EIGHTEEN
I CLIMBED THE STEPS to the back porch of my house as the first sunlight brightened the sky. My legs ached. The rest of me too. The night had drained the last of me and I wondered if I should climb into bed or just go inside and lie down on the kitchen floor. Twelve hours of sleep would help. Fourteen wouldn’t hurt.
I unlocked the door, let myself in.
I stopped. “Damn,” I said.
The three FBI agents who’d stopped Lucinda and me as we’d left Daley Plaza were sitting at the kitchen table. They had cups of steaming coffee in front of them.
“Good morning!” said the lead agent, cheerful, like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep.
“’Morning,” I said and went to the table and sat with them.
The agent tapped his coffee cup. “We helped ourselves. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Hey, my house is your house,” I said.
“That’s how we like to look at it.”
“What else did you help yourselves to?”
“Nothing yet. We just arrived.” He sipped from his cup. “It would be nice to say that we were surprised that you weren’t here, but that would be a lie.”
The kitchen was warm. I wondered what the agents would do if I laid my head on the table and went to sleep. “You did a lousy job of following me last night.”
The lead agent lifted his eyebrows just enough to tell me I was an idiot. “Didn’t matter. We knew where you went. You know, transporting stolen goods over state lines is a federal crime. It’s good for a couple years in jail.”
“How about breaking into a man’s house and helping yourself to coffee? That’s got to be worth a couple of months.”
One of the other agents, the heavyset guy who Lucinda had decked, picked up his cup. He glared at me. Then he flung the cup at the kitchen sink. It smashed against the tile backsplash.
That woke me up. “Vandalism,” I said. “A couple more months.”
He pushed his chair back and stood like he was coming after me, but the lead agent put a hand on his arm and he sat down. “We can take you in now for crossing the state line, or we can let it slide. Up to you.”
He’d mentioned nothing about the meeting with the gang representatives. I wondered if he knew about it too. I shrugged and stood. “It was a long night. I’m going to bed.”
He stayed in his chair. “We want you to work with us.”
“Like you said yesterday.”
“We say it again today. Plus we say we’ll pay you.”
“And?”
“What else do you want?” he said.
“Protection. Total immunity.” Bill Gubman said he wanted to keep the Feds out of the investigation. But when the Feds showed up in my kitchen at dawn and helped themselves to my coffee, I needed to calculate the risks of staying quiet.
“We can protect you—at least some. We can’t promise immunity.”
“You can promise me anything you want.”
“Not that.”
“You should talk to my lawyer. His name’s Larry Weiss. I’ll give you his number.”
“Fuck your lawyer.”
“Fuck my lawyer?”
He nodded.
“Well, then, fuck you.” I turned to go to bed.
Three chairs scraped against the floor. I spun, thinking they were coming for me. They weren’t. They went to the kitchen drawers, pulled them out, and dumped them on the floor.
“Now that’s foolish,” I said.
They shuffled the silverware and dishtowels with their feet like they were looking for something. Then they opened the cabinets and cleared the pots and mixing bowls. The lead agent went to the pantry and swept the food off the shelves.
“What are you looking for?” I said.
“A reason to arrest you on charges that will get you more than a couple years.”
“We’ll find something sooner or later,” said the agent who’d smashed my coffee cup.
“Or if we don’t,” said the third, “we’ll bring something in from our van.”
“Do you have a search warrant?” I said.
The lead agent stopped knocking things onto the floor and looked me in the eyes. “Now who’s being foolish?”
I watched them wreck the kitchen for awhile. Then they went into the hall and headed for Jason’s bedroom.
I followed them down the hall. “You don’t screw around with a kid’s stuff. You go in there and I’ll kill you.”
They came back up the hall and the lead agent looked at me long and hard. I looked at him the same. Then his face softened. “Okay,” he said.
I breathed out, relieved.
The other agents brushed past me, heading back toward the kitchen.
Then, one of them turned, grabbed my arms from behind, and shoved me against the hallway wall. The other drew his gun and held it against my head.
The lead agent went into Jason’s room. Drawers fell from the dresser. Toys knocked to the floor. Books tumbled from the shelves. He spent ten minutes destroying the space Jason had made for himself with me, away from his mom and everything he’d known for eleven years.
My muscles tightened. A 9 mm pistol pressed against the back of my head. My back and the insides of my legs sweated. I said nothing.
When the lead agent finished with the room, he came into the hall and got close to my ear. “You were right,” he said, soft. “That was a waste of time.”
I spun. My fist caught him in his face and blood burst from his nose. The 9 mm slipped from the back of my head. The agent who’d held it regripped it and pointed it at my chest, a look of panic on his face.
Fury rose in the lead agent’s face. “You fucking idiot.” He turned and went down the hall to the bathroom.
I slumped against the wall. “First time you’ve done this?” I said to the man with the gun.
He said nothing.
“You can relax now,” I said.
He said, “One call to DCFS, and we can take the kid away from you.”
Water ran in the bathroom sink and a minute later the lead agent returned with a bloody towel pressed against his face.
“There’s your charge,” said the agent who’d smashed the cup. “Assaulting a federal officer.”
The lead agent ignored him. “Let’s go back to the kitchen,” he said to me.
We kicked the food and pots out of the way and sat at the table.
“You like working with Earl Johnson?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Beats some of the company I’ve been spending time with.”
“Do you know who he is?”
I’d known Johnson since we went to the academy together. “What do you mean?”
He mopped his bloody nose with my bathroom towel. “He might be involved in more than you think he is.”
I considered that. Maybe Johnson really was running a side operation of the kind that Bill Gubman was fabricating. Maybe he was pulling a double scam, one against the police department and one against the rest of his crew. Maybe Bill’s plans to set him up were unnecessary because Johnson was already guilty. He wouldn’t be the first thief who dipped his fingers into his friends’ pockets.
I smiled.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Tell me about him.”
“The day that you shot our informant at Southshore Village, he reported that he’d found out something important about Johnson. We wanted to ask him about that when we met with him after the robbery. Thanks to you, we never got to meet. Do you know what he found out?”
I shook my head. “I’d never met your guy when I shot him.”
He nodded. “And you’ve seen nothing interesting about Johnson since then?”
I had suspicions about Johnson, no more. “I’ve seen a lot that’s interesting. But no.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
I thought about that. “I don’t know.”
He stood and pulled a card out of his wallet, said, “Call when you’re ready to talk—or if you need
help.”
I looked at the card. It had two phone numbers, one for his field office and one for his cell. It said FBI in bold letters. It also gave his name—Stuart Felicano.
“Is that your real name?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I gestured at his two partners. “How about these guys?”
“Just telephone me.” He pressed my bathroom towel against his bleeding nose. “Can I borrow this?”
I shrugged. “My house is your house.”
They let themselves out through the back door.
I sat for a few minutes at the kitchen table and considered what to do.
I should call Bill Gubman and tell him about the FBI. I should call Larry Weiss and ask for his legal opinion about how to avoid screwing myself more than I’d already done. I should call Lucinda and see how she’d spent her evening after Peter Finley escorted her to her car in Wisconsin. I should call Corrine and tell her I loved her. I should call to check on Jason at the hospital. I should sweep the mess from the kitchen floor and put the pots and pans where they belonged. I should pick up Jason’s room so he would never know an FBI agent ransacked it. I should pack a suitcase and drive south until the air warmed and my memory dulled.
I stood and went to my bedroom, climbed into bed, and closed my eyes.
NINETEEN
THE SUN WAS HIGH and my room was bright. The clock said 11:38. I’d slept for four hours. If I’d dreamed anything, my exhaustion had swallowed it. But when I opened my eyes, I ripped awake like out of a nightmare.
I got up and showered, cleaned the mess in the kitchen, and scrambled three eggs, my second breakfast of the day. Then I straightened Jason’s room. Stuart Felicano had done less of a job on it than he might have. Nothing was broken, nothing hard to clean. He probably hadn’t expected to turn up anything. He’d meant to pressure me. His card sat on the kitchen table. I wondered what would make me call the numbers on it.
I drove downtown to my office and rode the elevator to the eighth floor. The owner of the secretarial school stood at her office door with a student.
“Hi, Roselle,” I said.
She ushered the student inside and closed the door. Before the TV news and the papers had started calling me a cop killer, she’d sometimes flirted with me and once had invited me in to talk with her and allowed me out only when I told her I was still involved with my ex-wife.
In my office, the red light on the answering machine was flashing, and a small brown box and a stack of mail stood on the floor where the building super left them. My bottle of Jim Beam Black and the Baggie of cocaine waited for me in a file cabinet drawer. I ignored it all. I went to my window. The early afternoon sun shined warm on the insurance building across the street. In the distance, through a gap between buildings, Lake Michigan gleamed flat and bright as a golden mirror. From eight stories up, the city looked like a place where you could live a reasonable life.
I picked up the package and stack of mail and put them on my desk, then punched the button on the answering machine. A digitized voice told me I had eight messages. Two of them were hate calls, telling me what the callers thought guys who shot cops should do to themselves, including things that even a contortionist couldn’t accomplish. Three messages were reporters seeking comments. One message was a crank who said he was glad I’d shot David Russo and if I wanted an assistant he was available. One message was from a woman who wanted to hire me to find her runaway son. I figured she must not read newspapers or watch the news. I wrote down her number in case I survived Earl Johnson and the FBI. The last message was from Bill Gubman, who’d called ten minutes before I arrived at my office. He said he’d tried me at home and I didn’t answer, and if I got his message I should call right away—it was important. It must be, I figured, since he was willing to risk calling me when I was setting up Johnson. So I called the 1st District Station. The man who picked up the phone said Bill wasn’t available but he’d relay a message if I wanted to leave one. I told him where Bill could reach me and hung up.
Then I called Corrine at her landscape business. No answer. So I called her cell phone. She said she was heading into a meeting with a client who owned a Lincoln Park town house with a backyard garden bigger than a tennis court, though you would never guess it from the street. The client wanted Corrine to winterize the beds and prepare them to grow prize-winning roses in the spring. While life died around me, Corrine made things grow.
“That sounds like a good job,” I said.
“The client’s wasting her money,” she said. “The garden will never get enough sun for roses. Hey, she’s coming. Can we talk later?”
“Anytime,” I said and we hung up.
Next I dialed Children’s Memorial and asked for Jason’s room. The operator put me through to a nurse in his ward, who told me that they no longer had a patient by Jason’s name. A moment of fear pulsed through me before she added that his doctor had released him in the morning. I called Mom’s house and she said Jason was sleeping and why didn’t I join them for dinner at seven. I said I would be there.
Lucinda picked up her cell phone on the third ring. “You told me you’d call when you got back last night,” she said.
“And you told me you weren’t going to follow me last night.”
“I followed you because I care about you. You didn’t call me because you don’t care about me.”
A nice try. “I told you not to follow me because I care about you. I didn’t call because three FBI agents were sitting in my kitchen when I got home and when they left I passed out for a few hours. So in a way I’m just getting back from last night now and this is your call.”
I’d exaggerated the circumstances but she said, “Oh.”
I filled in some of the details about the hours since Peter Finley walked her from the gang meeting to her car, then asked what she’d been doing.
“For starters,” she said, “Finley asked me out on a date.”
“You’re kidding.”
She pretended to be stung. “Why would I be? He said any woman who could tail Raj for sixty miles without being seen was someone he wanted to know. He asked me out for dinner.”
“How did you tail us, by the way?”
“When you were downtown, you had your turn signal on at Congress Parkway. Then you spotted the FBI van and went straight. I figured you’d be coming back to Congress. So I waited and followed you when you reappeared.”
“You are smart enough to date.”
“I know.”
“You also know that Finley is married with three kids?”
“He said.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“This isn’t about romance, Joe. This is about getting in closer so we can find out more about him and Johnson’s group.”
“I know that. So you said yes?”
“We’re having dinner tonight.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like it for a good reason? Or you don’t like it because you don’t want me doing this kind of thing even though you’re still with Corrine?”
“Who said I’m still with Corrine?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I just don’t like it.”
“Sorry.”
“You do anything else since last night besides playing girlfriend to a gangster?”
“Yeah, I talked to some friends in the department about Bob Monroe and Raj. Monroe’s worse than his mixed record shows. The story is that when he was in the gang unit he not only buddied up with some of the gang members but he took sides. One guy who got busted for midlevel dealing offered to trade information on Monroe for dropped charges. He seemed credible enough that they sent someone from internal affairs to interview him. The guy supposedly said Monroe had set up two members of La Raza and was present when they died. The guy didn’t have evidence. It would’ve been his word against Monroe’s, and he supposedly already had a long record. But the interesting thing is that right after
the guy told his story, the department moved Monroe to vice and they dropped the trafficking charges and let the guy go.”
“A little too much supposedly in there. You think we could find this guy and talk to him?”
“That’s another interesting thing. Two days after he got out of jail, someone shot and killed him. No one’s been charged with the shooting.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Happens all the time to drug dealers,” I said.
“Sure it does,” she agreed. “And to some more than others.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about Raj?”
“No one had anything bad to say about him. Like we thought, he’s an eagle scout except that he’s involved with Johnson. Of the four guys I asked, three said he’s the person they would go to if they were in trouble and needed help.”
“Yeah, for a thief, part-owner of a whorehouse, and racketeer, he seems okay. You get anything else?”
“That’s it. I’m going to make more calls, but then I’ve got to wash my hair, paint my toenails, and get ready for my date.”
“Ha,” I said as humorlessly as I could and added, “Be careful tonight.”
“I will.”
“And call me when you get back.”
She laughed at that, said, “What are you going to do?”
“Spend about ten more minutes at my office, then go home and try to get more sleep.”
She said, “I’ll talk with you later then, right?”
“Right,” I said and we hung up.
The mail was bills, a catalogue of office equipment, payment for an employee background check I’d done, and more bills. The package had no return address. I had friends in the business who never opened a package without one. Too many unsatisfied customers—the ones whose suspicions about their wives or husbands you’d been unable to confirm, and the ones whose suspicions you’d confirmed. Too much chance that the package would contain something ugly.
I snapped the packing tape and opened the top.
I would have preferred a bomb.
I lifted out a stack of photographs. They were mostly of a woman and David Russo, the cop I’d shot. The photo on top was a formal portrait of them, him in a tuxedo, her in a yellow dress—probably taken at someone else’s wedding. The next showed their own wedding, him in another tuxedo, her in white. The next three photos showed them inside and outside a house which I figured must be their own. Dozens more showed them on vacations, with friends, at a birthday party, with a dog. He looked happy. She looked happy. I looked at every one. She’d sent me a record of the life they’d lived together. She wanted me to see what I’d taken away.
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