given me a state-of-the-art security system at my home, and I’ll make sure I park my next car in my state-of-the-art garage.”

  He nodded gravely. “The offer stands. When you get home, if you should feel at all uneasy about being there alone, just call and I’ll come get you. It’s no burden.”

  I leaned forward in bed and touched his arm. “Thank you, Jonathan, but please don’t be angry if you don’t hear from me.” I leaned back in bed and sighed. “Someone wants me minding my own business, and that’s what I plan to do. If they’re still watching me, I don’t want to give them any reason to think that I’m back on the case or that we’re working together.”

  Just then, my dinner tray arrived, followed three minutes later by my mother. Jonathan said his good-byes. My mother had brought a container of her chicken soup with matzoh balls and homemade kreplach. Overruling the nurse’s objections, she sent away the hospital tray with the imperiousness of a Cleopatra and had them heat up my soup in their microwave.

  “That nurse told me there was chicken soup on your dinner menu,” my mother said with irritated disbelief as she returned from the microwave. She set a huge steaming bowl on my bed table. “‘With matzoh balls?’ I asked the nurse. ‘With what?’ she says to me. ‘What about kreplach?’ I asked her, and she looks at me like maybe I called her a dirty name.”

  I laughed. “Oh, Mom.”

  My mother waved her hand dismissively. “Like the goyim know about chicken soup in the first place? They crumble five saltine crackers in the bowl and think all of a sudden it’s a feast fit for a king.”

  ***

  If hell ever decides to add a wake-up call to its list of amenities, the staff at the hospital could provide the in-service training. They woke me every hour, and the drill was the same each time: What’s your name? What’s your telephone number? Who’s the President of the United States? Then someone would shine a penlight into each eye, check my pulse, take my blood pressure, and depart, only to return for an encore performance sixty minutes later.

  Every hour, on the hour, beginning at ten that night and continuing until I finally cried uncle at eight the following morning. When my mother arrived at nine, I was packed and ready to go.

  “Ann’s bringing Ozzie back this morning,” my mother said as she drove out of the hospital parking garage.

  “Oh, good. I miss him.”

  “I’ve got your lunch packed in back. You’ll come to my house for dinner. I made a brisket.”

  “That’s sweet, Mom, but you shouldn’t. I’m feeling fine. Even the doctors agree.”

  “Let me ask you,” my mother said in a different, serious tone after she pulled the car out of the underground garage and turned south onto Kingshighway. “Did you notice that man standing by the black car in front of the hospital when we came out?”

  I looked over at her. She was frowning at the rearview mirror. I turned around. There was a black Oldsmobile 88 making the turn onto Kingshighway directly behind us. “That car?” I said.

  She nodded silently, still staring at the rearview mirror. I watched the car behind us. My mother pulled onto Highway 40 heading west. So did the black Olds.

  “What did he look like?” I asked her.

  “Big,” she said. “He was wearing a dark suit and one of those fedora hats your father used to wear.”

  The black Olds had a tinted windshield that made the driver invisible.

  “A business suit?” I asked.

  She nodded, checking the rearview mirror again.

  I looked back again at the Olds, my anxiety level starting to rise. “Get off at Skinker,” I told her, “and take the Forest Park Expressway west.”

  She did. So did the black Olds. It kept a steady distance of three car lengths.

  My mind was racing. “Where’s the nearest police station?”

  “University City.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Get off at Big Bend.”

  She did. So did the black Olds.

  “Hurry, Mom.”

  I cursed as the light at Delmar turned red. “Don’t stop.”

  She rolled through the stoplight and turned right. “Faster, Mom.”

  I watched as the black Olds paused at the edge of the intersection and then turned right.

  My mother screeched to a halt near the front of the police station. Before we could open our doors the black Olds pulled in directly behind us.

  “Oh, my God,” my mother said, her eyes widening as she watched in the rearview mirror. “He’s getting out of the car.”

  “Lock the doors!” I shouted as I spun around in my seat.

  The driver’s door of the black Olds swung open and out stepped a grim, thickset, square-jawed man. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and weathered gray fedora.

  “Honk the horn!” I said.

  My mother leaned on the horn as the man came around to my side of the car. “My God
,” she yelled, following his progress with her eyes. “My God!”

  I leaned away from the window toward my mother as the man approached. I watched his hands carefully, waiting for one to dart inside his suit jacket. But instead, he leaned down with a friendly grin.

  I looked over at my mother and back at him.

  He tapped on the window and motioned for me to roll it down. Then he held out his hands, palms facing me, to show me they were empty.

  I opened it a crack. “What do you want?”

  He smiled again, revealing well-worn, tobacco-stained teeth. He politely removed his fedora. “I’m sorry to have frightened you and your mother, Miss Gold. It certainly wasn’t my intent.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket. “Here you go, ma’am.” He held the card through the slot in the window.

  I took it from him. It read:

  WALTER BRUNT

  Security & Surveillance

  Experienced and Professional

  I handed it to my mother. She read it and looked at me, perplexed. By now, three uniformed police officers had come out of the station.

  The oldest of the three nodded at Walter Brunt. “What’s all the racket, Walt?”

  Brunt straightened up and nodded toward the speaker. “Hello, George. I was just introducing myself to my new client.”

  One of the other officers rapped on my mother’s window. She rolled it down. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked.

  She looked at the officer and then gestured toward Brunt. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, touching the bill of his cap. “Mr. Brunt used to be a special agent with the Treasury Department downtown. Secret Service, I believe. He retired about a year ago and opened his own shop.” He looked up at Brunt and winked. “He may have lost a few miles off his fastball, but he’s still pretty good.”

  As the police went back inside, I rolled my window the rest of the way down and stared up at Walter Brunt. He could easily pass for a retired G-man. His gray hair was trimmed short in a crew cut. There were crinkly crow’s-feet at the corners of his pale blue eyes. He had thin lips and big ears with pendulous lobes. Put him in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots and he could pass for the sheriff of Dodge City.

  “Let me get this straight, Mr. Brunt,” I said to him. “I’m supposed to be your new client?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Says who?”

  “Jonathan Wolf, ma’am. And you can call me Walt.”

  “Jonathan Wolf?” I repeated.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He had a flat Missouri drawl—the kind that comes from the farming communities where folks pronounce their home state Muh-ZUR-uh.

  “I see.” I took his card back from my mother and read it again. I looked up at him. “What exactly are you supposed to do for me, Walt?”

  He put his fedora back on and leaned down, resting his leathery, powerful hands on the car door. “Well, ma’am, I’m supposed to watch over you for a few days.”

  “Is that what Mr. Wolf said?”

  He nodded. “You’ve already had one attempt on your life. Mr. Wolf says once is enough. He was pretty durn clear on that point.”

  I looked up at him with an amused smile. “You mean you’re my bodyguard?”

  “In a manner of speaking, ma’am. I’m going to go home with you today and make sure your house is secure. Same with your garage and your office. Then I’m going to coordinate the police patrols by your house and your office. Mr. Wolf has arranged for squad cars to cruise by from dusk until dawn. I’m going to make sure all that happens in accordance with Mr. Wolf’s instructions.”

  I looked over at my mother. She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. I looked back at him with a smile. “Walt,” I said, holding my hand out, “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  We shook. “Same here, ma’am.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  On a drizzly, overcast Wednesday morning, Danny Mathews was laid to rest in a gray metal coffin near his father’s grave on a gentle slope overlooking a bend in the Meramec River. The small cemetery was south of the city, out where split-level suburbia fades into cornfields and silos.

  According to the obituary, Danny was survived by his maternal grandmother, his mother, and his two older sisters. The three generations of women, all wearing black shawls, were seated in the front row under the tent at the graveside ceremony. Seated in the four rows of folding chairs behind them were the uncles and the aunts and the cousins and the close family friends.

  I stood with a group of younger mourners crowded at the edge of the tent on the other side of the coffin. The minister’s back was to us. I looked past the minister at Danny’s mother. She was staring at the coffin, which was braced above the fresh grave. Seated on either side of Danny’s mother was one of Danny’s sisters, and each was gripping her mother’s hand. As the minister’s voice intoned a prayer to Jesus Our Savior, Danny’s mother took a deep breath and sighed, her lips quivering. Her eyes lifted slightly, and she seemed to meet my gaze. I gave her a compassionate look. After a moment, she lowered her eyes to the coffin. I watched her for a while, and then looked up and beyond her.

  Barely visible, way off in the distance, was the murky outline of the Mississippi River. It was shrouded in patches of fog that seemed to swirl off the water in slow motion. The river continued its journey south from here, tracing the common border of Missouri and Illinois. Just before Illinois gives way on the east side to Kentucky, the river passes the town of Cairo (KAY-roe), where the waters of the Ohio empty into the mighty Mississippi after their long journey down from the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania.

  It must have been the wisps of fog hovering over the river that made me think of Huck and Jim on their raft—floating blind past Cairo on that endless foggy night, floating blind past Jim’s chance for freedom, the silence of that night occasionally broken by Jim’s hopeful shouts of “Dah’s Cairo!” and “Dah she is, Huck!”

  My father, alev hashalom, read me that wonderful novel when I was a child. I had cried at the end of that fog scene, at the cruelty of fate, at the image of Jim, standing at the edge of the raft, peering into the mist, his face lighting up as he sings out, “Dat’s de good ole Cairo at las’, I jis knows it!” It made me weep back then, and it made me weep today. My vision blurred as I stared at the distant river. A tear trickled down my cheek. I looked at Danny’s coffin, suspended over that black hole in the ground. Someone nearby patted me gently on the back. Someone else whispered, “Is that his girlfriend?”

  I had come here alone today, filled with grief and anger and guilt. I had come here to watch a family I didn’t know bury a boy I didn’t know. I had come alone, knowing not a soul and feeling every bit the guilty bystander. But for the tiniest quirk of fate, Danny would be alive today and I would be dead. But for a single loose wire, it would have been me in a coffin near my father’s grave.

  The minister droned on, invoking Jesus and mercy and paradise and the Lord’s divine grace, but they were just words—empty sounds that couldn’t soften the harshness of pointless death. A boy had been killed by mistake. Forget about mercy and divine grace and the rest of those rickety formulas for pumping purpose into something so meaningless. This was an unlucky roll of the dice. Danny had come up snake eyes. Period.

  But I struggled nonetheless. Standing there at the edge of the tent, I struggled to find a meaning in what had happened. Danny Mathews had died in my place. I refused to believe that chance was the only explanation.

  “It’s okay, dear.”

  Dazed, I looked up from the coffin and into the clear hazel eyes of Danny’s grandmother. One of Danny’s sisters was leading her out of the tent. The funeral was over, people were leaving. The grandmother placed her hand gently on my arm. She smiled, her head trembling slightly. “Danny’s in heaven now, dear,” sh
e said. “He’s singing with the angels. Oh, my, that child had such a lovely voice.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. She moved past me and down the slope toward the black limousine, leaning on her granddaughter’s arm. The rain had picked up slightly. It made a gentle thrumming on the roof of the tent. I waited until the rest of the mourners had shuffled out, until it was just me and the cold gray coffin and the two workmen waiting off to the side.

  I nodded to the men and gestured toward the coffin. “Go ahead,” I said.

  They exchanged glances, and then the older one shrugged and said to the other, “Come on.”

  I watched as they lowered the coffin into the ground and pulled the straps free and removed the brace. Nearby was the mound of fresh soil, covered with a tarpaulin. As they pulled off the tarpaulin, I stepped toward them.

  “May I?” I asked the older man. I placed my hand on one of the shovels. “One scoop?”

  He nodded. “Go ahead.”

  I lifted a shovelful of dirt and held it over the open grave. The gray coffin seemed much farther away than six feet down. As I stood there, staring down into the grave, I thought how nice it would be to believe that Danny was up there singing with the angels. But it didn’t work for me. Maybe there were angels, and maybe they were singing, but I didn’t hear them. Perhaps life was just too noisy.

  I knew that if there was to be a meaning to Danny’s death, it would have to be forged by those of us still alive. I could dodge the rest of the case, but I could never dodge this one fact: Danny had died in my place. Whatever else that might mean, I knew what it meant for me.

  Tilting the shovel, I watched the clods of dirt slide off the end and clatter onto the coffin below.

  “I’ll find him, Danny,” I said softly. “I promise.”

  Chapter Thirty

  I called Jonathan Wolf the following morning at eight-thirty and told him I needed to meet with him. He had an arraignment and a client meeting that morning but was free for lunch. When I explained that I didn’t want others overhearing the conversation, he said he’d arrange for a private room at the Noonday Club.