At seven in the morning his telephone ripped him from the womb of blissful sleep. He sat up in bed, fully clothed, rubbing his eyes, trying to remember who he was, where he was, and what the hell he was doing there. These questions answered more or less, he ran a check on his nightmare file and came up blank—too drunk to dream, apparently. His head throbbed and the taste in his mouth was something out of a headhunters’ bivouac area. The phone continued to ring, and Willow reached for it, cleared his throat, and said, “Gloph.” For seven o’clock on any of Willow’s mornings it would have been a meaningful remark. His hung-over condition taken into consideration, it was little short of profound. Gladys Hornsby’s voice was irately shrill and in its stridency Willow could detect touches of old Sister Rosetta. Gladys said, “Well, Jesus H. Christ, it’s about time!”
Willow said, “For what?”
Gladys said, “Last night I tried reaching you from eight until damned near midnight! Where the hell have you been?”
“I was out looking for Sister Rosetta. No dice.”
“Well, of course, no dice! She was here, dammit!”
“Here? Where’s ‘here’—where are you?”
“I’m at home—Lincoln Park West. Tut, try to wake up, will you?”
“But how did she find out you live on Lincoln Park West?”
“That new detective of hers, I suppose.”
“Yeah, her new detective—he’s a sharp article.” Willow was shedding his fog, a wisp at a time. “What did she want?”
“She didn’t ask for anything. She’s going to help me, she said—she’s going to see me through my difficulties. She went on and on about how I was her dead sister’s kid and I was all she had left and we had to stick together and all that old united-we-stand malarkey. Here’s the payoff—Aunt Rosie was at Sammy Brumshaw’s office yesterday morning!”
“I know—at ten-thirty or so.”
“Who told you?”
“I stopped at UBS yesterday afternoon—had a little chat with Joe Orlando.”
“Before or after his accident?”
“What accident?”
“A garbage truck ran into his Corvette—totaled it—he was vague about it. Was he cooperative?”
“Reluctantly, yes. Orlando called you?”
“Last night—to apologize for talking to the cops. Joe meant well—he wanted to get those pictures. He was skulking around and the cops thought he looked suspicious. They scared him half to death.”
“Orlando has diarrhea of the mouth.”
“He was trying to be helpful.”
“So was Neville Chamberlain. Gladys, Brumshaw was probably killed with a Heffernan-Reese .38.”
“And Aunt Rosie has a Heffernan-Reese.”
“Right.”
“The Heffernan-Reese isn’t a collector’s thing, is it?”
“Not at all.”
“You’re inferring that Aunt Rosie killed Sammy?”
“It’s possible.”
“Ridiculous! If Aunt Rosie’s going to kill somebody, it’ll be over a bottle of booze!”
“She’s a scatterbrain, Glad—she goes around tilting at windmills, you’ve said so yourself.”
“Granted, but she’s no cold-blooded killer! She went to Sammy’s office to talk bout the Wow-Wee photos. She had no idea that he’d been shot—she was stunned when I told her!”
“Or so she appeared. If she didn’t kill Brumshaw, who the hell did? Joe Orlando saw who went in and out of the Walton Building on Wednesday morning.”
“Joe Orlando couldn’t see the alley service-entrance!”
“What did Brumshaw tell Sister Rosetta about the Wow-Wee snaps?”
“He denied all knowledge of them, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“All right, Tut, answer your own question! If it wasn’t Aunt Rosie, and it wasn’t, I assure you, who killed Sammy? You’re the detective in the crowd.”
Willow found his cigarettes, lit one, and blew smoke into the mouthpiece. His head was threatening to fly off his shoulders and he had a raging thirst. He said, “Why not Joe Orlando?”
“Never! Joe doesn’t have a gun—he’s just a crazy, lovesick kid—he isn’t dangerous!”
“Gentle as a kitten, right?”
“Not always—he gets into fights, but he couldn’t kill! Tut, where do I go from here? Sammy’s been murdered, somebody has the Wow-Wee pictures, Casey Bucknell’s due back from Germany next week, and I’m on thin ice!”
“Hang on. If blackmail’s the object, you’ll be contacted, and damned soon. Where’s Sister Rosetta now?”
“I sent her home in a cab last night. I suppose that she’s back on North Austin Boulevard, making her rounds.” Gladys was winding down, the sharp edge leaving her voice.
Willow said, “Well, I’ll take another whack at finding her. If she gets nailed with that howitzer in her purse, the cops will eat her alive.”
“Do that, for God’s sake! Take that damned gun and throw it away—do something! This whole damned thing is about to come down around my ears.”
“Uhh-h-h, Glad, you got another minute?”
“Sure, Tutto.”
“Tell me about Becky Johnson Comes Home.”
There was a silence. Then Gladys said, “Oh, that old flick? I’ve been ashamed to mention it. Who told you about it?”
“A cop saw it at the Cracker Box.”
“The Cracker Box lets cops in free. Well, it was a Supereight thing, one of a thousand just like it. We did a couple of days in Waupaca, Wisconsin, but most of it was shot on the north side here in Chicago. I thought it might be a shortcut to legitimate acting. I must have been crazy! They were just using me.”
“That’s your world, Glad—everybody uses everybody.”
“I know—and you wonder why I want to buy a farm.”
“What if Bucknell stumbles across Becky Johnson Comes Home?”
“He won’t—not now. It’s an old movie by X-rated standards, and Casey doesn’t go for that sort of thing—he likes his thrills firsthand.”
“Which you provide.”
“Yes, which I provide.”
“Okay, I’ll work on what I have. In the meantime, don’t dwell on this—get drunk or get laid or something.”
“I’ll get drunk. When can I see you?”
“Why?”
“So I can get laid, you dumbbell!” She broke the connection and Willow sat on the edge of his rumpled bed, holding his aching head, considering those outrageous currents of fate that had nudged Gladys Hornsby back into the mainstream of his life, splashing through the years and the sleazy taverns and the shabby women and the nickel-and-dime divorce cases and the foaming amber torrents of Kennessy’s Light Lager, back to the capricious, audacious, anything-goes honey-blonde bit of fluff who’d dragged him into bed five minutes after she’d met him, who’d enjoyed standing-up sex on an elevated platform and taken her chances on getting away with it because that was how she was—anything worth having was worth a certain amount of risk. Gladys was a big girl now and big girls play for taller stakes. She was betting her body and a fair-sized chunk of her life that she’d be able to amuse Casey Bucknell until he dropped over from high blood pressure or a bum heart or diabetes or a fucked-up liver or a perforated ulcer or what-the-hell ever. With Gladys had come the bubbles in Willow’s wine, laughter, glorious golden tumult, a few tears, a sprinkling of skullduggery, and scads of utterly uninhibited sex. She was one of a kind, a classic, and Willow wouldn’t have changed a single hair on her lovely calculating head.
He got to his feet, scratched his ass, stretched, yawned, went into the bathroom, jolted down three aspirins with a long drink of water, and returned to bed. Sleep was the only established antidote for a hangover. Willow was a bona fide expert on hangovers.