Authors: Ed Gorman

Tags: #Mystery

Sleeping Dogs (11 page)

BOOK: Sleeping Dogs

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CHAPTER 16

I was a suburban kid who grabbed every chance possible to get into the city. My main parental warnings fit into two categories: “strangers” and “neighborhoods.” They weren't mutually exclusive, but the former could be anywhere and the latter you had to be lured into. I was on such guard against strangers that I didn't even trust police officers. I'd learned from many science fiction movies that even city officials could be aliens in disguise, which, when you think about it, just may be true.

On the days I took the bus in, I didn't see much in the way of neighborhoods. The route was a three-lane nonstop jaunt that wasn't even long enough to make you sleepy, the way bus trips always seemed to make me. Going in on the train, though, you got to see or at least glimpse a variety of neighborhoods. The rough ones always fascinated me. After all the warnings I'd gotten about them, they held a real interest for me. Scary, for sure. But also intriguing. What were the people like there? If I went in, could I get out alive? Andâthis was at the age of peak romantic notionsâwould I find my true love there and
then carry her off to the land of three-car families and season tickets for all the Illini football and basketball games?

By now, though, my interest in poor neighborhoods had been trumped by reality. Working for various pols over the years, I'd spent many nights walking streets controlled by gangs and watching the sad, weary working poor try to stave off not only hunger but despair as well. They would listen to us but they wouldn't believe us. You can only hold out hope so many times.

And now, just as the sun began to slant downward in the cloudy sky, I was back in a place where most of the cars had taped windows and wired-shut doors and at least one tire that was nearly flat. Businesses had barred windows. The houses weren't much better. Taped windows, sagging doors, frost-staved sidewalks.

I passed three straight blocks of tiny shops so dusty and old they resembled something out of Dickens. Some of them didn't even identify what they had to offer. I counted four astrology readers on my way in. The taverns were narrow, dark except for the neon signage above the doors and just starting to fill up for the night, men from nearby factories entering in small and hearty groups.

Not even spreading dusk hid the wasteland here. Not even the deepest shadows could lie about the conditions of the houses, the stores, the people. I found the address I was looking for, thanks to the woman from Daily Double Discount. She'd given me the name of a Beth Wells. I slid into an open space along the curb, three car lengths down from where the two-story white house with the slanting side steps sat. I waited twenty minutes before I went up. If she came out I planned to follow her.

While I waited, I saw one of those heartbreaks you want to look away from as soon as you see itâan enormous woman in a cheap gray Goodwill coat came up the sidewalk toward my car, her limp so pronounced that she lurched violently to the left every time she stepped down on her right foot. She must have been three hundred pounds plus and even in the waning light her face showed the claw marks of a
vicious skin disease. She kept her eyes downcast. Eye contact for her would be deadly. She wouldn't want to see people smirking or making disgusted faces at the sight of her. You try to think of lives like hers and they're incomprehensible. All the pain; life as the alien, the outcast. I wished I still believed in praying. It was all I could think of to offer her.

By this time of day, NPR was doing lighter stuff, which generally didn't interest me. The jazz station I listened to was doing Dixieland, which didn't interest me, either. I took these two omens as my call to action.

I'd brought along my Glock. I wasn't sure why. Security blanket I suppose.

Since the address listed ended in
1/2
, I interpreted that as being the upstairs apartment. The wooden stairs were just beginning to gleam with frost as I made my way up them. I listened for any kind of sound. Nothing, neither downstairs nor up. No lights, either. Maybe Beth Wells wasn't home. I'd decided against calling her in advance. Didn't want to give her the chance to run away.

At the top of the stairs a voice. Then the door opened. I automatically touched the Glock in my overcoat pocket. And then one of those surprises that is so startling your first impression is that you're hallucinating.
This can't possibly be.
But it is.

He saw me now, too. But I already had the Glock pointed right at his chest. “Back inside.”

“What the fuck is the gun for?” He couldn't decide whether to be scared or angry. He was a bit of both.

“Back inside, you bastard. I'll be asking the questions. Not you.”

“What's wrong, Billy?” a female voice from inside said.

“Shit,” Billy said, “I can't believe this.”

I marched him back inside. I kept the gun in sight.

The makeup woman said, “Oh God. It's that guy from the other night.”

“My boss,” Billy said glumly, talking like a ten-year-old who's been caught stealing apples. “This is so totally fucked I can't believe it.”

“Turn on a light,” I said.

“God, please put that gun away. I had to live like this all my life with my father. He was always pulling guns on somebody.”

“Lights,” I repeated as I slammed the door shut behind me.

She clicked on a table lamp, bathing a sorry room of secondhand furniture in dusty gold. One of the end tables was missing a leg and supported by a stack of paperbacks. The couch was so swaybacked that a pair of throw pillows had been placed in the middle of it. Otherwise the sitter would sink out of sight forever. The wallpaper was stained grotesquely in the way of an X ray showing large patches of terminal cancer. Welcome home.

“Both of you on the couch.”

“Don't I get to talk?” Billy whined.

“No. Now both of you on that couch.”

“Or what? You'll kill us?” the Wells woman said. “I'm so damned sick of all you bullies.” But she went over and sat on her side of the couch as Billy sat on his. Nobody wanted to sit in the middle.

I took the overstuffed chair with the ripped arm. Stuffing the color of urine climbed out of the tear. I opened my coat, set the Glock on the good arm of the chair, and said, “You talk first, Billy. How do you know this woman and what're you doing here?”

“You're going to fire me for sure.”

Sometimes his naÃ¯vetÃ© gave me a migraine. He seemed to live in this dreamworld where no matter how badly you fucked up, people just slapped you on the back and said, “Just try and do better next time, Billy old salt, old pal, okay?”

“You're already fired.”

Even for somebody who was an old master at looking miserable, Billy gave me a peek at a terror I never want to experience for myself. His dreamworld had gone into nova at last.

“She's my friend.”

“I'm his lover. He's just afraid to say it. And he doesn't have to tell you anything.”

“The way you didn't have to tell us anything when you dropped that sedative into the senator's glass the other night?”

“Oh God. I should've known you'd accuse me of that. As soon as I heard it on the news, I said to Billy they'd try and put that on me.” The shy, quiet girl who'd applied Warren's makeup was now street voluble and street tough. “I didn't have a damned thing to do with it and neither did Billy. Or my father, for that matter. And I never stick up for my father. You can ask Billy if you don't believe me.”

“Who's this father you keep talking about?” I said.

“I guess I should tell you now, Dev. Her father is R. D. Greaves.”

“Oh, man, what the hell is going on here, Billy?”

“It's not as bad as it sounds, Dev. I promise.”

Beth Wells rubbed her fingers against her thumb. “Money. That's the only thing we were trying to get. I'm a beautician and I do makeup on the side. Billy helps me get hired for political things. He was just afraid of what you'd say if you knew who my father was, so we used a fake name and Billy pretended not to know me.”

“Good old Billy.”

“It's the truth, Dev. Neither of us had anything to do with putting anything in Nichols's glass. I swear.”

“It's the truth,” she said.

“You called Pauline Doyle at the auditorium and set it all up for Beth,” I said to Billy.

“I thought it was pretty harmless.”

“How long have you two been going out?” I said.

Their gazes met briefly. Billy said, “Since the last election. Her dad approached me back then. He wanted me to spy for him, spy on Warren, I mean. But I wouldn't do it. That's how I met Beth.”

What I was thinking about now was the videotape. If my contact
with the police had gotten the correct information, no videotape had been found among Greaves's belongings. Did these two know about the tape?

Beth brought me a glass half full of bourbon with ice cubes. I don't know what I expected, but the glass was clean and it came complete with a cocktail napkin. I'd marked her as being as uncivilized as her old man, but it wasn't a good fit. If her story was true, the worst thing she'd done was have Billy get her makeup jobs for politicians.

I could try to be coy or subtle, but I wasn't in the mood. “Your father contacted me about a videotape.”

“What videotape?” she said.

“Please. I've had enough of your bullshit. You
know
what videotape.”

Long, ragged sigh. “First you accuse me of putting whatever it was in Nichols's drink. And now you're accusing me of knowing something about a videotape.”

“R.D. never told us much, Dev. He really didn't. And I mean about anything. He didn't trust us, I guess.”

I didn't want to believe him. But I did.

Billy put a hand on her knee to comfort her.

She slid her hand over his. “He didn't trust anybody. He was even like that with my mom. After she died, I didn't want to live there without her. She was my best friend.” Bitterness came into her voice. “He was drunk at her funeral. Made an ass of himself.”

“But you kept up your relationship anyway?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, sounding both bitter and oddly wistful. “And you know what? If you asked me why, I couldn't tell you. I suppose because he was father and I was daughter and I just followed the script. I just played out the role. Thank God I met Billy.”

I was done here. Such a wonderful, sinister leadâand such a pitifully believable explanation.

“I'm going to make a pizza if you'd like to stay,” Beth said, and for
some reason in that moment I liked her very much. There was something of my daughter in her.

“Thanks, Beth. But I need to get back to the office.”

“Everything cool with us, Dev?” Billy said anxiously.

“Next time just tell me you want Beth to do the makeup, Billy. It'll be a whole lot simpler.”

Then I was gone.

CHAPTER 17

Gabe was alone in the headquarters office. I could smell the whiskey as soon as I walked in. Out front, the place was packed with well-wishers and volunteers ready for their nightly assignments. Gabe, in his graying ponytail and granny glasses, sat at his desk with his feet up reading
The
Rolling Stone Reader.
At least he wasn't doing any online gambling at the moment. The great Marxist who fell for the worst sucker game of all, gambling. Warren had had to loan him money several times. And as far as I knew, Gabe still owed him many thousands of dollars. He hated Warren for not taking more leftist stands. He hated him even more for having to beg him for money to replace what he'd lost online.

“I was just reading about the '68 Democratic Convention here in Chicago,” he said after I'd settled in. “You should've been there. The American gestapo's finest hour. Mayor Daley and his goons. Daley called one of the senators on the stage a fucking kike. You couldn't hear him, but you could see him say it. You could actually read his
lips. Then he called out his pigs and his police dogs and it was a mess. I got six stitches in my head.”

I'd noticed that left-wing people my father's age recalled even the worst moments of the sixties with a certain fondness. It had been, for many of them, as close to utopia as they would come here on Planet Earth. Yes, they'd been beaten, overdosed on drugs, suffered everything from scabies to incurable syphilis, broken bonds with families that had still not healed, and even been sentenced to prison. They'd had heroes as dubious as Timothy Leary, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, that only they could see the worth of. But even the worst of it all was cloaked in a nostalgia for that time when theyâor so they saw themselvesâbravely went up against the establishment that had contrived a war in Vietnam, persecuted blacks, let millions of their countrymen starve, and attempted to brainwash us with the Orwellian words of Nixon and Kissinger. For them these days, now approaching senior citizenship after all, there would never be a drug high, an orgasm, a guitar riff, or a speech as spiritually moving as the one they'd heard back in '66 or '68 or even '79. Those were the sacred days.

“Six stitches? Sounds like a lot of fun, Gabe.”

“That's the trouble with you kids today. You came out of your momma's crotch with only one thought in mind. You wanted to get rich. No ideals.”

“I think you're either overestimating your generation or underestimating mine.” I couldn't look at him without wondering if he was still gambling on the sly. Addicted gamblers are like that.

“I'm hoping you all change. Not you personally, Dev. I mean you're like me, an idealist. You know it'll never happen, but you keep on working at it anyway. The other people around usâpolitics is a gig for them. They think it's exciting.”

“It's probably more exciting than working for an ad agency or a brokerage house.”

“But that's all it isâexciting. And most of the time it isn't even
that. It's just slogging through to sell your candidate. Who'd sell out his country in a minute if he had to.”

“I'm glad I dropped by for your nightly inspiration.”

His laugh was bitter. “You know what I'm saying is true. Warren only takes the position he does because that's his niche in politics. Remember, he was on the other side all through college. Was even an activist for them. He changed when he couldn't get the nomination for a seat in the state legislature.”

Early in his career Warren had had to answer to that charge many times. There was no way short of a religious conversion that you could play the instant turnaround from one side to the other. And not look dishonest. But a scandal in the statehouse had squeaked him into office and he'd done so well in his first term in Springfield that even the press eventually began to see his conversion as real. Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus was frequently cited by way of explanation these days.

I wanted Gabe to shave the beard and cut the hair and quit wearing the crew necks and faded jeans. I wanted him to face the realities of the sixties and not live in the past. But mostly I wanted him to find peace for himself. There was such sadness in those faded blue eyes and in that cigarette-raspy voice these days. He was a wounded animal. For all his self-delusion, there was a saintliness about Gabe.

“I'm sorry, Gabe.”

He'd been staring off. Now his eyes fixed on me. “Sorry about what, Dev?”

“Oh, you know. I'm always sanctimonious about something. Now it's the sixties I'm sanctimonious about. Your generation did a lot of good and the country is better for it.”

He took his feet down from the desk, sat up straight. “Ah, who gives a shit anyway?” he said, reaching into his drawer for his pint. “You want a hit?”

“No thanks.”

“Mind if I have one?”

“Not at all.”

“You're a good man, Dev.”

“But sanctimonious.”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “But sanctimonious.”

I worked for about forty-five minutes, worked with enough intensity that I didn't quite realize that Gabe had slipped out and Teresa had slipped in, perching herself on the edge of Kate's desk.

When I paused to rub my eyes, she said, “In your own way, you're a good-looking man, Dev.”

“I guess that's a compliment.”

“It just means you're not conventionally handsome. You know, like my husband.” She sighed. “I'm feeling very sorry for him tonight.”

“Oh, right. That press association dinner.”

“They're really going to lay it on about the debate.”

Gabe came in just as she said that. “The cops doing anything about that by the way, Dev?”

“They claim to be.” I hadn't mentioned the obvious to any of the staffers, that it was one of them. And now that I'd met Beth and believed her story, that fact was irrefutable. I had no idea what the police theory was at this point and it really didn't matter.

“How about a hug, Gabe?” Teresa said.

He went over and took her in his arms, careful not to pull her off her perch. Teresa was a collector of lost animals and lost souls. She'd long ago taken pity on Gabe, even when some of the midlevel staffers quietly questioned his value to the campaign. One of them had even drawn a business card that read:

GABE COLBY
Resident Hippie

After Gabe sat down, Teresa said, “Did you tell Dev the news?”

“I was going to but he got busy.”

“Always the last to know.” But there was something about the tone in her voice, a kind of remorse, that I didn't like.

“I got a book contract to edit a textbook about campaign politics over the last fifty years,” Gabe said. “There's enough money for me to retire and do it full-time.”

“Hey, that's great.” But it wasn't great, because I didn't believe it. What the hell was going on here? I watched Teresa's face. She didn't seem happy.

“Who's the publisher, Gabe?”

“Oh, aâa new house. Small press. Rivington House is the name.”

I was no expert on publishing, but I wondered if a small press, a start-up yet, could afford to pay the kind of money that would let Gabe retire.

“Yeah, I'm really excited about it,” he said. “Something I've always wanted to do.”

“So this'll be after the election I take it?” I said.

“Sure, Dev. Hell, the press would have all kinds of questions if I quit now.”

Good old Gabe. Maybe he'd finally paid Warren off. Or maybe they were so sick of each other that Warren had agreed to forget the debt and just send him away.

Teresa went over to him and gave him another hug. “Warren and I are really going to miss you.” So she didn't know. One thing this staff did was keep things from her. As they many times, apparently, kept things from me. I'd only been half-joking about being the last to know.

“And I know Dev's going to miss you, too.”

“I sure am, Gabe. I'm glad you finally get to work on that book you've always talked about.”

“Think of all the people I can libel.” He laughed. “Especially the guy who wore a codpiece so he'd look bigger when he stood in front of female audiences.”

Teresa grinned. “God, is that true?”

“It sure is.”

“Who was it?”

“I don't know if I should tell you, Teresa. Might cut myself out of a book sale here. You have a credit card?”

She was delighted. “American Express Gold. Now tell me!”

“Okay.” He nodded at me. “You know who it was, Dev?”

“Uh-uh. I'm as curious as she is.”

“Downstate guy named Tim Aldrich. Real hot dog. I only worked for him because for some reason nobody could ever figure out he was against the war in Nam real early. Otherwise he was a reactionary bastard who thought half the population should be executed on general principle.”

“And he really wore a codpiece?” Teresa said.

“He really did. But then so does Dev.”

Teresa was in high spirits. “I doubt Dev needs one.”

I made sure to give her a kiss on the cheek before I left.

BOOK: Sleeping Dogs

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