Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection

by Matt Hader

  The victims would awake, hung-over of course, in their own hotel rooms the next day. As their blurry memories gelled, they’d believe that they had experienced a fantastic night alongside a few sultry women with sexy foreign accents. A month later, when the men received their exorbitant American Express statements, the scam would be nearly complete. The majority of victims tried to avoid the embarrassment and ramifications of having their wives discover what they’d been up to, and just paid. If they did try and fight the charges, the “legitimate” businessman who owned the clubs would merely email the credit card company security personnel video files of the victims cavorting in their establishments.

  Enright looked left out of Maggie’s bedroom window and could see that across the street, and four houses down, there was a nosey asshole-of-a-neighbor. The man had an angry and disgusted look on his face as he stepped around Enright’s car, which blocked a fire hydrant.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Enright. His mind was in such a fog when he drove up, that he hadn’t noticed he parked illegally.

  Shortly before Jack Enright set out to burglarize Maggie Lopresta’s home he received a couple of large boxes in the mail from the staff of the nursing home where his father, Mike, had been living. Enright never met Maggie, but the letter he found from her in one of the boxes rattled him. She wrote that she’d dug up some interesting information about his family and she wanted Enright’s father to confirm what she’d uncovered before her article went to print. She also insinuated that she would go to print with or without Mike’s approval if he didn’t respond promptly. Between Vasily’s questions and Maggie’s letter, Jack Enright felt a terminal heaviness in his head and chest that he just couldn’t seem to shake.

  The letter was post-marked a few weeks before, and when he saw it, Enright was immediately propelled to get online and read all of the previous articles Maggie had written. It was while glancing over the third installment, in which Enright’s grandfather’s name was mentioned, that he began to wonder if Maggie’s articles were going to get him killed.

  The boxes back at his crappy apartment on Northwest Highway were full of his recently departed father’s belongings – all of them, the entirety of his meager ten-year-long V.A. nursing home existence. Most of the items in the boxes were cheap knickknacks that his father had picked up during his many short road trips over the years.

  His old man loved to collect tacky cheese-themed Wisconsin Dells thimbles for some odd reason. There were probably fifty thimbles in just one of the boxes alone. Enright’s dad never sewed or worked with his hands in any regard, other than using his mitts to toss back copious shots of cheap rye or to light one off-brand cigarette after the next. The thimbles were an unusual find.

  Besides a stint in the Army, Enright’s absentee father, Mike, never amounted to much in his lifetime. He reached his highest rung on the societal ladder when he worked as the daytime bartender at a shot and beer place on Western Avenue in Chicago.

  Alcoholic dementia set in by Mike’s fifty-fourth birthday and it robbed him of his mental capacities. Enright’s dad was placed into a V.A. nursing home in Zion soon after. Jack Enright would visit his old man once a year to bring him a birthday present of cheap cigars, but otherwise he rarely thought of his father.

  Maggie definitely trekked in the right direction when she tried to locate Mike Enright, but the dementia-riddled old man in the Zion nursing home was a literal dead end, even before he took his last breath.

  Enright leaned back from Maggie Lopresta’s bedroom window and turned to open the closet door. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He figured though, that if Maggie had any pertinent personal information, as she stated in the letter to his father, she’d most likely hide it in her bedroom. In her most recent article, she’d hinted she was going to write more about her own grandfather’s connection to the Enright family in much greater detail. Enright’s hope was to pinpoint and destroy any incriminating evidence before it could go to print. Self-preservation dictated that he needed to do everything possible to get Vasily and his Russian mob friends not to look any deeper into his personal affairs.

  Any evidence Maggie obtained she’d have somewhere here in her home. He hoped for that, anyway. The stingy newspaper she worked for had no office space for her to operate from. Enright had made sure of this by calling the newspaper’s offices and pretending to be a fan of hers. The office receptionist, who also happened to be the sportswriter, told him that Maggie worked from home.

  Throughout his professional life, legitimate and criminal alike, Enright understood that the more damning something could be to an individual, the better the chance that the person holding that information would hide it in their bedroom. The bedroom or the freezer, and he had already checked the freezer.

  He tore open several shoeboxes that lined the shelves of the cramped and humid closet. They were filled with footwear and nothing else. Maggie had proved to be a tougher nut to crack than he had first figured.

  Before he went back downstairs, he looked out the window one more time. Now the asshole neighbor sat on his porch and looked as if he were ready to dial the cell phone in his hand.

  “Shit.”

  As Enright bounded down the steps, and no thanks to Maggie’s articles, his recollections of his brutal grandfather rushed into his head. The man was as old school as they came, especially as it related to the way he took care of a young Jack Enright -- where the belt easily, and often, overruled the hug. In his day, Sean Enright was a bitter and demanding piece of work.

  Sean was a decorated Chicago Police officer during the 1930s and 40s, but his law enforcement career coexisted with his part-time job as an ‘Outfit’ enforcer and informant.

  Irish-American criminals would usually have been precluded from working for the newly powerful Italian-American-run Outfit of 1930s Chicago, but Sean’s official access to confidential police department information and his killer instinct were deemed too valuable by his new bosses to pass up. His work as a Chicago cop was the perfect cover for his dangerous mobbed-up activities.

  His job working for the Outfit was eventually exposed, and he served five years at Joliet for assorted crimes.

  Although he was implicated in the gangland style hits of two men, Sean Enright was never convicted of murder. He still paid a hefty price, though. He was so viciously injured during fights in prison that he was scarred from head to toe.

  The summer that Enright turned 17, his grandfather died a drunken and resentful 71-year-old man.

  Jack Enright had had a few run-ins with the law himself before that time -- minor property damage stuff -- but he vowed then to never follow in his grandfather’s path – by getting caught.

  When he was twenty, Jack Enright earned his Associate’s degree in criminology from Oakton Community College, and then enlisted for a four-year stint in the Marine Corps. Following his honorable discharge from the Corps, Enright was hired by the Evanston Police Department as a patrol officer. It would be his very own perfect cover job for the real, criminal work he was about to embark on. Whether Enright wanted to admit to it or not, his grandfather Sean had taught him well.

  On the job in Evanston, Jack Enright’s forebear’s past caught up with him a year after his police career began. That’s when he started to shake down drug dealers for their cash and contraband and offer them ‘get out of jail free’ cards if they kept quiet. He convinced himself at the time that he was hoarding the cash to build a college fund for his young daughter, but that never happened. He used the money for his own edification, and as it turned out, lost contact with his ex-girlfriend and daughter in the process. He knew deep down that he could locate their whereabouts with the police computers available to him, but chose to let them be. Life was easier that way. Less complicated.

  Self-important people like Enright never factored actually getting caught into their master pla
ns, though, and that lasting arrogance was the eternal slice of his family’s criminal legacy that lived on to this day.

  He was immediately fired from his police job when four previous arrestees exposed his get-out-of-jail-for-cash scheme. Enright skated on the criminal charges once he secured, with his ill-gotten gains, a top-flight defense attorney. The attorney had a successful track record of representing crooked Chicago-area politicians and was able to throw enough doubt into the initial proceedings that the Cook County D.A., a close personal friend of his, didn’t see any point in going forward with a trial.

  All the leftover money and drugs that Enright snagged from other criminals went directly into his lawyer’s pocket. Without the means to purchase the high-tech spy equipment that most private detectives employed these days, Enright followed wayward spouses and took photographs of their extramarital exploits with his iPhone for cash.

  Business was not great – especially with the economic downturn. Even wealthy, pissed off, North Shore housewives didn’t have the spare cheddar to have their cheating husbands followed. Jack Enright barely made enough money to pay his cheap rent, eat, and hit the dive bars along Northwest Highway on a daily basis. That’s why his new gig with Vasily was so important. It could be his ticket out of drab-life-land.

  Enright stood in Maggie Lopresta’s tiny living room and rubbed his forearm over his sweat-soaked brow. He had already fruitlessly scanned the first floor for a PC or laptop when he first broke in. Where the hell did she keep her work source material? Did she travel around with her laptop at all times? That could be a real problem.

  He then spotted the only true hiding place in the entire living room: a small antique sideboard situated in the corner. He opened the drawers when he first arrived, but saw only bank statements, receipts and the like. He moved back to the piece and opened the drawers – again -- one by one.

  As he uncovered more piles of old bank statements and insurance papers, he hastily sifted through them. He inspected the papers for anything with his grandfather’s name on it.

  The letter from Maggie among his father’s stuff back in his apartment said that his grandfather was not what Enright always thought him to be. Namely, crooked.

  If Vasily got the wrong idea from reading Maggie’s articles and believed that Enright himself was only posing as a criminal, he’d disappear along with his apartment building’s next dumpster full of garbage. His new job with Vasily and the Russian boys was going to be his thickly iced cake -- he just knew it –- so Enright had to protect the new opportunity at all costs.

  Enright’s eyes locked onto a document the moment his grandfather’s name came into view. He separated the thick file folder from the rest of the papers, but hesitated, and took a deep breath before he flipped it open.

  He caught movement through the front living room window and noticed a car slowly park at the curb. A pretty, red-haired, woman stepped from the vehicle carrying plastic bags of groceries. Enright knew immediately that she was Maggie Lopresta. He’d seen her photo attached to her newspaper column. Her photos were also in a few of the frames that hung on the walls of the tiny home on Ozanam Avenue in Niles, Illinois, where he currently stood.

  Enright opened the file folder and saw an official-looking printout from the Chicago History Museum with his grandfather’s name typed across the top. Right under his grandfather’s name was that of James McManus and an inmate number from Joliet. McManus was Maggie Lopresta’s grandfather – he read that in one of her articles.

  As Maggie’s house key slid into the front door lock, Enright dropped the file back into the drawer. He knew he could obtain another copy at the Chicago History Museum just like Maggie had done. It was Sunday afternoon, so he would have to wait until Monday morning to do so, but that was okay. Or he could choose to simply stay and take care of her now. She’d never see it coming. But if he hurt the columnist at this time he would only open himself up to the possibility of more questions from Vasily. The Russian mobster would put two and two together after learning of the woman’s death, and wonder why Enright needed to shut the reporter down.

  That was that. He’d pick up another copy of the file at the museum, comb over it, and then try and figure out where Lopresta was going with her story. If Enright caught wind sooner, though, that Vasily had begun to lose trust in him after reading any new articles from Maggie, then he’d have no choice but to take out the reporter for good.

  He exited as he arrived, through the jimmied back door. As he hopped off the last step on the back porch he could hear Maggie close the front door.

  Enright made his way over the back fence, through the neighbor’s yard and out onto the sidewalk of Ozark Avenue.

  He headed south on Ozark Avenue, walked to Monroe Street and took a right. His illegally parked car and the nosey asshole neighbor came into view as he rounded the corner back onto Ozanam Avenue.

  The neighbor was no fool, he could sense Enright’s urgency, and knew instantly that it was his car that blocked the hydrant. The neighbor, a tall and physically imposing man, stepped off of his own front porch and speed-walked right up to Enright. Enright nonchalantly pulled his car keys from his front pocket and continued toward his car door, never making eye contact with the angry man.

  “A fire hydrant? Really? I was this close, man. This close to calling the cops to tow your piece of shit car-” but that was all he said, because Enright went after him with a flurry of lightning-fast Krav Maga strikes. He rained a succession of fists and elbows down on the poor man that left him lying prone in the street.

  Jack Enright got into his illegally parked car and casually drove away just as a terrified dark-haired woman scrambled from the nosey neighbor’s house. She knelt down next to the injured man and propped his head up so he could take a few deep breaths.

  ***

  Tequila dreams were always the weirdest for Enright. They usually revolved around the strange Dali-esque images of women he had bedded in the past. The women swayed and undulated in his mind’s eye, made even homelier by the bizarre contortions that his brain concocted. The images would amuse him when he woke.

  But this particular tequila dream was very different, vivid, and solidly real. In the vision, his grandfather -- the mean-spirited and physically abusive man that he hadn’t laid eyes on since they closed his casket lid in 1982 -- was instead comforting Enright. He hugged Enright tenderly, and told him in his Chicago-Irish accent, “Jackie, nothing is as it appears. Nothing you know is genuine.”

  The muted crash from his living room jerked Enright awake. He blinked and tried to snap some awareness into his brain as his shaky legs kicked the yellowed and wrinkled sheets aside. The only solid thought that got through his sleep-hazed mind was that he was also getting closer to finding the asshole known as the “Baby Face Robber.” It was another job he’d been working on for the past month. And it could be a lucrative one if it all worked out.

  The robber had been splashed all over the news of late, especially since he knocked over several northwest suburban restaurants for their cash. Enright knew if he could catch up to the man, he’d make what the “Baby Face Robber” stole his own. If that meant killing the criminal, so be it. In fact, it would be better that way. Probably less trouble all around.

  More noise from the living room jarred him to an even higher level of alertness. Enright fumbled under his sweat-stained pillow for his wallet. Thankfully, it was still there. The skanky woman he had drunkenly picked up at the run down lounge two blocks away on Northwest Highway the night before hadn’t found it.

  In his drunken-drowsy state he concluded that she was probably now rooting around in his darkened living room, among his cheap Wal-Mart furniture, as she looked for something of value to pawn. She had done this before. Other than the cash-filled wallet in his hand there was really nothing of worth in his shitty one-bedroom apartment, so bringing her home again wa
sn’t a bone-headed play at all. He got what he wanted from her, but reciprocation was not in the cards because the woman, just like the last time she had visited, was going to come up empty on all fronts.

  He cleared his throat as loudly as he could, and clad only in his boxer shorts, unsteadily lifted his 233-pounds as he rose to his feet. He made extra noise as he trudged toward his bedroom door. He dramatically turned and rattled the doorknob, and when he heard the front door slam shut he knew his additional acting effort had paid off. She was gone.

  Enright painted on a lazy smile, stumbled backwards, and plopped back into the bed. His snoring started five seconds after his head hit the sweat-stained pillow.

  His cellphone rang loudly and his terrified eyes flashed open. He coughed, sat bolt upright and snatched the ringing phone off the nightstand.

  “Hello, Jack? Did I wake you?” asked Vasily in his clipped Russian accent through the phone.

  “Ah, I’m up. I’m awake.”

  “Good. Good. Sleep comes infrequently for me most nights. I apologize if I caught you too early. A favor. Meet me at the place on Higgins and Cumberland in two hours. Maggie Lopresta filed a new report overnight, yes. I’m interested for your take on this new thing she writes. I find it all so fascinating.”

  Before Enright could reply, the line went dead. He looked at the phone as if he wasn’t sure the call had ended. When the display lights dimmed on the phone, he tossed it on his bed, got to his feet and flung his bedroom door open.