An Old Friend of the Family

* * *

For six minutes Joe Keogh had been back in the driver’s seat, with engine and heater running, keeping a sharp eye out for the old man and wondering when he should really begin to be alarmed. Now Joe started, with almost the sensation of electric shock repeated. His companion was standing once more beside the car, where he seemed to have reappeared while in the very act of reaching for the door handle. What good would you be in a stakeout? a part of Joe’s mind demanded angrily of himself. And another part answered: I was watching. He just—just—

“I told you you wouldn’t be able to get in,” he said aloud, with irritation, meanwhile reaching across the front seat to flip the doorlatch up.

“You were quite right,” replied Corday in a soothing, almost contrite voice, as he slid in and closed the door. “The attendants were not at all inclined to be helpful. One of them was sleeping at a desk. A most ill-run establishment. Were I in charge, things would be different there.”

Joe sighed, trying to remember if you could see anyone’s desk from outside the front door of the morgue. “I’ll take you back to your motel.”

“If that is out of your way I can easily take a cab.”

Joe shifted into drive and moved out, north on State, then swinging east to get back to the Outer Drive. “No problem, I’m headed back to the north side anyway.” He hadn’t really been headed that far north, but what the hell. Anyway there was something about the old man, in spite of all his oddities—or maybe because of them—that made Joe reluctant to let go of him. An air of hope; maybe that was it. A feeling of purpose, which was more than Joe had been able to get from anyone else around him since Kate’s death. Looking at the ugly situation logically, of course, there wasn’t much to be hopeful or purposeful about—except the chance of recovering Johnny alive, and to Joe that chance looked smaller and smaller as the hours passed.

His companion’s voice, breaking in upon his thoughts, was welcome. “Tell me one more thing, Joe, if you know it. What are the plans for Kate’s burial?”

“As far as I know, no time’s been set. Waiting on the autopsy, which is supposed to be tomorrow. I’m sure she’ll be buried up in Lockwood Cemetery, in the family mausoleum. It’s one of those the really wealthy Chicago families liked to put up around the turn of the century: all marble and as big as a middle-sized house. One of those famous architects designed it, I forget his name.”

“Thank you, Joe. You have been very helpful to me tonight.” It was said so sincerely that it sounded a little odd.

Joe glanced at the once-more shadowed face. “You’ll be coming to the funeral, then.”

“At my age,” the old man said calmly, “it is difficult to know which funerals one will be able to attend.”

EIGHT

When the closet door was closed Johnny never tried to open it, not after that first time, even though sometimes the house grew so silent that he could imagine himself alone in it.

On his first night in the closet all had been silent, for what seemed like an endless time, and at last he had eased the door open with his good hand, thinking maybe they had somehow left him unguarded. The huge man had been right there in the dark empty bedroom, standing right there as if he had been waiting hours for Johnny to do just that. That was when the huge man, without saying a word, had torn off the little finger on Johnny’s right hand.

The little finger on his left hand had gone even sooner, while he was still in the kidnap-car and trying to struggle. He had fainted, and when he came out of the faint—he couldn’t tell how much later—he found himself already here, shut up naked in the closet.

In the car, the huge man had ridden in the back seat, and the black-bearded man had done the driving. Black-beard was the one who had first beckoned Johnny over to the car as if to ask directions of him. When you were the fourth best high school wrestler in the state at a hundred and sixty pounds, you didn’t fear any more that some maniac could just grab you like a baby and throw you into the back seat of a car.

It had turned out, though, that someone could.

Then there was the man with the thick glasses, a short and muscular and sometimes nervous young man. He had not been in the car at all, but he stayed with Johnny in the house, escorted him from closet to bathroom and back again, and put food and water in the dishes on the closet floor.

Also there was the woman. Johnny was not quite sure, in his state of pain, fever, shock, fear, and confusion, whether he was dreaming her or not. He heard her sometimes; he never saw her clearly. She had not been in the car either. Once she came to the closet door and opened it, in darkness so thick that even his now fully adjusted eyes could see nothing but the vague outline of her body. Then she had bent forward to touch him, with a finger or perhaps a toe, as he lay on the floor. And she had laughed, musically, and had spoken to someone who was over near the door that must lead from the bedroom to a hall. Her language sounded a little like Latin, but mostly like nothing that Johnny had ever heard before. Then she had gone away again.

It was not easy to keep track of time. In the bedroom outside the closet, a modern but abandoned-looking room with no furniture that he traversed on his escorted trips to the bathroom, the drapes were always closed. Still he could just tell whether it was daylight outside or not. The trouble was in sorting out the periods of day and night and keeping track of how many of them had passed. And there was more trouble in trying to believe there was a reason why he should bother to keep track at all.

Thick-glasses sometimes left him plain bread in the aluminum pie plate placed on the luxuriously carpeted floor. Once there was cheese with the bread, and once it had turned into a peanut butter sandwich. Johnny didn’t eat much, whatever it was. He did drink a lot of water, though, out of the other dish. Lapping it up was the best way, because then he didn’t have to use his hands at all. They both hurt so much he wasn’t going to try to use them except to save his life. Maybe not even then.

It might have been his second night in the closet when he heard the car pull up outside. Immediately Thick- glasses went into a flurry of activity, entering the bedroom from somewhere, momentarily pulling aside the drapes to look out, then opening the closet door to growl: “Make any noise and it’ll be your left nut that comes off next.” Then he closed the door and went trotting off somewhere, closing the bedroom door too behind him.

Johnny could hear nothing more for several minutes. Then two sets of footsteps entered the bedroom, its ceiling light was switched on, the closet door was opened. Even with his eyes dazzled, Johnny could recognize Black-beard from the kidnap car.

The two men stood there looking at him on the floor. Black-beard was wearing some kind of fancy winter jacket with snow on the collar. Thick-glasses wore his usual khakis, almost a uniform.

“If the plan’s going on,” said Black-beard, “we don’t want him to die yet; we’ll want to send some more parcels. He’s shivering, better get him a blanket.”

“Oh, the plan’s going on,” Thick-glasses said.

Black-beard: “I’d like to get it straight about this house, who owns it, how secure it really is.”

“She’s taking care of all that.”

They closed the closet door. Their voices stayed in the lighted bedroom, though.

“Look, man.” It was Black-beard talking again. “You’ve really known her longer than I have, right? Her and her big friend. It was really you who arranged for her to meet me, huh?”

The other was quiet for a few moment. “Yeah.” As if he didn’t want to talk about that.

“I’m going to have to talk to her, get a few things straight. Like who really decides things. Meanwhile I want you to understand that I’m the one who does.”

“Sure.”

“I’m not gonna hang around here. Do either of them ever come out here?”

“They haven’t yet.”

“What’d you do with his clothes?”

“I got ‘em stashed away. This way he’s not gonna go running out. Also I don’t have to do his zipper for him.”

Black-beard chuckled. “Makes something else a little handier for you too, hey?”

“Hey, you know I don’t like to touch no one who’s unhealthy.” Thick-glasses sounded genuinely hurt. “He’s all blood and shit—yuck.”