“Name’s Preston. He works for Mrs. Martindale, the mother, that is,” I replied numbly.
“Better let me have that,” he ordered, prying the gun from my hand and wiping the handle with his handkerchief. “The way you’re shaking, you could blow your goddamn foot off. Good thing we kept watching you, huh? And good thing I decided to be part of the tail tonight.”
“I didn’t see any tail.”
“When I’m the one doing the tailing, nobody ever does,” he said without a hint of bragging in his voice. “And this clown here” — he motioned to the groaning Preston — “he wouldn’t know how to spot one. We were never more than two blocks behind you. Call it a hunch that I showed up, and then you getting into a limousine, that was a tip-off of something, shall we say, unusual. Now what’s with him?”
“He telephoned me at home, said that Mrs. Martindale was willing to talk to me about her son. I had tried once before to see her, but they wouldn’t let me in the house.”
“How’d you expect to find out who killed the guy from his mother?” the Brother asked, eyes narrowed.
“I have hunches, too,” I said, feeling slightly dizzy.
The Brother’s laugh was satanic. “We figured it had to be an inside hit.”
“Huh?”
He ignored my puzzlement and knelt on one knee next to Preston. “You got him, didn’t you. Mac?”
“Please, my knee, my leg,” Preston sobbed. A dark stain was visible on his pants.
“Yeah, your leg, right,” the Brother mimicked, pressing an automatic similar to the one that had been aimed at me against the wounded man’s temple. “Let’s hear your story. I’m feelin’ real twitchy.”
“What, what...”
“Cut the shit! You were ready to blow this man away. Why’d you off Martindale?” He jabbed Preston’s sweat-soaked forehead with the silencer-equipped barrel of his gun.
“Madam, she...”
“Who’s Madam?” the Brother demanded.
“Beatrice Martindale, Lloyd’s mother,” I put in.
“Go on,” the hoodlum prodded Preston.
“She got a call a few months back... from a woman...” He paused, grimacing. “This woman... she said Lloyd had fooled around with her... when she was just a little girl.”
The Brother looked up at me and scowled. “Shit, the guy was a pervert? Did you know about this?”
“This was my hunch,” I said, leaving it at that.
“This woman,” Preston went on laboriously after another sharp nudge with the gun, “she said that... if Lloyd ran for mayor, she would tell all the newspapers what he did to her back then.”
“Why didn’t she say that to Martindale himself?”
“She... wanted to punish Madam too... because she said that Madam had known all along what Lloyd liked to do. But I don’t believe that... I don’t believe she ever knew...” Preston, who was now lying on his side in a fetal position, groaned again, louder, and kept clutching the injured leg.
“So why didn’t you kill this other woman instead of Martindale?” the Brother asked, continuing to shine the beam of his flashlight on Preston’s contorted, sweating face.
“Madam wouldn’t tell me her name, and all this happened years ago... before I worked for the family. I asked her more than once... who it was. But all she would say was that if it got out... about Lloyd... she was going to kill herself.”
“And you believed her?”
“Oh yes... she would have,” Preston mumbled, again pleading for help.
“And why’d you want to kill this guy?” the Brother asked him, jabbing his automatic in my direction.
“Because he was poking around and I think he would have found out... about everything.”
The gunman turned and looked up at me. “You know who the girl was that Martindale fooled with?”
“No,” I lied, unblinking. “I never got that far.”
“Then where’d you get that ‘hunch’ of yours?”
“An old-time newspaperman, he’s long retired, said he remembered hearing that Martindale liked little kids... that way. But he didn’t have any specifics.” The second lie is always easier.
“You got paper and something to write with?” the Brother asked me.
I nodded and handed him my spiral-bound reporter’s notebook and a pencil. He tore out a couple of sheets from the middle and used the cardboard cover as backing. “Now, Mac,” he ordered, giving the paper and pencil to Preston, “you’re going to take some dictation from me, got it?”
“My leg... oh my God! My God!”
“We’ll take care of that leg, but first, you’re going to write. Malek, go sit in the car with Mel — you remember him, from when all of us took a couple rides around your neighborhood together.”
“But, I...”
“Goddamn it, go and sit in the car!” he commanded. Still shaking, I walked gingerly through the darkness for a couple of hundred yards to where the Cadillac was parked, its lights and engine off.
I opened the front passenger door and started to climb in. “In the back,” Mel muttered.
I was in no condition to argue. I slid into the back seat of the big car, where I had been before, although this time I had it all to myself. “Okay, Mel, where were you guys watching me on Clark tonight? Just curious.”
“Don’t be curious. Bad habit.”
“Okay, all right.” We sat in silence and darkness for maybe fifteen minutes. When the single shot sounded, I jumped, but Mel was impassive. “Jesus Christ,” I shout-whispered.
“It’s copasetic,” he said, yawning and grinding out his cigarette in the ashtray. “The Brother’ll be along now.”
And he was, within seconds. He slid in next to me, adjusting the knot on his silk tie. “Let’s roll,” he calmly ordered.
“And what about Preston?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“His leg doesn’t hurt him anymore,” the Brother said.
“So... just like that?”
“Hey, the fucker was about to kill you, Mr. Newspaperman. Also just like that.” He snapped a finger and a thumb.
“He really did shoot Martindale then, didn’t he?” I said as the reality began to sink in.
“Goddamn right. Showed his loyalty, and probably his love, for the old lady by knocking off her son.”
“And he figured that you guys — well, the organization — would get the blame, eh?”
“Goddamn right again.”
“Wait a minute. I heard the shot, but your automatic’s got a silencer.”
I thought I detected a fleeting smile on the Brother’s face as we passed under a streetlamp. “You’re not as dumb as you sometimes act, Malek,” he said. “The poor depressed bastard plugged himself with his own.32.”
“The one I picked up after you shot him in the leg. That means—”
“That means nothin’, except that when they dust the roscoe he’s still holding, the only fingerprints they find on it will be his.”
“But what about the shot in his leg? Done with a different gun — yours. How will that get explained?”
“You’re filled with questions tonight. So happens, call it good fortune, that my friend here” — he tapped the bulge in his suit coat — “is also a.32. Seems it took Preston two shots to end it all. He was so nervous the first time that he plugged himself in the leg.”
I leaned back and exhaled deeply as Mel drove north up Stony Island.
“You gotta be philosophical sometimes,” the Brother said, smoothing the sleeve of his suit coat.
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“Well, you lost yourself a scoop here, now didn’t you? I mean, you can’t very well write about what happened here tonight, can you?” His tone was not threatening, just matter-of-fact.
“Not if I want to stay healthy,” I observed ruefully.
“But that isn’t really so bad, is it? We took away your scoop, but we gave you something in return.”