Desotel jumped—not because of my stern, authoritarian voice but because James hit the basement door, hard.
“Where?”
“Some woman. I don’t know—I swear—”
James was really putting his shoulder to the door now. It was a contest: Would the door splinter before the chair legs slid far enough on the linoleum for the chair to topple?
Time to be scampering along. I didn’t want any bloodshed, especially as there was a chance the blood might be mine. I turned from the kitchen to Desotel.
“Fun time’s over, Jonny, you know that, don’t you?” He nodded stupidly. “There isn’t going to be any game.” I pointed at his briefcase with the gun. “That goes back to the club safe or on to the bank or wherever it’s supposed to be.” He nodded.
“Now,” I barked.
He jumped up, grabbed the case in both hands, clutched it to his bosom like it was a babe, and ran for the front door.
There was a shot, muffled and flat sounding. Wood exploded and littered the kitchen.
I took off behind Desotel.
Another shot, then a crash and a clatter that must have been the chair flying.
We hit the bricks and split off—Desotel south, me north. I fancied hearing the basement door shatter as we came out of the house, but it may have been my overactive imagination.
Or not: I heard an animal wail behind me as I yanked open the door to my car. I risked a look back. Monroe James stood on his front stoop, the .45 in his right hand, the other hand clenched in impotent rage. Desotel was midway between the house and his car—he’d had farther to run. James raised his gun. A perfect shot. If he was even just a passably decent marksman, he could plant one between Desotel’s shoulder blades, no sweat.
And then what? This was middle-class America, not Marlon Abel’s neighborhood. There would be no conveniently deaf neighbors. There would be cops and reports and witnesses …
I had turned, cradling my gun hand in my left, sighting James. Waiting. Sweating.
Had James fired three shots at me in the basement, or four?
Four plus two on the basement door added up to an empty gun.
Three plus two added up to one bullet left for Jonathon Desotel’s back.
Sweat ran down my face and into my eyes. My heart tried to break out of my chest. I couldn’t stand there and watch James murder a man. But if James’s gun was empty … Who was the murderer then?
Waiting. Sweating.
Until defeat washed over Monroe James, and he lowered his right arm and let the big, ugly gun drop into the shrubbery alongside the stoop.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sky was yellow and had the look of rough, faded fabric. The atmosphere was as it had been all day: airless: heavy, damp, and hot. The kids who played in the yards and the streets didn’t notice, didn’t care, but their parents did. They sat on lawn chairs in the shade or toyed lazily with gardening tools or, more commonly, were nowhere to be seen, holed up in their air-conditioned palaces with beer and TV, no doubt.
I drove quickly from Monroe James’s neighborhood. The wave of defeat that had so obviously washed over him might easily be replaced by the strong current of revenge. I didn’t want a confrontation: My quarrel was not with him. So I opted for the better part of valor—running—and made tracks. I had cut down to Happy Hollow Boulevard, taking it not northward, toward chez Nebraska, but southwest, across Dodge and into Elmwood Park, behind the UNO complex. The park was verdant, lush, cool and almost dark. Kids on bikes and young moms and dads behind strollers slowed my progress, but I didn’t care. I tooled along the curving, seemingly aimless drives, one eye on skateboarders and the other on the rearview mirror.
No gray Celebrity Eurosport intruded on the idyllic scene.
Eventually the park spit me out onto Pacific Street. I managed a left turn against the fag end of rush-hour traffic, heading east.
A breeze had come up, not a cool breeze, exactly, but one that carried, instead of the sticky, oppressive mugginess, the clean smell of rain. I drove slowly along residential streets and enjoyed the breeze. Or pretended to, at least, while my head swam in a dark pool of random thoughts and feelings. The stream of consciousness you’ve heard so much about.
The car went to Carolyn’s house. I was only a passenger.
The sky had darkened. The windows in the house were even darker. I went up onto the big enclosed porch and tried the bell. Deep in the house, a harsh buzzer sounded. There was no other sound. There was no answer, even after several more buzzes.
I went around the north side of the house. At the rear, ancient, bowed wooden steps led up to a tiny back porch. I hiked up them and pounded on the door that opened to the kitchen. Nothing. The curtain on the door gapped a little: I peered through and saw the gloomy, gray room. Empty.
Next to the back door was a double-hung window, open perhaps an inch from the bottom. You can guess the procedure: I used a ballpoint pen to punch a hole in the screen, widened the hole to accommodate my arm, got the screen off, raised the window, and climbed in. Inelegantly, but in.
“Carolyn … ?”
The empty room repeated it back to me.
I wandered through the kitchen, into the dining room, into the living room, into the entry. Nothing untoward, nothing out of place except for the usual clutter of everyday life. The house was closed up, and stuffy. The kitchen window appeared to be the only one left open. An oversight.
The stairs were wide, dark planks with a runner of pale carpet down the center. I went up, not caring about the creaks and squeals the steps made underfoot.
The bedroom doors were closed, and the top-floor landing, cut off from even the gray light from outdoors, was nearly pitch-black. I brailled across it to the door of Carolyn’s room.
“Carolyn?”
The doorknob was made of some heavy, dark metal. It was cool in my palm. I turned it, and the door swung open easily and silently.
The room was empty.
I hit the wall switch—the old two-button kind—and yellow light burst to life in a bowl overhead. The room was neat and orderly, much as I had seen it the other night, except for the absence of Carolyn, half-naked and half-asleep on the bed.
I sat on the mattress and the springs beneath it groaned, as they had groaned beneath Carolyn and me the night before. The night before, when twenty years caught up with us, or with me at least, and the story left unfinished all these years finally got an ending. Of sorts. Do such stories ever really end?
Images exploded in my brain, dark scenes captured in the brief, deceptive illumination of a flashbulb. Scenes at once repulsive and exciting, shameful and sensual. Scenes that should shame you but instead set you to grinning like a fiend. Carolyn, her hands tied loosely at the small of her back. Me, frozen in that half moment when power and passion rise in equal proportions and the voice in the back of the brain says, Yes! Take her! before the other, saner voice cuts in and says, This is not a power game, this is about sharing, not owning, and prevails. But the first voice, while still, is not gone, is never gone.
I lay back on the bed and contemplated the ceiling fixture.
There was nothing that said Carolyn couldn’t simply be out for the evening … working late … shopping. Hell, on a date even. Nothing at all.
I stood and crossed the room and swung open the closet.
Hard to say, having never seen the inside of the lady’s closet, but there seemed to be an awful lot of bare wire hangers staring back at me. There seemed to be some gaping gaps amongst the shoes neatly lined up along the floor, too.
I tried drawers in the dressers and nightstands. Again, the inventory was low. One dresser drawer was empty.
Bathroom cabinet. Empty except for a tin of Band-Aids.
Garage (also locked, but what are mere locks to the likes of me?): Empty except for lawn mower, shovel, other garagey junk.
“Ah, Carolyn,” I said to the dank, vacant space.
Only the cobwebs heard.
CHA
PTER EIGHTEEN
By the time I got down to Ralston, the sky was a sheet of yellow blotting paper onto which someone had tipped a bottle of india-ink wash. The breeze had grown up and become a wind, which wound the medical arts building’s U.S. flag around its metal pole and whipped the chain-link runner against it so rapidly and regularly that it sounded like a bell ringing. The wind dried the sweat on my back and arms as I stepped out of the car, and I shivered.
I felt old, tired, used up. My muscles ached, the residual effect of my encounter with Abel and Patavena the day before, compounded by my more recent exertions at Monroe James’s house. Now my head was beginning to think that maybe it would start aching too, just to stay in step. I wanted to go away, I wanted to be somewhere else, I wanted to be someone else.
A few tentative drops of rain kamikazied into the windshield. I closed the car door but only just, making about as much noise as you make buttoning a shirt. I scanned the trailer park but saw nothing and no one unusual. Nothing and no one at all.
Overhead, leaves of tall old maples sighed and whispered roughly as they shook themselves like great green animals. I trudged across the pea-stone drive to the little metal house. Another darkened house—but this one ominously so, not sadly, as Carolyn’s had been.
Correction: The house was almost dark. I noticed watery yellow light making its way through a translucent shade over one tiny window as I took one giant step up onto the wooden platform at the front door.
The skinny aluminum door was closed but not locked. I turned the hooklike handle and pushed with the side of my fist.
The living room was black. Drapes and shades were pulled, and what little graying light sneaked in around and under them had all the illuminating power of a safety match. I paused to let my eyes adjust. Hulking shapes appeared in the darkness. Furniture, righted and set back against the walls, where it must have stood before Abel and Patavena had had at it the other day.
The house shuddered in the wind and I, involuntarily, mimicked it.
I picked through the dark and unfamiliar territory like a blind man. My outstretched right hand touched hard, cool, round-edged plastic. The kitchen counter. Flat wall to the left. Cold metal to the right: the refrigerator. Ahead of me, a long yellow rectangle—a ribbon of light bleeding through a one-inch gap in the bedroom door. I moved toward the light, a moth to the flame. The door swung to soundlessly.
The yellow light emanated from a fat white candle on a bedside table. Its flame burned high, flickeringly, throwing weird nightmarish light against the walls of the small room.
Eloise Slater lay on the bed, facedown. She lay still, but her body seemed to undulate in the wavering candlelight. Blood drummed dully in my ears. I crossed the room and put two fingers behind the angle of her jaw.
I didn’t feel a pulse. I didn’t have time to, because I jerked my hand away, startled, when she jumped and made muffled noises as I touched her.
The noises were muffled because Eloise’s mouth was filled with a red ball-gag whose black straps were fastened securely behind her head. She was naked but for a thick-looking black blindfold that covered her eyes and ears and was fastened behind her head with two small silver padlocks. She was bound to the bedposts with the leather-and-nickel manacles that I had seen before. Her wrists were crossed over her head and secured with leather ribbons, left wrist to right bedpost, right wrist to left. Her legs were separated by a long black bar contraption fastened to her ankles.
Eloise’s body glistened in the candlelight. Glistened with perspiration, glistened with blood—tiny beads of blood that stood up in the sharp, vicious-looking welts that crisscrossed her shoulders, her buttocks, her thighs. A short-handled whip lay on the bed between her legs.
Something white and plasticky dotted her backside and was collected in the cleft and the small of her back. Eloise flinched and moaned into her gag as I touched the stuff. Congealed candle grease.
“She who hesitates is lost,” I quoted quietly as I moved to undo the gag. The red plastic ball was too big for her mouth. Getting it out took some work, and it’s fair to say it hurt her more than it did me, although small mewing sounds were the only protestation she made, or could. “Looks to me like you hesitated too long.”
To the garish, flickering shadows I added, “Wouldn’t you agree, Carolyn?”
And Carolyn Longo stepped from the darkened bathroom doorway into the tiny circle of light emitted by the candle.
“How did you know?” she said calmly.
I dropped the saliva-dampened gag and stood. Eloise Slater was silent but for swallowing, jaw-stretching noises.
“Know what? That Eloise had the money, or that you would try and take it away from her?”
An odd, enigmatic smile traced its way across Carolyn’s otherwise expressionless face. “You choose.”
“I knew Eloise had the money because she was here. Now. If she hadn’t been, it’d still be a toss-up in my mind between her and you.”
“I had the feeling you were suspicious of me.”
“I suspect everybody, as they say in the movies. I knew you’d try to take it away from her because here you are … unless there’s some other reason for your being here …”
Carolyn said nothing.
“Uh-huh. As for knowing you were still here … well, that was a lucky guess. The moment demanded something dramatic, and I felt obliged to oblige. If you hadn’t been here, I’d have felt foolish.”
“Yes, but why me? Why not somebody else?”
“I admit that Al Patavena looked like a real contender for a while there—until I saw Eloise lying here. Not Patavena’s style at all, this kind of theater. He’s more the aluminum-baseball-bat type, as I know from experience. You made yourself suspect by coming on so strong about how the cops were riding your ass and so on—probably so I’d feel sorry for you, take the case, and lead you to the girlfriend you were pretty sure your husband had had.”
She looked almost embarrassed. “I knew you didn’t do much detective work anymore. And I wasn’t sure how you felt about me.”
“Good thinking, but it didn’t hold up. Bill Jurgenson kept telling me the feds weren’t leaning on you—why would he lie? Ma and Pa Kent were parked on the porch across the street—the house you said the cops were staked out in. Finally, you tripped yourself up. You indicated to me that the feds had searched your house several times, but when you were yelling at Jurgenson last night you said they had gone through it once already.”
No reply.
“None of this really jumped out and hit me in the head. It all just contributed to a vague feeling of unease I’d had all along—unease about you and why you really wanted me to investigate Gregg. Tonight, when I was weighing things, sorting them out, these little inconsistencies and doubts kept floating to the surface. When I came across a load of dirty money tonight that was in the process of being laundered for a woman client, I felt that the field of contestants had suddenly narrowed. By the way, did you manage to ice both Patavena and Abel on your lunch break today, or just Abel?”
Her head jerked in surprise. “ ‘Ice’? You mean kill? I never killed anyone.”
“Then that leaves the Bitch Goddess.” I looked down at Eloise and raised my voice slightly so as to be heard through the blindfold that covered her ears. “What’s the story, Queenie? The boys come back and hot-box you until you got tired of it?”
Eloise remained still. But I knew she had heard. I knew that there must have been three names on her list of people who could cause her grief. Abel. Patavena. And Nebraska. Abel had been dealt with. Maybe Patavena, too: It remained to be seen whether he would turn up and, if so, whether he’d be breathing when he did. As for Nebraska … well, it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to picture what would have become of our hero if he had accepted Eloise Slater’s taunting invitation.
I turned to Carolyn. “Abel and Patavena were unimaginative souls. Having taken it into their fat heads that Eloise had the money—I’m sort of to blame for
that, I’m afraid—they weren’t about to give up the idea. Eloise knew there was only one sure way to shake them. And she knew enough to do it in such a way and such a place that she couldn’t be connected to it.”
“You’re good at what you do,” Carolyn said softly.
“This? Oh, this is the easy part now. Connect the dots. It goes like this: Eloise had the money and, being crafty, was keeping it socked away, laying low, keeping her life exactly as it had always been. Because she couldn’t be absolutely certain that no one knew of her existence. She couldn’t be positive that the cops—or someone—weren’t keeping an eye on her, giving her rope.”
I looked again at Eloise.
“Stop me if I get off track, will you?”
She might have been asleep for all the response she gave.
“I queered that deal. When I came on the scene, Eloise must have realized that it was only a matter of time before real live Establishment-type cops came swooping down on her. It was time to scoot along. But the loot was dirty. To exchange some of it for nice clean cash, she enlisted your pal—and hers—Monroe James.”
Carolyn nodded, as if confirming something in her own mind. “All those questions about him …”
“Now you know. You and James working in the same firm, that was coincidence. The bane of us pure-hearted private eyes’ existence. Existences. Whichever. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Eloise was one of the jurors in that Reilly trial that caused our Monroe so much trouble. In any event, James was the man Eloise thought could help her with her little problem. She was right. James latched on to the manager of a very upscale bar-and-restaurant here in this Paradise on the Plains, and if all had gone according to the diagram, Eloise would have had, I don’t know, five or ten thousand pristine bucks on her person right now. Plenty to get out of town on, way out of town.”
Carolyn’s smile was hideous in the lurid light. “I thought she looked like she was expecting someone else when she answered the door.”
“It’s always nice to have these loose threads tied up, isn’t it—oops, no offense, Eloise. What I’m interested in is, how’d you find out about her?” I indicated the helpless woman. “I never told you her name.”
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