Lockington drove south on Milwaukee Avenue, southeast, really—Milwaukee Avenue runs on a diagonal. The Club Howdy was on his left, and Moose Katzenbach’s report had been accurate—it was a different Club Howdy now. Its shabby gray shingles had been replaced by neat beige brick veneer. Its gaudy flashing red neon sign was gone. The new sign was smaller, pale blue, reserved. Throw in Moose’s description of the Club Howdy’s interior and it stood to reason that Bobbie Jo Pickens was cutting a hefty buck belting out country ballads. Or she was sleeping with the right people. Or both.
Lockington was entertaining a host of second thoughts. Second thoughts were new to him—he’d never had time for them. Although rarely a player of sudden hunches, he’d been given to responding to first impulses, often rashly, sometimes violently. Procrastination and Lacey Lockington were virtual strangers, this providing the reason for Lockington being alive and reasonably well in Chicago. As a police detective he’d prowled the dark corners of the city, and spontaneous action had become a habit. There’d been moments when it’d been all that’d stood between him and a cemetery plot.
At this stage of the ball game, he found himself in a position to empathize with Mrs. O’Leary’s much maligned cow. The hapless bovine had done no more than kick over a lantern. She’d burned Chicago to the ground. Lockington was no less innocent. He’d dropped into a local hotel to hoist a few with an old friend. He’d wound up smack dab in the middle of a red-hot homicide case.
He should have walked away from it forty-eight hours earlier—he knew that now. He should have left the International Arms, stopped at the nearest ginmill, gotten quietly crocked, and forgotten the whole confusing mess. He should have, but he hadn’t. Instead he’d managed to get himself grilled by Webb Pritchard, receive an intimidating telephone call, reject an unusual five-thousand-dollar offer from the Central Intelligence Agency, and be threatened by a Colt .45 automatic in a funeral home parking lot. On the plus side, if there was a plus side, he’d learned a bit more than he’d known earlier concerning a matter that’d been none of his affair in the first place—there’d been something between Rufe Devereaux and Bobbie Jo Pickens. Just how serious it’d been, Lockington didn’t know, but there’d been a relationship. A woman who isn’t acquainted with a man hardly ever dispatches a wagonload of flowers to his bier—a line of reasoning probably shared by the ubiquitous Sgt. Joe Delvano, if Moose Katzenbach’s booming right hand hadn’t scrambled Delvano’s brains.
Lockington hadn’t seen Rufe Devereaux since the evening he’d left him at the bar of the Club Howdy, apparently convinced that he could take Bobbie Jo Pickens to bed. According to Martha Merriam at Reindorff’s Flower Shop, taking Bobbie Jo Pickens to bed wouldn’t have qualified Rufe for anybody’s Hall of Fame, but, directly or indirectly, it might have been an action that’d put him in a northside crematorium. His interest in Bobbie Jo could have been a pivot point—at the time it’d blossomed, or shortly afterward, Rufe had taken an unexplained leave of absence from the Central Intelligence Agency, disappearing over Lockington’s horizon to surface scant hours before he’d been shot to death. Had Rufe rung Bobbie Jo’s bell and been run off the Club Howdy range by a jealous hillbilly guitar-picker, and had he been blown away because he hadn’t stayed gone? Lockington junked that line of thought instantly because Rufe had returned to Chicago with a different woman in tow, one who’d make Bobbie Jo Pickens look like a busted bale of alfalfa, if Webb Pritchard’s second-hand description was to be granted credence.
Lockington had a thousand dollars in his desk drawer, and he’d have returned it to its sender if he’d known the sender’s identity. If it was Rufe Devereaux’s money, as Lockington believed, he couldn’t return it. If it’d belonged to somebody else, they’d have to show up and ask for it. Well, so much for the sudden and untimely demise of Rufe Devereaux—Lockington was washing his hands of the whole tragic business. Aside from the loss of a dear friend, he had but one regret—he should have accepted the CIA’s offer of five thousand dollars to stay out of the picture. Making that kind of money for doing nothing is excellent work if you can get it. But, what the hell, it hadn’t been his first mistake and it certainly wouldn’t be his last. He nosed the Pontiac into the Randolph Street parking lot, his thoughts veering to verdant pastures—this evening he’d stop at the Shamrock Pub, and if Edna Garson was there, perhaps something could be arranged. It’d been a while.
He piled out of his car, turning it over to a scowling attendant—ancient, rusted-out vehicles such as Lockington’s fail to promise a great deal in the way of customer gratuities. There were several automobiles behind the smoking old dragon, all awaiting parking accommodations, and at the curb was a sparkling ’88 white Cadillac sedan driven by a portly, red-faced, silver-haired fellow wearing wire-framed, amber-lensed sunglasses, the type usually seen under the brim of a Georgia deputy’s Stetson. The man’s gaze hooked up with Lockington’s for a moment, then shifted to Randolph Street traffic. Lockington had seen him before, he thought. He shrugged the possible recognition off. He might have sat next to him in one of Chicago’s multitudinous northside taverns. He might have discussed the Cubs or the Sox or the Hawks with him. It’d happened on countless occasions—brief sports chatter with men he’d never seen before or since.
Lockington shouldered his way through the oppressive late spring heat. By noon the office would be untenable. If nobody laid claim to that thousand dollars, he’d have an air conditioner installed, a big mother, one that’d freeze the balls off a penguin. He smiled wryly. There was a line he’d damned well better keep to himself. If Moose got hold of it, it’d become an issue, Moose voicing doubts that penguins have balls, Lockington assuring him that they do—it had a time potential of hours, and the thought of becoming involved in such a discussion with Moose Katzenbach was enough to send a chill rippling up Lockington’s back.
Randolph Street clanged and clattered, a woman caught Lockington with her shoulder, spinning him into the path of another who knocked him against a utility pole, and he was less than half a block from the Classic Investigations office when the man in the ’88 white Caddy flashed onto the screen of his memory. There he was, silver hair flashing in the footlights, red face beaded with sweat, eyes glaring, pacing back and forth like a short-leashed Bengal tiger, waving a hand mike with one hand, a Bible with the other, exhorting a crowd of fifteen thousand people to wake up and join the noble cause of America for whites only, to stamp out the gross permissiveness that was sweeping the country, to return to the old values, to an era of law and order, to vote for Billy Mac Davis in the 1984 presidential election.
That campaign had busted out before November of ’84, and Lockington wondered what Billy Mac Davis had been doing on West Randolph Street. Maybe he’d gone straight and taken a job. Politicians have been known to do that. Even in Chicago.