She sucked on her lower lip, but she didn’t shake that easily. “You’re in here with guesses and stories. If that’s your idea of fun, I’m not going to stop you.”
“Yeah, they’re guesses and stories, but they’re pretty volatile. A more innocent woman might be hollering for cops or lawyers or witnesses or something. But you’re taking it all in to see how much I know, aren’t you? Well, Boots may have the local cops in his hip pocket, but I don’t think he owns the FBI yet.”
I got up to go. Star had a strange little smile on her face. “Of course you have to talk to them first, don’t you? And even if Boots doesn’t have much influence with the FBI, he can make sure they don’t listen to you.”
My stomach jolted a bit but I said calmly, “Oh, did Ralph and Boots tell you about their joke on my ignition? I found it and I’ll be extra careful looking for others. I remember LeAnn Wunsch telling me what a kidder Boots was. I’m only just beginning to really appreciate it.”
She barely waited for me to leave before she picked up her phone. I didn’t shut the door all the way and stood with my ear against it. She asked for Ralph and said it was urgent and that she’d wait at her desk until he called back. I guess her mother’s church friends weren’t that important.
43
The Eye of the Hurricane
I stood in the middle of LaSalle Street trying to quell a rising tide of panic. I needed some allies and I needed them fast. It was luck, pure and simple, that had kept me from disintegrating into my component parts today. If I had, Roland Montgomery would have closed the investigation for lack of leads—or painted me as a bizarre suicidal maniac. I’d miraculously side-stepped my fate, but it wouldn’t be Ralph MacDonald’s last effort to present me with his side of the story, as he’d put it on Monday.
Maybe I was jumping to conclusions in putting Ralph behind the dynamite in my car. Perhaps it was Roland Montgomery—he had ready access to all kinds of incendiary stuff. Or Michael, getting it from Wunsch or Grasso. Michael. My stomach twisted some more. He couldn’t have tried to blow me up. We’d never been in love, but we’d been lovers for a brief sweet time. Can you want to think of a body you’ve caressed torn into jagged chunks of bleeding bones? Or did my rebuff make him want to see me so?
I shook my head, impatient with myself. This was hardly the time or place to sink into a melancholy reverie, I needed to get myself organized. The Smith & Wesson was in my backpack, that was one good thing. Of course I couldn’t very well pull it out in the middle of LaSalle Street, but I didn’t think anyone was likely to try to shoot me during the evening rush hour. I was just lucky that Montgomery had been so hot to get me in the interrogation room and break my jaw that he hadn’t bothered with the usual formalities at the police station. No one had searched me; I hadn’t had to surrender the gun and go through the tedious process of producing my permit and getting permission to pick it up again.
I needed to get to a phone but I was too scared of what direction MacDonald—or Montgomery—or Michael— might next attack from to go to my office. That was an easy place to lay a trap. For the same reason I didn’t want to go home—or to Lotty’s. If MacDonald’s mind was running to dynamite, I didn’t want him to kill Peppy or Lotty in the effort to destroy me.
I finally flagged a cab to ride the nine blocks to the Golden Glow. Sal would let me use her phone and I wouldn’t mind a little Black Label to settle down some of the more extreme lurches my stomach was giving.
As the taxi wove recklessly through the end of the rush-hour congestion, it occurred to me that Ralph probably hadn’t ordered the dynamite in my car. Most likely it had happened just like Becket—him running his fingers through his well-cut silver hair and asking tragically if no one would rid him of this meddlesome priestess. It’s always that way, I thought bitterly, from Henry II to Reagan—your barons or Oliver North or whoever does the dirty work and you wrap yourself in a mantle of bewilderment and lawyers. I never knew about it, they misinterpreted my instructions.
“You say something, miss?” the cabbie asked.
I hadn’t realized I’d been angry enough to mutter aloud. “No. Keep the change.”
Murray Ryerson was sitting at the mahogany horseshoe bar drinking Holstein and talking to Sal about the upcoming college basketball season. Neither of them broke off a spirited debate about the NCAA sanctions on the KU Jayhawks when I climbed onto a stool next to Murray, but Sal reached behind her for the Black Label and poured me a glass.
Sal’s cousin was taking care of customers at the tables. I sipped my whiskey without offering any opinion on Larry Brown’s perfidies of Milt Newman’s abilities now that Danny Manning wasn’t leading the squad anymore. When Sal and Murray had run out of ideas on the subject, Murray casually asked me what was new.