Эд Горман - Stranglehold

I was on my feet before Jim Shapiro could say anything. Bobby watched me with the eyes of a child who knew he was about to be deserted.

“It’s been a pleasure, Lieutenant.”

“Right back at you, Mr. Conrad.”

Shapiro glanced at me, then at Courtney, then back at me. He laughed. “I take it you two aren’t in danger of falling in love, huh?”

“He works with Congresswoman Cooper.”

“Oh, yes, the dreaded Congresswoman Cooper. Hell, Brian, I’m one of her supporters, too.”

“Right. But Mr. Conrad here is actually in the business of getting her elected.”

“Thanks, Jim.” I reached over and put my hand on Bobby’s shoulder. His eyes were despondent; his mouth was crimped. “Jim’ll call me when this is over, Bobby. We’re going to take care of this. I promise you.”

I knew I was amusing Courtney. He was taking great pleasure in my frustration.

Shapiro patted me on the back. I went to the door. I thought of looking back, taking a last shot at Courtney. But what would be the point?

I opened the door and stepped into the hall. A friendly face above a blue uniform said, “There’s some fresh coffee in the break room down the hall. You won’t have to drink any more of that machine crap.”

“Thanks,” I said. I had a fair share of police friends in Chicago. Nice to know that the Aldyne police had at least one member who decided that civility wasn’t an admission of weakness.

But all I wanted was to get out of the station house. My footsteps snapped down the polished floor of the corridor and around a corner. Detective Kapoor, sheathed in a sleek blue suit, had probably been checking something at the front desk before heading to the interrogation room.

When she saw me, her dark eyes gleamed with humor. “Good to see you again, Mr. Conrad.”

“I just met your Detective Courtney.”

The smile now touched her rich red lips. “Careful what you say. He hears everything.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. The problem is he’s hearing things that aren’t true. Bobby Flaherty didn’t kill anybody.”

“And you’re going to do our department the favor of telling us who did?”

“Maybe even better. How about you tell me since you’re the police and I’m not?”

The polite smile left the perfectly constructed face. “Detective Courtney and I have put together a good preliminary case against your young friend, Mr. Conrad. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop looking for other suspects. But it does mean that we’ve got good sound reasons to make him our chief suspect, at least for the time being.”

She started walking past me before I could say anything. “Have a good day, Mr. Conrad.” Not favoring me with a look back as she spoke.

Then I was outside in a lashing wind and hurrying to my rental.

Sitting in a Starbucks, I used my cell phone to call Heather at her sister’s beauty shop. Sister answered the phone, and when I identified myself, she said, “I’ve been working on her but she won’t tell me anything. She got drunk last night and didn’t come in until late this morning. She’s not in real good shape. I’ll do my best to get her to talk to you.”

“I appreciate that. Thanks.”

I called the office and spoke to Ben.

“I got a call from a media rep, Dev. He said Duffy’s media man just made a big buy for both thirty-second and ten-second spots. And he’s heard that he’s buying them all over the district.”

“They’re going to jump on it. But Duffy’s smart. He won’t come at us head-on. It’ll all be by inference.”

“The rep says he’ll let me know the minute they get a spot. I’ll run out there to look at it.”

“I can see it now. Three women sitting at a table and an off-camera voice says, ‘Will the woman who had a child out of wedlock please raise her hand?’ And then the Susan look-alike will not only raise her hand, she’ll start bawling her ass off because she’s so ashamed of herself.”

“You should be in advertising.”

“Please, isn’t politics scummy enough for you?”

He laughed. “Good point.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Sure thing.”

Over coffee and a muffin I tried to make it as simple as possible. Craig Donovan and Monica Davies blackmailed Natalie. Natalie paid them the money. Monica was killed in her hotel room. I was assuming that Donovan had killed her and taken the money for himself because there was a good chance that his murder had also been a robbery. The longer I thought about it, Susan’s words played into my take on everything. “He’s the most devious person I’ve ever known — a sociopath who loves to play games. He’d blackmail people, and then when they paid him, he’d immediately demand more. Right on the spot. He told me he knew he couldn’t get it; he just liked to see them suffer. He enjoys the torture as much as the money.” But in this case maybe he didn’t just want to see Natalie suffer; he wanted more money for real. But now it was moot. Alive, he could have talked to the press and revealed a lot of Susan’s secrets from her days of drinking and drugging. That would have been his last resort. But he was dead and so were all his secrets. Now the problem was finding the killer. Our last chance at recovering from the Bobby story was getting ahead of the next one. The police were happy to keep Bobby in jail, case closed.

I decided to drive to the foundation. I hadn’t talked to David Manning yet. He might have connections with the press that even we didn’t. He was a local, and as head of a nonprofit, he’d know local important people. Management and CEO-level people who just might have a hand in controlling local media. Getting even one sympathetic outlet for our story would help. Fog and drizzle gave the afternoon streets a watercolor patina. Stoplights burned through the clouds like spreading wounds. I found an oldies station. Music transports me back into the past faster than anything else. I was once again a teenager of no particular note, given to a brown leather bomber jacket that was obstinate proof of my coolness. There’s a lot of self-pity in looking back — you want to look at who you were and warn him, make him smarter and tougher. You want to protect him. He is almost your child. Then I thought of Susan as a teenager. I wondered if she’d worn one of those bombastic hairstyles you saw on music videos. Then I thought of Jane, tried to picture her. Somehow the mental photo had her in jeans and a T-shirt, and smiling the way she had at dinner. The image made me smile.

And then I thought of Craig Donovan — no specific image, just a feeling of anger and dread. The most difficult thing for most people to imagine is evil. Real evil. Not Hollywood evil. The obvious ones are the drifters and the hobos and the lonely little ones who are invariably described as “quiet” when they’re caught after killing six or seven women. But then there are the swaggerers. They have looks and sometimes charm. I kept thinking about how he tortured his blackmail victims. I kept thinking about how many people he’d likely killed before, during, and after the time Susan had traveled with him. But at some point his luck had run out. The clothes weren’t so good, the motel was a shithole, and he’d put on the kind of weight that gave him a thuggish look. The man I’d fought with the other night was a career criminal destined to live out his days in a maximum-security prison. He’d had his vengeance for Susan deserting him, though. He’d forced her to publicly face her past.

The Cooper Foundation stood stout and stern against the dim day, the classic red brick with its concrete parapet and wide front steps, impenetrable by any agent except time itself. The lot on the east side of it was only half full, so I had no trouble finding a spot. I hurried through the drizzle and walked inside. The museum setting of the first floor imposed quiet the way a church does. I’d seen this floor in brochures. The walls told their stories in paintings, photographs, and the drawings of children — expressions of suffering from every part of the planet. Senator Cooper’s wife had wanted everybody to understand that while they were enjoying happy hour a good share of the world was dying of famine and illness and war. These were the places the Cooper Foundation sent its money. I remembered Ben making a joke about how different the foundation would have been if the second Mrs. Cooper — Natalie — had set it up. “It’d all go to fashion designers and Paris Hilton types. You know, the real Americans.”