Kaleidoscope (5 page)

Start with the lake, he decided. There was nobody on the water, yet. But the shoreline? Sure! A perfect place for somebody looking to stay out of the sun. Or out of sight. Out of the way.

So how many places could you find along the shore of Swan Lake? How long would it take to go all the way around?

Jack set off at a lope.

It was a half hour later and he almost missed her. Jack had finally reached the far-side shoreline, winded and drenched with sweat, when he saw a flock of pigeons vying with a pair of mallards over some sort of bread that lay scattered in crumbs before a park bench. A bag on the ground beside a trashcan. Or was that a purse?

It was the woolen handbag; Jack remembered. The one she was carrying when she got on the trolley.

“Get off, you,” Jack swiped at the pigeons on the bench. Made sure no one was looking as he rifled Sally’s purse.

Next to nothing inside. A pair of glasses, busted. Underwear. Some crumbs of bread. A waft of chilli and cinnamon. The scrawl of her signature on the prison receipt—Jesus, was that all? But at least he knew Sally was here. Or had been here.

Jack’s heart hammered as though he were still in the infantry as he kneeled to inspect the ground around the park bench.

A carpet of elm and maple leaves were freshly turned to expose some injury to the soft earth beneath. You didn’t have to be an Indian to see the gouges along the ground where something or somebody had been dragged away from the bench. Sally digging in her heels, maybe? And what was this? He wasn’t a fucking Mohican, but wasn’t that a boot print? Jack knelt to inspect an imprint too large for Sally or any woman he’d ever met. The heel’s mold was stamped much more deeply into the sammy soil than the toe. Light on the toe, heavy on the heel. Like he was walking backward.

“Oh, shit.”

Jack looked past the rim of the trashcan along the path of the troweled earth and boot prints to the lake beyond. It was shallow along the shoreline. You could see ducks breaking a smooth crease on water smooth as glass. And then he saw it.

“Mary and Joseph.”

Jack shed his shoes and socks on the run as he plunged into Swan Lake. What looked like a dozen strands of hair spread like a spill of oil on the water. Jack waded in knee deep to grab that meager purchase. He reached out. Gave a tug.

Sally Price’s scalp popped free of a bloody skull.

“Shill”—
one who displays a ticket to an attraction for the purpose of enticing another.

J
ack heaved what little was left in his stomach into the trash can beside the park bench.

“Oh, boy. Oh, boy.”

Jack had seen bodies dismembered before, had seen limbs blown off from artillery, had ministered to men with gangrene, men hideously wounded in the trenches. But a body shattered by shell or gunfire was impersonally violated. This corpse looked as though it had come from an abattoir, flayed along the belly, deep cuts into the tendons of her knees and hamstrings. That awful, naked skull.

Like a monkey skinned for meat.

Jack was pushing away from the bin when he noticed the half-eaten chilli-dog inside, a wad of grease and beef wreathed in brown paper and vomit. He glanced about the bench—no other trash obvious except a soda bottle still fizzing on the ground.

Some last meal, a chilli dog and a root beer. He turned his attention back to the trash.

“What’s that?” Was that a scrap of stationery wadded inside the chilli-dog’s wrapper?

Jack struggled to keep a fresh wave of nausea at bay as he retrieved the stained wrapper from the trashcan. You could see the watermark on the paper,
Eaton’s Highland Linen.
Pretty fancy paper to waste on an ex-con, but then, you wouldn’t want your friends talking behind your back. Jack returned to the bench, pinching his fingers to separate the stationery from its larded encasement. Moments later he had Sally’s letter.

…
Glad you’re out…Money…See you…Hotel Milner
…

“‘
Alex Goodman
’?” Jack muttered aloud.

Who the hell was Alex Goodman?

Jack brushed off the letter as best he could before slipping it into the breast pocket of his suit. Arno would not have thrown this letter away, he was sure of that. If Becker had seen this letter, he’d have kept it. Sooooo…

Arno must have surprised Sally at the bench. She managed to toss the letter before the bastard got to work on her. Jack felt another wave of bile threatening. If he had been at the prison when he was supposed to be, Sally Price might have been spared her ordeal, at least at Becker’s hand.

If he’d got up on time. If he hadn’t pitched a drunk the night before, or played cards—!

But then Jack told himself that even if he had been parked on the prison steps, even if he had taken Sally by the arm, Becker would still have been there and would surely have tracked them both. Wouldn’t he? And Arno certainly wouldn’t let Jack get away with Sally without a fight; why, he would have killed Jack right along with Sally. Sure he would! And then there’d be two scalps soaking in the pond. So it didn’t matter that Jack was hung over and late, did it? It hadn’t made two cents’ difference—that’s what Jack told himself. That was the dodge he tried to sell.

But his gut wasn’t buying it. And Oliver Bladehorn sure as hell wasn’t going to buy it. Jack sank to the wooden bench. Sally was gone, nothing he could do about that, but what about this character Goodman? What was Alex Goodman’s connection to this business? There was no doubt in Jack’s mind that Becker got everything out of Sally Price that she had to give. Becker would be waiting for Alex Goodman at the Milner Hotel—unless, of course, he didn’t need to. Unless Sally had sent him straight to the stolen cash and notes.

But had Sally ever known where to locate Bladehorn’s property? It was apparent that Jerry Driggers had stashed the loot someplace, or with someone, but what made Oliver Bladehorn think that a thief sleeping with Bladehorn’s wife would trust a cast-off girlfriend with that information?

The answer was that Bladehorn simply had no other lead to follow. But now there was a new name in the mix, a man who knew Sally, who obviously was taking great pains to remain out of sight as he squirreled Miss Price out of town. You didn’t do things like that for shits and grins, so Jack was betting, hoping, really, that Alex Goodman was somehow involved with the theft of Bladehorn’s cash and securities. Jack had to reach Goodman before Becker did, that much was clear. But how the hell do you get the drop on a killer you’ve never seen?

What did a butcher look like, anyhow?

Jack took a last look at Sally’s corpse. He could not afford to stick around.

“Sorry, Sal.”

He picked up his socks and shoes and limped along the shoreline back past the paddocks of the plant eaters and the cages of the big cats. The primate cage got his attention, chimps and orangutans fixing him with uncharacteristically silent stares.

Jack Romaine left the Cincinnati Zoo well before noon, hopping a single-truck streetcar heading south. He needed to put as much distance between himself and Swan Lake as he could. He was desperate for a drink. His hands were trembling in his lap and it wasn’t even noon, but Jack could not chance an unwelcome encounter at any of his usual haunts.

There was a woman in the car with a baby carriage. One of those perambulators that were becoming popular. Big rubber tires, pneumatic. Big hooped canopy. An infant socked away inside, impervious to sun or rain, the mother letting the car’s gentle sway prolong her baby’s slumber. She placed something near its head, a teething ring, maybe? Jack tried to imagine his darkhaired son waking from a deep sleep to find his father’s gift, the autographed ball waiting to be discovered beside Martin’s pillowing glove. Might be the last token Martin ever got from his old man. Because if Becker didn’t kill him, odds were Bladehorn would. After Fist broke his legs.

The joker in the deck was Alex Goodman. Fumbling a smoke from a damp pack, Jack tried to imagine how Goodman could plausibly be connected to the heist. Was he Jerry Drigger’s bosom buddy, or Sally’s brother-in-law, or third in a ménage à trois? Maybe he was humping Bladehorn’s missus. Talk about an inside job. Or maybe he was a fucking priest, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that some time after five o’clock Alex Goodman would enter the Milner Hotel expecting to meet Sally Price and Arno Becker would be waiting.

Jack felt a coil of smoke and nicotine working down. He didn’t know how he’d come out against a man who took scalps. It wasn’t the killing itself that gave pause. Jack had killed before. The whistle blew and you were up and over and it was balls and bayonets and barbed wire. Machine guns and shrapnel. The screams of men and animals drowned inside the concussion of artillery and tanks and grenades.

But war was a corporate slaughter. You fought as a group; you died en masse. Jack had killed any number of faceless enemies by martial order, but never by himself. What would it be like to face Arno Becker on his own?

And even assuming he got past Becker, was there any guarantee he’d get the time of day from Alex Goodman? What would he do if Goodman simply refused to talk? Could Jack beat or torture a man for information to save himself, or Martin, or Mamere? Or would he simply turn Goodman over to Fist Carlton and wash his own hands clean? Jack wasn’t kidding himself, these were sorry odds in a sorry hand, but he’d been called. He stubbed his smoke on the car’s lacquered sill.

It was time to show or fold.

The Hotel Milner was on Seventh, just off Vine. What could he do to improve the odds between now and five o’clock? First thing, was to clean up. Jack’s feet were still damp inside his socks, his woolen trousers clung to his calves, and his shirt was rank. He couldn’t go to the Milner like this.

Jack thumbed through the bills in his jacket. He’d filched a hundred bucks from the advance money that Mamere stashed under her cot and so for the first time in a long time, was cash rich. He’d be able to get some nice duds. Maybe take a car to the Empress after and get something in his stomach. No point in meeting this date on an empty stomach.

Or empty hands, either. He’d need a knife, at minimum, and maybe a pair of knuckles. Could get those from Spuds. Might as well pay off his marker while he was at it, make the Polack happy.

Jack dropped stiffly from the streetcar at West Fifth, found a café not far from the Carew Building. Mostly tradesman and merchants downtown. Manufacturers and railroaders didn’t get a lunch. Jack scanned the paper over eggs and hash browns and about a gallon of coffee. You couldn’t look at a newspaper without smelling money. Story on the front page said by September the Carew Building would be a pile of scrap. A skyscraper in its place. Forty nine stories tall. Forty nine! What kind of gelt did it take to build a place like that?

He checked the sports and the horses and was lighting his third Chesterfield when a clock reminded him of the hour. He stubbed out his cigarette, downed his coffee to the grounds. He could not afford to be late.

It took a couple of hours for Jack to get himself clean, clothed and armed. He crossed Vine around four on his way to the Milner. It was a nice hotel. You entered the lobby on ankle-deep rugs spread across an oak floor buffed to a pleasant sheen. Paintings all over, large oils, mostly. Landscapes of the Ohio or Mississippi. The obligatory portrait of the governor and General Grant. All displayed beneath electric lighting that was incandescent and expensive and mostly unnecessary.

Fair number of folks milling in the lobby, which suited Jack’s purpose. A banner over the entry to the bar greeted attendees to a convention of railroad executives. Pretty easy to spot that crowd, gents in their fifties and sixties with drinks and cigars and floozies flashing leg alongside. The usual complement of couples, married, courting or adulterating, drifting about.

Jack pulled a newly-bought Hamilton from his vest, checked it against a cabinet clock in the lobby. He returned the timepiece to his vest pocket, handling the fob like worry beads. Pausing to examine his reflection in one of the hotel’s many gilded mirrors.

He told himself that he fit right in. The man staring back from the glass did not look like some jerk scrapping for cash or booze. It was a clean-shaven man in the mirror, a well-boned comer in a brand new single-breasted frock. A silk four-in-hand. Studs for the lightly-striped shirt and a new pair of Cole Haan shoes

He cinched the knot of his tie. Act like you owned the place, that was the thing. Like you belonged.

He crossed toward the desk inhaling a mixed atmosphere of French perfume and Cuban cigars and looking smart. Jack paused along his measured course to buy a paper from a selection near the concierge, leaving the girl a tip; sufficient but not ostentatious. Trying to remain unimpressed with the gents in tails and cummerbunds tapping ashes into potted ferns. The women flat as boys in the little black dresses that were all the rage. Their cigarettes coiling smoke from the tips of ivory holders. Boas and beads.

He’d give anything for a drink and there was a bar to oblige, flouting inspection just beyond the lobby. You couldn’t buy booze, not even at the Milner, but you could bring your own. Jack would give much to join the murmur of conversation rising along that long brass rail, guys and gals consorting in mixed company. But he stopped himself, folding his paper as casually as he could manage before strolling past the bar to reconnoiter the front desk.

There were three clerks attending. Older man with the mien of a gatekeeper. Fella next to him looked fag. The third clerk keeping his eyes caged on the ledgers. No prospects there. Would have to be a bellhop, then. Jack took his time selecting the likeliest mark.

There he was, a kid kissing ass for tips. Chinstrap frayed at the edges. A tangle of unruly hair spilling below a cylinder of wool and tassel.

Jack strolled over.

“Sir?”

“Looking for a room.”

“Check-in’s at the desk, sir.”

“Said I was looking,” Jack displayed his wallet. “Didn’t say anything about checking in.”

The kid pushed Jack’s wallet away.

“Not here.”

“Where, then?”

“By the lift.”

“After you.”

The bellboy hefted a couple of bags on the way over.

“I don’t have much time,” the kid said.

“Room is already reserved,” Jack pressed a buck into his hand. “Price is the name. Sally Price.”

“You wanna number?”

“Yeah. And whether she’s checked in.”

“Wait in the lobby.” The kid lifting the bags again in response to the elevator’s descent. “Soon’s I drop these off, I’ll be back.”

Jack found a chair in the lobby below a framed oil of a river-boat. Hiding behind his
Enquirer
and trying to ignore the sweat that threatened to stain his expensively starched collar. Didn’t take more than a month for the bellboy to get back.

“Got something for me?”

“Gonna cost you another buck.”

Jack was already slipping him the bill.

“There’s a room, all right. Paid in advance. The lady ain’t checked in yet, though.”

“Anybody else checked in?”

“You, ah…you got a relationship with this lady, sir? This Miz Price?”

Jack produced a brand new five-dollar bill.

“Let’s say I’m her husband.”

The kid grinned.

“Husband? Really? Well, that’s queer as turtles ’cause there’s a gent already up there says he’s her husband, too.”

Upstart little fuck.