The Hours of the Virgin (28 page)

“I've worked for more lawyers than the plea bargain, Mrs. Raider. You're going to have to come out and say it.”

She lifted a sheet of typewritten bond from the desk, but she didn't look at it. “‘I shall pay the sum of one million dollars to the man who produces her'—
her
meaning Laurel Strangeways—‘alive and in good condition.' Etcetera, etcetera, signed Gordon Strangeways. You're aware of this document.” It wasn't a question.

“I was with him when he dictated it.”

“
Good condition
. The terms are specific. As you know, Mrs. Strangeways was critical when she arrived in the emergency room; a public venue which I think we can assume qualifies as a place of delivery. Translation: No million dollars.” She laid down the sheet.

“Mr. Strangeways might have something to say about that.”

“He won't have much to say about anything for a while. He's preoccupied at present. If at some future date he should decide to reward you regardless of the language in his letter of intent, the check will not be honored. I have access to all his accounts.”

“That ought to keep you out of Wal-Mart.”

“It might have been different had you not placed Mrs. Strangeways in the path of danger. Extortion and homicide are police matters.”

“Strangeways said no police. But go on. You're paying the rent.”

She smiled then. It wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a dent in her armor. “Let's not be enemies. I have another job for you. It won't pay a million, but I suspect you haven't the temperament for riches. It will pay your bills for a few months.”

I said, “I don't know where the Hours of the Virgin is.”

That rattled her right down to the carpet. She reached up and curled a coppery tendril behind her right ear. “The police in Dearborn Heights said you told Ben Broderick you knew where to get it.”

“So his last name was Broderick. I didn't know that.” I scooped one of my last two cigarettes out of the foil and held it up. She hesitated, then nodded at William, who put down his steno pad and went out through the trick door. He returned an instant later carrying a retro ashtray made of burnished steel with a lighter built into the center. He spun the wheel under my nose. I blew smoke at the ceiling and accepted the tray. “I was stalling for our lives, Mrs. Strangeways' and mine,” I said. “I can look for it, if you like. I charge five hundred a day and expenses.”

“I was thinking of offering a finder's fee of ten percent of the original estimate of a hundred thousand dollars. If you do know where it is and are hoping to sell it for more, you'll be in prison before you can spend a dime. The manuscript belongs to the British government.”

“That's why I can't turn it over to you even if I find it. It would have to go to the ambassador from the U.K., or the State Department, or the DIA, which has a better shot at an appointment with either one. If as a citizen concerned that national treasures are returned to the nations that treasure them you're hiring me to recover the Hours, I can save you the couple of hundred dollars it would cost you to fill in another investigator on the background. Anything else would bend my license to the breaking point.”

“I doubt that. Based on what I've seen, it's made of latex.” She walked to the window and looked out. Then she turned back. The blazer was unlined and the light silhouetted her bust. She would be the kind that worked out at Bally's three times a week between the office and the cigar bar. “I might double the finder's fee. There's no telling what those pages would bring at an underground auction.”

I looked at William, rapidly scratching Gregg on his pad. I set the ashtray on the glass desk and walked over to his corner. “May I see that? I want to make sure you're getting my answers right.”

He looked at Raider, but before she could signal or say anything I snatched the pad out of his hand and tore off the top sheet. I gave him back the rest of it.

“That doesn't mean anything,” the lawyer said. “Any judge would throw it out.”

“Any judge except Strangeways. Does he know what you're up to?” I looked at the hen tracks on the ruled sheet. They didn't mean anything to me, but I'd flunked secretarial school. I folded it and put it in an inside breast pocket.

“I said he was preoccupied. When he's had a chance to think he'll agree with the decision.”

“Were you planning to sell him the Hours or present it to him as a gift? That's what Laurel wanted to do, Ben too. Everybody wants Mr. Strangeways to have that manuscript. I wonder if anybody has bothered to ask him if he wants it.”

“He was willing to part with a million to get back his trampy wife, as if she'd stay afterward. He ought to be willing to offer the same price for the Hours. Oh, for God's sake, William, stop writing! You can go.”

He was up and gone in ten seconds, like a bird startled off a telephone wire. The velvet door closed behind him.

Jillian Raider's gray eyes were bleak in her taut white face. “I've held Gordon's cold-fish hand for fifteen years. I fought the same fight five times from scratch: district court, appellate, State Supreme, federal appeals, U.S. Supreme Court, each time against a different prosecutor, like a punch-drunk boxer facing fresh new opponents. I won. I established a precedent that shouldn't have had to have been established at all—that the First Amendment is for everyone, regardless of what he does with it. In the process I made Gordon a billionaire. He could have brushed a million my way as easily as flicking lint off his sleeve. Instead he offered it to get back that teenage Bayou bride, and she doesn't even
want
to come back. He can do whatever he likes with the damn manuscript once he has it, lock it up in his basement or return it to the Brits and get himself knighted. But he can pay me a million dollars for the privilege.”

My pager beeped. I turned it off and asked if there was a telephone I could use.

“There are pay phones on the ground floor. You can use one on your way out.” She turned on the intercom. “William, escort Mr. Walker back to reception.”

I said, “I'll find it. I'm a detective.”

Waiting for the elevator I took out the fold of steno paper and looked at it. I'd send it to Strangeways in the same envelope with Laurel's other earring and an explanation. Someone might be able to read it.

I watched the numbers change as I glided down in the car, but I was seeing Laurel Strangeways' hospital room, her husband sitting on his electric scooter beside the bed. You can get a lot of talking done under those circumstances, if you didn't mind health-care personnel getting an earful. I figured I'd read their decision in the tabloids.

In the ground-floor lobby I slotted some change and called my service.

“Mr. Walker, I have a Mr. Earl North on the line. Will you take the call?”

32

There were no official cars parked under the single security light in the lot of That Touch of Venus. I drew up next to a 1978 Dodge Club Cab pickup rubbed down to primer paint everywhere except for a four-square-inch patch of white on the hood, got out, and pushed the button. Hearing the chimes ring inside the building I was pretty sure it would be a long time before I could listen to Frankie Avalon without smelling blood and burnt gunpowder.

When the net curtain stirred I made sure I was standing too close to the door for my face to be seen. When the door opened and the little Korean girl with the painted features saw me, I wedged my foot into the space and leaned with my shoulder until she gave up trying to push it shut. I went in past her and walked down the linoleum hall toward the brightly lit kitchen. The older Asian woman poked her head out of one of the curtained doorways to watch me with no expression at all on her face. She'd traded the old pink bathrobe for a cobalt-blue kimono with peacocks printed on it.

The kitchen was unoccupied except for a fresh pot of cabbage cooking on the stove. I opened the flatware drawer and lifted out the divided tray. My heart missed a beat when I peeled aside the top page of the newspaper lining the drawer and saw only more newspaper. But the first page of the Hours of the Virgin was under the second sheet, gleaming gold and blue on a cracked yellow surface that was already old when the
Santa Maria
left its slip. I slid it into the cheap red cardboard folder I'd bought at Office Max, stuck it under my arm, and turned to the overhead cupboard. The cereal box was where I'd left it. So was the .32. I blew the crumbs out of the action and dropped it into my overcoat pocket. The girl and the woman were standing in the open doorway when I turned around, and I saw the family resemblance between them for the first time. Mother-daughter operations are common in the trade. I didn't speak to them on the way out. Korea would rise again before they ran to the police with what they'd seen.

A torn fingernail of moon showed through a gauzy break in the overcast when I got to the demolition site. A twelve-foot board fence had been erected around the remains of the Hotel LaSalle, but I worked two of the boards loose without working up a sweat and slid sideways through the opening. A brimstone smell still lingered from the charges the mayor had set off.

I'd brought a battery-operated Coleman lantern, but I didn't want to use it yet in case someone saw the light and called the cops. I picked my way through the remaining rubble with my penlight and down fourteen feet of steps into the well of the basement. Power shovels and armies of workers had scooped the debris into dump trucks and carted it away, leaving a square hole lined with concrete where bottles of vintage wine had been stored in racks throughout Prohibition. Jerry Buckley might have taken a tour of the labels before he was shot down in the lobby, presumably for changing his broadcast position on the recall of Mayor Bowles on the night of the election in 1930.

I set down the lantern and walked around to work the cramps out of my muscles and listen to my footsteps bouncing back at me from the crumbling foundation. The cellar smelled of concrete dust, dry rot, and sulphur. Only a week had passed since I'd seen Merlin Gilly standing inside the fresh notch in the skyline where the building had stood for most of the century. It seemed longer. It seemed as if they could have put up a new structure in its place and used it for sixty years and knocked it down and started work on another, long enough for two or three generations of private detectives and small-change grifters to pass by. I thought if I got through this night I'd go back to the Erin Go Bar and order a Bubonic Plague and raise it in a toast to Merlin's memory.

I wouldn't, though. I'd choose an anonymous bar with no history and all the ambience of a Styrofoam cup and drink Scotch.

A nail came loose with a gasp. I switched on the lantern, adjusting the metal louvers so that the light shone down onto the floor, and stepped away from it into the shadows. I listened to my own breathing for a long time before the first scraping footstep struck the edge of the basement. A circle of yellowish light—the beam of a larger flash than the one I'd put away in a pocket—bounced over the top of the wall and found the stairs. Beyond it I saw the vague outline of a figure, black against the charcoal sky.

“Walker?”

Although he spoke quietly, the name echoed as if he'd shouted it down a canyon.

I moistened my lips. “I'm here. Turn off the flash. It's too big. Someone will see it.”

“I'll break my neck.”

“There's a light down here. Wait a minute for your eyes to adjust.”

The circle of light vanished. After a moment he started down, reaching out with his foot to feel each step before trusting his weight to it. It seemed five minutes before he stood at the bottom. He didn't move from there. Very slowly I made out the features in the blur of his ordinary face, the banal mask the world saw when it bothered to look at Earl North. He wore a long dark coat and dark slacks and shoes, his body a blank cutout against the block wall behind him, barely illuminated in the glow of the lamplight ricocheting off the floor. Traffic swished by a dozen yards away. The downtown People Mover clattered along its circular run two stories above the pavement, its lighted windows a yellow crayon streak. The hour was early, for all the dark; some workers were still on their way home, shoppers were making their last purchases before dinner.

“You picked a lonely place to meet,” North said. “I told friends where I'd be, if you're planning to kill me.” It was clear from his tone his upper lip was lifted.

“You don't have any friends.”

Another silence. Then: “Did you bring it?”

“I brought it. Did you bring yours?”

Clothing rustled. He held up something wrapped in a bundle.

“How do I know that isn't last Sunday's paper?” I asked.

He fumbled with the package. His flashlight snapped on briefly. Part of an enormous capital
E
glittered, bejeweled and gilded. It matched the
L
on the page I had locked in my car. There were other pages behind it with puckered and uneven edges. When the light went back out I said, “It looks genuine enough in the dark. How's it look in the light?”

“It's the real thing. I wasn't kidding when I said the Hours is too risky to fake. Your turn.”

I took the .32 out of my pocket and held it up. The flashlight snapped on and off. I felt the heat of it on my hand. Our breath steamed in the fading phosphorescence.

“How do I know that's the right gun?”

“Who else but you knew it was a Beretta?”

“My dear daughter Laurel.” The lip was lifted.

“Well, you don't get to look it over until you let go of the Hours.”

“You surprise me. I would've bet you wouldn't part with that gun no matter how much the manuscript was worth.”

“Twenty years is a long time. You can't love the dead more than the living.” I breathed sulphur. “Two questions.”