“Fuck you, no. I got fourteen of Danny Vacco’s rocks in my pocket. Rode his sister all afternoon.”
The brown eyes flash at “sister,” a display Cop Killa wouldn’t have wanted; a small victory for me and polite society.
“What, you doing her, too? Right in her little cherry brown ass, I bet. Better than the joint, huh, all you Twenty-Trey wannabes bustin’ each other’s cherry.”
“Mejor que la niña muerta.” Better than the little dead girl.
“What? Was that Spanish?”
Cop Killa squints in the direction of Coleen Brennan’s building.
I don’t follow his eyes. “Do me favor, tell Danny Vacco you learned how to read, saw my name in the Herald this morning, and now you wanna be boss. In fact, I’m making you boss.”
Cop Killa blinks, not sure where this is going.
“Danny Vacco gives Little Paul one more fucking rock—one more—the police shoot Danny dead.” I finger-punch Cop Killa in his forehead, notice the A cut into his eyebrow for the first time. “We make you boss, then we shoot you.” I lean in to his nose and prison-murder tattoos. “I promise.”
Hahn says, “We taking any of these guys?” She’s interrupting, like I might have a problem of some kind. The A is for asesinos, “assassins” in Spanish, a shadowy subset of the old Twenty-Treys—cold-eyed sociopaths who in their day were a new breed of street killer and as frightening as any ghost story a Four Corners kid could conjure.
I step back and tell the air between me and the five gangsters: “From this day forward, Little Paul ain’t in your gang. He’s in mine. I take him.”
None of the five nod. I feel Hahn watching me, wondering what I’m talking about. I explain for her and them, in case they want to argue later.
“Me and these gentlemen just made a binding street deal. Little Paul becomes a taxpayer, these felons keep on keepin’ on.” Pause. “Anybody who wants to go to lockup instead, say so.”
None of the five want to keep Little Paul that bad.
“Done. All of you’ll be dead by twenty-six anyway.”
Hahn smiles but keeps her pistol out. The gangsters don’t move.
I tell them, “Get your shit off my car.” Now they move.
Hahn and I get in. We make the block on all four sides without speaking or seeing the gangsters again. She says, “The Little Paul kid mean something to you?”
“When I lived here you had a chance.”
“You lived here?”
“Right there.” I point at the third floor, two windows facing the street, two facing the alley. Out front, plastic bags and papers are blown against the low chain-link fence, empty 40s lean near the gate. “Looked better—my mom didn’t allow the trash, and no drinking on her stoop.” The whole neighborhood looked better. “My dad and my brother could drink at their friends’ or inside, but not on her stoop. She let me play guitar out there, though, and I did.”
Hahn turns from her window. “Flamenco? Spanish?”
My tone drops. “Yeah, I’m a mariachi; my outfit’s at home.”
Hahn pulls her head back. “Something wrong? I say something?”
“No. I pick lettuce on the weekends, too.”
While she’s staring, I stop at 2116, slap the transmission into park, and tell her I’ll be a minute. Halfway up the short walk I hear Hahn’s door. Little Paul is on the stoop; his mother is, too, hand-washing clothes in a tub. She stops, wary. I hand him a guitar pick that he takes, not quite sure what it is.
“Guitar pick. Stay outta the life for one day, I’ll show you how to use it.”
Little Paul looks at me, then the street where his world begins and ends.
“We’ll go by Wolfe City, see how the big dogs make their records.”
I hand Little Paul’s mother ten dollars. “Sorry about the pockets.”
She hesitates, eyes me like we don’t know each other all of a sudden.
“Little Paul had rock in his pockets. Danny Vacco’s rocks. Take the money, okay? Make me feel better I did something.”
She’s no older than me but could pass for sixty. Part of that’s árbol de bruja—the witch culture—and part of it’s four jobs, a dead husband, dead sons, and no hope.
“Take the money or I take your son to Child Services.”
She pulls Little Paul to her then takes the money, whispering to him in Spanish, “Don’t be afraid. The police is afraid. The dark has him.”
I know I’m the police but I’m not the devil … then I get it: the Herald. Me and Coleen, a girl not a lot older than her son stolen off these streets and … I start to explain, stop, and wonder why the fuck would I explain? What, exactly, would I say? I didn’t kill Coleen? I didn’t rape her? I’m not a midnight monster, the chupacabra?
“I’m the police, Mrs. Cedeneo. We ain’t afraid of Danny Vacco and we ain’t afraid of the dark.”
She pushes Little Paul inside and shuts the door. In Spanish she tells me, “The light will not have you. An’ you are afraid, no? When hell is the only place left to go.”
I turn for the car and she keeps talking, telling me my future according to the árbol de bruja. Officer Hahn watches. I shrug; Hahn smiles at the ten dollars and Little Paul in the doorway giving me the finger.
“That’s me, hero of the neighborhood.”
We exit the curb and I turn us onto Cullerton facing a Crown Vic coming our way. The headlights flash and I stop. When we’re window to window, my brother Ruben punches my hand. “Eh, buey, como’sta?”
“What’s up, Homicide?”
Big-brother smile. “Nothing but you, baby. Who’s your girlfriend?”
“Officer Tania Hahn. New, direct from the commander … via Miami, the DEA, and the F-B-I.”
Ruben keeps his grin, doesn’t show what we’ve all been thinking. “That a fact? Timing’s interesting.” Ruben cranes past me. “Hello, Officer Hahn, welcome to the West Side of Chicago.”
She tips a hat she doesn’t have on.
“Take care of my little brother. He can play guitar, make you weep, but this police thing we do …” Ruben winces. “Send ’em to school, they chew the covers off the books.”
Hahn smiles.
Ruben says to me, “Where you having dinner?”
“Wherever you want.”
“Pink Panther found you?”
Headshake.
Ruben’s brown eyes remain cool and steady like when we were young. Ruben saved me once a week on the street. He wasn’t the toughest guy in the Four Corners but Ruben Vargas would go—all day and as far as the other guy wanted. “Moens and her investigator get to you, behave yourself.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“I mean it, buey, these pachingas laying for the brothers Vargas.”
I glance at Hahn. Then back at Ruben.
He says, “You and I are having dinner with a lawyer friend of mine,” Ruben holds up a folded Herald, “get my retirement money lined up; buy you into that recording studio on Halsted you’d sell your soul for.” He drops his chin and narrows his eyes. “If someone don’t go loco, get all Mexican on everybody.”
“And fuck you, too.”
“Carnalito. All American in the land of plenty.” Ruben winks. “Seven o’clock, Levee Grill.”
I tap my vest and T-shirt. “Kinda underdressed.” My real issue is geography. The Levee Grill is in the First Ward, the very same building as the old Counselors’ Row Restaurant—ground zero for the FBI’s Operation Greylord back in the early ’80s, not exactly a brain-surgeon choice for the brothers Vargas, considering.
“We’ll sit outside.” Ruben cranes around me again. “Nice to meet you, Officer Hahn.”
“Likewise.”
Ruben drives off and so do I. Hahn says, “Handsome fellow. Seems nice enough.”
I stare. “ ’Cause you heard different?”
She makes that face black girls make when they think you’re playing them stupid.
“Ruben’s been the man a long time. Made major cases on connect
ed people the bosses wouldn’t touch.”
Hahn points at the Herald’s front page.
“Fuck them. Police this city for real, a guy’ll make an enemy or two along the way. The big dogs don’t scare Ruben. They bite and so does he.”
Hahn nods, reading me for … something.
Brake lights ahead. “Tell me about Miami.”
She presses her Converse All Star into the dash again. “Palm trees, cocaine, and Cuban showgirls. Sun shines all the time and no one gets skin cancer.”
“Like on TV, huh?”
“Sonny Crockett 24/7. You should transfer; hell, you play the guitar, handsome as you and your brother are, if you had any money at all they’d be in your pants with both hands.”
Left turn onto Eighteenth Street. “And you’d introduce me around?”
“Wait till season, though; all the models are down from New York.”
“Models are good; keep ’em under six foot. You work dope down there?”
Nod. “More cash than you can imagine. Boxes of it. Literally.”
“All federal?”
“Worked with MPD and Dade County all the time. The cops who want to work, work. The ones who don’t … no different than here, eighty-twenty like it is everywhere.”
I turn us onto Ashland. “Be tough for you here, being from the G, assuming ‘from’ is the right word.”
“Tough being a woman wherever you go. Most of your coworkers either want to bend you over or piss on your pumps. If a woman wants to wear a 9-millimeter instead of lip gloss, she better get used to it.”
Yup, an unfortunate but healthy assessment. “You should be speaking at the academy.”
Hahn finishes with her shoe. “Probably have too much history for that.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m starting over as a street cop after nineteen years as a fed. What’s that tell you?”
Smile. “That you’re undercover.”
She laughs. “Call me Frank.”
Frank would be Frank Serpico—Hollywood’s poster boy for a good cop busting bad cops—a distinct possibility. “You’re saying you might’ve stumbled into trouble somewhere? In Miami?”
Nod; she taps the bullet scar under her shirt. “It’s possible that a group of DEA agents overstepped their authority; two were killed, and a major case compromised.”
Left turn.
“The case was against Santo Trujillo. Some said the DEA agents in question made the move on purpose to compromise the case. Rather than air that dirty laundry, those agents were given choices. All I ever wanted to be was a cop; my boss knew your mayor—”
“You know Mayor McQuinn?”
“Met him.”
Headshake. “Buff was right. I better not get you killed.”
A boy died. Hispanic—Puerto Rican this paper reported—but he was Mexican. Officer Terry Rourke shot and killed him in an alley just above the river at Halsted. Terry Rourke had a 30-year history of violent responses. The Mexican boy had none. He was thirteen, deaf and dumb. His parents protested; the neighborhood protested. No one listened. And that’s how it started.
—“MONSTER,” by Tracy Moens; © 2011 Chicago Herald
ARLEEN BRENNAN
FRIDAY, 7:00 PM
Don’t do this. Fast breath, face wipe. If the VW I’m driving had velvet lining it’d be a coffin.
Wheel the car, Arleen. Turn around. Drive straight to the U.S. attorney’s office and confess. Tell the whole truth on videotape—Detective Ruben Vargas and TAC cop Robbie Steffen are scamming the Korean mafia. I was/am the unwitting front woman. Vargas and Steffen will kill me if I don’t continue and the Korean mafia will kill me if I do.
There. Police corruption. Send in the FBI. Okay?
My heart rate stays at one-sixty.
The U.S. attorneys will nod to each other, then ask, Okay, Ms. Brennan, we’d certainly be interested in malfeasance by Ruben Vargas and Robbie Steffen. What is your part in the scam?
My part? Oh, no, see I wasn’t actually in the scam, I was tricked—
Oh? So you weren’t participating in exchange for the first audition at the Shubert?
Well, yeah, but, not like, you know, a bad guy, partner in crime person would.
The U.S. attorneys will nod to each other again. Okay, Ms. Brennan, let’s say you’re an innocent pure-as-the-driven-snow good guy. Explain the scam, how everyone fits.
I’ll wince, apologize, and say, Don’t actually know. Vargas and Steffen have something scary valuable that belongs to the Koreans. Ruben denied he had it until the Koreans got ugly. Ruben brought me in—tricked me—to do the face-to-face. Through me, Ruben admitted he and Steffen had a third partner who actually had the stolen property. I told the Koreans that Ruben would get the stolen property from their partner and return it, but Ruben keeps stalling. See? Okay? Can I go to the Shubert now?
Why won’t my goddamn heart slow down?
Onstage it would work out, if that’s what the writers wanted. In street-world, the U.S. attorney will charge me as a coconspirator—either because they think I’m lying about being tricked or because they want max leverage on me when our partnership gets ugly. And it will get ugly. I’ll be told to wear a wire, finish the scam—whatever the scam is—and if I don’t die, I can testify against two cops and the Korean mafia for a reduced sentence or maybe, if I’m extremely lucky, catch a spot in the Witness Protection Program.
Sounds good, huh? Like a solution? My fist pounds the seat.
Bet it’ll be hard to do Streetcar from prison or the Witness Protection Program. But, hell, why care about that? I touch the Streetcar pages on the passenger seat—my pages; my part. My shoe presses gas pedal; the VW stays pointed at Koreatown and the fantasy that I can make Ruben’s patchwork of lies stand up. Sweat stings my eyes. I am an idiot, a certifiable loser on the pathetic dream-sick express.
Make no mistake, nothing in this universe is more powerful than a working actress’s dreams, not drugs, not sex, not safety. Maybe not even love, although I can’t speak for those girls. The only time I was in love, I was thirteen.
Not even death. Mirror check. Dry swallow. Three weeks ago I took the bait. Ruben and Robbie Steffen asked me to help CPD make a case against Korean child traffickers. In return, Robbie’s father, Toddy Pete Steffen, would get me the impossible-to-get short-list audition for Streetcar. I went to Koreatown for Ruben and played my part to the scariest men I’ve ever faced. An hour later I told Ruben to forget my audition—maybe for the part I’d die but not for an audition. Ruben and Robbie reminded me kids’ lives were at stake, little kids like my sister. Two days later the audition at the Shubert came through. Even then I said no, but the casting director called, said he was seriously, seriously interested and would I please come in. My agent called and Sarah almost never does that; my whole goddamn life called me.
Ruben fed me more lies: “We’ll protect you—we’re cops for chrissake—you’re in and you’re out. No biggie, be an actress for us and a Shubert star is born.”
They produced the Streetcar audition, that wasn’t a lie. Toddy Pete Steffen is one of the founders of the Shubert Theater Company. And I nailed my minutes like I was born to play Blanche. Lap glance—Ruben’s gun bulges my purse. Then today I get the Streetcar callback; fifty-fifty I get the lead—and here I am, six blocks from another face-to-face with Korean butchers who have special drains in their basement.
Both hands death-grip the wheel. Left turn onto Lawrence Avenue. July sunset glares my windshield opaque. Breathe, Arleen. Don’t die in a car accident. Do Koreatown. Get Vargas and Steffen their seven more days. Don’t die in a basement with special drains; don’t go to prison. Dodge both and you’re off the hook. Don’t get fat, or pregnant, or stupid—way too late for stupid. Be soooo much better if the Valium would kick in, if my hands were as dry as my mouth. If Koreatown were an indie horror movie.
A pothole swallows my tire; big bump and half of Ruben’s .38 Special pops out of my purse. I throw the purse onto the p
assenger seat. Try not to get arrested, okay? The gun’s a goddamn felony even if you don’t use it. Mirror check. And God can damn Ruben Vargas, too. Lying mockie wanker. Hooooorn. I jerk back to my side of the center line. Pay attention or Blanche DuBois will die before she gets to Mr. Psycho Choa’s restaurant. Where you probably will die chained to an autopsy table in his basement.
Taillights. Lawrence Avenue bunches. Downshift, red light. Breathe. Prepare.
You’re not Blanche, you’re Arleen, and she’d better plant her StairMaster ass in the present. She’s skin on skin with two crooked cops, one of whom the Herald will say raped and murdered your thirteen-year-old sister, then helped send an innocent man to the gas chamber … to close the case. And in my present situation, he’s one of the good guys.
Except I don’t have to read the Herald’s exposé to know it’s muckraker crap; I won’t read it. Black gangbangers from Stateway Gardens kidnapped, raped, and killed Coleen. Maybe Anton Dupree was retarded, maybe not. The state tried Dupree and his partner three times; 100 percent conviction rate. Tore my family apart. End of story. And there aren’t any good guys, anywhere.
At Kedzie Avenue, banners announce Albany Park; Lawrence Avenue stops selling Michoacán tacos and begins selling kimchi. The Shubert wants to give me my lifetime chance and I haven’t rehearsed one line, not a word or a gesture. Koreatown smells like … Turn around.
Yeah? Then what? Run?
At least you’d be alive tomorrow.
But run means no Streetcar … run means waiting tables in flower-shirt Mexico or the Dominican Republic under another name, listening to midnight promises that aren’t good past breakfast or pulling palms off my thigh until even the married tourists aren’t interested.
Gobshite. Both fists pound the steering wheel. Stupid, Belfast jackeen knacker. I should’ve slept with Vargas and Steffen. “Lay down, honey” is the standard trade for a serious audition. But no, I’ve been through that, I have to have pride now.
Mr. Choa’s restaurant appears on my right; instinct reaches for the .38. The pistol’s an Airweight but shakes in my hand. I make the sign of the cross. Five shots, all hollow points. If Choa’s done talking, gulp, then even from close-up Ruben says I’ll need all five.
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