“All right, you savages, let’s eat,” says Brendan.
“No bun for me,” Patti, the low-carb girl, announces, conveniently ignoring the fact that she’s drinking beer.
“How do you train for a marathon and not eat carbs?” Aiden asks her.
“I carbo-load for long runs.”
“I’ve got some powder you’d like.” Power lifter and bodybuilder that he is, Aiden has all kinds of supplements and enhancements, most of which smell like shit and taste even worse.
Brendan makes a face and nods at me. “Am I the only one who’s getting fat gracefully?”
“Give me time,” I say, recognizing the obvious, how much weight I’ve lost, but not for good reasons. “I’m not old as dirt like you.”
“When’s the last time you worked out, B?” Aiden asks Brendan.
“When your girlfriend came to visit last week.” Brendan dishes up the brats and buns, puts them next to the huge bowl of chips, which only he and I will touch. “She’s a wildcat, that one.”
“Our Aiden has a girlfriend?” Patti didn’t know that. Neither did I. The night just improved significantly. If Aiden has any brains, I mean any cerebral activity whatsoever, he will take the Fifth immediately, keep his lips shut so tight that the Jaws of Life couldn’t pry them apart. But he won’t, cuz he’s our Aiden.
“I’m seeing someone, yeah,” he says.
“Does she see you?” I ask. “Or do you just peep through her window and jerk off?”
“Hey, go easy on the lad.” Brendan to the rescue. “The windows at the psych ward are tough to see through.”
“Just kidding, A,” I say, sitting down. “Seriously, what’s the lucky fella’s name?”
Aiden spears a brat and drops it on his plate. “She’s a teacher at the high school.”
“What’s she teach?” Patti asks. Aiden’s gonna tell us now. He shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t.
“Special ed,” he says.
“Oh, you’re one of her students,” I say, low-hanging fruit. Patti likes that one, spills some beer down her chin.
Aiden raises his beer. “To Pop,” he says. “For not being exposed for the corrupt motherfucker that he was until we were grown up and out of the house.”
We clink bottles on that one, all of us except Patti, who shakes her head and frowns. It’s never going to be that simple for Patti.
“That’s fine,” says Brendan to Aiden, “but you ain’t changin’ the subject, meatball.”
It goes on like that for an hour. We slowly extract every detail of Aiden’s girlfriend’s life, devouring each nugget with any number of helpful comments. By the time we’re done, this woman has a harelip, male genitalia, a criminal record, Alzheimer’s, and a scorching case of herpes.
Good to be back with this crew. If nothing else, it takes my mind off Prince Valentine and Junior Peppers. It takes my mind off my Jane Doe on the porch, probably a victim of human trafficking, says the FBI.
Wherever she came from, however she got here, she deserves to have a proper burial, with her name on a tombstone, not a pauper’s grave.
So I decide, as I sit at the old table on our old back porch, drunk and sentimental, that I will give her that much.
I’m going to give Jane Doe a name.
Chapter 36
WALKING DOWN into the basement brings back everything from childhood, even though after we kids moved out, my parents replaced the wrestling mat with an area rug, the dartboard with artwork, the foosball table and weight bench with a love seat and couch.
We’re quiet at first down here, drunk and more emotional than any of us wants to admit, Brendan trying to break the ice with an occasional wisecrack, one or another of us turning away at times to hide the mist in our eyes. We brought a bottle of Jameson down here, and everyone’s partaking.
Patti will take this the hardest. She and I were tight, as twins usually are, but for her Pop was on a pedestal. And she was on his pedestal, his only girl. The boys got an occasional smack when we stepped out of line, even the belt once in a blue moon, but Patti always got delicate strokes of the hair and gentle admonishments.
But Patti’s also had the longest time to adjust. She worked with the movers more than I did. She’s been checking on the house since Pop went away. Brendan and Aiden, on the other hand, they don’t even live in Chicago anymore, so being here is a big deal for them.
We don’t spend too much time looking through the boxes. Thanks to Patti, they’re well organized. Aiden, the biggest puppy dog of all, just peeks into the boxes to make sure they contain his stuff. He’ll “go through it later,” he tells us, which probably means the boxes will sit in some closet in his house, untouched, for the next decade.
“Look at fuckin’ this.” Out of a tall moving box, Brendan pulls a Santa Claus suit—the red velvet, the black-and-white trim, the long cotton beard.
“God, was I pissed at Pop,” I say. There’s a story there: Santa Claus always used to come visit on Christmas Eve, bearing a present for each of us kids, while we sat, mute and awed. It was a big deal every Christmas at our place, with the rest of the crew there, too—Uncle Mikey and his family from Bridgeport, Aunt Marcy and her brood from the North Side, Cubs fans but otherwise good eggs.
Anyway, I’m six, and we’re done with dinner, same as always when Mom did Christmas—roast goose with boiled potatoes, cabbage, and brussels sprouts—and we’re all talking about Santa coming. Four of us little kids mean it, we still believe, and the older ones just go along with it.
For some reason, I head into the garage, probably for a Pepsi, but I don’t really remember why. And there, standing next to the Chrysler, is Pop, one foot already in the Santa suit, an oh-shit expression on his face as we locked eyes.
Needless to say, I’m beside myself, running through the house, calling everyone liars, letting the few of us who didn’t already know (including Patti) in on the big secret.
“You didn’t talk to Uncle Mikey for, like, a year,” Aiden says.
That part I don’t remember. “Why Mikey in particular?” I ask.
“For wearing the Santa costume,” he says.
“God, he felt so bad,” says Brendan, chuckling, shaking his head. “Remember? Mikey tried to tell you that night that Santa asked him to fill in because of the snowstorm.”
I look around the room. Everyone’s enjoying the memory, but…“Pop was wearing the costume,” I say. “Not Mikey.”
“No, it was Mikey, dumbass,” says Brendan. “He had the better stomach for it. At least back then.”
I look at Patti. “It was Mikey,” she agrees.
I put my hands on my hips. “The fuck you guys talking about? I was the one who saw him. I was the trauma victim. I looked Pop straight in the eyes. I can picture him, totally, halfway into that Santa costume.”
“Yeah, okay,” says Brendan out of the side of his mouth. “Or maybe it was Angelina Jolie in that costume, and you banged her. I mean, as long as you’re making shit up, it might as well be worth it.”
“You guys are fucked in the head.” I head into the back room of the basement, the storage area.
“Yeah, all of us are wrong,” Aiden calls out, “and you’re right.”
It was Pop. I distinctly remember it. I mean, I can picture it like it was yesterday.
The back room—the storage area and utility room. The boiler, which must be fifty years old. Pop was so proud of that thing. He said that boiler would outlive us all.
Next to it, the hot-water heater, nearly as prehistoric, a big beige contraption with a little slot in the back that opens, the place where they put the thick set of instructions, out of sight but there if you need them. I know this detail only because I needed a place to hide my Playboy magazine when I was a teenager, and my bedroom held no secrets from Mom.
What are the odds that it’s still there? I have no idea if I ever removed it. The feds, with their search warrant, went through the house with a fine-tooth comb after Pop’s arrest, tore the
place apart. Maybe, in addition to finding troves of incriminating evidence against my father, one of the agents came away with a centerfold of Lexie Karlsen.
What the hell. I step around some boxes and reach around the water heater. Using muscle memory, I push up on the latch. The door falls open, and I reach in.
No magazine. Some other kind of printed material. A hard cover. A book.
I move closer, so my hand can grip it better, and slide it up and out.
Yeah, a book. A small inch-thick book with a red cover. A ledger of some kind.
A flutter passes through my chest.
I leaf through it quickly, confirm it’s what I think it is—some kind of record Pop was keeping of payoffs. It’s his handwriting. Not prose but words, numbers, codes, written in pencil. I stop on one page, glance at the initial entries.
S3925P—Rio Fly—250
S2607R—V Disc—300
W3827K—Bobby Jay—250
I close it up. I don’t want to read it. That chapter, if you’ll pardon the pun, is closed. The feds missed this ledger, this little red book of secrets, but then again, they had enough to put him away for a life sentence anyway.
So what’s the difference? I consider putting it right back where I found it.
Instead I head back into the main part of the basement, where the siblings aren’t done with me, still throwing out guesses about who donned that Santa costume in the garage thirty years ago. Wilford Brimley? Caitlyn Jenner? Pee-wee Herman?
Nobody notices as I slip the small red book into one of my boxes.
Chapter 37
PAVLO DEMCHUK was a thug, but he was a thug with a sense of honor and dignity. When I put the cuffs on him almost eight years ago, he wasn’t exactly giddy with joy, but he didn’t complain, didn’t whimper, didn’t beg or plead. There was a sense of resignation about him, as if he knew this day would come but hoped it wouldn’t come so soon.
After he pleaded guilty to one count of running an illegal gambling establishment over in Portage Park—but before he was sentenced—I went to visit him in the lockup. I had a real hard-on back then, hoping to make detective, and I wanted the mobsters above him on the food chain. I thought Pavlo could give me that, because Pavlo knew everybody; his uncle had been one of the top Russian mobsters in Chicago, and though Pavlo never reached those heights or even tried to, he had his finger in plenty of things, and I suspected that very little happened that he didn’t know about.
Pavlo was a perfect gentleman, complimenting me on my police work, readily admitting to his own involvement, but he smiled politely when I asked him about anyone else. “I understand your curiosity, but I will not speak of others,” he kept saying in that thick Russian accent. I went through my routine: I could talk to the prosecutors; we could reduce the hell out of your sentence; why would you protect people who didn’t even bond you out when you were arrested—the full charm offensive.
Over the three trips I made to the lockup, always with some version of that same pitch, Pavlo’s expression never changed. He just nodded, let me say my piece, and politely declined to say anything further. I came to respect the guy, even admire him—at least how he handled adversity.
He got five years with his priors. He’s out now, but still on MSR, so I knew the address on his sheet must be current. I called ahead to make sure he was home.
Pavlo lives in a bungalow in Norridge, a decidedly middle-class neighborhood full of A-frames and Georgians on small plots, not far from Harlem Irving Plaza. Pavlo is standing at the door when I pull up. It’s been years, and I don’t know what I expected, but he’s aged more than I would’ve thought. I remember the bald top, but the sides were bushy and dark; now they’re snow-white and cut tight. His stomach used to hang over his belt; now he’s svelte, unnaturally so, which makes me think of illness.
“Mr. Harney,” he says, still with the heavy accent. Mee-ster.
“Pavlo, thanks for seeing me,” I say.
His eyes glance at the bag hanging from my shoulder. He couldn’t have thought this was a social call.
We shake hands. “This isn’t about you,” I say. “I just wanted your help on something.”
“How could it be about me?” His eyes widen, his hands spread. “I am committing no crimes.”
I wonder if that’s true. Finding work, straight work, after a felony conviction is ridiculously hard. The probation officer thinks he’s a cook at a Polish restaurant in Broadview. I’m sure he is. I just doubt that’s his only source of income.
He shows me into the first room, painted a bright yellow, family photos decorating the walls, many of them black-and-white, most from his homeland. If memory serves, Pavlo came to America in his teens, in the midseventies.
We take two chairs by the window, separated by a small pedestal table that looks like a relic from his childhood. He’s made coffee. Feels like it would be impolite to decline, so I accept a cup, even though I’m sweating from being outside for only two minutes.
“I’m trying to get an identity on a young woman,” I say. “Late teens, possibly early twenties. They have her from eastern Europe by way of her DNA. The FBI thinks she was a victim of human trafficking.”
Pavlo nods, his brow furrowed, but I don’t know how to read him. I doubt he was ever into that kind of activity, but I suspect he knew people who were, once upon a time. He probably still does. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to tell me.
“This is all off the record, Pavlo,” I say to put him at ease, if he’s worried about blowback for cooperating. I slide half a dozen glossies out of an envelope and hand them to him, hoping to give him an attack of conscience.
I nod toward the photos. “That woman didn’t do anything wrong. She’s an innocent victim. She deserves a proper burial, Pavlo.”
His expression eases. “And this is not all,” he says.
“Come again?”
“You wish to identify this girl, yes, but you wish for more than this. You wish to find out who used her.”
“Busting up a human-trafficking ring isn’t my assignment,” I say, but he’s not convinced. Say what you want about the guy, Pavlo’s no dummy.
He looks down at the top photo, a gruesome close-up of Jane Doe’s face. “Ah, how young she is,” he mumbles. He flips to the next one, panned back farther, a waist-up shot, part of the battered porch. “This I never did. Girls, never.”
“I believe you,” I say. “But you have good ears, my friend. If girls from eastern Europe were coming over here, it would be the Russian mob, right?”
“The Russian mob.” He says it like it’s a joke. “There is some…organization, yes. But you must know this, Mr. Harney. There are…freelancers?” He flips to the next photo and grimaces.
He’s right. There isn’t much organized crime anymore, only small pockets of Italians and Russians trying to score in their tiny fiefdoms. But girls and drugs never go out of business. Someone’s doing it.
“If you are looking for names, Mr. Harney, I cannot give them to you.” He flips to the next photo. “Not because I won’t.” He flips to the next one. “But because I—”
He stops midsentence, his eyes glued to the photo. It’s the close-up of the woman’s leg, the tattoo of the black flower above her ankle.
“I…cannot help you,” he says.
“You recognize that tattoo,” I say.
“I do not.” He hands me the photos. I don’t take them at first, but he shakes them. “I cannot help you.”
“Pavlo, it’s off the record.”
The color has drained from his face. His eyes have an intensity I’ve never seen. This guy took five years with a polite smile. The look on his face now, you’d think he was staring at the Angel of Death. “No, I—I do not know anything to tell you. Please. You must leave,” he says. “Please go now.”
Chapter 38
“YOU CAN see yourself out,” says Pavlo. He heads out of the room. I follow him through the kitchen and out his back door, the sweltering heat again.
“Nobody will know it came from you,” I say, stepping onto his back porch, passing a dingy gas grill, a hot tub covered with a tarp. “Just give me a lead.”
“I have no lead to give you.” He stops walking, standing in his lawn, his back to me. “This is the truth. I do not know the names of these people.”
“But you know about them,” I say. “The black flower. The lily,” I say, thinking of what Rodriguez called it.
The answer is yes, but he hasn’t said it yet.
“They brand their girls,” I say. “Why do they do that?”
I have a feeling I know the answer to that, too, but he’s giving me nothing so far.
“Pavlo, please.”
His shoulders rise and fall, his back still to me. His head turns to the side, so I have his profile. “I say the truth when I tell you I do not know who they are. I only know that they are organized, and they are protected.”
Protected. That can only mean one thing. And it explains why they brand their girls.
“People have died,” he goes on, “trying to investigate them. They will kill. Just for asking questions, they will kill.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I say.
He turns to me. “But I will not.”
“Who died?” I ask. “Give me the names of the people who asked questions and got killed. There must be an investigation opened. Your fingerprints won’t be on it. I’ll just be a cop opening a cold case.”
He considers that. Shakes his head, just his general anxiety, I think, because his eyes have drifted off. He’s thinking.
“There was a lawyer,” he says.
“A prosecutor?” I say. “An assistant state’s attorney? A federal prosecutor?”
He shrugs. “Lawyer is all I know.”
“And that lawyer was murdered,” I say. “In Chicago?”
Pavlo closes his eyes and nods.
Okay, so that would be a big deal, if a prosecutor in Chicago were murdered. There would be a file opened, no question.
“Can you give me any specifics?” I ask. “His name? Any dates?”
The Red Book Page 10
