Daughter of Darkness (24 page)

    "Remember the gun," he said.

    "Right."

    "And the alarm."

    "Uh-huh."

    "And the Carstairs if you need-"

    "-a phone. I liked that, by the way."

    "Oh?"

    "The kiss, I mean."

    "Oh. Well, I liked it, too."

    She slid her arms around him again and squeezed herself to him. "I just wanted to let you know that."

    He held her for thirty seconds or so, then turned the knob on the side door. "I'll be back in a few hours."

    He drove around a three-block area looking for the dark green Ford van. Not finding anything, he headed back toward the city.

    

    

    Hallahan's was a journalist's bar where such esteemed Chicago ink wretches as Ben Hecht and Charlie McArthur had all hoisted more than a few. With such a tradition, Ned Hallahan, III, grandson of the original owner, was able to argue that actually fixing up the dump would be to despoil history. So the john didn't work, the foot rail along the bottom of the bar had been wobbly for at least two decades, and the bar stools had holes in the seat padding that looked as if giant mutated rats had been munching on them all night. But the place had spirit and no amount of lousy decor, bad lighting, and numerous health code violations could take away from that.

    Neely was late. But then Neely was
always
late. Coffey sat in a booth by himself, listening to the sixties songs on the jukebox ("Eve of Destruction" had been a piece of crap then and was a piece of crap now) and eavesdropping on the conversations all around him. Somewhere in Coffey's first novel was an ironic little paragraph about the topics of men's conversations as they progressed through their decades. In your twenties, you talked about getting laid. In your thirties, you talked about getting laid
and
getting a promotion. In your forties, you talked about getting a promotion
and
some of the health tests you were starting to have. In your fifties, you talked about some of the health tests you were starting to have
and
all the snot-nosed twenty-five-year-olds who were always talking about getting laid. And in your sixties you started talking about your grand-kids and death. And not death in general, either. No death-as-an-abstraction, no death-comes-to-us-all. Real death. Specific death.
Your own
death, hard as that was to imagine, impossible as it was to accept. Extinction, was what you were really saying. What the hell had ever happened to that smart-ass twenty-year-old who used to think of nothing but getting laid? It had been a long, long time since you'd seen him in your mirror, that was for sure.

    Neely arrived half an hour late. "Sorry."

    "You always are."

    Neely sat down and signaled across the shadowy bar to the bartender. After all these years, the man behind the bar was well-acquainted with Neely's needs, shot of rye with beer chaser. No doubt just what his granddad drank back in County Cork.

    Neely kept up with the times. During the twenty years Coffey had known him, Neely had been, variously, a hippie, a disco lady killer, and was now something resembling a boomer, the expensive double-breasted suit, the hundred dollar haircut (sideburns shaved straight across far up on the ear) and ' the overwhelming aftershave. He'd always been one of those ridiculously good looking guys whose appearance misled many into thinking he was a creampuff. These days he looked like a suburban lothario who had spent one too many afternoons in a sleazy hotel with the wife of a close friend. Nothing is sadder to see than lover boys (or lover girls, for that matter) giving way to flesh and age. He had four kids by three wives and was always half a step ahead of all the loan companies he was in hock to. Anyway, not even the loan companies wanted his business, which was pretty sad given the fact that he was one of the city's ablest and best-known reporters. In the future, he'd probably have to start taking out juice loans. Someday, one of the juice loans would cost him his life. The mob loved to make examples of prominent people who didn't pay up.

    "We had to tear out part of the front page," Neely said.

    "Must be big."

    "Very big. You know a private investigator named Cummings?"

    "Sure. He's the one who works for all the rich people."

    "Not anymore, he doesn't. Somebody killed him tonight. In a parking garage."

    Coffey tensed.

    "They killed a client, too. Guy named David Foster."

    Coffey almost physically jerked at the mention of the name.

    He could feel himself become colder, as if his body temperature was dropping quickly.

    "You all right?" Neely said.

    "Yeah."

    "You look terrible."

    "So do you."

    "Yeah, but the difference is I cultivate it, Coffey. I'm too old to be the male ingenue anymore, so now I have to be the mysterious older man. It's sort of like changing from a young Robert Redford into an older Robert Mitchum. The ladies love it."

    "How's Emily?"

    For a minute, Neely forgot he was a lover boy, and that he'd almost won the Pulitzer twice, and that he was getting old and scared. He actually even forgot entirely about himself for this brief time. Emily was his daughter. She'd been born with cerebral palsy. Neely loved her with a ferocity and protectiveness that redeemed all the other bullshit in his soul. "She's getting along pretty good. They're making some progress, the scientists, I mean. People make fun of Jerry Lewis, but he does a damn good job for the cause. He really does." Then, and incredibly there were tears in his eyes, he reached inside his stylish suit coat and brought out a folded sheet of white paper. He opened it up. A pink crayon drawing of a birthday cake with the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DADDY! were scrawled across the face of the paper. "Emily drew it for me." His love for his eight-year-old daughter overwhelmed Coffey and for once, he actually felt a fondness for Neely.

    Neely made a kind of sniffling sound, tears, and then reverently folded the paper and put it away. And then he went back to being the Neely everybody knew and hated. "So how come you wanted to see me, Coffey?"

    At the moment, Coffey really wanted to talk about Cummings and his murder. But that wasn't why he was here. "Quinlan."

    "The shrink slash ass-bandit."

    "Yeah."

    Neely smiled icily. "I wonder how much ass that guy has gotten in his lifetime. The word is he makes it with most of his female patients."

    "That I've heard. Tell me something about him I
haven't
heard."

    Neely told Coffey about Quinlan's CIA connections. How he did ground-breaking work with mind control and behavior modification. Then they fired Quinlan.

    "Why?" Coffey asked.

    "Well, as usual with the CIA, nobody knows for sure. But there were a lot of rumors that Quinlan was even more radical than the people before him. He started working with career criminals, trying to change their inclinations. And then-though there was never any proof of this-that he started doing the opposite, too."

    "What's the opposite?"

    "Demonstrating that he could take an average, decent person and make him capable of being a criminal."

    "In other words, he could turn criminals into law-abiding people, and law-abiding people into criminals."

    "Essentially, yes."

    "Did it work?" Coffey said.

    "Again, all I've got is rumors. The word is that he had some success, but that several of his patients ended up in mental institutions for the rest of their lives."

    "Fortunes of war as the CIA sees it."

    "Exactly."

    Coffey thought instantly of what Hal had said about Jenny's two personalities, how one of them seemed artificially imposed. Mind-controlling drugs and psychotherapy would be one combined way to impose such a personality. As Hal had said, that sort of mental manipulation went back to at least the Korean War.

    "Anyway, he came back to Chicago and set up a psychiatric practice. Strictly carriage trade. There used to be a joke about him that you had to bring your stock portfolio with you when you went for your first visit. His lifestyle got a lot better, too. He actually bought himself a Maserati, every boy's ultimate wet dream. He dated all the society women, too. If you remember the mid-eighties, there was kind of a trend back to the forties. Night clubs and dinner jackets and things like that. Well, our friend Quinlan reveled in all that stuff."

    "Then he opened his psychiatric hospital?"

    Neely laughed. "Better known as Joliet East." Joliet was the state prison. "If you were rich enough and in trouble enough, Quinlan could get you shunted into his hospital. Your trial would either be put off indefinitely or the state would just forget about you."

    "You'd stay in the hospital?"

    "Right. But unless you were completely uncontrollable-and some of them are-you could get used to life there real easily. It's the psychiatric equivalent of a country club prison. They even have weekly conjugal visits."

    "A big family name like Stafford?"

    Neely grinned. "Jenny Stafford was everything, man. Money and beauty. That's about the time I first started writing about him and his hospital. He was really smitten for a long time. The word I got from the hospital people inside was that Quinlan has sexual relationships with all the women when they come in. They usually don't last very long. He gets tired of them and then hands them off to one of his lieutenants. But I'm told that with Jenny Stafford it was different. He really seemed to be smitten for a time. He kept her for several months."

    "Nice of him," Coffey said, trying to keep any bitterness from his voice.

    "You ever see Jenny Stafford?"

    "Once, I guess," Coffey lied.

    "Well, I'd keep her for a lot longer than a few months. Or I think I would, anyway. I guess she's pretty screwed up." He tapped a finger against his skull to indicate crazy. "She convinced her parents to take her out of there. They found this other shrink."

    "Priscilla Bowman?"

    "Yeah, how'd you know that, Coffey?"

    "I just picked it up somewhere, I guess."

    "Well, do you get the irony?"

    "What irony?"

    "Don't you know who Priscilla Bowman is? Or was?"

    "I guess not."

    "She was Quinlan's old associate, the one he turned his psychiatric practice over to."

    "And she took over Jenny Stafford?"

    "Who better? Bowman had worked with Stafford for several years. She knew the various techniques he used. She'd even fallen under the sway of his CIA techniques for a while."

    "So why was she helping the Stafford family?"

    "L-o-v-e. She'd had this on-again off-again thing with our friendly guru Quinlan when they were still working together. I guess she seriously thought he was going to march her down the aisle someday. But his zipper problem got to be too much for her. So working on Jenny was a kind of spite. Rubbing his face in one of his failures."

    "That's why they had the falling out?"

    "I guess he's pretty hard to work with, too. She just got tired of being treated like a servant instead of an associate."

    "I'll be damned," Coffey said.

    The bartender automatically replenished their drinks.

    "Think you can handle two Diet Pepsis in a row?" Neely said.

    "I'll give it my best."

    Neely knocked back his fresh shot of rye, shuddered orgasmically, and then said, "So what's your interest in ail this?"

    "My next novel."

    "Say, that's right. I forgot. I keep thinking you're still a cop." A sip of beer. "By the way, I really liked your first novel except I guessed the killer about halfway through."

    Coffey laughed. "I'll try harder next time." He checked his watch. "Well, I'd better go." He dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table. "Here's for the drinks."

    "Hey, you don't need to do that," Neely said. But the hungry way he scooped the money up told Coffey how appreciative Neely was.

    "Give your daughter a kiss for me," Coffey said.

    "Thanks, Coffey."

    

    

    The Ford van had been parked across the street for forty-five minutes now, ever since Coffey had left. A couple of bored boys, ages eight and six respectively, thought of getting up on the bumper and trying to see past the dark-tinted windows. But there was something ominous about the van-what was the strange flat black box on its roof, and why did the van make that faint humming noise?-so they decided to work their way down the street to find something else to interest them.

    

    

    The headache was so bad it woke her up. She lay, for a time, concerned only about her headache and how it might have gotten so bad.

    Nothing to drink, that she could recall. No flu. Or any other kind of sickness. No special stress came to mind either.

    So what was the headache all about?

    She sat up in bed. Bra and panties were all she wore. The funny thing was, these didn't seem to be any bra and panties she'd ever
seen
before. These were almost comically sexy underthings. They made Victoria's Secret seem downright virginal.

    She stood up. Walked over to a moonlit window.

    Where the hell was she?

    The window was filled with several backyards. Each with an outdoor grille, a clothesline, a garage. Suburbia.

    But Linda Fleming didn't
belong
in suburbia. She was a city girl. And anyway, what was she doing in this strange house? She found a black sweater and black jeans and put them on.