Dark Heart (27 page)

N
ick Seder walked up to the back door of Gwendolyne’s Flight and fumbled in his pocket for the keys. He was beat. The party at his house last night had wiped him out, and he wasn’t looking forward to a busy Friday evening. Fridays were always busy at the Flight. Nick was, however, looking forward to a Bloody Mary to calm the thumping in his head. He’d bitched about the rain yesterday, but he would have preferred an overcast sky to this blindingly bright fall day.

Lost in his own pain, he did not see the two figures approach him until it was too late. A meaty hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around.

“Hi, Nick,” McKenzie said, flipping open his badge case. “How ya doing?”

“What the hell do you want?” Nick looked from McKenzie to Sandra and back again.

“Hey, Nick, my man. Script says we ask the questions, right?” McKenzie spun him around and pushed him up against the wall. “And I’ll bet you know the position, don’t you? Ah, you do. What a surprise.”

Grudgingly, Nick spread his feet, put his hands out, and leaned against the wall as Mac body-searched him.

“Aw, man! I haven’t done anything! You can’t just—”

“Sure I can, Nick,” McKenzie said. “You know I can.”

“I don’t believe this,” Nick whined. “You can’t just take a guy and—”

“Hey, Nick? Shut the fuck up, okay?”

Nick frowned, but said nothing else until McKenzie was finished.

“Okay, turn around.”

Nick turned. His eyes widened as he saw what McKenzie was holding in his thick fingers.

“What have we here?” Mac held the two small glas-sine bags and a small black film canister up against the sun. “The baggies look like smack. Would that be about right, Nick?”

Seder’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “Hey, you don’t just walk up to me and go through my pockets, asshole. Ain’t you never heard of a fucking search warrant?”

Ignoring him, McKenzie opened the canister. “And coke, and some little pills here.” McKenzie shook the plastic case. “What would those be, Nick? Speed? Downers? What else you got on you?”

“Hey, those aren’t even mine.”

“Right. They don’t have your name on them, do they?” McKenzie said. “Guess you put on the wrong jeans this morning, huh? They’re your roommate’s, right?”

“That’s right,” Nick said. Then, sullenly, “So show me a warrant.”

McKenzie sighed with mock patience. “Don’t need no warrant, Speedy Gonzales. Not when Detective McCormack—that’s her, right there—and me, Detective McKenzie—saw you behaving in a suspicious manner. And in the process of us investigating your suspicious mannerisms, we happen to notice evidence indicating that you might be holding in your very own possession this dope here. Which we found in the process of checking you for weapons. For our own safety, of course.”

“That’s all bullshit and you know it.”

“You aren’t that stupid, are you, Nicky? Judge’ll buy it in a New York minute, right?” Mac grinned at him. “Am I right?”

All the air seemed to go out of Nick. “What the fuck you want, then?”

“You got the right to remain silent, Nick. And you got the right to a lawyer. If you can’t afford a lawyer—”

“I know the fucking drill, man. What the fuck you
want
with me?”

Sandra stepped forward. Mac handed her one of the baggies. She lifted it, dangled it in front of Nick’s nose. “You got a sheet, Nick?”

He shrugged.

“Bet you do,” she said. “Bet this won’t help any. Enough here for a felony possession for sale, I’d guess. And we got three strikes in Illinois now. How many strikes you got already, Nick? One? Two?”

“Aw, come on. What do you want from me? This ain’t no fucking dope bust. Is it?”

She stared at him, considering. “Maybe not.”

His shoulders slumped in relief. “So we can deal, is that what you’re saying? Okay, fine. Deal. You want names or something? That’s cool. I got names.”

Mac eyed him with distaste. “Man, loyalty’s always a fine thing. My dad used to say that. ’Course, he’d never met a slime-sack like you, Nicky. You’re a piece of work.”

Seder avoided his gaze, stayed focused on Sandra’s face. “Lady, tell me what you want, okay?”

Sandra considered a moment longer, drawing it out. Then she nodded. “I want to know about Carlton Wheeler. Who killed him.”

Nick’s resentful posture faded, and he looked scared. “I d-don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered. His brow furrowed.

“Nick,” Sandra said kindly, “how we going to deal with you standing there lying your ugly face off?”

“Look, I didn’t have anything to do with no goddamn lawyer, and that’s the truth!”

“Just like these drugs aren’t yours?” McKenzie pressed.

“Okay, fine! Pin the drugs on me. You bastards wanna roust people who’re just going about their business, fine! There’s nothing I can do about that. But I didn’t kill nobody!” He paused. “And I want a lawyer. I got nothing more to say.”

“We didn’t say you killed anybody, Nick.” McKenzie leaned over, close to the bartender’s face. “We just want to know what you know about it.”

“And you know something, Nicky. You know Carlton Wheeler’s a lawyer. And I don’t remember telling you that. Did you tell him, Mac?”

“Nope. Maybe he’s a mind reader. How about it, Nicky? You read minds?”

“I…uh…man, I dunno nothing about none of that shit. Honest to God.”

McKenzie shrugged. “Hey, look here, cool. Play it that way. See if I give a shit.” He pushed the remaining bag and the canister into his own jacket pocket. And pulled a pair of cuffs off his belt. “Turn it around, Ace. Hands behind your back.”

Nick’s gaze leaped from Sandra to Mac and back again. Suddenly he licked his lips. “Wait a minute…”

“Naw, no more waiting, Nicky. We thought maybe you knew something, maybe you’d wanna help us like any fine, upstanding citizen would.” He shrugged. “But if you don’t feel that way, well…just stick ’em out.” He grinned. “You can be one of the thousand tales of the big city.”

Nick’s face crumpled suddenly.

“Okay, okay, wait just a minute…” Nick held up his hands in front of him. “Maybe we can cut some kind of a deal?”

“Now you’re talking,” McKenzie said, moving so close to Nick’s face that the bartender had to take a step backwards. “Let’s just go back to the station house, and you can tell us everything you know. You know enough—maybe we can talk deals.”

“No, that’s not what I mean! I just mean, well, maybe I might know something.”

“Then you’d better tell us.” McKenzie smiled, but it wasn’t a happy face.

“No way. I’m not telling you something and then having you take me in for drugs anyway. Forget that.”

Sandra moved forward again. “You talk to us, we forget this ever happened. We don’t even know you.” She glanced at Mac. “Is that right, Mac?”

“Nicky who?” Mac said, grinning.

Nick blew a blast of breath out of his mouth and looked at his shoes. “I can’t believe I’m trusting a couple of cops,” he muttered.

“Listen, you cockroach,” Sandra said, “I don’t give a shit whether you trust us or not. You’re not in a good bargaining position here. Or are you too stupid to figure even that much out?”

“All right, all right!” Nick looked at each of them in turn, and then began.

“You said Wheeler, that lawyer, right? That’s what you want?”

“Yeah,” Sandra told him. “That’s what we want.”

Nick chewed on his lower lip a moment. “Okay. It was a couple of weeks ago, I think. In the bar. This guy came in and was drinking. It was pretty late. Close to closing time.”

“This guy? What guy?” Sandra asked.

“Omar something.”

Sandra nodded.

“What did he look like?” McKenzie asked.

“Short. Black hair. He looked Libyan or something. Really dark black eyes. He had a wide mouth and he seemed kind of paranoid, you know, freaky?” Nick paused, thinking. “But kinda like he could take care of himself, like he didn’t give a shit. Like, I dunno, like nothing could scare him, he could handle it all. He
knew
he could handle it.” He paused again, then shook his head. “Hard to describe, I guess.”

Actually Sandra thought Nick had described him pretty well. Omar just kept cropping up all over the place. She wondered what he would look like in a lizard suit. But even as she thought that, she knew she was missing something.

“Is he a regular?” she asked.

“He comes in often enough.”

“So what did he say about Wheeler?”

Nick shrugged. “He didn’t say much but he laughed really loud. Since it was pretty quiet, I looked over to see what he was laughing at, and it was the TV. There was something on about the Wheeler guy. Some big case he’d won just before he was killed. How he was supposed to be some kinda champion of justice or something. Anyway, I mostly remember this Omar dude laughing—he sounded sort of weird, y’know?—and so I asked him what was so funny.”

“‘Big guy, big man,’ he said. ‘Champion of the downtrodden.’ Or some shit like that, and he laughed some more. ‘He pissed in his underwear and all over that stupid kimono when he was looking down the barrel of a gun. Some fucking hero.’”

Nick paused, looked down at his shoes. He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Just some guy talkin’ shit, except I knew a girl who was Wheeler’s girlfriend for a while before he got famous. She came into the Flight a lot. When he first started hittin’ the news, she used to brag about it, a little, how she shouldn’t have let him go, and all that. I asked her what he was like. She said he was a really nice guy, not like some of the celebrities you hear about. She said he was pretty normal except he had a few eccentricities.” Nick paused. “Like wearing silk kimonos around the house. It was just another story. I’m a bartender. I hear stories all the time. But it stuck in my head because I thought the kimono was weird. I mean, isn’t it a Japanese woman’s dress?”

McKenzie shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Well, anyway, that’s why it stuck in my head, and when this guy said that, my blood kinda froze, and I looked at him, and I knew he’d done it. I knew he was the murderer and he was sitting right there at my bar, bragging about it. I must’ve looked weird, or he must’ve realized he was talking stupid, ’cause he shut up all of a sudden. I didn’t say anything or let on that I believed him. I think I just said something like, ‘Yeah, sure buddy. You want another one?’ So he looked at me really hard for a second, and I played like stone dumb, ’cause I didn’t want him thinkin’ that
I thought
I’d just heard a confession. The guy was creepy, you know? I mean, I didn’t want to have him following me home and putting a bullet in
my
brain. No way. He was so twitchy you’d think he’d do something like that. Like maybe he wanted to do that, and was looking for any excuse.” Nick shrugged. “Well, that’s all I know. But if you want my opinion, he wasn’t lying. He did it.”

“You see him around a lot?” Sandra asked. “Does he come into the bar on any kind of schedule?”

“Naw. Not recently, anyway. He used to come in almost every night, but he and the owner got into a fight or something. Mr. Sterling doesn’t like him. I haven’t seen him in the last week or so.”

Sandra gave a small sigh of relief. Reassurance splashed over her. Justin had recognized an asshole when he saw one, and had kicked him out of his club. Good. She was glad of that…

“Anything else?” McKenzie asked.

“No, that’s it. I didn’t follow the guy or anything. I didn’t ask him over to play poker. He was creepy. I just wanted him out of the bar. I was glad when Mr. Sterling told Rocky not to let him back in. There’s another one of ’em, though. I think it’s his boss or his brother or something. He still comes in.”

“Another what?”

“Another one of them fucking Arabs. We get a lot of them, but these two, Omar and the other guy, they were together a lot. And the other guy treated Omar like a flunky or something, always made him come to the bar to get the drinks, like that.”

“So, you know the other guy’s name?” Sandra said.

Nick chewed on his lip some more. “It’s uh…I dunno for sure, some weird name—begins with a K, I think. I didn’t go up and introduce myself to them.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Mac said.

Nick stared at him. “You kidding? Me, go to the cops?”

“Okay,” Sandra said. “That’s it? That’s all you got?”

“That’s all I got,” Nick said.

Mac and Sandra glanced at each other. Mac shrugged.

“See you around sometime, Nicky,” Sandra said.

“Hey, wait a fucking minute!”

Mac paused, then turned. “What? You just remember something else?”

“My shit. You got my shit. You took it off me, and it’s mine.”

He was almost crying.

And Mac grinned at him. “Shit? You know anything about any shit, Sandra?”

“Only the asshole I’m looking at right now,” she replied.

“Oh, you fuckers,” Nick breathed softly. “You thieving fuckers.”

Mac stared at him. “Don’t you need to be getting to work, Nicky? Instead of standing out here in the hot sun, giving me shit?”

Nick’s eyes went slightly wild, and Mac shifted his weight on his feet. “Don’t even think about it, asshole,” he said softly. “You can’t even begin to imagine what a pleasure it would be.”

After a moment, Nick’s gaze dropped and his shoulders slumped. Without another word he turned, opened the door, and stepped on through.

“Nice guy,” Sandra said.

“Asshole,” Mac replied.

Sandra stared at the back doors of the bar. Two doors. One door was large and one was just ordinary sized. She’d worked in a few restaurants when she’d been married to Chuck. None of them had had more than one back door. Despite the difference in size, the doors both looked like utility doors, except one was caked with grime, like any well-used back door to a club or restaurant should be. The other door was polished metal. Why would anyone polish a stainless steel utility door?

For no reason, she stood before the door, staring at her reflection until McKenzie touched her shoulder. “Hey, Bruce? You okay?”

She gave a slight twitch, caught herself, forced a grin. “I’m good, Mac. I’m just fine.”