A Bad Night's Sleep

by Michael Wiley

  The Tribune article gave most of the same information and provided a time line of the shootings and investigation. It called me a person of interest again, said I was in jail, uncharged, quoted Larry Weiss calling me innocent, reminded readers of my drinking habit, and quoted an unnamed former detective calling me “dirty.”

  I dropped the stack of papers onto the passenger-side floor.

  Dirty.

  I pulled my car into traffic. Across the street, a woman with a German shepherd was going into a redbrick building that had a sign advertising dog boarding, grooming, and training. The building had steel doors and glass-block windows that started about eight feet up from the pavement. Another prison. A white Honda SUV pulled from the curb in front of the building, made a U-turn, and fell in behind me.

  At the corner, I turned west onto 18th Street and cruised in the shadow of the El tracks. I checked the rearview mirror. The SUV followed me. We crossed the brown water of the old Sanitary and Ship Canal—the rusting steel skeleton of a railway bridge in the near distance, the downtown skyscrapers beyond it. We crossed the tracks of an empty railroad yard. We passed vacant lots with broken-down trucks and piles of scrap.

  The stoplight at Canal Street turned red. Afternoon rush hour was starting even in a lousy part of the city like this, and the SUV pulled close behind me. My rearview mirror showed two men. They looked thirty or thirty-five, both with short, receding dark hair that they’d messed up so it needed a comb. One of them wore black, the other a camouflage jacket. Like anyone still wore camouflage. That probably made them plainclothes cops. They stared out the windshield with faraway eyes as if I wasn’t there, which meant they probably were watching me close.

  I waited until the line of cross traffic approached, then punched the accelerator. The truck at the front of the line blew its horn but I slipped in front of it. The SUV lurched and tried to follow. It had nowhere to go.

  My car shot up Canal, past an old warehouse converted into a self-storage business, then past factories and more vacant lots. I searched the rearview mirror. Far as I could tell, the SUV was a half mile away.

  There were no stoplights on this stretch of Canal. I blew forward to Roosevelt Road, swung around the corner, and headed east. More railroad tracks. Back across the Sanitary and Ship Canal. More vacant lots. Across Clark Street, and suddenly million-dollar condos, tennis courts, and trees surrounded me. I sighed, let the tension go.

  Then I glanced at the mirror.

  The white SUV had fallen in two cars back.

  Traffic had thickened but the SUV wedged into the right lane and pulled within a car length. I wondered what the rush was. The men had caught up with me, so they must’ve figured out where I was heading to begin with. The SUV slid back into my lane, with a VW between us.

  The stoplight at State Street turned red and I hit the brakes. I considered getting out, tapping on the driver’s window, telling the men to get lost, but the SUV pulled into the left-turn lane, rolled next to me, stopped.

  The passenger-side window rolled down. The man in the black jacket gave me a tight-lipped smile.

  I rolled down my window, said, “What the hell—”

  He lifted a black pistol, pointed it at my head.

  I didn’t need to think. My body moved on its own. My hand reached for my holster.

  No gun in it.

  I looked for a way out to the left, right, front, and back. Cars boxed me in.

  The pistol fired—a huge sound. My vision narrowed.

  I waited for the pain, thought I felt it coming. Where? I wiped my hands over my face, stared at them. No blood.

  The SUV pulled away, bounced over a concrete median, completed a U-turn, and disappeared behind me.

  The other cars didn’t move, though the light had turned green. A big man climbed out of a red Camry and ran toward me, shouting. I watched his hands for a weapon, saw none. Was he with the men in the SUV, coming to finish me off? I looked around frantically. What could I hit him with? My cell phone? A shoe? A newspaper?

  He was outside my window, shouting. What was he saying? I forced myself to listen.

  “Are—you—all—right?”

  I ran my hands down my ribs, over my belly. No pain. I put my hands on my neck, looked at my arms and legs. No blood.

  “Are you all right?” the man was asking.

  I stared at him, said nothing.

  He leaned toward me, his hands on my door, his fingers curling through the open window. “Are you—?”

  I lifted his fingers away from my car with my fingers. I rolled up the window.

  He was a good man, a saint.

  I had nothing to say to him, no use for him at all.

  The cars in front moved. The man stepped away from my Skylark, bewildered. I let my car roll forward, accelerated through the intersection.

  The next corner was Wabash. I turned, drove up the street, and turned again into a parking lot.

  I cut the engine and breathed deep. The air felt thin. I tried to think—until a single simple idea grew bright. It was time to hide.

  If the guys in the SUV were plainclothes, and I was pretty sure they were, then the cops were gunning for me. I could argue my innocence any way I wanted but I’d killed a man in uniform, thief or not—and the man, if not quite unarmed, had an unloaded weapon and couldn’t have shot it even if he’d wanted to. That would be enough to drive some guys in the department crazy.

  It was time to hide.

  How had the shooter in the SUV missed me? He was five feet away, four maybe. If he’d had long arms, he could’ve punched me without getting out of his car. How could he have missed?

  Where could I hide?

  I knew about a little fishing village just over the Florida border.

  I also knew a store two doors from the entrance to the building where I had my office. The store advertised BEER, WINE, LIQUOR. LOWEST PRICES. It had no other name. A Polish guy named Charlie Brzowski used to run it. When I still was drinking, he knew my face better than my mom did. He was bald and heavy and picked up the bottle some himself.

  I got out of my car. The bullet shot by the man in the SUV had poked a hole through the panel behind the driver-side door. Like a thumb through a pie.

  The shooter had meant to miss me. He’d meant only to scare.

  I looked inside the car. The bullet had stopped short of the interior paneling. It was under the skin and might rattle, metal against metal, when I drove, but it would hurt me only as much as I let it.

  I locked the car.

  Charlie Brzowski was gone from the liquor store. A thin Indian man stood behind the counter. He wore his green shirt buttoned to the neck and had a full head of black hair. Still the store smelled and felt the same, and the bourbon was where it always had been. I grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam Black—good but not too good.

  My office was on the eighth floor of an eight-story building. A secretarial school that taught inner-city kids occupied the rest of the floor. I rode the elevator up alone. Roselle Turner, who owned and ran the school, was in her office talking on the phone as I walked by, but the students had left for the day.

  A steel plate on my office door said JOE KOZMARSKI. PRVATE INVESTIGATION AND DETECTIVE SERVICES. I resisted tearing it off.

  A pile of letters, bills, and take-out menus sat on the floor. Other than that, the office looked like it always did: the desk, the computer, the answering machine blinking red to tell me I had calls, the metal file cabinets, the couch where I’d sometimes slept until my nephew Jason had come to live with me. I set the Jim Beam on the desk and went to the window. On a clear day, Lake Michigan showed through a gap between an insurance building and the building to the north of it. It showed now but the gray of the lake blended with the gray of the sky so it didn’t much matter.

  I picked up the mail and sat at my desk.

  The menus and credit card offers went into the trash. The bills went into a separate pile, unopened. A letter on legal stationery explained that a client w
ho’d hired me to tell her where her husband was spending his evenings wouldn’t be paying my bill because she was unsatisfied with my services. I’d followed her husband but the news that he was spending his after-work hours playing chess with an old high school friend didn’t deserve payment, as far as my client was concerned. She’d been sure he was gambling or screwing another woman and wanted me to confirm her suspicions as badly as she worried about the truth of them.

  An envelope stamped with the Southshore Corporation logo contained a letter from Jen Horlarche telling me my security services would no longer be required. It was a Dear John letter, polite enough as those things go. At the bottom, she noted that she’d sent a copy to the Southshore legal counsel.

  The last envelope had no return address. Inside were a little Baggie and a note. The note said, Sorry about the bad luck. Let me know what you need.—Tommy. The signature made me shudder. Tommy had supplied my needs when I’d had habits that needed supplying. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him since I’d broken the habits. Now that the news showed me washing down a storm drain, he was reaching a hand to pull me out. Drowning would be better.

  I tapped the Baggie to settle its contents. Inside was enough cocaine to make three or four lines. Enough to get me started. When I needed more, I could call Tommy.

  I balled up the Baggie and threw it in the garbage.

  I looked at my desk, saw the bottle of Jim Beam.

  What was I doing?

  I dropped the bottle into the can on top of the Baggie.

  I closed my eyes, breathed deep.

  I waited for the tension to pass, breathed deep again, waited some more, breathed again.

  What was I doing?

  I pulled the bottle out of the garbage, set it on my desk, reached in again for the Baggie, and put it into my top desk drawer.

  I watched the bottle as though it would talk to me.

  Then I unscrewed the cap and took a drink, felt the burn and the release and the bright solution to every problem.

  It was time to hide.

  FIVE

  THE PHONE WAS RINGING.

  Someone should answer it.

  Not me.

  The phone rang some more.

  I drank.

  The machine picked up, explained I was unavailable. An understatement.

  My ex-wife Corrine spoke, her voice worried. “I talked with Larry Weiss. He says the police told him they released you. I left a message for you at home, and your cell phone seems to be off. Where are you?”

  I’m not here, I thought.

  “I’m concerned about you,” she added and hung up.

  Yeah, me too.

  I left what remained of the whiskey on my desk, went out of my office, locked the door. Roselle Turner was still in her office, talking on the phone.

  The elevator took me down to the street. The first dark of the evening had fallen. Streetlights and shop lights washed the pavement yellow. A couple of taxis, some passenger cars, and a city bus passed me on Wabash. I shouldn’t drive. The vendors in the newsstands that I hadn’t flattened agreed I shouldn’t. I walked toward my car.

  A police cruiser came around the corner, slowed.

  Panic flooded my belly. I fought it off, kept walking. I knew better than to think that every cop in the city had it out for me.

  The cruiser pulled to the curb and two cops got out. “Mr. Kozmarski?” one of the cops said.

  I kept walking, pretended I was someone else.

  “Mr. Kozmarski?” The voice was closer.

  If I ran, I would have no chance. I was drunk, tired. Maybe if I sat on the sidewalk, they would leave me alone.

  “Mr.—”

  I turned. “What?”

  The cop almost ran into me. “We need you to come with us.”

  I looked him in the eyes. He was a couple of inches shorter than my six feet but thick in the shoulders and arms, like he spent his off-hours at the gym. His partner stood behind him, about the same height but thinner, his hand on his hip near his service pistol.

  “No,” I said.

  My refusal didn’t seem to bother them. They seemed to think it was funny.

  The lead cop held his hands together over his chest. He could pray if he wanted to. Or he could throw a forearm into my jaw.

  He said, “Bill Gubman wants to talk to you.”

  Lieutenant Detective Bill Gubman—my closest friend in the department and maybe outside it too. We’d gone through the academy together, stood side by side at graduation, and become rookies in the same district. We fell away from each other for awhile when the department fired me. But then he called one night, crazy worried about his wife Eileen, and asked me to connect her with the substance-abuse counselor who’d helped me with my habits. Then we were close again. But two months ago he’d taken a bullet I should’ve stopped, and now I had a tank full of Jim Beam, and three or four lines of coke waiting for me in my desk drawer.

  “I’ve got nothing to say to him,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask if you did. I said he wants to talk to you.”

  I shook my head, turned away.

  They came at me fast, grabbed my arms, and threw me against a building. I tasted brick. I could’ve fought but saw no use in it. They cuffed my hands behind my back and shoved me toward their cruiser, the headlights of passing cars in my eyes. Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into a spot at the 1st District Station. The place was starting to feel like home.

  Bill Gubman sat at a desk on the first floor. The plaque outside his door called him Liaison to the Board of Ethics. The Board of Ethics was an independent unit in the city government, set up after a Sun-Times series of articles exposed three cases of corruption in the department’s own internal affairs division and a citizen action group collected over a hundred thousand signatures calling for external oversight. Now, when a cop used too much force against a citizen, or stole copper wire from a construction site, or got wasted and plowed his cruiser into a newsstand, the board made sure the department cleaned the dirt instead of just sweeping it out of sight. The department had a number of liaisons who kept relations with the board happy and sometimes alerted department higher-ups in time to sweep dirt out of the way before the board could point it out. The liaison job was a cushy chair reserved for guys too burned out to return to the street but who were a few months or a couple years short of pension, or guys who’d taken a bullet in the line of duty but were too restless to stay at home watching Oprah on administrative leave.

  The job was a long way from the homicide squad where Bill had worked for the past twelve years and I figured the cushy chair would be chafing him.

  The cop who’d cuffed me unlocked my hands outside the door and knocked.

  Bill waved me in and signaled to the cop to close the door behind me. His cold face said nothing about the meals I’d eaten at his house or the ones he and his wife had eaten at mine. He sat uncomfortably at his desk. His body had the lopsided shape of a man who’d gotten wounded in the gut and the surgical patchwork was tugging on one side, or else something was missing in the middle and he couldn’t help sagging into it.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’ll stand.”

  His lips twitched like an unseen pain stabbed him, but he stared hard at me.

  I shrugged and sat in the chair across the desk from him.

  He said, “In the eighteen years that Professional Regulations has been keeping track, you know what percentage of licensed private detectives have been disciplined?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Just over seven percent. Mostly it’s for something small—improper completion of an affidavit or, at worst, impersonation of a peace officer. The PIs do their probation and return to active status or they move on to something else.” He kept the hard eyes on me. “You’re the first private detective to shoot a police officer, clean or dirty. No one else like you on the record books. What do you think will happen to you?”

  I knew he was doing his
job, figured he might even have asked someone to assign me to him so the bad news could come from a friend. Still, I didn’t like bad news.

  I gestured toward his gut. “How are you feeling, Bill?”

  “Fuck how I’m feeling. You don’t shoot a cop, even a bad cop, and go back to work. Not in this city.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  He sighed. “What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was just dealing with the situation as well as I could.”

  He cracked a grim smile. “You know, after I took a bullet and now this, a lot of guys around here think you’ve got a grudge against cops and you’re gunning for us. Evidence looks pretty strong to a lot of them. These guys think you need to be stopped.”

  I thought about the white Honda SUV. “Yeah, I’ve maybe met a couple of them.”

  He let that pass. “So the smart thing to do would be to leave town. Go fishing for a month or two. Or longer, much longer. You can run away now but I don’t know about later. I say this as a friend.”

  I’d never told him about the Florida fishing village but he seemed to know. Maybe we all had a place like that. “And what do you say as a cop?”

  He sat back, folded his hands gently over his lopsided belly. He stared at me awhile like he was putting words to his thoughts. “There’s another option,” he said. “Right now, you look dirty. Hell, with all the shit that flew at Southshore Village, you are dirty. You could make that dirt work for you—and for us.”

  “Tell me.”

  Again the long stare. “You remember a guy named Earl Johnson?”

  “Sure. He was in our academy class—a bit of a screwup. Barely made it through. He did all right afterward, though. Vice detective, last I heard.”

  “Still on vice, though he spent a few years on the gang unit before that.” Bill looked at me square. “He’s behind the Southshore thefts.”

  I shook my head. “He wasn’t there.”

  “Not there, but he was behind it. He leads a group of eight other cops—ten until our guys dropped one of them and you dropped the other. They’re into anything that makes money. Mostly industrial theft and prostitution. Industrial theft because one of them has a brother-in-law who owns a re-processing company. Prostitution because of Johnson’s vice connections. We’ve been aware of them for the last eight months, and we’ve gotten a good sense of who’s involved and what they’re doing. Right now, they’re getting greedier and trying to expand.”