Applaud the Hollow Ghost (3 page)

“I knew you'd come back,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, 'cause you didn't ask me yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You wanna ask did I do what that girl said. That's why you—”

“Wrong. I came back to ask where you get the books about war. I mean … do you buy them, or what?”

“Uh-uh. The library. In the neighborhood. They order 'em from downtown.”

“One other thing. You promised me you'd lock the doors. But I just walked right in.”

“Oh … okay. But—”

“Good-bye.”

I retrieved the Cavalier and drove back to pick up the dog. The snow had stopped and the temperature was falling fast. I laid the dead dog in my backseat and drove a half hour to an animal hospital on the edge of Old Town without turning the car heater on. I handed the dog over to a slightly bewildered Doctor Lynette Daniels. I was a little surprised when she said she might talk to a veterinary pathologist. I never even knew there was such a thing.

“We'll have to consult a specialist like that if I can't tell what he died from,” she said. “I practice general veterinary medicine, and one day a week I go to the shelter where your friend works.” She smiled. She was very attractive.

“Not really a friend,” I said. “More like a client.”

“He's so … pathetic, isn't he? But he's very good with the dogs.”

I hadn't wanted to ask Lammy if he'd done what Trish Connolly said he did. I didn't want that to get in the way. I wanted to know first if he was right about the dog. I wanted to find out if he really knew “stuff about animals,” and if he really read lots of history books. I wanted to talk to people at the animal shelter where he worked, and maybe to the local librarian.

I wanted to discover that Lammy was just another one of us human beings that eats and takes a crap and rides the el to work and has good days and bad days—and even
knows
things. I wanted to think of him as a flesh-and-blood person, not that goddamn disappearing boy that kept showing up as a ghost in my dreams, standing in his jockstrap in the middle of a river of his own tears and calling to me over the sound of rhythmic applause even as he turns transparent, hollow, empty—and I practice jump shots on the bank and pretend not to hear.

*   *   *

T
HE TEMPERATURE MUST HAVE
been down to the lower teens when I left the animal hospital. There was a parking ticket on the Cavalier. I tossed it in the glove compartment, figuring this one
had
to be a legitimate business expense. Even the IRS wouldn't expect a person to park in a lot and carry a dead dog two blocks along a slippery sidewalk.
Would
they?

On the drive to Melba's Coffee Shop I wondered what income there'd be during the rest of the year to credit that expense against. I always report every penny of income. First, because I don't really mind paying what little taxes I owe, figuring I get back probably more than my share of basic services, no matter which set of scalawags is at the trough. Second, because I get audited pretty regularly. Not because they ever find anything, but because a while back I made some people unhappy. They just don't seem to get over their ill feelings—and I just don't seem to want to go back to jail.

Of course, when I did my time—first in Cook County Jail, and then downstate for a while—it had nothing to do with taxes, or even with a real crime. I was a lawyer then and a difference of opinion arose between me and the Illinois Supreme Court about whether a conversation I'd had with a client was privileged or not. The court said it wasn't, held me in contempt, and ordered me locked up until I'd reveal what the client told me. The justices have to run for office every so often, but the fact that almost every voter in the state believed my guy was a cop killer and I should tell, privilege or not, certainly wouldn't have affected the court's judgment. No way.

They finally let me out, but in the meantime they'd suspended my law license, too. When I inquired about getting it back they told me I'd have to “show remorse” for my contemptuous conduct. I figured I'd do that right after the court apologized to
me.

So now I didn't make much money, but I sure had lots of time. And it was my own. I could run, and work out at Dr. Sato's dojo, and practice the piano. The income from a small trust I'd funded a few years earlier with my one-and-only big-time attorney's fee—from a case for the Lady—wasn't enough to live on. But I had friends as well as enemies, and they helped contort my resume to fit into the requirements of the Illinois Private Detectives Act well enough to get me a license, and even a firearm authorization card. With an occasional paying client, and a few gigs here and there in barrooms where people don't listen too closely to the piano player, I got along.

I couldn't park on North Avenue because of the snow regulations, and I finally found a spot beside a funeral home. I finished the quart of chocolate milk and walked back to Melba's. You couldn't miss Melba's. It was the nondescript little hole-in-the-wall with the full-size Ford conversion van parked at the fire hydrant out front.

It's funny how the local cops, the Feds, the Chicago Crime Commission—and maybe Geraldo and Oprah, too, for all I know—can identify the hangout of just about every player in the syndicate lineup. Sometimes you wonder what good it does. But, when you're walking into the coffee shop where the father of the girl who says she was attacked by your client hangs out, it can be helpful to know that an old-time hood like Gus Apprezziano happens to hang out there, too. It makes you aware that there may be lots of fire power in the vicinity.

The sign hanging inside the window said “CLOSED,” but the hasp they must have used to padlock the door from the outside whenever they left was hanging open and there were lights on inside. I pushed the door open and went in.

The place was warm and full of the odors of overheated coffee and stale bacon grease and corned beef and garlic, and there should have been laughter and the jovial banter of regular customers and lots of local good cheer. Maybe Melba's was that way sometimes. But this was three o'clock in the afternoon and what laughter and banter and cheer there'd been, if any, must have gone out with the lunch crowd.

It was an old-fashioned room, four times as long as it was wide, with a Formica-topped table squeezed into the space in front of the plate glass window to the left of the door and a row of identical tables lined up straight ahead of me along the right wall, with four chairs at each one. A counter with stools ran along the left wall, then turned and made an L before it got to the back. A swinging door and a service window both opened into the kitchen in the rear.

A large-breasted woman somewhere past sixty, with a pockmarked olive complexion and a long, narrow nose hanging over a beginner's mustache, sat behind the near end of the counter. As I entered, her right hand drifted absently toward a stack of menus beside the cash register. When she looked up, though, her hand dropped down onto the menus. Meanwhile, her left hand was full of dollar bills, and there were little stacks of more bills set out in front of her.

Farther down the counter, on the customers' side, a woman sat on a stool with a pencil in her hand and a coffee mug and a
Sun-Times
on the counter in front of her. She wore a black leather coat and bright red pants tucked into black leather boots with very high heels. She glanced up at me, then returned to her crossword puzzle. Three men in shirtsleeves—all of them large and none of them over forty years old—huddled over the table farthest from the door. Their heads turned my way and I recognized one of them as Steve Connolly. His reddish-brown hair was thick and wavy, and he had the head and broad shoulders of an all-pro linebacker. He wasn't as wide lower down in the body as a linebacker, but he was tall and well-built, with maybe a hint of flab starting around the middle. I'd noticed all that the day I'd seen him in court. He hadn't come out into the corridor to join the group yelling at Lammy, and there was no reason he'd know my face.

The men returned to their conversation, leaving no one looking my way now except the money counter. I stared back at her. She must finally have decided I wasn't going to turn around and go away. “Sorry, mister,” she said, “we're closed.”

I could have said I was looking for Steve Connolly. I could have said the apple pie looked good and could I have a piece. I could have said any number of sensible things. What I did say was, “Sign says coffee shop, doesn't it? Maybe I'll have a cup of coffee then.” I said it so loud that even someone in the kitchen could have heard.

The three men raised their heads and craned their necks to stare at me. The woman in the red pants gazed down at her crossword puzzle, then flipped her pencil around and erased one of her answers.

“Sign also says breakfast and lunch only,” the money counter said. “Closed at two-thirty.”

I dropped one of my business cards on the counter. “I don't want coffee anyway. I have a message to deliver.” I kept my voice up, and my hands out and away from my pockets.

“Hey, buddy!” It was Steve Connolly who called out. “She said she's closed.”

Ignoring Connolly, I said, “It's a message for Mr. Apprezziano.” I didn't know what he looked like, but Apprezziano had to be close to seventy years old, so he wasn't there. “A message to Mr. Apprezziano about one of his flunkies who cut the balls off a dog and left the body at my friend's house.” I picked up a heavy soup spoon lying on the nearest table and waved it for emphasis. “My friend loves dogs, so that was a mean, chickenshit thing to do. Stupid, too.”

“Hey!” It was Connolly, getting to his feet now, and his friends with him.

I backed up and pulled open the door, very happy that it opened inward. “You tell Mr. Apprezziano if something like that happens again he's gonna read about his chickenshit boy in the newspaper—and about himself, too.”

Connolly and company were halfway up the row of tables, but by then I was outside the door. I pulled it shut, flipped the hasp closed over its U-shaped staple, and dropped the handle of the soup spoon down through where the padlock would go.

I don't know just how long it took them to get out of there, but it wasn't before I was around the corner.

CHAPTER
4

F
OUR HOURS LATER
I was standing in my kitchen, rinsing the remnants of a bowl of chili into the sink, and talking on the phone with Lammy's lawyer, a very irate Renata Carroway.

“Hey, slow down,” I said, as soon as Renata paused for breath. “That's a prosecutor's typical bullshit threat, and you know it.”

“Call it whatever you want, damn it. But the state's attorney calls it ‘witness intimidation.' Claims he's got four witnesses who'll testify that you, acting on behalf of Lambert Fleming, barged into property that was clearly marked ‘closed,' refused to leave when asked, then shouted obscenties and threats against Steve and Patricia Connolly if they don't, quote, ‘leave Fleming alone.' He says if anything like that happens again, he'll charge both you
and
my client with intimidation of—”

“I heard you the first time. But who is this state's attorney, anyway?” I stuck the bowl in the cupboard over the sink. “Somebody you can halfway trust?”

“Are you kidding? His name's Cletus Heffernan, and he's a full-blown, first-class, certifiable—”

“Asshole?” I tried.

“I was going to say Nazi.”

“Whatever. So … a guy like that, we know he's bluffing. Three reasons.
First,
if he thought they'd stick, he'd have filed his charges without wasting time talking to you.
Second,
neither you nor Lammy has given me any authority to act on Lammy's behalf. I'm the one paying your fee, but you have no control over what I do. Fact is,
you
work for
me,
come to think of—”

“Wrong. Who pays my fee makes no difference, and you know it. I work only for my client.” She paused. “But you're right about the control part. It's pretty clear even
you
don't have much control over what you do. Anyway, I've warned you. Now I have to hang up, because there's—”

“Wait. There's a third reason we know Heffernan's bluffing, and—”

“Good-bye.”

Renata hung up, but I told the phone anyway. “The third reason,” I said, “is that there were
five
witnesses at Melba's, not four.”

I dropped two empty beer bottles in the orange recycling bin outside my kitchen door at the top of the back stairs. The Lady was working on improving my dietary habits, so the homemade chili she'd sent over—five quarts of it, frozen, in plastic containers—was vegetarian. I'd added way too many hot peppers, trying to give it some flavor, which had made that second beer a necessity. But I'd finished one whole quart of the chili. For that I deserved a reward.

So I popped the top off a third bottle of Berghoff, thinking maybe I should throw out the rest of the chili—for the sake of my liver. Instead, I called the Lady.

“Could you use a gallon of your vegetarian chili back?” I asked, when she came on the line.

“Why certainly we can. But I was rather hoping you'd learn to like it, Malachy.”

Malachy.
The Lady always says
Malachy.

Lady Helene Bower, the widow of the late Richard Bower, who'd been a lord of the British Empire—or a knight maybe, I never got it straight—never calls me Mal. Her upbringing makes using nicknames uncomfortable for her and, as far as I can tell, she simply doesn't want to waste the effort trying. Not that the Lady can't change. For example, most people, even after I correct them, keep right on pronouncing my name so the last syllable rhymes with “sky.” But just one mention to the Lady that it rhymes with “key,” and she never made the mistake again. I told her once—when she was being especially annoying about something—that it amazed me how quickly she'd made
that
switch, given how slow she is to change sometimes. “Oh,” she'd said, “I just rhymed
Malachy
with smart-
alecky
 … and never forgot.” She'd said it with such a straight face, I couldn't—