Red Herrings Can't Swim

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

You're probably wondering if either of those two stories had a point. They did. I'll get to it later. You may be wondering if I'm ever going to put this show on the road. I will right now.

I've mentioned the injuries I suffered on my last case but, until now, haven't said anything about the case itself. Suffice to say it led me through a series of murders of the members of Chicago's famous Temple of Majesty church with a killer leaving cryptic Bible verses like bread crumbs to follow. The whole thing might have been easier to solve if I'd stayed up on my scripture over the years but, like most everything else in my life, it had gotten away from me. That case, though closed, was apparently not completely behind me. It obviously still bugged me because, as I'm telling this, another verse I haven't revisited since childhood springs to mind. If your right hand offends you, cut it off.

Nobody that knows me would be surprised to hear that Lisa is my right hand. She's also my right arm, my brain and, when push comes to shove, most of my backbone. But after nagging me into that hospital stay, where bad things happened, then dragging me to that fraud of a medium, where worse things happened, my secretary was – just then – also a sizable pain in my rear end. I needed a break, time to scream at the cosmos, and told her in no uncertain terms to leave me alone. I tell you this so you'll understand my cloudy mood when, a few short hours later, Lisa called me and interrupted my quiet night. To put it bluntly my secretary was lucky I take that 'right hand' verse figuratively.

In the first minute of her call I had to stop and restart her twice. Lisa has a tendency to talk fast when she's excited and only gains speed as she goes. Whatever she was saying, it sounded like her apartment was on fire. But I was mistaken. When I finally slowed her to a speed I could decode, it turned out she wasn't at her apartment. She was at the city harbor.

When I asked why, she went as closed mouth as Cagney on death row. “I can't tell you on the phone,” was all she'd say. That and, “Just get down here!” What could I do? I went.

The harbor is on Chicago's south side, not far from the massive stockyards, but just inland from Lake Michigan itself. It connects to the lake through a short east-west channel.

I no more than pulled up and parked when I spotted Lisa sixty yards away, out on what would prove to be pier 23, doing jumping jacks to get my attention. I haven't described Lisa yet and, it occurs, I ought to for those that don't know her. Lisa Solomon is a tall brunette. It's not over-stating it to say she's brilliant, efficient, and gorgeous. But God has a sense of humor and, for kicks, gave her all the grace of a Bourbon Street wino. Before you can fully take in her long beautiful legs, she's likely to trip over them and fall on her prat. Watching Lisa hop around, as I approached, I was half expecting she'd topple into the drink. But the world is full of surprises and this time she stayed on her feet.

I had almost reached her when she pulled something from her pocket, took a bite out of it, then chewing like a mad cow stowed whatever it was away again. That was not a surprise. I saw Lisa once when she wasn't eating; once. How she stayed skinny remains one of the world's great mysteries. This may have been a cookie, in which case it was probably peanut butter. “You're not going to believe this,” she shouted, spitting chewed bits.

“What? What's so unbelievable you couldn't tell me over the phone but you can yell across a pier? While you're at it, why are you on a pier?”

“C'mere.” She grabbed my shoulder, leaned in, and whispered, “I came down to rent a boat.”

“At this time of night?”

“No! Hours ago.”

“Why? What do you need with a boat? What do you even know about boats?”

“I used to date a fishing guy.”

“A fishing guy?”

“You know. A guy who fishes.”

“A fisherman. You did? I didn't know that.”

“It didn't last long. He smelled like fish.”

I sighed. Then Lisa sighed, frustrated by my sigh. I could feel her pain. It was probably aggravating to have a boss that wanted information when there was so much to ramble on about.

“Sorry,” I said, seeing the situation for what it was. I settled into my gum shoes and grudgingly accepted the fact I was in for the long version. “Go ahead.”

Lisa smiled. “It's just that, after what happened to you at that séance, I thought I better come out here and take a look.”

I studied her earnest face, owl-like as usual behind her massive glasses, then did a quick study of the pier and harbor beyond. Nothing I saw gave me a clue. Like it or not, I was going to have to ask. “What at the séance led you to the harbor?”

“That thing that happened to you. You know, the head thing.”

“The head thing.” You, reader, are now up to date on the thunderstrikes, the interactive Extra Sensory movies (visions? hallucinations?) that randomly and painfully played in my head. “Yeah, the head thing. I got it. How does the harbor come into it?”

“The water.” She pointed helpfully off the pier.

“I know what water is. What has the water in the harbor got to do with the séance?”

“You almost drowned!” Lisa beamed. “I detected!”

I think I mentioned too that Lisa wanted to be a detective? Yeah. Like Noah scooped pet food, Lisa wanted to be a detective. She was going on, “I added two and two. At the séance, during your head thing, you almost drowned. Where else in Chicago, but the harbor, are you going to almost drowned?”

“The Chicago River,” I said. “Or in any of a hundred thousand swimming pools. In a bathtub. A whirlpool in the Bear's locker room.” Lisa frowned but I went on. “In Bill Veeck's tears after Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. The fountain at Lincoln Park. A horse trough at the petting zoo. In your cups. In your toilet. A rain barrel.”

“All right.”

“A puddle. A teaspoon.”

“All right,” she hissed, angrily digging in her pocket. “I was playing a hunch.” She produced her comfort food again and took a vicious bite. I'd been way off. It was a Zagnut bar. “You play hunches all the time,” she whined, launching tiny peanut brittle and toasted coconut javelins my direction.

“It's part of my job to play sensible hunches. I'm a licensed private investigator. You are not.”

“Well, I'm going to be. Some day.”

“Until that fateful day could you just be my secretary?”

“What does that mean?”

“For starters, it means, stop forcing me to chase wild geese. Please! I have no clue what happened at that séance. Neither do you. I don't know what it had to do with water, except I saw a guy drowning. Then I was dropped into it and felt I was drowning. What I did not see, and what I fail to see now, is any connection to the city harbor.”

“Well, I did.”

“What? What connection? Why are you here? Why am I here?”

Lisa threw out her small but absolutely fine chest, lifted her proud chin, and poked her glasses up off the tip of her nose. “Because of what I have to show you in the boat.”

God, the night was never going to end. “What boat?”

“The boat I rented.” She turned giving me a view of the water, and of a twelve-foot aluminum craft with a small Johnson outboard to which I hadn't paid any attention, tied to the pier below our feet. She stretched her arm, twisted her supple wrist, and fanned her fingers like Carole Merrill offering a 'Let's Make a Deal' contestant a year's supply of grape Ne-Hi. Then she said (I kid you not), “Ta dah!”

The coat she should have been wearing was spread out across the bottom of the boat, from mid-ship to the bow, covering several inches of dirty shipped lake water and… something else. A pair of soggy boots protruded. It didn't take a genius to see they had people in them. My mouth fell open but nothing came out. What could I say? I stepped from the pier, down into the boat (soaking my own shoes and socks), and lifted Lisa's coat. What I saw ruined my whole day.

There wasn't much to him. He might have stood five-foot-four, back when he used to stand. He weighed maybe a hundred and twenty; a few pounds more with the weight of the water. He was soaked from crown to soles. His work boots were worn brown leather, with the frayed tops of once-white wool socks peeking out. He wore green bib coveralls over a gray button-down shirt, both worn. He wore a suit jacket, brown or tan, it was hard to tell as wet as it was, which seemed a bit odd over the work clothes. Soup and fish maybe? Had he been to an event or meeting it might have been healthier to skip? The coat's gray inside lining featured a tear from the left chest down to beneath the pocket. I guessed him at sixty but it was a guess. What I knew for certain was, he wasn't going to get any older. A sigh seemed in order and I produced one. Then, over my shoulder, I plaintively asked Lisa, “I don't suppose he came with the boat rental?”

“No. He was in the water. I pulled alongside and dragged him aboard.”

“Looks like you brought most of Lake Michigan with him.”

“I didn't have to go that far. He was actually,” she pointed, “right there in the mouth of the thingy.”

“The channel?”

She snapped her fingers and nodded. She tried to add something but I cut her off with a sharp, “Wait, don't say anything else. Cripes!”

Down the dock, passing through a pool of amber light cast by one of only three poles spanning the distance, headed our way, was a string bean of a male figure with a decided limp. The combination told me it was George Clay, the son of the old boat renter, and part-time boat renter himself. No doubt the one who'd provided Lisa's conveyance. I'd had dealings in one way or another with both Clay and his father. They were, after all, two ready sets of eyes when eyes were needed at the harbor. They rarely missed a thing and, therefore, came in handy to me on occasion. I wasn't surprised to see George headed our way.

“Time for you to go,” I told Lisa.

“Go where?”

“Home. Anywhere. Just get out of here.”

“But Blake…”

“But nothing. There's a dead body; it has to be reported. We can't answer the questions that will follow. There's no way they will believe you went looking for a drowned man on the spur of the moment and just happened to find one. And there is no way we are telling the Chicago police you were led here by my psychotic flashes. To put it bluntly, 'This is another fine mess, Ollie.' Wenders would love a chance to bury either one of us so deep in Joliet they'd have to bring us air in paper bags. I don't want you any more mixed up in it than you are. Now I've got to make up a lie about why I rented a boat. And how I found our friend here. And what I've done with him since. I can't do that with you buzzing in my ear.”

“Blake, I can help you.”

“Don't force me to say, You already have.” I stopped there, keeping it to myself that, once again, my secretary had helped me – right into the soup. Why say it? What would have been the point? I might as well start swimming. But there was no time to waste.

“George Clay is headed this way. Don't bother to look, just go, before he gets here. If I get thrown in the jug, I'll need you free to call lawyers, and Large, and God knows who else. Besides, if you don't get home safe, your mother will put out a hit on me.”

“What about your mother?”

“She'll take the contract. Go!”

Lisa didn't want to but, bless her heart, she went. George Clay arrived in time to see her fade into the shadows of the parking lot. “Hey, Blake. Was that your secretary? She rented a–” Then it dawned on him where I was standing. “Oh, yeah, there it is.” Then it dawned on him what lay at my feet. “Hey, Blake, is that a–”

“Yeah, George, it is.”

“Wow. Lisa caught her limit, huh?”

“No. She didn't. You haven't seen Lisa tonight. Got that, George? I rented the boat.”

“You rented the boat?”

“Right. I rented the boat. Do me a favor and make your paperwork say so.”

“There isn't any. I mean there is, but I… sorta…”

“See, George, we're on the same page. All you have to do is remember I rented the boat. Do that and I won't remember to tell your old man you're skimming customers by not logging the rentals.”

“You're a hard man, Blake.”

“John Wayne said it. It's a hard life.”

“Okay,” George agreed with no indication he appreciated the free philosophy. “Who is he? Your dead guy?”

“I don't know. Why don't you hop down here and help me find out?”

George grimaced and threw up his hands. “Uh, uh. No, thanks. He's your corpse. You roll him.”

Big surprise, I was on my own.

But George still wanted to be helpful. “You want me to go call the cops?”

“Hang on a second. Let me see what I can see first.” I reached down, grabbed the drowned man by his soggy jacket, and instantly regretted touching him. I felt an explosion of heat and pain in my head. Yes, I'd been thunderstruck again. My brain was on fire. Colors flashed in my eyes. The old guy, the boat, George, and the harbor vanished.

Blackness. Nothingness.

Slowly my vision returned; images spinning in my mind like a badly edited montage in a 60's LSD documentary. I saw shadowy crowds of faceless people, walls of stretched canvas, tight ropes on angle, electric cables like snakes on the ground, and brightly colored neon lights above. A roof of red and yellow stripes hid the sky and masked the time of day, or night, in this new unreal reality of mine. I heard a din of human voices, calliope music, shouting and laughter. I heard the shake of ice, bells going off, garbled tones over a loud speaker. I smelled hot grease and, I swear, freshly popped popcorn. I was in the middle of some sort of carnival. Then, as suddenly as they'd blinked to life, the lights were gone.

I was swallowed by the blue of night. And there, in front of me, I saw a fish smoking a cigar. Laugh, kids, laugh. I don't make this stuff up. The visions hurt too much to joke about them. I merely report them. And I'm reporting I saw a gray cartoon fish. Maybe a dolphin? A tuna? What did I know about fish? I saw it through some kind of porthole in a circle of blue. It was smoking a black stogie, blowing smoke rings, and had a big No. 2 pencil tucked under its left fin. You're laughing. I wasn't. My head was splitting. And somebody was screaming.

The screaming wasn't helping my head a bit. This wasn't a scream of delight. It was pain. It was terror. Then, boom, the angle from which I was seeing everything changed. Suddenly Lisa's drowned man was there in front of me, looking the same but different; the drowned man before he'd gone for his swim in the harbor. He was the one screaming. He was upright, dry but with a forehead bathed in sweat, his face contorted by fear. Then he fell away into the darkness. I heard a brutal thump and a cry of pain. I heard a splash into water.

As quickly as these visions had come they were gone. I was back in George Clay's boat, leaning over the body of the drowned man, grabbing for the gunwale for balance, trying not to fall into the harbor. George was on the pier above staring down at me like I was nuts. For all I knew he was right.

“You okay, Blake?”

“Yeah,” I replied distantly, my mind on other things. George was a distraction. “Never better.”

My hallucination had prevented me giving the corpse a going over. There was nothing in the world I wanted to do less than touch him again, but what choice did I have? I hadn't discovered a thing about him. I still needed to know who he was and why he was dead. I took a deep breath and grabbed his jacket again. Nothing happened, nothing otherworldly I mean, and I exhaled in relief. Then I went through his pockets. Sadly, I got bupkis for the trouble. His suit coat came off the cheap rack. The tear in the lining was more than a tear; a piece was missing. He had no identification. Other than a wet wadded dollar bill in the right front pocket of the coveralls, he wasn't carrying a thing. I left the buck where it was in case he needed tip money to get across the river. Yeah, I'm all heart.

George was talking, had been for some time, and finally I gave him my attention. “Did you hear me, Blake? We got to call the cops, don't we?”

“Not we, George,” I said, stepping up and out of the boat. “You. Phone away.”

“You're not leaving me with this? You're not running out on me?”

“I am leaving. But I'm not running. I've got to find out who this guy is. I've got to find out why he's dead. And I've got to do that before the homicide d***s wrap him around my neck.”

“But if you just tell them that Lisa–”

“Lisa wasn't here. Got that, George? Lisa wasn't here and she didn't rent your boat. I rented the boat! Is that too much to ask? To keep my secretary out of this mess?”

“But I can't tell the cops all them lies.”

“It's only one lie, George. One! Just tell them I rented the boat!”

“Right. You rented the boat. And… you brought it back… with the body in it?”

“Yes, George. I brought it back, as is, and I left. You don't know nothing from nothing. You can even call me a name in front of the cops, if you like. That will put you in good with them.”

I couldn't blame George for being excited. I was a little excited myself. But Lisa had gotten herself in good and, now that I'd taken her place, I had to get me out. That meant tracking down the drowned man and the person or persons unknown who'd pushed him into the pool. All I had to go on was my 'carnival' hallucination. And a fish smoking a cigar. Either one, I was sure, had a ninety-nine percent chance of leading absolutely nowhere. It was daffy. But it was somewhere to start.

“You rented the boat.” George repeated aloud on his way to notify the police. “Whatever you say, Blake. You can count on me.”

Despite his fading promise, I once again had the feeling I had nobody and nothing to count on but the two idiots I usually hung with; me and myself. I left the pier with a plan consisting of little more than 'Be gone before the cops arrive'. The homicide boys, particularly Wenders, I knew, would flay me alive when they caught up with me. But that would be then.

I jumped into my Jaguar, drove out of the marina, and right into Lisa's homemade soup.