“Oh, Murray, grow up. Why does anyone stay with anyone? She was a child, a baby. She couldn’t have been eighteen when he married her, and everyone she knows is in Oklahoma … Well, let’s not get into the psychology of marriage. Just tell me if there are any leads into his death.”
He shook his head. “He was out of town for three or four days. Elsie doesn’t know where he went or how he got there, and the police haven’t dug up anyone who can help. They’ll question the hockey team, of course, but as far as I can tell most of the guys felt the same way your cousin did.”
So the connection with Bledsoe was still secret. Or the connection with his airplane, at any rate. “Was he wearing size twelve Arroyo hiking boots by any chance?”
Murray looked at me strangely. “The footprint left in Boom Boom’s apartment? I don’t know—but I’ll find out.”
I turned my attention to the rest of the game. My hero, Bill Buckner, struck out. Such is life. I kind of knew the feeling.
After the game Murray wandered home with me for something more substantial than hot dogs. I scrounged around in my bare larder and came up with tuna, frozen fettucine, and olives. We drank a bottle of Barolo and put crime behind us for a few hours, while I found out how much exercise my dislocated shoulder was up to.
Murray and I have been competitors on the crime scene, friends, and occasional lovers for several years. Somehow, though, the relationship never seems to develop. Maybe our rivalry over crime investigation gets in the way.
Around midnight the Star signaled him on his beeper and he left to deal with a Mafia shooting in River Forest. Beepers are one of the twentieth century’s most useless inventions. What difference does it make if your office finds you now rather than an hour from now? Why not give yourself a break?
I asked Murray this as he pulled his T-shirt over the thick auburn curls on his chest.
“If they didn’t know where to find me, the Sun-Times or the Trib would beat me to the story,” he mumbled through the cloth.
“Yeah,” I grumbled, lying back in bed. “Americans are afraid that if they unplug themselves from their electronic toys for five minutes, they’ll miss out on—everything. Life. Imagine no TV, no telephones, no beepers, no computers for three minutes. You’d die. You’d be like a beached whale—”
I was working myself into a frenzy over our appalling dependency on gadgets when Murray dropped a pillow over my face. “You talk too much, Vic.”
“This is what happened to the girl in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” I padded naked after him down the hall to make sure all the locks got closed behind him. “She brings this guy home and he suffocates her with her own pillow … I hope you write a definitive exposé of the Chicago mob and get them run out of town.”
After Murray left I couldn’t get back to sleep. We’d gone to bed early, around seven-thirty, and slept for a couple of hours. Now I felt all the loose ends of the case whirling around in my head like trails of fettucine. I didn’t know where to find Bledsoe. It was too late to try the Phillipses again. Too late to call Grafalk, to find out if he had gone to that Christmas party alone. I’d already burgled the Eudora Grain offices. I’d even cleaned my apartment earlier in the day. Unless I wanted to wash dishes twice in twenty-four hours, there wasn’t anything for me to do except pace.
About one-thirty the walls started to close in on me. I got dressed and took one of my mother’s diamond earrings from the locked cupboard built into my closet. I went out onto Halsted, deserted in the early morning except for a few drunks, got into the Omega, and headed out to Lake Shore Drive. I rode south for several miles, past the Loop, and pulled off at Meigs Field, the small airport on Chicago’s lakefront.
The blue landing lights cast no illumination in the thick dark. They seemed like meaningless dots, not part of a human network. Behind the tiny runway lapped Lake Michigan, a dark shape. I felt desolate. Not even a beeper linked me with the rest of the world.
I skirted the runway and stumbled through the weed-grown rocks down to the water’s edge, shivering at the nameless menace in the black water. The water slapping at my feet seemed to call me to itself. Let me enfold you in the mysteries of my depths. All the dark things you fear will become your delight. Don’t think of drowning, of Boom Boom choking and fighting for air. Think of infinite rest, no responsibilities, no need for control. Just perfect rest.