“Yes, I would. Here it is now. Just one ride, and then I have to get back to me office.”
With unsteady hands, I bought two tickets. We waited for the merry-go-round—which is its proper name no matter what they call it in Europe. Even before it stopped to pick us up, my stomach was rumbling and churning.
Nuala bounded on to a white horse. I climbed gingerly aboard Ol’ Paint. The music started, the machine began to move and then spun forward at an altogether rapid rate.
My young friend was vibrant with the thrill of riding around in circles, her black hair streaming behind her, eyes dancing, face glowing, thin dress pressed against her body.
She was a wonderful sight. I figured that if I kept my eyes on her I wouldn’t vomit.
Maybe that helped. I climbed off Ol’ Paint when the merry-go-round finally clanked to a halt, convinced that I would be sick for the rest of my life. But vomit I did not.
Of course herself took no notice of my condition.
“We must find a cab and hurry back to my office,” she warned me. “Ah, there’s one, Derm!”
She waved her hand and yelled. The cab stopped. Nuala jumped in and dragged me after her.
“122 West Monroe,” she told the driver. Then she leaned back in her seat and recounted all the terrors and delights of our midday adventure. The jerking forward and braking of the cab as the driver wrestled with early afternoon traffic through the Loop was almost a repetition of the rides.
“Here we are, Derm,” she shouted exultantly. “I’m five minutes early.”
I helped her out of the car.
“I think I’ll walk home.”
“Pay the man, dear.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry.”
I gave him a ten-dollar bill and waved away the change.
“Would I be right in thinking, sir, that the young lady enjoyed those rides more than you did?”
“She is too young for me.”
“I very much doubt it, sir … . She’s very attractive.”
“I’ve noticed that, too.”
I walked over to the Richard J. Daley Civic Center, found a convenient men’s room, and left my lunch as a tribute to His Honor’s new Ferris wheel.
Then I walked back to my apartment and collapsed into bed. The only way to deal with vertigo is to sleep it off. Even in my sleep the wheel continued to sway and the merry-go-round to turn.
I was awakened by the phone which I had forgot to turn off.
“Dermot Coyne.”
“Are you all right, Dermot?”
Herself.
“I’m fine, Nuala. Why not?”
“You looked kind of peaked. Some of me friends in Dublin, great big strong amadons like yourself, used to get sick something terrible when we would ride the beach Ferris wheel down in Bray. Sure, there’s no disgrace in that. We’re all born with different inner ears, you know. If you get sick on them friggin’ things, you should have told me.”
I lied. I said a barefaced and total falsehood.
“Occasionally I get a little dizzy. Nothing more than that. I had a wonderful time watching you enjoy yourself. Anything that makes you hug me that often has to be good.”
“There’s no disgrace in being dizzy, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I was thinking about our project.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t think we should talk about it on the phone. So I wonder if I could take you to supper tomorrow night?”
“How can I pass up an offer like that?”
“You know the restaurants around my office.”
“Have they taken you to the Italian Village yet?”
“They have not, but I hear it’s a brilliant place.”
“I’ll pick you up at your office at five, and we’ll walk over. I’ll drive you home afterwards.”
“Grand!”
“You doing OK, Nuala Anne?”
“Much better, Dermot Michael, much better. By tomorrow I’ll be me old self. Are you sure you are OK?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
Another lie.
If our relationship had a future, I must tell her the truth about everything. She’d figure it out if I didn’t.
Ugh.
12
I SWAM the next morning. I had to be in good condition to persuade this cop-turned-painter that Nuala and I were not over the top.
It might be hard because I was not perfectly sure that we were not over the top—and maybe ’round the bend altogether.
The swim helped, but every time I closed my eyes, the wheel swayed and the merry-go-round sputtered.
A few minutes before eight, I walked into the Ritz-Carlton coffee shop—on the eleventh floor of Water Tower Place, as was the lobby and the Carlton Room where I had taken herself to supper, it seemed like a hundred years ago.
A tall, handsome man in his early sixties, with iron gray hair and an innocent face, stood up. Sean Connery with hair. I grinned and he grinned back.
“Mr. Coyne?” He held out his hand and smiled genially.
“Dermot.” I shook hands with him.
“Mike,” he replied.
He was impeccably groomed in a charcoal gray three-piece suit, a blue shirt, and a dark blue tie. He was about as unlike your Hollywood private eye as any man could be. We chatted for a few moments about the heat and the Cubs. Like me, he was a longsuffering Cub fan; he had been alive in 1945, the last year the Cubs had won the pennant, a half-century ago.
Promptly at eight, Nuala appeared, today in somber gray suit, her hair knotted in a bun, and wearing her phony glasses.
I ordered raisin bran, an English muffin, and tea.
He ordered toast and coffee.
Nuala ordered most everything on the menu. She turned on all her charm for Mike Casey. It worked. It always did. How could anyone so lovely and intelligent be crazy?
Just wait till you hear her.
“Perhaps we should get down to business, Dermot.”
“I think Nuala will present our case.”
In terse and succinct declarative sentences, Nuala summarized my research on the Camp Douglas conspiracy.
At first the former police superintendent—as I had learned he had been—listened politely. Then he leaned forward, coffee cup in hand, and absorbed every word my beloved was saying.
“Fascinating,” he murmured.
“So you see,” Nuala said, “It was a conspiracy that never was. There were lots of trivial conspiracies—the Tribune’s, Colonel Sweet’s, Captain Hines’s, poor St. Leger Grenfel’s, John Walsh’s, Clement Vallandigham’s, the prisoners’ in the camp—but none were serious in the sense of having any chance of ever happening. So the Great Camp Douglas Conspiracy never was.”
“That’s the way it is with a lot of alleged conspiracies,” Mike Casey said with a nod of his head.
Then she told him about Letitia Walsh Murray, who had lived in the house she lived in now.
I think the cop-turned-painter shivered, just as I had.
“Very interesting,” he said. “My wife was once involved in something like that.”
“Irish?” I asked.
“What else? You two will have to meet her.”
“Well, don’t you see now how the art-gallery theft at the Armacost is the same thing, a conspiracy that never was?”
Her first interrogative sentence in several minutes.
Very slowly, Mike Casey put down his coffee cup and gulped.
“To be perfectly honest, Ms. McGrail—”
“Nuala.”
“I don’t quite see the connection.”
“Well, aren’t there a lot of conspiracies—one perhaps at the gallery, another with the terrorists, another with the state’s attorney, one with the real thieves?”
“Are there?”
“There are,” she said firmly. “And the real conspiracy never was.”
“Indeed?”
“It’s only an analogy,” she continued. “B
ut if you take Camp Douglas as a model and apply it, you come up with very interesting results.”
“Do you now?” he said, resting his chin on his fist.
“You do.”
Then she explained what she thought had happened.
He did not ridicule her theory, nor even express any doubts about it. He merely listened thoughtfully and then nodded his head.
“You might be right, young woman. It certainly fits what we know about, especially when we take into account Dermot’s research on the Monets … . So you two want to sign on as temporary employees as well as clients of Reliable? Why not? Only promise me you’ll be careful.”
We promised solemnly.
“I’ll make a few calls to clear the way for you. You’ll want to talk to the man who saw the thieves fleeing the Armacost, won’t you?”
Indeed we would.
We waited for him in front of the elevators. The tireless fountain continued to spit water, producing a noise which Nuala described as, “Doesn’t it sound like a herd of cattle pissing on rocks?”
Once heard, the metaphor is never forgotten.
The “beautiful people”—the only kind you see at the Ritz-Carlton—bustled back and forth from the elevators. An idea for a story about a hotel like this percolated through my brain. I dismissed it quickly: The only reason for the story was to use Nuala’s metaphor.
Herself had drifted off to the women’s room.
“We’re in luck,” Mike Casey said. “Our man is a banker in Mount Prospect and will be happy to talk to you.”
“Could I ask a small question, Mike?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t think this is crazy?”
“I think it’s worth a shot … . You plan to marry that extraordinary young woman?”
“My family thinks I will.”
He nodded and smiled.
“She’s an accountant?”
“Yes.”
“Anytime she wants a job as a detective, she’s got one at Reliable. She has the green thumb.”
In my car I explained to the Woman with the Green Thumb what Mount Prospect was—a suburb that wished Chicago would go away.
“Doesn’t it strike you as interesting that our man from Mount Prospect, and himself a banker, would be driving on Superior Street that late at night?”
“People from out there,” I replied, “aren’t aware that Chicago exists. It’s like another country to them. They go by O’Hare and they start looking for Allan Quatermain with his elephant rifles.”
“Not like your River Forest people?”
“River Forest is an old suburb,” I responded. “It’s even has a lot of Democratic voters. To your point, however: It does sound very strange. Why Superior Street? You can’t get to the Expressway from there. Maybe he was at the Hard Rock Cafe and became confused.”
“To tell you the truth, Dermot, he doesn’t sound like a Hard Rock Cafe type.”
We turned into a massive traffic jam on Ontario Street and inched forward towards the Kennedy Expressway ramp. I described to Nuala the history of the Suho (Superior, Huron, and Ontario) art district as we passed along its south border. Back in the middle 1980s, most of the galleries were forced off of Michigan Avenue by rising rents, a great misfortune for the attractiveness of the Magnificent Mile. They migrated west to the lofts at the edge of the Loop and transformed the neighborhood from a nascent slum to a smart and fashionable place. Some galleries built new structures, others worked marvelous transformations of the lofts. Then, having made the area chic and a definite “must-visit” in Chicago, the galleries were faced with another wave of rent increases which were forcing them to move again or close or, if the galleries owned the building like the Armacost did, to consider renting them to bistros and restaurants and tony bars and nightclubs. In some arenas of life, nothing fails like success.
As we edged our way towards the Kennedy Expressway, I tentatively proposed a theory to explain her contact with Letitia Walsh.
“I assume that since she lived and loved and cried and laughed and raised children in that house, there would be a lot of psychic vibrations from her life still lingering there.”
“Why wouldn’t there be?” she replied indifferently. “Dermot, why are there so many cars?”
“It’s just an ordinary morning in Chicago … . So you move into the house and your psychic sensitivities pick up those vibrations.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Among them is a concern for truth and for her family’s reputation, as we saw in her memoir.”
“Why wouldn’t there be?”
“So that explains why you hear the screams and see the bodies and know about the letter.”
“Sure, Dermot Michael, if you need an explanation, that’s as good as any other, isn’t it now?”
So much for science.
The Kennedy Expressway was a mess. “Fifty minutes to O’Hare,” the radio reported with no exaggeration. Our ride to the bank at Mount Prospect required a solid hour, and when we stepped out of the Benz in the shopping plaza, we encountered a solid wall of humidity. I wished I was on the beach over in Michigan, preferably in the company of a gorgeous young woman with long black hair in a skimpy swimsuit. As it was I had to put up with her during one of her attempts to appear dowdy.
The bank seemed to be running very smoothly. It was only slightly less quiet than a mausoleum. Everyone smiled politely at us. In Chicago that’s against the rules. An extremely pretty woman with a slender waist and gorgeous legs, in her late fifties or early sixties, greeted us and led us to the president’s office. I introduced myself as Mr. Michael McDermot from Mr. Casey’s office, showed him our credentials and, as an afterthought, presented Ms. McCool, my assistant.
Our strategy, laid down by herself, was that I did all the talking and she took notes. She did not want anyone to remember her from her brief television appearance.
Mr. Whelan, an overweight man with gray hair, a frowning face, and nervous hand gestures, said he would be happy to cooperate with us. Not surprisingly, he was the same man who had been interviewed on Today Weekend.
He assumed that we were working for the insurance companies, an assumption which we neither confirmed nor denied. The theft of such priceless art was a terrible thing. What you have to expect in a city, of course; but still terrible.
What had he been doing in Chicago?
His brother had just survived heart surgery. He and his wife had spent the day with the sick man’s family. He had sent his wife home earlier in the evening. Finally the doctors had told them that the worst was over and it was safe for them to return to their homes.
“I became tangled up in that rabbit warren of streets down there. Can’t understand why anyone wants to live in a place like that. I figured if I headed west long enough I’d find the expressway.”
Bad strategy. If he continued west on Superior, he might still be there. Since he didn’t call it the “Kennedy Expressway” or simply the “Kennedy,” he was probably a Republican. (You can recognize Democrats easily, too: They use the real name of the Congress Expressway from the Burnham plan instead of calling it the Eisenhower, a name Republicans imposed on Chicago without asking us.)
And then?
“I was driving slowly west, I stopped at the stop sign on—what is the name of that street under the L tracks?”
“Orleans,” I suggested.
“Right. It was quite dark there under those tracks. Foreboding I might say, the kind of place where a carjacking might occur. I crossed the street. Suddenly these men rushed from a building, five of them, four men carrying these large frames, two for each, and the fifth man directing them. It all happened very quickly, faster than a similar scene in a film would take. At first I thought it was all unreal. They threw the frames in the back of an old red pickup truck and drove off at high speed. The police were displeased with me because I could not recognize either the make of the truck or the license number. I told them that it was absurd to expect th
at I would in the dark.”
“You drove over to the Chicago Avenue station?”
“Yes indeed. I was dead tired, and I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. The building from which they had fled was an art gallery, and I felt that it was my civic duty, even in a lawless city like Chicago, to report what seemed to be another art theft.”
“How did you find the station?”
“I remembered from the television that there was a Chicago Avenue police station. I calculated that Chicago Avenue was to the north of me. I turned right at the next corner and drove up to Chicago Avenue. Fortunately, my dead reckoning was accurate.”
Like Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic! He fiddled nervously with his letter opener—Waterford crystal—as he talked. There was something a little false, a little phony about him. Maybe I just don’t like Republicans all that much—and people who describe one of the most interesting neighborhoods in the world as a “rabbit warren.”
“I saw the blue lights and turned in that direction. I must say that the Chicago police were quite indifferent to my presence until I used the words ‘art heist.’ That seemed to awaken them.”
“They tend to be very busy down there on Saturday nights,” I said smoothly, as if I were there often on Saturday night.
“Yes, that is true. There were a lot of unsavory people in the station that night. Later I learned that the most unsavory appearing were policemen—and women!”
“Detectives, no doubt.”
“I suppose so … . In any case, they finally permitted me to report the crime; an officer told me that they would take care of it and that I might go home. As far as I could determine, no one seemed inclined to take any immediate action. I must say that, as a taxpayer, I was disturbed by their apparent incompetence.”
“Not like NYPD Blue—eh, Mr. Whelan?”
“Decidedly not.”
His frown became deeper as he talked.
“Now let’s go back to the crime scene itself. Can you tell us whether they ran out while you were still at the stop sign, or crossing Orleans, or actually next to the Armacost Gallery?”
Whelan paused; he tapped his letter opener and looked down thoughtfully.
Irish Lace Page 22