Windy City Blues

by Marc Krulewitch

  —

  Standing in the shower, I had no recollection of driving or parking the car. Only after I dressed and deposited my blood-spattered clothing into the alley Dumpster, did I look at my watch and realize almost two hours had passed since I had witnessed a murder and not reported it to the police.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t call me,” Kalijero said over the phone. “Go down to the crime scene and file a report—now! What the hell were you waiting for?”

  “A man’s skull and brains just erupted all over me. I’m not quite as seasoned as you.”

  “Did those busboys see this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they went back to work before the shooting. Or maybe exploding heads are no big deal in Juarez.”

  “Why the hell you would go to that alley—”

  “I take chances! Yeah, I know. And that makes me a bad detective.”

  “It makes you a stupid investigator. It didn’t occur to you that Robertson was setting you up? That maybe that bullet was meant for your head?”

  Of course it occurred to me, but Robertson’s pathetic veneer exploited the ember of goodwill that still glowed in my spirit. My real failure was not realizing Robertson was just a pawn like Jones.

  43

  I ducked under the yellow tape sealing off the alley and told the patrol officer I had witnessed the murder. He told me to stay put then walked to his sergeant, who was interviewing the two busboys through an interpreter. A crime scene photographer took pictures of the area from all angles. Investigators in white jumpsuits painstakingly examined the alley. The sergeant glanced toward me then said something to the officer who then headed over to where several people stood near the body. From this group a husky plainclothes man about forty with a flattop emerged, holding a notepad. He followed the officer back to me.

  “I’m Detective Horowitz. You say you witnessed the shooting?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got some ID?”

  I handed over my investigator’s license. Horowitz peered at the card then chuckled and shook his head. Contempt glowed from his square face while he scribbled in his notepad.

  “What were you doing in the alley?”

  “Conducting an interview.”

  “You told the victim to meet you here?”

  “No. I got a tip that he would be here.”

  “Who gave you the tip?”

  “Robertson, at Revenue.”

  “How did he know Jones would be here?”

  “Ask him!”

  Horowitz dropped his arms and looked at me. “You got a problem?”

  “You haven’t asked me how the deceased was involved in my investigation.”

  “We know the deceased. And I heard about your investigation.”

  “Really? I guess you boys don’t give a damn about Jones or you would’ve had him under surveillance.”

  “Did you lure him into the alley, Landau? Were you trying to buy drugs from him?”

  “That’s bullshit! Kalijero can vouch for me.”

  “Kalijero?” Horowitz said. “Kalijero was here, too?”

  “No—”

  “Then what’s he vouching for?”

  “I meant as a character reference.”

  Horowitz pretended to think about it. “Oh, you mean he’ll tell me you’re not lying. But how would he know if he wasn’t here?”

  Horowitz’s smirk begged a fuck you! but I stood fast. “The bullet came from behind me. The shooter must’ve been on one of these roofs.”

  “Thanks, but we got that part.”

  “So I was right! And I also think the victim’s lack of head might mean high velocity rifle? Fragmentation bullet?”

  “You’re a crackerjack investigator.”

  “Thanks, but I get the feeling you don’t respect my profession.”

  “I take it back. You’re better than crackerjack!”

  “Cool! Feel free to call anytime.” I turned to leave.

  “One more thing,” Horowitz said. “You know, it’s kind of weird you waited over two hours to report the murder.”

  “Sorry about that. I just assumed real detectives like you would’ve figured it all out by now.”

  —

  Despite the complications Jones’s death posed, not knowing how Jack got Lada’s phone number bothered me more. I knew a discussion with Tamar made sense and not only because of our fight that morning. From my apartment, I called and left a message. Then I called Palmer, left a message, and wondered if anyone answered their damn phone anymore.

  Pitch-black at six-thirty, and a few drops splattered on the window. Late October settled over my forehead, weighed on my eyes. I leaned the recliner back and watched grotesque images float past. Jones pacing around the alley, waiting for crack, then lying headless in the alley; Robertson strapped to a gear meshed with a larger gear in a mysterious machine full of rotating cogs; and Konigson lying shirtless on his side while a litter of miniature suits nursed on hidden teats. From all this, a murder will be solved.

  My phone vibrated—I got tired of Beethoven. Palmer sounded almost giddy. “I must show you what I’ve figured out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How they’re doing it. How they’re moving all that money around.”

  “We know about the Department of Revenue cleaners.”

  “That’s just one aspect, Jules. It’s much more involved.”

  By “involved” I assumed Palmer meant “complicated,” a warning he may have strayed from the path of Gelashvili’s murder. An hour later, I opened the door to Palmer, holding a folder and a bottle of wine.

  “What’s happened?” Palmer said. “You look dismayed.”

  “Not sleeping well,” I said, seeing no reason to mention the vaporization of a man’s head.

  “It’s just a French Colombard,” Palmer said, referring to the wine. I pretended to understand the significance of his statement.

  Palmer sat on my couch and began fingering through sheets of papers in the folder, carefully examining each one before laying them down in specific locations. I returned from the kitchen with two glass coffee mugs and sat next to him. Flow charts of rectangles and arrows covered half the coffee table.

  “There’s some serious involvement in those charts,” I said. Palmer looked at me with a puzzled expression and then noticed the mugs. “Forgive me,” I said. “I don’t drink anything that requires a stemmed glass.”

  He sort of smiled. “So you see, this involves a trust and an IBC. One country hosts the trust while another country hosts the IBC….”

  Palmer lost me five minutes into an explanation of international business corporations and foreign grantor trusts, but I was glad to be in his company if only for the pleasure of watching a man thoroughly enjoy himself talking about what most mortals would consider an impenetrable forest of arcane financial tactics.

  “…And believe it or not, a small business is defined as having one hundred or fewer owners!” Palmer burst into hysterical laughter, creating an image I never would have imagined or believed possible from this sober son of Manhattan royalty. Maybe it was the wine combined with some repressed emotion from Jones’s murder, but his unexpected merriment took on an absurd quality that provoked my own fits of giggling.

  When we both had settled down, I said, “This is all interesting—”

  “But what the heck does it have to do with Gelashvili’s murder?” he finished for me.

  I waited for an answer but realized Palmer did not have one. He leaned back on the couch and cradled the mug on his stomach.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am obsessed with the financial facets of evil motivations. But this information may be useless to you.” He emptied the mug then held it out for a refill.

  “How are you getting this useless information? We’re dealing with private companies, right?”

  “Information on private companies is available, although they don’t make it easy to find. You have to know where to look—or who to ask. And I�
�m well connected, as you might imagine.” Palmer sensed my concern. “Don’t fret over me, Jules. I take pride in my ability to remain inconspicuous.”

  His last comment sounded naïve. I wanted to remind him that he was connected to Konigson who was connected to Elon who was connected to gangsters, and that investigating the source of money was inherently conspicuous. Instead, I reminded Palmer of our first conversation when he confirmed how odd it seemed that Konigson would call the city editor to kill a story. Then I updated him on my conversation with Marta Soboroff and the love letters to her sister, Lada. “I want to believe that if these letters were worth killing for, there should be an obvious clue about who wrote them.”

  “If you want to show them to me, perhaps I will see something that only an outsider to the intimate details of the case might see.”

  Cloaked in Palmer’s intellectual timbre, the simplicity of his suggestion had a power of its own. I retrieved the letters and watched Palmer’s face as he read to the end of the first letter and then looked at me with a broad grin. Palmer skimmed the next letter and the next, continuing to do so with each subsequent letter while maintaining his grin.

  I said, “Yes, they’re not very imaginative, just the same letter written in a slightly different way.”

  “You really don’t see it, do you?” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

  “I don’t see it. Tell me.”

  “Clearly, you never studied German, otherwise you would have known the name ‘Konigson’ is a derivation of the German word Königssohn, which means ‘prince’ or ‘king’s son.’ ”

  Palmer’s revelation managed to suppress the shock waves of Jones’s murder and give me something to smile about.

  “Perhaps it’s time I share these letters with the author—just to gauge a reaction.”

  Palmer lifted his glass and said, “Cheers.”

  44

  “Maybe you were right,” she said.

  I thought I had been dreaming except I was holding a cell phone to my ear.

  “What?” I asked. Only when I sat up and saw the red numbers on the clock showing four-forty-five A.M. did the voice register. “Tamar?” I heard the sound of aluminum trays rattling on baking racks.

  “Uncle Gigi. Maybe you were right.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not now. I have to go.”

  She could’ve waited until at least seven to hang up on me. I turned off the phone and drifted back to sleep thinking her call had been a hopeful sign—of something.

  —

  A few hours later, from across the street of the Kutaisi Georgian Bakery, I watched an exhausted Tamar fill orders for the last customers of the late-morning rush. She glanced at the large clock above the oven, untied her apron, then disappeared into the prep room. I exited my car and waited for her outside the entrance. A frosty mist blanketed the city. I shivered in my jacket, unprepared for the damp cold. A few minutes later, she emerged from the back and made her way out the door. Scrunched low in her wool coat from the chill, she walked, oblivious that I stood in her path.

  “That was you who called me early this morning, right?”

  Tamar searched my face. She looked as if she’d been up all night.

  “I need coffee,” she said, then we walked in silence to a coffee shop in the next block.

  After we sat, I said, “Too damn cold for October.”

  Tamar sipped her mocha latte. “There’s a white van often parked in the alley outside the bakery. I’ve seen it since the first day I started working there. The cargo area has no windows. Sometimes they leave the back door open. Benches run along both sides. I didn’t think much of it at first. Sometimes I’d see hairbrushes and makeup kits lying on the floor.”

  “Is it the same white van that double-parks in front?”

  “Yeah. If someone’s parked in the alley, he’ll do that.”

  “Any idea what the letters IIPD stand for?”

  Tamar looked squint-eyed at me for a moment. “I’ve seen it somewhere. But I don’t know what it means.”

  “A patch on the van driver’s jacket and a decal on the windshield.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. He hangs out in the alley smoking. Anyway, one time I saw a pistol lying on the floor of the cargo area. I started asking questions.” Tamar held the cup to her mouth with both hands.

  “Who did you ask?”

  “First, I asked the other Georgians who worked in the kitchen or did whatever. Some said they didn’t know and acted like it was nothing out of the ordinary. Others just shook their heads and said nothing, as if I had asked something taboo. I convinced myself not to worry about it. But every once in a while the van wouldn’t be there, but some girls would be hanging around. They usually had some kind of travel bag with them. I started chatting with them. They were young Russian women, maybe eighteen or twenty years old. They seemed to think they were getting jobs in hotels. Luxury hotels. They even knew all the names. Hilton, Four Seasons, Park Hyatt, Fairmont.”

  “So they didn’t seem nervous or scared?”

  “No, they seemed excited. Like they were on an adventure. The last group, a few months ago, reminded me of happy little kids.”

  “You asked Gigi about this?”

  “He told me he had friends who sponsor people to immigrate here. Once they’re here, the sponsors network with people like Gigi to find jobs, just like he helped my family. But they couldn’t all work in the bakery, he said.”

  “Did you ask him specifically about jobs in fancy hotels?”

  Tamar looked at me, then looked away. “I was going to call all the nice hotels and ask if they had any women employees from Russia. But I didn’t.”

  “Because—?”

  “I just told you!” Tamar said, annoyed. “I convinced myself not to worry about it.” I kept my mouth shut, to let the anger linger. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just—I had no reason not to believe Gigi. I knew him only as a kind man.”

  “Even though they were all young Russian women.”

  “They were immigrants, just like I was an immigrant and all the people in the bakery were immigrants.”

  “Georgian immigrants.”

  Tamar put her cup down, turned sideways in her chair. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about politics. Of course, I was naïve. There’s no escaping politics. It follows you wherever you go, whether you realize it or not. You’re not just an immigrant; you’re Georgian. You’re not just Georgian; you’re Abkhazian or South Ossetian or Ajarian or from some other region nobody has ever heard of where Georgians murder each other.”

  “What are Gigi’s politics?”

  “After our conversation yesterday, I cornered some of my coworkers who have known Gigi since childhood. They told me his story—that he believed in a united Georgia under one government. Many of his fellow Abkhazians wanted to be independent. So Georgians started killing each other, with Russia helping the separatists win the civil war. Gigi was kicked out of Abkhazia, his ancestral home. He blames the Russians more than he blames his fellow Georgians.”

  “Making some cash while taking revenge. How do you think he feels about Russians paying him so they can enslave these women?” She didn’t answer, and the conversation needed to be steered back to Jack’s death, which meant having to tell Tamar about another murder. “Remember Jack’s girlfriend, Lada? I met her sister the other day.”

  Tamar rotated in her chair to face me. “Jack never mentioned a sister. How did you meet her?”

  “She wanted to talk to me about Jack.”

  “So Lada must know Jack’s dead. Is she still in Russia?”

  “How did Jack get Lada’s phone number?”

  Tamar gave me a strange look. “I assume she gave it to him.”

  “The sister’s name is Marta. She came here first, thinking she had a good job in a hotel. Instead, she was forced into prostitution. But she managed to escape, thanks to the generosity of a kind client.”

  “Wait a second. I remember a Russian
woman named Marta working at the bakery for a while!”

  “That’s right. After she got rescued from the prostitution world, Gigi magically discovered her working in a laundry and invited her to work at the bakery. Small world, huh?”

  “She was tall and beautiful. Gigi always wanted her up front, working the counter.”

  “One day Gigi asks her to help with his friend’s immigration charity. She was to give assurances to the young Russian women that everything was going to be fine. She still hadn’t made the connection between Gigi and her enslavement as a prostitute.”

  Tamar nodded her head. “I kind of remember that she would leave at odd times to run errands for Gigi.”

  “So one day, just like in the movies, a fashion photographer walks into the bakery and asks Marta if she wants to be a model.”

  “And off she goes to make a lot of money. Good for her.”

  “Except Gigi is angry about her leaving. I’m assuming he thinks she’s ungrateful, or that she owes him something. Time passes. Marta makes the mistake of asking Gigi to help bring Lada over from Russia. She thought showing up with a bunch of money would make things right. She was wrong.”

  Tamar closed her eyes. “Oh, my god. Jack was in love with a woman forced to work as a prostitute?”

  “How did you miss it? The fancy cars, the fur coats, the jewelry, Lada half his age.”

  “I was thinking how happy he was, that she was probably the daughter of a rich oil family, that she wanted an intelligent, handsome older man to take care of her. Why would I have ever thought my cousin would knowingly date a prostitute?”

  I supposed her explanation sounded plausible since the girls she had seen were new arrivals in ordinary clothing. Why should I assume Tamar knew how prostitutes dressed once they started making money?