Final Stroke (40 page)

As Steve wheeled up the sidewalk toward the apartment build
ing entrance, he tried to concentrate on the job at hand. Memories of Marjorie in rehab would do him no good now. Right now he had to concentrate on finding Jan.

At the entrance door he used the key to the outside lock and made his way through the entryway toward the door to his and Jan’s first floor apartment. He had a vague feeling of having been here before. But then he again reminded himself that their apartment had been upstairs and Jan had moved down to an identical apartment on the ground floor, the apartment to which he now had a key. He stared at the number on the door. Twelve. One less than thirteen. That’s how he had tucked it into his botched up memory. How lucky.

He unlocked the apartment and bumped his wheelchair over the threshold. Even though he knew the visit with Jan after his stroke had been upstairs, this apartment did seem familiar. It looked, felt, even smelled like home. But to make it a home he would need to have Jan here.

Thinking of Jan. Trying to see her here. He closed his eyes, but insane thoughts came into his head. Dwayne Matusak waiting here for him, hiding behind a door, or in a closet. Like at home once. Yes, Dwayne Matusak had chased him right into the house one time and …

He could not remember what happened after that. All he remem
bered at the moment was Joe Friday on the old black and white televi
sion. Joe Friday. Dragnet. Like the hairnet Marjorie spoke of. Yes, a net to catch important things and let other things go. Let go of these memories of elephants and donkeys and Presidential suites and the fact Marjorie became upset about strange things like her husband bad-mouthing Jimmy Carter. What he needed to do now was capture important memories and let everything else go on through so as not to muddle up what he needed to think about and organize in order to make something happen!

He was home, and the reason was to do what he could to find Jan. He put the keys to the apartment in his pocket. He needed another key, the key that was in the band-aide box.

After wheeling into the bathroom and reaching up to the medi
cine cabinet, he found the key where Jan said it would be. And now, holding the key in his hand as he rolled slowly to the spare bedroom where the cabinet would be, he thought of Marjorie’s keys and won
dered if Jan had found a key, and if she had, what had been behind the door unlocked by the key.

Going past his and Jan’s bedroom and seeing the bed made him want to weep again, but he rushed past it to the other room to open the cabinet.

The cabinet was not locked. He tried to recall if this was ever the case when he was still at home but could not. No, it had to be locked. Jan had stressed its always being locked when she told him about the key being hidden in the same place he always hid it. He studied the cabinet door and, after a few seconds, found what he was looking for.

There was an indentation about a half-inch wide on the corner of the wood near the latch. He could feel it more than see it as he ran his finger along the edge of the door. A careful, professional job had been
done. And he was certain that if it were possible to slam the door to lock it, whoever had broken into the cabinet would have locked it. But to lock this door would have meant making another, perhaps deeper, indentation in the edge of the door. Someone other than Jan had re cently been inside the apartment. He was sure of it.

Inside the cabinet, the shoulder holster hung from a hanger, empty, but the forty-five was on the side shelf with the police scanner. Just the way he always left it. Someone had broken into the cabinet but had left the forty-five and the ammunition.

He took the pistol, several boxes of cartridges and the extra mag
azine, the scanner, and a flashlight. The only other things in the cabinet were several beat-up sport coats and a couple of suits, and he wouldn’t need those.

In the living room he looked for other signs of a breakin but could find none. There were no locking drawers on the desk, and everything looked neat and tidy. If Jan were here, she might know if anything was missing or out of place, but Jan was not here.

Before doing what he had come to do, he locked the main lock and the chain lock on the door. Then he rolled back to the desk. He moved the desk chair aside and pulled his wheelchair up to the desk, got out a note pad and pencils, placed the scanner, pistol, ammunition, and flashlight on the desk, and picked up the phone. He called the voice mail number, put in the code and waited. “One message,” said the voice mail lady. And as he played the message from Tamara back, Steve Babe, the detective, began writing it down.

There were three Tyrone Washingtons in Chicago with vehicles registered. A Buick was registered to one of the Tyrone Washingtons, a DeVille to another, a Ford pickup and a Honda to the third. Phil Hogan had a three-year-old Chevy, but he also had a one-year-old Mercedes registered to his name, making Steve wonder if anyone on
the force knew about the Mercedes or if Phil used it only for out-of town trips. Dean “Dino” Justice owned a Lexus. Antonio Gianetti Junior, deceased, owned a Toyota Prius, a Chevy Tahoe, and an old Packard, not really as heavily invested in vehicles as Steve would have thought. But the mother load was Maximo “Max” Lamberti. Not only had Tamara come through with the vehicles owned personally by Max, but she had done her homework and found a fleet of vehicles registered to Lamberti Produce.

A Land Cruiser and a Fleetwood were registered to Max himself. The produce company owned a Ferrari, two Harley Davidson mo
torcycles, a Lincoln stretch limo, three Ford Crown Vics, two Ford vans, and a large Ford panel truck. The two vans and the larger truck might be used to haul produce, but he wasn’t so sure about the rest of the vehicles. The three Crown Vics were the most telling, all two years old and registered at the same time. To Steve this seemed like the fleet for “the boys” who were so attentive to Max’s needs and safety at Marjorie’s funeral.

Tamara spoke quite rapidly on the recording, saying she wasn’t sure how long of a message the voice mail recorder would take. Steve played it back six times in order to get all the makes, years, models, license numbers, names, and addresses written down.

No time to lose. He loaded Attila and the extra magazine and put both in the deep left pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. The notepad with the registration information he put in the pocket of his jeans. Then he rolled his wheelchair into the kitchen, got a paper sack out of a lower drawer, and put the scanner, cartridges, and flashlight into it.

After he rolled back into the center of the kitchen he sat there for a while. Then, suddenly, something edged its way in from the past. He stared at the kitchen sink, trying to figure out what it was. The saying “Everything but the kitchen sink” went through his mind for a while
until he recalled what bothered him.

When he’d been trying to tell Jan about the glass he had taken from the janitors’ closet on the first floor, Jan had said something about the kitchen sink at home. He closed his eyes and imagined Jan with him in his room at Hell in the Woods. She sat close to him. She was warm and fragrant.

“Oh,” she’d said. “You mean the way we always keep a glass on the kitchen sink at home?”

After he opened his eyes and saw there was no glass at the back of the sink where it should have been, he began searching through cup
boards. The lower cupboards were easy, but to get to the upper cup
boards he had to grasp the edge of the counter to lift himself up from his chair and brace himself against the counter while opening each door.

There were no glasses in the cupboards. Not one. And imme
diately next to the coffee cups in the cupboard to the left of the sink, there was an obvious empty space that took up an entire half shelf. And empty space where drinking glasses would be stored.

With Attila and the extra magazine in his sweatshirt pockets, and with the sack containing extra cartridges, scanner, and flashlight on his lap, he wheeled out of the apartment, and out of the building. Finally, back in the Lincoln, he turned on the scanner and adjusted the squelch control. He was not surprised at remembering how to do this. That was the way it was with his stroke. Physical things like eat
ing and dressing and even driving and adjusting his scanner seemed automatic. Right, automatic like it would be if he had to shoot his semi-automatic.

He started the Lincoln, then sat there for some time, waiting for the seatbelt warning to stop, not quite sure where he should go next. He felt suddenly helpless and vulnerable like he was horizontal on a hospital bed with tubes running into him and not knowing why.

The terrifying feeling came over him that there was someone in the back seat. Someone from the past. A man. He thought again of who this man from the past could be. His father? Joe Friday? Jimmy Carter? Sandor Lakatos? Or perhaps the man was from the future. The man there to warn him about something.

But when he turned to look, the back seat was empty.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

SIX

What to do when your hands are behind your back and
you can’t move. Where before the beast had called her
sweetie
as his stubble rasped her cheek, now he called her
gook bitch
as he pushed the wire brush of his face down across her neck and onto her breasts. He had grasped the seat back on either side of her and pulled himself onto her. Despite the absence of legs he was heavy, causing her feet to splay out on the floor of the van. When she tried to turn sideways to tip him off balance so he might roll off her, he growled at her. His lower torso was hard in two places, apparently what remained of leg bones. Or perhaps the protrusions were his lower hip sockets. If he had a penis, she was not aware of it.

Because of the tape on her mouth she was unable to scream when he slid his knobbed torso down the length of her legs and put his face at the coffee-soaked waistband of her slacks, pulling at her waistband with his teeth. Though she tried to remain in control, she choked sa liva up her nose when he did this, not because of where his face was, but because of his weight on her left leg. The leg had gotten wedged
beneath part of the wheelchair lift and she felt the sharp stab of pain and heard the sound that traveled through her body, making her cer tain he had broken her ankle. When he bounced on her outstretched legs, apparently having some kind of unfulfilled orgasm that made him angrier and angrier, the pain shot through her left ankle again and again.

She tried to think of Steve while the beast was at her. But when her ankle broke, survival instincts took over and she was able to think only of her efforts to push the beast away. When the pain in her ankle became so severe she thought she would pass out, the beast must have sensed it, because he shifted his torso to the side, and finally she no longer bore his full weight. After this he turned her toward him and began cooing, his foul breath spreading over her skin, which crawled with the coolness of his saliva.

Now, all that was left was to try to think of Steve.

Steve! What about our life together! Answer me! What about us? Don’t you remember? We had a good life, something to be thankful for when we’re old and lying on our deathbeds. But not now, not here, not like this!

When he finished with her, the beast dropped down off the seat and pulled himself along the floor, across the wheelchair lift and back into the driver’s seat. Against the dull glow of the night sky through the windshield, she saw him pull his wheelchair back within reach be
tween the seats where it had been.

The front door opened and Dino returned, making his way back to sit beside her. Although she could not see his face, she recognized the outline of Dino’s head and assumed he would now expect her to talk. Surely he would rip the tape from her mouth and expect her to talk. But instead, the van started up and someone else was talking. It was an authoritative male voice, and for an instant she glanced toward
the front of the van expecting to see her rescuer. But all she saw in the front of the van from the direction the voice had come were the red and green lights of the police scanner. And now the authoritative male voice was replaced by a female voice, then another male, then voice after voice as if in litany as the scanner scanned.

They were moving again, the van backing up, branches scraping its sides before they sped forward. As the van bounced on the rough road, Dino leaned toward her and pulled her blouse and raincoat closed, buttoning one button on the raincoat. She tried to cry out that her ankle was broken, but the tape would not allow it.

After several minutes, she could see they were heading into the city. The expressway was familiar. The white-on-green lettering of overhead signs telling her they must be inbound on the Stevenson Ex
pressway. Then, just after the sign for Harlem Avenue, the van slowed and they exited.

They headed north for several minutes, then west away from the city. Soon she knew where they were going, and knowing this created a pain in her heart. When the van slowed she could see the sign for the entrance road and the bus stop kiosk. The van turned into the en
trance road and drove the short winding road toward the lights of the building the way she had driven it so many times. So many times.

And so they were back where it began, back at Hell in the Woods where Steve first told her about his suspicions concerning Marjorie’s death, about Marjorie’s paranoia concerning the staff at Hell in the Woods, about Marjorie’s mysterious stories of a family and keys and her litany of U.S. Routes.

U.S.
6 and 45, U.S. 30 and 50, U.S. 20 and 41, U.S. 14 and 94,

U.S.
14 and 45, U.S. 20 and 83, U.S. 30 and 34, U.S. 7 and 30, U.S. 30 and 45 … U.S. 6 and 45, U.S. 30 and 50 …

Driving fast made him think of a speeding bullet, and this made him recall what he sometimes called his stroke. Brain bullet. He’d told Jan about it. He also told Marjorie about it and Marjorie responded by re
citing Presidents’ names. JFK and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and George Bush. “Brain bullet” most likely trig
gering a recall of the Kennedy assassination, and that recall bringing forth the names of other Presidents.

He sped southwest down the Stevenson Expressway—Stevenson who ran for President against Eisenhower but was defeated. He had passed Harlem a ways back and was already out of the city. Instead of the heavy rain of earlier, there was a light drizzle and the spray from other cars and trucks. To avoid being stopped for speeding, he tucked in behind a couple of speeders playing the lane change game. By doing this and letting them run interference for him, he was able to keep the Lincoln at seventy-five.

It seemed so stupidly simple when he finally remembered the plan. He had been sitting there beneath the overhead light in the apart
ment parking lot staring at the broad expanse of the Lincoln’s hood and listening to the police scanner when it hit him. The rhythm of a back-and-forth dialogue on the scanner had resurrected the rhythm of Marjorie’s litany of U.S. Routes.

U.S.
6 and 45, U.S. 30 and 50, U.S. 20 and 41, U.S. 14 and 94,

U.S.
14 and 45, U.S. 20 and 83, U.S. 30 and 34, U.S. 7 and 30, U.S. 30 and 45
. And after that it repeated over and over starting with U.S. 6 and 45.

He had heard Marjorie recite it many times, both in rehab and outside rehab. He had memorized it. But then, sitting there in the parking lot, his brain betrayed him, tucking the litany away some
where until the rhythm of police calls brought it out.

U.S.
6 and 45. The same area Antonio Gianetti Junior and his attorney had been killed in a supposed accident only hours earlier. It was too much to be a coincidence. Of course, with the vehicle registra
tion information from Tamara, he could go to Max Lamberti’s home, or to the address of Lamberti Produce, or to Dino Justice’s address, but he had a feeling this would be like treading water. Men like Max Lam
berti and Dino Justice made a career of denial, and he of all people would have a hell of a time trying to grill them with questions. Or he could go to one after another of the addresses for Tyrone Washington, but he had a feeling Tyrone had nothing at all to do with Jan being missing. There was something much bigger going on. Something having to do with the Chicago mob and corruption in high places.

And something else, another reason for going to the accident scene. If Jan didn’t go to Wisconsin with Lydia, he was fairly certain she’d de
cided to poke around using the information they’d gotten so far con
cerning Marjorie’s death. If Jan were here in the car with him now, he’d really show how upset he was with her for doing this. But of course she wasn’t here. Next to him, resting on the floor and leaning against the seat was his folded wheelchair. As he glanced at it, he momentarily transformed the movement of the car to the movement of the chair with him on board and Jan behind, pushing him down the hall, maybe back from the television lounge to his room on one of those nights she propped a side chair against the door and they made love.

Yes, there was something else, another reason for going to the acci dent scene. He knew Jan. Despite his stroke, he knew Jan better than anyone in the world. She’d done all she could for him in her efforts to help him rediscover who he’d been. And because of this, he was con vinced Jan must have taken Marjorie’s death more seriously than he thought. Even keeping the incident in the janitors’ closet with Tyrone
and his flat-nosed friend from her made no difference. She was a strong woman with a mind of her own and he should have known she would do something like this. He should have known, once he started the ball rolling by going to the funeral and examining everything he could remember Marjorie saying, that Jan would do something. It was his fault. Either he should have kept his mouth shut, or he should have gone to the police. And if the whole thing had gotten buried the way things sometimes do when the police come in and stir the pot, then so be it. Son of a bitch! It was his fault!

Another reason for driving to Orland Park was the alleged acci
dent Tamara had mentioned. Because of who Jan was and what he knew she would do, he was certain that sometime today, Jan would have been there. She would have looked things up. Probably at the library where they used to spend time together. She’d find out about the Gianetti family. Maybe there had been a key tidbit of informa
tion in a newspaper article. Maybe there was an event or something in Orland Park today and it had been clear to her that Antonio Gianetti Junior would go to this event. The Orland Park Shopping Center was there. Maybe something was going on there and Jan had somehow found out Antonio Junior would be there and …

Would she have approached Antonio Junior? Would she have sim
ply walked up to him and told him there might be more to his mother’s death than an accidental slip in the hallway? And if she approached Gianetti and cousin Max had been around and had reason to want to leave well enough alone and not let some woman stir things up …

Of course Jan had gone to Orland. She was missing. Someone she would have wanted to question was dead, along with his attorney, in a questionable accident, and Jan had been seen at Marjorie’s funeral by the hoods. Max Lamberti, Dino Justice, and all the other hoods who might be in their Crown Vics right now. And why? What were they
after? Marjorie had said it all. The keys. The family keys. The keys and the fly in the ointment. The fly in the ointment who could be none other than Max the Fly. And another thing he recalled Marjorie saying. The keys to the Presidential suite. Perhaps that was an indi cation of just how much someone had to gain or lose because of what Jan might be stirring up.

And so, he drove to Orland Park where he might or might not see Jan’s Audi or the vehicles on the list he got from Tamara. If he saw any of the vehicles out there, then he’d know for sure. And if he found that his suspicions were correct without finding Jan, he could always make his way back to the addresses in the dead of night and become death. Because if something happened to Jan, he wouldn’t care what happened to him as long as he got to the one responsible and put a bul
let through a brain.