“So when they realized Jack wasn’t a crook, they killed him so he couldn’t reveal any of the information they had already showed him—and you believe this?”
I thought about it. “Plausible but unlikely.”
“And who exactly is behind all this?”
“Well, I’m thinking a guy named Elon, the Department of Revenue boss. And lots of unwitting accomplices working in a fragmented bureaucracy.”
Blank stare. “The Chicago Department of Revenue is run by Elon the Gangster?” Something about her tone provoked a simultaneous burst of laughter. Then Tamar said, “And the Russians? Are they part of this or not?”
“I have no evidence Elon has access to the Russian mob.”
“Phew,” Tamar said sarcastically. “I thought for a second we were in trouble.”
“There’s more,” I said. “The tickets written to the guy who lived in your building were from Windy City Meters’ parking enforcement aides. That’s the private company that leases the meter boxes from the city.”
Tamar looked unimpressed. “Let’s keep things simple. Jack was killed to protect this complicated arrangement in which a private company rakes in tons of money from parking revenue.”
“That’s the baseline. I can’t tell you if Windy City’s breaking any laws—which brings us back to what this all has to do with Jack’s murder.”
“He wasn’t the Russian mobster they hoped for.”
“Did they really have to kill a frightened immigrant on the chance he understood what the hell was going on?”
A lot had been said in a small amount of time. We finished eating in silence.
Finally I said, “The months leading up to Jack’s death. Did he act different in any way? Anything you could attribute to Jones’s story?”
Tamar contemplated a few moments and shook her head. “Jones’s story is nonsense. My cousin was depressed about Lada—the girlfriend I told you about—going back to Russia. Although sometimes he would imagine out loud what he could be doing if he had stayed in Moscow instead of taking a teaching job in Tbilisi. I reminded him how much he meant to the family. But he would just stare into the distance and then start mumbling about corrupt politicians and oligarchs ruining the world. Boy, did he hate Putin.”
“How’s your aunt doing?”
Tamar sort of frown-smiled. “I think Jack’s death was the last straw in a hard life. She spends her days talking to St. Andrew.” Tamar grinned. “Jack and Andrew are now good friends, you know.” We both laughed. “Hey, if it brings her peace, that’s fine with me. What about you?”
The question took me by surprise. “What about me?”
Tamar looked as if I had just called her mother an infidel. “Family, of course. You must have family in your life to think about, worry about, deal with.”
“Oh, that,” I said and told an abbreviated version of my forefathers’ dubious reputations. “It seemed the families they married into shunned them once they realized who their daughters had chosen for sons-in-law. I have a lot of cousins out there I’ve never met.”
“But don’t you have someone you’re close to? A sister or brother?”
I told Tamar about Snooky, devoted family friend, genuine big brother, and the tragedy of his becoming my first murder case just a few months ago. Then I told her about my sickly father and described Frownie, what he meant to my family, and that I most likely saw him for the last time a few hours ago.
Tamar looked on the verge of tears. “That’s so sad! Why don’t you get in touch with your cousins? I’m sure nobody is going to hold a grudge against you for whatever happened in the past. I mean, they’re your blood.”
“I’m fine, Tamar. I have no complaints with my life.”
“But what else is there besides family? You can only depend on family to help you get through life’s troubles. Only family can make sure your legacy is properly honored.”
I let her words sink in. “I don’t know. I never thought about it that way. Don’t feel sorry for me. I have a lot of freedom.”
Tamar gazed into the tabletop.
I said, “How about some sorbet?”
She looked at her watch. “Let’s clean up first.”
Silence descended upon the kitchen as we wrapped leftovers, washed plates, wiped the counters and table. I could try to guess what pissed her off—something to do with my attitude toward family—but I hated guessing games.
“I give up. What’d I do?”
Tamar acted surprised. “Oh, no, nothing’s wrong. I’m just thinking. I guess it’s just that I’m not used to your type.”
“I gotta ask—”
“Your independence. It intimidates me. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s so different from the culture I grew up in. The idea of being alone in the world. It gave me a chill, but you seem so content. So it’s my problem.”
Punim landed on the table in front of Tamar. She stroked the feline’s back in one motion, starting at her head and ending with her tail.
“I’ve had other guests attempt what you’re doing. They all went home with bloody hands.”
Tamar shrugged. “Cats know who they can trust.”
I suggested tea, hoping to recapture our earlier rapport, but Tamar had to get up early. “Baker’s hours,” she reminded me.
—
Back on the couch, with ice packs, I thought about my so-called independence. I knew my career choice seemed bizarre compared to my peers who filled the professional ranks expected of a North Shore upbringing. But even Tamar, the Georgian immigrant, sensed a peculiarity about me. I was stranger than I realized. I was the foreigner in our relationship.
26
After a fitful night’s sleep, the morning introduced me to a universe of aching. I splashed cold water on my face, popped six more acetaminophen, and sat down to reorient my brain.
The usual breakfast of oatmeal with almonds for me and liver and kidneys for Punim. Beethoven’s Fifth rocked my head. I stifled the impulse to smash the phone against the wall. Tamar’s rebuff last night had hurt more than I realized.
“Seroquel,” Kalijero said.
“Screw you.”
“The mental case, Baxter. The lab thinks he took at least six thousand milligrams of Seroquel the day he died. Typical dose is around six hundred.”
“I get it, Kalijero. You can’t accidentally take ten times the normal dosage. Obviously that means he’s irrelevant to the Gelashvili murder,” I said sarcastically.
A pause, then, “Baxter’s shrink never prescribed Seroquel.”
Kalijero’s acknowledgment of what I already suspected shoved aside, at least temporarily, the sting of Tamar’s rejection. “So what’s next?”
“Who said anything was next?”
“Then why are you bothering me with what I already told you?”
Kalijero swore in Greek then said, “I gotta go,” and hung up. At least he said goodbye this time.
Escaping my bright, airy apartment for the stuffy familiarity of an office seemed appropriate. On the way to Old Town, I left a message with Palmer and then called back Kalijero.
“Sorry, Jimmy,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bark at you.” I told him about my trip to the Department of Revenue and the events leading up to getting cracked in the face.
“You want me to go talk to the principal and tell him kids are picking on Detective Jules?”
“Do you want to help me find Gelashvili’s killer or not?”
“Why should I help you?”
“I’ll be at my office in fifteen. Meet me there.” Dead air. “Please!”
Kalijero grumbled something unintelligible with an affirming inflection, then hung up. No goodbye.
—
She had just stepped off the last stair to the lobby as I opened the outside door to my office building. Tall, fashion-model thin, high cheekbones emphasizing exotic good looks. I guessed early thirties.
“Can I help you?” I said.
She stared a moment and sa
id with a Slavic accent, “I don’t think so.”
“Are you looking for someone?”
She searched my face as if wanting to speak and then rushed out of the building, leaving me to wonder what had just happened.
In my office, a legal pad lay on top of my desk with boxes drawn around names in a sea of empty yellow space. I called Palmer again, and he surprised me by answering.
“I got your message, Jules. Very busy. I should be able to get away in two or three hours—after the budget meeting. Will you still be at your office?”
“If I’m not here, call me. I won’t be far.”
I returned to staring at the yellow legal pad after telling the city editor of the eighth-largest newspaper in the country to call me back. The outside door slammed shut. Bounding footsteps, at least two at a time up to my doorway, where the uniformed mailman stood catching his breath. He was young and plump with a happy disposition that went well with his butterball face and red cheeks. Despite its not being very cold, he wore a postman’s winter hat with faux fur flaps.
“You do exist!” he said joyfully then kind of giggled. He struck me as one of those annoying nice guys who always had a good word for everybody.
“Why don’t you just leave the mail downstairs?”
“Can’t. There have to be mailboxes. When they get the rest of these rooms rented, then we’ll put in a row of locking boxes. Besides, I like running up the stairs. It’s helping me lose some of this fat.” He giggled again. “So whaddya do here anyway?”
“Investigations.”
“Oh, yeah?” The mailman leaned against the door jamb. He looked way too comfortable. “Like a private detective kind of guy?”
“Kind of like that.”
“Is that why you got that purple eye?”
“Have a good day, my friend.” He caught my hint.
Elon and Konigson separated by four inches of yellow space. Department of Revenue and the Republic Media Group. Big responsibilities, big egos. These kinds of guys liked to talk about themselves, and the Internet provided the largest possible audience. But numerous searches provided only generic background information and personal opinions on various blogs, as if the world assumed men like Elon and Konigson needed no introduction. Elon had come to the mayor’s team from “the real estate and banking world.” But to show that he was not a one-dimensional billionaire, Elon’s biographers always mentioned his Princeton doctorate in Teutonic literature. I clicked on a link to a photo from the late seventies of a bearded forty-something Konigson shaking hands with a twenty-something Elon. Konigson already had “two decades of success in real estate and investment banking” to share with Elon, then Decatur-Staley’s newest Ivy League wonder boy. Take our word for it, these guys are good and will look after your best interests. If you have to ask, then you’re probably not worthy of knowing.
The outside door slammed shut again. Heavy, plodding footsteps. Maybe Palmer. Izzy and Knight were both too skinny for such weight. Reaching the top of the landing, then several breaths, Kalijero’s stocky frame filled the doorway. His hair now more salt than pepper, he appeared to have aged significantly in the two months since I had last seen him.
“Greetings, Zorba! I’m flattered you came to see me.”
Kalijero panted for a minute. “You couldn’t have found a building with an elevator, Landau?”
“It’s only four flights, Jimmy. You should quit smoking.”
Kaljero sat. “I did.”
“Your presence here means you’re interested in the case?”
Kalijero started stretching his fingers back one at a time. “Ever since you told me Konigson ordered that editor to kill the story. Got me thinking.”
Silence.
Kalijero continued his appendage calisthenics, now flexing his hands open and closed.
“Jimmy, what’re you doing here?”
Kalijero answered with his own question. “How’s Frownie?”
I shook my head. “Any day.”
“Way back when I popped your dad, before the charges were officially filed, Frownie came to see me. He begged me to convince the DA to plea to a lesser charge and not apply the ongoing racketeering statute. I refused and he started cussing me out. And then he started crying. I didn’t realize how close he was with your family. He kept going back and forth between cussing me out and crying.” Kalijero scratched his head.
“I didn’t know this,” I said.
“I think maybe I should’ve done what he asked. Your dad would’ve done enough time and still gotten out to see you become a man.”
Something about men in their sixties suddenly becoming sentimental annoyed me.
“You were just doing your job, Jimmy. And you don’t know, Dad might have hooked me in. Maybe you saved me from a life of crime.” Kalijero wasn’t buying it. “Why don’t I start from the beginning and tell you everything I got on the Gelashvili case?”
Kalijero stood, smiled. “Nah, this one closed too quickly. I’m already reassigned to another last case. I’m doing them a favor, they tell me. A body just washed up downriver.”
He walked to the doorway and told me to be careful. I listened as he clomped down the stairs and heard the door slam shut. I still didn’t know why he had come.
27
The Blue Line let me off near Madison and LaSalle, close to the sacred temple that housed the Department of Revenue. I acknowledged the Walmart greeter and walked through the hallway metal detector. Like the previous day, lines of gloomy-faced citizens waited to exchange cash for having the scofflaw curse lifted from their lives.
Along the margin of the crowd, I shuffled toward the back. Beyond the row of tellers and revenue-agent desks, a woman sat at a reception station answering phones. I presumed Elon and his deputies conducted business from the offices behind her. A steady stream of suits approached the counter before heading into one of the offices. A lull in the action beckoned my entrance.
“I’d like to see Mr. Elon.”
The woman’s eyeballs plotted GPS coordinates over my face until she blinked a few times and said, “Do you have an appointment?”
I pointed to my purple welt. “I was involved in a car accident with his wife, and he said I should come by and discuss things.”
She plotted more coordinates. “I think he would’ve told us if someone like you would be stopping by.”
Someone like you. That hurt. “How can someone like me see someone like him?” I inquired, trying to be polite despite the scary face.
“You make an appointment.” She looked at her computer and typed something. “And what is this appointment concerning?”
“I have questions about how the system works. How the money flows.”
She dropped her hands to her lap. “What happened to the accident with his wife?” She looked flustered. “We have a public affairs office that can answer all your questions.”
“Why can’t I talk to Elon about it?”
“It’s not Mr. Elon’s job to explain how the Department of Revenue operates. That’s the job of the public affairs office.”
Her posture told me the conversation had ended. The security guard standing stage left reinforced her statement. I retraced my route back to the front of the room just in time to see four Bankroll Warranty guards march through the metal detector.
—
From across the street, I watched the armored truck idle in a loading zone. Half an hour later, the Bankroll Warranty men exited the building escorting bags of money piled on a flatbed dolly. I crossed back and leaned against a square concrete pillar about ten yards behind the truck. Nothing really to see, just three beer-bellied guards handing off bags of loot into the truck while one kept watch. A package neatly wrapped in gray paper positioned next to a rear tire seemed out of place and caught my eye. Probably contained paperwork. Another Chicagoan in an ill-fitting suit and smoking a cigarette loitered about ten feet from the passenger door. The cuffs of his pants stopped short of his ankles. A full head of silver hair
combed neatly across from a well-defined part gave him a stately handsomeness. But his wrinkled smoker’s complexion and deep lines at the sides of his mouth aged him past his forty-something years. He appeared mildly interested in the process but also distracted by the surroundings. I took pictures of him with my phone. When the guards slammed the rear door shut, the man flicked away his cigarette and double-timed it to the package, reaching for it just as the truck pulled out; a perfectly executed maneuver.
I followed the man and his briefcase across the street into a mid-rise called the Wolfe Professional Building, where he waited for the elevator while humming and drumming his fingers against the package. When the elevator arrived, I slipped in as he pushed the tenth floor button.
Halfway up, he pointed to his eye and said, “You thought he said stand up, when he really said shut up?” and followed his quip with unrestrained laughter.
I smiled politely and suffered his giggling to the tenth floor, where the door opened to Vector Solutions, Inc. The common area of the office was wide open, just a big room with doors along the back wall. Nowhere to hide, not even a partition. The man breezed past the woman at the reception station while lifting the package up near his head and pointing at it. She glanced at him and then at me as I followed in his wake down an adjacent hallway where two well-filled, size-54-long suits stood outside an office. One stepped aside to allow the man to enter, the other walked directly up to me and stopped.
From behind came a woman’s voice. “Sir, it’s not like you can just hang around if you don’t have an appointment.” I turned and saw the receptionist staring at me.
“How about I hang around the waiting area?”
“We don’t have a waiting area.”
Outside the office, I leaned against the wall next to the men’s room. Occasionally, the receptionist frowned at me. From the elevator emerged a chubby future business leader—young, well dressed, bored to death. The knot of his tie needed tightening.
I said, “Wake up, young man. He who labors diligently need never despair.”
Windy City Blues Page 12
