CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
While Jan headed south on the Tri-state Tollway in a driving rain, traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper pace. Inching along in traffic gave her time to think. Not only did she wonder why Tony assumed his mother had bad-mouthed Max, she’d also been thinking about Tony’s big house and his hybrid car. On the way out to her Audi, even though it was raining, she made a point of looking fur ther up the driveway. She’d seen a red Toyota Prius, and on the Prius was a bumper sticker, the same “BAU” with a line through it.
She thought about Tony’s environmental activities and his gay rights organization. Ironically, a lot of his activities these days were probably funded by his father’s organized crime ventures from the sev enties and eighties. She wondered if Tony’s father was rolling over in his grave or if he was happy with his son’s life. She thought about whether it would be wise to try to talk to Max Lamberti. Then, while wondering about how to find Max Lamberti and while looking at road signs, she visualized a map of the Chicago area and recalled looking at a map with Steve not long ago when they were trying to solve the riddle of what Marjorie could possibly mean by the U.S. routes litany she had recited in rehab. Steve said the therapist had gotten out a map and been unable to figure out what it could mean. Then she remem bered that when she and Steve got out a map, she had written the rid dle down in her notebook.
Why hadn’t she put it together earlier? She’d gotten ahead of her self, thinking about Max Lamberti instead of working with what she already had. If Steve were here he wouldn’t try to see Max because that would tip his hand. No, Steve would go with what he’s got. And she had almost let it slip through her fingers until she thought of Steve looking for details, always details, and trying to connect those details in a systematic, logical way.
The first detail was the Buster Brown jingle Marjorie recited from time to time. Steve told her Marjorie had two slightly different versions. In speech therapy the therapist named Georgiana had asked around in rehab trying to see if anyone knew which was the correct version.
“Hi, my name’s Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. Here’s my dog Tag. Look for him in there, too.” Or was it, “My dog’s name is Tag. He lives in there, too?”
It didn’t matter how the jingle went. What mattered was the man on the phone with Tony Gianetti. Tony had called him Buster, and the maid had definitely referred to Mr. Brown.
The next detail was Marjorie’s litany of U.S. routes. While traffic was stopped, Jan got out her notebook and found the litany.
“U.S. 6 and 45, U.S. 30 and 50, U.S. 20 and 41, U.S. 14 and 94,
U.S. 14 and 45, U.S. 20 and 83, U.S. 30 and 34, U.S. 7 and 30, U.S. 30 and 45,” and it repeated over again starting with U.S. 6 and 45.
So there it was, staring her in the face and she almost missed it. On the phone Tony had said, “Route 45 and 6,” and right now he must be driving in his Prius to meet someone named Buster Brown at that first intersection listed on the litany of routes. It was too much for co incidence. Steve was right. There was something here. Something.
When the crawling traffic merged to the left lane and finally cleared the scene of a multi-car accident, Jan stayed in the left lane behind a limo and took the Audi up to seventy. Tony had said his Prius had rain tires. Months earlier, before his stroke, Steve had put rain tires on his old Honda and wanted to put them on her Audi, say ing rain tires would go well with the four-wheel-drive. As she passed through the spray from a line of trucks, the Audi skittered slightly because she never did get a chance to purchase rain tires. While cor recting the slight skid, she had a quick memory of the strong smell of rubber in a tire shop. Steve, days before his stroke, standing in the brightly lit store running his finger down the deep center groove of a rain tire on display, the deep center groove branching off to side grooves resembling arteries providing lifeblood to brain cells so they can think their crazy thoughts.
The intersection of U.S. Route 6 and U.S. Route 45, Orland Park, Illinois, was about twenty-five miles southwest of downtown Chicago. Jan had been to Orland Park several times, most recently with Lydia Christmas shopping last December at Orland Park Shopping Mall. It had been a few weeks after Steve’s November stroke and she hadn’t wanted to go, but Lydia had insisted. She remembered buying the new computer for Steve. She and Lydia had driven south of the Or land Park Mall to a Best Buy. She remembered the Best Buy had been in another shopping center at the intersection of Route 6 and Route
45. All she could recall about the intersection was that it was busy and there were various shopping centers with huge parking lots and numerous stores and restaurants and maybe a gas station or two on the corners.
A haystack, she thought. I’m driving to a haystack to look for a Prius I saw briefly in a downpour. And who’s to say that wasn’t the maid’s Prius and Tony has a few more in his multiple-car garage? But she drove on, exited the tollway and cut over on Interstate 55 to U.S. 45 south.
The rain had let up some, but traffic, as she approached Orland Park from the north, was heavy. Typical Friday afternoon shopping center traffic. Tony Gianetti had said he’d be to the intersection in an hour and a half. She wasn’t sure exactly when she left his house, but she was certain the hour and a half must be up by now.
As she wound in and out of the slow traffic she got in behind a motor home that was going fifty-five instead of the forty-five limit. The motor home reminded her of another drive to a vague location to find something not yet defined.
She and Steve had gone to Montana because they had gotten a lead that the cult her husband had once belonged to, and the cult leader who turned out to be responsible for his death, had settled on an island in the middle of a large lake there. Then, when the lead turned out to be a trap and they were almost killed, they went into hiding, posing as an elderly couple traveling in a motor home. They had even gone so far as to put on gray wigs.
She recalled how, during the four hundred mile non-stop drive across North Dakota, they talked about cults and missing kids and raids on abortion clinics. She recalled how it all seemed so unbeliev able, even more unbelievable than Marjorie Gianetti being murdered, until the missing ingredient was added. And the missing ingredient had been money. Ten years earlier, when they were posing as an elderly couple in a motor home, a cult leader with money and connections had gone underground. At first it sounded like a scandal sheet story. But add the fact that years of fundraising by the cult and its thousands of followers allowed the leader to take millions of dollars underground with him, and believability no longer seemed an issue. And now, driv ing south to an intersection in Orland Park, was it possible a quarter billion dollars from a botched drug deal was at stake?
As she followed the motor home, she saw through its large rear window that a woman was making her way down the center aisle. The woman stood in profile, swaying with the motion of the motor home. An elderly woman, perhaps making coffee. Or was it a young woman dressed as an elderly woman? Who could be sure because that’s the way she and Steve had traveled from Montana to Minnesota on that wild trip so long ago. She had made coffee in the motor home after she put on the cruise control and Steve slid in behind the wheel and took his turn driving. She recalled that Steve had brought his violin along on the ride and, before making the coffee, she stood in the cen ter aisle in back trying to play Steve’s violin, but was barely able to get out a couple of screeches.
“Ah,” Steve had said, “a melody from my homeland. An old folk song entitled, My Foot Rests beneath the Wheel.”
“Very funny,” she had said, putting the violin and bow back in the case. “Gangsters used to carry machine guns in violin cases.”
“I know,” said Steve.
She remembered turning on the counter light and firing up the motor home’s generator. She remembered putting two cups of water in the microwave and returning to the cab with steaming cups of instant coffee. She remembered placing the cups in the holders on the con sole. She remembered bending and kissing Steve on
his ear.
“I wish this thing had an autopilot,” he’d said.
“So do I,” she said, as she sat on the floor between the seats and leaned her head against his hip.
Beneath the vast console of the motor home, the engine throbbed endlessly, and on the console the ripples in the cups of coffee had looked like bull’s-eyes in the greenish glow of the dash lights.
She remembered all of this, and felt tears come to her eyes when the thought struck her that Steve might not remember any of it.
The intersection was a traffic jam with multiple stoplights for shop ping center parking lot entrances. She turned into one of these and slowly made her way through the parking lot for Best Buy and other smaller stores. All she could think of to look for was a red Prius. Any red Prius.
After meandering in the Best Buy parking lot, she worked her way back to the stoplight and crossed over to the shopping center in which a Target store was central. She spotted a small red car, but when she got closer she saw that it was a Ford. After this shopping center, she turned out onto Route 6 and waited at the intersection to get across to a large restaurant at the opposite corner. She drove around the back of the restaurant, thinking there was a chance Tony Gianetti and Buster Brown might have planned to meet for a business lunch. But there was no Prius and she crossed back over to the other corner where there was a bank behind a gas station.
Suddenly, there it was. In the bank parking lot, partially hidden by a dividing wall between the bank and gas station, was a red Prius with a “BAU” bumper sticker. When she negotiated the left turn at the intersection and got into the bank parking lot via the crowded side entrance road, she saw what she needed.
The license plate on the Prius was PP2000, which made sense since the name of the gay rights journal Tony Gianetti had shown her was Pride and Perseverance, Gay Rights in the New Century. And parked next to the Prius was a Mercedes with license plate BBROWN.
Jan sat in the corner of the well-furnished bank lobby, hiding behind a large foldout bank brochure she held up before her. Within the bank brochure she held a Chicago area map she brought in from the glove compartment. While she waited, she began marking the intersections from Marjorie’s U.S. Routes litany written down in her notebook. The sofa on which she sat was soft and deep and she knew that, with all the other people in the bank filling out deposit and withdrawal slips and waiting in line, she would more than likely be overlooked back here even if Tony Gianetti looked directly at her.
She’d entered the bank carefully, watching for Tony. She covered her cautious entry by pretending to search for something in her purse, while at the same time scanning the bank lobby. Now, because she had not seen him, she sat waiting, and working on her map. Either Tony and this guy named Buster Brown, who was probably his attor ney, were somewhere in the bank, or they had met a third party and driven elsewhere. If that were true … but it wasn’t, because suddenly they appeared through an opening to her right. They were behind a waist-high door in the counter that had to be buzzed open. She real ized they had been back in the alcove containing the vault holding the safe deposit boxes.
Although Buster Brown’s hair was dark brown, Jan thought it looked dyed and figured he was older than Tony, probably upper for ties, her age. Tony wore a sport coat over his Sierra Club sweatshirt while Buster wore a suit. Both men carried briefcases and umbrellas.
If they had come to retrieve something from a safe deposit box, it was in one or both of their briefcases.
Because they faced the counter she could watch them carefully. Buster said something to Tony and Tony reached into his pocket and showed Buster a key. This made Buster smile and nod. When a teller approached the counter where they stood and handed Tony another key, Jan noticed that he put this key in his right jacket pocket, whereas the key he had just shown Buster was in his left jacket pocket. Tony and Buster thanked the teller, then headed for the door.
Jan imagined herself asking the teller what Tony and Buster had been doing in the safe deposit box vault and had to laugh. Not be cause such a move would be pointless, but because it was this kind of thinking Steve had always said to never overlook. “Think the obvi ous and even the absurd and often you’ll come up with things float ing just below the surface,” he’d said. Well, if there was anything she could uncover here, without getting arrested, she could do it later. For now, she knew what Steve would do is follow Tony to see where he went next.
They left together in Tony’s Prius, leaving the BBROWN Mercedes behind. As she drove out of the parking lot, careful to keep at least one car between them, but close enough so she wouldn’t get caught by a stoplight, she thought how appropriate the jingle seemed.
Hi, my name’s Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. Here’s my dog Tag. Look for him in there, too.
As she followed the Prius, she was aware they were heading in the direction of the next intersection from the litany.
South on U.S. Route 45 out of Orland Park, the highway becomes
divided before it intersects Interstate 80. The speed limit is fifty-five, but traffic often travels faster near the interstate as if the sixty-five mile-per-hour speed limit of the interstate were a living organism able to spread onto this U.S. Route. As if speed has fingers reaching out to grasp motorists fearful of being rear-ended. As if Tony Gianetti and Buster Brown might be aware they are being followed and want to lose her. That’s what she thought about when the huge red semi passed her.
She was doing over sixty when the truck barreled past. The spray of grimy water lifted from the pavement by numerous groaning tires blinded her. She turned her windshield wipers on high speed, but it made little difference. The air horn on the truck sounded long and loud, frightening a slower car out of the left lane. She cursed aloud at the driver of the truck, recalling a recent accident in which a brake part had dislodged from a truck and caused the death of a family. Didn’t the trucker realize she was working on an important case? What was so important to this trucker that he had to drive like this?
When the truck moved far enough ahead so she could again see, three cars were between her and the Prius. The Prius was barely vis ible, riding alongside the truck within the spray from its tires. The Prius shot ahead for a moment, Tony apparently speeding out of the blinding spray. Then the truck’s brake lights came on while it blasted its air horn and another frightened driver escaped into the right lane and dropped back.
The truck was on fire with speed, a tidal wave of steel and rubber, the driver in his perch above traffic able to see while everyone else is blinded. On a rise ahead she saw the Prius just beyond the truck in the right lane. She moved to the left lane to catch up, passed cars that had slowed, intimidated by the actions of the truck driver. When she moved back to the right lane, the truck and the Prius were side by side about a hundred yards ahead.
Then it happened. A guardrail that narrowed the shoulder where the road bridged a creek helped it happen. The guardrail was there and the Prius could not get over it when the truck suddenly moved over, whipping like a snake striking. The center of the trailer straddled the Prius for an instant as it disappeared beneath the trailer.
She thought the Prius might be low enough to come out the other side. But it was not low enough. Sparks spewed from beneath the truck as it crossed back over to the center lane. It was insane, like children racing cars and trucks willy-nilly across a floor. The truck’s rear wheels locked up, smoke billowed, the Prius turned sideways, and the rear wheels of the trailer rolled over the Prius causing the trailer to bounce high into the air as if it had been rolled at high speed on kitchen tile and had suddenly hit the edge of the living room carpet. The effect was complete when the Prius rolled like toy into the weedy flooded median beyond the bridge.
She slammed on her brakes and pulled off onto the left shoulder. Bystanders, who had moments earlier been in their cars, materialized from the mist. The truck was some distance ahead, stopped on the left shoulder. The driver, a large man wearing a baseball cap, jumped down
from the truck and started to run back, then stopped and cov ered his face with his hands. Those running to the wreck in the medi an from both sides of the highway were men and boys. A nurse would come running soon, she thought, picturing the nurses at Hell in the Woods. But no nurses were in sight unless …
Yes! Unless one of the men who arrived at the scene first was a nurse, or a doctor.
It seemed a group of men had taken charge already, two of them bent low reaching into the crushed and steaming wreckage, while three more did their best to hold the curious back. She expected the Prius to burst into flame, and some spectators kept their distance as if it might, but it did not burst into flame. As she watched the scene, Jan lowered her window slightly despite the rain. She wished she could do more, but did what she thought best. It was an automatic reaction. While the men reached into the wreckage and others surrounded them and eventually blocked her view, she realized she had already retrieved the phone from its mount on the center console between the front seats. She dialed 911 and gave the location of the accident in a remarkably calm voice to the operator.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Steve’s physical therapist was not a fuckhead. Percy was gentle and understanding no matter how much the victim com plained. Steve did not complain at all that day because the stretching exercises and range-of-motion exercises and resistance exercises felt good. He knew part of the reason they felt good was because, instead of trying to think about the past as he sometimes did while exercising, he thought about something that had happened quite recently. He thought about the janitors’ closet, and in so doing, mentally included a bigger and rougher black guy than Percy in on whatever exercise he was doing. When Percy had him stretch one of the giant rubber bands, Tyrone’s neck would be there and he’d be stretching it until poor Tyrone thought it would break. When Percy had him do range-of-motion twists, he made a fist and would give Tyrone a good clout on each turn. Any time he got hold of the handgrips and squeezed the hell out of them with his good left hand, he imagined he had hold of Tyrone’s throat. Pretty childish stuff, he thought, after thanking Percy and heading to the elevator.
Final Stroke Page 21
