“I bet. Security pretty good up here? I mean you can’t just walk in, right?”
The girl was looking over at the body again. The interview would go quicker if Lynch did it in one of the other suites, but most people didn’t see a lot of dead bodies and it kept them off balance, kept them from working on their answers too hard. If it didn’t, then that told him something, too. So Lynch liked to do interviews with a stiff around.
“I’m sorry, what?” she said.
“Security,” Lynch repeated.
“Oh, yeah. This level has its own elevators and ramps – you have to have a special ticket just to get up here.”
“You need to show any ID?”
“Not if you have a ticket. I mean unless you need to pick it up at Will Call or something.”
“Did Mr Stein leave any Will Calls tonight?”
“I don’t know. They’d know downstairs, I guess.”
Lynch waved a uniform over, sent him down to check; also told him to run down any records on Stein’s box, his contract, that sort of thing. The girl was looking at the body again. Lynch waited until she turned back.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s OK. That’s not normal for most people. What can you tell me about tonight? Who’d he have up here?”
“People from his firm mostly, I think. Mendy Axelman – he worked with Mr Stein, he’s here all the time. He was here early with a lot of younger guys. I think they were traders who work with Abe and Mendy. I recognized a couple of them. They bring them up to the box as a reward or something. Bulls went up by like twenty-five points midway through the last period, and they all took off. The younger guys were all heading for a party somewhere – one of them slipped me his card on the way out, told me I should stop by after the game, that it was going to go late.”
“You got the card?”
She handed it to Lynch. Mike Schwartz, Stein & Co. Business contact info on the front, address for a townhouse in Streeterville handwritten on the back along with another phone number – probably the guy’s cell. Lynch called another uniform over, told him to get a unit over to that address, make sure everybody stayed put until he could get there. Turned back to the girl.
“Were you going to go?”
“What?”
“To the party. Nice neighborhood.”
A weak smile; she shrugged. “Yeah, probably. I mean, not now.”
Lynch nodded, straightened his leg, his right knee barking at him some the way it did when it got cold like this. Green Bay had taken him in the third round back in 1985: strong safety out of Boston College. Blew out his knee in his second preseason game, and they couldn’t do shit with knees back then like they could now. Came back from rehab half a step slower. Wasn’t a half-step he had to give.
“Anybody else?” Lynch asked.
“One other guy came right toward the end of the game. He was different.”
“Different how?”
She made a thinking face. “I dunno. Rougher I guess? He was real tan, which you don’t see that much around here this time of year. This wasn’t a just-back-from-vacation tan, more like, you know, weathered? And he wasn’t in the usual clothes. It was mostly suits with Mr Stein. This guy was dressed casual, but not like Banana Republic, you know? You see these guys sometimes in the cargo pants and safari shirts, and it’s like Halloween – like they’re in a costume? This guy was like whoever it is they’re trying to dress up to be.”
“You said tan, so a white guy. He tall, short?”
“Not real tall, maybe five foot nine. Not big. Pretty broad shoulders I guess, but lean. I mean you look at some guys and you can just tell. This guy, he was in shape. He just looked hard. Gray hair – not like old-man gray, but like Anderson Cooper gray? Hair was pretty short, not a fancy cut.”
“You hear a name?”
“No, which is a little strange. Mr Stein is always introducing everybody. You know, like ‘Ashley, this is my friend so-and-so. We go way back. Take good care of him.’ I’d seen this guy go in, so I stopped to see if they need anything, and Mr Stein was just ‘Thanks, Ashley; we’re good for now.’”
“Like he wanted some privacy, maybe?” Lynch asked.
She nodded, like she hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, exactly like that.” A look on her face like there was more.
“Something else?” Lynch asked.
“Just this other guy? I could swear I’ve seen him before. At the same time, I’m positive I’ve never met him. That make any sense?”
“Seen him here, you mean?”
“That’s the weird part. I’m real good with faces, and I know I’ve never met him. But his face keeps nagging at me.”
“OK. Something comes to you, let me know. He was the last guest?”
She nodded. “That’s when I went back in to check with Mr Stein, see if he would need anything else. He said he was fine. That was the last time I talked with him.”
“He seem OK then, distracted or anything?”
“Seemed the same as usual.”
“And you never heard anything – shouting, gunshots, anything unusual?”
“No.”
“See anybody up here who didn’t belong?”
“You get a blowout like that, toward the end of the game, you got people leaving, trying to beat the traffic. You got the food service guys and janitorial service guys trying to get a jump on breaking things down – there were a lot of people around. Nobody stuck out.”
“The mystery guest, you see him after he left the box?”
“I saw him get on the elevator. I didn’t see him after that.”
“OK, Ashley. Thanks. If I need anything else, I’ll be in touch.”
Eight blocks west of the United Center, Membe Saturday shivered in the night air, trying to understand why the stars had moved. It had been only eight days since he’d arrived at the shelter run by the nuns he had met in Sierra Leone. His wife and sons had been killed by Taylor’s men during the war, and he had been forced to work at the mines near Kenema – until a stone went missing, and the guards lined up Saturday and the five other men who had been working near him, and cut off their right hands with an ax. Since then, he had begged and stolen and wasted away. Finally, he had gone to the hospital the nuns ran, thinking he could die there – everyone died there. But one of the sisters told him they would take him to a new life in America.
Saturday was beginning to think it had been a bad idea. It was too cold here, colder than Saturday had ever been. And the stars were not where they belonged. Saturday had never listened as a boy when his father would try to tell him what the stars meant, but now he wished he had. Saturday had a bad feeling all the time, and he was sure that these misplaced stars held a message for him.
Then he looked up past the iron fence that ran across the front of the property by the cement path in front of the street, and he saw a man he remembered from Kenema. He knew what the message from the stars was, and that he had learned it too late.
Six months earlier, he had been begging in the streets when this man walked into the house of the courier who worked for the Arabs who sold the diamonds. He had marched the courier and his wife and his two small children – a boy, maybe four, and a girl who could not yet walk – out into the street. The man made them all kneel there, except for the girl, who started to crawl away. The man shot the girl first, and then the boy, and then the woman. All in the head. And then he shot the man. First in both knees, then in both arms, and then in the stomach. He left the man to die slowly in the street with his dead family around him.
Now, the same man was standing on the cement path in front of the house in this strange city under these strange stars, and Saturday knew the man must have come for him. He could not think why, but why else would this man from Africa be here, with Saturday? The man had not yet seen Saturday in the darkness, but Saturday said, “Wetin mek? Wetin mek?” Why? Why? in Krio. He did not even know he had said it until he heard his own voice on the air. And then the man turned and pulled a pistol from inside his coat, and he shot Saturday.