“You think—?”
“Yes; I think. That’s why I’m looking for Dr. Chappel.”
But that was all Dyer could get out of him. Bela Joad left Dyer Rand’s office and returned to the underworld.
And in the underworld of Chicago a new star arose. Perhaps one should call him a nova rather than merely a star, so rapidly did he become famous—or notorious. Physically, he was rather a small man, no larger than Bela Joad or Martin Blue, but he wasn’t a mild little man like Joad or a weak jackal like Blue. He had what it took, and he parlayed what he had. He ran a small night club, but that was just a front. Behind that front things happened, things that the police couldn’t pin on him, and—for that matter —didn’t seem to know about, although the underworld knew.
His name was Willie Ecks, and nobody in the underworld had ever made friends and enemies faster. He had plenty of each; the former were powerful and the latter were dangerous. In other words, they were both the same type of people.
His brief career was truly—if I may scramble my star-nova metaphor but keep it celestial—a meteoric matter. And for once that hackneyed and inaccurate metaphor is used correctly. Meteors do not rise—as anybody who has ever studied meteorology, which has no connection with meteors, knows. Meteors fall, with a dull thud. And that is what happened to Willie Ecks, when he got high enough.
Three days before, Willie Ecks’s worst enemy had vanished. Two of his henchmen spread the rumor that it was because the cops had come and taken him away, but that was obviously malarkey designed to cover the fact that they intended to avenge him. That became obvious when, the very next morning, the news broke that the gangster’s body had been found, neatly weighted, in the Blue Lagoon at Washington Park.
And by dusk of that very day rumor had gone from bistro to bistro of the underworld that the police had pretty good proof who had killed the deceased—and with a forbidden atomic at that—and that they planned to arrest Willie Ecks and question him. Things like that get around even when it’s not intended that they should.
And it was on the second day of Willie Ecks’s hiding out in a cheap little hotel on North Clark Street, an old-fashioned hotel with elevators and windows, his whereabouts known only to a trusted few, that one of those trusted few gave a certain knock on his door and was admitted.
The trusted one’s name was Mike Leary and he’d been a close friend of Willie’s and a close enemy of the gentleman who, according to the papers, had been found in the Blue Lagoon.
He said, “Looks like you’re in a jam, Willie.”
“—yes,” said Willie Ecks. He hadn’t used facial depilatory for two days; his face was blue with beard and bluer with fear.
Mike said, “There’s a way out, Willie. It’ll cost you ten grand. Can you raise it?”
“I’ve got it. What’s the way out?”
“There’s a guy. I know how to get in touch with him; I ain’t used him myself, but I would if I got in a jam like yours. He can fix you up, Willie.”
“How?”
“He can show you how to beat the lie-detector. I can have him come around to see you and fix you up. Then you let the cops pick you up and question you, see? They’ll drop the charge—or if they bring it to trial, they can’t make it stick.”
“What if they ask me about—well, never mind what—other things I may have done?”
“He’ll take care of that, too. For five grand he’ll fix you so you Can go under that detector clean as—as clean as hell.”
“You said ten grand.”
Mike Leary grinned. “I got to live too, don’t I, Willie? And you said you got ten grand, so it ought to be worth that much to you, huh?”
Willie Ecks argued, but in vain. He had to give Mike Leary five thousand-dollar bills. Not that it really mattered, because those were pretty special thousand-dollar bills. The green ink on them would turn purple within a few days. Even in 1999 you couldn’t spend a purple thousand-dollar bill, so when it happened Mike Leary would probably turn purple too, but by that time it would be too late for him to do anything about it.
It was late that evening when there was a knock on Willie Ecks’s hotel room door. He pressed the button that made the main panel of the door transparent from his side.
He studied the nondescript-looking man outside the door very carefully. He didn’t pay any attention to facial contours or to the shabby yellow suit the man wore. He studied the eyes somewhat, but mostly he studied the shape and conformation of the ears and compared them mentally with the cars of photographs he had once studied exhaustively.
And then Willie Ecks put his gun back into his pocket and opened the door. He said, “Come in.”
The man in the yellow suit entered the room and Willie Ecks shut the door very carefully and locked it.
He said, “I’m proud to meet you, Dr. Chappel.”
He sounded as though he meant it, and he did mean it.
It was four o’clock in the morning when Bela Joad stood outside the door of Dyer Rand’s apartment. He had to wait, there in the dimly luminous hallway, for as long as it took the chief to get out of bed and reach the door, then activate the one-way-transparent panel to examine his visitor.
Then the magnetic lock sighed gently and the door opened. Rand’s eyes were bleary and his hair was tousled. His feet were thrust into red plastic slippers and he wore neonylon sleeping pajamas that looked as though they had been slept in.
He stepped aside to let Bela Joad in, and Joad walked to the center of the room and stood looking about curiously. It was the first time he’d ever been in Rand’s private quarters. The apartment was like that of any other well-to-do bachelor of the day. The furniture was unobtrusive and functional, each wall a different pastel shade, faintly fluorescent and emitting gentle radiant heat and the faint but constant caress of ultraviolet that kept people who could afford such apartments healthily tanned. The rug was in alternate one-foot squares of cream and gray, the squares separate and movable so that wear would be equalized. And the ceiling, of course, was the customary one-piece mirror that gave an illusion of height and spaciousness.
Rand said, “Good news, Joad?”
“Yes. But this is an unofficial interview, Dyer. What I’m going to tell you is confidential between us.”
“What do you mean?”
Joad looked at him. He said, “You still look sleepy, Dyer. Let’s have coffee. It’ll wake you up, and I can use some myself.”
“Fine,” Dyer said. He went into the kitchenette and pressed the button that would heat the coils of the coffee-tap. “Want it laced?” he called back.
“Of course.”
Within a minute he came back with two cups of steaming café royale. With obvious impatience he waited until they were seated comfortably and each had taken his first sip of the fragrant beverage before he asked, “Well, Joad?”
“When I say it’s unofficial, Dyer, I mean it. I can give you the full answer, but only with the understanding that you’ll forget it as soon as I tell you, that you’ll never tell another person, and that you won’t act upon it.”
Dyer Rand stared at his guest in amazement. He said, “I can’t promise that! I’m chief of police, Joad. I have my duty to my job and to the people of Chicago.”
“That’s why I came here, to your apartment, instead of to your office. You’re not working now, Dyer; you’re on your own time.”
“But—”
“Do you promise?”
“Of course not.”
Bela Joad sighed. “Then I’m sorry for waking you, Dyer.” He put down his cup and started to rise.
“Wait! You can’t do that. You can’t just walk out on me!”