'Walter'
'I helped build that bank. Me and my clients!'
'Walter, please, listen'
But Arthur K. Halliwell was in no mood to listen. None at all. He hung up.
He sat for several long moments, half-dazed, half-confused, feeling his age in a way that was almost horrific. How did a dashing, handsome man turn into a feeble old man who was deaf in his left ear, got gas whenever he drank milk, and was growing cataracts?
And who, even worse, was broke. Flat broke. Too many bad investments over the past ten years had done it. He was one of the few in his crowd to play all those late-eighties games and lose. All his other friends
Now his arrangement with Adam Morrow was more important than ever.
He reached an arthritic hand out to the phone.
Felt the bloated bag of his prostate between his legs.
Heard his breath wheeze in his windpipeand yet he'd never been a smoker.
He did not want to die in humiliation.
He needed money desperately.
He tried Morrow's number again.
All he got was that stupid answering machine.
He slammed the receiver down, not once but eight times, again and again and again, until his secretary came to the door and said, 'Is everything all right, sir?'
'Get out of here, you stupid bitch,' Arthur K. Halliwell snarled. 'Get out of here right now.'
CHAPTER 55
The dermatome is his most specialized instrument, one used to take skin from one part of the body and graft it onto another part. The surgery has been going seven hours now, the dermatome in constant use for the past two; for the first time the surgeon is beginning to see his work start to take shape, the way a portrait artist first glimpses the face on his canvas. Blood, pus, urine, the stench of human flesh burningthese are some of the vulgar realities of the craftbut the art… The surgeon pauses a moment in his work to admire what he's accomplished.
STATEMENT
The bars used to get to me, the singles bars along the Strip especially, the rainy Wednesday night just starting to roll. The first exultant beat of the disco music summoning the dancers to the floor. The first roaring snort of coke shared in both the men's and women's bathrooms. The first inkling in the minds of otherwise faithful wives out with girlfriends that maybe… just maybe… well, who can be faithful forever, right? And over it all a kind of despair… everybody knowing that soon enough their looks will be gone and the dancefloor given over to younger and prettier people… and that life will be measured out in paychecks and annual health checkups and the ever- increasing number of funerals one attends as one gets older. But if the music is loud enough… if the drugs are spellbinding enough… if the sex is hard and fast and explosive enough… well, then all these terrible intimations of age and grief can be held at bay for one boozy night.
I was of them, the dancers, and yet not of them because I knew the secret: that it doesn't matter. That you can go out and carve up as many people as you want because memory passes so quickly… collective memory… generation unto generation. All those people coming out of Loop office buildings today, soon enough they'll all be gone and gone utterly and gone for ever… in the dust and ash of relentless Time… the Time I'm always so aware of… the Death I see in the faces of infants… the Smile, there at the last, on the faces of the women, as if they're glad to finally have it over with.
And so turn the music up louder; and take an extra hit of coke; and cut her up real goodbutcher her, in factbecause in the end, despite all the bullshit the priests and the politicians try and fill us with, in the end, it doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter at all.
CHAPTER 56
Rick was back at Jill's place at 7 a.m. The media references to 'the mystery woman' and the inference that her former boyfriend Mitch was working on the case had made him curious. Was there really a 'mystery woman?' Could she truly prove Jill's innocence?
He decided to spend part of the morning following Mitch around, as he had the last two mornings.
CHAPTER 57
Mitch tended to remember neighborhoods by the murders that had been committed in them.
This one, where the young woman Cini lived, had been the site of three rather spectacular shootings a few years ago. A Yale man, no less, had been the shooter. He'd come to Northwestern to visit his fiancee and found that she'd fallen in with people he didn't care for, college theater people, a black, a gay male and a gay femaleand one night during his four-night visit, the Yale man just went crazy and popped all three of them right in the living room.
The houses that lined the street ran to variations on Victorian. Most of them appeared to be forty, fifty years old, the kind of rental properties that investors were always looking for. You couldn't go wrong renting to college kids in an overcrowded market. They'd pay premium rates and they'd put up with just about anything you pushed their way.
The sun was out now and Mitch felt better. He'd read a piece in Time about the effects of cabin fever really being the result of lack of sunshine. He could believe it.
On his way up the steps he noticed a squat little snowman complete with an old watchplaid hunting cap, scarf and broom held in extended snow hand. And one more thing: in addition to the eyes and nose and mouth made of tiny sticks, the artist had also endowed the snowman with a penis. A large dirty carrot shot from his crotch.
There was probably some kind of city ordinance against this kind of thing, but what with the socialite murder still accounting for most of his time, Mitch figured he'd better not let Lieutenant Sievers find out he was busting snowmen.
Cini lived in a graying, two-story Victorian with a downslanting porch and several strips of masking tape on each window to cover cracks.
The vestibule smelled of dust, wet rubber snowshoes and cigarette smoke. He checked the mailbox then walked down a long dark narrow hallway toward a small window of light. Everything smelled old. You could smell the decades.
He stopped and knocked on 7A.
'Who is it?'
'I'm with the Chicago Police.'
'Right. Who is it, really?'
'My name is Mitch Ayers and I'm really a Chicago detective. I'd like to talk to you a minute.'
