The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  “I can be there at three thirty,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said, and we hung up.

  I sat at my desk and considered him. Maybe there wasn’t a fight in him. Maybe he wanted to give me more stacks of twenties to stay away from the Sister Terrano investigation. Maybe I could retire from divorce work, skip-payment cases, and employee background investigations, and make a full-time gig of doing nothing after nun homicides.

  Maybe I needed some lunch.

  I peeled a twenty off one of the stacks William DuBuclet’s helpers had given me and slid the rest of the money into a file drawer and locked it. Twenty dollars would buy a sandwich and a drink at Grandma’s Kitchen just up the block and leave enough change for another lunch like it. I tapped my Glock in its holster, put on my jacket, and let myself out of the office. Then I stepped in again and went to the drawer with the cash in it. I took the twenty from my pocket, balled it up, and threw it in with the rest. Later I could put it in the bank and spend it with a smile. For now, I didn’t want to eat on it.

  ELEVEN

  THREE GREEK BROTHERS RAN Grandma’s Kitchen. If they had a grandma, she was dead, living in Greece, or doing dishes in the back. Alexandros, the oldest brother, said the Italian beef was good.

  While he put together the sandwich, I thought about the past twenty-four hours.

  Greg Samuelson was either an aggrieved husband who overreacted to his wife’s affair by burning a car and then got shot, or he was a lunatic arsonist who murdered a nun and then tried to kill himself. Why would he murder Judy Terrano and scribble the words BAD KITTY on her belly? What could she mean to him that would lead him to kill her like that?

  Eric Stone was either a jerk who screwed another guy’s wife and then got payback in the form of a burned Mercedes, or he was a homicidal lunatic who shot the husband of the woman he was screwing and who killed and marked Judy Terrano. Why? Because she interrupted him while he was killing Samuelson and setting up his body to look like a suicide? Because he had a history with the nun? But why would he?

  William DuBuclet’s motives were even foggier. He and his gun-swinging helpers were either overly enthusiastic about keeping outsiders away from business they considered their own, or they were playing a bigger game, where threatening a guy like me made sense. I figured they were playing a bigger game. What did Judy Terrano mean to them?

  Who was she? The Virginity Nun. A woman with a complicated past, DuBuclet had said. But everyone’s past was complicated in one way or another. What did the words BAD KITTY mean? What did the cat tattoo mean?

  It was none of my business. No one had hired me to find out. DuBuclet had paid me to turn my back on the nun’s corpse. Stan Fleming had told me not to interfere. I knew I should take the advice seriously.

  Alexandros didn’t object when I changed my order from one to two sandwiches with drinks and fries to go. He handed me the bag and my change, then formed a pretend camera with his hands and snapped a picture of me. “You lookin’ good on TV, Joe.”

  I dropped the coins in the tip jar. “Not all publicity is good.”

  “I don’t know. I got a cousin who see you and want to meet you.”

  I laughed. “I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.

  “She’s twenty-three and very pretty.”

  If his cousin was like him she wore a sleeveless white T-shirt and had hairy shoulders.

  I drove to Lucinda Juarez’s apartment. She lived in Edgewater on the second floor of a gray stone two-flat squeezed between brick-fronted apartment buildings. The neighborhood had improved in the past five years but still had one of the highest violent crime rates in the city. High enough that Lucinda should have worried about the broken lock on the door leading to the interior stairway to her apartment. High enough that when I found her front door open at the top of the stairs a shiver ran down my back.

  Until a month ago, Lucinda had been a newly minted detective rising through the department ranks. Then she’d gotten involved with me and had shot a man with her service pistol when she shouldn’t have. The department had suspended her and would have fired her if the union had let them. After that, we’d had a night together. It was too early to know whether that night had helped or would end up causing a terrible scar. Odds looked good for the scar.

  Now I stepped inside her apartment and called, “Lucinda?”

  The furniture was where it belonged and the place was neat except for an empty Absolut vodka bottle under the living room coffee table.

  “Lucinda!” I called again and walked up the hall. I poked my head into her bedroom, which was almost as neat as the living room. She wasn’t there. On the dining room table a thin layer of dust caught the sunlight from the window. By the sink in the kitchen, a cardboard case held six empty Sierra Nevada Pale Ale bottles. The back door, leading to the wooden porch and downstairs to a fenced backyard, stood open. I went through it.

  Lucinda sat on the porch in a lawn chair. She was short and heavy boned but she had olive skin and black eyes that made you forget that you ever questioned if she was beautiful, though now her eyes had an alcohol glaze and looked like they’d been crying. She wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt, no shoes or socks against the cold. She had another half-full bottle of Absolut in her hand. A Beretta M9 pistol was lying on her lap.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She looked only slightly surprised to see me. “Hey.”

  I nodded at the bottle and the gun. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Enjoying the lazy days of October. Silver linings and all that,” she said. “First time I’ve ever been able to do this.” Something caught her attention in the backyard—a squirrel jumping between branches on an oak tree. “Did you know we have possums in the city?”

  “That’s a squirrel.”

  She screwed her eyes at me. “I know that’s a fucking squirrel. I mean last night. I was out here and possums tried to get into the garbage cans.”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t know we had possums.” I nodded again at the gun. “You planning to shoot them?”

  She laughed at that. “What would I do with a dead possum?”

  “Can I have the gun?”

  She set the vodka bottle on the wooden porch floor and picked up the Beretta. “No,” she said matter-of-factly. “They can take my job. They can leave me at home watching fucking possums. But no one will take my gun.”

  I held my hand toward her. “Please.”

  A grin formed on her lips. “You afraid I’m going to shoot myself like that guy?”

  “Greg Samuelson. No, you’re drunk. You’d miss.”

  The grin widened. “I never miss. I’m the best shot.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re the best. Now give it to me. Please.”

  She waved her hand toward the backyard oak. “You see that blue jay?”

  About sixty feet away through the branches, a little brown bird sat on a telephone wire. “I see a sparrow.”

  “Whatever.” She lifted the gun, squinted her left eye closed, blinked both eyes, and pulled the trigger. The blast of the gun cracked off the wooden porch structure, threw me back, stunned my ears. Twenty yards away the sparrow disintegrated in a tiny storm of feathers and blood.

  “Jesus!” I yelled and I grabbed for the gun. She let go and it fell into my hands. “What are you—”

  But then she was crying. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She didn’t make a sound but the tears kept coming. I tucked her gun into my belt, reached for her, took her under her legs and around her back, and lifted her. She didn’t resist. She was small but she felt like she was made of something denser than skin and bones. I carried her inside to her bedroom and laid her on her bed, covered her with a quilt that looked older than either of us. I kissed her on the cheek and tasted the salt of her tears.

  “Sleep,” I said.

  She grabbed upward and pulled me toward her, lifted her head, and kissed me on the lips, a soft, wet kiss that tasted like alcohol and felt like freedom to do whate
ver I wanted with her. “Get in with me,” she said.

  I pulled away. “Sleep now.”

  Her eyes got furious but only for a moment. Then she let me go and relaxed into the pillow.

  I threw away the empty bottles from the living room and kitchen and brought in the half-drunk vodka from the porch. My house had looked like this plenty of times until I’d lined up my bottles and poured them down the drain. I didn’t pour out Lucinda’s vodka.

  I sat at the kitchen table and unwrapped one of the sandwiches from Grandma’s Kitchen. I’d finished half of it when Lucinda wandered back in and sat across from me. She looked ragged head to toe.

  “Can’t sleep,” she said.

  I pushed the other sandwich across the table to her. “Eat. Absolut doesn’t count as a balanced diet.”

  She looked at the white paper wrapping suspiciously, like it might jump if she touched it. “What is it?”

  “Italian beef from Grandma’s.”

  She stood fast and headed to the bathroom.

  When she returned she said, “You trying to kill me?” But then she ate the sandwich. I sat across from her and watched her eat, and when she was done I watched her some more. She blew a strand of hair out of her face and drank her Coke. She didn’t return my gaze.

  I took her pistol out of my belt and put it on the table in front of her. “That was the best shooting I’ve ever seen. Drunk or sober.”

  Still nothing.

  “Why don’t you work for me?” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Just for now,” I said. “A week or two, until you figure out what you want to do.”

  Another sip of Coke. She said, “You won’t get in bed with me but you want to hire me?”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t get in bed with you. The timing wasn’t good. But yeah, I want to hire you.”

  Like the Coke cup was the only thing in the room worth looking at. “So you want to get in bed with me and hire me?”

  I gave her silence.

  She thought about it for a while. “ ’Cause I’d never have sex with my boss.”

  I expected a smile with that but didn’t get it. “Work with me, not for me.”

  For the first time, she looked up. “What’re you working on, the Virginity Nun?”

  I nodded.

  She considered that for a while. “What’s the story?”

  I told her the story.

  She reached across the table and took the crusts from my wrapper. “First solid food I’ve had in two days.” She ate the crusts. Then she sat back in her chair and said, “Okay.”

  “Yeah? Good.”

  “When do I start?”

  “I’m going to poke around at Holy Trinity and then talk to Eric Stone,” I said. “You want to see what you can find out about William DuBuclet?”

  “Yeah, I can do that.”

  “And anything you can pick up on Judy Terrano. I want to know who she was that made her worth killing.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she said. She stared at the Coke cup again, then closed her eyes and her whole body seemed to relax. “But first I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  I closed Lucinda’s door tight behind me on my way out and allowed myself to smile. I liked having her in on this.

  But as I drove to Holy Trinity, I tried Corrine on my cell phone, and I wondered if I was calling her out of guilt. Her voice mail answered again and I listened to her voice, which I loved and which had hurt me as much as I’d hurt her. I hung up without leaving a message.

  TWELVE

  I DUCKED UNDER THE yellow police tape blocking the doors to the church. No cops stood guard, and I figured they’d left the tape to slow down reporters and ghouls hoping to look death in the eyes. But they’d failed. A television reporter spoke softly into a camera about the history of the church and Sister Terrano’s role in making it famous. A still photographer was snapping shots near the pulpit where a priest had given me directions to Greg Samuelson’s office.

  Men and women sat by themselves in the pews. A heavy man in black was explaining to a group of four other men that they couldn’t enter the door that led to the narrow hallway I’d taken the day before when I was looking for Samuelson. The man took the elbow of one of them like he was the father of the bride and steered them down the aisle toward the exit.

  I stepped into the narrow hall and went downstairs to the undercroft. In the big room a group of about thirty teenaged girls, some of them in VIRGINS ARE COOL T-shirts, sat on the carpet watching a video on a television screen. A couple of nuns stood at the side, nervously watching the video and glancing at the girls.

  The video showed some of these girls talking with Sister Terrano. She laughed easily with them on the screen. After some small talk she asked, “How many of us are ready to embrace chastity?” A round-faced, blond-haired girl about fourteen said, “ ‘Embrace chastity.’ What’s that mean?” The girl next to her, no older, said, “You know, embrace being a virgin.” The blonde girl smirked at the other one. “I know what chastity is, bitch. What’s it mean to ‘embrace’ it?” Another girl, maybe thirteen, said from across the circle, “It means ‘hug.’ ” A sixteen-year-old with acne added, “It sometimes means ‘fuck.’ ” Sister Terrano listened with a smile, her arms folded over her stomach. The blonde said, “It don’t mean ‘fuck.’ ”

  “It does some of the time,” the sixteen-year-old said. The youngest one said, “I can get into that. ‘Fuck chastity.’ ” The blonde smiled and raised her arms in the air. “See what I mean? Embrace chastity’s confusing.” Sister Terrano laughed. “Ladies? I appreciate your enthusiasm, but—”

  The girls in the undercroft watched the video quietly, though every time Sister Terrano talked, one of them sobbed—the thirteen-year-old who’d said embracing meant hugging.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to find one of the nuns who’d been standing watch over the girls. She gave me a stony face and beckoned me with an index finger. We walked out of the undercroft into another hall. She led me to an office and guided me inside. She stood close to me and said, “You’re intruding on a private moment.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.

  The nun seemed to think she still needed to convince me. “Sister Terrano connected with these girls in ways that no one else could. She touched them and her touch was like—” For a weird moment I thought she was going to say sex. “Like the touch of God,” she said.

  “I’m the one who found Sister Terrano’s body,” I said. I pulled a business card from my wallet and gave it to her. “I’m looking into the murder.”

  Knowing who I was didn’t impress her. “What’s there to look into? The police have Greg Samuelson.”

  “He didn’t kill her,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Why would he want to?”

  “I don’t know why anyone would want to. Everyone loved her. I never knew anyone who wished her harm. She was the purest person I’ve ever known, the—”

  I thought about DuBuclet’s comment on her complicated life. “Except when the cameras were off?”

  She adjusted her eyes and mouth. “You’re going to have to leave.” She was a small woman but looked ready to pick me up and throw me out.

  I stepped toward the door to the office. “I understand.”

  We walked up the hall toward the undercroft together. I asked, “Who controls the finances for Sister Terrano’s abstinence program?”

  The nun considered me for a moment. “She did, with some help from Greg Samuelson.”

  “Was there any oversight?”

  “Of course. We have annual audits.”

  “And everything added up for her?”

  I was beginning to annoy her again. “I’m not an auditor.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Do you know, when was the last time anyone saw Sister Terrano alive?”

  “No idea.”

  “Who would know?”

  “Greg organized her schedule.”

  “Do you
mind if I look at his office computer?”

  She looked liked I’d slapped her. “Yes, I mind. Anyway, the police have it. Judy’s, too.” She put her hand on my shoulder, guiding me toward the door to the undercroft.

  “Anyone come to visit her lately who’s not in the church?”

  “Out,” she said.

  “Did she have a cat?”

  “No. Come on. Out!” She stopped at the door. “You aren’t welcome here now.” She forced a smile. “Her funeral will be early next week. You can come back then.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve gone to too many funerals.”

  As we walked through the undercroft the girls on the video were continuing to give Sister Terrano a hard time. One said to her, “You don’t know what you’re missing, lady.” The thirteen-year-old looked triumphant. “Yeah, you don’t know.” Sister Terrano interrupted, now without a laugh. “Yes,” she said. “Oh yes, I do.” Something in the way she said it—something sad and longing—silenced the girls in the video. A few of them even nodded in sympathy.

  THIRTEEN

  THE SMART THING TO do would have been to drive downtown, find a coffee shop near Eric Stone’s office, and kick back until our 3:30 appointment. That also would have been the respectful thing to do. The priests and nuns who promoted teenage virginity would have approved. But Judy Terrano still would have been lying on a stainless-steel shelf in the Cook County morgue, awaiting release to a funeral that even a poor sinner like me could attend. Greg Samuelson still would have been lying in a hospital with half a face. Stone still would have been screwing Samuelson’s wife. William DuBuclet still would have been holed up in his curtained house on the South Side, stirring the pot slowly.

  I took a side door out of the sanctuary into the courtyard garden that separated the church from the buildings that housed the nuns and priests who taught at the parish school. A statue of St. Joseph, dedicated to a long-dead pastor, stood near the front fence.