City Boy (39 page)

The fever had drained out of him. Everything was cold. “Yeah, I got it.”

“That was some stunt. Did you get a big kick out of it? You and the whore?”

“It was just me. I know it wasn’t funny.”

Mrs. Jim Spencer said, “I’ll tell you what’s funny. You thinking you
know one thing about my life. My family’s life. Don’t hang up on me or I will find a way to put you personally in shit soup up to your neck. I’d like to hear you say that part. That you don’t know anything about me.”

“I don’t know anything about you.”

She said, “Orlovich. You’re right, an unusual name. Distinctive.”

“Thank you.”

“I wouldn’t just yet.”

Jack held the phone to his ear but didn’t speak. It held all the bad news in the world, that roiling, cresting wave.

Mrs. Jim Spencer breathed a big gusty sigh. It was probably meant to sound theatrical, but Jack thought it conveyed something genuine in spite of herself, weariness or heartache. “Is she really pregnant? Or was that another part of your song and dance?”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Is it Jim’s baby?”

“She says it’s mine.”

“Well hey. Glad that’s settled.” When Jack didn’t speak, she went on. “I think I met her once. Long, black hair. Frisky. Shakes her ass in your face. That her?”

Jack said it was. Mrs. Jim Spencer said, “So I guess we should be pals, you know, the wronged parties and all, but I don’t think I like you very much, Orlovich. Why did you call me, huh? Why did you want me to know. I didn’t, by the way. Thanks.”

Jack thought she might have been drinking. He said, “I wanted you to help break it up. It was a stupid thing to do. I’m sorry. I just wanted her back. I’m sorry I put you through all this for nothing.”

“I wouldn’t call it nothing.”

“Not nothing. Right. But I hope you and your husband can move on. Put the pieces back together. Get on with your lives. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

“Oh boy.”

“Again, I’m really, really—” “And here I thought I was dumb.”

She was laughing, a loopy, sniggering laugh. If it wasn’t drinking, it
was something else, pills maybe, the kind of pills suburban doctors dispensed to unhappy wives. “Oh
honey
. What do you look like? Are you one of those very handsome, not too bright guys?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Because if you think this is all ancient history, if you think it’s really over—”

“Shut up. Just shut the fuck up.”

The phone clicked and the line went dead. He put the receiver back. A moment later it rang again. He answered. “What.”

“Wow,” Chloe said. “I guess you’re feeling better.”

“Yeah.”

“You were out like a light when I left. I thought I should just let you sleep.”

“Good idea.”

“Got a big day planned?”

“Nope. Taking it easy. You?”

“The usual rat race. There must be something I like about this job. Oh yeah, the money. I have to run. I may be a little late tonight. Anything I can bring you, in case you don’t get out?”

Jack said he couldn’t think of anything. They said good-bye and he put the phone back. It was only a couple of minutes before it rang again. “Hello?”

“Sorry,” said Mrs. Jim Spencer. “I shouldn’t have hung up on you. I often find myself making impulsive decisions these days. Anyway. In the spirit of sharing information—”

“If you want to say something, just say it.”

“There are people who specialize in this sort of thing, you know? Right in the yellow pages. Professional. Discreet. What day is this?”

“Thursday.”

“That’s right. Thursday. The day I take our youngest daughter to ice-skating practice. You wouldn’t know that. It wouldn’t interest you. My boring life. In fact let’s skip it. Because nothing about me would be the slightest bit …”

“What about Thursdays?”

“ … for years and years …”

When she stopped talking Jack said, “Hey. You there?”

“What do you want?” He heard her breathing, slow and leaking air.

“What’s your name? Huh? Tell me your name.”

“Marianne.”

“Don’t wuss out on me, Marianne. Come on. Thursdays.”

She sighed. “Oh boy. What time is it getting to be? You know how when you waste time in the morning and then you’re behind all day? Or maybe you don’t.”

Jack didn’t want to risk her zoning out again. “What were you going to tell me?”

“Eventually I believe I’ll get to the point where I don’t care what either of them do. I think that will be healthy.”

“Marianne.”

“Maybe it’s better if you pretend I never called. And I can pretend you never called me. Even steven. Because really, in a hundred years, what will it matter? Not even a hundred. Fifty. Not even fifty. More like—”

“If you tell me, I’ll go after them. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s why you called. You want to dish out some pain and you can’t do it yourself. All this crap about rising above things and taking the long view. Who you think you’re talking to? Tell me where they are.”

After a while she said, “What would you do if I told you?”

“Don’t know that yet.”

“I don’t want him hurt.”

“Sure you do. You just don’t want to be the one in charge. I’m not making promises. Chance you take.”

“I can’t.”

“You know you’re going to tell me. Once you get through with your fragile-crackpot routine. You knew it when you called. Come on, Marianne. Self-respect’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

She said, “Do you have something you can write with?”

She gave him a Gold Coast address. “It’s somebody’s apartment. I don’t know when they get there. Sometime in the afternoon.”

“All right,” Jack said. “All right.” She was talking once more when
he hung up the phone. It rang again but by then he had stopped paying attention to it.

He found Mr. Dandy’s key, walked through the lobby and let himself in. The same brown air and staleness in the dead man’s rooms. He fished the gun out of the hall closet and wrapped it in Mr. Dandy’s musty raincoat. Scooped up the box of shells. There was still no one about in the lobby. Just as well. The bundle looked like a shotgun wearing a raincoat. It was a little past ten in the morning.

Jack laid the shotgun on the couch in his own living room and sat down across from it. His head was vacant but twitching with static, like a television turned on with no signal. He felt the wavering strangeness the fever had left behind. How unusual it was to have a dead body in the shape of a gun on his couch. At any moment he expected Chloe to come in and scold him for his foolishness. He must have fallen asleep. The clock on the desk said noon. He didn’t remember sleeping but nothing else made sense. He tried to think where the car was parked. It was a long block away, it would never do to walk the shotgun all that distance. Put a hat on it, maybe, and pretend it was a friend who’d dropped by for a visit.

In the end he drove the car into the alley behind the house and went through the backyard. He shoved the shotgun into the trunk and put the box of shells under the front seat. He couldn’t quite get the hang of driving. It felt like an amusement-park ride. The streets rushed at him through the windshield. Then he took a wrong turn and wound up heading north on the Inner Drive, swore at himself, tried to turn around, found nothing but one-ways that carried him farther and farther from the lake. He’d get there too late, or not at all, never know, stay crazy forever.

A horn sounded and a truck flew by in front of him. That put the top of his head back on, made him concentrate on his driving. At any given moment in Chicago, how many of its citizens were out on the roads stoned, drunk, hallucinating, murderous? They could have one of those call-in radio shows just for loonies. Hey there, this is Ed on the Eisenhower, how’s it going? And this is Sammy on the South Side, it’s a
great day to be out here loaded for bear, bouncing through intersections like a pinball, mowing down the sidewalks, hey there, Sad Sack Jack, let’s just keep on keeping it real.

Finally he got himself turned around, swung onto Lake Shore Drive. A clear day with the sun stinging his eyes. Driving the Drive always felt like being part of a parade, like you should be waving from an open convertible. He couldn’t stop thinking stupid thoughts. There was another moment of mad panic when he thought he’d lost the piece of paper with the address, before he found it fallen down by the brake pedal.

He slowed when he got closer to the high-rent district. Here were modish buildings of red brick or creamy stone, tall windows swagged with draperies, wrought-iron balconies, fussy bits of brass and gilt on the front doors. Who the hell lived in these places? The widows of furniture kings and pharmaceutical emperors. Trust funders, real estate magnates. At least one close friend of Jim Spencer, guy who wouldn’t mind if you drank his liquor and fucked on his bedsheets, what were pals for? The lake was the blue front yard for this neighborhood. They owned it in a way that other people couldn’t. Why was it always money with Chloe? His whore of a wife. He was looking for her on every corner. He almost drove past the building itself.

It was whitewashed brick with an awning set out over the sidewalk. There were evergreens carved into bulbs and some spindly trees given space amid the concrete. One of the widows, hatted, exercised a Pomeranian on a leash. No one else was visible. Behind the stately windows multiple adulteries might be in progress in different, imaginative ways, but the street’s public face was one of genteel boredom.

Jack parked beneath a sign telling him not to. Now what. Oh crying crap. He had an actual shotgun in the trunk. He who’d never fired a gun in his life. There was something funny about it, if he could find anyone to tell. The old woman and the Pomeranian tottered past him.

Jack hunched down in the seat and got ready to withstand her scrutiny, but she didn’t seem to see him. Cataracts? Or a lifetime of urban indifference? Maybe you really could unload a shotgun on a residential street without anyone noticing or sounding an alarm.

Scenes began to play out in his head. He broke down a door to find Chloe and Spence naked and scrabbling and Chloe screamed and they tried to cover themselves while Chloe got some words out, coaxing him, appealing for calm, forgiveness, a chance to explain. He brought the shotgun up to his chin and pulled the trigger and the kick of the thing would be tremendous, it would practically knock him over and Chloe would scream again, and the blood was a bright fountain and he fired once more, and what happened to a body when you did that, tore it apart in all the places it wasn’t meant to tear and Christ no.

He wasn’t and couldn’t. And yet he was and could. If he found Chloe in the apartment upstairs he would be that man, whether or not he committed murder. He would become lost, crazed, unrecognizable.

But the longer he sat on the quiet street with nothing happening, the less likely any of it—Chloe, Spence, murder—began to seem. It occurred to him that Marianne Spencer was making it all up. She was playing him, getting him back for the evil of his phone call. She could have picked an address out of the phone book for all he knew. She was wacked out, jealous, she hated Chloe too and she’d found this new and nasty plan to stir up trouble between them.

He constructed the logic of this carefully, testing it step by step, and determined it sound. The sense of it asserted itself. Chloe wasn’t betraying him. He’d been too willing to believe it, based on his own paranoia and the talk of a woman he’d never met. And the only thing he’d have to do to prove, or disprove, it all, to reclaim himself, step back from that brink, was to find the apartment number he’d been given, apologize to whoever lived there, be on his way. It seemed like such a clean, pure moment, this perfectly balanced instant before it would be decided if he was to remain himself, or cross over forever.

Then he roused himself, got out of the car, took one of the shotgun shells out of its box beneath the car seat, and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

He wished he had a package or a bouquet or some other prop to tuck under his arm as he stood in front of the buzzers listing the apartment numbers and their occupants. Apartment 2-N was someone named Hundley, which meant nothing to him. Jack pressed the buzzer and
thought too late about what he might say into the intercom, but there was no need. He heard the electronic click of the front door unhitching.

The lobby was the kind that made a pretense of welcoming you into an actual parlor. There was a fireplace and a mantel with a gold-and-scrolled ticking clock set between two candlesticks. White marble floor, armchairs and a coffee table with a fan of magazines, potted plants. He chose the stairs over the elevator. Thick gray carpet underfoot. Light streaming in from the arched windows. He climbed two flights of stairs. The doors he passed were silent. Windows dozed behind them.

At apartment 2-N he stood to one side of the door, out of range of the peephole. He tried to listen. Indistinct, muffled sound, and even that was something he might have imagined. Blood beat and popped in his ears and his heart roared. He put his knuckles to the door and knocked.

It opened inward and Spence stepped into the space. Spence recognized him, tried to push the door shut, but Jack gave it all his weight and sent it crashing into him. Spence staggered backward and Jack slammed the door behind him and where was Chloe, rooms and rooms in this place, very classy, leather furniture and genuine Art on the walls, unseemly to be knocking over the lamps when he tackled the other man, drove hard into his pudding gut. Spence didn’t go down but he was off balance, couldn’t get his feet underneath him. Jack put him in a headlock. Sounds were coming out of Spence, not words, just the concussion of air jarred loose. Spence’s teeth and jowls and thick neck were jammed up against Jack’s ear and Jack couldn’t wrestle himself enough space to really hurt him, it was all shoving and butting heads until Jack got his knees braced, found enough purchase to put some force behind his fists and a clear field of vision to hate him properly, and it was as if every crazy sad mad day he’d lived through had only been preparation for this.

“Where is she?”