A Time for Secrets (9 page)

“So you found Vernon Taber for Ronald Meek. When was this?”

“I met with Taber yesterday afternoon. Then I went over and told my client I’d found him.”

“Was Meek going to get together with Taber last night?”

“No. I didn’t tell him where Taber was.”

“You didn’t?”

“That was the deal. If Taber didn’t want to see him, I didn’t have to tell Meek where he lived.”

“And people pay you for this?”

“I always get money up front.”

“Why did Meek want you to find this guy?” he asked again.

I shrugged. “He said the last time they saw each other was nineteen fifty-nine. He gave me a first name and a partial address. That’s how I found Taber. That part has to be true. The rest of it…who knows.”

“Nineteen fifty-nine? Jesus.”

“They were killed by the same guy, right?”

He nodded.

“One guy who wanted them both dead. You find out what they had in common, and you’ll find out who killed them.”

“Thank you, Einstein,” he said with a smirk. “Here’s how I see it, the thing they had in common is you.”

And that’s when it hit me. Whoever killed them probably didn’t want them to meet, wouldn’t have known that I didn’t tell Meek how to find Vernon, and killed them to keep them from meeting. But how would someone know any of—I was followed. Someone had been following me since Meek showed up in my office, and I hadn’t even noticed.

“By the way, where were you last night?” Haggerty asked me.

“I was home in bed.”

“Alone?”

I smiled. “No. I was in bed with a Chicago police officer.”

For a moment, Haggerty thought it was a joke. Then I saw the wheels move, and he put two and two together. I knew he’d talked to Harker on the phone about one or two of my cases. Now he knew why Harker was interested.

He raised his eyebrows a moment then lowered them.

“Keep your nose out of this, Nick.”

I actually thought that was a pretty good idea, so I promised I would.

§ § § §

The minute I got home that afternoon, Harker sat me down and had a serious talk with me. Not surprisingly, he’d gotten the scoop on my involvement in the murders without having to ask me about it—one of the joys of loving a police officer with a telephone and a disability check.

“You’re going to stay out of this,” he said, as though talking to a child. I half expected to be grounded. “This is a murder investigation. Two murder investigations.”

“I have no intention of getting involved,” I said reasonably.

“If you keep interfering in police investigations, they’ll get your license pulled.”

“I just said I was keeping out of it.”

He sat there looking at me like he didn’t believe me. I believed me. I didn’t understand why he didn’t. Well, maybe I did understand, but I wasn’t in the mood to admit it.

I stormed out of the apartment and spent the next few days at the Daly Center digging around the County Clerk’s office for information on prospective employees for Peterson/Palmer. You’d be surprised by the kind of riffraff who want to work in the financial industry. I rejected three out of the ten names they’d given me, which seemed higher than normal. Must be the recession. Even crooks were hurting for work.

Friday morning, I puttered around my office. When I’d moved in the week before, we’d set the desk in the middle of the room and left it there. At the time, I’d just wanted to get the move over with; decorating was the furthest thing from my mind. Now it began to bother me. The new office was about twice the size of the old one, so sitting at my desk in the middle of the room, I felt like I was adrift in a sea of sculpted brown carpet.

I tried to decide whether I wanted the desk to sit in front of the bay windows looking at the door, so my clients could daydream out the window over my shoulder. Or, since I spent much of my time alone, did I want the desk pointed at the window so I could daydream myself?

I thought I might set the desk parallel to the far wall, which would leave lots of room for my one lonely guest chair—I supposed I could get another to keep it company. Then I could move the file cabinet and my coat rack down into the quirky little dip thing. That still left the room seeming very empty, but I guessed I’d eventually fill it up. Maybe invest in some large potted plants that I could let die. That would fill some space.

Around eleven, there was a knock on the door. Before I answered it, I wondered if it might be one of my neighbors. I’d briefly met the CPA, Sylvia Watson. She was a matronly woman with battleship gray hair who disapproved of me on sight. I hadn’t met Madame Torneau yet and assumed she’d be the more interesting neighbor.

I opened the door and did not find either of my neighbors standing there. Instead, I found a guy about my own age, red-haired with freckles, on the short side, holding a manila envelope clutched to his chest.

“Hi,” he said. “Are you Nick Nowak?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“You’re hard to find. First, I went downtown but there’s nothing there but an empty office. I thought maybe you’d disappeared completely, but I found the manager of the building and he gave me this address. Except, of course, when I got here it hardly seemed like I was in the right place.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“I guess.” He didn’t make a move to come inside. Maybe I needed to make my office more inviting. Then he said, “This won’t take long, though.”

“What won’t take long?”

“I just need to drop this off.” He held out the package. I took it from him. It was a standard size, nine by twelve. Whatever was inside was slightly smaller and about a half an inch thick. Some kind of notebook, maybe. On the outside, my name and old address were written in a shaky cursive.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, though I already had my suspicions.

“Ronald Meek gave it to me.”

“Come in and sit down. I have a couple questions.”

He took a reluctant step into my office. I wished I had something to offer him. A soda or coffee. I wondered if I should get one of those little box-sized refrigerators, the kind kids used in dorm rooms. If he had a drink in his hand he might not be so ready to run away.

“When did Ronald give this to you?”

“Last week. I think it was Friday. It might have been Thursday.” He looked at me closely then said, “I’ve made a mistake haven’t I? I should have given this to the police. At first, I thought you were a friend or family, that this was strictly personal, but it’s got something to do with his murder, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

Of course it had something to do with his murder. There wasn’t any reason in the world Ronald would want me to have his last will and testament or whatever other personal thing this guy thought he was carrying. “Who are you, by the way?” I asked.

“Oh, sorry. My name is Miles Edmunds. I live across the hall from Ronald.”

“Were the two of you close?”

“Not really. I was kind of surprised when he gave me the package and said to give it to you if anything happened to him. I mean, why me, right?”

I could tell the idea of giving me the package still made him nervous, so I said, “You did the right thing. You did what Ronald wanted.”

A look of relief flashed across his face, and he visibly relaxed.

“When he gave you the package did he indicate why he thought something might happen to him?”

He shook his head. “He didn’t look so good. I thought maybe he was sick.”

“The night he was killed, did you hear anything?”

He blushed. “I heard the gunshot, but I thought it was a car backfiring or someone’s TV. I guess I should have known better. I keep wishing I had. I could have looked out the window at least, gotten a look at the guy.”

“That wouldn’t have mattered,” I said. “Ronald was killed execution-style which suggests a professional. And if it was a professional you either wouldn’t have seen them or you wouldn’t have seen enough to identify them.”

“You mean he was killed by the mob?” Miles asked.

“I don’t have any reason to think that. Do you?”

“No, no, I don’t. You said professional, so I thought…” The room got quiet, then Miles felt like he had to fill the silence. “Ronald was a nice old man. I kind of liked him. He was retired, wasn’t he? I think he said he used to be a cook in a restaurant. Do you think he gambled? Is that why he got killed?”

“Maybe,” I said. I knew that didn’t have anything to do with the two murders, but there was no reason to give this guy information he didn’t need.

“Did Ronald have any friends?” I asked.

Miles shook his head. “I don’t think so. Or, at least, none that came by. Whenever I ran into him he’d talk up a storm. You know, sort of desperate for companionship. He told me he used to drink a lot but then had to stop. For his health, I guess. I got the impression his friends were too busy drinking to keep in touch with him.”

I tried to think if there was anything else I needed to ask. When I came up blank, I said, “Thank you. If you think of anything else will you call me?”

I offered him one of my cards, one with the old number crossed out and the new number written in. Something I’d spent the first hour doing that morning while I groggily drank some to-go coffee I’d gotten at the White Hen.

“Oh wait,” Miles said suddenly. “Maybe Ronald did have a friend. He mentioned moving to California, last winter, I think. Yeah, he was complaining about the cold. Said he hoped it was his last winter here. That his friend from California might help him buy a house in the desert and that he’d never be cold again.”

“Is that it?” I asked, as my mind flipped through a few possibilities. Was Vernon his friend from California? But how would Vernon help him buy a house? Cutting hair in your dining room couldn’t provide much money. He had to be as broke as Meek.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Thank you.”

Miles nodded at me and walked out of my office. He’d never even sat down.

As soon as he left, I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope. Inside, I found a journal with a blue gray cover and a black cloth spine. One of the journals Ronald had mentioned in our first meeting, one of the ones I’d seen when I looked over his apartment. Suddenly, I remembered the gap I’d seen on the shelf. A journal had been missing, and this was it.

I let the journal sit there in the middle of my blotter for a minute or so. The thing to do was to call Haggerty and tell him about the journal. I’d promised him I’d stay out of this. I’d promised Harker. I’d promised myself. So, why was I even thinking about reading the journal?

Because two men were dead. One who’d once done me a big favor and another who, as nearly as I could tell, was an innocent man. It looked like I might have been the one who’d led their killer to them. If I hadn’t been walking around in such a fog, I might have noticed that I was being tailed. Reading the journal seemed the least I could do.

I opened to the first page. It was lined in light blue. The pages had aged, but not yet yellowed. At the top of the first page it said, “January 1st, 1959.” The handwriting was similar to that on the outside of the envelope, but more confident, not as shaky. Whether the difference was age or panic, I couldn’t be sure.

Skimming the first page I saw that the entry was about a New Year’s Eve party the night before. Ronald had drunk too much and complained about his hangover. Like he’d done with my name, everyone he mentioned seemed to be disguised. He used initials a lot. The party had been given by B. K and C drank too much and were:

…deliciously scandalous. SR looked adorable in the camel-colored cashmere sweater I gave him at Christmas. He wore it with the teal tie I’d given him for his birthday in October. I was thrilled that he’d remembered it. He really is the sweetest man.

I remembered Ronald saying that there was enough information in here to get people arrested at the time. That was why there were no last names. He’d been so frightened he hadn’t even used first names, just initials and nicknames.

I wondered if SR was code for Vernon, and if so, what did SR stand for? I flipped forward. The daily entries were mundane, full of the basic facts of Ronald Meek’s life in 1959. At the time, he worked as a waiter at The Pump Room. I’d never been there; it was far too pricey. But I’d been hearing about the place since I was a kid. Frank Sinatra even mentioned it in some song.

In the sections about the restaurant Meek used full names, and when it came to the celebrities who came into the restaurant, he put their full names in capital letters. In early February he wrote:

…JUDY GARLAND came into the restaurant tonight. I would have given anything to wait on her, just giving her a glass of water would have been sheer heaven, but Arturo had to give booth one to his pet, James Corker. I despise James Corker.

Apparently, no one would arrest you for being an asshole in 1959, so James Corker got his full name. I found more mentions of SR that February. They went together and saw the touring company of
South Pacific
at the Shubert. Ronald liked the chorus boys and teased SR that they might meet a couple of them at someplace called The Lair.

Every couple of days there would be a short entry like BJ SR or SR-F. Obviously, these were references to his sex life with SR. In March, I ran across a longer entry.

SR is so romantic. He showed up at my apartment with flowers and candy, courting me, like he wanted me to be his girl. I suppose in a way I am. He’s so much more masculine than I am, and the crowd at The Lair is always asking him what he’s doing with a fey little number like me. Well, they can go jump in the lake for all I care. SR loves me. That’s all that’s important.

Minutes after he walked in, he had me on the divan French kissing me like a native Parisian. When I’d come up for air I’d get lost in the delicious smell of pomade and Old Spice. I wore a brand new sky blue rayon shirt and he nearly tore it off me. I tried to pretend I was mad at him about that, but I couldn’t keep up the pretense, I was too interested in getting his clothes off.

SR has a well-developed body. He could be on the cover of
Tomorrow’s Man
, which just delights me. I have my own personal body-builder. When we had all of our clothes off, he rubbed his muscled chest against my own somewhat frailer one. But he didn’t seem to mind my frailty, not if the swelling of his cock meant anything. He rubbed against me until I thought the friction would set the divan on fire.