“Now you’re getting the drift, Willow.” Curtin nudged Jim. He said, “Hey, Jim, Willow’s getting the drift!”
Jim nodded. “That’s nice. For a few minutes there, I was beginning to think that Willow was never going to get the drift.”
Curtin turned back to Willow. “You see, Willow, all we’re looking for is a place to start. It’s like that old saying.”
“What old saying—‘Never trust a fucking flatfoot’?”
“Naw—‘Tall oaks from little acorns grow.’”
Willow leaned back on his barstool, bathed in the splendor of his new light. He clamped his cigarette in a corner of his mouth. He smiled. He said, “Speaking of tall oaks, how would you like to go piss up a short stump?”
Curtin’s eyes bulged to roll like those of a mortally wounded Brahma bull. He leaned toward Willow. He hissed, “What the fuck did you just say, you horseshit, three-for-a-nickel, fourth-rate grifter sonofabitch?”
Willow said, “Perhaps the gist of it was beyond your limited comprehension, so I will clarify. The gist of it is as follows—up your ass, Curtin, and up your partner’s ass; up your grandmother’s ass, and up your great-grandmother’s ass. Up your—”
Curtin roared, “That’ll do it, you prick!” He had Willow by the arm. “All right, asshole, we’re going downtown!”
Willow smiled affably. “Sure thing!” He waved to Raponi. “Tell Florence that I’ve been arrested—tell her to hold everything in abeyance.”
Raponi nodded, pop-eyed.
Willow walked out, flanked by the two plainclothes policemen, looking at Florence Gambrello and shrugging his helpless regrets. Florence stared puzzledly, then left her table to head for Nick Raponi at the bar.
In the darkness of the parking lot, Willow stopped to hook a heel over a bumper of Buck Curtin’s black Ford sedan. He said, “All right, Brumshaw had a redhead in Franklin Park and a brunette in Park Ridge, both ex-models from his agency, both married—getting a little hefty, he said—available nine to three, seventy-five bucks, or a hundred if they travel, one hour, anything goes, but the brunette won’t greek. He sold a package to potentials, phone numbers and a code phrase that cracked the ice. He got twenty-five for it, and the girls were kicking back—probably half, I’d imagine—”
Forty-five minutes later Willow pulled into the parking lot of the Roviana Motel on Foster Avenue. He’d kept the key to Room 18—Willow always kept motel-room keys, sometimes they came in handy. The bed hadn’t been made up and he’d be good until noon. He locked the door, jammed the back of a chair under its knob, took a shower, hit the sack, and stretched luxuriously, his great white light slowly dimming to extinguish itself in the sweet shadows of sleep. He never saw it again.
24
Saturday
Tuthill Clinton Willow was forty-nine years of age. He was six feet one inch tall, he weighed one hundred ninety-five pounds, he was brown haired, brown eyed, getting soft in the belly, a bit broad in the beam, and he’d been through the running gears of hard luck, as they say somewhere. All of it hadn’t been ill fortune, of course; it hardly ever is. A hefty slice of it had been directly attributable to poor judgment. Willow lived his life from day to day, never concentrating on the future, because he’d never been thoroughly convinced that the future would ever arrive, and so it was that had it been raining pussies, a stiff dick would have struck him squarely in the mouth, as they say somewhere else, Kentucky, possibly. He’d developed an absolutely uncanny knack for locating the wrong place, and he had a pronounced tendency to linger there until the inopportune moment came along. He’d served as a rifleman with an infantry regiment during the Korean Emergency, or whatever it was. He’d been shot in the left leg by a Chinese sniper, he’d been awarded a Silver Star for reasons that he didn’t understand, and he’d damned near frozen to death for reasons that he did. He’d been married to a lumpy-thighed, buck-toothed creature, which was why he’d volunteered for Korea, and he’d spent nearly thirty years trying to forget about both. Following discharge and divorce he’d fallen into a ragtag, footloose way of life, driving an old Dodge dump truck for a landscaping firm in the summer and collecting state unemployment during the winter months while working on the side, cash on the barrelhead, for a faltering North Side private investigations agency, these services amounting to trailing philandering husbands to seedy motels and waiting in the cold until they emerged. When both shaky enterprises had folded, Willow had found himself unemployed and virtually unskilled. Private investigator licenses were considerably cheaper than dump trucks so he’d opted in favor of the former. He’d hit a couple of small jackpots in the early going but the bulk of his action had been in the booming divorce field. Three-quarters of Chicago’s married women were in bed with all of its men, married or otherwise, and Willow had done reasonably well. He had no office and his overhead amounted to ten dollars’ worth of business cards and a small advertisement in the Yellow Pages. He huddled with prospective clients at residences, in taverns, on park benches and street corners, getting as large an advance as he could wangle and turning in an honest day’s work when he found a day’s work to turn in. In the course of his twenty-five-year investigative career he’d been knocked down by a Fullerton Avenue bus, he’d fallen down at least one elevator shaft, his nose had been busted four times, he’d been knifed in the shoulder, kicked in the groin, bitten by innumerable dogs, scratched by as many cats, attacked by an irate pet alligator, shot at, spat upon, and cussed out, but with these had come comparative freedom from the workaday grind, and the fringe benefits had been numerous—usually married, fortyish, bored, and cooperative to the extreme.
Willow was the easygoing, play-it-as-it-lies sort, rarely belligerent and never temperamental. He smoked too much, drank too much, ate too little, and slept too late. He was a Chicagoan, born and raised—therefore skeptical, closemouthed, wary eyed, and quick on his feet. If Will Rogers had never met a man he didn’t like, Willow had experienced the same difficulty with women. He’d encountered a few who’d puzzled him and several who’d terrified him, but by and large, he’d liked them, giving each the benefit of the doubt—a practice somewhat on the order of raising weasels in your white-leghorn coop. All factors considered, it was readily apparent that Willow’s future was a doubtful thing, but it could not be denied that he’d enjoyed a truly magnificent past, which, in Willow’s opinion, was better than nothing, if not much.
Of the women in his life, and there’d been dozens, four or five had impressed Willow extra-favorably, but only Gladys Hornsby had rattled his back teeth. He hadn’t overrated Gladys, he’d always recognized her for what she was—a scheming little minx. She didn’t have a moral to her name and she wouldn’t have known an ethic from a peck of cranberries, but there was an intriguing openness of character about her. She hadn’t attempted to mask her Satan-take-the-hindmost outlook, and she’d never denied that she’d do just about any damned thing for money or pleasure, preferably both. The fact that she was the most scrumptious thing he’d ever laid eyes on and by far the most accomplished in bed had borne scant influence—it was her spontaneity that had captivated him, her ability to sweep the future aside so that she might better enjoy the now, the right now. Eight years ago he’d lost her to a Mexican marimba player, and he’d lose her this time—Gladys could be leased but she’d never be owned, she was a savage at heart, untamed, and Willow knew this streak and admired it, much as a broncbuster admires the unbustable bronc. For the better part of a year he’d slept with her three nights in four, but he hadn’t lived with her, and the dew had clung to their rose. He appreciated the hell out of her, and if that wasn’t love, it was as close to it as Willow cared to get. It had been a purely chemical thing from the start, they’d struck booming chords, awesome in their simplicities, the most powerful of these harmonies having been their mutual tendency to live for the moment at hand. They were friends, they liked each other, in or out of bed, and because they were friends Willow would have gone to hell in a suitcase for her,
and this was why he was on the prowl for Sister Rosetta, the fly most likely to crash-land smackdab in the middle of Gladys Hornsby’s carefully concocted soup. Something had to be done about the screwloose ex-nun, and Willow didn’t have the slightest idea what that something might be, but one thing was certain—her Heffernan-Reese .38 pistol had to be jerked out of circulation pronto.
At eleven-thirty that morning he left the Roviana Motel to have a cheeseburger and a cup of black coffee at a greasy-window hash house on Kimball Avenue. Two hours later he sat at Raponi’s bar with nothing but sweat, thirst, and sore feet to show for his efforts. Sister Rosetta had pulled a vanishing act. He’d been tempted to pop her apartment door lock, and he’d have done it if Gladys hadn’t assured him that the Heffernan-Reese was not to be found on the premises. An outraged Florence Gambrello towered behind Willow, breathing raggedly on his neck. She said, “I called every damned police station in the city of Chicago and nobody knew nothing about it!”
Willow said, “That was because the cops were from Bensenville.”
“But Bensenville ain’t in Cook County—Bensenville’s in DuPage County!”
“Makes no difference, DuPage County holds jurisdiction in cases of this nature.”
“Cases of what nature?”
“It was an old parking-ticket rap.”
“They drove clear the hell in here to pinch you for a goddamn parking ticket?”
“DuPage is rough on parking tickets. They got a new sheriff or something.”
“God, what a night Florence spent without you! She was going up in flames and you had her fire extinguisher!”
“No great loss. The damned thing wasn’t charged, anyway.”
“Well, just you don’t fret, borchia. We’ll make up for lost time tonight!”
Willow shuddered. “I daresay.”
“The very moment you come in, Florence asked Nick if she could get off a couple hours early!” She nudged him with an elbow. Getting nudged by Florence Gambrello’s elbow was like getting nudged by a pile driver. She said, “That’s so’s we can get a running start.”
The idea of a running start held great appeal for Willow—a running start for Finland. Sweat splashed into his eyes. “What’d Nick say?”
“Nick said okay.”
“Good old Nick.”
He went home at seven-thirty after stopping at Harry Palokous’ Athens Café for an order of snapper and a vanilla milkshake laced with half-a-dozen eggs. He was slightly acquainted with his waitress, a peppery little forty-year-old brunette named Judy. Judy brought his milkshake and poured it with a flourish. She winked at him. She said, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
Willow said, “Up your Rhode Island Red.”
25
Sunday
Chicago’s calendar is like a Greek restaurant menu—three hundred and sixty-five entrees, fifteen of them palatable. The average Chicago day is too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too damned something-or-other, but early October serves sapphire symphonies, crisp, clear, sparkling blue, garnished with the unforgettable scent of burning leaves, and this was October’s third Sunday. All good times must end and October’s bright blue weather is no exception to that rule. In the southwestern distances, out in the vicinity of Geneva, ominous drums of thunder muttered, and a towering wall of evil-looking billowing black clouds rode a suddenly chill breeze toward the big city. In another hour, hour and a half, there’d be rain and plenty of it. Hunched in his battered Buick Regal, Willow didn’t give a damn. Another couple of miles and let ’er rip—he had nothing going, nothing but collaring the elusive Sister Rosetta and relieving her of that accursed Heffernan-Reese .38 before she blew a hole in somebody, possibly herself.
He eased his aging vehicle to a creaking halt at the Harlem and Gunnison traffic light, close behind a shiny dark blue Lincoln Continental four-door sedan with a large gold decal in the lower right-hand corner of its rear window: a Bible and a cross, encircled by the words JESUS IS ALL THE WORLD TO ME—MY LIFE, MY JOY, MY ALL! Willow’s gaze dropped to the Continental’s bumper sticker HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS! He considered the invitation. All right, why the hell not? He clamped down on the horn button. At the wheel of the Lincoln a porky, gray-haired lady lofted both hands to the roof, levitated, gravitated, and bounced. She threw open her door, poked her head into the October morning, glared at Willow, and screeched, “Blow it out your stupid ass, jackoff!”
Willow shook his head. This could very well turn out to be another of those days. Well, a few Kennessy’s Light Lagers might serve to ease his melancholy, but what the Kennessy’s wouldn’t ease was the persistent dull, throbbing ache in the depths of his groin area. Florence Gambrello had checked in shortly after nine o ’clock on the previous evening, amorous to her considerable utmost. Florence was a large woman, that would have been obvious to the most casual observer, but Willow wasn’t a casual observer, and every time he beheld Florence in her unshackled altogether, he became intimidated in the fashion of a PT boat skipper making a ran at the Yamato with those 18.1-inch guns looking him in the eye. Florence’s breasts were larger than Willow’s buttocks, great, heaving, perspiring, talcum-powdered things with nipples the size of Dunlop Maxifli golf balls, and her belly protruded like a twenty-five-gallon crock of pickled pigs’ feet. She’d reached for him the way a grizzly bear reaches for a bucket of honey, crashing him to her awesome bosom with muscular stovepipe arms to begin bucking and lunging in a great number of directions, every one of them unpredictable, and it had been a great deal like attempting to insert a dime into the slot of an 8.5-Richter Scale earthquake. Then later, when festivities had been progressing in slightly more favorable fashion, she’d taken to pitching and yawing like a Gulfport shrimp boat in a hurricane, and they’d plunged out of bed like an Afghanistanian avalanche with Florence on top of him and her knee booming into his crotch like a Sherman tank into a one-hole outhouse. At that moment things had gone very, very dim for Willow. With his return to consciousness had come cognizance of his unenviable situation—he’d found himself gasping for air like a trained seal when the circus tent collapses, Florence draped all over him, huffing and puffing and grinding and thumping like a derailed Mikado steam locomotive, but somehow he’d caught his breath, gritted his teeth, and lasted until the end of the mismatch.
In her first-floor bedroom, old Martha Strotman had listened to the banging and the crashing, to Florence Gambrello’s wailing and moaning, and Martha had writhed on her bed, twitching and salivating, her tortured mind galloping a gauntlet of ten thousand unspeakable sexual aberrations, flirting once more with those temptations dominating her lonely nights, and all nights were lonely for Martha Strotman.
At eleven-fifty Willow wheeled past Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House at better than fifty miles per hour, his head down, his hat tugged low over his eyes. He whipped the Buick through a red traffic signal to drive two blocks south on North Austin Boulevard, and moments later he parked to the rear of Millie and Jake’s Watering Hole to enter through the back door. It was a second-rate shot-and-beer joint, its bar splintered, its roof leaking, its floor sagging, its clientele down on its luck; Millie was a shrill old chicken hawk, poor Jake’s memory was all but gone, and Willow had never patronized the place on a steady basis, but now it offered sanctuary from Florence Gambrello. There comes a time when youth’s reckless abandon ebbs, when a sense of self-preservation prevails, and for Tuthill Willow that time was at hand.
26
Sunday
Jake served Willow’s fifth Kennessy’s Light Lager, and Willow’s eyes flicked from the Chicago Bears’ football game on the television screen to the faded pictures on the cracked walls, seeing the interior of Millie and Jake’s Watering Hole far more clearly than he’d seen it on the previous Thursday evening. There was a painting of Gabby Hartnett’s 1938 twilight home run against Pittsburgh, and a black-and-white photograph of Native Dancer running away with the 1953 Arlington Classic, and one of Rocky Graziano and Tony Zale beating each other’s brains
out back in the forties. Jake claimed that he’d witnessed these events and Willow doubted this very much. He said, “Hey, Jake, tell me something, will you?”
Jake said, “Sure, Marty, shoot.”
“Make it ‘Tut,’ if you will, Jake.”
“Yeah, okay, Tut—sorry.”
Willow said, “Uhh-h-h, all these Christmas decorations—were they for last Christmas, or are they for next Christmas?”
Jake scratched a grizzled jowl. “Well, Fred, seeing as how it’s August, they’re—”
“It’s ‘Tut’ and it’s October, Jake.”
“Anyway, they’re probably for next Christmas—back in March they was probably for last Christmas.”
“You never take ’em down?”
“Naw, Leon, why should we take ’em down? If we took ’em down, we’d only have to turn around and put ’em back up again. They call it logic, Sam.”
Willow nodded complete comprehension of that which he completely failed to comprehend, and Jake said, “Hey, I been meaning to tell you—there was a telephone call for somebody, and it could of been you.”
“Tut Willow?”
“That might of been it—Tut Willow.”
“When?”
“When you was in the washroom.”
“But that was thirty-five minutes ago.”
“It don’t seem that long.”
“Had to be. During my first five beers I go to the can every thirty-five minutes. After the sixth it’s every twenty minutes. This is my fifth and I’m on my way, which makes that telephone call thirty-five minutes ago, give or take. They call it research, Jake.”
Jake said, “I’ll be damned! Well, anyway, I forgot about the call.”
“Who was it?”
“Just a guy who wanted to know if somebody was in here and I told him yeah, he was in here.”
Death Wore Gloves Page 11
