She shook her head, disgusted. “Since when did you start feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I’ve always felt sorry for myself!” I said.
She looked at me long. Then she laughed. When she caught her breath, she said, “You’re hysterical.”
I drank. “See? No sympathy.”
She nodded at the bottle. “You keep that up, you’re going to sleep tonight facedown on the floor.”
I thought about that and thought about my evening plans with Earl Johnson’s crew and Chicago’s gangs. I screwed the cap onto the bottle. “You’re probably right.” I dropped the bottle in the trash can.
Lucinda’s eyes were doubtful. “Really?”
I shrugged. “If the cleaning service doesn’t empty the garbage tonight, I’ll probably dig it out tomorrow.”
That seemed enough for Lucinda, or almost. “What about the coke?”
I picked the Baggie off the floor. “You want it?”
She shook her head no.
I dropped it in the garbage on top of the whiskey bottle, though it felt like lighting a fire in front of an exit door.
She sighed. “Now tell me what’s up.”
I filled her in on the meeting I’d agreed to attend and the illegal Ruger I was carrying even though the rules were against bringing guns. When I finished, she glanced at the garbage can like she might need a drink.
“You want me to tail you?” she said.
I shook my head. “Too dangerous. Johnson and his crew are going to be watching. If they see you in the rearview mirror they might get the idea that La Raza or the Latin Kings are making their own plans for the meeting.”
“You going to tell Bill Gubman about this?”
“I wasn’t going to. You think I should?”
“I don’t think you should get in a car with Johnson’s guys and go hang out with gangbangers unless you’ve got backup.”
“Bill would want to do the same thing as you—tail me. I think I’m safer without that.”
She looked unhappy but said, “Okay.”
“What have you found?” I asked.
“A lot. Some of it interesting.” She picked up a stack of paper from the computer printer. “Earl Johnson finished third from the bottom of the same academy class you were in. You finished third from the top. Nice symmetry.”
“That’s on Google?”
She shook her head. “I called records. Johnson’s gotten four commendations and two complaints. Nothing unusual for a vice detective. Most of the other guys have records that look about the same.”
“What were the complaints for?”
“First, a hooker says he made an agreement with her—she has sex with him and he doesn’t arrest her. She says they did it a couple of times. But then he took her money and arrested her anyway. Internal affairs investigates but the hooker disappears. Complaint file is closed. Second, a pimp says Johnson beat him up and took his money. Internal affairs investigates again but the pimp disappears too. Complaint file closed.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Johnson.”
“The commendations are all from good citizens whose neighborhoods he cleared of prostitutes. Bob Monroe’s record on vice is shorter, one complaint and one commendation. He came over from the gang unit two years ago. His gang record is clean—officially—but I made another call and the word is he got too friendly with some of the guys he was supposed to be policing. It never went to internal affairs but that’s why they moved him to vice.”
“Who told you that?”
“I’ve still got friends in the department. A couple of them anyway.”
I told her about Victor Lopez, the kid Bill Gubman told me about, who had complained about Monroe and then vanished and was presumed dead. Then I asked, “What else?”
She leafed through her papers, pulled out a few sheets. “The one I can’t figure out is Raj. He’s basically an eagle scout. Six service commendations. No complaints. Fast track to detective. Unless there’s another Farid el Raj in Chicago, he also coaches his son’s Little League team and is a member of the Lebanese-American league, serving as Chicago-area chairman of philanthropic outreach. What’s he doing with Johnson and Monroe?”
I shrugged. “Greed is greed. He looks happy enough when he’s at The Spa Club.”
“I Googled the club name and got hits for a chain of spas in Utah and a stand-alone in Minnesota—straight places, unrelated to Johnson’s. Johnson’s club doesn’t appear at all, not even on the adult chat boards.”
“It’s not like they’re advertising next to the escort services.”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to keep quiet about a place like that,” she said. “Sooner or later, some guy’s going to boast about getting laid, even if he paid a thousand dollars for it.”
“The guys who run The Spa Club have a lot of incentive to keep the place a secret. The people who go there have a lot to lose too. If they slip and it comes out, they fall hard.”
Lucinda gave me a half smile.
“What?” I said.
“I think I see them slipping.”
A little after 6:00, we walked out and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant called Opera, which made the best garlic black bean shrimp in the city. We split an order of the shrimp, some Hainanese mussels, and the black tiger prawn Singapore noodles. For an hour, the city seemed far away. Outside the window, the November wind sucked away the last warmth and life from the leafless branches of the trees in the curbside planters. It swung the metal and plastic sign that hung over the door of the bank across the street. Yellow cabs shined their headlights into the back windows of other yellow cabs as they took their passengers to whatever happiness or sadness was waiting for them at home. But inside the restaurant, the air was warm and smelled of garlic and chili peppers, and the light was low and comforting. A waiter brought a pot of tea, then plate after plate of hot food. He said to let him know if there was anything else he could bring us. It would be his pleasure to bring it, he said. Like we deserved it.
Afterward, we stood outside my building. Lucinda looked at me close. “Be careful tonight,” she said.
I nodded.
She moved in closer. “Give me a call when you get back.”
“It’ll be late,” I said.
She nodded. “Give me a call.”
“Okay.”
She looked at me with her dark eyes. She was wearing jeans and a brown leather coat that she’d zipped up to her chin. She looked small and warm and self-contained.
Already I felt the cold wind seeping into my skin.
She leaned onto her toes and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.
Then she was gone.
I rode the elevator to the eighth floor. During the day, the hallway would fill with students from the secretarial school. Roselle Turner cashed the students’ federal loan checks and sank a few pennies from each of them back into the school. Half of the computers were broken and the other half were ten years old. Still, the students dressed up for school each day and you could hear the hope in their voices.
Now the hallway was silent, the classroom lights off.
I let myself into my office and went straight to the garbage can. I took out the Baggie and the bottle, put them in a file cabinet drawer, and locked it. No telling when Lucinda would poke around again.
Then I sat in my desk chair.
The steam radiator clanked twice and went silent. Traffic passed on the street below with a hush as soft as waves breaking on a distant beach. A car horn honked far away.
I turned the chair to the window and sat with my feet on the sill. In a lighted window of the insurance building across the street two men were arguing. In another window, a cleaning woman mopped a floor with her eyes turned downward. Most of the other offices were empty.
I swung the chair back to my desk and loaded the Ruger. Be careful, Lucinda had said. Good advice.
What were the dangers?
The police department was like a small town when it came to secrets. Sooner or l
ater Johnson would learn that I was working with Bill Gubman. He already knew I was Bill’s friend. Unless he was sloppier than he looked, he would already be asking questions. His crew couldn’t have lasted a month unless he knew people in the department who would give him answers. What would he do when he found out I was helping Bill set him up to take a fall? Putting a bullet in my head might seem like a justifiable defense. Throw Chicago’s street gangs into the mix and I had another dozen angles to protect. Whatever else Johnson and his crew called their scheme, they were extorting the gangs. Taking a few bucks a week from each member sounded harmless until you did the multiplication. When Johnson introduced me as a money collector, the gang members would see me as an enemy and they had a long history of killing enemies.
At 7:40, I went back to the file cabinet where I’d stashed the bourbon and cocaine and unlocked it. Another drawer held shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes—for mornings when I had time to jog through Grant Park—and a pair of baggy black pants and a black Windbreaker, for nights when I needed to be invisible. Under the clothes were a small toolbox, a ball of twine, and a roll of duct tape. I took out the pants and tape and re-locked the cabinet.
I stripped off my jeans, taped the gun to my inner thigh, and put on the black pants. Reaching the gun would take some work, but most body searches stick to the outside of the legs. Ripping off the tape might sting but not as bad as taking a bullet.
I went out to the men’s room that I shared with the secretarial school and splashed cold water on my face in the sink. The eyes that stared back at me in the mirror looked tired and scared. I tried to flatten my emotions, make my face say nothing. Corrine used to say that I looked like Lech Walesa from Poland’s Solidarity days, but forget the moustache. Maybe if I grew the moustache I could pull off a cool Eastern European look.
I went back to my office and stared across the street at the insurance building. The arguing men were gone. So was the cleaning woman. The building was a slab of concrete and glass, like a monument to the people who spent their lives there.
At 8:03 the phone rang. Raj was waiting in a car outside the building. I told him I would be right down.
FOURTEEN
WE DROVE WEST FROM my office in Raj’s SUV. He put a Cal Tjader CD on the stereo and tapped the steering wheel to the beat. He glanced at the rearview mirror, back to the street, and at the mirror again.
“Someone following us?” I asked.
He glanced again, then cut hard to the left, crossed the oncoming traffic, and shot down South Clark Street. At the corner, he stopped and looked at the mirror. “No,” he said.
We turned right and, a block later, right again. At Congress Parkway, we stopped at another stoplight. Raj flipped on his left-turn signal and I glanced over my shoulder.
A white GMC van pulled close behind us.
Even in the dark, I recognized the men in the front seat—the lead FBI agent who’d stopped me and Lucinda after we left the Daley Plaza memorial service, and the man Lucinda had elbowed in the throat. The van had on its left-turn signal too.
When the stoplight turned and Raj pulled into the intersection, I said, “Go straight.”
He gave me a look.
“A van’s following us.”
He continued straight across the intersection and glanced in the mirror.
“Fuck,” he said and accelerated.
“They’re following me, not you,” I said.
He turned left at the next corner as a light turned red. After three cars passed, the FBI agents got a chance and the van ran the light and fell in behind us.
“They stopped me earlier,” I said. “They’re investigating the Southshore shooting. David Russo’s the second cop in a couple of months to get shot when I was around. They don’t like the coincidence.”
We sped west for four blocks. The van dropped back, couldn’t get around the cars in front of it.
Raj swung around the corner onto Upper Wacker. “Who are they?” he said.
“FBI.”
“Fuck. You tell Monroe or Johnson about them?”
I hung onto the overhead handle as we accelerated. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“When the FBI figures out that there’s nothing behind the police shootings but coincidence, they’ll leave me alone.”
He gripped the steering wheel in both hands, leaned over it. “Meantime, you put the rest of us at risk.”
We flew north and pulled a U-turn, went down a ramp into the orange light of Lower Wacker. We were doubling back toward Congress. Steel I beams supported the street over our heads. Steel pillars on the sides and in the medians supported the I beams. It was a lot of metal that could impale us a hundred different ways as we sped past. At Congress, we bounced up an exit ramp and merged into traffic.
Raj looked in the rearview mirror. I looked over my shoulder.
The white van was gone.
Raj breathed in deep and sighed. “Thanks for telling me they were behind us.”
I let go of the overhead handle and felt blood return to my fingers. “Anytime.”
We continued to the Kennedy Expressway and turned onto the on-ramp, heading north toward the suburbs and the Wisconsin border. Raj relaxed, steering with one hand, weaving past slower cars. He gave me a quick look. “Let’s keep the FBI to ourselves, okay?”
“Yeah?”
“Johnson already doubts you. If he hears about this, you’re done.”
“How about you? You doubt me?”
Another look. “Should I?”
I shrugged. “Probably. But no more than you should doubt the rest of the guys. How about Monroe? What’s he think of me?”
He spoke to the windshield. “He figures you’ve got more to gain and less to lose than any of the rest of us.”
I thought about what Lucinda had found out about Raj. The records she’d seen made him look as clean as an eagle scout. It seemed he had the most to lose. “What about you? What do you get out of this?”
His face darkened and he said nothing. Then, still to the windshield, he said, “I’ve got responsibilities.”
“Yeah?”
Again silence. Then, “Big family.”
“How many kids?”
He shook his head. “Just a son. But my mother’s in Lebanon. I send her money. And my sister and her family. She’s got four kids. And my cousins. Too many cousins.”
I nodded. “Nothing in life is free.”
He smiled again. “It sure as hell ain’t.”
We drove for awhile, quiet.
“How about your wife?” I said. “She also Lebanese?”
He laughed. “Irish Catholic.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And from what I understand, you’ve got an ex-wife who you’re still seeing and a partner who you’re sleeping with.”
That stung. “Where’d you hear that?”
He glanced at me like that was a dumb question. “We’ve asked around.”
“Well, I’m working things out.”
He nodded. “It’s a fucked-up world.”
That made me grin. “Yeah, it is.”
FIFTEEN
WE DROVE NORTH FOR an hour through suburbs with lakefront mansions, then onto a dirty strip of highway lined with dimly lighted signs for auto body shops, tire dealers, and trucker motels. Eventually the businesses were replaced by farms. Before the state line, we passed another lighted sign, for the Mount Rest Cemetery. Then a billboard welcoming us to Wisconsin loomed up on the roadside and we drove on in the dark.
A few miles later, we got off the highway and rode through an industrial strip at the edge of a town called Pleasant Prairie. We took some more turns and suddenly, even with the windows closed, the air felt cold and damp and smelled of pine. We were near Lake Michigan. An asphalt road led us past houses and cottages and, as we came around a bend, past a strip of beach where the whitecaps on the lake appeared and disappeared in the headlights. A couple minutes later, we arrived at a lone house s
urrounded by trees at the end of a gravel driveway. Raj turned the wheel and we went in.
A Mercedes SUV, a rusted Chrysler LeBaron, and about a dozen other cars lined the driveway. The house was bright, inside and out. Spotlights rigged to tree branches with extension cords threw an orange glow and long shadows over the yard. As we parked, two men got out of a nearby car and started toward the house. They wore loose blue pants, black high-tops, and nylon Windbreakers. One had a black skullcap with a Nike swoosh. The other had shaved his head clean and had a tattoo that said STREET in block letters on the back of his neck.
Another car pulled next to us, windows tinted, music pounding. The bass beat made the dashboard rattle in the SUV.
“Ready?” Raj asked.
The duct tape holding my gun to the inside of my thigh pinched my skin. “Ready,” I said.
We got out and walked to the house. It was a big log cabin, the kind you can have designed and built by a company that does nothing else. I figured the side facing the lake would have big windows and a wood deck with a Weber grill on it.
“Whose place is this?” I said.
“Peter Finley’s. He calls it a fishing lodge, but mostly he comes up here and gets drunk.”
On the front porch, Finley and another cop I recognized from the Southshore construction site were checking for guns while a little crowd of guys who I figured were gang members watched. Raj stepped up to the other cop and raised his hands. The gang members laughed while the cop frisked him. “Feel him good,” said one of them.
I stepped up to Finley and raised my hands. He swept the tops and bottoms of my arms with his fingers, traced my ribs, back and front, and ran his hands down the outside of my legs. Then he brushed the inside of my legs. He barely paused when he touched the Ruger, but he looked at my eyes.
I stared at him, silent.
“Of course,” he said. He turned to the guys who’d arrived in the car with pounding music. “Next.”
Inside, the house had been designed with an open floor plan. The walls were knotted pine paneling, the ceiling too. Framed prints of deer and moose hung on the walls. There were a lot of chairs and sofas and at one end of the room a large stone fireplace with a wide hearth. In the kitchen, two refrigerators stood side by side with enough space to hold a dozen cases of beer and as much trout as Finley could catch. The wall facing the lake was all windows. Outside the windows, lighted with more spotlights, was a wood deck with a Weber grill on it.
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