He left the tavern ten seconds before the sirens started to sound.
Chicago after midnight.
A million lights and a thousand voices along Randolph and State. Theaters and night clubs and drugstores and the open-all-night jewelry shops that specialized in zircons you couldn’t tell from real diamonds. Couples heading home from the show and sixteen-year-old hoods on the corners, hair thick with Vaseline and combed straight back, their sport coats too long in the sleeves and too big in the shoulders. The life and lights and sounds of a city after dark …
Three blocks over, the concrete and marble cliff dwellings of La Salle Street, silent and dark with only the faint street lights filtering through the fog. The glass caves that looked with empty eyes at the deserted sound stages of the metropolis.
The lights marched out from the Loop along the empty streets, marking them with thin threads of luminescence that quilted the night into gigantic squares; the squares of a chessboard with himself pitted against the master player.
Some place in the darkness was Adam Hart, Tanner thought. Sleeping? Prowling the city? He wished he knew.
He stepped out into the street and hailed a cab.
Petey wasn’t home.
He pressed the buzzer again, then walked over and tried the door leading to the apartments. It wasn’t locked. The moisture and the heat of summer had swelled the wood so the door had caught without closing all the way. He went up the stairs to her apartment but he wasn’t as lucky the second time.
He could wait until morning to see her, he thought—then realized he might not have until morning. And the empty apartment might tell him things that Petey wouldn’t.
He tried the knife-blade routine between the door and the frame and discovered that the door had two locks, only the first of which was a spring arrangement. He glanced down the hall. It wasn’t a new building. The wallpaper was discolored and the rose-figured rug was faded in spots and there was the indefinable odor of age. With luck, the building had probably been erected before the every-room-with-bath era.
He tried the apartment next door and managed to spring its lock. He waited a tense moment for noises from within—for the half muffled voice, thick with sleep, to mumble,
“Who’s there?”
But there was no sound at all and he slipped quietly into the darkened room.
It was a bachelor-girl’s apartment, dimly lit by light from the kitchenette. The sofa had been folded out into the bed and the covers were turned back, a pair of rumpled silk pajamas laid out on top. There was a faint noise coming from the kitchen that he hadn’t heard before and he froze for a moment, listening. A radio, turned low, and a midnight disc-jockey show.
Nothing else. No sounds of anybody moving around out in the kitchen, no sounds of dishes clattering in the sink.
He walked quietly over and looked in. The icebox door was ajar, the makings of a sandwich on the table. There was bread, butter, lettuce, and a few slices of liver sausage. A half-glass of milk had been poured and he picked it up and sipped it.
Sour. The girl must have gone down to the delicatessen for another carton—and she’d be back any minute.
He went back to the living room, saw the door leading off of it, and tried it. The connecting bath.
He flicked on the light, then turned and locked the door he had just come through. He ran water into the bowl, let down his trousers, and sponged gingerly at the flesh wound. The caked blood washed away and the wound started to bleed again. He found gauze and tape in the cabinet and bound his leg tightly.
It wasn’t until he put the tape back that he noticed what was wrong with the bathroom.
Face powder and talcum and bath salts and cologne and a fringe of nylons hanging from the towel racks. There was nothing unusual about it, not even the fact that the colognes and powders were of two different brands and the nylons of two different sizes. So two girls shared the same bathroom and had different tastes.
Except that Petey wasn’t the cologne-and-powder type and she preferred lisle stockings to nylons.
He turned off the light and slipped into the other apartment. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the dark and then he found a floor lamp and flicked on the night light set in the base—enough light to see the room with but not enough light to be seen from the street.
It looked pretty much like the apartment next door. Which was all wrong because there were too many details that didn’t match up with Petey’s character. The pink, tufted chenille bed-spread—a little too frilly, a little too feminine for the grimly efficient machine he knew was his secretary. The same thing went for the curtains and the drapes.
For a brief second he thought he was in the wrong apartment, then saw a photograph of Petey on top of the dresser. A smiling, laughing Petey with her hair down and her teeth showing, keeping company with a table-top army of perfumes and lotions and lipsticks.
It didn’t make sense. Petey wasn’t the type.
He pulled open the dresser drawer and ran his hands through the garments in it. They matched the bottles on top. Feminine as all get-out.
What the hell,
he thought,
Petey doesn’t make a practice of showing off her underwear anyway. An efficient
secretary with a grim exterior who probably liked to be feminine underneath.
The closet told him he was kidding himself. The suits and the cotton dresses and the drab wool ensembles were there, all right. But so were flowered prints and taffeta evening dresses and a black-lace creation with lots of skirt, no back, and a minimum of front.
Petey had been leading a double life, and nobody had suspected it. And then he wondered:
Why?
There were muffled footsteps down the hall and the metallic jiggling of a key in the lock.
He turned off the night light and stepped back into the shadows of the closet.
She flicked on the ceiling light and closed the door behind her, then threw her wrap on the bed and stretched, shaking out her thick, brown hair and arching her neck. It was amazing what drab clothes and dresses had done, Tanner thought clinically. She had a figure and she knew how to dress it. And the way she moved. Not the sharp, awkward movements she used to make that made her seem like a cubist painting come to life, all squares and angles … . She was smooth, lithe, animalistic.
She had started to unloosen the straps on her high-heeled pumps when he said softly:
“Hello, Petey.”
She froze for a second, balanced on one foot. “What are you doing here?”
“Just visiting.” He took out his tobacco pouch and pipe. “You look pretty when you’re all dressed up. Go dancing much?”
She kicked off the shoe and straightened up, one hand brushing back her long hair that had usually been worn in a bun at the back of her neck. “That’s none of your business.”
“So soon after your brother’s death, too.”
“You don’t mourn a person forever.”
“Not even for seven days?”
Her voice was ice. “I was your secretary at the university but you don’t work there any more. And you’ve no right to pry into my private life.”
He sat down on the bed and ran his hands over the sheets. Silk. You didn’t buy silk sheets on a secretary’s salary.
“Who replaced me, Petey?”
“Van Zandt, who did you think?” She deliberately turned away from him and walked over to the closet. She put her hands behind her back and unloosened the eyelets and stepped out of her dress. “Getting an eyeful, Professor? You don’t seem like quite the rube you used to be.”
Secretaries, he thought slowly, didn’t buy slips of black nylon and lace on their salaries, either.
“Why didn’t you tell your folks about John’s death so they could have been there?”
“I told them later on. They couldn’t have made it to the funeral anyway.”
“Your father could have made it.”
She glared at him. “You went up there?”
“I went through the whole town. I talked to everybody, from the little girl who waits behind the counter at the hotel to the math teacher who shows chubby little farm boys how to shoot baskets. They knew John very well. They knew Adam Hart, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He smiled faintly. “Come off it, Petey. You gave yourself away the minute you stepped into this room.”
She looked bored and started to roll down her stockings. “How?”
“I called up DeFalco and Marge when I came back. They knew the police were after me, they knew the police were convinced that I had murdered John. I don’t think they believed it themselves but … something had scared them to the point where they were willing to throw me to the wolves. You’re not scared, Petey. You’re not scared at all. Because you’re on pretty good terms with that ‘something’? You not only know I didn’t kill your brother, Petey, I think you know who did.”
Coldly: “So what?”
That’s right,
he thought to himself
. So what? So her brother is dead and I stand a chance of being killed any day. And it wouldn’t matter to her. It doesn’t matter a damn whether I live or die. And it hasn’t made any difference to her that her brother’s been killed.
The scene at the office and the scene at the cemetery had been part of an act.
He stood up and clutched at the sheet on the bed, his fingers clawing and bunching up the smooth, pink fabric. He yanked at it and the sound of ripping scissored through the room.
“Silk sheets—pretty expensive for a secretary, aren’t they?” He strode over to the closet and ripped half a dozen dresses off their hangers and dumped them on the floor. “You were a great little kidder, weren’t you, Petey? Good-looking girl and you managed to keep it hidden from all the boys, didn’t you?” He brushed his arm over the dresser top and a dozen bottles cascaded to the floor. “But there was somebody you didn’t hide it from, wasn’t there? There was somebody you fixed yourself up for!”
“Get out of my room!”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, his hand sinking deep into her flesh, and shook her until her neck almost snapped. “Who’s keeping you, Petey?”
Her voice was brittle. “Nobody’s … keeping me!”
He slapped her so hard that for a moment he thought he had broken her cheekbone.
“You’re a goddamned little liar, Petey. You’re being kept and you’re being kept by your brother’s murderer—you’re sleeping with Adam Hart!”
Her face was dull marble except for the mark of his hand that stood out in vivid red on her cheek.
“What do you want?”
“Who’s Adam Hart?”
The strength had drained from her voice and it was shaking. “I won’t tell you! I couldn’t if I wanted to!”
“I could make you. I wouldn’t hesitate.”
“Big man!” she said bitterly. “If you think you can, go ahead and try it!”
He walked back to the bed and sat down on the torn sheets. He took a strip of cloth in each hand and pulled until it snapped. Adam Hart wouldn’t have left himself open. Petey was probably telling the truth—she couldn’t talk even if she wanted to.
“Why do you live with him, Petey?”
“Because I want to—what other answer did you expect?” Her voice became shrill and ugly. “You wouldn’t understand me if I called you a small man, a little man, a weak man! You wouldn’t understand me if I said you were
human
—and that explained it all!”
He looked up at her and felt dirty, as if he were still lying at the bottom of the embankment and the oily water were spreading across his skin again.
“Can you tell me what he looks like, Petey?”
She shook her head. “What good would it do? No two people see him the same.”
“Could you describe everybody who was at the meeting that Saturday morning?”
She was sullen. “What do you want me to do, commit suicide?”
He changed the subject. “Do you think he loves you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You must know that he doesn’t give a damn for you. It’s his own version of bestiality, only he hasn’t any sense of morality to be outraged by it. You weren’t the only woman—he’s gone with others. Six girls back in Brockton had children by him. So you’re pretty and charming. But your greatest asset is simply that you’re handy.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
He stared at her, trying to determine whether she really meant it. He finally decided that she did.
“What does he want, Petey?”
“How the hell do I know what he wants—he doesn’t confide in me! Maybe he wants to run things, maybe he wants to run the world. Would that be bad?
We’re
not doing such a red hot job of it.”