They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee (13 page)

“You really are someplace else tonight, aren't you?” There was that concern in her voice again.

“Yes.” I pecked her on the cheek.

She walked out the door. When it swung shut, MacClough's reflection was gone. It was time to go speak with the man himself.

He wasn't in my room. I walked up to his. As I walked in, he handed me a cold bottle of my favorite ale. I took half the bottle in a gulp, but could not make my eyes meet his. He was easier to deal with as a reflection, when I could see him and see through him all at once.

“How was skiing?”

He said he hadn't done much of it. He had done a lot of hanging out at the bar, walking the grounds, bullshitting with the help. That was John in his glory. If you spent ten minutes with him over a beer, you'd understand why he had been so good at getting confessions out of suspects. I suppose he saved the rolled-up newspaper for special cases.

“Markum worked there, all right,” MacClough said. “Two years. He was a jack-of-all-trades. He worked on the lifts some, waited tables, but mostly parked cars. Wanna guess when he got fired?”

My head was spinning. “No.”

“The day after Valencia Jones was arrested. You think somebody was a little pissed at him for planting the Isotope on the wrong car?”

“I guess,” I said. “But he's been floating around loose for a year. Why kill him now?”

“From what I found out about Markum, no one was gonna beat down his door with job offers. Maybe he figured with the trial coming up he could put the squeeze on his old bosses for a little hush money. Getting killed is a kinda tough way to learn that blackmail isn't so easy as they make it on the tube.”

“Anything else? Anything about Zak?”

“Nothing about your nephew. Sorry. But there were a few buildings up there I'd like to get into to have a look-see.” He turned the tables: “And you, what'd you do? Did you get the test results?”

I explained that I hadn't, that I had other things on my mind.

“Other things!” He was incredulous. “You're waiting for the results of a fucking AIDS test, what else could you have on your mind?”

“Don't ask the question unless you're prepared to hear the answer,” I paraphrased Larry Feld's earlier admonition.

He let that go without a word, pressing me about my day. Omitting my call to Feld and my two side trips to the public library, I laid it out for him. I told him about the coffee house and my visitation by the mythical Guppy. I related our conversation as close to verbatim as I could manage without a transcript. MacClough was keen to know what I thought it meant.

“At first, at the coffee house, I didn't think it meant anything,” I said. “Just another interested party weighing in with well wishes and vague hints of this or that. But as I went over it in my head, it seemed to me he was delivering some kind of coded message. I don't know.”

“You think he knows something?”

“It was weird, John. It was as if he wanted me to know he was delivering a message, but not to realize it until after he had gone. And his demeanor was so calm, unworried, like he wanted to reassure me. But if he knows something, why didn't he come right out and say it?”

“Maybe,” MacClough suggested, “you didn't meet Guppy at all.”

“But I did.”

“How do you know? Come on, Klein, use that
yiddisha kop
God gave you,” he said with a perfect accent, slapping my forehead. “How do you know what Guppy looks like? Interesting, isn't it? You walk around campus all morning asking about Guppy, but no one knows who he is or where he lives or how to reach him. Then, bang! Three hours later, Guppy serves himself up to you on a silver platter. All you know is that you had a weird conversation with a guy named Rajiv Gupta and you can't even be sure of that.”

“Guppy the red herring. Great title for a children's book, you think?”

“If they could put the girl next to you, they could just as easily dig up a clown to talk some shit to you, confuse you, throw you off the scent.”

“About the girl . . .” I was almost glad MacClough had broached the subject. “I don't think I can play my part much longer. And tonight, when you saw us down in the lobby, I think she might have suspected something was different.”

“I know it's hard when you're that angry at someone,” he empathized.

I laughed at him for that. “It's not the anger that makes it hard, John. It's the lack of it.”

“She's that convincing, that good?”

“She's better. She's opaque. When I kiss her, when I look into her eyes, I can't believe she's acting. God, I'll be glad to be away from this place.”

“Okay, one more performance.” MacClough rubbed my shoulder. “We'll feed her a little misinformation to take back to her masters. Two can play these games.”

“You would know, wouldn't you, John? You and my brother Jeff.”

“And what's that supposed to mean?”

I did not want to believe the words that next came out of my mouth:

“You killed Hernandez and Jeff helped you cover it up.”

“No, Klein, that's what you think you know.”

“It's what I know!”

“Who told you so?” he sneered.

“You did, John.”

I reached under my coat and produced the copy of
Coney Island Burning
I had stolen from the public library on my way back to the Old Watermill. I handed the book to MacClough.

It was his turn to laugh. “If it was that simple, I wouldn't hate myself so much.”

“Then explain it to me. Make me understand.”

“You'll understand soon enough,” he repeated the words he had said to me at the rest stop.

Soon enough could not come soon enough for me.

Ids

He left a note for me. He had to get back downstate to take care of some personal business and to check on the Rusty Scupper. I did not pretend to myself that I wasn't relieved. He wrote that he had stayed up all night doing the reading I had suggested. He had nothing to say on the subject of my brother or of their mutual involvement with Boatswain-Hernandez. Parroting my review in
Publishers Weekly,
however, MacClough commented that he found
Coney Island Burning
a captivating character study featuring crisp, staccato dialogue, but that the plot was rather too arcane and my attempt to bridge the gap between the hard-boiled genre and today's suspense thriller was only sporadically successful. I marveled at the man. I marveled at his ability to remember that review and how it had seemed to hurt him more than me. I marveled at his ability to hang onto his sense of humor. I was not at all certain that I would be able to.

I had met killers before; some on my own, some with Johnny's help. I had shared food and drinks with, told dirty jokes to, and played poker with murderers. I had even listened to some describe with cold precision every detail of their crimes. Had it bothered me? Yeah, I guess, a little, but their crimes were as remote to me as the crimes I wrote about in my fiction. The killers themselves were two-dimensional cartoon characters; evil somehow, but unreal.

Well, I was a hypocrite, because it was different with MacClough. None of those other men were my best friend. John was. None had risked his life to save mine. John had. I barely remembered those mens' faces. I knew John's face better than my own. He was as close to me as a brother. No, closer. We understood one another better than brothers do. I used to think so. I wasn't quite as sure now. Maybe it was a measure of the world's unending barrage of cruelty that murder only mattered when it hit close to home. More likely, it was a measure of my own weakness. If what I thought was true, that John had killed Hernandez in cold blood, I knew I would never be able to look at him in the same way again. And I would have two men to mourn after this mess was over.

It was with this black heart that I set out for breakfast.

The coffee shop was crowded with students and I had to wait about ten minutes to be seated. I used the down time to thumb through the
Gazette.
Steven Markum was already old news. Mention of his “accidental” death was nowhere to be found. The Valencia Jones trial, on the other hand, remained a hot topic. The headline at the top of the third page let me know that Ms. Jones and her lawyer had taken our advice to heart:

JONES FALLS ILL—TRIAL ON HOLD

The article went on to explain that the judge agreed to interrupt the trial to allow Ms. Jones sufficient time to recover from what a leery prosecutor, Robert W. Smart termed: “Her sudden and convenient ailment.” The trial judge also noted that the time off would allow him to deal with the flurry of motions Ms. Jones' attorney had filed in recent days. It was clear from the story that neither judge nor prosecutor was very pleased with these obvious delaying tactics. And, though neither stated it for the record, it was equally clear that Valencia Jones would pay a price for stalling. I hoped we would be able to make it worth the gamble.

By the time I had finished off a pot of coffee and one cholesterol special—two scrambled eggs, cheese and bacon on a buttered roll—the place had cleared out. My waitress was the chatty woman who had gossiped about the death up at Cyclone Ridge to Kira and me. She hadn't been so talkative this morning; not enough blood in the morning paper to suit her purposes. But I was as wrong about her as I was about most everything else.

“Where's your girlfriend, honey?” she asked me right out. And when I hesitated, she prompted: “You know, that cute oriental number you was in with the other morning?”

“She's not my girlfriend,” was the best I could manage.

“Too bad.”

“How's that?”

“Well, she's in here a lot, usually solo.” The gossip shook her head in dismay. “And the few times I seen her in here with a fella, it's most a the time some dorky college kid. It's a pity, a cute girl like that.”

“She's a regular?” I wondered.

“Twice a week since her freshman year.”

Freshman year, my ass. I bit my lip not to say it. Kira probably came into the coffee shop after hard nights turning tricks on campus for a little mad money. And for an extra twenty bucks, she'd let you take her to breakfast. I felt the corners of my mouth curl into a nasty smile.

When my eyes refocused on the waitress, she was staring hard at me.

“Something the matter?”

Wagging her finger at me: “You look real familiar to me. I thought so the other day, too, but I couldn't place you. Where the hell do I know you from?”

“Read any detective novels?”

“Never. I'm a Harlequin romance gal myself.”

“Go to Brooklyn College?”

“Honey, the closest I ever want to get to Brooklyn is watching reruns of
Welcome Back Kotter
on TV.”

“You ever get down to Long—”

“That's it!” she snapped her fingers. “You look just like one of the boys that oriental girl used to come in here with. You his father?”

I shut the busybody out before she finished her question. What she said about the boy who looked like me didn't make any sense, if that boy was Zak. Even if Kira really did turn tricks on campus, her new employers would never have risked using her to get close to me; too many variables. They could never be sure Zak hadn't discussed her with me over a beer or in the locker room. A kid might not talk to his father about going to a hooker, but you couldn't be sure he wouldn't tell a favorite uncle. And if they were willing to wager Zak hadn't told me, they couldn't take the chance of some other customer recognizing her as she walked around Riversborough at my side.

“This the boy?” I showed her my wallet photo of Zak.

“That's him. Sorry about that dorky college boy crack.”

“It's forgotten. Listen, this girl we're talking about, you ever catch her name?”

She was staring at me again. Why would I have to ask the name of someone I obviously knew?

“I know it's a weird question, but humor me, please?”

“Well, mister, I ain't the nosy type,” she said with a straight face.

“Oh, believe me, I know you're not. It's just that I worked as a waiter myself for a while and I overheard things I wasn't trying to eavesdrop on. Come on . . . Sandra,” I read her name tag. “As a favor to an old waiter, try and remember.”

Sandra screwed up her face for dramatic effect, but I don't imagine she had to search her memory for more than a nanosecond. “Kiwi, Keela, I don't know, foreign sounding like that.”

“Kira?”

“Sounds about right,” she nodded. “Can I get you anything else?”

I waved a fifty-dollar bill under her nose. “Is there a way out of this place other than the front door?”

“Through the kitchen, into an alley that leads to Beethoven Street.”

I handed Sandra the fifty. “Think you can arrange a tour of the kitchen for me?”

“For a handsome man like yourself,” Sandra purred, leering at me in a way she must have thought sexy, “I could arrange almost anything.”

“I might just take you up on that.” I kissed the back of her hand. “But for now, let's see about the back door.”

With the fifty bucks worth of consolation, Sandra disappeared into the kitchen. She reappeared at my table within two minutes. Everything was arranged. I left a five on the table to cover breakfast.

“Listen,” I whispered to her as I stood up, “make like you're pointing the way to the bathroom.” She did. “Great. Some men are going to come in asking about me in a few minutes. Whatever you do, swear to me that you won't tell them I'm going back downstate for a few days.”

“I swear.”

As I trotted down the alleyway towards Beethoven Street, my legs were fueled by hope. Hope wasn't something I was terribly familiar with, but it felt pretty damned fine. Now I needed some time, sans chaperones, to make certain my newfound hope wasn't of the false variety. My exit through the kitchen was a start. And since I figured Sandra the waitress would confess as to my fraudulent travel plans within five minutes, I thought I could count on at least a few hours of unfettered activity.