by Ian K. Smith
“The problem is that it doesn’t just stop at marijuana. It’s not uncommon for people who use it to go on to more serious drugs. They’re a danger to themselves and society at large.”
“It’s only weed,” I said, resisting a very primal urge to roll my eyes. “You can get a bag at any local library.” I looked at Connor. “Was there harder stuff she was doing that I should know about?”
Mrs. Gerrigan and Connor looked at each other for a moment before he averted his eyes.
“I didn’t see her do anything else,” Connor said. “Just the grass.”
I turned again to Mrs. Gerrigan. “Has Tinsley ever gone off before without telling anyone?”
“Only once that was of any consequence,” she said. “But she was only seventeen at the time.”
“And where did you find her?”
“At the Ritz Hotel in Paris.”
I had to stop myself from laughing. When the average kid ran away from home, they scrambled across town to a friend’s or relative’s house. But a rich kid ran all the damn way to Paris to hang out under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
“Is it possible she decided to take another trip over the pond?” I said.
“Doubtful,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “She would’ve taken Tabitha or made arrangements for her.”
“Does she have access to her own money?”
“A very small part of her trust fund was recently released to her,” Mrs. Gerrigan said. “All of the children get their first check at twenty-five.” She turned her attention to Connor. “Just a small amount so that they can demonstrate responsibility before the bulk of it is released. Accountability is important in our family.”
“And how much was Tinsley’s first check?”
Mrs. Gerrigan cleared her throat and shifted a little in her chair. “Two million dollars,” she said in her clipped voice. It was as if she had just said two hundred quarters.
“And exactly when was this two million dollars made available to her?” I asked.
“The same day she disappeared.”
“Do you or your husband still have access to the money?”
“Not at all. It’s in a private account that only she has access to. She has full control.”
“Can you ask the banker or trustee if there’s been any unusual activity?”
“I already have. Legally, they can’t tell me anything. One of our attorneys is working on it.”
5
I WAS SITTING IN my apartment on East Ohio Street trying to divide my attention equally between the filet Oscar I had ordered from the Capital Grille and the report Burke had put together on Tariq “Chopper” McNair. A generous glass of 1998 Dunnewood Cabernet sat between the two like an intrepid referee. The lobster and filet were winning. Stryker, my fearless rust-colored cockapoo, sat at my feet, waiting for an errant morsel of food.
I was halfway through my dinner when the reading started to get good. Chopper McNair was no stranger to the criminal justice system. He’d grown up in the tough West Side and had been arrested at least five times, most of them misdemeanors—disorderly conduct, public intoxication, and a couple of fights. He had avoided a trip to the big house, but in his twenty-four short years he had become mighty familiar with what the inside of the county lockup looked like. He was last arrested seven years ago for loitering and had been clean since. His current address was a significant step up from the urban decay of the West Side. He owned a two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise in the 1500 block on Wabash Avenue, right in the center of the fashionable South Loop.
I couldn’t stop staring at Chopper’s picture. I was surprised by how clean cut he looked. His hair had been neatly trimmed and not worn in the popular cornrow braids or unruly Afro that had become the signature hairstyle of thug life. He wore a sizable diamond stud in his right ear, and his smooth skin was absent the scars you’d expect to find on a young gangbanger who’d spent most of his formative years running the streets. His teeth were perfect and noticeably absent of those gold caps and diamond studding designs that were all the rage in hip-hop mouth fashion.
Chopper’s life read like a modern-day Shakespearean tragedy. His mother had died of a drug overdose when he was a teenager, and his father was wasting away in the Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama for drug trafficking. Chopper had bounced from one foster home to another, but he had been able to finish high school and get accepted into DePaul. He’d majored in sociology and had graduated with honors two years ago.
It was the contribution from the Organized Crime Division, however, that pulled me away from the now half-eaten filet Oscar. Chopper McNair was a one-time thug who had pulled his life together, but it was the name of his uncle that sat me back in my chair. Chopper had been raised since his early teens by his mother’s brother, Lanny “Ice” Culpepper, the notorious leader of the Gangster Apostles, the toughest, most murderous gang the Chicago streets had ever seen.
6
ARNIE’S GYM OPERATED in the sweaty basement of Johnny’s IceHouse, a large skating rink on the corner of South Loomis and Madison in the West Loop. Arnold “the Hammer” Scazzi was pushing seventy, but he still reported to work every day to open the gym and give hell to the young boxers who had dreams of making it to the big fight. Hammer remained a formidable-looking man with wide, square shoulders and a barreled chest that sagged a little but retained enough power to knock the shit out of two thugs who had tried to rob him last year as he’d walked to his car one night. Hammer had not only been the youngest Golden Gloves champion, but he had accomplished this feat two years in a row back in 1955 and 1956. His name hung up there with the giants in the sport, including Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Had it not been for a freak car accident that took away the peripheral vision in his right eye, Hammer might’ve become one of the best professional fighters of all time.
Hammer was against the back wall doing one-handed push-ups when I walked into the gym.
“Look who’s making a guest appearance,” Hammer said, finishing off a flurry of push-ups, then springing to his feet. Not a bead of sweat. “Figured you’d be out on the course chasing that pissant white ball.”
“I should be,” I said. “My handicap is in the crapper. But I’m doing a little detecting right now.”
“Mechanic’s in the shower,” Hammer said. “He just finished working the heavy bag. You should’ve been here too.”
Just as I turned toward the locker room, Hammer threw a left hook at me. I blocked it with my right, ducked a little, then rolled and quickly threw a left jab that tapped him square in the chest.
“Reflexes are still there,” Hammer said approvingly. “Get back in here before you lose everything I taught you.”
Dmitri “Mechanic” Kowalski sat on a small locker-room bench toweling off his compact body when I walked in. Mechanic was an even six feet and all hard muscle. Pound for pound he was the strongest man I had ever met. Those who had been punched by him in the ring would often compare it to the impact of a metal wrecking ball that destroys buildings. But beyond being a physical specimen, Mechanic was absolutely fearless. He had grown up on some of the toughest streets in Chicago, and with his immigrant parents barely scratching out a living, Mechanic had seen things growing up that no child should ever see. He had earned his nickname as a teenager when he was getting his trial-by-fire education in the unforgiving ways of street life. For Mechanic it was all about survival, whether that meant intimidating, fighting, or killing. He was an expert with a gun, sometimes demonstrating his prowess by shooting a bee that had come to rest on a flower fifty feet away. The neighborhood kids started to call him Mechanic because he had an unrivaled knack for fixing people’s problems. The understanding in the community was if you had a problem, take it to the Kowalski kid. He could fix anything.
Mechanic was officially my unofficial partner. We had done some mixed martial arts training together when we wanted to expand beyond the traditional confines of boxing. To those of us classically trained
boxers, MMA was street fighting with a couple of rules thrown in to prevent someone from getting killed. We enjoyed it immensely. I called Mechanic when I needed extra muscle or some help with surveillance or intel. His fee never amounted to more than a good meal and a couple of bottles of imported beer.
“Gotta make a visit to K-Town,” I said, taking a seat across from him on one of the wooden benches.
“You’re moving up in the world,” Mechanic said. He stretched down to dry off his feet. Veins popped over his muscles like spiderwebs. He had been this way since the first day I’d met him at the Carrington Construction Company. We’d worked there one summer digging up roads around the city and pouring concrete. It was backbreaking work, but we were making our own money and spending it the way we saw fit.
“You have your equipment with you?” I asked.
Mechanic shot me a look as if the question offended him. “Who are we gonna visit in paradise?” he said.
“Ice Culpepper.”
Mechanic smiled, which was a rare event. “Fun,” he said. “Time to party.”
K-TOWN HAD BEEN DESCRIBED in many ways the last couple of decades, but “a walk in the park” had never been one of those descriptions. Located on the notoriously dangerous West Side of Chicago in the North Lawndale neighborhood, K-Town was a city within a city. Only ten minutes away from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Chicago and the Magnificent Mile, yet K-Town might as well have been in another country. It had become a circumscribed stretch of gang-ridden, drug-fueled, crime-infested streets that unapologetically operated under its own rule of law.
North Lawndale had once been the home to thousands of Jews of Russian and Eastern European descent, but as they became more prosperous, they started moving out and staking claim in the farther northern reaches of the city and then the suburbs. Blacks from the southern states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama joined those who already lived on the South Side of Chicago and took up residence in the neighborhood that the Jews had vacated. In the span of about ten years, the white population of North Lawndale dropped precipitously from a high of 99 percent to only 9 percent. Then the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s happened, including the famous 1968 riots that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. K-Town had never been the same since.
Most now thought the K in K-Town stood for killing, and judging by its skyrocketing murder rate, that was a logical assumption. But K-Town really got its name from a 1913 street-naming proposal in which streets were to be alphabetically named according to their distance from the Illinois-Indiana border. K, being the eleventh letter in the alphabet, was to be assigned to streets within the eleventh mile west of the state line. Kedvale, Kenneth, Kenton, Kilpatrick, Knox, and Kostner were just a few of the names. The scheme, however, was only partially fulfilled, stopping with the P streets on the city’s western edge.
If we wanted to talk to Chopper McNair, we were going to have to venture into K-Town and speak to his uncle first. Those were the rules of the street. While Chopper was not part of his uncle’s enterprise, according to OCD, the Organized Crime Division, he was still under its auspices. It was an obligatory show of respect to Ice to speak to him first.
Ice kept an office above a dollar laundromat he owned on Kilpatrick. It was fittingly ironic—a laundromat as a front to launder money. The storefront was like the others in the neighborhood, except a small army of state-of-the-art security cameras worthy of the Pentagon had been positioned across the roof and over the door.
Two massive mounds of flesh stood outside in dark suits and sunglasses, with wires running from inside their jackets to their ears. One had dreadlocks; the other was bald. They were the size of NFL defensive tackles. They looked hard at us as we approached.
“We’re here to see Ice,” I said.
“He expectin’ you?” the bald one grumbled.
“No,” I said. “But I’m sure he’ll want to see us.”
“What the hell make you so sure?” the bald one said. He looked disapprovingly at Mechanic.
“Let’s just say it’s a little inkling I have in my gut.”
“Who the fuck is you, wiseass?” Baldy said. His voice had become decidedly less welcoming. He looked over at Mechanic. “This ain’t your part of town. Go the hell back where you came from.”
I looked over at Mechanic, who was staring hard at Dreadlocks standing in front of him.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” the bald guy said to me. “Who the fuck is you?”
“The boogie man,” I said, then stepped toward the side door that led to the second floor.
Baldy stepped forward to block me. Just as he stepped forward, I raised my arm back to strike. But Dreadlocks stepped in front with his hands up.
“We don’t need no trouble,” Dreadlocks said. “You the dude who works out over at Arnie’s sometimes.” I lowered my arm and looked at him again. I faintly recognized his face. He looked at his partner and gave him a nod to stand down. “I’ve seen you in there working the bag,” he said. “We all good.” He stepped to the side so that we could pass.
I nodded to Mechanic, and we walked to the door. With all those cameras, I was certain someone inside had seen us. A buzzer sounded, and I pushed the door open. We started up the narrow staircase, and by the time we had almost reached the top step, the second door had swung open. A short guy, rail thin and barely bigger than a prepubescent fifth grader, stood there with an AK-47 pointed at both of us. It looked at least several pounds heavier than he was.
“We don’t want any problems,” I said, raising my hands. Mechanic did the same. “We just need a few minutes with Ice.”
“C’mon up slowly,” the little guy said. “And keep your fuckin’ hands where I can see ’em.”
Mechanic and I did as we were told. We stepped into a very spacious waiting room. The place was immaculate and decorated in a way you would expect to find in one of those gaudy mansions on the Gold Coast. A big leaded crystal chandelier hung from the middle of the room, and the dark-cherrywood walls had ornate carvings that ran along the crown molding. A fresco painting of some religious scene with flying angels and angry beasts had been meticulously applied across the entire ceiling. All the fixtures were polished gold.
A short woman with closely cropped hair and large hoop earrings sat at a desk in front of a set of closed double doors. She looked up from her computer and, judging by the nonchalant expression on her face, was completely unfazed at the sight of two strangers standing there with their hands in the air and Shorty pointing an AK-47. Business as usual. She went back to the papers on her desk.
An older guy who looked ex-military stepped into the lobby from a side door. Same getup. He patted us down and removed our pieces, including the 9 mm I had strapped to my ankle.
“The Bears could really use you guys,” I said. “Their defensive line had more holes last year than a french sieve.”
The second guy looked at the first with an expression of “Huh?”
“A real wiseass,” Shorty said to me. Then he turned to the other guy and said, “Sieve. Fancy word for a mesh strainer.”
The second guy nodded, but the blank expression on his face clearly indicated that he was still working on it.
Shorty turned to the woman, who was still going about her work as if we weren’t even there. “Can Ice see these two clowns?” he asked.
Mechanic typically didn’t respond well to verbal insults, especially from strangers. I could see his shoulders tense up as if he wanted to make a move. I gave him the look. Going up against that 47 was a losing proposition, even for someone as quick and fearless as Mechanic. He arrived at the same conclusion and settled back. All experienced fighters knew they had to pick their spots. This was not one of them.
The woman got up from her desk and went through the double doors. She looked to be in her early forties and genetically blessed. I followed her as she walked in front of the desk and noticed that she had a nameplate sitting next to a vase of long-stemme
d tulips in various stages of bloom. MS. PAM ELSWORTH, EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT. Ice Culpepper was making it clear that regardless of what you thought about his enterprise, he ran a very official operation.
Ms. Elsworth returned with a soft smile, and within a few seconds we were being shown through the doors. The nameplate next to the door simply said, THE CHAIRMAN. The office was almost as wide as the lobby, and it was equally ornate. Oil paintings in gold frames, built-in bookcases with leather books that looked like they were a hundred years old, dark wood and crystal lighting fixtures everywhere. It was like an English gentlemen’s club from the last century. Four guys sat in leather banker chairs in the corners of the room. They, too, could’ve been strong reinforcement on the Bears’ defensive team. Behind the desk was a tall, slim man in a charcoal-gray three-piece suit and a bowler hat tipped to the side. A gold chain hung across his vest and into the watch pocket. He was smoking a thick cigar. It smelled strong but good. A sparkly diamond-and-gold presidential Rolex hung from his narrow wrist.
“How can I help you, gentlemen?” Ice said, pulling the cigar from his mouth. He was surprisingly articulate, almost to the point of distraction. He remained in his semireclined position. It was clear that he was in charge.
“I’m Ashe Cayne,” I said. “This is Dmitri Kowalski. We’d like to talk to your nephew, Chopper.”
“Oh really?” He took a long pull on his cigar and blew an enormous cloud of blue smoke into the air. I expected a lot more bling from someone who ran a multimillion-dollar gang enterprise, but Ice was surprisingly conservative. He wore only one ring, a thin gold wedding band. No platinum caps on his teeth or those tacky oversize necklaces studded with cheap diamonds. By the stitching and fit of his suit, it looked to be custom made.
“Probably not so good for your oils,” I said, nodding to the cigar. “The smoke can wreak hell on the paint. You wouldn’t want to ruin a million-dollar Picasso.”
Ice smiled and looked at his guys. “A real smart-ass,” he said. “First rate. Takes a lotta nerve to walk in here mouthing off when you’re outnumbered.”
