The Talk Show Murders (18 page)

I had the feeling I’d seen him somewhere before, but I couldn’t place the location.

“See that silver van parked at the curb, friend?” he said. “The three of us are going to stroll to it and go for a little ride.”

“Really? In front of police headquarters you’re doing this?” I asked.

He scanned the area casually, noting the civilians and cops entering and exiting the building. “I don’t see anything here to stop you from taking a bullet,” he said.

“Good point.”

We headed for what I assumed was the silver van. It was silverish. And van-ish.

Country Boy opened the side door, exposing middle and rear seats.

“In,” the handsome bombardier ordered.

The middle row consisted of two separate buckets. Bombardier prodded me toward the far seat, and he took the one beside me, removing his hand from his pocket and pointing his gun at my groin. I wondered if he targeted that area on all of his kidnaps or if he suspected it might be my particular Achilles heel.

Country Boy shut the door and circled the van, sliding behind the wheel in front.

We sat like that for a minute or two while Country Boy puttered around. Finally, Bombardier said, “Anytime you’re ready, Ace.”

“I keep pressin’ the button, but it won’t start, C-man.”

“Turn the key.”

“Cars don’t have keys no more, C-man. They got buttons you press.”

“Then press it.”

“It ain’t doing nuthin’.”

“You fucking with me?”

“No. Maybe the battery wore out. It jus’ won’t start.” Country Boy slid down on his seat and began to inspect the underside of the dashboard. “Gaw damn,” he said. “The wires are all just hangin’ down like they been yanked out.”

Suddenly, Bombardier jerked upright beside me. He slowly lifted the gun until it was a few inches from his right ear, aimed at the van’s ceiling. Long black fingers appeared from somewhere behind us and plucked the weapon from his unresisting hand. The barrel of another gun was pressing against Bombardier’s neck.

I turned my head very slowly and saw a very black face surrounded by dreadlocks. It rewarded me with a big, gold-toothed grin. Without losing it, he drew back the hand holding C-man’s gun and slammed it hard against the back of the hard case’s skull.

When C-man grunted and tumbled forward off the seat, Ace suddenly became aware that all was not right in the rear of the van. He turned, and his eyes bulged. Almost as much as the zoot-suited wolves in Tex Avery cartoons when they see a pretty girl. All that was missing was the “boi-yoi-yong” sound effect.

Natty Dread was already on the move. In one fluid motion, he gracefully shoved the seat carrying the unconscious C-man forward far enough for him to use his gun to flatten some of Country Boy’s straw hair. Country Boy bounced against the left door and slid under the steering wheel.

“Mek haste, bredda,” the very black man said to me in a pleasant Jamaican singsong, “a fore jancro ketch us heah.”

He tossed C-man’s gun onto the front seat and tucked his into the pocket of his dark gray warm-up jacket. “Why you still sitting? Leggo.”

I heard the tap of a horn to our left. A big white Cadillac Escalade had pulled up beside us.

“Naa mek mi vex, mon,” Dreadlocks said. “Yu doan wanna romp wit me.” He was no longer smiling. He reached into his pocket, presumably for the gun. “Us step out yah,” he ordered.

I definitely did not want to romp with him. Which is why I stepped out.

Kidnapped twice. Right in front of Chicago police headquarters.

Had to be some kind of record. Hello, Chicago, Hello.

“Me name be Trejean,” my Jamaican captor informed me when we were ensconced on the rich leather mid-vehicle seat in the white Escalade. He gestured to our driver. “Dat lily-brown Portugee behin’ de wheel be Hiho.”

The white biker type seated beside Hiho introduced himself through a yellow beard. “I’m Dal, the brains of this crew.”

“Dal be a jesta, a samfi man,” Trejean said. “We put up wit his foolery ’cause he be fambly.”

The three of them were young, probably still in their twenties. As seemingly different as their modes of dress. Under his gray jacket, Trejean wore a black tee and narrow black trousers. From what I could see of Hiho, he preferred a hipster narrow-brim purple hat, a pale rose silk shirt, and suspenders matching the color of the hat. Dal opted for a leather wifebeater that left his heavily larded, muscular arms on display in all their naked glory. There was a tattoo of a pretty bespectacled woman near his left shoulder that looked suspiciously like Sarah Palin.

“Where we headed?” I asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Dal the jester said.

I turned for a final woeful look at the rapidly diminishing police headquarters building where Lieutenant Oswald was no doubt assuming I’d blown her off. I saw that the silverish van of my primary kidnappers, having loitered much too long in the passenger zone, finally was attracting the scrutiny of two uniformed officers.

Great work, guys. Keep that traffic flowing.

“All fruits ripe,” Trejean said. At least that’s what it sounded like. He had positioned himself with his back to the left side of the big SUV, facing me. “Yu nuh easy,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Jamaican jibber-jabber,” Dal explained. “Tre thinks you look worried. Shit, man, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’re protecting your ass.”

“Is that what just happened?”

“What else? Those boys were bad hombres. They were going to …” Dal pointed a thumb-and-finger gun at me and made the appropriate bang-bang noise.

“And you boys?”

“You’ve just been rescued by the A-Team,” Dal said.

Hiho giggled. “Love it when plan come together,” he said, the first peep out of him. A TV fan. Maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think Hannibal Smith ever giggled when he recited that line.

“Not that I’m ungrateful,” I said, “but why rescue me?”

“Info above our pay grade,” Dal said. “We’re told to keep you alive, that’s what we do.”

Trejean chuckled. “Dal bad bwoy. Las’ night, snap that hot-steppa’s neck.”

“Hot-steppa?”

“In Jamaican lingo, a hot steppa is a criminal hot-stepping from the cops,” Dal explained. “He’s talking about the wrong-o who tried to
light up you and the blond lady last night on the Near North. We took care of him.”

“Bad bwoy, Dal,” Trejean said, as if it amused him.

“Tre’s ribbin’ me because we weren’t supposed to get fatal on him until we found out who hired him. But the guy just wouldn’t cooperate—”

“He tess Dal.”

“Yeah. He tested me, all right. I may not look it, but I’m pretty even-tempered. That prick head-butted me. Made me see red, and I took that hard head and twisted it. A little too much.”

“A fuckery, dat,” Trejean said dismissively. “Car odah so bad, made us gwine adoor.”

“Ruined my ride,” Hiho said.

“My bad,” Dal said. “See, when his neck popped, the guy voided himself, front and back. Left the car smelling like a French pissoir.”

“Worse,” Hiho said.

“We had to dump that set of wheels.”

“That would’ve been a black SUV?” I asked.

“Yess. Black Beauty,” the newly chatty Hiho said. “Noble goddamn machine. A real machine. Not like this … this pale white marshmallow.”

“Hiho’s not a big fan of luxury,” Dal said. “He believes in what my mom used to call a spartan lifestyle.”

“The purple hat had me fooled,” I said.

“You don’t like my hat? Fuck you, Mister
GQ.
”

“Actually, Hiho,” Dal said, “it’s not a great color for a man of your complexion.”

“Fuck you, too, smartypants.”

Great, I was now in an episode of
Project Runway
. As amusing as my kidnappers were, I decided the wise thing would be for me to get my Sherlock Holmes on and start observing.

We’d been traveling west on Madison for a while, but Hiho had made a few turns and now we were passing a tall red-brick building with giant O’s filling its display windows. Oprah Country. The next
block was completely given over to the talk show queen’s Harpo Studios.

“You being in TV,” Dal said, “I guess you know her, huh?”

“We met once or twice,” I said.

“What’s she like?”

“The meetings were brief. She seemed pretty much like on the show.”

“They say studio haunted by woman they call the Gray Lady,” Hiho said. “Place built on a morgue fulla dead bodies.”

“Shut up, dat,” Trejean said, obviously no fan of ghost stories.

“Wasn’t a morgue, exactly,” Dal said. “Used to be an armory. Back in the early 1900s a big ship capsized on the lake and they stored some of the victims there. I think that’s how it went.”

“Dal got de ed-u-cay-shun,” Trejean said.

Hiho took a few more turns and we were in a Starbucks/hair salon/boutique fashions commercial area. He maneuvered the white Escalade down a narrow drive between a three-story yellow plaster building with a green awning and a white wooden two-story that, according to a shiny brass plate, housed
THE LEGAL COUNCIL
. I made a mental bet with myself that our destination would not be a building in which anything even remotely “legal” would transpire. And I was right.

Hiho parked near the loading area of the yellow building. He and Trejean remained with the Escalade while Dal walked me toward closed double doors in comradely fashion, his big, moist arm heavy on my shoulders.

A sign beside the doors read:
UBORA EMPLOYEES ONLY. PATRONS PLEASE USE THE MAIN ENTRY
.

“It’s okay,” Dal said, opening the door. “You’re with me.”

“What’s Ubora?” I asked.

Dal smiled. “The sign out front says it’s an international gallery of fine art. Me, I don’t even care much for comic books.”

We entered a large shipping area. Sawdust and plastic Bubble Wrap formed little and big mounds on the floor beside various basic tools, thin bare-wood crates, and heavy cardboard boxes. With a soft vocal—Norah Jones, I think—playing through the speakers, three sullen
males and two sullen females, all of them brown-skinned, young, and wearing green T-shirts under red bib overalls, were taking their own sweet time carefully crating a stack of oil paintings. They gave us the brief glances that our importance to their lives required, then returned to their tasks.

The paintings they wrapped so listlessly were news magazine–size and outlined by identical gold-leaf rococo frames. Each was a portrait of a different rabbi.

“What’s that all about?” I asked.

“The rabbis?” he said with a shrug. “It’s the art world. Go figure.”

After three flights up in the service elevator we arrived at a tastefully appointed reception area with indirect lighting that, combined with the powder-blue walls, gave the room the color of the sky in Dehiwala Town, Sri Lanka, at sundown. As best I could remember.

The couches and chairs were of soft white leather. Sand dunes?

A baby spot cut through the Sri Lanka–ish glow like a giant, well-aimed moonbeam calling attention to a very blond woman seated at the reception desk. She was something to see, perched ramrod stiff on her chair, looking pale and lovely in a soft yellow dress with a scoop neck. She reminded me of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
, minus the neurosis. Her only visible flaw was the ugly sliver of black plastic stuck in her right ear.

“Hi, Sugar Tits,” Dal said. “Buzz the boss that I’m here to deliver the male.”

“Is that a new gold tooth, Dal?” she asked. “Oh, no, I see. It’s just leftover lunch.” She pressed a button on the console resting on the desk. After a few beats, her lips moved, and I guessed she was saying something into her earphone, but I couldn’t hear a peep.

She pressed another button, and the door to the left behind her swung open. Dal winked at me and used his left hand in a sweeping gesture to suggest I enter in front of him.

Time to head down the rabbit hole. Whoever was waiting on the other side, I doubted it’d be Elmer Fudd.

After the reception area (and receptionist), the room we entered was something of a letdown. It was windowless, its soft light coming from two antique lamps. One with a filigree shade was perched on a carved, round wooden table with a marble top in the corner of the room to my right; the other, resting on a square table in the opposite corner, boasted a beaded rose shade. The walls were a restful ivory, except for four paintings that appeared to be, on first glance, primitive depictions of rural black Americana.

Two overlapping Oriental rugs partially covered a dark wood floor. There were several carved wood parlor armchairs in varying solid hues and, against one wall, a large hand-painted leather trunk decorated with metal studs. As I mentioned, I’m no expert on antiques, but my guess was that the furniture was Victorian.

A delicate glass-topped coffee table stood in for a formal desk. On it rested a cordless phone, a fluted glass half filled with what looked like champagne, and the inevitable iPad. Behind the table was the one
touch of vibrant color in the room, an orange velvet love seat. Empty at the moment.

As the rest of the room seemed to be.

I turned to Dal, who was standing to my right. “What now?” I asked.

“Now we meet, sir.” The voice came from my left.

He was standing near the wall beside the open door, a dark black man approximately five and a half feet tall, very thin and very fit. He was wearing an immaculate three-piece white suit, a crisp powder-blue shirt, and a black tie with a large knot. His scalp was covered by a meringue of neat white hair. He sported a matching mustache. If he’d been wearing glasses with a thicker frame and a goatee, he’d have resembled a skinny black Colonel Sanders.

The white hair was the only sign of advanced years. His face was unlined, and half-lidded eyes behind rimless glasses gave him the look of a relaxed, self-satisfied man.

“My name is Mantata, Chef Blessing,” he said, extending a manicured hand, which I shook. He smelled of mimosa—the flower, not the cocktail. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”