What a way to go! Strung up like a stocking and cut down like a lump of coal. At least the condemned man had a last cigarette, from the odor my nose detected going up the chimney. He had a lot of previous ones in this place here, although the butts are cold and dead as a smoked mackerel.
Of course, if I now know for sure who met his Maker in a chimney, I do not know why. A guy from this side of Skid Row would hardly be worth killing for love or money. So it comes down to the current theory among the amateur set: Rudy was an unintended victim. Brent Colby, Jr., had been so successfully mum about using a shill in a Santa suit this year that this poor dude swung in his stead.
I wonder how the perpetrator feels about slaying the wrong Santa, but mostly I am not too interested in the state of his--or her--conscience.
The question is, will the murderer make another attempt on Colby before Christmas Day rolls around?
Chapter 26
Home for the Holidays
"Your cousin Bo will meet you at the airport."
His mother's voice had been expressionless when he had called her back with his flight times. He found himself mirroring her apparent indifference.
"That's fine, if I can recognize him. He hasn't gone bald and grown a goatee, has he?"
"Bo, oh no. He'll be at the gate."
Matt nodded, though she couldn't see him.
"I don't like to drive in traffic like that," she added. "At night. And the airport is so big and busy."
"That's fine, Mom. I don't expect you to chauffeur the ex-priest home in triumph."
A pause as flat as their dialogue. "I didn't tell them yet."
"Yet? It's been almost eight months."
"Yes. Well. An opportunity didn't come up."
"Great. That leaves it to come up at the holidays."
"I didn't think you were coming back."
Not "home." Back. Not "this year." Ever.
"It's true I didn't get home much from the seminary, or later, when I was changing assignments. A priest's life is pretty demanding."
"I know that. It's quiet here at Christmas." He could picture her looking around the small, boxy rooms with their pillared forest of dark, unpainted woodwork between main rooms, a legacy of the twenties. "I haven't gotten a tree in years."
"I don't need a Christmas tree."
"We--the family--usually celebrate at Wanda and Stach's place Christmas Eve and then come back into town for midnight mass at St. Stan's."
"I know that, Mom. I used to live there, remember?"
"Not for a long time. I don't understand what you're doing in Las Vegas."
"You know why."
"No I don't, Matt. I know what you think you're doing there, but ... it doesn't matter. It was so long ago. I've forgotten about it, and I'm glad that I have."
"I haven't forgotten. Maybe I couldn't until now."
"Until now?
He grasped the speaker end of the telephone receiver, hard, and stared at the immensity of red sofa slashing across the shiny wooden floor.
"I found him."
"Oh, dear God! No, Matt."
"I know you don't want to be reminded. I don't blame you. But I was just a kid then. I need to understand."
"To understand what, at this late date? To drag out my disgrace before the family like a Christmas present? Again? And now you're not ever--"
His mother's emotions rarely stirred. Now she was angry. Not at the past, not at the man who'd beat and deserted her. But at him, her son, the only one who'd stood up for her.
"I discovered that it's not Effinger I don't understand," he told her, matching her agitation, as if she had summoned it. "I tracked him down, grabbed him, handed him over to the authorities. Then I realized what I really wanted to know was the other side of it. In Chicago."
"Cousin Bo will pick you up." She repeated in her deadest voice, the voice that he had heard for most of his three decades and counting.
He thanked her, wished her good night and hung up.
The closer he got to the center of the family web, the more he stood to lose. His mother disowned his quest, and his cousin Bo was a hearty Polish chauvinist who'd never left Sandburg's Chicago of hog-butchering, meat-packing plants that produced a lot of balogna to feed its teeming immigrant-spawn yearning to breathe free at ice-hockey games, over hot-dog vendors' fat-laden, steaming franks. And beer. Don't leave out the inalienable right to casks of beer for the boys, with the kitchen and coffeepot reserved for the girls and gossip.
It suddenly occurred to Matt that he was glad the hunt for Effinger had drawn him to Las Vegas, where almost everyone he passed on the Strip was a transient, where Milady Sleaze dressed up in denim and diamonds, where even the Statue of Liberty boogied at the ersatz concrete canyon of New York-New York--the theme hotel and casino, that is.
He looked at the red sofa, which might be a Kagan, and nodded his head. Nobody in the old neighborhood would have a wild and foxy sofa like that.
Matt carried his duffel bag up the connecting ramp to the gate at O'Hare International Airport. His left cheek was still icy, as if numbed by a dentist, from leaning against the window for the entire three-hour flight, watching the land change underneath him.
First sand and the rugged red-rock canyons of the West. A spilled sunset on the earth's dirt floor. The Rockies, magnificent in mobcaps of snow, skiers' delight. Then farmers' fields, flat and rolling, scribed as if by a giant compass into concentric circles of dirt and drifted snow. 'Twas not the season to grow even holly. Or mistletoe. There was never mistletoe at family Christmases; too pagan a custom.
He'd had a drink on the plane, despite being stunned by the four-dollar price tag for the dollhouse bottle of scotch whisky. His hands still shook a little. Facing the old folks at home would be worse than sparring with Cliff Effinger at a tacky motel.
He blundered into the mirage of faces looking toward the connecting tunnel like an audience in search of a star, blue eyes and blond hair in natural profusion. What did cousin Bo look like now? Six years older than Matt, almost forty, and never left Chicago in his life. Dutiful to family errands, even for his aunt Mira, who didn't exactly sit at the center of family affairs. But then a Pole will do almost anything for a priest; the Polish Spring had really begun when one became Pope one day.
The faces were expectant, but not for him. As soon as the press of departing passengers behind him eased, Matt stepped out of the flow and looked around. Maybe he had changed too.
The circle of waiting faces lit up in turn, and looked beyond him. People rushed together like colliding atoms, combined, and formed a new unit that walked as one down the long, echoing concourse toward the baggage-claim area.
He'd wait ten minutes, then head for the ground transportation area, though he'd hate to pay for a cab all the way to St. Stan's. He was couch-poor now, thanks to Temple.
"Matthi--" The voice began a greeting, then edited itself to a rule laid down by a firm teenager years before. " Matt. Over here."
Matt watched a form bob through a ring of waiting people. He tried to fit the lanky, cherub-cheeked teenager he had always thought so tall to the Santa-size roly-poly guy crashing through the circle of waiting people.
"You haven't changed a bit," Cousin Bo said as he pulled off a sheepskin-lined glove to shake Matt's bare hand. "Say, that sissy sheepskin jacket is okay for a Chicago autumn, but it won't cut no ice now. It's the dead of winter here. Got any bags I can carry?"
Matt was mesmerized by Bo's bulky, quilted yellow nylon jacket and massive boots. His girth had expanded, but his flaxen hair had dwindled to a few slick strands across a baby-pink scalp. His cheeks were still plump and rosy, and the cold had singed his ears scarlet. A knitted cap peeked out of a jacket pocket like an elf's cap.