Trouble in Mind

by Michael Wiley

  ‘That’s silly,’ Sue Ellen said. She brought Payday to Toselli. ‘You like me, don’t you?’

  Toselli looked as if he would vomit. He lifted his automatic from his lap and aimed it at Sue Ellen. ‘Yeah, honey,’ he said, ‘I like you.’

  Kelson would have shot Toselli under the table to protect Sue Ellen. He would have shot up half the city if he needed to. But a rumbling came from the hallway, and four cops dressed in SWAT gear burst into the apartment. They carried assault rifles and aimed them at Toselli. The lead cop told him to drop his weapon. All four moved close enough to shred him if he disobeyed.

  Toselli glanced at them as if unsure. Then he laid his gun on the floor and said, ‘Hey, guys, we’re all friends, right?’ He raised his hands over his head.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Peters wouldn’t let Kelson watch Toselli’s interview in person, but after Toselli pulled his signature move on a rookie outside the interview room and strutted out of the station with a service pistol shoved into the kid’s ribs, Peters let him see the video recording.

  ‘She was dying,’ Toselli said to the camera, ‘I mean, raking the skin off her face with her fingernails, she needed it so bad. Her husband had just OD’d. Good guy when he wasn’t high. Good father to Alejandro. Inez always counted on him to score for her. You know, I couldn’t watch her do that to herself. I said I’d take care of her. So I took care of her.’

  Peters gave him a blank face and used a nonjudgmental tone, though Toselli knew the routine. ‘So you helped yourself to some crack – to help out your big sis?’

  ‘She was into skag by then. But yeah, that’s more or less it. Easy to rip off a little after a bust.’

  ‘But you didn’t stop at a little,’ Peters said.

  Toselli had waved away the offer of a lawyer. He knew better than to talk without one, but he also knew better than to think one would do any good. So he acted as if he wanted to cooperate, as if he wanted to come clean.

  ‘My sister had friends,’ he said. ‘Their friends had friends. A little wouldn’t do.’

  ‘Junkies are a friendly group.’

  ‘They’ve got a shared interest,’ Toselli said.

  ‘Shared needles too?’

  ‘Inez already had Hep C when I started stealing for her. She was dying. I eased it for her.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve got to self-justify or you’d put a bullet in your head.’ Even in a seasoned cop like Peters, anger sometimes bled through a blank face.

  ‘Plenty of days when I wanted to do that,’ Toselli said.

  ‘So you became a big-time dealer. How about Alejandro?’

  ‘I swore to Inez I would take care of him. I didn’t want him in the game. But he was like her – he was already in it when he came to stay with me. He’d nicked from her stash since he was like eleven. Mostly he sold it to the older boys – at first for soda money, later for sneakers and phones – the shit kids like.’

  ‘Why’d you kick him out?’

  ‘I gave him a choice. Cut the dealing or leave. He left.’

  ‘But then you supplied him anyway.’

  ‘He wasn’t going to stop. He could get it from me, or he could get it from Chilito Nuñez, who would beat him to death if he came in late or short on cash and would cheat him anyway because Alejandro was just a boy. I told Inez I’d watch over him.’

  ‘Do the excuses help?’

  ‘Call it what you want, he was safer getting it from me.’

  ‘Until Sam Kelson shot him in the chest.’

  ‘Worst day of my life. Worse than when Inez died. When Kelson went into the alley with him, he wasn’t supposed to be armed. Department rules. Too much risk to Kelson. I set up the plan so there’d be no gun. Alejandro would rob the drug-buy money from him and escape out my end of the alley. No one would get hurt. I would fuck up the buy-and-bust op and laugh my ass off because I took department money. But Kelson brought a gun.’

  ‘So you decided to square things with him? Set him up. Wreck him. Kill him.’

  ‘I owed it to Inez. I owed it to Alejandro.’

  ‘And you forced Doreen Felbanks to do the dirty work for you?’

  ‘I had to stay out of sight. I figured I might as well put a pretty face on it.’

  ‘How about Dominick Stevens? Why gun for him?’

  ‘He betrayed my nephew with Francisca. Fucking her behind his back. Alejandro never even knew.’

  ‘Why’d you save Kelson in the alley when Alejandro shot him? You could’ve let him bleed to death.’

  ‘I ask myself that all the time. Alejandro was dead. I saw that. I mean, he had a hole where his heart was. And Kelson was dying. I could’ve let him go. No one would’ve known. It could’ve gone either way. Instinct kicked in. Principles. I saved him. I guess I’m a good cop.’

  ‘Tell yourself that as you sit in jail.’

  ‘I know who I am,’ Toselli said. ‘I don’t expect you to get it. But I’ll tell you this, by the time the ambulance pulled out of the alley with Kelson in it, I’d decided to kill him. I would make him hurt. I’d take away any sympathy people felt for him. I’d humiliate him. If I could, I’d drive him crazy. Then I’d shoot him. I’d put a hole where his heart was. You know why?’

  ‘Because you’ve got a sick mind?’

  ‘Because I defend the people in my life. My sister. My nephew. I defend them the way only a good man does.’

  The rookie was supposed to handcuff Toselli before taking him from the interview room. Regulations required it. Common sense did. ‘But he’s a cop, for Christ’s sake,’ the rookie said later from his hospital bed. ‘You don’t cuff another cop, do you?’

  As the rookie led him from the interview, Toselli grabbed the kid’s throat with one hand and pulled the pistol from his holster with the other. He held the gun to the rookie’s temple. Although he made the move silently in the middle of the busy Homicide Room, the whole room seemed to hush.

  Then a detective emerged from the closest office with a gun drawn. He stepped close, held the gun about five inches from Toselli’s head, and said, ‘Nope.’

  That made Toselli grin. In a single fluid move, he dropped the rookie’s pistol, slapped the detective’s gun hand, and, grabbing his wrist, wrenched the gun around so it pointed at the man’s belly. He kneed the detective, sending him down against a wall, and swept the rookie’s pistol off the floor. He stuck the detective’s gun in his belt and crammed the rookie’s pistol into the kid’s ribs. He announced to everyone in the room, ‘Next time, I shoot him and then shoot you.’

  No one else drew a weapon.

  ‘Don’t come after me,’ Toselli added. ‘If I see any of you again, I’ll kill you. No hard feelings.’ Then he marched the rookie out of the back of the station, commandeered a cruiser, and made the kid drive him to the corner of Kimball Avenue and Irving Park Road on the Northwest Side. He used the rookie’s phone to tell someone to pick him up there. He scanned the car radio, had the rookie stop a block from the corner, and scanned it again, then ripped the cord from the handheld mic and smashed the radio unit with the pistol butt.

  In a little parking lot at Kimball and Irving Park, a man with a medium build, gray-streaked hair, and a mean face stood by a white Plymouth. Toselli told the rookie to pull into the spot next to the car. He said, ‘No hard feelings’ again, and cracked the rookie’s head with the pistol butt.

  ‘And that’s that?’ Kelson asked when Peters finished telling him.

  ‘Afraid so.’

  But Peters misjudged. An hour later, Toselli’s escape hit the news – an armed killer-cop taking a hostage and outmaneuvering a whole station of other cops. Now he was running free with a list of targets and a willingness to hurt anyone who got in his way. The TV got hold of a series of pictures – Toselli as a young cop in uniform, Toselli looking heroin chic as an undercover cop in narcotics, Toselli looking like the meanest bastard ever born in his raid gear. The mayor advised citizens to shelter in place and, if they encountered Toselli, under no circ
umstances to approach him.

  Peters streamed the coverage on the computer in his office. He asked Kelson to stay and offer insights. Besides, he said, a lot of cops still pictured Kelson as responsible for Toselli’s string of killings. Peters wouldn’t want one of those cops to see Kelson and make a tragic mistake. But when a CBS commentator went down that path and speculated on the rumored friendship between him and Toselli, Kelson got up and said, ‘That’s so wrong.’

  ‘Easy now,’ Peters said.

  The commentator said, ‘An anonymous source high in the departmental chain of command says all aspects of Toselli and Kelson’s relationship will be investigated. In the meantime, Kelson is in custody—’

  Peters yelled at the screen, ‘Not custody – protective custody.’

  ‘Dammit,’ Kelson said, and he walked out of the office and then out through the front of the station.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Standing on the sidewalk, Kelson called Rodman.

  Rodman said Cindi had brought Doreen Felbanks’s fever down, though she guessed that without a hospital her chances looked about fifty-fifty. But even the mention of a hospital took Doreen out of her Demerol cloud and had her threatening to run.

  ‘How far would she get?’

  ‘She’d crash before she reached the door, but what good would that do?’

  ‘Throw her over your shoulder and take her?’

  ‘Is that what you want me to do?’ Rodman asked.

  ‘You think Toselli could get to her in a hospital?’

  ‘He seems to get wherever he wants to go.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s doing better than fifty-fifty. Can Cindi stay with her awhile?’

  ‘Sure, but she might leave me afterward. You know, Doreen isn’t worth it. Maybe she once was a long time ago to someone. But whatever was good in her is gone.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Kelson said. ‘But let’s keep her until the cops have Toselli again, OK?’

  ‘Your love life, not mine, man.’

  ‘Ha.’ When they hung up, he said again, ‘Ha.’ And to prove he was laughing, he drove to Nancy’s house.

  But he didn’t drive alone.

  As he pulled into the street from the station lot, the blue Buick with Nuñez’s men in it fell in behind him. Kelson watched the car in his rearview mirror and swore at Peters for broadcasting his presence at the station. But the men stayed back a few car lengths, and when they saw two police cruisers parked in front of Nancy’s house, they pulled to the side and cut their engine.

  Kelson stopped between the cruisers, one of them empty, the other with uniformed cops in the front seat. When he got out and walked up the front sidewalk, the cops jerked alert, then relaxed as they seemed to decide he was no threat.

  He rang the doorbell, and another uniformed cop opened the door.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ Kelson asked.

  The cop said, ‘Who are you?’

  But Nancy came from behind and let Kelson in.

  Sue Ellen ran from the living room and jumped into his arms. She looked deep into his eyes and said, ‘What the hell, Dad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kelson said. ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Me either,’ Sue Ellen said. ‘Mom let me bring Payday and Painter’s Lane. Just until this is over. I have to keep them in my room.’

  ‘You’ve got a good mom.’

  ‘The best,’ she said.

  He set her down, and she ran upstairs to check on the kittens. He went into the kitchen with Nancy. For the first time in his memory, her voice shook. ‘Would Greg have shot her?’

  He wanted to lie and reassure her. ‘Yeah, it looked like it.’

  ‘That asshole. She loves him like family.’

  ‘The department can put the two of you in a hotel room with a guard,’ he said again. ‘You should take the offer.’

  ‘I know.’ She glanced around the room as if the appliances, the walls, and windows were disintegrating even as she stood there. ‘Would he have shot you too?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Will you go to a hotel?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Stupid not to, right? Someone broke in while we were out.’

  ‘I came in.’

  ‘And moved … things? Took things?’

  He dug in his pocket and handed her the ball of hair. ‘I also stole his watch.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘Jealousy? Confusion? Something.’

  ‘You’re scaring the hell out of me,’ she said. ‘You don’t do me any good. You don’t do Sue Ellen—’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ he said.

  She stared at him. She gave no sign that she thought they were in this together. He saw only exhaustion. She said, ‘I think you should go.’

  ‘You’ll do a hotel? You’ll keep Sue Ellen safe?’

  ‘I told you I would.’

  ‘Right.’ He’d loved her and married her and had a child with her. He’d worn out her love for him. She was hard and beautiful, as tough as anyone he’d ever known. She clutched the ball of hair as if she might punch him. He asked, ‘Can I keep that?’

  She shook her head, so tough. ‘No – no, you can’t.’

  FIFTY-NINE

  Kelson drove back to Rodman’s apartment, tailed again by Nuñez’s men, and jogged up the front stairs.

  Little Marty LeCoeur still slept in the bedroom, while the others watched TV coverage of the police sweeping the city. Doreen sat up on the couch, though her eyes had a Demerol glaze. On ABC, news cameras showed the aftermath of a raid of Toselli’s Dearborn Park townhouse. A couple of dozen police cars and tactical vans were crammed into the little court outside the house. Plainclothes cops carried boxes out of the front door. The reporter had to shout over the beat of a hovering helicopter. Standing by one of the tactical vans, Toselli’s mother talked with two officers.

  ‘Nice lady,’ Doreen mumbled.

  ‘Huh?’ Francisca said.

  Rodman thumbed the remote, and the channel jumped to NBC. Toselli had just called the news program, and the station was playing the audio. He ranted about failures of departmental leadership, kids who fall through the cracks, wrongheaded crime-fighting practices. He sounded more than a little crazy.

  Doreen said, ‘He’s doing … it.’

  ‘What?’ Cindi asked.

  ‘Shh,’ Rodman said.

  Toselli said the police wouldn’t find him, because he was gone – gone and never coming back. He was done hurting others, done getting hurt.

  ‘Ha,’ Doreen said.

  Toselli said he loved his mom. He loved his dead sister Inez. He loved his dead nephew Alejandro.

  Doreen mumbled, ‘He’s so … damn … good.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Kelson asked.

  ‘It’s an act,’ she said. ‘Dis—’ for a moment she lost the second half of the word – ‘Distraction. You lower your guard. He’s coming after you.’ She smiled at Francisca. ‘And you.’ The smile fell. ‘And me.’ She wiggled a finger at Rodman – ‘I don’t know about you’ – then at Cindi – ‘You, he doesn’t know about … but he’d be happy to have you.’

  ‘No one’s guard is down,’ Kelson said.

  ‘If you blink,’ she said, ‘if you look at your … shoes – he’s so quick, so damn … good. If you take your eyes off for one moment—’

  ‘We get the idea,’ Rodman said. ‘So how do we beat him at his own game?’

  ‘You don’t. It’s’ – she did something with her mouth and lips that looked like an old woman adjusting her false teeth – ‘impossible.’

  ‘One of his friends picked him up when he got loose,’ Kelson said. ‘Where can we find them?’

  She shook her head. The TV ran more video of the raid on the Dearborn Park townhouse.

  Rodman said, ‘How many guys can he round up to back him?’

  She said, ‘When you think you’ve got him, he’s got you. He likes … corners.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Kelson said.

  �
��Back him into a corner … he likes that.’

  On the TV screen, the plainclothes cops ran out of the front door of the townhouse. Other cops backed from the sidewalk to the opposite side of the court. At the same time, a special operations truck, carting an object that looked like a bathysphere, drove past the police cars and over the front curb. Two men wearing helmets the size of an astronaut’s climbed out.

  Rodman asked Kelson, ‘Did you see anything that looked like explosives?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Kelson said.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Doreen said, as the men in helmets went into the townhouse. ‘You should turn that off – if you don’t want to see it.’

  ‘I don’t mind fighting him in a corner,’ Kelson said.

  Her face looked sour as she fixed her eyes on the screen. ‘I hate watching this.’

  Kelson turned off the TV. ‘Where—’

  Just then, on the other side of Rodman’s living room, a spray of bullets smashed the two front windows and tattered the plywood covering the one Toselli shot out earlier.

  Francisca screamed. Kelson, Cindi, and Rodman ducked to the floor. Doreen sat on the couch, indifferent. ‘See? That’s what I mean.’

  Little Marty emerged from the bedroom, wide-eyed and furious. With his pistol in his hand, he drifted to the wall by one of the blown-out windows and shot down at Toselli and two other men – the hard-faced one who had picked up Toselli at the Northwest Side parking lot and a stocky black man with a tightly trimmed beard. Nuñez’s men were nowhere in sight. Kelson and Rodman crawled to the windows and, after another spray of bullets pocked the plaster ceiling, also fired down at the street.

  For ten minutes, Kelson, Rodman, and Marty shot from the windows, and Toselli and his men dodged from parked car to recessed doorway, spraying the building with automatic gunfire. Cindi called 911 and, with the calm voice of a woman who worked in an emergency room, explained what was happening, then explained again when the operator didn’t get it – and no, Cindi could do nothing to quiet the noise that made her hard to hear.

  When a chunk of ceiling plaster fell on the couch inches from Doreen’s head, Francisca got on her knees and shoved her like a queen on a barge across the apartment to a sheltering wall.