Kaleidoscope (4 page)

Sally read the well-penned instructions once again. Then she returned the letter to its envelope, stuffing it along with the cash deep inside her blouse, pausing a moment, then, to consider—

It was a long time until five o’clock. How best to spend her first day of freedom?

Sally straightened suddenly. She walked with purpose to the front of the chilli dogcart. Waited for the vendor to acknowledge her presence.

“Yeah?”

“There a cross-town to Vine?”

“Trolley, yeah. Be by in a snap.”

“And then can I take Vine to the zoo?”

“You want Number 78.” He lipped a cigarette. “Straight up.”

Jack Romaine did not find Sally Price as she negotiated a course through knots of gentlemen, ladies, and cyclists on her way to the trolley bus that arrived in a shower of sparks. Jack was pacing back and forth on the prison side of the street, a hound anxious to pick up a buried scent. Once again he checked the faded lithograph that Bladehorn had provided.

That was Sally. Bad skin, angular face, narrow eyes and mousy hair.

“Jesus,” Jack had protested when Fist gave him the picture. “You expect me to know her from this?”

“She’s the only one they’re lettin’ out,” Fist returned. “Just be there.”

But Jack was late, way late. It was nearly eight o’clock, the street already busy as a bee in a tar bucket, and he had no idea where to look for Sally Price.

A bell rang sharply. The trolley. Through a shifting crowd of cyclists and commuters Jack glimpsed a woman juggling a portmanteau and a Coney dog. Not too many women carrying suitcases, this morning. In fact—

“Gotcha.”

Jack sprinted across the street just in time to take a bicycle’s wheel square across his knee, rider and runner falling to the bricks together like a couple of footballers.

The rider cursing from a pretzel of broken spokes.

“Hell with you,” Jack rose limping to plunge back through the cordon that lay between him and Sally Price.

Where was she?!

There! There she was, on the trolley!

She sat hindmost in a sandwich of commuters on the bottom level of a double-truck, a mousy woman almost smiling.

“All aboard.”

Jack limped toward the two-decker streetcar. A pedestrian cut him off. Damn near knocked him down, in fact.

“HEY, BUDDY!” Jack challenged, but the guy just sailed past him, bounding like a goddamned deer from the sidewalk onto the streetcar.

He was tall, this late boarder, and blond. A boutonnière fixed gaily to his vest. A new derby hat and spats.

Their eyes met for a moment. Distant. Fleeting. But then wires sizzled overhead and Jack was still a stone’s throw away as the car began its clatter up the gentle grade toward Vine Street.

“HOLD THE CAR!”

Jack now charging past the chilli-dog cart. The trolley was pulling away, gathering speed—!

“DRIVER! HOOOOOOLD UP!”

But the electric car clacked away noisily, accelerating uphill.

“JESUS, HOLD UP!”

Sally turned to see a man running up the tracks, his shouts muted by the racket of wheels and rails. He looked silly back there, like Charlie Chaplin. A handsome man holding his knee in a run for the trolley!

For a moment it seemed he might even make it. A final sprint drew Jack almost within reach of the car.

“SOMEBODY—GIVE ME—!” he gasped at a dead run.

But then he stumbled.

Sally laughed out loud when she saw Jack’s comic spill, the hands splayed out to break that awkward fall onto the pavement, the Charlie Chaplin hat flying off that otherwise handsome head. Sally wasn’t the only one amused by Romaine’s painful spill. Passengers widely separated by class and income and prospects joined her hoots of derision in a shared moment of Schadenfreude. And why not? The man pulling himself off the asphalt had to be a klutz. A loser.

Prob’ly drunk, Sally was thinking. And anyway—

He had nothing to do with her.

Laughter trailed down the tracks, sharp and brittle. But there was one passenger who did not share the moment. The blonde man in spats did not laugh. It was not that he had missed the antics of the fellow running to catch the trolley. No, indeed. The tall, blond passenger with the boutonnière had noticed Jack as he leapt from the street to catch Number 78. He noticed Jack just as he noticed everything on the grounds outside the prison and on the street. But Romaine’s predicament was not an object of humor for this gentleman, nor even of curiosity. Arno Becker’s peculiar attentions were focused instead on the woman he had followed from prison. She had a strident laugh, he noted. Too much scalp showing for her years. And her mouth was smeared with chilli.

Jack Romaine raised himself on knees scraped raw, craning to spot Sally among the passengers in the trolley that
clack-clack-clacked
up the hill. His shouted curse died long before it reached the ears of anyone aboard. Already, passengers were returning to their newspapers and cinnamon buns, their interest in Jack’s spill waning well ahead of his shouted profanity.

Sally’s attention, certainly, was already shifted, leaning against her woolen bag to face the damp breeze drafted by the trolley’s steady transport. She was savoring her new freedom at the car’s uncanvassed window, eager to feel the river’s air against her face. To smell its moldy aroma. Admiring the view of the Ohio, imagining herself installed on one of the shaded lawns banking that languid water-course, or sipping tea in those well-made houses whose floors and toilets she used to scrub, those homes that, until recently, she could never hope to own.

The fifty bucks burning a hole in her rude purse? Was chump change compared to the reward to come; Alex had promised. A payoff for keeping her lips sealed.

So many things on Sally’s mind, a maelstrom of competing emotions, expectations, and concerns. Arno Becker, on the other hand, was single-minded in his attention. His purpose.

Arno regarded Miss Price as he adjusted the carnation in his lapel. Should he approach her now? Or wait?

Perhaps wait, he decided.

Let her enjoy the ride. Relax. Lower her guard.

Meanwhile, Jack Romaine was hobbling back to the cart hawking chilli and dogs.

“What happened ta you?” the vendor challenged.

“When’s the next trolley?” Jack grated.

“Half hour.”

A half hour! Jack ran his hands through his hair. Well, that was it. He’d lost her. A deep, deep nausea stabbed him in the stomach. Bladehorn wasn’t going to like this. Not at all.

Jack was about to limp away, but then the smell from the cart reminded him. The Coney dog. Chilli and cinnamon.

He turned back to the vendor.

“I was ’spose to meet my girl, see.”

“Your girl.”

“Yeah, plaid skirt and sweater? Flat-chested?”

The vendor’s eyes narrowed.

Jack pulled out a crisp dollar bill along with the black and white photograph.

“Think of anything might help me out?”

He shrugged. “She might’ve asked about the trolley.”

Jack peeled off another bill.

“Just tell me where.”

The vendor gathered the bills in his cigarette hand.

“Try the zoo.”

Sally paid her two bits and entered the Cincinnati Zoo. It was the city’s pride, the zoo. Best in the country, people said. More animals than any zoo, animals you couldn’t see anyplace else.

Sally adored those large mammals who spent their time in water, the hippopotami, the sea lions. The big cats were also a thrill, of course. And who could resist the chimps and bonobos? The one great ape? But it was the birds that always offered a particular fascination for Sally, especially the predators, the raptors. As a girl Sally had made her daddy stop so she could watch when the keepers fed live snakes to the secretary bird. She had relished that encounter, the crested relative of the falcon, earthbound, stamping its clawed feet onto the snake’s neck, a sharp plunge of beak. Shaking the reptile to make certain of death. Then the feeding, the entrails bursting from their integument. Other children would hide their eyes, but not Sally.

But today she ignored the aviary, pausing instead to spend another nickel for food—a sausage in brown paper, a sweet roll, a root beer—before skirting the hippos’ paddock and the albino rhinoceros to head directly for Swan Lake.

The city’s zoo had been built on the acreage of a large dairy; Swan Lake dominated the interior, a body of water vast enough to accommodate sailboats and offering along its shoreline any number of retreats. On a weekend you’d expect to see hundreds of families milling about along the lake’s well-tended shoreline. By midday there would be any number of boaters on the water. All forms of languid recreation.

But at half past eight on a working day, the shoreline was deserted. There weren’t even any employees about, the staff still occupied with the tasks of feeding, grooming and medicating the largest gathering of exotic animals in the country. Sally, in fact, had not seen a single soul on her trek to the far side of Swan Lake. An ideal place for a woman seeking privacy. A retreat from prying eyes

She settled with her sausage and sweets on a bench tucked by an eddy of shallow water shaded by a grove of sycamore. No company but a gaggle of ducks that came for the crumbs that Sally threw into the water.

She retrieved the letter from her bag and spread it in her lap. Fifty dollars, and a hotel room waiting at five! Sally smiled. She counted her money again, chiding herself for profligate spending, separating the bills from the coins. Like Midas counting his hoard.

She finished the root beer, then returned to the letter, reading it once more before turning it over and smoothing the stationery on the bench’s hardwood planks, careful not to soil the precious correspondence on the wrapper stained with the grease of her sausage.

Those small chores completed, Sally could for the first time in eighteen months simply relax.

No walls. No guards. So quiet. So still.

She closed her eyes and breathed. The air was clear, swept of haze or smoke by a mild breeze just hinting of autumn.

She must have fallen asleep because when next she opened her eyes there was a tall blond man standing near. Some swell in spats. Fiddling with a carnation.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

She jumped as if hit with a cattle prod.

“Didn’t mean to startle,” Arno Becker removed his derby.

“I didn’t hear ya.”

“I imagine not. I apologize.”

Sally reached blindly for her letter, wadding it inside the butcher paper that wrapped her sausage.

“Not leaving on my account, I hope?” Arno remained amiable.

Sally dropped the letter and wrapper into the trash.

“Look, I ain’t no whoor.”

“Never imagined you were,” he replied.

“We got no business,” she gathered her soda bottle into her fist.

“Oh, but we do, Sally.”

She froze at the unexpected familiarity. “…I gotta go.”

Arno reached out almost lazily to jerk the bottle from her hand.

She cried out sharply.

“Ever hear a panther, Sally? A panther in the wild screams exactly like a woman in agony. Monkeys, too. Monkeys can scream bloody murder. Not that anyone would hear a primate or a panther out here. We are so out of the way, aren’t we? So…isolated.”

“Whadda you want?” her pale face was grey.

“Why, the loot, Sal. The moolah. Your boyfriend’s pickings, and don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“But I—AHH!”

She gasped, her wrist jacked up now between her shoulder blades.

“Fifty thousand dollars twists a lot of arms, Sally girl. Not to mention a quarter million in railroad stocks. So let’s just forget the ifs, ands and buts, shall we? Now, where did Jerry Driggers hide the stash?”

“Makes you think he’d tell me?”

“Oh, you know something. Or maybe somebody,” Arno found the knife inside his corded twill trousers. “I don’t presume to know the details, but Jerry surely did and you were Jerry’s gal, weren’t you, Sally?”

“Jerry was just the driver; he wasn’t the brains! He wasn’t!”

“Who was, then?”

“Oh, God!”

“Come on.”

“I can’t!”

“They say you keep it shut pretty good, honey. Well. We’ll see.”

Jack Romaine scoured the zoo’s grounds at a limping dogtrot, his tie pulled loose from a shirt soaked wet with sweat, his jacket slung over an arm.

Sally was here, somewhere, she had to be!

A trumpet blared to split his skull.

Well, she wasn’t at the elephants’ cage. Wasn’t around the monkeys, either. Or at the arboretum—he’d checked all those exhibits. In fact, he’d checked everyplace. Unless she had doubled back—?

A fresh panic. Who was he kidding? She could have come and gone and he’d never know! What the hell were the odds, anyway, of finding anybody at a goddamned zoo?

What if he couldn’t find her?

What would Bladehorn do?

Jack had a fleeting impulse to bolt. Five hundred bucks gave a man a good head start. He could take his son and mother in law, catch a train—To where?

You couldn’t outrun bastards like Bladehorn. Jack had scrammed his ass out of Chicago and what had it gotten him?

Jack skidded to a halt and the thought occurred. More like a hope—

Maybe Sally wasn’t here for the exhibits at all. Maybe she was just trying to lie low.

Jack wiped his forehead. Even assuming she was still on the grounds, how would he go about a search? There was a hell of lot of territory to cover. Acres!