The Big Score Read online

  “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

  “Love you, babe. Stay cool. Don’t let anything spook you.”

  He hung up the receiver just as Diandra came down the hall, barefoot and quiet, the breeze from the terrace fluffing her strawberry blond hair and billowing her long silken robe. She glanced at Poe and nodded—as if a wifely “good morning” and kiss and hug could be rendered in the simple shorthand of that gesture. Then she moved on to the terrace, pulling a chaise longue into the shade to protect her pale, clear skin. She’d kept all her model’s habits, except avoidance of drink. She brought one with her—a fruit juice thinned by gin or vodka. Turning on the terrace stereo and tuning it to a classical music station, she waited until she had fully reclined on the chaise before taking her first sip. Then she closed her eyes, listening to the music.

  Poe, watching her through his open study window, felt like going out and kicking over a chair just to shatter her tranquil moment. Tranquility was the one quality of life that had eluded him, and it angered him that she could arrange it for herself with such ease.

  Instead, he turned again to his phone. He made several calls but could not find Laurence Train anywhere. This displeased him immensely. Poe liked to be able to reach people anywhere, anytime, like an angry god, not to be trifled with.

  Zany Rawlings was in the middle of his breakfast—Polish sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and a cold Bohemian beer—when Sergeant Hejmal showed up with the autopsy report from the hospital and the developed pictures from the film processors in St. Joseph. Zany gave them the briefest glance, pushed the remains of his breakfast away, and then led Hejmal out to his screened side porch, taking his beer and bringing one for his sergeant. Zany took a sip, stifled a burp, and then let his stomach settle before turning to the pictures again.

  “Real pretty girl,” he said.

  “I checked missing persons again,” said Hejmal, munching on one of Zany’s sausages. “Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin. There’s a bulletin on two girls from Indiana, but they’re teenagers, and out of Laporte. Nothing out of Chicago.”

  “Someone’s always missing in Chicago,” Zany said.

  “No girl like this.”

  Zany read through the autopsy report slowly. The angle of the bullets’ paths indicated they had been fired from above and behind, but that much was already apparent from the bullet holes in the boat and the position the body had been in when the fisherman had found it. As Zany stopped to think about it, the shooter could have fired at her from almost anything—maybe even a bridge or a high seawall.

  He read on. The girl had had at least one alcoholic drink before her death. She’d not eaten, nor had she had sexual intercourse. Her bowels and bladder were mostly empty.

  Zany’s stomach began rumbling again. He gave the report back to Hejmal.

  “Send a copy of everything to Lansing,” he said. “Give some of these pictures to the district attorney so he can give them out to the press, but cut off the messy part.”

  “Okay, Chief. Did the Coast Guard come up with anything yet?”

  “Nope. Well, they had a couple of distress calls on the Illinois side, but nothing checked out. They told me that, running on the motor, with a following wind, the boat could easily have made it across the lake in six hours, maybe less. Maybe it happened on our side.”

  “Six hours from Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmmm.” The sound indicated that Hejmal’s brain had shifted into neutral.

  “I’m going to drive over there,” Zany said. “I want you to run things here in town. If something turns up, you let me know, but don’t blab it to Moran. I’ll fill him in later.”

  “Are you going to take this to the Chicago cops?”

  “I’m going to ask for their help. Have them check out this painting.”

  “Do you think it was stolen?”

  “She made somebody mad.”

  “I wonder if it’s worth a lot of money.”

  “Not now.”

  Ruth Anne Mazureski wondered if she really had reason to be worried. Jill Langley was one of three tenants in Ruth Anne’s Old Town four-flat, all of whom were single women and most of whom kept odd hours, often spending Friday or Saturday nights elsewhere. Jill had once been like that, but her lifestyle had changed—something to do with a romance gone bad. Now, when she wasn’t working late, Jill had taken to spending nearly every evening at home, sometimes joining Ruth Anne for a little television or a drink down at the bar on the corner, though usually holing up by herself—her stereo playing sad classical music until late in the night.

  For most of the weekend now, there had been only silence. Ruth Anne had knocked at the door several times, once hearing the telephone ringing endlessly.

  Jill might have had a reconciliation. She might have met someone new. She might be lying naked and raped and dead in some alley. Ruth Anne had no way of knowing.

  The weekly grocery shopping had to be done. Often Jill and Ruth Anne went to the Treasure Island supermarket together. It made Ruth Anne a little sad, and increasingly uneasy, to be going alone now. Pulling a thin sweatshirt over her leotards, Ruth Anne set out at a brisk walk, cheered a little by the balmy weather. The supermarket was crowded, and it was nearly an hour later when she returned, struggling up the stairs with three fully laden shopping bags.

  Jill’s door was open, about an inch. After setting down her burden, Ruth Anne knocked on it loudly, finally pushing it open all the way and calling out Jill’s name.

  There was no answer. Stepping into the little foyer, Ruth Anne was stunned and bewildered by what she saw.

  The living room was in chaotic disarray. The paintings on the wall had been taken down and cast aside. The rug had been pulled back. The kitchen was as bad, and the bedroom had been gone through as well. The bed covers had been pulled apart.

  Ruth Anne started to look to see if any of Jill’s clothing or jewelry might be missing, but fear began to overwhelm her. She fled from the apartment and ran down the stairs. When she’d left for the Treasure Island, she’d seen two men sitting in a car at the curb, one white, one black. She’d taken them for police. A lot of police were to be seen sitting in cars like that in Old Town, even on a Sunday afternoon.

  They were gone.

  Matthias Curland hated cocktail parties more than any other form of social congress. As a rule, they were about as festive and conducive to meaningful conversation as the Howard Street elevated during rush hour. The one aspect of “old money” upper-class life he truly did admire was that most such people abhorred these milling, swilling swarms, with all their rudeness and mindless chatter. Instead of “cocktail parties,” they preferred smaller, more comfortable social occasions, where people could seat themselves or move freely about, enjoying their hosts’ art and books and surroundings as pleasantly as if they were their own.

  Paris had been like that—intellectual Paris, at least. So had the south of France, when film festivals weren’t in season. He had met his French woman at such an affair. He had seen her on the topless beach at Cannes one afternoon while pausing during a stroll along La Croisette. She’d been nestled against the seawall, reading, and looked up, challenging him to move his gaze elsewhere. He’d walked on, only to encounter her again that evening at a party in a villa on a hill that looked onto the Tour de Mont Chevalier. This time she was standing near the open doors of a terrace, looking at a painting of bathers on the channel coast by the American artist Guy Pène Dubois. Matthias knew the work well enough to discuss its satirical point with her. That party had had perhaps fifty guests and the villa nearly as many rooms. As in so many scenes in Fellini films like La Dolce Vita, the party had progressed through them, chamber by chamber, through the night, ending at dawn on the rocky beach.

  He’d taken the woman home by cab. As he recalled, she’d had to pay the fare.

  That taxi ride through the streets of Cannes seemed a century ago. The one he took now with Sally was nothing so exotic—p
assing by the garish neon of liquor stores and bars and burger joints, the sidewalks filled with middle American couples heading for restaurants or Rush Street night spots. A hansom cab was stopped absurdly behind a wheezing city bus, the coachman a dopey-looking youth in top hat and tennis shoes. A stretch limousine began honking. America.

  It was a warm night, and he’d left his father’s eccentric old Rolls parked on the street outside his Schiller Street house, hoping he and Sally might walk the few blocks to Bitsie Symms’s apartment on East Lake Shore Drive. But Sally insisted on “arriving,” which meant at the least a taxi. It occurred to Matthias that he didn’t have much more money on him than he did that dreamy morning in Cannes.

  There was no prospect of pleasant contemplation of books or paintings at Bitsie’s. Her apartment was huge, occupying a high floor of an old between-the-world-wars residential stone tower with a view that reached up the lake shore to the city’s northern limits and beyond. But she seemed to have invited half of Chicago, the loud, shoulder-to-shoulder crowd extending almost into the entrance hall.

  “My ex-husband’s supposed to be here,” Sally said, taking a glass of champagne from a waiter, who was working the outskirts of the swarm. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

  “Should we leave?” Matthias said, declining a drink.

  She frowned. “No.”

  They moved farther inside, Sally stopping almost at once to talk to a woman with dyed ash-blond hair and a tonnage of large jewelry. Many of the female guests seemed to have hair of the same color.

  Matthias didn’t recognize the woman, but he saw others he did. And many men—politicians, lawyers, corporate chairmen, society swells, local news anchors, union bosses, gallery owners, newspaper columnists, and an interior decorator or two. They were paunchier, grayer, and balder than when Matthias had seen them last, but otherwise unchanged. Another loathsome thing about cocktail parties was that they were gatherings of tribes—in New York, literary tribes and real estate tribes and arts tribes; in Washington, political and diplomatic tribes; in Los Angeles and Cannes, film tribes. In Chicago, there was only one tribe, and its chiefs, whatever their professional calling, moved through life largely together, with only death rearranging their ranks. Matthias’s parents’ Lake Forest friends would have had little interest in attending such an evening, but the people with real power and influence in the city apparently found it obligatory. Matthias even saw an architect he’d gone to school with, a well-connected fellow whose big, important firm specialized in massive high-rise buildings.

  Matthias turned away from him. There was only one architect in the city he would have been happy to talk to in his present embarrassing circumstance—the legendary genius Harry Weese—and he was not there.

  Sally found more friends. Before she could drag Matthias into introductions, he slipped aside, moving through the crowd toward an adjoining room that seemed less populated. A few people waved to him as he passed, some expressing great surprise to see him, but he kept going, resolutely steering for the sanctuary of the uncrowded room. In it, he found a couple whispering together on a small settee, their coy, surreptitious manner suggesting they might be married to other people. In a corner, three men in dark business suits were volubly arguing about some point of commerce. By the unused fireplace, an exceedingly tall and slender woman was actually studying a painting.

  It was of a violently scrawled, grinning, skull-like human head, supported by a sticklike body. The highly textured background was purple and black. Matthias recognized the artist, but for some reason could not think of his name.

  The woman was far more compelling than the deathly image on the canvas, her ethereal beauty antithetical to the message of the grinning visage.

  Perhaps not. Perhaps they were just two sides of the same thing. “Beauty is the scent of roses,” F. Scott Fitzgerald had written, “and the death of roses.” Implicit in every lovely face was decay and rot. A grinning skull lurked behind the most beautific countenance. His mother had been beautiful.

  Matthias stepped closer. The woman’s thinness was extraordinary, yet nothing at all like the neurotic, skeletal, anorexic emaciation common to so many clinging desperately to self-images of aristocracy and youth. Rather, her long, graceful, pale-skinned body spoke of weight and health in a state of perfect control, as perfect as her careful and understated makeup and well-combed and brushed strawberry-blond hair.

  She was as tall as he was—a little taller even in the satin black high-heeled pumps she wore with her simple but elegant black lace cocktail dress. She wore a plain gold bracelet and a thinner gold necklace at the base of her long, slender neck. As he came beside her, there was the faint, delicate scent of fresh flowers—a marked contrast to the heavy, cloying clouds of expensive perfume that hung with the cigarette smoke throughout the other room.

  She looked at him, and he saw that she had wide, light-blue eyes. He saw also an exception to her perfection—tiny lines implying weariness and worry, a few faint furrows on her brow. She was in her thirties, though he could not tell how much younger than he.

  “It’s very ugly,” he said, nodding to the painting. “Like an angry child’s scrawl.”

  “Jean Dubuffet,” she said, matter-of-factly. The silkiness and clarity of her low, soft voice struck him as much as her beauty. It was like a summer evening breeze.

  “I was trying to remember who it was,” Matthias said. “Dubuffet. Of course.”

  “I’m no expert,” she said. “I was just looking through an old Art Institute catalog this week. The ‘High and Low’ show? It had a lot of Dubuffet stuff in it.”

  “He was a caricaturist and an existentialist,” Matthias said. “He liked to disturb.”

  “He succeeded, didn’t he?”

  Matthias looked about the room again. In addition to the Dubuffet, there was a René Magritte drawing on the walls.

  “I never met our hostess,” he said. “But she’s certainly acquired a lot of art.”

  “Three husbands’ worth,” said the woman. She turned to Matthias, her cool blue eyes assessing him. Giving him a careful smile, she extended her hand.

  “I’m Diandra,” she said.

  “Matthias. Matthias Curland.”

  Just as he took her hand he felt another on his shoulder. It was Sally, looking earnest.

  “Come on,” she said. “Bitsie wants to meet you.” She nodded politely to the strawberry blonde, who turned aside.

  Matthias let himself be tugged away. Bumping through the crowd, he found himself hauled into a circle of people gathered around a luminescent, golden presence.

  As they used to say in New York, Bitsie Symms was a woman somewhere between forty and death. Instead of ash blond, her hair was shiny bright, almost matching the circus yellow of her gaudy, low-cut dress. It was all wrong for the olive color of her skin, which seemed stretched unnaturally taut over her bony face, as smooth as Saran-Wrap over a bowl of leftovers. She had enormous breasts, set unusually high. They seemed on the verge of falling out of her bodice. At the base of her cleavage was an enormous gold and diamond pin in the shape of a rising sun, the whole effect—he supposed—meant to distract from close inspection of her face. Her large, dark, almost black eyes were intent with the task of watching others look at her.

  “Bitsie,” said Sally, clinging to Matthias’s arm. “This is Matthias Curland.”

  Mrs. Symms, discarding the others around her, swept forward, taking Matthias’s right hand in both of hers and clasping it up toward her bosom. “My dear Matthias. How absolutely wonderful you could come. I’ve been hearing so much about you.”

  She had a peculiar inflection, her accent obviously one of her own confection, completely cleansed of the broad, nasal speech of most native Chicagoans.

  Dropping her left hand, she thrust her right forward toward his mouth, making it seem as if he had set about kissing it. In hastily remembered correct Prussian fashion, he bowed his head over her hand but did not touch his lips to it. Finally
she released him.

  “I was so sorry to hear about your dear mother,” Mrs. Symms said. “Such a sweet person. So active in the arts.”

  The only art Matthias’s mother had shown any serious interest in had been portraits of herself. Mrs. Symms could not know this, however. Matthias had not even heard of this woman until that afternoon. He wondered if Sally had called her before the party.

  Mrs. Symms picked up on his blank stare. “You are Matthias Curland of the Lake Forest Curlands, aren’t you? The famous architect? The museum director? The painter? The yachtsman?”

  “Yes, I … my father lives in Lake Forest.”

  “Well, there you are. And here you are, the star of our party! Now come with me. There’s someone you must meet, because he’s been looking for an architect!” She squealed and giggled. “Isn’t that a wonderful coincidence? He was just telling me he wanted the very best architect in the world, and that would just have to mean a Chicago architect, because Chicago has always had the best architects in the world.”

  Matthias felt hot and flushed, hoping his acute embarrassment did not show. He saw the tall strawberry blonde moving sedately by, oblivious of the din and press of people, as if she were at the apartment on some quiet purpose of her own.

  She vanished. Bitsie Symms had taken his arm and was lugging him along, Sally tagging after. The party guests swiftly cleared a path for them as the hostess pushed ahead, passing into yet another room and coming to a halt before a small circle of men standing by huge windows looking out onto the lake. Among them were two politicians he remembered from the old days. Another one there was Sally’s Social Register lout of an ex-husband, who turned and left as soon as he saw them.

  In the midst of this circle, presiding over it as Bitsie Symms had the crowd in the main room, was a short, well-scrubbed man in the most perfectly tailored suit Matthias had ever seen. He was a little stocky, with broad shoulders and a short neck, but the expensive material of suit and shirt fit without a wrinkle or bulge. The man’s very British striped rep tie was knotted precisely and his graying, wiry hair cut and trimmed like a piece of sculpture. He had wide cheekbones and large ears, a strong, square chin and firm mouth. His most dominant and dominating features, though, were his almost turquoise blue eyes. They were as calculating as Mrs. Symms’s, but also penetrating, arresting. One didn’t want to look into them for long.