Trouble in Mind

by Michael Wiley

  ‘No rent? What a guy.’

  ‘Guapo too,’ she said.

  ‘Everyone in Chicago loves Mr Stevens,’ Francisca said.

  ‘I’ve heard that before.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kelson sat in his car outside Francisca Cabon’s apartment and added to his notes.

  Elena – roommate

  Hugo Nuñez – ‘Chilito’

  Esteban Herrera

  Chango

  Dominick Stevens – Apt./gift/why?

  Then he drove through a steady rain to the Stevens Group building. He parked on the street and ran up the slick sidewalk. The wild, wet face staring at him from the mirrored door startled him, but he went inside and crossed a black marble floor to the reception desk. A wide-shouldered man with a soft voice said, ‘May I help you?’

  ‘You got a towel?’

  ‘No, sir.’ He looked about twenty but had one of those faces that you can’t tell.

  ‘Then would you call up to Mr Stevens and say Sam Kelson is here to see him?’

  The man stared at him, as if assessing his state of mind.

  ‘Please?’ Kelson said.

  ‘You’re the one the cops chased off two days ago?’

  ‘Please call Mr Stevens and let him make up his own mind.’

  The man did. When he hung up, he said, ‘Mr Stevens is busy right now.’

  Kelson said, ‘Call back and tell him—’

  ‘Busy means he don’t want me bothering him with pointless calls.’ He straightened himself in his chair. He was a big man.

  ‘Tell him it’s about Francisca Cabon.’

  Something fierce appeared on the man’s face. ‘How do you know Francisca?’

  ‘I just came from her apartment. How do you know her?’

  ‘I’ve always known her,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah? What’s your name?’

  ‘Esteban.’ He offered it as if it was a challenge.

  ‘Herrera?’

  ‘Now, how do you know that?’

  ‘Francisca told me about you.’

  The man started to say something but instead picked up the phone again and dialed it. ‘He’s asking about Francisca,’ he said to the mouthpiece. When he put down the phone, he said, ‘You can go up – fourth floor.’

  ‘You’re a happy family here, aren’t you?’ Kelson said. ‘But I don’t understand, what’s Dominick Stevens’s interest in you?’

  ‘I’ve worked here since I was fifteen,’ he said. ‘He kicked me and my mom out of our apartment and gave me a job.’

  ‘You took a job from a man who evicted you?’

  ‘My mom was a bum and didn’t pay rent.’

  When the elevator doors opened at the fourth floor, Dominick Stevens, dressed in a closely tailored charcoal-gray suit, was waiting for Kelson. He led him to an office with a large steel-and-glass desk and big windows that looked out at Division Street. He closed the door and said, ‘Why shouldn’t I call the police?’

  ‘Because they might ask the same questions I have,’ Kelson said.

  ‘And what are those?’

  ‘Why do you have the friend of a gangbanger drug dealer like Alejandro Rodriguez manning your front desk?’

  ‘I knew Esteban a long time before I heard of Alejandro Rodriguez.’

  ‘I’ll bet he can get all the party drugs you and your rich pals want on the weekends.’

  ‘I’ll bet you have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Stevens walked to the other side of the desk. ‘Esteban’s mother was an addict and a prostitute. She was also one of my tenants in the first building I owned. I tried to work with her. When I kicked them out, that damn kid helped carry the mattresses to the curb. You want to know what guilt feels like? I talked to Esteban, and he impressed me. So I gave him an after-school job, and when he finished high school, I hired him full-time. The kid has problems – a possession arrest, a breaking and entering – but he’s always done right by me. When you got shot, I could help his friend’s girlfriend, Francisca, and so I did.’

  ‘No wonder everyone in the city loves you. You steal from your own pocket and give to the poor.’

  ‘Did you see where she lives? It’s crumbling. That apartment was no gift. She watches the building, and if anyone breaks in, she lets me know. Saves on a security service.’

  ‘So you aren’t Robin Hood – you’re self-serving?’

  ‘If you keep that up, you can explain yourself to Detective Peters. I’m practical, but I do good when I can. Agreeing to talk to you instead of kicking you down the stairs is another example – if you can handle the truth.’

  ‘I can always handle the truth,’ Kelson said. ‘Why didn’t you tell Peters about Francisca when he came two days ago?’

  ‘I did tell him. Apparently, he didn’t let you know. I thought my connection to her might give you a reason to come after me.’

  ‘That would be a dumb reason to want to hurt someone.’

  ‘I understand you suffered … some impairment.’

  ‘Sure, a hole in the head. But nothing that makes me stupid or violent.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t know that, would I?’

  ‘I have the sense that for a young guy you know a lot. But, look, I got set up for two killings—’

  ‘That’s what Detective Peters says you say. It’s also what I saw in the news.’

  ‘The people who did it left big holes in the setup. If they were smart enough to set me up the way they did, they should’ve been smart enough to cover the holes. They wanted to knock me off balance, but they also wanted me out of jail – making trouble. The thing is, when they sent me after you, they didn’t leave any holes. They couldn’t know I would call Peters and tell him I was coming here, and so they must’ve thought I would get to you.’

  ‘But as you say, you aren’t violent.’

  ‘Almost everyone who knows who I am thinks of me as the guy who killed a seventeen-year-old in a gunfight. You thought I’d come to hurt you when you scurried out two days ago. Peters is half convinced I killed a couple of pharmacists because I’m out of my mind. Whoever sent me after you probably thought they could make me flip out. I flip, but I don’t flip that way – yet.’

  ‘They wanted you to hurt me?’

  ‘I don’t know what they wanted. But at least they wanted me to get to you. That means they see us the same way. They’re screwing with me. They sent me to screw with you.’

  Stevens gave him a tolerant smile. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of Alejandro Rodriguez. Bicho. He’s the only link between us. I know what I did to piss them off about him, but I don’t know what you did.’

  ‘I never met the boy. I’ve helped his girlfriend and the baby. That shouldn’t make me a target.’

  ‘Whatever you did, you can expect them to come at you again.’

  The smile. ‘Just as long as they don’t send you to do the job.’

  ‘Since I got booted from the department, I pick my own jobs.’

  ‘Next time one of them points you toward my office, take a detour, all right? We don’t want to bump into each other too much. I think we’ll both be happier if we don’t.’

  So Kelson rode down in the elevator but, before going back out into the rain, stopped at the front desk. Esteban Herrera said, ‘You get what you came for?’

  ‘Stevens seems like a good man.’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘Do you know how I can get in touch with Hugo Nuñez and someone called Chango?’

  Herrera gave him a hard look but said, ‘Chango’s at Marion. Eight to ten for selling bombita.’

  ‘Heroin? How long’s he been there?’

  ‘Three months. He was in Cook County for ten before that.’

  ‘How about Nuñez?’

  ‘You don’t want to talk to Hugo. You might think you do, but you don’t.’

  ‘I hear there’s not much to him. You call him Chilito.’

  ‘I don’t call him that. No one does to his face if they want to stay alive. You know
how people worry about big dogs but it’s the little ones that get nasty? That’s Hugo.’

  ‘I thought you, Bicho, Chango, and Hugo were all friends.’

  ‘I don’t know where you heard that. I don’t talk about my friends. Hugo was more like Bicho’s guy. I do my own thing. I stay clean.’

  ‘Except when you’re getting busted.’

  Herrera’s grin was unapologetic. ‘Yeah, except for that.’

  ‘Where can I find Hugo?’

  ‘If you really want to – and I’m telling you that you don’t – try Bomboleo on Huron. He’s there most nights, drinking and eating and dancing.’

  ‘Look for the short guy?’

  ‘Look for the meanest hijo de puta in the place.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  That afternoon, Kelson drove to Sue Ellen’s school and parked outside of the pick-up lane. It was Nancy’s day with her, but Kelson wanted to see her, if only from a distance, as she bounded out with her friends. ‘No harm in that,’ he said to the man in the mirror. He waited until the last of the kids left the building, but Sue Ellen never came, and he didn’t see Nancy’s car. Maybe Nancy picked her up early for an appointment – the kind of thing they once would’ve discussed at the breakfast table but now left unmentioned in their separate lives. ‘Bummer,’ he said, and he drove to his apartment.

  As the kittens played with one of his socks, he dialed Nancy’s cell number.

  ‘Did you take Sue Ellen from school early today?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve started her with a therapist,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Are you really asking that?’

  ‘I think we’re handling this well,’ he said. ‘I think she is.’

  ‘Pull your head out of your butt. She cries herself to sleep every night.’

  ‘Not when she stays at my place,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t say she prefers to be with you.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said.

  ‘How did you even know I took her out early?’

  ‘I swung by her school to watch her coming out.’

  Nancy barely contained her anger. ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘What?’ he said, and after she hung up on him, ‘What?’ again.

  For a long time, he watched the rain falling outside his window, graying the city. Then he took a nap but jerked awake after he dreamed he crept behind Bicho in an alley, held a gun to his ribs, and pulled the trigger.

  The sky outside was dark, and so he made dinner for himself, Payday, and Painter’s Lane. Then he pulled a chair to his window, turned off the lights, and listened to the rain whisper against the glass. The lives of strangers in strange apartments shined from windows in the building across the street – TVs flickering, shapes of bodies moving – but the rain smeared and blurred the details of their lives. ‘Probably for the best,’ Kelson said.

  He sat until ten o’clock, when the lights in the apartments started to go out, and then he got up, took a shower, and dressed again. He strapped his KelTec into an ankle holster, popped a Percocet, and went back down to the street.

  Bomboleo occupied the bottom of an old eight-story redbrick factory building. The club served white-tablecloth dinners from a Latin menu before converting the dining room to a dance floor where a DJ blasted music until early morning.

  The valet looked at Kelson’s Dodge Challenger with hungry eyes.

  Kelson said, ‘Don’t even think it,’ and handed him the key.

  Inside, the women wore skintight dresses, and the men’s hair was stiff with gel. In the main room, the party was just getting started. The DJ switched between English and Spanish as he called the crowd to dance. As Kelson crossed to the bar, the room went dark, and then a mambo tune blasted from the ceiling speakers and a strobe light made the people jerk toward the dance floor.

  Behind the bar, two blonde women and a bleach-blond man in a black silk shirt mixed purple and green cocktails, topping them with sliced fruit.

  When the man saw Kelson waiting, he shouted over the music, ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘Grape Kool-Aid and a cookie,’ Kelson said.

  The bartender said, ‘Huh?’

  ‘Hugo Nuñez?’

  As if used to people asking, the bartender pointed his thumb at a corridor leading from the side of the room and said, ‘VIP.’

  So Kelson crossed the dance floor and went into a hallway lit only by dim, ankle-level bulbs. It took him to a door that he expected to be locked or guarded but wasn’t.

  He stepped inside.

  A very short man sat at the head of a table with twelve other men and women. The short one wore a white suit that he could have stripped from Bicho’s body in the coffin. Despite what Esteban Herrera said about him, he had a pleasant smile. The women at the table were young and pretty and looked extremely stoned. The men were tightly wound and kept their sharp eyes on the stoned women, as if they would keep flicking pills at them, like peanuts at pet monkeys, until they kicked them out of bed the next morning. A waiter stood near a wall, ready to answer any needs.

  Dishes – mostly empty – covered the table from a feast the group had just finished – glass bowls with the remnants of octopus and crab ceviche, a platter with stray pieces of a blood sausage, a dozen stripped skewers with fat clinging to them, the head and feet of a suckling pig. ‘So much for the zoo,’ Kelson said.

  None of them paid attention. Maybe they thought he’d come to clear the table or offer another roast pig.

  So he went to the short man and said, ‘I hear I shouldn’t call you Chilito.’

  Nuñez blinked at him. ‘Whoever told you that gave you good advice.’ The white in his left eye was bloodshot solid. ‘Yes, that’s advice you can live by.’ He spoke in clear, accentless English.

  The bloody eye transfixed Kelson. ‘Are you touching yourself with dirty fingers?’ he said.

  Nuñez gave him a stony stare. The others at the table quieted.

  Kelson said, ‘My dad got that sometimes in the corner of one of his eyes. He said tension did it – a bad day at work, a fight with my mom. He died of a heart attack. I don’t know if it was related – blood pressure or something.’

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ Nuñez said.

  That snapped Kelson out of it. ‘My name’s—’

  ‘I know who you are. You’re the one that killed Bicho. And you were on television yesterday.’ Now he had an accent.

  ‘That’s because of your friend Bicho again.’

  ‘Bicho was too big for his pants.’

  ‘His britches.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘Britches,’ Kelson said. ‘It’s “too big for—”’

  ‘Do I look like I care what it is?’

  ‘No, you look like a little guy who’s acting tough by dressing in a shiny jacket and lowering his voice an octave below where it would naturally fall.’

  One of the women took in a sharp breath. The waiter moved toward the door to the corridor.

  Nuñez said, ‘I could shoot you in the head.’

  ‘It’s been done before,’ Kelson said. ‘No glory in it. Like the second man up Everest.’

  Nuñez narrowed his eyes, which made the bloodshot one look all black. ‘I hear Bicho took out a piece of your brain. Like a doctor. He gave you a lobotomy.’

  Two of the men laughed.

  Nuñez liked the laughter. ‘I also hear they used to do lobotomies with icepicks. A bullet’s quicker. We could try the old-fashioned way since you disrespect me in front of my friends.’ He nodded at the waiter. ‘You got an icepick in the kitchen, Juan?’

  ‘No, Señor Nuñez,’ the waiter said.

  But Nuñez didn’t care about icepicks either. He said to Kelson, ‘You think you’re smarter than me?’

  ‘I think most people are smarter than you,’ Kelson said, ‘but you’re meaner and littler than the rest of us, and that counts for something.’

  ‘You say st
upid things,’ Nuñez said.

  ‘You ask stupid questions.’

  That made Nuñez break into a wide-mouthed smile full of mean little teeth. ‘Bring me some knives,’ he said to the waiter. ‘A bucket of them.’ Then, to Kelson, ‘What does a smart question sound like?’

  Kelson said, ‘Here’s one. Are you setting me up to get back at me for Bicho?’

  Nuñez gave a rapid shake of the head. ‘No, that’s stupid. Why would I do this? I’m grateful to you for taking care of Bicho.’

  ‘How’s that? I thought you were friends.’

  ‘He was a pest. I didn’t trust him.’

  ‘Because he was as tough as you?’

  Nuñez said to the waiter, ‘Do you think I am joking about the knives?’

  ‘I don’t know, Señor.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a joke. But when I ask for something, get it. To be on the safe side.’ Then, to Kelson, ‘No, I didn’t trust him because he didn’t answer to me. I trust only men who do what I tell them – like Juan here, who will get me knives next time I ask, even if I am joking.’

  ‘Who did he answer to?’ Kelson asked.

  Nuñez showed his mean little teeth again. ‘No, no, I don’t do that. There are men who are tougher than I am – not many, but there are men. They know who they are, and I know who I am. That’s enough. Maybe one of these men is going after you. I don’t know. All I know is I was eating a nice dinner with my friends, and you came in and interrupted us. You don’t want me for an enemy.’

  ‘You’ve always been my enemy,’ Kelson said. ‘I used to work in narcotics. Any man like you—’

  ‘Enough,’ Nuñez said. He didn’t raise his voice, and his accent seemed to melt away again. ‘You can leave now. You can walk out the door and straight to the exit. Do not look back. Do not think of looking back. Or I can have my friends remove you. I advise you to leave on your own. That’s more advice you can live by.’

  Kelson opened his mouth to reply – he thought he should say something – but no words came to his lips. So he just said, ‘Have a good night, Chilito.’

  But instead of crossing the dance floor to the exit as Nuñez advised, he went back to the bar and signaled the bleach-blond bartender. He handed him a twenty and said, ‘I forgot to thank you.’