Black House

“I’m not following you, George.” But Jack thinks he is. And although he’s starting to get excited, he shows it no more than he did when the bartender told him about Kinderling’s little nose-pinching trick.

“It’s probably nothing,” Potter says. “Guy had plenty of reasons not to like yours truly, but he’s got to be dead. He’d be in his eighties, for Christ’s sake.”

“Tell me about him,” Jack says.

“He was a moke,” Potter repeats, as if this explains everything. “And he must have got in trouble in Chicago or somewhere around Chicago, because when he showed up here, I’m pretty sure he was using a different name.”

“When did you swink him on the housing-development deal, George?”

Potter smiles, and something about the size of his teeth and the way they seem to jut from the gums allows Jack to see how fast death is rushing toward this man. He feels a little shiver of gooseflesh, but he returns the smile easily enough. This is also how he works.

“If we’re gonna talk about mokin’ and swinkin’, you better call me Potsie.”

“All right, Potsie. When did you swink this guy in Chicago?”

“That much is easy,” Potter says. “It was summer when the bids went out, but the hotshots were still bellerin’ about how the hippies came to town the year before and gave the cops and the mayor a black eye. So I’d say 1969. What happened was I’d done the building commissioner a big favor, and I’d done another for this old woman who swung weight on this special Equal Opportunity Housing Commission that Mayor Daley had set up. So when the bids went out, mine got special consideration. This other guy—the moke—I have no doubt that his bid was lower. He knew his way around, and he musta had his own contacts, but that time I had the inside track.”

He smiles. The gruesome teeth appear, then disappear again.

“Moke’s bid? Somehow gets lost. Comes in too late. Bad luck. Chicago Potsie nails the job. Then, four years later, the moke shows up here, bidding on the Libertyville job. Only that time when I beat him, everything was square-john. I pulled no strings. I met him in the bar at the Nelson Hotel the night after the contract was awarded, just by accident. And he says, ‘You were that guy in Chicago.’ And I say, ‘There are lots of guys in Chicago.’ Now this guy was a moke, but he was a scary moke. He had a kind of smell about him. I can’t put it any better than that. Anyway, I was big and strong in those days, I could be mean, but I was pretty meek that time. Even after a drink or two, I was pretty meek.

“ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘there are a lot of guys in Chicago, but only one who diddled me. I still got a sore ass from that, Potsie, and I got a long memory.’

“Any other time, any other guy, I might have asked how good his memory stayed after he got his head knocked on the floor, but with him I just took it. No more words passed between us. He walked out. I don’t think I ever saw him again, but I heard about him from time to time while I was working the Libertyville job. Mostly from my subs. Seems like the moke was building a house of his own in French Landing. For his retirement. Not that he was old enough to retire back then, but he was gettin’ up a little. Fifties, I’d say . . . and that was in ’72.”

“He was building a house here in town,” Jack muses.

“Yeah. It had a name, too, like one of those English houses. The Birches, Lake House, Beardsley Manor, you know.”

“What name?”

“Shit, I can’t even remember the moke’s name, how do you expect me to remember the name of the house he built? But one thing I do remember: none of the subs liked it. It got a reputation.”

“Bad?”

“The worst. There were accidents. One guy cut his hand clean off on a band saw, almost bled to death before they got him to the hospital. Another guy fell off a scaffolding and ended up paralyzed . . . what they call a quad. You know what that is?”

Jack nods.

“Only house I ever heard of people were calling haunted even before it was all the way built. I got the idea that he had to finish most of it himself.”

“What else did they say about this place?” Jack puts the question idly, as if he doesn’t care much one way or the other, but he cares a lot. He has never heard of a so-called haunted house in French Landing. He knows he hasn’t been here anywhere near long enough to hear all the tales and legends, but something like this . . . you’d think something like this would pop out of the deck early.

“Ah, man, I can’t remember. Just that . . .” He pauses, eyes distant. Outside the building, the crowd is finally beginning to disperse. Jack wonders how Dale is doing with Brown and Black. The time seems to be racing, and he hasn’t gotten what he needs from Potter. What he’s gotten so far is just enough to tantalize.

“One guy told me the sun never shone there even when it shone,” Potter says abruptly. “He said the house was a little way off the road, in a clearing, and it should have gotten sun at least five hours a day in the summer, but it somehow . . . didn’t. He said the guys lost their shadows, just like in a fairy tale, and they didn’t like it. And sometimes they heard a dog growling in the woods. Sounded like a big one. A mean one. But they never saw it. You know how it is, I imagine. Stories get started, and then they just kinda feed on themselves . . .”

Potter’s shoulders suddenly slump. His head lowers.

“Man, that’s all I can remember.”

“What was the moke’s name when he was in Chicago?”

“Can’t remember.”

Jack suddenly thrusts his open hands under Potter’s nose. With his head lowered, Potter doesn’t see them until they’re right there, and he recoils, gasping. He gets a noseful of the dying smell on Jack’s skin.

“What . . . ? Jesus, what’s that?” Potter seizes one of Jack’s hands and sniffs again, greedily. “Boy, that’s nice. What is it?”