I began to talk to Lurman—to try to explain to him and, I guess, to myself how it had happened that we were now sitting there in that deserted lounge. I told him about Lovingwell, that smooth, eccentric man, about the document that no one had come to claim, about Claire Lovingwell’s suicide, about Bidwell and Michael O’Hara. I told him everything except why I was talking in the first place, everything except for how I felt about the girl.
Lurman perked up when I got to the spy business.
“You don’t see any connection between your theory and what happened tonight?” he asked me.
I told him, no. “Not unless you want to say that it all began when he hired me.” Which was what I’d been saying to myself.
“To find a top-secret document,” he said, turning it over with pleasure. “Is that why you wanted me to get Lovingwell’s security file?”
I nodded.
“It wouldn’t hurt to do a little checking after all,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with Bidwell for you tomorrow and see what I can find out.”
“Good.”
“Now, what are we going to do about Grimes?”
“He’s not going to have a lot of friends after last night,” I said.
“You think he’ll skip?”
“He’s too crazy for that. He still wants me. He won’t leave until it’s finished.”
Lurman looked me over with a cold, professional eye. “You want out, Harry? No one could blame you after tonight.”
“What I want,” I said to him, “is for that girl to recover. Then what I want is to kill Lester Grimes.”
Lurman gave me a dark, appreciative smile. “We’ll get him,” he said.
“Not without some help. I’m going to try to get in touch with Chico Robinson tomorrow. Sarah told me he and Sean were close. Maybe that butchering job that Grimes did on his buddy will shake him up.”
“After what happened to Sean,” Lurman said, “I wouldn’t think he’d want any part of this.”
“The kid’s a Muslim,” I said. “He’ll have plenty of tough friends and plenty of streetwise contacts. All I want to find out is where Grimes is staying. After that, I’ll handle the Cowboy.”
******
At three-thirty that morning a surgeon came down to the waiting room where Lurman and I had migrated and told us that she was out of immediate danger.
Ted made a small grateful noise and I smiled for the first time that night.
“She’s suffered a skull fracture,” the doctor said. “There was hematoma and we had to remove the clot. Something must have struck her when the bombs went off—a stone, a piece of metal, maybe a piece of bone. Whatever it was, it was traveling like a bullet when it impacted. Understand, she’s still in critical condition. Skull injuries are unpredictable. She may start hemorrhaging again. And there’s no way to tell how much damage she’s already suffered. Not for a few days, at least.”
“Can I see her?” I asked him.
He nodded.
We followed him into an elevator and up to the Intensive Care unit on the sixth floor. Halfway down the hall a uniformed cop was seated on a metal stool in front of one of the doors. McMasters still wasn’t taking any chances.
“You can’t go in, yet,” the surgeon said as we walked up to the room. “But you can see her through the window in the door.”
I peered inside. She was lying stiffly on the bed. Her head was wrapped in a turban. The flesh around her eyes was a sooty black. Cords ran from different places on her arms and torso to a big bank of monitors and screens.
I was sorry I’d looked. She seemed irreparably wounded lying there, so far from help.
******
We went back to my apartment. Lurman sacked out on the couch and I tried to get some sleep in the bed. But I kept feeling her beside me, as she’d been the previous morning, and seeing her in that hospital room—wired like a failing motor to that bank of machinery. Before dawn, with the wind shaking the windows in their frames, I got up and called the hospital to check on her condition. It was the same. There wouldn’t be an update until nine. I set the alarm for nine-thirty and fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
19
ONE DRUNKEN night many years ago, a friend of mine and I were sitting at a bar talking nonsense and he said to me, in a voice full of liquor and the pompous silliness of the moment, “If you could only choose who you end up caring for.” I forget what I said. And he probably would have been happy if I’d forgotten the whole discussion. Because it was one of those mock-epic nights that men treat themselves to instead of to a good cry, and the conversation was filled with that self-satisfying bathos that sounds stirring when you have a few drinks in you and just plain dumb when you don’t.
Still, it was a good question. For which I didn’t have an answer. And as I sat in bed, with the pale morning light streaming through the dormer window, I wondered if I had chosen the girl or she had chosen me or whether it was just the usual sort of disastrous pairing that scientists attribute to auras and body language and the rarities of scent. It shouldn’t have happened—not after the way we’d begun. Not after Kate and Sean. And it might not last after the Lovingwell case was finished. I might not be able to tolerate her theatrical style or she my dogged earnestness. But when I called the hospital and found that she was improving, I felt a rush of affection for Sarah L. and a sense of relief that was not just a matter of guilty conscience or fellow-feeling. She’d made me feel alive again the day before—after six months of emotional hibernation. And I wanted her to be well again. I wanted to make her well again. Which, I knew, was dangerous and possibly degradingly sexist. But it was what I wanted early that Saturday morning.
And mixed with the affection or the relief was a terrible sense of anger and a vicious desire to be revenged on Lester Grimes. Of course, I probably knew that it was me I was angry with—I mean, at some level, I knew that I was, in part, to blame. But you don’t need a psychiatrist to learn that that kind of guilt gets transferred quickly to another party. And after the way she’d trusted me and confided in me, I felt an awful need to find that other party fast. To find him and to kill him, as he had tried to kill Sarah and me. I guess it was the misplaced confidence, or what had turned out to be misplaced confidence on Sarah’s part, that infuriated me the most. After all the betrayals, all the injuries she had apparently endured at the hands of her father and mother, she didn’t need the final injustice of Sean O’Hara’s death on her conscience. Of course, we all have a life, Harry, I told myself. We all catch our share of the crap. Only the night before somehow went beyond the notion of a “share” toward some sort of dreadful fatality that I couldn’t abide and that Sarah couldn’t live with. Not and remain sane. So Grimes had to be found; Lovingwell’s killer had to be found; and the girl had to be convinced that she was not to blame in either instance. Not for the death of a friend or for having hated a man who might well have deserved her hatred.
I started the day with a sense of mission—dressing and shaving quickly—and found that Lurman, who had less reason, was already dressed and sitting on the recliner.
“I’ve had better accommodations,” he said acidly and stared at the couch as if it were a bed of nails.
“Next time, guard somebody with a bigger apartment.”
“How’s the girl?” he said.
“Good.”
He smiled and sat back on the chair. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat around here?”
When I said “no,” he got to his feet and walked over to the door. “Then allow the FBI to treat you to breakfast. As the saying goes, it’s the least we can do.”
******
We drove to a pancake house on Clifton and planned strategy over waffles and coffee. It was a crisp, clean morning. The night’s snow was banked high on the curbs. We could see it through the restaurant window, where it sparkled at the feet of the oaks and maples in Burnet Woods.
“At least, we’ll have the weather with us today,” Lurman said. “At l
east, we’ll be able to see what we’re up against.”
“I doubt if he’ll show today. He’ll keep a low profile—for awhile, at least. Maybe by tonight we’ll be the ones in control.”
“Your idea—about contacting Chico Robinson—you still want to follow through with it?”
I nodded. “I figure you can take the club and the Friends of Nature. And I’ll take Chico and the Muslims. Between the two of us, we ought to come up with somebody who’s willing to help us find Lester Grimes.”
“I don’t know about splitting up,” Lurman said. “Alone, Harry, you’ll make an easy target.”
“Not in the West End or in Avondale or wherever the hell the Muslims make their home. A six-foot, nine-inch white man won’t be hard to spot on Twelfth Street. Anyway, contacting Robinson is a long enough shot as it is. With an FBI man along, it’ll be impossible.”
“I still don’t like it,” he said bluntly and made a serious face to indicate that he’d meant what he said.
I knew that, behind the face, Lurman was telling himself that if I got myself killed the FBI would be out of clay pigeons and he’d probably be out of a job. But that was all right. I’d come across that same combination of decency and self-interest in other cops. It was no different in kind than the back-slapping and back-stabbing that goes on among the personnel of any highly competitive organization. As ambitious men went, Lurman was more likeable and more honest than most. The concern wasn’t all show. But he was an ambitious man, who’d suffered a bad black eye the night before. And that part of him knew that splitting up would give him some time to mend fences. It would also give him the chance to look into Lovingwell’s security file. Nobody loves a spy more dearly than the FBI does; and digging one up, even a dead one, would get Lurman back into grace quicker than prayer.
He searched his soul for a few minutes and stared moodily into his coffee cup and finally said, “All right. We’ll split up. But, for chrissake, Harry, don’t get yourself killed!”
******
At ten-fifteen I followed Lurman over to the clubhouse on Calhoun. He went in and I stayed out in the Pinto, waiting for Chico Robinson to arrive or depart. It was a long wait in the cold; but around eleven-thirty, he pulled up outside the club in an old Caddy with Hermes as a hood ornament and a side panel that had been stripped and primed in gray. He looked virtually the same as he had on Tuesday afternoon—a light-toned black man in his early twenties with a thin, wispy beard and mean eyes. He was wearing a black arm band over his green combat jacket. And that gave me hope.
Robinson ducked into the club and came scurrying out once he’d spotted Lurman inside. He stood beside the car for a moment, making up his mind, then hopped back in and headed west on McMillan. I followed him in the Pinto at a dead pace, crawling down the street the way security cars do when they make nightly rounds.
Robinson worked his way down McMillan to the Parkway, then south on Liberty into that region of worn houses and low brick projects that is the westside ghetto. As many times as I’ve driven through it, the place still chilled me. It was a place to chill any good burgher’s soul. Cinder lots and broken fencing. Rubbish piles full of pint bottles, cigarette packs, and rotting refuse. The brick tenements not just run-down, but exhausted of hope—like houses in Hell. And, of course, the faces—black and vacant as the abandoned cinder lots. The old-young faces of the boys on Liberty, playing hockey on the ice with sticks and a can. Old men at a bus stop whose tired faces had begun to peel away, the way dark paint flecks away from weathered wood. Fearful and fearsome types. The effects or the talents of fear everywhere. Even in the children playing in the snow.
In time I got to the heart of it—Central Avenue at Twelfth Street, like the worst studio mock-up of a slum. Gutted buildings and tired shops, all of them like abandoned kiosks, dotted everywhere on their facades with old posters and snow-matted advertisements. Robinson pulled over in front of one of them and got out. The sign above the door read “Pool.” I kept driving, up to a gas station at Eleventh, where the tough black gas jockeys looked at me as if I’d dropped from a star.
There was a phone booth on the south side of the station. I got out of the Pinto and made my way through the pieces of scrap and snow-covered tires to the booth. Once inside, I felt oddly secure—out of the weather and that other, fiercer weather, like a season within the season, that I felt all around me. I dialed the Hi-Fi Gallery and, when Bullet came on the line, I told him where I was and what I wanted him to do.
He didn’t say anything for a minute, “You want me to come down there?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“How long you been knowing me, Harry?” he said. “Six, seven years? All you ever see is me in the store or me in the bar. Just like a white man. Right? That’s the way I wanted it. When I go back down there, man, I go alone. And I don’t ever go white.”
“It’s my life we’re talking about, Bullet,” I told him.
He thought it over—what it would cost him in pride and credibility against what it could cost me in blood. “I’ll meet you at that gas station in ten minutes,” he said. “And don’t go wanderin’ around.”
******
Some of the men inside the pool hall knew Bullet from his football days. They nodded casually to him as he walked by. Then they saw me and their faces filled with hate. There were ten or twelve of them leaning against the walls of the main room, and a half dozen more loitering in the lobby. Robinson might have been there. I couldn’t tell. It was so dark and smoky I couldn’t see all of their faces and those I did see I didn’t look at long.
Bullet said, “Wait out in the lobby, Harry.” And walked toward the rear of the main room.
I walked back out to the alcove, where the boys were leaning against the walls. One of them straightened up when he saw me. I turned away and pretended to study an old photo of Elijah Muhammed, and not to see the black kid as he came up behind me.
“Wha’chu doin’ here, man?” he said in quick, sharp, sing-song voice. “Wha’chu want ‘round here?”
“He lost his way,” one of the kids on the couch said.
“He look like he lost his way,” another one said.
“Is that right?” the one behind me said. He prodded me in the ribs, hard. “Hey! I’m talkin’ to you.”
I turned around and looked at him.
He was nineteen, maybe twenty. His hair was braided in corn rows and he was wearing a black dashiki over a pair of jeans. His face was as black as the dashiki, except for the whites of his eyes which were the yellow of raw egg yolk.
“You got a tongue?” he said.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked him.
“Say your prayers,” one of them said and they all laughed.
“That’s it. Say goodbye, man,” the one standing in front of me said. “How much money you got?”
“I’m not giving you any money.”
“Oh, you ain’t? Well, maybe, you change your mind in a minute.”
I stared at him. He’s just another smart-ass kid, Harry, I told myself. All bluff. Only that’s not the way it felt—in that dark, rank room. I put my hand in my coat pocket and he jumped back.
“Wha’chu got in there? You carryin’ iron in there? You best not pull no iron around here, man. You dig?”
We stared at each other for another minute, until Bullet came walking back through the door. He had Robinson with him.
“Back off,” Bullet said to the black kid.
“Wha’chu mean ‘back off,’ Tom? I be talking to the dude here.”
“Cool it, Lucius,” Robinson said.
Lucius looked angrily at Robinson. One of the other boys walked up and took him by the arm. “Let’s go, man,” he said.
“I be talking to the dude,” Lucius said to him.
Robinson walked over to me and said, “Just get the hell out of here.”
I walked out into the street, where the air was full of the smell of snow and the spicy incongruous smells of rib joints
and chicken shacks. For a second my legs felt rubbery and I was torn with the impulse to run—as fast and as far as I could—away from that dark, dangerous place. A few seconds later, Bullet and Chico Robinson came out the door. We walked quietly through the snow up to the gas station where I’d left my car. A man in a ski mask walked past us. He made me think of the night, four days before, when the gunman had tried to kill me in the Delores lot. In reaction to the rush of fear, I made my voice steady and subdued.
“Are you willing to help?” I asked Robinson. He didn’t answer.
We got to my car and piled in. Bullet in back, Robinson on the seat beside me.
“You’re a powerful fool comin’ down here like this,” Robinson said, staring at me the way the gas jockeys had stared. “What you think? You can just walk into this place and nobody be watchin’ you? Look over there.”
He pointed through the windshield at an old Chevrolet coasting down Central Avenue.
“That’s one of our patrol cars, man. They seen you way back on McMillan when you started followin’ me. Cobras in that car got them shotguns on the front seat. Po-lice goin’ to carry magnums, we goin’ to be prepared. And there are ten more of them cars out on the streets. I knew where you was the moment I got back to the hall.”
“Can you find Grimes that fast?” I asked him.
“If I wanted to, Jack,” he said, “I could find Jimmy-fuckin’-Hoffa.”
I didn’t know how to make the pitch. In a way it had already been made. Either he felt strongly enough about O’Hara’s death to cooperate or he didn’t. Banging the drum was just going to offend him.
“Well, where do you stand?” I said again.
“Grimes don’t mean nothin’ to me. Just another crazy white fucker.”
“I don’t want you to kill him. I want you to find him.”
“The girl,’’ he said. “She dead, too?”
I shook my head.
He got out of the car, slammed the door and walked off down the street. I started to call after him when Bullet clapped me on the arm.
Dead Letter Page 16
