The rest of the afternoon dribbled into evening. I spent a fraction of it lacerating my hands with ductwork but mostly I peeked out the window for whoever might come at me for the murder of Marilyn Paul.
At eight-fifteen, it paid off. And not.
A white Ford Explorer pulled onto my street and parked in the dark, a hundred yards away. That wasn’t unusual for bargain-seeking Johns. Nor was it strange he’d turned to face heading out. Knowledgeable Rivertown revelers desired speedy exits, should a Rivertown squad car come weaving at them. It wasn’t arrest they feared – nobody ever got arrested for lewdness in Rivertown – but rather a hard-to-explain collision, while parked in the company of a hooker, with a drunken cop.
I watched the Ford SUV for too many moments before I left the window, telling myself I was simply jumpy. Two attempts at a frame for murder will sandpaper even the calmest of nerves.
Thirty minutes later, I was back, looking again. The Explorer was still there and I had the thought it might belong to one of Sergeant Bohler’s people, keeping me under surveillance. I padded down the wrought-iron stairs, turned off the lamp I’d set on my new furnace so it could be admired after sunset by peeping toms or worse and slipped out the door. The interior bulbs in the Jeep don’t work and I eased in without flashing any light.
A twist of the key, a quick U-turn and I came up on him fast, ready to flash on my headlamps.
He was faster. He shot forward, made a right turn and another onto Thompson to head west. He was no john, and he was no cop.
Night-times, cars crawled along Rivertown’s seediest half-mile. Drunks poked along to avoid the hallucinations that jumped at them from the shadows and johns drove slowly to inspect the meat working the curbs.
The driver I was chasing wasn’t mindful of any of that. He darted recklessly in and out of the slow parade, causing a dozen drivers to hit their horns and swerve. In no time he’d gotten six car lengths ahead. I worked the tangle as best as my nerves would allow, but no matter how craftily I drove, he was better. Soon he was at least ten car lengths ahead.
The drunks and the johns fell away at the outskirts of town. I sped up, hoping to close some of the distance. But his Explorer was a rocket compared to the lump that was my Jeep. He gunned his SUV up to an almost suicidal ninety miles an hour.
And then he got stuck behind a slow-moving tractor-trailer. By then there were only three cars between us. I pressed down on the accelerator, hoping to pass to get closer.
The bubble lights of a cop lit up the opaque yellow of my plastic rear window. I had to back off and pull to the side of the road.
The plainclothes cop came up to my side window, flashing a badge. ‘Trying to outrun me, Elstrom?’ she asked.
‘You just cost me, Bohler,’ I said. ‘The person who likely killed Marilyn Paul was watching my turret. You just helped him get away.’
She smiled. ‘Your fantasies won’t change my mind. You killed Marilyn Paul.’
My heart finally quit pounding by the time the Bohemian called at ten. ‘No dice, Vlodek,’ he said. ‘According to my contact, Theresa Wade insists on running the lives of her brother and herself like she runs the campaign, entirely through her address on his website. The best you can do is request an interview through that.’
‘She’s keeping as low a profile as her brother.’
‘Supposedly, she’s severely agoraphobic.’
‘Delman Bean inferred something like that. She’s afraid to leave her house?’
‘She hasn’t ventured out for years. Plus, she’s paralyzed from the waist down, from an accident when she was very young.’
‘Wheelchair-bound,’ I said, remembering my meeting with the woman calling herself Rosamund Reynolds.
‘You’re thinking it could have been Theresa, not Marilyn Paul, who hired you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Marilyn Paul got my name through a sorority newsletter. The real question is why she wanted to impersonate Theresa Wade when she hired me.’
‘To leave a trail to Timothy Wade?’
‘That seems most likely. Wade was the fourth musketeer. One of the other musketeers is dead and two are missing. He’s got to be involved, either as a perpetrator or a target.’
‘Because he’s the only musketeer still standing? That’s a reach, Vlodek.’
‘Marilyn Paul worked for the Wade campaign. She knew his schedule,’ I said.
‘And planted those bones to publicly embarrass Wade, the very candidate she was laboring to elect?’
‘Whatever the intent, it didn’t work. The press dropped the story.’
‘As we discussed, Theresa has convinced the press that Tim was reacting to a very real and imminent threat and that he’s safest remaining in seclusion. She’s wise, and that’s wise, until they catch the perpetrator.’
‘If Theresa is as sharp as you think, she suspected Marilyn Paul right away.’
‘You’re imagining she had Marilyn Paul murdered? For that simple prank? That’s crazy.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said, ‘but I’m still stuck wondering if Marilyn Paul suspected Theresa or Timothy Wade of something.’
I told him I was going to poke around a bit on the Internet and he hung up, sounding tired but no doubt grateful that he wouldn’t have to listen to more of my nonsensical rambling. Not me; I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t too impatient to chase more nonsense. The man who’d likely killed Marilyn Paul and wanted me framed for it had come again. I went to my computer to find Theresa and Timothy Wade.
They came from a line of rum runners and politicians, which in Chicago was considered a doubly golden pedigree. Their great grandfather, Samuel Wade, Sr made his fortune during the Prohibition years, operating a construction company with excellent ties to Chicago’s city hall. By most accounts, the company did build a scattering of tiny municipal buildings – warming huts at ice rinks and such – but mostly it made deliveries. News reports of the day marveled that his trucks, presumably loaded with lumber, were a familiar sight in the city and in Cook County. Later, it became accepted that because Wade Sr owned a distillery in Canada it was likely his trucks delivered things more liquid than lumber.
I creaked my tilting red vinyl chair back from the screen and allowed myself an irony. We shared Prohibition-era histories, the siblings Wade and me. My own grandfather also ran alcohol through Chicago during Prohibition, though his was lowlier – beer made in local garages. And alas, our ancestors invested their incomes differently. Whereas Wade, Sr constructed an expansive estate close to the magnificent shore of Lake Michigan, my grandfather never got further than one turret of a castle along the greasier shore of the Willahock River – then, as now, more of a drain than a desirable waterway.
Samuel Wade, Jr brought the family new sources of revenue. He entered politics. The profession had always been a moneymaker in Illinois, making multi-millionaires of thousands that dedicated their lives to the public good. Wade, Jr was no slouch at it. He multiplied the family fortune ten-fold in the years he served in the state senate.
Jared Wade, Samuel Jr’s son, sought to use the ancestral money to buy the family respectability. He sat on several charity boards, contributed heavily to the Chicago democratic machine and married a dazzling blonde socialite from Kenilworth. They had dazzling children. Theresa was their first born, followed by Timothy, two years later. Pictures of them enjoying charitable events with their parents appeared regularly in Chicago’s newspapers.
At the age of six, Theresa showed promise as a gymnast. At ten, she landed wrong on the edge of a trampoline. It put her in a wheelchair. The family remained upbeat, and pictures from then on showed a smiling, pretty young blonde girl resolutely participating in all sorts of events with other kids her age. Theresa Wade was no recluse at that time in her life.
Jared Wade and his beautiful blonde socialite wife were killed in a boat explosion on Lake Michigan when Theresa was twenty-one and her younger brother, Timothy, was nineteen. A photo of the two young siblings showed them smiling bravely at their parents’ funeral, where Theresa announced their intention to live on at the family estate.
A second showed them six months later, sitting in the family’s older Cadillac Eldorado convertible with its top down, enjoying a polo match in Oak Brook, Illinois. Life was going on.
Theresa Wade graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism the next year. She’d never intended to go into any form of journalism, for reasons that did not become clear for several more years.
Fresh from graduating, also from Northwestern, Timothy Wade almost immediately became prominent in Chicago’s political and philanthropic circles. He became an aide to the president of the Cook County Board, and then to the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. He attended ribbon cuttings, taxpayer forums and open government meetings of every sort, always visible but in the background, assisting, learning. He was photogenic, a comer in Illinois politics destined for the national stage. Never, though, did he bruise himself in campaigns for small office. There’d been little doubt his future was in the US Senate. And then, likely, a run for president.
And all the while, he did serious social good, chairing or serving on boards devoted to helping young, disadvantaged children, often willing to brandish his own inheritance. Roadblocks disappeared when young Timothy Wade’s checkbook appeared.
The press on Timothy Wade was overwhelmingly favorable. And, by then, it had long been apparent that Theresa had gone to Medill to learn how to manage media, for the political career of her brother, Timothy. They were long-term planners, the Wades.
As photos of Timothy began appearing everywhere in the press, pictures of Theresa had completely disappeared. She’d backed away completely from public notice. One columnist speculated that Theresa had suffered some sort of delayed depression over the deaths of her parents. Nobody else speculated much at all. Tim’s star was rising by Theresa’s design. She best served their ambitions by staying out of the limelight.
I found only one picture of her taken in recent times on the Internet, and it was worthless. It showed her in profile, sitting behind a sheer lace curtain in a second-floor bedroom of the Wade house. It looked to have been taken with a long lens from a hundred yards away. Theresa Wade was a blur, much as Rosamund Reynolds had been the day I’d met her in the day rental office.
Fatigue found me at three in the morning. I went up to bed, numbed finally by enough information and adrenaline withdrawal to hope to not dream of the living or the dead. Of Amanda, and of Jenny.
That night, only one dream came, but it came hard. It starred the white Ford Explorer I’d chased earlier. I hadn’t seen much except its taillights but it had been enough. I was almost sure they were identical to the ones I’d seen on the car that had sped away, the night an intruder had left the serrated knife in my Jeep.
I dreamed the driver wore a black hood and was death himself.