“Who’s with you?” she said, after two deep inhalations. “Let me see her.” She waved the gun barrel from side to side.
I grabbed Ginny’s hand holding the target pistol and clenched it behind my thigh as she stepped to my side. “This is my wife Ginny,” I said. And then, just to try it out, I said, “And this, Ginny, is Barb Becker, wanted on suspicion of the attempted murder of Judy Pilske.”
“No, I’m not!” she shouted. Her face became even more distraught than it had been. “No, I’m not! That was my precious little lamebrain lover, Mike!”
“You’ve got the gun,” I said.
“I took it from him — can’t you see that? Then maybe you’re not so smart! He’s around here someplace tonight — pretty little Mikey — hauling garbage. I hope I never see him again!”
“He talked you into this?”
“Yes, yes, yes! Mike and his uncle, who else? He was going to make a killing, and no one would ever know. Then he’d go straight — straight to Hell — and we’d get married. God!”
When she stood up, I let go of Ginny’s hand and said, “Let me have the gun, Barb.”
“No! I’m going to shoot you down — you big smart-ass! And then that little dumb-ass, Mike.” She gestured wildly and then started to shake.
I said, “But the gun’s empty, Barb. You can’t shoot anyone with it.” That was the clue I’d been looking for in the restroom the previous night and hadn’t found. I stepped forward slowly with my hand held out, while she stared at me with an expression of intense loathing.
Then Ginny said, “Miss Becker, please give the pistol to my husband, or I’ll be forced to shoot it out of your hand.” As Ginny moved two paces over and assumed the stance of a marksman, Barb’s eyes turned reflexively in response. That was when I grabbed her hand quickly and yanked the pistol from it, then popped out the empty clip and held it up for Ginny to see.
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Barb Becker cried.
Even with my head throbbing, I managed to block her sudden rush toward the door.
Part V
“Well, the truth is, sometimes these things look more complicated than they are.”
The date was December twenty-third of that same year, and I was seated in a small, private visitors’ lounge at Northwest Hospital, along with Ginny, Frank Malin, Jim Sammons, Mr. and Mrs. Stan Pilske, and their daughter Judy — still on one intravenous feed, still weak enough to be in a wheelchair, but mending fast and strong enough, according to her physician, to hear the whole story. Strong enough also, I hoped, to see me without a relapse: the stitches I wore across my forehead made me look even more than usual like a Halloween freak.
“The thing really began last July,” I said, “when a man named Mike Corcoran, only I’m going to call him Mike Cooksey, got out of prison. He’d done three years straight time — not the kind of guy the parole board goes for — but when he got out he headed right for Barb Becker’s door.”
“Barb?” Judy said. “Not my Barb Becker!”
Jim Sammons was sitting beside her, strangely enough, and he said, “Yes, Judy, I’m afraid it was.”
She started to cry. He took her hand and offered his handkerchief in what I took to be a very ecumenical spirit. “Go on,” she said. “I can stand it. That’s the worst you can tell me. She’s my best employee — my friend. How...?”
“Well,” I continued, “she was also Mike Cooksey’s girl — his fiancée, in fact, although that was off while he was at Pontiac. I can’t tell you what charm Cooksey had to attract Barb in the first place, but he turned it back on when he got out, and suddenly he was there living with her, listening to her talk about her job, about Speedway Mall — how it worked from the inside — and about how he needed to find a job himself.
“I don’t honestly think Cooksey had a clear-cut idea of what he wanted to do after his prison stint, so when Barb wrangled him an interview for an opening on the Speedway custodial crew he went along with the idea, at least at first, but he also went to his uncle Tom Alton and got a false identity made up in the name of Cooksey, not Corcoran, that described a man recently discharged from the U. S. Navy. Because Mike had been in the Navy, just not recently or honorably.
“Barb, I’d guess, thought the false identity business was okay. She wanted Cooksey to get into some kind of honest work, and you don’t have to have a bleeding heart to understand that ex-cons have a hard time finding employment. The main point is, Speedway ended up hiring him — and then Tom Alton got ideas.”
“Who’s this Tom Alton?” asked Judy’s father.
Frank Malin broke in by saying, “He’s the biggest fence on the North Side, Mr. Pilske. Receiver of stolen goods. He’s so big he finances thieves to steal for him — everything from jewelry to cars to red-hot stoves.”
“Only this time it didn’t cost him anything except a little inspiration,” I said. “What with Barb being so enthusiastic about running the Christmas Temps program, and Mike hauling the garbage away from the backs of the stores two nights a week, and Christmas coming up pretty soon, his thought was to persuade Barb to put a handful of thieves into positions at the mall where they might shuffle a few fenceable goodies into the bottom of the trash twice a week. All in the spirit of Christmas greed, you might say.
“After Mike checked out the backs of the stores to learn their procedures, Alton selected six as the easiest to take the most profit from: Catterson’s, Mason’s, The Wedge, Orchid Records, Slade’s, and California Kitchens. Then the two of them told Barb about their little project and what her part in it was going to be. At the same time, Cooksey proposed that they get married on the profits and promised to go straight forever, and Barb, I’m afraid, caved in to the pressure. There were also some not-so-veiled threats by Cooksey, by the way, concerning Barb’s future health and personal appearance that probably helped sway her decision.
“At any rate, Alton lined up a crew of likely and likable thieves — including his own daughter — and Barb sent them out as Christmas Temps to the six targeted stores. This was actually a much riskier project than Alton realized, though, and my feeling, Judy, is that Frank and Speedway Security would have broken the ring by now through the process of elimination, even if Ginny and I hadn’t come into the business over the attack on you. All we really did was to intervene from a different angle, so we saw the problem in a different light. And, of course, Mike Cooksey’s stupidity and general incompetence would probably have blown the program to smithereens by this time anyway.
“And there was another problem as well.
“The deal Alton cut with the Christmas Temps gave them half the value of what they stole when it was resold, with Cooksey and Alton splitting the balance. Not a bad arrangement on the surface, but what it meant in real terms was that the young woman at Catterson Furs — Tom Alton’s daughter, strangely enough — stood to gain ten or twenty times what Florence Siwinski would make stealing from The Wedge.
“The Widow Siwinski, I think, was new to the game. Her husband had been a friend of Tom Alton’s, and Alton probably was trying, in his twisty old mind, to do her a good turn. But she didn’t see it that way. She looked upon herself as an employee with a grievance, taking as much risk for a few hundred dollars as Debbie Alton was doing for several thousand, so she finally went to Mike Cooksey and threatened to disclose the scheme to Speedway Management unless there was a more equitable distribution of the profits.