Grave Designs

by Michael A. Kahn

  “You look super,” I said.

  Cindi reached back into the bathroom and pulled out an oversize bath towel, which she wrapped around her body, sarong-style.

  Ishmael cleared his throat. “All set?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said, turning to Cindi. “This is the On button?” I asked, pointing to a button on the camera.

  She nodded. “Make sure I’m in the frame before you push it.”

  “What is the script?” Ishmael asked, still seated on the couch, trying to look relaxed.

  “We’ll open with Cindi alone on the bed,” I said, “facing the camera. She’ll talk into the camera, say something about how she’s lonely, and then she’ll say your first name and ask you to join her. That’s when I’ll stop the film.”

  Ishmael frowned. “We want to make sure we bait the hook, correct?” He seemed to perk up.

  I nodded.

  Ishmael said, “Lyndon Johnson once told me that the best way to destroy a man is to catch him in bed with another man or with an animal. I am afraid I must draw the line at animals. After all, I am a trustee of the Lincoln Park Zoo.” He smiled. “However, if we want to guarantee that the hook is properly baited, we should add another man to the bed along with Miss Reynolds.”

  Ten minutes later we were ready to roll. Cindi sat in the middle of the bed, her wrists handcuffed in front of her and one of the spaghetti straps of her teddy off her shoulder, exposing her left breast. She held a second set of handcuffs, the cuffs open, in her left hand. Seated next to her on the bed was Chicago Police Officer Thomas O’Brien, the beefy, moon-faced young cop who had been stationed on guard in the hotel room next door. He was in full uniform and attempting to keep a straight face.

  “Ready?” I asked nervously, peering through the viewfinder. Cindi was in the middle of the camera frame; Officer O’Brien was to her right. I never expected to be making my debut tonight as a porno filmmaker.

  Cindi nodded, looking down.

  “Roll ’em,” I said, pushing the On button.

  Cindi looked up slowly, her eyes wide. She ran her tongue around her lips. “Ishmael,” she said in a husky voice, “Officer O’Brien says that I’ve been a very naughty girl. He says I have to be punished because I’m such a bad, bad girl.” She held her handcuffed wrists up, the second pair of handcuffs dangling. “Officer O’Brien says that naughty girls have to be spanked.” She closed her eyes and then slowly opened them again. “Come over here, Ishmael. Spank me.”

  “Cut,” I said, turning off the camera. “Perfect.”

  “Here,” Cindi said, shoving her handcuffed wrists toward Officer O’Brien. “Take these off of me.”

  Officer O’Brien took the key off his belt and unlocked the handcuffs. Cindi got off the bed and walked quickly to the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her.

  “That’ll be all, Officer,” I said to O’Brien.

  “My pleasure, lady.” He had a big grin on his face.

  “If you breathe a word of this to anyone, Mr. O’Brien,” Ishmael said, “I will personally see to it that you are transferred to the graveyard shift at O’Hare Airport.”

  O’Brien’s eyes opened wide.

  “Do you understand me?” Ishmael said.

  “Yes, sir.” O’Brien left.

  Kevin stuck his head in. “Everything go okay?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Where’s Cindi?”

  “She’s changing,” I said. “Give us a few minutes alone, Kevin. Okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll be out here.”

  Ishmael and I reviewed the videotape twice on the small viewfinder screen on the camera. It looked good. Ishmael watched as I tried to dismantle the video equipment. I couldn’t unhook the camera from the tripod.

  “Rachel,” he said, glancing toward the closed bathroom door, “perhaps I should speak with her.”

  “No. I should,” I said. “Maybe you could wait outside.”

  Just then the bathroom door opened. Cindi was dressed again in her blue jeans and pink cotton T-shirt. Her face was taut. She took a deep breath. “Let’s go, guys. We have work to do.”

  ***

  But at 10:30 p.m. we were still stumped. Ishmael had left an hour before to meet in private with Joe Oliver to explain what had happened and what was planned.

  Cindi, Kevin, and I were seated around the table in her room, having just finished our room-service dinners.

  “There has to be a way,” Cindi said as she poked her fork at a decorative orange half that looked as if it had been cut with pinking shears.

  The problem was how to get the videotape teaser to the mystery man. We had to pick a drop point that would allow him to pick up the videocassette without the fear of being seen. The obvious choices were no good. A post office box, a locker at the bus or train station—he would be too visible, too conspicuous. It had to be someplace he knew he couldn’t be spotted by a plainclothes cop.

  “It has to be a private place in a public spot,” Cindi said. “Somewhere where there’s lots of traffic but where you can be private.”

  “A movie theater?” Kevin asked. “No,” he answered himself. “He wouldn’t know who was watching him in the darkness.”

  “How ‘bout a bathroom?” Cindi asked. “A public bathroom, like out at O’Hare.”

  “Where would you put the videocassette?” I asked.

  Cindi answered, “Tape it behind a toilet. Tell him which stall to look in. Like that scene in The Godfather.”

  I thought that one over. “Not bad,” I said. “But not foolproof. What if someone else finds it before our guy? Some other guy goes into the toilet stall, happens to see it, and takes it with him because he’s curious. By the time our guy gets there it’s gone.”

  We mulled it over until Ishmael called at about 11 p.m.

  “I spent an hour with Joe Oliver,” he said to me over the telephone. “He is quite upset about the whole situation. I made him understand that my interests are parallel to his. He has agreed to cooperate.”

  I told Ishmael that we still hadn’t solved the drop-point problem.

  “The bathroom idea has possibilities,” he said. “I’ll think it over tonight. We should meet in Miss Reynolds’s room tomorrow morning at 8:30. Time is of the essence here.”

  Kevin offered to drop me off at home. He went out into the hall to confer with the plainclothes cop handling the night shift.

  “You okay?” I asked Cindi.

  “Yeah. The whole thing got to me real bad while we were making the film. But I’ll be okay, Rachel. Let’s hope the cops get that bastard, and then I can get my life back together.”

  I gave her a hug. “We’re going to do it, Cindi.”

  ***

  Kevin drove me home in his unmarked car. He came up to my apartment and searched each room with Ozzie and me in tow. Ozzie and I walked back down with him to his car.

  “See you tomorrow morning, Rachel,” Kevin said.

  “Thanks, Kevin.” I kissed him on the cheek.

  I walked Ozzie to the end of the block and back while Kevin watched from his car in front of my apartment.

  “I’ll wait till you get upstairs,” he said. “Flick your lights twice when you get up there.”

  I did, and heard Kevin’s car start up and pull away.

  There was another message from Paul on my answering machine. I dialed his number, let it ring ten times, and hung up.

  Before I left Cindi at the hotel, I had asked her about Paul Mason. “No,” she had said. “Never had a client that matched that description. And I certainly never had an English professor from Northwestern.”

  Chapter Forty

  It was a quarter to nine Wednesday morning. Kevin, Ishmael, Cindi, and I were back in Cindi’s hotel room. I had just told them my idea.

  “In a sanitary napkin disposal
?” Kevin asked.

  “There’s one in every stall in every women’s bathroom,” I explained again. “It’s big enough to hold a videocassette. No one ever looks in there, so there’s almost no risk that someone else might find it. It’s a perfect hiding place. A closed box in a private toilet stall in a busy public bathroom.”

  “But how does he get to it?” Kevin asked. “Do you expect him to go in drag into a ladies’ room at O’Hare?”

  “No,” I answered. “He could send a girlfriend. Or just find some woman at the airport and ask her to do him a favor. Or maybe pay her to go in there and get it for him. It’s perfect. She walks into a private toilet stall in a crowded bathroom, takes the videocassette out of the sanitary napkin disposal…which reminds me.” I turned to Kevin. “You’ll have to put it in a plastic bag…to protect it”—I blushed—“from the rest of the stuff there. Anyway, she takes the videocassette, puts it into her purse, walks out, and meets our guy in some private spot at the airport and hands over the videocassette. There must be dozens of women going into those toilet stalls every hour out there. There’s usually a line during the busy hours. She goes in and goes out, just like anyone else. No one knows she took it. No one sees him, and his assistant is completely inconspicuous.”

  “It’s a great idea,” Cindi said.

  I said, “We just need to make sure the cleaning crew doesn’t empty the disposal before she picks up the videocassette.”

  “No problem,” Kevin said. “I can work that part out. We can keep the cleaning crew out of there for hours.”

  “Let’s get the personals message written,” Ishmael said.

  “Already done,” I said. I passed around the message I had worked on last night when the idea came to me in bed. “Now we need to come up with a message from Joe Oliver to the mystery man. We can have it typed on Oliver’s stationery and put it in the videocassette jacket along with the videotape.”

  “Joe Oliver has to insist that the exchange be done face-to-face,” Kevin said, “so we can nail him when it happens.”

  “How quickly can we get the personals message into the newspapers?” I asked.

  Ishmael checked his watch. “We have about four hours before the afternoon editions go to press,” he said. “I know the publishers. I’ll handle that part. It’ll run this afternoon and in all the morning editions. Set the drop for tomorrow afternoon.”

  Joe Oliver came to my office at 2 p.m. to sign the note that would be included with the videocassette. Mary had typed it on a sheet of Oliver’s stationery that he had furnished by messenger that morning. Ishmael had approved the text at noon.

  “Hello, Joe,” I said as he walked into my office. He was wearing dark-rimmed glasses, a blue blazer, and gray slacks.

  Joe Oliver nodded curtly. “Where’s the note?” he asked.

  I handed it to him. It was typed in all capital letters with a space for his signature at the bottom:

  IF YOU LIKE THIS PREVIEW, YOU CAN

  TRADE FOR THE FULL-LENGTH VERSION,

  STARRING ISHMAEL RICHARDSON.

  YOUR COPIES OF ME FOR MY COPY OF

  RICHARDSON. YOU NAME WHERE AND

  WHEN. BUT ONE CONDITION: WE

  EXCHANGE FACE-TO-FACE. WHEN I

  KNOW YOUR IDENTITY, WE HAVE

  MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION.

  UNDERSTAND? IF I DON’T RECOGNIZE

  YOU, THE DEAL IS OFF.

  Oliver read it through twice without comment and then, pulling out a gold fountain pen, signed his name in a diagonal scrawl at the bottom of the page. He looked up at me. “Ishmael said you intercepted the videotape,” he said in a nasal monotone.

  I nodded.

  “Did you watch it?”

  “Yes.”

  He took off his glasses and slipped them into the inside pocket of his blazer. There were bags under his weary eyes. “I want to meet him face-to-face,” he said slowly. “I don’t want some Keystone Kops operation. You understand?”

  “Even if he goes for the bait,” I said, “he’ll still be worried it might be a setup. He’ll try to arrange the meeting in a secluded place—where he can be sure that the police won’t be around. Don’t worry, they won’t be visible. But they’ll be there to protect you.”

  “The police can come in later,” Oliver said. “But I have to meet him face-to-face. Alone.”

  “Joe, the odds are good that he’ll try to kill you. You can’t do this on your own.”

  Oliver stared at me, his face expressionless. I had seen him do that to hostile trial witnesses on cross-examination. It worked in court, but it didn’t work today. The effect of the dreaded Joe Oliver stare was lost on someone who had seen him on videotape naked and tied to the bedposts with pink scarves. “I assume he will try to kill me,” he said in his deliberate monotone. He breathed deeply through his nose. “That’s why I want to meet him alone.”

  “You aren’t the only victim, Joe. He tried to kill Cindi Reynolds. He actually killed two people in that explosion. He’s a dangerous man.”

  Oliver remained stone-faced. I sighed and said, “You don’t want to cooperate, fine. We can junk the operation, and eventually he’ll give those tapes to your family and friends. Is that what you want? You’re not the only one who’s been hurt. I’m a victim too, and I’m not going to let you screw this up. You understand? Damn you, Joe. You can either trust the police or you can get out of here and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

  Joe smiled at my anger. He stood up. “Call me when he picks up the videocassette. I’ll call you when he contacts me. Don’t worry, young lady.”

  As soon as Oliver left I called Kevin. “Kevin, you’re going to have to watch out for Oliver. He may try to turn free agent on you. You may have to put a tail on him.”

  ***

  I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to dictate my Canaan investigation notes. I wanted to get the rest of the story down—to make sure there’d be some record of all this. Just in case.

  But I couldn’t concentrate. Last night I was filming a porno flick. Today I had arranged a “high noon” encounter between Joe Oliver and the blackmailer. This wasn’t what they prepared me for in law school. I stared at my Dictaphone and then reached forward to buzz Mary.

  “What’s up?” she asked, poking her head into my office.

  I sighed. “I’m bushed.”

  Mary studied me. “How ‘bout some fresh coffee?”

  I gave her a sheepish smile. “That sounds great. Bring us both a cup. I could use some company.”

  Harlan Dodson called around four-thirty to ask why I hadn’t yet sent him my files on the Canaan legacy. I told him that I’d been busy on other matters and would send them over in the next few days. He made a vague threat about informing Ishmael Richardson about my dilatory behavior and hung up.

  By 6 p.m. I found myself dictating the same sentence over and over. I decided to pack it in and go home. A warm bubble bath and an early bed sounded wonderful.

  I picked up the afternoon Tribune on my way to the subway station and found the personals message as I waited for the northbound train:

  To Video B-Mailer: Will exchange my tape for yours. Mine is better. For sample, go to ORD, Term. 3, Main Level, SW Worn. Bthrm., Stall 3, San. Napk. Disp. Thurs. @ noon. Joe O.

  The sanitary napkin disposal in stall number three of the women’s bathroom in the southwest part of the main level of Terminal 3 at O’Hare Airport. Tomorrow at noon. Go get him, Kevin.

  Ozzie came trotting out of my bedroom when I opened the door to my apartment. I froze in the entranceway. My bedroom light was on. Backing into the hallway, I grabbed for the umbrella hanging from the closest doorknob.

  As I drew the umbrella back with both hands, Paul Mason strolled out of my bedroom. “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “Whoa,” Paul said, his eyes wide. “It’s just me, Rachel.” He put h
is hands in the air with a sheepish grin.

  Ozzie walked back to Paul, his tail wagging. Paul kept one hand in the air and patted Ozzie on the head with the other.

  “Answer my question, dammit. What are you doing here?”

  “Hey, relax,” he said. “I’ve been leaving messages on your damn answering machine for three days. I finally gave up and decided to come over to show you what I found. Your landlord’s gone, so I came up here.” He smiled. “My key still works. I was afraid you’d had the locks changed when we broke up.”

  “You just come barging into my home? Damn you, Paul. You’ve got no right to do that.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. Okay? Relax. I wouldn’t have used the key if I thought you were in here. I knocked on the door, shouted your name. You weren’t here.” He shrugged. “So I decided to come in and leave you a message along with the stuff I found.” He rubbed Ozzie on the head. “Old Ozzie was sure happy to see me, weren’t you, boy?” Ozzie was sitting in front of Paul now, his tail flopping.

  I walked into my apartment. “Give me that key,” I said, holding out my hand.

  Paul dug a hand into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out the key.

  I took it from him. “Don’t you ever do that again. Ever.”

  “My mistake, okay? Let’s drop it. Listen, I’ve got some great stuff to show you. Then I promise I’ll leave.” He raised his hand. “Scout’s honor. You’re going to love it.”

  I shook my head, trying to force back a smile. “You are really a jerk,” I said. “Okay, what do you think you have?”

  “Think I have? May I remind you you’re talking to someone who probably knows more about Sam Spade and Mike Hammer than anyone in this country.”

  “Give me a break, Paul. Reading about detectives isn’t the same as being one. I’ve read Big Two-Hearted River about ten times, and I still can’t bait a hook.” I was standing just an arm’s length away from Paul, close enough to pick up the familiar scent of his cologne. I was torn between an urge to kiss him and an urge to crack him over the head with the umbrella. I wasn’t strong enough to do the latter; for the moment, at least, I was strong enough to resist the former.