The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  “Why did DuBuclet threaten Sister Terrano?”

  “Greg wouldn’t say. I’m not sure he knew.”

  “Yesterday you threatened Samuelson after he burned your car.”

  “If he’d heard me, he would’ve laughed. He knows I’m harmless. He didn’t laugh when DuBuclet said it.”

  Stone was right. Samuelson had laughed when I’d told him that Stone said he would kill him. “So you’re saying DuBuclet killed Judy Terrano or had her killed.”

  “I don’t know. I’m saying he threatened her and now she’s dead.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “DuBuclet’s a very powerful man, and he influences most decisions involving commercial property on the South Side. If word got back to him that I pointed the police at him, he would become a quick enemy. If he turned out to be innocent, his anger could have a lasting effect on my business. As a land developer I can’t afford to have that kind of enemy.”

  “So why are you telling me?”

  “I’d like to hire you to keep an eye on DuBuclet. Quietly. I don’t want you to talk to him, but I want to know what he’s doing. If he had Judy Terrano killed and if he’s responsible for Greg getting shot, I want to know whether he really meant he’d get Greg and his family. I want to know that Amy’s safe. Me too, to tell the truth. I spend a lot of time with Amy, and I want to know if DuBuclet’s people are coming.”

  I thought about all he’d told me. “Okay,” I said. “Write me a check.”

  He looked relieved. “How much?”

  Usually I charged fifteen hundred up front. But I didn’t like Eric Stone. Or what he did. Or how he did it. “Five thousand,” I said.

  Five thousand was no problem for him. He nodded and pulled a checkbook from his desk. I would put the check in the drawer with the cash from William DuBuclet and decide what to do with it later.

  I WAS FINDING MY own way out when the receptionist said, “Mr. Kozmarski? If you have a minute, Mrs. Stone also would like a word with you.”

  That stopped me. “Stone is married?”

  The receptionist found me funny. “Mrs. Stone is Eric’s mother.” She directed me through another door, which led down a short hallway to a single office. The woman who had been arguing with Amy Samuelson in the conference room sat at the desk having another argument, this time with the ponytailed man who had been driving the silver Mercedes that almost hit me outside of Samuelson’s condo. I saw no reason to listen to the argument, so I knocked on the door frame.

  The woman glanced at me with the same cold, impassive eyes she’d shown me before and touched the man’s hand with her fingertips. “We can continue this later,” she said quietly.

  The man pulled his hand away. He stood and cocked his head to the side like he was sizing me up. I guess he thought I was small enough. He bowed his head slightly and knocked my shoulder with his as he pushed through the door.

  Mrs. Stone offered me his chair. Her office looked a lot like Eric Stone’s, but the walls were tinted pink and she had framed pastel renderings of a project called Stone Tower that the company seemed to be working on. A small vase of roses stood on her blond-wood desk. The soft colors didn’t fool me. She was the hardest thing in the place.

  She said, “Never go into business with your family, Mr. Kozmarski. My son David”—she gestured to the door that the ponytailed man had passed through—“is fifty-six this month and Eric is fifty-eight, but I treat them like badly behaved thirteen-year-olds and they respond by acting like badly behaved thirteen-year-olds. They bring their girlfriends home and give them jobs. They hire their friends with or without qualifications.”

  I gave her a straight face.

  She waved impatiently. “Nothing but trouble. But what choice do I have? I won’t put them out on the street. Did you know that both of my boys live in my house? They’re almost sixty and they live with their mother. David’s daughter Cassie, too. I raised the girl myself. What do you think of that, Mr. Kozmarski?”

  “It’s nice to be close to your family.”

  She laughed sharply at that. “It’s nice to be close to this,” she said, and she gestured at the framed renderings of the Stone Tower project. “Without the buildings my boys would live in the holes where they probably belong. Me too. But with the buildings they get to play tennis and drive nice cars and hire the girls they’re dating. And I get to play queen over it all.” Her cold eyes watched mine. “What do you think of that?”

  “Like I said, family is nice.”

  She leaned back in her chair. “That’s my story, Mr. Kozmarski. What’s yours?”

  “Which story do you want?”

  “The one that explains why you’re here talking to my son.”

  “He called me because he thinks you’re having an affair.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “He’s paying me to follow you around, watch who you park next to at the Motel 6, snap some pictures. He thinks you’ve been getting together with the eighteen-year-old kid who delivers mail to your office.”

  She gazed at me with her hard eyes. “I have very little patience and less of a sense of humor.”

  “Why don’t you ask Eric?”

  “Are you saying you won’t tell me?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, yes.”

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll tell you, though, I protect what’s mine. I’ll do whatever I need to do. I have lawyers and other resources that can stop you and crush you.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. “If they crush me, they’ll probably get Eric, too.”

  She shook her head. “Just you.” But her voice quivered.

  I tried to see into her eyes but saw only a rocky hard place.

  ON THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE, I thought about the Stones. I wondered what they were up to and how they tied in to Judy Terrano. I wasn’t sure how much I bought Eric Stone’s worries about William DuBuclet. Robert and Jarik had threatened me. They’d pulled a gun on me to make the threat stick. But even if DuBuclet was responsible for killing Judy Terrano, Amy Samuelson seemed too far out of the nun’s circle to need protection. Still, if DuBuclet and his flunkies were on the prowl, I wanted to keep my eyes open for them.

  I wanted Lucinda to watch out for them, too. I pulled out my cell phone to check in with her. But the screen said someone had left voice mail while I was chatting with the Stones. The number was Stan Fleming’s and his three-word message sounded unhappy—“Call me please.” Please? Who was teaching him manners? I called the District Thirteen station and they told me how to reach him in Judy Terrano’s room at Holy Trinity.

  His voice was flat when he answered the phone. “Look, it seems Greg Samuelson got up and walked out of intensive care at Rush Med.”

  “Huh? When?”

  “A couple hours ago. But I just heard.”

  “He ‘got up’?”

  “And left.”

  “With half a face?”

  “The injury’s not quite as bad as it looks. He shot off part of his jaw. But, yeah, half a jaw, half a face, he left.”

  “I thought you had him under guard.”

  “Of course I had him under guard. But you know what he looked like. The guard took a break and—”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “With the bandages, he shouldn’t be hard to find,” Stan said. “We can stake out every Dairy Queen in the city. He’s not eating anything chewier than a milkshake.”

  “You think he killed the priest?”

  “The church is just a mile away from the hospital.”

  “Yeah, but it’s hard to believe he could have done it.”

  “It’s hard to believe he didn’t. Who else?”

  Exactly, I thought, who else? I said, “What can I do for you?”

  He said, “I need your help on this.” He must have had a hard time saying those words.

  I said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

&
nbsp; FIFTEEN

  I CALLED LUCINDA WHILE I drove. She was on her way to play reference librarian. I told her about Stan Fleming’s call and Greg Samuelson walking out of his hospital room. I warned her about William DuBuclet’s threats and told her about the check I was carrying from Eric Stone.

  “Do you trust Stone?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding? But he interests me. Yesterday he was waving his fists around and promising he would draw blood. Today he’s playing the calm, concerned boyfriend. He even sounds worried about Greg Samuelson.”

  “I’ll check the newspaper file for articles about him and his family.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You want to catch up over dinner with me and Jason?”

  She said she would pick up Thai on her way back from the archives and meet us at my house.

  _______

  A LITTLE BEFORE FIVE I pulled into a parking spot a block and a half away from Holy Trinity, locked my gun in the glove compartment, and eased myself out of the car. The afternoon sky had turned gray, and a cold wind was rising again from the west. Six police cruisers and an ambulance lined the curb in front of the church. News vans had parked across the street. A neighborhood crowd watched the church buildings as if Moses himself would walk out and deliver ten new commandments. If the killings kept up, concession stands would come next.

  A cop at the garden gate radioed inside to Stan Fleming, then let me in. In Judy Terrano’s room, a forensics man was working on the brick that the killer had taken from the stack next to the radiator and used to crush the priest’s head. A bunch of cops were squeezed into the nun’s bathroom. Stan was one of them. The forensics detective who dressed like Smokey the Bear was another. “We’re looking at early rigor,” Smokey was saying. “Better put a couple sheets over him, ’cause this guy’s coming out of the Virginity Nun’s room stiff.”

  “Can’t blame him,” said one of the other cops. “I get off on old nuns, too.”

  “Sickos, all of you,” said Stan, and he came into the bedroom, followed by the other cops’ laughter. He brushed past me and went into the hall. I followed him. “There are days,” he said. “There are—” He stopped again. His eyes were dry but I knew better.

  “Yeah,” I said, “there are.”

  He shook his head. “Samuelson worked for the church eleven years, the last eight of them for Judy Terrano. Quiet as a fucking rat.” His dry eyes moistened.

  “You don’t really think he killed the priest, do you?” I asked.

  His eyes got stony again. “He’s got priors, did you know that?”

  I admitted that I didn’t.

  “Nothing official anymore. The Mercedes he torched yesterday—that’s not the first car he’s burned. When he was fifteen he burned his mother’s station wagon. A 1979 Buick Century. Might even have deserved burning, I don’t know. They adjudicated him and he took four months in juvenile corrections.

  “He got in trouble again when he was twenty-nine. He worked for a small accounting firm and was directing company checks into his own account. The firm dropped charges when he agreed to pay back the stolen money.”

  “Anything else?”

  He looked incredulous. “What else do you want? We never arrested him for spray-painting BAD KITTY on the sides of subway cars if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “Burning his mom’s car and dipping his fingers into the company bank account isn’t homicide.”

  He looked at me hard. “The cash in Judy Terrano’s architecture book says this is about money, too. Eric Stone’s burning Mercedes says Samuelson’s still a bad boy.”

  “So Samuelson strangled Judy Terrano, shot himself, and then climbed out of his hospital bed to kill a priest?”

  “Who else?”

  I knew I should tell him about the similarly banded cash that DuBuclet gave me. But instead I said, “If you put this out on the street, a patrolman might think he’s doing his church duty to put another bullet in Samuelson’s head.”

  Stan shrugged. “I might have to agree with him.”

  I looked at him, unconvinced.

  “Why else would he escape from a locked-down hospital room?” he said.

  “A room without a lock or a guard.”

  “Still.”

  “Did he know you planned to arrest him?”

  He looked angry. “Of course he did.”

  “Samuelson was unconscious when he went to the hospital. Did anyone tell him? Or did he just wake up and walk out of the hospital without necessarily knowing everyone in the city thought he was a killer?”

  Stan considered that. “Okay. But the guy has a major head injury. Why would he leave?”

  “Like you said before, he tried to kill himself in Judy Terrano’s office. I would drag the river near the hospital and keep an eye open for floaters downstream. He might have left the hospital to finish the job.”

  “We’ve got a little problem with that, too. We did glue-lifts on his hands and they came out clean. No gunshot residue.”

  “He didn’t shoot himself?”

  “I’m not saying that. Not yet. We traced the gun. It’s his. And there were powder burns on his face. We’re retesting the glue-lifts.”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t kill the priest in Judy Terrano’s room. In the shape he was in, he’d be lucky to have enough strength to flag down a cab to take him to the morgue.”

  “A dying man could drop a brick on a guy’s head.”

  “And kill him?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “A dying man couldn’t drag him into the bathtub afterward.”

  Stan crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay, how do you figure it?”

  I said, “The priest worked closely with Judy Terrano and might have known her secrets. I figure he was looking for the same thing his killer was looking for and he surprised him in the nun’s room. The killer had made a mess of the closet but hadn’t gotten further. He was by the desk when the priest came in. He picked up a brick, hit the priest with it, dragged his body into the bathtub, swept the mess back into the closet, and left.”

  Stan nodded. “Okay, that fits the scene. What were they looking for?”

  “Let’s go with your theory. Money. Not robbery, though. Bigger money than we found in the architecture book. Enough to kill for.”

  “A nun with big money?”

  “A nun with cash stashed in her desk?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Where’s the money from?”

  I considered the connections to DuBuclet—the gold elastic bands around the cash, the threats Eric Stone had told me about, and the gun Robert and Jarik had pulled on me. “I don’t know. Look at the audit books.”

  “All right. Who’s the killer?”

  I figured the killer was one of DuBuclet’s followers, but I wanted to know more about DuBuclet before I turned him over. “I don’t know,” I said again.

  Stan thought about it. “It was Samuelson,” he said.

  I shook my head. “What else have you found out about Judy Terrano?”

  “Grew up on the South Side, one brother now deceased, both parents deceased. Poster child for famous activist nuns. What do you want to know?”

  “Any ideas about the ‘Bad Kitty’ and the tattoo?”

  “No ideas, but that stuff got to me. I dreamed about the tattoo last night.”

  “I don’t want to know about your dreams.”

  “I don’t want to know my dreams,” he said.

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked.

  That was easy. “Tell me where to find Samuelson.”

  I shrugged. “Try his condo on LaSalle,” I said, “but I’m guessing you’ve already done that.”

  He looked disappointed.

  I said, “If he calls me, I’ll do what I can to bring him in.”

  He nodded. That would have to do.

  “I doubt he’ll call me,” I added.

  He turned back to Judy Terrano’s room, then asked, “You find anything other than the book full
of money when you searched?”

  Denying that I’d dug through her belongings was pointless. “Nothing,” I said. The picture in my pocket of a teenaged Judith Terrano called me a liar, but I wasn’t ready to give it up.

  Stan looked at me close, like he could hear the picture calling. “You move or remove anything?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Why are you telling the news that she was raped?”

  “Huh? I’m not telling them she—”

  “You’re saying she was sexually assaulted, but you told me that your forensics guy said she wasn’t.”

  “She was assaulted. Her dress was around her neck. Her panties were off. That looks like sexual assault.”

  “It looks like it was about to be,” I admitted. “Has forensics found any evidence?”

  He shook his head a little. “Not even a hair.”

  “So maybe it wasn’t sexual assault.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe someone wanted to give you bad dreams.”

  SIXTEEN

  I WATCHED STAN WORK and tried to stay out of the way until 7:30, then slipped out of the housing block into the cold evening. The news camera lights glared like ice.

  I cranked the heat in my Skylark and drove. The wind was whipping through the side streets, and the pavement and lawns looked dark as rain-slicked tar. A couple blocks from my house I came around a corner and hit the brakes when something that looked like a red snake slithered halfway across the street. I squinted at it. The headlights shined on a red party streamer. Happy birthday to someone, I thought, and give me dinner and a full night’s sleep.