Hawk Moon (14 page)

I was already late for my meeting with Gilhooley but I decided to give it a few more minutes here. I reversed down the street where I could get a good view of the back of the place.

The tan building went ten stories and was too fancy for my taste. There was a lot of glass and a lot of timber and nice landscaping, but it took a little too much pride in itself to be suitable for human occupation.

Six of the verandas were occupied and all of the occupants were elderly. White hair and knobby knees shone in the fading sunlight. Just the sort of retirement I'd always envisioned for my late wife and myself, actually. Two elderly people still very much in love, sipping their lemonades on a breeze-blessed veranda, watching the sun sink behind the pines and hearing the sweet songs of the night birds only Iowa can claim.

Perry Heston brought the Indian girl out on her veranda a few minutes later. They both carried drinks. Their heads bobbed and pointed at each other. They were arguing.

He said something and she spat at him.

He stood unmoving, stunned.

Then he threw his drink in her face and disappeared back inside the apartment.

She walked over to the veranda door and stuck her head inside. I imagined she was yelling something at him.

Seventh floor, middle.

I had to remember that for when I tried to sneak in here tonight.

Now it was time for Gilhooley.

"Y
ou know how big a shit our government is, Payne?"

"You don't need to tell me, Gilhooley."

"All it cares about is taking care of the fat cats."

Two things you have to know about Gilhooley. He's a Maoist. Or says he is. And he measures all politics against Mao's politics. The second thing is, he's made a real study of Cedar Rapids and what he doesn't know, he can find out. He can be a valuable source of information.

He smiled. "This is good booze. I appreciate it. Plus it's great to argue with somebody bright. Most people just walk away when I start talking politics."

Gee, really, Gilhooley, I wonder why? Couldn't be because you're a fanatic or anything, could it?

I go back a number of years with the guy. When we were at the University of Iowa together, we used to go drinking every night just so we could argue. I was always a conservative and he was always a radical — not liberal, radical. He numbered, among the people he admired, George McGovern, Jane Fonda and Jerry Brown. I admired, among others, Barry Goldwater, Dwight Eisenhower and Joan Didion (a lot more conservative a thinker than many people realize).

The battle continued on, even after I joined the Bureau, even after Gilhooley became associate editor of a left-wing magazine published out of Cedar Rapids.

Any time I thought he might have changed, all I had to do was look around his tiny, dusty, littered apartment.

JESUS SAVES

(Green Stamps)

was the sign he had tacked to his door, the same one he'd used way back in college, when Green Stamps were still being made.

Gilhooley had been married three times but not a trace of domesticity had ever rubbed off on him. His idea of a formal occasion was one for which he had to tuck in his sports shirt.

He took out his garbage at least twice a month, three times if Christmas was coming up, and he picked up the debris in his living room — Domino pizza boxes, beer cans, girly magazines, dirty clothes — only when he needed to find a place for a guest to sit down. The guest was usually a woman. You might not think of a gangly red-haired Maoist Irishman as an ass-bandit — but somehow he was.

But even more than the clutter, his wobbly bookcase defined Gilhooley's soul. To him, it would always be 1970, with a whiff of tear gas on the air, an ROTC building in flames in the background, and a Jefferson Airplane song on everyone's lips.

In his bookcase you found battered paperbacks by Eldridge Cleaver, Timothy Leary, Bernadette Dorn, Danny the Red, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Seale among many, many others.

Indeed, for Michael Patrick Gilhooley, it would always be 1970.

He ran a hand through curly strawberry-blond hair that was slowly showing gray and said reflectively, "Perry Heston and Bryce Cook, huh? You could get in a lot of trouble . . ." He grinned. I suppose it gave him pleasure watching a Republican like me cast in the role of working-class hero.

"They look like players."

"Oh they are, they are — you know that kind of corporate macho bullshit you see so much today. They've got fortunes, they've got beautiful wives, they've got beautiful mistresses, and they relax by doing a little bullfighting on the side."

I laughed. "I didn't know there was a whole lot of bullfighting in Iowa."

"You know what I mean. All the macho shit these guys get into."

"Perry Heston didn't come from a rich family, right?"

"Oh, no. Horatio Alger all the way. In fact, at the time he married Claire Shipman, people said that he was going to take that old respectable family and give it some new life and that's just what he did. Sort of like introducing some pit-bull blood into a line of Pekinese. Not that he'll ever be quite acceptable to the real upper crust — you know, west-side boy trying to pass himself off as the Real Thing and all
that bullshit. And he does get in some trouble. I mean, he looks like the ultimate corporate player but he really is a chaser — booze and ladies and even a few fights from time to time. He's brought the Shipman family back to prominence again, but at a certain cost to their old reputation. He had the money and she had the name."

"She didn't have any money at all?"

"Not so's you'd notice. You know the Balzac line, 'Behind every fortune there's a scandal'?"

"Sure."

"Well, the Shipmans had had a lot of money until something happened to Great-great-grandpapa."

"That was going to be my next question. What happened?"

"Some kind of scandal. It broke the great-great-grandfather of the family, the one who made all the money. He ended up in an insane asylum. I mean, the Shipmans — including Claire's parents — always had enough money to keep up appearances, but that was about it."

"What kind of scandal with Great-great-grandpapa?"

"Not sure. But I can find out from a friend of mine, this old Labor guy who used to publish the Labor paper here."

"There was a Labor paper in Cedar Rapids?"

"Sure, back around the turn of the century, then intermittently up until the fifties."

One hundred years ago, Cedar Rapids, like other mid-western communities of its size, could claim as many as ten daily and weekly newspapers, between them covering the whole spectrum of political beliefs and social concerns. I hadn't known that any of them lasted until the fifties.

"Anyway, Sullivan, he's in his late eighties now and knew all the old newspaper people in this town. I'm sure he can tell me what happened to Shipman."

"You never heard any scuttlebutt, then?"

Gilhooley shrugged. "Some, I guess. One was that his wife caught him in bed with one of the domestics and later killed the girl and that the old man had to bury her and cover everything up. And that he was so ashamed of what all his carousing had done to his wife that he just gradually withdrew from everything."

"Anything else?"

"Well, there was one that the old man accidentally killed his mistress and had to cover that up." He looked at me and smiled. "You're really getting into this, aren't you, Robert?"

"I want to know who I'm dealing with."

"All that great FBI training you had." He arched an eyebrow. "Did you ever stop to think that the FBI and the Jesuits are a lot alike?"

"I think you've told me that before," I said patiently. "About six hundred times, if I'm not mistaken."

Of all the Machiavellian organizations in the world, according to Gilhooley anyway, the two worst are the FBI and the Jesuits.

"Any other rumors?" I said.

"The Circle of Six," he announced.

"The what?"

"Some kind of secret society. This was back near the turn of the century, remember. Victoriana was a big part of life for the gentry out here. You saw a fair share of hansom cabs parked outside Greene's Opera House downtown, and a lot of people affected Edwardian-style clothes. And had secret societies. You know what I mean, you're a big Sherlock Holmes fan."

"And Shipman was part of this secret society?"

"That was the rumor. But first of all, Payne, you've got to understand that there was this whole group of rich Anglophiles living in Cedar Rapids then. They went to Britain every few years and brought back everything British they could, including this English thing for secret societies. Hell, in those days, you still had vestiges of the Thugs." He grinned. "Not to mention the Masons."

"Who were the Thugs?"

His grin widened. "Very bad folks is what those were. The Assassins originated in Egypt back around A.D. 1000, and one of the things they were noted for was killing anybody their leaders told them to. The killer usually dressed in a white tunic with a red sash and he was absolutely fearless. He usually used a dagger. Every king in Europe was afraid of these people. They were absolute fanatics — and very successful, despite the white tunics and red sashes. Apparently they murdered seven European leaders in three centuries.

"One of their favorite routines was to kidnap somebody they hated, fasten him to a cross with rope — and then ask a young man who wanted to be a Thug to set him on fire. If the young man could do it, he was automatically made a Thug."

"You think Shipman was into some kind of violence?"

He shrugged again. "I don't know, but I doubt it. In Victorian England, there were a lot of secret societies involving sexual activities of various kinds. I suspect that's probably what the good burghers of Cedar Rapids were up to. But you're a good ex-FBI man, Payne; you should be able to figure it out."

"A secret that's over a hundred years old?"

He grinned again. "You're the detective, my friend."

"So after this thing happened — whatever it was — the Shipmans lost all their money?"

"Not all of it. As I said, the old man went into the asylum and died there, and a grandson looked after the estate. They always had money — I think Claire Heston probably still has some of her own today — but not big money. Not power money. And in a town like Cedar Rapids, nobody pays any attention to you unless you have power money." He laughed out loud. "But you're still working on The Circle of Six, aren't you? I knew that'd get you. Who could resist a secret society?"

Actually I wasn't thinking about a secret society at all. I was thinking about how I was going to get into the apartment house where Perry Heston had installed the beautiful young Indian woman.

"So you'll let me know when you talk to this old reporter friend of yours?"

"Sullivan? Sure. But he's back east visiting his daughter so it may be a while."

The phone rang. He grabbed it and said, "Hey, hi."

The way he said it, I knew it was a woman. Nothing focused Gilhooley's mind like the opposite sex. And I could tell that he suddenly wished I wasn't there.

I obliged him. We went through one of those brief pantomimes wherein I gestured that I needed to be going and he gestured back (insincerely) that I should stay, and then I was at the door and out.

Mother night was drawing the drapes, and the air was chill, and the stars were many and bright, and I thought of my wife, as I did at so many odd moments, and felt a terrible loneliness.

I
t is when we examine the death penalty that we see how skewed justice was for people of red or black skin. Time and again red men would be hanged while white men served life sentences (some with the possibility of parole) for the same offense.

Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

M
id-August — and a blazing mid-August it was, with ice wagons clopping up and down the street night and day. Tall Tree was found guilty by the jury and told by the Judge that he would be hanged at the state penitentiary early next year.

The sentence pushed Anna into further action.

She began carrying around with her the scrap of paper she had found at the crime scene:

ay

ouse

Whenever she got a chance, she showed the paper to people and asked them if they could guess what it would read if the other half hadn't been torn away.