by Al Roker
“No family connection to organized crime?”
“None I could find.”
“What about Luchek’s parents?”
“Salt of the earth.”
“So if you haven’t uncovered any basis for the claim of a reputed liar, and your client would no doubt be happy to hear the money is legit, why not close the case?”
“Because neither me nor my biographer roll that way.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You told me you read all my books,” she said.
Did I tell her that? Bad me.
“If you had,” she continued, “you’d know that I always start out trying to help my friends or relatives with a specific problem that eventually broadens into an investigation of something very big, something that has international repercussions. In Deadly Mission, for example, the mugging of my cousin, who happens to be a nun, led to my uncovering a bogus Catholic mission in Bogotá that was illegally importing cartel drugs and exporting American currency. In Fatal Courtship, the youngest sister of my best friend at Oriole Park Elementary disappeared from a tennis court two days before her wedding. At first I figured she’d had second thoughts about marriage and done a fade. But then I started getting death threats, and some guy wearing a Dr. Phil mask worked me over using a baseball bat—”
“A baseball bat? Really?”
“Well, in the book, it was a baseball bat. In reality, he was just a bald-headed asshole with a ’stache who slapped me in the face once or twice after I kneed him in the sweetbreads. But my point is this: I started out looking for a missing girl, and before it was all over, I had to take on the sex slave trade operating from this country to Bangkok.”
“In the book, you did this,” I said.
“Well, in real life, too. Kind of. I mean, the missing girl wasn’t in Bangkok. She was working at a gentlemen’s club in Joliet. But Stacy Lynne, who’s like my biographer, said we had artistic license to change it to Bangkok, which is way hotter.”
“Of course it is, but the average temperature of Bangkok compared to Chicago aside,” I said, “where do you or Stacy Lynne see your Onion City investigation taking you?”
“To something funky going down on the Internet. Maybe involving Net neutrality. Or an evil genius like the late Osama getting a hacker to take over a social network to rile up people in some Middle Eastern country so he can install his man as their leader.”
“That sounds like another winner,” I said, waving my credit card at the waitress.
“You’re not leaving?”
“Too many things to do, too little time …,” I said to her, mentally adding for my own benefit, to waste on bullshit like this.
“But I’ve a lot more to ask you.”
Watching the waitress take the card to the cashier, I said, “You got all I have. Picked me clean.”
“What about Alanz? Was he trying to kill you or the actress?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I was too busy trying to hide. And what does that have to do with your investigation?”
“Did Alanz say anything?”
“Kinda hard to hear anybody say anything over the gunfire!”
“Why didn’t he kill you?”
The waitress had returned in time to hear J.B.’s question. She looked a little apprehensive as she handed me the credit slip to sign. I gave her a full 25 percent tip, and she scurried off.
“You didn’t answer the question,” J.B. said.
“I honestly don’t know.” I stood and headed for the elevator. She was at my heels.
“Maybe he wasn’t really trying to kill either of you.”
“Maybe.” It was a possibility I’d been considering.
The elevator arrived just as we did.
“Any reason why somebody would send you a scare message that strong?” she asked as we descended.
I shook my head.
“Could it be Sands he was trying to scare?”
“I don’t have a clue. And I think we’ve just about covered the subject.”
“We’ve just started,” she said.
We stepped from the Garland Building. There was the smell of ironworks on the air, harsh and near toxic. I saw a taxi cruising toward us on Wabash and waved him down.
“You have a car?” I asked J.B.
“Over by the park. Need a lift somewhere?”
“No,” I said, and got into the cab, pulling the door shut behind me. “Just wanted to make sure you won’t be following me. Have a nice day.”
The driver wanted to know my destination. I suggested he head out and I’d tell him on the way.
As we departed, I looked back at J.B. She was pointing her phone in our direction. Taking a picture of the taxi. She’d be checking the driver’s schedule to see where he’d dropped me.
I wondered what she really was investigating and why she was spending so much time and effort on poor, innocent little me.
Chapter
TWENTY-SIX
If J.B. had bothered to inquire, she’d have discovered that the cab deposited me at 3510 South Michigan Avenue. That’s the address of Chicago police headquarters, where Lieutenant Maureen Oswald was expecting me in approximately twelve minutes. Kiki had said the lieutenant promised to impart new information. About Larry Kelsto’s murder? Or Pat Patton’s? Or both? Or neither? Or … the hell with it. I’d know in just a few minutes.
Or not.
The man who cut me off as I approached the building’s glass doors was dressed like a Wisconsin farmhand who’d just arrived in the big city. He was wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into faded blue denims. He stood at a little over six feet in worn brown work boots. His blond hair hadn’t been combed that morning, maybe never, and stuck up in corn-silk tufts. He had a half-grin on his square-chinned, dopey, beardless face. “You’re him, right?” he asked.
“Everybody’s somebody,” I said, and attempted to walk around him. He sidestepped, staying in my way. “I mean, you’re the guy on the morning show? Blessing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d love to chat, but I’ve got to get to a meeting.”
“No, you don’t.” That came from someone standing directly behind me.
He was a few inches shorter than his coworker, older by a decade, and, I suppose, women might have found him ruggedly handsome with his three-day growth of beard. He was wearing dark aviator sunglasses, a brown leather bombardier jacket, fashionably weathered, khaki slacks, and white tennis shoes. His right hand was in the pocket of his jacket along with something that gave him a lopsided look.
I had the feeling I’d seen him somewhere before, but I couldn’t place the location.
“See that silver van parked at the curb, friend?” he said. “The three of us are going to stroll to it and go for a little ride.”
“Really? In front of police headquarters you’re doing this?” I asked.
He scanned the area casually, noting the civilians and cops entering and exiting the building. “I don’t see anything here to stop you from taking a bullet,” he said.
“Good point.”
We headed for what I assumed was the silver van. It was silverish. And van-ish.
Country Boy opened the side door, exposing middle and rear seats.
“In,” the handsome bombardier ordered.
The middle row consisted of two separate buckets. Bombardier prodded me toward the far seat, and he took the one beside me, removing his hand from his pocket and pointing his gun at my groin. I wondered if he targeted that area on all of his kidnaps or if he suspected it might be my particular Achilles heel.
Country Boy shut the door and circled the van, sliding behind the wheel in front.
We sat like that for a minute or two while Country Boy puttered around. Finally, Bombardier said, “Anytime you’re ready, Ace.”
“I keep pressin’ the button, but it won’t start, C-man.”
“Turn the key.”
“Cars don’t have keys no more, C-man. They got buttons you
press.”
“Then press it.”
“It ain’t doing nuthin’.”
“You fucking with me?”
“No. Maybe the battery wore out. It jus’ won’t start.” Country Boy slid down on his seat and began to inspect the underside of the dashboard. “Gaw damn,” he said. “The wires are all just hangin’ down like they been yanked out.”
Suddenly, Bombardier jerked upright beside me. He slowly lifted the gun until it was a few inches from his right ear, aimed at the van’s ceiling. Long black fingers appeared from somewhere behind us and plucked the weapon from his unresisting hand. The barrel of another gun was pressing against Bombardier’s neck.
I turned my head very slowly and saw a very black face surrounded by dreadlocks. It rewarded me with a big, gold-toothed grin. Without losing it, he drew back the hand holding C-man’s gun and slammed it hard against the back of the hard case’s skull.
When C-man grunted and tumbled forward off the seat, Ace suddenly became aware that all was not right in the rear of the van. He turned, and his eyes bulged. Almost as much as the zoot-suited wolves in Tex Avery cartoons when they see a pretty girl. All that was missing was the “boi-yoi-yong” sound effect.
Natty Dread was already on the move. In one fluid motion, he gracefully shoved the seat carrying the unconscious C-man forward far enough for him to use his gun to flatten some of Country Boy’s straw hair. Country Boy bounced against the left door and slid under the steering wheel.
“Mek haste, bredda,” the very black man said to me in a pleasant Jamaican singsong, “a fore jancro ketch us heah.”
He tossed C-man’s gun onto the front seat and tucked his into the pocket of his dark gray warm-up jacket. “Why you still sitting? Leggo.”
I heard the tap of a horn to our left. A big white Cadillac Escalade had pulled up beside us.
“Naa mek mi vex, mon,” Dreadlocks said. “Yu doan wanna romp wit me.” He was no longer smiling. He reached into his pocket, presumably for the gun. “Us step out yah,” he ordered.
I definitely did not want to romp with him. Which is why I stepped out.
Kidnapped twice. Right in front of Chicago police headquarters.
Had to be some kind of record. Hello, Chicago, Hello.
Chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Me name be Trejean,” my Jamaican captor informed me when we were ensconced on the rich leather mid-vehicle seat in the white Escalade. He gestured to our driver. “Dat lily-brown Portugee behin’ de wheel be Hiho.”
The white biker type seated beside Hiho introduced himself through a yellow beard. “I’m Dal, the brains of this crew.”
“Dal be a jesta, a samfi man,” Trejean said. “We put up wit his foolery ’cause he be fambly.”
The three of them were young, probably still in their twenties. As seemingly different as their modes of dress. Under his gray jacket, Trejean wore a black tee and narrow black trousers. From what I could see of Hiho, he preferred a hipster narrow-brim purple hat, a pale rose silk shirt, and suspenders matching the color of the hat. Dal opted for a leather wifebeater that left his heavily larded, muscular arms on display in all their naked glory. There was a tattoo of a pretty bespectacled woman near his left shoulder that looked suspiciously like Sarah Palin.
“Where we headed?” I asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Dal the jester said.
I turned for a final woeful look at the rapidly diminishing police headquarters building where Lieutenant Oswald was no doubt assuming I’d blown her off. I saw that the silverish van of my primary kidnappers, having loitered much too long in the passenger zone, finally was attracting the scrutiny of two uniformed officers.
Great work, guys. Keep that traffic flowing.
“All fruits ripe,” Trejean said. At least that’s what it sounded like. He had positioned himself with his back to the left side of the big SUV, facing me. “Yu nuh easy,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Jamaican jibber-jabber,” Dal explained. “Tre thinks you look worried. Shit, man, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’re protecting your ass.”
“Is that what just happened?”
“What else? Those boys were bad hombres. They were going to …” Dal pointed a thumb-and-finger gun at me and made the appropriate bang-bang noise.
“And you boys?”
“You’ve just been rescued by the A-Team,” Dal said.
Hiho giggled. “Love it when plan come together,” he said, the first peep out of him. A TV fan. Maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think Hannibal Smith ever giggled when he recited that line.
“Not that I’m ungrateful,” I said, “but why rescue me?”
“Info above our pay grade,” Dal said. “We’re told to keep you alive, that’s what we do.”
Trejean chuckled. “Dal bad bwoy. Las’ night, snap that hot-steppa’s neck.”
“Hot-steppa?”
“In Jamaican lingo, a hot steppa is a criminal hot-stepping from the cops,” Dal explained. “He’s talking about the wrong-o who tried to light up you and the blond lady last night on the Near North. We took care of him.”
“Bad bwoy, Dal,” Trejean said, as if it amused him.
“Tre’s ribbin’ me because we weren’t supposed to get fatal on him until we found out who hired him. But the guy just wouldn’t cooperate—”
“He tess Dal.”
“Yeah. He tested me, all right. I may not look it, but I’m pretty even-tempered. That prick head-butted me. Made me see red, and I took that hard head and twisted it. A little too much.”
“A fuckery, dat,” Trejean said dismissively. “Car odah so bad, made us gwine adoor.”
“Ruined my ride,” Hiho said.
“My bad,” Dal said. “See, when his neck popped, the guy voided himself, front and back. Left the car smelling like a French pissoir.”
“Worse,” Hiho said.
“We had to dump that set of wheels.”
“That would’ve been a black SUV?” I asked.
“Yess. Black Beauty,” the newly chatty Hiho said. “Noble goddamn machine. A real machine. Not like this … this pale white marshmallow.”
“Hiho’s not a big fan of luxury,” Dal said. “He believes in what my mom used to call a spartan lifestyle.”
“The purple hat had me fooled,” I said.
“You don’t like my hat? Fuck you, Mister GQ.”
“Actually, Hiho,” Dal said, “it’s not a great color for a man of your complexion.”
“Fuck you, too, smartypants.”
Great, I was now in an episode of Project Runway. As amusing as my kidnappers were, I decided the wise thing would be for me to get my Sherlock Holmes on and start observing.
We’d been traveling west on Madison for a while, but Hiho had made a few turns and now we were passing a tall red-brick building with giant O’s filling its display windows. Oprah Country. The next block was completely given over to the talk show queen’s Harpo Studios.
“You being in TV,” Dal said, “I guess you know her, huh?”
“We met once or twice,” I said.
“What’s she like?”
“The meetings were brief. She seemed pretty much like on the show.”
“They say studio haunted by woman they call the Gray Lady,” Hiho said. “Place built on a morgue fulla dead bodies.”
“Shut up, dat,” Trejean said, obviously no fan of ghost stories.
“Wasn’t a morgue, exactly,” Dal said. “Used to be an armory. Back in the early 1900s a big ship capsized on the lake and they stored some of the victims there. I think that’s how it went.”
“Dal got de ed-u-cay-shun,” Trejean said.
Hiho took a few more turns and we were in a Starbucks/hair salon/boutique fashions commercial area. He maneuvered the white Escalade down a narrow drive between a three-story yellow plaster building with a green awning and a white wooden two-story that, according to a shiny brass plate, housed TH
E LEGAL COUNCIL. I made a mental bet with myself that our destination would not be a building in which anything even remotely “legal” would transpire. And I was right.
Hiho parked near the loading area of the yellow building. He and Trejean remained with the Escalade while Dal walked me toward closed double doors in comradely fashion, his big, moist arm heavy on my shoulders.
A sign beside the doors read: UBORA EMPLOYEES ONLY. PATRONS PLEASE USE THE MAIN ENTRY.
“It’s okay,” Dal said, opening the door. “You’re with me.”
“What’s Ubora?” I asked.
Dal smiled. “The sign out front says it’s an international gallery of fine art. Me, I don’t even care much for comic books.”
We entered a large shipping area. Sawdust and plastic Bubble Wrap formed little and big mounds on the floor beside various basic tools, thin bare-wood crates, and heavy cardboard boxes. With a soft vocal—Norah Jones, I think—playing through the speakers, three sullen males and two sullen females, all of them brown-skinned, young, and wearing green T-shirts under red bib overalls, were taking their own sweet time carefully crating a stack of oil paintings. They gave us the brief glances that our importance to their lives required, then returned to their tasks.
The paintings they wrapped so listlessly were news magazine–size and outlined by identical gold-leaf rococo frames. Each was a portrait of a different rabbi.
“What’s that all about?” I asked.
“The rabbis?” he said with a shrug. “It’s the art world. Go figure.”
After three flights up in the service elevator we arrived at a tastefully appointed reception area with indirect lighting that, combined with the powder-blue walls, gave the room the color of the sky in Dehiwala Town, Sri Lanka, at sundown. As best I could remember.
The couches and chairs were of soft white leather. Sand dunes?
A baby spot cut through the Sri Lanka–ish glow like a giant, well-aimed moonbeam calling attention to a very blond woman seated at the reception desk. She was something to see, perched ramrod stiff on her chair, looking pale and lovely in a soft yellow dress with a scoop neck. She reminded me of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, minus the neurosis. Her only visible flaw was the ugly sliver of black plastic stuck in her right ear.
