Authors: Max Allan Collins
“Oh, sure.”
“Now listen, you go down there, try to see Harry downtown, you’re gonna have to break some people in half. Maybe you get busted in half yourself, and that kid, and that money, ain’t never gonna be found. You be better off trust me in this.”
“Come on.”
“Tillie!” Phyllis yelled.
“Hey, I’m not stupid, man. I know how close those Chicago dudes are, I can feel ’em on my neck, breathing hot and hard, man. Shit. Remember, I used to work with those boys in the windy town, and I know how tough some of them mothers are. This town is nothin’. We’re a suburb of Chicago that got outa hand and that’s all. Those guys, they think it’s 1927 or something.”
“Tillie!” the girl called again. “Guy says it’s urgent!”
Nolan followed him into the bedroom. Tillis took the phone and said, “Yeah? . . . What? . . . What? . . . Jesus fuck . . . How long ago? . . . Where do we go from here, man? . . . No, I’ll come to you . . . Downtown I guess, be cops at the house . . . Yeah.” Tillis hung the phone up, said, “Somebody shot Harry.”
Nolan sat on the bed. “Say again.”
“Somebody killed him. He was coming out of his house. He was in his goddamn pajamas, gettin’ the paper off the porch. Some guy came by, in a car it must’ve been, and shot him. You know what with?”
“No.”
“A grease gun, they think. A fuckin’ grease gun. I don’t believe it.”
“Harry lives in a kind of nice neighborhood, doesn’t he? Didn’t that cause a scene? Didn’t everybody see the guy that did it, his car at least?”
“That fuckin’ grease gun must’ve been silenced. He laid there ten minutes before his wife found him. Can you put a silencer on a fuckin’ grease gun, a submachine gun like that?”
“Sure could. It wouldn’t make any more noise than somebody shuffling cards.”
“Who? The Family? They do it, Nolan? You been shittin’ me all along? Settin’ me up?”
“No. But it
could
be the Family. It could be that bastard Felix using me. Or it could be Charlie, killing everybody who helped him, anybody who could lead somebody to him.”
“Jesus. I got to get downtown. Jesus.”
“Is there anybody else who could tell you something?”
“Huh?”
“About Charlie. Anybody else in Harry’s regime here you can pump? Who’s second in command? Vito?”
Tillis nodded.
“Isn’t Vito Harry’s cousin, makes him some kind of half-ass relative of Charlie’s, then, too, right?”
“Yeah. Well. Nolan, Jesus. Okay, I guess my head’s straight. Yeah. You want, you can stay here, I’ll call the information to you if I can get it. If I can’t get nothin’, I’ll call you and you can try some of the other people on that list. But I suggest you move on to the Chicago names, man, because this town’s gonna be a fuckin’ funny farm for a while.”
“If I stay here, and wait for you to call, am I an asshole?”
“I’m not going to screw you, Nolan. I helped you before.”
“Yeah. I’ll show you the scars.”
Tillis mustered a weary grin. “Well, you want to watch me get dressed?”
“I don’t want to, but I’m going to.”
Before he left, dressed in his brown suit and black shoulder holster, the Luger in it unloaded at present, Tillis kissed Phyllis good-bye and said, “Later,” to Nolan, adding, “Take care of this girl while I’m gone, Nolan, I like her,” and Nolan knew what he meant, felt better about trusting Tillis.
Nolan and Phyllis retired to the living room. Nolan took Tillis’s place on the couch and Phyllis took the easy chair across. She stared sullenly at him, unaware that her spread legs were giving Nolan a view worthy of
Hustler
magazine.
“What do you do?” Nolan said.
“What Tillis tells me to,” she said, still sullen.
“For a living, I mean.”
“I’m a grad student.”
“You go to college, you mean? What do you study?”
“I’m in the Afro-American Studies program.”
Nolan looked at her thighs and got ready to ask her what the hell she meant, but the scream broke in.
He jumped up, and so did the girl.
The noise, the scream had come from outside. He pressed up against the clear glass and looked down and saw Tillis sprawled across the tan Ford, his unloaded Luger in his hand, a ribbon of blood across his chest. Even from the second floor, Nolan could see the wide white rolled-back eyes, the bulging tongue.
Didn’t take a college education to tell Tillis was dead.
The modern buildings of Northern Illinois University rose to the left like the set of a science fiction film with a big budget. The rich Illinois farmland dissolved into a blur of plastic college-town shopping center, apartment building and franchise restaurant living; the highway became a shaded street along which kids of both sexes wearing tee-shirts and cut-off jeans walked and pedaled bikes. Then, after blocks of pizza places and boutiques and McDonald’s hamburgers and dormitories, a wide, off-center intersection appeared from nowhere, as if to separate one half of Dekalb from the other. That seemed only right, as this other part of town was so different it was like passing through to another dimension; the business district beyond the intersection had no doubt been much the same for many years, the narrow main street lined with one- and two-story buildings, drug stores, dress shops, five and dime, hardware stores and only rare indications (“Adult Books in Rear” and “Water Bed Sale”) that this was a college town and not just a congregating point for area farmers and sedately middle class townspeople. Dekalb was a schizophrenic town. Even Nolan noticed it.
“Hey, look at the jugs on that one,” Angello said, pointing to a tall blonde girl with a short haircut, cut-off jeans and green tee-shirt. “Bouncy bouncy.”
“Just drive,” Nolan said.
“Sour ass,” Angello said.
Nolan still wasn’t happy about being with Angello, though he supposed he should’ve been grateful to his chubby-faced companion. It was just an hour and half ago that Nolan had been looking out the window and watching
the crowd form, a crowd of briefcase-carrying men ready to leave for work and curlered women in housewifely robes and gleeful little kids in bright summer shirts, all looking on in fascinated horror at the big black dead man sprawled across the tan Ford. Nolan’s tan Ford, and at that moment of no damn use at all, as far as transportation went. Nolan hadn’t bothered trying to calm the hysterical Phyllis Watson, who had started to scream, pummeling him with hard little fists. Instead, he had knocked her cold with a solid right cross, sincerely hoping he hadn’t broken the girl’s jaw, and went down the stairs and out of the house, cutting through the backyards of houses behind, moving away from the scene of Tillis’s death as quickly as possible. He’d gone to a filling station, called the number Angello had left, and after fifteen minutes and two cups of coffee in the station’s adjacent cafe, Nolan had gladly hopped in a car beside Angello and got the hell out of Milwaukee. Somebody would have to go back for the tan Ford, which belonged to the Tropical Motel and could conceivably cause some problems, but that was one of those details that would have to be ironed out later. Some asshole like Felix could sweat over that.
And so now Nolan was with Angello in a black Chevy (naturally) in Dekalb, Illinois. Nolan wasn’t happy about being in Dekalb, for several reasons. For one thing, Dekalb was only fifteen miles from the Tropical, his starting point on this largely fruitless trip, which already had lasted some nine or ten hours. Being so close to home served to remind him of how far he hadn’t gotten; he sensed he was going around in a big circle that included all of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He felt like a traveling salesman with nothing to sell.
Another reason for his discontent was that he was in Dekalb to do something he would rather not do. Something he had told Tillis he wouldn’t do.
He was going to bother Charlie’s daughter.
And he was, in fact, probably going to kidnap her.
Angello said, “What should I do, stop at a filling station and ask, or what?” They jostled across the railroad tracks
that slanted across Dekalb’s main street, announcing the decline of the business district.
“No,” Nolan said, “we’re already on the right street. She must live over one of these stores downtown here.” He checked the street number on the list of names, checked it against the numbers they were passing. “Yeah, just another couple blocks. Keep it slow.”
Back on the Interstate they had stopped long enough to call Felix. Nolan had questioned the lawyer, hard, about the violent doings in Milwaukee, and Felix had said, “Do you really think we would do
that
to people who could lead us to the man we
really
want?” The man they really wanted being Charlie, of course. Felix was careful about what words he used on the phone.
“I don’t know,” Nolan had answered. “I been dealing with crazy people so much I’m feeling that way myself.”
“Nolan, be reasonable. We’re fighting the same battle, for Christ’s sake.”
“But who is on what side, is what I want to know.”
“Let me send some people to help you out. This is getting big.”
“I already got your Angello along, and that’s one man too many. Oh, and you can call your man Greer and take him off those people in Iowa City. Not much chance of anybody warning Harry about anything anymore.”
“If you’re through making your ridiculous accusations, Nolan, I have something to tell you. Something important. We have a lead on Charlie.”
That had pleased Nolan, but still he said, “I thought this was my show.”
“I told you, it’s bigger than that now. We won’t get in your way, but we have interests in this affair far wider than your own, and resources at our disposal that a single man—even a most competent one, like yourself—could not hope to match.”
“So what have you got?”
“We’ve located a pilot who’d been chartered by Harry.
He was to fly up to a private air field in the Lake Geneva area and take a passenger to Mexico.”
Felix paused, for applause Nolan guessed.
When he didn’t get any, Felix continued. “The guy, the pilot, has done some work for us before . . . has picked up merchandise of ours in Mexico, occasionally, if you get my meaning.”
“Go on.”
“Harry’s death was reported on the radio and television about half an hour ago, and this pilot heard it and immediately called Vito up and asked him if this chartered plane thing was still on. Vito knew nothing about it, but thought it smelled funny and called Chicago to see what we made of it.”
“What you made of it was the plane was for Charlie.”
“Naturally. I told Vito to tell the pilot to go ahead and be where he was supposed to be at the proper time. We’ll have our men waiting there, at the private field.”
“If the field’s near Lake Geneva, odds are Charlie’s holed up someplace close by.”
“I would think so. Seems to me he used to have a lodge or summer home of some kind in that neck of the woods. We’re running a check on it now, trying to see exactly where it was.”
“What time was that meeting at the airfield supposed to be?”
“It was set for last night but the ‘passenger’ ran into some difficulty and they’d rescheduled the next possible time. Which was one o’clock today.”
“Tonight, you mean?”
“This afternoon, I mean.”
“Jesus. Not much time. Where is this air field, anyway?”
Felix gave Nolan directions; they were complicated and Nolan had to write them down. He knew the Lake Geneva area fairly well, but there were a hell of a lot of country roads around there to confuse things.
“You don’t really think Charlie will go ahead with the flight, do you, Felix? He’s pretty likely to’ve heard the news
about Harry and Tillis by now and figure something’s up.”
“Nolan, it’s pretty likely, too, that Charlie was responsible for what happened to Harry and Tillis. Tidying up after himself. He’s certainly ruthless enough to handle things that way. If our people aren’t responsible for what happened in Milwaukee . . . and Nolan, I assure you we aren’t . . . then who else could it be but Charlie?”
That was a good question, and it was still on Nolan’s mind even as Angello wheeled the black Chevy down a side street and slid into a diagonal parking stall next to the cycle shop over which Charlie’s daughter lived.
“Don’t tell me,” Angello grunted. “You want me to keep my ass in the car, right?”
Nolan nodded. “And if somebody comes at you with a silenced grease gun, try to get out of the way.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“But if you can’t, fall on the horn and warn me before you breathe your last, okay, Angello?”
“Nolan, what the fuck makes you such a nice guy?”
“The company I keep.”
To the left of the row of motorcycles and the window full of Yamaha signs was a doorless doorway, beyond that a stairway. At the bottom of the stairs were two mailboxes: apartment one had somebody called Barry West in it; apartment two had Joyce Walters. Walters wasn’t Charlie’s name, and Joyce wasn’t married, but she was Charlie’s kid just the same.
Nolan didn’t like this. It gave him a bad taste in his mouth. Charlie was a crazy man, and that made anyone who chose to play by Charlie’s rules a crazy man, as well.
But shit. What else was there to do? Where else could he turn? Milwaukee was out; it was a madhouse at the moment, and the two men he needed to talk to were both dead. Chicago? Might be a few people there worth seeing, but he doubted it, doubted he’d find out anything he hadn’t found out already, from Joey Metrano. No, it was obvious Charlie had done his most recent arranging through Harry, in
Milwaukee, so Chicago was no good, and besides, Felix would have Family men poking around the city, and as for that meeting at the air field, that was the same damn thing: Family people would be in control there, too. And Charlie wasn’t likely to show anyway; he’d much more likely be holed up, trying to regroup, trying to find some new way to get out of the country, now that the plane was out. Unless Felix was right and Charlie
was
going around shooting those who’d helped him. But Nolan simply couldn’t believe that, even though there was a cockeyed Charlie-like logic to it.
There was only one name on that list worth talking to. Only one person he could try.