The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  “Hey, anything you can say to me you can say to Frank. If you’re between jobs or something, don’t worry about it. We’d love to have you back on board, wouldn’t we, Frank?”

  Frank prudently kept his opinion secret.

  I said, “You don’t understand, Dan, this is personal with regard to you.”

  He dropped the pal o’ mine routine like an old shoe. “Oh? Then you’d better say it in front of both of us. Frank is my friend as well as my chief of staff and top adviser. If this is important, as you say it is, I want him to hear it.”

  That wasn’t too surprising, and I had no real objection. I didn’t like Schell much, didn’t like his type, but I had no cause to doubt his competence or integrity. Besides, he’d likely find out sooner or later.

  “Okay, then.” I propped myself on the edge of Mallory’s desk. “It has to do with some pictures, and blackmail.”

  They traded looks. “What sort of pictures?” Schell asked guardedly.

  I was glad he spoke; it meant I could look at him and not Mallory when I said, “Pictures of Adrian. The sort of pictures you could blackmail with.”

  Mallory said brusquely, “Don’t let’s be coy here, okay? I know you can put words together, man, so do it. Spell it out. What sort of pictures are ‘the sort of pictures you could blackmail with’? Is she burning down an orphanage? Running over an old lady? Hanging naked from a chandelier at my opponent’s primary victory party?”

  “Closer to the latter,” I said. I described the pictures.

  Schell said to Mallory, sotto voce, “They’re the same ones.”

  Mallory nodded. “Where’d you pick this up?” he asked me. I was thinking of having the story printed on handbills that I could just pass out at this point to save me the effort of reciting it for the umptieth time. I gave them a quick rundown on Copel’s visit to my house, how that led me to investigate Bell’s disappearance, how that led me to discover that Bell had taken the photos of Adrian. I took it no further than that.

  Mallory nodded more forcefully, as if he and I were doctors and I had just confirmed his diagnosis. He clapped me on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming down and telling us this, Nebraska. Hard thing to do, I know, because it is rather—delicate, eh? But I surely do appreciate it, even if we already knew all about it.”

  “You knew—”

  Schell elaborated. “This is the sort of thing you have to put up with in politics, you must know that. Happens all the time, hum? Some kook comes in threatening to blackmail you or some such fool thing.”

  “This was no idle threat,” I said. “He had the real goods.”

  “We know,” said Mallory. “He showed them to us.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “We showed him the door,” Schell said with satisfaction. “That’s the only way to handle something like this. We booted him right out, told him if he showed his face again we’d have him behind bars so fast it’d make his head swim.”

  I frowned, feeling very stupid. “But the pictures—were they fakes, phonied up somehow?”

  Mallory, who’d been nodding like a toy dog in a car window through Schell’s explanation, cleared his throat and looked a little abashed. “No, I’m afraid they were the genuine article. It was my Adrian, I’m sorry to say. In the altogether.” We got suddenly quiet and the quiet hung on us like the blankets of humidity that hung on the city. Then Mallory said feistily, as if he had been challenged, “Well, after all, she’s entitled to her life. She’s a grown woman now. Almost thirty, though she doesn’t look it. She can do as she pleases. So maybe she has a boyfriend, and the boyfriend has a camera, and they decide to take a few … racy pictures. Maybe you or I wouldn’t go in for that”—he tried to look rakish—“or maybe we would. It doesn’t matter. When she did it I’m sure hurting me was the furthest thing from her mind. I’m sure they were never intended to go beyond her and her boyfriend’s hands. I don’t know how this son of a bitch Eddie Bell got a hold of them, and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Adrian’s business, not mine.”

  It was certainly an enlightened attitude. “Does Adrian know about Bell coming to you? That you know about the pictures?”

  He waved his hands like he was clearing smoke. “No, no, of course not. And she never will, either. If I do say so myself, I’ve become a pretty fair actor since I went to the District, and if I don’t want Adrian to know anything out of the ordinary has gone on, she won’t know. In fact, I just came back from a long late lunch with her and one of her young friends, and let me tell you, neither of those wonderful girls had the slightest inkling that I had anything on my mind besides what to order.” The old boy was facing facts a lot better than his daughter had given him credit for. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t have anything on my mind on that score. It’s a dead issue now.”

  “To a certain extent,” I said. “Eddie Bell, at least, is dead. But those pictures are now hot items of interest for the Mafia.”

  “The Mafia?” said Frank Schell incredulously, putting a little laugh into it so it came out “Ma-ha-fia.” I never found it a particularly amusing word, but it seemed to provoke risibility in a lot of quarters.

  “Okay, ‘organized crime’ if you’re big on euphemism. The point, I think, is that the pictures exist, they are out there, and they can be used against you.”

  Mallory looked at Schell, whose fat face was as expressionless as a cue ball. One with yellow hair. “Well, yes, I suppose they can,” the senator said slowly.

  “So what do you intend to do about it?”

  Schell said, “We’ll do what we do with every crackpot threat: toss them out on their ears, tell them to get permanently lost unless they want more trouble than they ever bargained for.”

  I was beginning to feel I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up at the broken-record festival. “But these guys aren’t crackpots,” I said vehemently. “They’re for real, and so’s their threat.”

  Mallory put his hands on my shoulders, reassuringly. “Aw, come on, don’t you think you’re overexaggerating this just a tad? You know, I am a United States senator; I’m not entirely without resources of my own. Let them throw those pictures in my face. I’ll tell them what they can do with them, and if they don’t follow my suggestion they can be exposed to the cold light of public scrutiny. I have nothing to hide. I have nothing to fear. I have nothing to be ashamed of.” I had the feeling Mallory had given too many Independence Day speeches.

  “And what about Adrian?” I asked.

  “Well—yes, it will be hard, extremely hard on her. Naturally, I hope none of this comes to pass. But if it does—well, it won’t be any cakewalk for me either. And as I said, Adrian’s an adult. That means she has to learn to take the consequences of her actions. But I’m not worried. I know the hardworking people of this state. I’ve served them for going on twenty years, state and national. I know what fair-minded, upright people they are. And I know that it will take more than some silly pictures to make up their minds for them.” I waited for an “And in conclusion let me say,” but it never came.

  I looked at Schell. “Well, we certainly can’t knuckle under to these bastards,” he said, “and we can’t do much of anything until—and unless—they do anything, hum?”

  No, and that’s what I hated about the whole damn matter almost from square one: there wasn’t a blessed thing in creation to do about any of it, and that’s not the way I’m put together.

  Not that there was a hell of a lot I could do about it.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I just thought you should know what you may be up against.” I propelled myself off the edge of the desk, trying to console myself with the thought that Manzetti and Gunnelli might stay deadlocked until after the election, when Mallory would either be in a stronger position to fight any threat or would no longer be in office and therefore a much less tempting blackmail target.


  Schell made a show of consulting his LCD watch. Mallory seemed not to notice, but I saw that he was firmly, if gently, steering me toward the door, pumping my hand like he expected to get water. “Well, thanks, I mean really. It means a lot to me that you still think enough of the old war-horse that you’d come down here, that you’d be so concerned. It really does. And, look, I’m completely serious about you coming back to work here—hell, come with us when we go back to the District. Christ knows we’ve got enough work to go around, and the staff almost never has to go without paychecks anymore—isn’t that right, Frank?”

  “Yessir, senator,” said the fat man, who hadn’t lowered his wristwatch arm. “Now I’m afraid we are running late for your next appointment …”

  Mallory let go my hand and slapped me on the back some more. It was a disgusting habit he’d picked up since the old days, a manifestation of the forced bonhomie I suppose you develop when you have to be on twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know what else I expected, but I was a little miffed that Dan Mallory had become a politician. Still, who of us is as we were ten, twelve years ago? “Well, there you have it, old son,” Mallory was saying. “Hell of a life, eh? You take care of yourself, and thanks again for coming in. Don’t be such a stranger, either. And if you change your mind about that job, you just let me know, okay?”

  “Sure. Where’re you living these days?”

  The laugh at least seemed genuine. “God, I’d forgotten your comebacks. I’d like to put you up against some of these right-wing, neo-fascist cretins—”

  “Senator, we’re very late,” Schell interjected.

  “All right, already. Thanks again, my friend. Take care. You know the way out … ?”

  It was the smoothest bum’s rush I’d ever seen in my life. I toddled out of the office, picked up some literature and was in the lobby waiting for the elevator when Schell caught up to me. He hemmed and hawed a little, apologized in an extremely half-assed fashion for being such a pompous fool earlier, and finally let me bully him into coming to the point: “Well, I know that you’ve known the senator for a long time, and that you wouldn’t’ve come down here if you didn’t care about him, what he’s trying to accomplish in Washington, the projects he’s—”

  “Criminy, Schell, not you too. I used to crank out that drivel; save it for someone who hasn’t heard it. What are you trying to say?”

  He took a breath. Saying what he meant, that was a new one on him. “Okay. I need to know—the senator and I need to know—that we can count on your, um, discretion.”

  I should’ve been insulted, but I wasn’t. “What happened to the cold light of public scrutiny?”

  Schell looked embarrassed. “Yes. Well, the senator’s a man of high convictions, as you know. He does tend to get a little carried away on them.”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry your head about me. I’m out of it as of about now. But that doesn’t mean I’m not concerned for him.”

  Schell tried to force his mouth into a tight line, but the blubber was too much for him. He looked instead like he’d swallowed a tack, and said, “Don’t you worry about Dan Mallory. He’s a scrapper. There’s nothing he wants more than a good hard fight this time around. He wants to show the right wing a thing or three, and he will, too—you can count on it. He’s got the savvy for it, he’s got the stomach for it, and that he’s down a little in the polls only makes him fight that much harder. No, don’t worry about Dan. Nothing’s going to keep him from victory in November.”

  “I have to go now, Frank, my elevator’s here. Besides, I already saw Rocky.” I stepped into the car, but couldn’t leave Schell with that look on his face. Just as the doors closed I said, “Don’t worry, Frank, you’ve got my vote.”

  I’ll never know if that’s what he wanted to hear.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After sitting in the car in the ramp for ten minutes I finally came to the conclusion there was nowhere to go but home. The case—such as it was—was now definitely over for me. I toyed once more with going back to Adrian, but what could I say? What, that is, that wouldn’t just make her life seem bleaker to her than it already did? That Eddie Bell was dead and she’d never have to worry about him again? Sure—and what would I say to her questions about the remaining photographs? That would lead into the Mafia angle, which was an even worse presence than Bell had been. It would also probably necessitate telling her Mallory knew about the pictures—a sentence I wouldn’t even get finished before she flung herself in a swan dive off the building.

  No, there was nothing I could tell her, nothing that would do anything but make her lot worse for her in her own mind. Now, perhaps, she had at least lulled herself into a false and uneasy sense of security. After all, Eddie Bell had left her alone for a couple of weeks; she could begin to pretend it might be forever. She had no way of knowing how far everything had gone since Bell’s disappearance. She might be rudely, brutally, shatteringly snatched from that security of ingorance any day, any hour—but which was worse, having it happen or having to dread it happening, perhaps for weeks, perhaps for months, perhaps forever?

  I started the old car and left the cool garage for the harsh, hot streets.

  The sky was changing colors, going from a whitish blue to a bluish gray. The overcast was still a ways from evolving into anything that looked like a cloud, but there was a certain texture to it in the west that, with the first feeble suggestion of a breeze from that direction, seemed promising and gave me a certain desolate feeling of expectation.

  Magazines, bills and the check I’d been waiting for were in the mailbox. Beer was in the fridge. The landlord had yet to get the busted screens replaced, so the apartment’s atmosphere was like a pressure cooker again. I started to open the patio doors anyway, but noticed the winged insects ganging up outside, looking for a place to get in out of the weather that was coming. I flipped on the fan and made a mental note to let someone know his tribute wasn’t going to be paid until the screens were fixed. Kick ’em where it counts. Such was my mood.

  I drank half a Falstaff, flipped through the mail, got the check ready for deposit. In between long periods of staring off into space.

  For some reason I found myself thinking of Oberon. Poor Ben. I wondered if he had any inkling of the real reason for his superiors’ making him put Copel’s murder on hold, where they and he knew it would be forgotten. Probably he at least suspected it was because a higher authority—namely, Salvatore Gunnelli—was exerting pressure to hush the matter up lest it be traced back to his boy.

  Whoa. Wrong—not his boy; his enemy, his mortal enemy Manzetti. Wouldn’t it have been better to let the investigation proceed, to let OPD trace Copel’s murder to Manzetti, to let Chicago see Manzetti’s name and picture in the news and know that Manzetti was hardly keeping the low profile they desired? I would have thought that Gunnelli would try to engineer something like that, not squelch it. What could he fear from an investigation? That it would link him to Manzetti? If he could see to it that the investigation was canned, he could see to it that the investigation implicated only Manzetti and left himself completely unscathed. Reveal the existence of the photos? That would deprive Gunnelli of the blackmail potential, but he didn’t have that card anyhow.

  No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t get it to make sense. An investigation into Copel’s murder might destroy Manzetti, maybe even Mallory—but wouldn’t harm Gunnelli.

  Not, at least, so’s I could see.

  God, I had a headache.

  I dragged out my notes and manuscript for The Book and gave them the once-over, then moved over to my gleaming Smith-Corona to flesh out the scenes I had sketched earlier. It was tough going at first. Oftentimes I think the hardest part of writing is clearing the front part of your head of all the accumulated clutter—bills and personal problems and what you’re missing on TV—and getting the hell to work. Once you’re over that hurdle, it becomes almost
easy. Assuming, of course, you have something to write. Then later, naturally, you have to do it all backward: bring yourself back up from immersion in the work, forget about the progression of the story line, the problems and nuisances of trying to get the story from your head onto the page, and go back to worrying about money and spouses and social obligations.

  The last dragged me up out of The Book after almost two hours. My head still throbbed but it was a remote pain, as if it were someone else’s. I sleepwalked through the place a few minutes—got a beer, visited the gent’s, looked out the window at the graying day, then dug the phone book out from under the mail.

  I set down the beer and looked up the number of the bar Marcie Bell worked at. She was probably doing marvelously, but etiquette seemed to demand my show of concern.

  A man answered and I asked for Marcie. “She’s not in today. Can I help you?”

  A little nonplussed, I explained that I was a friend of hers. He told me she had had a death in the family or something and so wasn’t coming in today. He suggested I try her at home.

  I did exactly that: I got into my car and drove to the other side of town, to the duplex. It’s amazing I got there without killing anyone or getting killed myself. If you asked me what route I took to get there, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. My mind was totally unconcerned with such nuisances as traffic safety, was instead completely occupied with trying to understand the watery, unfocused images that were fast crystallizing in my head, coalescing like—well, like images on photographic paper. Utterly, inexcusably criminal to be operating a motor vehicle in that state of mind, but I got there, somehow.

  I barreled through the front door and up the stairs to Marcie’s apartment. The door was locked. No sound came from behind it. I rang the bell and knocked. Still nothing. I crashed back downstairs and tried to raise whoever lived in the lower half of the house. No reply there either. That was fine.