Trip Wire_ A Cook County Mystery - Charlotte Carter [64]
I spent a lot of time thinking about that money. Dirty money, Cliff said. How did it get so dirty? What was the prestigious Oscar Mobley doing that nobody but Wilton knew about? I couldn’t cast him in the role of a Mafia hit man or a sleazy blackmailer. But as one of the high-placed citizens above reproach who took bucks from a man like Henry Waddell? As Waddell himself had told me, anything was possible.
Last, Cliff died before I got to ask him something: If Wilton never cracked under torture, never told him where Alvin Flowers’s apartment was, how did Cliff track Alvin down and kill him? My best guess is that he didn’t.
I think the murder of Alvin Flowers was the one killing the cops really did commit. Just as Taylor had said. Maybe his article would be published and blow the lid off the whole filthy cover-up. Maybe. More likely, though, it would be seen as more left-wing conspiracy paranoia.
One thing involved no guesswork at all. I knew it for a fact and I had never wavered from it: Wilton wasn’t killed because he sold out Alvin Flowers. I now realized he was killed because he refused to sell him out.
Turnabouts. There was no end to them.
I live alone now and that’s kind of okay. I don’t mean literally alone. I’m back at Woody and Ivy’s place. But I have my own little universe there. My room, my radio, my books. I miss hearing laughter down the hall, passing a J back and forth, sitting down to meals with a crowd of pretty young people, striding on the street in formation with them, the mean north wind whipping hair into our eyes.
“Did you hear me, Cassandra?” Owen asked.
“No, sorry. I was somewhere else for a minute there.”
“I said, What are you smiling about?”
“Something that happened once. A bunch of us from the commune were on the street one day. This stoned-out young girl comes running up to us. She’s smiling like the Maharishi and her eyeballs are these whirling little pinballs. Anyway, she looks at us and says, ‘Oh, wow, man! You guys! You guys are beautiful, you know? You look like the Mod Squad.’ ”
“The what?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Owen. The TV series.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway, we start cracking up, right?”
“Why?”
“Because the kids in the Mod Squad are undercover cops. This spaced-out little hippie chick thinks we’re beautiful ’cause we look like the pigs.”
He tried gamely to share in the joke, but clearly it meant nothing to him.
In another minute, he asked, “Should we go right up here to Wells Street for a drink? Or should we walk back to my quarter and go to Otto’s, where the stout is better? Don’t you think?”
I took his raw, reddened hand and shoved it in his coat pocket. “Owen,” I said, “you’re the teacher.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have exercised the author’s privilege of intermixing fact and fiction. Some locales in Chicago—head shops, restaurants, book-stores, and so on—have been given slightly different names. Occasionally I have fudged the geography of some South Side and North Side locations. And Forest Street, where Cassandra lived as a child, is wholly imaginary.
About the Author
CHARLOTTE CARTER has worked as an editor and as a teacher. She is the author of the Nanette Hayes mystery series (Warner/Mysterious Press) and the novel Walking Bones (Serpent’s Tail). She is a longtime fan of mystery fiction and film noir. She lives in New York City.
Also by Charlotte Carter
Jackson Park
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Strivers Row/One World Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte Carter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Strivers Row/One