It was early evening, but it may as well have been twilight. The same sort of dreamlike saturation to the surroundings. The indistinct edges of distant buildings blending into a one-dimensional tapestry. The living blur of a crowded sidewalk.
A group of school children passed before them in a cloud of light mist kicked up by passing cars. They wore checkered uniforms, black backpacks. They jostled quietly, shepherded by a Catholic nun who stood at the center of their formation like a tower, eyes swiveling along her periphery in a state of constant suspicion. Marcus assumed she was marching them to a cathedral down the block, one of those old structures that looked as though it were an extension of the earth itself, shaped by human hands.
“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?” Marcus asked as they waited for the light to cross the intersection.
Peter didn’t answer.
The rain continued to fall like a veil from which shapes of cars and bodies emerged slowly and never fully, ephemeral and atomized. An L thundered from down the street, screeching and squealing.
Marcus’s doctor had told him a few years ago that he was developing arthritis in his knees and his elbows and even gave him some medicine to take each morning, but at the time Marcus considered arthritis to be one of those shadow diagnoses that drifts over a shifting pool of symptoms, a synonym for the body’s gradual entropy. Now he felt the arthritis fully, a dull ache seeping through his skin and bones.
Peter walked a full step ahead of Marcus, turning his head over his shoulder once every so often, as though to make sure he was still there. Marcus saw for the first time the full extent of Peter’s limp. His left foot never fully cleared the pavement and dragged with each labored step forward.
“It’s just a few blocks away, really,” Peter said each time they crossed another intersection. Tourists bumbled past on the sidewalks, trying to escape the rain. Their faces hid and shadowed beneath visors and baseball caps; on their shirts, ink drawings of the Sears Tower sprouted from the skyline in wispy strokes. They watched a limping Peter move toward them with expressions of amusement and pity intertwined into a grimace. Peter shrunk to fit through narrow openings between bodies.
“Let me get us a cab, Peter. This can’t be good for your leg.”
“No, no. We’re close. Just a few blocks more. Just give me a second.” He massaged his back with his fingers and stretched carefully, as if any sudden movement would snap him in half.
“We’ve been walking for a half hour.”
“We’re close.”
They moved farther south, crossing the southern branch of the river. The sidewalks and streets thinned into husks of a metropolis, sparsely populated with a few evening wanderers in the distance. The bricks of the homes they passed became less and less pronounced until soon they were wandering through run-down concrete tenements on the edge of Englewood, Marcus’s childhood home. Prairie grass grew up miraculously from the sidewalk in long, heaving stalks. Kids screamed and chased after one another through alleyways, some barefoot, smiling at the cool cusp of a chilled rain falling on their foreheads. Marcus tried to orient himself, to recall where he was in relation to his childhood as though navigating through someone else’s memory. But he felt lost. In every possible sense of the word. A tourist in citizen’s clothes.
Peter turned sharply to a tenement building and walked up a concrete stoop. He swiveled around and made sure that Marcus had followed.
“This is it,” he said, waving him up. His mouth opened and closed like a hooked fish as he caught his breath.
Inside the building, a stale smell of sawdust, vomit, pot smoke. Cellophane sheets hung at random, billowing in unseen drafts, revealing walls halfway torn down. Rusty nails littered the floor. The numbers on each apartment door followed an illogical arithmetic, scattered at random. 3, 15, 1, 28. The hallway was devoid of human presence save their own.
“It looks condemned,” Marcus said. “Are you sure we can be in here?”
Peter shrugged and continued to the end of the hall. He stood before a door on the left side and waited until Marcus stood next to him. Peter was still catching his breath. His chest heaved. Sweat poured from his forehead. He massaged his limp leg with both hands.
“I never told you this, Marcus, but I traced the Kingfisher here once,” he said in a whisper, half-apologetic. “I heard on the scanner that someone had reported seeing a man running on the rooftops along 64th. I was just a block away at the time, so I grabbed my bike and pedaled like hell. I arrived probably just a few minutes after the call.”
“What’d you do?”
“I just stood out in the street out there.” He pointed through the walls at the street beyond. “I wasn’t sure if I’d missed him or if he’d gone somewhere else entirely. But I knew it was the Kingfisher that I was looking for. Who else would be running along the rooftops at midnight? And that’s when I heard this sound. Loud. Really loud. Like two cymbals crashing together. So I followed the sound into an alley and saw a human-sized dent in a dumpster.”
“When was this?”
Peter ignored the interruption. “All around the dumpster were footprints in the snow. The same size footprints from the mold I showed you once. I ran after the footprints, tracking them. The footprints led to another alley and disappeared beneath a window that leads into this apartment right here.” He pointed at the door in front of him. “I knocked on the door. A woman answered. She asked me what I wanted, so I asked her if she had seen anyone around her apartment, but she said she was alone. I didn’t know what to say, because we both knew she was lying. I could see it, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. So I just sort of stood there until she closed the door on me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me after it happened?” Marcus asked. “I would have looked into it with you.”
Peter stared at the apartment as though trying to see beyond not only the wooden door itself, but also the years that separated him from that night. “I planned on coming back here to look for him myself. I didn’t think you’d be interested unless I had some sort of hard evidence.”
Marcus wanted to take issue with this claim, but it wasn’t worth it. “Did you ever come back?”
He nodded, “Almost every night.”
“For how long?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. The woman who was living here never answered the door again.”
“Who lives in the apartment now?” Marcus asked.
From down the hall, mariachi music began blasting through blown-out speakers.
“No one’s home.” Peter shook his head. “Not anymore. About ten years ago, I started to do some digging into who all had lived in this apartment. I pulled records, but the record-keeping on government housing is a shit-show. The last person to have a name on a lease here was a guy who I tracked to a graveyard in Southlawn. He may have moved in sometime after the woman I saw that night, or maybe even before. Hard to say.”
“Did you ever find out who she was?”
“A few years back, I finally got in touch with the landlord and asked if he could give me a name, but he didn’t know it. He was able to confirm that a woman lived here at the time that it happened. Red hair, just like I remember. I remember him implying that she was some sort of prostitute. Said she got creative when her rent came up short. That’s about all he could say. I asked him if he ever saw a guy coming in through the window, but he didn’t. Didn’t seem too happy to hear that there might have been an additional tenant who wasn’t paying rent.”
A kid walked into the building and moved toward them as if he didn’t see them, which maybe he didn’t. Pressed pants, headphones slung around his neck like an ornament. Loud music spilled from his headphones and into the walls. Hip-hop, unmeasured beats and double-timed rhythm. He entered a door in the middle of the hall and shut it, locking it behind him.
“So you were still looking into the woman’s identity just a few years ago?” Marcus asked, softer now. As though the walls were leaning in to listen. “Why?
”
An expression crossed Peter’s face, some sort of pained tremor. Marcus couldn’t tell if it was his back, his leg, or something else altogether.
“I just wanted to know what I missed that day,” he said quietly. “That’s the only reason. I came so close once. I spent years living in that one moment, in the time it took that woman to close the door on me. I needed to know what I had missed, what she had known. But obviously, it didn’t work out. So”—he held up his palms and gestured at the door—“here we are, I guess.”
Marcus leaned against the wall and stared at the closed door before him. A breeze passed through the hall, the cellophane curtains rising, particulates of sawdust skittering across the bare cement floor. Peter slid against the wall into a crouching position, grimacing as he did so. With his free hand, he began to massage the small of his back.
Marcus imagined the Kingfisher—a moving shadow he had never seen—wandering this unlit shadowed space. He imagined the Kingfisher lying in a bed just beyond this door, listening to the hollow reverb of sirens from across the river, and maybe removing himself from whoever it was he was lying next to—lover or otherwise—walking out from this very hallway, and setting out into the night.
“What are we doing here, Peter?”
He wasn’t sure Peter heard him, and he nearly forgot what he’d asked by the time Peter responded.
“We’re here because he brought me here.” Peter sighed contentedly, as if he’d said something that had pleasantly surprised him. “And whoever that woman was behind that door, she must have known the Kingfisher. She must have known him, Marcus. And if that guy in the video is killing people the Kingfisher saved, people whose names were never reported, he knows more about the Kingfisher than most people. Maybe even more than you and I. And for whatever reason, he believes the Kingfisher is still alive, and he’s trying to taunt him. He’s trying to draw him out of hiding.” Peter stood up and moved in shuffling steps toward the building’s exit. “We need to find her. The woman who lived here. We need to find her before he does.”
“What if he’s already found her?”
“I don’t think he has.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he would have shown her if he had her. If he thinks the Kingfisher is alive, he would have known she was important to him. And if he somehow knew about Walter, well, there’s no reason to think he doesn’t know about this woman.”
“What about the other men who were with Walter that night? They’re probably in danger, too.”
“I know that,” Peter said. “But what happens if he’s already taken them? Who is he going to take next?”
12 JUNE 1981
OFFICER GREGORY STETSON thrived on the graveyard shift. The other cops complained about pulling midnight patrol—cruising through the streets bone-weary while the sky shifted from bleak nothingness to the Easter-egg strata of dawn—but these were the same cops who complained about everything.
Give those guys a Holy Bible, and they’ll tell you the print is too small.
But what they didn’t seem to recognize was that Chicago at twilight was a different world. A better world. When the tourists finally retreated back into their swanky hotels, when the hawkers packed up their wares, when the children acquiesced to their mother’s calls for bed, Stetson was left with little more than static shadows on the sidewalks, and a sudden and real sense of the nothingness that surrounded him as he drove past the same old drunks prostrate in the gutters, muttering promises to themselves that tomorrow—yes, tomorrow—they would wake in the comfort of their beds next to someone who forgave them.
It was magical, all of it. And at this time of night, it was all for him.
He checked the time on the dash. Nearly three o’clock. Right now, Mindy would be asleep in their home in Chicago Heights, and she would be curled in the sheets as she chased whatever dreams came her way tonight. And when he was done with his shift, he would be home just in time to kiss his wife’s sleeping head and lie next to her until her alarm clock sounded just fifteen minutes later. But this was enough. Mindy didn’t complain. She understood that these things, these late nights, were investments in the future he dreamt of every waking day. She was good that way.
Stetson spotted something that did not belong, a spindly figure on the sidewalk. His headlights refracted from her ghost-pale arms sprouting from a tube top, the sequins on her skirt. Like a walking disco ball, this woman. Her bright red hair was curled in tight ringlets that jostled and bounced. He slowed down and drew the cruiser close to the curb, and he saw that her heels dangled in her left hand. In her right hand, she held a cigarette.
She turned over her shoulder, squinting in the headlights, and then turned back around. Uninterested.
He pulled up next to her and cranked the passenger-side window down. “Busy night?”
“I’m almost home, Officer,” she said, striding forward in an easy glide.
He eased off the brake pedal to keep up with her. He called out the window, “Didn’t answer my question.”
“Have a good night, Officer.” She waved.
“Shouldn’t be walking home this late all by yourself. Don’t you have a man to look after you?” He let the question hang out to dry before adding, “Maybe a pimp somewhere nearby?”
“I’m just a girl walking home. You don’t know where I’ve been and you don’t know where it is I’m going. Best we keep it that way. For your sake.”
She was walking faster now. He tapped the accelerator to keep up with her.
“Tell you what.” He leaned across the passenger seat as he drove. “I’m guessing if I search you, I find some serious cash,” he said. “That might fill in the gaps for me as to where exactly you’ve been. It’s what we might call evidence.”
She laughed as she continued marching up the street, her heels clacking at her side. “You don’t want to do that, Officer.”
“And why is that, sweetheart?”
“It’d be a big mistake on your end.”
“That so?”
She nodded, took a drag, kept walking.
He threw the car into park and got out, slamming the door shut behind him. “Get up against the wall,” he said, pointing at the concrete side of a grocery store whose doors were shuttered with iron gates.
She sighed a cloud of smoke from her nostrils and put out the cigarette beneath her bare foot. “You sure about this? You still got a chance to turn tail and get the hell out of here. If you’re not as dumb as you look, I’d suggest you do so. Never know who might be listening in.”
“Up against the wall,” he said louder. “I don’t think your pimp is coming to your rescue anytime soon.”
She laughed without making a sound as she folded her arms behind her back. He gripped her shoulders, pushed her closer to the wall, and began patting her down. His hands lingered over the fabric of her skirt. He dug his fingers into her narrow pockets and withdrew only a condom wrapper that he let fall to the sidewalk.
“If you’re looking for the cash, you’ll want to look up there, Officer.” She nodded at her breasts and turned over her shoulder to face him directly. “In the bra. Don’t you dare linger. That would be the end of you.”
There was a challenge in her stare.
He reached over her shoulder, between her breasts. His fingers folded over a wad of cash. He withdrew it and held the fold of bills against the light. Fives and tens, the usual suspects. Crumpled and warm with sweat.
“Oh my God, would you look at that?” She did a little schoolgirl giggle. “You found my grocery money.”
“This’ll buy you a whole lot of groceries. What about the drugs?” he asked, looking back at the street, which remained empty. “I know some of your johns probably like to pay with dope. You don’t tell me where you keep it, I’ll have to look around myself.”
“No drugs.”
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Officer.”
“I’m going to conduct a searc
h.”
“Yeah, you’ll conduct a search all right.”
“It’s called being a good cop.”
“And that’s called an oxymoron. And that’s what you are. An oxy-moron.”
He thrust her against the brick, one hand passing over her skirt while the other held her neck, the ligaments like harp strings in his fingers. “Tell me where you keep the dope,” he breathed into her ear.
She whispered something, her voice muted by his fingers around her throat. He relaxed his grip enough for her to speak. “Don’t make me do this to you,” she said.
He tightened his grip again and pushed her face against the wall, his free hand checking her waistband for dope, his fingers grazing her bare and cold skin. He felt her pull away beneath him, breaking out of his grasp. He clutched at her tighter but it was too late. Her body twisted beneath his, a powerful torque of her hips, followed by blinding pain as she leveled a knee directly into his groin. His world went black and quiet and he collapsed to his knees. Coughing, whispering, praying to the sidewalk just below him, strands of spit dripping from the corners of his mouth as the known world spun around him like hands on a dizzied clock.
He regained his footing with lung-heaving coughs. “You just made a big mistake.”
Surprisingly, she had not run. She stood before him, smiling. “I was about to say the same to you.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Help!”
He grabbed her arms and jerked them violently behind her back. He heard a hollow pop—one or both of her shoulders having dislocated from the socket. A scream and cry escaped her clenched teeth. He slapped his handcuffs around her upended wrists, clicking the cuffs as tightly as he could until the metal bit into the skin. He pushed her forward, opened the back door of the cruiser, and jammed her into the back seat.
He looked out over the empty street. He gathered a few calming breaths before rounding the hood and lowering himself into the driver’s seat. The station was only four blocks away. He would hover over her as she went through processing. All the street whores stuck to the same script. Their arresting officer tried to get handsy with them, they said. And when she would level this particular claim against him, he would laugh and nod at whatever poor soul was sitting at the front desk, and they would understand that this was just another lie among the countless lies they had heard already from the denizens of this otherwise wonderful city. And when she said it, it really would be a lie. Because he had only been doing his job. He was looking for money obtained illegally, he was searching for illegal drugs in the usual places. He was doing his job. He was a good cop.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 12
