I picked up the box, slipped out of the room, and hustled down the alley, where Koko waited with the motor running.
CHAPTER 18
She listened to my account with her eyes wide open and I gave it to her straight. She touched my battered face and said my name. “Oh Cliff. Oh God, Cliff, what a night.” Almost a full minute later, she said, “May I call you Cliff?”
I laughed painfully. “You really are a piece of work, Ms. Bujak.”
We were sitting in some common breakfast joint well away from downtown. She had struggled mightily to find something she could eat and I had eaten whatever came out of the dingy-looking kitchen. I was working on my third cup of real coffee.
“I thought you were a bookseller. I thought you were a scholar. Then you come out here and turn into some warrior straight from the Middle Ages.”
I smiled and she said, “I meant that in a good way.”
“I know how you meant it.”
“Does it make you uneasy, being a hero?”
“Nah. My favorite song is ‘The Impossible Dream.’ But it’s got to be sung in a deep baritone, not some wimpy tenor. I heard a tenor try to do it once. Disgraceful performance. Comical, in fact.” I drank some coffee. “A good bass could really do it up right.”
She smiled, almost lovingly, I thought, and said, “Do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“A comedy routine whenever someone tries to say nice things about you?”
I shrugged. “You haven’t even seen my old bullet wounds yet.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about.”
It was fun being her hero but the fun soon went away. She still didn’t understand what had just happened. To her the story was over. We had won.
So I told her. “I wasn’t trying to impress you, Koko. You need to know what you’re up against. Everything I did to Dante was calculated for an effect.”
“Sounds like you’re not sure it’ll work.”
I didn’t have a quick-and-easy answer for that. I sipped my coffee.
“Like maybe you’re afraid you’ve put me at some kind of risk.”
“You were already at risk. I just hope I didn’t make it worse.”
“What choice did we have?”
“Slink away in the night and let them keep your stuff.”
She flushed and shook her head. “No way.”
I liked her decisiveness but Boot Hill is full of decisive heroes. Vast new questions yawned before us.
“They may try to kill us. Does that change your mind?”
She shook her head, this time a little tentatively. But a no is a no, I thought. I said, “I don’t think you should go home. Not till I have a better read on it.”
She looked solemn at this news. I had her focused now.
“Where will I go?” Almost in the same breath she said, “Maybe I’ll go to Charleston. Sooner or later I’ll have to, I told you that. Maybe this would be a good time.”
I felt nothing but relief at this news. “Maybe it would. Maybe I’ll even go with you.”
She brightened. “Do that,” she said. “Please do.”
“Why not? It looks like I’m finished in Baltimore. I think my cover has been blown.”
“If I find what I hope to find down there, it might help you as well.”
“Want to give me a hint?”
“You can listen on the plane. Charlie tells it better than I do.”
I paid the tab and we retrieved her car.
“Can’t I even go home for some clothes?”
“I wouldn’t. Not just yet.”
“How long am I supposed to hide out like this?”
“Not forever. If something doesn’t happen after a while, I’ll force his hand.”
We made a quick swing by my hotel, got my stuff, and headed toward the airport.
“Is the tape player still in the box?”
“Yep. It’s even got earphones.”
We didn’t say any more till the unmistakable signs of runways and aviation rose up around us. She went to long-term parking and we got a shuttle to the terminal.
“What do you really think they’ll do about us?”
“I don’t know. Dante’s an animal. I gave him my best shot.”
“What do you think, though?”
In the end I still didn’t know. “Maybe it’s fifty-fifty. If I had to lay money…I don’t know. I’m just glad you’re getting out of here.”
We got on standby to Atlanta. From there we could get passage on Soapbox Airways to the coast.
“You must put on the world’s greatest bluff,” she said at some point.
But my silence told another story.
“You weren’t bluffing.”
“You don’t bluff a guy like Dante.”
“You would kill him.”
“He’s lucky he’s still alive and I hope he knows it.”
“What about your other promise?”
“He’d better believe that one too.” I looked at her sadly, hating the notion that I was becoming a tarnished hero. “Don’t ask questions if you don’t want to know the answers, Koko.”
“How do you know people like that? People you can just call up and order someone killed?”
“Please,” I said impatiently. “I am not a friend of killers. We’re talking about an old boyhood chum. He went his way, I went mine, but he still thinks he owes me. Something that happened long ago when we were kids. Maybe now I’ll let him get that off his chest.”
After a while I said, “I’m not ordering Dante killed. He’ll be fine as long as we’re fine. If anything happens to him, he does it to himself.”
But I still didn’t call Vinnie. Something in my heart wouldn’t let me.
Instead I called Erin and got her answering machine. “Hi,” I said. “I’m out of town. Not sure when I’ll be back, but we need to talk. Leave a message on my machine.”
No jokes this time around.
An hour later Koko and I looked down on the East Coast from 35,000 feet. She got out the player and rigged me up, picking among half a dozen fat folders and two dozen recorded tapes until she found what she wanted. “This is the best one. This is Charlie. All we’ll ever have of him.”
The tape began to play—an old man’s voice, recounting the times of his life. An old man’s voice, but as I listened the tone sounded vaguely familiar.
“Is that…Josephine?”
“Just listen. She’s trying to tell us what he told her—and what she read in his journal years ago.”
I looked at her.
“There’s nothing supernatural about this. Jo was in a deep trance that day. And this is what he told her. This is it, word for word. It’s been stored there in her head for eighty years. She’s even trying to tell it in his voice.”
“What’d she say when you played it back for her?”
“Nothing. She just cried.”
She pushed the rewind button and ran it back to the beginning.
“You’ll hear me on here, asking a few questions. All the rest is Charlie. Just forget me and listen. Just sit and listen and keep an open mind.”
A hissing sound came through the earphones; then, Koko’s voice.
“Who are you? What’s your name?”
There was a pause, followed by the high-pitched voice of a child.
“Josephine.”
“Josephine who?”
“Josephine Crane. My friends call me Jo. J-o, like in Little Women.”
“That’s a good, strong name. May I call you Jo?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How old are you, Jo?”
“It’s my birthday. I’m nine years old.”
“What day is this?”
“September third, nineteen hundred and four.”
“You sound very grown-up for your age.”
“Thank you.”
Another pause. Then Koko said, “Do you want to tell me about your grandfather?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s his name? We can start there.”
“Charles. Charles Edward Warren.”