The Talk Show Murders (21 page)

“I don’t know of any other way of getting the files.”

“How about you tell him to go fuck himself and I go around this crap hole to the rear door and grab him when he comes out?”

“The money seems less labor-intensive.”

“You understand that when they catch him—and they will—they’ll ask where he got it. And he’ll give you up, and you’ll be arrested as an accessory after the fact.”

“I’d still be better off than if we used your plan. At least now, when they pick him up, he’ll still be in one piece.”

“We make a citizen’s arrest,” he said. “It’s the smart play.”

“Let me just pay the two dollars,” I said.

“Your call.” He reached across me to pop open the glove compartment.

I was trying to think of a way to politely refuse the gun he was going to offer when he held out something that wasn’t any kind of weapon I knew. It looked like a plastic whistle on a white cord.

“What’s this?” I asked, taking it and dangling it by the cord.

“Air horn, Billy. Keep it handy. First sign of trouble, give just a light blow. It’ll blast out a one-hundred-twenty-decibel honk that’ll scare the shit out of anybody not expecting it. And since it can be heard for nearly a mile, I’ll be in there in seconds.”

I thanked him, got out of the car, slipped the air horn into my coat pocket, and walked toward Nero’s Wonder Lounge, where the deep-smoked windows were so dark and grimy there was no way of telling what I’d find inside.

No surprise: What I found was more dark and grimy. Judging by the music, the jukebox was locked in the pre-rap heyday of Motown. The smell was stale booze and cooking grease and disinfectant. There was a long bar, where several old-timers sipped from straws stuck in a communal barrel. In another section of the large room, a weary caramel-colored woman wearing a soiled apron stood behind a glass partition, stirring what looked like a large pot of … something, maybe chili, maybe meatballs and tomato sauce. She looked like she was in her sixties. The stuff in the pot looked older.

Of the twenty-five or thirty tables in the room, five were occupied by solo men. A sleeping man at one. Eating and drinking men at three. And at a table at the back of the room near the window, a glaring man, waiting for me.

He stood, walked to the window, and looked through a small clear section of the smoked glass. Then he sat back down at the table.

Nat Parkins wasn’t nearly as put together as he’d been when last I saw him. His slick hair was downright nappy, and that neat line of mustache had been removed. Great disguise. His eyes were bloodshot, and his clothes—a dark T-shirt and khaki pants—had that lived-in-for-three-days look. The smell coming off him was stronger than the eau de grease. But he was still big and powerful. And dangerous.

“You look a little run-down, Nat,” I said, taking a chair.

“I wonder why. That guy standing by the Z-car supposed to be your driver? He doesn’t look like a driver. He looks like muscle.”

“He’s my driver.”

“You got the money?”

The only things on the table were a bottle of beer, a spiral notebook, a pencil, and his big hands. “I don’t see any red files,” I said.

“Show me the loot and I’ll tell you where to get your file.”

My file. What about the others? And I didn’t like the “where to get” part.

“Gee, Nat, you see any dandruff in my hair?”

“Dandruff? Hell, you don’t even have any hair.”

“I don’t have any hayseeds sticking out of my ears, either. So don’t expect me to give you any—”

He held up a hand and pointed behind me. The woman I’d seen ladling the food was shuffling our way. “Git you somethin’, honey?” she asked me. “Hey, don’t I knows you?”

“You don’t know nuthin’,” Nat told her. “My homie here wants a brew in a bottle with the cap still on.”

The woman shrugged off this implied critique of her draft beer. “ ’Nuther for you?”

“I’m good.”

She shuffled off, muttering.

Nat leaned toward me, keeping his voice low. “I’m not playing you. If I had the files with me, what’s to stop that big blond dude out
there from just takin’ ’em? You give me the money and I tell you where they are. They’re easy to get to.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said, standing. “Don’t call me again unless you decide to show up with the files.”

“Hold on. Sit yourself. Let’s see if we can’t work this out.”

I sat back down.

“Twenty-five hundred,” he said.

I shook my head. “Not twenty-five cents, unless I see the folders.”

He slumped. “Fuck this,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. This isn’t my scene. A week ago I was living a normal life. I had a job. I was starting to sell my sculptures. Larry wasn’t the easiest guy to live with, but we got along okay.

“Then that stupid old man had to get greedy, and the shit hasn’t stopped raining down on my head.”

“Could be worse. Look at the old man and Larry.”

“I definitely don’t want to join that club,” he said.

“Is that why you ran?”

“Yeah, I figured a big homicidal dog was hunting my black ass. Now the cops are, too. I’ve gotta put miles between me and Chicago.”

“The cops have any reason to think you did it, other than the fact you took off?”

“Yeah. They musta found my shoes with Pat’s blood on ’em.”

“That’d be a clue, all right.”

“I told you I was there after he was dead,” he said defensively. “Like a fucking idiot I stepped in his blood.” He said it louder than he’d planned, and he scanned the room to make sure nobody was tuning us in.

“Why’d you go there that night?”

“Pat phoned me a little after midnight. Caught me at a comedy club in the neighborhood where Larry works out his material. He said he was worried. Somebody had threatened him, and he didn’t want to be alone.”

“He tell you who threatened him?”

“Nah. But it wasn’t anything new, him getting threats. And I was a
little wasted, because when Larry performs, booze is free. Anyway, I told Pat I’d come. But Larry was just starting his last set. And when that was over, he was wired, as usual, and wanted to go somewhere and eat and talk. Before that, I phoned the old man to see if he still wanted company.”

“What time is this?”

“A little after one. Pat’s phone rang a bunch of times, and I figured he’d gone to sleep. So I hung up. But I was a little worried. He’d been acting kinda strange. On Saturday, he even got out his old Police Special and cleaned it up. This was after he went off by himself for a couple hours. That was weird, too. He hates to drive.

“All that on top of the call when I was at the club, I thought I better check up on him before Larry and I had our late-night pizza.”

He paused while the waitress presented me with a bottle of Bud, capped. “Got ya the premium stuff,” she said before shuffling off.

I didn’t bother uncapping it. I wasn’t thirsty. “So you and Larry went to Patton’s sometime after one?” I prompted.

“Yeah. In Larry’s car. Took us another twenty minutes to find a place to park in that neighborhood. Shit, I just realized something.”

He straightened in his chair. “There was a Range Rover pullin’ out, leavin’ almost enough space for two cars. That was just down the street from Patton’s. It coulda been the bastards who killed him, leavin’ the scene.”

“How many men?”

“Two. One tall, one closer to the ground and thick. I didn’t get much of a look. Trees make it a little dark around there.”

“They were in a Range Rover?”

“Big fucking machine. Metallic red.”

“Killers would probably be driving something a little less conspicuous,” I said. Then it occurred to me that a big metallic red car had roared past Carrie and me just before our confrontation with the hit man.

“I guess it coulda been horndogs who’d been cruising the bars on Rush. Come to think of it, one of ’em was wearing a team jacket. Couldn’t see the name on it.”

“So you parked and went up to Patton’s apartment,” I said.

“Yeah. As soon as we cleared the stairs, I saw the door to his place was open and knew that couldn’t be good.”

“Had it been pried open?”

“You think I bothered to check the door? I was too busy looking at how messed up the living room was. I mean, it had been seriously trashed, but it was like whoever had taken the books off the shelves and cut up the cushions and the rug had done it carefully.”

“Didn’t want to wake the neighbors.”

“Maybe. Anyway, the old man—Jesus, they’d shoved his socks in his mouth, then cut and roasted him. And the smell … I still get a whiff of it every now and then. Larry and I see all this and we head for the door. But Larry stops and says, ‘No.’ He’s incredibly cool. He asks me if I’ve got any idea what the killers were trying to torture out of Patton.

“I tell him the old man kept some money at the apartment, but that’s sure to be gone. Larry asks if there’s anything else. And I remembered that on Saturday, before we went to your hotel room, Pat goes into the crapper and comes out with this little plastic bag. It’s drippin’ wet. He gets a key out of it. Then we drive to a storage place on Clark. He goes in and comes out with two red folders. One of ’em looks empty, the other’s got papers. From there we head to a Minuteman copy shop on North Clybourn.

“So I tell Larry all this, and he makes a beeline to the crapper. The medicine cabinet and linen closet are hanging open. The floor is a pile of tossed towels with the top of the toilet tank resting on the pile. Larry stares into the open tank, sticks his hand down in it, and starts unscrewin’ the brass float ball. He pulls that apart, and inside is the plastic bag and the key.

“We get some flashlights and go to the storage place and pop the lock. Spend hours searching through all the crap Patton had in there. His old cop outfits, caps. Trophies. Personal papers. Love letters some broads sent him back in the seventies. Turns out the guy even got married back then. Don’t know what happened to his old lady. Probably walked out on him.”

“Tell me about the files.”

“That’s what the place mainly was: files. But the current four—the ones we grabbed—were right on top.”

“What were some of the names on them?”

“Besides you? Well, there was … Naw. Not without some green changing hands.”

I considered offering him some of the five thousand for the name of the man he thought killed Patton and Kelsto. But pulling out a wad of bills and peeling off a few didn’t strike me as a smart move, even if we weren’t in a pit like Nero’s.

“Finish your story first. What’d you and Larry do after you had the files?”

“Went back to our place. It’s like three-thirty, four in the morning. Larry’s so wired he stays up, readin’ through all the files. I was so wiped that even with the image of Pat’s body in my head, I crashed hard. Wasn’t till morning I saw the blood on the edge of my shoe. I’ve watched enough TV to know you can’t just clean that stuff off. So I hid the shoes in the shed at our place.

“I barely got ’em hid before the cops showed.” He lifted his beer bottle and was annoyed to find it empty.

I moved my bottle across the table.

He twisted off the cap. “I don’t like staying in one place too long,” he said. “Are we making a deal here, or what?”

“That depends on whether you can convince me to trust you. What brought the cops to your house?”

He shrugged. “They found out somehow I worked for Pat. Nothing more. They threw questions at me for a couple hours and split.”

“They ask you if you murdered Patton?”

“That was question number one,” he said. “The next: Where was I between midnight and five a.m.? I had to bring Larry into it, to back up my alibi that we’d gone to bed at twelve-thirty and stayed there till morning.”

“Did they tell you your rights?”

“No. I didn’t get the sense they thought I was involved. Not then.”

“What other questions did they ask?”

“The usual. Did I know anybody who’d want to kill the old man? Hell, it was easier to give ’em the names of people who didn’t.”

“Was it around then you mentioned that Patton visited my hotel room?”

He opened his mouth, possibly to deny it, then nodded. “Yeah, I told ’em that.”

“Did you tell ’em why he came to see me?”

“No. ’Cause I didn’t know. I only figured that out later, when I looked at your red file. The clippings tell the story. Only thing I couldn’t figure, and still can’t, was why he’d stuck that movie script in your file. I know he didn’t have one in the folder he took to your hotel room.”

“What exactly is in my folder?” I asked.

“Just some newspaper clips, copies of your police record, and some guy’s death certificate.”

“You tell the cops about any other trips you and Patton made?”

“They just wanted to know the recent ones.”

“What else did you tell them?”

“I told them about him driving off somewhere on his own after he’d seen you. I told ’em I didn’t know where, which was the truth at the time. I told them about him getting out the gun and that he was worried when he called Sunday night.”

“Where’d he drive, Nat?”

He shook his head. Held up a hand and rubbed his fingers against his thumb in a give-me-the-money gesture.

“He called it an errand. Said I should go hang somewhere for a couple of hours, he had an errand to run by himself. But he’d be back in time for some business he had at a TV station. I don’t know what happened out there, but when he left me he was a happy camper. When he got back, not so happy at all.”

“What else did the cops ask you?”

“Nothing special.”

“Maybe about the headless body on the beach?”

His face broke out in a partial smile, the first since I sat down with him. “Yeah. They wanted to know if Pat said anything to me about it.”

“Had he?”

“Hell, yeah. That was pretty much what he was talking about the last few days. How the cops were fucking up. And how he was smart enough to know how it connected to some other crime.”

“He mention what crime?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything about the headless guy dying of natural causes?”

“No. He—”

Someone shouted “Hey!” outside the bar.

Parkins ran to the clear pane and looked out. “Shit!” he said. “That’s the one.”