Page 21 of Fade Out
I flashed on my brief visit to their home in Normal to bring Ross home. They struck me as the type of Christians who were kind in the cruelest ways. “So there’s no funeral?”
“He wants a party. That’s why Miss Minerva was there. She’s going to be the hostess with the mostest.”
I really hated talking about this. I asked Franklin, “What else was in the paper this morning?”
“Enormous fire at Arlington Race Track.”
“Arson?”
“I don’t know. I think just old and badly designed. The papers call it a firestorm. Nobody got hurt. Not even the horses.”
Okay, now that definitely sounded like arson. I decided not to say so though. Brian poured me another glass of wine. The conversation drifted. Brian mentioned a benefit he and Sugar wanted to do for Howard Brown. A costume party next Halloween. That seemed so far away. I wondered if I’d be in prison by then.
After they finished eating, we went into the living room and watchedHill Street Blues. It was a rerun. Franklin had seen it already and kept telling us what was going to happen right before it did.
* * *
The next morningI woke up not knowing where I was. It took a moment of focusing before I recognized Brian’s guest room. It was a small room with too much furniture: a double bed, a desk where Terry had done his homework, a dresser. There was a Wham! poster on the wall. I sat up, my head fuzzy with last night’s wine.
I didn’t have any clothes with me, so I’d slept in my underpants and the T-shirt I’d been wearing since Wednesday. When I stood up, I immediately saw that Brian had put a short stack of clothing on the desk with a note:
Nick—
I’m at the hospital with Ross. I’m off work for a while. This should get you through today. If you don’t want to go home, we could go shopping? Unless you’re catching bad guys.
Brian
There was an ironedand neatly folded white dress shirt, probably Franklin’s since he was closer to my size, a clean pair of underpants and socks. I took a quick shower—well, not that quick, I had to spend a good five minutes scrubbing 1025 off my forearm—dressed, grabbed the blue folders and files, and walked down the street to the Melrose for breakfast.
I bought the newspaper, but after the waitress poured my coffee I decided not to read it. Instead, I walked to the back of the restaurant to the payphone that was situated between the restrooms.
I put a quarter in and dialed information. “Frank Connor,” I said. “I think he’s out in Edison Park.”
“Hold for the number—”
“No, wait, wait, wait, I just want the address.” I really hated that operators no longer actually spoke to you. Just pressed buttons that spit out recorded answers.
“7534 West Lunt.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up on me. I went back to the table, asked the waitress to borrow her pen, and wrote the address on a napkin. Frank Connors had been a detective with the CPD and worked with Bert Harker for many years. The last I’d heard was that he’d gone out on stress leave after things in the CPD began to change.
Since the seventies, the department had been under a consent decree to look more like the neighborhoods they policed, which meant the force had to hire more Hispanic and black officers, and fewer Irish and Polish. The change began at the street level and now, a decade later, was starting to affect detectives at the various precincts. This hadn’t set well with a lot of the force, hence Frank Connors’ stress leave.
Yeah, he was being a dick for not wanting to work with black officers, but I needed him. He’d been around long enough to remember Rita Lindquist’s father. I figured he might be able to fill me in.
The waitress brought me an ABC omelet, hash browns and wheat toast. As I ate, I tried to remember what I already knew about Rita aside from the fact that she’d taken over her father’s business. I knew that she’d been involved with a guy named Bill Appleton, who was now in jail awaiting trial for embezzlement.
I actually knew more about Appleton because I’d done a background check on him for Peterson-Palmer. He was a liar and scam artist from way back with a resume punctuated with an education he didn’t receive and jobs he never held.
Rita had moved in on my job with Peterson-Palmer while I was otherwise engaged. She did the original background check. When they became suspicious of him, they asked me to redo her work. I learned that Rita and Bill had apparently fallen in love while she was investigating him. I assume she realized he was a con artist and that did it, she immediately fell head over heels.
After I ate, I walked around the neighborhood until I came upon my car. It felt like weeks since I’d seen the putrid-colored Lincoln. When I did find it, it was easy to pick out from a block away.
It started right up and I drove out to Edison Park. Edison Park, where the Harkers had also lived, was the neighborhood of Chicago where a lot of the CPD settled, especially the higher-ups. It was right at the edge of the city limits, where you could live in Chicago—required if you were on the job—and feel like you lived in the suburbs.
A little more than a half hour later I was cruising down Lunt. I pulled up in front of a long, low ranch house that was new sometime in the seventies. It was made of thin, yellow stone and sat on a nicely landscaped lot with a row of petunias running along the driveway.
