The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  He stood and left the room. Terrence, Lucinda, and I exchanged glances but we said nothing.

  Stetler came back with a faded photo album. He sat in a chair and removed two color photographs and handed them to me. The first showed a group of five guys standing with guitars, a trumpet, and a saxophone on the white front steps of a red two-story house. I recognized a much younger Thomas Stetler in the middle of the group, looking as proud and full of sex as a rooster. The steps led to a porch recessed into two side wings, each with large windows. Above the porch was a flat wooden roof and, above and behind the flat roof, an open door that made the roof into a second-story balcony. Pink curtains, which could have been purple before the photograph faded, covered the windows.

  The other photograph looked like it was taken inside on the second floor, facing down a hall toward the door to the balcony. The hall carpet was vibrant pink. A very fair-skinned woman with blond hair sat on the carpet, her arms supporting her from behind, her breasts jutting forward, her blouse unbuttoned but covering her barely, her legs dressed in the shortest of skirts and open like a dirty book.

  “That’s Louise,” said Stetler. “I ran with her for a while. She was a hot wire, too. Too hot. I had to get away.”

  “The Bad Kitty burned down in 1969?” I asked.

  “Yeah, summer of ’69. Terrible thing. Two young couples was upstairs at the time. They burned with it.”

  “How did the fire happen?” Lucinda asked.

  “Arson. The whole West Side had burned. The riots, you know? No one would’ve noticed the fire at the Bad Kitty, except for the dead kids.”

  I asked him, “Who would know about Judy Terrano if she hung out there?”

  He thought about the question for only a second. “Louise would.”

  “She still around?”

  “Yeah, lives a few blocks from here. Back then, she got heavy into drugs and went out on the streets. Shit, she’s probably still walking them even if it takes a cane. No one’s stopping her till she’s lying in the ground, if then.”

  We finished our iced tea and pried ourselves out of his comfortable chairs. When Stetler showed us to his door he picked up the baseball bat and tapped its sweet spot against his palm. “Come back and see me anytime,” he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “SURE, I KNEW JUDY Terrano,” said the woman. “Couldn’t forget her. No one could. Don’t know what ever happened to that girl.”

  So at least one ex-streetwalker didn’t know that Judy Terrano had become the Virginity Nun. “She’s dead,” I said.

  “Happens to the best of us.” She wore a green cardigan sweater and had an afghan blanket spread across her lap. Her skin looked bad, her hair stringy, but her blue eyes were clear and sharp. A Marlboro hung from her lips. “So why are you investigating a dead old party girl?”

  “Family interest. There’s a little money involved, and everyone wants to make sure it goes to the right relatives.” One lie was as good as another, I figured, though Louise Johnson’s eyes lit up at the mention of money. I added, “I saw a picture of her when she was eighteen or nineteen. She was a knockout.”

  Louise Johnson took a deep drag from her cigarette, held it in until the smoke must have burned, and exhaled. “Judy could take her pick. Hell, even if a boy was with another girl, Judy could walk into the room and he’d climb out of bed and follow her like a puppy. And the girl who was left in bed alone? She’d understand. Half the time she’d get out of bed and go after her like a puppy, too.”

  I thought about DuBuclet’s son, shot dead in his boxer shorts. “How about Anthony DuBuclet?”

  She laughed and she fingered the business card I’d given her. Her fingers looked surprisingly young. She touched my hand with them. “Yeah, Anthony was one of them. He was a good-looking boy. A charmer. Angry and dangerous. Do you know whose bed he got out of so he could chase after Judy?” She gave us a proud smile. “That’s right. Louise Johnson’s very own.” Her smile fell, and she inhaled a long drag from her cigarette. “But he was no good in bed. Too rough. I hated to see him leave me, and I loved to see him go.”

  We sat in her basement apartment at the kitchen table. The apartment looked decorated to offset the life she’d led on the streets. The furniture was plain, a lot of brown and beige. She’d taped newspaper comic strips onto her refrigerator next to old pictures of kids who probably were family members. A coffeepot percolated on the counter. Two bottles of Bacardi Gold, one empty, the other half full, stood next to the coffeepot. There were bread crumbs on the kitchen table. Even an ex-hooker has to make toast.

  “Judy fell for Anthony?” Lucinda asked.

  “You could say that, yeah. Far as I know, Anthony’s the only one she ever did fall for. She fucked with no more sense than I did. Young or old, boy or girl, black, white, or yellow. But when she got together with Anthony, that was it. It was love, or else she just liked banging with a boy that used his dick like a fist.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant when Anthony died?” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “No, I didn’t know about that. Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “Thank God. The world couldn’t handle another Judy Terrano. She drove us all wild.” She inhaled from the cigarette again like it was oxygen and she’d spent a long time under water. The cigarette paper glowed orange and burned to the filter. She tamped the butt in an ashtray, then lifted the blanket from her lap. She went to the counter and brought back four coffee cups, the pot of coffee, and the bottle of Bacardi. She poured half a cup of coffee for each of us and topped off one of them with rum. She handed the bottle to Lucinda, who poured half an inch into her cup before handing it to Terrence, who did the same. He offered me the bottle but I waved it away.

  Louise looked at me hard. “I never trusted a man that wouldn’t drink with me.”

  Terrence said, “If he takes one drink, he’ll finish your bottle.”

  “No problem with that,” she said. She took a long drink of her spiked coffee and gazed at me. “But I’m so fucking lonely I’ll talk to anyone. Even you. You know where Judy’s boy is now?”

  “Yeah, he’s with his grandfather,” I said. “Did William DuBuclet ever come around the Bad Kitty?”

  She laughed. “Hell, no. Back then William DuBuclet was a fighter, and the Bad Kitty was a place for loving. That man wouldn’t’ve known what to do there. It was a dump building in a dump neighborhood. I guess the owners couldn’t rent it or didn’t try. But then the kids started to move in and it became everything the rest of the city wasn’t. No cops. No limits. If you liked someone you could spend time together. If you wanted to experiment, you could experiment. If you were curious, you could find out anything you wanted to know. I found out a lot in that place.”

  “Yeah,” I said, getting impatient. “Sounds like paradise. Drugs and sex and no bedtime.”

  She picked up on the sarcasm but laughed. “Yeah, it was all of that.” She shook another Marlboro from its pack and hung it in her lips.

  “How did it get called the Bad Kitty?” Lucinda asked.

  She lit the cigarette and took a long deep drag, then looked at me, her blue eyes narrow, and smiled. She answered, “It was a joke. The Black Panthers were big news, and the Bad Kitty was another choice—loving, not shooting.”

  “Where exactly was the place?” I asked.

  “On Fourteenth, a little west of Halsted. There were a bunch of run-down, empty houses and then the Bad Kitty. Never been another place like it.” You could hear the rum in her voice. “I’d live there still if I could. But it was too much, too much. It’s probably good they burned it down. If they hadn’t I would’ve died a long time ago. But I can tell you I would’ve died smiling.” She took another slug of rum and coffee.

  “You say it’s good ‘they’ burned it down. You mean the rioters?”

  “Hell, no. The rioters didn’t burn it. The riots happened a year earlier. The man that owned it started the fire. For the insurance money, I think
, or because he didn’t like the house as a squat, or both. Or maybe he was just mean.”

  “What was the man’s name?” Lucinda said.

  “Been a long time”—she shook her head—“a lot of Bacardi and a lot of faces and names since then.” She drank from her cup, finished it, smiled. “First name was Bartholomew. Don’t remember his last. He was circumcised. His boys, too. I know that for a fact.” She leered at me. “A lot of the girls that hung out at the Bad Kitty knew it. I figure the girls must’ve kept the building from burning for at least a couple months.”

  “How about Judy Terrano?” said Terrence. “Was she screwing the owner?”

  Louise Johnson squinted at him. “You need to know this because you’re executing a will?”

  Terrence smiled like she hadn’t challenged him. “Just curiosity.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if she was or wasn’t,” she said. “I wasn’t paying a lot of attention usually. But let’s say, yeah. Why not? Judy was screwing everyone else. The daddy and the boys liked to come by. The daddy didn’t like the squatting, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. No one there had any money for rent even if they wanted to pay it, and the cops had their hands too full to worry about a house full of kids who were busy fucking each other. So the daddy and his boys made a good thing out of a bad deal.”

  “So much for paradise,” said Lucinda.

  “Every paradise has got its snakes,” the ex-hooker said. “That’s part of what makes it paradise.”

  Lucinda asked, “Any reason that someone from back then would want to harm Judy?”

  Louise Johnson squinted at her, then at Terrence, then me. “This isn’t about a will.”

  I showed my palms. “Not just a will. Judy Terrano was killed.”

  She considered that. “The Bad Kitty Lounge was a long time ago. What’s it got to do with anything?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Lucinda said.

  “Would anyone want to harm her?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said and she finished off her spiked coffee. “Judy was there the night the Bad Kitty burned. She saw them light the fire. She testified against the family in court. And then she disappeared.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “THAT’S A SPOOKY WOMAN,” Lucinda said as we sped north again.

  “Sad woman,” Terrence said.

  “She’s protecting someone,” I said, “and maybe protecting herself.”

  “Could be,” said Terrence.

  I checked my cell phone. It said I’d gotten a call from my home number. That would be Corrine. She’d left a message on my voice mail. I knew what she would’ve said about me in the message, and I knew she would be right—I was late and I was screwing up again. I turned off the phone and tucked it back in my pocket. I would listen to the message later. It would still be true, probably truer than it was now. I would face Corrine later, too. I might even face myself.

  I accelerated.

  “Where are we going?” said Lucinda.

  “To the Bad Kitty Lounge.”

  She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “The Bad Kitty’s long gone.”

  “Nah,” I said. “It just looks different. Bigger, probably thirty or thirty-five stories high, lots of polished steel and glass, underground parking, maybe a doorman to help you carry your packages.”

  Lucinda and Terrence exchanged glances.

  Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of a construction site. The building rose a full thirty-five stories from the street. Workers halfway up the side were framing plates of thick, reflective glass into a steel framework. A tower crane lifted another sheet of glass high into the air. Blocked by construction barricades, a wide driveway curved down under the building to a parking lot. There was no doorman yet, but the two-story, glassed-in lobby said there would be one soon.

  “Wow,” said Lucinda.

  “Man,” said Terrence.

  They weren’t looking up at the building, admiring its fine modernist lines, and they weren’t looking at me, admiring my act as Joe the Clever Clairvoyant. They were looking at the big sign posted outside the building. The sign showed three images. One was the building as it would look when completed, with a caption: “City Living at Its Best.” A second was a man and a woman lounging in a white bed with drapes open to a plate-glass window showing sparkling city lights on a clear Chicago night, also with a caption: “Urban Luxury and Comfort.” The third was a handsome woman’s face. She smiled warmly, decently. Under her portrait in italics were the words, “Come home to Stone Tower,” and a tag that said the woman was Dorothy Stone. A painted scroll at the top of the sign said, “Lakeview Commercial and Residential Real Estate Development—Your Kind of Living.”

  I read the sign and said nothing. I’d seen the building before in architectural renderings framed on Mrs. Stone’s office walls, and Eric Stone had asked me to keep the family name out of my report when I turned Greg Samuelson over to the cops because he wanted to avoid bad publicity as the family started to sell the condominium units.

  We got out of the car and walked into the fenced-in construction area. The ground was a mix of sand, asphalt, and the clay soil that had supported the city for two hundred years. A group of five Mexicans, four in yellow hard hats, one in orange, stood by an electrician’s van, looking at a blueprint. We went to them and I asked where we could find Eric or David Stone.

  They gave me blank looks.

  Lucinda spoke. “Con permiso, dondé esta Eric o David Stone?”

  The guy in the orange hat grinned at her. “Try the site office.” He pointed into the building.

  We walked through the concrete cavity that would become the lobby. Huge vertical supports rose through a network of steel rebar and more concrete. Water had pooled on the floor, and the place had the dank cold feel of a cave. In six months it would cost a million dollars to walk through that lobby and go upstairs to a condominium.

  Bare bulbs lighted the way past the concrete columns to a temporary office. I knocked on the door. No one answered, so we let ourselves in. The office had a central room with a metal desk and several chairs. Architectural blueprints and diagrams of plumbing and electrical systems were tacked to the walls. Four doors led to smaller rooms, one with a photocopier and office supplies, the others with desks, computers, and file cabinets. A quick check of the desk in the main room showed it was used for reception and nothing else. We split up and searched the other rooms with desks.

  The file cabinets in the room I searched held more diagrams and construction specs, building permits, permitting guides, and sheets of numbers that made no sense to me. One drawer held paper plates, plastic utensils, and a six-pack of Michelob, minus a can. Another held a folder of photocopies of construction contracts and, behind it, a folder of land titles and deeds. I took the folders to the desk and sat down. A screen saver played repeatedly across the computer monitor, showing a German shepherd fetching a throw-toy tossed from a beach into Lake Michigan. At the end of the video, the dog charged back onto the beach from the water, shook off, and ran to the camera. Its eyes were ferocious. It looked like it would drop the toy and bite the lens.

  The contracts folder showed that LCR had committed over twenty million dollars to the first stages of the building that would become Stone Tower. I put down the papers and shook the computer mouse. The German shepherd disappeared and I got a blank screen with icons. I started with one for NetSuite. Nothing showed dangers of bankruptcy, obvious signs of number juggling, or evidence that the Stones were siphoning funds from their project and hiding them in the Caymans, at least nothing to eyes that were used to calculating the loose change I kept in my checking account. But a spreadsheet showed the sale prices of the condo units in the buildings. They started at $450,000 for less desirable one-bedrooms and climbed to $2.7 million for luxury penthouses. Plenty was at stake.

  I turned back to the folders. The one with deeds and titles was thick with photocopies of papers that ranged from the late 1800s t
o last year. I started leafing through them when a man stepped into the doorway. He was short but powerfully built the way short guys who spent long evenings at the gym are powerfully built. He wore jeans a size too tight, a flannel shirt layered over a long underwear shirt, and a tool vest. He carried a hard hat. He didn’t worry me much. But the German shepherd at his side did. The dog had ferocious eyes and looked like it had just dropped its throw-toy. It glared at me like I was dinner.

  The man stepped into the room, the dog at his side. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m interested in buying one of the penthouses,” I said, “but I’m worried about the riffraff I might have as neighbors.”

  His eyes got almost as ferocious as the dog’s. “What are you—?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? I’m searching your office.”

  That slowed him momentarily. “Why?”

  Explaining that a dead nun had hung out in a house that had stood on the spot where he was constructing a residential high-rise seemed too complicated. “I’m a private detective,” I said and I reached for my wallet to show him my license.

  But when I moved, the German shepherd read the man’s nerves and growled. I stopped moving. The man smiled. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  I nodded.

  The dog growled again.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I was reaching for my detective’s license,” I said. “I’m Joe Kozmarski and I’m working a case that involves Mrs. Stone and her sons Eric and David.”