Along a side wall stood a counter, staffed by a short-haired, healthy-faced woman whose khaki top barely contained her. A sign behind the counter listed the services available at the club. tension relief (40 minutes), $400. sensual awakening (75 minutes), $650. gentleman of leisure (2 hours), $700. couples spa (3 hours), $869. his and hers (1 hour), $750. group (75 minutes), $350 per person. other services negotiable. videographer available.
Another hallway led to doors cracked open an inch or two and other doors shut tight. Raj showed me inside the unoccupied rooms. One had a marble floor and marble wall tiles, a crescent-shaped hot tub, and a large cushioned bench. Another had three massage tables arranged side by side. A third had a thin gray mattress on a cheap metal bed frame, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and walls that needed paint. “Fulfill your dreams, whatever they are,” said Raj.
A blond-haired woman came out of a closed door and shut it behind her. She was barefoot and wore a short green sundress, the kind of thing that would slip off her shoulders and then she would have on nothing at all.
At the end of the hall, there was an emergency exit. Just before it, Raj used a key to let us into another room. The walls were lined with television monitors showing what was happening in the occupied rooms. A pock-faced man who looked about sixty sat on a desk chair with his feet propped on another chair, watching without interest, like the screens were airing a slow-moving ballgame. Two larger screens, off to the side, took video feeds from street level—in front of the building and behind.
Raj pointed his thumb at the screens. “If we ever get raided, the club can convert to legal massages real fast.”
When we finished the tour, Raj took me to another closed door. “Signing bonus,” he said.
“What?”
“For joining us. Go inside.”
I pointed my thumb at my chest. Me?
He nodded and said, “It’s been a tough couple of days.”
I waved away the offer. “That’s all right,” I said.
He smiled. “Come on. Her name is Tina.”
I went in.
The girl was lying on a white sofa. She was Eastern European—Russian, maybe Ukrainian. Her skin was pale, almost translucent. Her face was oval, her eyes the lightest blue, her hair so blond it was almost white. She was thin and had a wisp of white pubic hair and small breasts with dark nipples. She looked maybe seventeen or eighteen.
“Hi,” she said.
My voice caught in my throat. “Hi.”
She rolled over and sat at the edge of the sofa. She held her hand toward me, inviting me.
I wanted her badly. I stood where I was. “How old are you?” I asked.
She gave me a look. “How old do you want me to be?”
“I don’t—”
She got up and came to me, put her hands on my shoulders by my neck like she either planned to strangle me or wanted me to fuck her. She didn’t try to strangle me.
I said. “I have a wife.”
Her eyes narrowed and her lips got mischievous. “You don’t have ring on your finger.”
“I have an ex-wife.”
She looked confused.
I said, “It’s complicated.”
“Yes, complicated,” she agreed, and moved her hands from my shoulders to my chest, caressing down toward my belt.
I stopped her hands with mine, held them to my lips, kissed her fingers. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked angry for a moment but it passed. “Your loss,” she said, and turned to the door.
“Yeah, my loss,” I said, but she was already gone.
NINE
I LIVED ON THE Northwest side in a house I bought after Corrine and I split up. I got there after midnight. My car tires crunched on the asphalt alley and I parked outside the garage, then crossed under an old elm tree to my back porch. An October storm had knocked the last leaves off the elm and now the branches hung bare in the moonlight.
I let myself in and flipped on the kitchen light. For the past three months, ever since moving in with me, my nephew Jason had run in and welcomed me home at the end of an afternoon. Even when I’d come in at midnight, he’d stumbled out of his room to say hello. But Corrine had picked him up for school on the morning after the Southshore shootings, and now he should be sleeping at my mom’s house in the bed I used as a kid.
Still, I called his name. I couldn’t help myself.
When Corrine picked him up, Jason had left a half-eaten bowl of Cheerios in the sink. The milk had dried and the Cheerios had glued together and made a cake more solid than anything else in my life at the moment.
I left the bowl and went to the shower, stripped, and cranked the faucet full throttle so the pins of water hurt. I needed the hurt, though I knew it wouldn’t wash all the dirt off of me. I stood for awhile and took it, then soaped myself and let the steaming water rinse me. I closed my eyes. The Russian girl at The Spa Club flashed in my mind. I wanted her and knew I shouldn’t have her. Sex at The Spa Club was a bit of Arizona for Bob Monroe, and I figured it would help me escape too for an hour or so. Two hours with the Gentleman of Leisure package. But then what? I would be back where I was, sweating in front of Corrine, trying to explain myself.
I knew I should run away from Johnson and his crew. If one of his helpers threatened Corrine, Jason, and my mom, then I should get them out of town and go with them. It wouldn’t be easy but I could do it.
Still, I’d laid the groundwork for the lies Bill Gubman wanted me to build. Bob Monroe was interested in what I knew about Johnson. Now I could start hinting that Johnson was freelancing and keeping the profits for himself. I could fill in the details later—places, times, amounts. Bill Gubman said he had a list of them that Johnson would have no alibi for, and phony bank accounts too. I could make the lies convincing if I moved slow and kept my head straight. I could help Bill make Johnson’s crew self-destruct quietly.
But why should I?
Bill said I could redeem myself. If I did, though, I would be back in the place I was trying to escape. There was nothing I liked about where I was.
Except for Corrine. She was in that place too and I still wanted her.
And Jason. He also was there.
I laughed out loud the way a guy who lives in a cage laughs, half crazy, half to keep from going crazier. Then I turned off the water. The heat and sting wouldn’t cure me. The only thing I could do was make the cage my own, make it as comfortable as I could since I was going to have to live in it.
I climbed into bed and after awhile I slept. An hour later I startled awake, worried about Corrine and Jason. Mom could take care of herself, I figured. I told myself that Corrine had been okay without me before we met and after we divorced, and Jason was safe in bed at Mom’s house. But I still couldn’t sleep. So I pictured the Russian girl coming to me at The Spa Club, imagined her face, which hadn’t hardened yet, her nickel-sized nipples, the tuft of pubic hair that rose from her like a breath of smoke. I thought of the sweetness she’d offered me.
Eventually I dreamed. I was sitting at my office desk looking for a letter. Just a piece of paper with words on it. But I knew in the dream that my life depended on my finding it. I checked the desk drawers, the file cabinets, the carpet under the desk. The letter was gone. I got frantic and looked for my gun instead, stuck my fingers into an empty holster, checked the desk and file cabinets, patted my pockets. Gone too. The phone started ringing. Like it was in front of me on the desk, but there was no phone on the desk. It rang and I knew everything depended on my hearing the voice on the other end.
I startled awake again.
The phone was ringing. The dim gray light of early morning filled my bedroom.
I looked for my desk. I had no desk in my bed. I pawed for the phone on the night table. “Yeah?” I said into it. Breathless.
“Thank God! You had me worried, Joe.” The voice was relieved and angry.
“I’m okay, Mom. They let me out yesterday.”
“I know they
let you out yesterday. They had it on the news.” All anger now. “Why didn’t you call?”
Because I wasn’t ready to hear her voice. “What time is it?” I said, then looked at the clock on the night table and saw for myself. 7:10 A.M. “Never mind. I just woke up.”
Mom was silent for a moment. Then, “Have you been drinking?”
“No. I’ve been sleeping.”
Again she went silent for a moment. “Are you all right?”
I lied. “Yeah. I’ll need to work things out, but I’m okay.”
“The news says you shot a police officer.”
“He was shooting at other police officers.”
“That’s not what the news says.”
“Then they’ve got it wrong.”
She went silent again, like she was waiting for me to explain what happened. I had nothing to add.
She asked, “Why didn’t you call when they let you out?”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t,” I said.
“You don’t listen to the messages on your answering machine?”
“I came in late last night. What’s happening?”
“You don’t answer your cell phone?”
“The battery ran out.”
“While you were in jail,” she said.
“As a material witness.”
“The news called you a person of interest.”
“Again, they got it wrong. What’s happening. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Jason’s in the hospital.”
I felt the world falling away from me. “What—?” The words caught in my throat. Jason had lived with me ever since my cousin Alexi ran off with a guy from the Jacksonville Port Authority and her mother and mine decided that her eleven-year-old would benefit from being around a father figure, even one like me. Now I’d fooled myself into thinking he was safe. He was in the hospital while I was lulling myself to sleep with fantasies about a high-priced hooker.
“He’s all right,” Mom said. “They took out his appendix.”
The fear lifted and I felt my body relax. Little things go wrong all the time. This was one of them, nothing more.
“He’s been asking for you.”
“I’ll go see him today,” I said.
“He would like that.”
More silence.
“I’m sorry about all this,” I said. “Do you need anything?”
“I can take care of myself,” she said and I figured that was true. But then she added, “Anyway, some of your friends already came by and offered to help.”
“What friends?”
“Relax. Men you know at the police department. Detectives.”
“Did they give you their names?”
“They did more than that. They showed me their IDs. One was a black man a little older than you and much bigger. Bob something. The other was white but had a foreign name.”
“Raj?” I said, figuring Bob something was Bob Monroe.
“It could have been,” she said. “I’d just gotten back from the hospital. I invited them in for coffee and they said I should let them know if they could help. They were very kind.”
“They’re not friends of mine, Mom.”
“No?” She sounded more disappointed than concerned.
“If they come back, don’t answer the door. Don’t talk to them. Call me.”
“Will you be picking up your phone?”
“This is serious, Mom. These guys don’t want to help.”
“That’s a shame,” she said.
I agreed that it was.
“Joe?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you should leave town for awhile.”
“Yeah,” I said and I almost smiled. “That sounds like a great idea. Maybe I’ll do that.”
Mom gave me Jason’s room number at Children’s Memorial and we hung up.
I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee. While it dripped into the pot, I looked out the back door into the yard. The sky was heavy and gray with the kind of cold rainless clouds that sometimes covered Chicago for a week at a time in November. The elm branches hung in the windless air just like they did last night. The tree was the last of its kind in the neighborhood. All the other elms had died from a disease in the 1970s.
After awhile I made my way into the living room. The red display on the answering machine said I had fourteen messages. Someone loved me. That was something.
But I figured I should take care of business first. I picked up the phone and dialed Bill Gubman.
“Did you change your mind about helping out and rent a fishing boat?” he said when I told him who was calling.
“I was about to,” I said, “but then I started partying with my friends Earl Johnson and Bob Monroe and I forgot about fishing.”
“You’ve met with them? Good work.”
“I didn’t find them. They found me.”
“Good work anyway,” he said. “I’ve got some things for you—bank receipts, police reports, photographs. All that you need to set up Johnson.”
“They’re watching me pretty close. I can’t pick them up at the department.”
He considered that for a moment. “There’ll be a ceremony this morning at Daley Plaza for the officers who died at Southshore Village. I’ll be there with a package for you.”
“Not exactly a private meeting,” I said. “Half the city will be there.”
“So no one will be surprised that you and I are both there. Look for me near the stage. We’ll find someplace to talk.”
Last thing I wanted to do. “I’ll see you there,” I said.
I hung up and stared at the phone. Then I punched the button on the answering machine and the machine spoke to me. “Listen, you asshole…” the first message started. It was a crank call from someone who’d heard early that I was involved in the shootings at Southshore Village, someone who knew how to reach me, someone who told me that he’d take me apart, joint by joint. That meant the caller probably was a cop, maybe a friend of one of the cops who were wounded or killed. So much for love.
Corrine had called four times. She was worried. She’d tried to find out where the police had jailed me but no one was telling. She’d figured my lawyer should know what was happening, so she’d called Larry Weiss, but he’d hit the same walls. The first three calls sounded more and more worried. What were they doing to me? In the fourth message, which she’d left last night, she said, “Call me,” and hung up. Like Mom, she must’ve heard that I was out of jail and gotten angry because I didn’t run to her first.
Three calls were from Mom, worried too, the first when she was taking Jason to the hospital, the next telling me that he was all right, the last wondering where I was now that the police had turned me loose.
The crank caller called twice more to let me know new ways he’d worked out to cause me pain.
Lucinda Juarez had left the rest of the messages. She’d been my informal partner for the last month and a half. She’d also fallen into my arms, or I’d fallen into hers—only for a night, but that night kept rippling like a stone in water. It had almost drowned me and Corrine and it still might. Her voice had no worry in it. She reported on her calls to Larry Weiss and to the police department, where she’d worked until she joined me. She still had friends in the department but they’d told her nothing about me. “Hope you’re okay,” she said like she figured I was.
I picked up the phone and dialed Corrine. Maybe she’d be available for breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or a lifetime. Her phone rang twice before someone knocked on my front door. I hung up.
Lucinda was standing on the front porch. She was small and compact but had a weight and a strength that always surprised me. She wore jeans and a leather jacket and rocked a little like she was cold.
“Hey,” she said when I opened the door, eyeing me like she might find me in pieces.
“Hey,” I said. “Come in.”
I stood aside and she did.
“You
okay?” she said.
I tried a smile. “Great,” I said. “I’m coming off a four-day vacation.”
Then it seemed that, without moving, she was in my arms kissing me and I was kissing her.
“Damn,” I said when we breathed for a moment.
Her dark eyes locked with mine. “God damn,” she said. Then she kissed me again.
TEN
AT 10:30, LUCINDA AND I drove downtown to Daley Plaza. The police had cordoned off the surrounding streets. We parked three blocks away and walked into a swarm of uniforms and spectators. News vans were broadcasting in front of City Hall.
“It looks like a party,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Lucinda, “except for the tears.”
In the center of the plaza, a bunch of people sat on folding chairs on a temporary stage. The mayor was there, somber in a dark suit. The police superintendent, a thick-shouldered man with a graying crew cut, sat next to him. Detective Chroler, who’d taken me into custody after the Southshore shootings, sat a couple of chairs away from the superintendent.
Two women, each with young kids, sat in a line of chairs off to the side. Families of the dead and wounded, I figured.
The flags at the east end of the Plaza were at half-mast.
“I hate this,” said Lucinda.
“Yeah, me too.”
We made our way toward the stage.
“What good does it do those kids to have them up there?” she said.
I said nothing. I’d given her most of the details about Southshore, my vacation in jail, and my introduction to Earl Johnson’s crew. The more she’d heard, the angrier she’d gotten—at the department, at Bill Gubman for dragging me into the mess, at me too, it seemed, though I’d left out the Russian girl at The Spa Club.
Bill Gubman sat in a wheelchair at the base of the stage, just where he’d said he would be. I shouldered through the crowd, Lucinda behind me.
I was about twenty feet away when Bill saw me, but he turned away hard and looked at the stage. I stopped. On the stage a woman dressed in a dark skirt and matching jacket stepped to the microphone, introduced herself as a police department community liaison, and thanked the crowd for coming to mourn the loss of three young police officers and celebrate their lives of service. Almost everyone in the crowd was watching her, but a half dozen men in suits and ties hovered nearby with the unmoving faces of plainclothes officers at work. Three of them kept their eyes on Bill. I thought that maybe one or two were watching me.
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