Trip Wire (16 page)

It was an ugly story. I figured any explanation was going to be ugly. But this was the worst.

“How did you find out about August 4? And where does Wilt come in?” I said. “How’d you know he was a member of August 4?”

“He wasn’t.”

“What?”

“Not a real member, I mean. I came home one day, before you moved in. Wilt had a black guy up here. They were talking in his room. I didn’t know who he was, but I heard Wilt call him Alvin. After the guy left I saw some papers and a pamphlet that told about the so-called mission August 4 was on. I tried to get Wilton to talk about it, but he wouldn’t. And I never saw the guy again.

“I followed Wilton all over the city sometimes. But I could never catch him with Flowers. I guess Flowers had gone underground. You were living here by then.

“That weekend we went up to the farm, when Mia was doing all her cooking, she and Wilt thought they were alone in the house one afternoon. But I heard them talking. He told her everything. He said he wanted to join Alvin in the radical work he was doing, but he didn’t feel like he was enough of a man to kill anybody, even a racist bastard. So he was helping August 4 in the only way he could. He was letting them use his parents’ property and he was giving them money.”

“Money he took from his father.”

“Yes. Wilton said he’d found out his father had money hidden all over the property, a fortune. And he’d learned the money was dirty.”

“Dirty how?”

“I don’t know. But he said he was going to take it away from his old man and use it for something the old man would hate. He was going to make a fool of him. It would be poetic justice. He laughed about it.”

Yeah, he did laugh.

“What else did you hear, Cliff?”

“That Alvin Flowers knew how hot he was. The feds were looking for him, the Chicago pigs, too. He was holed up in an apartment somewhere, and he and his men were going to be splitting soon. That’s when I knew; if I was going to catch him, kill him, I didn’t have long to do it.”

“So. That day,” I said. “The day you murdered them.”

“I didn’t exactly have it planned. But the time just seemed right. We all ate lunch together. Dan was out. Barry came and went real fast. You split to go see Nat. I told Wilt and Mia I was taking Jordan out sledding.

“Mia had a class. That herbalist course that she went to. I knew it lasted two hours. I sat in the window at Jordan’s place, watched Mia leave the building. I knew Wilton was alone. I went back to the building and up to the vacant apartment. Then I called him up there. Just to look at the space, I said.”

“He was kind of surprised when you tied him up and started slashing his throat, I imagine.”

He looked away from me.

“Didn’t he fight you at first? What? Did you have a gun?”

He nodded. “It was the one he got for protection. But he promised Mia he’d get rid of it. He never did, though. He gave it to me to hide for him.”

So Wilt also had a little taste of poetic justice before he died.

“How could you do it, Cliff? How’d you get yourself to kill him? He was our friend.”

He began to weep again. “I know that. I know that. I just wanted him to tell me where Alvin Flowers was. I had to make him tell me.”

“He wouldn’t, though.”

“No.”

“And then it fell apart even more, right? When Mia came back unexpectedly.”

“Yes. I don’t know what happened. Maybe she forgot something. Maybe the class was canceled. But she walked in on it, started screaming. I had to shut her up. Before I knew what was happening, she was dead.”

“So then you had no choice. You had to go through with it and kill Wilton.”

“That’s right. I had to.”

I heard the insistent rapping at the front door then.

“Beat it, Jordan!” Cliff screamed. “Go home like I told you.”

“Cassandra? You okay in there?”

It was Sim.

Cliff was faster than I. He snatched a chef’s knife from the drainboard and then grabbed me up. “Don’t touch that door, Sandy.”

“Why? You afraid of what he’ll do to you?”

“I don’t give a shit about that. I hope he kills me.”

“I hope he does too,” I said. It just came out of my mouth automatically. A second later, I knew I didn’t mean it. “Let’s end this now, Cliff,” I said. “I’m letting Sim in here. And you’re not going to do anything to stop me. Or are you? Are you going to hurt me, Cliff? Cut me up like you did them? What was all that shit about loving me and taking care of me and brown babies? All bullshit, right?”

“It wasn’t, it wasn’t. I never bullshitted with you. Don’t you think I realized we didn’t have long? I just wanted to be with you for a while. I wanted to show you, even if Wilt didn’t see you for who you are, I did. Even if he didn’t love you . . . I did.”

Sim was pummeling the door now, kicking at it, grunting. Cliff made a crazed rush forward and threw it open.

But Sim was no longer there. Uncle Woody was. His camel hair coat parted like a theater curtain on the black heft of a sawed-off shotgun, which was leveled at Cliff’s heart.

Cliff gave me one last backward glance, and then raised the knife and stepped toward Woody, delivering himself.

The blast took Cliff’s arm off at the shoulder.

I dropped right where I was. Just fell on my ass, screaming out his name.

Once again, I had a friend’s blood on my shoes. Only this time I could take no refuge in memories from happier times in the past. Nothing existed now but the present moment.

CHAPTER TEN

VALENTINE’S DAY, 1969

Spirit-killing cold in Chicago. But I was warm enough. Ivy had given me a sheepskin coat for Christmas. Some Christmas it had been: Ivy, Woody, and me around that underdecorated tree, a tar baby angel watching o’er us as we opened presents in our bathrobes. I’d never been happier to see the holidays come and go.

I held on to Owen’s arm as we made our way along Clark Street. We were still friends, thank God. Maybe even closer than we used to be. But somehow we didn’t feel the need to talk as much as we used to when we were together.

Owen’s coat, I kept telling him, really wasn’t warm enough for Chicago winter. He didn’t seem to care that much. He wasn’t even wearing a hat. I guess the whiskey kept him warm, and besides that, he was always happy when he saw old Mae West movies. That’s how we’d spent Valentine’s Day, seeing the double feature at the Clark. I had no sweetheart and neither did he, so why not?

The commune murders and the August 4 debacle were still very much with me. A couple of pieces of the puzzle were still missing, and might remain that way forever.

I knew, for example, that the man who’d tied me up in the apartment had been Paul Yancy, the white member of August 4. He’d posed as a cop, taken the bomb shelter key. More than likely he was the one who drilled into Oscar Mobley’s safe and took all that money. But had Wilt promised that fortune to August 4, or had he had other plans for it? And was Yancy planning to turn it over to the remaining members of August 4? Or did he get greedy and decide to keep it for himself?

I spent a lot of time thinking about that money. Dirty money, Cliff said. How did it get so dirty? What was the prestigious Oscar Mobley doing that nobody but Wilton knew about? I couldn’t cast him in the role of a Mafia hit man or a sleazy blackmailer. But as one of the high-placed citizens above reproach who took bucks from a man like Henry Waddell? As Waddell himself had told me, anything was possible.

Last, Cliff died before I got to ask him something: If Wilton never cracked under torture, never told him where Alvin Flowers’s apartment was, how did Cliff track Alvin down and kill him? My best guess is that he didn’t.

I think the murder of Alvin Flowers was the one killing the cops really did commit. Just as Taylor had said. Maybe his article would be published and blow the lid off the whole filthy cover-up. Maybe. More likely, though, it would be seen as more left-wing conspiracy paranoia.

One thing involved no guesswork at all. I knew it for a fact and I had never wavered from it: Wilton wasn’t killed because he sold out Alvin Flowers. I now realized he was killed because he refused to sell him out.

Turnabouts. There was no end to them.

I live alone now and that’s kind of okay. I don’t mean literally alone. I’m back at Woody and Ivy’s place. But I have my own little universe there. My room, my radio, my books. I miss hearing laughter down the hall, passing a J back and forth, sitting down to meals with a crowd of pretty young people, striding on the street in formation with them, the mean north wind whipping hair into our eyes.

“Did you hear me, Cassandra?” Owen asked.

“No, sorry. I was somewhere else for a minute there.”

“I said, What are you smiling about?”

“Something that happened once. A bunch of us from the commune were on the street one day. This stoned-out young girl comes running up to us. She’s smiling like the Maharishi and her eyeballs are these whirling little pinballs. Anyway, she looks at us and says, ‘Oh, wow, man! You guys! You guys are
beautiful,
you know? You look like the Mod Squad.’ ”

“The what?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Owen. The TV series.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway, we start cracking up, right?”

“Why?”

“Because the kids in the Mod Squad are undercover cops. This spaced-out little hippie chick thinks we’re beautiful ’cause we look like the pigs.”

He tried gamely to share in the joke, but clearly it meant nothing to him.

In another minute, he asked, “Should we go right up here to Wells Street for a drink? Or should we walk back to my quarter and go to Otto’s, where the stout is better? Don’t you think?”

I took his raw, reddened hand and shoved it in his coat pocket. “Owen,” I said, “you’re the teacher.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I have exercised the author’s privilege of intermixing fact and fiction. Some locales in Chicago—head shops, restaurants, book-stores, and so on—have been given slightly different names. Occasionally I have fudged the geography of some South Side and North Side locations. And Forest Street, where Cassandra lived as a child, is wholly imaginary.

About the Author

C
HARLOTTE
C
ARTER
has worked as an editor and as a teacher. She is the author of the Nanette Hayes mystery series (Warner/Mysterious Press) and the novel
Walking Bones
(Serpent’s Tail). She is a longtime fan of mystery fiction and film noir. She lives in New York City.

Also by Charlotte Carter

Jackson Park

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Strivers Row/One World Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte Carter

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Strivers Row/One World, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Ballantine, One World, Strivers Row, and colophon are registered trademarks, and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

One World Books website address:
www.oneworldbooks.net

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, Charlotte (Charlotte C.)

Trip wire: a Cook County mystery / by Charlotte Carter.

p. cm.

Sequel to: Jackson Park.

1. Lincoln Park (Chicago, Ill.)—Fiction. 2. African American men—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Interracial dating—Fiction. 4. Women detectives—Fiction. 5. Communal living—Fiction. 6. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.A7736L56 2005

813′.54—dc22 2004052092

eISBN: 978-0-345-48200-6

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