City Blood

by Clark Howard

  “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

  “But suppose you find evidence that you can’t use against him, and it doesn’t lead you to anything you can use against him? What then, Joseph?”

  “I don’t honestly know, Father, where I’d go from there.”

  “You’d be in quite an uncommon position, wouldn’t you, lad? You could judge, sentence, and punish—by no one’s standards or ethics or morals except your own.” The priest tilted his head as if to study Kiley more closely. “Almost a God-like position, wouldn’t it be? Omnipotent.”

  “I suppose so,” Kiley admitted. He was staring out the windshield, not meeting Father Conley’s eyes.

  “Only a divine person should have power like that, Joseph. If it comes to that, I hope you won’t do anything foolish.”

  Kiley looked at him now and shook his head. “I won’t, Father. Don’t worry about it.” He smiled scantly. “One of these nights, I’ll drop over and have a sip of that Cutty with you.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” the priest replied enthusiastically.

  They shook hands and Father Conley got out of the car. As Kiley backed up, the old priest was hurrying toward his young assistant, waving the check Kiley had given him.

  “Father Theodore!” he shouted. “We’ve just been given a donation to have our school desks refinished!”

  Kiley drove off, expression set, conscience clear. He didn’t like lying to Father Conley, as he had just done. But what was he to do? Tell the old priest that if there was indisputable evidence against Tony Touhy but it couldn’t legally be used, that Kiley really did know what he was going to do? That there was only one thing he could do—one way to expiate himself from guilt, just as the church had taught him to do, by penance? Kiley couldn’t tell Father Conley that.

  He couldn’t tell the old priest that he intended to kill Tony Touhy.

  Fifteen

  It was two nights later that Kiley prepared to illegally enter and search Tony Touhy’s apartment.

  Earlier that day, around noon, he had driven out to Bernard Oznina’s house again, alone this time, to go over the plan and schedule with the night doorman, and pick up two master keys Oznina had brought home. They had a cup of coffee together at Bernie’s kitchen table.

  “I’m nervous as a son of a bitch about this,” Oznina had admitted. “Look at this—” he held out a hand with trembling fingers.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Kiley, again posing as Sergeant Dick Mason of Homicide, assured him. “I’ll be in and out of the place in one hour maximum tonight, some time between two and four a.m., while the morning shift doorman is on duty. The keys will be in your mailbox when you get up tomorrow morning. Nobody’s ever going to know about this, believe me. You’re completely safe, completely protected.” Kiley took a sip from his cup. “This is good coffee, Bernie,” he tried to shift the conversation to a lighter level.

  “My sons say I make crappy coffee, but my daughter likes it.”

  “Fathers and sons are never happy with each other, Bernie. My mother pointed that out to me once.”

  “Yeah? Smart woman.”

  “Bernie, about that service door,” Kiley came back to their main discussion, “there’s no chance, is there, that the guy on the morning shift would double-lock it from the inside?”

  “Can’t be done,” Bernie shook his head. “There’s no dead-bolt lock on that door. That short key there will work, I promise.”

  Kiley had spent half an hour with Bernie, then driven down to 3333 Lake Shore Drive and walked around the area for a while, deciding where he ideally would like to park, the route he would walk to the service door off the alley, even strolling past that door to take a closer look at it. The entire plan, as far as Kiley could see, looked like an in-and-out job: no obstacles, no trouble spots, no problems. The very smoothness of it all was enough to make Kiley leery, however; such had been his luck lately that he was beginning to automatically expect the worst around every corner. At this stage, he did not think it would surprise him to find a boa constrictor slithering around Tony Touhy’s high-rise apartment.

  At seven o’clock that evening, Kiley had gone out to see Stella and the girls. He had taken them to a pizza restaurant called Chuck E. Cheese’s, where there were arcade games for Jennie to play, and kiddie rides for Tessie, as well as a comfortable booth from which Joe and Stella could observe the girls, relax, and drink a second beer after the pizza. Stella, he was pleased to see, was beginning to look a little like her old self again; she was less drawn, seemed less frightened, and the dark hollows beneath her eyes had disappeared.

  “There was a lady out from the pension board today,” she told him. “I had to sign some forms and stuff. She didn’t act like there was going to be any problem with my pension.”

  “You didn’t say anything, did you?” Kiley asked.

  “No, Joe, of course not.” Stella sounded a little surprised at the question. “Nick taught me better than that.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes, watching the girls out in the game area with some other children. Both girls were back in school now, Stella had told Kiley earlier on the phone, and she felt that their lives were returning to some degree of normalcy. “It’s strange being alone in the house as much as I am,” she shared. “Never having Nick at home, you know. But I’ve found that time seems to go by faster if I find something to do—just like you said. One of the secrets, I think, is not to turn on the damned TV; that only encourages sitting around, lying around, dozing; best thing is to keep moving, just make yourself keep moving.”

  Tessie came up and said, “Jennie wants to know if we can have more tokens.”

  “You used up five dollars worth already?” Stella asked, shocked.

  “Jennie used most of them—”

  “I’ll bet. Joey, don’t—” she protested as Kiley gave Tessie another five.

  “Last one,” he promised.

  They watched Tessie run and get Jennie, and the two of them skip to the counter for a bag of tokens.

  “They’re going to be spoiled rotten,” Stella said, “between you and Frank—”

  “Frank?”

  “Nick’s cousin. Uncle Gino’s—”

  “Uncle Gino’s son. Yeah, I know.”

  “Don’t you like him?” Stella had a slight frown.

  “Don’t like him or dislike him,” Joe said with a shrug, trying to make the lie sound like indifference. “Nick wasn’t crazy about him, was he?” Probing cautiously.

  “Nick wasn’t really crazy about any of his cousins. Except the females; he loved the females. But I think Frank’s okay. He certainly has been nice to the girls and me since we lost Nick.”

  Don’t let him be too nice to you, Joe wanted badly to say, or he’ll have one hand on your checkbook and the other between your legs. But he held his tongue.

  “Joe, have you tried on any of Nick’s things that I gave you?” Stella asked presently. “You’re still wearing the same old gray.”

  “I don’t think I’d feel right with Nick’s clothes on,” Kiley said self-consciously. Especially the hijacked suits from Maxwell Street, he thought.

  “Oh, that’s so silly,” Stella said. She put her hand on his across the table. “Do you have any idea how pleased Nick would be if he could see you in some of his clothes. He used to say, ‘I swear to God, Stella, I’m gonna get that drab, nondescript’—honest to God, he said ‘nondescript’—‘that drab, nondescript mick into some decent clothes if it’s the last thing I ever do.’ It would really make him happy, Joe.” She paused a beat, then: “Me too.”

  “I’ll try some of them on,” Kiley said.

  “When?”

  “Soon,” Kiley promised

  It had been a pleasant evening, Stella wearing a beige pantsuit that flattered without emphasizing her lithe, trim body, so unlike most Italian wives and mothers her age, Kiley thought. Joe had met the female cousins Stella said Nick had liked; the ones Stella’s age, with chil
dren, were, without exception, all fleshing out where they shouldn’t be, and clearly going to fat. And all their mothers, including Uncle Gino’s wife, had the same problem but were farther along. Stella, now—Stella was built like Raquel Welch.

  “I guess there’s nothing new about Nick’s case, huh?” she asked, interrupting Kiley’s mental comparison of her to the others.

  “No, nothing, Stel,” he had said. Kiley had yearned to tell her what he was going to do that night, longed for her to know what unlawful lengths he was going to, what illegal steps he was taking, to nail the person he was so certain killed her husband, his partner. He wanted her to know that just because the department had tried to isolate him in B-and-A, just because he was supposed to be quarantined away from the Bianco homicide case, just because he was being treated like a leper or something by the brass, did not mean that he was abandoning Nick. He would get his partner’s killer if it took him the rest of his life, breaking the rules all the way.

  Later, after Joe had taken his little surrogate family home and was on his way back into the city, he wondered why he hadn’t told Stella anything. He trusted her; at least, he thought he trusted her. Now that he thought about it, the occasion had never really presented itself for him to trust her. Of course, he had made her aware early on that Nick and he had not been on duty the night Nick was killed; as far as he knew, she had kept that confidence—but it had been in her financial interest to do so.

  What about something like this, he wondered? Something that probably wouldn’t affect her one way or the other? Kiley knew Stella would never intentionally inform on him—but suppose she were to slip and mention something to Frank Bianco? That son of a bitch, or his snake of a father, would probably be on the phone with an anonymous call to IA before Stella finished talking. No, it was best kept to himself, and it had nothing to do with a lack of confidence in Stella. Not very much, anyway.

  It was eleven o’clock when Kiley got back to his apartment. He showered and put on fresh underwear and two pairs of dark socks. Then he dressed in dark jeans, a navy blue crew-neck pullover, and an old pair of black crepe-soled loafers. He laid out a black windbreaker, both his guns and ammunition, his badge and ID case, wristwatch, a few dollars in currency, a fresh handkerchief, a pair of black pigskin gloves—little Tessie had given them to him one Christmas—and two pairs of clear surgical gloves that he had picked up at a medical supplies store earlier in the day. And the two keys he had obtained from Bernard Oznina.

  At midnight, Kiley drank a glass of milk, set his alarm clock for two a.m., and stretched out on the bed for a nap.

  He had slept, but only fitfully, and had been wide awake to shut off the alarm fifteen minutes before it was scheduled to buzz. Since his time frame was not an exact one—his only requirement was to be in the building during the dead hours of the morning—he collected the articles he had laid out, put on the windbreaker, and left a few minutes early.

  Driving over to the high rise, through night streets now quiet and mostly deserted, reminded Kiley of the morning shifts he and Nick had worked together: shifts on which they did a lot of talking, drank too much coffee, usually took turns dozing off and on. There had been times, of course, when there was police work to be done, especially before two a.m. when liquor stores were still open, and in neighborhoods where there were all-night businesses; but after two-thirty or so a kind of calm settled in—except on Friday and Saturday nights, naturally—and their patrols became lulls of inactivity, hushed hours as close to tranquility as two armed men can get while on duty deep in an inner city.

  It was during those periods, Kiley remembered, that they became closest, that their most personal feelings were shared. There is no relationship on earth like that of two police officers who last as longtime partners. It is, when successful, like two men each finding a strange clone that neither looked like the other, spoke, acted, felt like the other, dressed or had the same presence, bearing, attitude, demeanor of the other, in fact was in no discernible way anything like the other—yet was the other. Just as Joe Kiley, as a Catholic, believed irrefutably in the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, so too did he, and many of his peers, believe in the Triad of the Partner, the Other Partner, and the Bond Between Them. The Trinity promised life after death; the Triad was concerned with life before death—specifically, keeping it going in the face of all the SAMs in the world: SAMs being Savages, Assholes, and Maniacs.

  Everything he and Nick knew about each, Kiley realized as he drove, had been learned in the night cocoon of their worn, weary, unmarked police unit, when there were no SAMs about to distract them. Kiley had told Nick things about his father, brother, sisters, and especially his mother, whom he had worshipped, that he had never told anyone, not even Peg, the woman with whom he had shared an apartment and bed for two years, until both decided that it wasn’t quite right so why go on wasting time with it? And Nick, of course, had shared with Kiley his most intimate feelings about the extended Bianco family, Stella, the kids, and how his own parental veneration had been directed at his father rather than his mother. Comparisons between the Irish family and the Italian family had been ongoing in their patrol car for years; the similarities they discovered were as startling as the differences. The honesty that linked them, the frankness between them, the candor they shared, had been consummate and absolute—

  Except for the part that concerned Gloria Mendez, Kiley reminded himself. That had been a flaw in the fabric of their relationship; but one which Nick, almost but not quite too late, had rectified. And in retrospect, Kiley was not even too sure anymore that Nick should have told him earlier about Gloria; perhaps to have done so would, because of Joe’s deep feeling for Stella and the girls, have ruined the partnership they had.

  Nick, Nick, Nick, he thought as he parked on a side street two blocks from Lake Shore Drive, whatever was right, whatever was wrong, whoever was at fault in what now had become the past, one thing was still certain: Kiley was going to get the scum cocksucker who killed his partner. No matter what.

  Like some other cautious, career policemen, Kiley had no interior lights in his personal car, they being disconnected on purchase; so that now when he opened the car door at night he was not illuminated getting in or out. He left the car unlocked, in case he needed to get into it in a hurry; closed the door by pushing, not slamming; walked at a normal pace along the dark two and a half blocks to the alley that ran behind 3333. The building had no security lights in the rear because there were no windows in that wall of the building, and only one door, the service door, on a small loading dock three steps up from the alley.

  Standing with his back to the wall, Kiley removed the pigskin gloves he was wearing and put them in a back pocket. He stretched and pulled on one pair of the surgical gloves, then removed from his right trousers pocket one of the keys Bernard Oznina had given him. Easily feeling the contours of the service door lock through the skintight rubber of the gloves, he inserted the key, slowly turned it, at the same time gripping the doorknob, turning it, and pushing in just enough to assure himself that the door would open. Before actually entering, he replaced the key in the same pocket and put the pigskin gloves back on, this time over the surgical gloves.

  Stepping inside, Kiley closed the door as quietly as he had opened it, and stood still as a post with his back against it until his eyes adjusted to a subdued light being thrown from an overhead sign above an inside door off to his left, which read: STAIRS. After assuring himself that there was no sound, no movement, anywhere around him, Kiley, staying as close to the wall as he could, moved silently over to the inner door, and in the same slow, soundless manner, let himself into the ground level of the building’s steep stairwell. He found better illumination there because these were fire stairs, sealable by metal doors, windowless, their condition dictated by public safety regulations. It was while on these stairs, in this high vertical tunnel, that Kiley knew he could be most easily seen and most quickly trapped. Even so, he was also
still confident that it was highly unlikely at that dead hour of the morning: It was now, he looked at his watch, three o’clock straight up.

  And straight up was where he had to go. After first testing the crepe soles of his loafers on the bottom step to assure himself that no sound would be generated against the texture of the cement stairs, Kiley began his climb. He moved slowly, gripping the handrail on the wall for both support and leverage. On his first effort, he made it to seven before feeling his chest constricting for breath. At that landing, he sat, turning partway to lean against the wall. Looking at the second hand on his watch, he rested exactly two minutes, listening intently as he did.

  Resuming, Kiley reached twelve, rested again, resumed again, reached sixteen, rested, climbed to nineteen, then sat, chest heaving now, for four full minutes. Going up the last three floors to twenty-two, he made himself rest still again, even though he was very eager now, wanted urgently to be inside Tony Touhy’s apartment, to begin the search, his journey toward vindication, toward justice, toward—he desperately hoped—some relief from the terrible guilt he felt about Nick.

  When he was breathing normally again, Kiley quietly opened the fire door and stepped onto well-padded carpet lining the hall of the twenty-second floor. He was, he saw at once, standing equidistant between apartments 2206 and 2207. Moving quickly, he padded past 2206 and down to the end of the hall where, as he and Nick had surmised the first time they studied the high rise, 2201 was a corner apartment, which on a clear day, Nick had said, must have had a view into the next time zone.

  At the door, which was large, formidable looking, dark blue in color, Kiley once again removed the leather gloves and put them in his back pocket. He took the second key Bernard Oznina had given him, this one from his left trousers pocket, and with only a suggestion of metal-against-metal noise, unlocked the door and was inside the apartment.

  In the foyer, Kiley turned on the lights and looked the length of a long, sunken living room that stretched to a front picture window facing Lake Michigan. It was a rich, plushly decorated room done in two shades of blue intermixed with a single gray: blue leather sofas and chairs, blue tile-and-smoked-glass tables, silver gray metal lamps with blue shades, enameled blue bookcases and cabinetry, containing stereo equipment, speakers, a fifty-inch television screen, all behind smoked-glass doors, everything standing on luxurious thick gray carpet, surrounded by sumptuous blue-and-gray relief wall covering that elegantly embraced a series of seascapes done in oil, identically framed in blue lacquer.