A Bad Night's Sleep

by Michael Wiley

  He pushed a stack of photos across the desk. They included nine men. Earl Johnson was one of them. I recognized another two as the guys who’d shot at me from the white Honda SUV. The four guys who’d driven into the Southshore construction site and loaded copper wire into their vans until I called 911 were there too. In the pictures they wore police uniforms.

  I pulled out the four photos and put them on the desk. “These guys were there.”

  Bill nodded. “We know.”

  “So arrest them and you’re done.”

  “Not that easy. If the size of this group goes public, the department is screwed. We’ll be busy for the next ten years explaining that we’re not Juarez, Mexico, with cops playing both sides of the law. The mayor doesn’t want that. The chief doesn’t want that. Fuck knows, I don’t want it.”

  “This is what you do for the Ethics Board?” I said.

  “If the Ethics Board found out, they wouldn’t want it either. Too big. Too messy. Everybody wants these guys to disappear.”

  “That’s where I come in?”

  Bill nodded, picked up the stack of photos, and pulled out a picture of a dark-skinned, balding man. “This guy here, his name’s Bob Monroe. Also on vice. Used to be on the gang unit, which is where he met Johnson. Last summer he went toe-to-toe with Johnson for control of the group. Lost out to him and he’s unhappy—doesn’t like being number two and he’s looking for an excuse to make a move. Most of the other guys don’t trust him, though. He comes across at first like a nice guy but he’s crazy. When he was on the gang unit he had a run-in with a kid named Victor Lopez. Victor started talking to the Ethics Board, but then he disappeared—with some unwanted help from Monroe. We couldn’t find even a bone fragment. The other guys know Monroe’s a hothead but he thinks they’ll line up behind him if he takes Johnson down.”

  “What do you see me doing?”

  He handed me the photo. “You give Monroe news about times, dates, and places that Johnson has been running operations outside the group and pocketing the money. You give him the specific amounts he’s ripped off. You tell Monroe you’ve come across the information in your private investigations into the group. I give you the list and the evidence. Johnson will have no alibi. We know where he was at the times and we’ve set up dummy bank accounts in his name. The money will be there when Monroe checks for it. Monroe will make a move on Johnson. Johnson will fight it. My guess is Johnson will end up dead on the street and the others will run and hide their heads instead of getting behind Monroe. If not, we’ll play man against man till they’re so busy dancing they won’t have time for stealing or pimping.”

  “Seems to me a lot riskier than arresting them.”

  “If you listen to the superintendent and mayor, nothing’s riskier than arresting them. For once, I agree with them. Way too much bad publicity. This is the kind of thing that could define the department and the city for years.” He stared at me again. “This is straightforward undercover work but a cop can’t do it. The guys in the group would be too suspicious, especially right now. But you—they’ll know you’re independent, and after the Southshore shootings they’ll think you’re gutsy enough to make this kind of move.” He said it with a smile but I knew better.

  “I’m already tied to the deaths of two of them,” I said. “Why would they want to talk to me?”

  “Trust me, they want to talk. You’re the only one who saw them at Southshore. They need to find out what you know. My guess is they’ll pick you up off the street for a conversation and you can make your case for partnering with them. If not, you get in touch with them yourself, tell them you’ve dug them up as part of your investigation and you’re interested in making a deal. Your job as a detective is gone, you need an income, you’re impressed by the work they do, etcetera.”

  “They’ll kill me.”

  “Probably not. They could use a guy like you.”

  “I walk in, disasters happen.”

  He nodded. “It’s a talent.”

  “What does Detective Chroler think about this?” I asked.

  “She’s signed on,” he said. “You’ll never hear from her again.” He gave me a long stare. “What do you think?”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Your life back. Chroler takes her thumb off the top of your head. The department leaves you alone. You get to live on your own terms again.”

  If I pulled off the job, I would have a chance at redeeming myself. The Department of Professional Regulation might even let me keep my detective’s license. “I think I’ll go fishing,” I said.

  He looked at me long again, then smiled. “That’s what I would do if I were you.”

  I smiled too. “No, you wouldn’t. You could be lounging on a beach right now, expenses paid by the city. You could milk your injury for six months or a year before coming back, no questions asked. But you’re working twelve-hour days if I know you, worrying Eileen because you won’t take it easy.”

  We smiled at each other for awhile, eyes on each other’s eyes, neither of us blinking.

  Then I said, “Did you tell a Tribune reporter I’m dirty?”

  He blinked. “Never.”

  I nodded, waited for him to blink again. He didn’t. I said, “You want to bring Eileen to my house for dinner?”

  He seemed to pull into himself. He said, “When this is over, okay?”

  SIX

  I TOLD BILL I would find my own way home.

  A five-minute walk from the front of the station would take me to the Velvet Lounge on Cermak Road, shouldered between a Vietnamese manicure business and Baba’s Restaurant, the only place in the city advertising FAMOUS STEAK & LEMONADE. You would never guess from the clean redbrick building housing the Velvet Lounge that inside you could hear the raunchiest jazz in Chicago. The music wouldn’t start for another two hours. But the Velvet Lounge also poured a tall shot. That was enough for me.

  When I left the station a white Honda SUV with tinted windows idled at the curb. A shiver ran down my back. I fought it off. Chicago had to have thousands of white Honda SUVs. I was crazy to think this was the same one that had tailed me when I got out of jail.

  I crossed the street, turned south, walked toward Cermak. Two men got out of the SUV and followed me on the other side. One wore a camouflage jacket, the other black. The guy in black had short, receding dark hair. The guy in camouflage wore a gray wool skullcap, though I figured he had hair that matched the other guy’s.

  I sped up.

  They sped up.

  I could run but I figured they could run faster.

  The evening wind came from the south. If you looked for its tail, maybe you would find it in a quiet Florida fishing village. But it stung cold. The passing headlights were cold. On November evenings like this in Chicago everything was cold.

  I kept to the east side of the street, passing businesses that looked like they’d been dying since the 1970s—Blue Star Auto Store, Super Deal Food & Liquor, Giant Slice Pizza. The two men stayed across the street, where developers had knocked down old buildings and built gated condos and landscaped high-rises. The one in the black coat talked on a cell phone.

  At the corner of Cermak, I went left and they trotted across the street and followed me under the El tracks. At Wabash, a plastic sign advertising MUFFLERS 4 LESS banged in the wind. I crossed, passed a place that sold POLLO AL CARBON through an outside walk-up window, and slipped into the Velvet Lounge.

  If the guys from the SUV wanted to join me for a drink, I would buy them a round. If they wanted to shoot me, there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop them.

  At a quarter to seven on a cold November evening, the Velvet Lounge was almost empty. A recording of Coleman Hawkins played on the stereo. The room smelled like spilled liquor. The paneling on the walls was blond pressboard and the posters of jazz greats were framed in plastic, but the bar top was heavy oak covered with polished glass. Behind it, liquor bottles stood in an art deco display. The place put its money where it matt
ered.

  As I sat on a stool, the door swung open and the men from the SUV came in. They sat at a table facing me. A pistol showed on the hip of the guy in black, and, if you bothered to look, the camouflage jacket bulged over a shoulder holster.

  The bartender, a brown-skinned man in jeans and a black guayabera shirt, brought me a shot of Early Times and a glass of water. A waitress with blond, stringy hair took care of the men at the table. She had a low-cut blouse and leaned over their table like she expected them to tuck ten-dollar bills inside, but they kept their eyes on me.

  When we had our drinks, I considered leaving mine on the bar, going to the men’s room, slipping through a window, and catching a taxi for the airport. I had enough cash for cab fare and a credit card would take me the rest of the way.

  I stood with my whiskey and brought it to the table where the men were sitting. I sat down across from them. They didn’t seem surprised by my company.

  I drank the shot, let its burn warm my throat and stomach, felt the heat rise to my head. “Okay,” I said. “What now?”

  The man in black said, “We’re worried about you, Joe.”

  “My ex-wife’s worried about me too. Maybe we could start a club. Like a fan club but with hand wringing.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t be a smart-ass. It doesn’t work for you.”

  “I’m sitting at a table with two guys who put a bullet in the rear panel of my car, and I have the feeling these guys are cops who undoubtedly can explain why the bullet is in my car in a way that doesn’t involve them personally. Basically I’m screwed if you want me to be. So being a smart-ass is all I’ve got.”

  “The key is that we shot the bullet into the rear panel instead of your head. So you could try a little humility.”

  The bartender watched our table like he knew something was wrong, but he didn’t reach for the telephone. Not yet.

  “What do you want from me?” I said. “You want to scare me? You’ve done it and can go home. You want something else, you’d better talk fast because I’m planning to drink until I can’t hear you anymore.”

  I signaled to the bartender and tapped my shot glass.

  The guy in camouflage said, “You made a big mess at Southshore. It’s the kind of mess that you can’t clean up. So, you just need to build on top of it as if it isn’t there. You understand?”

  “Not in the least,” I said.

  He said, “If you want, we can forget about what happened at Southshore. We can start from here.”

  Nothing I would like better. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Three good cops are dead, two wounded. Nothing you can do to change that now. Nothing we can do either. So why bother trying? We’ll move on.”

  “Three good cops?” I repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  The bartender brought my drink. He looked me in the eyes—close, like he was waiting for me to signal him to call for help. Instead, I tipped him a couple bucks.

  When he went back behind the bar, I asked, “Have you guys got names?”

  “Peter Finley,” said the guy in camouflage.

  “Farid el Raj,” said the other. “Call me Raj.”

  A young couple came through the door into the bar laughing. They walked toward the table next to ours, looked us over, then sat. Peter Finley shook his head like he couldn’t believe their stupidity.

  I downed my shot and signaled to the bartender for another.

  “So, what now?” I said.

  “Now we help each other. You need to talk to one of our friends.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  I figured they would say Earl Johnson, the head of their crew, but they named number two, the guy who Bill Gubman said wanted to challenge Johnson. “Bob Monroe. You know who he is?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said.

  The waitress brought my drink. The bartender had given up on me.

  I reached for it but Finley put his hand on top of it. “Let’s go,” he said.

  He and Raj stood.

  I didn’t want to get into a car with these guys. Maybe they wanted information about how much I’d told Detective Chroler and Bill Gubman. Maybe they would do whatever they needed to do to get it and then they would kill me. Why not? Two of their own were already dead, a good cop was dead with them, and two more were wounded. What was one disgraced private detective? No one forgave as easily as they said.

  I stood. “Give me a minute,” I said. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  SEVEN

  A SIGN ON THE back exit said an alarm would ring if I opened the door. I turned the handle. No alarm. The alley outside was dark and dirty, but two taxis were passing as I stepped out to the sidewalk. I flagged the second.

  My cell phone rang while it was speeding up the Dan Ryan toward the Kennedy Expressway. Eighteen miles from O’Hare Airport. Twenty minutes at this time of night.

  The display said the caller was unknown, which meant the phone probably was disposable—and untraceable. I knew I shouldn’t answer. The voice on the other end wouldn’t be calling to wish me bon voyage.

  A clean break, that’s what I needed. I should turn off my phone and drop it in the trash outside the airport.

  But there’s no such thing as a clean break. I knew that too.

  I answered.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Finley, the guy in camouflage, yelled into the phone.

  “Running,” I said. The truth seemed as good as a lie.

  That stopped him for only a moment. “First, you can’t run. We’ll find you wherever you go. Second, we know about you. We know about your mother and her little house on Leland. We know about your ex-wife. Pretty lady. We know about your nephew, the one who’s been living with you. Looks like a nice kid.”

  He didn’t need to make the threat explicit.

  “You still at the Velvet Lounge?” I said.

  “Out front.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Make it sooner.”

  When I told the cabdriver to turn around and take me back, he shrugged and mumbled, “You must be nuts.”

  I didn’t argue.

  * * *

  THE WHITE SUV WAS idling outside of the Velvet Lounge. Raj and Finley stood next to it. Raj patted me down for a weapon, then opened the back passenger door and I climbed in.

  Peter Finley climbed into the driver’s seat and Raj got in beside him.

  We cruised quietly toward downtown. The SUV smelled like new leather upholstery and men’s sweat. I looked from man to man. They sat silent and calm like we were out for an evening and the excitement wouldn’t start until we reached our destination.

  Traffic thickened.

  “You guys take a lot of risks,” I said.

  They didn’t seem to think that needed an answer.

  I said, “Sooner or later a security camera’s going to catch you. Or you’ll run into nightshift at a construction site and they’ll see you. Your friends in the department won’t need to look at mug shots. They’ll recognize you. Seems like a dumb way of working.”

  Finley said, “This from a man who falls asleep on a job and then wakes up and shoots a cop.”

  I shut up.

  The wheels sounded like rushing water on the pavement. The city lights glared through the windows. Finley pulled out a cell phone, punched some numbers, mumbled into the phone, and hung up.

  At the corner of Randolph and Michigan, we pulled onto a driveway that dropped into a parking garage below a building called The Winchester. A banner stretching up the side of the building advertised CONDOMINIUMS, APARTMENTS, OFFICES. LAKE VIEWS. We went down two levels and parked by a service elevator.

  “Out,” said Raj.

  We stood in the concrete cavern, a man on each side of me. They knew I was willing to run and weren’t taking chances.

  The elevator came. Furniture pads lined the walls. We got in. Safe as a padded cell. Someone could get beaten to death in an ele
vator like this, and who would hear? Raj pushed the button for the twelfth floor.

  “You hungry?” Raj said as we rode up.

  It was 8:15 and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast in jail. Still, the question—from a man who’d shot a bullet into my car, threatened my ex-wife, mother, and nephew, and abducted me off the street—amazed me. “No,” I said.

  “Too bad.”

  Bob Monroe’s apartment was more or less what you would expect a cop to live in if he was single, had fifteen or twenty years under his belt, and liked to be close to downtown nightlife. It was a one bedroom, with a living room-dining room combination, carpeted wall to wall with the beige tough-grade stuff that lasts from tenant to tenant. On the outside wall, sliding glass doors gave a city view. If you stood on the little balcony on the other side of the doors you probably could see the lake.

  The dining room table was set for four. Two roasted chickens stood on a platter. A large bowl held baked potatoes, wrapped in foil. Another large bowl held salad. A big glass bucket had what looked like a twelve-pack of Heineken on ice.

  Bob Monroe came in from the kitchen with a big smile.

  “Welcome!” His voice was as big as he was. He was in his early fifties, black, with an almost bald head, the remaining hair shaved short.

  He reached out a big hand to shake.

  I ignored it, said, “You’re having a dinner party?”

  He laughed, though I saw nothing funny. “Just dinner. Thought you might like to join us.”

  “Not really, no.”

  Another laugh. “Have a seat at the end.”

  We sat, me at the end.

  Monroe cut up and served the chickens, passed the potatoes and salad. Then, using the carving knife, he cut a large bite of the chicken on his plate and forked it into his mouth. He chewed and asked offhandedly, “So why are you talking with Bill Gubman?”