The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  “Four in the morning, the police broke into the apartment and shot my son dead. Ninety-nine shots. And you know how many shots my son’s friends returned? One. One shot. You do the math. They shot my son in the doorway to his bedroom. His girlfriend was lying in bed behind him. Pregnant, you know. He was wearing boxer shorts, and the police shot him in the head. The newspapers showed the picture. Press conference the next day called him ‘vicious,’ called him ‘violent,’ like an animal. Maybe he was, I don’t know. But I do know that if he was violent and vicious it was because the police made him so. Because I know where he came from. I know that much. And I know that this supposedly violent, vicious man died in boxer shorts, without a gun in his hand. Pitiful. He was twenty-one years old.”

  I watched him talk. I listened to a voice that had come through a pain that I thought I understood, a pain that smelled of infection and guilt. He was ninety-six years old and he’d come through that and there was something extraordinary about him sitting at his desk telling me his story, weighed down by decades of grief, but still talking. I said, “Where’s my partner?”

  He shrugged, picked up a telephone, and dialed. He listened to it ring. I watched him listen. He said, “Robert, call me right away.” He hung up and dialed again. He left a similar message for Jarik. “They’re not answering their cell phones.”

  “Not good enough,” I said. “What are you going to do to find her?”

  He looked at me level. “Not much else I can do. If I were thirty years younger, they wouldn’t have done this. If I were your age, they wouldn’t even have dared to think about doing it. But I’m old and sick, and when the boys don’t listen to me there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

  “You don’t fool me. They do whatever you tell them. I want Lucinda Juarez now.”

  He nodded and a small smile crossed his lips. “Undoubtedly you do. But as you must have learned by now, we protect ourselves and our own first, and only then, if we’re able to do so, we protect others.”

  “I’m amazed that you consider Robert and Jarik your own.”

  “They’re what I have,” he said. “Just as you have Lucinda Juarez—and that nephew of yours.”

  I heard the threat in that. He knew too much about me, about my family, about all I loved. “You won’t have Robert and Jarik much longer if they’ve done anything to hurt her.”

  His smile turned grim. “I understand that, and it would sadden me terribly.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Call me the moment you hear from them.” I stood and turned to the door but stopped. “What’s the connection between you and Judy Terrano?”

  He looked astounded that I didn’t already know. “She was my son’s girlfriend.”

  The look on my face made his eyes glint with a small pleasure. “In 1969,” he said. “She was involved.”

  I needed a moment to sort out what I was hearing. “You’re saying Judy Terrano was the girl who was in the apartment when the cops shot your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was pregnant?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Wow!” I said.

  He laughed.

  “Is the—Where’s the child now?”

  “He’s sitting right behind you.”

  I turned and my eyes met the dull eyes of the tall, clapping man in the wheelchair.

  DuBuclet spoke gently to his grandson, “Tony, say hello to Mr. Kozmarski.”

  The man said nothing, but a big baritone laugh erupted from his mouth.

  William DuBuclet laughed, too, and said, “He’s the love of my old age.”

  I needed a moment to think. “Then why would you want me to stop investigating his mother’s murder?”

  DuBuclet sighed. “You’re part of the problem, not the solution.” He said it gently, like he was easing me into bad news.

  “Huh? Why? Because I’m white?”

  “For a starter, yes. And because you were a cop and your daddy was a cop, and for all I know your daddy’s daddy was a cop. And your friends are cops. You might not want to be, but you’re blind.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “It’s worth pistol-whipping me and kidnapping my partner to get me to quit?”

  He laughed at me. “You made the world, I didn’t.”

  “Me? I’m just trying to survive in it.”

  He shrugged. “Like the rest of us, Mr. Kozmarski.”

  I said, “Seems to me you’re still living in the past.”

  “The past is right here between you and me,” he said. “I can feel it in this room. I can smell it. You’re living in the past, too—you just don’t know it.”

  His grandson clapped silently.

  I said, “How did Anthony and Judy Terrano get together?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t quit, do you?” He considered me for a minute and said, “At twenty, anything’s possible, isn’t it? There was a hangout in the old Maxwell Street area. The whites—mostly Poles like you, Jews and Christians both—had moved out of the neighborhood, but they came back in to sell overpriced groceries from their grocery stores to the blacks who’d moved into their tenements. The ’68 riots had come and gone. The West Side already had burned, a lot of it. So, early in the summer of ’69, some kids in their teens and twenties started squatting in a vacant house. They filled it with old chairs, and sofas, and mattresses for those who wanted to spend the night. They’d come and drink, and party, and screw. Most of the guys my son was involved with stuck far away from the place. I don’t know what my son was doing there. Curiosity, I guess. But he went and he met Judy Terrano. I can’t say I blame him for falling for her. One thing led to another, and by Pearl Harbor Day my son was dead and Judy Terrano was carrying the child of a man the police had called a vicious animal.”

  If all that DuBuclet had told me was true, he’d told me a lot. But I didn’t know how much of it to believe. I asked, “Is the building where they had the hangout still there?”

  He shook his head. “It burned later the same year. Those were tough nights. Smoky ones, too. Now the rest of the neighborhood’s gone, wiped out. Wrecking ball, bulldozer, backhoe, and steamroller—every machine that weighs ten tons or more has been through there.”

  I thought about that and asked, “Did the kids who hung out at the place call it the Bad Kitty?”

  He smiled. “Now I’m impressed. Yes, the Bad Kitty. The Bad Kitty Lounge.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I CALLED A MAN I hadn’t seen or talked to in three and a half years, not since the day Corrine and I got married. He was one of those guys you see only when someone’s walking down the aisle or lying in a casket, but you like more than half the people you see every day. “I need a favor,” I said. “Maybe a lot of favors.” Lucinda was gone and I didn’t trust William DuBuclet to bring her back.

  He said, “Come on over.” Like we saw each other every day.

  I drove through the South Side and cut east into Bronzeville. The mayor had been turning downtown Chicago into a garden city. Flower beds bloomed all summer and park fountains played until the winter ice threatened to break their pipes. But the South Side was outside of the garden, mostly. The streets needed repaving, the sidewalks, too. Trash and dead weeds covered the vacant lots. The downtown high-rises fell away to brick tenements, two-flats, apartment blocks, and empty storefronts with ghostly windows covered by burglar bars. Developers had poured money into a few corners of Bronzeville but the rest of the neighborhood ate away at those corners like rust.

  I found my way to Forty-fifth and Lawrence and parked at the curb outside a gray, one-story commercial building. In a vacant lot across the intersection, a dozen men sat on an assortment of chairs around a trash and wood fire. A couple of them were drinking. A couple smoked. The others just hung out. Across the intersection the other way, a toothless woman sat on the steps of a crumbling gray stone, taking in the sun.

  I rolled down my window and took in the sun, too. The air was still cool but the bright light warmed my skin. The b
reeze tasted like lake air and wood smoke. I closed my eyes and tried not to worry about Lucinda.

  “Hey,” a deep voice said.

  I opened my eyes. A man stood outside my window. He was huge—around six foot four and three hundred pounds so when he stood on a bathroom scale the needle would spin once around and land on zero. He carried most of the weight in his chest and shoulders. He wore a black baseball cap with a sunshade hanging from the back. He had a close-cropped goatee and his eyes were set a little too close together, which gave him an almost unimaginable gentleness.

  I rolled up my window and got out of the car. The big man and I gave each other a big hug.

  I said, “How’ve you been, Terrence?”

  He gave me the gentlest of grins. “Getting by. You?”

  “Same,” I said. “Barely.”

  “That’s enough, I figure. How’s Corrine?”

  I shrugged. “We split up.”

  He shook his head like he felt it. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re still working on it. How about Darlene?”

  The grin came back. “Better and better.”

  “That’s what I want to hear.”

  “Come on,” he said, and he led me through a trash-filled alley, around the side of the gray commercial building, across a McDonald’s parking lot where seagulls were fighting over a scattered pack of French fries, and toward a redbrick apartment building with wooden stairs hanging off the back.

  I’d met Terrence Messier when we were going through the academy together. He’d scored perfect or near perfect in every course from Crisis Prevention to Presentation of Evidence. He’d broken the academy record in the muscular endurance tests and scored near the top on the pistol range. Our instructors had called in their supervisors to watch what he could do. Then five weeks before graduation his younger brother was walking home from working minimum wage at a Pizza Hut and took a bullet in his forehead. The cops were on the street breaking up a small coke-dealing operation, and they thought Terrence’s brother presented a clear danger. He’d come out of nowhere carrying a metallic object that turned out to be a foil-wrapped slice with pepperoni and mushrooms. The DA had ruled the shooting justifiable, and the next morning Terrence had cleaned out his locker at the academy. Since then he’d made his living by hustling.

  Terrence led me up the wooden stairs. On the first landing, we stepped past a tangle of dirty tricycles and bikes. On the second landing, we stepped over cases of empty beer bottles. The third landing faced a door. Terrence unlocked it and we stepped into a courtyard garden. He’d nailed wooden lattices to the exterior vertical supports, leaving a gap of a couple feet to let in air and light. Roses, flowering vines, and ferns filled most of the rest of the space. The plants, fed by the heat of the building, still lived, though the October cold was killing everything outside. In the middle of all the plants two reclining chairs waited for Terrence and his girlfriend Darlene.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “My island retreat.”

  He stepped past the plants to a large plate-glass door. He unlocked it, too, and we stepped inside. The inside looked nothing like the neighborhood. The sofa and chairs were leather. The rugs looked hand-loomed. The lighting was modern, with lots of exposed wires, halogen bulbs, and accents over the framed pictures, also modern.

  “Nice,” I said again. “And you got all this by doing what?”

  He looked at me square. “By doing what I’ve got to do. You got a problem with that?”

  “It’s what I do every day.”

  “All right then.” He allowed himself an appreciative glance at his possessions. “I decided I like high-end.”

  “Yeah, I’m feeling altitude sick.”

  He looked at me with those gentle eyes. “What can I do for you?”

  I told him about Lucinda’s kidnapping, then gave him the background, starting with William DuBuclet, Robert, and Jarik and ending with DuBuclet’s connection to Judy Terrano and the Bad Kitty Lounge. He knew about DuBuclet but not about the link to Judy Terrano. He’d never heard of the Bad Kitty Lounge but he knew people who would know about it.

  He got his phone and cupped the receiver in his big hand like it was a child’s toy. He purred into it, hung up, and dialed again, then purred some more. Everyone he called seemed glad to hear from him, and if they didn’t give him what he asked for he asked again, never raising his voice above a soft purr.

  After he hung up the last time, he said, “They’ve got her in Chinatown.” He looked at me hard. “DuBuclet’s a dangerous old bastard. You know what you’re getting into if you tangle with him?”

  “I’m already tangled,” I said. “Anyway, I kind of like him. He reminds me of another big tough man I know.”

  He shook his head. “Compared to him, I’m a violet. He wouldn’t notice if he stepped on me.”

  “You sure you want to tangle with him?”

  He laughed. “You know me. I’ve never been scared of getting stepped on.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “Just a minute.” He disappeared into a bedroom and reappeared cradling a FAMAS assault rifle. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got a gun.”

  “You have anything smaller?”

  “Yeah, if you insist.” He disappeared and reappeared again, this time with a Smith & Wesson pistol that would have looked enormous in anyone else’s hand but his. “Does this suit your delicate tastes better?”

  “What if I said no?”

  “Darlene’s got a fingernail file somewhere. I could borrow it.”

  “Your fingernails look fine. Let’s go.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WE DROVE INTO CHINATOWN, Terrence’s knees crammed against my glove compartment. The smell of ginger and garlic filtered into the car from outside. “If Robert and Jarik don’t kill us, I buy lunch,” I said.

  Terrence grunted and kept his eyes on the street.

  We turned off the main drag onto West Twenty-third and left the smell of lunch behind. At the far end of the street, narrow little houses stood shoulder to shoulder. Beyond them a chain-link fence rimmed an industrial park. I squeezed my car into a spot at the curb and we walked four houses back.

  The house that Terrence took us to looked no different from any other on the street. Cheap, white gauze curtains covered the front window. A screen door that had seen too much winter hung loosely on its hinges, covering a wooden door that had seen the same. The window, the red brick, and even the roof and the front sidewalk looked clean but cheap and old and tired.

  We walked up the front path and drew our guns. The window watched us like a cloudy eye.

  “Should’ve let me bring my other gun,” Terrence muttered.

  “You should’ve offered me one, too.”

  “All you needed to do was ask.”

  I glanced at him to see if he really had extra assault rifles ready for a loan. He gave me nothing back.

  On the front doorstep Terrence held the doorknob, squared his shoulder against the door, and pushed. The top of the door creaked quietly inward from the frame, and the lock bolt splintered the old wood that had held it. The door blew open with hardly a sound.

  We stepped into a softly lighted living room. Old, floral-print couches, chairs, and a coffee table were all the furniture. I wondered for a moment if we’d broken into the wrong house and we would find an aging Chinese couple drinking tea in the kitchen, but hip-hop music played from somewhere in the back, so I figured the owner might have rented the place to a couple guys I’d exchanged head wounds with. The hall floor sagged underfoot. There were three closed doors on the left and an open doorway at the end of the hall, leading into a brightly lighted room with an exterior door visible on the far wall.

  We stopped at the first closed door and Terrence held his pistol close to his chest like it was a small animal he’d rescued, then pointed it into the room as I eased the door open. The room was dark and smelled like sweat and musty sleep. A heavy curtain covered the window. Dirty clothes l
ay on the floor. Two unmade single beds stood against the walls. A man slept faceup on one of them. He had on sweatpants with one pant leg pushed up around his knee and a ribbed, sleeveless white T-shirt. He looked like he could have been Robert’s brother. I eased the door shut again.

  The second door was a foul-smelling bathroom.

  The third door stuck when I tried to open it. I used Terrence’s trick, holding the knob and leaning in. No lock held the door shut, just a damp, warped door frame. It sprang open with a loud crack.

  Chairs scraped on the tile floor in the next room.

  Terrence swung around and stepped into the bright room, gun first. I went through the door I’d forced open and into a dim bedroom. Lucinda sat inside on a metal-framed bed, her ankles chained to the foot posts, her wrists to the headboard, with just enough play to allow her to sit. She had a nasty bruise on her jaw and another under her left eye.

  I closed the door behind me.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she said, friendly enough.

  I went to her and checked the chains and locks. They weren’t coming off without help. “Do you know where the keys are?”

  She nodded toward the room that Terrence had entered. “They’ve got them.”

  I looked at her face and touched her bruised jaw. She flinched. “How bad?” I asked.

  “They barely touched me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Perfect gentlemen. They served me breakfast in bed.”

  There was a commotion in the next room, chairs tipping over, furniture sliding across the floor.

  “I’ll be right back, okay?” I started to the door.

  “Come soon.” She smiled but I heard the fear.

  The bright room was a kitchen—a table, a couple of chairs, a sink, a refrigerator, and a stove and oven, nothing more except the remains of Chinese takeout on the table. Terrence had Robert and Jarik up against a wall. He held his pistol against Robert’s forehead. He had a hand on Jarik’s chest. But our visit had awakened the man who’d been sleeping in the first bedroom. He stood behind Terrence and held a gun to his back. The four of them stood so still you could’ve painted them.