Dead Man

4

Weight, 100 pounds. For two years, pain.

Constant. Low and throbbing, like drums. Or high and shrill, like red-hot irons laid lovingly against his flesh by medicine’s benevolent sadism.

Start with the bones. Pins here, steel rods there.

Then, muscles and tendons. Slow, careful reconstructions.

Finally, the flesh. Operate, wait for the scar tissue to heal, operate again.

Now, the physical therapy. Move this finger. Wiggle that toe. Wonderful! Can you move that arm? Can that leg support...

No no, that’s fine. Falling down is part of the therapy. One, two, three, four, rest. Let the pulse slow... One, two...

Two years. Weight, back up to his original 140.

5

For the year after that, Las Vegas. At first he’d thought Phoenix, Santa Fe — just so it was desert. He thought he ended up in Vegas only because more buses went there. Hot sun, dry air, burn out the pain that, often, had him sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a razor blade against the inside of his wrist.

Not just the physical pain, though that was bad enough.

two bulky men charged in with sawed-off shotguns

Fragments of nightmare.

the shotgun belched yellow flame to smash Marie back and up

Razor blade. A couple of swipes against the wrists, and...

Albie’s legs disappeared as the door frame splintered

But — these were not nightmares. These were memories sent to him by God. The half-formed idea of doing something about their deaths started small, grew with the nightmares.

To do what you ought to do, you had to survive. So he started getting up before dawn each morning to walk along the road out into the desert. Half a mile, but and back. A mile. After a while, that led to trotting. Two miles, four. Jogging was the next logical move, skin brown, legs and arms pumping, sweat rolling, three, five, eight, twelve miles a day.

Six months in, he found himself other disciplines. Health club. Boxing gym. Karate dojo.

Weight, 160.

Carrying a book to strengthen his hands — the heaviest he had was a leather-bound fire-singed copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Clutched in his hand as he was dragged from the fire.

I wasn’t ready... Oh Christ... I wasn’t ready...

So, strengthening not just his hands, but also his resolve. Until on the last morning of that first Vegas year, three years after it had happened, he was physically ready. Maybe emotionally he was still screwed up, maybe he couldn’t remember any of it without black swirling rage, but physically ready to...

To what? To find the people who had done it, of course. After that was still hazy, but...

Hey — find them how? How do you find two anonymous hitmen hired to kill you three years ago... hired!

Somebody had hired them! So simple, yet in three years he hadn’t thought of it. Easier to find him than the hitters, because he wasn’t anonymous. Had to have a connection with Grimes...

Also, had to be tied into organized crime. The Mob. Mr. Average Joe, no matter how pissed off, didn’t know anyone could blow up a boat and make it look like an accident even to the experts. Didn’t know shotgunners for hire who...

Then he realized why he had come to Vegas. The mob still ran it, no matter how many layers of cotton candy you laid over them. The old men who played golf, the young men who protected them with watchful, venal eyes. Just because he was there recuperating, for the past year Dain had been studying them. He’d learned the players, the rules, without knowing it. Had watched the watchers without being watched himself, because he hadn’t known he was watching.

So maybe he was ready to start looking instead of watching.

Weight, 180.

His assets: he didn’t care if he lived or died; he didn’t care about legalities at this point in the game; he was a genius with a computer; he was physically ready. Maybe not emotionally, but at least he would be doing something about what had been done to him. Final asset, they didn’t know who the hell he was.

Even as Eddie Dain, he’d just been a fly to be swatted, so with a new name, a Vegas name... Travis. Travis... Holt. That was good. No elaborate disguise needed, but why be careless? Nonprescription glasses, colored contacts, rinse-away hair coloring, a neat goatee and mustache.

To go with the new name, a rock-solid new life. His laptop massaged Travis Holt into other people’s records. Gave him dead parents, schooling, a rather no-account brother named Jimmy, put him into the Las Vegas National Guard — this last a precaution just in case he had to disappear without making waves.

As Travis Holt he was just a guy looking for a casino that needed a bookkeeper for its legit books. Big guy, thirty, maybe thirty-two, close to 200 pounds, moved quick, didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, chase broads. Or guys. When he wasn’t at work he was out jogging or at a gym somewhere. Physical fitness freak. And could you believe, a computer nerd. Genuine, complete nerd. The connected P.I. who checked him out joked that he probably whacked off at night watching his reflection in his computer screen.

It took Travis Holt only six months to make himself indispensable to the casino that hired him. Creative ideas about bookkeeping. Always available for overtime. Always willing to fill in for vacations. And a real whiz with the numbers. Pretty soon they had to give him access to the sensitive files.

Dangerous to give him access? Shit, no, man. Checked him out back to the cradle. Family gone except for one brother in Vero Beach, Florida, fucking commercial fisherman when he works, which isn’t often. By the records a drinker, can’t hold a job...

Anyway, Chrissake, Holt is showing us things about figures make the accountants shoot their load. Legit ways to move money around, lose it, find it, turn it into goods and services — by the time it comes back in from the Bahamas it’s as clean as Tide Concentrate. And he knows he ever tries to get into files he isn’t authorized for, he leaves tracks right back to his terminal and we pound him headfirst into the desert and light his feet.

Knows better than to fuck with us.

Of course he knew better, knew all about the buried codes that gave warnings when access was effected. But he didn’t care. Once he was inside, his obsession deepened. Sometimes, alone at night in his office, trying to find the man who had ordered his family murdered, he thought he might be cracking up. And still didn’t care. The search gave him focus, eased his nightmares.

As for that access the wise guys thought impossible, at Cal-Tech he had learned all about the back doors always left in computer systems. Had designed viruses that would take security checks out and put them back when he was done. At Cal-Tech he had built his own computer, designed his own computer language, created his own software, broken into half the federal security mainframes in D.C. just for the hell of it.

So latenights, weekends, overtime, his computer made love to the mob’s, stuck its tongue down their system’s throat, lapped up their data. The books behind the books, the offshore skim accounts, the secret sauna meetings to move millions... The feds would have killed to know what he knew, but he cared nothing about that. Let the feds make their own cases. All he sought was to name the nightmares that rode through his sleep.

the door crashed back against the wall, two bulky men charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands, heavy boots on bare planks...

Long after midnight, almost four years after it had happened, he found a name, buried deep in the belly of the beast, that meshed with all the givens of that June night.

Mario Pucci. Los Angeles.

Pucci’s specialty was bringing in drugs from Mexico on other people’s private powerboats. Like Ron Grimes’s. In fact, he and Ron Grimes had been yacht club cronies, had played poker together. What more natural, Grimes bringing in drugs for him? But maybe a scare from the Coast Guard had made him panic, want out... or maybe he’d gotten greedy...

A phone call from Pucci, a specialist gets on a plane, Grimes’s yacht blows up with Grimes on it. Accident. End of story. But unknown to Pucci, a private eye named Eddie Dain had been hired by Grimes’s business partner fearful Grimes’s black money was coming from their company accounts. The private eye confirmed that it wasn’t — and then kept going on his own with his computer, like a kid with a new toy, thought it was all just a big fucking game, wouldn’t quit poking around...

Dain saw himself reflected in the computer screen, panting, sweating as with fever. He’d read the joke in the P.I.’s report on Travis Holt, about him watching his reflection in the screen as he jerked off... Was that what he was doing here? Mentally masturbating into this goddamned machine?

He sure wasn’t acting like a normal human.

Goddammit, he wasn’t a normal human being. He was a man who had been blown to pieces and fit back together again like a jigsaw puzzle. A man whose wife and child had been blown to pieces with him, then burned up without the chance to be fitted back together. Anything he did was all right, was justified...

He eagerly punched more keys. But when the machine spoke again the fire went out of his eyes, his jaw went slack, he sank back in his chair shrunken in size and density.

Mario Pucci had died of a heart attack on top of his mistress in a fancy Beverly Hills hotel two years ago. Had left no records in anyone’s computer of who he might have called to swat that bothersome fly at Point Reyes.

Dain settled slowly back in his chair. It was over. All finished. It all died with Pucci. He had nowhere else to look. Nothing else to do. No more reason to go on living. By habit, he backtracked out of the maze, reset the bypassed traps, logged out of the legitimate files, closed down his computer just as if he were coming back. But he knew he was all finished.

Out in the desert the sun was just up. Empty, brilliant, still. Saguaro cacti, Joshua trees, rocks, sand. Cry of a distant hawk, dry moan of the wind. A good day to die. He left his car, ran at a steady pace out into the desert. He would run until he died, like the runner bringing news of the victory at Marathon. His was a defeat, but his death would be as good, as clean, in the desert. A Hemingway death: grace under pressure.

Finally, miles from the road, where tumbled rocks rose to a ridge shaded by a big Joshua, he indeed fell. Collapsed facedown on the sand. A minute, ten, twenty. But he didn’t die, clean, in the desert. He didn’t die at all. He just felt hot, sticky, tired, irritable. He rolled onto his back. Lay there, arms wide, chest heaving, staring up into the clear blue sky. High above, wings motionless, dwarfed by distance, a turkey buzzard rode the thermals, binocular eyes seeking dead meat.

What had he done? Trained too well? Forged a body and a will that knew no despair? But Mario Pucci, like the vulture’s meal, was dead meat. Along with Pucci, Dain’s planned revenge was also dead meat. Tears ran down the sides of his face to the sand at the thought of it.

Finally he sat up, forgotten arms still outstretched. Scrambled to his feet. Began dancing to some silent inner music. Faster and faster, like someone stoned, twisting, rhythmic, sensual. Improvising, sweat flying.

If he couldn’t run himself to death, he would dance himself to death.

He whirled in a circle, fell, leaped up, face transfigured, carried outside himself. Any moment now he would fall down dead of heatstroke. He ran right up a nearly perpendicular rock face and did a perfect backflip, a graceful parabola to land backward in the sand and do a back roll to shoot straight up into the air like an arrow, come down crouched — and freeze.

Dry deadly rattle. Lying on an exposed rock in the new sun, a massive rattler five feet long, red-brown with pale diamond markings. Still just slightly sluggish, but already drawing into its coiled striking position, tail vibrating visibly, vertical pupil slits in pale yellow lidless eyes almost closed against the direct sunlight. Red diamond rattler. Enough venom in its fangs, desert old-timers said, to fell a bull.

He stared at it, motionless. Even better. Totally sure. Let the snake kill him.

“All right, goddam you, do it!” he cried.

The rattler hissed but was motionless.

He began to move again, once more slowly, oh so slowly, slowly around the rattler, challenging it. Any moment now...

The snake hissed and rattled warningly, but did not strike.

Dain sprang in and out like a boxer dancing in and out to jab an opponent in the ring. That was it, a game. Once he had been a great, a tremendous games player. At chess. With his computer. With Marie’s and Albie’s lives. Now the game was to piss off the snake, so the game would have the ending he sought.

Belatedly, the snake struck. But because the man was already moving away it missed, went out full length off the rock to thump down on the sand. Dain yelled again, eyes wild.

“Yes! Yes! Goddam you, do it!”

The snake, aroused, was striking repeatedly, as quickly as it could coil and release. But Dain was beyond rationality, into the game obsessively. Once the snake’s fangs struck the sole of his shoe as he whirled with one leg extended. He was shouting with... what? Madness, perhaps.

He tried a pirouette, his foot slipped in the soft sand, he fell just as it struck again, fanging the air a foot above his descending head. It landed across him, he bucked and rolled, throwing off the bewildered rattler even as it tried to coil and strike again in midair.

Venom was dripping off its fangs, its timing was gone. Its strikes were slower. It was running down like a cobra fighting a mongoose. Which is what the mongoose waits for.

Here, now, this man was the mongoose, pure energy, the years of training in every discipline he could find coming together and paying off. He whirled about the rattler, reached in a lightning hand to give its smooth sleek hard body a tweak, leaping back and away in the same motion, too quick, the snake too exhausted, the inevitable coil and strike didn’t come within four inches of him, Dain was winning the game.

The snake, overheated, finally lay stretched out on the hot sand. If it had been a pit bull it would have been lying on its belly and panting. The man stopped, hands on knees, head down, panting himself in huge gulping breaths. He had won!

Won? No! He had lost! He was supposed to die...

Then he realized that his canteen full of water was on his belt. If he had really planned to die in the desert, why had he strapped on the canteen? He took it off his belt, opened it. Poured sweet cool water over the snake, then over his own head, down his throat. After long moments, the rattler slid away between a creosote bush and its sunning rock and was gone.

Dain saluted it. He started walking back toward the distant car shimmering in the desert heat. Began to trot. To run. The dance with the snake had sweated out his madness. No longer Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus. The scales had fallen from his eyes and along with them, his blindness.

Pucci was dead, but of course the two men he had hired wouldn’t be. And Pucci wouldn’t have dealt with them directly anyway, he would have used a go-between.

Dain’s excitement was growing, but he had to face certain realities. He’d treated what was serious as a game. He’d been a computer nerd who’d wanted to be Sam Spade. Marie and Albie were dead because he’d been a fool. Accept it, go on from there.

Accept also that, despite his new designer body, down deep he was still just Eddie Dain. With that shell of muscle and reflex around the old core, he’d thought he’d be the Terminator. But he was Eddie Dain, and Eddie Dain couldn’t do it.

Unless he could make other people think he was as hard, as impervious as he looked. Then, perhaps...

Making a game of life had gotten Marie and Albie killed, but how about making a game of death? He had been a private investigator of sorts when it had happened; now he had to make the mob think he was the greatest eye at finding people who had ever lived. He was smart and he was superb with the computer: he would learn how to find people nobody else could.

For the mob. His months with organized crime had shown him they’d become company men like everyone else. Easy for him to create an aura, a mystique, make himself the man the mob came to when nobody else could find who they were looking for. He’d need a go-between of his own, heighten that air of mystery that would move him through the underbelly until, someday, somewhere, he would run into three special men.

Would he know them if he did? Would they know him? He didn’t know, didn’t care; but he knew he wouldn’t find them here.

So first he had to get away from Vegas clean.

A week later, orders came for Travis Holt to report to the National Guard’s 72nd Military Police Company for two weeks’ “summer camp,” as the annual training is called. Holt dutifully took the order to his boss in casino bookkeeping; the 72nd had fought in the Gulf War, guarding Iraqi prisoners, so it was a popular outfit in Vegas. Permission was readily given for him to take his training without losing his accumulated vacation time.

Ten days after training was done, while the casino thought Holt was on vacation, a hand-scrawled letter from his brother Jimmy in Vero Beach informed the casino that Travis Holt had been killed in a training accident during the 72nd’s summer desert exercises. Was any back pay due? Send it to his bereaved brother if there was.

Holt fortunately had passed his ideas along to the bean-counters, so his death was no real hardship to the casino. A letter went to the asshole brother assuring him that no back pay was due, and the casino, shaking its collective head over slimeball relatives, closed the personnel file on Holt.

Who worried about dead men?

But even before he had died, Travis Holt had broken his tinted glasses, flushed his colored contacts, shampooed the dye out of his hair, shaved his mustache and goatee, and had left Vegas to become Dain. Yes, Dain.

Because he had realized that the only three men alive who knew a contract had once gone out on Eddie Dain were the same three men he wanted to find. If they found him first, that was fine. Just so he had a chance to meet them — and had a chance to see if he could play the Terminator for real.

6

The game started, as the best games always do, with playacting. Dain wanted Doug Sherman to be his go-between, because Sherman loved gossip, loved intrigue, ached to be in the know, au courant. Loved playing a role himself, loved games, could be bitchy, was excited by power, by domination; being a go-between would push all his buttons at once.

But Dain would have to con him into it, because he could never be told that Dain’s ultimate game was the killing game, not just getting back into the detective game. Dain had to make him want to be a go-between so he would never think to ask the questions Dain couldn’t answer.

When Doug Sherman arrived to open the bookstore that June morning, a big quick stranger was waiting for him. Six-one, 210, 215, burned dark by desert suns, hands thick and knuckly from breaking boards. An Indian face, craggy and strong-boned.

The stranger said, “Hello, Douglas,” in a voice Sherman almost knew. The voice was deeper than the remembered one, and there was no playfulness in it.

Sherman, elegant as ever, was caught up short. He stared.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dain,” the man said. Flat voice, flat eyes. Something dead in them, also something intensely alive.

“Eddie Dain! My God, man...”

Sherman tried to embrace him, but Dain stepped quickly back out of his arms, callused hand extended to shake instead. It was like grasping a rock.

“It’s... good to see you...” said Sherman lamely.

Dain nodded but didn’t respond. Sherman kept busy unlocking the door and deactivating the alarms while casting covert sidelong glances at Dain. Keeping up a running chatter to cover his embarrassment and his scrutiny.

“Where have you been? After you checked out of Marin General I couldn’t find any trace...” The door was open. Dain walked through it ahead of him, a leather-bound book under one arm. Sherman caught himself stammering inanely, “I... I’m sorry, I... didn’t...” He went around behind his desk. “I’ll make coffee...”

“Coffee would be fine.”

Sherman busied himself with the Melitta, talking over his shoulder as he measured out fragrant ground beans into the paper cone, covertly watching Dain’s reflection off a glass-protected Greek icon of St. Nicholas above the table.

“What’s the book?”

“Ever the dealer,” that deeper voice rumbled. Dain almost smiled. Held it up to see. “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

“The same one that I got you for Marie’s—”

“The very same,” said Dain without apparent emotion. He lifted a shoulder. Muscles slid beneath his smooth hide like the muscles of a tiger. “Physical therapy. You carry a heavy book around all day, it strengthens your hands and forearms.” He chuckled. “So you’ll be ready.”

Sherman had recovered. “Ready.” He nodded as if he understood what it meant, added, “Of course. Ah... and so, these past four years... where have you...?”

Dain put his leather-bound book down on the edge of the desk and sat down in the same chair he had habitually sat in four years earlier, but there was no unconscious lotus pose this time. He still looked flexible enough to do one, but now he was solid, hard. Prepared. Power seemed to come off him like heat.

But he only said, conventionally, “Hospitals, mostly.”

The water was heating. Sherman sat down behind the desk which had, as always, the inlaid chessboard with a classic problem laid out on it. For the first time, Sherman’s sad, beautiful eyes studied Dain quite openly.

“And?”

“And nothing.” Dain almost shrugged. His smile was very slightly lopsided from the tiny white plastic surgery scars on one side of his face. “Lots of operations, lots of pain, lots of physical therapy. All of which cost a great deal of money.”

Money. Familiar ground here. Doug Sherman knew all about using money to control situations. And he wanted to control this one. This Edgar Dain made him feel defensive, uneasy, perhaps a little frightened. Talking to him was like stroking a tiger.

“I can imagine. If there’s anything I can...”

“There is.”

A statement so bald startled the aesthete in Sherman. He felt almost embarrassed for Dain; such a blatant pitch for charity diminished the man’s power. The kettle started to sing. He poured boiling water to the top of the paper cone.

“Listen, Dain, I don’t have a great deal put by, but...”

“Not money.” Dain stood up, started to pace. It was the impatient padding of a tiger about its cell. “Business.”

Intriguing. “I’m in the book business.” He suddenly thought he knew where this was going. Needed money, too proud to ask. He gestured toward the book. “That would be worth a good deal of money... and it must be painful psychologically to...”

“It’s not for sale.”

Sherman sighed, nonplussed. “A pity. But then, what...?”

“I’m going back into private investigations.” Dain paused, staring at a new painting in one of the alcoves. A Magritte original, he was sure. He shivered slightly, picked up his thread again. “For... unconventional clients. I know of no other way to make the kind of money I need relatively quickly.” He looked over at Sherman. “I need a front man. A go-between.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“Sure you do. I want heavy-money clients on the shady side who will pay a lot to find someone they need found without questions asked. I don’t want anyone else as clients. So I need a cutout, a go-between to screen out the unwanted.”

“But how can you... I mean, four years ago you were...”

“Naive? Inexperienced?”

“Bluntly... yes.” He poured coffee into two exquisite Meissen china cups, set out cream and sugar in solid silver bowls. “Why would anyone in that... underbelly sector of the... um, American experience, say, want to hire you?”

“You’re right. I was a fool. I wasn’t ready. But that won’t happen again.” Dain had stopped pacing. His face, voice, eyes, had lost their impassivity; there was an almost guttural intensity to his words. “Now I know how to create the sort of reputation I want. Trust me on that. With a screen, a filter, I can say no easily. That’s all I need from you.”

He sat down with that looseness of muscle that typifies all big predators off duty. Both men sipped their coffee. They exchanged pleased looks over its quality.

Four years ago Sherman would have laughed in his face if Eddie Dain had come to him with such a proposition. But not now. Now he couldn’t even think of him as Eddie any more. He spread his hands in deprecation.

“Even if everything you say is true, why do you think I’m the man for this sort of thing?”

“You were born for it. Everybody knows you, you know everybody, you love to gossip, you love intrigue. And I can trust your judgment. Maybe I even can trust you.”

“I’m flattered by your confidence,” said Sherman coldly.

Dain ignored his pique. “If a recovery of some sort is involved — skim money, stolen narcotics, whatever — my fee will be ten percent of recovery against a twenty-five K floor. That’s sixty-two hundred fifty minimum per case for you — tax-free.”

“Do you really think you can...” Sherman paused. He rubbed his eyes. He fidgeted. The offer was actually intriguing, not for the money, but... but he didn’t want to show he was interested. “The thing is...”

He fell silent in midsentence. He knew he was going to do it. Dain was right it was the sort of offbeat situation he couldn’t resist. To know all the dangers beforehand... to ride the tiger... Yes! Absolutely delicious...

“Well... against my better judgment...”

Dain didn’t do any cartwheels. There was that cold center Sherman hadn’t adjusted to yet. He merely picked up his book from the desk and stood up. Standing, he drained his cup.

“Wonderful coffee,” he said.

“Another cup—”

He shook his head. His eyes sought the tall grandfather clock in a shadowy corner of the room. Something flickered momentarily in those eyes, then was gone. Some feeling that might have been described as deep purple had it been a color.

“I’m due at Homicide in fifteen minutes,” he said.

Sherman was on his feet also. “Deja vu.”

Dain nodded. He stuck out his hand. Sherman took it. He was delighted with the way he had handled himself. He loved the image of himself at the edge of the precipice. He gestured at the chessboard.

“Did you notice this endgame problem? The thirteenth game of Fischer versus Spassky World Championship match at Reykjavik, nineteen seventy-two? Extraordinary encounter.” He moved eagerly to the nine pieces left on the board. “Look here—”

Something flashed in Dain’s eyes that drove Sherman back an involuntary step as if the tiger had suddenly crouched to spring. But Dain spoke in flat, almost disinterested tones.

“I don’t play chess any more,” he said mildly.

Sherman was silent, measuring him for a long moment, pushing it, relishing it. Riding the tiger! He nodded slightly.

“Of course,” he said. “A pity.”

So it had worked with Sherman, the tough-guy image behind which Eddie Dain could live and function. He felt uneasy to be using his friends this way; but the gamesman part of him was excited by his initial success. Sherman’s lively imagination had done a lot of Dain’s work for him, but Randy Solomon would be different. To enlist Randy’s cooperation for information only the cops could provide, he had to project the same stainless-steel image using very different tactics.

Homicide had a new percolator. It made good coffee, so the trade from out-of-town departments had slacked off. And sure enough, according to the load of bullshit Lieutenant Randy Solomon was trying to sell a trio of Homicide dicks when Dain walked in, out in the boonies the bullets and switchblades now were finding their mark with disconcerting regularity.

Four sets of indifferent cops’ eyes swept over Dain, making professional assessment without interest since no threat was perceived. Three sets turned away. One set remained fixed on him. Staring hard. Harder. Suddenly Solomon broke away from the water cooler gang and went across the bullpen toward him.

“Jesus Christ! Eddie Dain! Where in the hell...”

Like Sherman, he moved to embrace Dain. Unlike Sherman, he was attuned to physical rather than intellectual threat signs in people and so managed to turn the bear hug into a handshake without embarrassment on either side. He jerked his head at the big office dominating the far end of the room. They went in. His name was on the glass, with

under it in capital letters. Randy sat down behind the desk.

“Congratulations on the promotion,” said Dain. “I didn’t know. Nobody could ever deserve it more.”

“That’s what all the boys say.” Sherman leaned across the desk and said, “Thanks just a fuck of a lot for all those cards and letters over the past four years. Where the fuck you been?”

Dain waved a dismissive hand. “Around.”

“Not around here.”

Dain shrugged. He leaned forward. There was a whipcord quality to the movement, as if he could pluck a fly from the air with his bare hand if he wished.

“Hospitals, mostly. Here you know about. Stanford. Arizona. The Big Apple. Even Mexico.”

“That’s a lot of hospitals.”

“There was a lot to fix,” said Dain.

Randy said darkly, “Got a hunch wasn’t just double-ought buckshot that hurt you, Hoss.” He gestured. “But you look like these days you could knock down a bull with a good right cross.”

Dain was silent. Randy leaned back in his swivel chair and locked his hands behind his big square black head and chuckled.

“What ever happened to Shenzie the wonder cat?”

“Older but no wiser. I left him with Marie’s folks down in La Jolla while I was...” He stopped, considering his word. “Recuperating. I brought him back up with me when I came back.”

“They glad to see you?”

“Their daughter’s dead. Their grandson’s dead. I’m still alive. Would you be glad?”

“Fuck ‘em they can’t take a joke,” said Randy without heat or apology. He paused. “So you’re stay in’ a while.”

“Foreseeable future.”

The cop in Randy made his face and eyes get elaborately casual. “Plannin’ on doin’ what, exactly?”

“What I did before. Private-eye stuff.”

Randy suddenly got up and went to the door and made sure it was shut, then came back and leaned his butt against the edge of the desk, so he could speak in lower tones than his usual pane-rattling decibels.

“It’d be my ass the department knew, Eddie, but these four years I been looking. Not every day looking, y’know, but... Anyway, I got a sort of a hint that maybe a guy down in L.A. ordered that hit. But shit, Hoss, you gotta go dig him up you wanta do anything to him. He died two years ago.”

“Mario Pucci,” said Dain. Randy stared at him for a long moment, then nodded and went back around the desk and sat down again. Dain went on, “Grimes was running dope up from Mexico for him in his powerboat. I imagine Pucci wanted him blown up to keep him from talking, and the boat blown up so nobody would find the compartments the dope had been stowed in.”

Randy opened his arms like a priest giving benediction, but his face wore a puzzled expression.

“Guess I ain’t tracking, Hoss. If the man’s dead—”

Dain was on his feet, leaning across the desk to grip Solomon’s forearm with a force that made the big man wince. But Solomon did not try to pull his arm away.

“The shooters aren’t dead,” said Dain. His low-pitched voice somehow was like chalk on a blackboard. He let go of Solomon’s forearm. He sat down again. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “At least maybe they’re not dead.”

Randy sighed. “One way, I’m glad. It’s what I’d be doin’, was me, lookin’ for the fuckers. But the other way, I ain’t glad, ‘cause I can’t help you. I don’t think anybody can. Pucci was like all these guys now — about ninety percent legit.”

“Too legit to quit,” murmured Dain.

“You got that right. If he did have some old-time shooter around for laughs, he’d have him up in Washington State picking Granny Smiths in front of three hundred school kids when the hit went down. What’s that phrase those fuckers in Washington love? Deniability?”

“Tin mittens,” said Dain.

Solomon chuckled.

“I ain’t heard that one since I was a kid. My grandfather used to say it.”

“I had a lot of time to read a lot of old detective novels while I was recuperating,” said Dain. “Who would Pucci use?”

Some cop’s hardness came again into Solomon’s face. “You ain’t gonna make the same mistake twice, are you, Dain?”

“I’m not going to make any mistakes at all.”

Solomon nodded. “Good enough. Somebody good, it’d be, from one of the families back east. Contract guys, fly in, bang! bang! fly out the same night. With Pucci gone, you got nobody to pressure. They’ll of been paid out of some corporate slush fund somewhere with only Pucci knowing what they were gettin’ paid for. May as well chase a fart in a whirlwind for all the chance you got of finding “em.”

“That’s the way that I had it figured, but I had to ask.”

“What now, Dain?” He had started to say “Eddie,” but somehow the name didn’t fit any more.

“Dialing for dollars. I got a lot of medical to pay off.”

Dain stood up. He seemed quite recovered from the emotional turmoil of a few minutes before. He stuck out his hand to Solomon. They shook.

“Thanks, Randy. For everything. Now and four years ago.”

“Shit,” said Randy. He brightened. “Handball?”

“I’ll call you,” said Dain.

Randy stared at him for a long moment. “Sure you will, Hoss,” he said.

He walked Dain to the door of his office. Stood there watching him thread his way out of the room between the desks.

He went back and sat down. Heavily. And sighed.

7

His first commission didn’t come until three months after Sherman had started acting as his go-between. Six months before, a drug-money courier had skipped with the cash he had been carrying between New York and Chicago. Dain found him in two days on the Caribbean island of Curacao, and had a lot of sleepless nights over the man’s unknown fate.

But it got him a rep. What cemented it was a Mafia don’s private pilot who had testified against his boss and had gone into the federal Witness Relocation Program two years before. In seventeen days, Dain found him on a fishing boat in Alaska.

After that he had more of his curiously specialized work than he could handle, and in the intervening months had really become much more the image he projected: harder, colder, more indifferent to the fate of those he found. Still plenty of sleepless nights, but not over them. They were all scum. Just not the scum he was seeking.

Then, a year later almost to the day, Dain’s game began — although he didn’t know it at the time.

It was 9:01 a.m. in Chicago on a bright glary summer morning headed toward the century mark by midday. An early-thirties man went into the First Chicago Bank of Commerce on South Wacker a few blocks from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He was slender, weak-chinned, bespectacled, suited, carrying an attaché case. His eyes were close-set, which weakened the face even more.

He went to the window with SAFE DEPOSIT BOXES over it. Unlike the tellers’ windows, there was no line. Holding a key in his hand, he fidgeted until a round-faced girl in a frilly blouse came over to use her twangy Midwest accent on him.

“May I help you, sir?”

He displayed the key. “Six-two-three-eight.”

The teller riffled the signature cards. Took one out.

“Adelle Lorimer or James Zimmer are authorized to—”

“James Zimmer — obviously.”

His chuckle was so nervous it was almost a cough. She compared his signature with that on file with the bank, then pushed the buzzer to let Zimmer into the vault area. They went through the double-key ritual. Zimmer shut himself into one of the private cubicles with the long oblong green metal box. As he opened both it and his attache case, he had to wipe sweat from his face with his display handkerchief.

From the box he took a dictionary-thick sheaf of bearer bonds. From the attaché case, a much smaller stack of bonds. Laboriously and individually he checked their numbers against the larger stack, winnowing bonds from it until apart from the original he also had two small stacks that were, bond for bond, identical. He substituted new for old, returned the doctored sheaf to the not-so-safe deposit box, put the originals removed from it into his attaché case.

Zimmer emerged from the bank moving briskly and with confidence, case in hand. Starting to cross a quarter block short of the crosswalk, he had to wait for a grimy Cicero bus to pass. A tip-nosed Irish meter maid following the bus and blue-chalking tires from her three-wheeler yelled at him.

“Hey — you!” She revved her engine beside him a couple of times. “Didja really think you could get away with that?” Zimmer stared at her through spectacles that, luckily for him, darkened in bright light so she could not see his wide and terrified eyes. “Didja ever hear of crosswalks?”

“No, I... I mean, yes, sorry, Officer, I was just...”

But she was gone. The minute hand of a big wall clock on a brick building across the street jerked solidly forward to 9:24. At the corner he crossed with the light, turned right, trying to regain his casual, jaunty stride; but the encounter had left the hand holding the attache case white-knuckled with tension.

He looked around rather furtively, then ducked into an alley. A kid carrying a cardboard tray of Styrofoam cups had to make a matador-with-the-bull move, the cover came off a cup to slop hot coffee over his wrist.

“Jesus Christ, man, why don’t ya look where ya...”

Zimmer, oblivious, scuttled down the midblock alley at the far end of which a dirty and dented five-year-old red Porsche was parked facing the street. A lush-bodied platinum blonde in her mid-twenties, exotic as a tropical bird, was adding blood-red lipstick to full, sensual lips by the tipped-down interior mirror. Her dark and magnificent eyes were almost obliterated by too much mascara and liner, but even so she was vivid, alive.

A swarthy short-order cook came from a greasy spoon’s kitchen door to dump something into a garbage pail with a nasty splashing plop, and the passing Zimmer leaped two feet in the air. The blonde shook her head at his antics in the driver’s side mirror, pressed a Kleenex between her lips to blot them.

Zimmer got in beside her and put his attaché case on the floor. Now that danger seemed past he was high on excitement, a hell of a fellow.

“Smooth as fucking silk.” His lips curved around the dirty word his squeaky voice didn’t quite fit.

“My mighty hero of romance,” she said lightly.

Her irony was lost on Zimmer. He leaned over to kiss her. She pushed his face away with the back of her hand.

“What’s the matter with you, Vangie?”

“What’s the matter with you? This was the easy part.”

Her skirt had ridden up as she worked the pedals, exposing long, beautifully muscled dancer’s thighs in sheer black pantyhose. She tapped the horn twice as she edged the low red car out across the sidewalk. Zimmer, the coolest dude on earth, put his hand up between her legs.

“In an hour, sweet thing, I’m going to—”

Vangie slammed on the brakes so hard he bounced off the dashboard, thus effectively removing the offending hand. She glared at him with glacial eyes.

“Touch me again when I don’t want you to, sweet thing, and you’re going to need a prosthesis to pee.”

A black teenager just coming out of a clothing shop with a mop, pail and squeegee heard Vangie’s voice carry through the open window and started to laugh. She winked at him, then goosed it to send the beat-up little red Porsche zipping from the alley mouth.

Zimmer was angered by the black boy’s laughter. As Vangie skillfully threaded the car through Loop traffic under the cool shadow of the El on Van Buren, he sneered, “No guts, baby? Shit, I did it, while you sat here peeing your pants! I’m—”

“Just what did you do, Jimmy?”

“I ripped off two million bucks in bearer bonds from T. J. L. fucking Maxton!” he exclaimed with defiant triumph.

She looked over at him and her face softened.

“Oh Jimmy-honey, don’t you get it? When Maxton realizes what has happened here and picks up his telephone, somebody very good at finding people is going to be on the other end.”

Dain still lived in the modest bungalow in Tarn Valley, but now also leased a convenient loft over a dilapidated pier next to the firehouse on the San Francisco waterfront. The loft had a bed, dresser, wardrobe in one corner, bathroom in another, a kitchen in between. At 8:30 A.M., two hours after he had fallen asleep, the phone jerked him upright out of nightmare.

Albie’s legs were blasted back down the hall out of sight as the door frame was splintered and pocked and ripped by the edges of the shot pattern

His shoulders slumped. His eyes became human again.

“Bad one, Shenz,” he said.

Shenzie the wonder cat, his head sideways on the pillow and his front paws over the top of the blanket like a sleeping person, got up with a huge jaw-creaking yawn, stretched fore and aft, and stalked off in search of kibble as the phone rang again. Dain had not heard him purr since the day, five years before, when he’d been dropped off at Randy Solomon’s Victorian.

Dain blew out a big whoosh! of breath, fumbled for the phone with one hand while dashing sweat from his face with the other.

“Dain.”

“Sherman here. A call just came for you.”

Dain sighed. “One hour.”

He stood. He was nude, lean but tremendously muscular, his right shoulder, upper chest, and side of his neck peppered with small round white marks. On his left arm, rib cage, flank, and thigh were innumerable well-healed surgical scars.

In a gym area furnished with an Olympic bar set, racked dumbbells, benches, pulleys, rings and horses, mats, Dain selected two 70-pound dumbbells. He began doing warm-up cleans and presses with them. As his skin flushed with the added blood, the fishbelly scars stood out starkly.

Fifty minutes later, he settled into his usual chair across the desk from Sherman as the bookseller reached out a long arm to stab playback on the cassette recorder.

Sherman’s voice said, “Three-four-six-two.”

“I want to talk with Edgar Dain.”

“Mr. Dain is not available for phone calls.”

The other voice blustered. “Yeah, yeah, I know, but this is different. Very sensitive, large issues at—”

Dain cut the voice in midsentence by punching off.

“Midwest, maybe Chicago. Asshole, maybe an attorney.”

Sherman said, “Oh, well, that’s that, then. If the man is an attorney, Dain couldn’t possibly do any work for him.”

As their arrangement had blossomed, they had fallen into a professional relationship devoid of the personal. Dain executed the commissions he accepted through Sherman without discussing them or ever filing any written reports, facts Sherman found almost unbearably unprofessional.

“Attorneys lie a lot,” said Dain. “Always at the wrong time to the wrong people.”

Sherman began to prowl. He’d believed that being Dain’s go-between would be tweaking the tail of the tiger. Instead, the tiger stayed in its cage. He scooped up the invariable leather-bound book from the corner of the desk. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He almost slammed it down again.

“Still drugging your mind with lunacies five years later.”

“It’s my mind.”

“And don’t give me any crap about physical therapy. You use it to remind yourself of...” He paused, fearing he had gone too far, but Dain did not react, so he asked, “So, what do I tell T. J. L. Maxton when he calls again?”

Dain raised his eyebrows. “That was Teddy Maxton?”

“You know him?”

“Of him. Chicago investment attorney who does occasional legal work for some minor mob figures.”

“You amaze me, Dain. Sometime I’d like to know what you were really doing during those four lost years.”

“Recuperating.”

“Where? In the Witness Relocation Program? You know more arcane facts about obscure organized-crime individuals than—”

Dain came to his feet in a single swift movement. “Maxton, huh? Let’s step on his tail, see if he squeals.”

Sherman felt the familiar delicious thrill of excitement.

“If Maxton’s really connected, is that wise?”

“Is living wise?” Dain countered as he stalked out with his Tibetan Book of the Dead under one arm.

Two days later, 7:30 A.M., Dain was at the World Gym in Kentfield near the College of Marin, doing a circuit workout that built cardiovascular capacity while strengthening the five major muscle groups. The few dedicated bodybuilders in the basement free weight room at that hour were too busy with their own workouts to pay any attention to Dain, as he in turn ignored the morning-long shadow that climbed across him.

“Dain? Edgar Dain?”

Dain was doing barbell curls with two hundred pounds, grunting with the effort. He finished, pouring sweat, the planes of his chest shifting under his black sweatshirt with each heaving breath.

He said rudely, “Outside in an hour.”

When Dain emerged, the man was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the gym, legs slightly apart and heavy features set in an angry scowl. He was a fleshy well-conditioned late- forties, five-nine, 190, with mean blue eyes and a stubborn jaw. Raymond Burr during his early career as movie villain, with something of Burr’s indefinable dynamism that held the eye. Dain figured he would make a lot of a certain kind of woman go weak in the knees.

“Theodore Maxton,” Dain nodded without offering a hand. “You’d make a good politician. Plenty of physical presence.”

“How the hell did you know who I—”

“I spotted your hired flunky following me around, followed him last night to the St. Francis. You’re in suite nine-oh-one.”

His car was parked in the lot of Taqueria de Marin, which didn’t open until eleven. Maxton had to trot or be left behind. Dain pressed WALK for the three-way light at College Ave.

Maxton said almost reasonably, “Don’t be so damn difficult, Dain. Everybody likes money. I want you to find James Zimmer for me — until a week ago he was a law clerk in my legal firm.”

The light changed. They crossed. Dain said, “How much did he steal, how, and from whom?”

“Who said anything about stealing? I just want him found.”

“How much did he steal, how, and from whom?”

Maxton snarled, “A client, Adelle Lorimer has — had — five million dollars’ worth of her late husband’s undeclared bearer bonds in her safe-deposit box. Mrs. Lorimer is on an extended tour of Europe, our firm has power of attorney, Zimmer was her attorney of record so he had access to the box. He extracted two million worth of the bonds, substituted forgeries, and disappeared. Since the money is undeclared, Mrs. Lorimer does not want publicity that would bring IRS scrutiny.”

Dain paused beside the ‘84 Toyota Corolla in which he had driven Marie and Albie to Point Reyes five years before.

“Why was a law clerk her attorney of record, and why did he think he could get away with the theft?”

“Mrs. Lorimer knew his parents. As for the theft, in the normal course of events, the bonds probably would have remained untouched in the box until Mrs. Lorimer’s death.”

Dain unlocked the car door. “I’ll be in touch,” he said as he slid into the car. “Or I won’t.”

“Hey, wait a goddamned...”

He stood in the deserted parking lot, glaring after Dain’s car and muttering curses under his breath. But Dain, driving away, already was considering which data bases would give him best access to T. J. L. Maxton’s affairs. About the fugitive Zimmer he thought not at all, except to wonder if Max-ton’s definition of drastic might include hiring a hitman for him. Perhaps a hitman who, years before...

That sort of slim chance was all Dain lived for.

8

Teddy Maxton’s office was in the penthouse of a new high rise with a good view of Sears Tower and the Chicago River snaking through the Loop. The office was expensive without distinction, relentlessly modern, reflecting a designer’s tastes rather than Maxton’s. The lawyer was on the phone with a client when the door was opened by Jeri Pearson, his thirtyish executive secretary. Maxton looked up, irritated.

“I told you no—”

“A Mr. Dain? He seemed to think—”

Maxton, mollified, made a beckoning gesture. It was after 4:00 P.M., so he had a drink at his elbow. He said into the phone, “Something’s come up, I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Jeri ushered in Dain, shut the door as she left. Dain was dressed in a conservative business suit and a Sulka tie. In his left hand was his usual leather-bound book. He stopped in the middle of the room as Maxton moved his glass and raised an eyebrow, almost smirking to see him there after all.

Dain shook his head, wiped away Maxton’s self-satisfied look by saying, “I get ten percent of anything recovered against a twenty-five K guarantee. I cover my own expenses.”

“Ten percent! I told you he stole two million dollars. Ten percent is an absolutely outrageous—”

“My fee is not negotiable.”

Maxton came around the desk, his hands clenched and his face dark with anger. “Everyone’s fee is negotiable.”

Dain sat down in the visitor’s chair, laid his leather-bound book on the edge of the desk. After a moment, Maxton went back behind the desk to get his drink, jaw aggressive.

“You had two other P.I.’s looking for him for a week before you came to me, and don’t even know which rest room he uses.”

“You mean he’s a fucking fag?”

“No. I mean that you know nothing about him, yet you handpicked him to be Lorimer’s attorney with power to cosign on that box with her. Who or what made him desperate enough to steal from you? Was he being blackmailed? If so, over what? Was he a gambler in debt to a shylock? Is he a cokehead? In love?”

Maxton exclaimed, “How do you expect me to know anything like that? He’s a fucking law clerk, for Godsake!”

“Exactly. You said the substitution probably won’t be discovered until Mrs. Lorimer’s death, if then. Does she know about the theft? Do you plan to return the bonds to her?”

There was a long silence. Maxton finally turned to the window behind the desk, stood with his face so close to it that when he spoke his words left small puffs of steam on the glass.

“Zimmer agreed to substitute forged bonds I supplied for two million worth of the genuine ones. He was to get a hundred thousand, tax-free, for that service.”

“And just in case, you made sure you couldn’t even get into the box — only Zimmer,” said Dain. “That way, if the substitution was discovered, Zimmer would take the fall.”

Maxton turned back into the room. “That’s right.”

Dain leaned forward with a friendly look on his face.

“So the question is, why did you have to steal the bonds?”

Maxton slammed his empty glass down on the desk so hard it cracked in his hand. He threw it into the wastebasket.

“None of your fucking business.”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Dain. “Your wife found out you were fooling around and filed for divorce. She wanted the usual — alimony, house, car... But I’m assuming she also wanted a lot of tax-free cash under the table — or else.”

Maxton said softly, “Or else what?”

“Normally I’d expect her to wake up dead in a garbage pail somewhere, but instead you trot out and try to steal two million bucks to keep her happy. So she’s really got something — probably something the fraud division of the IRS or your playmates with the ini-names would like to know. So she’s got an edge on you.” He suddenly snapped the words. “Does Zimmer?”

“I told you, the man’s a fucking law clerk. That’s why I chose him for this — he wouldn’t dare try a double cross.”

“But he did,” said Dain. He stood abruptly, picked up his book, headed for the door. “I’ll be in touch.”

It was the week before exams on Northwestern’s hundred and sixty green hardwood-dotted acres bordering Lake Michigan. Undergrads sprawled on the grass like terrorist victims. Dain, in his three-piece suit and power tie, wearing clear-glass horn-rims that made him look professorial, stopped a worried-looking coed for directions to the law school. She had a chocoholic complexion and a stack of books under her arm that listed her to port like a sailboat beating into the wind. When he spoke to her she dropped her books. He caught them before they hit the walk.

“The law school?” he prompted gently.

“Oh, ah, yeah.” She half turned, pointed beyond the U-shaped concrete admin building with its signature clock tower to another building half-hidden by the green leaves and startling white trunks of some birch trees. “The red brick? With the white window trim?”

“Many thanks. Good luck with the exams.”

An hour later, in the pleasantly secluded Shakespeare Gardens, he stopped beside a bench on which a sternly attractive brown-haired woman was correcting papers. She wore a tweed suit with a skirt short enough to show several inches of very shapely thigh. There was a great stack of law-books on the bench.

“Dr. Berman?” She squinted up into the sun; Dain shifted so he blocked it from her eyes. “They said at the law review that you often came here in nice weather to correct papers.”

She took off her glasses, said rudely, “I’m faculty advisor for the review. Who are you?”

“James Zimmer,” said Dain as if the name were an answer.

The irritation faded. Her eyes softened with memory. “Jimmy Zimmer! God, I haven’t thought of Jimmy for...” She caught herself, said sharply, “I asked who you were.”

“Mr. Zimmer has applied to the United States Justice Department for a position as a federal prosecutor. In such cases there is a routine investi—”

“Jimmy? A federal prosecutor?” She stopped just short of an unexpected giggle. “We were law students here together...” Sternness tightened her face. “I doubt if I can tell you anything that would be of interest to the Justice Department.”

Dain put a shoe on the edge of the bench. “How about if Jimmy made the law review or not?”

She looked startled, then burst out laughing. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?”

“I hope so,” said Dain, and moved her books aside enough to sit down beside her on the bench.

When he left a half hour later, he knew that on his own Jimmy Zimmer would have had neither the imagination, wit, nor courage to plan the bond theft from Teddy Maxton.

That evening at Zimmer’s apartment building he gleaned a second possibly useful fact from a snide overweight born-again in the laundry room. She described a woman Zimmer had been “shamelessly intimate with” for several weeks that past winter

“Nights at his apartment?”

Her eyes flashed. “Whole weekends. It ended around the middle of January.”

“And after that?” Dain’s voice was insinuating.

“He had a peroxide floozie up one time, a month ago, but I put a stop to that.” Her uncolored lips curved in righteous triumph. One plump cheek even dimpled. “I called the police and told them harlots were working out of his apartment.”

Dain asked God to bless her, and left. Her description of the blonde was “cheap”; her description of the winter lover was that of Maxton’s executive secretary, Jeri Pearson.

A cooling wind off Lake Michigan was puffing its way up the skyscraper canyons to swirl old newspapers against pedestrians’ legs and tug at women’s dresses. If Marilyn Monroe had been out in it, her skirt would have been up around her ears and poor old Tom Ewell would have had to strap down his hard-on.

As the minute hand on the clock a block down from the First Chicago Bank of Commerce leaped forward to 9:23 A.M., Dain exited the bank. He had traded his leather-bound book for a clipboard. In the guise of a state bank examiner he already had talked with the woman who had let Zimmer into the safe-deposit box. She hadn’t remembered him, but her records had: clocked in at 9:03, clocked out at 9:22.

A city-grimed Cicero bus farted past Dain; he made a notation on his clipboard. Behind the bus, a red-headed Irish-faced meter maid was chalking tires. Another note for her. Near the corner a postman opened the letter box and began putting the mailed letters into a big canvas bag. Dain made a note.

He crossed the street, stood on the far corner. His eye was caught by a doughnut truck pulling away from KARL’S KOFFEE KUP KAFE midblock to his right. He scribbled a note, went down that way. A boy exited Karl’s with a tippy cardboard tray of coffee in plastic-capped Styrofoam cups. Dain wrote.

Beyond Karl’s was an alley. He glanced down that way, then stopped, utterly still. Foot traffic flowed around his solid immobility. Yes. It was what he’d do. He started ambling down the alley, stopped again. Him, but not Zimmer. Zimmer, alone, just about here would be thinking, still time to turn them over to Maxton and get his 100-K and live happily ever after.

As he was passing the back door of a café a short-order cook came out to dump some garbage in one of the pails. It went in with an ugly wet plopping sound. Dain stopped again, abruptly.

Zimmer would have given Maxton the bonds, but he hadn’t. So if he’d come down this alley, something stronger than his fear of Maxton had driven him on.

Or drawn him on.

Belatedly, he made a note on the Hispanic cook as a wino careened past him up the alley. No note for him. Winos saw a lot, but their sense of time and reality was elastic, and in hopes of a bottle of muscatel they would tell you not what they’d seen, but what they thought you wanted them to have seen.

He emerged from the far end of the alley, looked around casually. Here is where he would have parked if he’d been waiting to pick up Zimmer and the bonds.

A black teenager had just finished washing and squeegeeing the front display windows of a men’s clothing store. Dain made a note and strolled on, noting a florist truck, five secretaries exiting a building for a coffee break, an old woman staring down through lace curtains from a third-floor apartment window.

He quit for the day at the end of the block. Ten minutes max was as long as Zimmer would have been in the vicinity: after that he would have walked away, caught a bus, a taxi, driven off himself in a car, or been picked up by someone else.

For the rest of the week, Dain left the front of the bank each morning at 9:23 to canvass in a different direction until he was satisfied that he had covered all reasonable possibilities.

Records could tell him all about who Zimmer had been up until the day he stole the bonds. Records could tell him Zimmer had accessed the Lorimer safe-deposit box at 9:03 A.M. and had left at 9:22 A.M. There the records stopped.

But Zimmer had kept going. So Dain did, too. He now had his raw data: now he could begin to work it. This was like a chess game. The same almost infinite number of choices; the same implacable logic. And it absorbed him to be working someone else’s backtrail, so he wasn’t thinking about

Marie going back and up, mouth strained wide, eyes wild

Yes, only Dain could work the backtrail. In person. Which was his salvation. Using the computer made him unbearably sad; as for chess, even looking at a board, even now five years later, made vomit rise in his throat.

On the coffee table in Mill Valley was the unfinished game he and Marie had been playing before they had left for Point Reyes five years before. He hadn’t been able to put it away.

“You know, honey, maybe Randy’s right. Maybe you’re treating the Grimes thing a little too much like just a game...”

And he, pretentious asshole that he was, had said, “You know that all investigations are just a game, sweetie — move, countermove, just like chess.”

And she had died. And Albie had died.

Sometime, maybe, someone else would die. Oh God, please let him find someone else he could make die...

9

Next morning, Dain caught the Cicero bus three stops short of the First Chicago Bank of Commerce, stood right behind the driver talking to him under the sign that said DO NOT TALK WITH DRIVER WHEN THE BUS IS MOVING. Nothing. A bill changed hands and Dain got off at the stop beside the bank.

Meg Crowley, in uniform and with her citation pad sticking out of a back pocket, turned from the counter with a coffee and turnover to cannon into a man just emerging from the rest room. Hot coffee cascaded down the front of his shirt.

“No milk or sugar next time,” said Dain with a wry grin.

Meg already had set her turnover and empty coffee cup on the corner of a table and was ineffectually dabbing with paper napkins, trying to blot up the stain; he was a hunk. They sat beside a window that needed washing. He told her about the missing heir he was that close to finding, son of a woman dying in Bangor, Maine. He described Zimmer, with attaché case...

“I remember him!” exclaimed Meg suddenly, her face lighting up. She laughed. “I’ve got a Mick temper on me, and he jaywalked right in front of me as if I didn’t exist...”

The postman looked like a ferret but was worthless. He had no fixed schedule for picking up the mail from the drop-box on the corner, couldn’t remember his pickup on that particular day, and only saw letters, not people on his route. A dead man walking.

The next morning, twenty bucks bought Dain three blocks’ worth of conversation with the doughnut truck driver who delivered to Karl’s Koffee Kup Kafe just short of the midblock alley. He had seen nothing, or if he had, didn’t remember it.

Chuck Gilette was a sandy-haired kid who delivered coffee and Danish from Karl’s to offices around the neighborhood. He wanted to go to college but his grades weren’t all that good so his salary and the tips he made went into the old college fund.

For Chuck, also, the missing heir and his dying mum.

“Sure I remember him, Mr. Dain. He sort of darted into the alley just as I came out of Karl’s, so I had to make a move...” He sprang backward in demonstration, like a batter getting brushed back by a close pitch. “The cap flew offa one of the cups, hot coffee all over my hand.” He grinned sheepishly. “I started to cuss him out, but he didn’t even know I was there.”

A $50 contribution to Chuck’s go-to-college fund.

Pablo Martinez, sneaking a cigarette behind the greasy spoon, got uneasy when Dain showed him a $20 bill.

“Four day’ ago you come down the alley,” Pablo accused.

“I’m not la migra,” said Dain quickly. He described Zimmer, his clothes, face, the attaché case in his hand. “I want to know if he walked past you last week and where he went...”

The man Pablo had bought his green card from had assured him it was so close to genuine it would pass any immigration scrutiny, but Pablo was not convinced. As a short-order cook illegally in the country, he had learned to be a pessimist.

“I doan see nothin’, man.”

Dain gave him the twenty anyway. Pablo’s reaction had confirmed he’d seen Zimmer passing by.

The black teenager who washed down the haberdashery windows each morning was on break, so Dain went through the motions with his other possibles even though reasonably sure someone had been waiting for Zimmer in a car at the end of the alley.

The five secretaries who went for coffee at 9:30 each morning were like the three monkeys: hear no, see no, speak no.

The old woman who hung out of her third-floor window had seen nothing she could remember on the day in question.

The florist truck driver, intercepted on his route, said he only remembered cars that he was able to look down into from his truck’s height advantage and see women’s legs.

“Saw a broad driving a 280Z stark friggin’ naked, once.” He was gesturing, excited. “Saw another broad giving a handjob to a guy in a Caddy Seville once, he was stopped for a red light on South State Street, middle of the friggin’ day...”

Colorful, but about as useful as the wino in the alley.

When he got back to the haberdashery, Dain found Zeke White stacking sweaters in a row of bins across the back of the store. The place smelled of wool and leather and shoe polish. Zeke had bright eyes with almost bluish whites, a high-bridged nose more Hamitic than Bantu, and hands too big for the rest of him, hands like those of 49er wide receiver Jerry Rice. He wore his hair buzzed, with his initials shaved into one side. His jeans were baggy, his hightops red with the laces undone.

“I saw you doing the windows four mornings ago.”

“Zmah job, man,” said Zeke with great economy of speech.

Dain described Zimmer. Zeke kept folding sweaters. “I’m trying to find out if he came down the alley one day last week when you were washing the windows.”

“Didn’t see the dude, man.”

Dain took a flier. “Maybe getting into a car?”

Suddenly Zeke started to laugh, a big deep man’s laugh though he was still just a teenager.

“Blonde in a red Porsche,” he said. “Parked in the alley. Car was a beater, real muddy, she took a lot better care of herself than she did of that car. I’m doin’ the store windows, all of a sudden she come outten there like she be drivin’ the Batmobile. Was a cat with her but I couldn’t see him ‘cause he was on the other side of the car, y’dig?”

“Sure,” said Dain.

“Dude put his hands on her down where I couldn’t see, an’ she slam on the brakes so hard he hit his head on the dash.” He gave his booming laugh again. “Man, she tell him, You put yo hands on me again I don’t want you to, you gonna need a plastic dick t’piss.”

The woman? Really blonde, platinum like, man, with a really pretty face messed up with too much eyeliner an’ mascara, real red lipstick, didn’t really need it all, sure, it made her sexy, but also made her sorta... cheap like. Which she wasn’t.

“She winked at me, man, when she said ‘bout him pissin’. She call him sweet thing, but she doan really mean it.”

Another $50 for Zeke. He was worth it.

So... a blonde in a beat-up old Porsche almost certainly had been waiting in the alley to pick Zimmer up after the theft of Adelle Lorimer’s bonds. Like the Wizard of Oz with the cowardly lion, she’d given Zimmer his courage.

Jeri Pearson? Platinum didn’t fit her hair color, exotic didn’t fit her face. But she might know the exotic blonde — probably her successor with Jimmy Zimmer, maybe the one-night stand at his apartment before the bluenose had gone to the cops.

Meanwhile, it was Friday. Dain flew back to San Francisco for the weekend. He was missing Shenzie and the summer fog, and he had to analyze all of the data he had gathered.

Wearing only an old pair of blue cotton workout briefs, Dain was using a coiled spring exerciser with all five stainless- steel coiled springs in place. Through the open loft windows came cold wet foggy night air, the wash of small oily waves against the pilings beneath the pier, at intervals the far sad cry of the Alcatraz foghorn.

For the twentieth time without pause, Dain brought his arms down from straight overhead with agonizing slowness against the tension of the opening springs. When the arms were straight out from his shoulders at either side, the fully extended springs were stretched across the back of his shoulders and neck.

Dain gasped out, “What... do you think... cat?”

Shenzie, who was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him, said meowr and batted Dain’s hand lightly with one paw.

Dain’s arms started slowly back up. His face was contorted with effort, his torso flushed with blood. The pale pock scars on his shoulder, chest and neck were very visible. As the spring contracted above his head, his lats sprang out on the sides of his body in a tremendous V-shape spread.

When the springs were finally closed, he let out a gasping breath that carried “Twenty” with it.

He lay down on the floor parallel to the bed, his head to ward the head of it, his feet pointed toward an artist’s portable easel with a 19-inch by 24-inch sketching pad open on it. The hand-lettering in Sharpie permanent marker on it said:

Dain, still panting, began to do twisting crunches, hands locked behind his head, shoulders off the floor, bicycling with his legs, twisting to touch each elbow to each opposite raised knee. He did fifty on each side without stopping, letting his eyes sweep across the drawing pad open on the easel with each rep.

When he was finished he bounced to his feet, went to the board, with the Sharpie drew a line through every item under each of the headings, save one. Sweat formed a wet circle around his bare feet as he stood there on the plank floor.

“Cat, we have to find out who the peroxide blonde is.”

Shenzie yawned prodigiously, but had nothing to say. He began giving himself a professional wash job on the edge of the bed. Dain tapped the unlined item on the drawing pad — exec secretary under OFFICE.

“Only one easy shot left, Shenz.”

He phoned an airline, made a reservation for Chicago, then got down to do clap-hand push-ups, giving a sharp shove as he came up off the floor at each rep so he could clap his hands twice before his body started down again. Despite his grunts and the sweat rolling off him, they looked effortless. The only other sounds were the waves breaking against the pilings fifty feet below, and the occasional muffled bellow of foghorns.

Shenzie padded the length of the bed to the bedside table, curled himself around the telephone as if Dain’s call had made it warm, and went to sleep.

10

Chicago, like San Francisco, is a town where umbrellas routinely get turned inside out when it rains. Monday evening was blustery and Dain was relying on a rain slicker and rain hat as he entered the Sign of the Trader, just inside the West Jackson Boulevard entrance to the Board of Trade Building. He went through the heavy wood and glass door, the noise hitting him like a subdued echo from the trading pits that had closed several hours before. He tossed his rain-wet slicker over one of the coatracks lining the coatroom.

The bar/restaurant was dark-lit, richly appointed, with deep carpets and leather-lined booths and heavy wooden chairs and tables for the diners. Indirect pastel lighting enhanced the look of a never-never land where no opening bell ever rang — an effect negated by the strip of green electronic futures quotations running endlessly around the room just below the ceiling. Snatches of conversation flowed around him as he tried to pick Jeri Pearson out of the traders, runners, and company people crammed three-deep at the bar.

“I hear you sucked some gas this morning,” said a sandy-haired man to a beautiful brunette in her early twenties.

“I didn’t give much back,” she objected. “Maybe a K.”

“I made twenty-three K today,” said sandy-hair. He still wore his sweat-soaked trading jacket.

She chuckled. “Good. You can pay for the drinks.”

Dain spotted Jeri at one of the tables set back from the bar. The tide of milling humanity swirled him that way; he slid in opposite her. She had a lush body and a dissatisfied face. She caught the sleeve of a passing waitress.

“Bloody bull for the gentleman!” she yelled over the din.

The waitress nodded and moved on.

“Thanks for meeting me!” Dain boomed.

She shouted something back that contained “... mystery man...” and “... intrigued” in it.

He nodded as if he had understood. She stood, leaned down so her face was close to his ear and she could speak normally.

“Now you’re here to hold the table, I’m going to the little girls’. I’ll be right back.”

It was interesting that Jeri had chosen this place when he had called her for a meeting. Very public, very noisy, both of which would discourage not only intimacy, but questioning as well. Interesting, too, the trip to the ladies’: a chance to report to Maxton by phone that Dain had arrived?

“Seven-twenty a bushel?” said a twangy voice above him. “The guy is nuts. Me, I’m dreaming of beans in the teens, like the drought year of eighty.”

The voices moved off. “Dream on. The bottom’s going out of soybeans when the new Ag report comes out.”

Jeri slid in across from Dain just as the waitress set down his drink — a bloody mary with a shot of beef bouillon in it.

He lifted it to toast her, somebody jammed an elbow against his hand in passing, spilling the squat heavy glass across the tablecloth, moved on without apologizing. Dain set about wiping up his spilled drink with the cloth napkin.

“Quite a place!” he yelled politely. “You come here often?”

Helping with her own napkin Jeri shouted back, “Used to!”

Dain leaned toward her so he was speaking almost into her ear as she had done to him earlier.

“So what happened to you and Jimmy?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.” She tried to pull back from him, but he had one big hand clamped around her forearm.

“The fat born-again in his apartment building knows.”

“That bitch!” She tried to wrest her arm back from his grip. Dain was unmoving. She jerked her head. “C’mon, let’s get the hell out of this dump.”

“Your place or mine?” asked Dain without humor.

Despite the thunderstorm, Jeri’s one-bedroom, forty minutes from the Loop by bus, had been close and humid after being closed up all day. The rain had stopped, so Dain had thrown open some windows and sat on the couch with his feet on the coffee table while Jeri had made drinks.

Jeri came out of the bedroom, her steps languid; she had changed into a negligee that showed her dark nipples and pubic triangle through the thin shimmery material. She was carrying a little glass vial in one hand, a single-edged razor blade in the other, was performing meaningless little dance steps to some inner music. She plopped on her knees between the coffee table and the couch, beside Dain’s extended legs.

“Gonna do me a little itsy-bitsy line,” she said. “You interested?” Her voice was clear, but her movements liquid.

Dain answered only with a slight negative movement of his head, watched moodily as she chopped and rowed the coke. She used a plastic straw cut in half to snort the first line. She shook her head, then giggled and reached up to knock a fist gravely on his temple.

“H’lo! Anybody home in there?”

Dain was silent, waiting her out. He couldn’t afford to feel anything for Jeri Pearson. He needed to use her and lose her. She shook her head as if in wonder.

“Life of the party. When he first walked inna Maxton’s, I thought, Mr. Stud has come to town...”

She stopped and rubbed some of the coke on her gums. She giggled. She started to cry. Then her face smoothed out. She giggled again. She leaned back against his outstretched legs.

“You aren’t interested in me, are you? Jus’ in what I can tell you.”

“Tell me what happened to you and Jimmy. You and Jimmy were good together.”

“Jimmy?” A giggle. “Somebody t’do, that’s all.” She sat with her head down, staring at the coke on the coffee table. “Not a nice girl, that’s me. Nice girls don’t work for Maxton.”

“Why not?”

“Work for Maxton, gotta give him head under his desk when he’s on the phone.” She started to cry again. She leaned forward to snort the second line on the glass tabletop. “Was in love with him. Maxton. He dumped me. For an exotic dancer.”

“Exotic dancer?” asked Dain. “Peroxide—”

“Try whore instead.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, leaned back against his legs again. “No peroxide. Black-haired bitch, I could kill ‘er! Real long black shiny hair down to her ass. Real pretty, goddam her, jugs out to here...” She pantomimed in front of her own perfectly adequate breasts. “She an’ couple others p’formed at the Christmas party...”

“That’s when Maxton dropped you for her?”

“Chrissake, you aren’t listening!” She peered at him blearily. “That’s what he does. Focuses all that power... all that drive... all that energy on a girl ’til her panties get wet. At first he just needs you so fuckin’ bad you feel you’re the most special woman in the world. Then he drops you an’ makes you feel like shit on a stick... worse than shit on a stick, ‘cause he’s furious with you ‘cause he ever wanted you...”

“So he’d dumped you before the Christmas party.”

“Two months before. Christmas party was first time I saw her — one took my place.” She looked owlishly at him. “Firs’ time Jimmy saw that slut; too...”

Dain’s eyes had gotten sharp and bright, but his voice was very soft, almost insinuating.

“Tell me about her and Jimmy.”

Her eyes teared up. “Two weeks after the Christmas party he dumped me for her. Ever’body dumps poor ol Jen.”

“Do you remember the dancer’s name?”

“No.”

“Or where Maxton hired her from?”

“No.”

“Could you find out?”

“Why should I?”

When he didn’t answer, she struggled to her feet, swayed, caught her balance, and looked down at him with bleary eyes, her negligee open so her naked body was on display.

“Want some of that?” she challenged. Before he could answer, she said, “Did it inna men’s room once, backed up against the urinals...” She giggled again. “Guy banged me so hard the urinal flushed when he came.”

Dain was silent.

“Don’ believe me?” she demanded truculently.

She pulled up her negligee and straddled him, put her arms around his neck, started to French-kiss him as her naked crotch worked against him. Nothing happened to him. He wanted to get stiff. He wanted to feel something — excitement, lust, even anger. Nothing. Goddammit, wasn’t five years long enough to mourn? Marie was never coming back to him.

Marie’s mouth was strained impossibly wide, her eyes were wild, her hair an underwater slow-motion swirl, the black hole between her breasts blossoming red

Jeri suddenly stopped, drew back to look shyly into his eyes. “I’m going to be sick now,” she announced.

Dain got her off him and into the bathroom in time, held her head while she threw up.” As he wiped her mouth with a wet washcloth, she passed out. In the bedroom he put her to bed, and after pulling up the sheet and a light blanket found himself kissing her on the forehead as if she were a little girl.

Dain walked all the way back to his hotel, half-hoping some half-wit would try to mug him, but the Chicago streets on that night were safe as a cathedral. He was empty as a pocket with a hole in it, was nothing, had nothing, except a lust for revenge and a cat who wouldn’t purr.

11

“Great turnaround time,” said Dain to Jeri when he found her behind her desk at Maxton’s office at 8:30 the next morning. Her eyes were clear, her hair was brushed and shiny. She wore a wide-shouldered pinstripe suit and slacks, the suit jacket almost to her knees when she stood up. She looked terrific.

“Good genes. Dain, listen, I... I think I remember—”

“You passed out, I put you to bed. That’s all.”

In his private office Maxton was grunting into the phone. Rain-washed Chicago sparkled outside the windows. He covered the receiver, said sarcastically, “How nice of you to drop in. It’s been over a week. My bitch wife is getting...” He uncovered the receiver, said, “Yeah, I’m listening,” and covered it again.

“Who do you know drives a red Porsche?” asked Dain.

“Nobody.”

“Who did Zimmer know drives a red Porsche?”

“I told you before — Zimmer was a fucking law clerk. We didn’t have any social life in common.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Dain.

“What the fuck does that mean?” He said into the phone, “Then go into court and get a continuance, fuckhead.”

“Platinum blonde,” said Dain. “Mid-twenties at a guess, too much makeup, cool face, maybe beautiful, maybe just this side of beautiful. She was waiting for him when they grabbed the bonds. She’s the one who planned the steal. Too bad you don’t know her, I could have cut across, saved some time.”

Maxton barked into the phone, “Yeah, yeah, you stupid fuck, I’m listening,” then said to Dain, “A fucking broad? No way. Zimmer planned it.”

Dain shrugged and was on his feet, his usual leather-covered book in hand. He looked down at Maxton, said, “Why does every male in Chicago think he’s got to be Mike Ditka?”

In the outer office, Jeri Pearson, who had been listening on the intercom, bounded to her feet and kissed him on the mouth.

“Nobody’s ever told him off before! They’re all too scared of him.” She stepped back, suddenly shy. “Listen, I remember you holding my head when I was sick last night and—”

“It never happened,” said Dain.

Jeri said, “The dancers were from the Cherry Bomb.”

The Cherry Bomb was in Rush Street’s strip-club district, two blocks west of and parallel to Michigan Avenue. A huge barn that stank of stale beer and stale sweat and cheap perfume and disinfectant and testosterone. There was dim lighting for the tables, indirect lighting for the bar, spot lighting for the stage with revolving red, yellow, blue and green gels for the three women in G-strings and pasties who writhed, danced, and gyrated to canned music.

At the empty end of the bar furthest from the action, Dain waited with a $50 bill, folded lengthwise, nipped between his extended fingers. It quickly brought the bartender to him.

Over the music, Dain yelled, “Dancer. Real pretty. Great breasts. Black hair to her butt.”

The bartender eyed the fifty and made a fly-away gesture.

Mercifully, the music ended, the women left to scattered applause and rebel yells. A manic aging emcee bounded onto the stage. He rolled eyes like stones and flicked his tongue after the departing strippers in their G-strings and pasties.

“Put a dollar bill on their heads,” he yelled into his cordless mike, “and you got all you can eat for under a buck!”

“Any friends?” asked Dain.

Another trio of strippers was taking the place of the first. The bartender jerked his head toward a long lithe black woman. “The tall one. Cindy.”

Dain dropped his fifty on the bar, crossed to the stage as the emcee’s overamped voice yelled, “Anyway, welcome to the Cherry Bum — I mean Bomb, the only place in town where the girls wear underpants to keep their ankles warm!”

The music suddenly blared, the black woman started to dry-fuck one of the fire poles set up onstage.

Dain yelled over the music, “Cindy!“

She turned her head and he held up two fanned $100 bills, then stuffed them down the back of her G-string.

Dain was leaning against the brick wall of the alley when Cindy emerged from the stage door at 4:07 in the morning. She wore running shoes and tight jeans and a long-sleeve red T-shirt with DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM stretched across her breasts.

She stopped dead at the sight of him, sighed, and nodded as if winning a bet with herself.

“Don’t ever anything come free in this world of ours,” she said. “Now, mister, I know you laid a double-century on me, and I know you spect something for it, but—”

“Just a walk and a talk,” he said. “I don’t want to know where you live, I don’t want a free sample.”

She looked deep into his eyes for a moment, asked, “You weird?” then answered herself before he could, “Wouldn’t tell me if you was, would you, Mr. Sad Man?”

They started walking together; she was tall enough so they made a striking couple. In the street at this hour there was only silence, contrasting with the tumult of the Cherry Bomb. Their meandering unsynched footsteps were the only thing breaking the immediate silence around them, though the slow breathing of the city formed a background curtain of sound.

Cindy gave a deep laugh. “You don’t want nothing, Mr. Sad Man, you must be that Good Samaritan the preacher talk about on Sunday, layin’ a pair of C-notes on me like that.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want anything,” said Dain.

“Oh yeah, right, right. Walkin’ an’ talkin’. Y’want me t’talk dirty? ‘Bout what I’d like you to do to me, or what I’d like to do to you? Or maybe cry a little an’ tell you all about what a nice girl like me be doin’ in a place like—”

“I want to talk about you and your friend with the long black hair entertaining at Teddy Maxton’s Christmas party.”

Cindy dumbed down her face and put a whine in her voice.

“Was just a gig, man. Dude paid us a century each to do the same show we do at the club—”

“The long-haired one who took off with Jimmy Zimmer.”

“Look, man, I don’t know nothing about it. Even if I did know something about it I wouldn’t know nothing about it.”

Dain said, conversationally, “If they catch them, Cindy, they’ll snuff her. Right along with him.”

“Snuff?” she cried in alarm, her black eyes shocked in her strong-boned brown face. “What you talk snuff? Vangie—”

“If I get to them first, I can give her a break.”

She grabbed Dain’s arms and started trying to shake him. It was like trying to shake an oak tree.

“What you talkin’ ‘bout? Who you talkin’ about?”

“Maxton. His friends.”

She let go of his arms. A slow shudder went through her. She stared at the sidewalk. Dain gently took her arm and urged her along. The streetlights were on automatic, blinking yellow caution in four directions at each intersection. Somewhere far to the south a siren rose and fell, rose and fell.

“Straight she went off with Jimmy Zimmer? Mr. Creepo?”

“Straight. And they took—”

“I don’t wanna hear it.” She hugged herself as they walked, as if suddenly cold. “I don’t wanna be havin’ this conversation.”

They crossed on a crosswalk; there was no traffic.

“Vangie who? From where?”

She didn’t say anything for a quarter of a block, finally said in a rush, “Vangie Broussard. From I-don’t-know-where. Never talked about ‘did’ — only about ‘gonna.’” She gave her sudden deep laugh again, her fears for a moment forgotten. “That girl had the biggest collection of gonnas I ever heard.”

“Gonna what?”

“Gonna make a big score. Gonna get took care of right by Maxton. But that Christmas party...”

She fell silent. Dain prompted, “What happened?”

“Maxton wanted her to take some important client into the private office during the party and fuck his brains out.” She looked over at him, burst out, “She was in love with the dude, man, he say he love her, an’ he ask her to do that! Was a couple weeks after that she started hittin’ on Jimmy Zimmer — he already had his tongue hangin’ out down to his shoetops...”

They walked. Dain said, “Anything else you can tell me?”

“We roomed together, but she was a loner, didn’t do a whole lot with the other kids. I came home one afternoon, must be like two weeks ago now, she was gone. The place spotless, a month’s rent for her and me on my pillow, but not even a note...” She looked over at him, said suddenly, “We partied a couple times with Zimmer and his buddy, I never saw nuthin’ in either one of “em, but Vangie asked me.”

“Tell me about the buddy.”

“Bobby Farnsworth of Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth. Mr. Cube.” Her sudden urchin grin shaved ten years off her age. “Boooo-o-o-ring. I’m not really into IRAs and all that jazz, but like to him, The Wall Street Journal is Rolling Stone.”

“Stocks and bonds?”

“Chicago Board of Trade all the way, baby.” She stopped in front of a run-down brick apartment building. “You walked me home after all. It’s six floors straight up unless they fixed the elevator, but if you want a cup of coffee and ain’t afraid of heights—”

“You don’t want to know me, Cindy,” said Dain. “I’m bad news. Even my cat won’t purr.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and leaned forward and up to kiss him on the cheek.

“Goodbye, Mr. Sad Man,” she said.

12

Before starting through the newspaper, Dain called Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth. The receptionist sounded bored enough to be doing her nails behind the switchboard. He told her, “I’d like to make an appointment with Mr. Farnsworth to discuss setting up a rather substantial investment account.”

“Mr. Farnsworth Senior or Junior?”

“Junior.”

“Mr. Farnsworth Junior is in our San Francisco office for three months’ training. If anyone else—”

“No. But his San Francisco home phone number might help.”

He wrote it down, hung up. San Francisco. Could Zimmer and the woman, Broussard, also be in San Francisco? No. They would be hiding in Broussard’s life, not Zimmer’s. But a good coincidence for Dain just the same. When the time came, Farnsworth would be Zimmer’s best bet for moving the bonds.

But first, Broussard. Cracking the Chicago police computer with his laptop would take longer than direct action, so he quickly scanned the morning newspaper, finally stopping at an item on the local news page.

Dain’s ballpoint pen underlined Seth “Andy” Anderson and Central Station, then hand-scrawled a letter on a sheet of hotel stationery cut in half so it was memo size. Dain used the half without the letterhead, dating it five days earlier.

He scrawled Solly below the note as a signature, then added a handwritten postscript:

Dain addressed an envelope to Andy Anderson at Central Police Station, Chicago, then paused to run a mental check. It was okay. Randy Solomon wasn’t due back from vacation for two more days, so he put Solomon’s SFPD return address in the upper left corner, stamped it, set the date on a self-inking rubber stamp for five days previously, and canceled the stamp.

Finally, he put in the letter, sealed it, opened it again raggedly with his finger under the flap. He stuck the letter and an SFPD lieutenant’s shield in a leather carrying case into the side pocket of the cheap, rather shabby suitcoat he had bought at the Salvation Army, and left the hotel.

Chicago’s Central Police Station was old, ill-kept, angry-looking, as if it never got enough sleep and took a lot of Turns. At a booking desk from the days when Al Capone ran the city, Dain flashed his SFPD shield. In his off-the-rack suit and unshined shoes, an old-fashioned fedora mashed down on his head and an unlit cigar screwed into one corner of his mouth, he looked like fifteen years on the force.

“Yeah, welcome to Chicago,” said the booking sergeant. “How are things out there in fruit and nut land?”

“That’s L.A. We’re the cool gray city by the bay.”

“Yeah, Herb Caen. What can we do for you, Lieutenant?”

“Anybody awake in Vice at this hour?”

“Prob’ly ain’t gone home yet.” The sergeant grinned and handed him a visitor’s badge that he clipped to the breast pocket of his suitcoat. “Elevator to the third floor, turn left.”

Dain thanked him and rode the elevator up, not to Vice, but to the Detective Squadroom. Various plainclothesmen were at the battered desks, typing reports, interviewing complainants, witnesses, suspects. Off in a corner a black youth with dreadlocks was being fingerprinted by a Hispanic woman in a crisp blue uniform. Smoke blued the room. Dain’s eyes found an empty desk with a DET. ANDERSON name block on it.

Going down the room drew Dain no more than a casual brush of eyes from the busy cops. He hooked a hip over the corner of the desk, in the same movement slipped his letter, envelope clipped to the back, underneath the top folder in Anderson’s In box. He then leaned toward the man typing at the next desk. His nameplate read DET. KALER.

“Hey, pal.”

The cop kept on typing. Unlike the stereotype, he was good at it. Dain leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder. Kaler swung toward him, angry, pale eyes flashing.

“Andy, he’s out for coffee ‘r somethin’?”

Kaler began, “Listen, asshole, when—” then his cop eyes took in the policeman ID included on Dain’s visitor’s badge. He shrugged in wry apology, swiveled to face Dain. “Tough morning. You know Andy?”

“Y’know.” Dain shrugged in turn. “I wrote I’d be in town, he was supposed to be pullin’ a file for me to look at.”

Kaler leaned back and locked his hands behind his head in a lazy manner. “Well, I got some good news and some bad news. Andy’s in the hospital. Seems he stuck that hard fucking Swede head of his into something wasn’t any of his business, and somebody tried to knock it off.”

“What’s the bad news?” asked Dain, deadpan.

Kaler gave a short hard bark of laughter.

“Yeah, you know our Andy, all right. Bad news is he’ll live.” He came forward in his chair, the unoiled swivel creaking when he did. “I can snoop Andy’s desk for your note, and—”

Dain said very quickly, “No need to do that...” Then he seemed to catch himself. He seemed to make himself relax visibly. He shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

Kaler checked the In box, found the note, read it standing over Dain. “I like it,” he said finally, “especially all that you-know-what stuff. Tell me about that, and maybe I can...”

His voice trailed off. There was a $50 bill on the corner of the desk that had not been there before. He turned away, the trailing fingers of one hand sliding over the bill, palming it.

“I think I can find that file for you, Lieutenant Solomon.”

Kaler returned with the BROUSSARD, EVANGELINE file: every stripper passed through police hands a time or two. On top were the Broussard mug shots, front and side, her fingerprint cards, a thin sheaf of report forms. They leafed through it together. When Dain carelessly flipped the file closed, his fingernail flicked off the paper clip holding her mug shots in place.

“Shit, nothing here. Couple soliciting busts...”

“Yeah,” said Kaler, “couple indecent exposures when we hit a joint where she was dancing, couple of priors for the same thing down in New Orleans...” He gave a hearty laugh. “This chick has a hard time keeping her clothes on, don’t she?”

“You’ve no idea,” said Dain. He sighed. “Hell, it was worth a shot.” He stood up. When he did, his hand hit the file and knocked it off the edge of the desk. “Shit.”

Bending to retrieve it, he grunted slightly as if with effort. With his left hand he palmed the mug shots that had slid from the folder, stuck out his right to Kaler. They shook.

“Anyway, many thanks. What hospital’s Andy in? I gotta fly back this afternoon, but maybe—”

“Wouldn’t do any good, he’s still in intensive care.”

Dain shook his head. “Fuck of a note. Well, anyway, give him my best when you get in to see him.”

“Sure thing.”

Dain spent half a day working the O’Hare parking lots and shuttle buses with Broussard’s mug shots, then spent most of his flight to San Francisco studying them. Even with the flat police lighting and the dehumanizing circumstances, her beauty shone through. Exotic was a good word. Deep tan or dark skin, dark eyes that challenged the camera, the cops behind the camera... The surname suggested a reason for her dark rather wild beauty. As did the soliciting busts in New Orleans.

It was going to be another routine operation. He would find them, Maxton would get his bonds back, Zimmer would probably get roughed up a bit, and that would be that. He might as well be working for legitimate clients on the right side of the law for all the good this was doing him.

Who would need a hitman in the Jimmy Zimmer bond caper?

Homicide had been jumping all morning. A tourist from Cincinnati had wandered into Emergency at S.F. General complaining of a headache, then had fallen dead on the floor. They had found a .22 slug in his brain. The cabbie who delivered him to the hospital had picked him up on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin.

A thirteen-year-old shot a fourteen-year-old dead with an A/R on full automatic in the parking area of one of the Western Addition housing projects in an argument over a crack concession.

When police arrived at a rather nice Victorian on Elizabeth Street on a neighbor’s complaint, they found a seventy-three-year-old man watching Santa Barbara with a self-righteous set to his jaw and a bloody claw hammer in his hand. His sixty-eight-year-old wife lay on the floor in front of the TV. She had wanted One Life to Live.

In his private office Randy Solomon was working on the preliminary paperwork on the three killings. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, his jacket over the back of his chair.

Dain came through the open door. He was wearing horn-rims and a conservative three-piece suit and was carrying a slim attaché case. Randy hadn’t laid eyes on him for over a year. His face hardened as he did an exaggerated double take.

“Well, well, the big private eye. A whole year, nothin’, then here comes Jesus Christ. Down here slummin’, white boy?”

Dain sat down in the visitor’s chair.

“Why the hardnose, Randy?”

Solomon detoured around Dain to close the door, then came back so he could lean down into Dain’s face. He said softly, “I knew a guy once — young, sharp, good mind, good investigator. Sweet wife and a nice little kid. Just getting started on his own... looking for that big case...”

“And they all lived happily ever after,” said Dain.

Solomon ignored this. His voice was openly hostile.

“Know what I see now? A whore in a three-piece suit.”

“I do what I always did, Randy. Find people.”

“For the sleaze of the earth,” snapped Solomon hotly, “with that fag bookseller pimping for you.”

Dain was suddenly on his feet.

“What am I supposed to do, for fuck sake? Repos and wandering wives? The fuckers killed my family! Where else will I find them except outside the law?”

Solomon looked surprised, then chuckled and went around behind his desk. The tension suddenly went out of both men.

“Shit, I might of known. You getting anything?”

“Another day older and deeper in debt.”

“So why the fancy getup?”

“I’ve been at the stock exchange cavorting with the bulls and the bears.”

“Who’s winning?”

“This morning, the bulls. To be exact. Robert Farnsworth of Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth out of Chicago. Daddy sent him out here for three months of seasoning before giving him more control of the family brokerage business. Bobby-boy is best buddies with a guy I am seeking for a sort of connected Chicago lawyer named Maxton. This guy and an exotic dancer—”

“Teddy Maxton?”

“Yeah,” said Dain in surprise, “you know about him?”

Randy waved a vague hand. “He comes out here as consulting defense counsel every once in a while. He’s damned good in front of a jury.” His voice, eyes, hardened slightly. “Our Teddy the kind of guy hires a hitman?”

Dain shook his head. “I’m just paying the bills with this one.” He leaned forward in his chair, cleared his throat. “But I, ah, need a good wireman, Randy.”

“You know that stuff isn’t admissible in court,” chided Solomon. “And it sure as hell ain’t legal.”

“Admissible in court I don’t need, legal I don’t care about. I just think this Zimmer will be calling Farnsworth and I want to be listening in.”

Solomon tore a sheet from his memo pad, began writing on it. “Remember Moe Wexler?”

“Pensioned off six or seven years ago on a medical disability? Had a leg broken in about eight places...”

“That’s Moe. Here’s the address of his electronics shop.” He handed Dain the memo slip with a wink. They stood. “How’s my boyfriend? Shenzie the wonder cat?”

“Don’t ask. You might get stuck with him again for a few days if this Farnsworth thing pans out. The neighbor lady in Mill Valley who usually takes him is out of town...”

Solomon gave his deep chuckle. “Anytime for the Shenzie cat.” They shook hands, Dain started for the door. Randy spoke to his back. “How about some handball?”

Dain turned and looked at him. Suddenly grinned.

“How about tomorrow? I’ll whup your ass.”

“That’s my man,” said Randy happily. “The hopeless romantic to the bitter end.”

13

Arched across the front window of the narrow storefront in Clement Street was MOE’S ELECTRONICS PLUS. Under this in smaller letters was, TVs — VCRs — Recorders — Radios, and under that in even smaller letters, repair & service. Dain pushed open the door, jangling a small brass bell fixed to a spring inside the top of the door. There was a wooden counter with an old-fashioned cash register, behind that a doorway to the work area covered with a heavy brown curtain.

The curtain was shoved aside by a big easygoing man running to fat. He had a cute little mouth and hair in his ears and ex-cop written all over him. He moved with a slight limp.

“Hello, Moe,” said Dain.

Wexler studied him for a moment, then smiled genially.

“Eddie Dain,” he said. “You’re looking fit. Randy Solomon called, said you might be around, or I’d of thought somebody was sending an ex-49er tackle around to bust my other leg.”

“How’s the first one?”

“Still busted.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry about your wife and kid.”

Dain was silent. Wexler raised a hinged flap of countertop and went to the door to twist the bolt lock at the same time that he jerked down over the doorpane a small brown roller shade that had OUT TO COFFEE — BACK IN 15 on it. Dain had begun counting out $100 bills on the counter like dealing a hand of poker.

“One bug on the private phone of Robert Farnsworth at Farnsworth, Fechheimer and Farnsworth. They’re a brokerage house on Pine across from the Pacific Coast Stock Exch—”

“You sure your call won’t come through the switchboard?”

“My man is dumb, but not that dumb.”

Moe nodded. “They got a service door on Leidesdorff Alley with a lock on it you could open with garlic breath.”

“You ex-cops,” marveled Dain. He counted out another sheaf of bills. “The second bug is at Farnsworth’s apartment. He’s got a three-month lease in that tall white stucco place on Montclair Terrace where Francisco—”

“Yeah. Gotcha.”

“Apartment three-C. We’re looking for a call from a James Zimmer or anybody who could be Zimmer. I figure a week tops.”

Moe shuffled the bills together like a hand of cards.

“I can use an infinity mike at the brokerage house, can go back in for it afterwards. At the apartment I might have to go into the walls, that’d mean I’d have to leave the equipment.”

Dain gestured at the third fan of bills he had laid on the counter. “If you can salvage the equipment, consider the extra five bills a bonus.”

“A week gonna be enough?”

“If we’ve got no action in seven days, I’ll have to rethink my premise.”

Moe started to pocket the folded bills, then hesitated.

“Randy says you’re working for Teddy Maxton on this one.”

“Randy’s got a big mouth,” said Dain coldly.

“We went through the academy together, what can I say?”

“What the fuck is it with Teddy Maxton and the SFPD? Mention his name and you all piss your pants in unison. Maxton’s in Chicago, for Chrissake.”

“He’s got a long arm.”

“That bother you, Moe?”

“It rains, my leg hurts, that bothers me. I can’t get it up for the wife, that bothers me. Maxton don’t bother me.”

“Then why are we talking about him?”

Moe leaned forward slightly across the counter to look closer at Dain, as if confirming some rumor he’d heard.

“Watch your butt with this guy, Dain. He’s one tricky son of a bitch.”

Dain smiled for the first time since his wife and child had come up in the conversation.

“So am I, Moe. So am I.”

Maxton got out of the elevator on the P-1 level under his office building and crossed the concrete to the Mercedes parked in his slot. It was another scorching Chicago summer afternoon, but Maxton, moving between his air-conditioned office and his air-conditioned home in his air-conditioned car, only felt the heat by his backyard pool, where he expected it.

He pushed the remote that unlocked the doors of the Mercedes, started to get in, checked the movement. Dain was sitting in the rider’s side. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K-64, was sweet as honey off the car’s CD player.

“How the fuck did you get in here?”

Instead of answering, Dain said, “We’re going out to O’Hare, I want to show you something.”

“That’ll take hours this time of day, and I’ve got two tickets to the Cubs game.”

Dain said nothing. Maxton got in, grumbling, began fighting the rush-hour traffic out Wacker to the big convoluted freeway exchange that would put him on the John Kennedy north to O’Hare. Cars were stacked bumper-to-bumper, horns blared, exhausts fumed, light glared into drivers’ eyes off polished chrome. The air conditioner whooshed softly under the Mozart.

“Zimmer and a peroxide blonde were booked on a flight leaving for Rio four hours after the bonds were taken,” said Dain in a conversational voice.

This jerked Maxton’s head around. “They left the country? How the fuck’re you going to—”

“Remember last New Year’s Eve office party? When you hired some exotic dancers to put on a show for the employees?”

“Of course. We’d had a good year, financially.”

“Zimmer met her there.”

“Who, goddam you?”

“The woman who planned this whole thing. You had a little something going with her yourself at the time, I hear.”

Maxton said icily, “You hear wrong.”

“She wasn’t always a peroxide blonde. Think about it.”

Dain slid down in the seat and shut his eyes. He didn’t open them until the roar of a landing jetliner’s engines penetrated even the Mercedes’s vaunted sound-exclusion paneling, then he sat up suddenly.

“Get in the right lane, to long-term parking.”

Maxton swung the wheel over, stopped at the striped arm, got his ticket from the machine, drove through. His voice was tentative, almost shocked. “You’re saying it was... Vangie?”

“Evangeline Broussard,” Dain nodded. “She planned the steal, she was waiting for Zimmer in an alley around the corner from the bank. Go down this row.”

Maxton obediently drove down the long row of dusty cars.

“I don’t get it, Dain. Why would Vangie—”

“You wanted her to fuck one of your business associates in the back room during the Christmas party, for Chris-sake.”

His bewilderment didn’t lessen. “Yeah? So?”

“She thought she loved you, Maxton,” Dain said in an almost defeated voice. “She thought you loved her.”

“Loved her? She’s a fucking hootch dancer, for Chris-sake!”

“Stop here.”

Dain walked over to Vangie’s red Porsche; from the dust on it, and the dried rain-streaks on the windshield, it obviously had not been moved in many days. Maxton followed, still not knowing what they were doing there. On the far side of the Porsche, Dain leaned his elbows on the dusty top. Maxton faced him across the grimy red roof.

“And then?”

Maxton shrugged sullenly. “She did it, of course. A couple weeks later her gig ended, so we broke it off. But I gave her the money for a car since she was driving to New York...”

Dain patted his palms on the roof of the Porsche.

“This car. Right here. Vangie didn’t expect anyone to connect her with Zimmer, probably figured the car would get stolen and that would be that.”

Maxton started pounding his clenched fists on the car roof.

“Goddam her soul to hell! My money, my car! I’ll see her dead, the rotten little bitch!”

Dain shrugged by raising one shoulder.

“That crap doesn’t do any good, Maxton. Zimmer saw her at the party, fell hard. She saw him as a way to get back at you. She must have laughed herself sick when you decided to steal two million in bonds and handed them to Zimmer for safekeeping.”

“And the fuckers are away clean! You may as well—”

“You ever consider what sort of trouble you’d have converting two million in American bearer bonds into cruzeiros in Brazil? When the rate is nearly four thousand to one and you don’t even have the language? You can bet Vangie considered it.”

“What... are you saying?”

“They never caught the plane. Doubled back to the city by airport limo, caught a bus to Texarkana, left it at some stop in between. Once they have you thinking South America, why leave the country? The bonds are legal tender in any brokerage house they walk into.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Maxton almost suspiciously.

“It’s what I’m good at, remember?” He walked around the car back toward the Mercedes, Maxton following.

“I’ll get a list of the bonds to every brokerage—”

“No. You’ll spook them. She’s smart, I tell you.” He stopped, opened the driver’s door of the Mercedes. “She’ll plan to wait a few months before cashing them in—”

“My bitch wife won’t wait a few months, damn you! I’ll put an army to work on the brokerage houses, we’ll—”

“No army. Nobody. Nada. Zero. Nothing. Get it?”

Dain held the open door; after a moment’s hesitation, Maxton slid in under the wheel.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll play it your way for the moment. What’s your next move?”

“Go back to San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?”

“To wait. It won’t be long, believe me. She won’t be able to control him.”

“Wait is the goddamnedest stupidest idea I’ve ever—”

“It’s time to quit looking for your prey and start looking for what your prey is looking for. In the dry season if you’re a lion and your prey is a wildebeest, you wait by the water hole. If you’re a red-tailed hawk and your prey is a field mouse, you soar over the—”

“You think she’s in San Francisco?”

Dain slammed the door, walked away between the close-packed dusty cars. “Don’t screw it up, Maxton,” he said over his shoulder. “Wait for them to make their move. They will. Believe me.”