The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  The wound had soaked her cotton shirtsleeve with blood. I tore away the cloth. The bullet had taken the flesh off the outside of her arm. Blood flowed freely but it would stop on its own or with a few stitches. I ripped away the rest of the sleeve, folded it, made it into a compress. She held it against the torn flesh and I draped her jacket over her shoulders.

  I said, “How did you know where to find me?”

  “You weren’t at the Stones’ house or office.”

  “But how did you know I would be with the Stones?”

  She looked at me like I was missing the point. “You were too close.”

  “Yeah, so you froze—so what? How did you know?”

  “Birth records. You sent me to the county clerk’s office. Louise Johnson had a daughter in 1970.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The father was David Stone. The daughter was Cassie.”

  “David Stone and Louise Johnson?”

  “And daughter Cassie. I figured he had to be involved one way or another. So I went looking for him.”

  That explained the photos missing from Louise Johnson’s refrigerator and the frame in her hallway. The photos probably were of Cassie. David Stone had burned them and stuffed the ashes in the mouth of Cassie’s mother. I figured that Louise Johnson had kept quiet about her connection to Judy Terrano because a deal she’d struck with the Stones when they’d taken her daughter must have included a vanishing act. I wondered what she got in return. Rent money and a monthly case of Bacardi?

  “Thank you,” I said, because what else do you say when someone saves your life? Then, “How about Robert and Jarik? Did you bring them with you?”

  “I’ve no idea where they came from. But I get the feeling that William DuBuclet knows everything that happens in this city and where and when.”

  I thought about Robert and Jarik knowing I was helping Stan Fleming almost before I knew it myself. “I’ve got the feeling you’re right.”

  I glanced at David Stone’s dead body, flat against the concrete like gravity was pulling him toward his grave. “We should call the police,” I said. “You have your phone?”

  She nodded down at herself.

  I fished her cell phone out of the inside pocket of the jacket. She looked at me with those sad eyes. “I never freeze.”

  I leaned over her and touched my lips to hers, kissed her. She dropped the compress, reached, and pulled me toward her. She breathed me into her like I was life itself. Then she pushed me away.

  She looked at me, wild-eyed.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  Her voice was bitter. “Why is it okay? You could have died. I could have.”

  “I didn’t. You didn’t.”

  “Well, it’s not okay.”

  I had no answer for that. I sat on the dirt across from her and watched her. She looked away. I knew of nothing to say to her, nothing to say to myself. So I dialed 911 on her cell phone. I told the operator where we were and asked her to send an ambulance for Lucinda and the cops for David Stone and everything else. The operator told me to stay on the line. I hung up.

  I went back to Stone. His long hair was pasted against his bloody head, all but a few strands, which blew in the wind like dry grass. His body had the shape of something that had been broken inside. I started at his collar, patting his shirt. His pants pockets were damp with blood and urine. They held his car keys, his wallet, and a lighter. My wallet and keys, too.

  I groped his legs, then rolled him over. My Glock stuck out of the back of his waistband. I stuck it into my shoulder holster, then started again from the top.

  Nothing. If he had the file of land titles and deeds that Terrence and I had seen in the Stone Tower office, he’d eaten it.

  I returned to Lucinda and wiped my hands on the soil until they were filthy but dry. She still wasn’t looking at me, so I called Stan Fleming at the District Thirteen station. By the time I’d given him directions to Stone Tower, sirens filled the air.

  FORTY-FOUR

  FOR THE NEXT THREE hours we had a big enough crowd in back of the building to hold a block party. The cops rigged floodlights that shined a jaundiced yellow over the dirt and reflected high into the night from the mirrored glass. The paramedics convinced Lucinda to let them take her to the hospital. The medical examiner poked and prodded David Stone’s body, then put it in a bag. A forensics team did a scavenger hunt for bullets and shells. I told my story a half-dozen different times, but none of them included Robert and Jarik. Along with Lucinda, they’d saved my life. But they’d walked away afterward. I figured I should respect that, though it could cost me plenty. The cops didn’t like my knowing nothing about them.

  Stan Fleming came onto the dirt lot as the others finished with me, so I told my story again. He gave me a long stare when I said I didn’t know who had finished off Stone. When the stare didn’t break me, he said, “DuBuclet?” as if he’d read my mind.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “They were ahead of us on this. They knew it was David Stone.”

  He looked at me hard. “All the more reason I want them in my hands.”

  “You’re going to arrest them for bringing down Stone? You should be shaking their hands and pinning little medals on them, but you won’t and they don’t want your medals anyway. They definitely don’t want to shake your hand. They don’t want to be connected with you. They don’t trust you.”

  Stan shook his head. “Ask me if I give a shit.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m not arresting anyone yet,” he said. “But I want to know what happened from everyone involved, separate and together.”

  “They won’t tell you a thing. They’ll deny they were here.”

  “They’ll talk to me.”

  Stan had a toughness that made me wonder if he was right. But DuBuclet and his followers were tough, too. “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” I said.

  I gave it all to him, everything I knew and everything I suspected. I told him that David Stone had burned the Bad Kitty Lounge in 1969 and had wasted half his life in jail for lighting that one match. I told him I figured that after the fire the Stones had struck a deal with Judy Terrano involving her court testimony, making promises that involved the land where the Bad Kitty Lounge had stood and where the Stones now were building a luxury condominium tower. I told him I figured Greg Samuelson was trying to extort the Stones for a piece of the Tower and got himself shot for the effort. I told him about the loose connection to the priest in Judy Terrano’s bathtub and the close connection to Louise Johnson. I told him he could find Terrence’s body in his apartment.

  When I finished, Stan nodded but looked unhappy. “So why did David Stone put the ashes of the photographs in Louise Johnson’s mouth?”

  “The guy was into burning. Had a long history of it.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “And why did he take off her pants? Why did he strip Judy Terrano?”

  I shrugged. “He was a monster.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s the best I’ve got,” I said.

  He thought. “So this was about a square of muddy real estate with ashes on it?”

  It was about everything, I thought. Sex. A kerosene fire. Four dead kids. Race riots. A history of blood and sperm and sweat as old as the city or older. Ash that would stay in the air for as long as the city existed and we all would breathe it and live in it. It was about the hope that in a few rooms in an all-but-abandoned building on the southwest side, the violent history of the city could go to sleep and the kids who visited could have happy dreams. Like the Bad Kitty Lounge, it was about anything you wanted it to be about. It might even have been about love.

  “It was about money,” I said. “Millions of dollars. But basically, yeah—it came down to mud and ashes.”

  AROUND NINE O’CLOCK A young cop drove me out through the chain-link gate, past the news vans and cameras, away from the blood, and
back to the McDonald’s parking lot where I’d left my car. The seagulls were gone. But next door, four police cars and an ambulance lined the curb outside Terrence’s building. I knew what they were looking at inside and I never wanted to see it again.

  I got in my car and pulled into the street. Jason’s Gandhi bobblehead danced on the dashboard. I ripped it off the vinyl, threw it against the front window.

  I yelled for a while. I don’t know what I said.

  At the next stoplight, I looked at the passenger-side carpet. Gandhi gazed up at me without an angry bone in his bobblehead body. I picked him up and put him back on the dashboard.

  “It’s okay,” I said to him. “It’s going to be all right now.” And I drove home.

  FORTY-FIVE

  LUCINDA’S HONDA WAS PARKED at the curb in front of my house. A yellow light glowed inside. I pulled into the alley, walked back, and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “You going to live?”

  “They swabbed my arm with iodine, taped on some gauze, and told me to get a tetanus shot tomorrow.”

  “Not even a kiss to make it feel better?”

  “Not covered by my insurance. The doctor said the biggest injury will be mental. He said I should get counseling.”

  “So are you going to do it?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Me? I can’t even figure myself out.”

  “That’s why I figure you’re the one I should talk to.”

  “Hmm. So what do you want to talk about?”

  She looked at me long. “Dinner. I’m hungry.”

  “That’s not going to help you mentally.”

  “If you don’t feed me, you’ll really see crazy.”

  “Come inside.”

  We walked through the alley to the back of the house. The night was black and bitter cold. The elm tree hung overhead in the dark like an old, bent tower from a time before men made buildings of steel.

  We went up the back steps and into the house. The kitchen was bright and smelled like slow-cooking meat, roasting vegetables, and baking bread. It smelled like a place where no one has ever heard of guns, and people spend cold October days bringing in the harvest and eating themselves fat. Mom sat at the kitchen table with Jason, playing cards. She acted like she didn’t hear us come in. Jason looked up and smiled. I nodded at him, and Lucinda gave him a little two-fingered wave.

  We put our coats on the counter and washed our hands and faces in the kitchen sink. Lucinda had on a ripped, bloodstained shirt and had a thick bandage on her arm. Her face was bruised where Robert and Jarik had hit her. Her eyes were wild and hungry. I figured I looked about the same.

  A pot of bigos simmered on the stove next to a loaf of warm bread. That and a tumbler of bourbon, filled to the brim, no ice, would have sent me to heaven. I poured a glass of water for Lucinda, one for me, ladled bigos into two bowls, and brought the bread to the table.

  Mom slapped down her cards, looked at me, looked at Lucinda, and looked back at me. Anger and worry spread across her face. “What happened to you?”

  I tore a chunk of bread, dipped it into the broth. “Lucinda got shot in the arm. I took a couple knocks on the head.” The heat and salt of the bread soothed me like no medicine could, easing a weight in my chest and in my head. I looked at Lucinda. She was lost in the food, too. I stabbed a piece of sausage with my fork and tipped it toward her. “The best therapy,” I said.

  She smiled as she chewed.

  Mom glared at me. “You invited me for dinner at six. It’s a quarter to ten.”

  I tried again. “Lucinda got shot. I—”

  “If you’d been here for dinner, no one would have shot her and no one would have hit you on the head.”

  Her glare broke me every time. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Okay then,” she said. She got up and made an ice pack for my head and searched my closet for a shirt to replace the one Lucinda was wearing.

  “We saw you on TV again,” Jason said, like I’d become a rerun of a favorite show.

  “You shouldn’t watch so much TV,” I said. “There’s nothing good on.”

  Mom looked at me, concerned. “Is it over now?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s over. All but the funerals.”

  Mom nodded, content, and crossed herself. “May they all rest.”

  Jason squirmed but then brightened. He turned to Mom. “Did you know that a single aphid can have five million babies in a summer?”

  She laughed. “God bless her, that must hurt. I hope they’re all daughters.”

  At 10:30, Jason went to his room to get his overnight bag. He would spend the weekend at Mom’s house. I would spend it nursing my head.

  After I got them into Mom’s car, I went back into the kitchen. Lucinda was cleaning the dishes.

  I got close to her. “How are you doing?”

  “Better,” she said. “Not great, but better.”

  I watched her rinse a bowl and smiled. “You look like a mess.”

  She grinned. “You too.”

  “I feel like it.”

  We looked at each other for a while, quiet. Then I held my hand out, inviting her to come to me.

  She stayed where she was. “I froze because you were standing near him,” she said. “I was afraid I would hit you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I wouldn’t have hit you. It was a safe shot but I couldn’t take it.”

  “You took the one that mattered.”

  “I don’t like what you do to me. You make me freeze. Damn it, I can’t be in the same room with you without feeling like I might freeze.”

  I reached for her. But she pulled away from me, grabbing her coat.

  I said, “You make me freeze, too.” Like it was an excuse, an apology—like it was the most romantic thing I could come up with, my way of saying I wanted her.

  She dropped her coat on the floor. “Damn it, Joe!” She came to me. She said, “We could be happy together, the two of us.”

  And I said, “Yeah, I think so.”

  “What about Corrine?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. What about Corrine?”

  “What are you going to do about her?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “You’d better figure it out quick.” And she kissed me.

  I pulled her toward me but she didn’t come. She removed her lips from mine and stared at me. I thought I saw pain and desire in her eyes. She must have seen them in mine.

  “Figure it out real quick,” she said. She picked up her coat and put it on.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  She said nothing.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  She went.

  AFTER A WHILE, I slept. I dreamed of falling towers. I ran from strut to strut, propping them with bricks and boards. The bricks and boards slipped like gravity meant to flatten everything that was standing or had ever stood. I propped the towers until I was dead exhausted and then I stood to the side and watched them fall.

  I woke in the dark. My mom had asked if it was over and I’d said it was. But I knew that wasn’t true. I fished for the phone and dialed.

  “What?” Lucinda answered.

  “Get up.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s go talk to Greg Samuelson.”

  “It’s a quarter after two.”

  “Yeah. Let’s finish this.”

  “What the hell?”

  “He has Judy Terrano’s copies of the Bad Kitty papers.”

  “How do you know?”

  I didn’t. Not really. I said, “As Judy Terrano’s assistant he could have seen the land title every time he went to her file cabinet. When he realized that the Stones were building on the Bad Kitty plot he saw a chance to get rich. He told them he had the deed and would expose the Bad Kitty history if they didn’t pay him a price. So David Stone shot him in the mouth—a warning shot,
telling him to keep quiet about the Bad Kitty. They couldn’t afford to kill him, though—not if he really had the deed.”

  Lucinda was silent. Then she said, “I’ll be dressed in five minutes.”

  FORTY-SIX

  WE DROVE WITHOUT TALKING through cold, empty streets to Samuelson’s condo. The clouded sky was heavy and unmoving. Cars, parked along the curb, looked like the steel carcasses that would remain in the dark at the end of the world. Lucinda shivered and rubbed her hands in front of the heater vent like it was the last ember. I put a hand on her thigh and felt the heat grow through her jeans. I wondered if that heat could warm the world with or without the sun.

  She put a hand on top of mine and I decided there was hope.

  It was 3:10 A.M. and only one light was on in the condo complex. It was in Samuelson’s condo, like he was expecting us.

  I rang the buzzer and we waited for the intercom to crackle.

  There was no answer.

  I figured Amy Samuelson was at the Stones’ house, comforting Eric as he cried into an overstuffed pillow for his dead brother. I figured Greg Samuelson was high on painkillers, sitting in his kitchen like one of the living dead.

  I hoisted myself over the security gate, dropped onto the brick walkway outside the condo, and let Lucinda in. We climbed the stairs to Samuelson’s door. Someone had tacked a piece of plywood over the glass panel that I’d punched out when I’d come to visit the last time. A gentle tug removed it. Lucinda reached inside and the door swung open without a noise.

  We drew our guns and stepped into the front hall. The light came from the kitchen deep inside the condo. So did a soft sound, a chair moving back from a table. We moved silently toward the sound.

  Then Lucinda stopped, grabbed my arm, and pulled me into the living room. Slow, heavy footsteps were approaching. Lucinda hugged the wall, out of sight, her gun raised so close to her face she could have kissed it. I hugged the wall behind her, the same.

  A tall man in a black overcoat and sunglasses stepped past us in the hall. William DuBuclet. In his right hand he held a nine-millimeter, in his left a manila folder. Without looking at us or breaking his slow pace, he said, “Good evening, Mr. Kozmarski, Ms. Juarez.”