Requiem for a Realtor (6 page)

“Presbyterian!” It just came out. Willie hadn't been to church in half a century.

“Get together with another Presbyterian and you'll understand.”

Willie asked around about Stanley, discreetly, and it was worse than he would have thought. The guy was a total ass, a suit, zilch. But Wanda was a woman, and, increasingly, Stanley was her man. When he was in the room, she sang to him. And she was seeing him during the day.

Wanda had rented an apartment when the deal with the Rendezvous became permanent, but Willie distrusted security and kept his room at the Frosinone. It was a hotel on the skids, his kind of place, he became part of the background there, the permanent guest no one noticed. He had an old upright in his room on which he played Mozart, using a lot of soft pedal so the rapping on the walls wouldn't begin. Someone rented a room for the night and thought they owned the hotel.

Willie was not proud of his spying, but he had to know how serious Wanda was about Stanley. As for Stanley, nothing Willie had learned suggested he could be serious about anyone but Stanley. At least once a week they spent the afternoon together in Wanda's apartment. Willie got so he could recognize the car and know Stanley was up there. The affair was a threat to what he realized he considered his life. What the hell would happen to him if Wanda ever decided to break up their partnership? Stanley Collins was a menace, there was no doubt about it.

“You should get married and settle down, Wanda.”

“You trying to get rid of me?”

“This is no life for a woman.”

“No sale, Willie. You're stuck with me.”

If she had admitted it, he might have doubted her. He became convinced that Stanley Collins was going to put him on the dustheap of has-beens. The thought filled him with terror.

11

The Frosinone Hotel had been the U. S. Grant until the Pianone family took it over and renamed it after their ancestral city. Architecturally, it claimed to have been designed by someone in the Sullivan school, and it was this claim that Bob Oliver had come to inquire about when he was considering an article about the buildings of Fox River.

The way the reporter looked around the lobby made Primo Verdi, the manager, certain the Frosinone would not make the cut. Verdi led him to an arrangement of chairs in a corner of the lobby and, as luck would have it, Oliver got the chair with the broken leg. He tipped to one side as he settled in.

“Here, take this one,” Verdi urged.

Oliver made a gesture with his hand. “I feel tilted anyway. Why hasn't this place been condemned?”

“For what?”

“For impersonating a hotel.”

Oliver put his notebook back in a side pocket, leaning to do so, a movement which made him more or less upright, given the tilt of his chair. “Seriously, I thought this place was closed.”

“We're open twenty-four hours a day.”

Verdi wasn't worried about this visit. One, he could see the Frosinone would not figure in any article Bob Oliver wrote about the city's architecture. Two, nothing got into the papers the Pianones did not want to get in, so why worry? He satisfied the reporter's curiosity about the rundown hotel that it was Verdi's fate to manage.

Fifty percent occupancy isn't too bad for any hotel, and the Frosinone could count on that. Two floors, six and seven, were assigned to the model escorts who brought their johns to the Frosinone, and then there were the permanent residents, those who rented by the month, guests like Willie Boiardo, the musician. When his neighbors complained about Willie's piano, Verdi would ask him to play on the grand in the ballroom, the piano Willie used when he practiced with Wanda, his partner. Verdi was an audience of one as Willie went through a repertoire of operatic themes. What was an artist like Willie doing playing in a joint, Verdi wanted to know.

“Speaking of which,” Willie said.

“I left it in your room, in the bathroom cabinet.”

Maybe that was the difference, concert pianists didn't get hooked on drugs. Willie's supply was courtesy of the Pianones, the message enigmatically delivered by Peanuts, the Pianone nephew who was impersonating a cop.

“You try to collect, I'll break your legs.”

One of the uncles, the head of the family, had heard Willie play on the ballroom grand, and when he learned of the musician's habit, offered to finance a cure.

“Who's sick?”

The uncle had shrugged. The role of reformer didn't fit him. But he resolved to take care of Willie's habit gratis. Hence the message from Peanuts.

Tuttle, the lawyer, usually accompanied Peanuts on his periodic visits, which were no doubt meant to make sure Verdi was not taking money from Willie Boiardo.

“I like this place,” Tuttle would say, pushing his tweed hat to the back of his head and looking around the lobby. “It's got class.”

Tuttle also professed to like the food in the hotel restaurant where the chandeliers and elegant china were mementos of the great days of the hotel. The same menu was now offered every day of the week, but Tuttle always pored over it as if it represented a new challenge. Verdi joined their table from time to time, having a glass of wine while Tuttle and Peanuts enjoyed their Salisbury steaks. These two were beer drinkers and complained when bottles were not brought to the table. Verdi told the waiter to put the beer in a wine bucket. He had a residual sense of what was fitting in the former U. S. Grant hotel.

“How's business, Tuttle?”

“Good, good.” He chewed reflectively. “I don't think I've ever had Salisbury steak like this.”

“Many people say that.” But not with the admiration there was in Tuttle's voice.

“I told Bob Oliver about this place. He's thinking of doing one of his features on Fox River hotels.”

“He came by.”

“Was his photographer with him?” Tuttle asked slyly.

“I don't think he was impressed by the Frosinone.”

“Good,” Peanuts said.

All in all, a conversation with these two was about as rewarding as one with Boiardo. Many jobs are boring, but working in a hotel carries boredom to new depths. Verdi stayed because leaving would involve a decision, and he had quit making decisions. He was sixty years old and what future he had stretched before him like a barren moonscape. There had been a time when the sight of one of the model escorts would awaken an earlier version of himself, but Verdi tried to tell himself that all that was behind him now. He would have had no regrets if it were. In his experience, women were poison, and the consolations did not begin to make up for the aggravation. He had married three times and none of them had lasted a year. The last wife he had brought to his suite in the hotel, and within a week she was crawling the walls.

“There's nothing to do!” Her name was Flora and he had met her on a plane coming back from a weekend in Vegas. They lined up the empty little liquor bottles on their trays as they winged their way back to Chicago. When they landed, they headed for a bar in O'Hare. Verdi decided he was in love just before he passed out in the O'Hare Hilton. When he awoke with a roaring head and the roar of ascending and descending planes all around him, he was surprised to find Flora beside him. She opened her puffy eyes.

“You said we'd get married.”

So they got married, and he brought her back to the Frosinone where she learned the meaning of boredom. Then, one day in the lobby, one of the girls from the sixth floor cried out, “Flora! Where have you been?”

“Vegas.”

“I thought you was in Pittsburgh.”

Obviously they had worked together. That was the end of Flora so far as Verdi was concerned, and he didn't nix her plan to move onto the sixth floor and go back to work. He asked Tuttle to handle the divorce but the tweed hat went north and south. “I don't take divorce cases.”

“Don't you have to?”

“I'd turn in my licence first.”

“Geez. What's the big deal?”

“Marriage is sacred.”

“You married?”

“No.”

“I thought so. I could tell you stories.”

Mrs. Stanley Collins would be included in future stories. That night she showed up as the shy partner in a dubious couple. The guy she was with signed in as Jones and paid cash in advance. A real quickie, they were gone in an hour. Verdi looked forward to telling Bob Oliver the story, knowing the lady was his sister, running the risk of being hit by the reporter. Well, he would enjoy it in anticipation. Oliver would have trouble getting out of the broken chair in the lobby, giving Verdi time to flee to the safety of the desk. In his anticipating mind's eye Oliver just glared at him and then went through the revolving doors. Or tried to. They were on the fritz. He was lucky he hadn't been caught in them. He got out of the revolving doors and out of the hotel and Verdi breathed an imagined sigh of relief.

12

Phil Keegan, captain of detectives in the Fox River police department, parked on the road that ran along the side of St. Hilary's rectory and went across the lawn to the kitchen door. He entered without knocking, and Marie turned from the stove and looked at him without surprise.

“Were you at the noon Mass?”

“Couldn't make it. Does he have a guest for lunch?”

“If you stay.”

“Good.”

He wanted to make sure that Jameson, the dentist, wasn't hanging around. The man had become a frequent presence and Phil realized he resented it. The fact was he was a little jealous. He considered himself Roger Dowling's closest friend, at least among lay people, and the rectory had become a haven for him. Long ago Phil had been at Quigley, a couple classes behind Roger Dowling, but Latin had proved too much for him, and at that time Latin was crucial for anyone thinking of the priesthood. So Phil had left and eventually married and became a cop. When his wife died, the bottom fell out of his life. His two daughters were married, and each lived hundreds of miles away. A life of loneliness loomed. Then Roger Dowling had been made pastor of St. Hilary's. Phil told Roger he had known him at Quigley, one thing led to another, and soon Phil was a welcome guest at the rectory without need of an invitation.

Roger liked to hear of the cases they were working on, and often his priestly interest was engaged. If Phil was the representative of justice, Roger represented mercy, and their friendship was proof that the two were compatible. The smarmy Jameson seemed to jeopardize that.

“It's not Wednesday,” Marie said.

“Who said it was?”

“Wednesday is the dentist's day off.”

He should have known Marie would notice what he thought of Jameson. He suspected she thought pretty much the same thing herself. Roger was another story. The pastor might tease Marie, and Phil, too, if he had a chance, but Phil had never heard him knock another person. He realized he would have been shocked if Roger revealed a distaste for Jameson, or anyone else. It brought home to him how much of ordinary conversation consists in raking others over the coals. Roger was critical of the Cubs, of course, but that was necessary for salvation, or at least for peace of mind.

Several times Roger had jokingly referred to himself as a penitent and maybe that was the basis for his acceptance of others. Phil knew what he had meant. The pressures of the marriage tribunal had driven Roger gradually to drink. Eventually that had spelled the end of what until then had been a promising clerical career. Roger went off for a cure in Wisconsin, but the real cure had been St. Hilary's. This was the life he had wanted to lead as a priest, a pastor, not a bureaucrat sitting in a downtown office processing hopeless pleas for annulment.

Phil was sitting at the kitchen table having what Roger would have referred to as a preprandial beer when the pastor came in. His face lit up at the sight of Phil.

“Just a homeless person looking for a handout, Roger.”

“Welcome to the soup kitchen.”

“Soup kitchen!” Marie cried. “Well, I like that.”

“What's on?” Phil asked, looking toward the stove. “It smells good.”

Marie shooed them into the dining room where Roger said grace slowly in Latin and then, on signal, Marie came in with lunch.

“Eggs benedict!” Phil said. “I love them.”

“Blesséd eggs,” Roger murmured. “Or blessed eggs. Or maybe monastic.”

Phil ignored him. There were moments with Roger when it was necessary to ignore obscure remarks. No doubt they made sense in some world or other. This one seemed to rely on Latin, so Phil was doubly shy.

“I didn't see you at Mass.”

“I wasn't there.”

“Busy?”

Phil nodded, concentrating on the food. Marie had brought him another beer, pouring it for him with great deference. In the kitchen he could drink from the bottle, but not in the dining room. There was always beer, and harder stuff in the rectory, as if Roger were still proving to himself that it held no attraction for him.

Marie came and went and finally sat at the end of the table closest to the kitchen, side saddle, ready to jump up if need be.

“Busy with what?”

“A hit-and-run. Cy went to the morgue with the body.”

Marie made a face. “No details, please.”

“I don't have any.”

“Who was killed?”

Phil chewed thoughtfully and took a drink of beer. “He was a Realtor. Nobody you would know.”

“A Realtor?”

“A partner in the Sawyer and Collins Agency.”

A moment's silence, and then Marie asked, “Which one?”

Phil realized that Father Dowling was looking at him intently. Marie, too, was staring.

“Collins.”

“My God.”

Part Two

1

The Fox River police department had neither the personnel nor the bureaucratic division of labor of its big city counterparts, but even in its modest compartmentalization, hit-and-runs fell within the scope of the detective division's purview. Thus, if he were capable of expressing surprise, Cy Horvath might have reacted to Phil Keegan's interest in the death of Stanley Collins.