City Blood

by Clark Howard

  It reminded Kiley of what Gloria Mendez had said about her own job, except for the last part. “Handicapped? You don’t look handicapped to me.”

  “That’s because you’re not as alert and perceptive as a trained police office supposed to be,” she replied loftily. “Let me see what you got there,” she jerked the papers from his hand, while dropping a huge, pastel green purse heavily onto her desk. “Next time,” she said, scanning the pages, “make out one fax form for each city.”

  “I’ll change it,” Kiley said, reaching. She drew the papers out of his reach.

  “Do it myself, then it’ll be done right.” Sitting down, she used a staple remover to neatly separate the pages.

  “How are you handicapped?” Kiley asked. “Besides your personality, I mean.”

  “Just for that, I’m never going to tell you,” Aldena swore. She looked at the bottom of the small, handwritten form. “‘ASAP’ My, my, must really be important. Somebody planning to blow up the Wrigley Building?”

  “Prudential Tower,” Kiley said. “Seriously, Aldena, how are you handicapped?”

  Aldena sighed dramatically. “Come around here,” she ordered, standing. Kiley felt a fleeting trepidation that she was going to hit him. Aldena picked up on it at once. “Come on. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  When Kiley got around the desk, Aldena got right in his face. She began rolling her eyes: clockwise, counterclockwise, left, right, up, down. Then she stopped.

  “Okay, Detective,” she challenged, “which one is the real eye and which one is the glass eye?”

  “You’ve got a glass eye?” he asked, incredulous.

  “You are really dense, Kiley, you know that,” she said. “You ought to be working night traffic court.”

  “I don’t believe you, Aldena,” he said, smiling what was at best an uncertain smile

  “I don’t care if you believe me or not, man. I’d take it out and show you, but it’s been seamed to the socket muscles by laser surgery; that’s why I can move it in conjunction with my real eye.” She sat down at her desk. “If you’ll excuse me now, Detective, I have some ASAP’ work I got to get done.”

  Aldena began unlocking her desk and Kiley walked away, not sure at all whether she really had a glass eye or was just busting his balls. Whichever, he did not have time to dwell on it; he had to begin finding out everything he could about Bernard Oznina, the night doorman at 3333 Lake Shore Drive.

  It was a pleasant change of pace for Kiley when he sat down at one of the computers this time and began to access information. Keying in Bernard Oznina’s name brought him a virtual avalanche of facts from every data base he went into. Motor Vehicle records showed Oznina owning a 1987 Chevrolet Caprice two-door, color blue, license number B403Y21. During the last ten years he had been issued three overtime parking tickets; he had no moving violations. His date of birth was March 4, 1930; residence address was shown as 4406 W Grainger Avenue. Real estate records showed that the property at that address was a single-family dwelling, constructed in 1946, containing twelve hundred and eighty square feet, with a detached garage. Mr. Oznina had owned it since 1960. Credit records showed that he had a valid Visa card, Standard and Texaco gasoline credit cards, charge accounts at Sears, Montgomery Ward, Western Auto, and ABC Sporting Goods. He had a credit rating of B-minus: frequently a slow pay, but never a collection account. His twenty-five-year mortgage had been paid off in 1985, leaving his home free and clear. All of his taxes were up to date. Vital statistics showed that he had married Vera Marie Boronski in 1953. A son, Bernard, Jr., was born in 1955; a daughter, Marie Agnes, born in 1958; and a second son, Laurence Stephen, born in 1962. His wife had died of cervical cancer in 1988. All three children were married, the oldest for the second time, and lived in nearby suburbs. Oznina had been employed by the Chicago Public Library system as a bookbinder from 1954 until 1984, when he had retired on a full thirty-year pension. Since 1984 he had been a night doorman for Blaisdell Property Management at its high-rise apartment building at 3333 Lake Shore Drive. A veteran of the U. S. Army, he had fulfilled a three-year enlistment from 1949 until 1952, serving overseas in a noncombatant supply corps assignment during the Korean War. His religion was Catholic.

  Instead of printing a hard copy of all the information, or retaining it in the computer’s memory, Kiley made notes of everything he deemed important, then closed all files and when asked SAVE DATA?, keyed in NO and exited.

  As he was walking back to his desk, the phone rang.

  “Bomb-and-Arson, Detective Kiley,” he answered.

  “It’s me, Joe,” said Gloria Mendez. Her voice was more tense than Kiley had ever heard it. “I just spent two hours in my captain’s office. IA and OCB were both there. How soon can we meet?”

  “Any time,” Kiley said, feeling his stomach tightening. “I was just about to log out.”

  “I don’t want to be too obvious by leaving right away,” Gloria said quietly, “so here’s what I plan to do. A lady friend of mine works at the Chavez Neighborhood Clinic over at Irving Park and Kedzie. I’m going to have her put me down for a two o’clock appointment. If anyone checks, it’ll look legitimate. Then I’ll log out of here at one-thirty. Meet me in the waiting room of the clinic around two.”

  “Got it,” Kiley said.

  Gloria hung up without further conversation.

  Kiley stared at his receiver for a long moment, wondering what had gone wrong now.

  When Kiley got there, he found the waiting room of the Chavez Neighborhood Clinic to be a very large area, with seating capacity for at least fifty patients. It was spartanly furnished, a little cluttered and noisy with numerous children, but nevertheless clean and antiseptic smelling. Most of the patients waiting to be seen were female, Puerto Rican, with a few blacks, only one white woman, she with a mulatto child. Kiley felt distinctly out of place as he took a seat in an uncrowded corner, but to his surprise no one seemed to pay much attention to him. If the women had all been men, he knew he would have been subjected to a wall of hateful stares and mean glares as the hot, macho blood of the Latinos challenged his presence. But Puerto Rican women, like black women—like white women, for that matter; like any women—seemed to have more sense than their men when it came to avoiding trouble and conflict. So Kiley sat there, bothered by no one.

  Gloria came in at two on the dot. Stopping first at the counter to speak to her friend, she then came over and sat next to Kiley.

  “Well, nobody called to see if my appointment was legitimate, so I guess I’m not being monitored too closely, if at all,” she said.

  “What happened?” Kiley asked, keeping his voice as low as hers was.

  “Apparently OCB pulled up Tony Touhy’s file for something; nobody said what. But the record of my master terminal override was seen. OCB came to my captain with it and I was called in as soon as I got to work this morning. IA was there too; I don’t know if OCB brought them in, or if my captain did it for his own protection.”

  “Who was there for OCB and IA?” Kiley asked, hoping against hope that it was only a routine roust.

  “The commanders,” Gloria said. “Lovat and Vander. I think they’ve got us made, Joe.”

  “What did they ask you?”

  “To explain why I had accessed Tony Touhy’s file. I told them exactly what I told you and Nick I would say: that it was an erroneous access, and that I closed the file as soon as I realized the error.”

  “What was their reaction?”

  “Skeptical. Suspicious. The captain wanted to know the name of the file I was trying to access when I made the error. All I could say was that I didn’t recall; that it might have been another Touhy, like Andrew instead of Anthony; or a file I was trying to locate phonetically, like T-w-o-h-y. I explained to OCB and IA that we run thousands of names every shift. I figured it was better to say I didn’t remember the circumstances; otherwise, it might look like I had a story ready in advance.”

  “That’s good thinking,” Kiley said. He
felt a tinge of pride for Gloria, and even more admiration. “What else?”

  “IA asked if I knew you. I said I had met you once, when an officer I used to work with stopped in to say hello and had introduced you. My original thinking had been to deny that you and Nick were ever in my office—but that had only been if it was a routine bitch from OCB. I couldn’t stick to that because I didn’t want to put any of my people in the position of having to lie to IA.”

  “I understand,” Kiley said.

  “IA asked who had introduced us and I said it was Nick. I’m sure they had already run a scan match of our names and found out about Nick and me both being assigned to Humboldt Park at the same time—”

  “Sure, they did.”

  “—because then they started asking a lot of personal questions, like had I ever met his wife, had he ever met my daughter, had we ever socialized, things like that. I’m almost sure they couldn’t have known that Nick and I had an affair, Joe; my God, we were always so careful—”

  “They probably don’t know,” Kiley said, mainly to make her feel better. Whether they knew or not didn’t matter one way or another as far as the present situation was concerned. All that mattered was how they intended to proceed regarding the restricted access override. “What’s the status of the thing right now?” he asked.

  “My captain finally told them that he accepted my explanation; he said for them to either put something in writing and send it through channels, or leave me alone. That was when OCB offered to make a deal—”

  “OCB is good at that,” Kiley interjected, thinking about the compromise with Phil Touhy and his shyster lawyer. “What was the deal?”

  “Run an audit on the master terminal during my shift for the last thirty days and get a printout of every restricted file I’ve accessed. If there are no other unauthorized OCB files on the list, Lovat will drop the matter.”

  “And?” Kiley wanted to know at once. Gloria shrugged resignedly.

  “The captain agreed.”

  “So they’re going to audit you?”

  “Right.”

  “When?”

  “Some time next week; I’m not sure exactly when.” She rested her head back against the wall. “All I’m sure of is that whenever they do it, they’re going to find the seven other overrides for the license plate numbers Nick took down—six of which are OCB. And that, Detective Kiley, is going to finish me.”

  “Shit,” Kiley said, more to himself than to Gloria, as he rested his own head back against the same wall. For a while they sat like that, side by side, faces tilted partly toward the ceiling, almost shoulder to shoulder but not touching, their expressions for the moment inert, as if their lives were on hold. Eventually, Kiley shook his head unguardedly. “I don’t know what to say, Gloria—”

  “There’s nothing to say,” she told him, her tone neutral. “I went into it with my eyes open. I knew what I was risking. I took a chance and lost—just like you and Nick did.”

  “Difference is,” he pointed out, “we stood to gain something from it; you didn’t.”

  Gloria grunted softly. “When you get caught, Joe, it doesn’t matter why you did something. You’ve been a cop long enough to know that.” She sighed quietly and rose. “I’ve got to go. I need to do some heavy thinking on this. I know they’ll bring me up on charges; I’ve got to decide whether to hire a private lawyer or let the PPA handle it for me—” The PPA was the Police Protective Association, a quasi-union to which eighty percent of Chicago police officers belonged.

  Kiley stood and faced her. “It’s not over yet,” he said, but without much conviction.

  “I think it is,” Gloria said. “I think three cops threw away the book and stepped over the line—and all three are going to end up paying the price for doing it—Nick most of all.” She reached out and squeezed Kiley’s arm. “So long, Joe. Good luck.”

  Kiley felt completely impotent as he watched Gloria Mendez walk away.

  Kiley had been in the Bel-Ked Tavern for nearly two hours, sitting alone in a corner booth, engaged in solitary drinking and a program of ongoing self-upbraiding, self-denunciation, and self-revilement—when Harold Winston entered the bar and came over to him.

  “Hello, again,” the tense little man said, adding tentatively, “Joe.”

  Kiley frowned at him for a moment, then replied, “Oh, hello, Hal.” Looking solemnly down at his gin for a moment, Kiley then said, “I don’t mean to be impolite, Hal, but you’d be better off not drinking with me tonight. I got lots of problems and I’m not in a very good mood.”

  “Well, I don’t want to intrude—”

  “You’re not intruding,” Joe assured. “I just don’t want to ruin your evening. Personally, I’d like to have your company—”

  “All right, then,” Winston said resolutely, “I’ll join you. Maybe I can cheer you up.” He turned toward the bar. “Nate—!”

  “That’s not Nate,” Kiley told him. “Nate’s off today. I don’t know this guy’s name—”

  “I’ll just get my own drink then,” Winston said at once. He seemed to be in a very decisive mood.

  As Winston went over to the bar, Kiley tried to remember why he had decided to come to this particular tavern in the first place. He had, of course, planned a second encounter with Harold Paul Winston at some point, and then a third, in the course of his strategy to make Winston for the bus bombings. But the second encounter had not been on his agenda for this particular day. What he’d planned for this particular day was to make a field investigation of Bernard Oznina in the neighborhood where the apartment building doorman had lived for the past thirty-three-plus years. He needed a hook with which to snag Oznina; something with which to apply leverage on him regarding Tony Touhy.

  But Kiley’s agenda for the day had been irreversibly disrupted by the unexpected call from Gloria Mendez and his subsequent meeting with her. Learning that Gloria was about to be made for her involvement in his and Nick’s—really now only his—fiasco of department rule breaking, made him sick with shame. For two hours he had sat in his car after they had parted, and racked his brain for some way to take the fall for her; some way to relieve her of all, or nearly all, responsibility for the computer transgressions. But there was nothing he could imagine that would wash with IA; nothing that, given Gloria’s time with the department, her rank and experience, would be believed. Every possible scenario he came up with seemed more ludicrous than the previous one.

  His frustration was compounded by the fact that he knew—without any faint degree of mitigation such as he’d been applying to Nick’s death—he knew, that this one was his fault and his alone. Gloria had bluffed her way through the accessing of Tony Touhy’s file; her own captain had told OCB to either put it in writing or get lost. An audit of her terminal, with only the Tony Touhy access on it—what Nick had asked her to do—would have exonerated her of further suspicion, at least with her own superiors. But add what he had asked her to do, add the other seven “accidental” accesses of restricted information, and Sergeant Gloria Mendez was royally fucked. Courtesy of Joseph Patrick Kiley, who apparently now had the power to turn everything he touched into nothing but so much shit.

  Winston returned with a draft beer and another drink for Kiley. Sliding into the booth, he said, “The bartender’s name is Greg. He’s new. He said you were drinking Beefeater martinis; I hope that’s right—”

  “Completely, totally, and absolutely right,” Kiley said, drinking down what was left in the glass he already had and drawing the fresh one in front of him.

  “I’m sorry things have got you down,” Winston said. There was a tentativeness in his voice, as if he thought he might be prying.

  “It’s not ‘things’ at all,” Kiley said. “It’s my goddamned job, is what it is.” He suddenly realized again, as he had the last time he had talked to Winston, that he was essentially being honest with the little man. How much of it, he wondered, was by design—and how much simply to have someone, now that Nic
k was gone, to talk to? Somehow, it did not seem to matter right then. “You see, Hal,” he said, very evenly, “I’m beginning to question even being a cop.”

  “It’s probably because of losing your partner, don’t you think?” Winston offered.

  “That’s part of it, sure,” Joe said. “But there are other things, too. Like, I’m afraid there’s going to be some kind of cover-up about who killed him. And I think maybe there could be a problem with his family’s pension. And now it looks like the department might be coming down real hard on another officer who was working with us, trying to help us on a case. It’s like everything about being a cop is suddenly going sour, turning moldy all at once. I’m thinking about resigning—” Was that a lie? Kiley found himself wondering.

  “Well, I can’t say I’d really blame you, Joe. I always thought police work was kind of glamorous, but after listening to you now, and what you told me the other night—”

  “Frankly,” Kiley said wryly, “I don’t remember what I told you the other night. Too many beers. And tonight, drinking these,” he indicated the martini, “I probably won’t even remember you.”

  Winston sat back, seemed to relax a little, and took a long swallow of beer. “Well, anything new on our bus bomber?” he asked. Kiley frowned again for a moment, then shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. If there is, I haven’t heard it yet.”

  “Still nothing on the news or in the papers about it,” Winston commented.

  “I think they’ve got the whole case under wraps,” Kiley said. “No media attention of any kind, in case that’s what the guy is looking for. Personally,” he took a sip of gin, “I hope they don’t catch him.”

  “You’re kidding me!” Winston reacted with surprise.

  “No, I’m not,” Kiley asserted. “I think the guy—if it is a guy; could be a woman, too—”

  “A woman?”

  “Why not? Crime is an equal opportunity employer, Hal. But let’s just say it’s a guy. I think he’s got a reason for what he’s doing. I think he’s trying to make a point of some kind—”