The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  “Does something trouble you?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can you do anything about a dead nun?”

  He shook his head with practiced sorrow. He must have been hearing a lot of this from people who had known and loved Judy Terrano. “She’s with God now,” he said, “and she’s at peace.”

  “I’ve gone to too many funerals to believe it,” I said.

  “Nonetheless—”

  “If a guy dies after ten years of cancer, you can call it peace. But when a woman gets choked to death with her clothes pulled up to her shoulders, don’t call it peace and heavenly rewards.”

  The priest said, “Death is nothing to a woman like Sister Terrano. It opened a door to a bright beginning.”

  “Bright, huh?”

  He nodded. “Brilliant.”

  I stared at his eyes. “I’m carrying a Glock,” I said. I lifted my jacket to give him a peek. “If I took it out, pointed it at your forehead, and put my finger on the trigger, and you looked into its barrel, would you say death is brilliant?”

  He didn’t squeal, but he squirmed and sweat broke out on his forehead. “I hope so. Do you plan to shoot me?”

  “Me?” I barked a laugh. “No no. I’m sorry, I’ve had a couple of rough days.”

  He gave a feeble smile and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Yes, we all have.”

  “Just skip the consolations, okay?”

  “Sometimes they’re all I’ve got.” He stood.

  I said, “What happened to the hundred ninety thousand dollars that Judy Terrano skimmed from her charities?”

  The priest flinched and sat again. “Who are you?”

  I handed him one of my cards.

  He looked it over, then glanced at me nervously. “There can be authority in one’s sins as well as in one’s redemption.”

  “You can justify anything that way.”

  “Justify, no. Accept and forgive, yes.”

  I shook my head. “It’s a cop-out.”

  “It’s the oldest story in the book. Mary Magdalene . . . Augustine . . . Amazing Grace—all the converted sinners. Why would you expect faith to be clean?”

  “Not clean. But a little less bloody.”

  “The blood of Christ is the purest—” He gave me another nervous glance. “Skip it.”

  I said, “What did she do with the money?”

  “There are stories. I don’t know if they’re true—”

  “Try them on me.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I want to find the killer, and I can’t do that unless I understand why she got killed.”

  “Greg Samuelson didn’t do it?”

  “The police haven’t charged him and they won’t.”

  He looked at me, doubtful. “If that’s true, it will go a long way toward consoling the congregation.”

  “What stories did you hear?”

  “Sister Terrano was more experienced and worldly than many nuns. She had a background in political activism and her motives, beliefs, and actions were never quite orthodox.”

  He was avoiding my question, so I asked again. “The stories?”

  He hesitated, then said, “The rumor is that she had a child—out of wedlock—before entering the Church, and she was using the money to support him.”

  I nodded. “There’ve got to be worse sins than that.”

  He shrugged. “For a nun advocating teenage chastity? Her credibility would have been shot if the press had found out.”

  “So much for the authority of redemption.”

  He sighed. “That’s only if the penitence is sincere and complete.”

  “Hers wasn’t?”

  “There were other rumors—involving her relationship with a group whose beliefs are at odds with Catholic teaching. Questions about her financial dealings continued after the audit revealed the missing hundred ninety thousand dollars.”

  I figured the group was William DuBuclet and his followers. “Do you have access to her records?”

  He shook his head. “The police have most of them. They took her computer and files. I don’t know what’s on them. After the audit, the church asked Greg Samuelson to oversee her accounting and to act as a second set of eyes on her expenses and the donations she received.”

  “You say the police have most of the records. Could I see what you’ve got?”

  He frowned, but he stood and I followed him up the aisle and through the door to the narrow hall that led to Judy Terrano’s office. He let us into a small office with a desk and a computer. He opened a series of documents, selected one, and hit the Print command. He handed me the eight pages that scrolled out of the printer.

  The printout showed an annual summary and detailed listing of the funds Judy Terrano had received from donors over the past eighteen years. The funds totaled twelve million dollars and change. A Mrs. Arthur Fenton had bequeathed more than a million when she’d died. A number of national and local companies had contributed anywhere between two and twenty-one thousand dollars a year. Mrs. Stone first wrote a check for ten thousand dollars the year that the records began and most recently had written one for thirty-five thousand dollars. Most of the list named small donations of fifty or a hundred dollars. One man had contributed fifteen.

  There was one unexpected donor. For more than a decade the ex-hooker Louise Johnson had donated between thirty and a hundred dollars a year. When I’d talked with her, she’d said that she didn’t know where Judy Terrano was, but for ten years she’d been saving pennies and nickels for her. She’d kept donating her money while living in a cheap basement apartment and drinking Bacardi. I saw only two reasons why she would pretend she’d lost touch with Judy Terrano: She had something to gain if she kept quiet or she had something to lose if she talked. Greed or fear. Someone would pay her off or someone would hurt her.

  I handed the priest the printout. “Have you met many of the private donors?” I asked.

  He glanced at the sheets of paper. “Most of the smaller donors live in the neighborhood and attend services here. The larger donations come from all over the city and country. Some of the donors have visited. Some met Sister Terrano on her travels or saw her on TV and wrote a check.”

  “How about Louise Johnson?”

  “Louise, yes.” He smiled. “She’s an exception. She rides the bus in every Sunday. She seems to live modestly but she’s been generous with the little that she has. She became very attached to Sister Terrano and the work she was doing.”

  “Do you know what drew her to this church?”

  “I do. One of the other donors brought her the first time.”

  I considered the names I’d seen on the list. “Who was that?”

  “It was one of our largest private donors, Dorothy Stone.”

  I laughed.

  The priest looked at me uncertainly. “Mrs. Stone and her family have been extremely generous.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “They’ve given more—”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve helped a lot.”

  I found my way out of the church. The sky outside was graying, heavy, and cold. It looked like snow. I turned the key in the ignition of my car and cranked on the heat. The Gandhi bobblehead bobbed on the shuddering dashboard. Forty years had passed since Louise Johnson hung out at the Bad Kitty with Judy Terrano, Anthony DuBuclet, and the Stone brothers, but they still formed a tight little community, living and dead. I wondered if Mrs. Stone would invite Louise Johnson over for tea and a slug of rum when winter came.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I SPED DOWN THE Kennedy toward the Loop, then out the Dan Ryan and into the South Side. Twenty minutes after leaving Holy Trinity, I parked three doors up from Louise Johnson’s apartment. A couple of kids in winter parkas walked past. They were a year or two older than Jason and they should have been in school. They were smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough.

  I buzzed Louise Johnson’s apartment but got no
answer. It was 10:30, time for a tall glass of Bacardi and orange juice unless she’d drunk so late last night that morning wouldn’t start until noon.

  I buzzed again.

  Maybe she’d run out of rum and gone to the store. Maybe in her retirement she drank her breakfast at a local bar. Maybe she was making the rounds at the city’s churches, donating her pennies and nickels.

  I held the buzzer.

  Nothing.

  The kids in parkas disappeared around a corner. I rattled the outside door. The tongue bolt gleamed in the gap between the door and the frame. A hard shove would splinter the frame, but I hated to expose the building to the cold air and to any twelve-year-old thugs-in-training who were prowling in it. I slid my car key into the gap and worked the bolt until it slid partway into its casing, far enough for me to ease the door open.

  The entrance hall smelled of cooking and garbage. Loud music played against a crying baby. I went down a half flight of stairs into the hall where Louise Johnson lived and stopped outside her apartment.

  Her door was open.

  There’s nothing worse than a door that’s open when it should be closed and locked. It might mean nothing. I knew that. Before I quit drinking, I sometimes stumbled home and left my door open all night while I slept on the floor. And some buildings are so friendly that people leave their doors open in case the neighbors want to visit. But I hated that open door.

  I knocked but got no answer. I didn’t expect one. I knocked harder. Then, because I had to, I pushed the door open further and stepped inside.

  The apartment looked the same as the last time I was there, with the same plain, brown furniture, the same two bottles of Bacardi and the coffeepot on the counter. The only difference was the rum bottles were empty now and Louise Johnson wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table.

  I wanted to leave the apartment and go back outside into the cold air. But I walked into the hall that led from the kitchen toward the bedroom. No matter how hard Louise Johnson had scrubbed it, the hall smelled sour and the carpet showed old water stains. Three framed, studio-style portrait photographs hung on the hall wall. A fourth frame leaned against the wall at the floor. The cardboard backing had been torn away, the picture removed.

  I stepped past a bathroom into the bedroom and switched on the light. Louise Johnson was lying on the bed, her head on a white lace pillow. A bullet hole pierced her brow. The wound was clean, mopped so the skin around it was free of blood. Only the smallest hole remained, with a lip of pale flesh punched inward. She looked as pretty as a body in a gift box.

  Her mouth was closed, and her lips formed a vague smile. Her eyes were closed, too. Black flecks dusted her chin, cheeks, and the pillow under her head. Over a blouse she wore the green cardigan sweater she’d had on when I’d last seen her. She wore nothing else. I watched her chest for the slow heave that marks the breathing of deep sleep, but I knew there would be none.

  “Damn,” I said, and the word felt dull in my ears.

  I searched the bedroom, more or less. The closet had clothes and shoes but no bundles containing the memories of a hooker or of the life she had led as a girl, no secret diary. I opened the top drawer of her dresser. It was full of underwear, far more than any five women could need. That did it for me. I closed the drawer, left the room, and walked back into the kitchen.

  The coffee cups we’d drunk from a day earlier were gone—clean and back in the cabinet—but a couple of empty glass tumblers stood in the sink. That probably meant she’d been drinking with company yesterday evening or today, some time after Lucinda, Terrence, and I left. The company could have been her killer. I left the glasses where they were.

  The cabinets and drawers held the assortment of dishes, glasses, silverware, and boxed and canned foods that you would expect to find, except an unopened case of Bacardi Gold was in the cabinet under the sink. Louise Johnson was a well-provisioned drunk. The refrigerator was empty except for a quart of milk, a pound of butter, a couple of frozen pizzas, and a twenty-five-pound bag of ice. I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the kitchen cabinets, the counters, the stove, the refrigerator.

  I got up and looked closely at the refrigerator door. Lines of grime blocked out two white rectangles against the surrounding surface. I wondered if photographs had filled the white spaces the last time I’d been in the room. If they had, they’d smiled and smiled at me, and I’d drunk Louise Johnson’s coffee and ignored them. They’d whispered from the past about a time when Judy Terrano and Louise Johnson throbbed in the heat of a burning city, and I’d all but put my thumbs in my ears and hummed.

  I spent as much time in the kitchen as I could justify, then went back to the bedroom and did what I needed to do.

  Louise Johnson’s dead body was too neatly arranged. It was too clean, except for the black dust on her cheeks and chin. Her killer was sending a message, just as Judy Terrano’s killer had sent a message by scrawling the words BAD KITTY on her belly.

  So I touched her lips. They felt tough and dry as thumbs. I pulled them apart. I pried her mouth open with my fingers. The muscles in her jaws resisted. It seemed like the ligaments would snap and she would yawn so wide she could swallow the room and everything inside it, but her mouth came slowly open. It exposed a tongue, purple and swollen in death, and on the tongue and teeth and pasted to the walls of her mouth were ashes and, mixed with the ashes, bent and browned bits of burned photographic paper.

  I dug them out with a finger. The pieces broke apart in my hand.

  The ashes were the burned remains of Louise Johnson’s past, I figured, a past that she’d kept alive every time she’d looked at the photos on her refrigerator or passed them in the hall—until a slug ripped into her forehead and stopped time, stopped everything. That probably meant she’d shared that past with her killer, and her killer meant to burn the evidence of it. Or, since the ashes were in her mouth, meant to do more than burn it—meant to make a point by burning the evidence. The killer was silencing Louise Johnson and erasing her past, or some of it. The killer had yanked off pants that Louise Johnson had yanked off thousands of times for twenty or thirty dollars a pop. The killer was saying Louise Johnson was a whore with no other past or future.

  Who was the message for?

  Maybe the answer was in the burning itself. Forty years ago, David Stone had burned down the Bad Kitty Lounge. Three days ago, Greg Samuelson had burned Eric Stone’s Mercedes.

  I wiped my hand on the bedsheet, trying to remove the stain, but the soot streaked across my palm. So I went back to the kitchen and washed my hands in the sink until they were red and smelled like the dish soap Louise Johnson kept next to the case of rum in the cabinet, and I washed them some more.

  Then I called Lucinda.

  Her cell phone rang until voice mail picked up. She must have been deep in the archives, reading about a city that no longer existed but haunted us still. Or else she was ignoring my call because she was angry with me for failing to split from Corrine.

  I left a message telling her about Louise Johnson, her nickel-and-dime contributions to Judy Terrano’s charities, her dead body displayed as carefully as a store-window mannequin, and the ashes of photographs in her mouth—ashes of a child or of children who had laughed from pictures on her refrigerator and hall walls.

  I wondered how silent the child or children had to be, though. William DuBuclet knew that you can’t wipe out the past. You might not always see it, but it’s there and it might even talk to you if you listen closely enough. I said to Lucinda, “When you get done with the newspapers, will you go to the county clerk’s office? Ask them if they’ve got any birth records naming Louise Johnson as mother.”

  I hung up and called the District Thirteen police station.

  Stan Fleming didn’t sound surprised when I said I was standing in an apartment with another dead body. He sounded depressed. “Jesus, Joe, you stay away from me when I’ve got a cold. You’re dangerous.”

  “I find them dead. I don’t kill the
m,” I said.

  “What’s the address?”

  I told him and he sighed. “Why are you calling me? That’s way outside the Thirteenth. Call nine-one-one.”

  I told him about the connection between Judy Terrano and Louise Johnson, the short version. And I told him about the ashes in Louise Johnson’s mouth. I left out the finger I’d stuck inside and my feeling that the ashes had left a mark that I would never get rid of.

  “Second thought, don’t call nine-one-one,” he said. “Wait for me there.”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m walking out the door as soon as we hang up. But I figured you might want to take a look before other homicide cops get their hands on this.”

  “You figured right. Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  “I’ve got a friend I need to see.”

  “Does he wear a hooded black robe and carry a sickle?”

  “No, he wears a cape and blue leotards.”

  “Hey, your private life’s your private life.”

  “An academy dropout. He was too good for the department.”

  “Oh, one of those guys.”

  “Yeah, one of them.”

  “Well, shake this superhero’s hand for me and tell him I’ll send him a postcard when I’m retired on pension.”

  “You’ll never find him to get his address.”

  “Yeah, he’s one of those guys.”

  “Hey, Stan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Greg Samuelson still under lock and key?”

  He laughed bitterly. “His lawyer sprung him an hour ago. He paid bail on misdemeanor arson and walked out of the hospital on his own feet. They say he looked like living death but he refused a wheelchair.”

  A shiver ran down my neck, but I said, “Time line’s too tight for him to have gotten here and killed a woman, isn’t it?”

  “Unless he’s another superhero.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE PARKING LOT NEXT to Terrence’s apartment building was littered with dry weeds, cans, and a rimless tire. A sign at the McDonald’s at the other side of the building said WELCOME TO MCDONALD’S. So I parked there. Seagulls that had flown inland to find shelter from the cold lake-wind stood on the pavement, eyes narrowed, looking like they might freeze into statues and spend the winter there. I stepped over a thigh-high wall onto the sidewalk leading to the front of the apartment building. A couple of gulls fought over the remains of a Filet-O-Fish sandwich that someone had chucked against the fence.