Dying in the Post-War World

17

“Sam couldn’t come himself,” George said. “Sends his regards, and apologies.”

We were on Sheridan, heading toward Evanston.

“I was going to call Sam when I got home,” I said, watching him in the rearview mirror. His eyes were gray under bushy black brows; spooky fucking eyes.

“Then you did make it to the kid’s pad, before the cops.” George sighed; smiled. A smile on that slash of a craggy face was not a festive thing.

“Yeah.”

“And you got what Sam wants?”

“I do.”

“The photo?”

“Yes.”

“That’s swell. You’re all right, Heller. You’re all right. Pull over into the graveyard, will you?”

Calvary Cemetery was the sort of gothic graveyard where Bela Lugosi and Frankenstein’s monster might go for a stroll. I pulled in under the huge limestone archway and, when George directed, pulled off the main path onto a side one, and slowed to a stop. I shut the engine off. The massive granite wall of the cemetery muffled the roar of traffic on Sheridan; the world of the living seemed suddenly very distant.

“What’s this about, George?” At Statesville, they say, where he was doing a stretch for grand theft auto, George was the prison shiv artist; an iceman whose price was five cartons of smokes, for which an individual who was annoying you became deceased.

Tonight George’s voice was pleasant; soothing. A Sicilian disc jockey. “Sam just wants his photo, that’s all.”

“What’s the rush?”

“Heller — what’s it to you?”

“I’d rather turn it over to Sam personally.”

He unfolded his arms and revealed a silenced Luger in his gloved right hand. “Sam says you should give it to me.”

“It’s in the trunk of the car.”

“The trunk?”

“I had the photo in my coat pocket, but when I realized cops were going to be crawling all over, I slipped it in an envelope in my trunk, with some other papers.”

That was the truth. I did that at the hospital, before I took Lapp inside.

“Show me,” George said.

We got out of the car. George made me put my hands up and, gun in his right hand, he calmly patted me down with his left. He found the nine millimeter under my arm, slipped it out, and tossed it gently through the open window of the Plymouth onto the driver’s seat.

Calvary was a rich person’s cemetery, with mausoleums and life-size statues of dear departed children and other weirdness, all casting their shadows in the moonlight. George kept the gun in hand, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it. I stepped around back of the Plymouth, unlocked the trunk, and reached in. George took a step forward. I doubled him over with the tire iron, then whacked the gun out of his hand, and swung the iron sideways against his cheek as he began to rise up.

I picked up his Luger and put a knee on his chest and the nose of the silenced gun against his bloody cheekbone. I would have to kill him. There was little doubt of that. His gray eyes were narrowed and full of hate and chillingly absent of fear.

“Was killing me Sam’s idea, or yours?”

“Who said anything about killing you?”

I forced the bulky silenced nose of the gun into his mouth. Time for the Chicago lie-detector test.

Fear came into his eyes, finally.

I removed the gun, slowly, not taking any teeth, and said, “Your idea or Sam’s?”

“Mine.”

“Why, George?”

“Fuck you, Heller.”

I put the gun in his mouth again.

After I removed it, less gently this time, cutting the roof of his mouth, he said through bloody spittle, “You’re a loose end. Nobody likes loose ends.”

“What’s it to you, George?”

He said nothing; he was shaking. Most of it was anger. Some of it was fear. An animal smell was coming up off him.

“I said, what’s it to you, George? What was your role in it?”

His eyes got very wide; something akin to panic was in them.

And then I knew.

Don’t ask me how, exactly, but I did.

“You killed her,” I said. It was part question, part statement. “You killed Sam’s girlfriend. For Sam?”

He thought about the question; I started to push the gun back in his mouth and he began to nod, lips kissing the barrel. “It was an accident. Sam threw her over, and she was posing a problem.”

I didn’t ask whether that problem was blackmail or going to the press or cops or what. It didn’t much matter.

“So he had you hit her?”

“It was a fuck-up. I was just suppose to put the fear of God in her and get that fucking picture.”

I pressed the gun into his cheek; the one that wasn’t bloody. “That kid — Lapps... he was your accomplice?”

“No! I didn’t know who the hell he was. If we knew who he was, we coulda got that photo a long time ago. Why the fuck you think you were hired?”

That made sense; but not much else did. “So what was the deal, George?”

His eyes tightened; his expression said: You know how it is. “I was slapping her around, trying to get her to tell me where that picture was. I’d already tossed the place, but just sorta half-ass. She was arrogant. Spitting at me. All of a sudden her throat got cut.”

Accidents will happen. “How did that kid get the photo album, then?”

“I heard something at the window; I looked up and saw this dark shape there, out on the fire escape... thought it was a cop or something.”

The black leather jacket.

“I thought fuck it and cut out,” he said. “The kid must’ve come in, stole some shit, found that photo album someplace I missed, and left with it and a bunch of other stuff.”

But before that, he washed the victim’s wounds and applied a few bandages.

“What about the second girl?” I demanded. “Margaret Johnson? And the Keenan child?”

“I had nothing to do with them crimes. You think I’m a fuckin’ psycho?”

I thought that one best left unanswered.

“George,” I said calmly, easing the gun away from his face, “you got any suggestions on how we can resolve our differences, here? Can you think of some way both of us can walk out of this graveyard tonight?”

He licked his lips. Smiled a ghastly, blood-flecked smile. “Let bygones be bygones. You don’t tell anybody what you know — Sam included — and I just forget about you working me over. That’s fair. That’s workable.”

I didn’t see where he got the knife; I hadn’t seen a hand slip into a pocket at all. He slashed through my sleeve, but didn’t cut me. When I shot him in the head, his skull exploded, but almost none of him got on me. Just my gun hand. A limestone angel, however, got wreathed in blood and brains.

I lifted up off him and stood there panting for a while. The sounds of muted traffic reminded me there was a world to go back to. I checked his pockets, found some Camels, and lit one up; kept the pack. Then I wiped my prints off his gun, laid it near him, retrieved my tire iron, put it back in the trunk, which I closed up, and left him there with his peers.