Dirty Fire

by Earl Merkel

  “Anyway, it’s no wonder the antisocial criminal element won so fast,” she said. “There was nobody on the other team.”

  • • •

  Lenny Washburn walked me up the metal stairways that led to the street above. On Michigan Avenue, in the growing shadow of the Wrigley Building, Len raised his arm and a yellow taxicab swerved to the curb.

  “So,” he said. “What did I tell you? You got what you needed, right?”

  “It’s scary as hell, Lenny,” I said. “She makes the whole world sound like a neighborhood going bad. But, yeah—it’s helping me get a handle on what I’m dealing with. This Mikhail: he’s something out of your worst nightmare. Even after he found out that Kathleen Levinstein knew nothing, he kept working on her until she died.”

  “Where’d you come up with that?” Washburn scoffed. “You’re guessing now.”

  “No. We had the forensic pathologists take another look at the bone we recovered from the ashes,” I said. “It was a femur—a leg bone. They found a series of spaced, microscopic nicks on it. The marks were consistent with what Mikhail did to Katya Butenkova.”

  “Don’t forget our deal,” he said, climbing alone into the back seat. “Russian Mafioso, stolen artwork, arson and murder. Not to mention the other stuff it’s wrapped in. I love it!”

  I looked at him through the cab window, the skin on my face feeling suddenly tight.

  “There’s at least four dead people here, Len,” I said. “There’s people I know in a hospital right now, and they’re lucky to be alive. So don’t love it too damn much, okay?”

  Washburn held both hands palm up. “All I meant is we’re partners, right? It’s your story, Davey—but it’s my book, hey?”

  I nodded. “Soon as I know what I’m sitting on.”

  He winked as the cab started forward.

  “You know what you’re sitting on,” he said, irrepressible as ever, unable to resist a last lame joke thrown from the window of the departing taxi. “That’s what we’re both trying to save.”

  Chapter 32

  It was shortly after four o’clock before I returned to the Lake Tower Municipal Center. I was about to pull into a parking slot when Chaz Trombetta’s car, coming from the opposite direction, slid to a stop alongside. His window was already rolled down.

  “I heard about Posson and Bird,” he said without greeting. “Are they going to be okay?”

  I nodded. “They were lucky. By all rights, they ought to be dead right now. They were in way over their heads.”

  Chaz’s face was grim and tight-lipped.

  “Aren’t we all,” he said, not as a question. “This shit has got to stop, damn it. It’s time we had that talk, J.D. But not here.”

  I looked at him closely. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his face appeared slack and parchment-shaded, as if it had been weathered outside over a hard winter. “I have a…workout scheduled at the health club at six,” I said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “Sure,” Chaz replied sarcastically. “I really want to be seen driving around with you, don’t I? How about I meet you there instead. I think I remember where you park.” He looked directly into my eyes. “Six o’clock. Bring your friend Ronnie. He might be interested, too.”

  He drove off without another word, and I went inside to make the telephone call.

  • • •

  This time I brought along a vacuum bottle, filled for me by a teenaged clerk at a Starbucks along the way. As I checked in at the desk, the aluminum container tucked deep inside my bag, I felt a bit like a smuggler passing through Turkish customs.

  Ron Santori was in the health club meeting room when I arrived. Within minutes, Chaz Trombetta opened the door and entered. We all shook hands, awkwardly, as if we were little more than strangers. In the light of the situation, perhaps we were.

  I handed Chaz a paper cup filled with coffee.

  “Davey says you want to cooperate,” Santori said. “You know the way it works. It’s probably a good idea for you to get a lawyer.”

  “Yeah,” Chaz said. “I have a lawyer—I think. Whenever I try to call him, his secretary tells me he’s not available and he’ll call me back. My guess is he’s trying to write a book.”

  “Same thing’s happening when I call somebody in Justice,” Santori sympathized. “It’s that goddam Grisham. Ever since he got rich and famous, every lawyer in the country is trying to write a best seller. Problem is, lot of these guys can’t write their own name.”

  “It’d surprise me if my lawyer could spell his own name,” Trombetta replied, “but he sure knows how to churn a case. Keeps those billings coming, you know? They must learn it in law school.”

  “Well, you know what they say about lawyers,” Santori said. “Ninety-nine percent of them give the rest a bad name.”

  Chaz was too tense to respond to the joke. “Yeah. Anyway, when we get down to the deal making, I’ll be represented by legal counsel. Meanwhile, I just want to get out from under all this, and I want to get started now.”

  Santori took a microcassette tape recorder out of his pocket.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “No recording—at least, not yet. I told Chaz we’d agree to use him as a deep-background informant. Nothing goes on the record until he gets a deal that protects his interests.”

  Santori smiled. “No,” he said, “my bet is that you didn’t tell him anything like that. But I’ll go along with it anyway, for now.” He looked at Chaz. “If you’re straight with me, I’ll play it straight with you. So for now, it’s deep background—but you don’t hold anything back unless it’s directly self-incriminating, understand?”

  Chaz Trombetta looked briefly at me, then turned his eyes back to the FBI agent. He nodded, once.

  Santori put the recorder on the table, pushing it off to the side.

  “All right,” he said. “So let’s start with a name. Who’s in charge? Who set up the system, Chaz?”

  “Bob Nederlander,” Chaz said, and I realized I had been holding my breath. I had long known Nederlander was dirty—but knowing it as a gut-level belief is far different from being able to prove it as fact. I also knew my former partner; if Chaz said it, incontrovertible proof existed somewhere.

  “Nederlander came up with the idea of scamming insurance companies with phony car theft reports,” Trombetta said. “He’s been running that play for a couple of years, up until last summer or so.”

  I interrupted. “Old news, Chaz. Before I was tossed, we already figured Nederlander for that. Let’s fast-forward a little. How’d they drag you into it, Chaz?”

  Trombetta took a deep breath and blew it out in a long, sustained hiss. He sounded disgusted with himself.

  “You were the object lesson, J.D.—the stick,” he said. “After you were busted, Nederlander called me in for a little chat. He knew you had been feeding information to these guys”—he thrust his chin in the direction of Santori—“and he arranged it so you’d hear about those phony chop-shop guys ‘bribing’ the local cops. Said he figured you’d go there and do something dramatic, right in the middle of a county sting operation. He said you always did try a little too hard, J.D.”

  Chaz tried to smile and failed dismally. “Anyway, he told me what I could expect if I wanted to rock the boat. Remember, old buddy—at the time you were in county lockup, looking at maybe five years hard time. I was still out here, alone. He asked me if I liked wondering which of my fellow officers would be watching my back every time I kicked in a perp’s door. Then he showed me the carrot—a lot of carrots. Asked me if I was in or out. So I made the choice. Now I’m living with it.”

  “We’ll want dates and times when you make your formal statement. For now, let’s try some details on how it all fit together,” Santori said, smoothly moving the interrogation into deeper waters. Chaz, painfully aware of how far he had already drifted, had to follow.

  “They had—hell, who am I fooling? We had rules,” Chaz said, his lips twisting bitterly. “We didn’t
shit where we eat, which means we mainly left Lake Tower alone when we were working our little moneymakers. We’d hit the unincorporated areas in the county or go down into the city. About the only thing we did local was the stolen-car scam.”

  He laughed bitterly, a short bark. “It was so convenient to dump ‘em in the Sanitary Canal. You’d drive it out, pop off the plates and dashboard VIN, and roll it in. Afterward, one of the guys would drive you back. Sometimes it wouldn’t be ten minutes, and you’d be home drinking a beer and watching your own TV.”

  “Exactly how did that scam work, Chaz?” Santori asked, sounding sincerely interested, as if he was inquiring about the best fertilizer to use on his lawn. “For instance, the claims. Any problem with getting claims through the insurance companies?”

  “When I first got into it, there was no problem with anything—they had the system down to a routine. Nederlander handled the theft reports out of his own office, and the ‘victims’ would just file their claims through normal channels. We’d confirm and forward a copy of the report to the carrier.”

  “Sure,” Santori said. “But everybody knew it would look suspicious if Lake Tower suddenly turned into the car-theft capital of the Midwest. So the people who were in on it—I’d guess friends and family members at first, then other folks you figured you could trust—started making their reports to other police departments, saying the cars were boosted in those towns. Then they’d call the insurance people and make a claim. Is that about right, Chaz?”

  Chaz snorted again.

  “More or less,” he said. “Usually by the time they filed a report, the cars were already in the canal.”

  “How did Nederlander control the insurance side?” I asked.

  “Word was that by then Nederlander had found somebody at the insurance company, on the inside,” Trombetta said. “He made sure the claims would be called in at certain times, like real early in the morning or at particular hours over weekends. That way he could be sure of getting them into the system without a lot of questions being asked. But that was Nederlander’s side of it; the rest of us weren’t in on names or many of the details.”

  “What made it stop?” Santori asked.

  Chaz twisted his mouth sourly.

  “About a year ago, County got a tip to look for a body in the canal, right where we were sinking cars,” he said. “Nobody exactly thought it was a coincidence, but it must have really freaked out Nederlander. A couple of the guys wanted to keep going, only find a new way to lose the cars. But after a few more months, Nederlander pulled the plug on the whole deal.”

  “He said he was ending the car-ring operation?”

  “Temporarily—that’s what he said at first. Next thing I hear, there’s a new bunch of chop-shop professionals in the area, and Nederlander passes the word they’ve got a free ride from us. Maybe he figured getting paid for protection was the safer way to go. Whatever, it kind of retired all of us from the faked-claim business.”

  “What came next, Chaz?” I asked. “What are you guys into now?”

  “It turned into a friggin’ free-for-all, that’s what happened,” Chaz replied, addressing the response to Santori. “Getting stiffed out of the car-theft scam cut out the major source of income for everybody involved. We had gotten used to the money; some of us had made commitments, counting on it being there.”

  Chaz’s eyes fell, and I wondered how many nights he had spent sleepless, thinking about the ultimate cost—for all of his family—to landscape his yard or put a daughter through Notre Dame.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Chaz looked up at me. He tried to hold my eyes and failed.

  “So everybody started scrambling around to find their own little sideline to make up the difference,” he said. “Some of the guys are shaking down the betting professionals—just the independents, of course, which keeps it all pretty penny-ante. Others started stepping on tavern owners just outside Lake Tower, in the unincorporated areas.”

  “You mean shakedowns,” Santori said. “Extortion.”

  “Whatever.” Chaz didn’t rise to the bait. “Guys who put an electronic poker terminal in back, near the restrooms. Or maybe they have a cigarette machine, but if you look real close you see the packs don’t always have state tax stickers on ‘em. Penny-ante crap, sure. But what the hell—we’re dealing with players here. It’s kind of like collecting the local taxes, right?”

  “That’s got to put you in competition with the mob boys, doesn’t it?” Santori speculated. “Wouldn’t seem the smartest business venture you people could have taken. Not for the long run.”

  “Nobody’s thinking about the long run these days,” Chaz retorted. “For the past few months, it’s been like ‘make your money now, because it’s all going down the tube.’ A few of my fellow law enforcement colleagues have even decided to go somewhere a little heavier.”

  This time, we waited him out.

  “The First National Bank of Crack,” Chaz said. “You know—drive down to the city for a little hunting trip. Grab one of the shitheads selling on a corner, sweat an address out of him. Then they just kick the door, flash the badge and leave with whatever cash they find. A little armed robbery, that all it is. So what if it’s out of our jurisdiction? Or if they get a wrong address every now or then.”

  “Serve and protect,” I said, not trying to make it easier on him. “Classy bunch you’re hanging with these days, Chaz.”

  “It gets even classier,” Chaz said and shook his head in disgust. “Now, the latest thing is fairy shaking.”

  He glanced over at Santori, who had sketched an expression of polite inquiry on his face. He too was disinclined to ease Chaz’s journey.

  My former partner leaned back in his chair, trying to sound jovial.

  “Hey, Davey—you remember a couple of years back when the department got the federal grant to buy all that electronic surveillance equipment? Well, these days it’s getting put to a brand-new use. The guys sign out a video camera and stake out the Alamo, or the Tom Cat—the gay bars over in Polktown and Westphalia Springs,” Chaz said, for Santori’s benefit. “Or sometimes they’ll pick one of the sleazier places downtown that specializes in boy-on-boy porno flicks.

  “Any event, they’ll check the cars parked on the street. If they see one with a child safety seat or one of those ‘My kid’s an honor student at’ stickers, they write down the license plate and wait. Camera’s rolling, pointed at the door of the bar or the theater. If one of the creepies coming out gets in that car and drives away, they got a fairy hit.

  “They use the department computer to run the guy’s plate. The next day, guy gets a call at home. Depending on how he reacts, they’ll let him know they have him on camera, maybe even drop him a copy,” Chaz said. “The poor dumb schmuck either pays up, or everybody finds out what side of the plate he swings from. Courtesy of your local law enforcement.”

  He looked nauseated, like he had tasted something indescribably foul and wanted to spit.

  Santori’s voice was calm, encouraging, almost seductive. “And throughout all of this, you continued to work cases as a Lake Tower detective—is that correct? For instance, you worked the Levinstein homicides, didn’t you?”

  “I did some of the legwork on the Levinstein case,” Trombetta said, carefully. “One time or another, just about everybody in the detective bureau got pulled into it. It’s a major case for the department.”

  “To your knowledge,” Santori asked, equally carefully, “was that case handled in a legitimate way? For example, case supervision. It seems an awfully important investigation to assign to a relatively inexperienced investigator, doesn’t it?”

  Chaz blew out a deep breath.

  “Nederlander set up an arrangement with Terry Posson,” he said. “She got to be the lead investigator on the case, officially, but in every other way Bob Nederlander had direct control of the investigation.”

  “His idea,” I asked, “not hers?”

  Chaz nodded. “It didn’t
exactly thrill her, but the kid’s hungry to make detective grade. The way I hear it, he sold it to her on the basis that this way, she’d get the credit when the case was solved.”

  Santori made a short note on his legal pad, as if Trombetta had cleared up a minor point of confusion.

  “So Terry Posson got the job of lead investigator,” he mused. “What was supposed to be in it for Nederlander? Were he and Posson…involved?”

  Chaz laughed out loud, though not with mirth.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Nederlander told a few of his people that he thought she might be lesbian. Once he called her his ‘bull-dyke girlfriend.’ What I know of the bastard, that means he probably tried and she handed him his head back.”

  “So what was it?” Santori persisted.

  “Nederlander supposedly told her he was on the hook with the affirmative action people,” Chaz grinned. “Hell, that part of it is probably true. We don’t have any women carrying gold shields. She’d be the first, and all she had to do was pass on the directions Nederlander gave her.”

  Trombetta’s expression turned serious.

  “Problem was, the way he was running the investigation didn’t make any sense. Like, for the first month after the murders, he had Posson keep me running a canvass of gas stations and convenience stores, showing clerks a picture of Levinstein. I was supposed to ask, like, had he bought any gasoline in suspicious quantities. Dumbshit questions like that about a guy who was dead before the fire started.”

  “Not real productive,” Santori agreed noncommittally.

  “Went that way for almost two months,” Chaz said. “Oh, there was a lot of activity—hell, we questioned Levinstein’s employees four or five times, asking the same routine crap each time. It made for a helluva lot of reports but zip results.”

  I was watching him carefully, noting the hesitations, the inflections, and all the other signs Chaz was so clearly broadcasting.

  Whether indirectly or not, he was deeply involved in a conspiracy to commit fraud, blackmail, extortion, armed robbery and more; it was not the stuff that would have sat easily on the conscience of Chaz Trombetta. He might have come to an uneasy accommodation with them. But there was still a line he had drawn, still certain crimes that he could not countenance.