We met in the side room at Galecki’s at eleven that evening, after the restaurant had closed and once Bohler’s shift patrolling the forest preserves was over.
And after the phone call had been made.
I told Jenny I’d pay for the Polish cabbage rolls and beer later if her cousins managed to keep things under control. Stanley, Bernie, Frank and Eloise sat toward the front at a table big enough for the large platters and their handguns, set out in full view. The blinds had been closed against the night.
We sat farther back, at a table in the middle. Jenny wore tailored jeans and a finely woven yellow sweater. Bohler wore a beige holiday sweater that had a Thanksgiving turkey on the front and enough double-knots to suggest it had been someone’s introduction to knitting. It was a little too tight and showed the outline of the small revolver, perhaps a .22, holstered at her waist. I wore what I had: khakis, a blue button-collared shirt and my best sweatshirt.
Mrs Galecki was our waitress and the only other person in the restaurant. She wore black slacks, a white blouse and a meat cleaver in the pocket of her faded yellow apron. She hadn’t smiled when she let me in. I’d brought trouble to her daughter, and by the looks on the faces of the cousins and the guns they’d set on the table, I was bringing more.
She took our order for drinks. Jenny asked for a dirty martini and Bohler an upscale Pilsner Urquell. I ordered a Pilsner Urquell, too, since I’m almost never out, socially. Mrs Galecki set down their drinks as ordered, in glass and stein, and slammed down a Miller Lite in a bottle for me.
‘So, what’s the urgent news?’ Bohler asked me. She’d seen the guns on the table in front and had chosen to sit facing the cousins.
‘Marilyn Paul’s killer shared some DNA markers with the Jane Doe found in the pine coffin,’ I said.
Bohler inhaled sharply; she’d understood in a hard heartbeat. ‘You told me Wade buried the girl without them doing any tests,’ she managed, almost whispering. She was wonderfully frightened.
I could have said I hadn’t known of the testing but I was done lying. I was after some measure of satisfaction now.
‘Timothy Wade has been told he’s going to resign tomorrow,’ I said. ‘He’s going to say he has to take care of his sister, whose health is deteriorating.’
‘We talked about that sister story,’ she snapped. ‘Why resign over it?’
‘Wade’s being given no choice if he wants to avoid prosecution.’
‘We decided there’s no way to prosecute Wade.’
‘There’s no way he’ll even be swabbed for DNA,’ I said, ‘just as that DNA analysis done on the girl will likely never see the light of day. The samples will be destroyed, the report will get lost. Wade’s DNA will never be linked to his sister, Jane Doe, or through her to Marilyn Paul. In Illinois, Democrats and Republicans are vultures of a feather. They work together to avoid embarrassments, so Wade must go quietly.’
Bohler relaxed back in her chair and smiled a little. ‘Wade gets off scot-free.’
I smiled, too. ‘He can look forward to spending the rest of his life in philanthropy and having people marvel at what a generous, upstanding person he is.’
‘Almost,’ Jenny said, right on cue.
Bohler shot her a fast look. ‘Almost?’
‘Almost,’ I said, leaning closer to her face. ‘Wade will realize he still has to worry about the accomplice he paid to frame somebody for murdering Marilyn Paul, to keep him aware of what was being learned by that same troublesome private investigator and, later, to set up a failed search of his back yard to shut down any further investigation. He won’t want to spend his life worrying that she might spill all of that to some overzealous, do-good prosecutor who won’t be stopped by crooked politicians.’
‘Wade won’t want that,’ Jenny said.
‘He’ll have to tidy up,’ I said.
Jenny touched Bohler’s wrist and spoke soothingly, as though to a child. ‘Wade kills people who can hurt him. Marilyn Paul. John Shea.’
‘Why would Wade leave a loose end that could come back to haunt him?’ I added.
‘A big loose end,’ Jenny said, patting Bohler’s wrist hard now.
‘A blonde loose end,’ I said, unable to control myself.
Jenny squeezed Bohler’s wrist. ‘Dead for sure.’
Bohler, frantic, began looking back and forth between Jenny and me.
‘You know what bothered me right off?’ I said, making a show of asking them both. ‘How did an impound garage cop catch the Marilyn Paul case in the first place? Lieutenant Beech out in California questioned that right away.’ I shook my head. ‘I let it go, figuring that with all the cutbacks and such, sheriff’s deputies must be doing more than their normally assigned duties. Stupid, stupid me.’
‘Stupid, stupid you, Dek.’ Still squeezing Bohler’s wrist, Jenny shook her own head as if in sympathetic confusion.
I turned to Bohler. ‘Of course, I know now that you didn’t catch the case. Real detectives caught it but they move slow and they let you in because you said you got a call about a corpse in my Jeep. You didn’t get tipped; you got told, directly, by Wade, who put it there. The problem was I was out of town, and you needed me in Rivertown to arrest me while in possession of the body. But then, the body disappeared, right out from under your nose. I can only imagine Wade’s fury when you told him about that. Still, he had a back-up plan. He had you search for the murder knife he planted in my Jeep.’
Bohler shifted in her chair slightly, carefully. I slammed my hand down on her other wrist before she could pull away from Jenny’s grasp and grab her gun.
‘This time you were leaving nothing to chance,’ I went on as conversationally as I could. ‘You planted the knife and then hung around after phoning for a flatbed and a dog. But again your luck went bad. The knife got found before your dog arrived. Still, you figured you’d recover residual evidence, but the dried blood traces got trapped by a top layer of Burger King wrappers that went away with the knife.’
Bohler’s eyes narrowed. She was looking at the cousins sitting at the table in front, no doubt calculating her odds of escaping if she could tug free from Jenny and me.
I nodded to the cousins, who’d been watching us, for such was the price of the cabbage, and later, beer. They grabbed their guns, kicked back their chairs and hurried up to our table.
Jenny and I let go. ‘Waistband, right side,’ I said.
Eloise took the revolver from beneath Bohler’s sweater and motioned for her to stand up. She patted her down, found no other weapon and looked to me.
‘No extra bullets in her pocket?’ I asked.
Eloise shook her head.
‘If you could please remove the bullets from her gun and give it to me?’ I asked.
Eloise snapped open the cylinder, removed the bullets and handed me the revolver. I put the small gun in my pants pocket and told the cousins they could go back to their table.
‘If things go well you can have your gun back,’ I said to Bohler.
‘I didn’t kill anybody,’ she said.
‘For an expensive truck, Bohler?’ I asked, remembering Booster Liss’s assessment that the truck’s wheels alone cost a thousand dollars each. ‘You tried to frame me, just for money for a damned new truck?’
‘I was only supposed to discover the body. Then I was only supposed to leave the knife, come back with my partner, have him find it and impound your Jeep. That was all.’
‘How about the night Wade came to my place? You came along as back-up. What was he going to do, shoot me?’
‘He was crazy that night, paranoid about what you might have learned. He called me at the garage, told me I’d damned well better meet him at your place. I didn’t know what he was going to do. Whatever, he chickened out.’
‘You pulled me over before I could see who it was.’
‘That doesn’t connect me to anything.’
‘Remember, Jeffries remembers you from ten or fifteen years ago, working private security for a couple of Democratic events. He connects you to Wade.’
She pushed her chair back and got up. ‘This is crap.’
‘Wade won’t do time and he won’t forget that you’re the only one who can get him prosecuted. He’ll hire killers. They’ll find you.’
I handed over the small revolver. ‘Keep it handy, Bohler.’
She made for the door. I signaled to the cousins to let her go.
‘How far will she get?’ Jenny asked.
‘The meanest part of me wants her to run for the rest of her life, to be always looking over her shoulder. That same mean part wants Wade to be hunting her for forever, too, to always be sweating a day when Bohler tells all.’ I tried to summon up a smile. ‘For Marilyn Paul, I wish long lives for the both of them.’
‘What finally convinced you she was in Wade’s pocket?’
‘When I told her I was going to search the woods across the street. She tipped Wade that I was coming because that’s the only reason a guard could have been waiting so close. He heard me, found me and would have killed me if I hadn’t outrun him. When I got away, he and the other night man took off. They must have called the day shift boys to stay away as well. None of them had signed on to be questioned about the fresh grave across the street.’
‘They were gone by the time we arrived at that fire,’ she said.
‘I got lucky. If they’d hung around they would have put it out and no cops would ever have come to discover those graves.’
‘No, Dek. You wouldn’t have given up. You would have set another fire.’
I gave that a nod.
‘Explain something,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t Wade simply call the police when Theresa died in that crash? It would have been ruled an accident.’
‘He must have been in deep shock, and in denial. They were close, those two Wades. But part of him must have been lucid enough to fear what the crash would do to his future. He drove the Cadillac up into that sunken garage, closed the doors and built her a fine pine casket. He buried her across the road, on a property no one would ever think he owned. And he grieved. He must have grieved deeply.’
‘And then along came Red Halvorson, not that long afterward?’
‘Another horror not of his conscious making,’ I said. ‘I can almost pity the person Wade became, buffeted by such tragedies.’
‘So many years passed, living with such guilt.’
‘Years of doing many good things,’ I said. ‘And then along came John Shea and Marilyn Paul, threatening to stop all the good he still intended to do.’
‘Marilyn Paul, a nosy pest who could upend his entire career,’ she said. ‘And John Shea, a blackmailer and a murderer. Both had to be gotten rid of.’
‘As I had to be gotten rid of, though he needed me alive to wear the jacket for killing Marilyn. He’d found my name in her apartment and saw how I could be a fall guy. He remembered Bohler and contacted her, waving money. She went along.’
Jenny touched my hand. Mrs Galecki, who’d just set down four pitchers of beer for the cousins, charged up quick as a bullet, scribbling my check. She slapped it down onto the table, face up, and hovered close, waiting for me to look at it. I looked. She’d charged $112 for eleven drinks, $81 for four pitchers of beer, $52 for stuffed cabbages, $15 and change for tax, and $71 for her own tip.
It broke the moment. I started to laugh. Mrs Galecki dropped one hand to the handle of the meat cleaver in her apron, daring me to dispute the charge.
Jenny looked at the tab and then up at her mother’s steely glare. And then she started laughing, too.
‘It’s the Chicago way,’ I managed.
We stood up. I set down six fifties, two twenties, two singles, thirty-five cents and the last of the lint I had in my pocket. It was all that remained of Marilyn Paul’s money and all that remained of my own. Mrs Galecki nodded, satisfied that I’d been plucked clean.
We headed toward the cousins. They raised their beer glasses, toasting my largesse. Jenny stopped and put a hand on Bernie’s shoulder, or perhaps it was Stanley’s, or Frank’s. I couldn’t tell.
I touched her arm lightly. And then I went out alone, into the night.