‘No one thought to question what set him off?’
‘Come to think of it, no.’
‘Can we find out?’
‘Surely you’re not sensing something deliberate, are you?’
‘I like to check everything out.’
‘His secretary might be able to help.’ She reached for the phone next to the vase and dialed a number. ‘Anne, Joan. Fine, fine,’ she said, brushing away the obligatory questions about her well-being. ‘I’ve asked a friend, a Mr Elstrom, to find out something for me. I want to know with whom Benno was speaking on the phone, the night he died. It was about some matter that upset him greatly.’ She paused to listen, then said, ‘I’ll tell Mr Elstrom you’ll call him to set up an appointment.’ She read the number from the business card I’d given her, then hung up.
‘Joan was Benno’s secretary for years,’ she said. ‘She knows things she’ll never tell me, but she’s always been loyal to Benno. And unlike me, she did think to inquire with whom Benno was speaking the night he passed away. He’d set up a conference call with two of his subordinates. She’ll make them available to you.’
She walked me into the foyer and pushed the elevator button. ‘It was not like Benno to allow himself to become so upset, Mr Elstrom. I won’t ask again what you’re pursuing, but I expect the courtesy of a report when you’re done.’
I said I’d tell her what I could, when I could. As I stepped into the elevator, it seemed likeliest that Benno Barberi had simply lost control as accidentally as had the driver of the freak passing car that had smacked Grant Carson. But as the elevator descended, I imagined I heard the Bohemian’s voice intermingled in the soft whine of the motor, whispering urgently about the certainty of percentages. And by the time the door opened, I almost knocked over the burly Mr Reeves in my haste to get out. I hurried across the tomb-like foyer, silent except for the ancient ladies gently snoring beside their drained whiskies, and out into the daylight.
I called the Bohemian from the sidewalk. ‘Any luck on getting someone close to Whitman to talk to me?’
‘He was a widower. I left a message, and your cell number, for his daughter, Debbie Goring.’
‘She’ll call soon?’
‘My God, Vlodek, do I detect urgency?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’ve seen Anne Barberi?’
‘I just left her.’
‘And?’
‘Call Debbie Goring again.’
NINE
I was stuck waiting for the Bohemian to set up a call from Whitman’s daughter, Debbie Goring. I could do it pacing the planks at the turret, or I could indulge in the illusion of exercise at the Rivertown Heath Center. I chose illusion.
The health center is a stained, yellowish brick pile that used to be a YMCA, back when young people came to work in Rivertown’s factories and needed rooms, and running was considered exercise instead of a means of fleeing the police. Nowadays, the health center still has a running track and exercise equipment, and it still offers rooms, though now the equipment is rusted and the rooms are occupied by down-and-out drinkers working only half-heartedly to stay alive.
I knew those foul-smelling, dimly lit rooms. After being flushed, drunk, out of Amanda’s gated community, I spent the night at the health center, as vacant-eyed as any of the grizzlies who puddled the upstairs halls. Waking the next morning in a room still damp from the pine-scented cleaner used to mask the death of its previous occupant, I looked up and recognized rock bottom. I moved into the turret, clear-eyed for the first time in weeks, and began inching my way back to life.
I still come to the health club. The exercise doesn’t hurt, and the sting of pine-scented cleaner in my eyes and nose is a fine reminder not to slip that far again.
I eased over the potholes and parked in my usual spot next to the doorless Buick. As always, the lot was empty except for a half-dozen thumpers – high-school-age toughs in training – leaning against the husks of several other abandoned cars. I made a show of leaving my door unlocked. There was no sense in making them rip the duct tape from my plastic side curtains only to see that the seats had already been slashed and the radio boosted from the dash.
Downstairs, I changed into my red shorts and blue Cubs T-shirt quietly, pretending not to disturb the towel attendant pretending to sleep at the counter. Authentically, he was even drooling on the short pile of stained towels. Nobody minded; nobody dared use them. As with the Jeep, I left my locker door unlocked. The attendant need not dull his bolt cutters only to see I’d not left my wallet or keys inside.
Normally, raucous laughter from the exercise floor echoed down into the stairwell – chatter from the men in their sixties and seventies, retired from jobs that no longer existed, who came not to exercise but to laugh and sigh and share old stories. Not so today. The stairs to the exercise floor were eerily silent.
I understood when I got to the top. The regulars were all there – Dusty, Nick, Frankie and the others – roosting as usual on the rusted fitness machines like crows on felled trees. But that day, nobody was joking. They were staring across the exercise floor.
‘Purr,’ Dusty said softly.
‘Doo,’ Frankie murmured, almost worshipfully.
The others nodded, staring, just as transfixed as Dusty and Frankie. Big, yellow-toothed grins split their wrinkled faces.
Across the floor was a woman. She was no ordinary woman. She was a big woman, a jaw-droppingly huge woman, the biggest woman I’d ever seen. She was at least six-foot eight and three hundred pounds, but she packed no fat. Every ounce of her was perfectly proportioned, solid and muscular. And she was beautiful, with golden skin and long, dark hair. She was stretching and bending with the grace of a tiny ballerina, curving her body in such lazy, perfectly fluid motions that I could only imagine what long-smoldering embers were being fanned into a full blaze in the minds of the exercise room regulars.
She turned, so that her back was towards us.
‘Purr,’ Dusty said.
‘Doo,’ Frankie added.
The Amazonian goddess wore black collegiate exercise shorts, emblazoned with the university’s name in yellow letters across the rump. Those kind of printed shorts are designed with a gap in the middle letters, to allow the fabric in the center to curve into the cleft of the buttocks, yet still be read as one word. But her shorts, probably a man’s double extra-large, were stretched so taut that the name read as two distinct words: ‘PUR’ and ‘DUE’.
I left the old men to the frenzy of their imaginations and ran laps.
Amanda called my cell phone that evening. ‘Still in town?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that worrisome?’
‘Tying up little loose ends, is all.’
‘My father said you stopped by.’
‘Yesterday.’
‘How come you didn’t then call right away to say he’s delusional?’
‘I’m trying to be thorough, dot my “t”s, cross my “i”s.’
‘Don’t dodge with cheap humor.’
‘I report to your father, not to you.’
She took a breath. ‘You think there’s something to his fears?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Now I am worried.’
‘Don’t be. There are just a couple of wrinkles I want to check out.’
‘Wrinkles?’
Too late, I realized she remembered my hot word. A wrinkle was my slang for something troubling enough to require being checked thoroughly.
I tried to joke. ‘The older I get the more I’m like an aging beauty queen. Even the smallest wrinkles demand more attention than they’re worth.’
She let it go because she knew I wouldn’t say more. We tried other, smaller talk but it was stilted, like the stuff of two people passing time, sharing a cab. After another moment, I invented an excuse to get off the phone. She didn’t try to find an excuse to stop me.