Applaud the Hollow Ghost (23 page)

I thought of calling ahead, but that might just scare him away.

*   *   *

T
HREE HOURS LATER
I signed in at the desk, took the elevator up two floors, and knocked on the door.

“Man, am I glad to see you,” Jason whispered. He slipped his tall body through the narrow opening into the hall and closed the door behind him. “Dude's drivin' me crazy, man. I mean, I got no roommate so there's an extra bed for him, but the dude's gotta be almost as old as
you,
man, and he still makes me feel like I'm in
charge
of him or something.”

“Why didn't you call me?” I asked.

“Because I promised I wouldn't when he first showed up, which was stupid, but then I couldn't go back on my word. Except I been giving some serious thought to doing that all day. Especially now when I see the Chicago papers and—”

“Just play along with me,” I said.

“Huh?”

I reached around him and shoved open the door. “I don't care what you say, Jason,” I said, raising my voice louder than necessary. “I looked everywhere else and I wanna see for myself if Lammy's here.”

The surprise on Jason's face had already turned to understanding. “I told you, man,” he yelled, “the dude ain't here, period. You can't just come bustin' in like this.”

He stepped aside as he spoke and I went in. Lammy was already standing, panic in his eyes and ready to run. But there was nowhere to go. Jason came in behind me, pulling on my arm and telling me how I had to leave or he'd call security.

“Sit down, Jason,” I said. “And you too, Lammy.”

Lammy sat down on the narrow bed beside him, but Jason grabbed his coat from a tiny closet that had no door. He said, “I'm late for practice,” and was gone. It was nine o'clock at night.
Very
late for practice.

If Lammy noticed that Jason hadn't called security, and had given up the fight pretty easily, it didn't show in his face. What showed was still fear, but maybe some anger now, which actually made me feel good. “Why don't you leave me alone?” he said. There was just the hint of a real challenge in his voice, and that made me feel good, too.

But as soon as I opened my mouth to answer, his anger went south, and left him only afraid, with tears rolling down his cheeks. He slumped lower onto the bed, then flopped over on his stomach and lay there. Pretty soon he was sobbing, hardly making a sound, his whole rounded body heaving beyond his control. He was trying to say something, too, and when I leaned closer to listen it sounded like, “Just go away. Just go away.”

That did it. Suddenly I was angry, so mad I wanted to pick him up off the bed and throw him on the floor. “Damn it, Lammy. What the hell's wrong with you? You oughta be goddamn fucking happy that I—” And then I remembered the nurse in the hall outside Lammy's hospital room, how she'd recognized my stupidity and didn't even blame me for it.

So I shut up and sat there on a hard wooden chair between the two beds and watched the numbers on the digital clock-radio on the desk flip forward for a while. Then I went to the door and opened it and looked out. There was music—or something that passed for music—vibrating down the corridor, and the mixed odors of stale cigarette smoke and beer and marijuana. I turned back and looked at Lammy. He'd stopped sobbing, but now his breaths came in a strange combination of deep sighs and hiccoughing gasps.

I closed the door again and went back and sat down. “Lammy?” His breathing was becoming more regular, but he didn't answer or turn over to look up at me. “I … ah … I'm really glad I found you. I was worried, you know … that something bad might have happened to you.”

“What … what do you mean?” he said. His voice was muffled because his face was still down in the bedspread.

“I mean,” I said, “you might have have had an accident, or—”

“No.” He moved, turning onto his side and looking at me, then looking away again. “No,” he repeated. “I mean what do you mean by you were
worried?
Why's it make any difference to you?”

“I don't know why. I just care about what happens to you, that's all. I was worried and I came looking for you and I found you. I'm glad I did.”

“So then why did you just holler at me?”

“I don't know that, either. There's lots of things I don't know.” I paused. “Why don't you sit up?” He did, and he moved to the other chair.

Inside a tiny refrigerator on the floor of the closet, I found two Pepsis, an orange soda, and a wrinkled brown paper bag. Jason wasn't stocking any beer, which made me happy even though I could have used one just then. I took out the bag and it smelled like rotting beef, so I put it on the floor out in the hall and closed the door again.

“You want Pepsi or diet orange?” I asked.

“Jason likes orange. He got the other stuff for me.” I took one Pepsi and handed the other to Lammy. He set it on the desk beside him, unopened. “I bet Jason's glad you came. He doesn't want me here. He doesn't like me.”

“You're mistaken,” I said. “Maybe you make him nervous. But he doesn't put up with things or people he doesn't like. I know Jason. If he really didn't like you, if he wanted you out, you'd be gone.”

I was stretching things a bit. But Lammy seemed to accept it, because his eyes filled up with tears again.

I reached over for his Pepsi and popped it open. “Here, drink this,” I said. “We need to talk over my plan for what to do next.”

We each took a swallow of Pepsi. I looked at Lammy for a while and Lammy looked everywhere but at me. Finally, though, he gave up and looked right into my eyes. “Uh, what's your plan?”

“First, we go get a pizza. After that,” and I couldn't help smiling, “what the hell, maybe something'll turn up.”

Lammy smiled, too, just briefly.

“Aha!” I said. “That's number
two!
”

He didn't answer, and he didn't look as though he knew I was talking about the smile.

CHAPTER
30

J
ASON JOINED US
. I'
D
spotted him down the hall when I put the paper bag full of rotten whatever-it-was outside the door, and was surprised and happy to see that he'd taken the bag and disposed of it. We went for pizza and I allowed myself one beer and then switched to coffee. Lammy ordered a beer, too, although he didn't seem to enjoy it much and I wondered if it was a first and if I was starting him down the road to ruin. Jason seemed to have become very health-conscious and washed down his pizza with nothing but bottled water as he regaled Lammy with detailed replays of his own twenty-five or thirty greatest moments in sports. That was fine with me. I had plenty to think about.

When we dropped Jason off at his dorm he made a major point of how welcome Lammy was to come back. “Any time, man,” he insisted. “Any time.” Jason was so relieved to see us leave that he was able to make it sound as though he really meant it.

Once out on the open road, I showed Lammy how to make the seat recline and he was dead asleep before he had time to close his eyes. I wasn't sure he even knew he was supposed to have been in court earlier that afternoon. I hadn't mentioned it, but told him only that Renata and I would do everything we could to see that he didn't go back to jail. He hadn't asked any more about my plan of action. Maybe he suspected I didn't have one, and didn't want to hear that. My guess, though, was he was as relieved as Jason was that I'd come and gotten him.

“I don't wanna go home,” he'd repeated several times, “but I guess I have to.” Socially backward he might be, but Lammy had enough sense to know that he couldn't hide out forever.

Two and a half hours after we left Madison, and were approaching Oak Brook, I reached for the phone Barney Green's man had left in the Voyager. It was past midnight and Casey, who was staying on at Lammy's place, would be asleep. Still, he'd want to know I'd found Lammy, so I tapped out the number.

No answer.

I hit the disconnect button and tried again, taking care with the numbers. I counted twenty rings. Then five more.

No answer.

When I set the phone down I caught the speedometer moving quickly toward ninety miles an hour, and forced myself to ease up on the gas. I couldn't keep it below seventy, though. Lucky I didn't get stopped.

When we arrived back at my motel, I dragged a groggy Lammy out of the minivan and walked him to the room. I tried Casey again.

Still no answer.

“Maybe the phone's turned off,” Lammy said.

“Yeah, that must be it,” I said. “Anyway, I have to go out for a while.” I left him a room key and very careful instructions about answering the door and telephone. “The room's paid up until noon. If I'm not back by then, use your credit card and pay for two more days.”

“Uh-uh,” he said, “I can't. 'Cause how will I pay the bill when—” He saw the look on my face and realized he better shut up.

Then I went to see why Casey didn't answer the phone.

*   *   *

I
F THERE WERE COPS
, or anyone else, watching Lammy's block and waiting for me to check on Casey, I couldn't spot them. There were a couple of lights on at the Connolly house and, in the next block, lights at Dominic's place as well. That might have been significant, at that hour in the morning. But then, nearly every block in that working-class neighborhood had at least one home showing a light in a window. Someone sitting up with a sick child, maybe, or struggling with insomnia; someone winding down from working a late shift, or gearing up to work an early one.

Lammy's place, the two-flat far from the streetlights at either end of the block, was as bleak and dark as my own suspicions. I'd made a point of reminding Casey to leave the porch lights on all night, front and rear. But they were out. With Lammy away, maybe he thought the lights were unnecessary. Or maybe he forgot. Or maybe some other innocent reason or two. But none of them was convincing, given the splotched remains of about three dozen eggs that had been smashed against the front of the two-flat. Even in the dim light, the splayed, frozen splatters were visible, mostly on and around the second-floor windows.

What about Gus's promise that Lammy would be left alone till the case was over?

I parked a block away to the west and returned on foot through the alley. It was cold. The starless sky was heavy with low clouds that absorbed enough urban glow to turn them a dull gray, but illuminated nothing below. The alley light closest to Lammy's backyard was out. That happens. People support whole families replacing burned-out pole lights around the city, so …

Besides, the missing light made it less likely I'd be seen going in through the door—the unlocked door—at the bottom of the enclosed rear porch. Down half a flight the basement door was locked, as was the back door to the first-floor apartment.

I climbed cautiously up the dark stairs, straining for sounds from above, but there was nothing. Lammy's kitchen door was right at the top of the stairs on the second-floor landing. When I got up there I stood perfectly still for a moment, staring. The four-paned window in the door was broken out, mullions and all, just a few shards of glass still hanging in place—and the door to the dark kitchen stood just slightly ajar. I moved forward, bending low to keep my head beneath window level.

With the Beretta in my right hand now, I crouched, left shoulder close to the door. I slipped my left hand through the narrow opening and found the light switch I knew to be just inside. I waited, listening, fingers motionless on the switch. There were the softest of muffled sounds from beyond the door. Short, snuffled breaths, maybe. Or the rustle of clothing.

Or maybe there weren't any sounds at all beyond my own imagination and the pounding in my chest. I could crouch outside that pitch-dark kitchen and wait forever to find out. Or I could withdraw my hand, and turn and creep away.

But I flicked the switch, flooding the room with light, and nudged the door with my shoulder. I pushed harder than I intended, and the door slammed against the countertop behind it and the rest of the window glass broke free and fell on the counter and the floor. By the time the rebound of the door brought it halfway closed again, I'd gotten a glimpse inside. Breathing hard, my back pressed to the brick wall, I stayed out on the porch, out of sight of the wide-eyed man in the kitchen … and of anyone else in there that I hadn't seen.

A thousand years of seconds ticked by. Nothing happened.

Still keeping low, I peered around the doorjamb and into the kitchen. There was still nobody in sight but Casey, no noise of anyone rushing down the hall toward the kitchen. I stepped inside. Casey was tied with clothesline to one of the white wooden chairs. His ankles were lashed to the chair legs and there were coils of rope wrapped around his midsection and chest, binding him with his hands behind the chair back. His mouth was covered with duct tape, wrapped completely around his head several times. He was alive, but clearly struggling to breathe through nostrils that must have been partially closed off by blood that had clotted inside, as it had clotted on the tape over his mouth and on the front of his white collarless shirt.

He was far too big to be tied to that ordinary chair, so they'd kept him in place by pushing the back of the chair close to the refrigerator, putting a noose around his neck, and looping the rope around the refrigerator, then knotting it to the handle of the freezer compartment. The skin around his neck was raw, showing old, caked blood, and fresh blood as well, from the rubbing of the rope.

“Is there anyone else here,” I asked, my voice a harsh whisper.

He shook his head as well as he could, but that seemed to tighten the noose. His eyes swung crazily in a clear attempt to tell me something I couldn't understand. I dropped the Beretta in my pocket and yanked open drawer after drawer, looking for a sharp knife to cut the rope that dug so deeply into his neck that I thought it might be cutting off his air.