The Shattered Bull (Drexel Pierce Book 1)

by Patrick Kanouse

  Mark did not follow up with his assault, and Jose rubbed his lower arms as Mark held his fists up and walked around the sandpit, imitating a boxer. The crowd began to shout “Mark.” He tilted his head to the right and left, stretching his neck. Jose grimaced. As the shouts of Mark’s name blasted through his focus, he paused and turned to the crowd.

  Jose did not waste the opportunity and lunged at Mark’s back, tackling him to the sand pit. Without hesitation, he gripped the back of Mark’s sweat-soaked brown hair and used it to slam his foe’s head into the sand three times. He then sat on Mark and threw two punches squarely into the back of it, the snap of the neck and the head bouncing off the sand grisly, audible.

  The crowd was stunned in silence. Even Jose’s few supporters seemed unable to register how quickly the tide had turned. Jose raised his fist again, but one of the linesman grabbed the raised arm and lifted the victor up, while Mark lay in the sand, his face visible to Drexel. Blood was coming out of the fallen man’s nose and lip. The other linesman came and grabbed both of Mark’s feet, dragging him off the sandpit—his head raising up and down over the ring’s edges—and through one of the aisles leading to manager’s office.

  The emcee walked out. “And Jose is the winner. Fifteen minutes until the next match.”

  The manager’s office door opened, and Drexel saw Kara step out of it. She looked up and out into the crowd and walked down the stairs. He patted Ton on the shoulder, stepped off the bleachers, and walked around the sandpit and people collecting their winnings. Toward the manager’s office. Toward Kara.

  * * *

  Kara was halfway to the exit when Drexel caught up with her. He stepped in front of her and gripped her arm. “We need to continue our conversation.” Kara wrenched her arm but Drexel held tight. “Listen. What happened the other day wasn’t my plan. Sobieski surprised me. He’s an asshole.”

  She grimaced and jerked her arm again. “You’re all shits.”

  A couple of people looked oddly at Drexel, who glared at them, which seemed to satisfy them. He kept a firm grip on her arm and guided her to the bar, where they stood to one side. A crowd had lined up for more drinks.

  “You shits set me up. Made me think I was helping and then you throw some crazy shit at me.” She refused to look at him.

  “Look, I’m not going to convince you right now. But we’ve got to talk. I mean, what the hell are you doing here?” He waited for her to respond, but she stood and glared at him. “You can be pissed at me. Fine. Frankly, I don’t blame you, but we both want to get the Bull’s killer.”

  “Hal.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t use that stupid fucking nickname if you want my help. I hated it. The Bull. Shit.” She had a tear come down her cheek.

  Drexel loosened, just slightly, his grip. She didn’t move, so he let his hand drop. “We can’t talk here, and you need to explain why you’re here. This raises questions my boss won’t like.”

  Kara pushed him on the chest. “Fuck you.”

  As Drexel readied his response, he felt hands grip both of his elbows. He glanced back in both directions. A couple of men built like the linesmen at the sandpit held him. “Is this place staffed by damned former football players?”

  They tugged him away from Kara, and Drexel did not resist, turning around after a few feet and walking toward the manager’s office. He looked behind him and saw her pull on her coat and walk to the exit. Drexel shrugged off the arms, and when they went to grab him again, he said, “I got it. To the office.” The linesmen stayed close but kept their hands off. Up the yellow steel staircase and onto the steel landing. The office was made of what looked to be cream panels with small windows. One window had an air-conditioning unit poking out of it. A regular-sized man with patches of stubble and a mustache stood by the door, which he opened. He held a machine pistol in the other hand, the barrel pointing to the floor. Drexel walked in.

  The office was painted an off-white on the inside, had two desks halfway down and alongside the walls. Near the entrance, a small, round card table with two chairs, where two men sat, Cobra submachine guns with forward grips casually in front of them. One of them was looking around as if he lost something. At another square card table near the desks sat three men while a fourth stood close by. One of the men at the table stood up. His black hair was parted on the left and swept across his brow with a bit of gray at the temples. He wore a light blue turtleneck sweater and dark blue jeans. He smiled, though a scar from the edge of the right eye to the lip broke the smile, giving it a menacing attitude.

  “Detective.” He walked over and extended his hand.

  Drexel ignored the hand. “Tunney?”

  “Call me Gordon.” Tunney dropped his hand. He opened a silver cigarette case. After pulling out a cigarette, which he tapped on the case, he offered it to Drexel, who shook his head.

  From outside the walls, the emcee was speaking, though his words were unintelligible.

  Tunney scratched his chin and then lit the cigarette. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? I’ve got VIP options for members of the Chicago PD.”

  “I’m investigating Hal Nye’s murder.”

  “Murder? I know he died, but I’d been told murder was not yet confirmed. At least that’s what my police friends at headquarters told me.”

  Drexel would have to ponder the implications of Tunney’s police connections later. He had the impression that the stakes of his being here, in that office at that moment, were greater than seconds ago. He realized Tunney might just kill him and he fought off a need to shiver. “It’s murder. And some information led to O’Lawry’s.”

  Tunney nodded once.

  “And then I ended up here. I wanted to see what Nye was up to, what he was involved with.”

  “And who?”

  “Always important in an investigation.” Drexel felt the eyes of all four other men in the office on him.

  “You’ve done some good police work detective. Would it help you to say I had nothing to do with it. I was out of town the day before he died. Returned the morning after.”

  Drexel forced a smile. “Information’s helpful. Where were you?”

  “Miami. I have business interests there. I can get you names of people to contact.”

  “Sure, but I don’t doubt you were there. Were you and Nye partners?”

  Tunney scratched his chin again. “We had mutual interests.”

  “Were those interests coming to an end?”

  “Not that I was aware of.”

  “Why was his girlfriend here?”

  The man smiled, the scar lifting and creating a slight curve in its route.

  Drexel waited for a response, but when Tunney offered none, he continued. “Why did you have me followed?”

  “Followed? I did no such thing.”

  “You had Deon follow me.”

  “I don’t know why Deon followed you. He was a new employee. Eager. Perhaps overly so.”

  “Okay.”

  “Alas, I found out Deon was murdered himself. Gunned down in a bad part of town.” Tunney rubbed his lips with his finger. “My friends say they’re looking for a couple of people who fled the scene. I hope they catch them. Deon seemed like such a promising young man.” The man was cozy with someone in the ranks or at least wanted to make it seem that way. That or the gunmen had busted through on Tunney’s orders. A standing order to guard the house and deal with intruders?

  Drexel debated whether he could get Tunney to slip up, but he had nothing he could use on him. “Can I go now?”

  Tunney nodded once. “Yes, but gone. For good. Consider your invitation to these events revoked permanently.” He turned his back and walked to the desk.

  Drexel nodded and turned to the door, walking out it and down the steps. In the sandpit, two women were standing, ready to fight. Ton was at the
bottom of the stairs, near one of the i-beams the plant office sat on, pretending to watch the women. They walked out of the building in silence as the crowd started screaming. Outside, the temperature had dropped even more, and the lights of Chicago’s downtown gleamed in the northeast. They walked toward the Mustang. As they approached, from the shadows came, “Detective?”

  Drexel turned to the woman’s voice. Kara was sitting in a silver car with the window down. “Let’s talk.”

  Chapter 15

  Drexel sat at a table in the Old Towne Pub, tapping a glass of bourbon in front of him, staring at a glass intended for Kara across the table. At the plant, Kara punched the address of the pub into her navigation system of her Mercedes S63. She insisted on driving alone. She wanted to drop the car off at home and insisted she would meet Drexel wherever. So Ton drove Drexel to the pub.

  Drexel had thanked Ton, who grabbed his arm and then patted it. “You know. I would’ve busted in that office. Right?”

  Drexel nodded, surprised Ton put those thoughts into words. “I know.”

  Ton let go and put both hands on the large steering wheel. “And be careful, very careful, about this girl.”

  Drexel nodded, opened the door, and slid out.

  Now he waited for Kara. Facing the entrance, he finished his Bulleit, reached across and grabbed the glass he ordered for her and drank it. He raised his hand and nodded at the bartender, who pulled two clean glasses out. Behind Drexel, he heard a woman walk onto the stage. A brief, tentative, “Hello,” into the microphone. Then, “I’d like to read Wallace Stevens’s poem, ‘The Snow-Man.’”

  Drexel breathed in deep. A favorite poem of Zora’s. She had always kept a copy with a broken spine and folded page corners of Stevens’s poems close by. The book had been highlighted with green and yellow and underlined, her elegant handwriting gracing the margins with arrows to lines or verses.

  The voice behind him was shy, and a bit fast at first, until it caught the poem’s rhythm, until the words themselves became the focus. Zora had read poems to Drexel, insisting that only aloud could a poem’s power reach someone. She read in a confident, warm voice. She had dotted their conversations, he knew, with quotations many of which he would never know the origin of.

  The front door swung outward and Kara walked in.

  He rose halfway and waved. She saw him and came to the table, unwrapped the scarf woven around her neck and over the top of her head, and placed it into the purse, which she zipped closed and sat on the table beside the bourbon the waiter had just set down. She left her coat on and sat down.

  Drexel grabbed his glass and raised it a bit. Kara did the same.

  He leaned in. “A lot of people lost a lot of money tonight.”

  She shook her head that she didn’t hear him and leaned in. Drexel repeated his statement at the same volume.

  “And a few made a lot of money.” She downed the bourbon in two gulps.

  Drexel nodded to the waiter. “So why were you there?”

  “I think you know.”

  “There are a few reasons why Sobieski—that asshole—thinks you killed Hal. At least, I think he has a few reasons in his skull.” Drexel noticed a couple of young women a couple of tables down slyly point toward Kara. He could not imagine being so recognizable. And Kara was, in the scheme of things, only a minor celebrity. A big fish in a little pond his mother would have said, though Chicago was a bigger pond than most.

  “He’s wrong.”

  “But you’ve got to help me with the info that shows him you’re not the one who killed Hal.” He paused and looked at her. “For example, why’re you at an illegal fight? Why’re you meeting with Gordon Tunney? Your boyfriend’s recently dead. And has connections to Tunney.”

  The waiter set two more glasses on the table and walked away.

  “He’s dead. I’m alive.” She rotated the glass in front her. “I know that’s not much of an answer.”

  Drexel squinted at her, examining her steady gaze. “Look, when my wife died, I wanted to die. I think a week went by where I didn’t leave our apartment except when my friend dragged me to the funeral.” Drexel stopped himself. He was rarely this free discussing Zora or her death with people. He preferred to isolate this, to live in his own pain. She was dead now more than a year, yet he could not excise the scars for they were not yet scars, they were open wounds, and here he was telling a suspect about his feelings.

  “Why does your boss think I killed Hal?”

  “My boss’s boss.” Drexel held the glass up to his nose. “The reason all spouses or girlfriends typically do it. Money. Jealousy.” He shrugged and drank.

  She rubbed the edge of the table with her thumb and finger. “What do you mean money? We weren’t married.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t set you up pretty in his will.”

  “But he didn’t.” She looked to her right and then looked back at Drexel. “He wanted to, but I told him no. It’s going to charity, all of it. That’s what he told me. I didn’t want his money. The rumors were already out there I was after his money. Interested in my fifteen minutes and making a load of money just by charming him or screwing him. I was never interested in his money. Don’t get me wrong. I liked the money, the things it could buy. I loved screwing him too, but it wasn’t what interested me in him.”

  “What did?”

  She rubbed her index finger around the rim of the glass. “Why are you a cop?”

  Drexel thought the question over and went with her evasion, hoping it would lead somewhere. “I’ve got two answers. I’ll give you one of them. I grew up in this city. Went to college here too. One night a friend, David, David Haskert, we were high school buddies. We were out drinking like college kids do, and on the way back to an apartment we shared with a few other guys—a shit hole of a place—we were mugged. Some guy with a ski mask. We gave him our wallets. Our cheap-ass watches. We were college kids. We didn’t have much. Anyways, as the mugger starts to step back, David says, ‘Jesse’s photo is in there.’ Jesse was his girlfriend. And David stepped toward the mugger and reached with his hand and bang. The mugger panicked or didn’t care. But David kept going forward as if he were stepping but he never stopped. I think I remember the sound of him hitting the sidewalk more than I remember the gunshot. Hole straight in the chest.” Drexel pointed at this sternum. “He was dead before he hit the ground.”

  “Did they catch the mugger?”

  “No. Found our wallets a couple of blocks away. Jesse’s photo was in David’s.”

  “How very Batman.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. There was other stuff too, before. But that really sealed the deal.”

  Kara nodded. “I remember when I was a kid. My dad wasn’t around and my mom didn’t have much. My childhood is full of shit memories. What I saw on TV is what I wanted for myself. People with great families in nice homes, with small problems.” She took the last sip from her drink, and Drexel ordered another. When it arrived, he passed it to her and waited for her to continue. She drummed two fingers on the table. “My point is that I’ve lived a life with nothing—or what seemed like nothing at the time. Hal had a similar background as me and my family. Tough growing up. Parents trying. I think his failed more than mine.”

  Hal’s parents had indeed failed, though whether as a consequence of their own undoing or not was speculative. Hal’s father, Bill, was a low-level made man, collector and running some side rackets, who spent far more than he earned and was in and out of prison. Hal’s mother, Evelyn, struggled to keep her and her son away from the harshest of those realities, but she sought solace in heroin. Hal was nine when Bill was killed in an alley fight when a back room poker game went south. Evelyn died four years later from an overdose, sending Hal into the foster system. Hal was broken by then and found street life more attractive.

  “So…so Hal and I understood how fleeting money was. We l
iked it, but we didn’t worship it. Money didn’t make Hal happy. Running a successful company with people and politicians kowtowing to him who wouldn’t have dared do so just a few years earlier made him happy. So I had no motive, and I was drunk with friends when Hal was killed.”

  “That’s another problem.” He waited to see how that sentence would land.

  “What do you mean?” Kara seemed unfazed.

  “We still can’t find Samantha and Trish.”

  “Sam and Trina,” said Kara.

  “Right. Trina. They haven’t been to their apartments in a while. Have had mail being held since the day of the murder. We’ve left a number of voice mail messages, but they haven’t called back.”

  “Not surprising. They’re free spirits.” Kara smiled and tapped her fingers in the air. “They like to unplug, go off the grid. They’re always disappearing and coming back.”

  “But not answering messages? Completely off grid?”

  “I left Sam a message one time a year or so ago about a good friend of hers who was severely injured by a piece of falling masonry—freak accident, that building is no longer there—and she never responded. When she did come back, she said, ‘Yeah, I got the message.’ She had been out in the Rockies living in a tent.”

  “So where’s their money come from?”

  “Inheritances, both of them. Their parents were beaucoup rich.”