by Al Roker
This was not good news, and I must have showed it.
“Cheer up, dear boy.” He held up the notebook. “Your friend will be returning for this.”
“Probably not today,” I said. “But I can take it to him.”
“Excellent,” he said, handing it to me. “The night air and morning dew would treat it badly.”
I thanked him, promised to catch his next performance as Falstaff, and retired to Dal and the car.
“That doesn’t look like a red folder,” he said.
Working in live TV trains you in stretching information or condensing it. I brought him up to date in only three sentences.
“You figure it’s the same guys who shot up this car at Nero’s?”
“The description fits them better than the private eyes. And I doubt either of them would be doing any running.”
“So the killers picked up a girlfriend. Wonder what her story is.”
I was wondering the same thing. I knew a beautiful woman the color of caramel, but I couldn’t believe Adoree would be joyriding with the pair who’d killed and tortured two men. Then again, she’d heard about my criminal activity from someone she knew.
“So? What now, boss?”
“Either they’ve got him or he’s escaped,” I said. “But we might as well circle the park and see if by some stroke of luck the green car is still around.”
Starting the car, Dal said, “Might be luckier for us if it isn’t.”
Chapter
FORTY-FIVE
No green car. No Nat. No nothing.
By two-thirty we had retreated to my hotel suite. The housekeeping staff had restored it to its pristine condition, and Dal quickly began deconstructing their work by converting the couch into a bed and kicking off his shoes. “Excuse me if I grab a snooze, Billy,” he said. “It was a short night and a tough day.”
The idea was catching.
I went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and kicked off my shoes.
I spent a few minutes going through Nat’s notebook. I guess I should have referred to it as a sketchbook. It was more than half filled with nicely rendered pencil drawings. Patton in repose, on the phone, at the computer. Larry Kelsto looking wistful, watching TV, appearing onstage. Portraits of people I didn’t recognize. Our ancient waitress at Nero’s.
Of Nat’s many subjects, the one that inspired the most drawings was the Shakespeare statue. There were separate sketches of the tilted head, the back of the head, the right elbow resting on the arm of the chair, the left arm casually draped on the left leg, the chair itself. There were drawings of the legs, nicely capturing right knee, left knee, thighs, ankles.
I was tired and my eyes burned. I closed the sketchbook and got out my phone. While waiting for Cassandra to pick up, I slipped down in the bed and rested my head against the pillow.
“Billy? Is everything okay?” she asked.
The question momentarily threw me. Had something happened I didn’t know about? “I’m fine. Why?”
“You called at a time when I wasn’t busting my chops working or fast asleep.”
“Touché. How’s the biz?”
“Very good, actually. Busy for lunch, and we’re solid for dinner. TG for the TGIF mentality.”
“Anything new on the evil busboy?”
“Nope. The lovely little Phillipe is merely biding his time. I don’t see how he could possibly know we’re onto him, but maybe …”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “If he did, he wouldn’t bother coming in. He’s probably searching for a way to up the ante.”
“We have him covered. In addition to the undercover agent keeping her eye on him, I’ve reserved table twenty-three, the two-top near the swinging door, for circulating agents from A.W.’s office. And before you go into your Scrooge McDuck imitation, we get their services for the price of a meal. Booze and gratuities not included.”
“Okay, but tell the waiters to try to talk them out of steaks and lobster.”
“I hope you’re kidding,” she said, and hung up.
My next call was to Kiki, to inquire about our final week’s schedule. Only after I was switched to her voice mail did I remember that she’d gone to a “meeting.”
Good for her, I thought, yawning.
I put the phone on the night table, turned out the light, and lay back on the bed. I thought I might just fall …
The voice calling my name did not belong to Gabrielle Union, who had been urging me to search a nearby cave with her and forget about Halle Berry and Tyra Banks, my other companions with whom I was sharing a secluded cove.
“This better be good,” I said, forcing my eyes open.
“It’s six o’clock, bud,” Dal said. “Time to get ready for the scene at Dann’s Sports Den.”
I rolled over, away from him. “Wake me again when you’re through with the shower.”
“I’m through. I’m dressed. And there’s a blonde in the other room says you’ve gotta get moving.”
“She wearing an outfit that looks like a Lady Gaga reject?”
“It’s got feathers on the shoulders.”
I groaned. “Tell her I’ll be ready forthwith.”
“I’ll paraphrase,” he said.
“You holding up?”
“I’m okay. I compartmentalize.”
Twenty minutes later, shaved, showered, smelling like the piney woods, and dressed to the nines, I walked in on Dal and Lily Conover, who were discussing the relative merits of wearing apparel made from hemp and seriously depleting my bottle of single-malt.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Dal said, reacting to my picking up the bottle.
“Looks like you left me a shot,” I said, wondering if I really was starting to sound like Scrooge McDuck.
“Well, you’ll have to drink that shot later,” Lily said. “We haven’t much time, and the traffic is going to be fierce.”
There was quite a crowd lined up in front of Dann’s Sports Den when we arrived. Dal, preferring not to rely on the valets, dropped us off and rolled on in search of a place to park.
As far as the public is concerned, there is a big difference in arriving in a limo and being dropped off from a Nissan, even a Nissan Z. Some people on line recognized me, but the others, let’s call them “the unenlightened,” began shouting curses at us for busting the line.
Jonny Baker was waiting just inside the door, his face lighting up when he saw us. Tonight he’d dressed more formally. He was wearing a black Windbreaker with a white Onion City logo. “Billy!” he called. “Uncle Charlie’s been worried. Come on!”
The place was packed.
Jonny began opening a path for us, pushing people aside.
“Easy on the customers,” I told him.
“Uncle Charlie wants you to be with him,” Jonny said, continuing to cut a swath through the throng, oblivious to their loud and profane complaints.
The lounge area smelled of whiskey and beer and, substituting for the cigarette smoke of yore, fried potatoes. With just a hint of perspiration that would undoubtedly grow stronger as the night and the crowd progressed.
Charlie Dann was at the far end of the bar, not looking terribly worried. He was keeping about twenty people enthralled with a sports story that ended with “… and with all that damned hair oil on the ball, it slipped right out of my fingers.”
His listeners rewarded him with the kind of guffaw-laugh usually reserved for Chris Rock or Louis C. K. He looked past them at our approach and opened his arms wide in welcome. He hugged Lily, trying not to disturb the feathers, then put his arm around my shoulders and introduced me to the crowd as “The Man.”
I’d never been called The Man before, and I have to admit it felt good. Especially in a sports bar.
“Billy’s going to be watching the show with us,” he said, gesturing to the monitor behind the bar and to an even bigger thin-screen TV secured to the opposite wall, temporarily covering a large rectangular section of framed memorabilia. Both screens were present
ly occupied by a former homeless man named Philo Markus who’d become the host of the Wine & Dine Network’s show Bin Diver Dinner.
I looked away before Philo began feasting on a burger that had evidently been a little too super-sized for a McDonald’s customer. I saw that Dal had made it inside and was settling in at the bar, a few drinkers down.
“If you’ve got any questions about cooking or TV or the show you’re going to see,” I told the crowd, “I’m here to answer them.”
“Is American Idol rigged?”
“What’s Snooki really like?”
“How can I get on Survivor?”
“Who the fuck are you, man?”
It went on like that until the show began. The crowd calmed down, watched for about five minutes, then began ordering more drinks from the bar.
By the time the show ended, there was so much noise in the room that I doubted anyone could hear the speakers. Charlie shrugged, said, “Well, the customer’s always right. Especially when there are so many of ’em. Why don’t we leave them to their booze and go get some grub.”
He led us to a considerably more private dining room that he called the Bears’ Cave.
There were only about thirty place settings on five tables. At ours, Charlie was to my left, Lily to my right. Dal was at a nearby table with a group of Dann’s select customers.
Jonny was at a third table. But even before I was able to peruse the menu, he was up and at my side, handing me a slip of paper. On it, written in the same block-letter printing that had been on that sheet found in the deserted red Range Rover, was the terse message: “Come with me or your girl dies.”
Jonny was grinning at me with the sweet innocence of the mentally challenged.
Charlie and Lily were chatting about something. Across the room, Dal was staring at me with some curiosity.
“Come alone,” Jonny said. A simple statement, not a demand.
He was still grinning.
He leaned forward and whispered, “My brother says for me to wait for the count of ten.”
He backed away and walked out of the room.
My immediate thought was that he, or, more likely, his brother, had played it wrong. They’d skipped too many beats, evidently overestimating my mental agility as I had underestimated Jonny’s. It took me a few moments to fully understand the situation. Then it struck me that the squat man Nat had seen leaving Pat Patton’s the night of the murder had been Jonny in one of his Onion City Windbreakers. I supposed he’d also been the man the old actor had seen chasing Nat Parkins through Lincoln Park.
Which left me wondering about my “girl.” The Shakespearean dark lady who’d been with him in the park? Adoree? But how …?
To the count of ten.
I placed my napkin on the table, stood, and left the room. Dal watched me go. I nodded and tried to look as serious as a man heading for the gallows. I hoped he would follow.
Jonny was waiting just outside the door, a phone to his ear. “Billy’s here,” he said into it.
He closed the phone. “My brother says we’ve got fifty minutes. Better zoom-zoom, huh?”
He beelined to the restaurant’s rear stairwell, heading down the steps two at a time, assuming I was keeping up. Which I was, sort of. Then we were out through the exit and down an alley to the street.
“I’m around the corner,” he said.
We were in his dark green SUV, seat belts attached, heading north, when I asked, “Where are we going, Jonny?”
“To where it’s really nice. Right on the lake. You can swim. Or go out in the boat. I can even shoot my gun in the water. There aren’t many neighbors, and they’re pretty far away. But my baby brother, Dickie, says I should use a suppressor when I shoot so they don’t freak out. It’s this thing fits on the barrel. It still makes noise, but not as much and it sounds different, like a crack, not a gunshot.”
I chanced a quick glance in the rearview mirror. The car directly behind us could have been Dal’s maroon Z-car. Or not.
“I have many guns,” Jonny said. “I brought one of ’em.”
He reached inside his jacket with his left hand, keeping his right on the wheel. The gun he withdrew looked big and ugly.
“No suppressor?” I asked.
“No. It makes the gun not shoot straight. So I don’t use it when I’m working.”
“You need the gun for your work?”
“Sometimes. Depends on the job.”
“You working now?”
He smiled. “Kind of.”
“Who’s my girl, Jonny?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“That note you gave me said that if I didn’t come with you, my girl would be killed.”
“I remember the note. I don’t understand why you don’t know who your girl is.”
“Maybe I have more than one girl,” I said.
“Oh. We only have the one.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know if I should say. My brother, Dickie, told me exactly what to write. He didn’t say anything about telling you her name.”
His brother, Dickie. Damn it. I didn’t need Jonny to tell me her name. It wasn’t Adoree.
Chapter
FORTY-SIX
The sky continued to darken as we drove north along Lake Shore Drive, catching the tail end of the going-home traffic. “Why don’t you put the gun away, Jonny?” I said.
“It’s okay. I know how to use it.”
“Why would you use it?”
“Dickie said you might try something.”
“That’d be pretty silly of me,” I said. “If I did, Dickie would harm my girl. You know I don’t want that. It’s why I’m here with you.”
“Makes sense,” he said, and put the gun back into what I assumed was a shoulder holster under his jacket.
“There’s a faster way to get there,” he said, “but this is the way I know best.”
The lake was to our right. I caught glimpses of it through the trees and shrubbery, turning black as ink under the night sky. “I’m a little disappointed,” I said. “I thought you and I were friends.”
“Aren’t we?”
“Friends don’t threaten friends.”
“That’s not … Dickie explained how that works. It’s not personal. It’s what you have to do to make everything turn out okay.”
“How will my driving with you make that happen?”
“I don’t know. But it will.”
Belmont Harbor was on our right, a giant wall of high-rises to our left. “Is it your house we’re going to?”
He nodded, concentrating hard on the road.
“Your dad going to be there?”
“Maybe. In the big house. Not where Dickie and I live. He never goes there. Cecil and Camilla take care of us.”
“Will Cecil and Camilla be there?”
He smiled. “Of course not. They go to their daughter’s in Wilmette on weekends. Unless there’s a party, which there isn’t tonight.”
“So it’ll just be you, me, and Dickie?”
“And your girl,” Jonny said. “I better not talk anymore. I have to pay attention to my driving.”
I looked at the rearview mirror. Too many cars and too many headlights to see anything more than vague shapes.
Eventually, the four-lane drive curved left and was transformed into a two-lane street called Sherman Road. Low-rise buildings were mixed in with the high-rises. Though the traffic was gradually falling off, Jonny slowed the SUV. A twenty mph warning sign explained that.
At one point, not long after passing Loyola University, a roadside establishment called Leona’s Pizza appeared on our right. “We missed dinner,” I said.
“No talking now. We’re coming to the tricky part where I used to get lost. I need to concentrate real hard.”
He was leaning forward, scowling at the road.
I loosened my seat belt a few inches and casually turned my body, taking a long but careful look at the road behind us. Ther
e were only a few cars following us now. The night made it impossible to gauge their colors. The one nearest was an SUV. But behind that was a smaller, sleeker car riding close to the ground.
As it passed near a streetlamp, I saw that it was maroon-colored.
Feeling almost elated, I settled back on my seat and contemplated the road ahead as we drove through what appeared to be a residential area, its sidewalks illuminated by old-fashioned streetlamps.
Jonny turned left down one street, then right on another. He began to mumble, then wailed, as if in pain. He pulled over to the side of the road, stopped, and pounded on the steering wheel in obvious frustration. “Stupid-stupid-stupid,” he said, turning the word into a mantra.
The maroon Nissan Z was caught in our headlights as it passed us by and continued on down the street.
Jonny didn’t seem to have recognized the Z. He had his phone out. He pressed a button and held it to his ear. “Me,” he said. “No. He’s with me. That part’s okay, Dickie. I … got lost.”
He was silent for a few beats, then said, “Evanston, I think … Okay. Don’t hang up.”
He switched the phone to his left hand. With his right, he pressed a button on the dash that turned on the vehicle’s tracking system. Immediately, a colorful street grid filled the little monitor screen. “Okay, now what?” he asked.
Squinting, he reached forward and pressed a button. A series of numbers in yellow circles appeared along the bottom of the screen, along with a circle filled with what looked like the drawing of a Monopoly house. Jonny pressed that button.
A digitized voice, British or faux British, announced that he was to drive forward until the route instructions began. He obeyed, and the British voice issued its first command.
Breathing easier, Jonny said into the phone, “It’s working. We’ll be there soon. I’m sorry, Dickie. I’ll do better.”
I could hear the tone, if not the words, of Dickie’s harsh response.
Jonny put the phone away. He was sniffling, teary-eyed. He did not notice the parked maroon Nissan when we passed it by.
