“You must be feeling better,” Randi said.
“When you said you’d do anything you could to help, did that include taking off all of your clothes?” Willie said hopefully.
“No,” Randi said firmly. “But I’ll take the case.”
River Street was not exactly a prestige address, but Willie liked it just fine. The rich folks up on the bluffs had “river views” from the gables and widow’s walks of their old Victorian houses, but Willie had the river itself flowing by just beneath his windows. He had the sound of it, night and day, the slap of water against the pilings, the foghorns when the mists grew thick, the shouts of pleasure-boaters on sunny afternoons. He had moonlight on the black water, and his very own rotting pier to sit on, any midnight when he had a taste for solitude. He had eleven rooms that used to be offices, a men’s room (with urinal) and a ladies’ room (with Tampax dispenser), hardwood floors, lovely old skylights, and if he ever got that loan, he was definitely going to put in a kitchen. He also had an abandoned brewery down on the ground floor, should he ever decide to make his own beer. The drafty red brick building had been built a hundred years ago, which was about how long the flats had been considered the bad part of town. These days what wasn’t boarded up was industrial, so Willie didn’t have many neighbors, and that was the best part of all.
Parking was no problem either. Willie had a monstrous old lime-green Cadillac, all chrome and fins, that he left by the foot of the pier, two feet from his door. It took him five minutes to undo all his locks. Willie believed in locks, especially on River Street. The brewery was dark and quiet. He locked and bolted the doors behind him and trudged upstairs to his living quarters.
He was more scared than he’d let on to Randi. He’d been upset enough last night, when he’d caught the scent of blood and figured that Joanie had done something really dumb, but when he’d gotten the morning paper and read that she’d been the victim, that she’d been tortured and killed and mutilated … mutilated, dear God, what the hell did that mean, had one of the others … no, he couldn’t even think about that, it made him sick.
His living room had been the president’s office back when the brewery was a going concern. It fronted on the river, and Willie thought it was nicely furnished, all things considered. None of it matched, but that was all right. He’d picked it up piece by piece over the years, the new stuff usually straight repossession deals, the antiques taken in lieu of cash on hopeless and long-overdue debts. Willie nearly always managed to get something, even on the accounts that everyone else had written off as a dead loss. If it was something he liked, he paid off the client out of his own pocket, ten or twenty cents on the dollar, and kept the furniture. He got some great bargains that way.
He had just started to boil some water on his hotplate when the phone began to ring.
Willie turned and stared at it, frowning. He was almost afraid to answer. It could be the police … but it could be Randi or some other friend, something totally innocent. Grimacing, he went over and picked it up. “Hello.”
“Good evening, William.” Willie felt as though someone was running a cold finger up his spine. Jonathan Harmon’s voice was rich and mellow; it gave him the creeps. “We’ve been trying to reach you.”
I’ll bet you have, Willie thought, but what he said was, “Yeah, well, I been out.”
“You’ve heard about the crippled girl, of course.”
“Joan,” Willie said sharply. “Her name was Joan. Yeah, I heard. All I know is what I read in the paper.”
“I own the paper,” Jonathan reminded him. “William, some of us are getting together at Blackstone to talk. Zoe and Amy are here right now, and I’m expecting Michael any moment. Steven drove down to pick up Lawrence. He can swing by for you as well, if you’re free.”
“No,” Willie blurted. “I may be cheap, but I’m never free.” His laugh was edged with panic.
“William, your life may be at stake.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet, you sonofabitch. Is that a threat? Let me tell you, I wrote down everything I know, everything, and gave copies to a couple of friends of mine.” He hadn’t, but come to think of it, it sounded like a good idea. “If I wind up like Joanie, they’ll make sure those letters get to the police, you hear me?”
He almost expected Jonathan to say, calmly, “I own the police,” but there was only silence and static on the line, then a sigh. “I realize you’re upset about Joan—”
“Shut the fuck up about Joanie,” Willie interrupted. “You got no right to say jack shit about her; I know how you felt about her. You listen up good, Harmon, if it turns out that you or that twisted kid of yours had anything to do with what happened, I’m going to come up to Blackstone one night and kill you myself, see if I don’t. She was a good kid, she … she …” Suddenly, for the first time since it had happened, his mind was full of her—her face, her laugh, the smell of her when she was hot and bothered, the graceful way her muscles moved when she ran beside him, the noises she made when their bodies joined together. They all came back to him, and Willie felt tears on his face. There was a tightness in his chest as if iron bands were closing around his lungs. Jonathan was saying something, but Willie slammed down the receiver without bothering to listen, then pulled the jack. His water was boiling merrily away on the hotplate. He fumbled in his pocket and gave himself a good belt of his inhaler, then stuck his head in the steam until he could breathe again. The tears dried up, but not the pain.
Afterwards he thought about the things he’d said, the threats he made, and he got so shaky that he went back downstairs to double-check all his locks.
Courier Square was far gone in decay. The big department stores had moved to suburban malls, the grandiose old movie palaces had been chopped up into multi-screens or given over to porno, once-fashionable storefronts now housed palm readers and adult bookstores. If Randi had really wanted a seedy little office in the bad part of town, she could find one on Courier Square. What little vitality the Square had left came from the newspaper.
The Courier Building was a legacy of another time, when downtown was still the heart of the city and the newspaper its soul. Old Douglas Harmon, who’d liked to tell anyone who’d listen that he was cut from the same cloth as Hearst and Pulitzer, had always viewed journalism as something akin to a religious vocation, and the “gothic deco” edifice he built to house his newspaper looked like the result of some unfortunate mating between the Chrysler Building and some especially grotesque cathedral. Five decades of smog had blackened its granite facade and acid rain had eaten away at the wolf’s head gargoyles that snarled down from its walls, but you could still set your watch by the monstrous old presses in the basement and a Harmon still looked down on the city from the publisher’s office high atop the Iron Spire. It gave a certain sense of continuity to the Square, and the city.
The black marble floors in the lobby were slick and wet when Randi came in out of the rain, wearing a Burberry raincoat a couple sizes too big for her, a souvenir of her final fight with her ex-husband. She’d paid for it, so she was damn well going to wear it. A security guard sat behind the big horseshoe-shaped reception desk, beneath a wall of clocks that once had given the time all over the world. Most were broken now, hands frozen into a chronological cacophony. The lobby was a gloomy place on a dark afternoon like this, full of drafts as cold as the guard’s face. Randi took off her hat, shook out her hair, and gave him a nice smile. “I’m here to see Barry Schumacher.”
“Editorial. Third floor.” The guard barely gave her a glance before he went back to the bondage magazine spread across his lap. Randi grimaced and walked past, heels clicking against the marble.
The elevator was an open grillwork of black iron; it rattled and shook and took forever to deliver her to the city room on the third floor. She found Schumacher alone at his desk, smoking and staring out his window at the rain-slick streets. “Look at that,” he said when Randi came up behind him. A streetwalker in a leather miniskirt was standing und
er the darkened marquee of the Castle. The rain had soaked her thin white blouse and plastered it to her breasts. “She might as well be topless,” Barry said. “Right in front of the Castle too. First theater in the state to show Gone with the Wind, you know that? All the big movies used to open there.” He grimaced, swung his chair around, ground out his cigarette. “Hell of a thing,” he said.
“I cried when Bambi’s mother died,” Randi said.
“In the Castle?”
She nodded. “My father took me, but he didn’t cry. I only saw him cry once, but that was later, much later, and it wasn’t a movie that did it.”
“Frank was a good man,” Schumacher said dutifully. He was pushing retirement age, overweight and balding, but he still dressed impeccably, and Randi remembered a young dandy of a reporter who’d been quite a rake in his day. He’d been a regular in her father’s Wednesday night poker game for years. He used to pretend that she was his girlfriend, that he was waiting for her to grow up so they could get married. It always made her giggle. But that had been a different Barry Schumacher; this one looked as if he hadn’t laughed since Kennedy was president. “So what can I do for you?” he asked.
“You can tell me everything that got left out of the story on that Parkway murder,” she said. She sat down across from him.
Barry hardly reacted. She hadn’t seen him much since her father died; each time she did, he seemed grayer and more exhausted, like a man who’d been bled dry of passion, laughter, anger, everything. “What makes you think anything was left out?”
“My father was a cop, remember? I know how this city works. Sometimes the cops ask you to leave something out.”
“They ask,” Barry agreed. “Them asking and us doing, that’s two different things. Once in a while we’ll omit a key piece of evidence, to help them weed out fake confessions. You know the routine.” He paused to light another cigarette.
“How about this time?”
Barry shrugged. “Hell of a thing. Ugly. But we printed it, didn’t we?”
“Your story said the victim was mutilated. What does that mean, exactly?”
“We got a dictionary over by the copy editors’ desk, you want to look it up.”
“I don’t want to look it up,” Randi said, a little too sharply. Barry was being an asshole; she hadn’t expected that. “I know what the word means.”
“So you are saying we should have printed all the juicy details?” Barry leaned back, took a long drag on his cigarette. “You know what Jack the Ripper did to his last victim? Among other things, he cut off her breasts. Sliced them up neat as you please, like he was carving white meat off a turkey, and piled the slices on top of each other, beside the bed. He was very tidy, put the nipples on top and everything.” He exhaled smoke. “Is that the sort of detail you want? You know how many kids read the Courier every day?”
“I don’t care what you print in the Courier,” Randi said. “I just want to know the truth. Am I supposed to infer that Joan Sorenson’s breasts were cut off?”
“I didn’t say that,” Schumacher said.
“No. You didn’t say much of anything. Was she killed by some kind of animal?”
That did draw a reaction. Schumacher looked up, his eyes met hers, and for a moment she saw a hint of the friend he had been in those tired eyes behind their wire-rim glasses. “An animal?” he said softly. “Is that what you think? This isn’t about Joan Sorenson at all, is it? This is about your father.” Barry got up and came around his desk. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Randi, honey, let go of it. I loved Frank too, but he’s dead, he’s been dead for … hell, it’s almost twenty years now. The coroner said he got killed by some kind of rabid dog, and that’s all there is to it.”
“There was no trace of rabies, you know that as well as I do. My father emptied his gun. What kind of rabid dog takes six shots from a police .38 and keeps on coming, huh?”
“Maybe he missed,” Barry said.
“He didn’t miss!” Randi said sharply. She turned away from him. “We couldn’t even have an open casket, too much of the body had been …” Even now, it was hard to say without gagging, but she was a big girl now and she forced it out. “… eaten,” she finished softly. “No animal was ever found.”
“Frank must have put some bullets in it, and after it killed him the damned thing crawled off somewhere and died,” Barry said. His voice was not unkind. He turned her around to face him again. “Maybe that’s how it was and maybe not. It was a hell of a thing, but it happened eighteen years ago, honey, and it’s got nothing to do with Joan Sorenson.”
“Then tell me what happened to her,” Randi said.
“Look, I’m not supposed to …” He hesitated, and the tip of his tongue flicked nervously across his lips. “It was a knife,” he said softly. “She was killed with a knife, it’s all in the police report, just some psycho with a sharp knife.” He sat down on the edge of his desk, and his voice took on its familiar cynicism again. “Some weirdo seen too many of those damn sick holiday movies, you know the sort, Halloween, Friday the 13th, they got one for every holiday.”
“All right.” She could tell from his tone that she wouldn’t be getting any more out of him. “Thanks.”
He nodded, not looking at her. “I don’t know where these rumors come from. All we need, folks thinking there’s some kind of wild animal running around, killing people.” He patted her shoulder. “Don’t be such a stranger, you hear? Come by for dinner some night. Adele is always asking about you.”
“Give her my best.” She paused at the door. “Barry.” He looked up, forced a smile. “When they found the body, there wasn’t anything missing?”
He hesitated briefly. “No,” he said.
Barry had always been the big loser at her father’s poker games. He wasn’t a bad player, she recalled her father saying, but his eyes gave him away when he tried to bluff … like they gave him away right now.
Barry Schumacher was lying.
The doorbell was broken, so he had to knock. No one answered, but Willie didn’t buy that for a minute. “I know you’re there, Mrs. Juddiker,” he shouted through the window. “I could hear the TV a block off. You turned it off when you saw me coming up the walk. Gimme a break, okay?” He knocked again. “Open up, I’m not going away.”
Inside, a child started to say something, and was quickly shushed. Willie sighed. He hated this. Why did they always put him through this? He took out a credit card, opened the door, and stepped into a darkened living room, half-expecting a scream. Instead he got shocked silence.
They were gaping at him, the woman and two kids. The shades had been pulled down and the curtains drawn. The woman wore a white terry cloth robe, and she looked even younger than she’d sounded on the phone. “You can’t just walk in here,” she said.
“I just did,” Willie said. When he shut the door, the room was awfully dark. It made him nervous. “Mind if I put on a light?” She didn’t say anything, so he did. The furniture was all ratty Salvation Army stuff, except for the gigantic big-screen projection TV in the far corner of the room. The oldest child, a little girl who looked about four, stood in front of it protectively. Willie smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.
He turned back to her mother. She looked maybe twenty, maybe younger, dark, maybe ten pounds overweight but still pretty. She had a spray of brown freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Get yourself a chain for the door and use it,” Willie told her. “And don’t try the no-one’s-home game on us hounds of hell, okay?” He sat down in a black vinyl recliner held together by electrical tape. “I’d love a drink. Coke, juice, milk, anything, it’s been one of those days.” No one moved, no one spoke. “Aw, come on,” Willie said, “cut it out. I’m not going to make you sell the kids for medical experiments, I just want to talk about the money you owe, okay?”
“You’re going to take the television,” the mother said.
Willie glanced at the monstrosity and shuddered.
“It’s a year old and it weighs a million pounds. How’m I going to move something like that, with my bad back? I’ve got asthma too.” He took the inhaler out of his pocket, showed it to her. “You want to kill me, making me take the damned TV would do the trick.”
That seemed to help a little. “Bobby, get him a can of soda,” the mother said. The boy ran off. She held the front of her robe closed as she sat down on the couch, and Willie could see that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. He wondered if she had freckles on her breasts too; sometimes they did. “I told you on the phone, we don’t have no money. My husband run off. He was out of work anyway, ever since the pack shut down.”
“I know,” Willie said. The pack was short for meatpacking plant, which is what everyone liked to call the south side slaughterhouse that had been the city’s largest employer until it shut its doors two years back. Willie took a notepad out of his pocket, flipped a few pages. “Okay, you bought the thing on time, made two payments, then moved, left no forwarding address. You still owe two thousand eight hundred sixteen dollars. And thirty-one cents. We’ll forget the interest and late charges.” Bobby returned and handed him a can of Diet Chocolate Ginger Beer. Willie repressed a shudder and cracked the pop-top.
“Go play in the backyard,” she said to the children. “Us grown-ups have to talk.” She didn’t sound very grown-up after they had left, however; Willie was half-afraid she was going to cry. He hated it when they cried. “It was Ed bought the set,” she said, her voice trembling. “It wasn’t his fault. The card came in the mail.”
Willie knew that tune. A credit card comes in the mail, so the next day you run right out and buy the biggest item you can find. “Look, I can see you got plenty of troubles. You tell me where to find Ed, and I’ll get the money out of him.”
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