Jilling (Kit Tolliver #6) (The Kit Tolliver Stories)

J
ILLING

L
AWRENCE
B
LOCK

Copyright © 2013, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design: Jayne E. Smith

Ebook Design:
JW Manus

T
here was no Graham Weider listed in the Chicago white pages.

That was annoying, but couldn’t be said to amount to a dead end. He was some sort of corporate executive, and she seemed to remember a wedding ring, so he’d be more likely to live in a suburb than within the city limits.

A branch library had all the suburban phone books. No Graham Weider there, either. But there were two G Weiders, one in Lake Forest, the other in Naperville. “
Hello, is Graham there?
” And he wasn’t, and neither party knew anything about a Graham Weider. The G in Naperville stood for Gloria, and the one in Lake Forest wasn’t saying.

Hmmm.

Well, all that meant was that his number was unlisted. Or listed in his wife’s name, as there were plenty of Weiders scattered throughout Chicagoland. Should she call them all?

The library had computers available, but you had to sign up, and there was a long list ahead of her. She found an Internet café and searched for Graham Weider Illinois and came up empty.

A guy hit on her in the Internet café. Her frustration must have been showing, because his approach was, “You know, whatever you’re looking for, I bet I could help you find it.” He had a couple of piercings, along with a rattlesnake flag tattoo with the traditional
Don’t Tread On Me
updated to
Don’t Y’all Fuck With Me.
Not an improvement, she thought, but maybe it was supposed to be ironic. He was the sort of young man for whom irony was a sort of default setting.

“We’ll never know,” she said, and his expression suggested that he enjoyed the put-down more than anything an acceptance might have led to. That was almost enough to make her change her mind, but not really. Better to take the tattoo’s advice.

If only she knew something about Graham Weider besides his name.

His employer, for instance. It was a corporation, and he must have mentioned its name, but if it had ever registered on her memory, time had long since pressed the Delete key.

And she couldn’t just call firms at random. Even if she limited herself to Fortune 500 corporations, how many of them had Chicago offices? Four hundred? Four-fifty?

No, that wouldn’t work. But his New York hotel would probably have his business address on file, and
that
would let her know where he worked.

If only she could remember the hotel.

Well, it was somewhere in New York, specifically somewhere in midtown Manhattan. And it was a first-rate hotel, not some budget bargain spot. But which one?

Why the hell couldn’t she remember? She’d been there, for God’s sake, and not once but twice—once when he took her to his room and fucked her, and another time when he stood her up and she went to the front desk looking for him. And he’d left a note for her, on a piece of hotel stationery, but of course she hadn’t kept it.

Dammit anyway. She could remember standing in the lobby, reading the note. She could even recall the supercilious look on the face of the desk clerk.

Or was that some other snotty clerk, in some other hotel on some other occasion? Or was it all just her imagination trying to fill in the blanks?

Graham Weider, she thought. Graham Weider from Chicago, not Joe Blow from Kokomo. Why was he giving her so much trouble?

She tried the phone again, working her way through the Weiders. More often than not she’d get a machine, and rang off without leaving a message. The Weiders she managed to reach had never heard of a Graham Weider. “How does he spell it?” one of them asked her, and she started in: “G, R, A—” and was interrupted. “No, Weider,” the woman said. “There are different spellings, you know.”

And that sent her off on a whole new tangent, checking all the area phone directories, looking for Wieder and Wheider and Weeder and Weidter and every other permutation she could think of. A couple of them had the initial G, which triggered some fruitless phone calls, but nothing led anywhere useful.

She gave up on the Weiders, however they spelled their names, and thought about giving up on Graham altogether. Then she remembered something she’d read about Thomas Edison, and how he’d invented the lightbulb. It didn’t just form over his head, as in a cartoon; it took hundreds upon hundreds of experiments, in which the inventor and his assistants employed one material after another in an effort to find a workable filament, one that would glow when electric current ran through it without burning up or out in the process.

At one point, someone consoled Edison for his lack of progress. And he replied that he was making wonderful progress, that he had already discovered umpteen hundred substances that would not work.

That was inspiring, all right, but she couldn’t see that it led anywhere. She went out and walked for a while, stopped for a late-afternoon cappuccino at a little coffeehouse that billed itself as “the anti-Starbucks,” and sat there wondering how she’d come upon the Edison anecdote, and whether or not he’d actually ever said it.

And then, remarkably, a lightbulb, complete with tungsten filament, formed above her own head.

There were a great many Weiders, spelled one way or another, living in or near Chicago, and most of them didn’t answer the phone, and the ones who did were no help at all. And how many Fortune 500 companies were there? That question was right up there with
Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?
and
What color is orange juice?
There were 500 of them, far too many to call, and there was no guarantee that Graham Weider’s employer was on that list in the first place.

But there were far fewer A-list hotels in midtown Manhattan. And, no matter what time of day she called, there’d be somebody there to answer the phone.

She went back to the Internet café and pulled all the midtown four-star hotels from the hotels.com site, then found a quiet bench in Lincoln Park and worked her way down the list from the top. “
Hi, my name’s Susan Richardson and I’m on the organizing committee for the upcoming class reunion for Oak Park High. It’s my job to track down the graduates we’ve lost track of, and one of our class members, well, about the only thing anyone could come up with was that he always stays at your establishment on business trips to New York. So I was wondering—
”

The people she talked to were remarkably cooperative. Maybe it was the wholly frivolous nature of her request; she had the feeling they’d have made less of an effort if she’d claimed an urgent business reason to establish contact with Graham Weider, but how could they resist something as pointless as a high school reunion?

And perhaps it was their positive attitude that sustained her when the first ten hotels were unable to find Graham Weider in their records.
Ten more failed filaments,
she thought.
Ten steps closer to success.

Her eleventh call was to the Sofitel on West 44th, and this time the lightbulb blazed like the sun.