by Ed Gorman
He said,"I used to be a cop."
"That's what I understand." In the sunlight angling through the kitchen window, Margie Ryan looked especially vivid, with her red hair and freckles. She wasn't pretty, she wasn't even cute, but there was a vitality in her eyes and mouth that was erotic. At least for Coffey, it was. "I also understand your wife and daughter were murdered."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry. And you drive a cab now?"
"Right."
"The cab is why I'm here, Mr. Coffey."
"God, couldn't we do better than 'Mr. Coffey?' I'm not a kitchen appliance."
She smiled. "I'll bet you've used that joke a thousand times."
"Two thousand is more like it."
She sipped her coffee. "This is good."
"Thanks. I combine three different kinds of coffee and then put a bit of mocha in it."
"It works." Then: "Windy City Cab 701."
"That's mine."
"A man saw it parked in the lot of the Econo-Nite Motel the night there was a murder. Last night."
"Yeah, I read about the murder."
"Were you there?"
"Yeah"
"About what time was this?" She'd already taken a pocket-sized tablet from her sport coat and put it on the table. Now she took a red ballpoint from her pocket and clicked the tip out.
He told her.
"You were alone?"
He looked at her. "I don't think you'd ask me that question unless you already knew the answer. Like a trial lawyer."
"Does that mean you were alone?"
"It means I wasn't alone."
She wrote a few words in her notebook then looked up at him again. "Good. Because that's what our eyewitnesses said. That you were with a dark-haired woman."
"Yes, I was."
"And you went into the room where this Earl Benedict was?"
"If that's his name, yes."
"That's his name. Or was. He's dead now. Stabbed to death. But you knew that already."
He nodded. "He was dead when we got into the room."
"And you didn't call Homicide?"
"I know I should've."
"Why didn't you?"
"I didn't want to get the woman involved."
"The woman is already involved. Very involved. She was seen entering and leaving Earl Benedict's room earlier that same evening. A couple staying in the next room said they heard a loud argument at one point between Benedict and this woman. So who is she?"
"I don't know."
"You didn't call the police and you don't know who the woman was."
"I'm afraid that's correct."
"And you expect me to believe that?"
"She was a fare. I don't usually ask my fares their names."
"She was more than a fare. She asked you to go into the room with her. At least I assume she did. Do you make a habit of going into motel rooms with your fares?"
"Not usually."
She made some more notes then looked up at him again. "Pardon my French, but your story sounds like bullshit."
"I'm sorry. It's the truth. She didn't tell me her name." And it was the truth. She hadn't known her name, so how could she give it to him?
"We'd like to talk to her."
"She's a suspect?"
"Right now, we're just treating her as a material witness. We'll worry about 'suspect' later." Her pen hovered above her tablet. "So why don't you tell me her name, so I can write it down here?"
"I don't know her name. And no matter how many times you ask me, I still won't know her name."
"Where did she go?"
"When?"
"After you left the motel where the body was."
"I don't know." It was the first real lie he'd told her and it made him uncomfortable. He wasn't a liar by nature or inclination. He hated lying.
"She just vanished?"
"I dropped her off."
"Where?"
Another lie. "Over near Wrigley."
"Any place in particular?"
"She didn't ask for any place in particular."
"The middle of the night and she's alone and she doesn't ask for any place in particular. Brave girl."
"She must be," he said.
"You wouldn't shit a shitter, now, would you, Coffey?"
He smiled. "I guess I might try. I mean, if I needed to."
She stared at him. She did not look happy. "A man's dead."
"I realize that."
"A man's dead and you've got information about him being dead and you're deliberately keeping it from me."
He didn't say anything.
"She must be quite a girl, Coffey."
He didn't say anything.
"She put out for you, did she?"
He'd used this technique himself. Getting people mad so they'd get riled and say something they didn't mean to.
He didn't say anything.
"Two people got a pretty good look at her," Margie Ryan said. "Dark-haired. Very good-looking. One of them even saw her car."
He didn't say anything.
She was watching him carefully. "Or did you know about her car? Somebody saw her drive in and park it earlier in the evening. The kind of car it is, there aren't that many to check out. She may not be as mysterious as you think, Coffey." Then, "How come you went over to the other side?"
"What other side?"
"The bad guys."
"I wasn't aware I had."
"You're lying to a homicide detective trying to conduct a murder investigation."
He went back to silence.
She stood up. She had a nice body. Young and firm. She was smart and, he suspected, probably a very nice woman under other circumstances.
She reached into the left pocket of her sport jacket and pulled out a white card. "Call me if you change your mind."
"Middle of the night all right?"
"Fine."
"I won't wake your kids up?"
She smiled. "I've deputized them. They're old hands at this homicide business already."
She sneezed. "Cats."
"Three of them."
"I'm allergic. And anyway, you look too big and mean to be a cat man."
"It's my sensitive nature that I keep concealed from everybody."
"You can really sling the bullshit, Coffey."
"So I've been told."
He walked her to the door.
"The car's a special edition," she said. "Vintage MG. Not that many of them on the road."
"I'll keep an eye out for it."
He opened the door and she stepped out on the porch. The afternoon had turned out beautifully. He was assaulted by the vigors of autumn, the colorful and resplendent trees, the melancholy smells. Soon there would be apple cider and Halloween pumpkins and little kids in spook costumes. He loved the fall.
"You're too smart to be a bad guy. Coffey," she said. "You'll come around."
And with that, she walked down the porch steps and headed for her discreet blue Ford sedan parked at the curb.
As he walked back inside, he hoped she was right. He hoped he really was too smart to be a bad guy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The only thing that kept Ted Hannigan from looking like an arrogant (and slightly aging) movie star was the vulnerability in his devoutly blue eyes. The face was as chiseled and handsome as a Greek bust; the six-three, one-hundred-eighty-pound body was kept hard by constant exercise and careful eating; and the swagger probably went back to the first day he was able to walk. He coupled all this with a dashing taste in attire. Today, for instance, he wore a loose silk white shirt with an outsize and open collar. It hinted nostalgically of pirate movies of the forties. His black jeans were almost illegally tight and his snakeskin cowboy boots as imposing as the rattlesnake itself had once been. Then there was his hair, a Byronic mop of black curls that at least half a dozen countesses had run their hands through down the years.
This was what Jenny saw when the door opened and Ted escorted an older and somewha
t plump woman into the reception area. He was wiping red and blue paints off his hands with a white rag.
The woman, dressed in a regal purple suit, touched a delicate hand to her white hair and said, "You could have been a professional comedian, Ted."
He smiled. "Well, Agnes, I don't know if it's the same thing, but a lot of people already tell me that I'm a clown."
That was another thing about Ted. For all his self-drama, he had a good sense of humor about himself. He delighted in putting himself down.
Then he hooked a big arm around Jenny and pulled her to him. "This is my beautiful niece, Jenny."
"Oh, I recognized her right away," Agnes said. "She was a debutante the year after my own Cindy. She was the most beautiful debutante of them all, too."
Jenny muttered a thank you, once more made uncomfortable by flattery.
"Well, I'll see you next week," Ted said. He took Agnes' hand and kissed it. Even though there was a hint of mockery in the gesture-most Americans not being great hand-kissers, thank God-it was easy to see that Agnes was charmed by the kiss.
"Next week, then."
When Agnes was gone, Ted turned to Andi and said, "Well, is she as gorgeous as I said?"
"More," Andi said.
Jenny's cheeks were hot.
"She hates compliments," Ted said. "She likes it better when you tell her that she's got a booger in her nose and that her breath is terrible."
Both Jenny and Andi giggled. Ted was suddenly the older brother teasing his little sisters.
Ted leaned his head back and stared at her face. "That's a very attractive booger, too, young lady. It almost matches your dress."
Jenny playfully swung at his stomach but he enveloped her little hand in his large one.
"No calls," Ted said, and led Jenny into his work space.
***
He had once been a happy little boy, Sean Gray. This was back when he and his mother and father had lived in Milwaukee. He went to school, he played with his friends, and in the summers he went on vacations with his parents, sometimes to places as faraway as Denver and Salt Lake City.
Then they moved to Chicago and everything changed. He wasn't sure why. It just-changed.
He was in seventh grade when it had happened, coming home early from school because he had been bitten by the same stomach bug that was felling people all over the city.
He let himself into the house with his key. As far as he knew, his mother and father were at work. She was an accountant and his father an attorney. He was so sick that all he wanted to do was get out of his school clothes and lie down on his bed. He had a special fat issue of The X-Men and a new issue of Spawn and he could take his mind off his churning stomach by reading them, and then dozing blissfully off to sleep.
He walked down the hallway to his bedroom. And then he heard it.
At first, it sounded like somebody in pain. And then he remembered. He'd caught his folks Doing It once and it had sounded just like this. His mom all grunts and groans and cries, as if she were being beaten or something. But it wasn't pain he'd been hearing, he'd learned. It was pleasure. It was weird that they would sound like one and the same thing but the world of adults was a pretty mysterious place anyway, so why shouldn't pleasure sound like pain?
He hadn't seen either his mom or dad's car in the drive, but maybe they'd parked at the curb as they sometimes did.
The closer he got, the louder the sounds of pleasure-pain became. There was a frantic, almost hysterical edge to them now. And then it was at an end. The crescendo could go no higher.
He was right up next to the door of his parents' bedroom. And then a male voice said, breathing hard, like a distance runner collapsing at the end of a long race, "Wow. that was some romp, huh?"
A male voice not his father's.
"Oh, God," said his mother's voice, "I really needed that." She was panting as hard as the man.
But who was the man and what was he doing in his parents' bedroom?
He felt sick to his stomach. And there was a wild panic in his chest-like a huge berserk flapping bird-as he thought of what this meant for his folks. Back in Milwaukee, a school friend of his told him how his folks had gotten a divorce because the mom walked in on the dad who was screwing his secretary in the middle of the day at home-when mom was supposed to be at work.
His mom and her lover hadn't heard Sean, so he hurried out of the house. He ran down the block to the small city park. He sat on a bench-he was miserable with flu, but he was even more miserable thinking about his mother screwing some stranger-and he remained there until it was time to come home from school.
When he got home, his mother explained that she'd decided to take the afternoon off just so she could get some house cleaning done. She had a lot of overtime coming, the income tax season having just ended, and it was either take it or lose it. Then she looked at him-really looked at him carefully-and said, "Oh, honey, you don't look good."
She got him in bed and took his temperature (101) and then brought him the stuff she always did when he had the flu, 7-Up and Pepto Bismal and Kleenex and Vicks (though why she brought him Vicks when he had the stomach flu, he didn't know).
She also touched him and kissed him a lot and for the first time in his life, he felt repelled by her. All he could think of was the bedroom and the man's voice he'd heard in there and the pain-pleasure cries of his mother. His own mother.
He changed, then. He was no longer a happy boy. His parents couldn't understand it. Neither could his home-room teacher. And it was worse than his simply being secretive and sullen. He started getting into fights, his grades dropped from a B+ to a C-. His dad got a call from the police station telling him to come down and get Sean. Sean had been arrested for shoplifting.
At the dinner table, he'd look with great contempt at his mother and great pity at his father.
His parents started having terrible arguments in the middle of the night. The arguments always woke him. While he couldn't understand the exact words, he sensed that somehow his father had learned about his mother. Michael certainly hadn't told him. He didn't want his parents to divorce. He was terrified they would split up. He prayed every night that they would stay together. And that somehow his mother would never be unfaithful again. And that his dad would see that his mom was a good woman, even though she'd been with that other man.
Sixteen months to the day after they'd moved to Chicago, their divorce was final. Sean stayed with his mother. His father saw him on weekends. Or "tried" to. It seemed that just about every weekend something "came up," and his father couldn't pick him up after all.
The man whose voice he'd heard in the bedroom that day, his name turned out to be Pete Westbrook and he was at the house four, five nights a week. Mom and Pete always waited till they thought Sean was asleep before they did anything. But he could hear them because he didn't sleep well. He'd lie there in the dark and think about how his world had changed since the divorce. It was just about the only thing he thought about anymore.
***
While Jenny was visiting with Ted Hannigan, and Coffey was cleaning up after his visit with the homicide detective, Sean was walking into his last-hour seventh grade class. This being a rather tony private school-one conveniently located less than a mile from his house in Wilmette-the prospect of a student walking into class with a gun was never even considered. No metal detectors. No off-duty cops walking the halls.
Sean stepped across the threshold, looked at the four rows of desks filled with students, raised the .45 his mother kept in her nightstand drawer, and started firing immediately.
He killed three students before the teacher was finally able to wrestle him to the floor and take his gun away.
***
"No idea at all?" Ted asked.
"No idea at all," Jenny replied. "But as I said, I've developed these terrible headaches both times I heard about this murder at the motel the other night. I even threw up. I got so worked up."
Ted's studio ran the len
gth of the building, which was considerable. The walls were brick, the floor hardwood. A few dozen completed canvases, of various sizes, were leaned against the walls. In the center of the studio was a stool where his subjects sat. The canvas he was working on sat on an easel, on either side of which were cabinets filled with tiny drawers which were, in turn, filled with tubes of paint, brushes, and other art supplies. A paint-spotted dropcloth covered the floor beneath the canvas. The painting of Agnes was a perfect example of Ted's masterful and deceitful work. He'd turned a rather plump, gray-haired society matron into a rather thin, silver-haired younger woman who bore a curious similarity to the older Grace Kelly. Jenny had smiled when she'd seen this.
She wasn't smiling now, though. For the past half hour she'd been telling Ted about her missing eight days. And how the murder at the Econo-Nite Motel upset her for no reason she could consciously construe.
"It could be a coincidence," Ted said. "Just because you happened to react twice to the same story isn't any kind of definitive proof."
"I know."
They were sitting on a large leather couch he had stuck over in a corner next to a radiator he'd painted a brilliant silver. On this section of wall he'd leaned several of his "serious" paintings, the ones he did for himself. Even though she didn't know all that much about art-she'd had an art minor in college, but that hardly made her an expert-she could easily see how derivative and empty they were. He had been greatly influenced by the French painters of the last century. He could steal their style for his commercial portraiture, but his thievery didn't work for real painting.
"Terrible stuff," he said, nodding to a painting of a young black girl running along the shores of Lake Michigan on a hot summer day.
"Oh, it's very good," she said. But they both knew she was just being nice.
He touched her hand. "I hate to say this but all you can do is wait and see what happens."
"That's all?" Jenny said.
"There was a segment on 60 Minnies six or seven months ago. About various kinds of amnesia." He smiled. "That makes me an expert, doesn't it?"
