The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  THE

  BAD

  KITTY

  LOUNGE

  IN THE JOSEPH KOZMARSKI SERIES

  The Last Striptease

  NONFICTION

  Romantic Migrations: Local, National,

  and Transnational Dispositions

  Romantic Geography: Wordsworth

  and Anglo-European Spaces

  THE

  BAD

  KITTY

  LOUNGE

  MICHAEL

  WILEY

  MINOTAUR BOOKS

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE. Copyright © 2010 by Michael Wiley. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wiley, Michael, 1961–

  The bad kitty lounge / Michael Wiley. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-59300-1

  1. Private investigators—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction.

  2. Nuns—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.I5433B33 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2009041134

  First Edition: March 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Por los niños

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to those who’ve made the party happen at the Bad Kitty Lounge:

  Toni Plummer at St. Martin’s, whose editorial insights have been unerringly true, and Ruth Cavin, who prodded me first and hard.

  Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, and Luc Hunt, whose goodwill, good-spiritedness, and good sense are all that I could hope for.

  Julia Burns and Sam Kimball, who’ve helped me past many rough beginnings.

  Beryl Satter, who knows these streets and yards.

  THE

  BAD

  KITTY

  LOUNGE

  ONE

  I SAT IN TOMMY Cheng’s Chinese Restaurant facing a window onto North LaSalle Street and watched a four-story condo complex where Eric Stone was screwing another man’s wife. Not the kind of work I look for, but it always seems to find me. I kept my eyes on my client’s condo and ate egg foo yong.

  Behind me in the kitchen, Mr. Cheng cooked something that sizzled in the wok. He wore an apron and a white baseball cap. My Pentax, its telephoto screwed into focus, rested on the counter in case Eric Stone showed his face outside.

  I squinted into the glare. The little birch trees that the city had dumped into sidewalk planters flared October yellow. The condo complex was stucco and had the kind of Spanish arches and wide balconies that belonged far from Chicago in a place where the sea was always clear and the breeze blew as warm as a woman’s breath.

  A man walked onto the balcony in front of the condo.

  Eric Stone.

  I dropped my chopsticks, readjusted the lens on the Pentax, and snapped a photo. The man had a caterpillar of a beard under his bottom lip. The rest of his head was shaved. He looked somewhere in his early fifties but his arms and body were thick—all muscle. He flexed the arms over his head. He wore white shorts and a white T-shirt on a forty-degree autumn day. He looked like a pirate in tennis whites.

  A woman joined him on the balcony.

  Amy Samuelson. My client Greg Samuelson’s wife.

  She was dressed in khakis and a sweater, her blond hair in a ponytail. She wrapped her arms around Eric Stone from behind.

  Mr. Cheng came from the kitchen and stood next to me. “Every day the same thing,” he said, laughing. “She never gets enough of him.”

  She slid her hands down the man’s stomach. One hand disappeared into the front of his shorts. Stone looked proud of himself.

  Mr. Cheng said, “Some people’ve got no decency,” and I snapped more photos. “What do you do?” he asked. “Blackmail them?”

  I pulled out my wallet, let him read my detective’s license.

  “Joe Kozmarski?” he said.

  “I’m helping her husband get a divorce.”

  He laughed. “You blackmail them.”

  Amy Samuelson and the man went back into the condo, closing the door behind them.

  I ate more egg foo yong. The bean sprouts were fresh, the shrimp as big as walnuts. Mr. Cheng stood and watched the balcony as if he expected them to come back out naked and screw in the open air.

  Another man walked across a parking lot next to the condos. He was thin, wearing blue jeans, an oxford shirt, and a navy blue jacket, no tie. He carried a two-gallon gas can. He looked in no hurry. He crossed to a yellow Mercedes convertible that was parked facing the street.

  I knew the car. Eric Stone drove it when he wasn’t flexing his muscles on the Samuelsons’ balcony in his tennis shorts.

  The man set the gas can on the hood of the Mercedes and undid the cap. He screwed a spout onto the can. He poured gasoline over the car’s hood, over the convertible roof, onto the trunk.

  Mr. Cheng said, “What the hell—”

  The man shook gasoline onto the car doors. He stooped by the tires and poured gas over them. He took his time.

  “Take—pictures,” Mr. Cheng sputtered. I left my camera on the counter.

  The man splashed the rest of the gasoline under the Mercedes, then stepped back to appraise his work.

  He touched the fabric convertible roof with a lighter and leaped away. The car burst into flames. Thick black smoke fingered into the air. The convertible top flared and fell into the interior.

  The man with the gas can watched the fire, then pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed, and talked into it. When he hung up, he walked slowly away. The empty gas can dangled in his fingers. The car made a hollow popping sound and the windshield fell into the front seat.

  Mr. Cheng glared. “Why don’t you take pictures?”

  I looked him up and down. “That was the husband—my client.”

  Mr. Cheng stared at me with blank eyes and nodded, then returned to the kitchen and called 911. He told the operator that a car was burning and gave the street address. When he hung up, he came back and sat on the stool next to mine. “You like the egg foo yong?” he asked.

  “Best egg foo yong I ever ate,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It’s my mother’s recipe. It gives you long life.”

  We sat together and watched the Mercedes burn. Giant flames angled out of the interior. The car roared like an open furnace. Heavy black smoke, dense as dirt, clouded above it. The smell of burning rubber and something worse—the leather interior, something that once was living—made its way into the restaurant. By the time we heard sirens, the fire had blackened the car’s exterior, and whatever was feeding it from inside was gone. The flames shortened. Then the gas tank exploded and the fire roared again.

  I pushed away the egg foo yong. Long life it would give me, said Mr. Cheng. I’d lost my appetite.

  TWO

  THREE FIRE TRUCKS AND a squad car crowded the curb in front of the Samuelsons’ condo. A couple of firefighters sprayed foam on the burning car. The hot metal smoked and steamed. A young uniformed cop with a notepad talked to Eric Stone on the sidewalk. The October air was cold and Stone was still in his tennis whites, but he looked like he was sweating.

  I waited until the cop le
ft him and then I wandered across the street. Stone pulled out a cell phone, punched some buttons, and yelled into it. Up close he still looked like a pirate, but I added five years to the young fifties I’d estimated from a distance. He was driving hard at sixty, but he was sixty years of muscle. I was forty-three years old, six foot one, and just under two hundred pounds, but I didn’t want to bounce my muscles off of his.

  I stepped next to him and we watched the firefighters deal with the remains of his car. It looked like a burned carcass, a large grazing animal, a buffalo, maybe a small elephant—bury it in a pit with hot coals for a week, buy buns, invite the neighbors. Stone didn’t seem to notice me.

  “I used to be a cop,” I said.

  He glanced at me like I was an innocent nuisance. “That so?” He looked back at the car.

  “Yeah. Got fired. I plowed my cruiser into a newsstand at three in the morning. I was drunk—I did that back then—so something had to give. No one was hurt and my car, unlike yours, didn’t burn. But magazines and newspapers filled the air like a blizzard.”

  He glanced at me again, barely tolerating me. “Do you mind?”

  “Sorry,” I said. I nodded at his car. “Tough luck.”

  He nodded once, apology accepted.

  “I’ll tell you a story, though,” I said and he grimaced. “I knew this guy in the department—”

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sure you’re a fine guy but my car burned and there’s nothing you’re gonna tell me that’ll make me want to talk with you.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  We stood together and watched the firemen and the smoking car. “So this guy in the department,” I said and Stone’s shoulders tensed. “This guy had a problem. He played in a department softball league and every time he had a game a fellow in the neighborhood was screwing his wife.”

  Stone turned slowly from the car to my face. His eyes were cold, hard, dark.

  “Now, this cop kept a Taser in his trunk. Against department regulations at the time, but he kept it. So his problem was this. He came home early from a game and found the neighbor in bed with his wife. Well, not in bed—they were in the kitchen, the wife on the kitchen counter and the neighbor—you get the picture.”

  Stone got the picture. He’d balled his hands into fists. Nice fists and only a couple of knuckles looked like they’d been broken, probably hitting the jaws of guys like me.

  “The cop faced a hard question. Should he Taser the fellow, knowing one hundred percent he would lose his job in the department and spend the next four years working night shift as a security guard at Sears? Would it be worth it?”

  “Listen, you fuck,” Stone said. “I don’t know what—”

  “I’m Joe Kozmarski, Mr. Stone. Amy Samuelson’s husband hired me to keep an eye on you.”

  That startled him about as much as a poke in the eye. But he said, “That asshole burned my car.”

  “Doesn’t seem like something a guy like him would do,” I said. “He’s a regular altar boy.” It was true, or almost. Greg Samuelson worked at Holy Trinity Church. When he wasn’t burning cars, he surrounded himself with saints and saints-in-training.

  Stone showed me one of his fists. “Tell your altar boy I’m going to fuckin’ kill him.”

  The cop with the notebook returned. “Everything all right here?” He probably saved Stone and me from going a couple rounds.

  As I crossed the street to my car, a Mercedes convertible that looked like Eric Stone’s, but silver and without the flames, whipped around the corner. The driver was a thin man with a ponytail. A woman sat next to him in the passenger’s seat in a bright red vest, looking like a fancy fishing lure. The Mercedes sped toward me, swerved a few feet away, and swung to the curb beside a fire truck.

  THREE

  LATELY I’D BEEN DREAMING of escape. From Chicago. From the camera I kept in front of me on the counters of cheap Chinese restaurants. From the trouble I got myself into. From my life. I’d heard about a shrimping village just south of the Florida-Georgia border, a place where the sun shined soft through the ocean mist and the air smelled like salt and engine oil and the life that trawl nets raised out of the sea.

  I drove down LaSalle, a wide soulless street, banked by soulless residential towers. Downtown, the street dropped into a canyon of dark office buildings and dead-ended into the Chicago Board of Trade, a pyramid-roofed concrete giant that looked like it could rise and march up LaSalle, crushing everything that fell under its feet.

  I turned and drove west to the Kennedy Expressway, headed north, and exited at Division, then turned toward Holy Trinity Church, where Greg Samuelson worked when he wasn’t lighting Mercedes-Benzes on fire.

  Holy Trinity was in an old Polish neighborhood that was sliding fast to Mexican. A teamsters local, a Duks Red Hots hot-dog stand, and a school of cosmetology shouldered up to La Pasadita Taqueria and little tiendas in dirty old brick buildings. Depending on the weather and the mood, everyone might dance or everyone might fight. Holy Trinity Church stood at the edge of the neighborhood with a partial view of the expressway, its Polish name spelled out in gold letters over the door to the sanctuary—Koció witej Trójcy.

  Holy Trinity High School stuck out behind the church. A courtyard garden, dying in the cold October air, separated the church from three housing blocks for the priests and nuns who taught at the school. I parked on the street, climbed the steps, and tried the heavy steel doors that led to the sanctuary. They swung open. I had no excuse not to walk through them.

  The chapel was bright and painted as fancy as a twelve-year-old in mascara. A painter had climbed a scaffold and covered the vaulted ceiling with fat, rosy-skinned angels frolicking in heavenly blue skies. A portrait showed Jesus and Mary wearing crowns, Jesus dressed like a little prince, Mary in a red and gold getup that made her look like a model from an old Imperial margarine commercial. Still, the place took your breath away—all the color and light in the middle of the graying neighborhood. I hadn’t been inside a church since Dad died, but I crossed myself. Old habits and all, I couldn’t help it.

  A couple of women sat in the pinewood pews, praying or staring into the air. A thin, bald priest with a short beard was fiddling with a lighting fixture embedded in the ornate pulpit.

  I went to him and asked if Greg Samuelson was around.

  “In his office. Next to Sister Terrano’s.” He pointed to a door that led away from the pulpit.

  The door opened into a narrow hall with a room on either side. A man in priest’s black worked at a computer in one of them. At the end of the hall, another door led to a stairwell that went down to an undercroft and then more offices. The first office door, open a crack and marked by a brass nameplate, was Sister Judy Terrano’s. The next door was Samuelson’s.

  I went in without knocking.

  He sat at his desk working at a computer. He’d hung his blue jacket on a coat hook. A picture of Amy Samuelson, taken when she still had something to smile about with her husband, watched over him from on top of a file cabinet. The room smelled like the fruit and ammonia of a hundred years of furniture polish and floor scrubbing. Samuelson looked up from the computer and smiled with the innocence of a man who shared an office wall with a nun. “What’s the news?” he said.

  “News is that arson gets idiots like you thrown in jail. What were you thinking?”

  “Oh,” he said. “You saw that?”

  “You paid me to watch your condo.”

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “You weren’t supposed to.”

  He brightened. “Did you get pictures of my wife and Eric Stone?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the pictures right now. I would worry about torching the Mercedes.”

  He put on the innocent face. “I’ve been here all morning.”

  “Stone knows you did it. The cops will figure it out if he doesn’t kill you first.”

  He was crazy enough to laugh at that. “So, do you have the pictures?”

&n
bsp; “I quit,” I said. “I’ll send you back your check. Find someone else to take the pictures.”

  “Come on,” he said. “What else are you going to do with them?”

  “Buy a gallon of gas and make a fire of my own.”

  I turned, ready to get back to my dreams of the Florida shrimping village, but Samuelson’s boss, Sister Judy Terrano, stepped into the door. She was a light-skinned black woman, a couple years short of sixty, and wore a dress that, for a nun, showed plenty of leg. She had startling green eyes and tightly trimmed black hair curling gray.

  Everyone in the city knew her. She kept herself in the news as the founder of a sexual abstinence program for inner-city girls. The press called her the Virginity Nun. A lot of people thought she was a nut, though some thought she deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. She served on the Mayor’s Youth Commission and a half-dozen other city committees that dealt with teenagers and young adults. No matter who led the committees, the news cameras always went to her.

  Now she stepped into the office, carrying a stack of file folders. She nodded to me and placed the folders on Samuelson’s desk. “The clinic proposal and property records,” she said to him. Then to me, “Sorry to interrupt,” and moved again toward the door.

  I said, “I have a question.”

  She turned and looked at me with her green eyes. They held me like she’d traveled miles just to see me.

  “I used to be a cop,” I said, “and a guy in the department had a problem.” I told her the story that I’d told Eric Stone about the man, his wife, and their neighbor. She took it all in like it was a biblical parable. Samuelson sat at his desk with his mouth open. I ended with the same question I’d asked Stone. “The cop had to decide if he should Taser his fellow citizen. Should he have done it?”

  She thought for a moment and said, “Absolutely.”