I reserved a last-minute seat on a nine o’clock flight to Chicago as Jenny raced me to the airport in my rental.
‘You’ll talk to that cop in Laguna Beach?’ I said as I got out.
‘Discreetly, as I promised,’ she said, offering a small smile up at me through the open window. ‘I’ll see you again?’ she asked.
‘You betcha.’ I pulled my duffel from the back seat. It felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. It wanted to be an anchor, to tug me back into the car.
She eased me away. ‘Remember, I want to know about Halvorson, Arlin and your mysterious preacher, Dainsto Runney,’ she said. ‘I want to know the true identity of the mystery woman who hired you. But first, I want to know what’s in the back of your Jeep.’
There was so much more to say, and I said none of it. I bent down to quickly kiss her and then closed the car door. She gunned the engine and sped away. She’d drop off my rental and take a cab back to her apartment where she’d wait breathlessly, she said, for news I’d made her promise to not break on television.
The flight, luckily enough, was not full and I managed to find a window spot with an empty space between me and a fat man spilling out into the aisle. He had a bad cold and wanted to chat between wet coughs.
‘No habla ingles,’ I said, which I hoped meant, in Spanish, that I didn’t speak English. I closed my eyes. I needed to dare to think.
I was being set-up.
It now seemed so obvious. A woman behind a fake name and a thick mask of make-up and half-truths had played me for a chump. She wasn’t interested in learning much about Halvorson and Arlin and Runney so much as she wanted me noticed asking around about them. Clearly I’d been hired for my history and my susceptibility. I’d made a big splash in the Chicago papers, starring as a moron who’d gotten suckered into authenticating phony evidence for a crooked suburban mayor, Evangeline Wilts. That I’d been quickly exonerated made no ripple at all; it got one paragraph buried in the back pages of Chicago’s main newspapers and there’d been no mention at all on local television. Rosamund Reynolds had likely hired me for my ripeness to be made gamy again, perhaps for murder. After sending me away she could have filled my Jeep with something that might be the corpse of Gary Halvorson or Dainsto Runney. I’d even left her a cardboard box.
But I’d gotten lucky. Leo Brumsky, my pal of pals, had alerted me. And that bought me time. Rosamund believed I was still on the west coast, headed up to Oregon. With more luck, I could dispose of whatever was in the box before she’d anonymously tip the cops that I was returning from doing bad out of town and that I had a surprise in my Jeep.
It seemed so paranoid. It seemed so probable.
The fat man on the aisle seat beside me coughed wet into the flesh of his fist. It seemed so wonderfully ordinary.
I stepped out from Chicago’s Midway Airport terminal at two in the morning. Leo’s pale orange Porsche roadster was idling at the curb.
I jumped inside. ‘How long have you been waiting?’
‘I came straight here … almost. I didn’t know where else to go,’ he said in too small a voice. ‘The cops keep making me move.’
He stared straight ahead as he pulled us away from the curb. His hands were shaking, squeezing the steering wheel too hard. Two hundred yards down, the transmission whine was deafening; he’d not shifted out of first gear. I told him to pull over. He complied, a wooden man. We switched places and I started us up again.
‘I’ll take care of things, Leo.’
‘I already did.’
I slowed down. ‘Tell me.’
‘I dis-dis-disposed,’ he said, stuttering in that same small voice. His teeth chattered as though it were winter.
He was in some phase of shock. I’d seen him that way once before, though that time had been more severe. He’d just fired a revolver at a killer.
‘Damn it, Leo.’
‘You’d have done the same for me,’ he said, shivering.
‘I would not.’ I reached to turn up the heater.
‘You al-al-already did,’ he said, still chattering.
He was right, but I hoped never to confirm it. I’d done my own disposal of the man who’d come to kill him.
‘You returned the Jeep to the turret?’ I asked as we approached Harlem Avenue. I’d take it north, up to Rivertown.
‘Back again, okey dokey,’ he said in a strange, sing-song voice. He turned to look at me, working up a smile. As always when Leo smiled at night, his huge teeth lined up ghostly white, like cemetery markers in a row. That night, there was something wrong in his eyes. They were too dark, like black windows looking in on an empty room.
I backed off from asking him anything more. One thing was certain: I couldn’t return him to his mother’s bungalow; he’d be too much for the septuagenarian Ma Brumsky. I turned around, caught I-55 east to Lake Shore Drive and headed up to the high-rent district north of the Chicago River. We rode in silence for ten minutes. I doubted he was aware that he was out in the night.
I called Endora, his girlfriend. A former model and current researcher at the Newberry Library, she’s brilliant, like him. She’d be capable.
She answered the phone sleepy-voiced. ‘I’m bringing Leo to you,’ I said.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, instantly alert.
‘He did me too much of a favor. He needs a safe night’s sleep, out of sight.’
All the while, Leo said nothing. I drove faster.
She was waiting on the sidewalk outside her high-rise condo building when I pulled up.
‘I’m fine,’ he managed, getting out of the Porsche.
‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We’ll have lunch. We’ll talk.’
He nodded, uncertain. Endora smiled, uncertain.
I headed west to whatever waited in the night.