They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

A Children’s Book

I walked some more, made a second stop at the library, and headed back to the inn with the moon rising over my shoulder. Hesitating outside the door, I blew a good-night kiss to my escorts in the blue minivan. I was almost getting used to having them around. Truth was, they had kept their distance today, not interfering with me as I strolled the Riversborough campus hunting for Guppy. Maybe they were waiting for me to slug a lady professor. I could see no one on the street fitting the descriptions MacClough had given me of the ski dude or the federal agent. Then again, they were trying not to be seen.

“Dylan!” Kira rushed up to me, hugging me. “God, I’ve missed you.”

And for a second, I lit up. My heart raced. My cheeks warmed. I could feel the smile on my face. In spite of everything I knew about her, it was undeniable that part of me missed her as well. Not all of me though. I felt my smile harden, the blood rushing out of my face.

“Is everything all right?” she wondered, trying to look through me. “You don’t seem yourself.”

“No,” I said, “I’m not all right.”

Jesus, she was good. Her voice quivered: “Is it Zak?”

“No, it’s not Zak. I just found out today that a friend I thought I knew, I didn’t really know at all.”

And the moment I spoke the words, I wanted to take them back. But like my mom used to say, once the words leave your mouth, you’re no longer their master. It was the only truly wise thing she had ever said. I had been speaking of MacClough, of course, though Kira could have interpreted my words as meant for her. If she had taken it that way, her face didn’t betray her.

“I’m sorry,” she said right on cue.

Trying to assure her that my words were not a warning, I pulled her by the hand into the ever-vacant guest lounge. Making sure that we were alone, I kissed her deeply. While pulling her hair back with my left hand, I slipped my right into her coat, under her sweater, and began massaging her left nipple. It hardened and I wondered how she had learned to fake that. She clamped her legs around my tight thigh and began sliding her groin up and down the length of my upper leg. Finally, she clamped down hard and shook the both of us.

And then, oddly, as if trying to convince me of her genuine attraction, she pulled my hand out of her sweater and pushed it onto the wet crotch of her blue jeans. She waited a few seconds before urging my fingers into her mouth. I no longer had any doubt why her employers had picked her to get close to me. The desk clerk said they paid the girls across the border a C-note and a half. I was willing to bet she came more dearly.

“I missed you, too,” I confessed. “And I’d like more than anything to take you upstairs and let you wear me out, but. . It’s gotta be tomorrow night. I’m sorry. There’s just some stuff I’ve got to work out by myself.”

Not wanting to overplay her hand, she said, “I understand. I’m sorry that you’ve been hurt.”

“I’ll live.”

“I hope so.” She winked. “Be in your room tomorrow night and maybe I will come.”

I walked her out to the lobby. My thousand dollar friend at the front desk was trying too hard to ignore us; whistling, checking and rechecking the empty mail slots. I wanted to smack him. As I leaned over to kiss Kira, I noticed John’s image reflected in the glass door. I could make out his rugged features perfectly: the twinkling blue eyes, the crooked smile, the square jaw. Over the past decade, I had come to know his face as well as my own. Somehow that face looked different to me tonight there in the glass, but it wasn’t MacClough who had changed. John MacClough had had nearly a quarter century to live with what he had done. I had lived with it for only a few hours.

“You really are someplace else tonight, aren’t you?” There was that concern in her voice again.

“Yes.” I pecked her on the cheek.

She walked out the door. When it swung shut, MacClough’s reflection was gone. It was time to go speak with the man himself.

He wasn’t in my room. I walked up to his. As I walked in, he handed me a cold bottle of my favorite ale. I took half the bottle in a gulp, but could not make my eyes meet his. He was easier to deal with as a reflection, when I could see him and see through him all at once.

“How was skiing?”

He said he hadn’t done much of it. He had done a lot of hanging out at the bar, walking the grounds, bullshitting with the help. That was John in his glory. If you spent ten minutes with him over a beer, you’d understand why he had been so good at getting confessions out of suspects. I suppose he saved the rolled-up newspaper for special cases.

“Markum worked there, all right,” MacClough said. “Two years. He was a jack-of-all-trades. He worked on the lifts some, waited tables, but mostly parked cars. Wanna guess when he got fired?”

My head was spinning. “No.”

“The day after Valencia Jones was arrested. You think somebody was a little pissed at him for planting the Isotope on the wrong car?”

“I guess,” I said. “But he’s been floating around loose for a year. Why kill him now?”

“From what I found out about Markum, no one was gonna beat down his door with job offers. Maybe he figured with the trial coming up he could put the squeeze on his old bosses for a little hush money. Getting killed is a kinda tough way to learn that blackmail isn’t so easy as they make it on the tube.”

“Anything else? Anything about Zak?”

“Nothing about your nephew. Sorry. But there were a few buildings up there I’d like to get into to have a look-see.” He turned the tables: “And you, what’d you do? Did you get the test results?”

I explained that I hadn’t, that I had other things on my mind.

“Other things!” He was incredulous. “You’re waiting for the results of a fucking AIDS test, what else could you have on your mind?”

“Don’t ask the question unless you’re prepared to hear the answer,” I paraphrased Larry Feld’s earlier admonition.

He let that go without a word, pressing me about my day. Omitting my call to Feld and my two side trips to the public library, I laid it out for him. I told him about the coffee house and my visitation by the mythical Guppy. I related our conversation as close to verbatim as I could manage without a transcript. MacClough was keen to know what I thought it meant.

“At first, at the coffee house, I didn’t think it meant anything,” I said. “Just another interested party weighing in with well wishes and vague hints of this or that. But as I went over it in my head, it seemed to me he was delivering some kind of coded message. I don’t know.”

“You think he knows something?”

“It was weird, John. It was as if he wanted me to know he was delivering a message, but not to realize it until after he had gone. And his demeanor was so calm, unworried, like he wanted to reassure me. But if he knows something, why didn’t he come right out and say it?”

“Maybe,” MacClough suggested, “you didn’t meet Guppy at all.”

“But I did.”

“How do you know? Come on, Klein, use that yiddisha kop God gave you,” he said with a perfect accent, slapping my forehead. “How do you know what Guppy looks like? Interesting, isn’t it? You walk around campus all morning asking about Guppy, but no one knows who he is or where he lives or how to reach him. Then, bang! Three hours later, Guppy serves himself up to you on a silver platter. All you know is that you had a weird conversation with a guy named Rajiv Gupta and you can’t even be sure of that.”

“Guppy the red herring. Great title for a children’s book, you think?”

“If they could put the girl next to you, they could just as easily dig up a clown to talk some shit to you, confuse you, throw you off the scent.”

“About the girl. .” I was almost glad MacClough had broached the subject. “I don’t think I can play my part much longer. And tonight, when you saw us down in the lobby, I think she might have suspected something was different.”

“I know it’s hard when you’re that angry at someone,” he empathized.

I laughed at him for that. “It’s not the anger that makes it hard, John. It’s the lack of it.”

“She’s that convincing, that good?”

“She’s better. She’s opaque. When I kiss her, when I look into her eyes, I can’t believe she’s acting. God, I’ll be glad to be away from this place.”

“Okay, one more performance.” MacClough rubbed my shoulder. “We’ll feed her a little misinformation to take back to her masters. Two can play these games.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you, John? You and my brother Jeff.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

I did not want to believe the words that next came out of my mouth:

“You killed Hernandez and Jeff helped you cover it up.”

“No, Klein, that’s what you think you know.”

“It’s what I know!”

“Who told you so?” he sneered.

“You did, John.”

I reached under my coat and produced the copy of Coney Island Burning I had stolen from the public library on my way back to the Old Watermill. I handed the book to MacClough.

It was his turn to laugh. “If it was that simple, I wouldn’t hate myself so much.”

“Then explain it to me. Make me understand.”

“You’ll understand soon enough,” he repeated the words he had said to me at the rest stop.

Soon enough could not come soon enough for me.