Windy City Blues (21 page)

It was after midnight when I finally reached Brigitte. Yes, she’d gotten my message about Jade. She was terribly sorry, but since she couldn’t do anything to help him now that he was dead, she hadn’t bothered to try to reach me.

“We’re about to part company, Brigitte. If you didn’t know the guy was dead when you sent me up to Winthrop, you’re going to have to prove it. Not to me, but to the cops. I’m talking to Lieutenant Mallory at the Central District in the morning to tell him the rigmarole you spun me. They’ll also be able to
figure out if you were more interested in finding Corinne or your cat.”

There was a long silence at the other end. When she finally spoke, the hint of Southern was pronounced. “Can we talk in the morning before you call the police? Maybe I haven’t been as frank as I should have. I’d like you to hear the whole story before you do anything rash.”

Just say no, just say no, I chanted to myself. “You be at the Belmont Diner at eight, Brigitte. You can lay it out for me but I’m not making any promises.”

I got up at seven, ran the dog over to Belmont Harbor and back and took a long shower. I figured even if I put a half hour into grooming myself I wasn’t going to look as good as Brigitte, so I just scrambled into jeans and a cotton sweater.

It was almost ten minutes after eight when I got to the diner, but Brigitte hadn’t arrived yet. I picked up a
Herald-Star
from the counter and took it over to a booth to read with a cup of coffee. The headline shook me to the bottom of my stomach.

FOOTBALL HERO SURVIVES FATE
WORSE THAN DEATH

Charles “Jade” Pierce, once the smoothest man on the Bears’ fearsome defense, eluded offensive blockers once again. This time the stakes were higher than a touchdown, though: the offensive lineman was Death.

I thought Jeremy Logan was overdoing it by a wide margin but I read the story to the end. The standard procedure with a body is to take it to a hospital for a death certificate before it goes to the morgue. The patrol team hauled Jade to Beth Israel for a perfunctory exam. There the intern, noticing a slight sweat on Jade’s neck and hands, dug deeper for a pulse than I’d been willing to go. She’d found faint but unmistakable signs of life buried deep in the mountain of flesh and had brought him back to consciousness.

Logan then concluded with the obligatory rundown on Jade’s career and its demise, with a pious sniff about the use and abuse of sports heroes left to die in the gutter when they could no longer please the crowd. I read it through twice, including the fulsome last line, before Brigitte arrived.

“You see, Jade’s still alive, so I couldn’t have killed him,” she announced, sweeping into the booth in a cloud of Chanel.

“Did you know he was in a coma when you came to see me yesterday?”

She raised plucked eyebrows in hauteur. “Are you questioning my word?”

One of the waitresses chugged over to take our order. “You want your fruit and yogurt, right, Vic? And what else?”

“Green pepper and cheese omelet with rye toast. Thanks, Barbara. What’ll yours be, Brigitte?” Dry toast and black coffee, no doubt.

“Is your fruit
really
fresh?” she demanded.

Barbara rolled her eyes. “Honey, the melon pinched me so hard I’m black-and-blue. Better not take a chance if you’re sensitive.”

Brigitte set her shoulder—covered today in green broadcloth with black piping—and got ready to do battle. I cut her off before the first “How dare you” rolled to its ugly conclusion.

“This isn’t the kind of place where the maître d’ wilts at your frown and races over to make sure madam is happy. They don’t care if you come back or not. In fact, about now they’d be happier if you’d leave. You can check out my fruit when it comes and order some if it tastes right to you.”

“I’ll just have wheat toast and black coffee,” she said icily. “And make sure they don’t put any butter on it.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “Wheat toast, margarine instead of butter. Just kidding, hon,” she added as Brigitte started to tear into her again. “You gotta learn to take it if you want to dish it out.”

“Did you bring me here to be insulted?” Brigitte demanded when Barbara had left.

“I brought you here to talk. It didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t know diner etiquette. We can fight if you want to. Or you can tell me about Jade and Corinne. And your cat. I had a visit from Joel Sirop last night.”

She swallowed some coffee and made a face. “They should rinse the pots with vinegar.”

“Well, keep it to yourself. They won’t pay you a consulting fee for telling them about it. Joel tell you he’d come around hunting Lady Iva?”

She frowned at me over the rim of the coffee cup, then nodded fractionally.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the damned cat when you were in my office yesterday?”

Her poise deserted her for a moment; she looked briefly ashamed. “I thought you’d look for Corinne. I didn’t think I could persuade you to hunt down my cat. Anyway, Corinne must have taken Iva with her, so I thought if you found her you’d find the cat, too.”

“Which one do you really want back?”

She started to bristle again, then suddenly laughed. It took ten years from her face. “You wouldn’t ask that if you’d ever lived with a teenager. And Corinne’s always been a stranger to me. She was eighteen months old when I left for college and I only saw her a week or two at a time on vacations. She used to worship me. When she moved in with me I thought
it would be a piece of cake: I’d get her fixed up with the right crowd and the right school, she’d do her best to be like me, and the system would run itself. Instead, she put on a lot of weight, won’t listen to me about her eating, slouches around with the kids in the neighborhood when my back is turned, the whole nine yards. Jade’s influence. It creeps through every now and then when I’m not thinking.”

She looked at my blueberries. I offered them to her and she helped herself to a generous spoonful.

“And that was the other thing. Jade. We got together when I was an Alabama cheerleader and he was the biggest hero in town. I thought I’d really caught me a prize, my yes, a big prize. But the first, last, and only thing in a marriage with a football player is football. And him, of course, how many sacks he made, how many yards he allowed, all that boring crap. And if he has to sit out a game, or he gives up a touchdown, or he doesn’t get the glory, watch out. Jade was mean. He was mean on the field, he was mean off it. He broke my arm once.”

Her voice was level but her hand shook a little as she lifted the coffee cup to her mouth. “I got me a gun and shot him in the leg the next time he came at me. They put it down as a hunting accident in the papers, but he never tried anything on me after that—not physical, I mean. Until his career ended. Then he got real, real ugly. The papers crucified me for abandoning
him when his career was over. They never had to live with him.”

She was panting with emotion by the time she finished. “And Corinne shared the papers’ views?” I asked gently.

She nodded. “We had a bad fight on Sunday. She wanted to go to a sleepover at one of the girls’ in the neighborhood. I don’t like that girl and I said no. We had a gale-force battle after that. When I got home from work on Monday she’d taken off. First I figured she’d gone to this girl’s place. They hadn’t seen her, though, and she hadn’t shown up at school. So I figured she’d run off to Jade. Now … I don’t know. I would truly appreciate it if you’d keep looking, though.”

Just say no, Vic, I chanted to myself. “I’ll need a thousand up front. And more names and addresses of friends, including people in Mobile. I’ll check in with Jade at the hospital. She might have gone to him, you know, and he sent her on someplace else.”

“I stopped by there this morning. They said no visitors.”

I grinned. “I’ve got friends in high places.” I signaled Barbara for the check. “Speaking of which, how was the Vice President?”

She looked as though she were going to give me one of her stiff rebuttals, but then she curled her lip and drawled, “Just like every other good old boy, honey, just like every other good old boy.”

Lotty Herschel, an obstetrician associated with Beth Israel, arranged for me to see Jade Pierce. “They tell me he’s been difficult. Don’t stand next to the bed unless you’re wearing a padded jacket.”

“You want him, you can have him,” the floor head told me. “He’s going home tomorrow morning. Frankly, since he won’t let anyone near him, they ought to release him right now.”

My palms felt sweaty when I pushed open the door to Jade’s room. He didn’t throw anything when I came in, didn’t even turn his head to stare through the restraining rails surrounding the bed. His mountain of flesh poured through them, ebbing away from a rounded summit in the middle. The back of his head, smooth and shiny as a piece of polished jade, reflected the ceiling light into my eyes.

“I don’t need any goddamned ministering angels, so get the fuck out of here,” he growled to the window.

“That’s a relief. My angel act never really got going.”

He turned his head at that. His black eyes were mean, narrow slits. If I were a quarterback I’d hand him the ball and head for the showers.

“What are you, the goddamned social worker?”

“Nope. I’m the goddamned detective who found you yesterday before you slipped off to the great huddle in the sky.”

“Come on over then, so I can kiss your ass,” he spat venomously.

I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. “I didn’t mean to save your life: I tried getting them to send you to the morgue. The meat wagon crew double-crossed me.”

The mountain shook and rumbled. It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing. “You’re right, detective: you ain’t no angel. So what do you want? True confessions on why I was such a bad boy? The name of the guy who got me the stuff?”

“As long as you’re not hurting anyone but yourself I don’t care what you do or where you get your shit. I’m here because Brigitte hired me to find Corinne.”

His face set in ugly lines again. “Get out.”

I didn’t move.

“I said get out!” He raised his voice to a bellow.

“Just because I mentioned Brigitte’s name?”

“Just because if you’re pally with that broad, you’re a snake by definition.”

“I’m not pally with her. I met her yesterday. She’s paying me to find her sister.” It took an effort not to yell back at him.

“Corinne’s better off without her,” he growled, turning the back of his head to me again.

I didn’t say anything, just stood there. Five minutes passed. Finally he jeered, without looking at me. “Did the sweet little martyr tell you I broke her arm?”

“She mentioned it, yes.”

“She tell you how that happened?”

“Please don’t tell me how badly she misunderstood you. I don’t want to throw up my breakfast.”

At that he swung his gigantic face around toward me again. “Com’ere.”

When I didn’t move, he sighed and patted the bed rail. “I’m not going to slug you, honest. If we’re going to talk, you gotta get close enough for me to see your face.”

I went over to the bed and straddled the chair, resting my arms on its back. Jade studied me in silence, then grunted as if to say I’d passed some minimal test.

“I won’t tell you Brigitte didn’t understand me. Broad had my number from day one. I didn’t break her arm, though: that was B. B. Wilder. Old Gunshot. Thought he was my best friend on the club, but it turned out he was Brigitte’s. And then, when I come home early from a hunting trip and found her in bed with him, we all got carried away. She loved the excitement of big men fighting. It’s what made her a football groupie to begin with down in Alabama.”

I tried to imagine ice-cold Brigitte flushed with excitement while the Bears’ right tackle and defensive end fought over her. It didn’t seem impossible.

“So B. B. broke her arm but I agreed to take the rap. Her little old modeling career was just getting off
the ground and she didn’t want her good name sullied. And besides that, she kept hoping for a reconciliation with her folks, at least with their wad, and they’d never fork over if she got herself some ugly publicity committing violent adultery. And me, I was just the baddest boy the Bears ever fielded; one more mark didn’t make that much difference to me.” The jeering note returned to his voice.

“She told me it was when you retired that things deteriorated between you.”

“Things deteriorated—what a way to put it. Look, detective what did you say your name was? V. I., that’s a hell of a name for a girl. What did your mamma call you?”

“Victoria,” I said grudgingly. “And no one calls me Vicki, so don’t even think about it.” I prefer not to be called a girl, either, much less a broad, but Jade didn’t seem like the person to discuss that particular issue with.

“Victoria, huh? Things deteriorated, yeah, like they was a picnic starting out. I was born dumb and I didn’t get smarter for making five hundred big ones a year. But I wouldn’t hit a broad, even one like Brigitte who could get me going just looking at me. I broke a lot of furniture, though, and that got on her nerves.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, I can see that. It’d bother me, too.”

He gave a grudging smile. “See, the trouble is, I
grew up poor. I mean, dirt poor. I used to go to the projects here with some of the black guys on the squad, you know, Christmas appearances, shit like that. Those kids live in squalor, but I didn’t own a pair of shorts to cover my ass until the county social worker come ’round to see why I wasn’t in school.”

“So you broke furniture because you grew up without it and didn’t know what else to do with it?”

“Don’t be a wiseass, Victoria. I’m sure your mamma wouldn’t like it.”

I made a face—he was right about that.

“You know the LeBlancs, right? Oh, you’re a Yankee, Yankees don’t know shit if they haven’t stepped in it themselves. LeBlanc Gas, they’re one of the biggest names on the Gulf Coast. They’re a long,
long
way from the Pierces of Florette.