by Clark Howard
“He left a note,” Winston concluded his story, “saying that he was sorry, but that he loved me and didn’t want to be a burden to me. He asked me to be sure and have him cremated at a crematorium that complied with federal environmental guidelines; he didn’t want his cremation to pollute the air.”
When Winston finished talking, the two men stood silently, bars between them, for an awkward, and what seemed to Kiley a very long, moment. Kiley was acutely aware that none of this should have been a surprise to him. Once learning of Aaron Codman’s existence, collateral investigation should have been made of him at the same time that continuing investigation was being made of Winston himself. But Kiley had enlisted Aldena’s help at that time, and had told her explicitly what he wanted checked after she had uncovered Winston’s real father. That had been at the time of Gloria Mendez’s death, wake, and funeral, when Kiley had been dealing with Meralda’s insistence that her mother had not killed herself. Although working under a self-imposed deadline to deliver the bus bomber to Captain Madzak, Kiley nevertheless had given priority to looking into the details of Gloria’s death—and left the bus bomber work to Aldena. The final objective had been accomplished, on time, and Winston was in custody as promised. And even if Kiley had done the background work himself, had made an in-depth check of Aaron Codman and learned ahead of time everything that Harold Winston had just told him, it would not have changed anything as far as Kiley’s actions were concerned. Kiley probably would have felt sympathy for Winston, just as he was feeling it now, but it would not have interfered with his plan to develop some hard evidence against Winston, or deterred his objective of taking Winston into custody.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Kiley told Winston now. “I didn’t know about anything that took place after he was fired. You led me to believe he was still alive; you even told me that he and his second wife were shopping at the same stores your mother and her second husband shopped at. Maybe if you hadn’t told me so many lies—”
“I told you what I had to tell you,” Winston declared. “Anyway, you were lying to me just as much. All that stuff about the police department getting ready to bring you up on charges—”
“That was true, Hal,” Kiley asserted, unawarely slipping back into the more casual version of Winston’s name.
“Do you expect me to believe that?” Winston asked piquedly, ignoring Kiley’s familiarly.
“Believe it or don’t believe it,” Kiley retorted. “It’s still true.”
Winston sat back down heavily on the bench again, shaking his head confoundedly. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” He looked up at Kiley. “What do you think I’ll be charged with?”
Kiley shrugged. “Could be anything from destruction of municipal property, to reckless public endangerment, even to attempted second-degree murder. It’s basically up to the judge.”
“Are you going to be the main witness against me?”
“Yes.”
“You know,” Winston sat back, head against the cement wall, staring straight ahead, “I’ll bet you and I could have been real friends under different circumstances. I mean, I’ll bet we could have even gotten to like each other.”
“Maybe we could have,” Kiley allowed. He recalled briefly how there had been a moment in the Bel-Ked Tavern when he had realized that he was confiding in Harold Winston much in the same way he had entrusted personal thoughts to Nick Bianco in the past. It had been an odd reflection, totally without precedent in Kiley’s consciousness. It was almost as if there had been some seed of companionship struggling for recognition within him. Apparently Harold Paul Winston had felt it too. “Maybe we still can be friends someday, Hal,” he said tentatively.
“I’m afraid it’s too late for ‘Hal’ anymore, Detective Kiley,” the jailed man replied. His head did not move, but his eyes, now hard and unforgiving, shifted to glare at Kiley. “We’re back on opposite sides again.”
Kiley endured the hateful glare for a long moment; he guessed Harold Winston had that much satisfaction coming to him. Then he nodded resignedly and said, “Good luck, Mr. Winston.”
Kiley walked away, back toward the courtroom where he would testify.
Twenty-Six
When Kiley reported back to work at B-and-A the next morning Aldena glanced up at him and said curtly, “Don’t forget to sign in,” as if she had not noticed his nearly week-long absence, and knew nothing of his short-lived suspension—which of course he knew she did, because nothing got past her.
“And don’t forget,” she added as he wrote his name on the squad shift roster, “to let me know as soon as the state’s attorney’s office gives you a disposition in the Winston case.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” he assured her. “Decide yet whether you want your name included in the final case write-up?”
“In light of your recent difficulties with IA,” she said dryly, “as well as the personal reputation you seem to be developing, I think I’ll pass. I’d be better off having my name on something written by the Zodiac killer.”
“Aldena,” he said, as plaintively as he could manage, “I thought we were going to be friends.”
“We are, Detective,” she assured him. “We’re just going to keep it a deep, dark secret.”
“Who from?”
“The entire world. Plus,” she added, “any planets that might be colonized in the future.” She looked at her calendar for the day. “The captain’s got you penciled in to meet with him the first thing this morning, so don’t plan on going anywhere.”
Kiley found his desk exactly as he had left it, and the other members of the squad who were on shift and sitting nearby took note of his return merely by exchanging neutral greetings with him. Only Lee Tumac got up and came over personally.
“How’d the bus bomber prelim go?” he asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Kiley said. “The judge continued it until today.” He frowned at Tumac. “How come you’re here in the daylight?”
“I finished my period on nights,” Tumac said. A “period” was a four-week cycle of duty that was standard throughout the Chicago Police Department.
“Maybe it’s going to be my turn next,” Kiley ventured. Tumac shook his head.
“Not while you’re on TAD. Can’t work a night period unless you’ve been to bomb school and arson school, and only permanent members of the squad get sent to school. Think you’ll be permanent?”
“Don’t know yet,” Kiley said. The two detectives looked over as Captain Leo Madzak came through the squad room on the way to his office. Seeing Kiley, he motioned him toward the office. “Maybe I’m going to find out,” Kiley said to Tumac.
Tumac winked at him. “Good luck, Joe.”
Madzak was hanging up his coat as Kiley came in. “Take a chair,” he said. “Any news on Winston yet?”
“No, sir, not yet.” Kiley cleared his throat. “Captain, I want to apologize for that crack I made in my apartment yesterday about you not being invited—”
“Forget it,” Madzak said.
“I know I was way out of line; I know you and Captain Parmetter were trying to help me—”
“I said forget it, Joe,” the captain repeated. “So forget it. What kind of coffee do you drink?”
“Uh—black, no sugar—”
Madzak dropped into a squeaky chair behind his desk and flipped on an old intercom, the kind Kiley had not seen around the department for years, “Aldena, my coffee, please, and a black, no sugar, for Detective Kiley.”
“Coming up, sir,” Aldena’s static voice replied.
“Okay, let’s discuss your future,” Madzak said to Kiley. “We can go two ways here. As I told you in your apartment, I’d like to consider you for permanent assignment to my squad. I can keep you on, expend money from my budget to give you the proper training, and if I see that you have the aptitude and the right attitude, keep you on as a permanent member of the squad. Our work in this unit is not the most exciting in the department; it’s
primarily investigative in nature, and frankly involves mostly very low-profile offenses, with an occasional big-time case, but not often. We don’t get much glory here, there’s not a lot of room for promotion, but there’s also not a lot of personal exposure to gunshots, knife wounds, AIDS infections from suspect bites, high-speed chases, and that sort of thing. But, in my biased opinion, I think I have the best, most professional and efficient group of detectives in the department—”
Aldena came in and put the coffee on the desk as Madzak was talking. “Don’t forget some lavish praise for the squad secretary,” she interjected, and quickly left.
“—and the finest squad secretary in the world!” Madzak added, loudly enough for her to hear.
“I’ll second that,” Kiley agreed. “She did some major work on the Winston case while I was occupied with Gloria Mendez’s wake and funeral—”
“I’ll see she gets credit,” Madzak assured, “and I don’t want to discuss the Mendez matter with you. Any arrangement you and I make today is contingent on you straightening yourself out with Allan Vander and IA on that, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
They sipped their coffee and Madzak continued the main conversation. “I’m of the opinion, after talking at length about you with Dan Parmetter—and I’ve known Dan for thirty-five years; there’s no better man carrying a badge in Chicago—anyway, I’m of the opinion that you would make a first-rate B-and-A man and an excellent addition to this squad—but only if you want to; only if you’ve got a sincere desire to stop being a maverick and become a working cop again. That, of course, is something you’ll have to make up your own mind about.
“Now then,” the captain sat back and blew on his coffee a little, “the other way to go is for me to just keep you occupied for a few months doing scut work, and then go to Chief Cassidy and request that you be TADed to some other command. At that point, the chief would decide what to do with you. Now, between you and me, I think Cassidy likes you; he’s real pissed at all the problems you’ve caused, but he recognizes the value of cops like you to balance the department scales with tradition and training on one side, and book-type intelligence and formal education on the other. A good example is Vander’s deputy, Bill Somers: He’s bright, well-spoken, polished, and knows everything that’s ever been written about law enforcement. But he’s not tough, doesn’t know the street, probably can’t function well under the pressure of personal danger. Send him to argue with the city council for a bigger department budget and you’ve got a winner; send him through a door first on a hot bust and you might have a problem.
“Point is, if I shift your file back to the chief’s desk, you could very well end up in a more active squad; it won’t be Homicide, that’s for sure, but you could get Robbery, maybe Narcotics, Vice, maybe even something classy like the Fraud Squad. It’ll be a crapshoot for you with the chief, but you could come up seven.”
All the while Kiley had been listening, he had also been trying to evaluate what position to take in light of the plan he had already put into motion to avenge Nick Bianco’s death. He felt there was a reasonable degree of probability that he would get away with what he intended to do; it was a well thought out plan, moving on schedule, the key players already falling into place. The Sun-Times that morning had included in its list of pallbearers for Frank Scarp the name of Anthony Touhy, younger brother of reputed North Side mob boss Philip Touhy. That meant Tony was back from Ireland for the funeral—so it looked to Kiley as if everything was proceeding exactly as he thought it would.
Kiley’s dilemma was not what contingency plans to have if things went wrong; in that event, he would probably be dead and need no plans, or be in jail charged with murder, in which case he would need a lawyer, not plans. But if everything went right—what then? Did he just go on with his life as a policeman, an opportunity that was being offered to him here; could he do that, knowing that he had now committed murder, and was planning to do so again?
Kiley could not help wondering whether he would be able to function normally after it was all over; wondered if he would be able to manage the outward appearance and demeanor of an ordinary person, perform the tasks of his everyday work life, run on the same track that decent people, straight cops, ran on? Would he be capable of looking Captain Leo Madzak and Captain Dan Parmetter in the eye like a man, or would he shift his glance away guiltily like suspects did during interrogation? What he was asking himself, he realized, was whether he had any integrity left; notwith-standing his prejudices, his occasional violent eruptions of temper with criminals, his cynicism toward the world in general, did there remain a spark of decency, a hint of morality, a trace of goodness, that might sustain him in making a new beginning for himself in the wake of the blood he would have shed?
It was a question he could not answer, a prediction he could not make. His self-confidence, the self-assurance, self-reliance, that had served him so well for so long, now seemed to support him only insofar as his plan to avenge Nick was concerned. In every other facet of his existence, whatever strength of character there was within him appeared to be failing. He had lost Stella, just when he thought he might be on the verge of attaining her; he had not dealt well with Gino Bianco, sending the man’s sons-in-law back bloody and humiliated; he felt terrible about the Harold Winston situation, even though he knew he had done the proper thing in arresting him; he had a troubling foreboding that he might fail Meralda Mendez in proving that her mother was not a suicide; and he was planning to involve Reggie in an illegal act, knowing how much Reggie stood to lose if caught—even though he now knew that Reggie, whom he had thought completely rehabilitated for so long, was no more an honest representation of what Kiley perceived than was anything else in his life.
So Kiley, as he listened to Leo Madzak’s prognosis of what the future might hold, had no way of making a judgment call of any value. The best he could do, it seemed to him now, was take the path of least resistance and try to maintain a status quo that would give him another seventy-two hours to complete carrying out his plan.
“What do you think, Joe?” the captain asked when he finished outlining the two directions open to Kiley.
“Captain, I’d like very much to work for you,” Kiley told him. “I’d like to try and make a new start with the department, and I realize that for it to be successful, I’m going to have to find a place where the past won’t be held against me. To me that means being assigned to somebody like you or Captain Parmetter or somebody else from the old department. I don’t seem to fit in with the newer breed, cops like Vander and Somers and the chief’s deputy, Lester Ward. I need a place like B-and-A, Captain, and I need a boss like you. If you’ll take me on, I won’t let you down.”
An expression of satisfaction settled on Madzak’s face and he vigorously nodded endorsement of Kiley’s decision. “Fine, Joe. Good decision. I’ll get to work on a program for you. I think I’d like to send you to the FBI’s bomb school back in Virginia for a month, but first I’ll have to talk to Chief Cassidy about taking you off TAD status. I don’t anticipate a problem there; I know he’d like to see you straighten out your career as much as Dan and I would.” Madzak rose, so Kiley did also. “Vander is going to conduct your interview regarding the Mendez matter on Monday. Tomorrow’s Friday; I’ll try to see the chief in the morning. For the rest of today and tomorrow, why don’t you review our recently closed bomb files just for familiarization purposes—”
At that moment, Aldena stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Faber just called from the state’s attorney’s office, Captain. Harold Winston was held to answer on one of the lesser charges: gross public vandalism. Apparently he gave the judge a story about getting even for his daddy being fired from the transit authority. I guess the judge bought it. He turned Winston loose on twenty-five thousand bail.”
Madzak and Kiley exchanged disgusted looks.
“Gross public vandalism,” Madzak said. “Jesus H. Christ!”
“What does that carry?” Ki
ley asked.
“What is it, Aldena, one to three?” asked Madzak.
“Yes, sir. Plus restitution.”
“He’s a first offender with no record,” Kiley evaluated.
“So he’s probably looking at probation plus restitution,” Madzak said, shaking his head. Then, having been around too long to lament such disappointments, the captain brightened. “Well, you closed the case anyway, Joe, even if he doesn’t do any time. And look at it this way, at least maybe the city will get paid for some of the damages.” To Aldena he said, “Get out a dozen of our most recent closed bomb cases for Detective Kiley to review, please, Aldena.” To Joe: “I’ll talk to you after I see the chief.”
As Kiley and Aldena left the captain’s office, Aldena said knowingly, “Going to bomb school, I’d guess.” She looked him up and down. “You’re going to have to get something to wear besides those dreary gray suits. I can’t have you representing this squad at no FBI school looking like the house detective at a cheap hotel. We’ll discuss your wardrobe later.”
“You’re the boss,” Kiley said.
“You’re going to do just fine in my squad, Detective,” Aldena told him with a smile.
Kiley spent the rest of the morning reading case files involving bomb attempts made or carried out at a city high school, a Vietnamese convenience store that had opened in a black neighborhood, an Israeli Consulate office, a public coin-operated locker in the Greyhound Bus terminal, and a large vault in a retail Loop jewelry store during a failed robbery attempt. Kiley found the cases interesting, even with the cursory attention he was giving them, and it crossed his mind briefly that being a permanent member of the B-and-A squad might not be a bad assignment, providing everything went as he hoped it would in his plan—and provided he did not get caught afterward, or killed.
And—provided he could revert more or less to his old self after it was over.
Around noon, when most of the people in the squad room drifted out for lunch, Kiley went back to the computer section, opened his pocket notebook next to one of the monitors, and turned on the terminal. He had to try tying up the last loose ends of all the dangling threads that had unraveled in Nick Bianco’s murder; he had to try and find out who the person was that Fraz Lamont knew only as Mr. O, the last remaining unidentified person who had been at the Shamrock Club meeting the night Tony Touhy killed Nick.
