Kaleidoscope Page 4

  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 wer
e 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!

  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.

  Chapter four

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

  Jack 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 peram
bulators 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.