The street was as quiet as I’d left it. No cops waiting at the curb. No neighbors peeking through the shades. I decided to push my luck and took a quick turn around the yard. The back door was locked. The windows looked undisturbed. Facing into the alley, I found a garage with a Lexus parked inside. Near a corner of the building, I saw what looked like fresh scratches in the dirt. The soil underneath was loose and quick through my fingers. I pulled out the envelope and checked the sample I’d taken from the crime scene against the soil from the yard. Close, but no cigar. My victim had been suffocated with what looked like beach sand, which meant whoever killed the old man had come prepared for the job. I walked back to the front of the house and was about to step onto the sidewalk when I noticed a small plaque. It was set a few feet off the ground, just to the right of the porch. I moved close and read the inscription.
THIS IS POLICEMAN BELLINGER’S COTTAGE.
SAVED BY HIS HEROIC EFFORTS FROM THE CHICAGO FIRE. OCTOBER 1871.
I made my way back to Clark Street and walked five blocks north, to a steam shop called Frances’. It had been in business since 1938, which was long enough for me. I ordered a bowl of chicken noodle soup, the old-fashioned kind, with thick noodles, real chunks of chicken, and broth that warmed from the inside out. I loaded it up with pepper and enjoyed. When I was finished, I stepped to the back of the shop and found one of the few pay phones in existence on Chicago’s North Side. I dropped a quarter and called in the body on Hudson to the police. Then I went back to my table and ordered a corned beef sandwich on marble rye and coffee. Whatever Johnny Woods was up to, it wasn’t good. I didn’t think, however, it added up to murder. Then again, there was at least one corpse in a house on Hudson that might beg to disagree.
CHAPTER 8
The next day I got to my office early. Broadway was being repaved for the fifth time in the past three years. The Vatican had Michelangelo, a single man lying on his back, painting a chapel. Chicago has city workers, four to a shovel, filling potholes and pulling down twenty-five bucks an hour. Either way, it seemed to be a lifetime’s worth of work.
I closed the blinds in an attempt to shut out the noise. The jackhammer, however, would have its way. I sighed, put my feet up on the desk, and opened up the Tribune. David Meyers’ afternoon at Hawkeye’s had dropped to page two. The body on Hudson was buried, literally. An inch or so of column space on page thirty-four. No hint of foul play. No mention of a mouth full of sand. Just a dead guy found inside a house. His name was Allen Bryant. He was seventy-five years old and lived alone, an amateur historian with a special interest in the Chicago Fire. Bryant, it seems, was the great-great-grandson of the home’s original occupant, a cop named Richard Bellinger, and kept the house as a tiny monument to the fire. I didn’t know where any of this was going. Except nowhere. I also didn’t know why the police seemed to be covering up a homicide. I knew, however, where I could get some answers. Or at least some creative outrage. I picked up the phone and dialed.
“What do you want?”
Dan Masters was named in the article as a working detective on the Bryant case. He wasn’t exactly a friend. More like the Catullus poem I had shared with my client. I hate and I love. In Masters’ case, it was mostly hate.
“You in the office today?” I said.
“Depends. Are you planning on coming in?”
“I was.”
“Then I’m out.”
“You may want to stick around.”
“Why?”
“The homicide on Hudson. I read in the paper you’re working that.”
“I caught the call. Not sure if we’re going to work it as a homicide yet.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You find a lot of seventy-five-year-old guys in their homes with their mouths stuffed with sand?”
No response.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Fucking Kelly. You called it in.”
“I’ll be over in a half hour.”
“Bring your lawyer.”
“I won’t need one.” I hung up the phone and headed out to see my pals at the Chicago PD.
CHAPTER 9
Masters was working out of the Nineteenth District, at the corner of Belmont and Western on Chicago’s North Side. I got there a little after two p.m. and was ushered into a large room jammed with detectives and their desks, in varying states of decay and disarray. Cops call it the bull pen.
A woman in her early thirties was cuffed to a chair a few feet to my left. She had brown hair with paint-by-number highlights and makeup that looked like it had been put on with the lights off. Her head was slumped to her chest and her eyes were closed. She offered up a delicate yet definite burp as I sat down, mucked her lips together once or twice, and settled back into a light doze. The detective sitting across from her was somewhere north of fifty. He pecked away at a manual typewriter and seemed capable of ignoring everything and everybody in the room. That is, until the woman woke up.
“Why am I here?” she said.
The cop stopped typing and pulled a pair of half-moon reading glasses off his nose.
“You crashed your car through the plate-glass window of a Krispy Kreme.” The cop checked a report on his desk. “At the corner of Paulina and Montrose.”
“I know that,” she said.
“That’s why you’re here.”
“It was an accident. Is that against the law?”
“You’re drunk, ma’am.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I can smell it on you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“We found seven empty liquor bottles in your car.”
“They’re my mother’s.”
“You failed the field sobriety test.”
“What’s that?”
“When they asked you the alphabet.”
“He was confusing me. I have a disability.”
“Ma’am.”
“Is this because I’m a woman?”
“Ma’am, we’re going to administer a Breathalyzer.”
Silence.
“Ma’am?”
“I have a drinking problem. It’s a disease.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want my lawyer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We were all waiting for the legal eagle to show up when Masters shouldered his way into the room and sat down at the desk.
“Sorry for the wait.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I forgot how much fun this can be.”
“Yeah.”
“This your desk?”
“I have an office now.”
I hadn’t seen Masters in six months and he didn’t look any better for it. His face was the color of paste. His eyes were rimmed in red and full of water. His hand shook a bit as he moved some papers around, and he might have smelled of gin. Of course, that last bit could have wafted over from Miss Krispy Kreme next door, but I didn’t think so.
“Anyone notice you sitting in here?” Masters talked in an undertone and swung his head around the bull pen. I swung around with him and shrugged.
“Don’t know.”
“No one came up and said hello.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
I followed Masters down a thin hallway to a solitary door with a sign on it that read room no. 1.
“Step in here.”
I walked into a small room with a wooden table and a row of blue chairs on one side. There was a TV and VCR in one corner and a dry-erase board in the other. The TV was turned off and the board had been wiped clean. Masters dropped a brown file folder on the table and sat in one of the chairs.
“Sit down, Kelly.”
I sat.
“You talk to the press about the body on Hudson?”
“Would we be sitting here if I had?”
Masters nodded at the brown folder on the table between us.
“This is the working file. Tell me what you k
now and you get a look—provided you keep your mouth shut. Offer up the usual happy horseshit and the conversation ends. Right now. I go to the county and file charges. Tampering with a crime scene. Obstruction of justice.”
“They’ll never stick.”
Masters shrugged. “Maybe not. But you’ll never get inside this file. And you want to get inside this file.”
I looked at the brown file. Then I looked up at the detective. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies. We trusted each other implicitly, except for the times when one of us didn’t. Like I said, Catullus. Right now, Masters’ face was split in half with a nasty sort of grin. Not a good sign.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, Kelly? How did you wind up at the house on Hudson yesterday? Let’s start with that and we’ll make it up from there.”
Masters was right. I did want to get inside the file. I had no idea why, but that didn’t make me want it any less.
“There are some things I can tell you,” I said. “Some things we just have to leave alone.”
Masters leaned back in his chair and slipped his feet onto the table. “I’m listening.”
“I was tailing someone for a client. The person I followed was in the house for less than a minute. No way he, or she, could have been the killer.”
“Because they weren’t in the house long enough?”
“Exactly.”
“He, or she, could have killed this guy earlier and just been returning when you picked him, or her, up.”
I shook my head.
“I saw this person’s face when they left the house. Scared. Shook. Didn’t expect to find that body inside.”
Masters dropped his feet off the table, scratched the side of his jaw, and pulled a copy of a police report out of the file.
“Start with this. I’ll be right back.”
He left the room, undoubtedly to talk to whoever was watching me on the closed-circuit camera secreted in the wall paneling to my right. I had read about a half page of the report when Masters came back into the room. He wasn’t alone.
“Hello, Kelly.”
Vince Rodriguez was wearing a soft brown Italian suit with a striped shirt and olive-green tie. He had a gold watch on one wrist and carried a second file folder under his arm. This one was thick with paper. He dropped it on the table and took a chair to my right.
“Detective Rodriguez,” I said, and gave him my best profile. “Tell me. Is this really my good side?”
“Shut up, Kelly.”
That was Masters. He slumped back in his chair, poured some coffee from a thermos, and offered me nothing. I had tasted cop coffee before so that wasn’t a problem.
“Taken a look at the autopsy report?” Rodriguez said, and began to unpack the file on the table in front of him.
“Not yet. Why don’t you give me the highlights?”
“Water found in the lungs. Appears Bryant might have drowned somehow.”
“So the sand in his mouth was postmortem?”
Rodriguez nodded. “Probably staged by the killer. Why, we have no clue. Now, tell me this, Kelly. What do you know about the Chicago Fire?”
“The Chicago Fire?”
“That’s right.”
Rodriguez flipped open a manila folder tabbed history and began to read.
“Started on the night of October eighth, 1871. Burned for two days. Destroyed most of the city, more than seventeen thousand buildings.”
I looked over at Masters, who offered the slightest of shrugs. Rodriguez kept talking.
“The fire started at 137 East DeKoven Street, current home of the Chicago Fire Academy. In 1871, it was the home of one Catherine O’Leary. The fire is believed to have started in her barn. The theory for years was that a cow kicked over a lantern and the whole thing just got out of control. Now, however, people aren’t so sure.”
“You mean the cow wasn’t good for it?” I said.
This time it was Rodriguez who looked toward Masters. The veteran cop cracked his knuckles and grunted.
“Told you,” Masters said. “Guy knows nothing. And if he knows something, it’s still nothing.”
The detective was right. I didn’t know much about 1871. Still, I could fake it with the best of them.
“The house on Hudson predates the fire,” I said. “You think there’s a connection.”
Rodriguez grinned thinly and held out his hand. Masters reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of twenties. Rodriguez pocketed the cash.
“I told him you’d see it. Straight off.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s anything,” I said.
“But you see it,” Rodriguez said. “Just like we did. There were only a dozen or so buildings that survived the fire of 1871. A hundred-plus years later, we have a body turning up in one of them. A guy, by the way, who happened to be an expert on the fire.”
“Coincidence?” I said.
Rodriguez shook his head and pulled a single sheet of paper from the murder file.
“There’s more. Best we can tell, this is the only item missing from the house on Hudson. First edition of a book written by Timothy Sheehan in 1886. Titled Sheehan’s History of the Chicago Fire.”
Rodriguez pushed the page over so I could take a look.
“How the book fits in,” Masters said. “Whether it has any connection to any of this. No real idea.”
“And you guys are sitting on all this because the brass says so?”
Rodriguez nodded.
“The press would have a field day with it,” Masters said. “You know that.”
“Fifth Floor showing any interest?” I said.
“Why do you ask?” That was Rodriguez again.
“Just thinking that might be where the heat is coming from. No pun intended.”
I smiled. Masters leaned forward, letting his bulldog features swell with blood. It wasn’t pretty. Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be.
“Why don’t we cut the bullshit here, Kelly. Tell us all about your client. Starting with why they’re so interested in Johnny Woods.”
I hadn’t figured on Woods’ name coming out of Masters’ mouth. I think he enjoyed the moment.
“So you know about Johnny.”
“We know,” Rodriguez said. “Again, we don’t understand.”
I was in a bit of a spot and my two cop friends knew it. Johnny Woods appeared to be a key to whatever was going on. Throw in the fact that he was one of the mayor’s guys and the stakes rose considerably all around. Masters and Rodriguez wanted answers. I had plenty. Problem is, none of them were going to be what you might call good.
“What exactly do you know about me and Woods?”
“You’ve been asking about him,” Rodriguez said.
The image of Fred Jacobs flickered through my head. I should have figured as much.
“Okay, I’ve been asking. It’s a personal thing.”
“Personal?” Masters said. “Just so we’re all clear. You’re telling us Johnny Woods had nothing to do with your presence at 2121 North Hudson yesterday.”
The corner I was in seemed to be getting tighter by the minute. “I didn’t say that.”
Masters got up from his chair and clasped both of his hands on top of his head. “Maybe we need to take a statement from this guy, Vince.”
“I don’t think so,” Rodriguez said, and looked at me. “I think we can get what we need and still make Kelly feel good. Right, Kelly?”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “You keep my client’s name out of it.”
Rodriguez looked at Masters, who shrugged, then smiled. “As long as Mrs. Woods is not our killer, you won’t have any problems, Kelly.”
“Fuck off, Masters.”
“So that’s it, then.”
Some days you just can’t win. Inside a Chicago cop shop, make that most days.
“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “Woods’ wife asked me to help her out, so I tailed hubby to the house on Hudson. Just wanted to talk to t
he guy. See what his day was like. Woods rang the doorbell. No answer. He looked around, rang again. Then he pushed the door open.”
Rodriguez was taking notes now. Masters was asking the questions.
“Did he force the door?”
“No. Looked like it was ajar. He just pushed it open. Like I said, he was nervous.”
“Then what?”
“He went into the house. Less than a minute later, he came out. White face, big eyes. Scared. Ran right by me. Got himself a cab and never looked back.”
“Then you went in,” Rodriguez said.
“I went in. Saw the body. Didn’t touch anything and left.”
It went on for a while longer. Details of the body. The house. The Johnny Woods angle one more time. Just to see how many different lies I could tell. It wasn’t hard. Never is when you didn’t do anything and are mostly telling the truth. Finally, they were done. The big question, of course, remained unanswered.
“So why was Woods there?” Rodriguez said.
“No idea.”
Rodriguez held up a photocopy of the title page to Timothy Sheehan’s book. “You didn’t see one of these in there?”
I shook my head.
“Johnny Woods didn’t walk out with one?”
“Not that I saw.”
“You ever talk to Woods about his wife?” Masters said.
“What do you know about that?”
“We’ve had a couple of calls out to their house. Domestic stuff.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “No one ever filed a report.”
“Janet Woods didn’t want any paperwork filed,” Masters said. “We accommodated her request.”
The Fifth Floor Page 3
