Deadly Beloved

by Max Allan Collins

“Wrench,” I said. “It was a wrench.”

  Chic said, “Awaiting his much-deserved lethal injection. Randall got ten years for hiding his brother out.... Got sprung two days ago.”

  Dan came over, quickly. He was on the verge of tears but too angry to let them out. “Why didn’t anybody tell us Hazen was out? Good-the-fuck behavior, I suppose.”

  Chic said, “Parole.”

  Dan shook his head. “Both brothers at their trials pointed right at Mike and swore to kill him....If I’d known, if Mike had known....”

  “Dan,” Chic said, “Mike knew. I told him. He said he wasn’t about to postpone his wedding over some ‘lameass dirtbag.’ I offered to put the bastard under surveillance, but Mike said it was just...hot air. Buncha ...hot air.”

  “Cold,” I said.

  Rafe put a hand on my shoulder. “Michael?”

  “Cold,” I said. “I’m cold. Could somebody...take me home?”

  Dan covered his face with a hand and the tears came.

  That young woman from the wedding reception was at Dan’s side now, slipping an arm around him, comforting him, but clearly this pick-up was getting more tonight than she’d bargained for. I knew the feeling.

  Rafe and Chic exchanged glances, and Rafe nodded, and Chic took the honors, escorting me away.

  We were in Chic’s unmarked car when he asked, “Where, Michael? Mike’s place or yours?”

  “We...we moved my things to his place last week. His place, Chic. Mine and his, I mean. I want to sleep in his bed tonight. Our bed tonight.”

  “I’ll stay on the couch.”

  He did.

  I had some sleeping pills and took a double dose, and in the morning Chic had breakfast ready for me. He waited on me at the table in Mike’s little kitchenette and finally asked me, “What are you going to do?”

  “What is there to do?” I sipped coffee. “I already killed the bastard who took Mike from me.”

  “I know. I mean...about the business? The Tree Agency? If you want to come back to the PD, I’m sure I can make a few calls and—”

  “No,” I said, a little too sharply.

  He just looked at me curiously.

  “We’ll keep it open,” I said. “We’ll keep it going, Dan and Roger and me.”

  “Can the Tree Agency survive without...” But he couldn’t get it out; his eyes were everywhere but on me.

  “What, Chic? Say it.”

  “Can the Tree Agency survive without Michael Tree?”

  “Chic—you’re looking at Michael Tree.”

  He just sat there, not knowing what else to say. What was there to say, anyway? I felt better. Not a lot better, but enough so to eat. Enough to go on.

  SIX

  The sunlight around the edges of the window curtains was fading into early evening. Honking horns said the city was still out there.

  “That was a Friday,” I said. “Monday I took over the Tree Agency. Hell...we didn’t even have to change the name on the door.”

  Leather whined as the doctor shifted in his chair. “Why not take time to grieve? To process your husband’s death?”

  “I ‘processed’ my husband’s death, Doctor. Every newspaper covered it. We were news. Our newfound celebrity meant we got work. It kept us afloat.”

  “Yes, and your celebrity has only increased. But had that truly been an effective way to come to terms with your husband’s murder, Ms. Tree, you wouldn’t be in this office, right now....”

  I took a moment.

  Then I said, “You’ve accused me of burying my feelings, Dr. Cassel, my emotions...of not confronting this...tragedy.”

  “Yes. I have.”

  “Well, since I’ve seen you last, I have confronted it....In particular, I confronted the tragedy itself...the murder...by opening a door that I’d previously considered closed....”

  My office was warmly masculine, having been my husband’s, and, though it was now mine, I’d chosen not to change it much, leaving up on the dark-paneled walls police citations of valor and framed photos of Mike shaking hands with local mucky-mucks and a few framed front pages, too—the Tribune and Sun-Times alike. Mike had always looked so natural, so at home, behind the massive dark wood desk; and now I felt the same way.

  I was on the phone with Lt. Valer, who it was easy for me to picture in his own considerably less spacious and upscale office, running to a decor of Early Institutional as it did. I could see him at his work-filled but perfectly organized desk. Mine might have piles of this and piles of that, but so what? I knew where everything was.

  I was saying to him, “You credit this ‘Event Planner’ with seven or eight murders, tied to the Muertas.”

  A dry chuckle preceded his reply. “Chic thinks I’m overworkin’ my imagination.”

  “I don’t. I think you’re onto something.”

  “You do?”

  “And I also think you owe me an explanation.” I couldn’t keep the irritation from edging my voice. “You failed to mention that one of those ‘events’ in question was my husband’s murder.”

  The silence on the wire went on forever—a good five seconds.

  Finally he said, “I figured you could add two plus two. I, you know...didn’t want to insult your intelligence.”

  “Really. You are a friend.”

  He sighed. “Michael...I told you about the Event Planner, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. Almost a year after Mike’s murder, you told me.”

  More silence.

  Then his voice returned, the tone even, the words considered: “I figured...you needed time before you took that...journey. And, when that time came, you’d need to arrive at these conclusions yourself.”

  My laugh was less than kind. “I already have a shrink for the touchy-feely crap. You’re supposed to supply me with inside facts. I’m the private eye, and you’re the goddamn police contact—remember?”

  “And here I thought I was your friend.”

  I said nothing.

  “...Michael? Michael, are you there?”

  “Yeah. Fine. You’re my friend. But answer me this, Rafe—what kind of friend sits on information like this for a goddamn fucking year?”

  I could hear him swallow.

  “The kind of friend,” he said finally, “who wanted more information before turning a lunatic like you loose on the world. Tell me you wouldn’t have gone off half-cocked...make that fully cocked...”

  “I don’t even have a cock.”

  “You don’t need one, lady, with that nine millimeter.” He turned up his volume. “Tell me you wouldn’t have been out there, a year ago, looking to take your revenge out on anybody who looked like half a suspect?”

  “And I won’t now?”

  “No. I don’t think you will. I think some time has passed and you can confront this coolly. Like the old Russian proverb says, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ ”

  “I thought that was Klingon. Or is it Romulan?”

  He laughed a little. “Look. I want Mike’s real killer, if he’s still out there, just as dead as you do. Of course, I’d prefer it to happen in some vaguely legal way...”

  “Self-defense is legal.”

  “Why am I not surprised to hear you say that?”

  “Because you know me too well. And maybe you did do the right thing, waiting till you really thought you had something for me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So. Knowing you too well, I’d say that after quietly working on this all year, you’ve probably got private, personal files on each of these ‘events.’ ”

  Rafe let out a wry, weary laugh. “Really? Is that what you think?”

  “Right. Neat, orderly files, just like your desk. And not computer files—nothing somebody could find and easily transfer. But hard copy, in a locked drawer. Possibly two copies, since some day I’d ask for them.”

  A ten-second eternity passed.

  Then: “...I’ll messenger ‘em right over.”

  I smiled at the phone. �
�Thanks.”

  “No problem. We here at Police Contact Inc. aim to please all our private sector clients.”

  He hung up.

  I pushed my chair back and stood and got around from behind the big desk to cross the room and join Dan Green, who was seated over on the dark-brown leather couch in the mini-conference area by the gas fireplace at the far end of the office.

  This area consisted of two such couches and matching chairs arranged around a glass coffee table littered with magazines that included stories on either the late Mike Tree or the current Michael Tree.

  Dan seemed very much at home, like Mike once had been behind what was now my desk. My young partner wore a dark brown sportcoat with an open-collar cream-color shirt and tan jeans, sharply casual, as usual. He’d gotten himself some coffee, and had a cup waiting there for me. He always took cream, but he knew to leave mine black.

  He grinned up at me. “Kinda rattled ol’ Rafe’s cage there a little bit, boss, didn’t you?”

  “Rafe gives as good as he gets,” I said, and settled myself into the nearby leather chair.

  “Looking back,” Dan said, keeping his tone easy, “you think that just maybe we dropped the ball on our most important case?”

  “Not sure I follow you.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Mike’s murder?”

  I took a sip of coffee. “...We may have. But, if this so-called Event Planner really exists, he...or she...is world class.”

  Dan mulled that momentarily. “You know, if Mike’s murder was a planned ‘event,’ we’re going to need to look at every aspect of the other planned event, the one we were hired to look into—Richard Addwatter’s murder.”

  “I agree. Where do we start?”

  Dan sipped his coffee. “I’m thinking we need to look not only at Richard Addwatter’s life, but the other victim—that hooker, what was her name?”

  “Holly Jackson. That’s the name the police came up with, anyway. Local girl. South Side.”

  He hiked an eyebrow. “She was murdered, too, remember.”

  “Just another unfortunate pawn of our Event Planner, probably.”

  “Sure, but chess masters select their pawns carefully. We should look into it. Maybe it’s a chance to get Bea up off her pretty behind and...”

  “Dan...”

  He spread his hands. “I’m just saying, somebody needs to ask some questions about Miss Whozit. Bea’s the only other licensed investigator we’ve got right now. You can hire a temp to man, or woman or person or whatever, the phones.”

  He was right.

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “Cool,” Dan said.

  Then he took one last drink of coffee, and got to his feet, cutting this conference short.

  “Well,” he said, “I know where to start the Addwatter end of things.”

  I knew he did. “You have the condo key?”

  He showed me the key, already in his hand, dangling it like a Christmas ornament and smiling like an evil elf. “Mr. Levine dropped it off personally, and paved the way with condo security.”

  I had to smile. “As always, Bernie’s providing solid support.”

  “That he is. The counselor says we can rip the fuckin’ place to shreds, if we feel like it.”

  “And we may need to.”

  He slipped the key in his pocket. “You want me to wait till I get back to report?”

  “No. Call me from the scene.”

  “You got it.

  He flipped a wave and was gone.

  “What happened at the Addwatter apartment,” I said, “proved crucial to the case.”

  “I see.” He tapped the top of his pen on the pad. “You seem to value Dan Green....”

  “I do. I understand why Mike took him on, despite his youth and relative inexperience.”

  The doctor nodded. “What was it that happened at Addwatter’s apartment that was so crucial?”

  “I wasn’t there, but Dan reported in detail.”

  Dan Green, carrying a small slimline briefcase, entered the Addwatter condo, hitting the light and exposing a modern, upscale, spacious apartment—a sterile world of grays and light blues occasionally broken by abstract paintings, sharp explosions of color that seemed to evoke Marcy Addwatter’s mental illness.

  Dan took in the place, scanning swiftly but carefully, then set his briefcase down on a small table just inside the door, where a glass bowl that might usually be home to fresh-cut flowers stood empty. He opened the briefcase, its contents various electronic tools, one of which—a hand-held bug detector with a meter—he removed.

  Leaving the briefcase on the table, he moved deeper into the living room, past sleekly anonymous modern furnishings. He turned the living room lights off with a switch near an open door onto a bedroom, and went in, switching that light on.

  This was another cold, sparsely decorated room with sterile modern furnishings and artwork that was jarringly abstract. On a nightstand was a small metallic neo-deco clock radio and a lamp. To Dan, the place looked like a movie set from a weird arty Euro movie and he would not have blamed anybody who went screwy in this cozy crib.

  He slipped out of his sportcoat and tossed it on a chair, exposing his leather shoulder holster with .38 Police Special revolver. Then he began to check around the bedroom with his bug detector, starting with the tufted buttons on the bed’s ivory-color padded headboard.

  He was typically thorough, trying walls, floors, and furniture surfaces, but his meter registered nothing but indifference at every stop.

  He even climbed onto a chair to check the ceiling, and examined its light fixtures with both the meter and his eyes.

  No luck.

  The client’s attorney had given the go-ahead, so Dan began the only logical next step: taking the bedroom apart.

  The mattress was soon off the bed, on the floor to one side, a pile of bedding on the other. His small sharp knife ripped at upholstery and, when he got nowhere, he returned to the mattress and ripped it up, too.

  Next he removed each tufted headboard button, using the knife point to pry all of them apart. Fifteen minutes was devoted to this process, with the end result being a bunch of buttons with their coverings pried off and resting in a pile on the nightstand by the clock radio.

  Before long he was seated on the edge of the bed—actually on its springs—in the middle of a bedroom that no longer lacked character, having been turned into a first-class fucking mess.

  He got out his cell phone and used it.

  “Ms. Tree? Me....Full proctology exam. Zip.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “I can try the living room, but if Mrs. Addwatter heard voices at night? They’d be coming from in here.”

  “Nothing registers on your toys?”

  “If somebody piped voices, wirelessly, to hidden speakers in the bedroom? My bug zapper would only pick ‘em up if they were still transmitting. Which they got no reason to, now.”

  “There have to be speakers. Find them. Use the metal detector.”

  “In a room with this much metal? Anyway, Ms. Tree, those speakers’d be smaller than a gnat’s nuts. I tore this place up—”

  But Dan was interrupted by the sound of a door opening out in the other room.

  “Gotta go,” he whispered.

  And he flipped the cell phone closed and slipped it away.

  Then, quickly, he moved to the bedroom light switch and shut it off.

  Peeking around the edge of the bedroom doorway, Dan could see a male intruder in black, right down to black gloves and ski mask, moving carefully across the living room, which remained dark but for slices of light leaching in through curtained windows.

  In one fluid motion, Dan stepped in and drew the revolver from its shoulder holster.

  “Okay, Zorro,” he said. “Reach for the sky.”

  Only the intruder had an object in one hand, small but not tiny, which he hurled at Dan like a baseball, hitting him in the shoulder, hard, sending the revolver flying.
>
  Then the intruder was heading for the exit, fast.

  Dan, recovering quick, dashed across the room and threw a flying tackle at the guy, taking him down.

  The intruder twisted as he fell and swung a fist into the side of Dan’s face, dazing him, and Dan’s grip loosened involuntarily, enough so that the guy could scramble and squirm out of it.

  Now the intruder was on his feet and Dan wasn’t, and as Dan started up, the toe of a boot caught him in the stomach, doubling him over in an explosion of pain.

  The guy was heading toward the door, Dan incapacitated enough to pretty much guarantee him a getaway; but then the figure in black did something surprising: he paused, turned and moved quickly past Dan, who was busy trying not to puke from the kick in the gut.

  Still, Dan managed to roll over and see where the guy was headed...

  ...toward the bedroom, it seemed.

  Before getting there, though, the intruder bent to pick up whatever it was he’d tossed at Dan, just a momentary stop, but that was enough, because Dan came up behind the bastard and gave him a field-goal kick in the ass.

  The guy went sprawling, hitting the wall, hard, and sliding down to land near the bedroom doorway.

  Dan looked around for his revolver, quickly recovered it, then aimed its short but insistent snout down at the unconscious intruder.

  But the bastard sprang to life, and came up to execute a swift, deft martial arts kick that clipped Dan’s hand and sent the revolver flying again.

  The intruder swung his leg around again, in another skilled kick, only Dan kicked, too, nothing nearly so graceful, just a nice pointed shot that caught the guy in the balls.

  This put the intruder down again, screaming this time.

  “Be the pain, grasshopper,” Dan advised him, then knelt over his victim.

  Within seconds Dan had used plastic-tie handcuffs (he never went anywhere without them, including on dates) to bind the guy’s hands behind him.

  When Dan finally pulled the ski mask off, the moment of potential drama fizzled, because he didn’t recognize the guy, a young-looking but chiseled character who Dan immediately made as ex-military.

  By this time the guy’s screams had dissolved into howls of pain. You could be a Marine or a Green Beret or a Navy Seal, it didn’t matter—a kick in the balls was the great leveler.