by Ian K. Smith
Chico had agreed to meet us, but only on his turf. Mechanic and I arrived five minutes before our one o’clock appointment. We were specifically told that Chico had little tolerance for tardiness.
We entered the storefront on Chicago Avenue and were immediately met by a tall, skinny Puerto Rican kid with two large diamond studs in his ears and a gold chain the thickness of a tow truck cable hanging around his neck. His White Sox cap tilted slightly to the side. We followed him down the back aisle to a door that electronically unlocked as we approached. We stepped into a bright foyer, where we were met by two guys the size of sumo wrestlers. They relieved us of our guns, which they deposited in a plastic milk crate; then they did a full pat down and wanded us with a metal detector before nodding us along. We turned the corner of a second short hallway before reaching another guy about the size of the last two put together, give or take a hundred pounds. He patted us down also, then opened the nondescript black metal door. The tall skinny kid led the way.
The entire room was immaculate. It had been transformed into an adult entertainment center. Pinball machines and video game units stood on the far wall, with two Skee-Ball machines adjacent to them. A television monitor the size of a coliseum scoreboard stood against the entire expanse of another wall, with several wired video consoles and a stack of game controllers sitting on a table in front of it. A basketball rim had been set up in one corner and a racing arcade machine in another. Chico Vargas stood in front of a video machine, working the joystick hard. I could tell by the music it was Ms. Pac-Man. He hit a button that froze the screen, then turned to us. His hair was braided tightly in a fancy design, the edges of his beard razor sharp. He was average height, thin build, with a pair of skinny jeans that hung just beneath his waist. He wore a black White Sox jersey with Ozzie Guillén’s number 13 embroidered on the right pocket. The edge of a toothpick stuck out the right corner of his mouth.
“Ashe fuckin’ Cayne,” Chico said with a thick accent that seemed to combine Puerto Rico, LA, and Chicago all in one. “I ain’t got no love lost for a cop, but I respect how you walked away from that cover-up when they shot Marquan in cold blood. Took a lot of balls to do that.” He looked down at his watch and rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “And you’re early. That’s how I like to do business.”
“We were told you could be persnickety when it came to punctuality,” I said.
Chico looked at the skinny kid with the huge diamond earrings, who shrugged.
“They warned me you were a wiseass who liked to use big words,” Chico said.
“Be careful. When I get warmed up, I can put together two in a row and really make your head spin.”
“You’re much taller than I expected,” Chico said.
“I tend to be modest in my bio,” I replied. “Leaves me with some element of surprise for the unsuspecting.”
“And this is the fuckin’ sharpshooter everyone be talkin’ about,” Chico said, nodding respectfully at Mechanic. “Is it true you the one took out the Santiago boys in Pilsen last year? Seven done, only one shot each man.”
I looked at Mechanic. Not a single muscle twitched in his face.
Chico walked over to a big leather chair in the center of the room in front of the monstrous monitor and motioned for us to join him on the nearby sofa. I accepted. Mechanic remained standing.
“So, what this shit about Ice’s nephew?” he asked.
“I was hoping you would tell me,” I said.
“Ain’t nuthin’ to tell. I found out like everybody else. I already talked to Ice and told him we ain’t have nuthin’ to do with it.”
“He believes you,” I said.
“But you don’t?”
“I don’t have a reason not to. I’m just trying to figure out why someone would kill the nephew of one of the city’s biggest gang leaders, dump him in an alley over in Englewood like a dead animal, then make it look like you did it.”
“These streets mean and stupid as fuck,” Chico said.
“Chopper stopped running the streets a while ago,” I said. “He was a smart kid. Graduated from DePaul. Made dean’s list his last two years. Quoted Shakespeare quite easily.”
“A real fuckin’ Einstein,” Chico said. “Smart in the books don’t mean smart in the streets. Knowing a bunch of trigonometry and all them shapes ain’t stop his ass from getting killed before his twenty-fifth birthday. What you in this for?”
“That would be geometry, not trigonometry,” I said. “I’m looking for a missing girl.” I pulled out a photo of Tinsley and handed it to him.
“Damn she fine,” Chico said. “What she got to do with Ice nephew?”
“They were copulating,” I said.
Chico looked puzzled. “Speak English, man,” he said, pulling the toothpick out of his mouth. “What the fuck you tryin’ a say?”
“Exactly what you just said.”
“They was fuckin’?”
“And maybe even in love.”
Chico took another salivating look at Tinsley and nodded in approval.
“So, it’s safe to say you’ve never seen her before,” I said.
“If I had, you wouldn’t need to be lookin’ for her.” He smiled a mouth full of platinum. “She’d be right here by my side.”
I turned to Mechanic. The corners of his mouth moved ever so slightly.
“Any chance one of your crew went rogue and took out Chopper?” I asked.
“Zero. None of my people is stupid enough to do something like that. It would start a fuckin’ war that we don’t need right now. Everyone stickin’ to they own turf. Everyone makin’ plenty of money. I’m a businessman first. Killin’ Ice’s kin would be really bad for everybody business. Don’t nobody make a fuckin’ move less I say so.”
I had figured as much.
“Who would try to set you up for this?”
“How the fuck I’m supposed to know?”
“Any beefs right now?”
Chico flashed an easy smile. “Always gonna be beefs, but ain’t no shit bad enough to rise to this level.”
“Somebody wants you to go down for it. Left your signature. His left ring finger was missing, cut completely off at the knuckle. And your crown was drawn under his rib cage.”
“Which side?”
“Left.”
“You got a picture?”
I took out my phone and opened it to the photo I had taken. I zoomed in, so he could see it clearly, then handed it to him.
He examined it for a few seconds and started laughing. “It’s a sorry-ass fake,” he said. “Whoever did it don’t know what the fuck they doin’.”
“Care to expound upon that?”
“You supposed to be the detective. Can’t you figure it out?”
“I never worked gangs,” I said. “Wasn’t tough enough. Big guns and decorous tats tend to scare me, especially when the ink is crawling all over the neck.”
“You’re a real wiseass,” Chico said.
“People keep telling me that.”
Chico shook his head. “The crown ain’t right. We put our numbers in the crown. Two and nine. Real small. You gotta look real close to see it.” Chico turned the phone so that I could see the tag. He had opened it to full zoom. “The two goes in the bottom left of the crown and the nine in the bottom right. It represents Canóvanas, our motherland back in Puerto Rico. The zip code is 00729, but we only use the last two numbers. Whoever the fuckin’ amateur was who did this forgot the numbers or didn’t know how to use ’em.”
“Sloppy work,” I said.
“Real sloppy,” Chico returned. “But do me a favor. When you find out who did this shit, let me know first. I’m gonna personally put some lead in his ass for trying to fuck with my business.”
23
MECHANIC AND I COLLECTED our hardware and made it back to the car. A group of kids were ogling my ride, then began to walk away nonchalantly as we approached. The leader of the crew turned around and said, “What
year is that?”
“Eighty-six,” I said.
“That’s what’s up,” he returned, before nodding and walking away.
“You up for a little spin in my that’s-what’s-up ride?” I asked Mechanic.
“As long as I get home by dark,” Mechanic said. “I got some business tonight.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The female kind,” he said.
It took us just under twenty minutes to work our way south to Englewood, and on the way Violet had checked in to let me know they had been given legal authority to examine Tinsley’s accounts. Once they had, they’d found her trust money untouched except for a few thousand dollars. She’d also discovered that Tinsley hadn’t used her credit or ATM cards since she had gone missing. It wasn’t exactly easy to survive this long with none of your own money. If Tinsley wasn’t dead, maybe someone else was paying her way.
I turned my attention back to the road and started at the intersection of Halsted and Seventy-First Street. I turned left on Seventy-First and traveled east toward the viaduct and elevated train tracks, then kept going until I reached the Dan Ryan Expressway. I turned and looped back, coming up Sixty-Ninth all the way west back to Halsted. It was a depressing ten minutes. Condemned buildings, abandoned cars, blocks upon blocks of vacant lots and dilapidated row houses. After I had completed the loop and had gotten my bearings, I did it again, this time more deliberately, paying attention to the streets running parallel to South Wallace and making a grid in my mind to better understand the typical flow of traffic. I made note of certain landmarks, such as churches, schools, and fire stations.
Running from west to east on Seventy-First Street, we passed the Martin Luther King Junior Academy of Social Justice, an elementary school with weathered pale brick and a tired marquee precipitously leaning toward the sidewalk. The Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church sat across the street, a lumbering structure of heavy, impenetrable stone. We passed Lowe Avenue, which meant South Wallace was the next block. But it wasn’t. The Lily Gardens Park ran right up against the embankment of the elevated train. That meant South Wallace Street had dead-ended at Seventieth, one block north. I whipped a quick U-turn and went back down Seventy-First, took a right on Union Avenue, then arrived on Seventieth Street. This was where it got tricky. From where we sat, traffic ran one way toward us from the west. However, once you passed the Seventieth and Union intersection, Seventieth became a two-way street. St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church sat across from us at the northwest corner of Seventieth and Union. I hung a right on Seventieth and headed east. Small clapboard prairie-style houses badly in need of repair lined the street. Naked fence posts stood where there once had been fencing. A small apartment building anchored the corner across from the church.
“Not much good happening over here,” Mechanic said. He had his piece on his lap and the safety off.
We drove past Lowe Avenue, then saw South Wallace up in front of us. It was a one-way street running north, which meant to our left. On the southern side of Seventieth, the park had cut it off so that it couldn’t run any farther south. The elevated train’s embankment ran up along the entire east side of South Wallace and continued south along the border of the small park. I turned left onto South Wallace and killed the engine once we were fifty feet in.
I buzzed the windows down; then Mechanic and I sat silent for several minutes. The noises of the urban jungle rang out around us. A warm wind blew through the car, and we just listened.
“This definitely wouldn’t top the list of places where I want to die,” Mechanic said.
We sat in front of a huge open lot with what looked like an abandoned construction site trailer. The wooden steps leading to the door had collapsed and the windows had been busted with rocks. Several handwritten NO TRESPASSING signs fronted the property, graffiti covering most of the letters. Rusted trucks in various stages of decay had been parked haphazardly, as had several eighteen-wheeler trailers whose cargo bay locks had been cut and doors pried open. A sign on the adjacent lots advertised free property, with a number listed underneath. Nothing moved except for discarded wrappers and empty bags being hustled by the wind. This was the land of the forgotten.
“It didn’t happen here,” I said, surveying the narrow street. All types of trash had collected at the base of the crumbling concrete embankment of the elevated track. Beer cans and whiskey bottles sat next to used condoms and dirty syringes. More vacant lands deeper into the street sat neglected and ominous looking, off the grid, places where bad things happened under the cover of darkness. “But why did they drop it here?” I said aloud. “What was it that made them choose this location?”
“Convenient,” Mechanic said. “Nobody here to see it. Nobody here to give a damn even if they did see it.”
“But did they plan to drop it here the whole time or was it a last-minute decision? They shoot him, maybe they panic, and then they find the closest place for the drop where no one would be looking.”
“Then this was a good decision,” Mechanic said. “We’ve been here for fifteen minutes in the middle of the day, and not a single car has passed. Nothing. Not even a stray dog.”
“That’s because this is a place where people don’t come by accident,” I said. “Anyone who comes here has intentions.”
I looked to where Chopper’s body was found. A plastic shopping bag and tattered diaper had reclaimed the space. The crime scene tape had been taken down, and the chalk outline of his body had been washed away. It was as if he had never been here.
“Understanding the mistakes that were made will be critical to piecing this all together,” I said. “This was the work of one or more amateurs. Why didn’t they get the tag right on the body? They tried to misdirect to the Warlords, but that was a bad target when everyone’s at peace right now.”
I started the car and drove farther into the street and stopped across from a neon-blue ranch house that had lived way past its glory. It just stood there, isolated and pitiful, no windows or doors and a hole in the roof as if it had been hit by a meteorite. From our vantage point we could see clean through to what would have been the back of the house all the way to the empty lots on Lowe Avenue just behind it. Nothing moved except the tree branches in the soft wind.
“At least we know how they entered the street,” I said. “They couldn’t come from Sixty-Ninth, because that means they would’ve had to turn onto South Wallace going the wrong direction. No one trying to dump a body would take the risk of making an illegal turn when other motorists or cops might see you. They must’ve entered from Seventieth Street, drove in about seventy-five feet, and dropped the body. They got back in the car or truck and continued driving north before exiting onto Sixty-Ninth Street. They turned right to go to the expressway or left to get back to Halsted.”
“I can buy that,” Mechanic said.
My car rumbled awake as I turned the key and drove slowly down South Wallace. Once we reached Sixty-Ninth Street, the ground trembled, and the squeal of crushing metal filled the air. We looked up but could see only a silver blur as the train flew by toward safer destinations.
“Jesus Christ!” I said aloud, pressing my head back into my seat. “How could I have missed it?”
“Missed what?”
“The cameras!” I said. “There are cameras all the way down Halsted and down Sixty-Ninth Street. The old Paul Robeson High School is only two blocks away. Anyone who knew this area would know how wired it was with police observation devices. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to take the chance of dropping a body here. All the gangs have copied the POD grids throughout the city. The PODs are buried everywhere, including red lights and streetlamps. Anyone who’s done this before knows the grid, and this would not be a location they’d choose.”
“There can’t be any cameras on that street,” Mechanic said. “There’s nothing back there worth looking at.”
“There doesn’t need to be,” I said. “Surveillance doesn’t need to get them on South Wallace
. You can catch them leaving when they turn onto busy Sixty-Ninth Street.”
24
I DROPPED MECHANIC OFF in time for his evening appointment, then headed back to the office to work on the timeline of dumping Chopper’s body. As I pulled up to my building, an unmarked pulled in behind me. Only the passenger door opened. Burke unfolded his two-hundred-plus-pound body out of the front seat. He had one brown bag under his arm and another in his hand. It was barely forty degrees, and he still wasn’t wearing a coat. Once we got into my office, he arranged everything with great precision on the small worktable opposite my desk. He took a glance at the timeline I had mapped out on my dry-erase board and nodded.
“Dinner’s on me tonight,” he said, tearing open the Harold’s Chicken Shack bag and spreading out one of my old newspapers as a place mat.
“Thanks for splurging,” I said. “I’m sure it was a stretch on a commander’s salary.”
“Grease and Jack,” he said, pulling out a long bottle from the other brown bag. “A proper meal.”
I pulled open the bottom desk drawer and found two glasses that were reasonably clean, then grabbed a can of soda from the fridge. Once we had divided the bucket of chicken and commenced the business of eating, Burke got down to the business of his visit.
“You making any headway on the family front?” Burke said, chewing vigorously.
“Coming along,” I said. “Family dynamics aren’t as perfect as their Christmas card photo. There could be some complications between mother and daughter, and he might be in the middle. It’s what Carl Jung called the Electra complex.”
