The round ended and we went back to our respective corners. We were both breathing hard now, but I was really feeling winded. The amorous activities of the previous night, coupled with little sleep and a long, hard day, were starting to weigh on me. Chappie looked at me and shook his head.
“You doin’ a little bit better, but you still messin’ up,” he said, smearing more Vaseline on. “You ain’t been doin’ your roadwork, or what?”
“I met an old girlfriend last night,” I said after blowing out a quick breath.
He smirked and said, “I shoulda knowed.” He turned and went over to the other corner as Lucander was stepping through the ropes. “Last round,” he shouted.
The bell rang and each of us came out intent on taking the other one out. I kept on the move for the first minute, popping out my jab. Lucander caught me several times with body blows, and I smashed counter hooks in return. The bulb lit up, indicating the final minute. We both seemed to know this was it, so we poured it on. He dropped his guard as he tried a hook kick, and I pushed out a right that had everything behind it. He went down, rolled, and got back up again. Chappie went over and held up his fingers, ticking off an eight-count. He looked into Lucander’s eyes and asked him if he was okay. The kid nodded, and Chappie wiped off the gloves.
He came after me like a man possessed, swinging wildly. I sensed that his legs weren’t all the way back, but I danced away, not following up as I would have in a real fight. I’ve never been a believer in gym wars. Especially in a routine sparring session. So I let the kid chase me until the bell rang, just using the light counters to keep him off.
At the end of the round Chappie looked at me with a mocking smile.
“You gonna let Elijah Day off the hook too?” he said.
“Remind me not to when we get there,” I said. In my heart I knew that I hadn’t been at my best, but after all, this was just training.
Phil Brice, our resident bodybuilder and Chappie’s assistant manager, came ambling over, his massive arms and distended lats stretching the fabric of his thin nylon shirt.
“Chappie, you want me to untie them for you?” Brice asked.
Chappie nodded and headed toward the office where he kept his notebook. He made comprehensive notes on each training session. Knowing that I’d meet with him later, I concentrated on getting my breathing back to normal.
“You only went four,” Chappie said over his shoulder. “We should be doing at least six at this late date.”
I wanted to remind him that it had been four three-minute rounds, which translated to six kick-boxing rounds, but I was too beat. I just lowered my head and stared at the drips of sweat dotting the canvas. I’d been a couple of steps behind all day.
Brice hopped up onto the ring apron, undid our gloves, and helped pull them off. All I could think about was getting something to drink and hitting the steam and showers.
I nodded a thanks to Jack and Lucander and headed across the boxing area, past the weightlifting section, where several muscleheads pumped iron, grunting noisily. Chappie’s daughter, Darlene, was leading her nightly aerobics class to the beat of some Whitney Houston song. She smiled at me and managed a quick wave. I stared at all the leotard-clad girls bouncing around and could barely manage to smile back.
After drinking huge amounts of water, I took ten in the steam room, got under the shower, and just let the warm spray wash over me.
I stretched and reflected on how good I felt, despite my lousy luck: first the ill-fated reunion with Paula, then the disastrous job interview, the wild-goose chase, and finally the damn burglary.
But the hell with it all, I thought. Especially with that asshole Russell and his goddamn security company. Pretty soon I’d be the heavyweight kick-boxing champion of the world. Yeah, I thought, there’s nothing like a good workout to put things in perspective and leave you feeling on top of the world.
As I was drying myself, my beeper went off. I checked the number. It was a Chicago exchange, but it had George’s badge number after it, followed by a 911. I figured that he needed me to work the hotel job to night, and I wasn’t really up for it. I fished out my cell phone. He answered on the second ring with a gruff-sounding, “Detective Grieves.”
“Yeah, it’s me calling you back, and I ain’t gonna work at the hotel to night ’cause I’m too damned tired, okay?”
“Huh?” he said. “What the fuck you talking about?”
“What the fuck am I talking about?” I said playfully. “You beeped me, remember?”
When I heard silence instead of his usual wise-ass comment I knew something was wrong.
“Ron,” he said slowly. “Remember this morning you told me that you’d bumped into Paula Kittermann last night?”
“Yeah. Why?”
I heard him blow out a heavy breath before he spoke.
“I’m down at the Harrison Street Morgue,” he said. “We got a body of a female, and I think it might be her. Had one of your cards with your beeper number on it in her purse. Can you come down here right away and make the ID?”
CHAPTER 7
I got to the morgue fast, but it was like I was on automatic pi lot. I didn’t remember the trip. It just seemed like all of a sudden I was there. George and Doug met me in the receiving room next to the loading dock, which was around the back. They kept the front entrance locked after regular business hours. George looked solemn as he set the paper cup of coffee down and came over to me.
“It was a hit-and-run,” he said. “Looks like she wandered out between two parked cars.” He spoke slowly and his eyes scanned my face as he talked.
“Are you sure it’s her?” My voice cracked as I talked.
He shrugged.
“I remembered what you said this morning about Paula being a blonde now, and figured you could tell if it was her. It’s been so long since I seen her, I ain’t sure.”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t anxious to go look. Some part of me was still holding out hope that it wasn’t true. Maybe it would just turn out to be some other girl that sort of looked like her. God, how I was hoping. I remember whispering a silent prayer as Doug stood up and slapped me on the shoulder. We moved down the hallway to the viewing room. The walls were made of heavy cinderblock and painted a putrid green.
“Think you can tell from the TV, Ron?” Doug asked. It was the morgue’s standard policy to first attempt an identification by closed circuit television viewing.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Christ, you told me you slept with her last night,” George said. The anger in his voice was almost palpable.
What the hell was he so pissed off about?
I just stared back at him.
He grabbed my shoulder with an uncharacteristic roughness and hustled me through the interior rooms to the last viewing area. It was a small room with three large windows. On the other side of the glass the same blond hair that I’d caressed the night before now lay spread out against the blackness of the plastic bodybag. Her face was swollen and discolored, lips curling back in an almost ludicrous grimace. Dark blood had coagulated over her teeth, and I could see her eyelids were caked with it too, but her glazed eyes stared straight up at the ceiling. I clenched my jaw and looked away.
“Well?” George said.
I nodded.
“Shit.” He turned to Doug and said, “You wanna give us a minute?”
Doug nodded and left us alone.
“You’re sure?” he asked harshly. “You’re absolutely sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What the fuck’s your problem, anyway?”
His lips drew together and his head jutted forward.
“What the fuck’s my problem?” he said. His index finger shot forward and beat a staccato rhythm on my chest as he spoke. “You’re my fucking problem. You go jumping into bed with some broad you ain’t seen in a dozen years, and now she turns up dead. And guess what? Know what we found in her purse? Besides your fucking card, that is?” His big index finger kept
jabbing me. “A fucking kit. Syringe, cooker, and a couple pony packs of smack.” He glared at me. “Yeah, that’s right, she was a junkie.”
I was too stunned to speak.
“Thinking with your dick again,” he was saying. “You ever hear of AIDS?”
His voice sounded distant. Like we were suddenly shouting through a tunnel.
“Well, have you?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“Now tell me that you were at least smart about it.”
I was still thinking about seeing Paula’s face, so I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Tell me, dammit.”
“What?” I yelled.
George reached out and grabbed my jacket with both hands and shoved me against the wall.
“Did you at least use a rubber?” His face was inches from mine.
I stared into his eyes for a moment, then looked away.
“Aww, shit,” he said. His fingers slackened and fell away from my coat. George turned slightly and suddenly smacked the edge of his fist against the wall. “Are you ever gonna start acting like a responsible adult, for Christ’s sake?”
A vision of Paula’s face, smiling and laughing, danced through my memory…the sight of her reflected in my bedroom mirror, the tails of her blouse brushing the tops of her thighs…the electric touch of her fingers on my skin.
George stared at me and licked his lips.
“Is that all?” I asked. There was a certain detachment that I strained for. A distancing that would let me get through this without breaking down. I tiptoed on the edge of it, struggling to seize control of myself, but it was like trying to catch smoke. Like someone had used a big monkey wrench to pinch off part of my gut. I felt the tears rush up behind my eyes, but I knew I couldn’t lose control. No, not in front of him. Not now.
“No, it ain’t,” he said, his face looming closer to mine. “You want to keep on working for me, you better start keeping your peter in your fucking pants from now on.”
I started to tell him to go to hell, but I swallowed it instead. I’d seen George lose it before with arrestees and street punks, but never with me. It was almost like he was trying to bait me or something. Then I saw his eyes starting to mist over and I looked away. He shifted around next to me and braced his back flat against the wall.
We stood there side-by-side for a few moments more, each of us staring straight ahead at the three-by-five Plexiglas panes, neither daring to glance at the other. Then he blew out a long, slow breath. “You probably ought to get tested right away.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will.”
A morgue attendant in green scrubs appeared on the other side of the glass and was adjusting the edge of the black plastic over Paula’s face.
Please, be gentle, I thought.
“I’ll see if I can pull some strings with the lab here. Maybe they can run a quickie HIV scan on an extra blood sample from the autopsy.”
“Okay. Thanks.” The attendant began pushing the gurney away.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw George reach up and wipe a solitary tear from the side of his cheek.
“How’d this happen?” I asked, still looking straight ahead.
He pursed his lips before he spoke. “Looks like she just finished shooting up and walked out into the street while she still had the nods. The car appears to have been stolen. Peeled ignition. Abandoned about a block away from the scene.”
I felt numb. Like I was trapped in some god-awful dream.
“You know where she was living?” he asked. “We found her driver’s license and IDs. Don’t know if it’s current or not. Address is south of the Loop.”
I shook my head.
“I think I’ve got her phone number at home,” I said. “It was a 773 area code. I left a message on her machine this morning.”
“Well, hold on to it for me, just in case,” he said. “What was the name of that town her parents moved to up in Michigan?”
“Ludington.”
“They still live there?”
I shrugged.
“You know their number?”
I shook my head. “You want me to try to find out?”
“Nah, we’ll handle it,” he said. “It’s not your job.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, then added, “Look, Ron, I’m sorry I yelled at you like that. It’s just that, dammit, you’ve always been sorta like a kid brother to me, and…Aw, hell, I’m just worried about you, that’s all. These days, you just never know. I mean look at that young boxer a couple of years ago…Tommy Morrison. And Magic Johnson. And who was that Olympic diving guy that got infected?”
I nodded, too upset to say anything. Finally, I was able to speak after swallowing the lump in my throat.
“You need anything else?” I asked.
“No, you might as well take off,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Doug and I will take a run over to her apartment and then try to get a hold of her parents up in Michigan.”
“Okay,” I said. That was one task I didn’t envy. “Let me know about their address. I’ll send some flowers.”
The next day I picked up the little cat. All his tests had come back negative for feline leukemia, but he was infested with worms and fleas. The clean-up bill was hefty, and I decided that with all the money I’d invested, I might as well keep him. After fashioning a make shift bed in the cat-carrier, I put him by a heating vent. Georgio and Shasha went to inspect him regularly, but kept a respectful distance. I prepared a second litter box and stuck him in the workout section of my basement. He was so tiny that I worried he’d get lost running around unattended. I solved the problem by going out to the garage and pulling down a bird cage I’d picked up for my former girlfriend at a garage sale. We’d broken up before I could give it to her, and I’d kept it, figuring to put an ad in the paper or something.
It’s a good thing I’m such a pack rat, I thought as I re-did Rags’ temporary living quarters.
With the trapdoor to the basement closed, he would be segregated from the other cats. The vet had cautioned me not to put him in “general population” until he was rid of the worms.
Paula’s death cast a pall over the rest of the holiday week for me. I kept seeing her face, and recalling memories of when we’d first gone out that I hadn’t thought of in years. Death seemed so final, so harsh, so brutal. Still, I went through the motions, doing the tasks that I had to get done. George called with the information on Paula’s parents. He said they were pretty devastated, and he’d helped them with the arrangements to have Paula shipped back to Michigan. Better him than me.
I thought about calling them…maybe even going up there for the funeral. But ultimately I decided against it. Funerals, after all, are for those left behind, not for the dead, and I had no desire to talk to her parents. What would I say to them? Yeah, I met your daughter again and we went to bed right before she was run over. Real classy.
I called information and got hold of the funeral home up in Michigan that had claimed the body so I could send flowers along with a sympathy card. I used my office address, which consisted of my P.O. box.
Setting up my blood test didn’t go as smoothly as Rags’ had. It was, after all, the Friday before a holiday weekend. But when the nurse heard that I had been with someone who may have been an intravenous drug user, she told me to come into the clinic and she’d squeeze me in. When I got there and identified myself, she put on a second pair of latex gloves before she tied the plastic tubing around my biceps and patted the distended veins on my arm. I watched as the needle pierced my flesh, feeling the sharp prick, followed by the steady flow of the dark blood into the hollow glass vial. When she had enough, she deftly snapped in a second vial and let that one fill with my blood too. She carefully withdrew the needle and stuck a small wad of cotton onto the wound site and folded my forearm up over it.
This can’t be happening, I thought. How could I have been such an idiot? So reckless with my health…my future. George had always berated
me, telling me someday I’d have to grow up. Now I wondered if I’d have the chance to change. I made a silent vow that if I got through this I would.
As she labeled the vials, she gave me the mandatory lecture about proper precautions and practicing safe sex, which consisted of either abstaining or using a condom until I got the all clear. The second vial, she told me, was for testing several possible STDs as well as hepatitis A, B, and C.
“Of course there is a chance that even if the HIV test comes up negative,” she continued sternly, “you could still be infected. So you’ll have to have a re-test again in six months. Do you have any other regular partners?”
I shook my head. There was something about the way she’d said “partners,” stressing the “s.” It seemed to convey her total disdain.
“Well, you’ll have to continue with all the precautions I listed until that time,” she said. “Six months. Do you understand?”
I nodded, feeling to reply verbally would be somehow inappropriate.
“I’ll try and get these to the lab this afternoon,” she said, holding the blood-filled vials in her gloved fingers. “You can check back with us in a week for the results.”
“A week? How come so long?”
“They’re very busy,” was all she said.
I tried to stay busy myself by putting in a lion’s share of hours at the hotel for George, and keeping my peter in my pants, of course. But whenever I pulled into the parking lot, I couldn’t help glancing wistfully toward the area where her car had been, and thinking of that night when she’d pointed to it and said, “That’s my baby.” One of the local coppers mentioned that the red Firebird had been towed from the lot earlier that day as an abandoned vehicle with its trunk punched. I remembered Paula’s strange message call about going to pick up her car and being in some kind of jam. But I hadn’t figured at the time that the jam involved drugs.
I called George and asked him to notify Paula’s family about the car so they wouldn’t have to pay a huge storage fee to get it back. He said he’d take care of it. For some strange reason I hoped her car hadn’t been vandalized too badly. Somehow it seemed like another violation of her.
Windy City Knights Page 6
