by Jim Stevens
“Before credit cards,” she says. “I think I was about nine.”
“How far down did he take you?” I ask.
Clayton looks flushed. The truth can be exhausting.
“Congratulations,” I tell him.
“What did I do?”
“Catapulted yourself into the number one position for the person most likely to have killed their father.”
“Bullshit.”
“You have motive, access, a lousy alibi, and a business the old man was taking into the toilet.”
“I wouldn’t kill my dad.”
“Even if he was bleeding you dry, ruining your business, and making life unbearable, as only he could do?”
“You are out of your mind.” He becomes angry, animated and quite sweaty. “It was that muff-diving, bitch of my half-sister.”
“If you say so.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Everything you’ve told us so far has been, if not exactly a lie, pretty close to being untrue. That doesn’t put you in our highest regard.”
“I hated him, but I didn’t kill him.”
“How could you hate your father?” Tiffany asks. “He was your dad.”
Clayton gets up from the table. “I came here to help and this is what I get.”
We watch as Clayton hurries out of the Sign.
“Weren’t you supposed to tell him not to leave town?” Tiffany asks.
“Only cops can tell suspects that; and I’m no longer a cop.”
“Do you think he did it?”
“He could have.”
“Really, you mean I was sitting next to an actual murderer?” She giggles. “How exciting.”
“The only thing that bothers me is that I’m not sure he’s bright enough.”
19
A Clarence in a Bird house
Since my girls were old enough to spit up, I have stressed that there is no such thing as an unloaded gun. I pray to God, they have listened.
I hate guns. Coming from a cop that may be hard to believe, but I do hate guns. There are more than 270 million guns in America, almost one for every man, woman, and child. Worse yet, the majority of guns are handguns. Absolutely absurd, this is more guns than were used in World War II.
What is the purpose of a handgun? You don’t hunt, shoot skeet, or compete with one. No, their purpose, and only purpose, is to shoot people. All the millions of handguns in our country are for the distinct purpose of shooting another person.
As a cop, I hated toting one around. Not only can they hurt others, they can hurt you. Hence the term, “shooting oneself in the foot.” Guns are heavy, uncomfortable, need holsters, and are horribly unfashionable. They do not fit on a belt, under a suit coat; nor can they be hidden anywhere on a normal person’s body. Herman might get away with stashing one in a fat fold, but not me.
If it were up to me, all handguns would be illegal. I’m not advocating the end of your right to bear arms. You want a gun, get a rifle, but no handguns or automatic weapons. Those are more ridiculous than handguns, if that’s possible. The USA would be a much nicer place without these elements of destruction.
I’ve kept my service revolver. In my line of work it is a necessary evil; but it seldom sees the light of day from the locked, upper kitchen cabinet where it is kept.
I strap on my gun. Where I am off to tonight, I might need it.
The sun is down; a full moon is up. It is a perfect night for trolling the mean streets. I take the Dan Ryan south and get off on 35th, close to Sox Park. It’s quiet. The team must be on a road trip. I travel east, past the projects. The usual idiots are hanging out, smokin’, chuckin’ and jivin’ on street corners, dealing weed and crack. They all eye me going by; but how much money could a guy driving an old Toyota be worth?
I turn onto a residential street where all the tree trunks in the parkway are painted white. This denotes a block club, where the neighbors take turns watching the street for gangbangers up to no good, a very effective brand of protection.
Two more blocks up is a line of small factories, each protected by circular lengths of razor wire and high iron gates locked up tight for the night. The factory owners have added bright florescent lights to ward off evildoers, which not only complement the city streetlights, but provide an illuminating glow to the streetwalkers working the block.
I pull up to the first ho dressed, or almost dressed, in a pair of diamond-sparkled hot pants. I wonder where she shops. “Babala, how you doing, girl?”
Babala started out ten years ago as a fifty-dollar whore and remains the same today. What she needs is an understanding of inflation, besides better teeth, deodorant, and to maybe lose forty pounds.
She flips the hair from her bad wig aside as she leans onto the passenger side window. “Sherlock, man, where the hell you been?”
“They threw me off the force.”
“Oh, man, if that ain’t shit, I don’t know what is.”
“Bennie come around yet?”
“He been here twice, already; bizness bad when the Sox outta town.”
“Tell him I’m hanging at the screw.”
“No problem, Missa S.”
I wave goodbye and drive up the street to the Snyder Screw Corporation, seemingly a perfect name for a business on this block. I park in the driveway and wait.
Bennie Jackson has been a street hustler and pimp going on twenty years. Get past his choices of profession and he’s actually a pretty nice guy. He can talk Chicago White Sox fluently, is buddies with every alderman in a three-district area, and has a working knowledge of the mean streets like no other. Bennie is smarter than your average pimp. He knows where the lines are drawn, when to cross and when to stay put. He keeps his business away from the homes in the hood out of respect, and has an innate sense to keep on everyone’s good side -- good guys as well as bad. More criminals out there should be like Bennie.
It must be going on ten years now that a rookie cop arrested Bennie on a pandering charge, brought him in and locked him up. Bennie’s one phone call was to me. I had him back on the street in a matter of hours, complete with an apology from the cop.
A brand-new black Chrysler pulls up behind my Toyota. I get out of my car and head back to his. As a guest in their neighborhood, you always visit in their living room.
“Bennie, how you doing?”
“Sherlock, I miss ya.”
“Business good?”
“Problem with this business, Sherlock, you just can’t get away. I haven’t been on vacation since you been off the force.”
“Hey, you got to do it.”
“Tell me about it.”
“How’s it hangin’ wit you?”
“Could be better, Bennie. Could be better.”
“I can hear ya.”
I settle into the plush leather seat. I wish my Toyota had seats this comfortable.
“What do ya need?” Bennie’s never been a man to beat around the bush.
“I got to find a shooter named Clarence.”
“Clarence?”
“Yeah.”
“Who told you ’bout him?”
“Magpie Morris.”
“Ah, man,” Bennie shakes his head. “Magpie is dumber than dog shit.”
“Told you things were bad. See who I got to deal with?”
“You lookin’ to shoot this shooter?”
“No.”
“Arrest him?”
“No.”
“You want him to join your weekly poker game?”
“Something like that.”
Bennie thinks it over for a few seconds. “I don’t know him, but I know someone who would.”
“I only want to chat.”
“These dudes ain’t the kind that give out interviews.”
“I’m kinda stuck, Bennie; I need this one.”
Bennie pulls on the extra flesh on his jowls. There is plenty to yank. “You go, drive to Leon’s and wait in the parking lot.” Bennie puts my cell phone number i
n his phone, then puts out a hand as big as a tennis racket to shake. “Next time you got to hit somebody, you call Bennie, okay.”
He is referring to the end of my police career. “I will.”
Good friends are hard to find.
___
Leon’s is a takeout rib joint on the South Side. Ribs so good, white folks come and stand in line on summer nights. Success brought Leon money, a standing in the community, and more guys trying to rob him than all of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. It got so bad that criminals would buy a giant bucket of rib tips, sit in their cars and, while eating, count the customers going in and out. After reaching a total equal to their fingers and toes, the slimeballs throw on a ski mask, pull out a Glock, and rob the place; then back to the car for Leon’s peach cobbler dessert.
Poor Leon tried everything: security guards, home delivery, paying off cops, mafia thugs; but nothing worked until he devised a bulletproof glass, lazy-susan window. Necessity was the mother of that invention. A customer orders, puts his money on a spinning circular tray, which sticks out from under a thick piece of plate glass. The clerk inside unlocks the glass, swings the wheel a one-eighty, makes change and adds a receipt with a pickup number, and swings it back to the customer. Ten to fifteen minutes later, the clerk calls out the number and the food slides down a pickup window shoot. The delivery system worked like a charm. Leon’s crime rate plummeted. Only problem remaining was the number of bullets stuck in the thick glass from thieves who couldn’t believe a system could be that foolproof.
My cell rang three minutes after I arrived. I was glad no one but me was around to hear “Breakaway” coming out of the tiny cell speaker. “Hello.”
It was Bennie. “Is there a big-ass, black Mercedes parked near you?”
“There’s two of them.”
“Go between ’em. Whatever door opens up, get in that one.”
“Thanks Bennie.”
“Come by more often; I miss ya.”
I flip the safety off my gun and place it loosely in my shoulder holster. I make a very slow trek across two lines of parked cars (Leon was having a big night) and stop behind the bumpers of the two Mercedes, whose windows were almost opaque from their custom tint. The rear door on the car on my right opens. I take two more steps forward and climb in.
Two guys are seated in the back, chewing on ribs. One small, one huge, both with Bozo-the-Clown smiles from the amount of sauce on their faces.
“You didn’t get no ribs?” the smaller guy says, tossing a perfectly clean rib bone into a cardboard bucket on the floor. It was obvious he’s the one who does the talking.
“I have to watch my cholesterol.”
“Hell, that’s no fun.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Bennie says you looking for Clarence.”
“Yeah.”
“His name ain’t Clarence.”
“Lucky for him.”
“You realize there are guys cheaper.”
“I’m into referrals.”
“Whose?”
“I’m embarrassed to say,” but I have no choice. “Magpie Morris.”
“That fool?”
“He’s on his way to the joint.” The big guy can actually speak.
“I didn’t say it was a good referral.”
“You used to be a cop, right?” the man asks bluntly.
“Used to be.”
“Got retired, I hear?”
“You could put it that way.”
He’s checked me out, which is good.
“You the guy that cold-cocked that D.A.?”
He is referring to a slight bit of temper on my part. Hearing that my district attorney made a deal with Jerry “The Tooth,” Lombardo to turn state’s evidence on some bullshit theft, after I had spent nine months building a case against Jerry and most of his immediate family, I got a bit perturbed. One crummy punch got me kicked off the force sixteen days before my twenty-year anniversary, a major financial plateau for lifelong benefits. Ouch, the punch hurt me a lot more than it hurt the D.A.
“What are you doing now?” the little man asks.
“Make a living checking out insurance claims.”
“Bet that’s a shit job.”
I like this guy and I can tell he likes me.
“This kinda info don’t come cheap.”
“I know.”
Little man takes another rib, bites off the meat on one side. “You want his cell or his email?”
“Cell, I’m not very good on the computer.”
“You don’t got a Blackberry?”
“Sorry.”
“Man, you got to get with the times.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I hand over my phone and he punches in the number, leaving sauce on the key pad. “Here.”
“What can I do for you?” I ask.
“Nothing right now, but you know, there’s always something around the next corner.” The man gives me a wink as I exit.
“We could use another bucket of tips.” The big guy speaks for the second time.
I pull out a twenty and leave it next to the bone bucket. “Bon appétit.”
___
It is amazing what someone with access can discover, using a database with all the cell phone numbers in the country. Clarence wasn’t Clarence. The phone number was registered to a Preston Bird. He lived in East Chicago, Indiana, in a small bungalow in a neighborhood of steel mill laborers.
East Chicago is actually southeast of Chicago and why it wanted to call itself East Chicago, with the big Chicago being so close, was anyone’s guess. Seemed stupid to me. It was, is, and always will be a soot-laden town that has not, and will not, see better days. One two-bedroom, one bath houses, one after another, with small backyards and one-car garages standing on block after block, each with a clear view of the U.S. Steel smokestacks pumping effluent into their air. The bad news about the smoke was it would be the death of all of them; the good news was when the stacks were all puffing away, everybody who wanted a job had a job.
The Bird house was in the middle of the block. It had burglar bars on all the windows, a plexiglas screen door, a four-foot chain-link fence and a walkway of cracked concrete. No makeover could make this house any better.
My first pass-by gave me no indication of anyone being home. No doors or windows open for ventilation, no lights on, or flicker from a TV set. My second pass, which was much slower than my first, told me the front windows were being blocked by thick curtains or blankets. The lawn of weeds was cropped, no mail hung out of the box, and the throwaway newspapers and advertising flyers were blown against the outside of the fence, not the inside. I wouldn’t put the place in a “pride of ownership” category, but whoever lived there cared.
I drove through the alley and immediately wished I had counted which house the Bird house would be, because each garage was a spitting image of the garage next door. I drove back around to the front and parked on the opposite side of the street, one door up.
A kid, about ten, came up to the car, looking inside as if I were a penguin behind the glass at the zoo. “Hey, you a cop?”
“No.”
“Sheriff?”
I rolled down the window. “A sheriff is a cop.”
The kid didn’t care. “Repo man?”
“No.”
“Then what you doin’?”
“Why do I have to be doing something? Couldn’t I just be here enjoying the neighborhood?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’re white.”
He had a point.
“I’m trying to find a guy named Bird.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“He live right there.”
I pull a five dollar bill out of my pocket. “Go up and tell him a guy named Clarence is here to talk to him.”
The kid tries to grab the bill, but I hold it back. “You get paid on completion, not hiring.” I tear the bill and give him half.
&
nbsp; “I can’t spend this.”
“I’ll give you the other half after you get Bird.”
The kid runs off, enters the yard, up the six stairs, and rings the bell. As the door opens, I can’t hear what is said, but a man about forty steps out onto the small porch, looks to where the kid points and nods his head.
I get out of the car, lock it, and make my way onto the property. I fork over the other half of the bill to the kid. “Nice doing business with ya.”
The man hasn’t moved from the spot on the porch. “You Clarence?” he asks.
“No,” I say, “I think you are.”
He holds the screen door open and I go inside.
Preston Bird wears a Bulls Three-peat tee-shirt which sports stains from all the major food groups. The neckband sags. There is a small hole on the shirt’s bottom that reveals a soft belly, the result of too many beers during Bulls, Sox, and Bear games. The pair of jeans he wears covers his butt crack, for which I am thankful.
“You a cop?” he asks.
“No.”
“You want a beer then?”
“No thanks.”
The room is dominated by a four-foot-wide plasma TV, which is worth more than the accumulated value of the couch, chair, coffee table, side table, so-called art, lamps, and knickknacks. Two black boxers are on the screen, beating the crap out of each other.
“I’ve been referred to you,” I say after he sits down.
“By who?”
“A little guy in a Mercedes who likes ribs.”
“Leon’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, those are good ribs.”
The bell rings, the round ends, but one fighter sucker punches the other, jumps on top of his opponent, and wails away.
“Boxin’ getting more like professional wrestling every day.” Preston Bird tells me.
“I hate that.”
We watch as a brawl breaks out in the ring with cornermen, managers, and one fighter’s mother throwing haymakers.
“No women, no kids,” he says, “so if you here about a wife, I can’t help you.”
The guy at ringside dings the bell so fast it sounds like school recess, but does little to stop the melee. Preston punches the sound way down with the remote.
“How’s business?”
