JIMMY WAS STILL UP, watching Petula Clark sing a duet with Dean Martin on The Dean Martin Show. It didn’t seem like the kind of show Jim would happily watch.
I walked around the couch, expecting to find him sound asleep. Instead, he was still on his stomach, engrossed in whatever book he had been reading since dinner.
I smiled. Jimmy had come a long way.
I shut off the television.
“Hey!” he said.
“Hey yourself,” I said. “Did you finish everything?”
“No, I still have this.” He waved the book at me. I still couldn’t see the title. “And I like the noise.”
I also noticed that since he was preoccupied, his grammar was better. It made me wonder if he had been using bad grammar as much to annoy me instead of as an example of his ignorance.
I decided not to point it out.
He got up, book in hand, and turned the TV back on. Now, Martin was joking with Gale Gordon. Jimmy made a face, but didn’t change the channel. He went back to the couch and the book.
First, I did the dishes, making enough noise to mostly drown out the inanity on the television. I hated hearing Marvella echo my thoughts on the difficulties of what I wanted to do.
I also didn’t want to bring innocents into this. I had already ruled out Franklin and Jonathan without even telling them. I certainly wasn’t going to bring in “tough” women if I could help it.
Although Marvella’s comment about the girls being unwilling to come with me resonated.
The dishes took less time than I expected. I glanced over Jimmy’s shoulder, saw that he had about ten pages left, and went into my office. I grabbed a legal pad and brought it back to the kitchen table.
While Jimmy and Dean Martin finished up, I diagrammed the interior of that hotel, as best I could remember it. Then I leaned back and stared at my drawing.
That was a lot of real estate. More than I could cover alone. I needed to clear the place out and then check to make sure it was empty. Those one-way mirrors bothered me, and so did the boarded-up windows.
I would have to be very careful.
I realized that the television show had ended and late night news had started. I listened for a moment, heard nothing about
a body, and felt some of the tension leave me.
Then I stood and looked at the couch. Jimmy was sound asleep on top of the closed book.
I went into his room, pulled down the covers on his bed, and turned on the night light. I left the door open, came out, and got him. I debated putting him in his pajamas, but that seemed redundant. I supposed smart—or at least attentive— parents would have had him change when they realized he was going to take longer than usual on his homework.
He was making little snoring sounds. I crouched, and picked him up, careful not to wake him. He was getting heavy. There would soon come a time when I wouldn’t be able to do this. But for the moment, he was still a kid. I cradled him close as I carried him to bed.
I took off his shoes, and put his pajamas on the chair next to the bed. I covered him up, and pulled the door closed.
That was the other problem I would have on this mission. If some of those girls were in as bad of shape as Lacey had been, they wouldn’t be able to walk out. They would need someone to carry them. A group of women couldn’t do that. And Marvella seemed to believe these girls would be afraid of men.
I sighed.
I went back to the kitchen, and froze as Floyd Kalber’s voice informed me that police had discovered a body on Chicago’s South Side. I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was ten after ten, which meant that this was not a main story.
I wasn’t sure if I should have been grateful or not.
“Police identified the victim as Clyde Voss,” Kalber
intoned. “He was found shot to death in his apartment….”
I walked to the back of the couch so that I could see Kalber. His hair looked sprayed on and his suit, some kind of plaid, seemed to vibrate on the black-and-white screen. He stared through the television as if he could actually see me.
“…Voss, a convicted drug dealer released last year on parole, was under a blanket, surrounded by drug paraphernalia. The building’s manager discovered the body while investigating a complaint about the victim’s blaring television. A police spokesman said that such noise was not uncommon in Voss’s apartment. The neighbors say it took two days to get up the nerve to complain. Voss had threatened many of them at gunpoint when they had complained before, so they were willing to put up with the sound.”
I swallowed hard, my hand gripping the top of the couch.
“Police have no leads, but neighbors believe Voss’s death was the result of a drug deal gone bad. In other news, police in Rogers Park…”
I let out the breath I had been holding. No leads. A drug
deal gone bad. No one had even tied Voss to the Starlite Hotel.
I glanced at my front door almost involuntarily. If the police didn’t contact me in the next few days, they wouldn’t contact me at all. Police didn’t work hard on drug-related homicides, especially those that occurred on the South Side.
But I couldn’t be complacent. I had to remain wary. Someone at the hospital might have heard Lacey talk; someone might have figured out that I went after Voss.
I had to be prepared for questions, and I had to remain calm if anyone spoke to me.
I shut off the television, trying to identify my mood. It took a moment.
I was relieved, relieved that Voss’s body wasn’t waiting out there to be discovered at the exact right moment. Relieved the police had tied him to drugs, not the Starlite. Relieved that, at least according to this report, no one really cared about him.
Someone probably had once. Just like an entire family cared about Donna Loring, even though she slipped deep into a life that Marvella said no one could escape from.
Maybe that had happened with Voss as well.
It didn’t matter to me. I had met the man he had become, not the boy he had been. And the man he had become had tried to destroy someone I loved.
Just like the Starlite was doing every day.
I returned to my diagram.
It would take planning and a little bit of help, but I could get that hotel away from the school.
And I could do it in one very long night.
I just had to be as willing to destroy the Starlite as I had been to get rid of Voss.
I had crossed lines there. I needed to cross lines again.
I needed the right kind of help.
And I knew just where to get it.