“No obvious sign of trauma on the corpse,” he said. “No way to know how the kid died without talkin’ to someone. I doubt, since there ain’t much of this corpse left, the coroner’s gonna find anything.”
“Right,” I said.
“We don’t assume, just because we found the kid in a window well, that he’s a murder victim. We get too many of these things.”
I felt cold, despite the room’s mugginess. “What’s next, then?”
Sinkovich folded the list in half again, using his thumb and forefinger.
“Procedure is first we figure out if it’s murder. In the cases of skeletal remains, we don’t got a lot to go on. We look for bullet wounds or fractures or something like that. We don’t got that here. Then we try to figure out if it’s negligent homicide. The drug mothers, most of the time that’s what it was. And then we decide if it’s prosecutable.”
That shiver ran through me again. “How do you figure that out?”
“Higher-ups usually make that decision. But mostly, we put these ladies away in some kind of mental-health place, detox ’em, at least the first time. Then if they have another kid, and the same thing happens, we put the bitch away for life.”
“You’d let another child go through that?” I asked in spite of myself.
“First offense, tough to prove,” Sinkovich said. “Even a public defender can handle one of those. Babies die for no reason all the damn time. I had a cousin, she had a perfectly healthy baby. Put it to bed one night, next morning she comes in and the baby’s blue. They did a damn autopsy on that kid, at my cousin’s insistence, and didn’t find nothing. The kid just stopped breathing for no apparent reason. And this was in a nice, middle-class house where the kid was fed regular. It’s a lot worse in places like this, where there’s rats the size of dogs and bugs everywhere, and filth in the fuckin’ air.”
This time, I slid back in my chair. I’d understood LBJ’s War on Poverty. I’d seen the kids outside of Memphis with the bloated stomachs and the big eyes. I used to give money to the church relief programs, and donate food every Thanksgiving. But I never really thought about the day-to-day living, not until I started inspecting houses for Laura.
Even then, I wasn’t sure the reality of these lives penetrated. I did what I could and then walked away.
“We get a second offense,” Sinkovich said. “You know, the second kid dies the same way—starving or something—we can prosecute. Usually, it don’t come to that. Usually with the detox, we introduce these women—girls, really—to someone they can go to if they get pregnant again. If they’re on dope, then they might not even remember the act what got ’em pregnant, and they’re more than happy to give up the baby.”
“What if they’re not on dope?” I asked.
“Jesus.” He shook his head. “Then it’s usually something sad. Can’t afford medicine for a kid with a fever, baby didn’t breathe right from the minute it was born, that kinda thing. Most of these women can’t afford a hospital at all. They don’t get care in the beginning, and they have the baby at home, in all that dirt. So the kid contracts something, dies, and then what? You can’t afford to go to the doctor to have a baby, you sure as hell can’t afford to bury the thing.”
The pizza wasn’t sitting too well in my stomach. “And the procedure?”
“Those cases?” Sinkovich crumpled the list, then realized what he had done. He smoothed it out again. “Depends. We always try to find out the whys, if we can, but we don’t put a lot of effort into it. And if there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, what’re we gonna do? Charge them with illegally burying a corpse? It’s a friggin’ misdemeanor. What does that get us?”
I nodded toward the list. “So you didn’t need this after all.”
“I’m not plannin’ to do much,” Sinkovich said. “First off, I can’t. Not with my life the way it is, and my standing at the job. But even if I could, I wouldn’t. Too much heartache for everyone. So I’ll wait for the official coroner’s report, if I ever get it, and maybe call one or two of these people on the list, then, you know, something else’ll come up.”
I nodded, feeling sadder than I had in days.
“You gotta let this one go, Bill.”
I started. I wasn’t sure he had ever used my first name before.
“I learnt that from early on,” Sinkovich said. “That’s why cops get so hard, especially those what work in the bad parts of town. You can’t think about the kid.”
“Someone has to,” I said.
“Sure, and you are,” Sinkovich said. “You’re gonna take him when the coroner’s done, and you’re gonna make sure he gets a nice little funeral. And that’s what you can do. Because there ain’t no justice in this one. Not for him, not for you, certainly not for his family.”
I stood up. I couldn’t sit any longer. The room seemed tighter and closer than it had before.
“You gotta concentrate on the living.” Sinkovich shoved the crumpled paper into his pants pocket. “My old partner told me that first time we came across one of these. Pissed me off royal back then, but he was right. You gotta concentrate on the ones that’s left.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, not sure I truly agreed with him.
“Look, I’ll make good case notes. I’ll go over that list, give this a little time. Maybe we can put a name on that grave you’ll be payin’ for. But that’s probably the most we can hope for, and we may not want even that.”
He stood and clapped a hand on my back.
“Sorry, Grimshaw,” he said, and let himself out of my office.
I continued to stand there for a moment. I heard him talking to Laura in the living room, their voices soft, but I couldn’t hear Jimmy.
Looking out for the living. Wasn’t that what I was doing with Jimmy, when he actually held the secret to Martin’s death? Martin was a great man, but he was gone. And if I put Jimmy out there so that he could testify against unknown men, he might not survive the week.
Looking out for the living.
It sounded easier than it actually was. There was no justice in it, only survival.
But sometimes, survival was all we had.
EIGHTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, Franklin had driving duties. He picked Jimmy up at seven-thirty, and I was left alone to face a new day.
I hadn’t slept well. Sinkovich’s words echoed in my mind, and I felt like I was missing something important. Laura had not stayed. We didn’t sleep together around Jimmy, something we had never discussed. It had simply become a habit which neither of us questioned.
I found it fascinating; in some ways, we were more old-fashioned than we cared to admit.
I cleaned up the breakfast dishes, and made a grocery list, since we were out of nearly everything except beer. Sinkovich had left his Old Milwaukee behind—Grimshaw, he’d said with a grin, some of your snobby friends might actually enjoy a brewski instead of that hoity-toity stuff you keep around here—and try as I might, I couldn’t get him to take his brewskis home.
When I finished the list, I wandered into my office and stared at the paper Laura had given me the night before. Her list was shorter than either of Marvella’s, but none of the names overlapped. Since Laura had clarified Marvella’s reasons for wanting this investigation—her fear that Valentina, even if she came out of the coma, would never tell her who this butcher was—everything seemed clearer to me.
I also realized that I might be investigating these names and others for a long time.
The night before, Marvella, Laura, and I had brainstormed ways for me to approach people to find out who some of the other abortionists were in Chicago and the surrounding areas. The women had devised an entire script for me, which, after my encounter with the teenagers near the Castle Church, made a lot of sense to me.
I planned to use the script that afternoon, as I started digging into the rest of the names and searching for the ones who had changed location. My first plan, however, was to do the most simple thing in the world. I was
going to go through the phone book, looking for the names on the two lists.
Sometimes the most obvious method was the one that worked.
But first I had some household errands to complete, and I would use the morning to finish those before spending my afternoon on Marvella’s case.
After I cleaned up the kitchen, I called Chicagoland Southside Insurance. They owed a check for the two reports I had finished for them, and they had more work for me as well. I put off the work for another week, but did tell them I would stop by for the check.
By early afternoon, I had Southside’s check in my wallet and was unloading groceries out of my Impala. As I did, I toyed with the idea of going to the hospital to check on Valentina Wilson. She, more than Marvella and Laura, was my motivation for this case.
It was the second stormy day in a row. Even though the weather wasn’t as muggy as it had been the day before, thunderstorms had rolled through with amazing regularity, shaking buildings, and dropping sheets of rain for fifteen minutes before stopping.
I had avoided getting drenched, mostly by waiting out the storms, but the ground was covered with large puddles. By the time I got to my apartment building, my cuffs and shoes were soaked.
As I crossed the porch, thunder boomed again and lightning zigzagged across the sky. A few drops of rain splattered on the sidewalk behind me, so loud that they sounded like slaps.
I knew what was coming next. I hurried inside as the heavens opened for the fifth time that day.
Even though I moved quickly, I still got wet. I shook off at the entry, checked the mailbox, and found only an advertising circular. Then I started up the staircase.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim indoor light, I realized someone was sitting at the top of the stairs. I frowned, wondering what was going on, and then I recognized Jack Sinkovich.
He looked as bedraggled as I felt. His clothing was soaked. He had been sitting in the same spot long enough to create a puddle of his own. His hair was plastered to his skull, and he looked grim.
“Bad news?” I asked.
“You haven’t heard, then?” His voice was flat.
I shook my head, balancing the groceries in one arm and fishing for my keys. “Did the coroner find something on the baby? I thought he wasn’t even getting to the case for weeks.”
“No,” Sinkovich said. “It’s not the baby.”
Something in his tone made me stop. I was still six steps from the top, so that we were able to look at each other face-to-face.
He looked like he had lost fifteen pounds overnight. His eyes were bloodshot, and his cheeks were hollow. He hadn’t even looked this bad the night his wife threw him out of the house.
“It’s not Jimmy, is it?” I asked.
Sinkovich shook his head.
“Laura?” I didn’t like how my voice sounded. Strangled, frightened. Not my voice at all.
“I figured no one would tell you,” Sinkovich said. “So I come over soon as I heard. Get your rain gear. I’ll tell you on the way.”
My mind was still running scenarios. What would get Jack Sinkovich to my front door because he was concerned about me?
I couldn’t come up with anything.
“Tell me first,” I said.
He studied me for a long moment, then said, “They found Johnson.”
Whatever I had expected him to say, it wasn’t that. “Truman Johnson?”
“Yeah.”
“Found him?” I said. “I didn’t know he was missing.”
“They found him,” Sinkovich said again, “outside Greenwood’s Tavern on the Gaza Strip. He’d been shot.”
I felt a surge of adrenaline “Where’d they take him?”
“Nowhere yet,” Sinkovich said.
It took a moment for his words to sink in. “He’s dead?”
Sinkovich nodded.
I had to struggle with the grocery bag to keep from dropping it. “Who did it?”
“They don’t know.” But his tone said that someone did.
“They have a guess, though, right?”
“Grimshaw, he was shot on the Gaza Strip. Outside of Greenwood’s. Of course they got a hunch.”
I felt slightly dizzy, as if I had forgotten to breathe. “They think it was a gang hit? On Truman?”
“All I know is what I got from dispatch, and it’s got all the markings.”
“Why would the gangs gun for him?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Sinkovich said.
My mind flashed on Truman Johnson, sitting in that smoke-hazed waiting room, his hands clenched between his knees.
“This can’t be right,” I said. “He wasn’t even working this week.”
“It’s him, Bill.” Sinkovich stood. His clothing dripped onto the fine old wood. “Get your rain gear. I’m taking you down there.”
NINETEEN
THEY CALLED the neighborhood around Sixty-fifth Street and Woodlawn the Gaza Strip because it was the most hotly disputed gang territory in Chicago. The Blackstone Rangers ruled all of the South Side to the east, and the East Side Disciples ruled the west.
Their territories met at Sixty-fifth and Woodlawn, which was often no-man’s land. Lately, I had heard, it had become Stones territory, but who knew how long that would last. When I had first heard of the Gaza Strip last summer, it had been in the hands of King David and his Disciples.
No one went down there without a good reason. No one in his right mind, not cop, not working adult, passed through, no one except teenagers bent on destruction. A lot of gang murder victims were found there—killed somewhere else and dragged into a gutter at the disputed turf near Sixty-fifth and Woodlawn.
But that wasn’t what crossed my mind as Sinkovich drove us south from my apartment in his beat-up Ford. What went through my mind was Johnson, the man I had known. The man I had worked with on two separate occasions.
He may have been difficult, but he was a good cop. And good cop rule number one was to never venture into gang country all alone.
Twice Sinkovich had to pull over as water poured from the sky, turning the streets into rivers. Sinkovich sat patiently, his hands on the wheel, while the car shivered and shook with the force of the rain.
He kept the radio off—whether to protect me or because he had no interest, I didn’t know and didn’t much care. As we got into the car, he turned his police band down, so all I could hear was the occasional crackle of static.
He was off duty, which gave him a certain amount of freedom. I asked—in the apartment, in the car, I wasn’t sure which—if they minded our coming to the crime scene, and he said that he doubted it. Whenever a cop died, the others came as if it were a holy site.
It didn’t feel as if we were traveling to a holy site to me. I felt shaken and slightly hollow, unable to believe that Johnson was dead. I had just seen him two days before—and we had parted badly.
What had he done then? Gone back to his desk?
“You’re sure it’s Truman?” I asked on one of our pullovers.
“Dispatch’s been pretty clear,” Sinkovich said.
“Gang country.” I shook my head. “That doesn’t sound like him.”
But I wasn’t sure who he was. We weren’t really friends. I hadn’t even known he was married—or divorced—until Sunday, and I knew even less about the rest of his family. I only had one sense of the man, a professional sense. And in the middle of that was a certain recklessness that had startled me.
Was that what had brought him to the Gaza Strip?
Sinkovich didn’t say anything. He had been amazingly quiet since he followed me into my apartment. He had been the one who had put away my groceries, and had found my raincoat, along with a battered hat, which had probably once been Franklin’s since I didn’t recognize it. Sinkovich even found some galoshes, which I refused to wear. My shoes were already wet. I didn’t need to risk another pair on this weather, even with protective rubber around them.
While Sinkovich searched for my gear, I called Franklin and just
managed to catch him before he left the office. I asked him to keep Jimmy for the evening, feeling guilty the entire time.
I knew how important it was to be with Jimmy these days. I also knew that Franklin disapproved of the way I was taking care of Jim. This was just one more nail in that coffin.
As we waited out the rain, I realized I could have called Laura. She would have been happy to take Jimmy for the night. But relying on her had never been my first reflex. When I had first come to Chicago, she and I were estranged. I had never gotten into the habit of asking her first to step in on an emergency basis.
It took Sinkovich and I nearly a half an hour to get down to the Gaza strip. I could have walked quicker in that driving rain, but I needed Sinkovich to get me on that crime scene.
I had a feeling—maybe it was a hope—that the body wasn’t Johnson’s, that someone had made a mistake. I would go in and disprove the initial claim, and then the investigation would go on from there.
The Gaza Strip looked like a war zone. Burned and gutted buildings—not from riots, but from everyday living, every day fighting—covered both sides of the street. A few taverns remained open, as well as a pawn shop, and an all-night grocery with barred windows and doors.
The rain-created river on Woodlawn carried all sorts of trash in its waves—needles, crumpled paper, beer cans. No one seemed to care that so much stuff was floating toward the rain gutters, and disappearing into Chicago’s sewers, maybe forever.
Sinkovich pulled up on the sidewalk not far from Greenwood’s. It looked like a place that had long ago lost its soul. On one side, a burned building tumbled into itself. On the other, a three-story apartment building rose like the desiccated survivor of an unspeakable tragedy.
The police had set up a makeshift tarp tent over the crime scene, and official-looking people in official clothing were taking pictures inside, creating miniature lightning flashes that echoed the large ones still splitting the sky.
I counted five official cop cars, parked in a U so that no one could get around them. Another half a dozen cars parked haphazardly on the street, lights on, flashers creating red reflections in the muddy water.
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