Photo Finish (9781101537510) (3 page)

IV

At three the next morning, Davenport came forcibly back to mind when the phone hauled me out of sleep.

“Vic, why would an old drunk be clutching your business card when he was run over?” It was John McGonnigal, a Chicago police sergeant I used to do a lot of work with. I'd lost track of him when the Department transferred him from downtown to one of the far-northwest precincts.

“John!” I sat up in bed, trying to scramble my wits together. “What old drunk?”

“Sixtyish. Five ten, five eleven, three-day growth, chip on left incisor. Ring a bell?”

Hunter Davenport. I demanded details in exchange for a name and McGonnigal grudgingly supplied them. Hunter had been bar-hopping, as far as the cops could make out, ending up at the Last Belt on Lincoln around one a.m. A witness said a car had actually driven up on the sidewalk and hit Hunter before roaring off into the night. The few onlookers out at that hour couldn't guess at the color or the make of the car, or remember the license number.

“He didn't have any ID. Just some singles wadded up in his pocket and your card. What's the story, Warshawski?”

“There is no story. Maybe he was trying to work up the nerve to invite me out for a drink. Have you talked to his mother? No, of course not. You only just learned who he was.” I gave him Mildred Davenport's address. “I'll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

He began a sentence with, “You can leave police business,” but I hung up before he told me where.

There's a wonderful freedom in driving the city in the predawn—no one else is out, and you feel as though you own the empty streets. I coasted up to Mrs. Davenport's building at the same time that McGonnigal's unmarked car arrived.

He grunted a greeting but didn't actively try to keep me from following him into the building. He had phoned Mrs. Davenport from the hospital, waking her up, confirming her nightmares about the city's dangers, but she buzzed us in. She opened her own door the width of the chain and demanded McGonnigal's ID, then caught sight of me.

“What do you know about all this, young woman? Are you with the police? Hunter told me you weren't really interested in his photographs, but he's never been mixed up with any crimes—at least not that I know of.”

“Can we come in, ma'am?” McGonnigal said. “We'll wake all the neighbors if we have to talk to you through the door.”

She compressed her mouth in a suspicious line, but unbolted the chain. “Hunter's been like a cat on a hot brick ever since this lady came over. He's been drinking way too much for years. I warned him after Vietnam no one would keep a drunk on their payroll forever, and I was right. All those glamorous places he used to visit, all those famous people he took pictures of didn't count for anything in the end. He had to come home to his ma and the little bit of social security he can claim. So when this lady said maybe someone wanted to buy some of his old pictures, I thought he should talk to her.”

McGonnigal stopped her to ask me about that; I muttered that I was a go-between with a possible buyer but nothing had come of it. Before he could push me further, Mrs. Davenport interrupted.

“Yesterday, after this lady left, someone started calling on the phone and hanging up. I thought maybe it was her bothering him, but all Hunter would say was he didn't know who was on the phone. Finally, about eight o'clock tonight—last night, I should say—the fifteenth time the phone rang, he said, ‘I can't take this. They're going to drive me insane.' And off he went.

“I knew he was going out to find a bar, like he always does when he's in trouble. I told him a million times all it gets you is a hangover and the trouble is still there in the morning, but you can't talk to a drunk. But the calls kept coming. Someone who just said, ‘Hunter, I know where you are, Hunter,' and then hung up. So the last time I yelled before he could say anything, ‘He's not here. Leave me alone or I'll have the cops on you.' I should have done it then and there, but how could I know they'd follow after him in the street?”

“Who could have been harassing him?” McGonnigal demanded of me.

I shook my head, bleakly, and asked Mrs. Davenport if her son had ever discussed any threats from anyone overseas.

“If he had any troubles like that, he never said anything to me about them. He lived away from home for thirty years, and he wasn't much of a letter writer at the best of times. I don't know what he got up to, all the places he visited.”

“Do you think he could have a child he never told you about?” I asked.

“With a man, anything's possible. Just because he's your own boy doesn't change that.” She folded her lips tightly.

McGonnigal was demanding what that was about when his cell phone rang. He grunted into the mouthpiece a few times, then turned to Mrs. Davenport.

“Does he have any insurance? It looks like they can save him, but it's going to be expensive.”

“Insurance? Where would he get insurance? He wasn't even a vet, just a war correspondent. And if they think I've got fifty thousand lying around to pay their rotten bills, they can think again.”

While McGonnigal relayed the news to the hospital, I wandered into the back room, looking for evidence of Davenport's work. I found a worn black zip case under the daybed, where he seemed to keep his clothes and a few personal items. The case was stuffed with hundreds of prints.

McGonnigal came in and watched me go through them. Near the bottom of the stack, I came on a dozen views of a woman who looked so familiar that I thought I must surely know her. Tortoiseshell combs pulled a halo of ash blond hair away from her face, and her blue-gray eyes smiled at the camera with a wistful yearning. At first I thought my leap of recognition was because she looked so much like my client. But I felt sure I knew her face, and that that was why I thought I'd known him when he had come into my office.

I tried not to let McGonnigal see I'd come on anything I knew. I was zipping up the case when it fell from my hands, scattering photographs wholesale. I managed to stick a shot of the wistful woman inside my T-shirt while I was scrabbling under the daybed for the rest.

V

Sherman Tucker, the
Herald-Star
's photo editor, wasn't happy at climbing out of bed so early in the morning, but he met me at the paper. He took one look at the print I'd borrowed and went without speaking to a cabinet, where he pulled out a thick file.

“Were you brain-dead thirteen years ago? The only person photographed more back then was Princess Di.”

“I was in law school,” I mumbled. “My father was dying. I didn't follow the society pages.”

Sherman slapped a dozen versions of the face onto the table: Lady Helen Banidore riding to hounds in Virginia; Lady Helen bringing her infant son, Andrew, home from the hospital; opening a charity ball; leaving a courthouse in tears after her divorce; laughing on the arm of a Marine colonel at a British embassy ball.

She had been born Lady Helen Aldershot, only child of the Earl of Revere. Revere didn't have a dime, or even a shilling, to his name, so everyone agreed it was a wonderful thing when she had married one of the heirs to Banidore Tobacco in South Carolina. Happiest of all had been the paparazzi who followed her, supplying the insatiable appetites in America and France for beautiful women with titles.

Even I used to read the reports that filtered from the
National Enquirer
into
People
and the daily papers after the star-studded wedding in the Reveres' picturesque private chapel. Following the wedding, Jim Banidore and Lady Helen moved back to America, dividing their time between New York and Charleston. About the time the kid was born, the tabloids began screaming that Banidore hung out in leather bars when he was in New York. Old Mrs. Banidore tried suing the
Star
over a photo of Jim in an embrace with a man in a motorcycle bar, but the matter was quietly dropped a few months later.

If Lady Helen was disconsolate at her husband's behavior, she hid it well. She'd been a lively member of the international nightclub scene before her marriage; after Andrew's birth she took up with her old playmates. The divorce was messy—old Mrs. Banidore tried to claim Andrew wasn't even Jim's son, but the terms of the family trust apparently made it important for Jim to have a male child, so he swore an affadavit of paternity.

Lady Helen's alimony, estimated at a hundred thousand dollars a month, depended on her never breathing a word about her husband's extracurricular activities. If she remarried, of course the alimony stopped, but old Mrs. Banidore also got the family lawyers to insert a clause that gave her custody of the kid if the Banidores could prove Lady Helen was sleeping with other men.

This last clause lashed the paparazzi into a competitive frenzy. They staked out her apartment on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; they followed her skiing in the French Alps and the Canadian Rockies; they zoomed on her nude sunbathing in the Virgin Islands. When she went on safari in Kenya with Italian racer Egidio Berni as part of the group, the photographers followed in a helicopter. That was where Lady Helen died.

The
Herald-Star
hadn't paid much attention to Lady Helen, since she didn't have a natural following in Chicago, but of course they'd covered her death. I flipped through Sherman's files to read the front-page story.

Lady Helen's safari was spending a week at a luxury lodge, from which they took day or night trips to study animals. It sounded like fun: They even followed elephants on their nocturnal treks into mineral caves.

In deference to the divorce decree, Berni stayed in one suite, Lady Helen and young Andrew in another. One evening Berni and Lady Helen decided to go for a sunset drive. An enterprising photographer had bribed one of the guides to let him know if Lady Helen and Berni were ever alone; the helicopter caught up with the Land Rover three miles from the lodge. Berni took off, hurtling the Rover across the veldt, and smashed into a rhinoceros. He and Lady Helen were killed instantly.

Some moron brought young Andrew to the crash site, and the
Herald-Star
had used a photograph of the white-faced boy kneeling by his dead mother, cradling her head on his knees.

I would have to be brain-dead not to know that the boy was my client as a child. And I'd have to be even deader not to figure Hunter Davenport for the photographer in the chopper.

“So Andrew Banidore hired me to find one of the men who drove his mother to her death. Or who he thinks drove her to her death. And then what? He lay in wait like James Bond to—”

I stood up so fast, I knocked half the photos off Sherman's table. When he squawked a protest, I was already out the door. I shouted, “I'll call you,” over my shoulder and ran down the hall to the street.

I'd been an idiot. James Bond. The glimpse I thought I'd had of my client on the L platform two days ago. The guy in the car behind me yesterday morning. My client had tracked me while I located Hunter Davenport. When I'd found Davenport for him, my client breathed threatening messages over the phone until he fled the apartment, then chased him to Uptown, where he ran him over.

V. I. Warshawski, ace detective. Ace imbecile.

VI

The Trefoil's tiny lobby was filled with luggage and travelers. The receptionist on duty was settling bills and handing towels and keys to joggers while juggling two phones. I took a towel with a smiled thanks and slipped into the elevator behind two lean, sweat-covered men in shorts and cropped tops.

On the fifth floor I knelt in front of 508 and probed the keyhole. I was in an agony of tension—if some other guest should come out—the maid—if Andrew Banidore had left and a stranger lay in the bed. The guest doors had nice, sturdy old-fashioned locks, the kind that look impressive on the outside but only have three tumblers. In another two minutes, I was inside the room.

Lying there in bed, Andrew Banidore looked almost like his mother's twin. The white-gold hair fell away from his face, which was soft with the slackness of sleep.

“Andrew!” I called sharply from the doorway.

He stirred and turned over, but a night spent tracking his subject through Uptown had apparently left him exhausted. I went to the bed and shook him roughly.

When his wistful blue-gray eyes finally blinked open, I said, “He's not dead. Does that upset you?”

“He's not?” His voice was thick with sleep. “But I—” He woke completely and sat up, his face white. “How did you get in here? What are you talking about?”

“You were too tired when you got in to lock the door, I guess.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “You've got five minutes before I call the cops. Better make good use of them.”

“What are you going to tell them? How you broke into my hotel room?”

“I'm going to tell them to look for the blue Toyota that hit Hunter Davenport early this morning. If you rented it, that'll be easy, because you had to show someone a driver's license. If you stole it, it'll still have your fingerprints on it.”

I went to the bureau and rifled through the documents on top. He was traveling on a British passport. He had a first-class ticket on Air France, with an open return date. He had a rental agreement with one of the big chains for a blue Toyota. His wallet held an American driver's license issued by the state of South Carolina, a variety of credit cards, and two photos of his mother.

“Put those pictures down.”

I held them between my fingers, as if poised to tear them. “You can always get more. Most photographed woman in the world and all. There are a million pictures of her lying around. I just saw twenty-eight of them.”

“She gave those to me. I can't get more that she gave me.”

He was out of bed and across the room so fast, I just had time to slip the pictures into my shirt pocket. He tried to fight me for them, but I was dressed and he wasn't. I stood on his left foot until he stopped punching at me.

“I'll return them when you give me a few answers. You have lived in South Carolina, and your mother was killed in a car accident in South Africa. Did you happen to tell me anything else true? Is your grandmother dead? What about all those other tobacco-smoking Banidores? You really an orphan?”

He pulled on a pair of jeans and looked at me sullenly. “I hate them all. The way they talk about her, they were so happy when she died. It was as if all their dreams came true at once. The fact that Jim died of AIDS five years after I had to go live in fucking stupid Charleston—I wasn't supposed to mention that. Poor, dear Jim picked up a virus in Africa when he went out to get Andrew, they told all their friends at the country club. We should never have allowed Helen to keep the boy to begin with. Then all my he-man cousins made my life miserable claiming she was a whore and I wasn't even one of the family. As if I wanted to be related to that houseful of cretins.”

“Did you kill your grandmother?”

He gave a hoarse bark of laughter. “If I'd thought of it in time. No, she died the old-fashioned way: of a stroke.”

“So what made you decide to go after Davenport?”

“I always meant to. Ever since the day she died. Chasing her all over Europe. It was a game to him. She didn't have a life. She knew she'd lose me to those damn Banidores if she ever got caught with another man, and I was the one person she really loved. I was the only one she care about losing.

“She was trying to protect our life together, and he—that Davenport—he was trying to destroy it. For twenty-four hours he got a taste of what that was like, how it feels when someone knows where you are and is following you. I missed him when he snuck out of that apartment building last night, but when the lady yelled he wasn't home, I found him at the bus stop. He got on a bus, and I followed the bus. He got off and went into a bar. I went in behind him. But it wasn't enough he was scared. I told him who I was, what he'd done, and he tried to tell me it was a job. Just a job. He killed my mother, he ruined my life, and he thought I should slap him on the back and say, ‘Tough luck, old sport, but a man's gotta do . . .' and all that crap.

“That was when I couldn't take it anymore. I got into the car. He started to go back into the bar and I couldn't stand it. I just drove up on the sidewalk and— I should have gone straight to the airport and taken the first flight out, but my passport and ticket and everything were still here. Besides, I never thought you'd find out before I left this afternoon.”

I leaned against the door and looked down at him. “You never thought. You are an extremely lucky guy: Hunter Davenport is going to live. But he has very expensive hospital bills and no insurance. You are going to pay every dime of those bills. If you don't, then I am suddenly going to find evidence that links you to that Toyota. The cursory washing they give it at the rental place— Believe me, traces of Davenport's blood will be on it a long time. Do you understand?”

He nodded fractionally. “Now give me back my pictures.”

“I want to hear you say it. I want to know that you understand what you've agreed to.”

He shut his eyes. “I agree to pay Hunter Davenport's hospital bills. I agree to look after the man who killed my mother. I agree to live in hell the rest of my life.”

I wanted to say something, something consoling, or maybe heartening: Let it go, move on. But his face was so pinched with pain, I couldn't bear to look at him. I put the snapshots on his knee and let myself out.

 

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