Black House

But Jack, who interrogates as Jerry Lee Lewis once played the piano, thinks it does matter. In the usually dim section of his mind where intuition keeps its headquarters, lights are coming on. Not a lot yet, but maybe more than just a few.

"A moke," he says, as if he has never heard the word before. "What’s that?"

Potter gives him a brief, irritated look. "A citizen who . . . well, not exactly a citizen. Someone who knows people who are connected. Or maybe sometimes connected people call him. Maybe they do each other favors. A moke. It’s not the world’s best thing to be."

No, Jack thinks, but moking can get you a Cadillac with that nice smooth ride.

"Were you ever a moke, George?" Got to get a little more intimate now. This is not a question Jack can address to a Mr. Potter.

"Maybe," Potter says after a grudging, considering pause. "Maybe I was. Back in Chi. In Chi, you had to scratch backs and wet beaks if you wanted to land the big contracts. I don’t know how it is there now, but in those days, a clean contractor was a poor contractor. You know?"

Jack nods.

"The biggest deal I ever made was a housing development on the South Side of Chicago. Just like in that song about bad, bad Leroy Brown." Potter chuckles rustily. For a moment he’s not thinking about cancer, or false accusations, or almost being lynched. He’s living in the past, and it may be a little sleazy, but it’s better than the present — the bunk chained to the wall, the steel toilet, the cancer spreading through his guts.

"Man, that one was big, I kid you not. Lots of federal money, but the local hotshots decided where the dough went home at night. And me and this other guy, this moke, we were in a horse race — "

He breaks off, looking at Jack with wide eyes.

"Holy shit, what are you, magic?"

"I don’t know what you mean. I’m just sitting here."

"That guy was the guy who showed up here. That was the moke!"

"I’m not following you, George." But Jack thinks he is. And although he’s starting to get excited, he shows it no more than he did when the bartender told him about Kinderling’s little nose-pinching trick.

"It’s probably nothing," Potter says. "Guy had plenty of reasons not to like yours truly, but he’s got to be dead. He’d be in his eighties, for Christ’s sake."

"Tell me about him," Jack says.

"He was a moke," Potter repeats, as if this explains everything. "And he must have got in trouble in Chicago or somewhere around Chicago, because when he showed up here, I’m pretty sure he was using a different name."

"When did you swink him on the housing-development deal, George?"

Potter smiles, and something about the size of his teeth and the way they seem to jut from the gums allows Jack to see how fast death is rushing toward this man. He feels a little shiver of gooseflesh, but he returns the smile easily enough. This is also how he works.

"If we’re gonna talk about mokin’ and swinkin’, you better call me Potsie."

"All right, Potsie. When did you swink this guy in Chicago?"

"That much is easy," Potter says. "It was summer when the bids went out, but the hotshots were still bellerin’ about how the hippies came to town the year before and gave the cops and the mayor a black eye. So I’d say 1969. What happened was I’d done the building commissioner a big favor, and I’d done another for this old woman who swung weight on this special Equal Opportunity Housing Commission that Mayor Daley had set up. So when the bids went out, mine got special consideration. This other guy — the moke — I have no doubt that his bid was lower. He knew his way around, and he musta had his own contacts, but that time I had the inside track."

He smiles. The gruesome teeth appear, then disappear again.

"Moke’s bid? Somehow gets lost. Comes in too late. Bad luck. Chicago Potsie nails the job. Then, four years later, the moke shows up here, bidding on the Libertyville job. Only that time when I beat him, everything was square-john. I pulled no strings. I met him in the bar at the Nelson Hotel the night after the contract was awarded, just by accident. And he says, ‘You were that guy in Chicago.’ And I say, ‘There are lots of guys in Chicago.’ Now this guy was a moke, but he was a scary moke. He had a kind of smell about him. I can’t put it any better than that. Anyway, I was big and strong in those days, I could be mean, but I was pretty meek that time. Even after a drink or two, I was pretty meek.

" ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘there are a lot of guys in Chicago, but only one who diddled me. I still got a sore ass from that, Potsie, and I got a long memory.’

"Any other time, any other guy, I might have asked how good his memory stayed after he got his head knocked on the floor, but with him I just took it. No more words passed between us. He walked out. I don’t think I ever saw him again, but I heard about him from time to time while I was working the Libertyville job. Mostly from my subs. Seems like the moke was building a house of his own in French Landing. For his retirement. Not that he was old enough to retire back then, but he was gettin’ up a little. Fifties, I’d say . . . and that was in ’72."

"He was building a house here in town," Jack muses.

"Yeah. It had a name, too, like one of those English houses. The Birches, Lake House, Beardsley Manor, you know."

"What name?"

"Shit, I can’t even remember the moke’s name, how do you expect me to remember the name of the house he built? But one thing I do remember: none of the subs liked it. It got a reputation."

"Bad?"

"The worst. There were accidents. One guy cut his hand clean off on a band saw, almost bled to death before they got him to the hospital. Another guy fell off a scaffolding and ended up paralyzed . . . what they call a quad. You know what that is?"