Applaud the Hollow Ghost (2 page)

*   *   *

T
HAT WAS OVER TWENTY
years ago.

Now I was standing in a stuffy, noisy corridor outside Branch 66 of the Circuit Court of Cook County, at Twenty-sixth and California, about eight and a half miles south of where Saint Robert's High School used to be before they tore it down. Lambert Fleming was there, too. I saw him. He was backed up against the wall, breathing hard, hugging his soft body, and staring down at the floor. Ten yards down the hall, sheriff's deputies were pushing back a group of about a dozen angry people.

The little mob was shouting at Lammy—chanting actually: “Filthy pervert! Lock him away! Filthy pervert! Lock him away!”

Lammy's lawyer, Renata Carroway, took one of his arms and I took the other and we led him away from the crowd. Renata and I had laid low until after his bond was set. The judge never dreamed that a loser like Lammy, a maintenance worker at an animal shelter who had lived with his mother all his life on the second floor of a two-flat, could hire private counsel, much less come up with bond money. Otherwise, with that crowd in the spectators' seats, he'd have set a higher bond. No one had been more surprised than Lammy when we showed up.

But about a year or so earlier I'd been drinking brandy with the Lady in front of the fireplace at her home on the lakefront in Evanston. She's old enough to be my mother and she has a name—Helene Bower. But everyone calls her “the Lady.” She's great to talk to, and that evening, although she hadn't asked, I'd been trying to explain—again—why I acted the way I did sometimes, and I'd spilled the whole sad Lambert Fleming story.

The Lady's the sort of person who actually hears what you're saying and remembers an awful lot of it. She must have remembered Lammy's name, anyway, because she'd cut an article about his arrest out of the
Chicago Sun-Times
and left it at my door with the supermarket coupons she clips for me every Thursday. No note. Just the newspaper article.

So now Lammy was free on bond and I'd hired one of my favorite criminal defense attorneys for him. He even had his own private investigator now, to help his lawyer find out what had really happened.

Because this time, damn it, I wasn't going to walk away on him—no matter what. Although I sure hoped I wouldn't help his lawyer find out he was really as guilty as everyone thought. I was going to help him this time, but I certainly didn't want to learn that Lambert Fleming really
had
exposed himself and sexually assaulted that cute little girl—like she said he had.

Renata and I walked Lammy out to her BMW and I watched as she drove away with him. He hadn't said one word to me. He acted like he couldn't even see me.

CHAPTER
2

O
N
T
UESDAY MORNING, THE
day after Lambert Fleming was let out on bond, the weather wasn't bad for January in Chicago: temperature in the mid-twenties and snowing like crazy. From my place in Evanston I drove south on Sheridan Road, into and through the city's East Rogers Park neighborhood, then west on Foster. If traffic was slower than usual it wasn't due to the snow, but the salt trucks all over the place. This isn't Louisville, or D.C., or even Philadelphia, after all. When it snows here, entire political regimes are at risk, so we smother the stuff in salt before it can even hit the pavement. That's why my Chevy Cavalier was on its fourth muffler in eight years.

Putting up Lammy's bond had exhausted what remained of my share of the $40,000 Breaker Hanafan left in a gym bag on my doorstep the previous October. Breaker's a crook, but it hadn't surprised me when he'd returned the bag after I'd carelessly left it at his place. The forty grand had been paid me by a very pretty, but drug-addled, former investigative reporter for a local TV station. Actually, “paid” isn't the right word. But she certainly wasn't about to ask for it back.

Anyway, now it was gone, but as long as Lammy didn't jump bail, there'd be a bond refund at the close of his case, whatever the disposition was. I wanted to get it over with in a hurry and get my money back, which is why I was ignoring Renata Carroway's order not to do anything without checking with her first. I hadn't actually
promised
her, after all.

The victim of Lammy's alleged sexual attack was eight-year-old Patricia Connolly. From the newspaper reports and some checking I'd already done, I knew that everyone called her “Trish.” Her mother was dead and she lived just down the street from Lammy, with her grandmother and her father. The grandmother, Rosa Parillo, went to Mass every day of the year and usually stayed after to recite the rosary in Italian out loud with her cronies. Trish's father—Rosa's son-in-law—was Steve Connolly, who'd parlayed his performance as a precinct captain into a job as a senior snowplow driver at O'Hare Airport from November to April. Steve played a lot of golf the other six months, when he wasn't getting out the vote or hanging out with cronies of his own—mostly Italian, like Rosa's, but hardly the churchgoing type—at Melba's Coffee Shop on North Avenue.

I was on my way to talk to Lammy, but as I got closer I changed my mind. Whether that was because it would
really
be better to look around a little first, or whether I just wasn't ready to face him yet, I'd leave to my analyst—if I ever needed one.

The snow regulations prohibited street parking, but I found a plowed lot beside a grocery store. The sign said “For Customers Only,” so I went inside and bought a quart of chocolate milk and found a pay phone.

“D'par'men'AviationO'HareSnowR'moval.” The way he said it, it was one word.

“Steve Connolly, please,” I said.

“Steve ain't in today.”

“But it's snowing like hell. I thought he—”

“Steve ain't here. Personal day. Wanna leave a message?”

“No thanks, I—”

“Good.” He hung up. Probably busy. And shorthanded at that.

I unfolded the ear flaps of my wool cap, zipped up my jacket, and walked four blocks through a beautiful swirling snowstorm to the Connolly house, a well-kept brick bungalow on a corner lot just a half block south of where Lammy lived. It was a safe bet no one there was anxious to talk to me, and I didn't bother to knock on their door.

In the alley, tire tracks that were rapidly filling with snow still showed that someone had backed out of the Connolly garage within the last hour or so, and hadn't come back. It wasn't likely that Trish or Rosa would be driving anywhere, so it had to be Steve. I continued on down the alley to the rear of Lammy's place. The owners lived on the first floor, but were retired and spent the winters in Florida with their son. Lammy's mother had been renting the second-floor flat for over thirty-five years. Her other child, a daughter ten years older than Lammy, was divorced and lived somewhere else.

Most of the homes that backed up to the alley had garages, but not this one. A waist-high chain-link fence enclosed the backyard, its gate trapped half open by the snow. The two-flat building itself was brick but, like so many others in the city, its once-open back stairs and porches had long ago been framed in and enclosed in wood siding. Through the blowing snow, I could see the faded blue-gray paint that was peeling away from the vertical boards. Ninety percent of the enclosed porches in the city must get the same blue-gray paint. Most of it starts peeling off in a year or so.

I went through the gate and into the backyard. If anyone saw me, they kept it to themselves. The ground was covered with snow, but I imagined a sidewalk that ran from the gate to the enclosed porch, and I followed it.

According to what the state's attorney told the judge, this was where Lammy had dragged Trish. It had been cold out and she was hurrying home from her cousin's house. She'd been watching TV and gotten bored and decided to walk home when her father was late picking her up. It was less than two blocks and she'd taken the alley and wasn't paying much attention. She tried to scream and get away but he grabbed her from behind and put a gloved hand over her mouth. Then he dragged her inside the porch enclosure. He tore open her coat and pulled down her jeans and her panties. Then he pushed her down onto her back and … about that time she blacked out. The medical report Renata Carroway had seen spoke of contusions on Trish's jaw and cheek, and lacerations inside her lips—from her own teeth. There were bruises and scratches on her lower abdomen, and on one of her thighs, too, but no other significant wounds, and no lacerations or abrasions on her buttocks or the backs of her legs. The findings were inconclusive as to penetration. There was no sign of ejaculation, no blood traces other than her own.

She'd apparently identified Lammy, even if it was too dark for her to get a good look at him. He had his pants open and exposed himself. She saw that. He was white, and he had on a dark blue coat with a hood over his head, “like that Mr. Fleming always has,” she'd said.

I tried the door to the porch enclosure. It wasn't locked and I stepped inside and stood on a slab of rough, cracked concrete. Out of the snow, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the semidarkness. Wooden steps led up to the first and second floors, and a cement stairwell led down to an exterior basement entrance. I looked down … and locked eyes with the man staring back up at me.

It was Lammy, all right, standing at the bottom of the short stairway in his shirtsleeves. He didn't move, and somehow it looked as though he'd been standing in the same spot for a long time. I yanked off my cap and his eyes widened with sudden recognition, then quickly shifted away from my face. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but closed it again and lowered his head.

He held a dog cradled in his arms like an infant lying on its back. The dog was a mutt with no collar and a ragged coat. Almost certainly part German shepherd. Very certainly dead. Its body was stiff, and dark blood stained and clotted the fur around where its genitals used to be.

CHAPTER
3

“H
E WAS ALREADY DEAD
,” Lammy said.

“Of course he was. Jeez, I didn't think
you
killed him.”

“No, I mean he was already dead when they … when they cut on him.”

“What are you—”

“A stray. I been tryin' for a week to catch him, take him to the shelter.” He spoke in a monotone and never looked up at me. “Musta got hit by a car and died and somebody saw it and … and then they did this.”

“How do
you
know?”

“I know stuff about animals. He didn't feel anything, I don't think. Dead already.”

My guess was he didn't really know, but was trying hard to convince himself the dog wasn't conscious when it was cut. Even though I hadn't talked to him since he was fifteen years old, my problem wasn't believing that Lammy might “know stuff about animals,” but that he might know anything worthwhile at all—about
anything.

“… rang and I answered it,” he was saying. “A man said I should go downstairs and see what they oughta do to … to me. That was real early. I was scared and I didn't go down for a long time and—”

“Is that basement open?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. But there's no heat in there.”

“That's even better. We'll put the dog inside for a while, and go upstairs and make some phone calls.”

An hour later I'd learned the police weren't much interested in a dead dog, castrated or not, but Lammy was welcome to go into the station and make a report if he wanted. I'd also had Lammy's telephone calls rerouted through a service that would try to trace any calls he got, and I loaned him a cellular phone I sometimes use that's listed to Barney Green, who'd once been a partner of mine—back when I used to have a law license.

Lammy said that after his arrest his mother had been kept awake all night with threatening phone calls. The next day his sister, Elaine, picked her up and took her to Elaine's house in Cicero. It was a tiny house and there wasn't much room for Lammy's mother, and there certainly wasn't room for Lammy to come, too—even if Elaine would have invited him. Which she didn't.

“No room,” Lammy repeated. “Besides, she said she's worried what her neighbors would say, you know, 'cause she's got daughters, and—”

“Right. I got it.” We were standing in the kitchen. I wanted to leave, to get away from there. I wanted to help him, but I didn't want to have to talk to him. It was too depressing.

“I'd rather stay here, anyway,” he said. “I'll lock the doors.”

“Have you ever stayed anywhere else overnight in your life, other than right here?”

“Just when I was in jail. That's all. I never been anywhere.” He was looking out the window. “I read a lot, though.”

“I know. I heard all about what they took.” The cops had confiscated a stash of what the newspapers described as “sexually explicit, lewd, and pornographic materials” found in Lammy's room.

“No, not that,” he said. “I mean … history.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, mostly books about war. The other stuff—the magazines—it's just, you know…”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Look, I'll go get my car and come back and pick up the dog. I'll see that it's buried, okay? Or cremated or whatever they do. Come to think of it, is there a veterinarian at the shelter where you work?”

“Different ones, on different days. The one I like is Doctor Daniels.” He gave me the vet's office address.

“Everything'll be fine,” I said. “I'll call you every so often on the cellular phone, see how you're doing.”

“Uh-huh.” He stared down at his shoes. Except when I'd startled him with the dog in his arms, he hadn't looked straight at me once.

I was halfway down the back stairs when I thought of something else. I went back and stuck my head in the door and found him still standing in the same spot in the kitchen.