by Scott Simon
“‘We'll see.’”
“I'll ask. Maybe she smelled a rat in the garage. What's the projected cost?” Sunny asked.
“A million and a half,” said Eldad.
“That's a lot of digital rectal exams.”
“Those aren't the fingers to worry about,” Eldad replied, flexing the digits on his right hand. “Miles doesn't miss many targets of opportunity. Speaking of which … Luis Zamora wants a TEZ for Breslau Brewing's old warehouse. To expand their adult learning center. He's with Arty out of the chute, but …”
The 31st Ward alderman ran a beer distributorship, delivering nine different brands from national brews to Pilsen Pilsner to restaurants and taverns.
“On Fullerton?” asked Sunny. “I saw a coffee bar nearby just a few months ago. That's usually the first sign. Then a wine shop, then an organic grocer, then next thing, Hilton wants the warehouse.”
“But until they do,” said Eldad. “The brewery keeps the building off the tax rolls.”
“Christ, that's clever,” said Sunny. “I guess that's why some of us drink beer, and others own the breweries.”
Their car was moving as slowly as if two men were pushing it through heavy snow. They were only now approaching State Street, and the short arm of the old green Field's clock was rising toward one in the window over Eldad's shoulder. Sunny sighed, smiled, loosened his maroon muffler, and touched a button at his right elbow to lower the tinted window just enough for cold, fresh air to whistle into the car.
“Making an empty warehouse into an educational center. Jobs. Adult classes. Immigrants holding jobs and learning English. I could vote for that.”
“He votes for ours,” Eldad reminded him. The site of an old auto body shop on North Clark had been declared a TEZ, and the block now held a chain bagel shop, a franchise coffee shop, and Clarabelle's Preschool.
“Maybe we should remind Luis that he can waste his vote on the first ballot,” said Sunny. “But on the second, he has a chance to bring Mayor Barrow into office, and Mayor Barrow knows how to express her appreciation.”
(Sunny was appalled to hear Brooks Whetstone's expression emerge from his own mouth.)
Eldad said that Vernetta Hynes Griffin of the 37th was a sure vote for Vera on all ballots, but she had a concern.
“She wants to delay implementation of Eleven-B.”
It was an ordinance, set to take effect in March, which required trash compactors for all buildings that produced fifty or more cubic yards of garbage a week.
“It's been a year,” Sunny pointed out. “They should be ready.”
“Fuel prices,” Eldad reminded him, raising a hand from the middle of his chest to just above his forehead. “Vernetta says that the landlords on Austin Boulevard are locked into leases. They can't pass on the costs. They've had to take money they were going to spend on trash compactors and pay for heat.”
“We had a trash smasher installed at the restaurant,” said Sunny. “It's a thousand, fifteen hundred.”
“But apartment buildings on Austin Boulevard?” asked Eldad. “Do we want them to choose between giving heat to residents and squeezing trash into bunny pellets?”
“That's why we pass laws,” Sunny said, squirming at the slow pace and blasting heat. “They're not supposed to choose. Trash compactors keep rats away. If Vernetta's landlords think trash compactors are expensive, they should weigh the costs of paying a settlement to the parents of the first sleeping child that gets bitten by a rat on March second.”
Sunny drummed his fingers along an armrest and tipped his head on the back of the long black seat.
“She wants a delay, alderman, not a suspension,” Eldad said just above Sunny's drumroll. “Just to give the landlords a couple of warmer months to catch up. April and May. She's with Vera. But she says that friends have to know that friendship is worth something.”
Sunny rolled his muffler over and over in his hands, as if wrapping something fragile, then stretched it out with an audible snap.
“Maybe three months isn't so bad,” he said finally. “Blame global warming. Unscrupulous oil companies.”
Eldad squeezed two fingers into his pants pocket and pulled out a scrap of card stock.
“Sanford Booker,” he announced. “Has two people who want jobs in the Bureau of Forestry, cutting down trees. He says they're the best qualified. He knows them—they've worked for his contracting company. That's why he has to stay away from writing a recommendation.”
“It's also why we do. A letter, a phone call, this close to the special council session—stupid.”
Eldad pressed the scrap of paper against his chest with a finger.
“Why don't we tell Sandy that Mayor Barrow will be pleased to work with the alderman on seeing that the best possible public servants are hired in the city of Chicago? The only recommendation that Dr. Daryl Lloyd will have the authority to make after Monday is to floss nightly.”
Eldad tented his fingers over a knee and brightened.
“I almost forgot to tell you: Vernetta says that Daryl offered to do a dental implant for Emil Wagner.” The 32nd Ward alderman was a home security consultant with a heavy red rump roast of a face. Eldad waggled the scrap of paper until it made a flapping sound. “I even wrote down the particulars: tooth number five, upper right. A lateral incisor.”
“Daryl once offered to a repair a crown for me,” Sunny recalled. “But I thought he'd only steal the gold filling.”
The car had finally pulled to a stop on Randolph Street. Officer Mayer had softly told Sgt. Gallaher that it could take another fifteen minutes to pull around to the LaSalle Street entrance of the hall, but she could observe Sunny's impatience and fidgeting and asked if he would like to make the walk from there.
“Thirty to forty steps,” she said. “But, with these crowds, sir, I'll have to ask that you wait until I can get two uniforms out in front.” She leaned into the door while speaking into the radio on her belt and rocked open the door long enough for a blast of wind to blow the tassels of Sunny's muffler against his ears, tickling. When the car door had snapped closed and silence had returned, Eldad sat back and just said softly to Sunny, “Ivan.”
The 41st Ward alderman ran a neighborhood credit union.
“Arty.”
“Yes. But. He wants traffic on runway fourteen R-thirty-two L cut after eleven p.m.”
Sunny had unwound his muffler and now stretched it between his hands.
“Every few months we go through this. You've got long-range jets coming in from Hong Kong, Tokyo. You've got—”
“He's got constituents who say the sound depreciates their property.”
“Did they think that the northwest side was an old growth forest? There's the whole state of Maine for those who want the quiet life. He can't get Arty to sign on?”
“Alderman Agras apparently shares your analysis. As well as bedbugs with the Air Traffic Controllers and the Transport Worker's unions.”
“Losing a couple of hundred jobs on a shift at the airport depreciates property too,” said Sunny. “A few homeowners are getting their windows rattled. The people who work there—apartment dwellers—can lose their jobs. An international airport has to be a twenty-four-hour operation. Otherwise, they'll start building them in Nowheresville, and nobodies get the jobs.”
“Homeowners stay put and vote,” Eldad reminded him. “People who lose their jobs can wind up moving to—At-a-lanta.” He pronounced the name as if it were one of the smallest of three hundred volcanic isles of the Aleutian Islands.
Sgt. Gallaher opened the door about a foot wide and leaned down to declare, “Whenever you're ready, alderman.” Sunny saw small grains of snow dance and melt in the wind sluicing into the car and leaned over to tap Eldad's knees with his ungloved knuckles.
“I wonder,” he said. “Put in a call to the general manager at the big arena right across from the runways at I-90. That arena changes names more than a porn star. They've got basketball games and beauty pageants the
re all the time. I never once heard somebody say, And I couldn't hear Miss Naperville sing, ‘Raindrops' because they've got planes landing and taking off.’”
Eldad turned his head up with sudden new attention.
“They must put soundproofing in the rafters and walls,” said Sunny. “Let's find out what it is—brand names, retailers. I'll explain to Ivan that you can make a major motion picture quicker than you can get the federal government to authorize new landing restrictions. You'll have everyone from AARP to the International Criminal Court file impact statements. But by the end of the year, we can get a bill authorizing payments to homeowners to install soundproofing. Ivan can put checks into their hands.”
Sunny pushed his shoulder over to the car door and paused for Eldad to put his feet forward and pull himself out. By the time Sunny stood up on the Randolph Street sidewalk, Sgt. Gallaher's dark hair was adorned with icy white flurries.
“I'm sure the mayor's conversations were a lot more colorful,” he said as he fell in behind her long steps. “All our talk was about parking and trash.”
“Politicians love to talk trash,” she called back. “Food, roads, and trash.” Two uniforms had snapped open a door next to the revolving one that other people—including Sunny until recently—had to use, and they stepped into the quiet of City Hall on a Saturday. Small threads glistened as the flurries melted and slid down the sergeant's dark hair.
“It's actually getting rare to hear politicians talk politics,” Sunny told her in a low voice. “Politics is being outsourced like everything else. You hire professionals to ask for money, the way you can pay someone to talk dirty to you on the phone. Politicians used to hire a campaign manager—some old school chum or business partner that you could trust to be unscrupulous on your behalf—to run the campaign while the candidate took positions. Now, politicians consult consultants the way Hollywood stars confer with their psychiatrists and astrologers. Won't go to the bathroom without them.”
The empty brass cab of Elevator One waited for them in the dim, hushed halls.
The police superintendent of Chicago also waited, his blue coat folded into a side chair and drizzling onto the rug of the conference room that had been appropriated for Sunny's use. Chief Martinez turned at the sound of Sunny's approach and dipped his head slightly to signal Sgt. Gallaher to stay nearby.
“Don't dribble on the carpet, Matt,” Sunny told him. “They might charge a damage fee on my way out.”
“Two people are being held in connection with the death of the mayor,” Chief Martinez announced. Sunny drew in a small, stunned breath.
“It may amount to nothing. But …” said the chief. “They're both service people at Quattro's. The first goes by the name Carlos Ponce. He has also been Zambrano, Reyes, Rios, Contreras, Alomar, and Uribe.”
“I know those names….” said Sunny, and the police chief smiled curtly.
“Baseball players.”
“Ah yes. Well he's smart enough not to try to pass himself off as Ichuri Suzuki.”
“A real criminal mastermind,” the chief agreed. “We found him with a change of clothes and almost a thousand dollars packed in a laundry sack, hiding out in a garbage trough under Wacker—knowing that Streets and San wouldn't be through until Monday. He's wanted in Guanajuato, Hidalgo, and Mexico City. Drugs, smuggling, money laundering—the whole combo platter.”
Sunny shucked his own tan coat, spattered with snow and suddenly as heavy as a grocery sack, and held it out until a uniformed man took it in his arms.
“I'm glad you got him before he could run off with my daughters. Still, Matt, how do you go from any of that to something like this?”
“Someone could have threatened him with exposure,” the chief ventured. “‘Do this, we wipe your debt off the books.’ Or he could have a stash of doubloons waiting for him somewhere. He had proximity to the poison and the pizza. When word leaks, I'd rather have him locked up than at large.”
“Holding him on Mexican warrants?”
The chief nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Mexico City detectives arrive Monday. I told them that I know Sunday is a day for faith and family among we Mexicans. Their prisoner can enjoy the hospitality of a holding cell on North Larrabee until then.”
“Which gives your folks at the Eighteenth District—”
“—about forty hours.”
Sunny squirmed in a side chair, and knocked his muddy heels together before replying.
“Well, be hospitable indeed. And the other?”
“Kambiz Said. Twenty-six, and, conveniently for us, working on a counterfeit green card,” Chief Martinez explained. “He fled the restaurant, too, and when the mommy and daddy tracked him to a basement apartment on Kimball, they discovered that he is a frequent visitor to a white supremacist web site. Forty-something times in recent weeks.”
“His name sounds …”
“Iranian. By way of Jordan. The group in question is called the National Vanguard.” The police chief looked down at a cluster of printed pages, and seemed to trace words with an index finger. “Although they say: ‘Persons of Jewish descent, homosexuals or bisexuals, persons with a non-White spouse or sexual partner, or persons with more than an undetectable trace of non-White ancestry are specifically barred from National Vanguard membership.’ End quote,” the chief emphasized.
“Good Christ. And he didn't think that meant him?”
“Maybe he came to the site just to be appalled. Or for the music— they play something called White Power hip hop. Or maybe he thinks Persians are descended from Aryans, and they mean everybody but him.”
“Like Kashmiris,” Sunny suggested.
“Look, Mr. Roopini, both you and I know that bigots come in all tints.”
“Like idiots,” Sunny repeated. “And he's being held—”
“At the Fourteenth.” The Shakespeare Avenue district. Sunny's voice subtly changed pitch.
“Matt, how did you folks discover his surfing habits?”
“His laptop was on the toilet seat.”
“Along with a court order?”
“Plain view. Obvious and germane. The mayor had been murdered. The subject had fled. He had access to the means of murder.” Sunny noted that the police chief would not deign to identify a pizza as a weapon. “Mr. Jenkins had done his Dumpster dive. Our officers had to assume the computer could contain clues.”
“No time for a warrant?”
“In theory. But practically, that would take an hour. There was an ongoing situation. Evidence could be destroyed. Lives could be threatened. In an hour, someone on the north side could be in Milwaukee. Someone in Milwaukee could be …” Chief Martinez hesitated over an example. “In Wauwatosa,” he declared finally, then warmed to the word. “Someone in Wauwatosa could be in the woods. Someone in the woods could hide for years among bears and woodpeckers.”
“You might have to tell a court how nature works,” Sunny advised, and the police chief tipped back in his chair and lowered the brim of his service hat over the back of his head.
“I'll gladly explain that our officers acted aggressively to protect the people of this city,” he said softly. “They didn't flinch because a lawyer might try to take them down later. I'd rather explain a procedural error than another murder.”
Sunny smiled.
“You'll be sipping rum punch in Dubai when that happens, Matt. Or whatever they drink there.”
“Orange juice, I believe,” said the chief.
“Any ties between the two?”
“So far, only that they swabbed the same floors and set the same tables.”
“And you're sure we're not looking at a couple of wet matches here and seeing weapons of mass destruction?”
“We're sure of nothing,” said Chief Martinez. “That's why I don't want to let them out of our grip until we are.”
“You found a thousand dollars on Roberto Clemente—whatever he calls himself?” asked Sunny. “Not top dollar for a paid assassin.”
“But just enough to get to—I don't know—Trinidad and Tobago,” and when Sunny rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, the police chief said with pointed gentleness, “You know, sir, it doesn't take a Leonardo or an Einstein to kill someone famous. Look it up in the history books.”
The men let the chief's observation float between them for a moment; Sunny returned the front legs of his chair to the floor, squishing softly as they heard a shrill twitter from a police traffic whistle outside.
“And you've ruled out any possibility with Collins?”
The police chief hesitated only slightly and plucked the white gloves of his dress uniform out of a deep side pocket and balled them against his chin.
“Nothing is ruled out. But Collins …” Chief Martinez let the fingers of the gloves fall over his chin. “I suppose no man looks very appealing when you have to gut his life open. He told some people that the mayor was a corrupt bastard who spouted populist rhetoric but kissed ruling class ass and repressed the people with a political machine. He told others that the mayor was a shrewd, selfless public servant who dared to fight special interests and antediluvian forces everywhere. Depending.”
“On?”
“Who he was trying to impress.”
“No funny money?” Sunny asked, but the chief was already shaking his head.
“Trust fund baby unto death. Every month, interest just accrued. He couldn't be bothered. Holes in his black nylon socks. Didn't even open the copies of the check deposits. No red flags. The mayor however …”
Sunny sat up, and for the first time, the police chief allowed a grin to stretch across his face.
“A model of frugality,” he explained. “Bank records say that he spent just twenty-three thousand nine hundred five dollars all of last year.”
“Is that possible?” asked Sunny. “Apartment, food, clothing …”
“A place on Milwaukee Avenue gave him suits and shoes,” said Chief Martinez. “A market on Hyde Park Boulevard sent over milk, peanut butter, coffee—a whole smoked turkey, if he wanted. A place on Rush sent over bottles of Maker's Mark and Gayle's root beer. A drugstore delivered toothpaste, soap, shampoo, razor blades, ointments, creams, and jellies that, even in death, should remain private. Never a charge.”
