"He's served some time since then. He sees himself rising in the party. He's got more to lose now. I can't see him trying to kill you because you put him away ten years ago."

  "I can't see him coming straight at me, either. But I can see him getting half-bagged and, maybe alone, maybe with that friend of his, sitting in a car in the wee smalls, sharing the tail end of a pint, and bragging about what they could do to me the next time they had the chance."

  Janet sits there looking doubtful.

  "I know it's a stretch, but what else have I got to go on at the minute?"

  "How are you going to start checking it out?" Janet says.

  "I'm going to go over to Schaller's Pump and have a talk with Harry Fannon, the bartender, first of all."

  It's the slow hour between dinner and the evening crowd. Harry Fannon's behind the wood wiping a glass with a clean towel, making a jeweler's art out of it. Holding it up to the light. Removing every stain and smudge.

  He sees me coming and pulls a Vernor's ginger ale from the refrigerator.

  I hold up a hand to stop him.

  "I ain't going to be here long enough to drink it, Harry," I say, putting a fiver on the bar.

  He glances at it and looks quizzical.

  "Forgot to leave you a tip last night."

  "Not required, not expected," he says, not touching the fin.

  "I'm sorry about the fuss."

  "Not your fault. I was standing right here watching it all. Bailey was out of line..." He leaves a long pause and then adds, "again."

  "Well, I shouldn't've let it happen anyway."

  "What could you've done? He wasn't giving you any room."

  "I got to figure out something I can do about them two."

  "I'd say so. They're carrying a lot of bad feelings against you."

  "They stay after I left?"

  "For an hour maybe".

  "Having more to drink?"

  "All they could manage. Some of the other boys here last night set them up. Claimed they was celebration drinks for the way Bailey beat up on you, taught you what was what and who was who."

  "Did what?" I say, surprised at such a thing.

  "They was pulling Bailey's leg. Making fun of him. Making him a goat. He didn't know no better."

  "How about Connell?"

  "He knew what was going on but he didn't clue Bailey in that they were making a fool of him. He was downing the free drinks, too."

  "They make any threats against me?"

  Fannon makes believe the glass he's working on has a stubborn spot, deciding what he should or shouldn't say.

  "Come on, Harry, I know they're regular customers and I know bartenders don't like to bad-mouth regulars. But I'm going to be around more than a little and maybe I'll get to be a regular."

  "Ginger ale?" Fannon says, but he's grinning. "It was just pissin' in the wind, Jimmy. You know how drunks get. Especially when a bunch of jackasses are egging them on."

  "So some threats were made."

  "The usual. How next time they'd tear your head off, rip your balls off, and otherwise rearrange your anatomy."

  "They?"

  "Connell wasn't going to let Bailey get the best of it, what he'd do to you the next time. They kept on topping one another and the rest of the bar was laughing."

  "That's all?"

  "Well, it went on for a while. I can't remember every damn thing he said."

  "Did he mention doing anything to me with anything other than his fists and feet?"

  "What the hell are you talking about, Jimmy? He just made the usual threats like a kid or a drunk'll make."

  I don't want to lead him into remembering something he don't remember on his own. I don't want to tell him the reason I'm prodding him is to find out if Bailey or Connell mentioned anything about guns in their threats.

  "I don't know. Maybe they said something about doing worse to me than just beating me up."

  Fannon's been a bartender for a long time and he ain't no fool. He narrows his eyes as though seeing me better'll make him hear what I'm saying without saying it.

  "Like they might blow your brains out?" he asks.

  "Well, did they say anything like that?"

  "It was all just drunken brag, Jimmy."

  "Did they say anything like that?"

  "Well, yeah, they did. Bailey said something like that."

  "Anything else?"

  "Has something bad happened which you ain't telling me?" he asks.

  "It was on the local news."

  "I watch the television with half an eye and I don't even bother listening with half an ear."

  "Somebody took a shot at me last night."

  "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Fannon says. "You okay?"

  "I didn't get hit but Mabel Halstead got it."

  "Do I know the lady?"

  "Probably not. But she got killed."

  "And you think Bailey and Connell might've done it?"

  "I don't know. I'm just picking through the garbage because, right now, I don't know what else I can do. Well, thanks, Harry."

  "Hey, Flannery," he says, as I start to walk away. "Pick up your fiver."

  When I don't reach for it right away he pushes it closer to me and says, "You want to, add it to any floral tribute you're gonna send the lady."

  TWENTY-THREE

  It's nine o'clock before I wake up.

  Mary's been up a couple of hours, getting Kathleen dressed and fed and off to school on the bus.

  So we have one of our long talks while I eat the breakfast she makes for me.

  "Did she have any relatives?" she asks.

  "She may have told me she had a couple of brothers or sisters. Maybe some aunts, uncles and cousins. Nephews and nieces. I don't know. She might have told me that. She never talked about her family much that I can remember. I have an idea that any family she had disowned her after she quit being Milton and had the sex-change operation. I could find out from Janet if she knows anything I don't know."

  "I could do that for you," Mary says.

  "I appreciate the offer, sweetheart, but I think I've got to do this thing for my friend. Try to take some of the confusion out of her death which I couldn't take out of her life."

  "I understand," Mary says. "But if you need me to do anything at all, please let me help."

  "Yes, I'll do that. Right now I think I'll go over and talk to Janet."

  "She called this morning and said she'd be at her office down in City Hall until one o'clock this afternoon if you wanted her for anything."

  "She called this morning?"

  "While you were asleep. I didn't want to wake you."

  "Will you give her a call for me while I get dressed?" I ask. "Tell her I'll be right down."

  When I get to City Hall and the floor where Janet has her official office, I see her walking toward me the way she walks, striding out like a person going somewhere. She starts to hold out her arms when she's a good ways away from me and starts to come at me in a rush. It's like one of them scenes in a moving picture where two lovers come together in a field of flowers.

  But we ain't two lovers eager to embrace, we're a couple of old friends seeking comfort in each other because of the violent death of a friend.

  We hold each other as people hurry past, giving us the eye.

  Janet breaks away, her hands still on my arms, and smiles at me.

  "We're an item now, Jimmy."

  "The world is full of fools," I say.

  "Come on back into my office," Janet says.

  "Did Mabel ever talk about her family?"

  "A little, now and then. Particularly if she was feeling blue. She'd talk about being a little kid living with her mom and dad, and a brother and sister in—in—in—" She's searching her memory. "...in Highland Park."

  Highland Park's a very upscale community that stretches along about five miles of the Lake Michigan shoreline. It's maybe twenty-five miles north of downtown Chicago. The Metra makes it there in just over half an hour or you can take the Interstate 94 or U.S. 4 if you want to go by car.

  I happen to know about it because Mary went through a period a couple of years back when she thought we needed more culture in our lives. So one summer weekend we drive up there to the Ravinia Festival where some world-class musicians, dancers and actors perform.

  "How about lately?" I ask, taking the visitor's chair.

  "The best I can do, perhaps, is to try to recall the names of the schools he went to."

  "That'd be a help."

  She stares out the window, trying to get her memory to bring up some information. But after a couple of minutes she spins back around and says, "What am I doing, wasting time trying to remember? Just a second, Jimmy."

  There's a computer monitor on a swivel arm attached to her desk. She brings it around in front of her and slides out a keyboard from under her desk drawer. She pushes a key and something beeps.

  "The CPU's in my desk drawer," she says.

  "Oh," I say, seeing as how I don't know what she's talking about.

  Then I remember Kathleen explaining to me that CPU stands for central processing unit.

  "That's a good place for a central processing unit."

  Janet looks at me funny, like if I know what's a CPU why do I have to spell it out and not call it a CPU?

  The screen's up. She clicks this and clicks that. It makes more noises.

  "Okay," she says. "Move your chair around over here."

  By the time I shift my chair so I can see the screen over her shoulder, there's something up there, a document headed "Personnel Records."

  She taps the keys and comes up with another page headed "Ward Office."

  Then she scrolls down past addresses, telephone and fax numbers, and stuff about rent and utilities until she comes to a subheading for "Volunteers" and right there, at the top of a short list, is Mabel Halstead.

  "Here we go," Janet says. "Mabel Halstead, current address, 729 North State Street. I don't think that's her home address. I think that's the office she was using when she was selling insurance and brokering stocks for the professional women."

  "She could have been sleeping there, too."

  "No age," Janet says, and smiles like I smile, both of us thinking that hiding her age was a very feminine thing for Mabel to do.

  "Kindergarten through five, Kipling Elementary School, 517 Deerfield Road, Deerfield, Illinois. Shepard Junior High School, grades six through eight, 440 Grove, Deerfield. Deerfield High School. College of Lake County, 1860 First Street, Highland Park, Illinois. United States Army, Vietnam."

  "She put that down as an address? Vietnam?" I ask.

  "Yes," Janet says.

  "What year did he go in?"

  "Nineteen sixty-five."

  "Right there at the beginning of Johnson's war."

  "When did he get out?"

  "There's no date of discharge, but he went into the Chicago Metropolitan Police Academy in June of 1968."

  I do a quick calculation in my head. Fourteen weeks at the academy and twenty-five weeks in-service training at district stations. Ten months. On duty in '69.

  "Do you have anything on the precincts he worked in?" I ask.

  "The only other entry is a note that says he took a six month leave of absence in 1987, then resigned before the six months were up."

  "Did he put that entry down in your regular information sheet?"

  "No, I probably checked with the department," Janet says. "To see if there was a shadow over his career that forced him out?"

  "Standard practice. Everybody gets vetted to one degree or another. You can't be too careful nowadays and friendship doesn't figure into it."

  "So, he quits two years short of retirement," I say. "That must've been when he made up his mind to have the operation."

  "And he's been Mabel Halstead ever since. Ten years."

  We sit there quiet for a long time, each of us in his or her own thoughts about this tall, beautiful woman we knew or thought we knew. Because, actually, we didn't have a clue about how Mabel really thought and felt. She was a helpful presence but the notion that she was a novelty was never altogether out of mind.

  "Well," I say, "I think maybe I should try to locate her people and tell them that their—child—is dead."

  "Wait a second, Jimmy. Let me see if I can get a telephone number and an address for you."

  She selects a jewel box, one of them containers for a CD, from a line of them between bookends on her desk, opens it up and pops it into a drawer that comes whispering out of her computer at a keystroke.

  "White pages for the United States," she says.

  "You telling me that little disk has got every telephone number in the country?"

  "Well, this one's got all the numbers from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rockies. At least that's what they say. But like everything else, much is promised and less is delivered. Updates aren't sent. Companies fail. Well, you know. Still and all I get a hit about nine times out of ten."

  She types in "Illinois," then "Deerfield" and then "Halstead." A short list of four names comes up. One's a post office box, the other three's got addresses.

  Janet punches a key, and the printer, a little cream-colored thing no bigger than a lunch box, lights up and starts chugging away.

  "They might have an unlisted number," Janet says. "Or, of course, his people might not even be living there anymore."

  She hands me the printed sheet and I look it over.

  "John J. Halstead," I read out loud, "800 Rosemary Terrace, Deerfield." Then there's another John D. Halstead, on Lake Cook Road. And a Halstead and Son, Plumbing. And this last one just has the name and number but no address.

  Janet's tapping away at the keyboard again. The computer in the drawer makes phone dialing sounds. Then there's a little crash of beeps and hisses.

  "I'm on," Janet says, more to herself than to me. "On what?"

  "The Web."

  More key tapping and I see a screen come up what says "MapBlast!"

  Janet types in the address for John J. Halstead. In a minute, maybe a little more, the printer's spitting out a map with a little red cross marking the spot.

  She does the same for Kipling Elementary and Shepard Junior High.

  So I got these three maps, one of the man's address on Rosemary and one each for the schools, which are both easy walking distance from the house where John J. lives.

  "Anything else you can think of?" Janet asks.

  "I couldn't even think of what you got already. I got to start taking some computer lessons from Kathleen."

  "Do you want to call those four numbers?" she asks. When I hesitate she says, "Do you want me to do it?"

  "I hate giving people bad news over the phone. It's very hard, but I'd rather do it face-to-face."

  "I understand, but these people may be no relations. His folks may have moved away long ago."

  "Okay," I say, reaching for the phone.

  I punch in the number for John J. The phone rings several times and then an answering machine kicks in, "You have reached the residence of John J. Halstead. If you wish to leave a message wait for the signal. If you want to reach Halstead and Son, Plumbing, the number is..."

  The message gets cut off abruptly and a woman's voice, which sounds out of breath, says, "Yes. I'm here."

  "I take you away from something?"

  "That's all right. I was out in the garden."

  "I wanted to speak to Mr. Halstead. I need a plumber and—"

  "Oh, well, this isn't the shop. You must've got the numbers mixed up. The shop number's—"

  "I got it right here in the book," I say, interrupting her, acting like I'm embarrassed for making the mistake. "I'm really sorry I got you out of your garden on such a nice day."

  "Well," she says, with a little laugh in her voice, "I can go right back to it. It's not far."

  "I used to live in Deerfield before I moved to Highland Park," I say, telling a white lie.

  "Did you?"

  "Went to Kipling Elementary."

  "My children went to Kipling," she says. "Did you go to Shepard Junior?"

  "Well, yes I did."

  "And Deerfield High, too?" she asks, with this wonder in her voice that people get when a coincidence happens in their life, like there's something amazing about it, that two people who lived in a fairly small town should have gone to the same schools.

  "I think I knew a couple of Halstead brothers at Kipling and Shepard," I say. "Johnny and Milton."

  "Did you?" she says, and now I hear some wariness where there was nothing but a kind of innocent eagerness before.

  I think maybe I tried something to establish a connection there that gave her some kind of warning.

  "Johnny? You mean Jack. We always called my youngest Jack."

  "It's been a long time. My memory ain't always so good. Just out of curiosity, did I get Milton right?"

  "No, you didn't," she says. "You say you've got the shop number?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Good-bye, then," she says, and hangs up.

  I hang up the phone, wondering if I should call the shop and go any further with the search. But then I think that if I do, and the family compares notes around the dinner table I might be causing some nice people some unnecessary anxiety and concern.

  "I think that's them. Something I said pushed her alarm button and she cut me off"

  "Are you going out to Deerfield?" Janet asks.

  "I think I will."

  "If there was no connection between Mabel and her family anymore, maybe it'd be just as well to leave it alone," Janet says.

  "No matter how bad feelings was between them, they'd want to know their son and brother died when Mabel died."

  I go over to Bochos Elementary in the neighborhood what they call SuHu in the Eighth. It's on my way to Deerfield.

  I catch Cora Esper teaching her last class of the day.

  I sit in the back while Cora explains gerunds, which is what you call a verb while it's acting like a noun. So at least some of what she taught me stuck. Though what good it does me I ain't yet found out.

  She dismisses the class and comes over and sits down in one of them chairs with the big arms like the one I'm sitting in.

 

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