Past the high school, the Joslyn Museum’s banners ballyhooed its Nam June Paik exhibition or display or whatever it was. I had seen it: a wall full of Sony Trinitron television monitors endlessly barraging the viewer with an ever-changing stream of vaguely psychedelic images. When you stepped back from the wall, you saw that the monitors and the images displayed on them conspired to form a collage resembling the American flag, in design if not necessarily colors. I hadn’t made up my mind about the exhibition. I know all about art but I don’t know what I like.
Past the museum, Vickers bragged about seventy-four-cent gasoline, as if it was something to brag about.
Past the gas station, I got the feeling I was being followed.
I had had the same feeling on the way to Carolyn’s house from Irish Tim’s little Xanadu. A sexy Ford Taurus had drifted along with me as I headed into the city, sometimes in my rearview mirror, sometimes in my blind spot, for a distance of some miles. Even after I had changed my route and my direction a couple of times. I lost him—or he me—in the tangle of narrow residential streets around the old St. Joe’s Hospital, now the Saint Joseph Center for Mental Health, on Dorcas Street. But the jumpy, jittery, prickly feeling of paranoia stayed with me, and I had taken an amazingly circuitous and gasoline-wasting route to Carolyn’s place.
I had convinced myself that the only thing following me was coincidence—after all, we wouldn’t need so many streets in the burg if a lot of people didn’t drive on them a lot, sometimes several people at the same time, on the same street, going the same direction. But now the edgy feeling was coming back, strongly.
Let’s put things in perspective, I told myself. Outside of the imaginations of television producers and crime novelists, people rarely get followed. Excuse me: “tailed” is the preferred jargon. It happens, of course—it’s happened to me, and I’ve caused it to happen to a dozen or more people over the years—but it doesn’t happen so frequently that it gets monotonous. Which is lucky, since it’s very difficult to determine with certainty whether you are in fact being followed. Tailed.
And it pays to be sure. Several years ago I lured a “shadow” onto a narrow side street, jammed my car edgewise across the road, grabbed my revolver from the glove compartment, leaped out like Captain America … and nearly gave heart attacks to an elderly couple who only wanted to let me know I’d lost a hubcap to a pothole several blocks back.
At night, the problem of certainty is greater. You’ve seen one set of headlights, you’ve pretty well seen ’em all.
Past Twenty-fifth Street, the traffic on Dodge grew slightly heavier, which would only make life easier for someone tailing me. Heavy traffic and no traffic make for hard shadowing. Light-to-medium makes it a snap.
Without signaling, I turned right past the Amoco at the bottom of the hill and gunned the Impala up the freeway ramp. As I turned I hit the tiny lever under the rearview mirror, canting it up from its glare-killing night-driving position, brightening the picture. In the cold, harsh light spilling from the service station I could see that the suspect car was a dark blue or black sedan. I didn’t get a make before I hit the ramp.
I’d have another chance, however. The car mimicked my turn.
I ignored the speed limit on the North Freeway, whipped past Creighton University and down the exit ramp to Burt Street. The Chevy’s engine wailed in outrage at the unaccustomed abuse. At Burt I signaled for a left turn, the only kind they let you make there, but jumped the red and went straight, up the hill, looping through an apartment-complex parking lot and reemerging on the hill, facing the intersection I’d just bulled through. I drifted over to the curb and doused my headlights.
The sedan, a Lincoln, I could now see, sat at the light on the other side of the intersection, signaling for a left.
The light went green and the Lincoln made the turn. I let up on the brake pedal, rolled into the intersection, and turned right to follow it, leaving the headlights black.
Whoever was behind the big car’s wheel didn’t seem to be in any hurry—didn’t seem to be rushing to try to find me. Past Thirtieth, Burt merges with Cuming Street, and the intersection is lighted up like an operating theater. There was no longer any point in sailing along without lights, so I pulled the switch on the dashboard and continued to hold back four or five car lengths.
The sedan turned left onto Fortieth Street. By that point I was certain that the driver had just happened to follow the same route as me. Well, okay, ninety percent certain. I continued west on Cuming, followed the northward curve onto the Radial, and let the highway take me the eight blocks home.
I got to Decatur Street shortly before the hour I should have been getting up. I left off the lights, except for the fluorescent doughnut over the kitchen sink, which I needed while I threw together a pot of coffee. I poured a cup and went out through the sliding doors and onto my so-called balcony, which is about the size of a piece of notepaper.
A six-foot square of pavement was missing from the darkened street below, exposing the ancient cast-iron gas fittings that lay six or eight feet beneath street level. The city was ripping them up all over town, replacing the old works with spiffy new ones made of plastic or PVC or fiberglass or something equally sexy that probably cost more than the old material but would only last half as long. Your tax dollar at work.
An orange-and-white sawhorse barricade guarded the wound in the pavement. The sawhorse was topped with two blinking yellow lights. One of the lights was sick and the other was dying. They blinked out of sequence as I watched them, mesmerized, for several moments. Then one of them speeded up or the other slowed down—I don’t know which—and their blinks grew closer together. The yellow light seemed to jump from the right-hand lamp to the left-hand lamp. Faster and faster. Then they blinked in sync awhile. Then the light appeared to leap from left to right. Then they were hopelessly out of sequence again.
If it’s late enough and you’re weary enough, phenomena such as that can take on deep significance.
Uninvited, Jennifer came into my thoughts.
Jennifer. My wife.
When you thought about it—and I didn’t very often—my marriage was a lot like my private-eye career: I still had the paperwork, and every once in awhile, as circumstance dictated, I fooled around with it, but when the inky, heavy night pressed in and I was alone with myself and too tired to keep up the pretense, the pointlessness of it all settled on me with all its crushing weight. Jennifer and I were like the warning lamps—occasionally synchronized but eventually, inevitably, back out of step, out of whack, out of … out of everything.
I slurped too-hot coffee and leaned against the iron railing. It was cool and damp.
Gregg Longo cheated on Carolyn with Eloise Slater. I cheated on Jen with Koosje. Jen cheated on me with I’ll never know how many men in how many corners of the world. I cheated on Koosje with Carolyn.
My self-righteous dissertation on honor and sincerity, fidelity and truth and justice and the American way—it all echoed hollowly in my brain now, and I felt mildly ill.
I poured the coffee over the rail and listened to the brittle sound of it splashing onto the pavement a story below.
I had been truthful when I told Koosje that I wanted to sleep with Carolyn and then get up in the morning and have it not have been. Have my cake and eat it too, I had said—or, more accurately, eat it and still have it. I wanted the pleasure of sleeping with my old flame without hurting the relationship with my new flame.
Put more succinctly, I was no better, no more righteous, no more faithful than Gregg Longo had been.
In the far distance, to the southwest, lightning fluttered against the sky, like the phosphors you see when you squeeze your eyes shut tight. There was no thunder. Too far away. When we were kids we had some kind of formula for telling how far away lightning was. We counted the seconds between the time we saw the flash of the lightning and the time we heard the sound of the thunder. I couldn’t remember the formula anymore. I never knew if it
was valid or not.
I like a good electrical storm. Something about the display, the demonstration of raw, naked elemental force, the sheer wildness of it appeals to me. Out here, we get electrical storms like none I’ve ever seen anyplace else, not even elsewhere in the Midwest. Great crackling bolts, not mere flashes of light but jagged blue bolts ripping across the sky, accompanied by sharp, terrible claps of thunder that sound like cannon fire in your ears and thump way down in your chest and make you jump. The very atmosphere is supercharged with excitement—literally, electricity—and for one sizzling instant you know how Clark Kent must feel when he steps out of that phone booth.
Tonight the lightning was far away. We’d see none of it, beyond this weak lightening of the distant horizon.
Tired but not sleepy, I locked up, killed the kitchen light, and toddled down the hall to my bedroom. I sat at my desk, put on the lamp, and looked at my typewriter, a pale blue Smith Corona Coronet, the kind with the pop-out ribbon cartridge. At the rate I was going, one cartridge would last … oh, years and years. I stared at the yellow paper wrapped around the roller, read and reread the half-dozen lines typed there.
Then I yanked the paper out of the machine, balled it up and tossed it, and inserted a fresh sheet of white bond.
I began pecking out my report to Carolyn Longo.
That’s what you do when a case is over.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sun came up and made things Thursday. I had fallen into an unrestful sleep on the living-room sofa, fully clothed, and felt the way you’re supposed to feel when you fall asleep on the living-room sofa fully clothed. I forced myself into a semi-upright position, mentally assessed the bruises, scrapes, and sore muscles left over from yesterday’s two-step with Abel and Patavena, dumped out the night’s cold coffee, and went about fixing a replacement batch. I showered, and shaved in the shower, and brushed my teeth for a long time in the shower. Then I got dressed and drank most of the coffee and ate two old English muffins that were okay once I cut the moldy spots away, and felt better.
Probably as a result of the mold. Penicillin, you know.
When the blood supply to my brain had been restored, I got on with the day.
Loverboy went to work and I went with him.
Then I stashed the car and scouted out Kim Banner. She was sitting behind her desk and an Egg McMuffin. I said, “Why don’t you hang out at a doughnut shop like every other cop,” and she made a face at me.
I sat and sipped gingerly at the Styrofoam cup I had filled from the coffeepot in the bull pen. “Got something for you,” I said.
“Please,” Banner said. “Can’t you see I’m eating?”
“About Gregg Longo.”
Banner leaned back in her creaky chair and lifted her own coffee cup, a space-capsule-shaped “tipless” mug that had Holiday Inn and a toll-free reservations number on the side. “Why me? This isn’t my case. My squad has nothing to do with it. The division hardly has anything to do with it. I’m not interested. I don’t care. Yet somehow you and the feds both think I should be in on the deal.”
“We know how hurt you’d be if we left you out.”
“I wouldn’t. Honest.”
“Aw, you don’t have to put on the brave front with me. Listen, all I want you to do is plant a bug in the right ears.”
“Which ears? I’ll point ’em out to you and you can do your own planting.”
“I don’t know which ears. That’s why I need you.” The coffee had the burned taste that is almost inevitable with thirty-six-cup urns. Percolation is no way to make coffee. “Here’s the lowdown,” I said, and told Banner all about Gregg Longo and Irish Tim Callinan and why I felt strongly that the former owing the latter twenty Gs meant the latter didn’t have in his possession seventy-eight Gs. You’ve heard the whole business a couple of times now already; there’s no point going over it again.
Twenty minutes later Banner, who had been staring intently at a Ticonderoga pencil lodged point first in a ceiling tile overhead, said, “If Longo didn’t bust the banks, who did?”
“Could be anybody,” I said.
“Longo’s car was placed at the scene of at least one holdup,” Banner said.
“A car like his, maybe, was possibly seen. The I.D. isn’t what you’d call rock solid.”
“His whereabouts at the times of the robberies are unaccounted for. You said even his girlfriend can’t vouch for him.”
“My whereabouts are unaccounted for, too. People who don’t need alibis don’t go out of their way to line them up. I’d be more suspicious of Longo if his little playmate could produce a calendar showing that he was with her on every date and at every time in question. Wouldn’t you?”
She ignored it. “What about that fifty-dollar note?”
“What about it? It could have been circulating for weeks before it hit a bank—it could have gone through several banks before it hit one that happened to be spot-checking serial numbers. Hell, the robber could’ve tipped an airport skycap with it on his way out of town following his last holdup.”
“Sure, Sherlock. Just like it could be that Longo paid his buddy with money from the robbery.”
“That would be brilliant. And then why didn’t Longo pay Boyer all of the money he owed? Why didn’t he pay Eloise Slater? Why didn’t he pay Callinan?”
“You’re right—it would be a stupid thing to do, but people do stupid things all the time. Borrowing money from loan sharks is stupid. Robbing banks is stupid. Maybe Longo was stupid. Maybe he was careless. And maybe he was a crook, which is why he didn’t keep current with his debts.”
“Do you buy that?”
Banner sighed elaborately and ran a hand through her short, dirty-blond hair. “No. Stupid is one thing, suicidal is something else … . All right, Nebraska. I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but I’ll spread the word. What about the feds, though, are you straight with them?”
I shrugged. “Jurgenson’s about like you. Skeptical, but reasonable.”
“That’s about the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day.”
I stood. “Gorilla dust,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Gorilla dust. When gorillas fight, they grab handfuls of dust from the ground and throw them up into the air to blind and confuse each other. That’s all this is—gorilla dust. Nobody knows anything. Nobody can prove anything. All we’re doing, all of us, is throwing dust into the air, confounding and distracting each other, hoping the other gorilla will get tired first and give it up. It’s a completely unsatisfactory way to resolve things. Us P.I. types like to wrap these things up in a hail of bullets that, remarkably, miss us but take out the evildoers.”
“Welcome to reality,” Banner said. “You gotta find the evildoers before you can take ’em out.”
Koosje’s office is over a French bakery in the Old Market. The Old Market is what the name indicates: an old market, the old city market, to be precise, where grocers and restaurateurs and food suppliers once argued and haggled and swore at one another in the predawn on a daily basis. Now it’s a tourist trap, albeit a charming one, with its red-brick buildings and its cobblestone streets, its sometimes painfully trendy shops and cafés and its seemingly infinite supply of junk masquerading as antiques.
Koosje’s operation is through a door coated with ancient royal-blue paint that is badly alligatored. The door leads to a long set of stairs so steep and narrow it might as well be a ladder. At the top is a landing slightly smaller than an LP-record jacket and a door, unpainted. On the door is a wooden plaque with gold lettering: Koosje Van der Beek, Ph.D, and below it, Psychologist. The door opens to a small, high-ceilinged, sparsely decorated reception room, off of which there are two larger rooms where Koosje sees patients, or “clients,” as she prefers to call them. The northern room’s door was closed; the southern room’s door was six or eight inches ajar.
Cinda—not “Cindy”; blame her parents—looked up in mild surprise. I never drop by unann
ounced.
“She’s with someone,” Cinda said apologetically.
“Just let her know I’m here, okay?”
The girl picked up the phone and I picked up last month’s Smithsonian. No old Reader’s Digests and Peoples and Golfs lying around with stickers on their tattered covers threatening you with unspecified curses if you swiped them, as if you would want to. Koosje’s waiting-room literature runs more to Smithsonian and The New Yorker, American Heritage and Connoisseur. Several of the Time-Life books about flying graced a small walnut bookcase. People who enjoy flying are relaxed by pictures depicting flight, Koosje says, and people who don’t like flying won’t look at the books in any case.
“Why don’t you go ahead and wait in the other room, if you like,” Cinda said, nodding toward the open door. I moved off just as she spoke into the mouthpiece, announcing me.
The wait was short. Through luck rather than good planning, I had happened by at around a quarter before the hour, just five minutes or so before Koosje’s sessions usually end. I hadn’t even finished “Around the Mall and Beyond” when the connecting door slid open and Koosje stepped in. She wore a light gray pin-striped suit and a pink blouse with a tall, narrow collar—the kind Herbert Hoover’s always wearing in the old pictures. Of course, Hoover never wore his with an eighteen-inch string of pearls. At least, he never let himself be photographed wearing them.
“This is a surprise,” she said. “Or did you tell me you’d be by and I forgot?”
“No,” I said, “this is completely impromptu.”
“Mm.” She sat in one of the two Scandinavian-style chairs near the sofa I was seated on. This was the “informal” room; the other, Koosje’s office, was a little more authoritarian. That room looked a lot like a dean’s office, this room looked a lot like somebody’s living room. Koosje’s, come to think of it.
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