Chicago, Early Summer
Sprawled out in a high-backed stool, Don Olson had commandeered the entire lower half of the long bar at Mike Ditka’s. While his left arm barricaded his drink, his right index finger jabbed the air. He kept his head turned back toward the bartender. The bartender was ignoring him.
“There he is, the guy I was telling you about. You read a book called The Agents of Darkness, didn’t you? Eighty-three, right? Year it came out? Cover of Time magazine?”
“Good memory,” I said.
Stationed in front of the two men at the far end, the bartender appeared to be engrossed in passing celery sticks through a stream of cold water. This was going to be even more terrible than I had feared. I wished I had never talked to the guy. The people at the tables were shifting their eyes between Olson and myself. The guys at the far end stared straight ahead. They might have been watching television, but what they were watching, with increasing wariness and alarm, was the former Dilly-O.
“I asked you a question, my friend. Does the name Lee Harwell mean anything to you?”
“Sir,” said the bartender, “in 1983, I was eight years old.”
“How fleeting is the bauble, fame,” Olson said. “Come over here and give your daddy some sugar.”
So now this guy was my daddy? The odors of sweat, unwashed flesh, and tobacco intensified as I drew nearer, and I held my breath while I embraced my old friend. Salt-and-pepper stubble covered Olson’s cheeks. The stench was part of the reason everyone else had fled to the other end of the bar. The rest of it would have been whatever he had said or done. Olson gripped me a couple of beats too long before releasing me.
“Let me buy you a drink, man, hey? That sound like a good idea?”
“Good enough,” I said, and asked for a glass of pinot grigio.
“Pinot for my buddy, and another margarita here. Hey, Lee.” A slap on the shoulder. “You gotta know—I really appreciate this.”
He leaned back, grinning. “Should we maybe grab a table?”
“Let’s,” I said, and saw the bartender’s shoulders drop an inch or two.
“Which one you like? That one?” Olson was pointing at one of two empty tables at the back of the room.
I was trying to reconcile the scruffy, hard-used man before me with both his eighteen-year-old self and the man Jason Boatman had once described to me in the lobby of the Pfister. Olson looked exactly like a man who had just walked out of prison. The yardbird bravado made him seem inauthentic, potentially dangerous.
“That one’s fine.” I felt an instinctive need to keep Olson pacified.
The entire room relaxed when we sat down at the back table.
Olson faced the door, keeping a watch out for something that was never going to happen, and the other patrons went back to their conversations, their burgers, their laughter. A small, brown-haired, and extraordinarily good-looking female waiter brought our drinks on a gleaming tray and set them down with a flicker of a glance for me, nothing for Olson. She evoked the memory of forties movie queens like Rita Hayworth and Greer Garson. She also evoked another memory, sharper, more immediate, and charged with feeling.
“This is a great place, right? I thought you’d like it.”
“I like it fine,” I said.
“You’ve been here before, I suppose.”
“I think so.”
“Places like this are so common in your experience, you don’t remember if you were here before?” Olson’s eyes flicked away and for a moment inspected the bar’s entrance. Then his attention snapped back to me.
“I was here once before, Don. About a week after it opened. We came for dinner.”
“They serve good food in this place, right?”
“Their food is dandy. It’s ducky. It’s swell.”
“Okay, I get it. Hey, can I get you anything? An appetizer, maybe?”
Ditka’s was on East Chestnut, five blocks south of my house on Cedar Street, not so close that Olson’s arrival felt like an intrusion—apart from all the ways in which it felt precisely like an intrusion.
“Come on, let’s split a shrimp cocktail.” Here he gave another sharp, brief glance at the doorway, but whatever he was dreading or waiting for failed to appear.
“Look, I never got around to having lunch,” I said. “And now it’s almost four. Let’s have a late lunch or an early dinner, does that sound good? On me, please, Don. I know you’ve had some hard luck lately.”
“Today my luck is good. Tell you the truth, though, I could eat a cow.”
“Then you picked the right place.”
He waved to the waitress, and when her blue-gray gaze found him, performed a mime of reading a menu.
She came to our table with two big gull-wing menus, and Don Olson, alas, folded his hand around her wrist. “What’s good here, honey?”
She jerked her hand from his grip.
“What do you think I should order?”
“The Da Pork Chop.”
“Da Pork Chop, that’s like the specialty of the house?”
“Comes with cinnamon apples, green peppercorns, and au juice.”
“That’s the baby for me. Start me off with the Fried Calamari. Extra crispy, can you do that for me?”
I ordered a blue-cheese burger and a second glass of wine.
“Another margarita, too, honey. Corona back. Did you ever read a book called The Agents of Darkness?”
“I don’t think so.”
“This is the guy who wrote it. Forgive me, I’m Don Olson, and this is my friend Lee Harwell. What’s your name? It has to be as pretty as you are.”
“My name is Ashleigh, sir. Excuse me, but I’m going to punch in your order now.”
“Hold on, please, Ashleigh. I want to ask you an important question. Think it over, then give me your honest response.”
“You have thirty seconds,” she said.
Olson checked the entrance, lifted his chin, and closed his eyes. He raised his right hand and pinched his thumb against his index finger. It was a parody of careful discrimination, and it was awful to behold.
“Does a person have the right to turn his friends’ lives into entertainment, for money?” He opened his eyes, his hand still raised in that snuff taker’s position.
“You don’t need permission to write a novel.”
“Get outta here,” Olson said.
Ashleigh twirled away.
“Ten years ago, that little slut would have gone home with me. Now she won’t look at me twice. At least she didn’t want to look at you, either.”
“Don,” I said, “your heart isn’t in this. You checked out the door maybe five or six times since we sat down. Is there someone you’re afraid will come in? Is someone following you? Obviously, you’re on the lookout.”
“Okay—when you’re in the slammer, you learn to keep an eye on the door. You get a little jumpy, a little paranoid. Couple of weeks, I’ll be back to normal.”
He made another quick check of the entrance.
“When did you get out, anyhow?”
“I took a bus up here this morning. Know how much money’s in my pocket? Twenty-two bucks.”
“Don, I don’t owe you anything. Let’s be clear about that.”
“Harwell, I don’t think you owe me anything, could we be clear about that? I just figured, maybe you’d be willing to help me out a little, you and your wife. She was always great, you were always a good guy, and you’re about a million times better off than anyone else I know.”
“Leave my wife out of this.”
“Oh man, that’s harsh,” Olson said. “I loved the Eel.”
“So did everybody else. What do you mean, help you out a little?”
“Let’s save the business for after lunch, all right? I’m thinkin’ about when we were all on top of the world, our little bunch. And you and the Eel were ‘the Twins.’ Because you sure did look a lot alike, you gotta give me that.”
“I wish you’d stop calling her ‘the Eel,’” I said.
It was as though he had not heard. “Man, she must have been one of the great tomboys of all time.” For the first time since we had taken the table, Olson seemed able to step aside from his obsession with the door and fully inhabit his half of the conversation.
I remembered something that dampened my sudden flare of anger. “In the old days, when I wanted to piss her off, I called her Scout.”
Olson’s face creased into a smile. “She was like the girl in, you know, that movie …”
I found that I remembered nothing about a movie I had held perfectly in mind a moment before. Lately, these mental vacancies and erasures seemed to be happening with an increasing frequency. “The one with that actor …”
“And Scout was his daughter …”
“Damn,” said Olson. “At least you can’t remember, either.”
“I know it, but I don’t know it,” I said, frustrated but no longer in a bad temper. Our shared failing had put us on a common footing; and this evidence of Olson’s aging had served, however paradoxically, to evoke the forthright and appealing young man Dill had been. Full of sweetness, the past bloomed before me.
Simultaneously, we said, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” We burst out laughing.
“I have to ask,” I said. “What were you charged with?”
For a second, Olson glanced up at the ceiling, exposing a skinny, wrinkled neck that looked like some inedible organic vegetable in a health food store. “I was charged with and convicted of committing crimes of gross indecency with a young woman. The alleged victim was eighteen years old and engaged in an informal program of study with me. For a couple of years, I’d been working with the erotic occult. I started out with a group of ten or twelve, it shrank to maybe six, you know how that goes, and in the end it was just me and Melissa. It got so we could prolong the act like to infinity. Unfortunately, she mentioned this feat to her mother, who went completely nuts and got the university involved, which wound up with the Bloomington vice squad hauling me out of my sweet no-rent sublet and dragging me off to the station.”
At this point, Olson’s eyes again moved from my face to the doorway.
“Indiana turns out to be the most self-righteous state in the Union.”
Don Olson once again returned to me, his old friend, and the conversation, this time without the effect of bringing a lost era back to life.
“You were in an Indiana state prison?”
“I started out in Terre Haute, then I was sent to Lewisberg, PA. After six months, they sent me here, to Illinois. Pekin. They like to keep you off balance. But I can do my work in prison the same as anywhere else.”
The calamari arrived. We began spearing pieces of fried squid and popping them into our mouths. Don Olson leaned back in his chair and groaned with pleasure. “God, real food again. You have no idea.”
I agreed: I had no idea. “What did you mean, your work? What could you do in jail?”
“Talk to other prisoners. Show them another way to think about what they had done and where they were.” Olson resumed eating, but did not let it interfere with his explanations. Bits of fried squid and batter occasionally sprayed from his mouth. His glances at the entrance punctuated his sentences. “It was like social work, actually.”
“Social work.”
“Plus the old hoodoo mojo,” Olson said, rippling his fingers before him. “Without you got the sizzle, you can’t sell the steak.”
Ashleigh returned and picked up Olson’s plate without getting near enough to be reeled in. Returning with a small but heavily laden tray, she slid our plates before us with the finesse of a croupier.
Olson cut into the massive pork chop and brought a glistening nugget to his mouth. “Whoa,” he said, and chewed for a bit. “Man, these guys know how to cook a pig, uh huh.”
He stopped grinning long enough to swallow. “When we all fell in love with Spencer Mallon, the Eel was right there, alongside Hootie and Boats and me. Why you weren’t, I never understood. You stayed away, but you must have heard all about it.”
“Not really,” I said. “But that’s part of the reason I asked you to come here.”
Olson waved at the waitress for more drinks and took the opportunity to check out the doorway again. “Way I look at it, you kept yourself out back then. In fact, way I remember it, you were sort of pissy about what we were doing.”
“I didn’t see the point of pretending to be a college student. Especially for Hootie, for God’s sake! And your ‘guru’ smelled like bullshit to me.” For a second or two, I watched Olson eat. Then I cut the giant burger down the middle and took a bite from the dripping half-moon in front of me.
“Mallon put a curse on all of you, my wife included.”
Olson’s wandering eyes snapped back to my face, and there he was again, fully present. It was like turning on a big battery, like watching a statue come suddenly to life.
“Jesus, you’re still weird about this. It still puts a hair up your ass.” He shook his head, smiling. “And do you really think there’s any difference between a blessing and a curse? I’d be amazed if you did.”
“Come on,” I said, a little taken aback by his sudden intensity. “Don’t give me that Mallon horse shit.”
“Call it what you like,” Olson said, concentrating now on his new margarita. “But I’d say the same principle applies to me. And to the Eel.”
“Her name is still Lee Truax.”
“Whatever.”
I took a moment to work on the giant burger while keeping an eye on Don Olson. I tried to work out how far he was willing to go.
“I suppose Mallon’s blessing is the reason you went to jail.”
“Spencer’s blessing allowed me to do exactly what I wanted for the past forty years, not counting jail time.”
Something struck me. “Pekin’s a federal prison. How does a sex offender wind up there?”
“He probably doesn’t.” Olson smiled an off-center smile. Another glance over my shoulder. “Come to think of it, probably wasn’t Melissa Hopgood got me sent away. Let’s call it a financial miscalculation.”
“The IRS?” Tax fraud sounded too boring for the man who had once been the heroic Dill.
Olson made a big deal of savoring his mouthful of pork. I saw him come to a conclusion a moment before he swallowed. “The error was, the mechanism we used to create extra money was pretty fuckin’ dubious.”
He grinned and raised his hands: Hey, you got me.
“Melissa knew this kid. Turned out the kid was a sort of big-time facilitator. From a big, serious family. Lot of money flowing into the country, lots of money flowing out. If I could help him with a distribution issue, I’d make enough to get off the road and settle down somewhere. I thought I’d maybe write a book.”
He winked at me. “The stuff about erotic magic was all straight truth, by the way, and Melissa did go and blab to big fat Maggie Hopgood about all the orgasms she was having, but she threw in some stuff about the distribution setup, and that’s why the boys dragged me away in the cold, cold mornin’.”
“A drug deal.”
“Let’s just say, my get-rich-quick scheme didn’t pan out. From now on, I stick to honest labor and the kindness of friends.”
“Is this where we get to business?”
Don Olson racked his knife and fork. His plate now held only a bone, a knot of gristle, and brown smears. “A minute ago, you said you were still curious about Spencer and the old days.”
I said nothing.
“You tried to get the Eel to tell you what happened that day in the meadow?”
I held my silence.
“I’m not surprised. It’s a hell of a topic. You guys must have spent a lot of time with the police.”
“They were interested in what I might have heard about Keith Hayward. If he had enemies, stuff like that. All I knew was that my girlfriend hated his guts. Which I wasn’t about to say.”
“Hootie hated him, too.”
“Later on, did Spencer ever say anything about Hayward?”
Now it was Olson’s turn to let a question hang in the air.
“I did a little research, and some pretty interesting stuff turned up. Do you remember hearing about the Ladykiller, back around 1960?”
“Hayward couldn’t have been the Ladykiller,” Olson said, firmly. “He had a whole different bag.”
“I’m not saying he was. But he had a connection to the murders, and I have the feeling that he had at least some kind of effect on whatever happened out there in the meadow.”
“Ask that gorgeous Miss Thang for the check,” Olson said. He looked up and regarded the ceiling for a couple of seconds. “To get me back on my feet, I need, hey, a thousand dollars.” He grinned. “Of course, the amount is up to you.”
“On the way to my place we can stop at an ATM. And yes, the amount is up to me.” I waved at the waitress and pretended to scribble in the air. She brought the check, and I handed her a credit card. Olson leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He never took his eyes from my face. It must have cost him something to keep from eyeing the entrance. After I added a tip and tore off the receipt, I stood up and stared at the floor for a little while. Olson continued regarding me.
I met his gaze. “I’ll give you five hundred.”
Olson stood up without taking his eyes off mine. Smiling an annoying lopsided smile, he moved toward the entrance with a sloping, sidling walk that insinuated a trace of criminality and an underlying degree of physical strength. It seemed a kind of unspoken rebuke. Several of the remaining patrons kept their eyes on Olson, making sure he was really leaving.
The bright dazzle of Chestnut Street seemed lighter, less ponderous than the atmosphere we had just left. “What did you do in there before I showed up?”
“Shook ’em up a little,” Olson said, grinning at the memory.
“So I gather.”
“When my first margarita came up, I had me a little taste and said, ‘In the joint you can get any kind of drug you can name, only it’s like tequila was wiped off the face of the earth, which is pretty fuckin’ strange when you consider how many Mexican motherfuckers are doing time.’ Then I started talking about you, but the damage was done.”
I steered my companion north onto Rush Street, and for a couple of minutes Olson fell silent to inspect both the people around them and the spaces between the people. Being outside, I saw, increased his sense of threat. Chicago’s usual gridiron charge and swerve occupied the sidewalks. Olson did not excite notice until we paused for a traffic light, when several people moved away from his odor.
“I didn’t expect so much hostility out here in the land of the free.”
“A shower and a change of clothes will fix that. I’m amazed you can’t smell yourself.”
“On the bus everybody smelled this way.”
Two more blocks took us to the Oak Bank, and I stopped in front of the ATM machine. Before I could pull out my wallet, Olson whispered, “Let’s go into the lobby, okay?”
He was nodding like a bobblehead doll. Transacting our business out on the street ramped up his anxiety.
“We’re in no danger here.”
“Must be nice to feel that way,” Olson said.
I took him into the lobby and led him toward the row of ATM machines. A bearded kid with a backpack was punching numbers into the machine at the far right, and a guy who looked like he might once have been a college lacrosse player—broad back, short hair, starched blue shirt, pressed chinos—was withdrawing money from an ATM near the center of the row. I moved toward the machine two openings to the lacrosse player’s left, but Olson stepped in front of me and, like a sheepdog, guided me to the last machine in the line.
“You have no idea how many ways people can figure out your ATM number just by watching you. Trust me.”
I extracted my card from my wallet. Olson posted himself like a bodyguard at my shoulder. I brought the card to the lip of the slot and paused. “Hmmm …”
Olson stepped back and twisted his neck to look at me.
I pushed my card in and immediately pulled it back out. Olson made a show of looking away while I tapped in the code numbers. “I wish I knew why I said I’d give you five hundred bucks.”
“I’ll tell you, if you really want to know.”
While the screen asked me what I wanted to do now that I had its attention, I swung around sideways and raised my eyebrows in silent demand.
“Because I asked for a thousand.”
While bills shuttled out of the ATM, he tilted his head, propped his left elbow in the palm of his right hand, and snapped his fingers.
Olson folded his twenties and fifties into the front pocket of his jeans. “People tend to act in certain specific ways. Spencer had it all figured out. You always ask for twice as much as you really want.”
A few minutes later, the two of us turned into Cedar Street. After a quick, darting inspection of the terrain, Olson remarked that I sure did live on a beautiful block. Past the restaurants bordering Rush Street, handsome row houses and residential buildings extended eastward beneath the shelter of great trees toward the bright blue immensity of Lake Michigan. For some reason, he stepped off the sidewalk and began to walk toward a semicircular asphalt drive curving up toward the glass entrance of a tall apartment building that, although contemporary in style, fit in perfectly with the comfortable affluence of its surroundings. I had spent a significant portion of my life in that building.
I asked Olson where he was going.
Puzzled, Olson looked back over his shoulder. “Isn’t that where you live?” He jerked a thumb at the apartment building.
“No. What makes you think so?”
“Some kind of instinct, I guess.” He looked sharply up at me. “To tell you the truth, I once spent some time in that building. A girlfriend of Mallon’s let us stay there when she was out of town. But I swear, that’s not the reason. I had this feeling …” Olson brought a hand to his forehead and peered up at me. “Usually, I’m right about stuff like this. Not this time, huh?”
I shook his head. “I lived in that building for twelve years. Moved out in 1990. That’s where I wrote The Agents of Darkness and the three books after it. I wonder how you …”
“I’m not a complete fake,” Olson said, appearing to be confused about some central point. “But if you moved out in 1990, why are we here?”
“I moved right across the street, to number twenty-three.” I pointed at my four-story brownstone with a shining red door and two rows of clean modern windows on the upper floors. Despite the competition offered by its handsome neighbors, I had always considered it the best-looking building on Cedar Street.
“You must be doing pretty good,” Olson said. “What apartment did you live in over there?”
I struggled against the impulse to conceal information from him. “Nine A. It was a nice place.”
“Same apartment as the one Mallon and I borrowed from the girl. Nine A—right down at the end of the hallway.”
“Now you’re starting to freak me out. I first heard about the building from my wife.” I took out my keys as we moved toward my red door.
“Why are you being so generous with me?” Olson asked, maddeningly. “Forget that shit about getting half of what you ask for. You didn’t have to give me five hundred bucks, and for sure you don’t have to let me into this house. It’s not like I expect you to give me everything I want.”
“Is that right?”
“I just got out of prison, man, we were never really close close friends, and you’re gonna let me walk into this amazing house?” He tilted his head to look up at the brick facade and its rows of shining windows. “You and the Eel live here alone? With all this space?”
“We live alone.”
“Only now even she isn’t here.”
I could not help it, I flared out. “If you’re afraid to come in, go across Rush and check into the local flophouse.” I pointed down the street and across the busy avenue, where a yuppie bar seemed to be supporting a sagging residence hotel for derelicts, identified by a big Jetsons-in-Miami neon sign as the Cedar Hotel.
“I’m not afraid of your house,” Olson said. This, I understood, was almost but not quite the literal truth. “And believe me, I’ve stayed in that fleabag more times than you can imagine. But what the fuck do you really want from me?”
I inserted the long key into the enormous lock, then swung the red door open onto a wide vestibule with rosewood walls, a Shiraz rug, and a Chinese vase filled with fleshy-looking calla lilies. “For one thing,” I said, offering the first rational thing that came to mind, “I’d like to hear about Brett Milstrap.” This statement, which I had uttered without benefit of any sort of thought or consideration, startled me. If I had paused to think about it, I would have said that I had long ago forgotten the name of the second fraternity boy who had been in Spencer Mallon’s adoration circle.
Infuriatingly, Olson stopped moving just before he would have walked through the door. “When am I supposed to have met Brett Milstrap?” Incapable of restraining himself, he looked down to the corner we had turned and retraced our steps: the conflict between his urgency to escape into the house and his reluctance to enter it froze him to the cement stoop. This was maddening to behold.
Shaking his head, Don finally walked across my threshold. For a moment he glanced into the living room, then up at the angular staircase, attempting to adjust, I supposed, to the nature of his surroundings. The staircase and the gleaming warmth of silver and polished wood in the living room probably invited and repelled him in equal measure.
“How many rooms you got in this place?”
“Twelve or fourteen, depending on how you count.”
“Depending on how you count,” Olson muttered, and began to place his feet on the intertwined long-stemmed tulips woven into the central runner.
“Tell me,” I asked from the top of the stairs, “were your encounters with Milstrap accidental, or was he looking for you?”
“Everybody thinks I have all these answers. Which I don’t, by the way.”
The staircase opened into a roomlike mezzanine space furnished with a desk, a handsome leather chair, cut flowers in a straight-sided vase, and bookshelves flanking the side of the staircase in its ascent to the third floor. A dim, book-lined hallway led into the depths of the house.
“If you ever get in trouble,” Olson said, “make sure your lawyer arranges house arrest.”
Olson leaned against the top of the railing, narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips. A wave of goatish body stink floated from him as if misted through a secret valve.
“While you’re taking a shower, I’ll find you some clothes. Drop what you’re wearing in the hamper. By the way, what’s your shoe size?”
Olson looked down at his battered, mud-colored sneakers. “Ten and a half. Why?”
“I believe this might be your lucky day,” I said.
Half an hour later, a renewed Donald Olson padded into the ground-floor living room with the delicacy of a cat. I gathered that as well as showering he had washed, conditioned, and mildly gelled his hair, removed his stubble, moisturized his cheeks, and in a number of other ways improved his scent and appearance. The result was amazing—Olson seemed to have transformed himself into a younger, happier, and more handsome version of himself. A portion of this effect was due to his clothing, a blue button-down shirt slightly too large for him and green khakis bunched at the waist and rolled an extra turn at the cuffs. Below the cuffs appeared a pair of lightly brogued cap-toe shoes made from what looked like soft, buttery leather, of a brown so pale they were almost yellow. Apparently impressed by these splendid shoes, Olson smiled and pointed down.
“That’s hand-tooling, right?”
“If they were saddles, I guess you’d be right. You can have them.”
“Man, you’re giving away your shoes?”
“My feet went up a half size a couple of years ago. There’s a box of my old shoes you can go through.”
Olson fell back on the sofa and extended his arms to his sides, his legs out before him. He looked like a furniture salesman. “What comfort. And my room, man. I couldn’t ask for anything nicer than that room.” Legs outstretched, he lifted both of his feet and contemplated the gorgeous shoes. “Say I walked into a top-of-the-line shoe store, how much would these babies set me back?” He lowered his feet to the carpet and leaned forward, prepared to be astonished.
“How much did they cost? I don’t really remember, Don.”
“Give me a ballpark number.
“Three hundred.” I could not remember how much the shoes had cost, but it was probably twice that.
Olson waggled a foot in the air. “I didn’t know you could even wear that much money on your feet.” He lowered his foot and spent a moment on a self-inspection: smoothed the fabric covering his thighs, held out his arms to regard his sleeves, ran his fingers down the row of shirt buttons. “I look like a guy with a house in the country and a flashy sports car. A vintage sports car—like what Meredith Bright used to drive! Remember that little red car? With that big chrome swoosh on the sides?”
“I never saw her car,” I said. “I never even saw Meredith Bright.”
“You really missed something, man.” He guffawed. “Meredith Bright wasn’t half bad, either. Back then, she looked like the most beautiful girl in the world. The most beautiful girl possible.”
“Do you know what happened to Meredith Bright? Could you help me get in touch with her?”
“Meredith wouldn’t add much to your project.”
I jerked myself upright. “What is she doing now?”
“She’s the wife of a senator. Before that, she was married to the CEO of a Fortune five hundred company. When they got divorced, she took him for thirty million dollars, plus an estate in Connecticut, which she sold to buy something a little bigger in Virginia or North Carolina, I forget, wherever the senator is senator from. He’s a Republican. She wants him to be president.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“No, she will. It’s like something got into her.” He glanced at the wall beside him, then shifted his body to take it in more directly. The paintings on the wall seemed to have distracted him. They were by Eric Fischl and David Salle, who had been young art stars back when I bought the paintings. I would not have thought Don Olson would be particularly interested in them.
“Got into her back then, you mean?”
“Yeah. Before she started on her career of sucking the life out of rich guys, or whatever the hell it is she does.” He shifted around on the sofa, trying to figure out a way to describe what had happened to Meredith Bright. “You know how people sometimes have a kind of internal temperature, an internal climate? Meredith Bright has the internal climate of a vampire. That’s the best way I can say it. She makes you see the whole idea of demonic possession in a whole nother way. And we loved that woman, man, we were crazy about her. She’s scary, man.”
“I guess her husbands didn’t think so.”
“Millionaire senators and CEOs got different standards for a wife than other people. If the package looks really classy, they don’t care if she’s a zombie vampire. And this woman can pretend like a motherfucker.”
“Boatman once said to me your whole group was ruined by what happened in that agronomy meadow. It looks that way to me, even though Meredith Bright is sort of a special case. Do you think you were ruined?”
“Of course I was ruined. Look at my life! I need your help to get back on my feet. I just got out of jail. It was Menard, by the way, the prison in that Fugitive movie. Menard Correctional Institution.”
I nodded but said nothing.
Olson snapped his fingers. “That waitress at Ditka’s, what was her name? Ashleigh? You know who she reminded me of? The Eel.”
“I know, yes,” I said. “Me too. Except Ashleigh isn’t as beautiful as your friend the Eel. You should see the way she looks now.”
“No offense, but she’s the same age we are.”
“Just wait,” I said, and left the room, using a gesture that would tell a dog it would earn a treat if it sat down long enough. A few minutes later, I returned with a black-and-white photograph in a simple black frame with a foldout stand at the back. I handed it to Olson.
“This was taken about a year ago. I’d show you more, but my wife hates having her picture taken.”
“Again, Lee, no offense, but …” Olson was leaning against the back of the sofa and holding the photograph in both hands. “Wait.”
He sat up, placed the photograph on the tops of his knees, and bent over to peer at it. “Wait a second here.”
Olson was shaking his head and grinning. “Here’s this little gray-haired woman, but … it sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? She’s amazing. Beauty like that, where does it come from?”
“Sometimes in restaurants, or on airplanes, I see these guys staring at her as if they’re asking themselves, How the hell did that happen? Waiters fall in love with her. Cops fall in love with her. Cabdrivers fall in love with her. Baggage handlers. Doormen. Crossing guards.”
“She’s really … stunning. Once you see it, you can never miss it again. She still looks like herself. The gray hair doesn’t matter, she has a couple of lines on her face, they don’t matter. She still looks like the Eel, only she grew up into this amazing woman.”
Olson was still staring down at the photograph of Lee Truax, the former Eel, her luminous face tilted up to gather or shed sunlight apparently produced from within. “Anyhow, your wife gets out and about, I gather? She does a lot of traveling? That works out okay?”
“Are you asking me about something else now, Don?”
“Well, isn’t she … is she blind?”
“Blind as a bat,” I said. “Has been for years now. It never actually slowed her down. It doesn’t even get in her way very much. If she happens to need help, there’s always some cabdriver, or doorman, or passing cop, to give her a hand. She could raise a dozen volunteers just by holding up that stick leaning against the chair. She calls it her distaff.”
Olson shivered. “Really?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“A distaff is supposed to be this harmless thing you wind wool around, but … Oh, never mind. Now, I guess, it just refers to things connected to women. You knew that.”
“Of course. I’m sure it’s a reference to something she saw back in the meadow. That’s why she went blind, you know—because of something she saw. Or because of everything she saw. It happened gradually. Over about ten years—roughly 1980 to 1990. She said it was being kind to her, taking so long to become complete.”
“I saw a distaff,” Don said, a little reluctantly. “On that day. Just for a second.”
He pushed himself up from the sofa and moved to the windows at the front of the house. Hands in the pockets of the khakis, he bent forward and looked out at Cedar Street. “You got anything to drink here, by the way? Been a long time since lunch.”
“Follow me,” I said, and brought him back into the kitchen. Last in the row of gleaming cabinetry, down from the refrigerator and immediately above the glass-fronted wine fridge, the liquor cabinet contained dozens of bottles arrayed in ranks.
“And a very merry Christmas to you, too,” Olson said. “Do I see some fancy-schmancy tequila back there?”
I poured him a juicy, cognac-like tequila and gave myself a beer. It was a few minutes past six, at least an hour before I would ordinarily permit himself to take alcohol. At a level not quite conscious, I supposed that Don Olson would be more forthcoming if he put away some tequila.
We carried our drinks to the slab of the kitchen table and sat facing each other, as my wife and I usually did. Olson gulped tequila, swished it around in his mouth, swallowed, smacked his lips in appreciation, and said, “Hey, it’s not like I want to be ungrateful or anything, but I feel like an imposter in these clothes, man. Blue button-down shirts and khakis might be a great look for you, Lee, but my own personal style is a little edgier, I guess you could say.”
“You’d like some new clothes.”
“That’s what I’m saying, basically.”
“We could go to a couple places down on Michigan Avenue. No reason you should feel uncomfortable.”
“Man … you’re like a saint. No wonder the Eel married you.”
I let that one go, irritating though it was.
On we talked, and later went shopping and had a simple dinner of fish and pasta and talked some more, and I had the odd thought that I was becoming better friends with the former Dilly than we had been in the years when we had seen each other every day.
Olson’s abrupt departure on the evening of October 16, 1966, had felt like a wound, all the more painful for being so absolute. There had been something about a rising tide, apparently, but I had assumed this vague prediction to apply to Boats. Unexpectedly, Boats had been left behind, reeling with shock and loss like the rest of the survivors. According to three eyewitnesses, Meredith Bright had bounded harelike through the scraps of orange-yellow fog drifting across the meadow, scramming back into the safety of what we assumed to be her privileged life. At least, her disappearance made sense of a kind. Hootie was another matter. Howard Bly, like us a child of West Madison, had vanished into a world at once eerily utterly unknown and dreadful to contemplate.
This history, and more, formed the substance of the endless conversation between Donald Olson and myself that went for days on Cedar Street. I knew perfectly well that nothing was stopping me from disappearing into my office five or six hours a day, and that I was taking a deliberate break from work (something my wife had only rarely succeeded in getting me to do), yet I could tell myself that spending time with Olson amounted to research of a kind. And it was somehow as though my wife had given me permission to poke around in the only locked room in our marriage—the only one I knew about, anyhow.
On the fourth evening of his stay, Don Olson gave striking corroboration to her conviction that Keith Hayward was a dangerous character. What Don said about Hayward also backed up Detective Cooper’s theory that the murdered boy was related to the Milwaukee villain known as the Ladykiller.
“Hootie and your wife used to tell Spencer that Hayward was even worse than he imagined, which was pretty funny anyhow, because how did they know what he thought? Besides, they were only going on impressions and intuitions.”
“But you had some kind of proof?” I asked.
“Well, it wasn’t proof, but it looked crazy enough to spook me.”
“A place, a special place Hayward set up. I wandered into an antiwar rally behind the library and saw him mooching around, trying to pick up girls. He wasn’t getting anywhere, let’s put it that way. Every girl he went up to shot him down. After he struck out four or five times, he got pissed off. Even that tells you a lot about the guy, doesn’t it? He didn’t get depressed, he didn’t get unhappy, he got angry.”
“The girls refused to follow his script.”
“That’s right. And he changed—his face got tight, and his eyes shrank. He looked around to see if anybody was watching him. Never saw me, thank God, because I’d parked myself in a pretty inconspicuous spot. I could tell he had some kind of secret. So when he took off up State Street, I just puttered along behind him.
“The guy marched straight up to Henry Street, where he turned left and zoomed on by the Plaza Bar and right into this vacant lot that had three old sheds, like small garages, at the far end. As soon as he stepped into the lot, he pulled his big ball of keys out of his pocket, and he let himself into the last little shed. Even back where I was, I could hear him slam the door and lock it. Then I waited a couple of seconds and hustled across the lot to look into the little windows in the door.”
I had some ideas about Hayward’s idea of amusement, but I asked, “What was he doing?”
“Talking to a knife, that’s what he was doing,” Don said. “And singing to it. Singing. He was standing in front of a table, picking up this big knife, kind of fondling it, and putting it back down. The whole deal struck me as really creepy. Who sings to a knife? In a locked shed?”
“Hayward was a disturbed guy, that’s for sure. I’ve been looking through some … No, I can’t talk about it yet.”
“Hey, Chief, that’s up to you.” Don slumped in his chair and pushed aside his plate. We had lingered at the irregular slab of dark-gray stone that served as the kitchen table. “Is it too late for a nightcap?”
“You know where the bottles are.”
Olson slid out of his chair and began to move toward the liquor cabinet.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “Get me another beer out of the fridge, will you?” I felt an underlying heaviness tugging at my voice.
“You got it.”
Olson handed me a beer and sat down again. His story had excited him, and he would be damned if he would go to bed: Donald Olson was still only a few days out of jail, he was dressed in new clothes, and he had his mitt around a glass of the finest tequila he had ever tasted.
“How’s the Eel?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is her conference going well? Or whatever it is?”
“It is, yes. In fact, she told me she’s going to stay in Washington for another week. There’s plenty for her to do there.”
“She knows I’m here?”
“Yes. You can stay a while longer, if you like. There are a few ideas I want to explore, a couple of things I’d like to suggest.”
“Okay. And here’s some actual good news I was saving up. From now on I won’t have to sponge off you anymore.”
“You scared up some money? How’d you do that?”
“Called in a few favors. Maybe you could give me a hand setting up a new bank account, arranging for a checkbook, stuff like that?”
“How much are we talking about?”
“If you really want to know, five K.”
“You raised five thousand dollars with a couple of phone calls?”
“A little more, actually. If you like, I can pay back your five hundred.”
“Maybe later,” I said, still amazed. “In the meantime, let’s get you down to the bank tomorrow, deposit that money.”
The next morning, I walked Olson to the Oak Bank and used my long acquaintanceship with its officers to ease the process of setting up a checking account in the amount of $5,500 for my houseguest. Three separate checks had been made out by persons I’d never heard of: Arthur Steadham ($1,000), Felicity Chan ($1,500), and Meredith Walsh ($2,500). Olson wound up with a temporary checkbook and five hundred dollars in cash. When I declined to accept any money, Don tucked half of the debt into my breast pocket.
I thought Olson would write checks until they started to bounce. The credit card company was going to get burned, because Don would see the card as nothing more than cash in instantly available form. To establish credit, he would pay his first month’s bill. After that, everything was uncertain.
Feeling like the midwife to a criminal career, I accepted Don’s offer to buy me lunch at Big Bowl, the Chinese restaurant near the corner of Cedar and Rush. After we ordered, Olson surprised me. “You’re going to ask me to drive to Madison and visit Hootie Bly with you, aren’t you?”
The chopsticks nearly jittered out of my hand.
“Let me go you one better. How would you like to talk to Meredith Bright? Meredith Bingham Walsh, as she is now.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you’re interested, I can probably arrange for you to meet Meredith. Hootie isn’t going to say anything that makes sense, but Mrs. Walsh might give you something useful. I don’t know, I’m just guessing here.”
“The vampire married to the senator? How can you do that?”
“It’s a long story,” Don said. “I think I amuse her. She sent me one of those checks.” He watched me as he sliced a soup dumpling in half and lifted one of the halves out of the bowl. “I guess you’re really into finding out what happened out there in that meadow. It’s like you think everyone saw the same thing, like all of us had the same experience. Is that what you think?”
“I guess I did, yes. Once. But not anymore.”
“What changed your mind?”
“A couple of years ago, I ran into Boats on the sidewalk outside the Pfister. This was even before I started getting interested in the Ladykiller.” An extremely specific memory returned to me. “He was carrying a suitcase. Uh-oh, I said to myself. He’s really still at it. That suitcase probably had a lot of other people’s cash and other people’s jewelry inside it. Plus whatever else he felt like stealing.”
“You gotta give him this,” Don said. “Man has a hell of a work ethic.”
“Seen one way, I guess. Anyhow, we recognized each other and he felt like talking, so we went inside and sat in that lobby bar, that lounge. With the big tables, and all the staircases? I thought he’d be nervous, but he said it was actually a very safe place for him to spend the next half hour or so.”
Olson laughed, and said, “Good plan.”
“So we were sitting there, just talking like two normal guys, and I realized that he might actually tell me something about that day. Back then, he barely even looked at me in the hallways. Hootie was in the bin. Lee refused to say anything. And you were off God knows where.”
“Right down the street, at least for a while.”
“Anyhow, when we were in the Pfister’s lounge, I brought it up. ‘Didn’t you talk about this with your wife?’ he asked, and I said, ‘Well, I tried.’ ’No way, huh?’ he said. Then he said that a lot of time had passed, and he might be able to tell me something. ‘It was horrible, though,’ he told me. And he said you were the only other person he had ever spoken of this with.”
Olson nodded. “Four, five years ago, in Madison. He has a little hideout there, a crummy room near the stadium, and he just waited for me to come through town. We got together after one of my initial meetings with the students, like that one you didn’t go to at La Bella Capri. He was shook up—couldn’t get it out of his mind. That picture.”
“A tower of dead children, he said. With little arms and legs sticking out.”
“And some heads, too. Did he cry, when you were talking?”
“He cried with you, too?”
Olson nodded. “It was when he tried to tell me that most of the dead kids were sort of folded over. ‘Like tacos,’ he said. And after that, he couldn’t keep it together anymore.”
“Amazing. That’s just what happened with me. ‘Like tacos,’ and boom, he’s in tears, he’s shaking, he can’t say another word for about five minutes, he just keeps making these ‘I’m sorry’ gestures with his hands.”
“Hell of a thing to see,” Don said. “But he didn’t see much else.”
“No. Just a big tower made of dead children. And a lot of blinding red-orange light, light the color of Kool-Aid, streaming in.”
“That’s what I said to him! He’s such a thief, he steals other people’s words. Anyhow, that light was really foul. Streamed in on us like through some crack in the world. One of the worst smells ever. I’m sure we all went through that. Unfortunately for you, I never managed to see a lot. There was one thing, though.”
“Yes?”
“Well, two things, actually. The first one was this dog, standing up inside a little room with a rolltop desk. He was wearing a dark-brown suit, two-tone shoes, and a bow tie. You know how guys with bow ties can sometimes give you this look, like you just farted and they hope you’ll go away before they have to ask you to leave? Pity and contempt. That’s the way he was looking at me.”
“Oh, that poster,” I said.
“No, not that poster Eel’s dad gave her. He wasn’t anything like those dogs. He wasn’t cute, not at all. This guy was sorry to see me, and he wanted me to go away.”
“But there was something else, too.”
“Jesus, have a little patience, will you? I’m getting to it. Mallon grabbed me by the elbow and yanked me away, but just before he pulled on my arm I saw that the dog was trying to hide something from me—things I was not supposed to see. These things were more like men, but bright, almost shiny, as if they were made of mercury or something. And they scared the shit out of me. One of them was a woman, not a man, a woman like a queen, and she had this stick in her hand, and I knew that the stick was called a distaff. How I knew I had no idea, but that’s what the thing was called. The whole thing scared the shit out of me. It terrified me. No, it horrified me, it filled me with horror. If Spencer hadn’t yanked me sideways, I would never have been able to move.”
“You told this to Boats, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. He was a lot more interested in his dead children. He asked me if I thought it could have been real. I said, ‘It was probably real somewhere, Jason.’”
That evening we made several necessary telephone calls, and after that secured reservations at the Concourse Hotel. The following morning, we drove 150 miles north to Madison. For 140 of those miles, we were on I-90 West, for most of our journey a highway with little to recommend it but simplicity and ease of use. Exits for villages and small towns, mileage signs, and billboards appeared, but the towns themselves did not, nor did the restaurants, motels, and roadside attractions advertised in the billboards. From the highway nothing was visible but the few farmhouses and fewer hills that punctuated a wide, flat landscape of fields and trees. For long stretches, three or four cars moving in a huddle fifty yards ahead were the only other vehicles in sight.
Don Olson said, “Slow down, damn it. You’re scaring me.”
The speedometer revealed that I had been stepping along at eighty-eight miles per hour. “Sorry.” I took my foot off the accelerator. “It snuck up on me.”
Olson caressed the top of the dashboard with a bony hand. “Man, everything you have is beautiful, isn’t it? Me, I got nothing at all. That’s fine with me, by the way. I had your stuff, I’d be worried sick about trying to protect it.”
“How fast does this old baby go, anyhow?”
“Around two o’clock one night, I was all alone on the highway. Bombed out of my skull. I got it up to a hundred and thirty. Then I got scared. That was the last time I ever did anything like that.”
“You hit a hundred and thirty when you were drunk at two in the morning?”
“Stupid, I know.”
“It also sounds very, very unhappy, man.”
“Well,” I said, and offered no more.
“Spencer used to say, everybody runs around looking for happiness when they ought to seek joy.”
“You have to earn joy,” I said.
“I’ve known joy. Long time ago.” Olson laughed. “Spencer once told me the only time he experienced absolute joy was in the meadow, just before everything exploded.”
Olson was still sitting sideways, facing me, one leg drawn up onto the car seat, almost grinning.
“This is out of left field, I know.”
“All right,” Olson said.
“Did you ever sleep with Lee when we were all back in high school?”
“With the Eel?” Laughing, Olson held up his right hand, palm out, as if taking an oath. “For God’s sake, no. Me and Boats and Hootie, we were all madly in love with Meredith Bright. Give me a break, man. You’d have to be a rat to go after another guy’s girlfriend. I had more principles than that. Anyhow, I always thought you and the Eel were doing it on a daily basis, more or less.”
I must have displayed rubber-faced amazement. “I didn’t think anybody knew that.”
“I didn’t know it … but I sure had the feeling that, you know.”
“We tried so hard to—”
“It worked, man. Nobody in our school knew that you and the Eel were having more sex than the rest of us combined, faculty included.”
That was probably true, I supposed. Lee Truax and I had progressed to actual intercourse on our fourth (or according to her, our fifth) get-together—encounters too informal to be called dates. At a party during our freshman year, we, by then long an informal couple, had wandered into an empty bedroom and followed our history of kisses, touches, partial disrobings and revelations, to its natural conclusion. We were stunningly, amazingly lucky. Our first experiences of sex were almost totally pleasurable. Within weeks, the mutual discovery of her clitoris led to her first orgasm. (Later, we referred to this day, October 25, as “the Fourth of July.”) And we knew from the first that this miracle depended for its survival upon silence and secrecy.
At times, as our erotic life receded over the course of our long marriage, I permitted myself to speculate that my far-wandering wife may have taken a number of lovers. I forgave her for the pain this possibility caused me, for I knew that I, not she, had inflicted most of the heavy-duty damage on our marriage. When we were in our mid-twenties, Lee had mysteriously left me, demanding “space” and “time by myself.” Two months later she reappeared, without explanation of where she had been or what she had done. She said she loved and needed me. The Eel had chosen me again.
And then … ten years later, my prolonged, on-and-off infidelity with the brilliant young woman who had agented The Agents of Darkness and thereby permanently changed my life had, I now thought, broken my marriage. That, that was what did it. The affair went on too long; or it should never have ended. Maybe I should have divorced Lee and married the agent. In my world, such recombinations happened all the time: men were forever leaving their wives and trading up, then divorcing and trading up again—editors, authors, publicists, publishing executives, foreign rights people, agents, all in a perpetual roundelay. I had been, however, too stubborn to leave my wife. How could I compound the betrayal I had already committed? That single act would have turned us into clichés—an abandoned wife, a newly successful man who had dumped his longtime spouse for the sexy younger woman who had aided that success. It was impossible that we should become such cartoons.
Yet the essence of our marriage had been broken.
Or maybe, I thought, this was the essence of our marriage: that we had come through so much pain, not just then but other times, too, and managed to stay together and love each other in a tougher, deeper way.
At the worst times, though, I wondered if our marriage had not been broken from the beginning, or from near the beginning, probably around the time I was pretending to be a scholar and Lee Truax tended bar in the East Village. Well, no, that was out of the question. One of the reasons I cherished Lee Truax was that she had stuck with me, she had hung in there.