Final Stroke (57 page)

Finally, the Hispanic old man turned to Steve and Jan once again. He looked down at Jan for a second, then at Steve. “I hope we have an understanding, Mr. Babe. If not, you’ll receive a visitor in the fu
ture. Carter was smarter, by the way. He did not allow bad memories to ruin his life or the lives of those around him. Rather than dwelling on the past he chose to spend the remainder of his life helping others. He was a modern day Don Quixote. But unlike Don Quixote he se
lectively dismissed elements of the past he could do nothing about, ele
ments of the past that, if dwelled upon, would have made him a bitter old man. The historically proven greed of the Chicago mob offers clo
sure, Mr. Babe. For your good and for hers, forget everything else.”

Steve wondered if he was smiling, because now the Hispanic
man smiled. “Keep pressure on the wound, Mr. Babe. I’ll call an ambulance.”

The Hispanic man stared at Steve with a smile on his face a mo
ment more before he turned. He quickly propped the other old man’s feet up on the footrests, grabbed the push handles of the wheelchair, hurried with his passenger toward the end of the hallway and the load
ing dock, and finally disappeared around the corner.

In the opposite direction, coming through the double doors that led to the lobby, Steve could hear voices, two men shouting for some
one to drop a gun. A pause, then another man saying, “Okay, okay!”

Back down at the end of the hallway, a door slammed and there was another voice.

“Hey, what gives here?”

Standing outside the door to the men’s room, a pasty-faced, heavy
set young man in a soiled white kitchen uniform carrying a towel stared for a moment at the dead killer sprawled on the floor at the end of the hall. “Holy Jesus.” Then he turned toward Steve and Jan and the bodies of Max Lamberti and So-long Sue. “I mean really, what gives?”

CHAPTER

THIRTY

F
aces smiled at her. Voices said she’d be all right. When
she tried to speak but could not, one voice said the man who shot her had no hair on his head because his hair was in his pocket. This made the others smile before they loaded her into the ambulance. All of it seemed long ago. Or perhaps it was only an hour ago. She couldn’t be sure. As for the man’s hair being in his pocket, it had taken her a while, but she thought she had this figured out.

The man’s hair was in his pocket because when she last saw him inside the van he was bald, and since he had plenty of hair on his head at the funeral earlier in the week, she assumed he must have taken the hairpiece off in anticipation of the busy night ahead. A busy night of tears and pain and fake smiles from a man without legs.

She knew about smiles. Especially on the face she now saw. She’d seen this face often enough, and under sufficient circumstances, to know when the smile was real, or when it was caused by stroke. Steve smiled at her now, his face close. He touched her forehead with his right hand. His right hand! She turned her head slightly and saw
that his left arm was in a sling and he was sitting at her bedside in his wheelchair. When she tried to ask if he was all right, the words gath ered in her throat like hot coals and she flinched because of the pain.

“Don’t talk. Shot in your neck, but okay. Surgery over and out. You’ll be fine. You’re at hospital, not in hell.”

He put on the sour face he sometimes displayed when he used the wrong words. “I mean you’re not at Hell in the Woods.”

She was in a hospital bed, IV and monitors to her left, Steve in his wheelchair and others standing behind him to her right. The last time she recalled being conscious it had been night. She had come awake while they loaded her into the ambulance. She had glanced to the side and seen the loading dock. Crashed into the building at the top of the loading dock ramp was the car in which she and Steve had tried to es
cape. She remembered trying to talk to a policemen inside the ambu
lance and not being able to and taking a pen from the policeman and writing some things on a notepad the policeman held up for her. She’d written that the bald killer was Max Lamberti, and that Max had been after not only the keys, but the litany of routes.

Lydia appeared with Steve at her bedside, Lydia’s long black hair hanging down, brushing against Jan’s hand. Until then she hadn’t been aware of her hands, and now she grasped some strands of Lydia’s hair with her right hand and gave a tug. Lydia smiled when she spoke.

“The doctor was here a while ago, says your voice will be okay in a couple days. I’ll visit again and we can talk about the reunion you missed.”

Lydia glanced at Steve. “This guy here says you’d want to know the particulars about the investigation. Tamara came here to tell him about it.”

After Jan nodded, Lydia backed away and Tamara pulled a chair close to the side of the bed beside Steve’s wheelchair.

Tamara said a lot of what the police knew so far had been pieced together from things Steve told her. Some of the explanation seemed vague, but Jan knew this was because of the painkillers they’d given her. She listened as best she could, hearing what she needed to hear. During the explanation she reached out and took Steve’s right hand in hers.

Max Lamberti and Dino Justice were dead. Others were in cus
tody, including the handicapped driver of the van. The keys taken from the safe deposit box were found in the van along with an aide named Tyrone Washington, who was also here in the hospital because of the beating he sustained. The litany of routes Steve had memorized matched the one found in Jan’s notebook shoved between the seat and center console in her car. The police obtained a judge’s order to open safe deposit boxes at banks located at the intersections designated by the litany. There they found information on foreign bank accounts registered to the Gianetti family. A quick check of several accounts had already tallied over a hundred million dollars.

The Gianetti family secret, vaguely alluded to by Marjorie Gia
netti in rehab with Steve, was that the money gathered in 1980 for a drug deal was put into the foreign accounts. Some time prior to his death, Tony Senior hid the information about the accounts in safe deposit boxes all over the Chicago area. The litany of routes, a jingle memorized by Marjorie before her stroke, and apparently also memo
rized by Tony Junior when he was a boy, specified the intersections at which the banks were located.

When Marjorie had her stroke, she took the purpose of the secret with her. The only thing Tony Junior was aware of was the litany of routes. It meant nothing to him until he came across the safe deposit box key after his mother’s stroke. This key opened the first box, and inside the first box were the keys to the other boxes. But to get to the
other boxes, one had to know the list of intersections, which were in the same numerical order as the order of the key numbers. Therefore, once Tony Junior got the keys, he could have gone to the next intersec tion and used the key with the lowest number, and so on. But he never made it to the next intersection.

Max Lamberti inherited knowledge of the phony 1980 drug deal from his father. Somewhere along the line, Max discovered that his Aunt Marjorie knew the secret. He killed his aunt—or had her killed—because he feared therapy would reveal the secret to the au
thorities. Max assumed once he had the keys he’d be able to retrieve the money. He knew that when his aunt died, something, somehow, would be passed on to Tony Junior, and he felt he would be able to step in at the right moment, get Tony Junior out of the way, and claim the money he felt rightly belonged to the mob, namely him.

But Max jumped the gun when he eliminated Tony Junior, along with his attorney, Buster Brown. Brown may have been paid off by Max, and could have tipped Max off about the existence of the safe deposit box key and the trip to the first bank in Orland Park. If so, Max must have decided to get rid of Tony Junior and Brown at the same time.

Several foreign bank accounts were pointed to by documents in the first box, but these amounted to a small fraction of the total. Tony Senior apparently did this on purpose. If someone eliminated his wife
and
his son, he provided pointers to a small fraction of the money as a way of getting even, letting whoever got hold of the contents of the first box know they’d come close, but no cigar.

When Jan was spotted at the scene of the “accident,” Max as
sumed she knew where the rest of the boxes were. That’s what kept her alive. She knew something Max needed, and as long as she didn’t tell him …

Tamara paused in her explanation and looked up to the other side of the bed. When Jan looked there she saw a nurse injecting some
thing into the IV port near her arm. The nurse glanced at Tamara and Steve, then to Jan, and said, “Sedative, so you’ll rest.”

It took only moments for the sedative to take effect. Although Jan wanted to hear more, she felt warm and happy and ready to sleep.

The room was dark, only a faint glow of night light through the cur
tains at the window. The room was also warm, as if the heat had been turned up. Or perhaps some time had gone by since the incident and it was warmer outside. Summer instead of spring, and the air condi
tioning was turned off or broken.

He had been dreaming about the shootout in the nursing home wing. So-long Sue lying on her side before him and he had just rested the gun on Sue’s ancient child-bearing hip to steady his aim as he struggled with all his will to squeeze the trigger. He had come awake at the point he always came awake. He had come awake the moment after he fired. He had come awake the moment he turned and saw Jan lying unconscious in the overturned wheelchair, blood spurting from her neck and him trying desperately to stop the flow.

The dream always ended before Max regained consciousness and retrieved his gun. The dream always ended before the two old men came down the hallway, first killing Max, then the Hispanic old man who had pushed the wheelchair executing the old man who had been in the wheelchair. Before executing his partner, the Hispanic man had stooped down to where Steve was trying to keep Jan from losing too much blood. The Hispanic man had stared into Steve’s eyes and asked the oddest of questions.

“Who was the smarter politician, Mr. Babe? Was it Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan?”

He could still see the look in the old man’s dark eyes, the man watching for a reaction the way therapists and even Jan watched for his reactions to things they said following his stroke. Jan and the thera
pists looking for any sign he knew what they were talking about.

Yes, it had to be that. The old man had been looking for evidence that Marjorie had revealed to him something about Presidential elec
tions, or something about a specific Presidential election.

“Who was the smarter politician, Mr. Babe? Was it Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan?”

The man had also spoken of Don Quixote and Steve wondered if the man considered himself a Don Quixote, a righter of wrongs.

As he lay with his eyes open, staring at the faint glow coming through the curtains, he heard something. A clicking like someone very far away down the hallway tapping on a counter with the tip of a pencil. He wondered why someone would tap a pencil on the counter of the nurses’ station in the middle of the night, and concluded who
ever it was must be listening to music with earphones on. One of the staff, bored silly at Hell in the Woods in the middle of the night, lis
tening to a music player and tapping out a fast tempo.

But as soon as he settled on this as the cause of the sound, the rapidity of the clicking sped up and seemed to be coming closer, getting louder. It had regularity, not at all like someone tap
ping a pencil point, more like a machine. A cricket-like ratcheting. Click-click-click-click-click-click.

Something told him he’d heard this sound before. Something told him he’d heard this sound a long time ago before his stroke. Yes, something before he had his stroke. Was it the clicking of a semi automatic pistol? Someone inserting a magazine and retracting and
releasing the slide? But why would this be repeated again and again?

The clicking came closer, slowed a little, sped a little, paused.

He sat up. He was certain the clicking had come from the door
way, the dark doorway. The night light bulb burned out again and the door closed. But even when the door to the hall was closed, the bright hallway light always shone at the space beneath the door.

As he stared into the darkness, he could now see that this was not a closed door, but a doorway, a doorway that cast a faint glow like the glow through the curtains at the window. And someone or something was in the doorway. Although the shadow in the doorway was vague at first, he determined it was indeed a person, a person standing on one leg and curiously leaning to the side.

Was it someone who had come to get him because of what he might know? Was he still dreaming? Was this going to turn into yet another dream drummed up from childhood memories? Memories that lingered, using up precious brain cells in spite of his struggles to purge them in order to make room for more recent memories. Was this yet another recalling of the fight with Dwayne Matusak on the playground so long ago? But if he were dreaming about the fight with Dwayne, things would happen much faster, and there would be other kids. Even if he could not see the other kids, he would be aware they were there.

Suddenly, there was something else in the shadow. Thin lines down low, thin lines and two oblong circles.

That clicking, that sound. For some reason he felt he was looking at himself.
He
was the person in the doorway. Yes,
he
was in the door
way. He had no clothes on. He could feel the coolness on his skin. He definitely was not on a playground, because if he were, the kids in the dream would be laughing like crazy because he had no clothes on. No, not on a playground, but simply in a doorway. Not standing in
the doorway. He was sitting. He was sitting astride something.

A few more clicks emerged and he had it. He was there. He’d been there. Right there in the doorway long ago before his stroke, but not so long ago that he’d been a kid. He’d been there in the doorway as an adult, sitting astride a bicycle, its seat feeling obscenely skinny because he was naked. He was in the doorway reaching out toward the light switch in order to surprise …