A Sad Song Singing Read online

  “You want this one, too?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said, “but I don’t want to leave it lying around—for children to play with.”

  She replaced it on the desk with something of a bang. I opened a desk drawer, took out the money she had given me and put it in her hand.

  “There are only two things certain in life,” I said. “Just in case we should get separated, you’ll need some money.”

  She looked at me curiously, then at the money in her fist.

  “You’re funny,” she said.

  “Well, I guess it’s not one of my serious days.”

  She pushed the money into a pocket of the suede jacket and I put the .38 into a pocket of my own.

  “Shall we blow?” I said.

  She came along without hesitation. At the top of the steps I cased the street in both directions, then led her to the car, briskly but not at a run. She hadn’t shown any signs of panic and I didn’t want any to develop. I decided she had been scared at first for fear I would laugh at her story, and what would she do then? Now that was over with and she didn’t seem scared any more.

  * * * *

  I drove around the Near North Side for a few minutes, got on Lake Shore Drive and went out north, then came off it, heading for the Loop on Michigan Avenue. By then I was satisfied we weren’t being chased.

  Cress didn’t show any curiosity. Maybe she had figured it out for herself, or maybe she just didn’t give a damn. As it turned out, I discovered, when I pulled into the garage of a medium-sized commercial hotel downtown, she was asleep.

  I had picked the place because I knew it to be well run and to have a good house cop; because everything she would need was inside, so she wouldn’t have to go out on the street; and because it was a handy location for the work I would have to do the next day—or later that same day, come to think of it.

  We had two rooms, adjoining, with the connecting door unlocked. While she sat at the dressing table, brushing her long hair, I explained that I would go out in the morning and wasn’t sure when I’d get back but that she would be all right here. If she needed anything, all she had to do was to get on the phone and tell the desk what she wanted and somebody would bring it up. She could order her meals from room service. She wouldn’t have to leave the hotel.

  “I feel like a queen on a white horse,” she said.

  “All right. That’s good,” I said.

  “That’s the way Richie always made me feel,” she said.

  “Was it at The Mill you first met Richie Darden?”

  “Yes—at The Mill—I was working there and he came—he wasn’t on the show, but he had his guitar and naturally somebody noticed and they all began clapping and calling for him. I was waiting on him and when they started this, Richie asked me, ‘Do you think I should?’ And I said, ‘Sure—can you sing?’ ‘I know a few songs,’ he said. So I said, ‘Go ahead then,’ and Richie said, ‘Okay, honey, but you pay attention, because I’ll be singing them all to you.’ Which he did—right to me, and when he finished, I was crying.”

  She was crying a little now, and the brushing had stopped. Her mouth moved and after a while I realized she was singing, softly, on her breath, to her own reflection in the mirror, with that long hair down on her shoulders. It was a familiar song, simple and plaintive; I had heard it before somewhere, or maybe I just thought I had. Her voice was small and not always strictly true; it lacked color and confidence, but she sang straight from the heart.

  The joys of love

  Are but a moment long;

  The pain of love endures

  The whole life long.

  My love loves me,

  And all the wonders I see—

  A rainbow shines in my window,

  My love loves me.

  And now he’s gone

  Like a dream that fades into dawn;

  But the words stay, locked in my heartstrings,

  My love loves me.

  She faltered at the end and she was crying in earnest now, big tears welling from her eyes and flowing down that narrow, sad face. She put her head down on her arms.

  “Richie…!” she cried. “Richie—come back.”

  I had no words of comfort for her. There was too much time between us. What hurts like death at seventeen may be a muffled pang at my age, and there is no way to explain this across the years.

  I looked at Richie Darden’s suitcase, next to hers, and at the guitar and wondered what that world was like inside their heads.

  “Richie—” she moaned into her arms.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, but she took no notice.

  “Try to get a little sleep,” I said. “I’ll be right in the next room.”

  I left her alone, closing the door between us to give her privacy. I undressed, put on pajamas and a dressing gown, in case I should have to get up in a hurry, and got into bed. With nothing to distract it, my headache got in some concentrated licks, but gradually I learned to relax under it, and in time it dulled. I checked two or three times and the light still showed under the connecting door. I dozed off and the next time I checked, the light was out. I settled back, ready to sleep, and the door opened. I lifted my head and after a minute I could see her standing in the dark, wearing a night gown and some sort of bathrobe that was too long for her and fell in folds on the floor around her feet.

  “Mac—” she said.

  “Yes, Cress?”

  “Can we leave the door open?”

  “Sure. Any way you want it.”

  She lingered in the doorway. Her hand came up and brushed her hair back from her face.

  “Are you frightened, Cress?” I asked.

  I got up on my elbow. She lifted the robe clear of the floor and came to the bed, sat on the edge of it with her hands in her lap.

  “No—not exactly,” she said. “I was just thinking—what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to visit the mug shop—rogues’ gallery—and see if I can get a make on those three guys we had the spat with. And then I thought I would talk to your friend Roger at The Mill and see what he knows.”

  “Well, when Richie comes back,” she said, “and I’m not there anymore, in that apartment—how will he find me?”

  “Easy. I’ll make a connection with Roger and we’ll keep in touch with him.”

  “Oh.”

  Pretty soon she said, “When I’m here alone all day, will it be all right if I play my guitar a little?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because I can get pretty lonely, just sitting around. But if I can play the guitar—”

  “You can absolutely play the guitar as much as you want to.”

  “All right,” she said.

  She got up, holding the long robe off the floor, and started away. Then she came back, leaned over the bed and kissed me on the mouth, quickly, without warning.

  “Thanks, Mac,” she said. “I’m sorry I cried.”

  “Don’t be worrying about that,” I said. “Crying’s good for you, as long as you can stop when you have to.”

  “Good night, Mac…”

  She started off, then returned once more.

  “Listen—you said something about—only two things are certain in life. What are they?”

  “Oh—that’s an old cliché.”

  “But what are the two things?”

  “Death and taxes.”

  “Death and taxes,” she said thoughtfully. “Death and taxes—I like that.”

  “You’re among the few,” I said.

  “Okay—‘night, now,” she said.

  She waved her hand and ran into her own room, leaving the door open. I had the distinct impression that she went to bed happy because of death and taxes.

  Chapter Four

  My call came at ten o’clock and I replied gruffly, then remembered I had asked for it. I felt as if I were made out of burned-out wire, but I managed to make the shower and after about fifteen minutes I woke up enough to get dressed. C
ress was asleep, and I left a note for her and went out in silence. Before leaving the hotel, I looked up the house detective, whom I knew, and asked him to keep an eye on the room. He asked no questions and I knew I could depend on him.

  At the place where they keep the pictures of the misguided, I had to make my report to an officer who was unknown to me. He was young and efficient and not too interested, especially when he found out who I was.

  “Private eye, huh?” he said. “Were you some place you shouldn’t have been?”

  “I was some place I was hired to be,” I said.

  He grunted and made a note.

  “Will you sign a complaint?” he asked with suspicion.

  “What good would it do to sign a complaint against persons unknown?” I said. “If I could see some pictures…”

  He thought it over and gave me a slip of paper that got me through a couple of doors, and after a while I was looking at pictures. There were a hell of a lot of them and the prospect was gloomy. I could remember clearly only the youngish one with the black-rimmed eyes. The one with the distorted nose I had seen through a red film and the rest of his features were a montage in my memory. The third was a total blank.

  An Identification officer was with me at first and he got called away. He was replaced by a detective sergeant whom I knew from my old days on the force. By the time the first man left, I had studied so many pictures the faces were beginning to blend into a composite monstrosity, and I took a few turns around the room to get my blood going and to rest my eyes—or eye; the one was still swollen more or less shut. The third time around, without thinking much about it, I took out one of the fliers with Richie Darden’s picture on it and looked at it for a change. It was somebody I knew, in a way, and it gave me a sort of orientation. I was looking at it when Sergeant Schnell came in, and I dropped it on the table along with the mug shots.

  “Well, well,” he said, “looky there. If it ain’t the old bird dog—run into some kind of a door.”

  “Hello, Kegs,” I said.

  Schnell was German, with a taste for beer, and was always in trouble with the physical-fitness outfit.

  “You run into it kind of hard, huh?” he said.

  “Kind of. What’s new?”

  He eased himself into a creaking armchair and his belly came to uneasy rest against the edge of the table.

  “You know how it goes,” he said. “I ain’t had too much sleep lately for sure. Who you lookin’ for here?”

  “Three guys,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “A fellow left a suitcase with his girlfriend. These three seem to want it. Last night they came to get it and I happened to be there.”

  “Where was this? What neighborhood?”

  I told him and he nodded sagely—whatever that meant. Pretty soon he said:

  “You mean all three of ’em got away?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you had the gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “I left it home.”

  “You should turn that in.”

  “I forgot it. I’ll bring it around later.”

  “Did you get a number off it?”

  “There was no number on it that was legible.”

  “Great.”

  He looked depressed.

  “These rascals say anything, like names or anything?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “The one I remember best was a young guy with black rings around his eyes.”

  “What’s in the suitcase that they want so bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does the girlfriend know?”

  “She says not.”

  “Can’t you open it, for God’s sake?”

  “Not without permission.”

  He snorted and ran his hands through his hair.

  “Where’s the boyfriend now?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Is it a heavy suitcase, like full of printing plates or something?”

  “No, it’s very light.”

  “Uh-huh.” He thought about that. “Heroin don’t weigh much.”

  I had thought of that myself but had passed over it, maybe because I wanted to. I shrugged.

  “A suitcase full—” I said.

  “But nobody would have a suitcase full. Nobody could afford it.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  So we were back at the starting line.

  “Well, you found any suspects here in the likenesses?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let’s get lookin’.”

  We started turning pages. Every once in a while a face would strike some chord in Schnell’s memory and he’d chuckle or grunt or swear. He told me a story about one of them—a counterfeiter named “Good Sam,” who had scruples about passing his product among innocent, unsuspecting people. He would only dump it on other hoodlums, gamblers and con men and such, and he finally turned himself in for his own protection.

  We had gone far beyond Good Sam, had been at it for three quarters of an hour, before I found the one I was looking for, the young guy with the rings around his eyes. The picture was clear and recent and it was him all right.

  “Let’s see,” Schnell said, “he’s nobody to me—‘Carryl Borchard—age, twenty-two, five, ten and a half, one forty-five pounds, black hair, dark eyes, tending to be shadowed.’ What else? ‘Probation, stolen car, at eighteen; parole from armed robbery—a very light rap…’ Not much of a record. ‘Last known address…’ It don’t say. Great.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Somewhere.”

  There was a phone on the wall and Schnell went to it and put in a call. After a while he came back and sat down beside me.

  “You want us to bring him in?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You don’t plan to file no complaint?”

  “Maybe.”

  I saw the Richie Darden flier lying on the table, picked it up and started to put it in my pocket. Schnell reached for it and took it out of my hand.

  “Who you got there?” he said. Then, “Oh—one of them.”

  “What do you mean, ‘one of them’?” I said.

  “You know what I mean—troublemakers. If it wasn’t for the Civil Liberties Union, we’d run ’em all out of town.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  But Schnell was serious.

  “They’re Commies, for Christ’s sake!” he said. “Freedom Riders”—he snorted—“and that peace march!”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Listen, when you and I was that age, we wouldn’t of gone for a peace march—more like the other way around.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “When you and I were that age, we wanted a war to see what it was like with those French girls our pappies told us about. We didn’t figure on Guadalcanal—or the Aleutian Islands.”

  Schnell regarded me through half-closed eyes.

  “You’re talkin’ pretty snotty,” he said, “for a man with a renewable license.”

  “I guess I’m sore for getting pushed around. Excuse me.”

  The phone tingled and I put the Richie Darden thing in my pocket and reset my hat on my head. Schnell was on the phone for about a minute.

  “Carryl Borchard,” he said, “last known address.”

  He dropped a piece of notebook paper on the table and I picked it up. The address was far out on the West Side and I looked at my watch.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” Schnell said.

  “Thanks for everything,” I said. “I’ll check in with you.”

  “Please,” he said.

  * * * *

  Carryl Borchard’s address was a housing development about ten years old. It contained maybe two thousand units, spread over a couple of acres of cleared ground. When new, it had been an
improvement over the old tenements, but ten years and a generation of vandals can do a lot of damage. The outside walls and the entry halls had been stripped of every removable fixture. The lawn was no longer maintained, and a pathetic jumble of playground equipment angled starkly from a desert landscape of sand and brown weeds. Inside, climbing to the second floor and Borchard’s apartment, I saw that the walls had been defaced in every imaginable way and the odor was predominantly of garbage. I had seen old LaSalle Street flea bags with a more appealing décor—and aroma.

  I knocked on Borchard’s door—with my knuckles, there being only three holes in the panel now where the original metal knocker had been—and waited quite a long time. I had my hand up to give it another rap when the door was opened from inside.

  The young woman who had opened it held a very small baby in one arm. She was well advanced in pregnancy, and a little girl of about two looked around and up at me from behind her mother’s skirt. The woman brushed at a lock of hair that had fallen across her face and the baby began to cry.

  “I’d like to talk to Carryl Borchard,” I said.

  She looked at me with eyes that seemed to have moved backward into her head, as if afraid to come out and look around.

  “What do you want with him?” she said.

  “Just talk.”

  “You from the police?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She looked at me some more, disbelieving.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and closed the door.

  I waited three minutes and the door opened again and it was him.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  He looked at me without recognition. Inside, the baby was crying lustily now. There was the sound of a slap and the little girl began to howl. Borchard came into the hall, closing the door behind him. At about the same moment the door clicked shut, he remembered me and where he had seen me before. He went stiff; his hands moved out from his body a few inches, and he slid along the wall away from the door and set his shoulders against it.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I want some information.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. It was the other two—I just went along—”