Finders Keepers

  At least I hope so, he thinks.

  God, I hope so.

  38

  Morris Bellamy turns onto Sycamore Street. He's aware that his life is rapidly narrowing to a point. All he has is a few hundred stolen dollars, a stolen car, and the need to get his hands on Rothstein's notebooks. Oh, he has one other thing, too: a short-term hideout where he can go, and read, and find out what happened to Jimmy Gold after the Duzzy-Doo campaign put him at the top of the advertising dungheap with a double fistful of those Golden Bucks. Morris understands this is a crazy goal, so he must be a crazy person, but it's all he has, and it's enough.

  There's his old house, which is now the notebook thief's house. With a little red car in the driveway.

  "Crazy don't mean shit," Morris Bellamy says. "Crazy don't mean shit. Nothing means shit."

  Words to live by.

  39

  "Bill," Jerome says. "I hate to say it, but I think our bird has flown."

  Hodges looks up from his thoughts as Jerome guides the Mercedes through Government Square. There are quite a few people sitting on the benches--reading newspapers, chatting and drinking coffee, feeding the pigeons--but there are no teenagers of either sex.

  "I don't see him at any of the tables on the cafe side, either," Holly reports. "Maybe he went inside for a cup of coffee?"

  "Right now, coffee would be the last thing on his mind," Hodges says. He pounds a fist on his thigh.

  "North Side and South Side buses run through here every fifteen minutes," Jerome says. "If I were in his shoes, sitting and waiting around for someone to come and pick me up would be torture. I'd want to be doing something."

  That's when Hodges's phone rings.

  "A bus came along and I decided not to wait," Pete says. He sounds calmer now. "I'll be home when you get there. I just got off the phone with my mother. She and Tina are okay."

  Hodges doesn't like the sound of this. "Why wouldn't they be, Peter?"

  "Because the guy with the red lips knows where we live. He said he used to live there. I forgot to tell you."

  Hodges checks where they are. "How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?"

  "Be there in twenty. Maybe less. If I'd known the kid was going to grab a bus, I would've taken the Crosstown."

  "Mr. Hodges?" Pete.

  "I'm here."

  "He'd be stupid to go to my house, anyway. If he does that, I won't be framed anymore."

  He's got a point. "Did you tell them to lock up and stay inside?"

  "Yes."

  "And did you give your mom his description?"

  "Yes."

  Hodges knows that if he calls the cops, Mr. Red Lips will be gone with the wind, leaving Pete to depend on the forensic evidence to get him off the hook. And they can probably beat the cops, anyway.

  "Tell him to call the guy," Holly says. She leans toward Hodges and bellows, "Call and say you changed your mind and will give him the notebooks!"

  "Pete, did you hear that?"

  "Yeah, but I can't. I don't even know if he has a phone. He called me from the one in the bookshop. We didn't, you know, exactly have time to exchange info."

  "How poopy is that?" Holly asks no one in particular.

  "All right. Call me the minute you get home and verify that everything's okay. If I don't hear from you, I'll have to call for the police."

  "I'm sure they're f--"

  But this is where they came in. Hodges closes his phone and leans forward. "Punch it, Jerome."

  "As soon as I can." He gestures at the traffic, three lanes going each way, chrome twinkling in the sunshine. "Once we get past the rotary up there, we'll be gone like Enron."

  Twenty minutes, Hodges thinks. Twenty minutes at most. What can happen in twenty minutes?

  The answer, he knows from bitter experience, is quite a lot. Life and death. Right now all he can do is hope those twenty minutes don't come back to haunt him.

  40

  Linda Saubers came into her husband's little home office to wait for Pete, because her husband's laptop is on the desk and she can play computer solitaire. She is far too upset to read.

  After talking to Pete, she's more upset than ever. Afraid, too, but not of some sinister villain lurking on Sycamore Street. She's afraid for her son, because it's clear he believes in the sinister villain. Things are finally starting to come together. His pallor and weight loss . . . the crazy moustache he tried to grow . . . the return of his acne and his long silences . . . they all make sense now. If he's not having a nervous breakdown, he's on the verge of one.

  She gets up and looks out the window at her daughter. Tina's got her best blouse on, the billowy yellow one, and no way should she be wearing it on a dirty old glider that should have been taken down years ago. She has a book, and it's open, but she doesn't seem to be reading. She looks drawn and sad.

  What a nightmare, Linda thinks. First Tom hurt so badly he'll walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and now our son seeing monsters in the shadows. That money wasn't manna from heaven, it was acid rain. Maybe he just has to come clean. Tell us the whole story about where the money came from. Once he does that, the healing process can begin.

  In the meantime, she'll do as he asked: call Tina inside and lock the house. It can't hurt.

  A board creaks behind her. She turns, expecting to see her son, but it's not Pete. It's a man with pale skin, thinning white hair, and red lips. It's the man her son described, the sinister villain, and her first feeling isn't terror but an absurdly powerful sense of relief. Her son isn't having a nervous breakdown, after all.

  Then she sees the gun in the man's hand, and the terror comes, bright and hot.

  "You must be Mom," the intruder says. "Strong family resemblance."

  "Who are you?" Linda Saubers asks. "What are you doing here?"

  The intruder--in the doorway of her husband's study instead of in her son's mind--glances out the window, and Linda has to suppress an urge to say Don't look at her.

  "Is that your daughter?" Morris asks. "Hey, she's pretty. I always liked a girl in yellow."

  "What do you want?" Linda asks.

  "What's mine," Morris says, and shoots her in the head. Blood flies up and spatters red droplets against the glass. It sounds like rain.

  41

  Tina hears an alarming bang from the house and runs for the kitchen door. It's the pressure cooker, she thinks. Mom forgot the damn pressure cooker again. This has happened once before, while her mother was making preserves. It's an old cooker, the kind that sits on the stove, and Pete spent most of one Saturday afternoon on a stepladder, scraping dried strawberry goo off the ceiling. Mom was vacuuming the living room when it happened, which was lucky. Tina hopes to God she wasn't in the kitchen this time, either.

  "Mom?" She runs inside. There's nothing on the stove. "Mo--"

  An arm grabs her around the middle, hard. Tina loses her breath in an explosive whoosh. Her feet rise from the floor, kicking. She can feel whiskers against her cheek. She can smell sweat, sour and hot.

  "Don't scream and I won't have to hurt you," the man says into her ear, making her skin prickle. "Do you understand?"

  Tina manages to nod, but her heart is hammering and the world is going dark. "Let me--breathe," she gasps, and the hold loosens. Her feet go back to the floor. She turns and sees a man with a pale face and red lips. There's a cut on his chin, it looks like a bad one. The skin around it is swollen and blue-black.

  "Don't scream," he repeats, and raises an admonitory finger. "Do not do that." He smiles, and if it's supposed to make her feel better, it doesn't work. His teeth are yellow. They look more like fangs than teeth.

  "What did you do to my mother?"

  "She's fine," the man with the red lips says. "Where's your cell phone? A pretty little girl like you must have a cell phone. Lots of friends to chatter and text with. Is it in your pocket?"

  "N-N-No. Upstairs. In my room."

  "Let's go get it," Morris says. "You're going to make a call."


  42

  Pete's stop is Elm Street, two blocks over from the house, and the bus is almost there. He's making his way to the front when his cell buzzes. His relief at seeing his sister's smiling face in the little window is so great that his knees loosen and he has to grab one of the straphandles.

  "Tina! I'll be there in a--"

  "There's a man here!" Tina is crying so hard he can barely understand her. "He was in the house! He--"

  Then she's gone, and he knows the voice that replaces hers. He wishes to God he didn't.

  "Hello, Peter," Red Lips says. "Are you on your way?"

  He can't say anything. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. The bus pulls over at the corner of Elm and Breckenridge Terrace, his stop, but Pete only stands there.

  "Don't bother answering that, and don't bother coming home, because no one will be here if you do."

  "He's lying!" Tina yells. "Mom is--"

  Then she howls.

  "Don't you hurt her," Pete says. The few other riders don't look around from their papers or handhelds, because he can't speak above a whisper. "Don't you hurt my sister."

  "I won't if she shuts up. She needs to be quiet. You need to be quiet, too, and listen to me. But first you need to answer two questions. Have you called the police?"

  "No."

  "Have you called anyone?"

  "No." Pete lies without hesitation.

  "Good. Excellent. Now comes the listening part. Are you listening?"

  A large lady with a shopping bag is clambering onto the bus, wheezing. Pete gets off as soon as she's out of the way, walking like a boy in a dream, the phone plastered to his ear.

  "I'm taking your sister with me to a safe place. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks."

  Pete starts to tell him they don't have to do it that way, he'll just tell Red Lips where the notebooks are, then realizes doing that would be a huge mistake. Once Red Lips knows they're in the basement at the Rec, he'll have no reason to keep Tina alive.

  "Are you there, Peter?"

  "Y-Yes."

  "You better be. You just better be. Get the notebooks. When you have them--and not before--call your sister's cell again. If you call for any other reason, I'll hurt her."

  "Is my mother all right?"

  "She's fine, just tied up. Don't worry about her, and don't bother going home. Just get the notebooks and call me."

  With that, Red Lips is gone. Pete doesn't have time to tell him he has to go home, because he'll need Tina's wagon again to haul the cartons. He also needs to get his father's key to the Rec. He returned it to the board in his father's office, and he needs it to get in.

  43

  Morris slips Tina's pink phone into his pocket and yanks a cord from her desktop computer. "Turn around. Hands behind you."

  "Did you shoot her?" Tears are running down Tina's cheeks. "Was that the sound I heard? Did you shoot my moth--"

  Morris slaps her, and hard. Blood flies from Tina's nose and the corner of her mouth. Her eyes widen in shock.

  "You need to shut your quack and turn around. Hands behind you."

  Tina does it, sobbing. Morris ties her wrists together at the small of her back, cinching the knots viciously.

  "Ow! Ow, mister! That's too tight!"

  "Deal with it." He wonders vaguely how many shots might be left in his old pal's gun. Two will be enough; one for the thief and one for the thief's sister. "Walk. Downstairs. Out the kitchen door. Let's go. Hup-two-three-four."

  She looks back at him, her eyes huge and bloodshot and swimming with tears. "Are you going to rape me?"

  "No," Morris says, then adds something that is all the more terrifying because she doesn't understand it: "I won't make that mistake again."

  44

  Linda comes to staring at the ceiling. She knows where she is, Tom's office, but not what has happened to her. The right side of her head is on fire, and when she raises a hand to her face, it comes away wet with blood. The last thing she can remember is Peggy Moran telling her that Tina had gotten sick at school.

  Go get her and take her home, Peggy had said. I'll cover this.

  No, she remembers something else. Something about the mystery money.

  I was going to talk to Pete about it, she thinks. Get some answers. I was playing solitaire on Tom's computer, just killing time while I waited for him to come home, and then--

  Then, black.

  Now, this terrible pain in her head, like a constantly slamming door. It's even worse than the migraines she sometimes gets. Worse even than childbirth. She tries to raise her head and manages to do it, but the world starts going in and out with her heartbeat, first sucking, then blooming, each oscillation accompanied by such godawful agony . . .

  She looks down and sees the front of her gray dress has changed to a muddy purple. She thinks, Oh God, that's a lot of blood. Have I had a stroke? Some kind of brain hemorrhage?

  Surely not, surely those only bleed on the inside, but whatever it is, she needs help. She needs an ambulance, but she can't make her hand go to the phone. It lifts, trembles, and drops back to the floor.

  She hears a yelp of pain from somewhere close, then crying she'd recognize anywhere, even while dying (which, she suspects, she may be). It's Tina.

  She manages to prop herself up on one bloody hand, enough to look out the window. She sees a man hustling Tina down the back steps into the yard. Tina's hands are tied behind her.

  Linda forgets about her pain, forgets about needing an ambulance. A man has broken in, and he's now abducting her daughter. She needs to stop him. She needs the police. She tries to get into the swivel chair behind the desk, but at first she can only paw at the seat. She does a lunging sit-up and for a moment the pain is so intense the world turns white, but she holds on to consciousness and grabs the arms of the chair. When her vision clears, she sees the man opening the back gate and shoving Tina through. Herding her, like an animal on its way to the slaughterhouse.

  Bring her back! Linda screams. Don't you hurt my baby!

  But only in her head. When she tries to get up, the chair turns and she loses her grip on the arms. The world darkens. She hears a terrible gagging sound before she blacks out, and has time to think, Can that be me?

  45

  Things are not golden after the rotary. Instead of open street, they see backed-up traffic and two orange signs. One says FLAGGER AHEAD. The other says ROAD CONSTRUCTION. There's a line of cars waiting while the flagger lets downtown traffic go through. After three minutes of sitting, each one feeling an hour long, Hodges tells Jerome to use the side streets.

  "I wish I could, but we're blocked in." He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, where the line of cars behind them is now backed up almost to the rotary.

  Holly has been bent over her iPad, whacking away. Now she looks up. "Use the sidewalk," she says, then goes back to her magic tablet.

  "There are mailboxes, Hollyberry," Jerome says. "Also a chainlink fence up ahead. I don't think there's room."

  She takes another brief look. "Yeah there is. You may scrape a little, but it won't be the first time for this car. Go on."

  "Who pays the fine if I get arrested on a charge of driving while black? You?"

  Holly rolls her eyes. Jerome turns to Hodges, who sighs and nods. "She's right. There's room. I'll pay your fucking fine."

  Jerome swings right. The Mercedes clips the fender of the car stopped ahead of them, then bumps up onto the sidewalk. Here comes the first mailbox. Jerome swings even farther to the right, now entirely off the street. There's a thud as the driver's side knocks the mailbox off its post, then a drawn-out squall as the passenger side caresses the chainlink fence. A woman in shorts and a halter top is mowing her lawn. She shouts at them as the passenger side of Holly's German U-boat peels away a sign reading NO TRESPASSING NO SOLICITING NO DOOR TO DOOR SALESMEN. She rushes for her driveway, still shouting. Then she just peers, shading her eyes and squinting. Hodges can see her lips moving.


  "Oh, goody," Jerome says. "She's getting your plate number."

  "Just drive," Holly says. "Drive drive drive." And with no pause: "Red Lips is Morris Bellamy. That's his name."

  It's the flagger yelling at them now. The construction workers, who have been uncovering a sewer pipe running beneath the street, are staring. Some are laughing. One of them winks at Jerome and makes a bottle-tipping gesture. Then they are past. The Mercedes thumps back down to the street. With traffic bound for the North Side bottlenecked behind them, the street ahead is blessedly empty.

  "I checked the city tax records," Holly says. "At the time John Rothstein was murdered in 1978, the taxes on 23 Sycamore Street were being paid by Anita Elaine Bellamy. I did a Google search for her name and came up with over fifty hits, she's sort of a famous academic, but only one hit that matters. Her son was tried and convicted of aggravated rape late that same year. Right here in the city. He got a life sentence. There's a picture of him in one of the news stories. Look." She hands the iPad to Hodges.

  Morris Bellamy has been snapped coming down the steps of a courthouse Hodges remembers well, although it was replaced by the concrete monstrosity in Government Square fifteen years ago. Bellamy is flanked by a pair of detectives. Hodges recalls one of them, Paul Emerson. Good police, long retired. He's wearing a suit. So is the other detective, but that one has draped his coat over Bellamy's hands to hide the handcuffs he's wearing. Bellamy is also in a suit, which means the picture was taken either while the trial was ongoing, or just after the verdict was rendered. It's a black-and-white photo, which only makes the contrast between Bellamy's pale complexion and dark mouth more striking. He almost looks like he's wearing lipstick.

  "That's got to be him," Holly says. "If you call the state prison, I'll bet you six thousand bucks that he's out."

  "No bet," Hodges says. "How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?"

  "Ten minutes."

  "Firm or optimistic?"

  Reluctantly, Jerome replies, "Well . . . maybe a tad optimistic."

  "Just do the best you can and try not to run anybody ov--"