Dead Man Read online

  “Want some of that?” she challenged. Before he could answer, she said, “Did it inna men’s room once, backed up against the urinals…” She giggled again. “Guy banged me so hard the urinal flushed when he came.”

  Dain was silent.

  “Don’ believe me?” she demanded truculently.

  She pulled up her negligee and straddled him, put her arms around his neck, started to French-kiss him as her naked crotch worked against him. Nothing happened to him. He wanted to get stiff. He wanted to feel something—excitement, lust, even anger. Nothing. Goddammit, wasn’t five years long enough to mourn? Marie was never coming back to him.

  Marie’s mouth was strained impossibly wide, her eyes were wild, her hair an underwater slow-motion swirl, the black hole between her breasts blossoming red

  Jeri suddenly stopped, drew back to look shyly into his eyes. “I’m going to be sick now,” she announced.

  Dain got her off him and into the bathroom in time, held her head while she threw up.” As he wiped her mouth with a wet washcloth, she passed out. In the bedroom he put her to bed, and after pulling up the sheet and a light blanket found himself kissing her on the forehead as if she were a little girl.

  Dain walked all the way back to his hotel, half-hoping some half-wit would try to mug him, but the Chicago streets on that night were safe as a cathedral. He was empty as a pocket with a hole in it, was nothing, had nothing, except a lust for revenge and a cat who wouldn’t purr.

  11

  “Great turnaround time,” said Dain to Jeri when he found her behind her desk at Maxton’s office at 8:30 the next morning. Her eyes were clear, her hair was brushed and shiny. She wore a wide-shouldered pinstripe suit and slacks, the suit jacket almost to her knees when she stood up. She looked terrific.

  “Good genes. Dain, listen, I… I think I remember—”

  “You passed out, I put you to bed. That’s all.”

  In his private office Maxton was grunting into the phone. Rain-washed Chicago sparkled outside the windows. He covered the receiver, said sarcastically, “How nice of you to drop in. It’s been over a week. My bitch wife is getting…” He uncovered the receiver, said, “Yeah, I’m listening,” and covered it again.

  “Who do you know drives a red Porsche?” asked Dain.

  “Nobody.”

  “Who did Zimmer know drives a red Porsche?”

  “I told you before—Zimmer was a fucking law clerk. We didn’t have any social life in common.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Dain.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” He said into the phone, “Then go into court and get a continuance, fuckhead.”

  “Platinum blonde,” said Dain. “Mid-twenties at a guess, too much makeup, cool face, maybe beautiful, maybe just this side of beautiful. She was waiting for him when they grabbed the bonds. She’s the one who planned the steal. Too bad you don’t know her, I could have cut across, saved some time.”

  Maxton barked into the phone, “Yeah, yeah, you stupid fuck, I’m listening,” then said to Dain, “A fucking broad? No way. Zimmer planned it.”

  Dain shrugged and was on his feet, his usual leather-covered book in hand. He looked down at Maxton, said, “Why does every male in Chicago think he’s got to be Mike Ditka?”

  In the outer office, Jeri Pearson, who had been listening on the intercom, bounded to her feet and kissed him on the mouth.

  “Nobody’s ever told him off before! They’re all too scared of him.” She stepped back, suddenly shy. “Listen, I remember you holding my head when I was sick last night and—”

  “It never happened,” said Dain.

  Jeri said, “The dancers were from the Cherry Bomb.”

  The Cherry Bomb was in Rush Street’s strip-club district, two blocks west of and parallel to Michigan Avenue. A huge barn that stank of stale beer and stale sweat and cheap perfume and disinfectant and testosterone. There was dim lighting for the tables, indirect lighting for the bar, spot lighting for the stage with revolving red, yellow, blue and green gels for the three women in G-strings and pasties who writhed, danced, and gyrated to canned music.

  At the empty end of the bar furthest from the action, Dain waited with a $50 bill, folded lengthwise, nipped between his extended fingers. It quickly brought the bartender to him.

  Over the music, Dain yelled, “Dancer. Real pretty. Great breasts. Black hair to her butt.”

  The bartender eyed the fifty and made a fly-away gesture.

  Mercifully, the music ended, the women left to scattered applause and rebel yells. A manic aging emcee bounded onto the stage. He rolled eyes like stones and flicked his tongue after the departing strippers in their G-strings and pasties.

  “Put a dollar bill on their heads,” he yelled into his cordless mike, “and you got all you can eat for under a buck!”

  “Any friends?” asked Dain.

  Another trio of strippers was taking the place of the first. The bartender jerked his head toward a long lithe black woman. “The tall one. Cindy.”

  Dain dropped his fifty on the bar, crossed to the stage as the emcee’s overamped voice yelled, “Anyway, welcome to the Cherry Bum—I mean Bomb, the only place in town where the girls wear underpants to keep their ankles warm!”

  The music suddenly blared, the black woman started to dry-fuck one of the fire poles set up onstage.

  Dain yelled over the music, “Cindy!“

  She turned her head and he held up two fanned $100 bills, then stuffed them down the back of her G-string.

  Dain was leaning against the brick wall of the alley when Cindy emerged from the stage door at 4:07 in the morning. She wore running shoes and tight jeans and a long-sleeve red T-shirt with DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM stretched across her breasts.

  She stopped dead at the sight of him, sighed, and nodded as if winning a bet with herself.

  “Don’t ever anything come free in this world of ours,” she said. “Now, mister, I know you laid a double-century on me, and I know you spect something for it, but—”

  “Just a walk and a talk,” he said. “I don’t want to know where you live, I don’t want a free sample.”

  She looked deep into his eyes for a moment, asked, “You weird?” then answered herself before he could, “Wouldn’t tell me if you was, would you, Mr. Sad Man?”

  They started walking together; she was tall enough so they made a striking couple. In the street at this hour there was only silence, contrasting with the tumult of the Cherry Bomb. Their meandering unsynched footsteps were the only thing breaking the immediate silence around them, though the slow breathing of the city formed a background curtain of sound.

  Cindy gave a deep laugh. “You don’t want nothing, Mr. Sad Man, you must be that Good Samaritan the preacher talk about on Sunday, layin’ a pair of C-notes on me like that.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want anything,” said Dain.

  “Oh yeah, right, right. Walkin’ an’ talkin’. Y’want me t’talk dirty? ‘Bout what I’d like you to do to me, or what I’d like to do to you? Or maybe cry a little an’ tell you all about what a nice girl like me be doin’ in a place like—”

  “I want to talk about you and your friend with the long black hair entertaining at Teddy Maxton’s Christmas party.”

  Cindy dumbed down her face and put a whine in her voice.

  “Was just a gig, man. Dude paid us a century each to do the same show we do at the club—”

  “The long-haired one who took off with Jimmy Zimmer.”

  “Look, man, I don’t know nothing about it. Even if I did know something about it I wouldn’t know nothing about it.”

  Dain said, conversationally, “If they catch them, Cindy, they’ll snuff her. Right along with him.”

  “Snuff?” she cried in alarm, her black eyes shocked in her strong-boned brown face. “What you talk snuff? Vangie—”

  “If I get to them first, I can give her a break.”

  She grabbed Dain’s arms and started trying to sha
ke him. It was like trying to shake an oak tree.

  “What you talkin’ ‘bout? Who you talkin’ about?”

  “Maxton. His friends.”

  She let go of his arms. A slow shudder went through her. She stared at the sidewalk. Dain gently took her arm and urged her along. The streetlights were on automatic, blinking yellow caution in four directions at each intersection. Somewhere far to the south a siren rose and fell, rose and fell.

  “Straight she went off with Jimmy Zimmer? Mr. Creepo?”

  “Straight. And they took—”

  “I don’t wanna hear it.” She hugged herself as they walked, as if suddenly cold. “I don’t wanna be havin’ this conversation.”

  They crossed on a crosswalk; there was no traffic.

  “Vangie who? From where?”

  She didn’t say anything for a quarter of a block, finally said in a rush, “Vangie Broussard. From I-don’t-know-where. Never talked about ‘did’—only about ‘gonna.’” She gave her sudden deep laugh again, her fears for a moment forgotten. “That girl had the biggest collection of gonnas I ever heard.”

  “Gonna what?”

  “Gonna make a big score. Gonna get took care of right by Maxton. But that Christmas party…”

  She fell silent. Dain prompted, “What happened?”

  “Maxton wanted her to take some important client into the private office during the party and fuck his brains out.” She looked over at him, burst out, “She was in love with the dude, man, he say he love her, an’ he ask her to do that! Was a couple weeks after that she started hittin’ on Jimmy Zimmer—he already had his tongue hangin’ out down to his shoetops…”

  They walked. Dain said, “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “We roomed together, but she was a loner, didn’t do a whole lot with the other kids. I came home one afternoon, must be like two weeks ago now, she was gone. The place spotless, a month’s rent for her and me on my pillow, but not even a note…” She looked over at him, said suddenly, “We partied a couple times with Zimmer and his buddy, I never saw nuthin’ in either one of “em, but Vangie asked me.”

  “Tell me about the buddy.”

  “Bobby Farnsworth of Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth. Mr. Cube.” Her sudden urchin grin shaved ten years off her age. “Boooo-o-o-ring. I’m not really into IRAs and all that jazz, but like to him, The Wall Street Journal is Rolling Stone.”

  “Stocks and bonds?”

  “Chicago Board of Trade all the way, baby.” She stopped in front of a run-down brick apartment building. “You walked me home after all. It’s six floors straight up unless they fixed the elevator, but if you want a cup of coffee and ain’t afraid of heights—”

  “You don’t want to know me, Cindy,” said Dain. “I’m bad news. Even my cat won’t purr.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and leaned forward and up to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Sad Man,” she said.

  12

  Before starting through the newspaper, Dain called Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth. The receptionist sounded bored enough to be doing her nails behind the switchboard. He told her, “I’d like to make an appointment with Mr. Farnsworth to discuss setting up a rather substantial investment account.”

  “Mr. Farnsworth Senior or Junior?”

  “Junior.”

  “Mr. Farnsworth Junior is in our San Francisco office for three months’ training. If anyone else—”

  “No. But his San Francisco home phone number might help.”

  He wrote it down, hung up. San Francisco. Could Zimmer and the woman, Broussard, also be in San Francisco? No. They would be hiding in Broussard’s life, not Zimmer’s. But a good coincidence for Dain just the same. When the time came, Farnsworth would be Zimmer’s best bet for moving the bonds.

  But first, Broussard. Cracking the Chicago police computer with his laptop would take longer than direct action, so he quickly scanned the morning newspaper, finally stopping at an item on the local news page.

  COP IN COMA AFTER BRUTAL BEATING

  When he got off-shift this morning at 4:00 a.m., plainclothes detective Seth “Andy” Anderson of Central Station made the mistake of stopping off at a coffee…

  Dain’s ballpoint pen underlined Seth “Andy” Anderson and Central Station, then hand-scrawled a letter on a sheet of hotel stationery cut in half so it was memo size. Dain used the half without the letterhead, dating it five days earlier.

  Andy:

  I don’t want to go through channels on this one, since it’s about Vangie Broussard, that black-haired “exotic dancer” I been humping since she left Chicago. I think she was involved in a 187PC out here a couple nights ago, and if she was, I wanta bust it myself. I’ll be in Chi on the 14th, can you pull her package to give me a look when 1 get there? Thanks, pal.

  He scrawled Solly below the note as a signature, then added a handwritten postscript:

  P.S. I need a sweetener in the Department since you-know-what.

  Dain addressed an envelope to Andy Anderson at Central Police Station, Chicago, then paused to run a mental check. It was okay. Randy Solomon wasn’t due back from vacation for two more days, so he put Solomon’s SFPD return address in the upper left corner, stamped it, set the date on a self-inking rubber stamp for five days previously, and canceled the stamp.

  Finally, he put in the letter, sealed it, opened it again raggedly with his finger under the flap. He stuck the letter and an SFPD lieutenant’s shield in a leather carrying case into the side pocket of the cheap, rather shabby suitcoat he had bought at the Salvation Army, and left the hotel.

  Chicago’s Central Police Station was old, ill-kept, angry-looking, as if it never got enough sleep and took a lot of Turns. At a booking desk from the days when Al Capone ran the city, Dain flashed his SFPD shield. In his off-the-rack suit and unshined shoes, an old-fashioned fedora mashed down on his head and an unlit cigar screwed into one corner of his mouth, he looked like fifteen years on the force.

  “Yeah, welcome to Chicago,” said the booking sergeant. “How are things out there in fruit and nut land?”

  “That’s L.A. We’re the cool gray city by the bay.”

  “Yeah, Herb Caen. What can we do for you, Lieutenant?”

  “Anybody awake in Vice at this hour?”

  “Prob’ly ain’t gone home yet.” The sergeant grinned and handed him a visitor’s badge that he clipped to the breast pocket of his suitcoat. “Elevator to the third floor, turn left.”

  Dain thanked him and rode the elevator up, not to Vice, but to the Detective Squadroom. Various plainclothesmen were at the battered desks, typing reports, interviewing complainants, witnesses, suspects. Off in a corner a black youth with dreadlocks was being fingerprinted by a Hispanic woman in a crisp blue uniform. Smoke blued the room. Dain’s eyes found an empty desk with a DET. ANDERSON name block on it.

  Going down the room drew Dain no more than a casual brush of eyes from the busy cops. He hooked a hip over the corner of the desk, in the same movement slipped his letter, envelope clipped to the back, underneath the top folder in Anderson’s In box. He then leaned toward the man typing at the next desk. His nameplate read DET. KALER.

  “Hey, pal.”

  The cop kept on typing. Unlike the stereotype, he was good at it. Dain leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder. Kaler swung toward him, angry, pale eyes flashing.

  “Andy, he’s out for coffee ‘r somethin’?”

  Kaler began, “Listen, asshole, when—” then his cop eyes took in the policeman ID included on Dain’s visitor’s badge. He shrugged in wry apology, swiveled to face Dain. “Tough morning. You know Andy?”

  “Y’know.” Dain shrugged in turn. “I wrote I’d be in town, he was supposed to be pullin’ a file for me to look at.”

  Kaler leaned back and locked his hands behind his head in a lazy manner. “Well, I got some good news and some bad news. Andy’s in the hospital. Seems he stuck that hard fucking Swede head
of his into something wasn’t any of his business, and somebody tried to knock it off.”

  “What’s the bad news?” asked Dain, deadpan.

  Kaler gave a short hard bark of laughter.

  “Yeah, you know our Andy, all right. Bad news is he’ll live.” He came forward in his chair, the unoiled swivel creaking when he did. “I can snoop Andy’s desk for your note, and—”

  Dain said very quickly, “No need to do that…” Then he seemed to catch himself. He seemed to make himself relax visibly. He shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

  Kaler checked the In box, found the note, read it standing over Dain. “I like it,” he said finally, “especially all that you-know-what stuff. Tell me about that, and maybe I can…”

  His voice trailed off. There was a $50 bill on the corner of the desk that had not been there before. He turned away, the trailing fingers of one hand sliding over the bill, palming it.

  “I think I can find that file for you, Lieutenant Solomon.”

  Kaler returned with the BROUSSARD, EVANGELINE file: every stripper passed through police hands a time or two. On top were the Broussard mug shots, front and side, her fingerprint cards, a thin sheaf of report forms. They leafed through it together. When Dain carelessly flipped the file closed, his fingernail flicked off the paper clip holding her mug shots in place.

  “Shit, nothing here. Couple soliciting busts…”

  “Yeah,” said Kaler, “couple indecent exposures when we hit a joint where she was dancing, couple of priors for the same thing down in New Orleans…” He gave a hearty laugh. “This chick has a hard time keeping her clothes on, don’t she?”

  “You’ve no idea,” said Dain. He sighed. “Hell, it was worth a shot.” He stood up. When he did, his hand hit the file and knocked it off the edge of the desk. “Shit.”

  Bending to retrieve it, he grunted slightly as if with effort. With his left hand he palmed the mug shots that had slid from the folder, stuck out his right to Kaler. They shook.