Flight Dreams (37 page)

Manning bites his lip, thinking. “Gordon, his apartment is only a few blocks from here. Why don’t I run over there and take a look?”

From across the room, Neil rolls on the floor, laughing. He calls to Manning, “You’d better put some pants on first!”

Five minutes later, Manning is on the street, walking through his Near North neighborhood toward Clifford Nolan’s apartment building. The long summer evening is a warm one, and the urgency of Manning’s stride has caused him to break into a sweat. He tells himself to slow down. Nothing is wrong.

After all, Cliff Nolan has pulled these brief disappearances before. When he won the Partridge Prize a few years back, there was the traditional Friday-afternoon champagne toast in the newsroom. With uncharacteristic spontaneity, Nolan invited everyone to his apartment to continue the celebration that night. Manning was inclined not to go, but dismissed his reticence as base jealousy of Nolan’s award (known among reporters as “the coveted Brass Bird”), so he joined the festivities later that evening. Funky dance music was blasting from the apartment, and Manning laughed in astonishment as he climbed the stairs—at the office, Nolan never missed an opportunity to flaunt his ballet-and-opera tastes. Inside the apartment, the party was in full swing, and so was Nolan. His usual abstemiousness, which only rarely allowed a glass of port or an exceptionally fine Armagnac, was out the window that night, and he raced through the crowded rooms half-naked in pursuit of female coworkers who laughed hysterically at his metamorphosis. The next week, he didn’t show up at the office for several days, and when he did arrive back, he offered no explanation for his absence. Whether he was drying out somewhere, or shacked up with someone, or simply embarrassed into hiding was never known.

The incident reminds Manning that there has been newsroom gossip of other parties, not attended by Manning, that also led Nolan to miss work. In the course of Nolan’s career, however, these aberrations have been rare, and Manning is willing to dismiss his colleague’s current disappearance as merely another brief escape from a repressed personality.

Manning has reached his destination, standing now at the canopied entrance to the other reporter’s building. He tries the door, knowing that it will be locked, and indeed it is. He presses the buzzer to Nolan’s apartment, and predictably there is no response after several tries. Stymied, he stands there in the shade of the awning, wondering what other options he has. Perhaps he could try to reach the building’s superintendent. Then he notices an older resident approaching the building, a woman with two bags of groceries, packed high. As she steps up to the door, she struggles with her purse, fishing for her key.

“May I be of help?” asks Manning, reaching for one of the bags.

“Thank you so much,” she gasps, handing him the groceries. “Every day, it seems that life just gets more
complicated
.” She laughs at her futile complaint.

When she unlocks the outer door, Manning opens it for her, steps inside with her, then opens the inner door. Inside the lobby, when she has recomposed herself, he hands back her groceries. She thanks him again and hobbles off toward her own apartment. Manning is already up the first flight of stairs.

Arriving on the top floor, he walks past several doors to the one he knows to be Nolan’s. He pauses, listening. There’s a television playing somewhere, but it comes from another apartment. Otherwise, silence. He knocks. There is no response. So he knocks louder, calling, “Cliff? It’s Mark Manning. Are you in there?”

Down the hallway, the door to the next apartment cracks open, emitting the sound of the television he heard—someone is preaching about moral decay. Through the narrow opening, a face peers out, wondering who’s in the hall. Manning turns to get a glimpse of the woman, and the door snaps shut.

Returning his attention to Nolan’s door, Manning knocks louder still.
“Clifford?”
And still there is no response. So he tries the knob, knowing that it will be locked. But in fact, it clicks open, and Manning swings the door wide before him.

Stepping inside, he remembers entering the living room on the night of the party. Even then, crowded as it was, the place struck him as lavishly furnished, expensively decorated. This return visit confirms that impression—the apartment is serene and tasteful, all velvet and crystal and dark hardwood, with framed old art
(real
art) on every wall. Air-conditioning wafts through the chilled but stuffy rooms, carrying the slightest whiff of something rotten. Then he notices that all the lights are on. The sun won’t set for another hour, and daylight streams in through west windows. So the lamps have been left on since at least last night.

In the hush of the apartment, he senses that his ears are ringing—but no, it’s not that—it’s a different sort of noise. What he hears is a low electronic hum. It comes from the next room, which he knows to be Nolan’s study. Manning again calls, “Clifford?” but this time his voice is colored with apprehension. He crosses the room to the doorway of the study and looks inside.

There in a chair sits Clifford Nolan, his body slumped forward onto the desk. Manning steps closer. “Good God,” he mumbles. “Cliff?” But he knows that his colleague will not answer. The underside of the reporter’s face has turned purple, swollen against the surface of the desk. Bullet wounds, several of them, pierce his back. Blackened blood has caked down his shirt, disappearing into his pants. He’s starting to stink. He’s been here awhile.

Manning stands at his side for a moment, head bowed, then heaves a sigh of resignation to this grim discovery. Carefully, he nudges Nolan’s shoulder. As he suspected, the body is limp and flaccid—it has been here for at least a full day.

Aware again of his surroundings, Manning notices that the hum he heard is still sounding from a stereo system housed on shelving along the wall opposite the desk. Stepping over to it, he sees that the volume has been turned to its upper limit. The lights on the amplifier indicate that a CD was playing and has finished. There are many CD cases stacked in the vicinity, and it is not apparent which one contained the disc that’s inside the machine. He’s tempted to tap the button that will open the drawer and give him a look—but no, he reminds himself, don’t touch
anything.
He shouldn’t even switch off the amplifier, even though it’s running very warm.

He returns to the desk and studies the articles atop it, which seem to radiate from Nolan’s lifeless body. There’s a phone, of course, pencils and pens, a few pictures and other personal mementos—including the coveted Brass Bird, shoved unceremoniously into a dark corner behind the lit desk lamp. There are several reporter’s notebooks, some of them open to blank pages, all of them sprouting shreds of missing pages from their spiral bindings. At the edge of the desk sits Nolan’s modem, identical to the one issued to Manning by the
Journal.
It’s plugged in, and its standby light indicates that it’s ready to transmit over the phone line. Missing from this tableau is Nolan’s laptop computer.

Manning checks. It’s not hidden beneath the hunched body. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the room, although its carryall case is plopped next to the desk on the floor, zipped open and empty. Glancing around the carpet, Manning also notices that no shell casings were left behind—they’d be conspicuous within the tidy confines of Nolan’s study.

Manning reaches for the phone, then stops himself before touching it. Instead, he pulls his own phone from his hip pocket, flips it open, and punches in the code of a programmed number. When someone answers on the other end, Manning asks, “Is Jim in?” He waits. Jim is a high-ranking Chicago police detective who has become Manning’s principal contact at headquarters. “Evening, Jim. It’s Manning from the
Journal.
Glad I caught you in.”

“Always good to hear from you, Mark—but I assume this is no social call.”

Manning allows himself a short laugh. “No, Jim, it’s not. I’m at the apartment of a fellow reporter, Cliff Nolan.” He gives the address. “He’s missed some work, and I just found him shot to death, multiple wounds to the back.”

“Ouch. Any signs of break-in or struggle?”

“No. He was working at his desk. His computer may have been stolen, but robbery isn’t a likely motive—his place is full of pricey stuff. All the lights were left on, so it must have happened at night.”

“Is he stiff?”

“Beyond stiff,” answers Manning. “The rigor is resolved.”

Jim can be heard scratching notes. “Then the corpse should be at least thirty-six hours old. If he was shot at night, it couldn’t have been yesterday, Tuesday.”

“Right,” says Manning. “And he was alive on Monday afternoon—he conducted an interview at Civic Planetarium. So Clifford Nolan was murdered Monday night, sometime after dark, while working on something at his desk.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Gordon Smith leads Manning past a
Journal
security guard and into a small elevator. He fidgets with a seldom-used key, inserting it into the control panel. With a twist of his wrist, the elevator begins to rise. Under the black gaze of a video lens, Smith turns to tell Manning, “Nathan Cain looked upon Cliff Nolan as an intellectual equal—few reporters can make
that
claim. I haven’t talked to Nathan since yesterday, but I’m sure he’s devastated by the news of Cliff’s murder.”

Manning shakes his head in recognition of the tragedy. “Nathan didn’t know about the murder when he called this meeting. I wonder if there’ll be a change of agenda.”

“He’s the boss,” Smith says with a shrug. “I’m sure he
intended
to discuss the Zarnik story. Did you bring your notes?”

Manning answers by patting the breast pocket of his jacket, which contains a notebook. He asks his editor, “Do you spend much time up here?”

“Where, the inner sanctum? My fair share, I guess. But it still never fails to impress. Prepare to be wowed, Marko.”

Throughout his life, Manning has been grateful that his given name is one of those that don’t lend themselves to nicknames—but his editor has managed to invent one. Though older than Manning by only ten years or so, Gordon Smith has grown increasingly paternal toward his star reporter, showing signs of proud, manly affection that are altogether new to Manning, who never really knew his own father. Mark Manning, Senior, died when his son was only three, leaving the boy to grow up without his influence—or the tag of “Junior.” He’s always been Mark, just Mark, to his mother, his friends, his coworkers, even Neil. Now this “Marko” business….

The elevator stops, opens. Manning and Smith step into a small lobby that leads to a single door, wide and heavy, constructed of rich walnut panels, bearing a plaque with gold lettering:
Colonel Nathan Cain, Publisher.
Cain’s military days are long past, but the title has stuck. A security guard, seated at a ridiculously petite desk, rises, nods to Smith, and swings the massive door open.

Manning and Smith enter an outer office, a windowless room with walls covered in the same walnut paneling. The dark wood, combined with the deep carpeting underfoot, creates a hushed atmosphere, churchlike. Manning’s throat tickles, but he stifles the urge to cough. The room’s sole occupant is a receptionist at an oversize desk, atop which there is only a fresh arrangement of flowers, a telephone, and a computer terminal—no pictures, papers, or clutter. A bundle of cords slithers down the side of the desk and disappears into a slit in the carpeting—a clumsy installation, notes Manning, inconsistent with the impeccable fit-and-finish of these posh quarters. The computer is clearly a recent addition, never envisioned by the architect who won the international competition for design of the Journal Building back in the twenties.

The receptionist rises, greets Smith, is happy to meet Manning, bemoans Nolan’s murder, then ushers them down a hall. They pass through another windowless room, which houses Cain’s secretarial pool, four well-dressed women, all on the high side of middle age, who tap away at their computers. Cords and cables again spoil the finesse of the room’s decorating.

They pass file rooms, a lounge, and several closed doors, arriving at last in Cain’s outer office where they meet his special assistant, Lucille Haring. She’s a tall woman, lean and mannish, with carrot-red hair worn short and parted. She speaks and moves with military precision, an impression that is reinforced by her olive-colored gabardine suit. She wears no makeup or jewelry, just a Swiss Army watch, a no-nonsense timepiece with a large, readable dial.

Manning can tell by her conversation with Smith that they have not met before, so she is apparently a recent addition to Cain’s staff. She makes no mention of Cliff Nolan, whose murder has been all over the news this morning, and Manning concludes that the woman never met the late science editor. As they continue to talk, the receptionist who escorted them from the front office excuses herself, and Manning turns to acknowledge her departure from the room. Doing so, he notices that this office has windows, and his glimpse of the skyline confirms that they are at the top of the
Journal’s
landmark tower. He also notes that Cain’s outer office, now Lucille Haring’s domain, is cluttered with even more computer hardware. Racks of electronics line one of the walls, covering part of a window—a hasty, makeshift setup.

“This way, gentlemen,” Miss Haring tells them. “The Colonel is expecting you.” Manning could swear he heard her heels click. She leads them through an imposing doorway, and Manning gets his first glimpse of the fabled inner sanctum. He fully expected the publisher’s office to be grand, even lavish, but he wasn’t even remotely prepared for
this.

If the outer offices seemed churchy, this room is more like a cathedral. Indeed, the curved wall at the far end of the room, two stories high, resembles an apse, replete with Gothic arched windows overlooking carved limestone gargoyles and the city beyond. The high altar enshrined by this vaulted space is the desk of Nathan Cain, which lacks only candlesticks to complete the image. The computer terminal on the desk seems not only anachronistic to this setting, but baldly offensive to it.