I had smoked my way through half a pack of cigarettes before it occurred to me that maybe John wasn't going to show. My first thought was that he had pulled a gag on me. My next was that something had delayed him. I started to walk over to his hotel.
Between Michigan and Wabash, right next door to the library, there's a small street that's more of an alley than a street. Street cars used to turn down it before the Chicago Transit Authority got into office and a lot of trucks use it to make deliveries. It's not too well lighted and the only people who use it at night to cut through from Washington to Randolph are people in a hurry.
You're way ahead of me, I know. And you're right. But you're wrong if you think I found him after five minutes of playing Sherlock. The police found him at three in the morning after they had combed the loop half the night.
John Kelley was in one of the store fronts, his head bashed in.
John Kelley was the first martyr to the cause. In a lot of ways, he didn't make a very good one. The papers put it down to gangland enemies—the usual explanation for murders in Chicago—and for a while I thought I had convinced myself that they were right.
Then I caught myself glancing behind me when I walked up dark streets at night and staring hard at the mirror in the local bar, watching the people on the stools and wondering which were real and which were fake. Kelley's story had started to haunt me and I couldn't shake it.
I thought maybe a vacation would help so I pulled strings at the office and got the last two weeks in July. I usually take my two weeks up in northern Wisconsin, around Hayward and Spooner and the Chippewa Flowage. It's one of the best fishing spots in the nation—everything from muskies to bullheads, bass to trout. You can take along a small fortune in flyrod for game fish, or you can have a lot of fun with a plain bamboo pole and bobber for pan fish.
Fred Gray—he was in the advertising department—went along with me. After all, fishing is a gregarious sport and besides, whoever heard of going alone? And Fred was the kind of man who was good company. The big, bluff variety with a string of stories as long as your arm.
We packed up Friday night and left early Saturday. With both of us trading off on the driving, it was still a fourteen hour trip. If we pushed it we could get to the Flowage early Saturday evening.