An Echo of Death

Read An Echo of Death Online

Authors: Mark Richard Zubro

For their kind help and patience: Barb D'Amato, Hugh Holton, Rick Paul, and Kathy Pakieser-Reed
“And I don't want him there,” I said.
“It's after two in the morning,” Scott said. “Can't this wait until tomorrow?”
“No, I want to talk about it now.”
I glared out the window of the cab toward the Salvation Army Headquarters at Addison and Broadway. After the light changed, the driver waited for oncoming traffic to clear, then turned left and sped toward Lake Shore Drive. The cabbie's radio crackled for a few seconds. Then all I heard was the swish of tires on the rain-misted streets.
“Tom, he's a friend,” Scott said. “He needs help.”
Even with the glass partition between us and the cabdriver nearly closed, we spoke in hushed voices.
“He's an overgrown child with a drug habit whose family owns half of this city,” I said. “Why didn't he run to Mommy and Daddy for help?”
“He didn't say,” Scott admitted.
“And that's another thing I don't like,” I said. “He hasn't explained what this so-called big trouble is. We're supposed to simply believe him that something bad happened in Mexico, he rushed up to Chicago and came straight to us, and we've got to protect him and he can't tell us why? He probably tried smuggling drugs into the country and got caught or is about to get caught, and your reputation
is going to be ruined along with his. He'll be suspended for life—again.”
The driver turned his wipers to intermittent as we waited for the traffic signal at Addison and Lake Shore Drive. Outside the cab, the light drops of moisture sprinkled themselves on black puddles.
Scott said, “He promised me he was clean, and he said he could tell us the whole story. He just needs a little more time.”
“He also has a habit of exaggerating,” I said. “Remember the time he got everybody on the team feeling sorry for him because he said he might have cancer? Turned out to be an exceptionally large boil.”
“I know he likes attention,” Scott said, “but something about the way he talked last night made me believe him. I'm really upset about the way you treated him. At least he tried to be pleasant, and you didn't need to sneer at the gift he gave you.”
“They've got to be fake, or at least we better hope they are.” Glen Proctor had given us each a necklace for a gift. He had claimed that the stone at the center of Scott's necklace was a Colombian emerald. It was the size of a quarter and the deepest green you could possibly imagine, and he swore the rest of the necklace was Mexican gold which was studded with diamonds, some the size of dimes. Mine had a stone that he claimed was a ruby but seemed mostly purplish and opaque to me.
“If those things are real,” I said, “they are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he wouldn't be giving them to us. A real possibility is that he stole them, and by giving them to us, we're put in danger. It's not like we exchange birthday and Christmas gifts. This is out of the blue, and I don't like it.”
“We can have a jeweler appraise them,” Scott said.
“A gemologist.”
“Huh?”
“You need a gemologist to appraise stones like this. Most jewelers don't know the first thing about …”
“Fine,” he said. “We'll get the King of Persia or whoever you want to play with the jewels. My point is, you could have been more polite when he gave it to you. It wouldn't have killed you to say thanks.”
“I'd rather buy a watch off a guy peddling them in the street. I'd trust him more than I trust Glen Proctor.” Actually, I thought I'd been reasonably grateful—or at least tried to be.
“You're not being fair,” Scott said.
“They're gaudy and they look stupid,” I said. Scott had chosen to wear his this evening. “You look like a reject from a disco that's been nuked.” I had tossed mine in the bottom of a drawer, hoping it would disappear forever.
Scott was still trying to be relatively reasonable. He hadn't gotten to short, clipped sentences yet. We hadn't had time for this conversation last night or earlier today. Scott had stayed up until the early hours talking to Glen. I hadn't wakened when he'd come to bed. I'd had to go out for most of the afternoon to run some errands that I'd promised to do for my parents. We'd argued briefly while dressing for the fund-raiser, but Glen's hovering around prevented a major fight. We'd driven to the dinner in reasonable civility. On the way home, I had broached the subject as soon as the cab started away from the curb. He was trying to be calm and reasonable, neither of which I felt at the moment.
Scott touched the chain that barely peeped from beneath the loosened tie and opened top button of his shirt.
“People change,” Scott said.
“I don't like him,” I said.
“You're jealous,” Scott said as the driver cut off two other cars to be the first up the on ramp to Lake Shore Drive.
“I find it strange that he just happened to manage to
walk around the apartment in the most clinging underwear this noon and accidentally rub up against you when you passed in the hall, and that he practically sat in your lap while leaning over your shoulder when you were reading the paper. If he'd been any closer while you were making toast, he'd have come out singed, and he wears too much after-shave. It's not as if there isn't enough room in the penthouse for an army. He didn't have to get that close.”
Glen Proctor's underwear had been molded around his taut butt and bulging crotch. The guy had the compact muscular body of a stud athlete that I would have cheerfully shoved off the top of the building.
“He's straight,” Scott said. “He brags about all his conquests with women. Every chance he gets, in the locker room, on the field, on the bus and everywhere else, he tells us how great he is with women.”
“And that's another thing,” I said. “Besides being a prick tease, the man is a menace. That kind of promiscuity is unforgivable.”
“You don't know whether he uses protection.”
“How can you defend him?” I asked.
We were talking about Glen Garrison Proctor III, one of the phenoms of the last few baseball seasons. He'd openly bragged last night that he wanted to break Steve Howe's record for being suspended for life from baseball the most times.
Proctor and Scott had been teammates during Glen's first and second years in the majors. They'd become close friends, and Scott had been the players' union rep during Glen's suspension and before he was traded after the second season. They wound up working together for hours that year on Glen's first dismissal from baseball.
“I defend him because he's my friend. I'd think you'd be more understanding.”
“I wish I could be, but I think he's dangerous. You don't know what-all trouble he's gotten himself into. I didn't like him the first time I met him, and I still don't like him. He
takes from people and never gives. He is the most self-indulgent person I've ever met, and I don't know why you can't see it. Frankly, I think we should call the police. He's nuts and he's stupid.”
“You're wrong,” Scott said. “You're being unfair, and I don't like it. You always call something stupid when you're the one who doesn't understand. You're the one with the problem.”
The rest of the drive to Scott's penthouse occurred in icy silence.
Out of the cab, Scott slammed the door and swept ahead of me toward the entrance. Howard, the night doorman, didn't greet us with his toothy smile. He was probably on one of his numerous breaks or occasional real errands. Seemingly a thousand times a night, Howard found excuses to attend to everything but his job. I always figured he hid in some dark corner to grab as many naps as he could when he should have been on duty. Scott had to use his key to let us in the lobby entrance. Howard locked it if he wasn't standing at his post, and tenants knew to use their keys. I caught up with Scott while he fussed with the door, but he ignored me as he marched across the lobby to the elevators. He punched the heat-sensitive button fiercely.
I trailed through the marble-encrusted entry, feet clicking on the highly polished floor. We'd been to a fund-raising dinner for a lesbian candidate for alderman in the 44th Ward. It hadn't helped my mood any when the gay people in the audience fawned over my lover from the minute we entered the room. Yes, I know he was the main reason many of them bought tickets. I seldom have a problem with his fame, but being completely ignored by the crowd, coming on top of Glen's presence back home, increased my anger.
Scott inserted the special key that allowed the elevator to deliver us to the penthouse. We barely glanced at each other while we rode to the top floor. Off the elevator and
across to the only door on this floor, we remained silent.
Inside he flicked on the foyer light and stalked through the entryway and then turned left toward our bedroom. I hung my black leather jacket in the hall closet and began loosening my tie as I strode through the foyer and turned right into the living room.
In the hallway, I tripped over a pile of boards and a scattering of bricks. Glen Proctor had been the proximate cause of our morning squabble, but his presence had only exacerbated a month-long difficult time in our relationship. My home had burned down several months earlier. We'd lived together at either Scott's place or mine for years, but we'd never consolidated households. This was at my insistence. The issue was dependence. Scott is one of the highest-paid pitchers in baseball, and something in my pride said that moving in with him would be a kind of living off his income and a loss of my independence. But after the fire, a series of discussions had resulted in a huge compromise. We would redecorate his place, and I would move in permanently.
It sounded so simple, but all his money made it worse. Scott—and thus we—could afford just about anything we wanted. First of all, we've always used separate bathrooms. I love watching him shave and his double-nozzle sunken tub and Jacuzzi were very sexy, but I'm a slob and he's a neatnik; and yes, I know he's got a maid service, but if he put my stuff onto my shelf in my cabinet one more time, I was going to toss it through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
This week's epic battle had been over the bathroom faucets. He wanted gold-plated ones made in Italy. This made no sense to me. And the whole operation would have a waterfall effect for the flow in the sink in each bathroom, a soft and gentle cascade of fluid. Very nice, but how are you supposed to rinse the toothpaste from your brush or the hair from your razor in a gentle flow? He couldn't understand why mine had to be different from his.
It did seem like the smaller and less significant the item became, the more we fought over it. What I really wanted to do—and more so with each grapple with contractors and fight over minutiae—was to build a new place down in the south suburbs near where I taught high school. I knew I loved him and I wanted our relationship never to end, but I had to tell him soon that I wanted my own place. We'd go on as we had before, living together in my place or his.
I passed the mountain of mess in the hall, strode a few feet forward, and tripped over the debris left by the workers renovating the fireplace in the living room. Arguing about this (what kind of stone and how large) had long since taken backseat to arguing over who was going to call which day to find out where the hell the workmen were. They'd promised to finish the job twenty-six days ago, but who's counting? At their speed, they might be finished before the next ice age. We'd fought about who would move the beginnings of the soon to be fireplace out of the way so we'd stop running into it.
I pulled myself up and dusted off my hands and paused in the entrance to the living room. I usually paused to survey the fantastic view of Chicago's magnificent buildings that could be seen through the walls of glass windows. But now I also paused to try to let my anger cool. Watching the towering works of man always had a soothing effect on me. I sighed at the quiet majesty, descended two steps, and stopped.
On the far side of the room, propped up against the windows and sitting three feet to the left of the table that held Scott's baseball trophies was Glen Proctor. He had a large red stain in the center of his beige fisherman's sweater. A small red pool around his body showed starkly against the white carpeting.
“Scott!” I called while I hurried to the body. A bullet between Glen's eyes had penetrated but not emerged against the glass. A smear of blood and a rim of black showed around the wound. Splashes of blood dribbled
from both sides of his nose. The gaping hole in his chest told of the source for the still-damp blood pooled on his chest.
“Scott!” I called again.
Proctor was dressed in the usual tight acid-washed Levi's he always wore, the type that emphasized the bulge in his crotch, and the round firmness of his butt. I didn't say he wasn't attractive, just that I didn't like him. He wore dark mahogany loafers and beige socks.
I checked for a pulse, although I didn't think there was much point. As I touched the cool skin around his neck, the memory of similar contact with bodies in the jungle while in the marines in Vietnam flashed through my mind. The instant my fingertips made contact with his skin, they confirmed the obvious, but I moved my hand up to the flesh over the carotid artery. A few seconds there absolutely confirmed that the handsome and swaggering Glen Proctor wouldn't play another inning of baseball.

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