And suddenly Marcus was inclined to agree, though not for the reasons that Paul expressed. Maybe good and evil were no longer reasonable categories to contain the breadth of the twenty-first century. Too subjective, too malleable, too easily weaponized. Perhaps instead, in an era of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, women’s marches in D.C., there were simply those who spoke out and those who remained silent.
And the whole world was listening.
Peter continued staring out the window at Lindley Apartments. He cleared his throat. “What are you hoping comes from this, Marcus? You find Miss May and then what?”
“Well,” Marcus said, removing his seat belt so that he could scan the street more fully, “assuming that she knew the Kingfisher in some way, then I’m worried she may be in danger. Like you said, maybe the gunman is looking for her.”
Peter turned to face Marcus, dialing down the volume of the radio. “Don’t get me wrong, Marcus, I’m glad we’re checking on her, but is that really what you believe you’re doing here?”
Marcus remembered Paul Wroblewski asking him a variation of that same question, and if it had annoyed him then, it infuriated him now. “Why else would I be here?” Marcus heard the sharpness in his voice and wished he could retract it. “I’m retired. I don’t have any other reason to be here.”
“I was just asking.”
“I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning to another execution video of a person I might have warned.”
“So you don’t think…” Peter said, voice trailing into a hum.
“What?”
“You don’t think he really is still alive?” Peter asked. “You’re not here because you think she will tell you that he’s still alive? That he’s still out there somewhere?”
“No,” Marcus said. “I’m not interested in all that nonsense. The Kingfisher is dead, not that it really matters anymore one way or the other.”
“OK.” Peter nodded. “I guess I was just surprised when you called me today. I didn’t get the impression yesterday that you were too interested in delving back into the past. But then you called. I assumed something had happened. Maybe you’d heard something that changed your mind.” He shifted in the passenger seat. “That’s why I asked.”
Marcus spotted from his periphery a flash of red in his rearview mirror. He turned in the driver’s seat and saw a wild mane of red hair bobbing along the sidewalk, accompanied by the click-clack of high heels, like diminutive gunshots. He pointed at her, muted words collecting in his throat.
Peter turned, squinted. “That’s her,” he said to himself. “Oh my God, that’s her. Marcus, that’s her. It’s really her.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely sure.”
Marcus waited until she passed to get out of the car. He shut the door quietly behind him and followed her across the street toward Lindley Apartments. Peter followed after Marcus, body bent, minimizing the space he occupied as he crept forward.
Miss May’s head swiveled as she walked to the apartment building’s entrance, curious, as though seeing everything around her for the first time. Marcus was worried she might turn around and see them following after her, but she didn’t. She never once looked behind her. Her purple-sequined tank top burned in the light of a waning day.
She was tall, but her height was exaggerated by the hand-high skirt that barely inched over her thighs.
When May reached the entrance to Lindley, she stopped and began digging around in her purse, swearing softly under her breath. Marcus froze where he stood, pretending to be lost, which in some sense of the word was entirely true. Peter froze behind him. Marcus listened to May’s string of whispered curses as she dug in her purse for her keys.
She passed into the building. Marcus waited, cautious. Three seconds. And then he lunged forward and caught the door before it closed, held it open for Peter, and followed after her. They turned a corner and peered down a hallway. Nothing. Marcus turned the other way and saw May disappearing into a stairwell. He hurried after her, trying not to make too much noise. It was hard for him to walk briskly. He’d been under abnormal stress, hadn’t been sleeping well. It was all catching up to him. He felt like cement had been poured into his bloodstream. His legs were stiff, uncompromising.
Peter followed after him, trying to keep up. He hadn’t brought his cane.
Marcus turned into the stairwell and paused. He heard her footsteps maybe a flight or two above him. He started up the narrow stairs, wincing at the loud, thunderous echo of Peter’s uneven and limping footfalls behind him. But all that mattered now was that he didn’t lose her altogether. Marcus ascended four flights of stairs, struggling for each breath, and when he turned onto the next flight, he stumbled backward, nearly falling down the stairs into Peter, when he saw Miss May standing at the top of the next flight, pointing something directly at both of them. A black canister. Upon closer, panicked inspection, he saw that it was pepper spray.
Marcus raised his hands, open-palmed, and felt foolish. Shamefaced. He was sweating, heaving for air, unable to put together the most basic apology, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Peter centered himself behind Marcus.
Miss May appeared perfectly calm. Steeled and poised and still, her pepper spray held in an unshaking hand. She waited for Marcus or Peter to put together a sentence that might excuse themselves.
“I’m sorry.” Marcus caught his breath. “Are you Miss May?”
She lowered her ready arm a fraction. “Who gave you my name?”
“Sorry?”
“Who referred you?”
It took Marcus a few seconds to understand.
“No,” he said quickly. “No, it’s not like that.”
“Then who told you about me? Because they ought to know I don’t do threesomes.” She nodded at Peter. “And they should damn sure know that you don’t follow me to my home. I have a nine-millimeter handgun in my front bureau. Had you made it to my apartment, I would have buried a bullet in both of your foreheads. I swear to God I would have. You don’t show up at my place of residence unannounced. You call me like a normal human being if you’re looking to make an appointment. I could have spared you the embarrassment.”
“We’re not here for that,” Marcus assured her. “I was just hoping we might be able to sit down and talk with you.” He motioned at Peter’s frozen body behind him. “We’re worried about your safety, honestly. Just let us explain.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Marcus Waters. And I really need to talk to you.”
“Marcus Waters,” she repeated. Something in her expression changed. A glimpse of recognition, revelation. She lowered the pepper spray to her side. Lips pursed, considering the answer to a question he hadn’t asked. She looked around at the white walls surrounding her, as though looking for a way out of them. “I don’t have anything to say to you, Marcus Waters,” she said, her voice hollowed out. She looked briefly at Peter before turning back to Marcus. “I’m not interested in whatever the hell you’re here for.”
“This is about your safety. Just please let me talk to you.”
“I’m not telling you two anything,” she fired back. “Nothing. Now, please, both of you, go away.”
“It’s important,” Marcus said. “You are in danger.”
“I doubt that.”
“You’ve seen the news,” he said in an imitation of calm. “You know what’s going on out there right now. Please just talk with us. I just want to make sure you’re going to be OK.”
“I’m just fine. I’ve got nothing to do with all that’s going on.”
“OK. But maybe you could help me find someone who does.”
She stared back at him, unblinking, unfixed to the moment. “Who?”
“The men you were with the night the Kingfisher attacked a car you were in.”
To Marcus’s surprise, she laughed at this, dismissed it with a tilt of her head. “Are you talking about Richie and Olander?”
“They’re both long gone,” Miss May said. “Now please leave me alone. Because I’m about ten or so steps from that pretty little nine-millimeter of mine. And it would sting a whole hell of a lot more than this.” She waved her pepper spray in her hand.
“Please, just let us speak with you,” Marcus said. “It’s important.”
“Trust me, it’s not important.” She turned and walked through the stairwell door into the hallway.
Marcus and Peter followed after her, maintaining a careful distance.
“The man you’re searching for, Mr. Waters,” she said over her shoulder as she passed through the hallway in an easy-bounce step, “is a dead man. You and I, we ought to damn well know that.”
“I’m not looking for the Kingfisher.”
“Sure about that?” she asked, unlocking a door near the end of the hallway.
“I know that you knew him,” Peter said.
Marcus and May turned to face him, both of them equally surprised to hear his voice enter into the narrow walls.
“I followed him back to your apartment in Englewood once,” Peter continued, sheepishly. “I knocked on your door and you sent me away. But I know that he was inside. I know that you knew him. Marcus and I, we just want to ask you some questions. That’s it. And if you don’t want to answer them, then you don’t have to. But you could at least listen. There are people out there right now, and their lives might be in danger. Maybe yours, maybe not. But we’re trying to help. And we need to hear what you know. That’s all.”
In the long silence that followed, Miss May slowly relaxed. She looked back and forth from Marcus and Peter. “Well, there’s no use for us to just stand around in the hallway like a few fucking idiots. Here, come on.” She gestured for them to follow her inside.
“I take it you won’t bury a bullet in our foreheads?” Marcus asked, more as a suggestion than a lighthearted joke.
“I’m not making any promises,” she said, locking the door behind them.
26 THE ARMADA
TILLMAN GOT OFF THE L at Hyde Park and immediately called her father’s cell phone, which she’d purchased for him after he’d moved in. As she had anticipated, he’d refused to learn how to make calls, and instead kept it atop the stand next to his recliner, where he was able to both ignore its material presence while also satisfying his daughter’s insistence that he keep it nearby. Needless to say, she was surprised to hear him pick up when she called. She heard Al Green crooning in the background atop the sharp punctuation of a hi-hat. “Stand Up” from Call Me. One of her father’s favorites. He had made her memorize it at the age of five and she used to sing it back to him before she went to bed.
“Who?” he asked loudly into the phone. Tillman told him it was her, his daughter, and then she told him she’d be home soon, although there was no way of knowing if this were true. It simply felt good to say, and, she hoped, good for him to hear.
These small, untrue mercies.
Tillman pocketed her phone and passed through a sidewalk crowded with college kids hunched beneath the weight of their backpacks, bodies bent and leaning toward the sun slung low across the University of Chicago campus. A lethargic parade of sunglasses, wiry hair. Skinny jeans, too much cologne. She squeezed between their day-weary, hungover bodies with an easy hand, shifting them aside like passive objects.
She passed a parking garage, the hollow sounds of engines erupting through a narrow tunnel into the street. Next to it, the Armada. A sheer-faced glass structure; a human terrarium ten stories high. It resembled its name only in its violent imposition against the otherwise aesthetically unified buildings on either side—red bricks laid delicately atop each other, rising a modest three stories. The Armada seemed to relish its out-of-place-ness. Sunlight reflecting from its glass walls, blinding anyone so brave as to stare at its surface for more than a second.
She entered the lobby, the chill of the air-conditioned space kissing her skin. Everything about the Armada seemed designed to make sure she understood she didn’t belong. She passed a plate of apples and oranges arranged into a multicolored pyramid. The light fixtures were shaped into geometric figures she couldn’t name. The floors were marble, polished so thoroughly she saw her reflection tracking her every step. A bouquet of fresh lilacs sprouted from a crystal vase on the counter. A sign beneath them said: COMPLIMENTARY BOUQUETS. Tillman could smell them from across the room as she approached. Much to her chagrin, they smelled incredible.
A young man with his long hair pulled back into a ponytail regarded her, head cocked to his shoulder in a show of hyperbolic hospitality. His name was etched onto a metal pin on the breast of his suit coat: DYLAN Q. Dylan Q. was smiling widely, as though relishing the opportunity to quote her prices of rooms he knew she wouldn’t be able to afford.
“How can I help you, ma’am?” Dylan Q. asked.
On any other day with time to spare, she would have eviscerated him for calling her ma’am. But on this day, she only said, “I need to speak with your manager. Or your supervisor. Or whoever it is above you.”
He was taken aback in the literal sense. He stepped backward away from his computer terminal. But the painted-on smile remained. “What seems to be the problem, ma’am? There is a number on the back of your key card—assuming you are, of course, a fine hotel guest at the Armada—listing the number to register any and all unfortunate complaints.”
“I just need to speak with your supervisor. Sooner rather than later, please.”
His shoulders sloped inward as he stepped back to his computer. “I am the supervisor at the moment, ma’am. Is there something I can help you with? Are you a guest at the Armada?”
“Have you recently interviewed anyone for the doorman position?”
His eyebrows curled into question marks. “If you’d like a job application to join the Armada family, you can find one on our website. Would you like me to write down the Web address for you? We have a variety of job openings for maid service if you would be interested.”
“No.” She tapped her fingers, on the desk, ignoring the condescension with enormous effort. “Have you recently interviewed anyone for the doorman position?”
“May I ask why you’re inquiring about this matter?”
“I have a friend,” she said. “He interviewed here, but he lost his phone. He sent me to check up to see if he got the job or not.”
“Well, ma’am,” Dylan Q. said, turning his head to look over his shoulder at nothing in particular. “I’m afraid I can’t help you in this present inquiry.”
“Why is that?”
He nodded at the door through which Tillman had entered. “As you may observe, we do not have a doorman, nor have we ever employed any such doorman.”
She wanted to reach across the counter and smash his head into the computer terminal, but instead she followed his gaze to the same glass door she had passed through. Sure enough, no doorman in sight.
His smile parted to reveal his bleach-whitened teeth. “Maybe your friend imprecisely offered you the name of the wrong hotel, ma’am?”
She held up her hand and similarly held her tongue. “So you weren’t interviewing anyone for a doorman job in the past few days?”
“As previously mentioned, no, we do not employ doormen. We want our guests to feel completely immersed in the architecture of the Armada, including our doorways, which are imported from a glass artisan in Italy,” he said, lingering in his own pretention like a pig in its own filth. “And, I assure you, ma’am, I would know if we had decided to hire a doorman. As previously mentioned, I am a supervisor.”
Tillman stood at the counter, unsure of what to do with or think about this information, all the while battling her instincts to throw a vase at this man’s head. So she resorted to something more direct. “Have you ever heard the name Jeffrey Jenkins? Goes by Penny?”
He shook his head, ponytai
l tapping each shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am. But I believe you have been misled by your friend. There are a few hotels nearby here. I can give you the names if you do not have access to a smartphone or some similar device which would give you this information very readily.”
She imagined strangling him slowly, slowly, slowly. A couple walked through the entrance to the hotel. Gray-haired tourists, man and wife, suit and sundress, saddled with leather luggage. The husband pointed at a stone pillar running alongside the full-length windows. “Look at that,” he said. The woman nodded. “Wow.”
“That was constructed,” Dylan Q. called out to them, “by a French mason named Pierre Giraux. The last great mason of the Giraux family.” He turned back to Tillman. “Now if you’d please excuse me, ma’am, I have fine guests of the Armada to assist.”
Tillman leaned across the counter. She grabbed his tie, but only held it in her fingers, resisting every impulse except to speak into his ear the words “Go fuck yourself, Dylan Q.” And with that, she released him and walked calmly past the unaware couple.
The woman was saying to her partner, “What time is the tasting, Charles?”
Tillman exited the hotel onto the sidewalk, unsure of where to turn, where to go, what to do, what to think. She’d come here. That was what she had done, that was what she had to do. But still no answers. No nothing. A dead end. And how perfect a phrase, dead end. Because all deaths are ends and all ends are deaths.
Penny bleeding onto some forbidden concrete floor, face arranged into a sort of wry, sleeping smile. His daughter next. She had picked him up from Lucky’s. This much Tillman knew. She had most likely driven him here. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe they hadn’t made it. Maybe they had gone somewhere else. Maybe Abe had misheard where Penny had his interview. Or maybe Paulina hadn’t picked Penny up at all.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 25