Terminal

by Andrew Vachss

  I didn’t know Chicago, but I didn’t want to be inside that dirty little room at night, so I roamed.

  The blues bars of Chicago in the sixties were merciless. Anyone who thinks Darwin got it wrong should have been there, down in the crucible. If you wanted to try, you looked for a nod from the leader, climbed up on the tiny little stage, plugged in, and took your shot.

  If you could bring it, they’d let you know. If you couldn’t, you had to go.

  “Good enough” was never good enough in those joints. Either you killed the crowd, or the crowd killed you. For every Buddy Guy, the West Side produced a thousand who didn’t make the cut.

  “Magic Sam” wasn’t a stage name; it was a title, earned in the ring. I don’t mean some two-bit “belt,” handed out like a rigged-bid contract by one of those licensed-to-steal “sanctioning bodies” who rule boxing today. No, Magic Sam won his title in matches where the crowd picks the winners.

  His signature song was “Sweet Home Chicago.” A Robert Johnson original, transplanted but still rooted in Delta soil. Like Sam himself. But “I Found a New Love” was always my favorite.

  I loved the city’s architecture, too. Supposedly, the whole town is built of stone because no wood construction was allowed after the Great Fire. But the first time I saw the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side, I saw the future of America. Miles of housing project, sixteen stories high, overlooking the Dan Ryan Expressway, the outside walkways covered in chicken wire so the inmates could look out from their cages on the world passing them by. It became its own world. Gangland. Just like the planners planned.

  The Robert Taylor Homes are gone now. The inmates have been relocated…to where they were intended to spend their adult lives since birth.

  This time, I could have driven—it’s only about a twelve-hour trip, with all kinds of disinterested motels between Ohio and Indiana.

  But this was a hit-and-run. I’d sent a message and given it a few days to work its way through to the guy I asked to do something for me. I knew better than to think he’d talk on any phone. All I needed was five minutes with him, alone. Plus, I owed Claw some speed after he did the job inside the rich old freak’s house on just my word.

  O’Hare is famous for a lot of things, but on-time landings isn’t one of them. I walked through the terminal’s glowing tunnels on my way to the CTA line. That was another reason I hadn’t driven: where I was going, I wouldn’t need a car. Paper is a fingerprint—you can’t go through life without touching anything, but you avoid it whenever you get the chance.

  As I approached the airport exit, a young woman came toward me, towing one of those wheeled suitcases behind her. As we passed each other, she smiled. Not flirting—an anxiety reaction to any man who looked like me. A momentary “please don’t hurt me” flash in her too-wide eyes.

  I knew some humans who would get aroused by that look. Just as the Prof knew the truth about why I’d come all this way just to draw to a gut-shot straight.

  The receptionist took the name we agreed I was always going to use, said, “Someone will be out to get you in a minute, sir.”

  The “someone” was wearing a skirt tighter than spray paint and four-inch strappy stilettos instead of business pumps. She walked ahead of me, letting me know that the man I was there to see was getting his money’s worth. And that he hadn’t learned anything from the last time he did.

  I’d had to clean up that mess for him—that was the favor he owed me.

  “I could only get something off the radar on one of them,” was his greeting. He didn’t get up from behind his free-form desk, or offer to shake hands. Didn’t even invite me to have a seat.

  I watched his eyes.

  He looked away from mine.

  “Reggie Bender is leveraged.”

  I made a “So?” gesture.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything, all by itself. But he’s got some very heavy plays going in nonprecious metals. And he borrowed against his own holdings to go that deep. If copper jumps, he’s in mega-bucks. If it goes the other way, he could have to sell off some big pieces. Moneymaking pieces.”

  I spread my arms, palms turned to the ceiling.

  “Who knows?” he answered my unspoken question. “Maybe got word of something. Maybe he’s gone all Hunt brothers—remember what those loons tried to do with silver?—and wants to corner the market so he can set the price. He doesn’t need the money, and the risk looks stupid, but…”

  I made a fist, extended the little finger and the thumb, held it to my ear.

  “I don’t have a direct line for him,” the man behind the desk said. “But I can certainly get him on the line; he’d return my call. You want me to tell him he should speak to…whoever?”

  I shook my head “no.”

  “Would a home address help?”

  I gave him the same answer.

  “He doesn’t have the kind of…interests I do,” the man who owed me offered.

  I made my wrist limp, asking the obvious question.

  “No. I don’t mean that. It’s just that he’s a straight arrow. Wife, four kids. Church. Doesn’t get out much. Or around. Far as I could find out, anyway…without making anyone curious. Sorry. I wish I could have been more help.”

  I made a “no big deal” gesture, walked out, took the elevator down forty-eight floors, walked to the El, and caught the three o’clock to LaGuardia.

  Nothing makes people more outraged than being wrong. A few years back, I was in a bar, waiting for a man who said he had a job for me. Michelle was there, too—not only is she the perfect cover, the job was the kind of thing she’d be in on if we took it.

  We were there early. Too early, as it turned out. Michelle was looking past my shoulder when she saw someone coming, signaled me it wasn’t our man but someone she knew.

  The woman was big-city pretty, about as fresh-faced as a Kabuki dancer, indigo cocktail dress, black-pearl necklace, perfect manicure, no rings. She slipped into Michelle’s side of the booth, hip-checking her way into the spot facing me.

  “Who is this, girl?”

  “My brother,” Michelle said, sweetly. “My big brother.”

  “Oh!” Meaning: she’d heard the stories. But she made a little gesture to summon the waiter, ordered a gimlet—“Absolut Mandarin, please”—and settled in.

  I looked at my watch, telling Michelle we had a half hour, tops.

  The girl—“If Michelle’s not going to introduce me, I guess I’ll have to do it myself. I’m Tommi”—was asking Michelle about people she hadn’t seen in a while. I tuned out. Until I heard Tommi say, “I voted for Nader. I mean, really, there was no difference between Gore and Bush, anyway.”

  “I hope you remember that the next time you need an abortion, bitch!”

  Michelle was still giving off steam long after Tommi jumped up and split like the place was about to be raided.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” Michelle said. “It’s just that—”

  I held one finger to my lips, nodded my head up and down to tell her I understood.

  And I did. None of us can vote. We’re not citizens. But we can’t figure out how citizens can’t be bothered to. Or, worse, throw their vote away so they can say something they think is precious-special in their blogs.

  Like the Prof always says: Nothing you can do about being born stupid, but volunteering for that job means you need a proctologist, pronto.

  Sure, politicians are whores. But even in a whorehouse, you’d want to pick your own, right?

  And certain whores, you pay them enough, they’ll do anything. Even the right thing. I still remember Michelle bursting into Mama’s holding a copy of the newspaper in her hand. She was always beautiful—that day, she was incandescent, glowing with joy.

  “Look!” she yelled, too excited to say anything more.

  We all gathered around, staring at the story she was pointing to. And felt it pulsate through us all…together. A law had just been passed that closed the “incest loopho
le” forever. Used to be, in New York, you fuck a neighbor’s baby, you were going under the jail. But if you fucked your own baby, you’d probably never see the inside of a criminal court. Maybe, if the case was real serious, they might bring you down to Family Court, that secret room where the predator gets “therapy” and the victim gets fucked. Again. By everyone.

  Say some maggot sneaks into a ten-year-old girl’s bedroom one night and tells her to suck his cock or something terrible will happen. That’s Rape One, a Class B felony, with a twenty-five-year top. But if the maggot is smart enough to grow his own victim, and does the exact same thing to his ten-year-old daughter, then the DA could charge him with “incest.” And that was a Class E felony…meaning, even if he was convicted, they could still just put him on probation.

  Happened all the time. Very clear message: Children are property. You can’t mess with your neighbor’s property—that’s holy—but you can do whatever you feel like doing with your own.

  And now that beast was dead.

  “How the hell did this happen?” I asked Michelle, still shaking inside because New York finally, after all those years, had called incest what it’s always been—rape.

  “I know,” she said, as gleeful as a little girl with a new doll. “There’s this PAC—you know, political-action committee, like the NRA or the AARP or whatever—and all it cares about is protecting kids. It’s called the National Association to Protect Children, okay? Anyway, they put this huge package together…the whole works. I saw the boss of the New York chapter on TV—gorgeous Asian girl—and you could just tell, she was in this to the death. I don’t know how they got it done, but who cares?”

  “Amen!” from the Prof.

  I looked over at Max. He put both hands over his heart.

  Mama came over. Read the story in silence. Then she stood up, walked to her register. When she came back, there was a wad of cash on the table.

  “Yes!” Michelle said. And instead of crying about how this came too late for any of us, my steel-hearted little sister said, “Ante up! I saw their site on the Web: protect.org. It shows how to join. We can’t do that. But that machine runs on money, and I’ve got the deposit slip right here.”

  She pulled a FedEx box out of her giant purse, already addressed. You’re not supposed to send cash that way, but our kind don’t play by your rules.

  I couldn’t wait much longer, but I couldn’t come up with a way in. A guy with “office help” like Reedy had wouldn’t answer his own door at home. Or even open his own mail.

  Going backdoor didn’t appeal to me, which was why I rejected the Chicago guy’s offer to set it up so that one of the others would take my call. Too many ways that could go wrong. Reedy was the only one I had anything on to tie him into the killing, not counting Thornton’s nonexistent tape.

  “A straight arrow” is what the Chicago guy had called Bender. Said he was leveraged heavy, too. I get him to take my call, first thing he does is run to Reedy.

  I replayed my debriefing of Thornton in my head. All it did was remind me of questions I hadn’t asked. The plans those three punks had for that little girl, was that some sort of collective enterprise, or one leader and two followers? Was this a folie à trois crime, or the kind one of them would have done on his own?

  If Reedy was the power man in a triad, using Bender as a messenger was all wrong. Prison taught me that. There’s killers who’ll draw the line at torture…but no torturer will ever draw the line at murder. If the whole plan had been Reedy’s, Bender’s family was going to be cashing life-insurance policies.

  And if Bender was cash-poor, he wasn’t any good to me, anyway.

  The other one—Henricks—was in Europe somewhere. Not relocated; on business. I only knew that because The Wall Street Journal had a little squib about him meeting with some big players in the Netherlands—neutral territory?—about putting together a consortium to run a natural-gas pipeline from the Russian icelands all the way down to a Y pipe. One channel to go to countries where they paid in euros, the other to one that paid in anything you wanted, from warplanes to harvested organs.

  Reedy.

  I thought of something Wesley told me once. “It’s easier to take a man’s life than his money. He don’t always carry his money around with him, but you can put the crosshairs on him wherever he goes.”

  I was walking down lower Fifth, between the New School and the Arch, when I heard a cell phone go off. Knew it wasn’t mine—that one is always set to “vibrate” when I’m working.

  I saw a homeless guy, sitting on an old army blanket, his back to a building, holding a sign, THE VA THREW ME OUT!, hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard, a dented coffee can in front of him for contributions. He furtively looked both ways, reached inside his olive-drab jacket with a name stenciled on a piece of tape over his heart, and pulled out a fold-flat cell.

  “I’m at work, bitch!” I heard him growl as I passed by.

  “Feel anything, Gate?”

  “Just that it’s wrong, boss.”

  “Wrong, like in…off?”

  “When is a fucking skinner not ‘off,’ man?” Gateman half snarled. “I haven’t looked at the whole thing, just what the kid brought down for me, but…I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t know if I’m saying anything,” I admitted. “Just feeling it.”

  “This all came out of some evidence locker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cops,” Gateman said. Saying it all. There could be pieces missing. Pieces we’d never see.

  “I think they went for it, Gate.”

  “I kinda think they did, too, boss.”

  “Yeah?” I said, frankly curious. “How come?”

  “Nobody ever got jugged, right? Girl like that, crime like that, town like that, that’s heavy pressure. If they weren’t really looking to do the right thing, how hard could it be to come up with a George Whitmore?”

  I slapped Gateman’s held-out palm; hard, signifying complete agreement. The “Career Girl Murders” had shocked New York back in 1963. Daughters of the rich and famous, found raped and murdered in their own apartment. A headline story, so big that it pushed the surrender of a gutter thug who had helped kill two cops in a bar for the fun of it down to the second lead. That murder had been in Jersey, but the punk had given himself up in New York, where he and his partner had run to, looking for a place to disappear. His partner had made the other choice: they put enough bullets into him to stock a lead mine.

  Months went by before some cop got a mentally impaired black man named George Whitmore to confess to the Career Girl Murders. Big press conference. Medals and promotions. But it only took a few more months for some investigative reporters to figure out Whitmore couldn’t have done it. We’re not talking about CSI stuff here—Whitmore was in another state at the exact time the sex murders were taking place. The only “evidence” was his confession, which was about as believable as a used-car salesman deep into a nasty loan shark over his gambling debts telling you the odometer was accurate.

  But just in time—before the papers started calling for deep investigations into “police practices”—they caught the “right” guy, a dope-fiend burglar named Robles.

  Well, they didn’t actually “catch” him. What happened was that a three-time felony loser got popped for a homicide of another street-level dealer. This was when they still had the electric chair in Sing Sing, and this guy knew he was a prime candidate. He told the law that Robles had confessed to him, and he wanted to trade. Told a great story, about bloody clothes and a knife he had disposed of. Did such a great job of it that nobody could ever find them. So the cops wired him and his apartment, and waited for Robles to admit everything.

  When they got tired of waiting, they arrested Robles. A few months later, New York abolished the death penalty. By then, it was such common knowledge that Whitmore had been framed, people finally realized an innocent man could be executed. The abolition vote wasn’t even close.

 
Robles was convicted. Nobody down here thinks he did it, either. But, more than forty years later, he’s still up in Attica.

  Supposedly, he finally “admitted the whole thing.” None of us bought that one, either. Oh, we believe he said it, but we know who he said it to—the Parole Board. By then, Robles had been jugged for at least twenty years, and he’d learned the convict’s Three “R”s for dealing with the Parole Board: Remorse. Repent. Release. If you don’t say the first word, nobody even listens to the rest.

  Where I come from, the cops always get their man. Whether it’s the man isn’t always top priority.

  Anyone who thinks there’s only one law in this city is a tourist. Whitmore had been convicted of other crimes—all on “confessions”—so the man who became district attorney of Brooklyn, Eugene Gold himself, personally petitioned the court for the poor bastard’s immediate release. I still remember reading how Gold said the evidence “renders the case so weak that any possibility of conviction is totally negated.”

  Years later, Eugene Gold—yeah, the same one—gets charged with aggravated rape of a child, a ten-year-old girl. Happened in Nashville, when he was attending a convention. The victim was a prosecutor’s daughter. Gold pleaded guilty to “fondling,” and the court gave him “probation and treatment.” He was on the next plane to Israel.

  I remember that one because I showed the paper to the Mole. Got a blank stare for my efforts.

  Yeah. Citizens read the news. But we know the truth.

  “Dad wants to see you,” Terry greeted me as I walked into my place.

  “So why didn’t he just—?”

  “Just you,” the kid said, not happy about it.

  “What’s with the mope, dope?” the Prof asked him, not looking real happy himself.

  “I can’t say anything to Mom.”

  “There are things I could never tell my mother, mahn,” Clarence put in, trying to smooth things.