Dark Blonde (16 page)

Miss Mathews answered the door looking like a bleached sheet. Her eyes blank, red-lined, her hands trembling. I thought she was going to hug me, but she led me into the Gateswood foyer and down a long hallway to Henry’s den. Following, I pictured the pale silky curves of her stomach and thighs, and wondered what she’d be like climaxing. It was a dirty little thought. She was the kind of neurotic mouse that grows on a guy, brings out the protector in him, but I knew I’d wind up slapping her. I should have slapped myself.

At first glance Henry Gateswood might have been taken for a CPA. He looked much smaller than his campaign pictures. He was a rather slim bald man of average height, not quite skinny, though with an ample waistline. He was carefully dressed in a tailored pinstripe navy blue suit, light blue dress shirt and yellow paisley tie. His hands were thin, almost graceful. The intense blue of his deep-set eyes looked inside me disinterestedly, magnetizing his otherwise dull face. His election posters displayed a wide smile with perfect teeth. He had solid features and unquestionable charisma, but not one out of a hundred women would describe him as handsome.

He stood when I entered and moved easily around his desk to extend his hand, a veteran clasp of countless political intros. His eyes were clear, steady, surprisingly youthful, the sort of blue eyes you might find tucked in baby stroller blankets. There wasn’t a care in the world in those eyes, or at least no hint of one. I understood the man’s appeal in the first ten seconds. He made you relax.

He gestured for me to take a chair. The room was cavernous, more in keeping with the Vatican than a residence. Nearby, a fireplace large enough to back a truck into, with a puny fire breathing in its midst looked lonely. I sat down and glanced around. The ceiling, some fifteen feet up, wore frescoes of little fat boys chasing little winged girls with legs too chubby to escape. The furnishings were rich antiques. The cherry desk was clear and clean. The ticking of a massive grandfather clock filled the room.

Henry Gateswood had made his dough by building and selling a trucking firm, long haul from Chicago to the east coast. The new owners drove the company out of business in five years. Henry’s money had been properly placed in the commodities market and had grown tenfold, or so Kup claimed. I leaned back into an ox-blood leather chair large enough to seat three, feeling like a kid in knickers about to ask for a raise in his allowance.

I sized Henry up, the pork belly king of Chicago. It was an unfortunate nickname the Whipple campaign used in their campaign to characterize Henry’s liberal politics. Or mischaracterize them, given your political stance.

“Thank you for coming so quickly. I apologize for not meeting with you sooner. As you can understand I’ve been weighed down by the events of the past week. But now there’s urgency in my seeing you.”

If he felt urgent, his manner didn’t show it.

“A full plate, I believe they call it, Senator, if I can call you that now that Whipple’s out of the race.”

“I suppose I’ll get used to it. Now, I have little time to waste and I need your help.” His face was still relaxed, eyes clear. He might as well be on the deck of cruise liner taking a month off.

“Just say the word.”

“I’m terribly concerned about Julia. She didn’t come home last night or the night before, as you know. I believe the police found her car around the corner from your residence. Is there something you might tell me to help locate her? When did you last see her? Where was she headed? Was she with anyone?”

Even-keeled, calm, measured, but laying a path of eggshells for me to tiptoe over. I sifted in my inside pocket for a crumpled pack of Luckies. I held one up to gain permission. He nodded and glided a lighter under my nose. I took a deep drag and let the smoke head to the ceiling, a trip that might take all day. If Henry didn’t know who Julia was by now, my bluntness wasn’t going to educate him. And, if he did know, I couldn’t shock him. I gave it to him straight, the only way that seemed right, but without the kind of sloppy details that Rick liked hearing:

“Your missus tapped on my door just after one two nights ago, somewhat distraught. Said she was leaving you, something a lot of wives and husbands talk about until they’re too old to find the front door. She wasn’t overly upset, a disagreement she characterized as a major brouhaha with you, I believe. I’m a single man, not qualified to be a marriage counselor, so I can’t judge. She left the next morning sometime around six, pretty relaxed. Didn’t say where she was going and parked around the block for reasons of her own. A lot of women have done stranger things when they visit me. It was light out when she left so I didn’t walk her to her car, though now I realize I should have. Said she came to gave me a check, to stay on the case for two more weeks. Evidently, it was important to her.”

“I see.” Henry’s expression didn’t change but his hands gripped the arms of the chair enough to perceptibly whiten his fingernails. Practiced control.

A charged emptiness hung in the air. The snapping of the fire echoed in the cavernous room.

He had more to say and there were at least 57 ways to say it. Henry seemed to be sorting through each of them. Finally he stood and turned to the fire, holding his palms out as if to warm himself, though the room was at least 80 degrees.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said, “but until recently our marriage has worked very well, though an unconventional one, to be sure. Julia’s an ambitious woman, an attribute not unnatural for a politician’s wife, but she’s more than that, she’s driven. I should say, at times, well, quite frankly, she’s irrational. I don’t blame a man like you for taking what she offers, God knows I took it in exchange for her elevation in social class and my political career. But I might as well come out and say it — Julia’s become unbalanced. I’ve been gently trying to persuade her to get treatment.”

Something was off. “That’s strange. She seems quite lucid. Even that night she was clear of mind.”

Henry took a cigar out of his inside pocket and cut the end off, then worked his lighter under it until the aroma had reached my nose. He paced in front of the wide fireplace searching for the right words again. Then he stopped, looked down at the cigar and flung it into the flames. He faced me and squared his shoulders.

“Yes, she can be that way. Briefly. That’s the hell of it. But I lost her months ago. She’s not the same person. Flies into a rage at the slightest contradiction, has her own ideas of everything from what suit I’m to wear to hiring you, right in the middle of the campaign. I didn’t mind when it was to find Gail, but since the murder, you understand, I don’t wish to appear to lack faith in the police. Now she’s left me, or worse. She threatened to that night, and yes, we had words over several things, including you continuing to be in our hire. Today Miss Mathews called everywhere. Julia’s nowhere to be found. That’s not like her, to stay out two nights in a row, to leave her car around the corner from a man’s house she spent much of the night with. The worst part is this.”

He pulled a drawer out of the end table next to his chair and took out a blank eight by ten yellow envelope and handed it to me.

Inside was a woman’s glove, silver with embroidered script initials JG. Smeared the length of the glove along one side was a large recent bloodstain.

“How did you receive this?”

“That’s the strange part. It was left on the dash of my Mercedes, which is always locked in the garage. The car hadn’t been broken into.”

“Who has access to the garage or keys to your car?”

“Julia. Miss Mathews. No one else.”

I turned the glove inside out and examined it closely. Most of the blood had not penetrated the suede-like material. “It appears the glove was wiped against a bloody surface. The hand probably wasn’t the source. Someone is warning you and if they have her, odds are there’ll be a follow up demand. The glove effectively primes you so you’ll be more agreeable to whatever terms they send next. It’s meant to alarm you. If you contact the police, they’ll probably advise you to wait three days before filing a missing person’s report. Even with the bloody glove, without a note or call of some kind demanding terms, they might not look for kidnapping, given your quarrel. They’ll assume she either did leave you or is cooling off in a hotel somewhere.”

“Even with her sister’s recent murder?”

“Cops can be stupid sometimes.”

“What would you advise?”

“Given the gruesome nature of Gail’s murder, it’s possible the same people have taken Julia, but this time they want something. Or, possibly someone’s playing off the recent murder to scare you into some kind of payment or concession. It’s vital to track her down as quickly as possible. A hostage situation is a ticklish affair, if that’s what this is. There’s always the possibility that Julia herself left the glove. You say she’s unbalanced. If so, that could explain it. Until we know for sure we must prepare for the worst. With your permission, I’ll have my partner put a recording device on your phone. And I’d like to examine your garage and your car and question Miss Mathews concerning her keys. First I have a few rather personal questions of you, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“I realize the police have asked you this, but is there anyone who has a grudge against you or Julia? An old boyfriend, someone with a complaint? Perhaps another man Julia’s been seeing?”

It was a question I didn’t want the answer to, but one I had to ask.

“As I told the police, outside of the normal political opponents I can think of no one, and none of them are the type that might resort to violence. As for Julia’s personal life, we’ve agreed not to share that.”

I certainly wasn’t about to share my hot little slice of Julia’s personal life.

“Do you know Kermit Brockway?”

Something changed in Henry’s eyes, an expansion of the pupil maybe.

He stared into the fire. “I’ve met him. He’s the legal counsel for Whipple’s campaign, as you probably know.”

The good congressman was holding back. “He had a connection to the French prosecution. One of his partners defended him. What do you know about that?”

“What I read in the newspapers and by reputation. I can’t afford to be seen with such men.”

“Have you or Julia ever met him, socially or politically? Or his law partners?”

“I can’t speak for Julia, but I haven’t. No. Except one time he was at a benefit and French arrived with Julia’s sister. I was pretty upset about it and refused to have my pictures taken with such a gangster. Gail was huffy about it so we left. She could be extremely demanding and manipulative.”

“What about French? You break bread or otherwise meet the man any other time?”

“Except for that one night I never met him again. I did talk to him once on the phone when Gail felt he’d threatened her. He denied everything. A week later she gave her grand jury testimony and French disappeared.”

I stood and walked to the fireplace. I finished my cigarette and flipped the butt into the flames. The idea that Julia was unbalanced didn’t feel right. At the time it wasn’t an idea I liked very much. Julia didn’t seem unbalanced any time I’d seen her, certainly not when she came to my place and not when Burk had badgered her. Had her beauty blinded me? The act at Alfie’s with the disguise and the strange way she’d acted when finding Gail’s body suggested Henry might be right, although I’d attributed the first instance to her need for secrecy and the second to shock. A man can explain away a barge load of evidence if he wants a dame to be someone else. That went double for a stunner like Julia.

“When and where did you meet Julia and Gail?”

“I met Julia about three years ago in Omaha, which is where she’s from. She was in the pageant then, and had made the final cut. I was there attending a conference on poverty programs. A good friend of mine was judging the pageant and asked my opinion. I thought it a bit irregular but I was introduced to the final four ladies. When Julia won she came to my hotel room the next day to thank me and we had lunch. She was exquisite, charming and since my late wife was killed on the expressway a decade before, I’d become increasingly lonely.”

“I don’t suppose she wore a full length fox mink with nothing on underneath?”

Henry’s face tightened as if his head had been shoved inside a freezer. For the first time something besides calm floated in his eyes. The question made me the heel, a talent that comes with the investigator’s license. I had a knack for questions like that.

“Never mind,” I said, “go on. When did you meet Gail?”

“Julia and I saw each other a lot in Omaha that week and the next month Julia and Gail moved to Chicago. I met Gail when I visited Julia after the move. They’d rented an apartment on the North Side. Julia took a position in public relations for Montgomery Ward’s while Gail mostly slummed. They parted over that and Gail moved in with one shady man after another until she met Christy French. She was very jealous of Julia, even coming on to me when it suited her and she wanted things.”

“What sorts of things?”

Henry pinched the skin under his chin and looked up at the fat kids on the ceiling “Sometimes money, favors — show passes, legal assistance for her friends, recommendations for jobs for them, that sort of thing.”

“And she offered you sexual favors?”

Henry kneaded his fist with his palm like it was a wad of dough. His eyes shifted around the room. He took in a bushel of air. “It was foolish of me, I suppose, but yes, a few times. She’d drop by without calling when Julia was out. The first time I helped her lease a North Side apartment with a lake view. Gail answered the door in a peignoir and fed me slings while we waited for Julia’s flight from Omaha to arrive that evening. The next thing I knew we were in bed. I made it clear it wouldn’t happen again.”