Dirty Fire

by Earl Merkel

  He shot a hard look at Terry, then turned back to me.

  “Pull any hard-guy shit with me and I’ll swear out a complaint against the both of you. Now I want a lawyer, and he’s going to take your bullshit material witness warrant and use it for Kleenex. And you and your bull-dyke girlfriend here are in for some fun times ahead. Remember where you heard it first.”

  Terry put a hand in his collar and pulled him to his feet. “Okay, you’ll get your lawyer. But you’ll get to call one from a cell up in Lake Tower—because that’s where you’re going, right now. Let’s take a little ride, asshole.”

  Sonnenberg straightened himself and leered at the police officer.

  “Yeah, let’s go to Lake Tower,” he said, smirking. “You poor, dumb cow.”

  He sounded like a man who knew a secret. I hoped he was right.

  • • •

  We waited near the front desk while the Chicago Police processed the paperwork that would release Sonnenberg to our custody. From behind us, a voice called. It was Phil Sozcka, and he approached with a troubled look on his face.

  “Officer Posson, I just want to tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “I was way outta line.”

  “Call me Terry, Phil,” she said, “and, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He looked abashed.

  “Back at the perp’s apartment. I want you to know I wasn’t trying to be harassing, or set up a hostile environment or anything.”

  Posson looked blank. “I still don’t get it.”

  Phil sighed. “I’ve been written up two times, and the Captain sent me to sensitivity training after both of ‘em,” he said. “That’s why they’ve had me in Records for the past month. I’ve been trying to do better, I swear to God—and I don’t do it hardly at all anymore. Except when, you know, things get all stressful. Like today.”

  Terry just looked at him, determined to wait him out.

  “My language,” he said, looking contrite. “All the ‘assholes’ and ‘shits’ and the rest when we busted in the door. It’s just a bad habit I got into because I’ve been out on the streets so long. The CPD’s got a policy against it. They take it real seriously, ‘cause it creates such a potentially damaging climate on the job. Particularly when officers are of different, uh, genders. So like I said, I’m real sorry.”

  They give medals for conduct above and beyond the call of duty, and for what Terry Posson did next, I was ready to sign the recommendation for her.

  “Phil,” Terry smiled and clapped him on the shoulder, “don’t give it a fucking second thought.”

  Chapter 17

  The way Gil Cieloczki described it to me later, when we met in his office to compare notes, he thought the interview at the Cook County Sheriff’s Police office was going to be over before it began. All he did was say a name; he was unprepared for the reaction it evoked.

  “I beg your pardon?” Gil Cieloczki said, looking across the desk at the county officer and wondering what he had done to piss him off so quickly and so thoroughly. “Lieutenant, I just thought you may have worked with the, uh…with Chief Nederlander at one time or another.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you,” Virgil Erlich said, not looking sorry at all. “And I apologize for the ‘son-of-a-bitch’ comment. I’ve only met the man once.”

  He reached for a packet of chewing gum, one of several which rested beside a desk plaque that identified Erlich as head of the Major Crimes Division, Cook County Sheriff’s Police.

  “I’ve never had any extended contact with your Mr. Nederlander, and as far as I personally know, he’s as pure as the driven snow.” He stared, with no small measure of irritation, at the firefighter seated across from him. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Mr. Cieloczki.”

  “I was given the impression that you would be candid with me, Lieutenant. Off the record, of course.”

  “Mind if I ask why you want to know all the dirt about your town’s police chief?”

  “Call it a public spirited concern.”

  “Uh-huh. Your ID says you’re a fireman. But just because a person carries a badge doesn’t make him—specifically, you, who I also don’t know from Adam—my soul brother and trusted confidante, you catch my drift?”

  He picked up the pack of gum, put it into his pocket and carefully straightened the brightly-patterned tie he wore. It was primarily scarlet, flecked with small yellow and green diamonds.

  Erlich sighed theatrically.

  “Okay, Mr. Cieloczki—I don’t seem to have the patience I used to have, so let’s cut through the crap, right? Without all the goddam dancing around the issue, you’re trying to find out if we—that is, if I—have any direct information to indicate your police department may be a little…tainted.”

  He chewed furiously for a moment.

  “First of all, that’s a hell of a thing to ask. But given the nature of the phone call I got asking me to talk to you, you’re not just trying to come up with a little juicy gossip.”

  Erlich shot a look at Gil that spoke volumes. “And by the way, the FBI is chock-full of sons-of-bitches, and my advice to you is to watch your own tail feathers if you’re dealing with that bunch. Give my regards to Santori, that jerkoff, when you see him.”

  Erlich plucked a tissue from the box on top of his desk. He delicately spat the gum into it, wrapped it almost reverently, and dropped it in the wastebasket near his feet. Almost immediately, his hand went back to his shirt pocket for another stick.

  “My second comment is, ‘Direct knowledge, no.’ I have no direct knowledge that might lead me to believe your department might not be operating in an honorable and ethical manner.”

  He looked hard at the fire chief. “But maybe you want to re-word the question.” He waited for Cieloczki to respond, then again sighed loudly.

  “Let me tell you a little story,” he said, peeling the foil back and popping the gum in his mouth. “Two or three years ago, right before Christmas, my predecessor in this office got passed a tip from the Drug Enforcement Agency boys downtown. They had word a guy we were both looking for—a small-time coke wholesaler name of Ravanza Ben El—had taken up what you might call permanent residence out in the ‘burbs.

  Erlich smiled, a cold thin line. “Mr. El, you see, had been accepting a small stipend from the DEA for finking out his competitors. He was also on our pad; as it turns out, ol’ Ravanza was dropping the dime on homies who made a habit of paying late or never. And to finish icing the cake, he had started stepping a little too hard on product that he was selling as uncut.

  “Everybody’s all-American boy, right? So when he dropped out of sight all of a sudden, we didn’t exactly figure he was off at church camp. Well, according to the federales, their snitch said we could find our boy in the trunk of a white LeBaron at the bottom of the Northside Sanitary Canal. That runs up by you, right? Anyway, he even gave up a pretty good idea of where to look. The feds wanted to keep everything at arm’s length from their office, and they figured since we were interested too we could front for them and maybe take a quiet look.

  “So, my guy said what the hell, why not, and got permission to use the County Search and Recovery dive team. The SCUBA boys were really thrilled, as you might imagine, because the ‘sanitary’ canal isn’t—it just sounds better than calling it a big deep ditch that floats Chicago’s shit out of town. It’s treated shit maybe, but to me shit’s shit. This being a beef where the DEA had expressed an interest, there wasn’t anything they could do about it, but that doesn’t keep them from wasting a couple of hours bitching about diving for dead dope dealers.”

  Erlich took a moment, repeating the ritual with the tissue and the new stick of gum. It was like the breaking of a spell, and Gil realized that he had been sitting in a tense, almost motionless paralysis during Erlich’s narrative. He tried to order his muscles to relax and only partially succeeded.

  “By the time all of this gets done, it’s past quitting time,” Erlich continued. “M
y predecessor, having those great family values you want in a civil servant, is in a hurry to get home for dinner. So he tells his secretary to send a fax to the police chief over there as a courtesy, just to let him know we’re going to be poaching on his turf, and heads home for his meatloaf and mashed. And bright and early the next morning all us grunts troop out to see if we can find the missing Mr. El.

  “I had a case where my man Ravanza was down as informant, so I got invited to the party. It was a nice sunny morning—a little cold, but the divers had those big rubber suits and anyway, there’s so much crap dissolved in that water I don’t think it ever freezes over. But even with the sun out, that damn canal was so dark and thick it looked like chocolate syrup flowing past.

  “So the S & R guys put on their tanks, rope up and go in. Not more than a minute later, bingo! There’s the vehicle. We had this big wrecker truck along—the kind they use when the big rigs tip over on the Interstate, you know?—and they winch the car up.

  “Except even covered in weeds and shit, you can see it’s not white and it’s not a LeBaron. And there’s no body in the trunk. So back in the divers go. Another minute or so, they’re waving for the winch cable. Wrong car again: it was like a Jeep Cherokee or something.

  “This goes on all morning. It’s like we discovered the damn Legendary Graveyard of Lost Cars. We got maybe two dozen of ‘em lined up on the shore—and none of them, not one, has a license plate or a VIN plaque under the windshield. A couple of the cars, you could still make out the gouge marks where somebody had pried the vehicle ID number plate right off the dash.

  “So now it’s after noon, and all of a sudden we hear these sirens and they’re getting closer and closer. Everybody’s looking up the embankment, even the divers in the water, wondering what the fuck is happening. Then half a dozen Lake Tower squad cars—Mars lights flashing, sirens wailing—come tearing over the hill and lurch to a stop in, like, a semicircle around where we’re fishing for wrecks. Out jumps the local police chief—your Mr. Nederlander—and he’s yelling about jurisdiction and waving a piece of paper that turns out to be the fax my guy’s secretary sent the night before.”

  He arched his eyebrows and smiled.

  “Except, see, she didn’t send it the night before. It was late and she wanted to get home too—so she decided, all on her own, that it wouldn’t do any harm to wait until the next morning to type up the fax to your chief. Late the next morning, as it turned out. By the time Nederlander read it, we had been hauling cars out of that damn canal for hours. But the son-of-a-bitch sure burned rubber getting down to the canal.”

  “Then what happened?” Gil asked.

  “Well, the long and the short of it is, “ Erlich said, “he threw our sorry asses out of there. He gets on his cell phone to my Sheriff, who—as luck would have it—knows your man pretty good. Seems your police chief made a habit of dropping some serious pocket change into my man’s campaign kitty over the past decade or so. Anyway, they kidded each other about their golf scores, threw a little shit about who’s doing what with whose wife. In general, yucked it up like all get-out. Then Nederlander mentioned his department had been investigating a stolen-car ring and asked why the Sheriff’s Police was in his town screwing up the case.

  “Your guy’s a pretty cool customer, I’ll give him that. I happen to be standing closest, so he’s looking right into my eyes the whole time he’s talking to my boss.”

  The investigator shook his head in what Gil was fairly certain was not admiration.

  “Nederlander cited ‘probable cause’ on the basis of the ‘evidence’ we had spent all morning gathering; then he claimed jurisdiction. Next thing I know, we’re all driving home with our peckers in our hands.”

  Erlich chuckled. “‘Probable cause’—well, he had that one right. It didn’t take a genius to figure there was a stolen vehicle report on file somewhere for every damn one of those cars. But that’s not the crime we fell into out there.”

  “I remember reading about this,” Gil said cautiously. “Something about a car theft ring operating in the area.”

  “Car theft ring, my ass,” Erlich snorted. “When somebody steals a car, it’s almost always because they can make some cash on it. They strip it for parts, carve it up in a chop shop. They smuggle it out of the country to sell to some new-rich shithead in Prague who wants to impress the local coke whores. What they don’t do is take a little joyride and dump it in a canal. Not often, and for sure not in the numbers we found out there.”

  He shook his head.

  “Nope. The probable cause at that goddam ditch wasn’t car theft. It was your basic, low-level insurance fraud. Hell, somebody gets behind on their car payments, or maybe they’re just bored with it, but they’re in the bucket and owe more than they can sell it for—they dump the damn thing and report it stolen.”

  “Sounds like a lot of trouble,” Gil said, doubtfully. “I wouldn’t have thought it’d be worth the risks.”

  “There’s more money than you’d think in it, and long as nobody looks too close, everything’s dandy. The bank gets paid, the mope collects the difference and gets out from under. Everybody’s happy but the insurance company, and they just jack up everybody else’s premiums to cover their margins.”

  “What happened with all the cars you pulled out?” Cieloczki asked. “They find out who was dumping them in there?”

  “You may have missed my subtle message about my predecessor,” Erlich said, picking up another pack of gum and putting it down gently. “At times he took a kind of …uh, low-intensity approach, particularly when something looked like it might make him late for dinner. The ‘car theft ring?’ Still an open investigation, as far as I know. I guess I could call there and ask the chief—it’s his case. But officially, I have no interest.”

  “I guess it makes it tough to trace a car if the plates and ID numbers are gone,” Gil said, his tone noncommittal.

  Erlich gave him a disgusted look. “There are traceable serial numbers stamped all over every car. They put some of ‘em in hard-to-reach places like the frame or under the engine block, but they’re there.” Erlich waved his hand dismissively. “Pulling off license plates and the dashboard VIN plaque—that’s what you do when you just want to discourage your casual observer. It won’t stop somebody who really wants to trace the vehicle.”

  Cieloczki held up his hands, palms toward Erlich. “Hey, I’m a fireman,” he smiled. “I’m just curious as to your guess on this thing. Do you think finding the cars stopped what was happening?”

  “My guess,” Erlich repeated, amused. “Okay, why not? My guess is that all we did was to screw up the lazy man’s technique for dumping cars. Most likely they stopped pushing ‘em into the canal. We may even have done somebody a favor and made ‘em more efficient. It just takes a little organizing. See, taking a cut of the insurance settlement on just one or two stolen cars is pretty chump change. The only way to make it worthwhile is to deal in a lotta volume, and over the long run that’s asking to get caught.

  “So, if they decided to get serious about it, they probably linked up with a chopper to sell the parts and started making real money on both ends of the deal. Plus, once they’ve made that connection, they probably start dealing out the stripped-out hulks as scrap to a junkyard or two where nobody asks for titles before the heap goes to the crusher. No fuss, no muss and no embarrassing questions get asked.”

  He grinned, showing Gil teeth like a wolf smiling. “Least, that’s the way I’d go about it.”

  Gil smiled back. “Still, I get the impression you have…a feeling about this incident,” he said. “Am I right?”

  Erlich pursed his lips and raised his eyes to a point above Gil’s head.

  “Being charitable of nature,” he said, as intentionally toneless as if he was giving testimony, “I interpreted everything that happened as the legitimate concern of local law enforcement to maintain control over their own jurisdiction and to preserve a potential crime scene for subsequent
investigation.”

  Erlich paused and looked Gil directly in the eye. “Were I a less trusting person, I might question why a police chief comes running out with half his police force to stop a routine search and recovery. I might wonder where all those cars came from, who owned ‘em, and how much the insurance company paid out on them. Hell, I might even want to look at whether any of the payments got made to people who wear a badge, or maybe are real good friends with somebody who does.”

  Erlich gestured significantly at the file folders stacked on his desk. “But, like my boss tells me, I have my own open cases to worry about. Hey, crime never takes a holiday, right?”

  Gil stood to leave. “Thanks for taking the time for me.” He held out his hand to Erlich, then said as if it was an afterthought, “Did you ever find your drug dealer?”

  Erlich reached for a tissue, then stopped, his hand in mid-air.

  “The missing Mr. El? How nice of you to ask. As a matter of fact, we did. A few weeks later, a couple of kids found ol’ Ravanza under a piece of dirty cardboard in a vacant building. He was smelling up the neighborhood about a block from where he used to live.”

  “Natural death?”

  “Natural as hell, given what got done to him,” Erlich retorted. “Best the pathologist could tell, what with the rat bites and everything else, somebody used a big-ass framing hammer on just about every joint in his body. Then they cut his throat right under the jawline and pulled his tongue through the slit.”

  Erlich put one hand on his brightly patterned tie and held it against his Adam’s apple. “They used to call it a ‘Colombian necktie’ before everybody started doing it.”

  “So the tip you got was completely wrong,” Gil mused. “That seems funny, your source being so specific on where to look and all.”

  “Like I said, it was a tip the Feds passed along to us from one of their snitches. They didn’t tell us who.” Erlich shrugged carelessly. “If they don’t offer, it’s not considered polite to ask. You know—it’s like a gift horse. You don’t look in its mouth.”