Just Kill Me (32 page)

“That's one theory. I think maybe Virginia liked Lillian more than Lillian liked  Virginia.”

“Maybe.”

“Didn't find anything about her dying in 1925, though.”

“Oh, she did,” he says. “Tuberculosis. Got a lot of girls back then. Probably caught it out in Bughouse Square on a cold night.”

There. A lie. Evidence.

Part one of the plan is confirming our suspicions, and I'm off to a good start.

“Makes sense,” I say. “So, you wanna go get some food first and talk about this TV deal before we go to the tomb? I'm starving.”

“I could eat.”

“I know a good place,” I say.

“Point the way.”

I navigate him to one of Rick's favorite diners, which is a grimy hole-in-the-wall hidden in a hotel just off the Magnificent Mile. Cyn and I have staked out a spot where
she and Punk Rock James can park the car and keep an eye on us from across the road, unseen.

The plan is working so far.

Ed's cell phone is sitting in the change tray by the gear shifter.

Mine is rigged up so that I can call Cyn with the push of a button if I get into a jam.

I've never actually been into this diner, but it seems familiar when I step inside. It takes me a moment to figure it out, but the place looks almost like the hotel bar from the dream where I was Lillian in the 1950s. Close enough to feel really fucking weird. Maybe she and Irene Castle sang along with a jukebox here twenty thousand midnights ago.

“What's good on the menu?” he asks.

“They do a good Italian beef,” I say.

Ed gets one of those, and I order a pizza puff. He pulls out his card to pay, but I'm quicker on the draw and hand over cash to the clerk.  A credit card would leave behind evidence that we were here. Cash won't.

I grab us a seat by the window and we sit and chat for a bit, just making small talk. Ed talks about the old days in the ghost business, and how he used to have access to places we couldn't dream of going now. Like Bachelor's Grove, the old abandoned cemetery in the southwest suburbs that is sort of a ghost-hunting theme park now.  You can't legally be there at night without a filming permit anymore, but back in the day
he could take tour groups out there without any trouble.

“How did you even have time to go there on a tour?” I ask. “It's an hour from downtown.”

“My old tours were six hours long, every time,” he says. “People had longer attention spans back then. Only trouble we had was that sometimes we'd come out there and there'd be a bunch of kids on drugs. Once they were digging up a body.”

“Yeah, I saw some newspaper articles about kids doing that out there back in the seventies,” I say. “I don't know how dull life must have been in the south suburbs back then.”

“Pretty dull,” he says. “Supposedly one of the guys was buried with a huge wad of cash. The hell of it is, they kept digging up the same guy over and over again, even though there wasn't any cash there the last time.”

He laughs a cheerful old-man laugh as our food comes. Tweed is a strange person to watch. Sometimes he seems like a young hipster, with his curly mustache and the twinkle in his eye. But then he'll laugh or cough and move his face a certain way, and look a hundred years old. Like a freaking shape-shifter.

I eat slowly. My job right now is to keep him talking, drag the meal out as long as I can. Let the food do its work. Rick mentioned this place back on the tour with those hicks from downstate—this was the place where he said the Italian beef went south fast. If all goes well, Ed will need the bathroom soon.

And with any luck, he'll leave his cell phone on the table.

It's in his pocket now.

“Hey,” I say. “We got a great shot at Hull House the other night on the tour. Let me send it over.”

I send a tour shot—one that I know damn well is fake—over to him via text, and he pulls his phone from his pocket to see.

“Looks so good, I'd be afraid they used one of those apps to fake it,” he says.

“I assume they did,” I say. “But I played along.”

He chuckles and sets his phone down on the table, beside his plate, instead of putting it back in his pocket. Just like I hoped he would.

“Playing along is part of the job,” he says. “You're new at this, but how many people have told you Al Capone had a vacation home in whatever small town they live in?”

“I lost count the first week.”

He smiles. “And you can't just tell them they're wrong.  You don't want to be a killjoy.”

I nod, get up to order another pizza puff (which has the added benefit of needing to be fried up on demand, which will give me a few extra minutes), then sit back down to keep the small talk going.

“So, how did you find out how to get into the Couch tomb in the first place?” I ask.

He smiled. “Old girlfriend, years ago,” he says. “She could find her way into anything.”

I keep a poker face.

“Was she, like, a professional finder?”

“Yeah. Ran a company. She was looking for a ghost on some movie guy's nickel back when I was just starting out—he wanted to put a real one in a film. She found all kinds of stuff. Like that thing about how to kill people just right. She knew it.”

“No kidding?”

“She was an older woman. I liked older women back then. Of course, at my age now, liking older women is basically just being a necrophiliac. Or at least someone who likes the elderly, whatever you call that.”

“Gerontophile.”

This is an interesting piece of new data: Edward apparently used to date Marjorie Kay Stone.

I keep eating and make a point of not reacting much, except to ask a few questions about this person he knew. The kind a historian would ask when she hears about a woman who was hired to find a real ghost. This line of questioning doesn't tell me anything new, but it gets me through my second pizza puff. When that's done, I order a milk shake and stall things even further.

“Now, let's talk about this TV idea,” I say. “Where we team up.”

“Well, if you'll pardon me for saying it, I'm a selfish old man and I want the show. And I think I would get the show, since I get more sightings, except that they have you. You're the edge.”

“We've been having more sightings lately,” I say. “We're trying out new sites and having good luck. Death corner. Places like that. We were thinking of Bughouse Square, where Lillian hung out.”

“That'd make good TV,” he says.

“I've never even really been there,” I lie. “I really want to, but it keeps feeling dangerous. I don't quite believe you that Cyn's planning to kill me and make me into Lillian's ghost, but I'm not taking any chances.”

“Smart,” he says. “Tell you what. I'll go out there with you right now, we can scope it out as a haunted spot and figure out how to make it spooky for TV. Even if we have to make stuff up. I know it's not really your style, but that's what would make us the villains on the show.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I never make up stories, really, but I always identified as a villain.”

“Sure,” he says.

It really is a pretty decent concept. Assuming he really plans to let me live long enough to carry it out. But now he's offered to take me to Bughouse Square himself. I can imagine him making me decide right then whether or not to leave Mysterious Chicago and join him, and if I turn him down . . .

For all the chatting, I don't have enough data on him to know how scared I should be yet.

Then it happens.

He makes “the face.”

“Is there a washroom here?” he asks.

“Behind you.”

“Be right back, and then we'll head out.”

He leaves the table, and, hallelujah, leaves his phone sitting on the table.

I immediately grab it and run outside. Cyn is waiting on a bench just outside of the door.

“You got it?” I hold up the phone.

“Hurry,” she says. “Give it here.”

When I hand it to her, she attaches a cable to it that runs into her laptop, then starts punching buttons. As she does, she hands me a clove cigarette and a lighter.

“Just so you have an excuse if he comes out and finds that you aren't at the table,” she says. “Say you needed a cigarette.”

I try to light the thing while Cyn messes with Edward's phone. Thank fuck Ed doesn't have a password lock. I'm not totally sure what she's doing as she pushes buttons, but she told me that Punk Rock James taught her some hacking tricks.

I feel like I'm in a spy movie.

“Edward used to date Marjorie Kay Stone,” I say. “That's how he knows about the brain punch.”

“That would explain it,” she says. “They must have made a hell of a pair.”

“The TV thing sounds fairly sincere,” I say. “Like he'd want to keep me alive if I joined up with him.”

“Until he didn't need you anymore, or decided you knew too much.”

She taps a few keys on her phone, looks something over, then unplugs the phone and hands it back to me.

“Okay,” she says. “I've got what I need. We're moving forward. Stall him, don't turn your back on him, and wait for texts from me.”

I start to tell her that if he's got my stories, I'm not sure I want to know about it, but before I can, she sprints back to her car, leaving me alone with the phone and the clove cigarette. I take a drag and cough. Inside, I see that Ed is just coming out of the bathroom. I make sure Cyn is out of sight, then wave to him through the window. He ambles out, joins me on the sidewalk, and takes a whiff of the spicy air.

“I thought they outlawed those clove things.”

“When did something being outlawed ever stop you from being able to get it in Chicago?”

He laughs and his eyes twinkle again. “True.”

Then I hold up his phone. “Sorry, I reached for my phone and accidentally brought yours out.”

“Any calls?”

I shake my head and hand it over to him.

“So, Bughouse Square, then the Couch tomb?” I ask.

“Sounds like a plan.”

I slip back in to get my phone off the table, completing the act of having grabbed the wrong one. We get into his car and
I take out my own phone, acting like I'm not paying attention to where we're going.

I start getting more nervous. My fingers shake.

This is it. If he's planning to kill me, I've agreed to go to two perfect spots.

As we get to a traffic light, there's a series of texts from Cyn:

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

He has e-mails from Zoey. Affirmative.

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

And he didn't turn off location tracking on a few key apps.

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

So there's data showing he was at the body dump the day Aaron Saltis died.

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

Before the tours. Before you found him. He killed him all right. Good bet you're next.

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

Are you going to the tomb or bughouse?

I text back “Plan B,” meaning Bughouse Square, and try to stay calm.

It's all real. I am in a car with a murderer. Who knows way too much about me and is quite likely taking me out to turn me into a ghost myself. He doesn't know that I know the truth, so I have the upper hand, but still. Shit. It's not the same dread I was feeling a couple of days earlier, but the squirrels in my stomach are doing a regular ballet.

I try to calm myself down, repeating my best historical rude words to myself in my head.

Ordure (1390).

Hinder-fallings (1561).

Pilgrim-salve (1580).

The park is sort of crowded when he pulls over next to it. If he's been planning to kill me there, he's off to a bad start. It's full of dog walkers. Witnesses.

“It'd be tough to do a ghost hunt here,” I say. “So much else in the environment.”

“If we get a filming permit we can kick them all out,” he says.

He glances around, like he's trying to find an out-of-the-way place where he can kill me without anyone noticing. I spot a few places myself, little clusters of trees in the tiny park.

I can see him eyeing them too.

“What about Tooker Place?” he asks.

“What's that?”

He points to an alley half a block down Dearborn. “That alley. Used to lead to a hole in the wall you'd climb through to get to the Dil Pickle Club. You know about that?”

“Sure. The indoor Bughouse Square. Lillian hung out there, too.”

”Why don't we go check that out? I'm not sure if the old building is still there.”

I nod, even though I'm sure the building is gone, and I'm sure that he knows it.

There's only one reason he can be leading me into that alley.

This is it.

I notice Punk Rock James's car idling on the other side of the park. Cyn isn't in it.  As was the plan.

My nervousness takes over my body and I have to force myself to take each step.  As I text “Tooker” to Cyn,
OED
swear words race through my head. I lock in on them, letting them distract me enough from what's happening to keep me moving.

Fex. Commixtion. Coney burrow.

Gong. Tantadlin. Rutting.

I think I see Cyn moving in the shadows as we cross over Dearborn.

There isn't much to see in Tooker Place; it's just a regular alley now, all garages and garbage cans. The mansions beside
it are pretty fantastic, though. It's like we've stepped into a Charles Dickens novel. There are even gaslights flickering on one of the garages.

“You know,” he says, “your new haircut makes you look even more like Lillian.”

“That's the idea.”

Addle. Fling-dust. Croupon.

Crepitate. Nodcock.

“In fact,” he says as he comes to a stop in the middle of the empty alley, “people might even say you look just like her ghost right here.”