That night, Kelson slept hard and woke at dawn with Payday nestled against his mouth. He blew fur from his teeth and went into the bathroom to shave and shower. He fried bacon, laid two strips on a plate with scrambled eggs and toast for himself, and set a strip for each of the kittens on the floor. Payday attacked the meat, pouncing as if Kelson had bought her a pet gerbil. Then the kittens eyed each other, seemingly unsure whether they would fight. Then each bit into her bacon and disappeared with it under Kelson’s bed. ‘Huh,’ Kelson said, and ate his breakfast.
The windows in Dr P’s office at the Rehabilitation Institute faced an alley and, beyond the alley, a one-story utilities building topped with air-conditioning units, cooling pipes, and a bunch of brightly painted metal boxes of unclear purpose. Dr P was staring at the boxes when Kelson came in.
‘I’ve been thinking about metaphors for you,’ she said, without looking at him. ‘All those machines – the fans and tubes, the shiny, noisy things that belong inside – you’ve got them on the outside. It’s fascinating.’
Kelson looked out the window at the rooftop. ‘And ugly.’
‘No, only fascinating,’ and she turned her eyes to him. ‘How are the breathing exercises working?’
‘Not so well at Big Pie Pizza. Fine afterward.’
‘Were you drinking?’
‘Only if Sprite counts.’
Dr P narrowed her eyes, as if that would help her see inside Kelson’s head. ‘Instead of asking for assistance, some people self-medicate.’
‘I know,’ Kelson said. ‘Got any advice for keeping my mouth shut during a civil trial if the pizza woman sues?’
‘Sure. Settle out of court. You live … a complicated life. Still, some people with disinhibition have it much worse. You’re a lucky man.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Bet for me next time you go to Arlington Park. Win, place, or show.’
After Dr P kicked him out, Kelson went back to his office, checked his guns as he’d checked them the previous night, and turned on his laptop.
He googled ‘Jimmy Choo’. He brought up the website and scrolled through the women’s sneakers, stopping at the Norways – black tennis shoes with strips of fur, like squirrel tails, pasted where the laces belonged. ‘Cool,’ he said, ‘and creepy.’ They sold for $875. As he scrolled through other styles, he said ‘cool’ again for the Malias – gray suede high-heel sandals with a go-go dancer fringe. $1,150. ‘But these,’ he said, clicking on a pair of studded and leather-strapped black boots called Bikers – $1,795 – ‘I like.’
The site linked to ‘A Style Lesson with Blanca Miró Scrimieri’, a Spanish fashion expert with fashion model cheekbones and severe shoulders. ‘For you, Blanca,’ Kelson said to her picture, ‘the Teslers’ – high-heel boots with a rabbit-tail puff at the top. The Jimmy Choo ‘Celebrity Sightings’ included pictures of Emma Stone and Nicole Kidman. ‘Whole worlds I didn’t know about,’ Kelson told Natalie Portman.
Then he closed the computer on Jimmy Choo, locked his office, and went down to the street. As he walked into the parking garage, the attendant wished him a good morning, and Kelson said, ‘Keep your pants on.’
He drove to the address Genevieve Bower gave him for Jeremy Oliver – on North Hermitage, a mile and a half west of Wrigley Field.
Oliver rented rooms in a green single-story bungalow with a high attic. A dried flower wreath hung on the front door, and an empty flowerbox balanced on the porch railing. Kelson climbed the porch steps and stared in through a window at a living room furnished with a green-and-white striped rug, a set of raw pine bookshelves, a blue overstuffed armchair, and a matching sofa. A child’s crayon drawing of an elephant hung over the fireplace mantel. ‘Don’t think so, JollyOllie,’ Kelson said, and went down the steps. He walked around to the back of the house. A set of painted wooden stairs went up to a separate entrance to a dormered attic apartment.
Kelson went up and again peered through a window, this one facing into a little, dark kitchen. He knocked on the glass and waited. When no one came, he knocked again – and then harder on the wooden door. No one came. He moved close to the door and listened. Nothing.
He went back down the stairs to the backyard. A detached garage faced an alley behind the house. On the brown lawn between the alley and the house, someone had built a brick fire pit and surrounded it with a mix of wooden and plastic chairs. Years ago, while working a case as an undercover cop, Kelson had chased a crack dealer through a backyard like this. He’d caught the dealer when he tried to vault a fence separating the yard from the alley. ‘The world gets bigger and bigger, and I get smaller and smaller,’ Kelson said. ‘Chasing a damned shoe thief.’ He climbed the back stairs again and tried the doorknob.
It turned, and he pushed the door open.
‘Bummer,’ he said.
He stepped inside and patted a wall until he found a light switch. ‘I’ll get killed this way someday,’ he said. The kitchen smelled like new paint, though the walls were grimy with cooking grease. The attic ceiling slanted from the low walls. He called into the apartment, ‘Mr Oliver?’
Nothing.
‘Jeremy Oliver?’
Still nothing.
Kelson moved around the kitchen. ‘I know better than this,’ he said. There was a scraped breakfast plate in the sink. In an open garbage can next to the stove, there were broken eggshells, a balled paper towel, and an orange juice carton.
Kelson called into the house again. ‘JollyOllie?’
Nothing.
‘Yeah, I wouldn’t answer either,’ Kelson said.
A hallway led toward the front of the house. As he walked up it, he poked his head into a bedroom. A shade covered a dormer window. A red velour bedspread was bunched at the bottom of a black-sheeted bed. A row of shirts, most of them black, hung inside an open closet door. The top drawer of a dark-wood dresser was open. A half pint of Hennessy – the cap off, the last of the cognac skimming the bottom of the bottle – stood on a night table. Kelson peered under the bed. No Jimmy Choos.
Kelson moved on to the bathroom – filthy enough to give him a niggling pain above his left eye and make the eye twitch. ‘Compulsive risk taking,’ he said. ‘Ask Dr P.’ He pulled back the shower curtain on an empty tub.
The hallway ended in a living room with a slanting ceiling, exposed ceiling beams, and a broad front window facing the street. In the middle of the room, a red throw rug, little bigger than a bathmat, covered a patch of floorboards. A large-screen TV and short shelves stood along one low wall. A black fabric couch stood against the other. A barefoot man in black jeans and a black silk shirt sat on the couch. Kelson recognized him from the picture Genevieve Bower showed him on her phone and the images on the JollyOllie website. But now the man’s olive skin looked gray. His hand – limp – held a small black pistol. His head – hanging – had a spot of blood above the left eye, just where the headache had started to niggle Kelson in the bathroom, and a spray of blood on the cheek below the eye.
‘Huh,’ Kelson said, and, though he already knew, ‘Mr Oliver?’
The man said nothing.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Kelson said.