“Everybody’s careful not to micromanage nowadays,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. It was an easy case, a smoking gun. Nothing to it, open and shut. Then during a briefing, one of my dicks says he’s not so sure, maybe there’s more to it. I tell him to bring me the Deceased file the next day and we’ll talk it through. That night, I get a call at home.”
“Who?”
“I’m not giving you names. Let’s say, someone far above my pay grade. Wants to know exactly what I know about the case. I tell him the truth—I don’t know anything yet but I’m having a meeting with my guys in the morning and I’ll let him know what I think after the meeting.” Mike reached into his pocket, fired up another cigarette, but kept the windows rolled up. “Fuck it, I’ll be a chain-smoker. Want one?”
“I’ll just breathe your exhaust,” I said. “So the next day…”
“Next day, the two dicks working the Richmond-Zhang case are nowhere to be found. I’m told that they were summoned to headquarters and they took the deceased file with them. I call down to Thirty-fifth, get bounced around to nowhere. Ten minutes later I get a call from an asshole assistant state’s attorney telling me to hang tight and I’ll be briefed soon enough. I tell him to go fuck himself and give me back my men. An hour after that I get a visit—a heavy suit from the governor’s office. Tells me there are federal implications but won’t say anything more. Couple hours later, my dicks show up along with a CPD lawyer and the asshole ASA. Lawyer tells me they’ve been reassigned to Area 3, effective immediately, and the case goes with them. My guys clean out their desks and off they go. Can’t even look me in the eye. And the case was cleared the next fucking day.”
“But you showed me the file,” I said.
“They sent me a copy for records, since it was our case for a while. But I tell ya, my binder is about half as thick as the original. And here’s the kicker: both detectives made sergeant a week later.”
“Damn, Mike.”
He put the car in Drive, kept his foot on the brake. “Seems to me you’ve got a choice to make. This can still be a simple gig and you can make some easy money. Or you can make it complicated. You go that way, I wish you good luck. But I cannot help you, not even a little bit. I won’t brainstorm it with you, I won’t vouch for you…and if you break the law this time, I sure as shit won’t cover for you. I mean it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I said, “I paid a visit to Amy Zhang yesterday. She acted like she’d never heard of Hawk River but she’s a lousy actress. And she’s scared to death.”
“Somebody threatens her, she can go to her local district station and file a complaint, like any other citizen.”
“At some point during my visit, she decided I wasn’t really working for Isaac Richmond. She was petrified. We’re way past someone threatening her.”
“Sorry. Nothing I can do about it.”
“Well I can’t just leave her to twist in the wind,” I said.
Mike said, “She’s not your client, Ray.”
“Duly noted.” I got out of the car and slammed the door.
The passenger window lowered and Mike said, “Don’t call me again about this case.”
The window went back up and the Impala screeched off down Wabash.
CHAPTER NINE
My office door was unlocked, but Vince was not sitting behind my desk. I drew my pistol and flattened against the wall. I scanned the room. The percolator on top of the little bar fridge was making burbling noises. Beneath the coffee aroma I caught the smell of Aqua Velva and my head started swimming and the room began to slip away from me and I felt like throwing up. The taste of blood flooded my mouth and a wave of heat rolled over me and my skin broke into a clammy sweat.
You killed the guy. He’s not here. It’s just in your head…
I forced a long deep breath and fought against the surging flashback images and managed to stay out of the torture chair. After a minute of deep breathing, I was relatively normal again.
The office was obviously empty and the only thing I was sure of was that I was losing my mind. I got a beer from the fridge and sat in my desk chair and put the gun on the desk. I swallowed half the beer and lit a smoke. Vince came into the office, started for the coffeemaker, saw me and said, “Hey, you want some coffee? Just made a fresh pot.”
“How many times am I going to tell you to lock the door?”
“I had to drain the main vein,” he said. “I was just down the hall.”
“You leave the office, even to go to the can, you lock the door. Next time I find it unlocked, I dock twenty bucks from your pay. Got it?”
“All right, okay. Sorry.” Vince poured coffee into a mug and planted himself across the desk from me. “You okay?”
“Your aftershave smells like Aqua Velva.” I pulled a wad of bills out of my pocket.
“It isn’t. It’s a new one, called—”
“It smells similar to Aqua Velva.” I tossed three twenties across the desk. “Go buy some good cologne. Nothing from the drugstore, go to Field’s.”
Vince picked up the money with a confused look on his face. “Thought you were mad at Field’s ’cause they’re selling out to Macy’s.”
“I don’t care where you go, just get something that smells better.”
Vince shoved the money in his pocket with a shrug. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Don’t guess. It’ll improve your love life. And don’t thank me, I’m doing it to improve the atmosphere around here.”
I got another beer from the fridge and Vince gave me a verbal report on his recent surveillance of Dr. Boyfriend. While half my brain listened to Vince, I considered the implications of what Mike Angelo had told me and how it related to what I’d learned from Terry and Kate Weinstein and Douglas Hill. And how it related to Amy Zhang’s fear and Isaac Richmond’s grief.
I wanted to toss it around verbally, as I would’ve with Mike if he hadn’t so elegantly recused himself. I liked Vince and he was smarter than most people realized, but he was still too green to offer any useful advice and, anyway, our relationship hadn’t developed far enough for me to lay this on him. I pushed it out of my mind and refocused on what Vince was saying.
Andrew Glassman had continued to be a good doctor and son since the last report. He and Jill had not gotten together but she’d switched to the night shift, so they probably wouldn’t see a lot of each other until she went back on days two weeks from now.
Vince flipped the page of his notebook. “So the subject had coffee with another doctor in the cafeteria at Rush and I sat at the next table…”
“I hope you didn’t get made.”
“Not a chance,” said Vince with some pride. “I was careful. And doctors are too full of themselves to notice civilians, anyway. Hey, I heard two nurses talking and one told a great doctor joke: Most doctors think they’re God, but God thinks he’s an invasive cardiologist. Funny, huh?”
“A riot,” I said. Thinking Maybe it’s time to give it up, Dudgeon. You’re starting to look pathetic.
“Well I thought it was funny,” said Vince. “Anyway, so our subject is having coffee with this other guy and he’s talking about Jill. Saying how he thinks Jill is the one and maybe he’s ready to make a commitment…”
It felt like a punch in the gut. I wanted to tell Vince to stop right there. But I just said, “Oh yeah?” I swallowed some more beer, lit a new cigarette with the butt of the old one.
“Thought you were quitting.” Vince caught my look, went back to his notes. “Anyway, he says he’s got some concerns. First he says they’ve been fighting a bit because she won’t stop smoking.” Vince conceded the obvious with a smirk in my direction. “Then he says he wouldn’t want the mother of his children to work outside the home and he isn’t sure how she’d react to that, ’cause she loves being a nurse. Finally he says that, at the end of the day, all relationships are about who has the power, and this worries him because he thinks he loves Jill more than she loves him, so the b
alance of power will always be in her favor.”
For the first time I was hearing things about Andrew Glassman that made me dislike him. And call me shallow, but it offered new hope. I said, “That’s a terrible way to look at love.”
“I think he was just talking, I don’t think it bothers him that much.” Vince closed his notebook. “The way their conversation ended, I think he’s getting ready to propose.”
So much for new hope. “Okay. Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Vince left to go serve some court papers for his other employer and I switched from beer to coffee. I called a flower shop and had a “bright and cheery mixed tulip bouquet” sent to Angela Green. The woman on the phone asked what I wanted on the card. I opened my notepad and read aloud what I’d written there earlier:
Very sorry about Thursday night. I’ll do better next time. Please give Diane my apologies and tell her I had a migraine. She’s very nice. Congratulations again on Chester. I’m very happy for you guys.
Ray
Then I called Terry at work and got his voice mail, on which I left a full and unabridged apology complete with offers of self-immolation.
What do you want me to say? Amy Zhang had pleaded. I said everything right. And then, I don’t like being tested.
Given what I’d learned from Mike Angelo, it was easy enough to conceive that Amy Zhang might be under pressure to stick with some official version of events…to say everything right. She came to believe that I’d been sent to test her, to make sure she could still sell that official version. That now seemed obvious. And the way she said it suggested that it wasn’t the first time she’d been tested. And it scared the hell out of her.
The pressure may have been applied by a bent cop or other government official involved in the cover-up of whatever the hell it was they were covering up. But Amy Zhang wasn’t frightened at the front door, when she thought I was a cop. More likely, she thought I’d been sent by Hawk River. I had no evidence that Hawk River was behind it, but the company was at the very least a cobeneficiary of the cover-up, along with some part of the government.
If…If Joan Richmond knew anything damaging to Hawk River, and if she was willing to testify about her knowledge before the congressional Oversight and Government Reform committee. And if they knew she knew. And if they knew she was gonna spill to Congress.
That’s a lot of ifs.
After a half hour of research online, I picked up the phone, dialed Hawk River’s head office, and asked to speak with Joseph Grant. Grant was the CEO and I knew I wouldn’t get him on the line, but the CEO’s secretary is one of the true power positions in any company.
I told Grant’s secretary who I was and who my client was and explained that I was on a fool’s errand to collect information about Joan Richmond so that her father could come to terms with her death. I asked if Mr. Grant could spare me a few minutes, just to tell me what he remembered of Joan.
The secretary assured me that she would relay my request and asked me to please call back in an hour.
I spent the hour surfing the Net, reading what I could about Hawk River and its place in the world of government contracting, and about the congressional hearings into military contractors and their alleged billing abuses. It looked like a rat’s nest but Washington had been a rat’s nest for a long time now. Maybe it was ever thus. And besides, you can’t always believe what you read in the papers.
I called back and the secretary told me that Mr. Grant would be happy to give me fifteen minutes at three o’clock tomorrow, if that was a convenient time for me. I assured her that three o’clock was perfect for me and thanked her for her help and hung up with a sour taste in my mouth.
Fifteen minutes. Joseph Grant ran a company with private soldiers servicing hundreds of government contracts in at least fifteen countries. Although most of the business was with Uncle Sam, some contracts were with other sovereign states. Plus dozens of contracts with several multinational corporations. All together Hawk River was billing three-quarters of a billion dollars, give or take a few bucks. Billion, with a b. And Joseph Grant can give me fifteen minutes of his time? He shouldn’t have fifteen seconds for me. Some half-assed gumshoe taking $800 a day from a grieving father? Grant should’ve had his secretary pass me off to a public relations lackey with instructions to shine me on.
But Grant had time for me, so obviously he saw things differently. Perhaps he saw a gumshoe asking questions about Hawk River’s former head of payroll who was murdered just in time to stop her from testifying before that congressional committee. The murdered former head of payroll whose every connection to Hawk River was quietly scrubbed from the CPD’s case file by the concerted effort of several Chicago cops, a police department lawyer, an assistant state’s attorney, and a lawyer from the governor’s office.
I unplugged the percolator and put on my jacket, thinking Don’t wander too far down Speculation Alley, Dudgeon. Even if Hawk River is a beneficiary of some cover-up, you don’t know that Grant even knows of it. Stay within sight of the established facts.
I left the office. And locked the door behind me.
Back at my apartment, I changed into my sweats and did an hour on the recumbent bike with the stereo blasting Stiff Little Fingers. You don’t get much better than SLF, and the music kept me motivated on the bike. I toweled the sweat off my face and got down on the floor. I lay on my left side, with a three-pound dumbbell in my right hand, and struggled through the exercises prescribed by my physical therapist, isolating muscles and feeling them tremble under the strain of such incredible weight.
Nothing so humbling as a contest lost to three pounds.
Having just barely survived the workout, I shaved and showered and put on jeans and a Columbia College sweatshirt. Padded barefoot into the kitchen and swallowed two Percocet and a pint of water, opened a can of Beefaroni and ate it right out of the can, cowboy style. Poured three fingers of Mount Gay Extra Old over ice. Added a splash of water. Took my drink to the living room and faced the stereo.
Over half my music collection was jazz but for the last nine months I hadn’t been able to listen to it. Jazz had been my musical anchor since I was sixteen. But now, every time I tried, it just made me angry. I hoped that I’d be able to return to it someday.
But not yet.
I put on Lurrie Bell’s Blues Had a Baby. To my ears Bell had the most soulful voice and inventive guitar on the Chicago blues scene. And that’s saying a lot.
I drank the rum slowly and let the music wash over me and waited for the Percs to kick in. My shoulder hurt like a bastard, and it took some effort to stay in the present tense. The pain was a houseguest you never invited, who doesn’t know when to leave and insists on retelling the story of how you met, over and over. A trip down a specific memory lane that I’d just as soon never take again.
The thing about being tortured is, there comes a point where you just want to die. You don’t care anymore. You just don’t give a fuck. All that exists is pain and self-hatred and the only way to make it stop is to tell them what they want to know. Or die.
So you want to die. You want it more than you want to tell them what they want to know, or you’d have told them by now. You want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life. The desire for death actually strengthens you, buys you a few more minutes of resistance. You know you’re going to break soon, and you beg death to come sooner.
It’s sick, I know, but that’s how it is.
Talk about ultimate tough guy credentials. That’s what you’d think, right? You made it through that and you never told them a goddamn thing. But here you are almost ten months later, still waking up crying in the middle of the night like a small child with night terrors. Or freaking out because you catch a whiff of cheap aftershave.
Some tough guy.
I finished the rum in my glass and poured another and returned to the stereo.
Next up, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.
The pain
was dull enough that I could use my arm again, so I started packing books into cardboard boxes while listening to Bob get tangled up in blue. I hadn’t been in complete denial about my upcoming move and I’d actually bought packing boxes. But only a few were packed. I had less than six weeks to find a new place to live and I hadn’t even started looking in earnest.
As I looked around the apartment, I realized that this place was part of the problem. My belongings were part of the problem. The back of the couch had loose threads where my cat used to sharpen his claws. The cat died seven years ago. And the old battered piano bench that served as a coffee table? I’d had that thing since college. I’d bought the big reading chair as a gift to myself, to mark my second year working as an investigative reporter at the Chicago Chronicle.
They were relics of a closed chapter of my life—life before torture. Constant reminders of the man I used to be, and of what had been taken from me. I decided right then that I would make a clean break, leave all the relics behind and start from scratch in the new place. All I needed to pack were my books and CDs, my electronics, clothes, exercise equipment, and kitchen gear. Everything else could go in the Dumpster.
Hell, moving would be a cinch.
Feeling liberated by my decision, I went to the bedroom and packed a small suitcase and left the apartment. I walked a few blocks over to the Red Line and hopped on the northbound El, headed for a dead woman’s apartment where so far I’d been able to sleep without nightmares.
CHAPTER TEN
Excuse me, Mr. Dudgeon?”
The man closed my office door behind him and strode toward my desk and stuck out his hand. “I’m Tim Dellitt. I’d like to hire you.” I stood and shook his hand and gestured to one of the client chairs and he sat and so did I.
I guessed him in his early or midthirties. His blond hair was cut close to the scalp and he wore a precision-trimmed goatee and mustache. His suit was expensive.
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