Chi-Town Blues

by D. J. Herda

  Except she wasn’t some empty-headed dame, and she did turn me on with her smile. I realized that suddenly. And she had more intellect, street smarts, and social breeding than anyone I’d ever met before. And I still didn’t know what I was going to tell her about why I wanted her to join me. Or where. Or why we could never come back. Hell, I didn’t even know if she’d say yes. She might have family in Chicago—she never did say. She might not be comfortable living in a third-world country. Christ, I didn’t even know if she liked frijoles!

  But, I couldn’t just give it all up. Not now. I had already put through the second withdrawal, and after checking the old lady’s account, sure enough, it had triggered the requisite 1053 Transferal Form signed, of course, by “J. Martinowicz.” I had given Security a copy of the form to send to the Feds before the bank’s closing that afternoon. By noon the following day, the First Bank of Acapulco had e-mailed me that a transfer of $270,000 was pending, noting that the funds would be available for withdrawal the following day, Friday.

  No, no, I couldn’t back out now. The only sensible thing was to wait until morning and proceed as planned. And try to keep my mind off her.

  Then, as I stuffed my last knit shirt into the satchel and struggled to close the clasps, I heard a knock at the door.

  I froze.

  Who could that be?

  My heart raced, my palms itched, my temples pounded—beating so hard I didn't just feel them, I heard them ... really heard them, for God's sake. I looked around. It wouldn't do to have anything lying about that might give me away. But everything appeared normal, so I shoved my case under the bed and paused. To the sound of silence.

  I let out a deep breath. Had I been mistaken? I must have been. Perhaps it was a knock at the door of the apartment upstairs. I checked my watch. Nearly 10:30. No one would come calling at 10:30. Not at 10:30 at night they wouldn’t. Not on a Thursday evening before a busy work day.

  I listened some more. The only sounds in an otherwise silent sanctum were the steady klickety-clack of the roaches as their little feet skittered across the Formica countertop in the kitchen.

  Bastards!

  I was just in the process of bending down to pull my satchel out from under the bed when I heard it again. Louder, this time, more insistent. I shot up, my eyes bulging. This time, there was no mistaking it.

  “Fuck!” I spat. I had slipped up. I knew it. I had missed some tiny, nearly inconceivable detail and would now have to pay for my carelessness.

  But that was impossible. I'd followed my plan down to the letter—even so far as giving my boss at the bank a prescription from my doctor, ordering me to Arizona for six weeks of rest and relaxation for an asthmatic condition I’d been faking for a few weeks. My “doc” was a friend, a guy I’d gone to school with, not a real doctor but a pharmacist—close enough. I slipped him a fifty and told him I needed a break from work. That was all it had taken. My boss bought it hook, line, and sinker and actually expressed his deepest sympathies and concerns. He even put me on medical leave so I could continue drawing a paycheck, which I conveniently instructed our Accounting Department to send to a drop-box in Tucson where it would be forwarded to Mexico.

  "You lucky son-of-a-gun," Fred announced when I'd told him of my misfortunes. "While we're here, suffering through another bank audit, you'll be basking in the sunshine by the pool, flirting with all those pretty girls!" I smiled to myself. Little did he know.

  The knock sounded again, louder than the last. It was Mrs. Martinowicz come to say goodbye. That was it. To wish me luck ... maybe even refund me half my rent. That would be fine with me. I could use a little extra traveling cash.

  I let out another deep breath, straightened my tie, and walked across the kitchen to the door. I lifted the latch, but Mrs. Martinowicz was nowhere to be found.

  "Mr. Singleton? Joseph Singleton?" the taller of the two men asked. He wore a suit like a Maxwell Street bum and smelled like a cut-rate undertaker. His eyes were cold, glossy, black. His lips were dry and white. I couldn't tell whether or not he had any color at all to his pallor.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Mr. Singleton, I’m Lieutenant Cartwright. I think you know why we’re here.”

  I froze. Could I have heard right? Was he a cop? I glanced at the second man, a uniform, and realized what was happening.

  I furrowed my brow. "I’m sorry. There must be ... some mistake."

  The man shook his head. "No mistake."

  "But ... what’s this all about?” I really didn't want to hear it, but I figured it would look bad if I didn't at least feign a modicum of interest.

  He squinted down at a piece of paper he'd been holding. "Mr. Singleton, we’re here to take you down to the station with us.”

  “Me? For what?”

  His face was chiseled marble as he ticked off the list. “Let’s see, we’re talking grand larceny, grand theft, embezzlement, forgery, bank fraud, mail fraud, and an attempt to flee the scene of a crime. Will you grab your coat and accompany me, please?”

  "What?" I said again, this time my furrowed brow genuine. "You've got to be kidding."

  I mean, attempted fraud I could see. But I hadn't done that other stuff. Not all of it, not yet, anyway. How could anyone arrest someone for what he was planning on doing? And how would they even know? It’s not as if I’d taken out an ad in the Chicago Tribune, for God's sake. How could they possibly pin all those charges on me? It was insane.

  The man shook his head again. "Afraid not. Mr. Singleton. Please. If you don’t mind. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Long? Oh, no. Not for him. But probably forty-to-life for me!

  He held his arm toward the door, and he said something unintelligible, either to me or to the uniform, I wasn’t sure, although I imagined it went something along the lines of, “You have the right to remain silent. If you choose to give up that right, anything you say may and will be held against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you by the court at the expense of the government ...”

  I never actually heard the words. I was too stunned. He could have read me the Mexican Magna Carta for all I knew. For all I cared. Somewhere along the line, I had miscalculated. It was the perfect crime—with one tiny flaw. But what?

  I gathered up my wallet and grabbed my watch, and I slung my coat across my back. Lieutenant Cartwright took me by the arm and led me to the door, and I felt the sudden chill of the evening across my face.

  "This is some mistake," I said. "Some big mistake."

  "I don't think so," he said. "We've got her nailed to the wall."

  I stopped. Her! My blood froze, my heart raced. Did he say her?

  He led me up the stairwell and out into the night, where we paused at the curb for his partner to walk around and unlock the door to the prowler.

  "Tell me," I said. I knew I shouldn't have. I knew it was stupid, against all advice any attorney might have given me. I knew it was wrong to say anything, but I had to find out. I had to know.

  "What?"

  "How?"

  He paused. "How what, sir?"

  "How did you find out?"

  "Oh, that? Your coworker called and tipped us off.”

  “My ...”

  “Coworker. A Miss Margaret Madding. She gave us a call when she noticed an impropriety with one of the bank’s accounts.”

  Goddamit, I knew she was too good to be true. I just knew it was a setup from the start! My one fucking chance to foul things up, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. And me, practically ready to give it all up, throw it all away, just to be with her!

  “You know,” I said, not sure yet of from where the words were coming, “I don’t know what she told you, but in my book, this looks more than a little like entrapment.”

  Meet Perry Mason.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “We’ve got all the proof, all the docum
entation.”

  “Of what? I mean, I didn’t actually do anything. Oh, maybe some fooling around here and there, but nothing major.”

  “According to Miss Madding, you apparently did plenty. You were the brains behind it all.”

  I froze, the anger welling within me. “Did she tell you that? Did she say that?”

  I thought back to our first night together, when I’d looked at her in the glow from the fluorescent lights seeping through my bedroom shades, how I couldn’t tell if she had the face of an angel ... or the devil. Now I knew.

  Cartwright opened the rear of the car before the uniform came around to the passenger’s side. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” the cop said. “Is that her?”

  Cartwright looked up toward the building, second floor, to a window with a light behind a silhouetted figure that slowly pulled closed the curtains. “That’s her,” he said. “3-B.”

  “Couldn’t be on the first floor,” the cop groaned. He labored his way up the steps to the solid wooden door on the landing, brushed some webs out of the way, and pushed it open.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The lieutenant never took his eyes off the window. “Jack’s going up to get her.”

  “Her? You mean Mrs. Martinowicz? For what?”

  “To bring her down, of course.”

  Fucking great. It wasn’t bad enough one woman in my life had turned against me. Now a second was coming down to nail the coffin shut. Things just keep getting better and better. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about her Mr. Joseph darling now!

  Several moments later, the cop emerged from the building, helping Mrs. Martinowicz down the steps and over to the curb and the waiting car. When she saw me, she smiled; when she looked at Cartwright, she frowned.

  He told her that she was under arrest for embezzlement, collusion, and bank fraud.

  He thinks she’s in on it, too? How could she possibly embezzle her own funds?

  She sighed, frowned, and looked up like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “Tell me, please, officer. Will I have to go to jail?” she asked. He replied that most likely not, considering her age, provided she returned the money to the bank.

  She demurred. “But the money from the interest the bank paid me is mine. They shouldn’t make me pay that back, no? That money is from my investments.”

  “Your investments,” he said, shaking his head, “were the bank’s money in the first place, remember? The bank was paying you interest on the money you stole under false circumstances. It’s like stealing from the bank twice. You can’t do that, Mrs. Martinowicz. Life doesn’t work that way.”

  I felt like shaking my head, asking if he minded if I turned up the volume or switched to another channel, one with subtitles in English, anything to understand what the hell was going on. But they hadn’t slapped the cuffs on me yet; they hadn’t shoved me into the back seat of the cruiser, either. They hadn’t even read me my rights. Had they? Something strange was going down, and I figured the best chance I had of coming out on top was to keep my mouth shut until someone addressed me. Someone did.

  “So,” Cartwright said, “I take it this is the woman you’ve been investigating? The one with the account at the bank?”

  I raised my brows. “Her? Oh, yeah. Yes. Sure is. Absolutely.”

  “Just making sure.”

  “Yeah. No doubt about it. It’s her all right. But tell me, lieutenant, how did you catch on to her so quickly?”

  The lieutenant told me that Margaret had notified them that Mrs. Martinowicz had made arrangements to withdraw her funds a little at a time and transfer them to Mexico. That’s when she got suspicious as to how a little old lady from Poland, with no job and a meager social security income, could have amassed so much money in such a short period of time. That’s when she ran a check on the woman’s account and learned about the loan scam.

  “Loan scam?”

  “Miss Madding wired the bank in Acapulco to hold the funds until we called for them. I assume that’s when she enlisted your help to ensure Mrs. Martinowicz wouldn’t find out what was happening and skip town before we could build a case against her.”

  “My help. Yes. Of course. But tell me, just how did she get all that money? I mean, Mrs. Martinowicz. I’m a still a bit fuzzy about that part.”

  “Do you want to tell him that,” Cartwright asked. The woman shook her head. He said he didn’t think so and turned back to me. “Apparently Mrs. Martinowicz here got the idea to doctor several fictitious bank loans, using several of her friends and relatives to pose as applicants. After they had received substantial loans using the phony docs she’d supplied to them, they turned the loan money over to her in exchange for a payoff of a thousand dollars each. Then she deposited that ‘loan money’ into her account, which, over the eight or ten years of running the scam, had grown into quite a nest egg.”

  “So,” I said, “the part about Mexico ... she was transferring her funds there?” It paid, I realized, not to play too dumb.

  “She’d just started doing so when Miss Madding discovered the transfers and called us. A little sleuthing, and we were able to tie everything back to her.”

  I looked at the woman and craned my head. “Is that what you were planning, Mrs. M.?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know nothing about no transfer to Mexico, but I am not sorry one bit. That president of the bank, he is a dumbbell. Excuse me for saying so, Mr. Joseph, darling, sir, but he is empty-headed. I never liked him one bit. He treat me like an old lady. He treat me like a dummy, so I show him who is the smart one and who is the dummy.”

  “But ...” I heard the words slip out of my mouth without being able to stop them. “But, you knew that setting up a loan scam was wrong. You knew it was wrong and that someday you’d be caught. Didn’t you?”

  “Caught? Caught what? No one lost anything. When my friends get their loans, they pay a fee to the bank. Then I pay them for their trouble, and they go back to Poland for a visit for a while, and no one is hurt. You know that, Mr. Joseph, darling, I can’t hurt nobody. Nobody except the dumb people like the bank president and that little fellow who used to live here before you move in, such a little fellow and a drunk and with the women all the time. The women for the sex. It’s such a shame.”

  I glanced at the lieutenant who was making some notes, his lips moving as he scribbled. I tried glancing at what he was writing down, but he turned away before I could see.

  “Do you ... do you think she had some ... help?” I asked, motioning toward her. “I mean, do you think she had an accomplice or something? A partner?”

  I hadn’t wanted to ask, but for some reason, I was suddenly fascinated. The old lady had actually pulled off a scam worth more than I’d ever imagined. And would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t bumbled along. Yet, at first glance at least, she didn’t seem to have the brains to boil a pot of coffee.

  Cartwright looked up. “Nah. She’s strictly a lone wolf,” he said, turning toward the woman, “aren’t you Mrs. Martinowicz?” She shook her head and looked away. “It seems she didn’t need any help. For her, pulling off the scam was no big deal. Not for someone who once worked for a bank in Poland ... as an Internal Affairs Officer in the Fraud Division.”

  “What?”

  “So,” Mrs. M. said, “what happens now?” She tugged on his overcoat sleeve. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name is, again?”

  “Cartwright,” he said. “Lieutenant Daniel Cartwright.”

  “Oh, that is a good name. Such a elegant name, Mr. Daniel, darling. I am so fortunate to live the good life with such wonderful people around me. First Mr. Joseph come to me looking for a place to stay, and now you. I tell you, Mr. Daniel, sir, I thank my lucky God to find people like the two of you in this world. But tell me something, tell me something, Mr. Daniel. Do I have to go somewhere now or can I go back upstairs and feed my cats?”

  He told her she’d have to accompany him
to the station, and he helped her into the back of the prowler. He said they’d probably keep her in the holding area until they could get the night judge to bind her over for arraignment, after which she’d most likely be released on her own recognizance; so, she’d be back home and sleeping in her own bed by midnight.

  “With my cats?”

  He nodded. “With your cats.”

  She asked if she could go back upstairs to retrieve her shawl, and he told her it wasn’t necessary, that the officer would be happy to turn up the heat in the cruiser. “Won’t you, Officer Carlisle?”

  Carlisle looked from one to the other. “Oh, yeah, sure, thrilled. Nothing I like better than running the heater full blast in the middle of August.”

  I watched as Carlisle slammed the back door and walked around to the driver’s side. I turned to Cartwright. “So, you don’t really need me anymore, do you, lieutenant? Now that you have Mrs. Martinowicz’s confession.”

  “I’d still like you to come down to swear out a complaint on behalf of the bank. Then you can go.”

  “You mean that’s why you ... I mean, that’s the reason you ...”

  “We need your complaint on behalf of the bank to bind her over.” I told him that, since Margaret was more knowledgeable than I, perhaps she should be the one to sign off.

  “She’s on her way to the station now,” he said. “You can sign a joint complaint and make things official. That will wrap things up on our end.”

  “And ... Mrs. Martinowicz? Will she really be okay? I mean, you’re not going to throw her behind bars or anything like that, are you? I don’t know that her old heart could take it.”

  “We’ll treat her with kid gloves. Look, she made a mistake in judgment. She’s an immigrant American. Once the funds are returned from Mexico and she signs over her account back to the bank, everyone will be satisfied, including the D.A. I don’t expect there’ll be any more to it than that.”

  Thank God, he thought. Thank my lucky God.

  Following the affairs that were unfolding, my biggest remaining concern was what Miss Margaret Madding was going to say when we collided at the police station. Was she going to stick to the story she originally told Cartwright, or was she just setting me up to turn me over to the D.A.? How much did she actually know about my activities, my plans? And why, if she knew as much as it appeared, did she just let me off the hook?