Stranglehold

by Ed Gorman

  “Yeah, I heard they were going to pass a law against that. It must’ve gotten through, huh?”

  It was at that moment that he discovered me. I’d just been some nuisance bastard dragging a double-murderer into his clutches, but now I was as much his enemy as Bobby was. Now I was real and he didn’t like me at all.

  “Exactly what is your interest in this?” His fake cordiality had a nasty edge to it now.

  “I’m a friend of his wife’s.”

  “Oh? And how does that work?”

  “It ‘works’ that I’m a friend of his wife’s.”

  “Uh-huh. Are you a lawyer, Mr. Conrad?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a political consultant.”

  You could see all the computing going on behind the robot eyes. “I see. And you’re working in this area?”

  “My firm is. For the Cooper campaign.”

  The smile was deadly. “Congresswoman Cooper. I wouldn’t advertise that in this building if I was you.”

  A knock interrupted our sparring. A voice said: “I’ve got Jim Shapiro out here, Lieutenant. All right if he comes in?”

  “Fine. Send him in.”

  Shapiro came in like a bullet. He looked ready for court in a custom-cut gray pinstriped suit. He carried a briefcase and a cup of 7-Eleven coffee. He smelled of masculine cologne and cold air. He set the briefcase on the table and nodded to me. He didn’t look at Bobby; instead his eyes focused on Courtney. “You’re not nearly as pretty as Kapoor, Brian.”

  “Kapoor is in court. I got ahold of her. She’s on her way. For now here I am and here you are and now that you’re here I don’t know exactly why our friend Mr. Conrad has to sit in.”

  Shapiro’s tone was icy. “He did you and the police force a big favor, Lieutenant. This was successfully resolved without anybody being injured.” The implication being that Courtney might be disappointed about that fact.

  Courtney shrugged. “Whatever. I’d be just as happy if he left.”

  I was on my feet before Jim Shapiro could say anything. Bobby watched me with the eyes of a child who knew he was about to be deserted.

  “It’s been a pleasure, Lieutenant.”

  “Right back at you, Mr. Conrad.”

  Shapiro glanced at me, then at Courtney, then back at me. He laughed. “I take it you two aren’t in danger of falling in love, huh?”

  “He works with Congresswoman Cooper.”

  “Oh, yes, the dreaded Congresswoman Cooper. Hell, Brian, I’m one of her supporters, too.”

  “Right. But Mr. Conrad here is actually in the business of getting her elected.”

  “Thanks, Jim.” I reached over and put my hand on Bobby’s shoulder. His eyes were despondent; his mouth was crimped. “Jim’ll call me when this is over, Bobby. We’re going to take care of this. I promise you.”

  I knew I was amusing Courtney. He was taking great pleasure in my frustration.

  Shapiro patted me on the back. I went to the door. I thought of looking back, taking a last shot at Courtney. But what would be the point?

  I opened the door and stepped into the hall. A friendly face above a blue uniform said, “There’s some fresh coffee in the break room down the hall. You won’t have to drink any more of that machine crap.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I had a fair share of police friends in Chicago. Nice to know that the Aldyne police had at least one member who decided that civility wasn’t an admission of weakness.

  But all I wanted was to get out of the station house. My footsteps snapped down the polished floor of the corridor and around a corner. Detective Kapoor, sheathed in a sleek blue suit, had probably been checking something at the front desk before heading to the interrogation room.

  When she saw me, her dark eyes gleamed with humor. “Good to see you again, Mr. Conrad.”

  “I just met your Detective Courtney.”

  The smile now touched her rich red lips. “Careful what you say. He hears everything.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. The problem is he’s hearing things that aren’t true. Bobby Flaherty didn’t kill anybody.”

  “And you’re going to do our department the favor of telling us who did?”

  “Maybe even better. How about you tell me since you’re the police and I’m not?”

  The polite smile left the perfectly constructed face. “Detective Courtney and I have put together a good preliminary case against your young friend, Mr. Conrad. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop looking for other suspects. But it does mean that we’ve got good sound reasons to make him our chief suspect, at least for the time being.”

  She started walking past me before I could say anything. “Have a good day, Mr. Conrad.” Not favoring me with a look back as she spoke.

  Then I was outside in a lashing wind and hurrying to my rental.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sitting in a Starbucks, I used my cell phone to call Heather at her sister’s beauty shop. Sister answered the phone, and when I identified myself, she said, “I’ve been working on her but she won’t tell me anything. She got drunk last night and didn’t come in until late this morning. She’s not in real good shape. I’ll do my best to get her to talk to you.”

  “I appreciate that. Thanks.”

  I called the office and spoke to Ben.

  “I got a call from a media rep, Dev. He said Duffy’s media man just made a big buy for both thirty-second and ten-second spots. And he’s heard that he’s buying them all over the district.”

  “They’re going to jump on it. But Duffy’s smart. He won’t come at us head-on. It’ll all be by inference.”

  “The rep says he’ll let me know the minute they get a spot. I’ll run out there to look at it.”

  “I can see it now. Three women sitting at a table and an off-camera voice says, ‘Will the woman who had a child out of wedlock please raise her hand?’ And then the Susan look-alike will not only raise her hand, she’ll start bawling her ass off because she’s so ashamed of herself.”

  “You should be in advertising.”

  “Please, isn’t politics scummy enough for you?”

  He laughed. “Good point.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Over coffee and a muffin I tried to make it as simple as possible. Craig Donovan and Monica Davies blackmailed Natalie. Natalie paid them the money. Monica was killed in her hotel room. I was assuming that Donovan had killed her and taken the money for himself because there was a good chance that his murder had also been a robbery. The longer I thought about it, Susan’s words played into my take on everything. “He’s the most devious person I’ve ever known—a sociopath who loves to play games. He’d blackmail people, and then when they paid him, he’d immediately demand more. Right on the spot. He told me he knew he couldn’t get it; he just liked to see them suffer. He enjoys the torture as much as the money.” But in this case maybe he didn’t just want to see Natalie suffer; he wanted more money for real. But now it was moot. Alive, he could have talked to the press and revealed a lot of Susan’s secrets from her days of drinking and drugging. That would have been his last resort. But he was dead and so were all his secrets. Now the problem was finding the killer. Our last chance at recovering from the Bobby story was getting ahead of the next one. The police were happy to keep Bobby in jail, case closed.

  I decided to drive to the foundation. I hadn’t talked to David Manning yet. He might have connections with the press that even we didn’t. He was a local, and as head of a nonprofit, he’d know local important people. Management and CEO-level people who just might have a hand in controlling local media. Getting even one sympathetic outlet for our story would help. Fog and drizzle gave the afternoon streets a watercolor patina. Stoplights burned through the clouds like spreading wounds. I found an oldies station. Music transports me back into the past faster than anything else. I was once again a teenager of no particular note, given to a brown leather bomber jacket that was obstinate proof of my coolness. There’s a
lot of self-pity in looking back—you want to look at who you were and warn him, make him smarter and tougher. You want to protect him. He is almost your child. Then I thought of Susan as a teenager. I wondered if she’d worn one of those bombastic hairstyles you saw on music videos. Then I thought of Jane, tried to picture her. Somehow the mental photo had her in jeans and a T-shirt, and smiling the way she had at dinner. The image made me smile.

  And then I thought of Craig Donovan—no specific image, just a feeling of anger and dread. The most difficult thing for most people to imagine is evil. Real evil. Not Hollywood evil. The obvious ones are the drifters and the hobos and the lonely little ones who are invariably described as “quiet” when they’re caught after killing six or seven women. But then there are the swaggerers. They have looks and sometimes charm. I kept thinking about how he tortured his blackmail victims. I kept thinking about how many people he’d likely killed before, during, and after the time Susan had traveled with him. But at some point his luck had run out. The clothes weren’t so good, the motel was a shithole, and he’d put on the kind of weight that gave him a thuggish look. The man I’d fought with the other night was a career criminal destined to live out his days in a maximum-security prison. He’d had his vengeance for Susan deserting him, though. He’d forced her to publicly face her past.

  The Cooper Foundation stood stout and stern against the dim day, the classic red brick with its concrete parapet and wide front steps, impenetrable by any agent except time itself. The lot on the east side of it was only half full, so I had no trouble finding a spot. I hurried through the drizzle and walked inside. The museum setting of the first floor imposed quiet the way a church does. I’d seen this floor in brochures. The walls told their stories in paintings, photographs, and the drawings of children—expressions of suffering from every part of the planet. Senator Cooper’s wife had wanted everybody to understand that while they were enjoying happy hour a good share of the world was dying of famine and illness and war. These were the places the Cooper Foundation sent its money. I remembered Ben making a joke about how different the foundation would have been if the second Mrs. Cooper—Natalie—had set it up. “It’d all go to fashion designers and Paris Hilton types. You know, the real Americans.”

  I crossed the parquet floor to the front desk—the solemn air filled with Debussy on the sound system—where a young black woman sat reading a book. She smiled when she looked up. She was quite pretty, winsome, in her crisp white blouse. There was a hint of mischief in her eyes as she saw me trying to read the title on the spine of her paperback. “Sister Carrie,” she said. “Theodore Dreiser.”

  “One of my favorite novels.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Mandatory reading for people my age who grew up in Chicago.” Sister Carrie was about a country girl who comes to Chicago at the turn of the last century and uses her looks and cunning to become a creature of high society. It is a brilliant, bitter novel.

  “God, the story’s fascinating, and the way Chicago was back then . . .” She had a wonderful smile. “My English professor said it was banned in places when it first came out.”

  “The publisher said he was sorry it was ever brought out.”

  She had a sweet smile and a smart laugh. “It always amazes me what was so scandalous back then. She’d be on a reality show today.” She put her slender hand forth. “I’m Keisha, by the way. I work here after my college classes are over, answer the phone and greet people and do homework when nothing’s going on.”

  “Dev Conrad. Is David Manning in, do you know?”

  “No. They’ve been trying to find him. When I come in I always check upstairs with Doris. She’s very upset. Scared, I think. Nobody’s heard from him all day.”

  “Doris is in then?”

  “Yes. Would you like to see her?”

  “Please.”

  Nobody’s heard from him all day, I thought as she picked up her phone and punched in a single digit. “Hi, Doris, it’s Keisha. There’s a Mr. Conrad to see you. Is it all right if I send him up?” Pause. “Thanks, Doris.” Then: “You can go right on up. She sits at the reception desk. The other offices and the conference room are behind her. If you need to see anybody else, she can direct you.”

  “Enjoy the book, Keisha.”

  “Oh, I am. I just can’t help feeling sorry for Carrie sometimes—I don’t think I’m supposed to feel that, do you?”

  Before I could answer, her phone rang and she started explaining to someone how a group went about setting up a tour for an entire class. She gave me a little wave.

  The upstairs was all business. Wine-red carpet instead of parquet flooring, the walls covered with photographs of the late senator and various dignitaries of various eras, and a front desk wide enough to play tennis on. Doris Kelly looked almost childlike sitting at it. There was no music up here. She didn’t seem to hear me until I stood right in front of her desk. When she looked up, I saw her pull open a drawer and drop something inside quickly. She closed it with a look of shame. “I really shouldn’t be doing that, Mr. Conrad.” She knew I’d glimpsed what she’d hidden away. “I’m not a very good Catholic. I only go to Mass occasionally, but, of course, whenever something bad happens, there’s old hypocrite Doris saying her rosary.”

  Tears had stained the flower-blue eyes red. The nostrils were red, too. A small box of Kleenex sat next to her phone setup. Today’s suit was black—I wondered if she believed in omens—the blouse fuchsia.

  “All I got was from Keisha downstairs.”

  “She’s such a sweetheart.” She plucked a tissue from the box and dabbed her eyes and nose. “We’ve been calling everywhere all day. He had a meeting at a bank and a meeting with an investment group. He spends a lot of time talking to financial people, trying to steer some of their wealthiest clients to put us on their list of charities. He’s very good at it.”

  “When was the last time anybody here talked to him?”

  “From what I can tell, it was Keisha. She said she worked until five forty-five and walked out with him. She said he locked up and said good night and then walked to the lot and got in his car. I’d usually have been here, but I had a four o’clock appointment with my doctor. You know how doctors’ offices are. I didn’t get in until nearly five. Oh, God, I’m just babbling, aren’t I?” Her voice was trembling.

  “You’ve called Ben?”

  “Yes. I didn’t tell him what was going on. I didn’t want to alarm him. Or anybody there. But I said we really needed to hear from David in case he made contact with campaign headquarters.”

  “Has David ever done anything like this before?”

  She looked at me as if I’d asked a dirty question. “Of course not. He’s the most responsible man I’ve ever known.”

  She was talking about the man she loved, that was obvious. Whether David felt the same way, I had no idea.

  “I was thinking of calling the police.”

  “No!” My anger surprised me. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap there. But no—we’ve got enough problems with the press, and if we bring the police in on this the press will have another story to flog us with.”

  “I happen to care about him very much.” She blushed.

  “Look, Doris. We don’t know what’s going on. People just walk away from things sometimes. Not for long. They just take a day off. I’ve done it myself. Haven’t you?”

  “I have a perfect employment record. You never know when you might need your employer to give you a recommendation.”

  She was starting to irritate me. It was easy to see her now as the snitch in grade school who reported everything to the teacher.

  “The police wouldn’t do anything, anyway. There’d be no reason to. Not at this point. Did you try his home?”

  “Yes. I talked to the maid. She said that David came home late and went to bed. She said he had an early breakfast and left for the office. That was around seven o’clock. Nobody’s seen or talked to him since.” She touched a slender fin
ger to the Kleenex box; there seemed to be solace in the act because she sighed. “I’m just so worried about him.”

  I took out my card and placed it on her desk. “There’s my cell phone. No matter what time it is, if you learn anything, call me. Meanwhile, I’ll do some checking of my own.”

  “You’ll really help me with this?”

  “Of course. I just want to keep it quiet while I’m doing it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Conrad. This has—this has just really frightened me.”

  She’d always called me Mr. Conrad, even when the group of us had had dinner in Chicago. She was just being proper, I supposed, the way her favorite book instructed her to—The Secretary’s Guide to Anal-Retentive Behavior. There was no point now in trying to get her to call me Dev.

  “Remember, call me the minute you hear anything.”

  “I will. Of course I will.”

  I reached over and placed my hand on hers. “This’ll have a happy ending, Doris. He’ll turn up and he’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

  Then I was walking to the stairs. I wondered how long it’d be before she hauled her rosary out again.

  On the way to campaign headquarters I punched between three radio call-in shows. Each was dealing with the subject of Congresswoman Cooper’s son and the fact that he was being held for questioning by police. Somewhere amid the din of disapproval there was a gentler, more reasoned voice, female, making the point that a fair number of women had put illegitimate children up for adoption and that the fact that they were together again would be good for both of them. And that maybe we—the public we—should wait to see what kind of evidence the police had before judging Bobby guilty. She wasn’t on long. Who wanted to hear this kind of conciliatory crap when finding a tree for lynching was so much more fun?

  At four-thirty in the afternoon the front of headquarters was empty except for volunteer staffers. Between rain, fog, and headlines the usual crew of young helpers had found other things to do after school. In the staff office in back, only Ben and Kristin remained. Kristin was laboring through a telephone conversation with a reporter who was obviously checking out various rumors. Duffy was probably floating a few of them—just as we would—but this kind of situation produces fictions through some kind of organic process that borders on magic. Then Susan wasn’t a lesbian after all? Had Susan produced other illegitimate children we didn’t know about and were any of them of the colored persuasion perhaps? Was there any possibility that Susan had been impregnated by an alien and that Bobby was a Venusian spy?