A House on Liberty Street

by Neil Turner

  Is this guy for real? “Like there’s a cop on the planet who’s interested in a damned thing besides getting a conviction.”

  “Don’t confuse good street cops and detectives with prosecutors, Mr. Valenti,” he shoots back. “Those of us who practice criminal law don’t make that mistake.”

  My finely tuned lawyerly instincts warn me that I may be talking out of my ass again.

  Plummer’s return spares me further humiliation.

  “You folks ready?” he asks.

  We all nod. He leads us out of the squad room and into the hall. We follow in silence until he stops outside the first of two adjacent doors. Both are labeled Interview Two. Brittany and I are ushered inside a cubbyhole with a wooden bench along one wall and the viewing side of a two-way mirror on the other. When we sit down, our noses are within two feet of the glass. Brittany’s trembling hand slips into mine when Williams and Plummer walk into the next room.

  Francesco Valenti, my father and alleged cop killer, is shepherded into the interview room. It’s as if someone let the air out of him. The collar of Papa’s prison-issue shirt seems at least two sizes too large. He looks wilted—inches shorter than his true 5’10” height; even his olive Mediterranean complexion seems bleached. His eerily vacant eyes look first to Plummer and then to Mike Williams, who is a stranger to him. The detective settles into a straight-back chair and gestures for my father to sit. Papa sinks into a chair across the table, appearing to leak a little more air as he does.

  Williams steps forward. “I’m Michael Williams from the Public Defender’s office, Mr. Valenti. I’m here to assist you.”

  “You asked for a lawyer earlier,” Plummer explains. “Mr. Williams is a criminal defense attorney.”

  “I wanted my Anthony,” Papa answers, his voice barely audible through the cheap speaker hanging in the corner of the viewing room. I’m stung by the disappointment in his eyes when he asks, “Why he no come?”

  “Your son isn’t licensed to practice in Illinois,” Plummer informs him. “Mr. Williams is here to protect your interests.”

  Williams steps in. “Mr. Valenti, my job is to advise you and make sure you’re afforded all of your rights. Did the first police officers to arrive at your house read you your rights before they questioned you?”

  Papa shakes his head no. “They not do that until we come here.”

  Excellent! That invalidates his so-called confession.

  Williams, who appeared momentarily taken aback by Papa’s fractured English—even after almost fifty years in America—leans in closer, “You understand what your Miranda rights are?”

  “I know about this,” Papa replies.

  True enough. Papa loves his cop shows.

  “I need to be sure, Mr. Valenti,” Williams presses. “This is a serious matter. They should have told you that you have the right to remain silent, that anything you say can and will be used against you, and that you have the right to an attorney.”

  “I understand,” Papa retorts with a flash of irritation. “I did what they say. I shoot the policeman.”

  Brittany goes rigid at my side while my stomach twists like a towel being wrung out. Papa did shoot the cop? Why? Where in hell did the gun come from?

  Williams settles back and sighs in exasperation. “I was about to say that you don’t have to answer questions about that.”

  “It no matter,” Papa announces. “Now they will kill me—an eye for an eye. This is the way of things.”

  “Well, I guess we’re done,” Williams mutters to Plummer.

  No shit. The horse isn’t just out of the barn, it’s already somewhere in the next county.

  After the detective nods in agreement, Williams kneels in front of Papa. “I or someone else from my office will see you at bond call tomorrow. Do you have any questions, Mr. Valenti?”

  Papa’s reply is a disinterested shake of his head.

  Plummer summons a uniformed cop into the room. “Take Mr. Valenti back to his cell and keep him in a paper suit tonight. Understood?”

  “Yeah,” the officer replies as he jerks Papa to his feet.

  Plummer’s eyes flare. “Gently!” he admonishes the cop.

  I watch in disbelief as Papa shuffles out of the interview room.

  Brittany’s fingers tighten their grasp on mine and her voice quivers when she asks, “What’s wrong with Papa? He looks awful!”

  He looks awful? That’s the least of our worries—he just said he shot a cop. No, I can’t accept that. There has to be some other explanation. Getting back to Brittany’s question, I’m not sure how to reply. Do I tell her that maybe her grandfather has grown weary of the world? His home of almost fifty years is being taken away from him, he just watched cancer devour his wife, his daughter Amy has been dead over fifteen years, and he’s estranged from his eldest son. As for me, I’ve just returned from Atlanta, but maybe that isn’t much of an incentive for Papa to carry on. No surprise, I suppose—I’ve been absent for most of the past two decades, physically and emotionally. Maybe Papa’s playing out the string, anxious to join Amy and Mama.

  Plummer opens the door and summons us out of our cubicle. “Well?”

  “He’s whipped,” I announce.

  His eyes search mine intently. “Enough to do something crazy to himself?”

  I finally understand what he meant about the paper suit. Aside from a possible self-inflicted paper cut or two, Papa won’t be able hurt himself. “No,” I reply with a little less certainty than I had a few minutes ago.

  The detective picks up on my hesitancy. “You’re sure?”

  I nod. “The Catholic Church forbids it.”

  Plummer raises his eyebrows and calls bullshit on my logic. “I’m not sure they encourage parishioners to shoot police officers, either.”

  Good point. Maybe the paper suit isn’t such a ridiculous idea, after all.

  Plummer hands me two business cards—his own and another with the address of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse. “We’ll take him down for bond call around one tomorrow afternoon.”

  Williams, who has been watching silently, turns a questioning gaze on me when Plummer walks away. “You coming to bond call?”

  “I’ll be around. I’m not giving the cops a free ride to railroad Papa.”

  “You’ve really got it in for the police, don’t you?” he notes with what seems to be genuine curiosity. “Do you have some history with the law that I should know about?”

  “No record, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Don’t forget that I’m also an officer of the court.”

  Williams nods and wordlessly walks toward Plummer, who is waiting for us. I take Brittany’s hand and trail Williams.

  A cop appears in the doorway at the end of the hallway. “Peter Zaluski’s on the phone for you again, Detective.”

  Plummer sighs heavily. “What the hell does he want now?”

  “Says he needs to speak to you.” The cop glances at me before adding, “about this.”

  “Christ!” Plummer curses. “Get a number and I’ll call back when I’m done.”

  I briefly wonder who Peter Zaluski is. Then my thoughts turn to the more pressing matter of where we’ll sleep tonight. “Can we go back to the house now?” I ask Plummer.

  “Not tonight. They’ll be bagging and tagging evidence for a few hours yet.”

  So, a hotel for tonight. Just tonight? “What about tomorrow?” I ask.

  “I imagine we’ll be done by morning.”

  “What about the eviction notice?” That scares the hell out of me. We’ve got nowhere else to go and we sure as hell can’t afford to live in a hotel.

  Plummer rubs his chin. “Hadn’t thought about that.”

  “Have you got any objection to us going home tomorrow? You’re in control of the house, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. If our people are done, you can go home in the morning.”

  “Good,” I say in relief before pivoting to the other concern that just cropped
up. “Who’s Zaluski and what does he have to do with Papa?”

  Plummer rolls his eyes. “Don’t ask.”

  Oh, I’m asking. “Is he the Chief of Police or something?”

  “Nope. He’s the village manager.”

  The cops are after Papa. It sounds like the village is after his house and no less than the village manager has his finger in the mix. It’s not enough that I already feel like a drugged mouse trying to navigate a maze; now they have to blindfold and spin me twenty times to make sure I can’t tell up from down or right from left? “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “It’s nothing,” Plummer replies. “Forget it.”

  Like hell I’ll forget it. I add Village Manager Peter Zaluski to my mental checklist of people and things to investigate. If nothing else, a checklist might organize the puzzle pieces of fear and suspicion that are ricocheting around my skull.

  I take Brittany’s hand. “Let’s go pick up Deano and get a room.”

  Chapter Three

  After a restless few hours and too little sleep at a Best Western Inn—rated two stars by AAA, at least one of which must have been a pity point—Brittany and I are on our way home at seven o’clock the next morning. The temperature is already in the low sixties, there’s not a cloud in the sky, and a hint of breeze blows off the lake. The sun filters through the trees to speckle the Porsche’s windshield with winking bursts of light when we turn onto Liberty Street. It’s a beautiful morning that heralds a gorgeous autumn day in Chicago.

  The neighborhood seems as peaceful as ever when we cruise past the tract housing that was slapped together by a long-forgotten postwar builder. The cookie-cutter houses gradually took on something of the personality of their owners as the two long blocks of Liberty Street matured into a vibrant neighborhood. There were many happy hours for those of us who grew up on this street: baseball, swimming, cloud-gazing, and lemonade stands in summer; backyard skating rinks and snow forts in winter. We kids fought a lot, as well, the squabbles generally forgotten by the next morning, if not sooner. Our folks also did battle, often loudly over a beer or two on someone’s front porch—usually with an abundance of boisterous laughter tempering the verbal salvoes. Show me a neighborhood without petty jealousies, catty cliques, and silly squabbles, and I’ll show you a street of strangers. Not us. We ate at one another’s houses, had sleepovers, pitched tents in backyards, and went to plenty of weddings and the occasional funeral. The more ambitious of us earned our first few dollars cutting lawns and shoveling snow. Like most of us who grew up here, my first fumbling efforts at necking and beyond took place in the nighttime shadows of Independence Park at the end of the street.

  My trip down memory lane ends abruptly when I touch the brakes and steer into our freshly resurfaced driveway. The Porsche’s fat twenty-inch tires crunch over bits of sooty asphalt as we glide to a stop. A silent foreboding settles over me when I kill the engine. Turning my attention to the house, my eyes quickly traverse the weathered sidewalk leading to the front porch, where a diagonal slash of fluorescent yellow crime scene tape stretches across... nothing? What the hell? Where yesterday a storm door had fronted an elaborately carved mahogany entry door—one of the few extravagances of Mama’s sixty-four years on earth—this morning only a gaping rectangle of emptiness remains.

  The unlatching of Brittany’s car door stirs me to action.

  “Deano?” she calls uncertainly.

  Deano, indeed. When we’d come by last night to collect him, Bullethead was still manning the perimeter. He wouldn’t let us by, claiming they hadn’t heard from Plummer. Then he blew us off with the explanation that “the dog’s been taken care of.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I’d asked the snot-nosed bastard.

  He didn’t seem to like my tone. “It means you’ve got no business here. You best be on your way.”

  I’d stalked away and called Plummer. No answer. Three times. When I returned to the perimeter to again demand our dog, Bullethead warned me that I was on the verge of being arrested for interfering in a police investigation. When Brittany burst into tears, the asshole had softened a bit and said, “Come back in the morning. It’ll be quieter and you can get the dog.”

  Brittany had seemed mollified. Given that I didn’t even know if the motel would let Deano in, I decided to let it go.

  We stand side-by-side in the driveway and gawk at the vacant doorframe. Our noses wrinkle in disgust at an odor that reminds me of the gag-inducing reek of the Milwaukee Cargill slaughterhouse from my Marquette University days. I turn around to look up and down the street while Brittany takes a step toward the house. No police presence at all—not a single cop! How many hours has our home stood open to the public? What’s been taken? More alarming, who or what might be inside?

  Brittany starts retching behind me. She’s frozen at the bottom of the steps with her face twisted in horror. I hurry over and find myself staring down into a lake of congealed blood that covers a good portion of the green indoor-outdoor carpet. Well, that explains the slaughterhouse stench. Do all murder scenes smell like this?

  I wave my hands wildly in a futile attempt to disperse the horde of feasting flies. Bastards! I rail at the cops for not cleaning this up. No fourteen-year-old should have this sprung on her—granddaughter of a cop-killer or not. I take Brittany’s trembling arm, lead her back to the car, and ease her into the passenger seat. “Wait here while I get Deano and check things out.”

  Satisfied that she’ll be okay for a few minutes, I jog down the driveway to the rear of the house, unlatch the gate, and cross the empty yard to the back step. At least the bastards locked this door before they left last night. After unlocking it, I nudge the door open and step into the kitchen. Papa’s nightly bottle of Birra Moretti Italian beer sits in its usual spot on the maple table, the sports page of the Chicago Tribune—predictably opened to a Chicago Cubs article—is folded neatly alongside… all as if he just stepped away for a moment. He must have been here when the doorbell rang. The dog’s water bowl and his food dish with a few stray bits of kibble sit in the corner. Where the hell is Deano? Had the cops locked him in a bedroom? The basement?

  My next stop is my dead sister’s bedroom. It now temporarily houses Brittany. Until our arrival four weeks ago, the room had remained much as Amy left it the final time she was home. It’s now overflowing with stuffed animals and other refugees from Brittany’s Atlanta bedroom, which had been at least twice the size of this—only one in a litany of injustices done to her by our move north. No Deano. Nor is he in either of the other two bedrooms, the bathroom, or the L-shaped living/dining room. After bypassing the front entry, I trudge down the stairs to the basement. Again, nothing seems out of the ordinary except the flies, a handful of which have found their way into the bowels of our home.

  Still no dog. Surely, the cops didn’t leave him loose in a house without a front door? They better not have impounded the poor old guy. Assured that I’m alone in the house and that the only vandalism perpetrated last night was done by the police, I stomp back up the stairs and head for the front door. After a quick peek to make sure Brittany is still in the passenger seat of the Porsche, I turn my back on the bloody porch, then pull out my iPhone and Detective Plummer’s business card.

  “Your pals ripped out the front door and left the house wide open for who knows how many hours!” I shout when he answers.

  “Who is this?”

  “Tony Valenti. How could you do this to someone’s home? Anybody could have waltzed in here!”

  “The doors were evidence.”

  “Fine, so take them. You couldn’t call me? We’d have been back in ten minutes!”

  “Anything else?” he snaps.

  “Where the hell is our dog?”

  “You didn’t pick him up last night?”

  I relate how that circus played out.

  Plummer sounds concerned for the first time. “He’s really not there?”

  “Would I be asking if he was?�
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  “I’ll look into it.”

  My anger over the dog, the door, and this entire nightmare explodes. “This is bullshit, Plummer! It’s your investigation, so I hold you responsible. You haven’t heard the last of this.”

  The bastard hangs up on me.

  I’m furiously stuffing the phone in my pants pocket when someone behind me asks, “Giving Plummer an earful?”

  I spin around and find Public Defender Mike Williams standing at the bottom of the steps. “Damned right I am!”

  “The cops left the place open all night?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes track from me to Brittany in the front seat of the Porsche. “Hey, I’d be pissed, too, but you might want to dial things down for her sake.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I mutter, but the empathy in his words tempers my anger.

  Brittany climbs out of the car and exchanges greetings with Williams.

  “Where’s Due?” she asks, pronouncing it Doo-ey. Mama had named our first dog “Deano,” in honor of Dean Martin, who she always spoke of wistfully with a pat over her heart. Taciturn Maria Valenti was a Dean Martin groupie, something that amused the hell out of us. When Deano the dog passed at fifteen, a replacement black lab puppy had waltzed into our home and straight into Mama’s heart. She had christened him Deano Due—due being two in Italian. I just call him Deano.

  “He’s not here,” I reply lamely. “Plummer’s looking into it.”

  Brittany’s face falls. “Can I go to my room?”

  I nod. “Go in the back door.”

  “This is just beginning, my friend,” Williams says after Brittany disappears around the corner of the house. “You’ll make yourself crazy if you let the anger consume you.”

  He’s right. The storm of emotions unleashed last night is already wearing me down. Taking care not to step into the atrocious mess on the porch, I hop down to the sidewalk. “What are you doing here?”