Applaud the Hollow Ghost

by David J. Walker

  “Wait. There’s a third reason we know Heffernan’s bluffing, and—”

  “Good-bye.”

  Renata hung up, but I told the phone anyway. “The third reason,” I said, “is that there were five witnesses at Melba’s, not four.”

  I dropped two empty beer bottles in the orange recycling bin outside my kitchen door at the top of the back stairs. The Lady was working on improving my dietary habits, so the homemade chili she’d sent over—five quarts of it, frozen, in plastic containers—was vegetarian. I’d added way too many hot peppers, trying to give it some flavor, which had made that second beer a necessity. But I’d finished one whole quart of the chili. For that I deserved a reward.

  So I popped the top off a third bottle of Berghoff, thinking maybe I should throw out the rest of the chili—for the sake of my liver. Instead, I called the Lady.

  “Could you use a gallon of your vegetarian chili back?” I asked, when she came on the line.

  “Why certainly we can. But I was rather hoping you’d learn to like it, Malachy.”

  Malachy. The Lady always says Malachy.

  Lady Helene Bower, the widow of the late Richard Bower, who’d been a lord of the British Empire—or a knight maybe, I never got it straight—never calls me Mal. Her upbringing makes using nicknames uncomfortable for her and, as far as I can tell, she simply doesn’t want to waste the effort trying. Not that the Lady can’t change. For example, most people, even after I correct them, keep right on pronouncing my name so the last syllable rhymes with “sky.” But just one mention to the Lady that it rhymes with “key,” and she never made the mistake again. I told her once—when she was being especially annoying about something—that it amazed me how quickly she’d made that switch, given how slow she is to change sometimes. “Oh,” she’d said, “I just rhymed Malachy with smart-alecky … and never forgot.” She’d said it with such a straight face, I couldn’t—

  “… far too much red meat,” the Lady was saying on the phone. Then, “Malachy? Are you there?”

  “Oh. Yes. I guess my mind was wandering. Anyway, I just called to tell you I’m trying to help Lambert Fleming.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, “if that’s what you want to do.”

  “Well, you sent me the newspaper clipping. So that’s what you think I should do, isn’t it, Helene?” People only call her “the Lady” when she’s not around, because she insists on being called “Helene” in person. I never said she was any more consistent than the rest of us.

  “I don’t really have an opinion,” she said, “except that I believe unresolved issues such as that can often—”

  “What unresolved—” I started, but then thought better of it. “The point is I’ll do what I can for Lammy, but I have a feeling I might regret getting involved.”

  “From what I saw in the papers,” she said, “I’d be surprised if you don’t come to regret it very much—in the short run. But you may eventually find you’re glad you did—in the long run.”

  I promised to deliver the rest of the chili back to her, and we said good-bye. I knew she’d want to spend the evening meeting with some of the battered, abused women who live with her, or in one of her other homes.

  I took a long pull on the Berghoff and opened the refrigerator. Except for the beer on the bottom shelf, it looked pretty barren in there, with margarine and mustard and a package of generic bologna pretty much covering the food supply. But there were also two twenty-six-ounce cans of coffee. I took the opened one over to the counter by the coffeemaker.

  The Lady’s house is just a little north of Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. My wife, Cass, and I helped her find it, back when the Lady decided there was nothing for her to go back home to in England. It’s a mansion, really. And as you drive in, up a curving, very classy crushed-stone drive, there’s a long garage with six sets of very classy folding doors, with windows. The doors had been built tall enough to accommodate carriages in an earlier era. The garage has a not-very-classy second-floor apartment that Cass and I leased from the Lady and called our “coach house.”

  From the coach house kitchen windows I could see Lake Michigan as I measured out the Folgers, because the moon was up and it was winter and the leaves had abandoned all the tall oaks and maples between me and the shoreline. The moon, the lake, the leafless trees—even the Krups coffeemaker she’d gotten for ten bucks at a garage sale—all urged me to think about Cass. But thoughts such as those weren’t helpful, because I hadn’t seen or heard from Cass for far too long just then.

  So I thought about the Lady, and how odd it seemed that not everyone liked her—at least until they got to know her well. They’d start out suspicious anyway, thinking she sounded too good to be true. Then, at first meeting, she seemed so … well … so British. Stiff, maybe. But the Lady simply was the way she was, and it never seemed to occur to her to care very much anymore about what people thought of her.

  As for me, I liked her—very much. I’d given up trying to explain the Lady without sounding sentimental, but to me she was like an eccentric, lovable aunt—often irritating, impossible to ignore. At any rate, she was right about things more often than it was comfortable to admit.

  I programmed the timer to start my morning coffee, hoping the Lady was right this time and that I’d be glad about trying to help Lammy in the long run.

  The phone rang.

  The caller identified herself as a trauma unit social worker, and wasn’t far into her message before I canceled the timer and started the coffee brewing right away. The long run would have to take care of itself.

  The short run had just taken a sharp turn down a very steep hill.

  CHAPTER

  5

  THE TRAUMA CENTER CLOSEST to where it happened was about a half mile due south of Wrigley Field, and I knew it well. When I got close, there were police cars swarming all over the neighborhood, many of them unmarked—although perfectly obvious to anyone with a vested interest. Blue-and-white squads, strobe lights flashing, blocked off traffic at intersections. So I had to park on Belmont Avenue, just slightly intruding into a bus stop, and hoof it four bitterly cold blocks to the hospital. I made my way unmolested all the way to the main entrance, where a security guard blocked the way. Another guard stood just inside the plate glass doors, head down, talking into the radio attached to his collar.

  The outside guard, young, probably Puerto Rican, raised a gloved hand. “You need a city star or hospital ID to get in. Sorry, sir.”

  “But a social worker called. My friend—”

  “Can’t help it, sir. There’s too much going on right now.”

  Just then the other guard, a middle-aged, pleasant-faced man who would have looked like the neighborhood grocer if there still were such a creature, pushed through the door toward us. When he saw me his face lit up. “Hey, big guy!” he said. “Long time no see.”

  Sometimes the gods do smile on us.

  I couldn’t recall his name, and even if he knew mine he’d have called me “big guy,” like he called every other male person in the universe, regardless of size.

  “Long time,” I said, “three years, anyway.”

  “But hey, you’re lookin’ great, big guy.” He turned to his partner. “This here guy’s an okay guy. He was a patient here. You shoulda seen him in the ER. Him on one stretcher, half his damn body parts on another.”

  “Not exactly,” I said, but before I knew it he was escorting me down the corridor, bringing me up-to-date on his baseball card collection along the way.

  In the emergency room, it turned out Lambert Fleming was already old news and the trauma team’s attention had turned to a pair of shooting victims who’d arrived together within the last hour. That’s what all the excitement was about. The victims were members of rival street gangs—one a Latino group, one a mixed bag. The army of cops had been mobilized to keep both victims’ outraged and oh-so-courageous fellow gang-bangers from storming the hospital and shooting at each other inside, w
here it was warm.

  The guard got Lammy’s room number and steered me to the proper elevator. “A medical floor,” he said, “not intensive care or anything.”

  I rode up and stopped at the nurses’ station, thinking maybe it was too late for visitors and someone might challenge me. But the ward clerk found my name listed on Lammy’s chart under “next of kin.” She said he might be drowsy—from painkillers—but pointed me down the hall.

  One of the two beds in the room was empty, and pictures flickered and flitted eerily across the screen of a soundless TV set high on the wall. The head of Lammy’s bed was raised, propping him into a sitting position. Both his arms lay motionless on top of the thin white bedspread, the left one wrapped in bandages from above the elbow down to his hand, with just the fingertips sticking out, and held in a slightly bent position. His right arm, pudgy and hairless and pale—except for the bruises and scrapes and ragged cuts—stuck out below the short wide sleeve of a hospital gown. An IV line was taped to that arm.

  I stood there silently a while and stared at him. They’d shaved off his eyebrows, and most of the hair from his skull. The facial and scalp lacerations were too many to count, with a few that had needed multiple stitching. The upper half of his face was already turning purple and yellow, the flesh puffed with fluid and the eyes like slits in the smooth swollen flesh of a terribly discolored lump of bread dough.

  Finally, I cleared my throat and his head jerked as though he’d been dozing. He must have seen me through the slits, because he opened his mouth. But he closed it again, and if he said anything it was drowned out by the chorus of adolescent male voices that had risen up inside my head, uninvited, in a jeering, sing-song chant I’d replayed too many times over the years: Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL!

  Anger tightened up in my chest at whoever had done this, and along with it came apprehension, the urge to forget about the whole thing, to just turn around and go home. But there’d be no more comfort at the coach house now than there’d been the last time I ran away from Lammy’s problems. So I just stood there and let the hard, hot desire to retaliate fight it out with the urge to walk away.

  “I’m sorry.” Lammy’s voice had a far-off sound and took a while to break into my consciousness. “I mean I just went out to get—”

  “For chrissake,” I said, my own voice tight and harsh. “You should have expected something like this. Going outside alone, at night. What the hell were you thinking about?”

  Nothing like blaming the victim.

  “They’re gonna keep me at least overnight,” he said, ignoring my attack as though criticism and blame like that were just part of the everyday air he breathed. “I was unconscious for a while. I guess I lost a lotta blood.” His words came as a dull monotone, and it was impossible to tell if he was looking at me or not. “But I’m okay,” he added.

  Not that I’d bothered to ask.

  “Has your sister—”

  “I told ’em I don’t have any relatives. They kept asking for a name. Finally I gave ’em yours.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Well, I suppose I’m glad you did. I … I’m glad you’re okay, too.” My anger was dropping down from boil to simmer. “What happened? You were gonna stay inside. Keep the doors locked.”

  “There was hardly nothing to eat at home. So I was goin’ to the White Hen for some milk and stuff and—”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You didn’t tell me I could. You said you’d be calling me. But then you didn’t, and I thought—”

  “Okay, okay. You’re right. I forgot to call. But didn’t you think someone might try to hurt you? I mean, after that dog and all?”

  “Yeah. I was scared. About goin’ outside. But I was hungry and…” His voice trailed off.

  “And what?” I asked.

  He took a breath. “And I decided you weren’t gonna help me after all ’cause you didn’t call and I was on my own and I hadda just go out whether I was scared or—”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m sorry.” His voice cracked like an adolescent’s.

  “Stop saying that. I’m not mad. Not at you, anyway.” Moving closer, I picked up a glass of water from the bedside and held the bent straw to his lips. “Here. Have a drink. Then tell me what happened.”

  * * *

  A HALF HOUR LATER I rode down the elevator with a dour-faced young Latino whose dark blue lab coat said “Transport” above the breast pocket and who was pushing an empty wheelchair. The car stopped once before ground level and when the doors slid open there were two beefy, hard-breathing Chicago cops standing there, with a short, thin man in handcuffs propped up between them. The prisoner wore a khaki-colored cloth overcoat that ended below his knees, a baseball cap turned backward, and lots of bright red blood all over his face. When the cops saw us one of them just shook his head in disgust and the other vaguely waved us on with a shotgun he was holding by its sawed-off barrels. The doors closed again, leaving the cops there with their gang-banger and the weapon they must have found hidden under his coat.

  A sign on the elevator wall said “A Smile and a Cheerful Word Just Might Make Someone’s Day!” So I smiled and gave it a try. “Never a dull moment around here, huh?”

  He looked up at me. “Fuckin’ gangs,” he said, his sad expression deepening into a sour frown. “Ask me, they oughta just fuckin’ let ’em inside the building, man. Evacuate everybody else and throw in some extra fuckin’ ammo. Then they could lock the doors from outside and come back in a goddamn week. Haul the motherfuckers off, man, in fuckin’ refrigerator trucks.”

  Sanitize the language just a bit, and he could have been quoting from any number of election campaign speeches I’d spent the previous autumn trying not to listen to.

  I hustled back to my car, planning to drive straight home and call Renata Carroway for another little chat about “witness intimidation.” When I got to Belmont, though, there was a blue-and-white squad car double-parked beside the Cavalier, and a cop was sticking a parking ticket on the windshield.

  “Hey!” I called, breaking into a trot. “I’m moving it right now.”

  “Too late,” the cop said, heading toward the squad car. “Shouldn’t park in a bus stop. Shows a disregard for the common good.”

  “Yeah, I know. But what about the Cadillac?” I pointed to the shiny black Fleetwood that took up most of the rest of the bus stop. It looked freshly washed, not yet covered with sprayed salt, and its rear bumper was backed up snug against the front of the Cavalier. “Why not give that guy a ticket, too?”

  The only response was the slam of the squad car door and the roar of its motor as it left the scene, emergency lights flashing. And as it did, a very large man climbed out of the front passenger seat of the Fleetwood, opened the rear door, and invited me to get into the backseat.

  I did.

  And so did the other very large man, who’d appeared from somewhere behind me and taken me firmly by the arm.

  CHAPTER

  6

  “CASTRATING A DOG, GUS. That’s what all this newspaper talk is about. Grabbing my client on the street and throwing him headfirst through a window. That’s what’s bothering me, Gus.”

  The man on my right, the big one with the recently permed long golden hair and the brass knuckles, kept putting new bruises on my rib cage each time I disregarded his earlier admonition: “You should call Mr. Apprezziano by his last name, asshole.”

  But I figured if the man on my left, the one with the white wavy hair and the thousand-dollar alpaca coat and the long thin fingers, was going to call me Malachy—and mispronounce it as Malachai, at that—I’d call the skinny old fart by his first name, too.

  They’d caught me off-guard, and when I’m embarrassed like that I tend to act even less prudently than usual. “So, Gus, lemme tell—”

  “Wait, wait, wait, Mr.… uh … Foley. Let’s all just calm down, and I’m sure we’ll have a more profitable discussion.” Gus Apprezzian
o had one of those affected, world-weary voices, as though he’d seen it all, and it was all so very tiresome. Maybe he really felt that way. Or maybe he just watched too many movies.

  I waited, silently happy to be on a last-name basis.

  People I trusted had told me that Gus had the moral sense of a crawling swamp creature, but was a man of his word—like it or not. He was upper management—not at the top, but still up there a ways—and along with a bunch of other Outfit types was taking a lot of high hard ones just then in a Chicago Tribune series called “Uncovering the New Untouchables.” I was guessing he didn’t like his name surfacing in the papers, especially when the reporters kept hinting that the Feds were closing in. That’s why, at Melba’s, I’d thought mentioning the newspapers would catch his ear.

  And that’s why there were three of us shoulder to shoulder in the backseat of his car, staring at the backs of two more heads in the front, and waiting to calm down and have a “more profitable discussion.”

  In fact, quite a long time passed, while no one said anything. A CTA bus rumbled up beside us. Three passengers, a heavy-set young woman and two small children, stepped off into a deep pool of salty slush ten feet from the curb because the bus stop was occupied—by us. When the bus roared away a squad car followed it, then turned the corner to the right. If the cops happened to notice five men in a black Fleetwood in the bus stop with its motor running, they certainly didn’t let on.

  Finally the game got too boring even for me. “Okay, Mr. Apprezziano. I’ll go first.” I’d already shown him I was dumb enough to disobey orders even at the risk of a punctured lung. I didn’t have to prove that I was patient as well. “I have a client named Lambert Fleming.”

  “Yes,” Apprezziano said, “the creep who attacked—”

  “Hold it. First, it’s doubtful that Fleming sexually assaulted that little girl. Second, even if he did, that doesn’t give Stevie Boy the right to threaten to cut off his balls, or to throw him through a window.”