Peerless Detective, page 25
The smile faded and Harry looked at him, then looked away. Billy sensed that he was trying to decide whether to tell him something. Finally, Harry turned to him and made a small one-handed shrug.
“There’s one other thing I didn’t tell you. Didn’t tell anyone. When I was in Dietrich’s place—well, he had my card.”
“So?” And then he understood. “Ah. I get it.”
“Yeah. I never gave Dietrich my card. But I gave it to Moncrief. And when I saw it there, it was clear to me that the cops were supposed to find it. So I lifted it.”
“So this guy was setting you up.”
“It would seem so. Now you’ve really got what I have. That’s all of it.”
Billy made a little salute with the pay envelope and left. When Harry finally emerged, Billy was across the street in a doorway. He waited and watched until Harry got safely into his car and then left. And late that night when Harry Strummer came out of his apartment building, Billy was there again, standing in a gangway up the street, watching him. He followed Harry to a small restaurant on Clark Street and waited down the block in a tavern while Harry ate. He watched Harry make small talk with the short Mediterranean-looking man at the register. A while later, he saw Harry go into a tavern on the corner. Billy changed his hiding place so that he had a view of Harry at the bar, chatting with the bartender and another man. He hung back in the doorway and waited, moving from one foot to another on tired legs. He looked around at the street traffic and turned back to the tavern just as Harry was waving to the bartender. Just as Harry came out, a bus went by. When the bus had gone, so had Harry.
Shit. He made me.
On Monday morning, Billy was chatting with Doris when a uniformed messenger came into the office with a brown envelope for Harry. They continued their talk, but both of them watched as Harry tipped the messenger and stared eagerly at the return address. Leo put down a lock he had been playing with and watched.
Oblivious to his audience, Harry slit open the envelope with his Swiss Army knife and took out several photocopied pages. Two of them appeared to be newspaper pages. For a while Harry read through the file, frowning, and then stopped. He took out his reading glasses and scanned the page again, then looked off into space.
“Now I got it all,” he said to no one in particular.
“So?” Doris said.
“I almost missed it. Because it’s buried. But it’s there.”
“What’s there?” Leo asked.
Billy said, “Moncrief. Right?”
Harry nodded and held up the paper. “Yeah, he’s here. He’s here, he’s in a whaddyacallit, a parentheses. Take a look.”
Billy moved over and picked up the paper. It was the obituary of Theodore (Ted) Hannah. Written by someone familiar with Mr. Hannah, the obit laid out his long years of hard work and community service, his many favorite projects and local charities. It reviewed the history of his company and spoke of his service in the Pacific with the Navy during World War II. It described his love of fly-fishing, golf, and boating. At the very end of the obituary, Mr. Hannah’s family members were listed, among them his mother and two sisters, his late brother Donald, beloved sister-in-law Donna (Moncrief), and Hannah’s “loving nieces Terry and Bridget, and loving nephew David.”
“Found him yet?”
“Yeah. The—what? Nephew? His nephew. So that’s him.”
“Yeah.” Harry’s gaze drifted. “On his wall he had pictures of them, the three kids. Because he didn’t have any of his own. And they had no father. So. A boy with no father, but he’s got this uncle that’s like a father. That’s it.”
“All these years later?”
“Well, he was a kid. Besides, there’s no time limit on revenge. There’s no statute of limitations for anger.”
“This just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Harry looked at him for a moment, then said, “Who says it has to? You’ve seen this guy. You’ve seen his eyes.” He spread the pages on his desk and tilted his head, frowning. He pointed to one of the pages. “And I bet that’s it.”
He shoved the paper toward Billy. It was an obituary, for Donna Moncrief Hannah, dated a little over six years earlier.
Harry seemed to recall something. “Something I been going over in my head. Might have nothing to do with anything, but a while back—this must have been around five, six years ago, I got a call from Randy Brierly. He said he got a call from a guy, and the guy didn’t want to give his name. He wanted to know the whereabouts of Harry Strummer. Said he was an old friend.”
“An old friend, right. An old friend would have given his name, right?”
“I think so. Anyway, Randy’s been around the block a few times, so he tells him I moved West—L.A. That’s it, just the one phone call, but every once in a while I think about it. Who was trying to find me back then?”
“So now what?”
“Now we should call the cops, that’s what.” Doris glared at Harry.
“To tell them what? What have I got that connects him with anything they’d be interested in?”
“He killed Dietrich.”
“Maybe. But he’s smart enough that maybe he used those two punks. Or maybe he’s not in it at all. It’s just coincidence.”
On the far side of the room Leo shook his head slowly, but said nothing.
“You could have the cops watch him. Put a tail on him.”
Harry gave him a sarcastic smile. “Watch him where? We don’t even know where he is. And I think this is a smart guy. I think he’ll go under for a while if he has to, lay low, you know? Nah. I’ll handle this my own way,” Harry said, carefully looking at no one in particular.
Harry went to the window. After a few moments he nodded to himself, stepped back, clapped his hands together and said, “All right. That’s good.”
“There’s nothing good about it,” Doris said. “You’re in danger.”
“Maybe so. But I’m on my home turf and I’m not without, you know, resources.”
She turned and began folding a page to stuff into an envelope. She sat with her back stiff and her jaw clenched, and Billy would have left her alone. But Harry didn’t.
“For instance, I’ve got you, Hon.”
“Do you?” Doris said through gritted teeth. “For how long?”
• • •
In the afternoon, Billy went out in Harry’s car looking for another runaway, this time a husband on a bender. He spent two hours in the saloons near the ballpark, crowded now that the Cubs had come back from a disastrous road trip, and finally thought he had a line on the place where the man was holed up. He stopped for a quick lunch and returned to the office. At the landing just below the office he stopped and waited, silent, on the staircase. He heard two voices raised, both of them speaking at once. He heard Harry start to say something and then Doris’s voice cut through, sharp and angry.
“Goddam it, don’t play around with this, it’s not a game.”
“Oh, no kidding! A guy is dead. It’s not a game, Doris? Really?”
“You’re gonna make a game out of it. A contest. I know you.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Harry said.
“Leave it alone. Go wait it out. Go somewhere.”
“It’ll just be waiting when I come back.”
“Don’t be stupid about this. Let somebody else handle this asshole.”
“No. I think I know what I want to do here. I want to settle it.”
For a long moment Billy heard nothing. He held his breath on the staircase and waited. Then he heard Doris again, her voice softer, tired. Resigned.
“If I asked you to do this for me—”
“Don’t do that. You have to let me do this my way.”
Another moment of silence, then the sound of something being slammed down on a desk and Doris muttering “shit” in a tone of utter surrender. Billy counted to ten and then went in.
“Hey, Bill,” Harry said. “Did we find this Kearns?”
“Think so. Hey, Doris.”
“Hi, Hon,” she said without looking up. After a while she made a quick gesture to her face, wiping something from her cheek.
“So what do you have, Bill?”
“I think he has a room at the YMCA by Lincoln and Belmont. And he drinks at a dark old tavern by the El station. I got to meet the owner—an old guy named Johnnie. Says our guy drinks there from around ten to about midnight, at which time he goes to sleep on the bar.”
“Nice work. I know that saloon. The old guy’s from Bosnia.”
“That’s Yugoslavia, right?”
“Ah, there’s that American educational system at work.”
“So what about this thing with Moncrief? What are we going to do?”
“We? We nothing. This is my problem, I’ll handle it.”
Billy opened his mouth to protest but Harry held up his hand to stop him.
“I don’t know anything yet. But I’m getting some ideas. When I can tell you more, I will.”
For a moment, Harry looked down at the blotter as though trying to read sense from the chaos of his old scribbling. He looked up and saw Doris staring at him.
“I know what you’re going to do,” she said. “Don’t. Let this go.”
Harry shrugged. “It might not let me go. I might not be able to let it go.”
Billy saw her start to ask another question, then she thought better of it. With a shake of her head, she went back to work, and her anger came off her in waves like heat.
He looked back at Harry just as Harry looked up. “I just have to figure this out, that’s all. Now I’ve got something to work with.”
• • •
Sometime after sunset he went to Millie’s apartment. He took the longest way possible and rehearsed what he would say, at one point ducking into an alley to say his lines out loud. He wondered if he would sound as foolish to her as he did to himself. He took the rest of the way at a long, slow walk, and by the time he reached her building, he was nauseated.
She met him at the downstairs door, a wary look in her eyes.
“Hello, Billy.”
“We need to talk.”
She stepped back and led him up the stairs. “I guess so,” she said under her breath.
Billy sat on her sofa, and Millie perched at the edge of the chair across from him. He would have sworn she knew what was coming. Twice he tried to start, but stopped, feeling that there were no words to make sense of all of this.
“You want a cup of coffee—while you get yourself together?”
“No, thanks. I’m not—together. And I’m not gonna be. I just have to say these things outright.”
She nodded and sat back, and he began, he told her all of it, why he’d come to Chicago, the many nights and days he’d spent looking for Rita. And as he told it, he felt foolish but not nearly as silly as he thought. There was a certain mooncalf logic to it all. Once he looked up and saw that she was shaking her head slowly at him, at his story. Her eyes were wet and he knew his were as well, and he feared he wouldn’t be able to finish his story before he started to cry.
When he was finished, he made a gesture of helplessness with both hands.
Millie’s cheeks were wet and her nose was red, but she stayed composed. She wiped her cheek and nodded. “That’s quite a story, Billy Boy. You poor thing. And nobody knew any of this? Why you’re here, or anything else about this girl?”
“No.”
She tried on a small smile. “Not even Harry the Wizard who knows so much about people?”
“Not even him.”
“That’s not good, it’s not healthy to have nobody know what’s going on in your heart. Somebody should know what’s in a person’s heart. You’re a solitary boy, Billy, and that’s not good. But I’ll tell you a little secret—I knew all along.” She held up a hand. “And I could tell you weren’t happy with me. With just me. With, you know, us.”
“That wasn’t it,” Billy began, but didn’t know what else he could say to that. He had realized he was in the midst of a familiar moment. All his life he’d suffered these moments, these times in life when there were elemental things to say and he was met once more with this crippling inability to express himself. It was as though his words and ideas were dammed up inside him and he could not force them out. At least he was telling her the truth. That had to count for something.
“I was happy. I was. It’s just that—”
Millie made a little shrug. “Sometimes in the middle of a sentence your eyes would kind of lose focus, you’d be watching something behind me or somewhere across the street, and I knew you were looking for somebody at those times. I just didn’t know it was a particular somebody. I just thought you were looking for somebody more interesting to you.”
“No. And I was always happy with you.” He met her gaze. “That’s true, that part. Maybe I was watching the street because from the time I got here, from the moment I got off the bus downtown, that’s what I did, I looked for her. In my sleep, even. I dreamt about looking for her. So it was like second nature. I never stopped looking for her.”
“And now you’ve found her. That’s kinda remarkable. What are the chances?”
She gave him a long look that was plain to read—And she’s what you want.
“I’m sorry. About all of this. I never meant—”
She shook her head and seemed small and frail to him. “It’s all right, Hon. It’s actually my fault. It’s what I do, I attract unhappy men, or I find them, either one. I find unhappy men and I think I’m gonna make them happy, and I don’t. I can’t. Women do that, we tell ourselves we can make you all happy. I’ve actually said that to a man, ‘I know I could make you happy if you gave me a chance.’”
“You probably could.”
“No. You can’t make an unhappy man happy. You got to do that your own self, Hon. And right now I think you’re pretty far from that.”
In the ensuing silence, Billy fought for words. “I feel stupid,” he said.
“Makes two of us. You’ve had another girl on your mind all the time we’ve been together. A girl with a head on her shoulders has to know when she’s with a fella who’s not gonna work out for her. Or she ought to. Most of the time you try not to see it, or if you do, you ignore it and tell yourself it’s gonna turn into something. But I’m not stupid.” She shrugged. “I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
He turned away to compose himself. When he looked back, she was watching him, dry-eyed and calm now. In other circumstances, he might have said she looked faintly amused.
“It’s just what I expected, Billy. No more, no less. I really don’t have a good record with gentlemen.”
“I just—people get lonely,” he began.
And Millie said, “So you do. So you do, Billy boy. I sure do know about that. It’s all right, Hon.”
Billy sat there for a moment longer, and when she said nothing further, he got up and went to the door. She got there first, opened it for him, and leaned against the doorway as he went out into the hall.
“You take care, Billy. And good luck with your person. This lady.”
“Thanks,” he said. He began to say “I’m really sorry” and then understood it would be the wrong thing. “You take care, too. Millie.”
As he walked away, he realized that this was one of the few moments when he’d said her name.
TWENTY-ONE
Tactics
Billy slept badly and woke before the sun came up, feeling exhausted and light-headed. He recalled feeling this way as a child after his parents had one of their all-night battles. He got up, certain that he would not get back to sleep, and went out for a long run through his neighborhood. As he ran, he thought of Millie and what he’d just done.
On his way in to work, Billy nearly trampled an old man in a ragged Army jacket picking up a dime from the sidewalk just outside the office building.
“Sorry,” Billy said.
The old man grinned at him, his face framed by a knit cap.
“Found ten cent,” he said holding up the dime.
“Here’s a buck to go with it, now you’ve got enough for a—” He paused, unsure what a dollar and ten cents would buy.
“A hamburg and a beer!” the old man said, and laughed. He held Billy’s gaze for just a moment, and Billy would have said there was something there—amusement or recognition. Then the old man nodded and left.
Billy watched as the old guy shuffled away, stopping to rummage through a trash can on the corner. He had the odd feeling that he’d spoken to the old man before.
In the office, Leo was getting ready to go out.
“And take my car,” Harry was saying. Leo nodded and left.
“Hey, kid,” he said to Billy on his way out.
“What’s up?”
“Leo’s gonna police the area for us. While we do some other things.”
“We? As in you and me?”
“And other people.”
Harry’s gaze moved to Doris’s empty desk. He frowned.
“She didn’t come in today?”
“Nah. Says she’s got the flu.”
When Billy said nothing, Harry added, “She’s pissed at me. I think she’ll be in later. But right now we have other things to focus on. We’re gonna use some of our—”
“Resources?”
“Ah, you’ve been listening after all. Yeah.” He went to the window and said, “You and I are gonna go for a walk.”
Half a mile from the office, near the spot where Lincoln came to an end at Clark Street, there was a museum.
“We going on a field trip?”
“No. We have a business meeting in the vicinity. But you ought to check out this place. That’s the Historical Society. You need to know about your city if you’re gonna live here.”
“Not sure I am.”
“No, huh?” Harry said absently. Then he gave Billy the look of a guy with inside information. Billy refused to bite.
They walked for a while along the edge of Lincoln Park, to a place near a horseshoe pit where a couple of gray-haired men were tossing shoes and laughing. Close to the sidewalk was a huge boulder with a bronze plaque. The boulder was badly chipped, as though someone had gone at it with a sledgehammer. Harry pointed to the plaque.
