I said, “Accomplices?”
“Doubtful. He had two pals, coupla lowlifes …”
“Abel and Patavena,” I supplied.
“Yeah, whatever. OPD put them through their paces, and we kept a close watch on them for a week or better. Nothing. Personally, I think they’re too stupid to play it cool with money. They’re the kind to go from welfare to Ferraris overnight—you know: sub-tie.”
“Not only that,” I said. “I wasted my breath trying to talk with them yesterday, and they let it slip that Longo had a girlfriend on the side—”
Jurgenson turned to Robinson. “We got anything on that?”
Robinson was already paging through the gray folder that had been balanced on his knees. “I don’t think so, Bill.”
“I sort of planted the notion that Longo, if guilty, may have parked the dough with her, and they went after her like greyhounds after one of those electric rabbits. They’ve got money like they’ve got brains.”
Jurgenson grinned. “Then we can forget about them. What about this girl?”
“Eloise Slater.” I gave him a twenty-five-words-or-less rundown. “Sort of a cool customer. Like most of the people who knew Gregg Longo, she doesn’t faint dead away at the speculation that he might have been crooked. Her position is, if he was, he did a good job of keeping it from her.”
“Huh.” He was still dinking with the eyewear. On every backswing, the lenses caught the afternoon sunlight that angled through K. Schotten’s Levolor blinds and flung it against my sport shirt.
“What about taking it from the other direction,” Robinson put in. “Can she alibi Longo? Even for one or two of the robberies?”
“She says not. They held their little get-togethers as time and circumstance and desire dictated. I gather there was no pattern, no set rendezvous; she says she doesn’t know from dates.”
“Huh,” Jurgenson repeated. He stopped playing with the glasses and slipped them on.
“I already gave all this to the local cops,” I said. “It might be worth having someone pay a call on Ms. Slater. Not that you need me to tell you how to do your jobs.”
Jurgenson’s mouth formed a humorless grin. “I always say, I’ll listen to all the advice I can get—not that I’ll take any of it. But you’re right, we’ll want to talk with this Slater woman, if only so we can say we covered the bases.” He spoke the last sentence to Robinson, who nodded, making notes on the cover of the file, then turned back to me. “Thanks.”
“No charge. Listen, maybe you could do me a little favor.”
“Here it comes,” Jurgenson said, grinning wider.
“I know you’ve got an investigation and all, but maybe you could go a little easy on Carolyn Longo. She’s been through hell.”
“We know that. And believe me, we’ve tiptoed as much as we could. We had to search her house. We had to question her, her neighbors—hell, you know the drill.”
“Sure,” I said, watching him closely. Bill Jurgenson was an okay guy, I felt, but I had no doubt that a successful conclusion to this case would amount to one very large feather in his cap … and that the opposite conclusion would likewise trigger the opposite result. Under such circumstances, anyone might get overeager. “But you know how it is with civilians,” I said. “Just tread softly if you can. Like you have been,” I added smoothly.
Jurgenson smiled at me just as smoothly. “You bet,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wasting time in downtown Omaha is easier than it used to be, even just four or five years ago. Back then, the retail stores, the movie houses, even the restaurants were retrenching at the malls or drying up entirely. What was left wasn’t much to get excited about … and you did not want to hang around too long past sundown. The Big O was treading a path well-worn by dozens of other American cities in the past quarter century: Its downtown district was fast becoming a business district, gray, faceless buildings full of gray, faceless people performing gray, faceless functions.
An effort was being made to reverse that. An expensive “face-lift” for the downtown riverfront. A pedestrian mall. New retail space—old space made new, rather—and the economic incentives necessary to lure merchants back. It was much too soon to tell whether the effort would pay off in the long run, and anyone who thought downtown Omaha would ever again be what it was thirty years ago was dreaming, but it was a step in the right direction. Sometimes the attempt is worth as much as the result. Sometimes it’s worth more.
I bummed around the new and the novel, the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected, made a visitation to the central library, where I looked up my name in Books in Print, and was at my post in the yellow zone in front of the Omaha Olympic Club by the time the office buildings started hemorrhaging workers at four fifty-eight.
Young Desotel was a bit late this evening. I figured being in charge of food and drink for a posh, exclusive club must not be too bad a job. Regular hours, at least. Eight to twelve, one to five, Monday through Friday. Some poor flunky of an assistant manager probably got stuck with noons, nights, and weekends. Still, rank entails responsibilities as well as privilege: Tonight, for instance, Loverboy was required to burn the midnight oil. Oh, all right, the five twenty-seven oil.
I tagged him to his car park, then fell in behind and one lane over from his blue Toyota as we followed our time-honored route home.
Only we didn’t.
Desotel left Dodge Street at the light at Park. I barely made it through on the pink without getting creamed by a VW bus that had obviously done its share of creaming in the last fifteen years. He doubled back onto Harney and, at Twenty-sixth, pulled into the lot of the Antenna Lounge—aptly named, since it sits virtually under Channel 7’s broadcasting tower.
I went by, slowly, making sure Loverboy left his car and headed into the building. Then I circled the block and parked my car next to his in the lot.
Unusual. I’d been on the guy’s tail for about a week, and this was the first time he’d deviated from the routine. Which either meant something … or didn’t. Maybe he had finally lined up a hot date. Or maybe he just decided to stop for a cool one after a long day.
Not an entirely depressing thought. I was feeling a little parched myself.
I reached under the front seat and hauled out the little Vivitar 110 LF tele camera I’d been hauling around ever since I’d taken the guardian-angel job. The camera was small and discreet, it slipped easily into my shirt pocket, it shifted from normal fixed-focus snapshottery to “telephoto” at the push of a button, and it had a built-in electronic flash. It took a 110 film cassette that didn’t produce pictures as crisp as thirty-five-millimeter film but was much easier and faster to load—and unload, if need be.
Best of all, it had set me back only eighteen bucks.
I locked up the glove compartment with the gun inside and left the door unlocked. The situation was not such that I anticipated needing firepower, but, with luck, it would be such that I would need to make a hasty getaway after taking a snap of Desotel and friend in intimate embrace.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
The bar was filled nicely with escaped wage slaves. I spotted Desotel, alone, in a booth against the wall, and bellied up to the bar, as the poet has it. There was no reason to be coy or furtive: Loverboy didn’t know me from Adam, or Adam Ant, or even Atom Ant. I could have sat right across from him, except that booth was taken. Secure in my anonymity, I treated myself to a beer and waited for developments.
I was better at waiting than Desotel was. He checked the gold watch on his wrist several times a minute, strummed a nervous tattoo on the table, shredded the cocktail napkin that had come with his drink, and cast anxious eyes toward the door every time it opened, which was frequently.
By the way, when I say “anxious,” I mean anxious, with anxiety—not “eager.”
About half a beer passed before Desotel’s date arrived. I was disappointed. I’d sort of had my heart set on one of those statuesque, all-American blondes
with a store-bought tan and perfectly capped teeth. But Loverboy’s date was a man, a trim, lightly colored black man in a black suit with the barest of salmon pin-striping. He could have been the man I had seen Desotel with downtown.
Well, I said to myself, keep a good thought; Maybe Desotel was having an illicit tryst with the black fellow. These are the eighties, after all.
The black man seemed familiar, and a quarter of a second later I realized why: I’d seen him with Eloise Slater, or vice versa, that morning.
If coincidences didn’t occur, we wouldn’t have a word for them. But this coincidence put a decided strain on credulity. Which means I doubted the coincidence-ness of it.
The black man spotted Desotel, sat opposite him, ordered a drink, drank it. Desotel drank his drink. I drank my drink. Everybody drank his drink: It was a bar. The two men talked for nearly an hour. They had second rounds; I didn’t. If there’s one thing you learn in the P.I. dodge it’s how to make a drink last. Desotel visited the head once; his companion, twice. I, having nerves and other vital components of steel, stayed put.
As was the case at the HoJo coffee shop, the bar was too noisy, the conversationalists were too quiet, and I was too far away to pick up any juicy details of their discussion—again, just snatches:
Desotel. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.
Friend. (unintelligible) … business.
Later on—
Friend. (unintelligible) … fast now.
Desotel (nibbling a fingernail). I don’t know …
Friend. Better figure it out … (unintelligible).
Still later—
Friend. (unintelligible) … lot of money, man.
Desotel. I know that.
If I were the guess-hazarding type, I would have hazarded the guess, by the look of it, that the black guy was trying to sell the white guy a lot of whole-life insurance that white guy didn’t think he wanted to buy. Good move: whole life’s a racket. However, since the black guy didn’t have the requisite brochures, loose-leaf binders, pie charts, free pens, and other insurance-salesman impedimentia—or any impedimentia, for that matter—I didn’t hazard that guess. Or any other. The black man was trying to convince Desotel of something, and Desotel wasn’t too sure, and that’s about as far as I could take it.
But what about Eloise Slater? Where did she fit into the picture? What possible connection could there be between her and Loverboy? And how did the black man happen to be the fulcrum?
Finally, the two men stood. I waited until they were out the door, then hustled out after them.
They were standing in the lot near the other fellow’s car, the gray Eurosport, talking. The sky was a purplish stain and the air was still, thick with moisture. I slid behind the wheel of my car, started the engine, waited.
Eventually, the two concluded their remarks. The friend unlocked the Eurosport. Desotel got into his Toyota.
I had intended the swift completion of my appointed rounds, viz, follow Loverboy home and sit on him for an hour or two, but as I sat and mulled over the incredible coincidence of running into the black man twice in one day—in the course of two otherwise unrelated investigations—I decided to leave Desotel alone and tag the Chevy.
Up behind Memorial Park, off of Western Avenue, the Eurosport pulled into a narrow driveway in front of a trim, brick-fronted house perched on a green bump of land above the street. The garage was a tuck-under, and its door was slowly rolling upward as the car entered the driveway. Desotel’s friend wheeled right in like he owned the joint, which meant he probably did, and the door slid down after him.
Mail delivery was to the door in that neighborhood, so to check the box for a name would have been slightly unsubtle. I copied down the address, which appeared in brass numerals over the garage door, and doubled back to Decatur Street.
Decatur Street, where the answering machine fairly bulged with telephone messages. Most of them were nothing, several were hanger-uppers, one was a writing assignment, albeit a small one: two-hundred words—slightly less than one double-spaced typewritten page—about the health hazards of extended-wear contact lenses, for the “Health Update” section in Omaha Now! magazine. They were willing to pay peanuts and, of course, they wanted it yesterday.
One call was from Carolyn, and it reminded me that I had to think of a good way to tell her about her husband and Eloise Slater, if there were a good way. I was even less enthusiastic about that assignment than the extended-wear contacts thing.
A third call was from a fellow named Cook or Kuck or something, telling me that he was with Callinan Development Corporation and that Mr. Timothy Callinan himself would appreciate hearing from me at my “earliest convenience.”
Mr. Timothy Callinan was better known to most Omahans as Irish Tim. Why this should be has always been a puzzle to me, since Irish Tim was neither Irish nor was his name Tim. Irish Tim’s name, as far as his parents were concerned, was Gabriel Solomon Rabinovitz, accent on the o, and not too many of our Rabinovitzes hail from the Old Sod.
Tim, no doubt, had good reason for changing name and nationality. Good to him, at least. Back fifty, fifty-five, sixty years ago, when Irish Tim began plying the first of his many trades, Omaha was a city sharply divided along numerous lines—race, religion, nationality, neighborhood. In large measure it still is today, but in those days the dividing lines were almost physical, and their strictures nearly impossible to surmount. At a tender age, young Gabe Rabinovitz, newly arrived to the profession of importing Canadian liquor in the last days of Prohibition, may have concluded that being Irish was a good career move.
Whatever his reasons, Irish Tim at least looked the part. He was a big man—not tall, but big—with a wide, solid belly and a head of wavy red hair that refused to go gray even after what must have been sixty-five, perhaps even seventy years.
In those years, Irish Tim Callinan had been in and out of more crooked, slightly crooked, and, yes, not-at-all-crooked schemes than even a television writer has ever thought of. Booze, gambling, rackets, you name it. Currently his main interest was real estate—legit, I was told, or as legit as that particular racket gets. And why not? Why risk your neck when there are semilegal ways of stealing money? Irish Tim and I had crossed paths but never swords now and then over the millennia, but I couldn’t imagine what he wanted with me now.
There was a good way to find out.
It was past seven, but I took a chance and dialed up the corporate offices at the number that had been left on my machine. The phone rang twice, then I got a metallic choonk! in my left ear, followed by another ring, softer than the first two. The line had automatically switched over to an answering service.
“Seventy-six hundred,” the operator answered in a tinny rush of words, omitting the exchange prefix.
“For Timothy Callinan.”
“Yessir.”
“Returning his call. My name is Nebraska. Like the football team—”
“Just a moment, please.” A pause, the line still open. Then: “I have a message for you, Mr., uh, Nebraska. Mr. Callinan invites you to call on him at home this evening. Any time this evening.”
“Thank you,” I said, but I said it to a dead line.
There was no point in my asking where Callinan lived, and no point in her volunteering it. Everyone in Omaha knew that Callinan Development had built Emerald Place—Emerald, Ireland, Emerald Isle, Irish Tim, are you getting it?—as an excuse to give Tim a bird’s-eye view of the city.
Emerald Place is an exclusive residential, office, and retail complex set back from Center Street out on the extreme west end of town. At the center of Emerald Place is a fifteen-story residential tower, and at the top of the tower sits Irish Tim. His digs, Callinan Development Corporation, and his Shamrock Realty Company between them conspire to eat up the available penthouse space. The twelve floors below that are residential. The bottom two floors are given over to numerous offices, three restaurants, a radio station, and too many of the type of retail opera
tions that look askance at even a Gold Card.
Ringing Emerald Tower, as it was known, are town-house condominiums and smaller office-parklike workplaces, all interlinked by wide, meandering drives with names like Donegal, Ulster, and Londonderry.
No Shillelagh Avenue, I’m afraid.
Emerald Place may sound like a planned community, and as I navigated its loping, seemingly aimless streets, trying to get to the tower, it looked like one. It isn’t. It’s just a tony address that caters to those who believe “exclusive” is as good as something can get. Most of the people who work there don’t live there. Most of the people who live there don’t work there—don’t work anywhere much at all at very much of anything. The place is by no means self-sufficient. Its denizens are as much a part of the city as the vagrants sleeping in cardboard boxes down along the Missouri River, although such notions tend to give the upper crust upset tum-tums.
It occurred to me that a great many of the residents probably whiled away the long hours over dinner and drinks at the Omaha Olympic Club. Circles within circles.
Weeks passed. By keeping it ever to my left, I eventually came to the tower. Wasn’t there something like this in The Lord of the Rings?
Emerald Tower featured ’round-the-clock valet parking, of course—I’d’ve been disappointed at anything less—but I skipped it and planted the car myself in a surface lot separated from the building by a long curved drive. I don’t like other people driving my car.
The lot was full of Mercedeses and Volvos, Audis and Saabs and BMWs. I spotted a DMC, a couple of Porsches, even a Tojan. The Tojan is a luxury sports car manufactured by an Omaha-based company, Knudsen Automotives. They say they came up with the name “Tojan” by dropping the R out of “Trojan.” It adds up all right, but it doesn’t explain why anyone would want to name a thirty-thousand-dollar car after a condom.
I tucked the old Impala between a cute little Mercedes two-seater convertible and one of the new, sleek T-bird Turbos.
“See if you can pick up some good habits,” I told my car as I buttoned it up.
Money Trouble Page 9
