"Well, then if I yell, you won't mind."
"Yes. I guess that's true."
I screamed "Help! Help! Help!" at the top of my lungs.
He waited, bored. He was so unworried that I decided to save my breath. "What about janitors? Cleaning people?"
"They don't come in until 10 P.M."
"Guards?"
"There's one on the first floor in a soundproof booth looking at monitors of the doors and vaults. There are no monitors trained on the elevators."
The brass elevator door, decorated in a pattern of vines and leaves, slid smoothly open to reveal a marble-and-brass interior. Pottle pushed a button and the elevator descended. Yup, he could wash this floor, too, if he had enough time. And while tests can reveal traces of blood on almost anything, the cops would have to suspect I'd been in here before they bothered to run tests. And even then, how tightly could they tie the blood to Pottle? What's more, I'd be dead by then so it wouldn't help me much.
Pottle was in a position where he really had very little to lose by killing me now and taking his chances later.
The elevator door sighed open on a floor labeled BB, which apparently was the bank's way of saying subbasement. No marble here. The flooring was institutional vinyl.
A long hall led away to the right and left. Pottle nudged me to the left. The walls were poured concrete, painted cream. The hall itself was about fifteen feet wide. There were shelf-lined equipment alcoves along the way. In some were boxed supplies for the bank, mostly reams of paper. A couple of boxes were labeled pencils or pens or erasers, but in keeping with the twenty-first century, far and away most of them were fax cartridges, printer cartridges, both color ink-jet and regular, and so on. I hadn't much time to look. Pottle was pushing me on.
I said, "Don't be so impatient."
"I suppose I'd drag my feet if I were going to die, too," he said with more satisfaction than regret.
We passed janitorial supplies, cleaning supplies, floor polish, mops, brooms, dusting cloths, furniture polish, toilet disinfectant, rest room soap, whole alcoves filled with letterhead paper on shelves with the different letterheads posted underneath each batch. My mind raced, trying to see a possible weapon among all the useless objects.
"Where are we going?"
"Why, the tunnels, of course. Would you believe we never even realized that there were tunnels under the bank until that flood a few years ago? The one where somebody broke through the top of one of the old freight tunnels? We had hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. All of a sudden the water started to rise in our basement. The maintenance staffers were up to their ankles in dirty water. Nobody could figure out why at first. It wasn't raining. There were no plumbing leaks. It was utterly amazing. Nobody had any inkling. The tunnels had been down here all along and literally nobody knew. Anyhow, we know now. There's a door down some stairs at the end of this corridor where I can push you into the tunnel."
I had come to a stop next to a storage area for vacuum cleaners.
"I've had it, Pottle. I'm not going any farther. And you'd better rethink this. This isn't going to work for you. They'll just find me, sooner or later. Why don't you come to Chief of Detectives Harold McCoo's office and work out a plea bargain."
"A plea bargain for two murders? Oh, certainly! They'd give me a slap on the wrist, I don't think. This is very safe. For me. Once I pitch you into the tunnels, they probably will never find a body. It's pitch dark down there, and you'll wander blindly until you die of thirst. Nobody will ever figure out where you went in."
I grabbed one of the vacuum cleaners. "Stand back or else!"
Pottle actually giggled. "You're going to hit me with a vacuum cleaner?"
He raised his hand to slap it out of my grip. He could have disarmed me in two seconds, because he was bigger, and also because my left shoulder was so horribly painful. All I could do was hold the vacuum at my waist, while my other hand pulled open the zipper and grabbed at the dust bag.
"No," I said. "I'm going to hit you with this bag!"
"So what?"
He pulled the vacuum and I pulled frantically at the paper-fiber bag, ripping it, which was what I meant to do. Pottle hesitated for maybe two seconds, wondering whether to shoot me right then and there or not. He didn't want to leave a trail of blood if he could help it. And I didn't seem to be doing anything threatening.
"I'm going to hit you with two quarts of dust!"
Then I poured the bag of dust over his head.
His first breath went halfway down. Then the air and dust stuck in his throat. He coughed. He wheezed. He gasped for breath and the gasp just sucked in more dust. Dust ran over his hair and into his eyebrows. Two rivers of dust ran around his nose, across his mouth, and made a little funnel shape as he sucked it in. He grabbed frantically for the inhaler in his pocket.
I was in a fury. I poured more dust over his head, shouting, "That's for Jennifer! And that's for Plumly! And that's for Jennifer again!" She had been a sweet, talented, and kind young woman and now she was dead.
Pottle's face turned red and then purple.
"That's more for Jennifer! And for what you put Barry through!"
I coughed. My eyes watered. My throat itched and partly closed up.
But I didn't have asthma.
As I poured the last of the dust over him, I shouted, "Oh, Pottle. What a world. What a world!"
25
REALLY MOST SINCERELY DEAD
Edmond Pottle didn't die from the dust. So I didn't kill him directly. In his pocket with the inhaler was a Rohypnol pill not in its packaging. Apparently he kept it unwrapped and ready to drop into a woman's drink when opportunity offered. It had stuck to the mouthpiece of the inhaler and he sucked it into his windpipe when he sucked desperately on the inhaler. I actually tried the Heimlich maneuver on him when he started to turn blue, but it was too late.
I had further damaged my shoulder throwing the vacuum cleaner around, although the injury was well worth it. With my shoulder immobilized in a fiberglass two-piece cast held together by straps, I spent the night in the hospital sedated. Sedated but happy.
The next morning, the hospital released me. I wasn't supposed to drive. The taxi let me off at home at nine-thirty in the morning. Long John was delighted to see me. Sam had stopped by to give the parrot a change of water, and judging by the half banana in its skin on the kitchen counter, had also sat around doling out treats. LJ gets a banana one half-inch slice at a time, as Sam well knows. Birds can't hold bigger pieces and make a mess if they try. LJ takes several minutes to savor each slice.
My answering machine played back three messages.
"Cat, this is Harold Briskman. I have an idea for a snazzy article you could do for us. Call me chop-chop."
"Ms. Marsala, this is E. T. Taubman. My attorney will ring you to discuss your persistent harassment of me." (A click that sounded louder than others, although I knew it wasn't.) This from a man who was happy enough to knowingly let an innocent man take the blame for a murder.
"Aunt Cat?" There was a gulp. "They want to take Lion away from me. They can't do that, can they? Can you help me?"
Shoulder problem or no shoulder problem, I grabbed up my car keys and headed out.
* * *
Barry and Maud live in a modest brick house in Oak Park. There's a small front yard with two plots of grass, one on each side of a tan cement crazy-paving path. As I started up the walk to their house, the front door opened.
The woman who came out was about fifty-five, gray-haired, with wings of white at her temples. She wore a light blue knit dress and, given the heat of the day, an unnecessary cardigan sweater, left open. Many women don't believe they can go out without a jacket of some kind.
"Well, thanks. I just feel much better about it all now," she said, turning to face the doorway.
Maud stood in the doorway, flanked by Jeremy, who held a bundle under his shirt. They waved at the woman. She got into a blue Chevy and drove away.
I said, "Hi."
Maud said, "Hi, Cat." She smiled. Jeremy smiled more broadly than Maud, and in fact more broadly than anybody I'd seen in days.
I said, "Who was that?"
"Well, maybe Barry ought to explain."
Barry was lurking in the shadows behind her. She moved aside to let me in.
"Morning, Barry," I said. "I had a call from Jeremy. What's the problem? Who was that leaving?"
"It's like this," he said. He hesitated, and we moseyed into the living room and sat down.
"See, the problem was the collar around Lion's neck. The cat didn't have a name tag or a shots tag, and I know he was a dirty mess," Barry said, "but it still seemed like he wasn't wild, really, but maybe strayed off. He acted kind of tame, you know."
"In other words, his owner might be looking for him."
"Um, yes." He cast a glance at Jeremy, but went on. "So I thought maybe I had a responsibility to put an ad in the paper. So I got the paper to look at how the Lost & Found ads were written. And this is what I saw." He pushed a copy of the
Trib
over to me. A short ad was circled:
Lost cat: A marmalade tom, wearing a red collar with a white diamond pattern. Lost in vicinity of Grant Park Underground Garage Monday. Reward.
It gave a phone number.
"So the person I just saw leaving was Lion's owner?"
"Right. She and her husband were in town on Monday shopping. They left the cat in the car, because it was an underground parking place and they knew the car wouldn't heat up. But they cranked the window down, just an inch, she said, for air."
Maud said, "The woman was horrified that the cat got out such a small opening."
"Cats do."
"And apparently it was her daughter's cat. The daughter had left for summer term at college last month and gave the cat to her parents for safekeeping."
"Cats don't like to be given away," I said.
"The mother was extremely embarrassed and upset."
Jeremy was bouncing up and down. "So that's what you called me about?" I asked him.
"And she talked with me, Aunt Cat, the lady did, and I told her about how Lion had saved our lives, and she said her daughter would be away at college for three more years, and that was too long, and she didn't really like cats very much— the mother, I mean— and we all talked, and you know what?"
"I kind of think I do."
"She said I can keep him!"
"That's wonderful!"
Maud said, "What a relief! I wished he—" We all looked at Barry. She said, "I admit, I told Barry I wished he wouldn't call her."
Barry said, "But I had to phone the woman."
"Because—?"
"Uh— well, it seemed like the honest thing to do."
I said, "Honest like telling the truth is honest?"
"It's not the same."
"No, it's not exactly the same." He had made an honest move, in the face of the possibility that Jeremy would be devastated, deprived of his new cat friend. And Barry knew well how upset Jeremy would be.
"It's not the same," I said, "but it's not entirely different, either. You either have a policy of being honest, or you don't. Wouldn't it be nice if all of life's lessons were right in point? I tell the truth about you and then you have to tell the truth about somebody else. And as a result you tell me you understand and approve of what I did. But then, life doesn't work out that neatly."
Jeremy said, "Well, I think this is neat!"
We laughed.
26
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Saturday afternoon. Closing day of the festival.
We all disembarked from Barry's van in the Grant Park Underground. The van held a rear-facing baby car seat with baby Cynthia in it, a child's car seat for Jeremy, and me and Barry and Maud. We had warned Jeremy we'd only stay an hour or two because Maud still tired easily. Maud and I had talked a long while about whether to bring Jeremy back to the parking garage. I had argued for taking him to the festival, to get rid of any lingering unhappy feelings remaining from our experience, but left the garage decision to her. Once she had made it, I admitted it was the choice I was hoping for.
We simply got out of the van, without making any special fuss about where we were. And Jeremy seemed happy, dancing from foot to foot.
"I'll show you everything, Mom."
"That's the Hungry Tiger, Mom!" Jeremy said as an Oz character ambled past. "You know, the Hungry Tiger who wants to eat fat babies."
You could almost see the warning lights go on over Barry's and Maud's heads. And in balloons like comic book thoughts: Alert! Sibling rivalry! Jealousy! Red alert over here!
