‘Mickey said there were nine bars within three blocks of your address,’ Endora said at ten the next morning. She read off the list.
‘Now I’ll bet there are twenty,’ I said, because the neighborhood had been yupped up in recent years. I thanked her and called Lena Jankowski, the used-to-be Democratic volunteer who’d worked with the musketeers.
‘I was wondering if I’d hear from you again,’ she said.
‘I’m like termites,’ I said. ‘Almost impossible to eradicate.’
‘Or understand completely,’ she said.
‘I’m going to read you a list of bars, or lounges, or small restaurants. I want you to give me any memory or association that comes to mind.’
‘We’re playing games?’
‘I hope not. First name: Tony’s.’
‘None.’
‘Willadean’s Whistle.’
She laughed. ‘We went there, back in the Delman Bean days.’
‘You, John Shea, Willard Piser, Red Halvorson and Tim Wade?’
‘And others,’ she said.
‘Marilyn Paul?’
‘I told you, she didn’t hang with us after hours. She was all business, that woman.’
‘Anything else about Willadean’s Whistle?’
‘It was a real dump. Too bright, fluorescent lighting, sticky red tile floor. They were still serving Harvey Wallbangers twenty years after the last young person in Chicago ordered one.’
She had no memory of the next two names I read off.
‘Harley’s,’ I said.
‘Motorcycle-themed,’ she said. ‘Spicy chicken wings. We went there once in a while.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Despite the biker name, a nice place. Clean.’
‘Lakota Nation,’ I read out.
Dead silence. I couldn’t even hear her breathe.
‘Lakota Nation?’ I repeated. It was the name of an American Indian tribe that moved around the Midwest.
‘Sorry; remembering that place set off a lot of memories,’ she said finally. ‘We went there the most because they had cheap pizza and good-enough beer. It was American Indian warrior-themed, can you believe it? No one worried about political correctness back then. Chicago still has its Blackhawks hockey team, but so many of the other Indian themes are gone from here …’ Her voice drifted away for a moment, and then she said, ‘That was the place, I’m sure of it.’
‘Sure of what?’
‘That was our last good time. I remember because we got as drunk as coots and some of us got thrown out.’
‘The musketeers?’
She laughed. ‘Probably. They always got drunker than the rest of us.’
A queasy thought flitted in my mind. ‘Tell me about the decor,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘I might have been there, long ago,’ I lied. My gut was already sure.
‘What you’d imagine,’ she said. ‘Dark wood booths, American Indian stuff on the walls – fake feather headdresses, bows and arrows.’
My mind replayed the television video of the bones falling out of the silo. ‘Tomahawks, too, I seem to remember,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘There were tomahawks on the walls.’
‘Those little Indian axes you used to see in old Westerns?’
‘The very same.’
‘They were everywhere,’ she said. ‘There must have been a hundred of them stuck on the walls – cheap little plastic ones so much smaller than the other junk. You know, Mr Elstrom …’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Yes?’
‘The sad part was how it ended. We had so much fun working on that campaign. And then John, Willard and Red walked out of that place and out of our lives without so much as a goodbye and the rest of us had to get crazy busy trying to cover their jobs. We couldn’t do it, not on such short notice. We lost the election.’
‘They said nothing about leaving, you’re sure?’
‘Not one damned word. The next morning they were gone and we were stuck. We couldn’t get all our voters to the polls. And worst of all? Not even after the election, after the candidate we’d worked so hard for lost by so few votes, did one of those guys think to send a note of apology for leaving us in such a lurch. We would have understood. Good jobs were tough to get, then as now.’
‘Just Christmas cards, every December, from Halvorson?’
She sighed. ‘After that, we grew up.’
I read her the last of Mickey Rosen’s names but she had few memories of them. That was fine. I’d gotten more than I’d phoned for. The cryptic threat that John Shea, living as David Arlin, wanted passed to Timothy Wade had nothing to do with American Indians, or headdresses, or bows or arrows.
‘If he wants to keep the hatchet buried,’ Shea had threatened, playing off an old cliché. He’d been cryptic, so that only Timothy Wade would understand.
Marilyn Paul hadn’t understood but she suspected enough to set a rubber axe and some plastic bones tumbling from a silo. Likely, she’d merely intended to nudge Wade just a little into dealing with what Marilyn saw as a real threat. But Wade had overreacted and gone into hiding. And then the man who she thought was John Shea got blown up. It set all her alarm bells ringing. She tried to locate Red Halvorson and Willard Piser because they were both musketeers and might know something about Shea’s blackmail plot, and because they’d fled town twenty years earlier, along with Shea.
Both had disappeared. One very recently, the other perhaps years before.
She hired me to see if I could learn more, on the cheap. But someone was watching her, someone who needed to kill her before she could ever know that Shea’s cryptic message had nothing to do with a hatchet, or even a tomahawk.
It had been about a bar.