He stopped rubbing on the window. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t ask Dillard to have the surveillance start now.”
“Our county sheriff doesn’t have jurisdiction.” I pointed at the window. “The surveillance would get passed to Rivertown’s finest. When they find out it involves the turret and me, they’ll tell Benny to stock up on more doughnuts because he’s going to be working late. Dillard said he can get a one-shot accommodation from the Cook County sheriff. Two coppers will be waiting for your call, starting tomorrow night. You alert them, they’re here in five minutes to nab Kovacs.”
“He’ll come tomorrow night, for sure?”
“For the key to a lockbox that holds over a million dollars? You bet.”
I bent to look at the long lens camera he’d mounted on a tripod.
“Good enough to pick out the wood grain on your front door at night, so long as you don’t jiggle the camera,” he said. “With luck, I’ll be able to give them a license plate number along with the description of the car.” He set the Windex on the floor beneath the window and turned to look at me. “What if he doesn’t come tomorrow evening?”
“Then the next night, or the one after. We’ve got the key to over a million dollars.”
Benny Fittle chugged away at nine thirty-five that evening. He might have been convinced I was tucked in for the night. More likely, he was out of doughnuts. Either way, we could now set things up. Leo hoofed it across Thompson Avenue to the turret.
He’d insisted that we fine-tune the view through the long lens by maximizing the lighting that would fall outside the turret. After we each got something to eat, I was to watch from the kitchenette and report improvements as he adjusted lights on the first, second, and third floors. Then we would switch locations. He would come to the kitchenette, to satisfy himself that the lighting on the timbered door was the best we could get.
“This is a waste of time,” I said as he stomped the snow off his boots outside my door.
“Dare I bring up the last time you did night surveillance with a long-lens camera?” he asked, coming in. He was referring to a night when I’d staked out a Dumpster.
“I was looking for something that wasn’t there.”
“You fell asleep.”
“Allegedly. And that had nothing to do with lighting.”
“We make sure everything’s right tonight.” Leo fluttered his fingers at the floor of the turret. “Want to take some sawdust to breathe so you’ll feel at home?”
I fluttered a finger of my own, told him I’d call him at eleven, and headed over to what used to be a Dog ‘n Suds drive-in. Nowadays, nobody drove in; they mostly staggered up, exhausting ninety-proof fumes. Still, the hamburgers were decent enough, if only for the truly undiscriminating, and they were fast. I got two, wrapped in foil to minimize their flammability, and hustled back to the shiny walls of the kitchenette.
At ten fifteen, as I was finishing my first hamburger, a rusty red Honda Civic pulled up to the front of the turret. I trained the long lens on it to see a kid in a red shirt and matching ball cap get out. Leo had said he ordered one of his grunge pizzas from Mama Pasta’s, a fogged-window joint that had been hardening arteries in Rivertown since before I was born. Through the camera, I watched Leo comically smack his lips as he paid for the pizza-his usual abomination of pineapple, spinach, and double Polish sausage-and wave off the change.
I finished the second hamburger at ten thirty. Then, for a time, I played the long lens up and down Thompson Avenue, looking at the cars and the girls and the johns.
At eleven, I called Leo’s cell phone, as we’d agreed. I was going to begin by complaining that I could smell his pizza through my window.
He didn’t answer. After five rings, his cell cut over to voice mail. I clicked off and squinted through the long lens. Lights burned brightly through the slit windows on the first and second floors. They were too narrow to see through, but I supposed he was in my office, where I kept my four-inch television and the electric blue La-Z-Boy.
I tried his cell again. Still no answer.
I called my landline, which rings in my office. It rang five times and then switched over to my machine.
I swung the long lens down to the first floor, focused on the timbered door, but thought he’d stepped outside.
A faint sliver of light ran down the opening edge of the timbered door. It was slightly ajar. I moved the lens down the sliver of light.
Something lay at the bottom, at the threshold.
It was a hand, fingers splayed. Not moving.
I ran down the stairs.
Thirty-seven
At six o’clock the next morning, they moved Leo out of intensive care, to a bed by the window in a semiprivate room. The guy in the bed by the door looked to be eighty pounds and dying of cancer, but he seemed in better spirits than Ma and Endora when they saw me come past the curtain. They gave me the kind of look nuns give to child molesters and turned back to whispering to Leo. I backed out of the curtained area, leaned against the doorjamb, and started chatting with the cancer patient. By unspoken agreement, we kept the conversation away from plans either of us had for the future.
After an hour, Ma and Endora left to get coffee. Neither looked at me as they walked out. The cancer patient noticed, and shrugged as best he could with tubes running into his veins.
“C’est la vie,” I said.
“What?”
“Vie: that’s French, for ‘life’. I just said ‘that’s life,’ in French.”
I think he laughed. “I’m about out of vie”
I walked around the curtain.
“You look horrible,” I said to Leo-and he did. His pale body, all one hundred and forty pounds of it, had been beaten into shades of greenish yellow, purply blue, and, for brightness, a few spots of vivid red that had not yet dried to maroon. Still, there was but one tube running into his arm, and only two white bandages on his skull where he’d been stitched. Then again, I was desperate to see positives.
He motioned with his untethered hand for me to come closer. “You should see the other guy,” Leo slurred, through bruised and swollen lips.
“You saw the other guy?”
“Nah.”
“Hear anything?”
“Just your voice, afterward, saying you were sorry you’ve always been such a jerk.”
Screaming at 911 in my cell phone, I’d run, as best I could, across the high snow on the spit of land and my own little street to drop to my knees at the timbered door. I’d been too afraid to lift his head out of the blood on the snow, so I held his hand and prayed to every God I’d ever heard of, until the ambulance came. Then I’d prayed in the Jeep on the way to the hospital.
Now he pinched my arm with his fingers, tugging me closer.
“You called that cop in Iowa?”
“Right after they wheeled you in. I called Dillard in Michigan, too.”
“A couple of Rivertown coppers, by the names of Malloy and Cruck, stopped by with photos of Mother Kovacs’s sons.”
“I talked to them in the hall.”
“I’ll bet they were impressed by your planning, how you laid this super trap to catch the missing bank robber. They probably begged you to join their department.”
“They love me like Ma and Endora do.”
“I heard. It sounded like ice hardening.” His lips twitched. He was trying to smile.
“Listen, Leo…”
He attempted to lift his head, gave it up after an inch, and sank back into his pillow, somehow smaller.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
I didn’t. “Tell me,” I said instead.
“I’d ordered nourishment, my special concoction-”
“I recognized the pizza guy by the clothespin clipped to his nose.”
“It was magnificent, but I was only halfway through when I heard a rustling sound from down below. I thought it was you, come to share the gourmet experience, so I left the pizza and went downstairs. And then, nothing.”