A Bad Night's Sleep

by Michael Wiley

  * * *

  INSIDE, A ROW OF chairs was bolted to the floor and wall. The woman cop told me to sit and one of the men unlocked my handcuffs, then relocked my left wrist to a metal bar. The woman cop said, “Make yourself comfortable,” and the three of them went through a glass office door. The hallway smelled like sweat and ammonia. Guys who’d sat in the chairs before me had scratched gang graffiti into the plastic. I wanted to scratch Help! but figured anyone who ended up on these chairs couldn’t do me much good.

  I fished my phone from my pocket and dialed Larry Weiss’s home number. He worked late and then played cards most nights, usually arriving at his law office between ten and eleven A.M. He would schedule meetings at midnight and had bailed me out more than once at two in the morning without complaining, but he considered calls at dawn an insult.

  His wife answered the phone and handed it to Larry.

  “What?” he said.

  “Hey,” I said, “it’s Joe.”

  “I’m not a fucking banker,” he said. “Call me later.” He hung up.

  I dialed again.

  The phone rang twice and he picked up. “What?” He stretched the word, made it sound like the phone was hurting him.

  I gave him a short version of the night.

  When I finished, he said, “Holy shit, Joe.” The words of a professional.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Don’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “Not till I’m sitting by your side.” He paused. “But you know that already.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “They can hold you for twenty-four hours. Forty-eight, tops.”

  “They should be shaking my hand and pinning ribbons on my shirt. I ended the situation before anyone else got hurt.”

  “Yeah, but you shot a cop.”

  “A thief.”

  “A thief in a uniform.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “How soon can you be here?”

  “I’m stepping into the shower right now. Give me an hour.”

  “Thanks, Larry. I’m counting on you.”

  He let that sit for a moment, said, “Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You might want a real lawyer on this.”

  “You’re real enough for me.”

  “I mean someone good.”

  “You’ve always done the job right,” I said.

  “I’m just saying. Dead cops and all. Someone’s gotta fall. I don’t want it to be you.”

  “I appreciate that, Larry.”

  “Keep your head together.”

  “It’s never been together,” I said. “Why should it be now?”

  We hung up.

  Voices came from behind the door where the woman cop and her partners had disappeared.

  I cupped the phone in my palm.

  The voices faded.

  I dialed my ex-wife Corrine at the landscaping business she ran from a storefront on the Northside. She was there most mornings before the sun rose.

  She had caller ID and she answered, frightened, “What the hell is happening?”

  Two years after the divorce we were working at getting back together. But every time we got close I screwed up and blew us apart. Still, I loved her and she said she loved me. I figured there was love in her fright.

  “You watching the morning news?” I said.

  “They’ve got pictures of you. They’re saying you shot a policeman.”

  “No—well, yeah, but not really.”

  “Where are you?”

  “They’ve got me at the First District Station. Not in lockup. Yet.”

  “Joe, what’s going on?”

  “I’ll need to explain later. It’s a mess. But I need a favor.”

  She’d regretted most of the favors she’d done for me in the past but she said, “Anything.”

  My eleven-year-old nephew had been living with me for the last three months. He would be rolling out of bed about now, wondering why the house was quiet and where I was. “Jason needs breakfast and a ride to school,” I said.

  She hesitated. “They’ll let you go in time to pick him up after school?”

  A good point. “Will you call my mom and ask her to take care of him for a couple days?”

  She seemed relieved that I hadn’t asked her to do it herself. “Sure.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I owe you.”

  “You’ve always owed me and you always will,” she said. Then, gently, “Are you all right?”

  I lied. “Yeah, I’m fine. Any moment now, they’re going to bring me coffee and donuts.”

  “Joe?” Her tone told me not to screw with her.

  “Look, I’ve just got to go through the process. I’ll call as soon as they let me go.”

  “Do,” she said. I imagined her standing over a worktable in the back room of her landscaping business. The bright light and heat of sunlamps would surround her. She would be wearing jeans and short sleeves and her arms would be dusted with potting soil. She would have a dozen green plastic pots on the worktable and she would be transplanting the first growths of flowers and ferns, which she would transplant again into the gardens of her wealthy customers in the spring. I’d seen her like that dozens of times. I wished I was standing with her. I started to tell her that but she’d hung up.

  At the other end of the hall a door swung open and a cop guided a short black man my way. The man wore a blue surgical gown but he looked like the closest he’d ever gotten to being a surgeon was when he broke into a doctor’s medicine pantry for a fresh supply of OxyContin. He stumbled twice, and, when the cop handcuffed him to a chair down the line from mine and disappeared through the glass door, he kept his eyes on the floor.

  I dialed Lucinda Juarez. We’d worked together for the past month, and we’d spent a night together once before that—the worst of the screw-ups that had kept Corrine and me apart. Lucinda was another ex-cop, smarter and quicker than anyone I knew on the force and way smarter and quicker than me. If Larry Weiss screwed up and left me sitting in jail, I figured I could count on her to do what it took to spring me. I needed her to get started now.

  As Lucinda’s phone rang the glass door swung open and the woman cop and three uniformed cops came out. She extended her hand for my phone. I gave it to her.

  “Time to check into the First District Hotel,” she said.

  THREE

  FOR THREE DAYS I sat in an isolation cell behind the 1st District Station, which had the biggest stationhouse lockup in the city. If a political convention came to town and a demonstration got out of hand, the cops put the protesters there. The rest of the time, the jail housed hookers, pimps, dealers, and addicts. Far as I could tell, the cell block I was in held no one but me.

  A little time to myself. Time to think. Time to reflect on my life and the choices I’d made. Not a bad thing, I told myself. Everyone should do it.

  That worked for about an hour.

  For three days I had no newspaper. No TV. No phone calls. Larry Weiss never managed to get inside to see me. Maybe he was right—maybe I needed a better lawyer. Corrine didn’t get in either. Lucinda must’ve figured out where I was but she never showed. Guards delivered three meals a day, enough to survive on. They shrugged when I asked to see my lawyer. They laughed when I demanded to talk to the district commander. I didn’t bother to ask for Corrine or Lucinda. The stainless steel toilet and sink were clean when I arrived but started to stink on the second day. The world outside the stationhouse could’ve burned and I wouldn’t have known.

  In the evenings before Jen Horlarche had hired me to watch the Southshore construction site, I’d been reading about a fishing village just over the Florida border from Georgia. Boats went out at night from the mouth of the St. Johns River and came back at dawn, their nets dripping salt back into the ocean, their holds full of shrimp or redfish or both. Winter, spring, summer, and fall, the waves danced in the sunlight where the river met the Atlantic. At the river mouth the undertow got crazy and every year riptides swept t
wo or three people out to sea, waving good-bye to their family and friends on the beach. But the village looked like a place I wanted to be.

  If I sold my house, I could afford to rent a moving truck and buy a place big enough for me and Jason—and Corrine, if she would come. I might have enough left over to buy a little boat and some nets. I’d finally decided the fishing village was more than a dream. Then Jen Horlarche had called and invited me to spend my nights in a wasteland where men stole copper. Instead of breathing deep in the warm salt spray, I’d sat in my car and watched dirty plastic sheets blowing across the dirt in the November wind and thieves and cops, who looked identical, shooting each other and my own hand coming away from my holster with my Glock in it. And pulling the trigger.

  Every time I’d seen someone die I’d felt the world go a little quieter like I’d lost part of my hearing, and sooner or later the singing, laughing, and screaming would fade into a hushing wind of white noise. That had happened when my dad died. It had happened when Kevin, a boy I was supposed to be protecting, ended up twisted and broken on his mother’s kitchen floor. It had happened. Shooting the cop felt worse. I’d ripped a little hole in the universe and I wondered what sound would fly out through it.

  For three days I stared at the three cinder-block walls, the bars that formed the fourth wall, and the concrete floor. I stared at myself too but I preferred the walls, floor, and metal bars.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day a guard unlocked the cell door and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Detective Chroler wants to see you.” We went through the next cell block where the prisoners jeered and cheered me like they knew something about me that I didn’t know. Then we went through two security doors and were back among the living. Cops in uniforms or plainclothes walked the corridor, laughed with each other, or stood outside office doors talking on cell phones. It made me dizzy.

  We went around a corner, into a stairwell, and up some stairs. Detective Jane Chroler had an office next to the stairwell. She sat at her desk looking unhappy, though I guessed she had been spending her days and nights in nicer places than I had. A stack of newspapers rested on the corner of her desk with a copy of the morning Sun-Times on top. The headline to the lead story read, NO PROGRESS IN SOUTHSHORE KILLINGS. A headline to a sidebar story next to it read, ROGUE INVESTIGATOR JAILED. The article included a small color photograph of me. It was the photograph from my detective’s license. In the paper it looked like a mug shot.

  I knew Chroler had positioned the newspaper for my benefit. “Sit,” she said.

  I took the chair across the desk from her, and the guard left us. A steam heater hissed softly, but the tile floor and the walls were bare and the room felt cold.

  I said, “Ballistics confirmed what I told you?”

  “More or less,” she said.

  “More or less?”

  “You fired your gun once, like you said. The bullet was in Officer Russo, like you said.”

  “He’s the one who was helping the thieves?”

  “According to what you’ve said.”

  “And who says anything different?”

  “No one.”

  “So where’s the ‘more or less’?”

  “Officer Russo’s gun was unloaded.”

  “Huh?”

  She nodded. “You say he aimed it at the other officers, but there were no bullets in it. So why would he do that?”

  That made no sense. “He was on duty and his gun was unloaded?”

  She shrugged. “A lot else remains unknown. We haven’t caught the others. When we do, they might tell us something about you.” She kept her eyes on me like she was expecting me to sweat.

  The thieves couldn’t say anything about me. I sweated anyway. “I don’t think they’ll tell you anything very interesting.”

  She cracked a small, mean smile. “I spent a little time over the last three days looking at records and getting to know you. And I’ve got to say, I don’t like you. When you were in the department you had a habit of breaking the rules and the habit got worse after you were fired. You’re a drunk. You use drugs. You—”

  “I quit all that a long time ago.”

  “Number one rule of AA: Once a drunk, always a drunk. You might not be drinking but you’re still a drunk, just waiting for life to get bad enough again to start you up again. Same thing for an addict, from what I’ve seen. Never a cure, just occasional vacations.”

  I gave her a hard stare. It didn’t make her sweat.

  She frowned. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been present when a cop has gotten shot, is it?”

  “You know it isn’t.”

  “You know where Detective Gubman is now?”

  Two months earlier, my friend Bill Gubman had asked me to go with him to stake out and ID a robbery suspect I’d seen. I couldn’t ID the guy, but he’d shot Bill in the stomach. If I’d moved faster, I could’ve shot the suspect first. It was getting to be an old story.

  Bill had spent three weeks in the hospital and another three in rehab. The doctors had taken out half of his upper colon and a couple other spare parts, but he’d lived. Far as I knew, he was at home recovering with his wife Eileen.

  I said so to Chroler.

  She shook her head. “First day back. He’s sitting at a desk downstairs.”

  That made me happy, kind of. “Welcome him back for me.”

  She shook her head some more. “He hates that desk. But that’s where he’ll be until he retires.”

  I said, “Are you letting me go?”

  “Got no reason to keep you.”

  “You had no reason to keep me for three days.”

  She shrugged. “We forgot about you.”

  “I wish.”

  “You need a better lawyer.” She reached under her desk, came up with a plastic bag, slid the bag across the desk to me.

  I laid the contents on the desktop. My cell phone, the battery dead. My keys. My holster—without my Glock.

  “My gun?” I asked.

  “Impounded.”

  My wallet. I flipped it open. Four twenties, a five, and two ones inside—probably what I was carrying when the police took it from me. Also my Visa card and driver’s license.

  Something was missing.

  “My detective’s license?”

  “Under review,” Chroler said, like it was no big deal.

  “What’s that mean?” There was no review process that the police were part of, not that I knew of. “The Department of Professional Regulation handles complaints, you don’t. Only the DPR can revoke a license.”

  “The DPR gave this one to us.”

  “Bullshit. They don’t do that.”

  Chroler shrugged. “Your license is under review.”

  Fighting with her would get me nowhere. I would ask Larry to do what he could. Or I would get a better lawyer.

  I stood up.

  “Take the newspapers too,” Chroler said. “You might learn something.”

  “About?”

  “Yourself.”

  I picked up the newspapers, turned to go, stopped at the doorway. “You could have had me released downstairs. Why did you call me up here?”

  “I wanted to give you the newspapers personally. Also I wanted to be the first to tell you that one of the wounded officers died. So that’s three dead now and two still in the hospital. Congratulations.”

  FOUR

  THEY’D PARKED MY SKYLARK at the curb outside the station. Couldn’t do better with a parking attendant. They hadn’t washed it, though.

  I sat in my car and fingered through the newspapers while the November sky grayed against the afternoon.

  The first copy of the Sun-Times ran a front-page headline that said SOUTHSIDE MASSACRE and showed pictures of the five men killed and wounded. David Russo, Tom Stanley, and Marvin du Pont, dead. Christopher Pelman and Emelio Fernandez, wounded. The article said they were experienced, dedicated cops. It mentioned the thefts at the construction site b
ut didn’t say that officers Russo and Stanley were in with the thieves. According to a police spokesman quoted by the paper, all five were heroes who died or had been wounded protecting the city. The spokesman also said the thieves had gotten away in two dark-colored vans. A third van, left behind, was stolen. As far as the newspaper reporter seemed to know, I didn’t exist.

  The Tribune had the same information, though it included a diagram showing where the cops fell and biographical sketches of the dead and wounded. David Russo, the cop I’d shot when he pointed his gun at the others, was married but had no kids. I breathed easier at the no-kids part. But his sister said he’d grown up wanting to be a cop like his dad, a story I knew too well.

  By the third morning, frustration was starting to show. The Sun-Times ran a sidebar titled BLOODBATHS IN BLUE about the psychological effects of shootings on the men and women in blue. They’d also gotten my name and described me as a private investigator who’d phoned the police with news of the Southshore robbery. They mentioned that I had a checkered past but other than that they left me alone.

  The Tribune was ahead of them. They’d gotten their hands on the 911 tape of me reporting the Southshore theft and broke the news that officers Russo and Stanley were involved in it. They said I was an ex-cop with a drinking problem. They’d dug through their files and come up with a photo of the newsstand I’d wiped out with my cruiser the night before the department fired me. Last time I’d seen the photo it was deep in the Local News section of the paper. Now it was page one.

  This morning’s Sun-Times went hard into the story about departmental corruption, questioning if only Russo and Stanley were involved in the thefts. An op-ed article noted that no one had been arrested, wondered about a conspiracy of silence in the department, and called for an investigation. In the “Rogue Investigator” story, Detective Jane Chroler called me a person of interest. The article also connected me to Bill Gubman’s shooting two months earlier.