by Al Roker
She shuffled off, muttering.
Nat leaned toward me, keeping his voice low. “I’m not playing you. If I had the files with me, what’s to stop that big blond dude out there from just takin’ ’em? You give me the money and I tell you where they are. They’re easy to get to.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, standing. “Don’t call me again unless you decide to show up with the files.”
“Hold on. Sit yourself. Let’s see if we can’t work this out.”
I sat back down.
“Twenty-five hundred,” he said.
I shook my head. “Not twenty-five cents, unless I see the folders.”
He slumped. “Fuck this,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. This isn’t my scene. A week ago I was living a normal life. I had a job. I was starting to sell my sculptures. Larry wasn’t the easiest guy to live with, but we got along okay.
“Then that stupid old man had to get greedy, and the shit hasn’t stopped raining down on my head.”
“Could be worse. Look at the old man and Larry.”
“I definitely don’t want to join that club,” he said.
“Is that why you ran?”
“Yeah, I figured a big homicidal dog was hunting my black ass. Now the cops are, too. I’ve gotta put miles between me and Chicago.”
“The cops have any reason to think you did it, other than the fact you took off?”
“Yeah. They musta found my shoes with Pat’s blood on ’em.”
“That’d be a clue, all right.”
“I told you I was there after he was dead,” he said defensively. “Like a fucking idiot I stepped in his blood.” He said it louder than he’d planned, and he scanned the room to make sure nobody was tuning us in.
“Why’d you go there that night?”
“Pat phoned me a little after midnight. Caught me at a comedy club in the neighborhood where Larry works out his material. He said he was worried. Somebody had threatened him, and he didn’t want to be alone.”
“He tell you who threatened him?”
“Nah. But it wasn’t anything new, him getting threats. And I was a little wasted, because when Larry performs, booze is free. Anyway, I told Pat I’d come. But Larry was just starting his last set. And when that was over, he was wired, as usual, and wanted to go somewhere and eat and talk. Before that, I phoned the old man to see if he still wanted company.”
“What time is this?”
“A little after one. Pat’s phone rang a bunch of times, and I figured he’d gone to sleep. So I hung up. But I was a little worried. He’d been acting kinda strange. On Saturday, he even got out his old Police Special and cleaned it up. This was after he went off by himself for a couple hours. That was weird, too. He hates to drive.
“All that on top of the call when I was at the club, I thought I better check up on him before Larry and I had our late-night pizza.”
He paused while the waitress presented me with a bottle of Bud, capped. “Got ya the premium stuff,” she said before shuffling off.
I didn’t bother uncapping it. I wasn’t thirsty. “So you and Larry went to Patton’s sometime after one?” I prompted.
“Yeah. In Larry’s car. Took us another twenty minutes to find a place to park in that neighborhood. Shit, I just realized something.”
He straightened in his chair. “There was a Range Rover pullin’ out, leavin’ almost enough space for two cars. That was just down the street from Patton’s. It coulda been the bastards who killed him, leavin’ the scene.”
“How many men?”
“Two. One tall, one closer to the ground and thick. I didn’t get much of a look. Trees make it a little dark around there.”
“They were in a Range Rover?”
“Big fucking machine. Metallic red.”
“Killers would probably be driving something a little less conspicuous,” I said. Then it occurred to me that a big metallic red car had roared past Carrie and me just before our confrontation with the hit man.
“I guess it coulda been horndogs who’d been cruising the bars on Rush. Come to think of it, one of ’em was wearing a team jacket. Couldn’t see the name on it.”
“So you parked and went up to Patton’s apartment,” I said.
“Yeah. As soon as we cleared the stairs, I saw the door to his place was open and knew that couldn’t be good.”
“Had it been pried open?”
“You think I bothered to check the door? I was too busy looking at how messed up the living room was. I mean, it had been seriously trashed, but it was like whoever had taken the books off the shelves and cut up the cushions and the rug had done it carefully.”
“Didn’t want to wake the neighbors.”
“Maybe. Anyway, the old man—Jesus, they’d shoved his socks in his mouth, then cut and roasted him. And the smell … I still get a whiff of it every now and then. Larry and I see all this and we head for the door. But Larry stops and says, ‘No.’ He’s incredibly cool. He asks me if I’ve got any idea what the killers were trying to torture out of Patton.
“I tell him the old man kept some money at the apartment, but that’s sure to be gone. Larry asks if there’s anything else. And I remembered that on Saturday, before we went to your hotel room, Pat goes into the crapper and comes out with this little plastic bag. It’s drippin’ wet. He gets a key out of it. Then we drive to a storage place on Clark. He goes in and comes out with two red folders. One of ’em looks empty, the other’s got papers. From there we head to a Minuteman copy shop on North Clybourn.
“So I tell Larry all this, and he makes a beeline to the crapper. The medicine cabinet and linen closet are hanging open. The floor is a pile of tossed towels with the top of the toilet tank resting on the pile. Larry stares into the open tank, sticks his hand down in it, and starts unscrewin’ the brass float ball. He pulls that apart, and inside is the plastic bag and the key.
“We get some flashlights and go to the storage place and pop the lock. Spend hours searching through all the crap Patton had in there. His old cop outfits, caps. Trophies. Personal papers. Love letters some broads sent him back in the seventies. Turns out the guy even got married back then. Don’t know what happened to his old lady. Probably walked out on him.”
“Tell me about the files.”
“That’s what the place mainly was: files. But the current four—the ones we grabbed—were right on top.”
“What were some of the names on them?”
“Besides you? Well, there was … Naw. Not without some green changing hands.”
I considered offering him some of the five thousand for the name of the man he thought killed Patton and Kelsto. But pulling out a wad of bills and peeling off a few didn’t strike me as a smart move, even if we weren’t in a pit like Nero’s.
“Finish your story first. What’d you and Larry do after you had the files?”
“Went back to our place. It’s like three-thirty, four in the morning. Larry’s so wired he stays up, readin’ through all the files. I was so wiped that even with the image of Pat’s body in my head, I crashed hard. Wasn’t till morning I saw the blood on the edge of my shoe. I’ve watched enough TV to know you can’t just clean that stuff off. So I hid the shoes in the shed at our place.
“I barely got ’em hid before the cops showed.” He lifted his beer bottle and was annoyed to find it empty.
I moved my bottle across the table.
He twisted off the cap. “I don’t like staying in one place too long,” he said. “Are we making a deal here, or what?”
“That depends on whether you can convince me to trust you. What brought the cops to your house?”
He shrugged. “They found out somehow I worked for Pat. Nothing more. They threw questions at me for a couple hours and split.”
“They ask you if you murdered Patton?”
“That was question number one,” he said. “The next: Where was I between midnight and five a.m.? I had to bring Larry into it, to back
up my alibi that we’d gone to bed at twelve-thirty and stayed there till morning.”
“Did they tell you your rights?”
“No. I didn’t get the sense they thought I was involved. Not then.”
“What other questions did they ask?”
“The usual. Did I know anybody who’d want to kill the old man? Hell, it was easier to give ’em the names of people who didn’t.”
“Was it around then you mentioned that Patton visited my hotel room?”
He opened his mouth, possibly to deny it, then nodded. “Yeah, I told ’em that.”
“Did you tell ’em why he came to see me?”
“No. ’Cause I didn’t know. I only figured that out later, when I looked at your red file. The clippings tell the story. Only thing I couldn’t figure, and still can’t, was why he’d stuck that movie script in your file. I know he didn’t have one in the folder he took to your hotel room.”
“What exactly is in my folder?” I asked.
“Just some newspaper clips, copies of your police record, and some guy’s death certificate.”
“You tell the cops about any other trips you and Patton made?”
“They just wanted to know the recent ones.”
“What else did you tell them?”
“I told them about him driving off somewhere on his own after he’d seen you. I told ’em I didn’t know where, which was the truth at the time. I told them about him getting out the gun and that he was worried when he called Sunday night.”
“Where’d he drive, Nat?”
He shook his head. Held up a hand and rubbed his fingers against his thumb in a give-me-the-money gesture.
“He called it an errand. Said I should go hang somewhere for a couple of hours, he had an errand to run by himself. But he’d be back in time for some business he had at a TV station. I don’t know what happened out there, but when he left me he was a happy camper. When he got back, not so happy at all.”
“What else did the cops ask you?”
“Nothing special.”
“Maybe about the headless body on the beach?”
His face broke out in a partial smile, the first since I sat down with him. “Yeah. They wanted to know if Pat said anything to me about it.”
“Had he?”
“Hell, yeah. That was pretty much what he was talking about the last few days. How the cops were fucking up. And how he was smart enough to know how it connected to some other crime.”
“He mention what crime?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything about the headless guy dying of natural causes?”
“No. He—”
Someone shouted “Hey!” outside the bar.
Parkins ran to the clear pane and looked out. “Shit!” he said. “That’s the one.”
I moved to the clear pane, too.
A big red vehicle was parked near the front door. It looked like the same one I’d seen that night on the way to Webber’s home.
There was the sound of gunfire and shattering glass.
I dropped to the not exactly clean floor. I turned to check Parkins’s condition, and discovered he was among the missing. The bar’s rear door was swinging shut.
I got up and ran to the door.
All I saw in the paper-and-trash-strewn alley was a row of overflowing garbage cans and living proof that you can draw more flies to garbage than you can to honey.
Chapter
THIRTY-TWO
When I returned, Dal was in the bar, looking for me. He didn’t seem to realize that everybody else in the room was looking at him.
“Billy,” he yelled. “Gotta boogie.”
I looked at our table, wondering if Nat had left his notebook. It and the pencil were gone.
We boogied.
The maroon Nissan Z had a line of bullet holes along its left side, leading to a hanging piece of wire where the extended mirror had been blown away.
By the time I made it to the passenger seat, Dal had the engine revving. “Let’s see how lucky we are,” he said, and steered us away from the curb.
“The question is,” he continued, as he drove us away, “did that asshole hit any vital parts?”
I assumed he meant parts of the car.
“What happened?”
“These two very white guys drove up. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there aren’t a lot of white guys around here. The driver didn’t bother to park. Just hovered. The other guy hops out. Twenties. Thin, six-foot-plus, black hair, dark suit, white business shirt. No tie. Average-looking, but there’s a very intense vibe coming off him.
“He’s heading for the bar. I figure I’d better slow him down. I get out of the car and shout at him. He responds by pulling a Glock G32 from under his jacket, and I dive inside the car just before he stitches up the open door. I return fire while he’s running back to the Range Rover. He dives in, and they’re gone.”
“It was a metallic red Range Rover,” I said.
“Yeah. You saw that? It makes even less sense. Who goes to a shoot-out in a red Range Rover?”
“The same guys who tortured and killed Pat Patton,” I said. “Very stupid or very confident.”
“I vote for very crazy,” Dal said. He had his phone out.
I heard him ask to be put through to Mantata. While he summarized the shoot-out at Nero’s, having nothing better to do, I searched the streets we were passing for the red Range Rover. In a city boasting more than three million cars, the result was no more than expected.
Dal finished his conversation as we crossed the Kennedy Expressway, traveling west. “The man’s not happy,” he said.
Our destination was Zeke’s Auto Repair on North Milwaukee. To my surprise, Zeke was a female. Literally if not ostensibly. A woman-of-the-plains type—ageless, big, muscular, straight gray hair tied in a ponytail, wearing baggy, oil-spotted Levi’s and an Orange County Choppers T-shirt. She gave me a quick, curt nod, had a raucous laugh at Dal’s “purty clothes,” and barely spent a minute looking at the damage to the car.
“Hell, Dal, this is all Bondo bullshit,” she said. “Rattlin’ cages again, huh?”
“Something like that,” he said. “You know anybody drives a metallic red Range Rover?”
“Nah. My customers all got good taste. ’Cept you. You like these foreign crapwagons. Be ready for ya tamarra. Take the Camaro.” She pointed to a yellow two-door with twin thick black stripes down the center of the hood.
“It looks like a fucking bumble bee,” Dal said. “What about the Mustang?”
Zeke turned to the mechanics working on cars in the shop. “Bessie, Dal here wants to borry ya new ’tang,” she shouted.
A tiny woman rolled out from under a Buick. She was young and had oil smudges on her attractive pug face. “Dal can go fuck himself,” she said, and rolled back under the car.
Zeke gave Dal a helpless shrug. “What can I say? A woman scorned. Key’s in the Camaro. And pick up ya damn Nissan early tamarra. Cars that ain’t homegrown give the shop a bad name.”
“Colorful character,” I said, as we drove east.
“Huh? Oh. Zeke, yeah. Character.”
“Something on your mind?” I asked.
“I’m a little surprised at Bessie’s attitude. I thought we were … okay. I guess I did stand her up last time. But she knows the nature of my job with Mantata. Brush fires spring up, putting ’em out takes precedence over a roll in the sack. I explained all that to her.”
“In those words?”
He didn’t answer, which I took to be a positive response.
“This car rides fine,” he said.
“Where’s it taking us?”
“Ubora. Mantata wants to talk with you about the shoot-up.”
“Me? I didn’t even see it.”
“I think it’s got less to do with the shooting than what would have happened if the guy had made it inside the bar with his Glock.”
“Nat Parkins was out of there so fast,” I said, “I
doubt the killer would have had the chance to shoot him.”
“Well, that’s the thing Mantata wants to talk about. He’s thinking maybe Parkins wasn’t the target.”
Me? The target? Now there’s a happy thought.
Chapter
THIRTY-THREE
To take my mind off how close I’d come to experiencing multiple bullet wounds again, I phoned Kiki for news of the day.
“Trina says that since you’re not doing Hotline! she expects you to do the first hour of the show tomorrow, and Arnie has scheduled your interview with the Da Mare author for six-twenty a.m.”
“What else?”
I heard paper crinkling on the other end. “J. B. Kazynski called and left her number. Please tell me that it’s only business.”
“Not even that,” I said. “Next.”
“Lily C. called from New York. After cursing you for not turning your phone on, she said to tell you she fixed the sound on the Puff Potato Man show. She thinks the show is better than the one scheduled for Friday, and since this is a sweeps week, she’d like to switch the play dates.”
“I can’t remember which show was scheduled for Friday.”
“The, ah”—more paper crinkling—“the organic milk controversy.”
“Oh, hell, yes. Tell her to change it,” I said.
“Derek Webber’s office called,” she said, “to remind you about a dinner party tonight at Pastiche. Eight p.m. I looked up the place, Billy. On the Chicago River. Very swank. It was designed to look like a restaurant in Paris on the banks of the Seine.”
“Which one? The River Case? La Plage? Le Petit Poucet? Riviere?”
“If they’re on the Seine, just like one of them.”
“That must be why they named it Pastiche,” I said.
“Sometimes I hate you.”
I put my phone away and turned to Dal, who was steering the car with thumb and forefinger. “You ever hear of Restaurant Pastiche?”
“Oh, yeah. Very new. Very French. Very good. Yachts floating by on the river. The lights of the city on the water. If you and your companion aren’t bumping uglies twenty minutes after dessert, you did something wrong.”
“You and I are having dinner there tonight,” I told him.
