by Clark Howard
Another clipping read:
DISCIPLES GANG LEADER HELD
That item reported that Frazier Lamont, leader of the Disciples, a black street gang, was being held in the central jail lockup on a variety of charges which his attorney called “ludicrous and totally in violation of his client’s constitutional rights.” Among those charges were: accessory to the murder of a police officer, racketeering, felonies committed in the enhancement of street gang activities, extortion, carrying a concealed weapon, resisting arrest, assaulting police officers, and several other lesser offenses. Police were also looking into the recent disappearance of a Disciples gang member, one Otis Webb, who was observed being forcibly taken from the gang’s headquarters in the old Cortez Theater and had not been seen since. Lamont was being held in lieu of five hundred thousand dollars bail, and federal racketeering charges were also expected to be filed against him.
The next clipping Kiley picked up was headlined:
RACKETEERS RECOVERING
The two survivors of the now infamous New Saints Cemetery bombing, Augustus Dellafranco and James “Jocko” Hennessey, were reported to be making satisfactory recoveries from their injuries. Dellafranco, reputed head of organized crime on Chicago’s South Side, had lost his right arm and right leg in the explosion. Hennessey, a reputed member of the late Philip Touhy’s North Side crime family, had lost both arms above the elbow. The men were recuperating at separate undisclosed convalescent homes in other states. Neither was expected to return to a position of leadership in Illinois organized crime activities. The cemetery bombing case was still open, but DuPage County and Mt. Canaan city law enforcement agencies reported no progress being made in the investigation. The United States Department of Justice had declined to have the FBI join in the investigation because there was no evidence of any interstate violations connected with the crime.
Translation, Kiley thought: Nobody gives a fuck.
He put the latest clipping, about Gordon Lovat’s plea bargain, into the envelope with the others and put the envelope back in the dresser drawer. Glancing at the clock next to his bed, he saw that it was eleven-forty. Slowly he made his way through the dining room and into the big country kitchen of the old house. He took some leftover roast beef from the refrigerator and sliced part of it for sandwiches. As he was getting out the bread, he heard Alma’s car door slam and presently she came through the back door.
“You’re supposed to be resting, Joseph,” she scolded mildly. She kissed him on her way to the sink to wash her hands. “Remember what the doctor said about overdoing too soon.”
“Fixing lunch is not exactly overdoing,” he replied.
Drying her hands on a dish towel, Alma took the bread away from him and guided him to a chair at the kitchen table. “Sit,” she ordered, and took over the preparation of their lunch.
Alma came home every day at eleven-forty-five and stayed until one-fifteen. She had arranged her class schedule so that the lunch period and her daily free hour were consecutive, allowing her a long midday break. The school administration permitted it because they did not want to lose her. She had taken a leave of absence the previous semester, when she first brought Kiley home, and neither students nor parents were happy about it. Alma was probably the most popular teacher at Ripley Senior High, and the school board made it clear that whatever accommodation was necessary would be made to get her back. None of them knew how close she had come to resigning altogether. In fact, it had only been at Kiley’s insistence that she resumed her teaching career. That had been six months earlier, but nearly a year since the night he woke up in the hospital and found her sitting next to his bed.
When she saw Kiley open his right eye, which was not bandaged, Alma had smiled and said softly, “Welcome back.”
Kiley knew who she was—but that was all; he did not know where he was or why he was there.
“Your car blew up,” Alma quietly explained. It was almost one in the morning. There was a folding cot in the room that she used to stay with him every night. During the day, she would go back to a nearby motel room to rest a little and change clothes, but most of the time she was with him. “You’re in St. Benidictus Hospital,” she told him that night when he first awoke. “This is the trauma unit. You’ve been unconscious for twelve days.”
“Is my other eye gone?” he asked, alarm spreading in his awakening mind.
“No, it’s just under a bandage,” Alma quietly assured. She wet his lips with a towel and some water from a metal pitcher on the bed table. “Your face was burned, but your eyesight is all right.”
“I can’t—move anything—” He was trying to activate his fingers. Alma hovered over him, trying to reassure him with word and touch.
“You’ve got casts on. The concussion broke both of your collarbones and both ankles. And there was some internal damage; one of your lungs collapsed, some vertebrae were knocked out of place, that kind of stuff. But the doctors say you’ll be all right. It’ll just take time.”
Kiley had faded back out for several minutes and woke again to find a resident doctor and several nurses around the bed. They spoke quietly, encouragingly, to him as they checked his vital signs. His uncovered right eye shifted anxiously in its socket, and only relaxed when he finally saw Alma, waiting patiently in the background for them to leave. When they at last did, she moved a chair next to his bed and sat holding his hand, talking soothingly to him as his level of consciousness rose and fell. At one point, she explained how she got there.
“My cable TV service comes from Gary, Indiana,” she told him. “They carry all the local Chicago channels. I had been watching WGN almost nonstop after I heard on one of the networks that Tony Touhy had been killed in that cemetery bombing. I wondered at the time if you had anything to do with that.” She paused, then asked, “Did you?”
“No,” Kiley replied quietly.
“I really didn’t think you did,” she amended. “Anyway, the next night after the cemetery thing, just as I was getting ready for bed, I saw the report on you. I got dressed, got in my car, and drove to Chicago. I was here at the hospital before you even got out of surgery—”
Kiley dropped off again, wondering whether Stella had been there. Toward morning, Alma had answered that unasked question.
“Lots of people have been here to see you; I wrote down their names.” She got a sheet of paper from his bed-table drawer. “Chief Cassidy was here; Captain Parmetter, Captain Madzak; a sweet old priest named Father Conley; a lady named Aldena Loomis; another lady named Gertrude Levine—she said she was your landlady; then there was Mrs. Bianco—she said she was your late partner’s wife—widow, I guess—she was pretty curious about me, incidentally; seemed to think it was very odd that you had never mentioned me to her—”
So Stella had been there. In the hazy aftermath of awakening after twelve days, Kiley wondered what Stella would think, how she would feel, if she knew he had been leaving to come see her that night, wearing some of Nick’s sharp clothes, making promises to himself to pay more attention to his personal appearance—
He didn’t have to worry about keeping that promise, he thought, not with half his face burned off.
Alma remained with him for weeks, then months, keeping a room at the motel but staying at the hospital most of the time, tending to his personal needs, helping with his physical therapy when the casts came off and he began using his arms and legs again, being there for him before he went into and when he came out of the operating room after the doctors began the long process of grafting skin from his thighs onto his face. Kiley was sick a lot, nauseated, in pain, ill-tempered, and Alma was the target of some of his ire, but she never faltered, never snapped back, never deviated from being the epitome of patience, comfort, and support. Captains Parmetter and Madzak thought she was a saint and in time let Kiley know that she was much too good for the likes of him and that he was damned lucky to have her. Aldena felt the same way. Only Mrs. Levine reserved her full blessing, hoping right up to the l
ast minute that Kiley would return as her personal policeman and that she could nurse him back to health herself. Only reluctantly did she finally give up on that hope when Alma arrived one day to pack up all of Kiley’s personal belongings when he was being moved to a convalescent home outside the city.
Stella had been to see him a few times by then, and even though Alma always deferred to their privacy by leaving to run an errand or something, Stella’s visits were nevertheless awkward. She and Kiley both seemed to sense a lack of comfort in each other’s company that they had never felt before. They didn’t know whether it was Alma’s presence in his life now, or if they had finally realized that for them there simply was no future together. The last time Kiley heard from Stella Bianco was when she telephoned one Friday night to tell him that she and Frank Bianco would be getting married the following morning. That was their good-bye.
Just as it had been in the hospital, so it was in the convalescent home: Alma with a room nearby, but most of her time being spent with Kiley. She helped him exercise, eat, shower; she sat with him late at night when he couldn’t sleep—when the demons of what he had done, the murders he had committed, those terrible things of which she knew nothing, came to haunt him and gnaw at his conscience and his soul. The men he had killed had been evil—all eight of them: Fred Scarp and seven of his nine pallbearers—but they had been human beings nevertheless, men with mortal souls, and the right to end their lives was reserved far beyond Joe Kiley, and that tormented him. So Alma held his hand, stroked his arm, blotted the sweat from his neck and chest, and never asked questions.
“You’re putting in a lot of time with me, lady,” he said one day when she had helped him walk out on the grounds for some fresh air.
“I know,” she replied. “Everybody tells me you’re not worth it.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, I’m stubborn,” she told him. “I want to see for myself.”
After four months in the convalescent home, during which he had his fifth and sixth skin grafts at a nearby hospital, it was finally time for Kiley to be discharged. He resisted the notion. The state disability fund was paying all his expenses, and he was still on full salary from the department. He was comfortable at the convalescent home, had a nice room, a television, the food wasn’t bad at all, and people left him alone when he wanted them to. He saw no reason to go anywhere.
“You have to leave,” Alma argued. “The doctors have told you that if you don’t, you’ll become a professional convalescent and never want to go. Now, you know that I have a great big house down in Ripley and it would be perfect for you. Six months or a year there and you could really get well—”
“No,” he shook his head adamantly. “You’ve given up too much of your time already—”
“Joey, I want to help you,” she insisted. Every once in a while, he noticed, she called him “Joey” like his mother had, like Stella had on occasion. “Look,” Alma reasoned, “if you think I’m doing this so you’ll make some kind of commitment to me, well—” she could not help smiling, “you’re right. But you don’t have to. I’ve fallen really hard for you, I’m sure you realize that—everyone else does; but I know that a person doesn’t always get back what they give. I mean, it would be great if you grew to feel the same about me as I feel about you—but if that never happens, I wouldn’t want you to fake it. All I’m saying is let’s try. You need a place to stay until you’re completely well; you need someone to help you until you can take care of yourself again. Come home with me. If it lasts, it lasts; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” She took his hands in hers and her voice became very soft, a whisper. “Come home with me, Joe.”
Finally, he did—but only on condition that she resume her teaching and restore some normalcy to her own life.
After lunch, they went out onto the front porch and Alma sat in the other wicker chair and they rocked together for a while.
“Jimmy Burns is pitching in the Legion game tonight,” Alma said.
“Yeah, Verne told me.”
“Think you’ll feel up to going? You seemed to enjoy the game last week.”
“I wouldn’t mind going,” Kiley allowed.
“If you get tired, we can leave early.”
“Okay.”
When it was time for her to go back to school, she kissed him long and lovingly. “See you in a few hours.”
“I’ll be here,” he said.
Kiley waved to her as she backed out and drove away. It wasn’t too bad, this small town living, he supposed. Of course, there was no edge to life: It was American Legion baseball, Fourth of July parades, Labor Day picnics, Christmas caroling; it was tending the garden in the summer, and grilling steaks in the backyard; stretching out in front of a crackling fire while snow fell outdoors in the winter; it was Alma playing soft melodies on the piano while he sipped gin without ice; it was reading National Geographic every month and enjoying it.
No edge—none of the sharpness of city life, no constant delineation between safety and danger, no fringes of exposure, margins of defense, no points of penetration to protect. Easy days flowed smoothly into comfortable nights. In Alma’s big four-poster bed upstairs she made love to him, and to herself, in ways that were compatible with his convalescence; her imagination and dexterity were unrestrained, and his resultant pleasure euphoric.
Kiley remembered telling Alma once about the difference between people who had city blood and people who did not. He wondered of late whether that theory had any validity at all. Not in a million years would he have believed that he could power himself down enough to remain in Ripley—but then, he never counted on his Buick blowing up under him either. He realized that some of the contentment he felt was because his body was still mending, and half guessed that when—if—he ever regained full strength, the uncertainty of who was responsible for his bombing—Phil Touhy, Uncle Gino, Hal—might arouse in him a desire to return to the city, energize in him a need to at least know, if not to retaliate. Revenge did not appeal to him at the moment; he was still privately anguishing over his last reprisal. Secretly, he hoped that in time it would make no difference to him who had set the bomb. But he couldn’t be sure how long his city blood would circulate at small-town speed.
He would just have to wait and see.
About the Author
Clark Howard was born in Tennessee and raised in a series of foster homes in Chicago, and he served with the US Marines in Korea, Howard is the author of many novels and true crime books, as well as more than two hundred short stories, primarily in the crime and mystery genres. His work has won the prestigious Edgar Award, five Ellery Queen Awards, and the Derringer Award, and he has been nominated for Anthony, Shamus, and Spur Awards, among other honors. Additionally, Howard’s stories have been adapted for both film and television.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1994 by Clark Howard
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6205-3
This edition published in 2020 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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CLARK HOWARD
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