Two minutes later, there's no answer, not even anybody yelling to wait a minute.

  "Maybe we should've kept on calling until we got him home," I say.

  "The man's supposed to be in a wheelchair, didn't you say? The man's supposed to not be able to go anywhere without his wife, didn't you tell me?"

  "Maybe he's lying down in a bedroom at the back," I say.

  We walk down the cold, gloomy hallway, which smells of cabbage a hundred years old, and knock on the pebbled pane of glass set in what is probably the kitchen door. Again we wait. Just as we're about to give it up a muffled voice says, "Who is it and what do you want?"

  "Mr. Hovannis?" Pescaro says, raising his voice.

  "Yeah?"

  "Police. We've got something to tell you, Mr. Hovannis."

  There's some noise behind the door and when it gets pulled open, there's a man about fifty sitting in a wheelchair with a light blanket covering his knees and legs. He's sweating even though he's wearing a sleeveless underwear shirt and the kitchen's no warmer than the hallway.

  His upper body is the body of a weight lifter, maybe from pushing the wheels on the chair all the time, and lifting himself up on couches and the bed.

  He's a good-looking guy except that his complexion's sallow like he ain't been getting much sun. There's pale freckles on his shoulders, chest and upper arms. He's in a neck brace. His eyes are scared.

  "Something's happened to Mavis," he says, making it a statement, not a question.

  "What makes you say that?" Pescaro asks, which, under the circumstances, I think is a little cruel.

  "When cops come to the door, it's usually bad news."

  "I'm afraid you read it right," Pescaro says.

  "Did somebody beat her up?"

  "What makes you say that?" Pescaro says again.

  Hovannis scowls. He looks like an angry turtle.

  "You think I don't know what she does to support me?" Hovannis asks, like somebody was sticking a knife in him. "How bad did the sonofabitch hurt her?"

  "As bad as it gets," I say, before Pescaro can carry on the way he's carrying on.

  Hovannis closes his eyes real slow and sits like that. Tears come out of his eyes and run down the lines of his cheeks into the corners of his mouth.

  "You all right, Mr. Hovannis?" Pescaro asks.

  "No, I ain't all right," Hovannis says. "Is that all you got to say to me?"

  "The law requires an eyewitness identification," Pescaro says.

  "Where?"

  "The morgue."

  "When?"

  "Whenever you say."

  "The sooner the better."

  "I'll send a van inside the hour. You'll be here?"

  "I ain't going anywhere," Hovannis says.

  We leave. When we're outside I ask Pescaro why he was so rough on the man.

  "A woman dies, suspect the man closest to her, husband, father or lover," Pescaro says.

  "For Christ's sake, the man's a cripple."

  "They got upper-body strength."

  "What'd he do, push his chair up six flights of stairs?"

  "She could've let him in. She could've sent the elevator down for him."

  "If that's the case," I say, "I don't think you'll have much trouble finding witnesses to a man in a neck brace and wheelchair rolling away from the scene of a murder."

  Pescaro stops and gives me the stink eye.

  "So I'm a sonofabitch, Flannery. It goes with the job."

  TWENTY

  Pescaro leaves me at the morgue to walk—or push—Hovannis through the identification.

  Chicago works it like most cities work it nowadays. It ain't like in the movies or on television where the friend or relative stands there while a morgue attendant pulls out a drawer and whips back a sheet.

  How it works is, the body's not even in the room. It's in another room altogether and the person identifying it is elsewhere looking at closed-circuit television.

  So this is one way that we keep on getting some distance between ourselves and some of the harder things in life, which may not be altogether a good thing.

  As it happens, Hovannis don't want to see a picture of his dead wife. He not only wants to be in the room with her but when I wheel him in there, he wants to touch her.

  Eddie Ferguson gives me a look when Hovannis pushes aside the sheet and takes her hand, his head held in this neck brace which ain't one of them things with Velcro closures that you wear for maybe a week or two when you twist your neck or suffer a minor backlash.

  It's a terrible device. Something you'd deliberately inflict on somebody to torture them.

  I got to turn away from seeing the struggle it is for him to get a good look at his dead wife's face.

  "Help me," he says.

  Eddie and me get on either side of him and lift him out of the wheelchair and hold him on his feet, bent over so he can stare down at her.

  "Get me closer," he says.

  It ain't easy but we manage to get him positioned so he can kiss her on the corner of the mouth. He's crying.

  "Ah, God, babe, I told you to leave the goddamn life," he says. "I told you not to have anything to do with that bastard."

  He sort of slumps and puts his forehead on her breast. Eddie and me almost lose our grip on him.

  We get him back in the chair.

  "Can you make the identification, sir?" Eddie asks.

  I give him a look.

  "I'm sorry, Jimmy, but I got to hear him say it for the affidavit here."

  "What do you want me to say? I, Harry Hovannis, husband of Mavis Hovannis, declare and avow that this is her and she is dead?"

  He's being sarcastic, even behind his grief, like people get, as though all the clerks and pencil pushers they got to deal with at times like these is to blame.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. It's trembling.

  "You okay?" I ask.

  When he don't say anything, I wheel him out of the room, leaving Fay Wray there for what comes next.

  The cop what drove Hovannis over in a van rigged for wheelchair access is waiting out in the lobby. I turn Hovannis over to him.

  "Can I ask you one more question, Mr. Hovannis?"

  "Anything I can say to stop you?"

  "Who was the bastard you told your wife not to see?"

  He almost blurts it out, but something stops him and he gets sly. "I'll tell you when I decide what to do about it," he says.

  "I hope what you decide to do ain't anything foolish, like confronting this person and making threats," I say.

  He turns his whole head and shoulders away from me, telling me in no uncertain terms that the conversation is over.

  "Anything I can do, Mr. Hovannis, don't hesitate to ask," I say.

  He holds up his hand but still don't say anything and the cop wheels him out.

  "Hackman around?" I ask Eddie.

  "In his office, I think," he says.

  "Thanks for everything."

  "How come you witnessed the identification?" he asks.

  "I think Pescaro wants me to see what it's like doing what a cop's got to do."

  Hackman's in his office all right, leaning back in an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, his feet up on the desk, sleeping, a dead cigar in his mouth.

  He's one of those people who wakes up and is instantly alert. His eyes pop open and he says, "You're here about the woman found in the tub."

  "That's right," I say.

  "Broken neck," he says.

  "Did somebody break it for her?"

  "That I couldn't tell you. It looks like she might've slipped getting into the tub and hit the edge with her jaw as she went down. She may have tried to turn around and sit up but couldn't. Went unconscious and slumped down just far enough to cover her nose and mouth."

  "Drowned in six inches of water without anybody holding her down?"

  "It happens."

  "Choked to death without a struggle?"

  "How do you know it was without a struggle?" he asks.

  "Because the floor was dry."

  "You ever hear of evaporation?"

  "The water in the tub was still warm. I don't think there was enough time for a wet floor to dry," I say.

  "I didn't say it couldn't have been a punch in the jaw that knocked her out and even broke her neck," he says.

  "That going to be in your report?"

  "Of course not. I don't speculate about such things in my reports. I just lay down the physical evidence."

  "Are you going to do an autopsy?"

  "You mean split her down the middle and saw off the top of her head?"

  I maybe wince because he reaches over like he's going to pat me.

  "Take it easy," he says. "She a friend of yours?"

  "I only met her once."

  "Was it a special meeting?"

  I understand what he's saying. He's been told by somebody that Mavis Hovannis aka Fay Wray was a companion for hire. I wonder who told him. I know if I ask, he won't say.

  "It was after Delvin's funeral."

  "I forget how people feel about autopsies sometimes," he says. "When there's no special reason to suspect poison or other subtle means of death, I've got no reason to do anything but a basic postmortem on her unless somebody orders it. You think I should do more?"

  "I don't know what to think," I say. "You take any swabs?"

  "The usual."

  "There was semen?"

  "What would you expect considering the woman's line of work?"

  "I'd expect her to make the customer wear a condom."

  "You'd be surprised how many don't. They're half-drunk or half-stoned or too tired to face an argument or they just forget it.".

  "We're not talking about streetwalkers or bar girls here," I say. "We're talking about a very high class professional. I don't think she'd forget to make a customer wear a skin anymore than she'd forget to brush her teeth."

  "All right, if you believe that, what does it tell you?"

  "It tells me that the client must've been a very special customer, indeed."

  "So run with it," he says.

  "You're saving samples for future serology and DNA tests?"

  He nods. "What are you doing in this anyway?" he asks.

  "I got a phone call. I was the first one on the scene...except whoever made the caller."

  "But how do you come to be acting like a cop?"

  "Pescaro hands me the package," I say. "He needs a witness that everything was done right. He made me the witness."

  Hackman smiles. "I see his point. You can't go yelling cover-up if you been in on it from the beginning and walk it through all the way."

  I shake Hackman's hand, thank him for the news and take my leave.

  On the way home I'm thinking about how the sequence could've gone.

  Fay Wray services the client in the love nest. He leaves because he may have a wife to go home to. She stays behind and sleeps over, taking a rest from all the care she's got to give her husband night after night.

  In the morning she gets up and goes into the bathroom to have a bath.

  Somebody, maybe the customer, has gained entrance to the flat. He confronts her just as she's about to step into the tub. There's a quarrel or maybe he does what he come to do without even exchanging words.

  Or she knows this john is coming back in the morning for another taste. She runs herself a bath, getting ready for him...this ain't no fifty-dollar trick. She steps into the bath. She slips and twists around trying to save herself from a bad tumble, but she goes right on over and smacks her jaw against the side of the tub and she's down and under. She never comes to.

  The customer arrives and finds her. He calls me.

  Why the hell does he call me?

  And who buzzed me in, then ran away from the flat? You can see where I am. I'm nowhere.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I'm wore out from the emotional stress and running around.

  I go back to Bridgeport to the house where my old Chinaman used to live not long ago and I'm hit all over again with a sense of loss.

  The door's open to let the dust out. I walk into the entry hall and it ain't anything like it was. All the pictures celebrating Delvin's life, the political rallies, the picnics, the testimonial dinners for the Democratic Central Committee and the Sons of Hibernia, is all down, neatly filed away in cardboard boxes lined up on the floor.

  The house smells fresh and clean, a little bit like lemon oil, a little bit like pine-scented cleaner.

  I could cry.

  I stoop down so I can finger through some of the old sepia photos.

  Mary steps into the doorway to the living room. I look up. She's in jeans and a cotton blouse tied around her middle just under her breasts. There's a bandanna tied around her hair.

  "I wasn't going to throw any of them out before consulting you, James," she says.

  "Throw them away?"

  "I mean give them to some historical society or the new library. Somebody who'd want them and would know what to do with them."

  "There's a few I'd like to keep. Hang back up on the wall. Maybe not here in the hall, but someplace."

  "There's plenty of room," Mary says. "I picked out a room downstairs, the old sunporch, for your office. It's got walnut paneling and an old mahogany desk that'll clean up beautifully. A few of those old photos in new frames would look very impressive."

  "Impressive?"

  "Pictures like those on the wall will assure your constituents of the continuity you mean to bring to the ward."

  "Constituents?"

  I'm talking to her like I'm some dim-witted gazooney without a thought in his head.

  "I mean, if you run for committeeman alongside Lundatos, you could have your office right at home. There's a separate entrance."

  "Delvin ran the Twenty-seventh but he lived here in the Eleventh. I don't know what continuity you're talking about."

  "Of tradition, James."

  I stand up, feeling a little creaky.

  "You look tired," Mary says.

  "You don't," I say. "I don't understand it. You been moving things around and cleaning this house since seven o'clock this morning and you look fresh as a daisy."

  She colors with pleasure a little bit. She ain't lost that even after we been married now—what—nine years, going on ten. She still blushes when I give her a compliment.

  "Mary?" Aunt Sada calls from somewhere upstairs.

  "I've had help," Mary says. "Go look around. There's still lots to do. You want to have a yard sale or would you rather give whatever we can't use away to some charity?"

  "Let me think about it. Maybe we can offer it around to individuals what ain't got, as long as we can make it so it don't look like we're buying votes."

  "You and Lundatos?"

  "We'll see."

  She climbs the stairs after Sada calls again and I go into the living room.

  The old worn carpets are off the floor, rolled up against the wall. The dusty lace curtains and heavy brocade drapes are down.

  Stanley Recore, the kid what used to talk so funny when he was small, is up on a stepladder washing the tall windows. I notice he's got what you might call the hope of a mustache on his upper lip.

  He stares at me, which I realize is about all I been getting from him the last couple years. We ain't enemies but we sure ain't pals like we used to be when he'd come busting in on me, and sometimes Mary and me, unannounced, having a talent with locks that would make a housebreaker green with envy.

  "How's it going?" I say.

  "It's going."

  "I ain't seen you around much lately."

  "I ain't been around much lately," he says.

  I wave my hand, telling him to go ahead with what he's doing if he wants to. He don't wait for a second invitation but goes right back to work.

  Mary, Sada and Stanley have shoved all the furniture back against the walls. In the light of day it looks worn. The couch has sprung some springs and the stuffing's coming out of the upholstery, which is that mohair I ain't seen in thirty years. Even Delvin's favorite easy chair, the one from which he gives me a thousand years of experience and good advice, the one made of leather, is so cracked that there's no way of saving it.

  The end tables are rickety and the coffee table scarred and stained, maybe beyond repair. The glass-fronted bookcases look dusty but otherwise okay.

  I catch myself and stop what I'm doing, taking a goddamn inventory of an old friend's belongings.

  I wander back through the house.

  There's an office off the hall that nobody's got to yet, with a roll-top desk and a wooden swivel chair. There's even a spittoon on the floor, which I suppose is Delvin's idea of interior decorating, and more pictures on the wall, including a big framed print of Chicago back in 1912.

  One of the three windows is made of stained glass. It shows a man in armor on horseback fighting a dragon with a spear. I suppose it's Saint George, though what Saint George, an Englishman, has got to do with Delvin escapes me.

  The next room down the hall is a bathroom. I can see it's going to cost a little money bringing it up to date.

  And right across the hall is the bedroom where Delvin breathed his last.

  The kitchen's at the end. It's big and bright with all the curtains and shades down. There's a big pantry, what used to be called a larder, right there. There's not much by way of canned goods and staples on the shelves. I guess old Delvin and Mrs. Thimble didn't eat so much that they needed to stock up for themselves and I doubt he'd had a dinner guest since his wife passed away.

  There's a porch off the kitchen, part of it glassed off. What they call a sunporch. The place where I'm supposed to hold office hours when I get to be the committeeman of the Eleventh.

  I go wandering back through the house and up the stairs.

  My wife and Sada and my mother-in-law and Gloria Chapman, all dressed for housework, are in the master bedroom, which is twice as big as the one we got at home.

  They all look at me like I'm going to say something.

  "This ain't the room he died in," I say.

  "He wouldn't have been sleeping up here," Sada says. "All the stairs at his age."

  "Where's Mrs. Thimble?"

  "I saw her this morning when I arrived," Mary says. "She said she had errands to run."

 

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