I called Lucinda. When she picked up her phone, I said, “Am I obsessed with making things turn out the way they never can be?”
“Well, yeah,” she said like it was obvious.
“Is that bad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
* * *
AT 4:45, I DROVE back to The Spa Club. Rush-hour traffic filled the streets. Cars inched toward intersections with men and women strapped into their seats as if a sudden catastrophe might lift them out of the gridlock and hurtle them through the air.
At LaSalle and Division, a traffic cop held his hand up and stopped me so that cross traffic could move through the intersection. He stared through the windshield like he recognized me, and sweat beaded between my shoulder blades and on the insides of my legs. But he waved me through with the rest of the cars.
The valet at The Spa Club building took the keys to Raj’s SUV and welcomed me by name. “Good afternoon, Mr. Kozmarski,” he said. I was coming up in the world. Or going down.
The elevator man greeted me by name too and took me to the fourteenth floor.
The lounge was crowded. I waved hello to the hostess and cut past the tables. Men and women—mostly men—relaxed with drinks, wearing clothes that would be fine at the office if they put back on their ties or buttoned a couple more buttons on their blouses. Spa Club staff mingled with the customers, making small talk, flirting, moving on if the customers weren’t interested. A man in a suit sat at a table with three other men in shirtsleeves. I thought I recognized the one in the suit from TV, forecasting the weather or making political promises. A waitress sat on his leg and he told her a joke that I couldn’t hear, and the other men laughed but she just blushed, which must have taken some effort after working here. A woman dressed in black sat alone at a table in a corner, glaring at everyone else in the room. I wondered who she was waiting for and what she was doing at the club.
No one seemed to be heading toward the hall leading to the back rooms. Maybe that happened later in the evening after the drinks and small talk.
I went alone into the second lobby and into the back hall. The meeting with Johnson would start at 7:00 and Lucinda would climb the stairs to the fourteenth-floor emergency exit a half hour earlier.
No one was around, so I went to the monitor room, knocked once, and opened the door.
Peter Finley sat in a swivel chair with headphones on. Ten screens were on. Six showed rooms where the girls and boys who worked at The Spa Club took clients. Three of the rooms had clients in them now. The seventh screen showed the back door into the alley behind the building; the eighth, which was hazy, the front entrance. The ninth, which I hadn’t noticed before, showed the front lounge and the elevator. The last I also hadn’t noticed. It showed a stairwell. I figured the camera must be outside the emergency exit door.
Damn, I thought, but I grinned and said, “You always have someone in here watching and listening?”
Finley took off the earphones. “Twenty-four seven,” he said. “We can’t afford not to. Plus sitting in here beats the hell out of watching Oprah.”
The meeting would start in just over two hours. In that time, I needed to disable the stairwell camera or the monitor that it fed, and I needed to do it in a way that looked like an electrical or mechanical malfunction, not like someone had damaged it on purpose. If the camera was still working, Lucinda would walk into the hands of Johnson’s crew for a second time in three nights. This time, I figured, no one would walk her politely to her car. She would get hurt, and I would too.
“How are you liking the work?” Finley said.
I shrugged. “Beats sitting at home watching Oprah.”
He gave that an uncommitted smile. “You know, when Earl Johnson invited me to join his crew, I was like you. I resisted. I’d been doing some solo shit, taking a few bucks off the hookers who were standing on the corner and, if they were carrying a little crack, taking that too. Solo treated me just fine, I thought. But Earl had bigger plans and he convinced me. He also got me to clean myself up. No more crack. Now I’m having the time of my life.”
I raised an imaginary glass. “Here’s to Earl.”
He considered that. “To tell the truth, he doesn’t like you.”
I dropped the imaginary glass and smiled. “Then fuck Earl, right?”
His half smile remained. “He’s usually got good judgment about people.”
I shrugged again and looked at the screens that showed the rooms with clients.
In one, a good-looking man I’d seen tending bar was sucking off a nude, balding fat man who looked like he was in his fifties. A woman—also nude, also fat, also in her fifties—sat in a chair a few feet away, watching the two men. She looked bored. I figured she was the fat man’s wife.
In the second room, a man, also in his fifties but thin and well-muscled, was having sex with a big-breasted woman in her thirties I’d also seen around the club. The sex was tender, almost loving, and I wondered why they were here instead of in a bedroom at his home or a hotel room where no one could see them.
In the third room, two men were screwing Tina. One stood behind her and the other faced her mouth.
Finley caught me staring at the screen. He laughed. “You like that?”
I said nothing. I wanted to go to the room and slug the men.
“Tina’s the best we’ve got,” Finley said. “She’ll do anything. Anything and anyone. She makes more in a day than some of the girls make in a week.”
Why did I think she needed me to help? When I’d turned her down, she’d looked like I’d insulted her. Still, I wanted to beat up the men she was with. I also wanted to beat up Finley. I said, “You need to figure out how to install debit card machines on the girls so they vibrate for thirty seconds every time you add cash.”
Finley looked puzzled.
“I’ll see you later,” I said and stepped into the hallway, closed the door behind me.
The hallway was still empty. I waited a moment, then turned to the emergency exit. The sooner the camera stopped working, the better.
As I reached for the door, a voice at the other end of the hall said, “Hey, Joe, I’ve been looking for you.”
I turned, unsure how I would explain myself. Bob Monroe had come into the hallway from the lobby. He’d changed into brown warm-up pants and a matching hooded sweatshirt. Comfortable clothes for taking over the world. “Hey,” I said, “what’s up?”
“Come on.” He nodded toward the front of the club. “We need to talk.”
I followed him to the lounge, down the hall behind the hostess desk, and into his office.
He sat at his desk. “What were you doing back there?”
“I was going to cut the cables to the security camera so my friends could sneak in without paying.”
He laughed but still wanted to know. “What were you doing?”
I shrugged. “Looking around. I like to know a place well, especially if I’m facing down someone like Johnson.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Good idea.” Then he waved an open palm over his desk like he wanted to sell it to me. “What do you think?”
He’d spread the bank receipts that I’d given him across the desktop. Under each of them, he’d placed a couple more sheets of paper. Photocopies of police reports.
I picked up a receipt and a report. The report described an unsolved burglary of a construction site on the Northwest side. It was dated September 10 and said the burglary had occurred the previous night. It said twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of copper and other metals had been taken. The bank receipt also was dated September 10 and was for seven thousand dollars, a little less than a third of the value of the metal.
I picked up another receipt and report and saw the same pattern—an August 29 account of a sixteen-thousand-dollar burglary on the night of the 28th, and an August 29 bank receipt for four thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars.
A third receipt and report showed the same, except the deposit occurred the
day after the report.
“Wow,” I said. “Where did you get the reports?”
Monroe looked at me sideways. “I’m a cop,” he said. “Where do you think I got them?”
I looked over the papers on the desk. Monroe had done impressive work in lining up the information that could bring down Johnson. Bill Gubman had done impressive work in rigging the bank receipts so they would line up with the reports. “You think this will be enough to convince everyone?”
“I think so. Figuring that a couple of the construction sites overreported their losses, the bank total comes to about thirty percent of the value of the thefts. That’s roughly the same percentage we get when we deal with our buyer.”
I nodded, impressed again.
“I also checked the dates of the burglaries against the nights when our crew was working. No overlap. And I checked the dates against the work log. Johnson was off duty. He was on his own. I remember two of the dates in August. He said he was going out of town.”
“Looks like you’ve got him.”
He allowed himself a small smile. Then he said, “You should present the evidence tonight.”
I shook my head. “Why me?”
He numbered the reasons on the thumb and first three fingers of his left hand. “You found the bank receipts. You’re an outsider. No one thinks you’ve got anything against Johnson. And the guys all know Johnson and I have gone at it before and they’ll be suspicious of anything I say.” He touched his pinky. “Common sense. You present the evidence and then I step in.”
If that was common sense, I didn’t want any of it. “What happens to him after we show that he’s been ripping you off?”
Monroe looked down at the desk and arranged the receipts and reports into neat piles. “He disappears.”
I felt the ice in those words. Bill Gubman had told me about Victor Lopez, the kid who’d disappeared when he’d started talking too loud about the trouble Monroe was giving him. Nothing had been found of the kid, Bill had said, not even a bone fragment.
“How does he disappear?” I said.
Monroe looked me in the eyes with the mild smile. “I do a little magic.”
I knew better than to ask more. “You bury him?”
He said nothing.
“Sink him in the lake?”
Monroe said, “If you bury or sink him, he hasn’t disappeared, has he? Someone comes along with a shovel or a storm shakes him off the lake bottom, and you’ve got yourself a big problem.”
“How do you make it happen?”
His smile broadened.
Before he could tell me, there was a knock at the door.
He lifted a finger to tell me to hold on for a moment and said, “Yeah?”
The door opened and Finley stepped in. He held a Glock that looked a lot like mine but bigger. He pointed the gun at Monroe. Three other cops from Johnson’s crew stepped in beside him. One of them was Raj. One of the others held a second gun, which he pointed at me.
“What the fuck is this?” said Monroe.
“Stand up,” said Finley.
I stood.
“No,” said Monroe.
Finley went around the desk and held his gun to Monroe’s head. “Get up,” he said. He couldn’t have been calmer.
Monroe stood.
Finley patted him down, found nothing on him, and then removed a pistol from his desk drawer.
The other guy with the gun took my Ruger out of my over-the-shoulder rig and handed it to Finley.
I tried to catch Raj’s eyes. He wasn’t looking at me.
I said to Monroe, “What’s going on?”
Monroe looked unhappy. “We just got fucked,” he said.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE GUY WHO’D TAKEN my gun stuck his head out of the door and looked toward the hostess desk to make sure no one was watching. Then Finley hurried us into the hallway and down to the conference room. A dark-wood rectangular table stood in the middle with twelve black leather office chairs around it. The yellow carpet had crease marks from a recent vacuuming.
Finley led Monroe and me to a door with a key lock at the back of the room. It opened into a stairway with a single flight of stairs down to the floor under The Spa Club. On the wall just inside the door, a ladder rose to a trapdoor and, I figured, the roof. The ladder and the trapdoor looked original to the building. The stairs down looked like an afterthought, added when The Spa Club or an earlier tenant needed extra space.
We went down the stairs to another hall. Three open doors lined the left side of the hall, and at the end there was a heavy exit door. Finley walked us past the first open door. Unused furniture, a couple of mattresses, and an unplugged refrigerator crowded the room. The second door opened into a windowless space, empty except for an office chair. Finley and Raj pushed Monroe inside. Raj closed the door and locked it.
The third room was a twin of the second.
“In,” Finley said.
I stepped toward the door like there was no place I would rather go, then spun and lifted my knee into Finley’s gut. He made a sound like air blowing from a narrow-necked bag and fell to the floor. The door at the end of the hall was three or four steps away. If it was unlocked, I could be through it before Raj and the others realized what was happening. I spun toward it.
Then my feet were no longer on the floor. Someone had kicked them out from under me. As I fell, I looked and saw Raj. He’d knocked me down.
Finley was lying on the hallway floor, doubled over, moaning and swearing. I looked at him eye to eye.
Raj pulled me into the room and set me down next to the chair. As he stepped back into the hall, he faced me so only I could see him. He mouthed a word or two but I couldn’t read him.
Then the door slammed and a key turned in the lock.
I stayed on the floor for awhile, staring at the ceiling. The paint looked new but a thin line marked an old crack that was starting to show through. I traced the crack from one wall across the ceiling to another, then traced it back. The gray carpet was soft enough. Still, I stood up and looked around the room. There was nothing to see except the chair, metal legged with a vinyl seat cushion. And the walls, the cracked ceiling, and the carpeted floor. And the locked door.
The chair in the middle of the room was strange. Why had they bothered to put it in the room and another one like it in the next room? I kicked the chair leg. It was solid. Someone could be tied to a chair like that, I decided. And then someone else could hurt the person tied to the chair. Or maybe they put the chairs in the rooms so that we wouldn’t have to sit on the floor. Maybe they were being hospitable.
I liked that idea better. I sat on the chair.
I put my hands around the chair back to see how it would feel. Scary. I stood and went to the door. I looked at my watch.
It said 5:41.
In less than an hour and a half, Lucinda would climb through the stairwell to The Spa Club. Maybe in less time than that, Johnson’s crew would come back and tie me to the chair.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and dialed Lucinda’s number.
Before it rang, a key sounded in the door lock and I hung up.
Finley stepped in, gun drawn. His face was a shade too pale and he bent like his belly was tender where I’d kneed him. He looked like he wanted to shoot me. He said, “Your phone.”
I handed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said and turned to the door.
“Sorry about the stomach,” I said.
He said nothing to that. He went out and locked the door behind him.
I paced the room. Five steps long, four steps wide. Six steps from corner to corner. I put in a mile or two, back and forth and around.
Then I went to the wall that I shared with the room where Finley had put Monroe. I put my ear to the wall.
Silence.
I knocked on the wall.
More silence.
I called softly, “Hey!” Anyone standing near the door to the room would hear me but I c
alled anyway. “Monroe!”
After a few seconds, Monroe’s voice answered through the wall, “What?”
“If you’re locked in a room in this building with just a chair, how do you get out?” I said.
“Is this a fucking riddle?”
“You know this building better than I do. How do you get out?”
“You don’t, you stupid fuck.”
“I’m getting out,” I said.
He said nothing to that.
“Monroe?” I called.
Silence.
I went back to pacing.
When I got tired of pacing, I sat in the chair.
When I got tired of sitting in the chair, I stood, picked up the chair, swung it as hard as I could, and released it. It flew across the room and hit the wall by the door. Two of the chair legs punched through the drywall.
A moment later, a key unlocked the door and Finley stepped inside again. He still held the gun. Color had mostly returned to his face and he was standing straighter than before. He looked at me. He looked at the chair sticking out of the wall. He went to the chair and yanked it. Pieces of drywall fell to the carpet and the chair came free. One of the legs had poked through the outside wall and light shined through from the hallway.
Finley shook his head like he was disgusted with me, carried the chair out of the room, and locked the door.
I paced some more, then stretched out on the floor and looked at the crack on the ceiling. If Finley would give me sandpaper, some brushes, and a can of paint, I could fix it.
I closed my eyes, opened them again.
The crack still reached across the ceiling. I was still locked in the room.
I stayed like that for a long time. It felt like days and weeks. I sometimes looked at my watch. It said 5:58. Then it said 6:10. Later it said 6:40.
That meant Lucinda was probably in the building, climbing the stairs.
Then my watch said 6:50. That meant Johnson and his crew probably had Lucinda in their hands or would soon. There wasn’t a thing I could do to help her.
At 6:55 a key rattled in the lock.
A Bad Night's Sleep Page 16
