Nine Fingers (26 page)

She was staring at Jack.

No one else caught her interest; her eyes didn’t flinch. She was taking in every gesture as his fingers roamed across the
middle half of the keyboard I had managed to salvage. Her eyes were cool, her back straight. I couldn’t see lust; I couldn’t
see disdain; I couldn’t see anything. Whatever was going on inside was way down deep, for herself alone.

As I stared I heard the band start its final tune-up, and they quickly jumped into the same song we had heard on the sound
system on the way in from the kitchen, “The Heebie Jeebies.” This hadn’t been on the playlist; it must have been one of Paul’s
last-minute improvisations.

It was hard to tell that we hadn’t practiced this tune in years. Sidney remembered it from our early Dixieland days and played
it on his tuba, and Akiko knew the old Baby Dodds drum routine well enough, and Jack and Ken jumped right in and made it work.

The crowd applauded madly.

Paul took a minute to introduce the band, even pointing to me over at the bar, and they went right into “West End Blues,”
another Louis number, starting with the famous sixteen-bar obbligato way up in the stratosphere on the trumpet. After that
was “Skid-Dat-De-Dat.” And then right into the ballad “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” a beautiful tune, all minor-key
regret and major-key resolution, and they did a fabulous job on it. I looked over at Amelia and the expression on her face
was rapt and yet surprised.

They played the final chorus on “Sleepytime” and before I knew it my shot was gone and my beer glass was empty and they were
done, an all-Armstrong set, and a nice one.

The crowd gave them a big ovation—some of them even stood up and hooted—and all of a sudden all the lights came on and all
of the player instruments came on all at once, playing “When the Saints Come Marching In,” and we all held our hands over
our ears until it was over.

CHAPTER 51

Ken Ridlin

At the Nickelodeon

Friday, January 24

Halfway through the first set I see her, sitting at a table in the corner in the darkest spot in the room. At first I think
it is Laura, with her hair pulled back, watching Jones play the drums. But the stage rotates a notch and I see it is her mother,
Amelia. She’s not watching Akiko play the drums, she’s watching Landreau play the piano.

We’re in the middle of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” all minor keys with lots of sharps, and I don’t like lots of sharps
and I haven’t played this tune in years, and Powell hands the solo off to me as we get to the bridge and I have to concentrate
just to stumble my way through it and I lose sight of her as I focus on the music.

We come down to the close and the set ends and the crowd applauds and I look for her again. The stage is still turning. I
am feeling dizzy and nauseous and weak. I lean back in the chair to feel the forty-five tucked into the small of my back,
and it comforts me. I rub my right foot against my left ankle to feel the thirty-two tucked in the holster there, and it strengthens
me.

For a second, I see her again, just a glimpse. Then the crowd stands and we are borne off the stage and I lose her again.
In seconds I find myself in front of Amatucci at the bar, and a beer is placed in my hands and I look at it, the light shining
through it all golden and warm. In a second a ginger ale replaces it. I take a sip and look around and we are all there.

Except for Landreau. I find Amelia’s corner and she is gone as well.

CHAPTER 52

Vinnie Amatucci

At the Nickelodeon

Friday, January 24

By one in the morning the place had finally emptied out and Akiko had finished packing up her kit. Ridlin herded us over to
a booth. He took one of the police drawings and held it up.

He asked us if anyone had seen him tonight, and we all said, no, we hadn’t. I had been looking for him, but I hadn’t seen
anyone who even fit the general physical parameters. Ridlin took the drawing, set it down on the table. A breeze lifted it
away. He put it back down on the table, smoothing it out with his long fingers, and placed his ginger ale on top of it.

“The latest thinking over at headquarters is that the focus may have shifted, from Ms. Jones to Mr. Landreau,” he said.

Passive voice, I thought. Not “I think,” not “We think,” not even the protective coloration of “They think,” but “The latest
thinking.” I glanced at Paul. He had caught it, too. Passive voice. What he sometimes calls the “Present Irresponsible” tense.

“Shifted?” I followed up. “Why?”

“You were there at the bus stop. The man who was there may be the man we have been looking for. Who identified him? Landreau.
We think there might be some history there.”

Sidney leaned forward. “History?”

Ridlin waved him off. “Nothing I’m at liberty to say. Jones may still be a target, but Landreau may be a target as well. That’s
why we’re keeping him in town. He may know something he’s not saying. But now he’s disappeared.”

“I mean, like, ‘disappeared’? He didn’t leave alone,” Akiko said.

“I don’t know if that’s better or worse.”

“Do you
know
if Jack has, you know, a history with her, with Laura’s mother?” Akiko asked.

He said nothing.

She said nothing. It was a standoff, each one trying to see how much the other knew.

I was also acutely aware that I didn’t know how much I knew myself. I had seen Landreau freak out and ID the guy in his semi-autistic
way at the bus stop. I had heard Akiko’s interpretation of Laura’s wild theories about Jack and her mother. I had seen Amelia,
unable to take her eyes off him. But I didn’t know if she was staring at him with hate or lust or disdain.

When you have no data, it’s easy to speculate. In fact, if you have half a brain, it’s hard not to.

Ridlin interrupted my reverie.

“But we don’t even have a clue where she might be hiding out.”

Akiko spoke up in a quiet voice. “Yes, you do, you just don’t
know
you do.”

Ridlin looked over at her. So did the rest of us. She does that a lot, waits and circles and then pounces; it’s like a linguistic
version of her martial arts discipline.

“What do you mean, ‘he knows but he doesn’t know he knows’?” I prompted.

“You all do,” she said, “except for you, Vince. You weren’t there.”

We all leaned in. She had the floor.

“Remember the gig up at Lake Geneva?” she asked. They all nodded their heads.

“We went outside and looked over the lake, and it was cold and foggy and beautiful? There was a house there, a house on a
promontory—”

“I remember it,” Paul said. “Modern. Plains style, very Frank Lloyd Wright, all horizontal lines. I remember wishing Vince
were there so he could tell us if it was a real Wright.”

“In Lake Geneva?” I repeated. “No. No way.”

Akiko looked down at the floor, then looked up, but only halfway. There are some stories you can tell and look someone in
the eye. This wasn’t going to be one of them.

“We went up there once,” she said. “Laura and I. She’s like, ‘Field trip!’ so off we went. This was back in, I don’t know,
October, November. We drove and drove and got there and it was dark. There’s a road, on the other side of the house from where
we were, where you can see it? The road sticks out into the lake a bit and you look over a little cove and there it is. It’s
like the same sideways view of the house that we saw, but like, from the other side. So she had me pull up this little road,
almost to the water’s edge, and kill the lights. Laura likes to—well, she’s adventurous, OK? She was telling me about this
fabulous house with this incredible view, and how the bedroom ceiling was all glass, so you could see the stars, and the walls
were all glass, so you could see the water and the woods. She was pulling me out of the car and I’m like, ‘But Laura, we’ll
get caught, someone will see us, I am
not
breaking into somebody’s house, no
way,
I don’t
care
how cool the view is,’ and she’s like, ‘No, it’s OK. I have a key.’And she was dragging me out of the car and just then the
porch lights came on. She grabbed me and pulled me down behind a bush. A door opened, and a woman came out onto the deck.
She was standing there, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the lake. Laura kept shushing me, begging me not to make a sound.
Finally, the woman went back inside, and turned out the lights. We waited maybe two, three minutes, freezing our asses off,
and then scrambled into the car and she said ‘Drive!’ and I did. She had one of those looks on her face, so I backed out of
there and did a U-turn and said, ‘But I thought you had a key,’and she said, ‘I do,’and held it up, in the light of the dashboard.
‘I thought you said you knew her,’ I said. ‘I do,’ she said again. ‘So?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t we going in?’ She looked back
at the house, and said, ‘I didn’t know she was home. I thought she was at her other house, on Saint Barts. We can’t go in
there if she’s home.’ And I said, ‘Why? Who is she?’ And she’s like, ‘She’s my mother. She’s my long-lost mysterious mother,
and we have to stop talking now.’ And that’s, that’s how I know where she lives. In Lake Geneva. In that house.”

I was stunned. There was nothing to say.

Until Ridlin picked up his ginger-ale glass from on top of the picture of the killer.

The glass had left a ring on the paper, right about where a mustache would be, and that pulled the image together for me.
It was a different mustache from the one with the beard at the bus stop. With the beard it had been straight and bushy, almost
British sergeant-major-ish. The wet line on the picture was curved, like the bottom of the glass, and it ran down his chin
like a Fu Manchu and I slapped the table and yelped, “Holy shit! Holy fucking shit!”

Ridlin looked at me and I looked back at him. “Do you remember that I said I thought the picture of this guy looked familiar,
like I had seen him somewhere, but I didn’t know where?”

“Yeah?”

“And I couldn’t figure out why because at the bus stop all I saw of him was his back, and that was kind of familiar in a kind
of a strange way, but how the fuck do you recognize somebody’s face when all you saw of him was his back?”

He squinted, like he was trying to remember something.

“Now I know where I saw him. He was wearing a mustache, like a Fu Manchu, like in this picture, in the shape of the water
stain.”

“Who is he, Vince? How do you know him? Where can we find him?”

I thought through his three questions.

“I don’t know who he is or what name he goes by, but I have a regular customer with the cab who I think works for the Mob—I
think he does collections—and he had this guy show up someplace where he had a problem collecting. It was on the West Side,
out on South Cicero, and I missed the address and went too far, and when my customer saw that I caught a glimpse of this guy
he freaked out. I mean he fucking lost it.”

“I’m not following,” Ridlin said.

Paul jumped in. “What Vince is trying to say is that he doesn’t know the guy, but he knows a guy who knows the guy.”

“Is that right, Vince?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know him and wouldn’t know where to find him, but my guy, my regular customer, does. He’s like a
leg-breaker, but my guy was surprised as hell when he showed up, like he was the leg-breaker to end all leg-breakers, if that
makes any sense.”

“That’s exactly what he is, the leg-breaker to end all leg-breakers, although using him like that, I don’t know…” Ridlin
said.

Ridlin knitted his brow together, and drummed his fingers on the table.

“So, what are we going to do?” I asked.

“ ‘We’? ” he asked. “‘We’ are not going to do anything. You two are going to come with me and make a full report down at HQ,
and they are going to take it from there.”

“No, we’re not,” I said.

“That’s right,” Akiko said. “No, we’re not. By the way,” she said, turning to me, in a stage whisper, “how come we’re not?”

“Because it’s gotten personal,” I said. “These guys are personally coming after us, and they’re going to keep coming after
us until they get us. Think about it,” I said. “We have a chance to get our hands on both Amelia and the mob’s favorite all-purpose
assassin. What kind of fish could we lure in with that kind of bait?”

“Vince, you’re talking crazy,” Ridlin said. “It’s totally outside of policy. I can’t just—”

I cut him off.

“Look, you can tell us all about policy later. I’m sure it’ll be fascinating. But think about it. What do you think we might
be able to trade for if we had both of them? They want to make it personal?
We
make it personal. They take a pawn, and then our rook? We take their queen and threaten their bishop.”

“What are you talking about?” Ridlin wailed.

“Chess,” Sidney said. “He’s talking about chess.”

“These people don’t play chess,” Ridlin said. “They just kill you and then they go get something nice to eat.”

I looked at him. “Are you talking about the mob or about the cops?”

“Come on, that’s not fair. I can control the cops,” he said.

“Like you controlled them tonight?” I said quietly. “They were everywhere, man.”

He looked hurt.

“Sorry, but you gave it to your people, and they took over from there. They do what they always do, and he—you know,
He
—he saw it coming and he didn’t come near this place, right? And while everybody was looking for him, Jack and Amelia slipped
the hook, right?”

“Vince does make a compelling point,” Sidney said. “There are times for a frontal assault and times for a more indirect approach.
One could quote Machiavelli on this, or Lao Tsu for that matter.”

I figured Sidney as a Machiavelli man—he had had that kind of classical education—but the Lao Tsu was something of a surprise.
Akiko was nodding. I figured her for Lao Tsu but not necessarily Machiavelli, although, after all the maneuvering she had
done to be with Laura, I was entertaining second thoughts.

“What’s your plan?” she asked Ridlin. “To keep dangling us like bait and wait for this shark to circle in so you can catch
him before he kills us? That sucks.”

Ridlin wasn’t dangling us, he was dangling
her.
Sure, I had gotten bitten, and it looked like Jeff had stumbled into his path and gotten chewed up. There was always the possibility
of collateral damage, but it was still really about Akiko.

Unless, of course, it was really about Jack.

“I don’t know about you guys,” I said. “But the waiting is making me a little nuts. Every time we go out in public, my hand
starts to twitch. My eyes feel like I haven’t blinked in a month. Even if I see the guy, what the fuck can I do? Start snapping
my fingers like Jack? I can’t do shit, except hope that you get him before he gets one of us. I mean, no offense, I’m sure
you’re doing all you can, but it leaves me feeling passive, and I just fucking hate that.”

“One does want more of a sense of involvement,” Sidney said.

“A proactive approach,” Paul said, “preemptive.”

Akiko nodded. “Let’s get them playing defense for a change. See how they feel.”

There was a chorus of murmurs all around. Ridlin said nothing. He could easily quash this train of thought with a word or
a look. He didn’t.

“So what do we do?” Sidney asked, to no one in particular.

“We sit down and we plan it out, every step,” I said. “I think the first thing we do is shake them off our trail, go somewhere
they wouldn’t think to look.”

“Quite,” Sidney said. “But where?”

We all thought for a minute, until Paul spoke up.

“No one looks in a dead woman’s unmarked grave.”

We locked eyes. I think I even grinned.

“To Wisconsin,” I said.

“Now just hold on,” said Ridlin. “If he saw the, uh, presence here, and held off because of that, he’ll maintain his perimeter
and try to pick up the trail on the way out, evading the surveillance.”

“Like, what the fuck does
that
mean?” Akiko asked.

“He’ll be looking to ditch the cops and follow us when we leave,” I translated.

“No problem,” Paul said. “I know a back way. No one will know we’re gone.”

“A back way?” I grinned. “More complicated than the way we came in?”

He smiled and arched his eyebrows. This I had to see.