Applaud the Hollow Ghost (10 page)

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS AN OPEN
spot on the street near Lammy's place, so we parked and used the front door. Lammy went ahead of me up the steps and it wasn't until he was unlocking the door on the second-floor landing that I remembered I hadn't told him he'd be having company. He pushed open the door and then stopped, because both of us heard the same strange noises, like metal scraping across metal, over and over.

I pushed Lammy aside and yelled through the open door. “Casey, is that you?”

“Course it is,” the call came back. “I'm in the kitchen.”

He was down on his hands and knees, with his head stuck inside the oven. The oven door was off and was sitting on the other side of the room, leaning against the cabinet under the sink. Casey extracted his head from the oven and hauled himself clumsily to a standing position.

Lammy stared up at the huge man.

I didn't know what to say anymore than Lammy did. Casey was wearing black pants, a white collarless shirt, and bright yellow rubber gloves that were covered with swirls of greasy slime. He held what looked like a putty knife in his massive hand, and a red, white, and blue stocking cap on his head. There was more greasy gunk smeared on his shirt, and even some on the cap.

“You must be Lambert Fleming,” he said, then looked down at his yellow gloves. “I'd shake hands except this chemical crap would burn holes in your skin.” He waved at the stove. “Damn thing looks like it hasn't been cleaned in about twenty years. Had a helluva time getting the door off.”

“Lammy,” I said, “this is Casey, a friend of mine. He's been ordered out of his own home for a while, and I asked him to stay with you.” I stopped, then added, “I have to run, so I'll leave you two to get acquainted.”

“C'mon back for supper if you can,” Casey said. “I decided to wait and make the meat loaf tonight. At least, I will if I can get that damn oven door back on.”

Lammy shrugged off his new coat and hung it on one of the kitchen chairs. Then he just stood there looking embarrassed, like a kid who might be ordered out of the room any minute, so the grownups could go on with their work.

“I could use some help here, Lammy,” Casey said. “But you better change your clothes.” He leaned forward. “Hey, that's a really nice shirt you got there. It's new, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Lammy said, staring down at the floor. “It's new. I better go change.” He fled from the kitchen.

“He's all yours,” I said.

“Yeah,” Casey said. “Doesn't look like much of a sex maniac to me. Course, don't know that I ever met one before.”

I left by the back door because it was the quickest way out. It was Casey's turn to help Lammy struggle with his clothes.

*   *   *

W
ALKING DOWN THE ALLEY
toward Steve Connolly's garage, I wondered if he was home. I don't know why I wondered, and I don't know why I thought I'd be able to tell, since I'd have had to go into his backyard to look through his garage window, and that would only tell me whether his van was there, not whether he was home.

Thinking about garages, though, reminded me of something. According to the police reports, Trish had said at first that she didn't know where she was attacked. Later she said the man pushed her down on the floor, then changed “floor” to “ground,” then said her clothes were dry because the man had dragged her inside somewhere. It seemed clear to me she was making things up—maybe not the attack, but how it happened.

It was Trish's insistent repetition of the statement that “nothing happened in the garage”—before she corrected herself and said she wasn't in any garage—that most intrigued me. I turned around and walked the other way down the alley, past Lammy's backyard and into the next block, where Dominic lived. And yes, Dominic had a garage.

It nearly filled the width of his lot, a brick, two-car garage. Its wide overhead door opened onto the alley, and could have used a couple of coats of paint. I'd had enough of Dominic for one day, so I kept on walking, even though I really wanted to see what the floor looked like in there, and whether that might help prove that Dominic's garage was the garage nothing had happened in.

*   *   *

I
KEPT TO THE
alley for a half mile farther. I knew it was a half mile, because in Chicago eight blocks make a mile—most of the time. It was already dark, and my lower right ribs were beginning to ache again. Whoever had called Lammy, claiming to be Renata Carroway's secretary, had learned I was driving him home, and must have identified my rental car by now. So it would stay right there on Lammy's block until somebody could pick it up and return it.

A cab took me east, all the way to the el station at Wilson Avenue, and I called Barney Green's secretary from a pay phone to make arrangements for a new rental car, a process more complicated than it sounds, since I have no credit cards. Maintaining this absence of plastic gets harder by the hour. But Barney, my ex-partner, helps out. We both see it as part of an experiment in liquidity. In other words, if one has no credit, no bank account, no real estate, minimal personal property, virtually nothing but cash—in unpredictably fluctuating amounts, unfortunately—can one function as we enter the third millenium? One thing for sure, one seldom has to check one's mailbox.

Then I made two more calls. Casey would save me some of his meat loaf for a sandwich. The Lady would be busy that evening, but we agreed we'd get together the next day. She seemed to think I needed cheering up.

I took the el to Central Street in Evanston. My recollection being that my pantry was still pretty bare, I stopped for a couple of cheeseburgers with lots of greasy French fries. Then I walked the “back way” to my place, carried another package from the Lady up the rear stairs, and went inside and listened to my two phone messages.

The first message was brief. “The person you talked to the other day about sliding down chutes wants to talk to you again.” He left no number, but said he'd be in touch. Maybe it was about the paint job on the Fleetwood. The other call was more unexpected, but the message was similar. Someone else wanted to meet with me, too. This someone left a name, Dan Maguire, and a time and a place as well. Said he wanted to confer with me about a certain Dominic Fontana.

I swallowed a few aspirins and thought seriously about shining my shoes, what with all these conferences coming up. Instead, I poured myself an inch of scotch over one ice cube and sat down at the kitchen table with the book the Lady had left in my back hall,
A Christmas Carol,
by Charles Dickens. A few years back, when domestic affairs had been going better, Cass and I had taken the Lady to see the staged version at the Goodman Theatre. Cass, ever the English lit professor, claimed it was the world's most popular ghost story. I told her I thought
Casper
had greater name recognition. Anyway, the Lady must have decided there was a lesson in the Dickens tale somewhere for me, or she wouldn't have dropped it at my door. My best guess was she wanted to remind me that even a cynical, miserable Scrooge of a person might wake up some morning transformed into an optimistic and happy old coot—and discover that “the Spirits had done it all in one night.”

I caught myself nodding before I got much beyond the part right near the beginning about Jacob Marley's ghost appearing to Scrooge, but that wasn't Dickens' fault. I got up and set the timer on the coffeemaker before I went to bed. One musn't oversleep when one's been invited to a morning audience with the great Daniel O'Laughlin Maguire, Grand Poobah of Bauer & Barklind, a Partnership of Professional Legal Corporations.

Well, possibly
invited
wasn't exactly the right way to describe that second message on my machine.
Summoned,
that was more like it.

Gosh, maybe I really should have polished my shoes.

CHAPTER
13

T
HE LAW FIRM OF
Bauer & Barklind occupied floors thirty-two through thirty-seven of a prestigious marble-clad building west of State Street, on Wacker Drive, across from the Chicago River. On floor thirty-five, I was barely out of the elevator when a young woman with a Miss America smile and a brushed silk suit, teal blue, strode forward to greet me and show me where to hang my hooded parka.

“I'll keep the coat,” I said, taking a good look around. “This looks like the kinda place, you know, you don't keep your eye on things, they disappear.”

If she had any visible reaction at all, it was on the right side of her upper lip, maybe. “This way, sir,” she said. “Would you care for a cup of coffee, or—”

“You got any strawberry soda?” The time might come when I'd want her to remember the day Malachy Foley came in. “Oh,” she'd say, “you mean that rather odd man?”

She left me sinking into one of three identical sofas that were drawn up to three sides of a low, square table—and was back in thirty seconds flat with a cold can of Cherry Coke. “Closest I could come,” she chirped. She was enjoying herself.

After that I was abandoned for a while. Oddly enough, there wasn't a piece of reading material in sight, presumably so one could sit undistracted and contemplate one's surroundings and be put in the proper mood for one's encounter with power.

Stated succinctly, Bauer & Barklind had a pretty classy-looking suite of offices. The reception area was spacious and bright, with parquet flooring that would have sneered if you breathed the word
oak,
or any other tree any of us has ever actually run into. Straight ahead, I looked into the wide space between two banks of elevators. To my left were broad circular staircases leading to the floors above and below, suspended by thin cables that stretched up and out of sight.

To my right, and just beyond earshot, Miss America sat at a reception desk and answered an apparently ceaseless flow of telephone calls. She kept an eye on the elevators, though, and whenever the need arose, she abandoned her phone without hesitation, helping people stow their coats, steering them in the right directions.

She never steered anyone my way.

I killed time first by wondering if she had a way of instantly forwarding calls elsewhere, or if she were just faking all those conversations.

Then I thought about Dan Maguire, and how the hell he could be involved in this mess. The patriarch now of a family in its third generation of power in Chicago, he had followed a father and grandfather who—with blood-kin and in-laws hanging on tight—had built and maintained an empire on patronage and clout, and a noticeable lack of scruples. Dan Maguire had inherited all the power that money and connections can buy, but managed to shake off the shady reputation of his forbears. He never ran for office, but nearly everybody who did consulted with him. If the Illinois Supreme Court wasn't asking him to chair committees to dream up ways to improve the state judiciary, the United States Congress was naming him special prosecutor in some heavy investigation. He'd been a member once of the Chicago Crime Commission and, more recently, been appointed to a presidential committee to study the effects of organized crime on international trade. He'd been counsel to politicians and corporate presidents, and was on more boards of directors—nonprofit and Fortune 500 alike—than most people could have kept straight. Everybody had heard about Dan Maguire, and nobody I'd spoken to said anything negative.

I was getting the feeling, though, that I wasn't going to like him. It wasn't just that he'd called and obviously assumed I'd show up on one day's notice. It's that he was giving me all this time to sit there and reflect on how being ignored is just about my most unfavorite thing in the world.

There must be people besides me who notice how often it happens that someone who ought to be paying attention to them … isn't. Oh, I don't mean times when I'm struggling at the piano in some bar, and can't seem to catch the ear of a single soul who isn't drunk or depressed, or both. That I can take pretty well. In fact, that seems to be one of the rules of that game. But when I'm busting my ass trying to figure out how to keep a guy
(a)
out of jail, and
(b)
out of worse than jail, and some Mr. Wonderful calls and says he has a suggestion and I should show up at eleven o'clock sharp, and—even though I'm pretty sure I won't like his suggestion—I
do
show up at eleven o'clock …

Anyway, I have this thing about being ignored.

At fifteen minutes after eleven, I stood up, tucked my coat under my left arm, and started toward the elevators.

“Oh, Mr. Foley,” Miss America called, “you're not leaving us, are you?” Her heels
tap-tap-tap
ped across the floor after me. “I
know
Mr. Maguire wants to see you. He must—”

When I whirled around she almost fell over backward. “Great,” I said. “His office is that way, isn't it?” Pointing to my left.

“Well, actually, no. It's that way and around the—” She caught herself, but too late. She was already pointing to my right.

“Thank you.” I went back for my can of Cherry Coke, then strolled slowly down the wide corridor toward the office of Daniel O'Laughlin Maguire. With a sip of the sweet cold drink to lubricate my own pipes, I was ready.

“Oh, Danny Boy,” I sang, loud and lilting, my brogue turning
boy
almost into
bye.
“The pipes, the pipes are call-all-ling. From glen to glen…”

My range is a good five tones below a true Irish tenor, but it has a fine carry to it all the same, don't y'know. Anyway, heads poked out of open doors up and down the hallway.

“… and down the mountainside.”

People who looked like lawyers were attached to the heads sticking out from the doors. Most wore dark pants and long-sleeved white shirts with ties and multicolored suspenders, and the rest opted for dark skirts and tailored white blouses, adorned with various bright accessories. All the haircuts looked expensive; and all the faces a bit worried. And why not? Seems like once a year some disgruntled client shows up in the Loop and opens fire on his or her lawyer, or an opponent's lawyer. Which is bad enough, but the shooters are usually deranged and frightened, and tend to shoot at everyone in sight—often including themselves.