Touch of the White Tiger

by Julie Beard

  There was no reason to believe that Gorky could have fabricated the realistic images in those horrific photographs. So how could I love a man capable of such brutality? And how could that man be the same one who had made love to me so sweetly? But he had and I did and the knowledge of both these facts rammed my heart like a burning ember. It was paralyzing pain. Yet my mind still worked and sought some order and analysis of the evidence.

  Perhaps Marco had become a cop to make amends for heinous crimes committed in his youth. Then again, maybe he was a sociopath using the perks and authority of his profession to stalk his victims.

  He’d first appeared at my door a few months ago out of the blue, claiming that he had just graduated from a detective training program after serving for years as a psychologist in the police department. He said he was reopening the investigation into his half-brother’s murder, who’d been gunned down in a drug deal gone awry, which I had witnessed.

  When that excuse for making my acquaintance proved misleading, Marco claimed he was using me to learn more about Gorky via Lola for the mayor’s secret committee. Obviously, that too was a lie, since he knows Gorky as well as, if not better, than my mother does.

  So what was Marco’s real reason for knocking on my door? Perhaps he was casing the joint for his planned attack against Certified Retribution Specialists. Gorky had said the murderer wanted to discredit my profession, and that would certainly fit in with Marco’s disdain for retributionists. He once called me a vigilante.

  Oh God, was that the real reason he had asked me to give up my work? Had he unintentionally fallen in love with me and then needed a way to protect me from his own murderous plot?

  A white tiger indeed. It was time that Detective Marco and I had a little chat.

  Chapter 21

  Blast in the Past

  When I trudged up the stairs to my apartment, I found myself disappointed to see that Jimmy was still deep in permanent synthesleep. I guess I’d gotten used to having him around. The AutoMates pickup service was supposed to come for him today. I’d finally gotten through the voice-mail system. That was probably because whoever planted the bug in Jimmy’s system realized it was no longer working.

  While I was pouring myself a glass of iced tea in the kitchen, my phone beeped. It was Henry, who wanted to update me on trial preparations. I plugged the earpiece in and wandered out to the living room while we chatted.

  According to Henry, it was time I stopped gallivanting around the streets in search of evidence and started huddling with my lawyer. When he asked what my investigation had uncovered, I shared the information gathered by some of my colleagues and their PIs. I did not share with him my suspicions about Marco, but nevertheless his name came up in the conversation.

  “Angel, Berkowitz thinks he might be able to get the case thrown out of court on a technicality.”

  “No!” I sat upright in the armchair. “You’re kidding. How can that be possible? I chose the Diva. I thought I was screwed.”

  “Well, he didn’t say he could settle it before you went to trial. But he thinks the judge might dismiss the case once Berkowitz makes it clear that you were involved with the arresting officer.”

  I took a long moment before responding. “How did you know that I was seeing Detective Marco?”

  “Hank told me. We both thought it might cast doubt on the legality of your arrest.”

  “It won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The public defender assigned to me in the Crypt told me that judges ignore that kind of thing in their haste to keep the wheels of justice cranking and groaning.”

  “Well, he was wrong, if Berkowitz is to believed. And I’d trust him more than a public defender. How did you get him, anyway? There’s always a long line of suspects waiting for free representation.”

  “He had his arm twisted by Marc—” I stopped midsentence. Once again the dots of this ugly little picture were connecting back to Marco. How convenient it would be for him to have me misunderstand my rights so that I wouldn’t bring his name into the case.

  “Detective Marco set you up with this bozo?” Henry said. And I didn’t need to see his distinguished gray eyebrows raise nearly to his thinning hairline to get the gist of his incredulous question.

  “Yes, Henry. You know, I’m starting to feel like a gullible…ditz.”

  “A ditz you are not, my dear. But your boyfriend is a son of a bitch.”

  I gasped. “Henry!”

  “You need to break with him, honey. Publicly and personally.”

  “No, Henry—”

  “He’s not worth your loyalty.”

  “I just need to talk to him one more time. There is something I need to ask him. Then I’ll make a clean cut.”

  “The sooner the better, Angel.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly.

  We made arrangements to meet the next day at Berkowitz’s downtown office, and said our goodbyes.

  When our conversation ended, I sat a moment, torn between joy over the possible resolution of the charges against me and regret that it would depend on making Marco the bad guy. Even if Marco was innocent of all the crimes I feared he had committed, his reputation would be badly damaged.

  And most upsetting of all—I knew Henry was right. I had to cut Marco off at the knees. But I didn’t want to. I’d almost rather go down than lose what he and I had together. How pathetic was that?

  Frustrated, I looked around the room and found my Personal Listening Device looking at me, eyes open. Her face was an inexpensive blend of synthetics that didn’t feel much like skin but allowed for movement of the jaw and eyelids. With her puffy blond hair and permanent hot pink lipstick, her resemblance to my foster sister had never seemed so strong.

  “What are you looking at?” I demanded to know. “I thought Jimmy had turned you off.”

  She blinked. “Hello, Angel. Would you like to talk?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, dripping sarcasm. “I’d love to talk with you, Gigi. I’d love to tell you how much I want to strangle your pretty little neck.”

  “That’s nice,” she replied, dripping sugar.

  “I’d love to tell you that there’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time,” I said, putting down my glass and stalking her like an animal in the jungle. I picked her up by the neck, which was made of a porcelain-like substance with a rotating joint at the point where her head was attached.

  “What is it you want to do, Angel?” She tried to hold my gaze, but it was difficult when I started marching toward the back porch with her cradled in my arms. Her glassy eyes moved herky jerky every time my stride threw her out of balance.

  “What are you doing, Angel?” she asked when I shoved open the screen door and walked to the porch railing overlooking my garden.

  “You’ll see.” I held her up in front of my face for one last good look. “Goodbye, Gigi, it was nice knowing you.”

  “Goodbye, Angel.”

  With that, I let go and the robotic device fell to the patio below. The sound of breakage was music to my ears. I wanted to gloat over the mangled mess, but the doorbell rang. I ran inside, found out it was the AutoMates pickup service, buzzed them up, then ran back outside and down to the garden to make sure Gigi was as destroyed as she looked.

  I picked up the cracked device, delighted that one of those creepy blue eyes had shattered, then turned it over to examine the guts of the computer system, which hung from the bottom by a wire. That’s when I saw it.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered to myself. Attached to the matchbook-size black smart box that housed the device’s central brain was a button-sized red eavesdropping device. “Just one more reason to hate you, Gigi.”

  I ripped out the bug and ran upstairs just in time to see a lanky young man in a white jumpsuit wheeling Jimmy out my door.

  “Wait! Stop!”

  The deliveryman looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “You can’t take him,” I pronounced. “He did
n’t do it.”

  “Didn’t do what, ma’am?” He scratched his head, clearly not in the mood for a change of plans.

  “He didn’t sp—” I caught myself. “There’s a misunderstanding. Jimmy has to stay.”

  “I have orders.”

  When he started to pull out an e-tracker, I ran to my stash of money chips and returned, pressing one into his palm. “I’m sorry for your trouble,” I said glibly. “Have a nice day.”

  He looked at the amount I’d given him and nodded agreeably. “Don’t mention it, ma’am.”

  When the delivery truck zoomed off, I wheeled Jimmy to the middle of the room and reinstalled the program in the small of his back. A few computer beeps later, his eyes opened, his body came back to virtual life, and he looked at me.

  “What’s wrong, Angel?”

  “Nothing, you dear man!” I kissed him full on the mouth then tousled his hair. “Nothing is wrong. You didn’t spy on me. It was that stupid Personal Listening Device.”

  “Gigi? Where is she?”

  “Where is it,” I corrected. “I destroyed it.” I ran both hands through my hair and paced in aimless circles, full of giddiness and relief.

  “Why are you so happy?” Jimmy asked.

  I turned on him with a brilliant smile. “Because you didn’t betray me. Oh, I know your loyalty doesn’t matter because you’re not…real. But still, I never suspected you, and my trust in you turned out to be justified. I’d always hated that PLD, and my suspicions proved valid in that case as well. And Lola was right, as well. She had predicted these murders were connected to a woman who had no heart.”

  “That’s right,” Jimmy said, agreeing as far as it went, but clearly he didn’t understand why being right meant so much to me in this instance.

  But my heart understood, even if my brain wasn’t quite ready to agree, that if Jimmy hadn’t betrayed me when I thought he had, maybe Marco hadn’t, either.

  Two hours later, I stepped off of busy Clark Street on the near northside of the city into what used to be the Biograph Theater. Now called the Tommy Gun Interpretive Center, it was half a block of connected buildings filled with games, rides, shops and displays celebrating Chicago’s long history of gangs. Basically, it was a glorified tourist trap. The Biograph was the place where cops arrested John Dillinger, Public Enemy #1, in 1934.

  I walked into the movie house, which showed antiquated news footage detailing the war between South side gangster Al Capone and his North side rival Bugs Moran. I picked up a map of the arcade. Popping corn sounded like the muted rat-a-tat of a machine gun, and the buttery smell made my stomach gurgle. When Marco called saying he wanted to meet me here, I’d dropped everything, including lunch.

  I wasn’t sure why he wanted to meet in a public place, and such a surreal one at that, but this was probably the best for what I suspected would be our showdown. If we weren’t alone, we’d have to keep the melodrama, not to mention deadly assaults, to a minimum.

  I skirted a crowd as it exited the theater at the end of a showing and moved on through a virtual arcade, where dozens of people stood on small platforms, wearing compuglasses, swinging their virtual Tommy guns this way and that as they played out scenes from the gory days of Al Capone.

  I passed by kiosks selling Elliot Ness FBI badges and cappuccino. I took a pass on the badges but bought a coffee to tide me over. Heading toward the museum in the back of the complex, my chest began to constrict with nerves. Or was it excitement? Or the caffeine narrowing my arteries? In truth, I couldn’t wait to feast my eyes on the swarthy, muscular Riccuccio Marco. I actually felt a twinge of desire just thinking about him.

  You need therapy, Baker, I told myself as I took another slug of enervating caffeine. I’d always known that a childhood of neglect had made me a master of disassociation, but this was ridiculous. In my mind, there was a good Marco and a bad Marco. I couldn’t wait to make love again with the good one, all the while hoping the bad one wouldn’t slit my throat.

  For some reason the back of the building was empty. I went to the ticket booth, but no one was there to charge admission to the museum. This wing of the arcade must have been shut down, yet I’d managed to wander back here unnoticed. Since I hated crowds, I was happy to go it alone.

  “Marco?” I called out when I entered the oblong, high-ceilinged brick building.

  When I didn’t get an answer, I wandered around the large exhibition hall. With shiny wooden floors and walls made from the bricks of the garage where four of Al Capone’s assassins, dressed like police, gunned down seven of Bugs Moran’s men in the infamous 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre. Moran was the rakish, hot-tempered leader of the North Side “Irish Gang” that competed with Capone for dominance in illegal liquor sales.

  This wing was a pleasing blend of old and new. A bullet-ridden black Ford was parked in one corner. In another was a pile of wooden liquor barrels from Capone’s bootleg operations. I was particularly taken with a life-sized robotics display of a Capone and Ness argument.

  And then there were the wax figures of the men who had been slaughtered execution style. Fake blood had been splattered on the brick wall behind their crumpled and bloody bodies. It was too realistic, and I stifled a gag as a wave of sadness, nausea and thwarted anger over the death of my friends threatened to undo me.

  “Angel.”

  I gasped and jumped, whirling. “Marco!” Coffee splashed and burned my hand. “Ouch.” I dumped the two-thirds-full cup in a nearby waste bin.

  “Let me see your hand,” he said intimately, grasping my wrist. He pulled out a cloth handkerchief—who had those anymore?—and wiped the milky coffee from my fingers, turning my hand over with care to make sure he’d dabbed every drop.

  Satisfied, he tucked the kerchief in the pocket of his tailored, pleated sea-green pants, pushing back the flowing folds of his aquamarine, knee-length Renaissance coat. The light coat was made of smart fiber and the weave had widened to accommodate the heat of the museum. Underneath he wore a loose white linen shirt. With his dark hair coiled just above the high collar, he reminded me of Mozart.

  “You look like a composer.”

  “Can’t play a note.” A skylight cast a rectangle of sun on his brown eyes. They looked like caramels, slowly melting in the heat that passed between us. “But I am a painter. Strictly amateur.”

  “You’ll have to tell me more about that sometime.” I found myself moving toward him, unable to deny my attraction. “I was surprised to see the paintings in your apartment.”

  “I was surprised to see you in my apartment. That day set off a long, crazy chain of events. But I’d do it again, Angel. I’d do anything for you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I said, the truth winning out over conscience.

  His hands slid around my waist and moved, smooth and hot, like the sun up my back as he pulled me close. I slid my hands up his strong arms, over broad shoulders and around the back of his neck, where heated skin met the fringes of his unruly, dark hair. We needed no words. Our lips connected, brushed, caressed, then fused. I breathed in his luscious breath. Like a shot of pure oxygen, it made me high.

  Locked in a deep, full-bodied kiss, I was on another planet. The world could have exploded around us and I wouldn’t have noticed. I wasn’t sure if this was hello or goodbye, right or wrong, but since the moment seemed to be all I had left in this world, I was going to live in it as long as I could.

  Marco’s tongue rotated intense and deeply around my own. Who needed to make love when you could kiss like this?

  But all good things must come to an end. When we finally detached ourselves, both gasping in wonder, trying to find balance as we came down to earth, I searched his eyes and stroked his cheeks. He gave me such pleasure, but still there was so much pain.

  “Marco?” I rasped, knowing I had to speak. “Are you the killer?”

  His face went dead, though he still clung to me as if I were a life raft, just as I still held him.

  “Did you
kill Roy and Victor and Getty?”

  He frowned. “Is that why you asked me to come here?”

  I took in a breath, held it, then released it, saying, “But I didn’t. You called me.”

  We looked at each other as realization set in.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “Let’s get out of here!”

  He grabbed my hand and ran for the exit just as the building exploded around us.

  Chapter 22

  Falling Water on the Lake

  Just before the blast propelled deadly slivers of bricks, concrete and glass like missiles into the ticket area, Marco and I briefly fought each other, both trying to be the one on top—the protector. We quickly compromised and rolled together behind a giant steel bank vault that Capone’s goons had once robbed. It saved our lives.

  Scratched, bruised and disoriented, but otherwise miraculously fine, I climbed to my unsteady feet while Marco leaned against the steel vault and made a call on his wrist phone. I assumed he was calling for help.

  I stumbled toward the burning rubble of what was now an open-air museum with obliterated displays. Wind blew smoke my way, and I coughed, covering my mouth with a forearm. Sirens wailed in the distance.

  Museum officials, who had been so suspiciously absent before, now came running, shouting in disbelief, dispensing panicked orders. Keeping my nose out of it, I staggered back to the bank vault, gripping it for support.

  Marco, now standing, looked like rage incarnate. He held his wrist up to his mouth and hissed, “You bloody bastard, you almost killed Angel.”

  There was a pause.

  “She’s here. At the museum. With me. We’re coming to see you. Make sure the gates are open.”

  Marco and I said little as he zoomed his hydrocruiser northward along the lakefront. I didn’t have to ask where we were going. Nor was I surprised when he pulled into Falling Water on the Lake, Gorky’s lakeside compound. The gates, as Marco had requested, opened as soon we pulled onto the private drive.