The end had closed in upon me, the way the corn does in late summer, along the country roads--you suddenly realize you're trapped in a corridor you can't see over or through or around. You can either go forward, backward, or nowhere, and that's it. Even when the road intersects with another road, and you know what's buried at the intersection, you still can't see what's merely around it. Sometimes those intersections don't even have stop signs--completely uncontrolled--and you don't know if maybe you shouldn't slow down, but then what are the chances, really, that somebody would be crossing the rarely-traveled road you're on at precisely the same time you're crossing the rarely-traveled road he's on? One in a million, maybe less? There must be a reason, after all, why the intersection is uncontrolled. The sky above is big and distant; it doesn't touch you; it sure as hell doesn't help: you can't access it, all that free space up there to move in, and in which the birds do freely move. All that free space to move in, not just forward or backward, and not even just crissing or crossing or curving, but also up or down in 3 dimensional space: you can see the birds with their freedom to choose from an infinitude of directions, but you yourself have only two choices, really. You are able to see what's behind you and what's in front: what is passed, and what is coming, but you are powerless to control either. If a car is barreling toward you at 80 miles an hour, you can see it well enough, but you certainly can't stop it.
That's how I felt. Of course, reader, you already know that my story can't end the way Durney's did, because I have to live to tell the tale. Those are the rules of fiction, kind of like gravity is a rule of reality. I can't die at the end of my story any more than you can suddenly float away into the sky while you sit there reading it. Still, that's no guarantee my story ends any better than Durney's did.
I knocked Buddy out, undressed him, put my own clothes back on, and left him in his truck, at the Golden Horseshoe, with his uniform and his keys lying on the floor beside him. I spent the night at some motel, and the next day I drove into Chicago to get Delaney Demmering's will.
That will told me a lot, much more than who inherited Demmering's fortune. As for that fortune, it was to be divided equally among three men. The first was the one I already knew about, Fernando Pedrosa, the man Blondie had met, the man Will Sneed was waiting to receive his instructions from, the man Lennie Pecorelli was waiting to marry. The second was a man named Samuel West, of Kasbeer. Samuel West had to be related to Ellen West, the Blonde Bombshell, the girl Durney had made me torture, the girl who was now shacked up with Harry Thomasson down on the Old Rome Road. Kasbeer was a small shit-hole-of-a-town, maybe 200 people; there couldn't be that many Wests living in Kasbeer. Still, I didn't know for sure and I didn't know him. The third man listed was my bingo: Bruce Hardesty, of Peoria. Bruce had never told me his last name, but I knew as surely as I knew that the car I was driving was a car and was not me--I knew that Bruce Hardesty of Peoria was the Bruce who had been working with Durney in Bureau County the few months before Durney was killed, that he was the Bruce who had befriended me, that he was the mysterious Night Auditor at the Galena Trail Farmer's Cooperative, that he was the person who pulled the trigger on Durney. If these two Bruces were not one and the same person, then I would give up and admit that life indeed has no meaning.
But the will told me a whole lot more. It old me that Delaney Demmering was Leona Pecorelli's Mr. X. And Demmering was Will Sneed's Mr. X, and Kevner's Mr. X, and my Mr. X, and everyone else's Mr. X too.
As I drove back to Tiskilwa from Chicago, reflecting on what I knew, I figured the plot like this:
Delaney Demmering had probably been some kind of big-time racketeer operating out of Chicago or someplace in the north suburbs. Fernando Pedrosa worked for him; Lennie Pecorelli's father worked for him; Leona Percorelli worked for him, even if she didn't know it. Leona probably thought her husband, maybe ex-husband, was the big gee himself, and he probably let her think so. But they all worked for Demmering.
Rewind to where it begins. . .Demmering already controls the rackets as far southwest as La Salle, and decides the time is right to expand further west. It actually made sense, too. Durney had become old, and he wasn't working those territories nearly as hard as he should have been--even I knew there was lots of untouched wealth, especially in Elmville, that he could have been shaking down. Todd Menocken had basically told Durney as much, according to Blondie, and Durney had interpreted it as a warning or possibly even a threat. That was a month before Durney was murdered, about the same time Will Sneed and then Fernando Pedrosa showed up in Bureau County. By that time, Todd Menocken was already being operated by Kevner for a syndicate out of Peoria, but I don't think Durney knew that, and I know I didn't know.
So Demmering decides the time is right to expand into Bureau County, and decides to begin his infiltration with a simple labor union shakedown. Even I had to admire Demmering for that move. Those smug shitbirds in Elmville always prided themselves on being union-free, like they were the last redoubt of the John Birch Society, or something. The Elmville city motto was "Where Tradition and Progress Mean Liberty." Fucking cock-sucking hypocrites, their mayor's office and city council and their whole police force was bought and paid for by Durney--their liberty was exactly as much as Durney wanted it to be, and no more. Durney's mistake was letting them keep too much of that liberty.
Anyway, Demmering decides to test the water by shaking down a couple of Elmville factories, but he wants to keep his intentions concealed, so instead of sending one of his own stooges, he makes Leona Pecorelli use her contacts down in the Illinois River valley to recruit a union organizer with no connections to Demmering or even Chicago. Maybe Leona was telling the truth when she said she didn't know who wanted the union organizer; maybe Demmering really did send the request through multiple intermediaries so as to ensure that his own involvement would remain concealed.
Leona, not realizing that Todd is now being run by Peoria, asks him to find the union organizer, putting him in the impossible position of having to help a rival gang set up operations in the same territory that Kevner is also eyeing for the Peoria syndicate. Leona must have had something big on Todd in order to make him conspire against Kevner, which wouldn't surprise me in the least: she probably has something on everyone, friends and enemies alike. So Todd recruits Will Sneed out of Peoria, and Kevner probably thinks that Todd is sending Sneed to work for the Peoria syndicate. Maybe Todd even tells Kevner this to cover his own tracks, and Kevner assumes the order is coming from some other place deep within the syndicate, and keeps his own mouth shut because he doesn't want to let on what he does and does not know. Kevner let's Todd think that everything is copacetic, keeps his ears open for further developments, and probably taps Sneed for updates, which would explain why Sneed had been telephoning Kevner so frequently.
Todd was a pathetic, venal son-of-a-bitch. He was working both sides against each other not because he was wise, but because he was cowardly: he had Leona Pecorelli yanking his chain on one end, and Kevner doing the same on the other. I almost had to pity Todd, but also marvel at the irony that he was finally killed by neither of the rival mobs he was simultaneously working for and against, but by a fourth party and for reasons entirely personal and unrelated. That, however, is a different novel, reader, which you can read if it ever gets written.
After Todd successfully recruits Sneed to organize workers in the Elmville factories, Demmering sends Fernando Pedrosa to operate Sneed. A showdown between Demmering and Kevner seems imminent, because both want to control Bureau County. Then something spooks Demmering, and he calls Fernando back before Fernando even makes contact with Sneed. But Demmering doesn't withdraw from the field entirely, because Blondie said that after Fernando left Bureau County, Durney got himself involved in some kind of tangle with Demmering. That was the snag in the story: why did Demmering suddenly change course? Why did he abandon his plan to use Sneed? Why would he decide instead to engage Durney directly?
The answer to those questions had to be the same as the answer to the question why Bruce was named in Demmering's will. Could Demmering have secretly been operating Bruce, just as Kevner had been operating Todd Menocken? It didn't make any sense. When you operate somebody, you use him, and you use him, until he's all used up; you don't also leave that person a third of your fortune. There had to be a personal angle to it all that I wasn't seeing.
It was late before I was back in Bureau County, and I decided to stop at Menocken's Old Place for a beer.
On my way up the stairs to the entrance, I passed a giggling young couple, and overheard the girl saying, "He was anxious his Eskimos might leave," before they were out of earshot.
Inside, there was only one customer, and he was sitting at the bar. The red lights at Menocken's--I always liked those, and the black lucite table tops. Red light and black lucite: there's something really beautiful about that combination, the most beautiful darkness. It was weird, being in Menocken's, with Todd Menocken being dead. Guess that's why they changed the name to "Menocken's Old Place"--as a warning to the curious.
The customer sitting at the bar stood up, and walked toward the bathrooms.
I sat at the bar and ordered a Budweiser. I knew the bartender a little. We all worked for the same person by then, even though none of us knew who it was. Maybe there was more than one--they did call it a syndicate, after all: the Peoria Syndicate. By this point, however, I knew a little more than the bartender probably did. I knew, for instance, that Menocken's Old Place was near the north-eastern boundary of the Syndicate's territory. I knew that as close as La Salle, and maybe even closer, another outfit was running the rackets, and that this outfit was probably eyeing the Syndicate's newly-acquired operations in Bureau County. Yeah, I really doubted the bartender knew any of that.
The bartender started telling me about his 4th of July weekend in Rock Island: "My brother thinks none of us knows he's a faggot, so at every family gathering he brings this ugly broad with him, and then ignores her the whole time. The main reason she comes is because she wants to go to the mall. All day Saturday and half the day Sunday, she just keeps pestering my sister about going out to the mall. 'Barb,' she'd say, 'Are we gonna go to the mall in yer bomb?' The way she said it, sounded like she was straining to shit when she pronounced the words 'Barb' and 'mall' and 'bomb'. All she cared about was getting to that goddamned mall. Then she starts complaining about my sister's dog, saying 'It like to bit me,' and kicking him whenever he came near her."
I ordered a second beer. The bartender took my glass and put it under the tap. I hate it when they reuse my old glass. I like a clean, cold, frosty glass if I'm gonna pay full price for a second beer. When he pulled the tap handle, nothing came out but beer foam. The mug just started filling with foam. It looked like nightmarish mounds of bile or cat vomit or foam insulation, like a bowel movement, like shit-shaped foam filling a dirty glass mug. I hate beer foam; it makes me gag. It really does.
The bartender said, "Looks like we killed the keg. I gotta go downstairs to change it. Be back in a jiffy." He lifted a trapdoor in the floor behind the bar and walked down a hidden staircase, letting the trap door slam shut above him.
I heard somebody say, "Bottoms up, bottoms out," and then realized that the other customer--the one that left for the bathroom just as I arrived--had returned, and was seating himself on the bar stool right next to me.
I didn't want him sitting next to me, especially since he hand't been sitting there when he left for the bathrooms, but there didn't seem to be any polite way to tell him, and I wasn't in the mood for a quarrel. Instead I decided to chat him up. He had to be more interesting than the bartender, anyway. I turned my head to say something, but instead, for a moment, I just stared at him. He looked familiar, but I didn't recognize him at first. He was dressed differently--a short sleeve Oxford with navy slacks--and he was wearing thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, and his hair had been cut shorter. But slowly, through the deep, red light, his handsome face merged itself with another one lurking in my mind. He was the Tab Hunter look-alike, the man who, a couple days ago, laid me out cold and ransacked my house.
Before I could reach for my gun, he shoved his own into my side, and said, "Easy does it there, pal."
I said, "What the hell do you want?"
"I want to know what's that folded up in your shirt pocket there."
"Nothing."
He pressed his gun a little harder into my side.
"It's a will," I said through clenched teeth.
"It's not a will. It's a copy of a will. It's not even that; it's a copy of a copy of a will."
"Fine, have it your way--"
"Thanks, I think I will--"
"It's a copy of a copy of a will. If you already knew, why'd you ask?"
"I asked because I wanted to know how you would answer. You think people only ask questions because they need the information that's in the words that form the answer?"
No answer.
"What's your will say," he asked, emphasizing every other word by thrusting the barrel of his gun into my side.
I stubbornly refused to speak.
"Talk," he said, in a way that meant business. "Don't think I'd hesitate for even a second to blow your kidneys right out of you, and don't think you can stall long enough for the bartender to return. If you aren't gonna talk, then you're just as good to me dead."
"And what good am I to you alive?"
"If you don't already know, then you don't need to. Now talk."
"My copy of a copy of a will," I finally answered. "says that a man, Delaney Demmering, divided his entire estate among three men."
The Tab Hunter look-alike burst out in this staccato, childish laughter, "Haha!" Then he said, "If he had died when he was, say, seventeen, instead, people might have said, 'Good-looking boy: dark haired, good build, handsome. You took one look and you knew right away he was too young to be dead. You could argue for a week but you couldn't change it; he was dead.' When somebody dies young, people always assume he had such a bright future. Nobody stops to think that maybe he might have grown up to be a degenerate or a crook or maybe even both; nobody stops to think that maybe after all he was better off dead at seventeen. People'll forgive a seventeen year old almost anything, especially if he's found lying face up in the water, near a fluff of trees."
"I don't understand," I said, "Did you know Delaney Demmering?"
"No," he responded sharply, "I didn't know Demmering. Did you know Demmering?"
"No."
"Huh. So who're the three men who get his money?"
"First, a man named Fernando Pedrosa, of Glenview."
"You know this guy, Fernando Pedrosa?"
I shook my head.
"Go on," he said.
"Second is a man named Samuel West, of Kasbeer."
"Now that's a lot closer to here, isn't it? You know him?"
Again I shook my head. I didn't know Samuel West, father of the Blonde Bombshell.
"And the third?"
"It says Bruce Hardesty, of Peoria."
"And what about him: do you know Bruce Hardesty, of Peoria?"
I shook my head, "Don't know him either."
"Well now, that's kinda strange to me, that you're carrying around a copy of a copy of a will, and you don't know any of the people named in it. Don't you think that's kinda strange?"
I was beginning to wonder how long before the bartender returned from switching the keg.
The Tab Hunter look-alike said, as if reading my mind, "You wonderin' when the bartender's coming back?"
I didn't say anything.
He said, apparently changing the subject, "You like colored lights, don't you?"
I did; I do. How did he know?
"You ever see the colored lights floating in the river?"
I nodded.
"You like 'em?"
I nodded again.
"You know what they're for?"
I shook my head.
"But you surely realize they're there for a reason, that they mean something?"
I nodded.
"They mark the river channel, for the tugs. I've been trying to help you, but you won't let me. You have to look inside yourself. I ripped things up for you, to give you a fresh start, like the spring till, to get you going in the right direction, but you're stubborn. You went in the complete opposite direction instead."
"If you're trying to help me," I asked, "then why do you have a gun shoved into my side?"
"Oh, come on now, you're not gonna start playing games with me, unless you're asking why I have a gun shoved into your side instead of down your throat? Is that what you meant? I know you, Ora."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
He said, "I know you better than you know yourself. It's not your fault. You lack mental clarity, and you crave it. You look out on that river, and you see the blinking lights on the buoys, but you don't know what they mean; you can't see the channel. If you were piloting a tug, you'd be constantly running aground on sand bars, or else floating into backwater lakes. Sure, you see the blinking lights, but you don't know how to read them. You respond to them emotionally, not intellectually."
Silence.
Then, he said, "Alright, enough chit-chat, we're gonna blow this pop stand," by which I guess he meant he wanted to leave, and again he shoved his gun into my side. We left the bar--the screen door springing shut behind us--and descended the wooden staircase, which now seemed longer and more rickety than I remembered. He steered me toward the passenger door of his car, a Cadillac de Ville, and said, "Get in. It's unlocked." There were ziplock bags of drugs on the passenger seat. "Move them to the back seat," he said.
The bags were full of pills. I wondered what kind. I was also surprised that he would be transporting them openly in the front seat of his car.
Once again, as if reading my mind, he said, "Yellow jackets and goofballs. Kids love the stuff. Why not carry it openly? Who's gonna care? The cops? We all work for the same person nowadays, even if none of us know who it is." When I had finished moving the bags of pills, he said, "Okey, now, hands up." He patted me down, and removed my weapons, throwing them into the weed-filled ditch between the parking lot and the road. "Now put your hands behind your back, and don't try anything funny."
He handcuffed me, and I had this strange sensation of submission, of submitting to him. It was a familiar feeling, and yet I could not recall when I had ever experienced it before. Not even with Durney. I never submitted to Durney, because I always wanted to do what Durney told me to do. This was different; the feeling was different.
After he handcuffed me, he said, "Now get into the car."
As he drove, I asked him, "What's your name?"
"Trace."
Incredulous, I said, "Trace? Don't kid me. Trace--?"
"That's my name, don't wear it out," he interrupted, and then made a karate chop gesture with his left hand, saying "Ka-pow!"
He drove to my house in Tiskilwa. We walked onto the porch. He put his hand into my pants pocket and took my keys. He unlocked the front door, and we both entered the house.