The Fall

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

  “Not worth a cent.” He waited. “Just wondering how to film that paint splashed on the pavement.”

  “What paint?” he said, but she knew he’d seen it. She doubted that he missed much of anything.

  Minorini remembered the rush he’d felt when he first saw Bonnie and Clyde. Sex and violence. Absurd as it was, the idea that Joanne killed Dossi sent an echo of that excitement through him.

  As they approached Lake-Cook Road, she interrupted his reverie, her face pale and flat in the deepening dusk. “Does anyone ever confess?” she said.

  “You mean come forward and say, ‘I did it and I can’t live with myself?”

  She nodded.

  “No. The people who commit murders usually don’t feel remorse. Or much of anything else, apparently.”

  Navigating the intersection was like driving in snow. It took constant vigilance to avoid disaster and the constancy was exhausting.

  He was suddenly afraid she was going to say she did it. “It seems to me the killer can’t afford to indulge in remorse. If the mob gets him, they’ll make a horrible example of him. If we get him, he’ll go to prison where the mob’ll make a horrible example of him. If he’s smart, he’ll keep his urge to confess to himself. Or find an old-fashioned priest who’ll give him absolution and take his secret to the grave.”

  He knew! No, he was fishing, but she wouldn’t take the lure. Or was he warning her that in this case, confession would not be good for the soul?

  How many times had Howie come home from visiting clients at the jail, seething with frustration—Why can’t they just keep their mouths shut?

  Paul turned off the wipers. Snowflakes landing on the heated windshield liquefied. She watched the drops run down. Traffic streaming past seemed to be in a parallel universe.

  “Do you still think I’m innocent?” She felt her face redden and her scalp prickle as she recognized her Freudian slip. Thank God it was dark and he was driving.

  The lights from oncoming traffic reflected from his eyes as he glanced at her without turning his head. He looked back at the traffic. “I underestimated you.”

  “What made you decide that?”

  “Your pictures.”

  “Ah.”

  “You can get away with acting dumb, but your work gives you away.”

  “I don’t act dumb.”

  “Okay. All right. Say you don’t constantly show off—What?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But you were thinking Where does this guy get off? He doesn’t even know me.”

  “Yeah?” She couldn’t keep from smiling, and even though he wasn’t looking at her, she knew he’d heard the amusement she was feeling.

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged and glanced from side to side as the car approached a cross street, then he looked at her. “Your pictures of the shoplifters were like trophies. And the shots you got of the bikers made them look like wild animals in their native habitat—fierce.”

  “That’s how I saw them initially. But when I got close enough I realized that, like lions and tigers, they were only dangerous when they were threatened or hunting.”

  “When I first met you, I thought you were a typical divorcée with kid.”

  “What do you mean by typical?”

  He hesitated.

  “Think I can’t take the truth?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  “Financially strapped, a poor judge of men, a little desperate…”

  “Well the first two are right on. And now?”

  “You’ve got a lot more guts and brains than I suspected.”

  “Just what every man looks for in a woman.”

  He gave her a look she couldn’t read. “Some of us.” They traveled two blocks without speaking, then he said, “Have you made any adjustments to your first impression?”

  “I was afraid you’d turn out to be like Howie.”

  “Have I?”

  “You remind me of one of those fast cars with the tinted windows—impossible to see inside. But you’re not anything like Howie.”

  Paul turned onto her street and stopped the car in front of her house. It was dark except for the front porch light. He put the car in park. “Sean’s not home yet!”

  “Once he decided I was really out of danger, he asked to stay and visit. He’s flying in the twenty-first. Would you like to stay for dinner? I could throw a pizza in the oven.”

  She thought he drew his breath in rather fast.

  She wondered when she’d begun to think of him as Paul.

  “Why not?” He unbuckled his seat belt, then turned off the ignition and removed the key.

  After they’d finished the pizza and a bottle of Chianti, Joanne invited him into the living room. She turned the stereo on low as he made himself comfortable on the couch.

  “You any good in bed?” she asked. She was gratified to note that, for the first time since she’d met him, he seemed unnerved.

  She’d been a virgin when she met Howie. She’d supposed her lack of satisfaction with him to be her own fault, so she’d researched sex with the same naïve enthusiasm she’d employed in trying out new recipes. She’d come to be quite good at pleasing, then to realize, more slowly, that he had no interest in pleasuring her. The discovery that she could satisfy herself had been the beginning of the end for them. Since the divorce, she’d found her infrequent sexual encounters with men pleasant enough. Paul Minorini had turned her on almost from the beginning.

  “That’s not something I’d be able to judge,” he said. “How about you?”

  “I’m like my old F1.” He waited. She stepped into his personal space and began to tug on the knot in his tie. “Second-hand but serviceable. And what you get depends on what skill you can apply. Would you like a demonstration?”

  There was no mistaking his response to that. She leaned against him and felt how hard he liked.

  By way of answer, he grabbed her face and thrust his tongue into her mouth, and pushed her down onto the waiting couch.

  He was gentle and willing to please, but he held off his climax until she was sore from the unaccustomed thrusting. She hid her frustration, finally rewarding his effort with a cry of “Come! Please! Oh, please!”

  She matched his final convulsion with her own, and marked its passing with a sigh. It was a performance, but the little regret she felt when he finally slipped out of her was real enough. As was the tenderness with which she wrapped him in her arms. And the joy she felt when his breathing slowed and his eyelids drifted shut.

  Forty-Eight

  Minorini woke with Joanne Lessing on his mind. What had he done?

  But he wanted to see her again. He wanted to fuck her again. He wanted to sleep with her and wake up next to her. A woman who could be—No, almost certainly was—a murderer. It was insane. He was insane.

  The sun was out as he walked to work, so the cold didn’t seem as biting. He left his coat open and eyed passersby incuriously as they wrapped themselves tighter, hurrying along. He studied the Calder sculpture as he passed it in the post office square. His mood matched its bright color. He felt like a fool, but a happy one. He was still whistling when he got upstairs.

  He stopped when he entered his office and found Haskel sitting in his chair, with his feet on Minorini’s desk.

  “You got lucky last night,” Haskel said. “I can tell. Who’s the broad?”

  “None of your business.” He walked around the desk and knocked Haskel’s feet off, then gestured with his thumb for Haskel to vacate his seat.

  Haskel laughed and got up. “Must be married. Long as you don’t knock ’em up, they’re the best—safe sex.”

  A woman from the secretary pool interrupted to put a sheaf of papers on the desk.

  Haskel moved aside for her, then picked up the top sheet and glanced at it. “What’s this?”

  “Phone
records,” the woman said as she walked out of the room.

  Haskel said, “Dossi’s phone.” He dropped the sheet back on the pile. “Waste of time and paper. We got transcripts of all those, along with the dossiers of everyone he talked to.”

  “And now we have the phone records,” Minorini told him. He let his tone say, Go away and let me do my job.

  Haskel laughed. “Job security, I guess.”

  As soon as the door closed behind him, Minorini paged through the sheets. Only the top four or five were from Dossi’s home phone. The rest were from all the pay phones at the Harold Washington Library on the days Carlo had driven Dossi there. Minorini took them out to the secretary’s station and made duplicates. Back in his office, he put the originals in an old file—where no one would think to look for them—and reached for his phone.

  Half an hour later, he had a long list of names—the individuals whose numbers had been called from Dossi’s phone and from the library phones. By cross checking the surveillance records compiled since the wiretap was put in place, Minorini was able to eliminate as irrelevant most of the names on Dossi’s phone call list—his daughter, his wife in Italy, his health club, restaurant reservations, golf courses, pizza delivery…As Haskel said, the Feds had transcripts of all those conversations, and all were innocent or at least not incriminating.

  The lists from the library phones were much longer, and many of the numbers were unpublished. To save time and aggravation, he marked off the calls made an hour before and after the time Carlo recalled Dossi’s being there and concentrated on those. And on the theory that the unpublished numbers were more likely to belong to someone up to no good, he called his source at the phone company to get names to go with them. He was halfway down the list, writing the name and address next to each number as his informant gave him the information, when one number seemed to jump off the page. He forgot for a moment what he was doing. He knew the number! He’d called it more than once—to get Haskel!

  “You still there, Minorini?”

  “What? Yeah, sorry. What did you say?”

  “I said, I can’t get you the out-of-state number.”

  “Okay. How ’bout the next one…?” He skipped Haskel’s and read off the next few. When they got to the end of the list, he said, “Thanks. I’m gonna put you in for a commendation.”

  “A pair of playoff tickets would be better—any game.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Minorini rang off and called the Detroit FBI office.

  Detroit called him back an hour later. “Got an ID on your unpublished caller—Armand Wilson.”

  Bingo!

  “You get an address?” The agent gave it to him and said, “Isn’t Wilson the lowlife you guys just nailed?”

  “Yup. Thanks.”

  “Any time.”

  Minorini hung up and called the State’s Attorney’s office. “We subpoenaed Armand Wilson’s phone records yet?” They had. “Mind faxing me a copy?”

  He told the secretary to watch for the fax. He’d just made up his mind to worry about Haskel tomorrow when the phone rang. He picked it up; Butler’s voice announced, “ATF got your bomb setter.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Caught him red-handed putting a device in a Cadillac. They’ve got him over at the MCC. Why don’t you meander on down and see what he’s got to say for himself?”

  Minorini left his gun locked in his desk and walked the block and a half to the Metropolitan Correctional Center. The federal jail looked like a twenty-seven-story monument to the computer punch card, from the stone age of data entry.

  The bomber told them he was Milo Jaxx, a plumber from Beverly, and he wasn’t in the NCIC computer. But there was something a little off about his south side accent, so one of the marshals sent his prints to INTERPOL. His real name was Terrence T. Finn, wanted for an impressive number of offenses in his native Belfast. He’d been in the US for nearly thirty years, had established his alias back in the days before identity theft became a growth industry, back when notarized photocopies were all you needed to get a driver’s license.

  The bullshit required for Minorini to get in to see Finn seemed to take forever. And for the first half hour of the interview, Finn refused to talk. He was tired, he said, of the Mutt and Jeff routine the marshals had been playing for him all morning. He was tired of the smell of Feds. Minorini finally asked to speak to him alone.

  “We need some help, here,” Minorini told him. “You’re up to your crotch in this; you could use someone to put in a good word. How ’bout it?”

  “Yeah right.”

  “We think a certain mob guy hired you to eliminate a witness, but then dis-hired you when the bomb didn’t go off.”

  “You can think what you like.”

  “This guy was pretty big, and you didn’t deliver,” Minorini said. “Was. That’s got us thinking maybe you had something to do with his currently being past tense.” He could see Finn thinking. He added, “We’d be willing to overlook the murder attempt—since the witness wasn’t harmed—if you cooperate.”

  “You’ll put that in writing?”

  Minorini shrugged. “Why not.”

  “I’ll wait while you get it made official.”

  An hour later, Minorini sat across from Finn, with Finn’s lawyer and a US Attorney parked at right angles. The paperwork lay on the table like a centerpiece.

  Minorini said, “When did Dossi first call?”

  Finn looked at his counsel, got a discreet nod, and said, “About two in the afternoon, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.”

  About an hour after Carlo claimed he had the meeting in the forest preserve.

  “Just what did he say?”

  “He said he had a little pest problem he wanted me to solve. Told me it was worth a hundred bucks to know that I’d take care of it immediately.”

  “A hundred dollars?”

  “Yeah. That meant a hundred grand—in case anyone was listening.”

  “I see. And you knew the caller?”

  “Not by name. I couldn’t a picked him outta a lineup—that’s how it works—but I recognized his voice. We done business before.”

  “What did you call him?”

  “Mr. Million. Cause if he did a job for you, it would cost that.”

  “So why did you work for him for less?”

  Finn frowned. “He was the only one I ever heard of getting that kind of change.” He shrugged. “His money was good. And he always paid within twenty-four hours. He used to recommend me for the stuff that was beneath him, and I think sometimes for stuff when he needed an alibi. Anyway, I fucked up. I got no idea why that one didn’t go off.”

  Minorini let him wonder.

  But Finn came close to guessing. “That broad must have the luck of a narrowback.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “I get another call from Mr. Million—check the Chicago news. I say, Just tell me. ‘You screwed up,’ he says, ‘I’m gonna overlook this one, ’cause this broad’s charmed or something, but you’re out of it.’ I’m lucky he just canceled my contract and didn’t take one out on me.”

  “Did he say what he was going to do about his problem?”

  “Told me to forget he ever called. I wasn’t about to ask.”

  During the postmortem the marshals held after they took Finn back to his cell, they laid out what they had so far. A rumor. Someone high up in the US Marshal’s Office had been seen dining with a mob-connected union boss. No names. No definitive details or even any provocative ones. Obviously the absence of data was creating a vacuum that rumor and speculation were rushing in to fill.

  Forty-Nine

  “Joanne,” Rick said when she walked in the door, “Fitz pulled a no-show and he’s supposed to be shooting a wedding in forty-five minutes. You gotta do it for me!”

  Rick didn’t often ask for big, last-minute favors but…

  “I can’t go dressed like this. And if I go home to change—”

/>   He whipped out his wallet and pulled out a credit card that he shoved at her. “Here. Stop at Fields and get yourself something. May, you called a cab?”

  “You asked me that three times already,” May said. “It should be down there waiting.”

  Rick took a handful of bills out of his wallet and handed them to Joanne. “Have the cabby wait while you go in Fields.”

  “Okay, just let me get my stuff together.”

  “It’s all ready—film, backup cameras, tripod, reflectors, background screen, battery packs—Just go!”

  “Rick, chill!”

  “This is too close! That son of a bitch is never getting another assignment from me. C’mon. I’ll carry this stuff down to the cab for you.”

  Joanne shrugged and gave up. She could check the plumbing at Fields…

  The sales lady looked Joanne over and gave her a cool reception—until Joanne hinted that she had an unlimited expense account and no time to make use of it. Twenty minutes later—after taking a whole ninety seconds to admire a striking, midnight blue evening dress—Joanne was on her way in a conservative navy pantsuit, with her jeans rolled up in her camera case. The saleslady even sold her a lint roller—for twice what she’d have paid at Walgreens—to make her black car coat look presentable.

  The family was angry because the photographer they got wasn’t the one they thought they’d been promised. And she wasn’t a man. They were getting a deal—she was much better than Fitz—but she was depressed and tired and didn’t feel like selling herself. Without anger or emphasis, she told the father, “You can sue, if you can find a lawyer to take your case.”

  “We won’t have any trouble finding a lawyer.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, but you haven’t got a case.”

  “The hell I haven’t. My daughter’s getting married in twenty minutes and the photographer I hired hasn’t showed!”

  Joanne felt exhausted. There was nothing she’d have liked better than to just go home. But she owed it to Rick to give the guy a last chance. “Your contract with Rage Photo states that you’d be provided with a professional photographer, not necessarily a male professional photographer. I’m a professional and I’m here to fulfill Rage’s commitment. However, if you prefer, I’m authorized to refund your deposit. All you have to do is sign a release stating that your contract with Rage is dissolved by mutual agreement.”