Last Dark Place

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “What happened to that little Jew detective?” he asked.

  “Went back to Chicago,” said Parsons.

  Johnstone held up his right hand and showed Parsons his thumb.

  “Looking for the man,” Johnstone said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You aren’t much of a shot,” Johnstone said. “How much you practice?”

  “Couple of times a month.”

  “I was counting on you killing me,” Johnstone said.

  “Sorry,” said Parsons.

  “Hell, I killed that Gower straight off and I’ve never fired a gun before in my life,” said Johnstone. “And I hit him square and dead. And my hand was shaky and my eyesight isn’t all that good anymore.”

  “Next time I’ll be sure to kill you,” Parsons said flatly.

  Johnstone cocked his head and looked at the young detective and asked, “You’re joking with me, right?”

  “Wouldn’t count on that,” said Parsons with a smile. “You’re joking with me, right?”

  “Count on it,” said Johnstone.

  Parsons was silent.

  “Price Is Right is on,” Johnstone said, looking up at the television. The sound was off. “Game channel.”

  “Let’s talk,” Parsons repeated.

  “We’ve been talking.”

  “Let’s talk some more,” said Parsons.

  Johnstone clicked off the television and muttered, “Hell, they’re all long dead anyhow. Watching dead people play games,” he said. “All right, let’s talk.”

  At three minutes after four, which was three minutes after three in Yuma, Mr. Woo sat in the rear showroom of Alexander Pietros’s gallery on Michigan Avenue. The showroom’s steel door, tastefully painted to look as if it were wood, was locked and bolted. Pietros had just ordered his nephew Marcos to bring out a stone carving. The carving, a rough, eyeless human head with a long face, was on a cart, resting on purple velvet, a touch Mr. Woo found condescending.

  Marcos pushed the cart noiselessly in front of the old man, who nodded. Alexander Pietros nodded, too, and made a twisting motion with his right hand. Marcos responded by slowly turning the cart so Mr. Woo could examine the carving from all sides.

  No one said what it was or where it had come from. No one had to. Mr. Woo knew that it was Mesopotamian and had been stolen during the war in Iraq from a museum in Baghdad. Its value was in its age and history and not its beauty. To possess it was to have in one’s power a relic that proved human history was vulnerable to the furtive fingers of a thief. To possess it was to say that one had it in his power to preserve or erase a small piece of the past.

  Fingers could reach out to protect it, worship it, want to preserve it to prove their own ties to a history they considered ancient and part of a lineage far longer than the Book of Numbers. Or hands could lift it high and dash it against a floor shattering it into bits, pieces, shards that meant nothing.

  Woo wanted the rather homely piece not to destroy it, but to know that he could destroy it if he wished. He would dream of curators and archeologists reaching out to him as he stood on a platform with the worn carving on a fragile pedestal from which he could push it to crushed powder on a marble floor.

  That dream was worth much to Woo, who had been born a thief and a beggar in Shanghai. He was prepared to pay whatever was required to own it.

  El Perro fingered his scar with one hand and looked down at a white Ping-Pong ball with the letter B and the number 2 on it. The Ping-Pong ball rested on a turned-over Dr Pepper bottle cap.

  El Perro adjusted his cast and sling and dropped B2 into the wire basket in front of him. He was well enough to call numbers tonight. He would have the cast cut off before doing so even though he had been told that it had to stay on for at least another two weeks. Everyone knew the Twin Dragons had shot El Perro. He wanted to show them that a Chinese bullet meant nothing to him.

  Dr. Luis Algado would come in an hour. That would give El Perro time to flex his fingers and will himself to ignore the pain he anticipated but didn’t fear.

  From the stage in the large hall on North Avenue he looked down past the tables as Martin Lozada Cruz came in, closing the doors behind him, and hurried forward.

  “Two of them at a place in Little Vietnam,” said Cruz.

  “Which ones?” asked El Perro.

  “I don’t know their names,” said Cruz. “But they are Twin Dragons. They are with girls. You want them dead?”

  “Before bingo.”

  Cruz nodded and turned to leave.

  “Martin,” El Perro called. “You know it is a good thing to be alive.”

  “Sí,” said Martin, turning.

  “But being alive don’t mean shit if you don’t take chances,” said El Perro. “You don’t take chances, how do you know you’re alive.”

  Sí,” said Martin Cruz with a smile, though he wasn’t sure if he understood what El Perro had said.

  As he left the hall, Cruz heard the turning of the basket of numbered Ping-Pong balls behind him.

  At three minutes after four, Parker Liao sat in the backseat of a black Mazda. The windows of the Mazda were tinted and dark. The car was parked on Argyle Street across from a Vietnamese restaurant called Saigon Flower.

  Besides the driver, two other young Chinese, all wearing dark silk suits with compatible but not matching ties, sat waiting.

  “You are certain?” asked Liao.

  “Certain,” the driver said. “The Puerto Rican worms saw Chao, Winn, and the two girls enter.”

  Liao said nothing.

  He was sure they would come. The Puerto Ricans were stupid, brave but stupid. They had been led into a trap thinking they were the ones who were trapping. The double turn appealed to Liao. In the next hour, the crazy Puerto Rican would know he had been beaten in this battle.

  Liao would rub El Perro’s scarred face in the defeat.

  He had no illusions about El Perro giving up. He did not want him to give up. He wanted him humiliated and on his knees in front of him.

  The Puerto Rican wouldn’t beg for his life. He had pride. It was not quite honor, but it was an animal pride that Liao could appreciate.

  He would let El Perro utter defiance and curses. And then he would cut his throat and have his body dumped on a street in his neighborhood.

  And that would be soon.

  And that would be a very good day.

  At three minutes after four, Blue Berg was strung out and in need of something, anything. Comedy was dead. Easy Dan was dead. Blue was alive, shaking and sitting on a toilet in McDonald’s.

  The stall door was locked. He could hear people come and go. The sound of peeing in a urinal and the flush and rush. The sound of flushing in the next stall.

  Blue’s pants were up, belted. He tried to think. Blue just didn’t believe life was going anywhere but right here and now. Life was a series of flats and blasts and Blue knew how to find the blast that would last, at least a little while.

  Blue looked at his hands. He had kept them in his pockets as much as possible before he washed them in the fountain in the park. He never drank from the fountain. The water came out too low and to get a drink you had to put your lips on the rusting metal spout. Who knew whose mouth had last touched that spout. But he had washed his hands trying to get the blood out.

  Someone washing his hands in the restroom coughed. Blue shivered.

  A lot of the blood had come out when he had washed. Not all but a lot. Now Blue’s hands were just pink.

  He hadn’t looked back when he left his house through the back door. He had heard someone call “police” but he hadn’t looked back. He had run through the back door, gone over the back fence, run around a redbrick house with a swing in the back, run across a street, hidden behind some trash cans for a few minutes, and then run to the park.

  He didn’t want to think about what was in his pocket, but he really had no choice. He could have thrown it away, wiped his fingerprints off and thrown the gun away. He should
have, but he couldn’t. It sat heavy in his pocket, covered by his extra-large blue T-shirt, which had a few spots on it that might be anything, but were certainly blood.

  Staying in the toilet forever was not an option though it wouldn’t hurt to stay here for a few hours more. In those few hours, he could try to think of what to do. Try was the operative word. He had no illusions about succeeding.

  He counted the money in his worn wallet and front pocket: twenty-four dollars and sixty-three cents. Can’t get far on twenty-four dollars and sixty-three cents. Besides, he couldn’t think of anyplace to go except his aunt Henny’s apartment in Palatine. They wouldn’t let him in. He knew that. He could break in through the bathroom window. He had done it many times before, but then what? And how would he get there? His car was still parked in front of the house. Maybe he could steal a car and—

  Knock at the stall door.

  “Someone in there?”

  It was a man. He sounded black. Deep voice. Voice of a preacher, a cop, Mr. Dwight the principal at Lake View High where Blue had gone to school, more or less, for two years. The principal is a pal. That’s how you spell it, pal not ple. Why did he remember that? He didn’t remember fuckin’ much else.

  The stall door rattled.

  “Someone in there?” the man asked again, knocking at the door.

  “Yeah,” Blue managed.

  “Been in there a long time,” came the voice. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Were there any bullets left in the gun? He could take it out, pull the trigger hoping the bullets would go through the stall door. Then he could run. He just sat feeling cold.

  “Well, quit playing with yourself or whatever you’re doing and make it snappy.”

  “Yeah.”

  The man’s footsteps clapped away on the tile floor. Blue could hear the washroom door opened and closed. Blue tried to stand. His legs were weak. He tried again holding on to the side of the stall. This time he made it. He reached for the bolt and realized that he hadn’t the slightest idea of what he was going to do when it swung open.

  At three minutes after four, the mayor of Chicago sat behind his desk drinking a cup of coffee, listening to the traffic outside and the three people across from him who had carefully rehearsed their presentation.

  They were all black. One, Estelle Rives, was a former alderwoman and the leader of the group that had come with a carefully couched demand that something be done about TerrorTown, the area of the South Side where drug gangs ruled the streets, people hid at night, and police, when they had to go there, were less than welcome and sometimes shot.

  “And you have a plan?” the mayor said.

  “We have a plan,” Estelle Rives said, looking at the lean elderly man at her side with a professorial air, thick glasses, and white hair.

  The man, Dr. Frank Roland, handed the mayor a neatly stapled, thin sheaf of paper with a red cover. The mayor took it, put down his coffee, and opened the stapled plan.

  “Bottom line?” the mayor asked, flipping pages and putting the report aside.

  “A substantial increase in financial aid and support for a broad neighborhood voluntary watch group,” Estelle Rives said.

  The mayor picked up a pen and took notes on a yellow lined pad.

  “And?”

  “A special commission composed of active community members to gather information and encourage law-abiding residents to aid in ridding our area of its crime and reputation,” said the third member of the group, a media favorite, the Reverend Karl Harrison.

  “Right,” said the mayor, writing again. He looked up at Estelle Rives. “Anything else?”

  “A substantial increase in the number of African-American police officers in the area, preferably in a task force headed by an experienced African-American police officer.”

  “You have someone in mind,” the mayor said.

  “Detective Hugh Morton,” said Rev. Harrison. The other two nodded their heads.

  The mayor nodded and wrote the name.

  “Anything else I should know before I read the report?”

  “We are holding a press conference in the morning,” Dr. Roland said. “If you have something of substance to have us report to the press, please let us know as soon as possible.”

  All three of the visitors rose and so did the mayor, who leaned over his desk to shake each of their hands.

  “We would appreciate an early response to our report and requests,” said Estelle Rives.

  “I’ll have copies made immediately and given to our people with a strongly worded request for a response by tomorrow,” said the mayor. “Before your press conference.”

  The three visitors left. The mayor looked at his schedule. He had the parks commissioner on for four-thirty. The mayor pushed a button on the keypad by his phone and said, “Find Taradash. Get him here.”

  The mayor’s secretary didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

  The mayor, into his second term, fielding problems with the skill of a seasoned second baseman, sat and looked at the report.

  He knew the name of Hugh Morton. He had personally called the detective early this morning to express his sympathy for what had happened to Morton’s wife. Morton had simply said, “I appreciate that.” No more.

  It was good politics to call the man who was probably the most visible black police officer in Chicago, but give the mayor his due, he was also outraged by what had happened and deeply moved. The mayor had been assured that an arrest was almost certain within a day. And then, a little over an hour earlier, he had received a report saying that two of the suspects in the attack on Denise Morton had been murdered and there was more than a slight chance that the man he had just been asked to appoint to a high-profile task force was a murderer.

  The buzzer on his desk rang.

  “Commissioner Scobiak is here,” his secretary said.

  “Send him in,” said the mayor, sitting behind his desk and picking up his half-full cup of coffee.

  He welcomed the arrival of the parks commissioner. The parks commissioner was a political hack, not terribly bright, in fear of losing his plum and always willing to say “yes” to his honor.

  Scobiak was, in contrast to the three who had just left his office, an easy target. Ten minutes of browbeating the parks commissioner would do wonders for the mayor’s morale.

  At three minutes after four, Lieberman’s grandson Barry sat down in the sanctuary at Temple Mir Shavot, opened the Scriptures to his Torah portion, flattened out the sheets of his Haftorah portion, and laid his neatly typed speech facedown on the table.

  Across from him a weary-looking Rabbi Wass adjusted his glasses, nodded, and said, “Read.”

  Barry chanted, hoping his voice would not pick this moment to break. He lived not in fear of forgetting his portion or his speech or even of making a mistake. He lived in fear of the curse of the changing voice, the curse that had struck Michael Bernstein last year and Larry Tallent the year before.

  Abe had suggested to his grandson that God may well have chosen the thirteenth year of a boy’s life to have his initiation into adult Jewish responsibility for the precise reason that it was the year he was in transition.

  “If it’s not a trial, what does the initiation mean?” Abe had asked.

  “Thirteen is the year Maori boys go alone into the bush and kill a lion,” Abe had said. “At least they did when there were lions to kill. Now they probably tear up a picture of a lion.”

  Barry had nodded.

  “A little fear and anxiety is a healthy thing,” said Abe. “It helps you remember the tribulations of the rite of passage. You follow me?”

  “Yes,” Barry had said.

  “You agree?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry had said.

  “Good,” Lieberman had replied. “Go forth and multiply.”

  “Multiply?”

  “Well,” said Lieberman, “add to the number of the initiated.”

  And now Barry sat across
from Rabbi Wass and chanted. His voice did not break. He barely looked at the pages he had been studying for months. His mind wandered and he thought about the man his grandfather had walked away with at the cemetery, the big man with the disfigured right thumb.

  At three minutes after four, the phone rang at the small Chinese restaurant in the motel on Sheridan Avenue.

  Iris answered. A male voice with an accent identifying him as a second-generation Chinese said, “And how will your child look?”

  Iris held her breath.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Who …?”

  “He or she will have pink Irish cheeks and red hair,” the man said calmly. “Have you ever seen a Chinese with red hair?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “If you intend to threaten me and my child, please do so quickly. We are about to have our first lunch customers.”

  “No threat,” said the man. “Just something to consider. What will your aunts, uncles, cousins think? And what of your husband’s family?”

  “They will love my child,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” the man said. “The question which I believe you have not addressed is, ‘what do you want?’”

  The man hung up and Iris turned to greet the three suited and laughing businessmen, lawyers, regulars, as they nodded and moved to their favorite table.

  Iris carried menus to the three men, deciding that she would not tell her husband about the phone call unless, of course, others followed.

  10

  “YOU’RE LOOKIN’ FOR ME,” the man with the gnarled thumb said.

  People were moving away from Ida Katzman’s grave and toward their cars. Abe had told Bess to wait with Lisa for a few minutes. Bess had followed her husband’s eyes and seen that he was staring at a heavyset man on the other side of Ida Katzman’s grave. The man wore a dark suit and a properly funereal dark tie. With people moving away, the man stood alone, hands folded in front of him, feet slightly apart, eyes fixed on Abe.

  “A few minutes,” she had said, touching his arm. “We’ll be in the car.”

  “Turn on the air.”

  “You said ‘a few minutes.’”