Detective Fiction

by William Wells

  MY RIDE with Marisa was short, just the distance from her office to the Phoenix. As much as I admired the body designed by Pininfarina coachbuilders for Ferrari, I liked the body designed by God for Marisa better.

  After I dropped her back at her office, I drove to her house, used the key under a pot of geraniums on the back porch, and went inside to visit Joe. Marisa volunteered to take care of him while I was staying in Naples. She liked Joe and he liked her back. I could tell this by the fact that he’d never bitten her, which he was not above doing to someone who rubbed him the wrong way, or sometimes for no apparent reason at all.

  I found him napping on the living room couch. Hearing the door open, he lifted his head, jumped to the floor, strolled languidly over to me, and began rubbing against my leg and purring. I scratched him behind his ears and said, “This is just a temporary arrangement. Enjoy the cuisine, and I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

  I GOT another speeding ticket on the way back to Naples. Eighty in a forty mph zone, allegedly. This time, it was unavoidable because I was on a tight schedule. I had to be back in time for lunch, and time flies whenever I’m with Marisa, especially when we’re in a horizontal position. In Chicago, the pols give out get-out-of-jail-free cards to their pals; get pulled over, show the card to the officer, and you’re back on your merry way. Maybe my pal Cubby Cullen could fix both tickets so that my auto insurance premium wouldn’t increase.

  The young Collier County sheriff’s deputy who pulled me over on the way back asked me, “Where’re you headed in such a hurry, sir?”

  I knew this was a rhetorical question, and any answer I gave wouldn’t matter unless I said I was a bomb squad tech headed to an elementary school. So I didn’t bother telling him that I didn’t want to be late for lunch at a fancy country club, especially while I was driving a car that had cost enough to cover his salary for several years. No reason to aggravate one less fortunate, especially when he was wearing a .45-caliber Sig Sauer.

  10.

  THE MEN THEY USED TO BE

  A half hour later, I was driving with Ash up a long, winding road lined with flowerbeds, sculpted bushes, and palm trees, leading to the Olde Naples Country Club. I guess when you add an “e” to “Old” you acquire a touch of class. Maybe I should change my bar’s name to The Olde Drunken Parrot and increase the drink prices.

  I’d chosen the pink Cadillac from Sir Reginald’s collection. Ash told me that the car was originally owned by Elvis and that the Ferrari I’d driven to Fort Myers Beach was once the personal vehicle of the great Ferrari Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, seven times a world champion. My Corvette was once owned by Tony Cavalari, a Tampa plumbing contractor, according to the papers that came with it.

  On the way to lunch, Ash told me about the Olde Naples Country Club. In a town with many exclusive clubs, Olde Naples was the crème de la crème, she said, with a waiting list of seven years. This added to its cachet, she explained. It didn’t matter who you were, you still had to wait your turn.

  A story often told, Ash said, was about a past CEO of one of the Big Three auto companies, she forgot which one, who retired to Naples. One day he strolled into the club’s membership office and said he was there to join up. If they did the paperwork right then, maybe he could get in eighteen holes before lunch, he said. He’d brought his checkbook and his clubs.

  The membership director informed him that there was a long waiting list.

  “Do you know who I am?” he reportedly asked her.

  “Yes,” she replied. “You are someone who will be put at the end of our waiting list.”

  And he was.

  Most of the club’s members were very old (olde), even for “God’s Waiting Room,” as Naples is called. Whenever a hearse goes by on the street, the joke goes, someone just moved up a notch on the Olde Naples waiting list.

  I parked on a circular drive in front of the clubhouse, a sprawling, one-story, white brick building, and turned the car over to a valet who greeted Ash by saying, “Welcome back, Lady Howe. It’s so good to see you today.”

  The maitre d’ in the dining room, who also greeted Ash warmly and by name, had some sort of European accent and was named Philippe, according to the brass nameplate pinned on his jacket. Claire and I once saw the comedian Dennis Miller perform in a theater in Rockford, Illinois. I remember him saying that, if you wore your name on your shirt to work, you’d made a serious vocational error. Funny. At the time, I was a uniformed patrolman with my name on my shirt.

  Philippe showed us to a table with a view through floor-to-ceiling windows of grounds that looked a lot like those at Ash’s estate, except that they also contained a golf course. The green outside our window was the eighteenth, Ash told me.

  “Do you play?” she asked.

  “No. But if they have a bowling alley here, next time I’ll bring my ball and shoes.”

  She laughed. “No bowling alley, but we do have a cricket field.”

  Of course they did.

  The waiter arrived with the menus. His jacket told me his name was Michael. He also greeted Ash by name. With an initiation fee of $250,000 and annual dues of $25,000, figures Ash gave me on the ride over, they’d better know your name, and the names of your next of kin in case you keeled over while eating your poached salmon.

  “What are the soups today, Michael?” she asked.

  “Today we have vichyssoise and split pea with ham, along with our usual gazpacho and New England clam chowder,” Michael told her.

  I wondered what the staff at a club like this really thought of the members. Did they spit in the soup—or worse—before serving it?

  “The vichyssoise and gazpacho are cold, the other two are hot,” Ash told me, helpfully. So began my tutorial in the customs of Naples high society. I knew that the clam chowder and split pea were hot, but I may have made wrong answers on a culinary multiple-choice test about the other two.

  Ash ordered a Cobb salad, dressing on the side. I really wanted a cheeseburger, the cheese not on the side but right on top. But I was Frank Chance, so I asked for the poached salmon and found it quite tasty, actually, even though it was healthy. No soup.

  As we ate, I scanned the room. Ash was right about the age of the members. We might have been in a very fancy nursing home. She seemed to guess what I was thinking.

  “One morning, you wake up and you’re old and you have no idea where all the years went,” she sighed. “At what point are you old? I think it’s when you die and people don’t say it was premature, they say it was about time.”

  She began telling me about the other diners:

  “That guy over there by the window, sitting alone, founded a bathroom fixtures company in Wisconsin. I have his products in my house, including a super toilet that does everything but shine your shoes. His wife died two years ago. They had lunch here together every Monday and sat at that same table. The bowl at the place setting across from him contains a Waldorf salad, which his wife always ordered. The waiter brings it automatically. It’s sad, but so very sweet.”

  She indicated another table with a nod of her head. “That guy with the knickers—the 1950s called and they want their golf pants back—and the mane of silver hair? He was an army general who became head of one of the big defense contracting companies. Everyone calls him General. I think he’d like them to salute. And the fellow over by the potted palm in the pink shirt and red slacks with three other guys was managing partner of the biggest investmentbanking firm on Wall Street before he got indicted. He served a few years at one of those federal minimum-security prisons, Club Fed they call them. He said he improved his tennis backhand while he was there.”

  As we ate, Ash continued telling me about the backgrounds of people in the dining room, always saying who the men “used to be” and dishing dirt on the women:

  “She’s currently screwing the assistant tennis pro while her husband’s playing hide-the-salami with that cute little waitress walking into the kitchen. Who am I to
judge? It works for them.

  “She’s had so much work done, the only parts left of her original self are her internal organs, and maybe not all of them.

  “The woman with brown hair over there was blonde last time I saw her and a redhead the time before that. I bet she can’t remember her original color.”

  And so on.

  She noted how the men had acquired their money. Some by hard work, some by luck, some by picking the right parents, and some by a combination of those attributes.

  There was another route to Easy Street, one that my time as a detective made me familiar with. Balzac wrote, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” An exaggeration for literary effect, no doubt, but I was probably lunching with a number of unindicted co-conspirators.

  I told Ash that it seemed everyone here used to be somebody, past tense. Just like when Cubby Cullen said I used to be a good detective.

  “That’s right. They used to be rich and powerful. Now they’re just rich. You’d think that’d be enough, but for many of them, it’s apparently not. They were accustomed to having staffs and giving orders that were always followed. They had drivers. Their phone calls, which they never dialed themselves, were always answered, or returned promptly. Now they play golf and then sit in the barroom playing cards and telling stories about the old days that no one wants to hear for the zillionth time.”

  “Not all that different from the Fraternal Order Of Police lodge in Chicago,” I commented. “Retired cops go there to drink beers and shots and talk about the old days too. One day you’ve got a badge and a gun, and the next you’re just another civilian. If I hadn’t moved to Fort Myers Beach, I’d be hanging out there too.”

  A cell phone rang in the dining room and all conversation stopped. The ringtone was John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March.” It was very loud.

  I saw a man a few tables from us hurriedly find the ringing phone in the pocket of his golf slacks, take it out, and turn it off. He looked very embarrassed. His companions, another man and two women, were looking away from him as if trying to dissociate themselves from the offender.

  A moment later, Philippe appeared at the man’s table and held out his hand like a teacher taking contraband away from a student. The man surrendered the phone without protest. Philippe walked away with it, and only then did conversation in the room resume.

  “The guy with the phone is James Cunnane, a former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration,” Ash told me. “His wife, Edith, looks like she’s about to disown him. Cell phone use is strictly prohibited in the clubhouse. You can have one out on the golf course in case someone in the group needs medical attention, but it must be on mute or turned off. It will cost Jimmy a $500 contribution to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Collier County to get his phone back.”

  I wondered how much they’d fine me for a burp in the dining room. Fortunately today’s special was not a kielbasa-and-kraut sandwich, a favorite of mine at the Baby Doll.

  “What other rules should I know about?” I asked Ash. “I mean, if I’m ever invited here again.”

  She laughed. “You will be, dear boy. Hmm . . . You must always keep your shirt tucked in. You may not wear a hat inside the clubhouse. On the golf course, you must behave like a gentleman, follow the Rules of Golf to the letter, and maintain a good pace of play. Otherwise, you can feel free to sleep with anyone’s spouse or cheat anyone in a business deal.”

  When we finished our meals, Ash walked me around the room, introducing me as her nephew, Frank Chance, to some of the used-to-bes and their wives, who were all very cordial. As we were waiting for the valet to bring Elvis’s Cadillac, she touched my arm and said, with a mischievous look, “Whoever or whatever you’re investigating, this is going to be great fun!”

  11.

  THE GIRL TOLD THE TRUTH

  Back at Ash’s house, I had free time between lunch and the dinner party in my honor. I decided I’d use it by continuing my editing of Bill Stevens’s book.

  I met Bill when he was covering one of my cases for the Trib. I was after a woman who shot her husband one night in their bed because he couldn’t—or wouldn’t, as she claimed as a mitigating circumstance—stop snoring. She left him there, bleeding out, packed a bag, and went to her sister’s house in Naperville, which was the first place I looked.

  Generally, cops don’t like reporters, but Bill and I hit it off, in part because we both were lifelong Cubs fans, and also because he was known as a guy who did his homework and got the facts right before putting them into print. Sometimes, after we got to know one another, he’d call me before deadline to double check the facts of a police story. That’s where he got the idea for me to check his fictional stories, too, I suppose.

  Bill still pretty much lives the life he did before becoming a best-selling author. He doesn’t spend much on clothes, and he drives a white 1996 Ford Bronco, “a classic,” he calls it, which he bought at a police auction. His one indulgence is a forty-one-foot Sea Ray motor yacht named The Maltese Falcon, which he keeps at the Belmont Harbor Marina. I’ve never known him to actually take it out onto Lake Michigan. Instead he uses it during the good weather as a floating writer’s studio. During the long Chicago winter, the boat is hauled out and stored inside a boatyard building.

  Bill lives in an apartment building he owns on Waveland Avenue, right across from Wrigley Field. Those buildings, and a number of others like it on Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, are known as “Wrigley Rooftops” because their flat roofs provide a nice view of the ball field. The owners installed seating and other amenities on their rooftops and sell tickets to watch Cubs games, with commentary from radios and TVs tuned to the broadcast.

  Bill’s rooftop has tiered bleacher seats for authenticity more than for comfort, a bar with a cold keg of draft Goose Island lager, soda on ice, and a gas grill for hot dogs, burgers, and brats. On a warm summer evening, with a game on, surrounded by friends, that rooftop is as close to heaven on earth as I’ve ever been.

  A typical gathering during a ball game on Bill’s roof included print and radio journalists (Bill hates TV “talking heads”), lawyers, judges, cops, tradesmen, restaurateurs, corporate execs, cabbies, and a number of ex-cons Bill met while covering their trials. In other words, the same demographic you’d find in the stands at Wrigley Field.

  Bill allows the tenants of the apartments in his building to come up to see a game whenever they want. He has a night for Boy and Girl Scouts and residents of the Cook County Youth Home. I’ve been with vagrants up there too, and found them to be excellent and appreciative companions.

  I still follow the Cubs and watch their televised games whenever I can. They are known as The Lovable Losers, and not without justification. They have not been in a World Series since 1945; the time since their 1908 win represents the longest such drought of any sports team in America. That was only five years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Aviation has come a long way since then; the Cubs, not so much.

  None of that is the team’s fault. The problem is the Curse of the Billy Goat, placed on the team in 1945 by Billy Sianis. Billy owned the Billy Goat Tavern, which is still in business. It was made famous by a Saturday Night Live skit: “Cheezborger! Cheezborger! . . . No fries—CHEEPS! . . . No Pepsi—COKE!”

  Billy always brought his pet goat to Cubs games for luck. He was asked to leave a World Series game in 1945 because the goat’s odor was bothering the fans around him. He was outraged and declared that, “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.” That was thought to mean that another World Series game would not be won at Wrigley Field, and it has not.

  Still we die-hard fans always believe that maybe this could be the year. My favorite song from the Broadway play and movie about the Cleveland Indians, Damn Yankees, is “(You’ve Gotta Have) Heart.” I know all of the lyrics and sometimes sing them in the shower.

  Bill Stevens could easily retire on his book royalties. But he continues to prowl the streets of Chicago wit
h a reporter’s notebook in his hip pocket. He says that this keeps him at the top of his game as a crime novelist.

  Given the rapidly declining state of the print newspaper business, it’s fortunate that Bill has a second career. So many of his colleagues have been laid off, or taken buyouts, he said, that you could fire a cannon in the Trib’s newsroom without fear of hitting a member of the Newspaper Guild. Every day unemployed reporters and editors could be found at the Billy Goat Tavern eating burgers, drinking draft Goose Island, and commiserating about the good old days of Chicago newspapering, back when Mike Royko was writing his column for the Chicago Daily News and reporters covering a big fire or triple murder would grab a pay phone, dial the city desk, and yell “Get me rewrite!”

  Bill has offered to work for a dollar a year so that a colleague can keep his or her job. But apparently that’s too complex a concept for upper management to deal with. So instead he makes generous contributions to the Guild’s Health and Welfare Fund, and helps reporters down on their luck in other ways as well.

  I went to my bedroom, took the manuscript of Stoney’s Last Stand and a pen downstairs and out to the backyard table, and began to read from where I’d left off:

  Stoney saw Marcus Lamont standing in the middle of the room, buck naked, his shotgun aimed high, expecting whoever the fuck it was out there to stroll in standing up, apparently.

  Not the first time Lamont had guessed wrong in his sorry life.

  Stoney, still on the floor, assumed the prone position and put three hollow-point .357 Magnum rounds into Lamont’s chest. Lamont dropped the shotgun as the force of the volley threw him backward, ending up with his back against a wall. He looked down at his chest as if surprised at the blooming crimson stain and then slumped to the floor.

  Stoney got to his feet, walked over to Lamont, the S&W still trained on him, and kicked away the shotgun, a Benelli Super Black Eagle.

  That was unnecessary because Marcus Lamont wasn’t a badass anymore; he was a lump of lifeless meat.