by Clark Howard
City Blood
A Novel of Revenge
Clark Howard
To more of the next generation
Robert Lee Stoneking
Ashley Nicole Stoneking
One
As the unmarked Chicago police car slowly cruised the night streets of the lower West Side, the faces of the two detectives in the front seat were shadowed except when they passed under a streetlight, or went by a cocktail lounge with a twist of neon in the window or above the entrance. The vapor lights overhead cast their features in a clammy gray that made them look embalmed, while the neon brought them back to life with brief lines of carnival colors. As the car was guided along its aimless way, the two detectives conversed in quiet tones.
“I don’t believe this,” said the man in the passenger seat. He bobbed his chin toward the sidewalk, where a ferret-like little man was skulking down the street. “Pete Fingers. The son of a bitch must have made parole.”
“Wonder why those assholes in Corrections didn’t send us a release notification?” the driver asked.
“Who knows?” his partner replied indifferently. “What the hell do they care if the pickpocket stats at the Stadium go up?” He watched the little man disappear into a building.
“Maybe they didn’t notify us because he’s rehabilitated,” the driver suggested.
“Yeah. And maybe I’ll win the fucking lottery next week.”
The car passed the mouth of an alley. Down that alley, in the murky light of a single bulb above the rear entrance of a topless go-go club, a young woman in a terry-cloth robe was flailing with her fists at a man who had backed her against the wall of the building.
“Cut it out!” she said. Her fists seemed feeble against his solid chest. “Stop it! Leave me alone, you son of a bitch!”
“Son of a bitch, am I?” The man’s words were soft but offended. He slapped her, a hard, stinging blow.
“Goddamn you—!” The woman tried to claw his eyes but he grabbed her wrists, jerked her forward, and slammed her against the wall. Her head bounced off the brick and she moaned.
“Little bitch,” the man said, so quietly it was like an obscene breath.
“No, please—look, I’m sorry, okay?” the woman begged. She gave up her physical struggle and tried words. “Wait—I’m sorry—” From one of the club’s partly open back windows, the sound of muted go-go music underscored her plea. “Please, don’t—”
A hand shot out of the shadows and slapped her again, viciously, across the mouth. Groaning, she slumped helplessly back against the building. The hand jerked open her robe. She was wearing red bikini panties with a fringe trim, and a matching half bra with tassels on it: a dancer’s costume with breakaway Velcro closures for easy removal on the stage. The hand seized the bra’s breakaway between the cups and pulled it open, exposing the young woman’s buoyant, starkly white breasts to the hazy light.
“Fucking little slut—” the man’s voice said from the darkness, harsher now.
The detective on the passenger side of the unmarked car was Joseph Patrick Kiley, a fourteen-year Chicago PD veteran. He was a third-generation Irish-American whom women found attractive if not exactly handsome. His features were clean, even, honest; the kind of a face a woman—or a man—could talk to. It was a face that showed interest easily, even though its most memorable feature, his clear, light blue, very direct eyes, were most of the time completely without warmth. Still, strangers tended to start conversations with him, quickly confiding in him, trusting him, which frequently served him well as a cop. If he had paid more attention to wardrobe and grooming, he would have been charismatic; as it was, he often passed for ordinary. His hat said it all: It was inexpensive, nondescript; under it, he had thinning brown hair that cried out to be styled but never would be. He was the kind of cop who always carried a backup piece.
The cruising car passed a seedy little bar called the Down-and-Dirty. A young Haitian man with bulging, wild eyes leaned in its doorway, surveying the night street.
“Bert Bombier,” the driver remarked with a soft grunt. “Three times the son of a bitch has been in a lineup in front of his rape-robbery vies, and three times he’s walked.”
“Sure,” said Kiley. “The women take one look at those voodoo eyes glaring out at them, and they lose their memories. Never mind what he did to them. Nobody wants to finger a fucking psycho and have him get out in five years and go on the prowl for them.”
“I’d like to catch him in the act sometime and have him make a run for it,” the driver yearned. “I’d put one low in his spine, just far enough down to cripple him.”
The driver was Nicholas Dominic Bianco, twelve years on the force, a swarthy, sensuously handsome Italian-American, also third-generation, whose hat was a Burberry snap-brim that covered a head of lustrous, healthy black hair. He too was the kind of cop who carried a backup pistol.
“Listen,” Bianco said, abruptly changing the conversation from police to personal, “you’re still on for Saturday night, aren’t you?”
“Sure, I’m still on. I’ve never passed up Stella’s manicotti yet, have I?”
In the alley, the young woman’s nose was bloody; mascara-darkened tears streaked her cheeks, giving her the look of some painted primitive. She continued to plead to the background of faint go-go music.
“Please, stop—I’m sorry—please, no more—”
“No more?” the harsh voice said indignantly. “I haven’t even started on you yet, you tramp!”
The hand began slapping her face back and forth: sharp, cracking blows, like the sound of slow applause.
It was Kiley who watched the streets more closely as they patrolled, Kiley who scrutinized people, cars, doorways, shadows, looking for something wrong, something out of place, something presently or potentially bad. Kiley was like a doctor checking a patient’s bloodstream; to him the streets were the bloodstream of the city, and he was supposed to recognize the germs in that bloodstream. Not that Bianco was a flake; Bianco was a good cop too. But Bianco had a house in the suburbs, a wife, two little girls. What Kiley had, mainly, was his job.
Crossing the street in front of them at the next corner was a shapely black woman in a tight dress, with highly glossed, thick, prominent lips.
“When did Power Lips start working west of Damen?” Kiley asked.
“Who the fuck knows?” Bianco said, shrugging. “Hey, know what Alvin told me about her?”
“Alvin who?”
“Alvin Washington, the spade that partners with Charley Norris. He said that Power Lips practices her technique by sucking marbles through a piece of garden hose. He knows the pimp she hustles for, and the pimp told him.”
Kiley shook his head in mild disgust. “You’ve got a dirty mind, you know that? And just when were you talking to Alvin Washington?” There was a barely perceptible edge to the latter question.
“I wasn’t exactly talking to him,” Bianco explained. “I was with some other guys in the locker room who were listening to him.”
Kiley watched Power Lips strut her stuff down the street. She had a fine, dark body, but Joe Kiley did not particularly like blacks in any form. There were too many of them in the department these days, thanks to the goddamned mayor’s insatiable hunger for federal funds, and Kiley had lost out on a couple of promotions to them. Most of the white cops he knew felt the same way, that it was reverse discrimination. Bianco was a little more liberal, a little more tolerant.
“Better stay away from Alvin Washington unless you want to get a bad rep,” Kiley reminded him quietly. He held one wrist close to the dashboard light to look at his watch. “Let’s go for some coffee.”
In the alley, the young woman no longer begged for mercy. She was being beaten by two hands now. Closed into fists
, they punched out of the shadows, delivering blows to her eyes, nose, cheeks, ears. Finally, in the wake of a sadistic chuckle, the fists began beating the young woman’s full, bare breasts, methodically drubbing them like a boxer working on a speed bag. The chuckle became a laugh as the attacker’s enjoyment increased.
After a while, the young woman’s head fell limply to one side, but the fists went right on pounding her breasts.
Two
Bianco pulled into a NO PARKING ANYTIME space in front of the Midwest Hotel and Athletic Club, and the two detectives went into the corner drugstore of the building and sat at the lunch counter. Bianco carried their portable police radio and set it on the floor between his feet. They were General Assignments detectives, working out of the Warren Boulevard station; they patrolled rotating selected segments of the precinct, just as uniformed officers did in marked cars. Their job was to respond to felony calls so that the uniforms could stay on regular patrol.
At the lunch counter, over coffee, Bianco swiveled his stool around to check out, for about the sixth or seventh time since their shift had begun at four that afternoon, Kiley’s new suit. “I can’t believe you bought another gray suit,” Nick said in mild exasperation. “Your other two suits are gray.”
“Gray doesn’t show the dirt,” Kiley replied. “My mother taught me that when I was a kid.”
“Where’d you buy it at?” Bianco asked. “I’ll bet in one of those warehouse stores where everything’s hung on metal pipes, right?” Bianco himself was wearing a snappy double-breasted number, navy blue, with a fine pinstripe, European cut. “How long I been asking you to come down to Maxwell Street with me to get your suits?” he asked. “Look at this one I’m wearing: It’s a Valentino, retails for eight-fifty. I got it for two.”
Kiley nodded knowingly. “One of these days,” he warned, “you’re going to get caught buying hijacked suits and it’s going to be good-bye badge.”
Bianco shrugged. “I’ll be the best-dressed cop they ever fired. Anyhow, look who’s talking. Where’d you get that set of silverware for your sister’s wedding present six years ago? Maxwell Street, that’s where. And what was it? Hot, that’s what.”
“That was different,” Kiley rebutted. “That wasn’t for myself, it was a gift.”
“Oh, I see,” his partner derided. “Well, just think of my suits as gifts too: from me to me.” He took a sip of coffee, then added, “Wait’ll I tell Stella you bought another gray suit, she won’t believe it. Wear it Saturday night so she’ll know I’m not putting her on. Only do me a favor, get a nice red tie to dress it up, will you?”
Kiley’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Who else did Stella invite to dinner?”
Bianco looked away. “I don’t know. Stella takes care of all that stuff.”
“Who else?” Kiley pressed.
“Hey, I said I don’t know.”
“Forget it then,” Kiley said. “I’m not coming.”
“All right, look,” Bianco admitted, “it’s a gal named Arlene. She’s a fireman’s widow, goes to our church.”
“Christ,” Kiley said irritably. “I can’t believe this, Nick.”
“Listen, this one is primo, buddy,” his partner promised. “Brunette, nice bod, no kids—and a city pension.”
“Stella’s got to cut it out,” Kiley complained. “I’m serious, Nick. This shit has got to stop.”
“She’s just trying to find you somebody nice to socialize with.”
“Somebody nice to marry and settle down with, you mean. Tell her I’m not coming.”
“For Christ’s sake, Joe, what the fuck’s your problem anyway? What, are you gonna live alone in that ratty little apartment of yours until you die?”
“Ratty little apartment?” Kiley snorted. “It’s good enough for you to use as a home address so you can live in the suburbs and be on the city payroll. What you seem to forget, Nick, is that I—”
Kiley’s words were halted in mid-sentence by a beep from the radio at Bianco’s feet. Bianco picked it up and put it to his ear. After listening intently for ten seconds, he pressed a button and said, “Ten-four, dispatch., Tac Eight will respond.” To Kiley he said, “We got a situation with a dead woman in the alley behind the 4-Star Lounge.”
They each put a dollar on the counter, left the rest of their coffee, and hurried out to the unmarked car.
At the rear of the 4-Star, several shadowy figures were standing around something still and white on the ground when Kiley and Bianco got out of their car, folding badge cases over the breast pocket of their coats so that their badges showed outside. As they walked toward the body, a large rat scurried out of a garbage can and disappeared. Bianco went directly to the spectators and began corralling them. “Okay, everybody move back a little, right over this way, come on, let’s go—”
Kiley knelt next to the woman, shining a flashlight on her. Under an open robe she was wearing some kind of Frederick’s of Hollywood getup. Red hair spread out from her head, and she had freckles on her forehead, probably on the rest of her face too, and her breasts, but he couldn’t tell because the former was close to being pulp, and the latter were covered with blood so completely they might have been spray painted. Trying her wrists first for a pulse, Kiley found none, so he put two fingers in the slick blood on her neck but didn’t find life there either. As long as his fingers were already bloody, he gently turned her face by its chin for a better look at what had been done to her. When he moved her head, the flesh on her face shifted like gelatin that hadn’t set. Laying the flashlight down, he used his clean hand to feel in her two robe pockets but found nothing, not even Kleenex. He retrieved the flashlight and played its beam slowly along her body all the way to the feet. She had a gold ankle bracelet on one leg, two hearts engraved on it but no names, no initials.
Kiley rose, put the flashlight in his coat pocket, and cleaned the blood from his fingers with a handkerchief, which he carefully folded, blood inside, and also put in his coat pocket so the crime scene techs wouldn’t find it and think it was evidence. Stepping over to Bianco, he handed him the flashlight and said, “Okay” Nick went to kneel beside the dead woman to make his own observations.
“Who found the body?” Kiley asked the five men that Bianco had herded back under the single bulb above the club’s rear entrance.
“Th-that was me,” said a short man wearing bib overalls and a sweatshirt. “I c-come out the back door to t’row out the t-trash an’ there she was—”
“You the one called us?”
“No, that was me,” another man said. He was bigger, with a belly that pulled at the buttons of a plum-colored silk shirt.
“What’s your name?”
“Max Getman. I’m part-owner of the 4-Star. Wally here,” he gestured toward the shorter man in bib overalls, “is my janitor. That there girl on the ground is one of our dancers—”
“Was one of our dancers,” a black man next to Getman corrected. He too wore a silk shirt, with pearl buttons.
“I’ll get to you in a minute,” Kiley told him evenly, pointing his ballpoint at him. It was another way of saying shut up, and both Kiley and the black man knew it. “Go on,” Kiley told Getman.
“That’s all, I guess,” the club owner said. “Wally found her and come right away to tell me. I come out and took a look-see, then went back in my office and called the station. ”
Kiley nodded and turned to the black man who had spoken out of turn. “All right, who are you?”
“Ed Laver,” the man replied coldly, obviously miffed by Joe’s blunt rebuff. “I work for Max. Club manager.”
“What do you know about this situation?”
Laver shook his head. “Just what Max and the janitor said.”
The other two men didn’t know anything either; they were both customers, both black, who had been in the men’s room and became curious when they happened to see the activity in the alley.
“Okay, I’d like all of you to stay right where you are for a minute whi
le I get my partner,” Kiley told them. “Then we’ll speak to you individually and let you go. Don’t walk around the area, and don’t leave.”
Kiley went over to the car where Bianco was now sitting with one leg in, one leg out, using the radio. “—morgue wagon, deputy coroner, homicide team, and two squad cars to block the ends of the alley.” After his request was confirmed, Nick added, “Nell, call Stella for me, will you? Tell her I might be a couple hours late.”
Bianco stood up out of the car and Kiley asked, “What’d you get from those guys?”
Nick, who had out a spiral notebook of his own, shined the flashlight on it and said, “The vic’s name is Ronnie Lynn, dancer inside, hasn’t been there long, was working eight-to-two tonight. The three guys connected to the club don’t know what she was doing out in the alley.” Nick leaned closer to Kiley. “What the fuck’s a white girl want to take off her clothes and dance in front of a bunch of spades for?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Kiley said almost curtly. He was still irritated about the Saturday night dinner setup. “Come on, let’s get some of this situation worked up before the Shop boys get here.” The “Shop” was Chicago Police Department headquarters at 11th and State streets; it was from there that the team of Homicide detectives would be dispatched, along with evidence technicians and others needed to process the crime scene. Kiley, Bianco, and other General Assignments detectives in the precincts had little use for the “Shop cops” from Homicide, Robbery, Burglary, Auto Theft, Bomb and Arson, Organized Crime, Gang Intelligence, and the other titled commands, members of which were the cops who always seemed to get their names in the newspapers—and snared the attendant promotions and commendations—while, as everyone above the level of Mongoloid idiot knew, it was the GA cops who did most of the real work in the city, the scut work, the grunt stuff that kept the streets from turning completely into a swamp. The only time a GA cop admitted to any possible worth of a Shop cop was when the GA cop got promoted to a command—something to which they all, or most all, aspired. Prior to promotion, however, GA cops did nothing but denigrate Shop cops.
