“Isn’t that your...?” Sally Velez asked me from the metro desk.
“Yeah,” I said, and was on the elevator in about a minute.
612 West Franklin is the Prestwould, where I was living. It hovers over Monroe Park like a dark angel, casting its twelve-story shadow across the college kids and the homeless. They’d brought a guy down from New York City in the late ’20s to build it. Guess they had what you’d call delusions of grandeur. They finished it just in time for the Great Depression to punch in and end that kind of fairy-tale building. But it’s something. The sick puppy who had the unit across from mine, halfway up, said that if the 9/11 bastards had flown those planes into the Prestwould, they’d have just bounced off and killed a bunch of bums in the park.
The place has a lot of characters in it, but mostly of the midnight-and-magnolias Old Richmond type. The majority of them, to my knowledge, do not pack heat.
I was there in ten minutes. The night photo guy was out covering a fatality on the interstate, so I’d grabbed one of those moron cameras even reporters can use. They’d trained me how to use it the previous week. There wasn’t much crime-scene photography at the legislature, although maybe there should have been.
I saw Gillespie as soon as I got out of the beat-up company Citation and put out the Camel I wasn’t supposed to be smoking in it. He was leaning his fat butt against the patrol car. He’d been a young cop when I was on my first tour as police reporter, more than twenty-five years ago. He recognized me.
“Black,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting, just a confirmation. “I heard they kicked your ass back to the curb. You’ve put on weight.”
I mentioned that he seemed to have cornered the Krispy Kreme market.
He gave me the finger, but otherwise didn’t seem to take offense as we braced ourselves against the wind.
“What happened?” I looked up the side of the building. Most of the lights were out. The residents of the Prestwould were so used to sirens screaming by on Belvidere and Franklin that most of them wouldn’t know what had happened until morning. Only the twelfth floor, the Randolph unit, was lit.
“We got a call from the night security guy,” Gillespie said. “He got a call from some guy on eleven, saying he’d heard gunshots up above him.”
Nobody had really lived in that apartment since Taylor Randolph died in October. Far as anyone knew, her nephew, Mac Constantine, was her only living family, other than her sister Jordan, who the nephew had moved into an adult group home. Said it wouldn’t be safe for Aunt Jordie to be there by herself. He was a jerk, but maybe he was right. The nephew inherited the unit, and he stayed there sometimes. I’d been to one of his parties. I figured he would put it up for sale or just move in permanently, if he could afford to. The Randolphs were Commonwealth Club from way back, knew all the right people, but I knew Taylor had been hard-pressed to pay a four-figure condo fee, assessments, and seven grand a year in property taxes.
I’m renting, thank God.
When they went up, Gillespie and the other two cops, they found the door cracked. Inside, they found the nephew. It was a mess, Gillespie said, and when they let me up, I could see that the carpet looked like somebody had spilled a gallon of cheap Pinot Noir all over it. Pieces of indeterminate matter that probably used to be part of Mac Constantine’s brains speckled the rug and white walls. What was left of his head was, like the rest of him, under a sheet that was getting stained from beneath.
“You don’t wanna see,” Gillespie said before I even asked.
“So where...?”
“We figure the service elevator. Didn’t take the main one, or the guard would have seen him come out. Down there, up the stairs, out the back door. He must have took the gun with him.”
I walked through the rest of the unit. A lot of Taylor’s clothes were still in the closets. A half-empty bottle of Coke sat on the kitchen counter alongside the remains of a half-eaten pack of cheese Nabs.
I got the basics and was back at the paper in another twenty minutes, in time to get something in for the city edition. They even used one of the photos I took.
“Good job,” Sally Velez said to me. “You might have a future in this business.” I gave her the same one-finger salute Gillespie had given me.
I skipped the usual round or three at Penny Lane. Something was bothering me. It was like that piece of meat you realize is wedged between your molars after you’ve eaten a good steak. You know you can’t stop until you find a toothpick.
Next day, I took my morning stroll through the Fan. People were out walking their dogs, raking leaves, doing all the crap people do. Kate and I’d had a town house over near the river, and we’d spend Saturday mornings like that, more or less.
Kate was my most recent wife. She was the one who’d wanted to move to the Prestwould. Said she’d seen it all her life and always imagined what it would be like to live there. We’d only been married eight months when we stumbled on a rare rental unit and did the deed.
I’m not sure Kate understood what she was getting into, marrying me. What might have seemed at least regionally exotic — hearing my stories of state senators acting badly, going to cocktail parties where the governor called me by my first name (he knew the janitors’ first names too) — soon just became a pain in the ass. So did those long nights waiting for me. And then not waiting for me.
I could’ve drunk less, I’m sure. There were times when it would have been hard to have drunk more, and she wasn’t the only one that was guilty of tippy-toeing outside the sacred bonds. Like our charming city’s teenage drug desperadoes, who seem to believe that thinking might hamper their nerve or their aim, I have been known to not properly consider the consequences of my actions.
Because she’s a lawyer headed for partner and I’m a half-assed, broken-down political writer turned night-cops reporter, she hasn’t been busting my chops. I don’t even think she hates me. Maybe she just sees me as a youthful indiscretion, something she can learn from and get over.
She surprised me by moving out of the Prestwould herself instead of telling me to. Said the place was pretty much ruined for her. It isn’t exactly growing on me either, but it’s a roof, at least until I can’t make rent anymore.
The ten-incher I did on Mac Constantine’s murder was on A1. Couple of black guys get gunned down in the East End and it’s B6, maybe B1 if it’s a slow news day. But Mac Constantine was rich and white. Since Taylor Randolph was descended from two presidents, I suppose Mac was too. And he had been on the city council.
At the end of my daily constitutional, I waded my way through the TV trucks and a couple of dozen reporters and cameramen who weren’t allowed inside the Prestwould. They were waylaying every elderly citizen who tried to get past them and into the building. Good thing we have security guards. A couple of the TV folk, trying to save their well-tended hair from the wind that was bringing in the season’s first real cold front, recognized me and begged to be let inside. I made sure the door closed all the way.
When I got up to the twelfth floor, I saw they’d padlocked the door and sealed it off with yellow crime tape. As I went through the door separating the lobby from the back stairs and turned a corner, though, I saw that Gillespie was the same fiend for detail he’d always been. The back door, the one that opened into Taylor Randolph’s kitchen, was untouched, even though they must have gone out that way the night before to check on the service elevator I was standing alongside. The door was locked, but Taylor had entrusted me with a key. I think she’d given one to half a dozen other residents, just in case she needed help. She worried a lot, about her health and about Jordie.