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  The Big Score

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Eric and Colin

  CHAPTER 1

  It was early to be seeing a sailboat—still more night than morning, the pale first light all in the east behind the dunes. As the dawn’s glow increased, it made the boat’s sails starkly bright against the implacable darkness to the west, from which the craft apparently had come. Relentlessly the boat moved nearer still, its sailcloth fluttering and flaring pink as the sun finally lifted into the sky. The western gloom began to yield, revealing the sharp line of the watery horizon and the full breadth of Lake Michigan, which was perfectly empty, except for the boat.

  The fisherman, who had set up his small encampment on the breakwater shortly after midnight in the vain hope of returning with a coho salmon or two, was irritated by the sailboat’s presence. When it had first appeared as a vague, gray, forbidding glimmer in the false dawn, it had frightened him. Then, when he had finally come to realize what it was, he had been oddly comforted, glad of its company, welcoming the interruption it made in his long, lonely, fishless vigil. In its leisurely way, it seemed headed directly for him. He called to it, expecting an equally cheerful reply, but received none—heard nothing at all. For a time he ignored the boat, busying himself with checking his bait and recasting his line.

  But it was still there, edging ever closer, swinging in slow, idle, partial circles from right to left and back again, under way but not truly sailing. The breeze was very light, but constant. It had been out of the southwest all night, warming the air but bringing only a slight, rhythmic slosh of water against the breakwater. Except for the occasional scree of a seagull and the tiny clank of the boat’s rigging, there was no other sound.

  Setting down his rod, the fisherman stood, wincing at the ache in his legs and back. He called out again, more sharply. There was no answer. He could see no one at the helm or in the boat’s cockpit. He reassured himself with a new thought: The boat must have come loose from its mooring in some distant harbor and been blown across the lake. But his unease returned when it occurred to him that no one would have left a boat tied up with its sails fully rigged and cleated. The mainsheet was taut, but the boom and tiller appeared to be caught up in tangled lines, accounting for the craft’s erratic behavior in the water.

  He realized then that he could be looking at death, or a sign of it, that whoever had been aboard might well have fallen over the side, drowning unheard and unseen in the night’s vast darkness. The fisherman could make out the letters and numbers at the bow clearly enough to note an Illinois registration. The straight-line distance from the Grand Pier, Michigan, breakwater where he stood to Chicago across the lake was nearly forty miles, a long way to travel in a single night. He stepped back from the edge.

  There had been no storm, no heavy winds, nothing to overwhelm a helmsman or cause sudden distress. One could have crossed the lake in a tiny outboard that night, if one had gasoline and courage enough. Whoever had been aboard probably had been drinking. It happened all the time.

  The boat’s northeasterly course continued to bring it nearer, but was taking it farther along the breakwater. The fisherman thought of going for help, but it was a long walk to the harbormaster’s office, and he wasn’t sure anyone would be there this early. Grand Pier was not a busy port, even at the height of the summer boating season.

  He began moving along the breakwater, keeping pace with the boat. It was large enough for a comfortable crossing, thirty feet or more, a cruising sloop that might sleep six. He called to it again, more loudly than was probably necessary, hoping that someone might somehow be below, asleep.

  Then, as the boat shifted slightly away from the wind for a moment, he was able to see down into the cockpit. There were several dripping lines of rustlike red running down the side of the seat by the helm. The water sloshing thinly in the bottom was a paler red.

  At last the boat bumped against the breakwater. The bow swung away and then the craft bumped again on the beam. A jib sheet was hanging over the side by the starboard maststay. The fisherman grabbed up the rope, pulling back, and tied it tightly around one of the rusty stanchions of the railing that ran along the center of the breakwater out to its end. Standing up, he could see into the shadowy cabin, could see the feet splayed at the entrance way.

  The left foot was in a dark-brown, white-soled boating shoe. The other was bare. The legs were tan. The sole of the unclad foot was white, like boiled fish meat. They were small feet, women’s feet.

  After rechecking the knot he had tied at the stanchion, the fisherman clambered clumsily down into the cockpit. He was a heavyset man, and caused the craft to rock sharply. Steadying himself, he sat down on a seat, the pink water in the bottom slapping against his boots. Gathering his courage, he peered into the cabin.

  The body was indeed that of a young woman. She wore khaki Bermuda shorts and a white blouse that was all dark and dirty at the back. The fisherman took a deep breath and tried to stop trembling. He had handled drowning victims before. This was different—scary. With a grunt, he leaned over, grasping the girl’s ankles, and pulled, hard. Her belt caught briefly on the cabin steps, then slipped free, and she came up to him, her bottom high.

  Her blouse had been pulled out of her shorts and was loose. There were two holes in the back of the garment, surrounded by merging crimson circles. Heaving again, he got her into the cockpit, still lying on her stomach. She was quite slender, and had very fine light brown hair. Her arms were extended over her head, and her hands were tightly clutching a curled and slightly crumpled heavy piece of paper or cardboard. The fisherman ignored that and turned her over, startled by her large, light-blue eyes—that they were so dead, that they were staring at him. Putting his hand gently to her cold cheek, he turned her face away. She was in her twenties, maybe even thirty, and very attractive.

  The front of her blouse was bloody, too, but had been pulled open and was missing buttons. She wore no brassiere. Her small breasts were stained a shiny red, as was her belly beneath. There were two larger, more ragged holes in her chest—one just above her stomach, the other torn through her right breast. The blood looked dry.

  He felt sick. He was breathing very heavily, making a loud noise with it. Closing his eyes, he sat back a moment, making his diaphragm and stomach relax, wondering stupidly what next he should do. Looking at her again, studying the clear-cut line of her beautiful young face, he felt very angry at whoever had done this. Then he gently took the thick paper from her hands.

  It was actually something else—a painting. The fisherman had never seen one out of its frame before. It was a dark painting—oil, he guessed—made all the darker by the blood smeared over its center. It was a strange sort of painting, what he supposed was modern art, but of a kind that made clear what it was about. A crowded street. Despite the smears, he could make out the figures of the people. Men in top hats. Women in furs. All hurrying toward a high, brightly lighted building in the background, colored as red as her blood. It rose above them into a stark, black sky. In the foreground, a woman in a long red coat, low-cut pink dress, and white high-heeled shoes stood watching them, a slash of a smile on her face.

  The painting had been disfigured by two holes to either side of the woman in
high heels. The girl must have been holding it to her chest when she was shot. There were small scratches on it also. He guessed they might have been made by her—maybe in the pain of her last throes of dying.

  With a shudder, the fisherman tossed the painting back into the cabin. A small chugging trawler was moving along the water to the south, heading out into the lake. He looked at his watch, and then at the sticky redness he’d gotten on his thumbs and fingers. Wiping it off on his pants, he turned and heaved himself back up onto the breakwater. Stumbling, he got to his feet and started back toward the shore, moving as fast as his bulk and age would permit.

  When possible, Matthias Curland always took a window seat when flying. The view from on high never bored him, even when he was flying over the featureless sea or, as now, the flat checkerboard plains of the American Midwest. It gave him the truest sense of where he was, and put man and his works in proper perspective.

  The farmland, green and yellow in the late spring, slid relentlessly by. Then, in a sudden magical moment, it began to give way to the cerulean blue curve of the Lake Michigan shore. The juxtaposed colors of earth and water and angle of line offered the prospect of an interesting painting—two-dimensional shapes rendered three-dimensional by the angle of perspective. But the aircraft moved on over the lake and the picture vanished, as if erased, his window showing only the merging blues of hazy sky and water. Curland straightened in his seat, looking at his watch. He drank the last of his coffee and folded the drop table back into its recess, politely handing the empty cup to a passing stewardess. He leaned back, calm and patient, his abiding melancholy receding like an ebbing tide. It would return, inexorably, but for now, he was almost content.

  Here in economy class, his Chicago-bound flight was crowded with businessmen, wearing the ubiquitous dark, drab suits that served as the uniforms of corporate slaves. These were men traveling not where they desired but where they were sent.

  Matthias was dressed casually—an old navy blazer, a light-blue button-down shirt open at the collar, gray flannels, and black English loafers, worn at the edges. A tall, slender man not yet forty, with long, elegant hands, narrow nose, thin lips, and patrician face, he had the easy poise and reflexive courtesy of the kind of well-bred person Oscar Wilde had in mind when he said, “A gentleman never insults—except on purpose.” Two years in the Mediterranean sun had deeply tanned and lined his skin, bleaching his graying hair back to something near the blondness that, along with their blue-gray eyes, was a common trait of his German-American family.

  A woman had once told him he looked rich. He’d never really been that. His grandfather had been rich, of course. For his time, fabulously rich. Matthias had grown up in the old gentleman’s house in Lake Forest, one of those great stone mansions that clung to the tops of the bluffs above the shoreline like miniature baronies, but after his grandfather had died, leaving most of his money to his private foundation and favored charities, Matthias’s parents’ fortunes had rapidly diminished. Matthias had been compelled to go through life as an ordinary man—just another architect struggling to pay his bills. When he’d finally managed to change his life, it had not been to become rich, but to become poor.

  Hoping initially to become a painter, Matthias had attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Then he’d switched to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where his father had studied architecture. Matthias’s classmates had included a lot of people whose grandfathers had been steelworkers and subway motormen. Most had become far more successful than he had ever managed, even when the family architectual firm was prospering.

  For the last two years, Matthias had been living largely on the bum, attempting—pretending—to be the painter he had always dreamed of becoming. He had had to borrow the money to make this flight. He hadn’t the slightest notion of how he was going to pay it back.

  He leaned close to the window again, watching intently as the Chicago skyline appeared in the distance ahead, the tiny toy buildings standing like little battlements before the following sweep of hazy city.

  Matthias loved cities. Even in his sunny exile in the south of France, he had chosen to live in the crowded bustle of Cannes. Though he was returning reluctantly, he considered Chicago very special, almost as special as Paris. New York was really only Manhattan, a very small place really, crowded in on itself, its buildings all slabbed together, stubbornly ignoring the enormous world around it. Los Angeles resembled the scattered contents of an upended toybox. Washington was an insulated, prettified federal park, bordered by slum—except for its monuments and government buildings, an architectual void.

  Chicago was a true capital, queen city of America’s emerald inland seas and master of its sprawling midwestern region. It had a full sense of itself, a view of itself. Its buildings stood as individuals. There was a mightiness to them, as if they had thrust themselves out of the earth.

  The city’s three principal towers stuck up above the rest—the dark domino of the Hancock Center, the thin white pencil that was the Standard Oil Building, the gray-black bound shafts of Sears Tower which was now being challenged for the title of tallest in the world by an egomaniac billionaire in New York who had plans for a slightly higher pile of steel and concrete, erected on some land along the Hudson River once owned by the now-long-broke Donald Trump, who had hoped to have his own name on such a monument.

  As the aircraft thrummed nearer to the shore, Matthias pressed his forehead against the window, straining his eyes. The air was clear enough along the city’s lakefront for him to make out his own small contribution to the Chicago skyline—a narrow, green triangular-shaped tower facing Lincoln Park just to the north of the Gold Coast. The developer had given him a very free hand in the design, and the building had won a very prestigious architectual award. The developer had gone bankrupt.

  Matthias had been an architect for seven years in Chicago. He had moved to New York because the woman he had married was from there and desired it. When they had eventually divorced, he had escaped not only her but his profession and past life. He became “a painter”—in Paris, Cannes, Nice, and Cap Ferrat—supporting himself as best he could, sometimes starving, often sponging, but managing somehow to remain “a painter,” resembling Paul Gauguin in many ways, though not in talent.

  Now he didn’t know what he was—only where. He was home, the last place he had thought he wanted to be.

  Landing only twenty-five minutes late, the plane lumbered to its gate with many pauses. Before it came to a stop, one of the businessmen leapt up to reach for one of the overhead bins, and others followed suit, grappling for briefcases and garment bags, every gained minute somehow vital. Matthias remained relaxed in his seat until the aisle was clear.

  He strolled through the bizarre, tubular high-tech architecture of O’Hare’s redesigned interior corridors, liking the light, airy, friendly feeling they gave, but finding a lot of the touches obtrusive and artificial. He arrived at the luggage carousel to find his two bags already there. He bought both of the Chicago papers, then stood by one of the car rental counters, waiting, watching the down escalator from the main level above. He wanted to smoke his pipe, but a sign sternly forbade it.

  His brother Christian had promised to meet his plane, but of course had not. Matthias waited nearly half an hour, out of courtesy, paying Christian the respect of believing in his good intentions. Finally he surrendered to the obvious, gathering his belongings and heading for the taxi line.

  His driver was a friendly black man who began talking about sporting contests Matthias knew nothing about. He kept up a conversation as best he could but, after a few minutes, allowed it to lapse and turned to his newspapers.

  Both the Tribune and the Sun-Times had front-page stories about someone named Peter Poe offering to buy the White Sox baseball team. The articles included commentary to the effect that it was doubtful the league would permit such a purchase by a man who owned a casino in Indiana and gambling riverboats on the Mississipp
i, even if he divested himself of these properties. What caught Matthias’s attention most was a paragraph noting that, the year before, Poe had bought Cabrini Green, a crime-and vermin-infested complex of crumbling high-rise public housing on the Near North Side that had been erected in the less than visionary 1950s as a daft, utopian answer to slums.

  When Matthias had left Chicago, gentrification had been spreading west from the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park areas into what had been an abysmal black ghetto. Cabrini Green lay not far from the North Branch of the Chicago River. He supposed the man might have made a shrewd investment. There were nightclubs and restaurants now on Clybourn Avenue, not far away from the project.

  “Who is Peter Poe?” he asked.

  “You don’t know Peter Poe?” said the driver, incredulous. “He’s Mr. Chicago. Shit, he’s gonna own the whole fuckin’ town before he’s through. He’s the guy who made legalized gambling such a big deal over in Indiana. He’s got a big casino in Michigan City. He’s got buildings all over town—one of the biggest yachts on Lake Michigan.”

  “Sorry,” Matthias said. “I’ve been away.”

  “You must have been far away, man. He’s on the news like every night.”

  “I’ll have to watch the news then.”

  The driver turned the conversation to sports again, launching into a monologue about the deplorable state of the White Sox ball team. Matthias tried to remember the last time he had looked at the major league standings. As the driver talked, he contented himself with gazing out the windshield at the distant downtown towers. There were a few he’d not seen before.

  Christian Curland opened the door of the old brick house on Schiller Street before Matthias could ring the bell but, characteristically, not in time to help bring the bags from the curb. Their grandfather, the original owner of the house, had left it to their mother as an in-town residence, but the two brothers had taken it over after college, sharing it until Matthias had married. When Matthias and his wife had gone back East, Christian had moved back in again. A succession of women had lived in it with him, according to letters Matthias had received from his sister. He wondered if one was there now.