After a moment, Johnson stepped into the office. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it.
Monroe gestured at the vinyl bag. “Look what the cat dragged in.” He grinned like he’d scored a point against Johnson. “He got it from Rafael.”
Johnson glanced at me, then picked up the bag. He unzipped it and poured the bills and change onto the desk. The bills were crumpled, a lot of tens and fives and ones. The coins included nickels and pennies. “What the hell is that?” he said.
“First weekly payment,” I said. “A few days early.”
Johnson shook his head. “Tell him next time you want it in twenties and fifties. You’re not collecting milk money.”
He left the office, went into his own, and closed the door behind him.
Monroe still grinned. “Some guys are hard to please.”
I reached and closed his door, then pulled out the pile of phony receipts and put them on the desk next to the money.
He stared at my eyes. “What’s that?” he said.
“Take a look.”
As he read the receipts, his face angered. “You’re full of surprises this morning. Where’d you get these?”
“I was looking into you guys long before the night at Southshore.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
I said, “I was following Johnson and saw what he was up to. I saw him going into the banks. If you want bank records as a cop, you go to a judge. If I want them, I go to a friend.”
He looked at the receipts and shook his head, disgusted. Then he picked up his phone, pushed a button, and a moment later said, “Is Raj here? Send him in.”
Sweat broke between my shoulders. If Raj told Monroe that he saw me with Bill Gubman, my game would be over.
A minute later, Raj tapped on the office door and stepped inside. He was wearing a jacket like he’d just come in from the cold. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His face fell when he saw me. He turned to Monroe. “Cindi said you wanted to see me.”
Monroe tossed the receipts onto the desk and Raj picked them up. Raj looked at them like he was trying to figure out what he was seeing, trying to make sense of it. Then he said to Monroe, “Where did you get these?”
Monroe nodded at me, grim faced. “Joe did some private work. What do you make of them?”
Raj looked at me long, without expression, and I figured this was it—he would tell Monroe that he’d seen me with Bill, they would call Johnson into the office, and then someone would get hurt or worse. I figured that someone would be me. The Ruger rested against my side and I wondered if I had enough energy to reach for it when the moment came.
Raj turned to Monroe. “That fucking Johnson!” he said.
Monroe nodded.
I almost laughed. I looked at Raj, hoping he would give me a glance, a gesture, that told me we were in this together.
He kept his eyes on Monroe. “What now?”
Monroe thought. “It’s an opportunity,” he said.
Raj thought so too and nodded.
“I’ll call a meeting for tonight,” Monroe said. “Let’s make sure everyone’s there.” He turned to me. “It’s an opportunity for you too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re going to make some changes around here.”
I shook my head. “I’ve known Johnson since he started at the department. He’s tough—you don’t want to underestimate him.”
Monroe waved that away. “I’ve seen what he can do and I know who he is. But you know what? He shits out of the same hole I do. And right now”—Monroe allowed himself a little smile—“he’s deep in it.”
I shrugged. “Can I have the receipts?”
“No,” he said and held his hand toward Raj, who gave them to him. Monroe folded them and stuck them into a pocket. “Right now we need them.”
Raj and I left the office together and walked into the lounge. It was empty. The men had finished their breakfasts. The hostess was gone from her desk, probably in a back room with one of the men.
I stopped Raj. “Why are you helping me? Why didn’t you tell Monroe?”
“Tell him what?”
“I know you saw me yesterday.”
He glanced at the empty lounge. “This whole thing is about to come down, isn’t it?”
I nodded, said, “Maybe.”
He thought about that and looked defeated. He said, “I don’t know what you’re up to. But when it comes down, you’re going to say I did the right thing, okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
TWENTY-THREE
I SPENT THE MORNING driving around the city in Raj’s SUV. Raj said every patrolman in the city knew about my Skylark, down to the scratches on the bumpers, so my car stayed in the parking garage fourteen floors below The Spa Club.
I cruised for awhile through the side streets near my house. The sun was burning through the clouds. The light played off the last leaves hanging on the tree branches and glared off the windshields of parked cars.
At 9:30, I called Lucinda. “Hey,” she said when she heard my voice. “Is this your one call from jail?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Have the police been there?”
“Still here—parked on the street. Last night they came in and tried to sweet-talk me into helping them find you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I offered them coffee and talked sweet to them too.”
“Yeah?”
“So they stopped the sweet talk and threatened me with everything in the book and a little that they made up. They seemed to forget that I used to be a cop. I threatened them back and kicked them out of my apartment, and now they’re sitting outside in the cold.”
“Can you slip away from them?”
“Are you kidding? Where do you want to meet?”
I told her and added, “Bring a pen and paper.”
“You going to write your last will and testament?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll see you in a little bit,” she said.
“Hey, how was dinner with Peter Finley?”
“He spent the whole time trying to convince me to work at The Spa Club. He said selling me as an ex-cop would bring in big money. Guys would like that, girls too if I was willing. He said I could make five times what I made in the department.”
“I believe it. Did you find out anything useful?”
“Nothing new. He’s got little love for Bob Monroe, less for Raj, and none at all for you. I think he’s got ambitions to replace Monroe as number two, behind Johnson.”
“Anything else?”
“No, he was too busy looking down my shirt and putting his hand on my thigh.”
“At least he’s got good taste. When are you going out again?”
“Not funny,” she said.
Next I called Corrine. She answered on the third ring and sounded like I’d woken her.
“Hi,” I said.
She was quiet, then asked, “Where are you?” She said it like she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“Driving around.”
That was enough of an answer. “They’ve got you on the news. And in the papers.” She sounded as if she was holding back tears.
“I know.”
“Are you going to turn yourself in?”
“No,” I said. “Do you think I should?”
“I don’t know.” Then, “Are you going to come over here?”
“No,” I said again. “Not right now.”
We were both quiet for awhile. She said, “Why did you call?”
Because I’d wanted to hear her voice. Because I’d wanted to ask where she’d been last night. I said, “To tell you I love you.”
She said nothing to that.
“Corrine?”
She said, “I love you too, Joe, but I don’t know if I love you this much.”
At 10:30, I walked into the Lincoln Park Conservatory, a four-room greenhouse that looked lik
e an enormous glass-roofed pagoda. A concrete path snaked through gardens of ferns and tropical flowers, under palm trees, past hanging baskets of orchids, and past an artificial waterfall. The air was warm and moist—the weather from a tropical rainforest. Lucinda was sitting on a bench under a palm tree.
I sat next to her.
“It’s nice here,” she said.
I nodded. “I’m thinking of taking off my clothes and swimming in the waterfall.”
“I can see the headlines now.”
“Any trouble getting away from your apartment?” I asked.
She smiled. “I left the cruiser boxed in at a stoplight two blocks from my place.”
“You’re good,” I said.
She looked me in the eyes. “Yes.”
“Did you bring the pen and paper?”
She reached into a brown leather bag and handed them to me.
I told her about the meeting that Monroe was scheduling for the evening, and, as I did, I drew a sketch of The Spa Club.
The sketch showed the front lounge with the hostess desk, the hallway that extended behind the desk, and the two offices and the conference room that the hallway led to. I drew another hallway too, which led to a lobby and then the back rooms where you could get anything that money could buy, the room with television monitors, and the door to the emergency exit at the end of that hallway. I put an X on the conference room and another on the emergency exit. The meeting where Monroe confronted Johnson would happen in the conference room, I figured. If Lucinda was willing to take the risk, I wanted her to get into the building and up to the fourteenth floor, and to be standing in the stairwell outside the emergency exit when the meeting started.
I said, “I can think of about a dozen ways this meeting could blow up. If it does, I wouldn’t mind having backup—the more the better. Drive a tank up the stairs if you can. Or at least bring a couple guns and be ready to use them.”
Lucinda studied the diagram. “Do any of the TV monitors show the stairwell?”
“Not that I noticed,” I said, “but I’ll check. If there’s a camera, I’ll disable it. If I can’t, I’ll call and tell you not to come.”
“Do they have guards?”
I shook my head. “Not when they’re open for business. They probably figure it would wreck the mood.”
“They’ll be open this evening?”
“They’re always open.”
“Is there anything else that could stop me between the emergency exit and the meeting room?”
I thought about Tina, who’d offered herself to me twice. I thought about the women at the hostess desk. “Nothing you can’t brush aside.”
She put the paper and pen in her bag.
Then I told her about the conversation I’d had with Raj after we left Monroe’s office.
“Can you count on him to stay quiet?”
I shook my head. “He’s one of the ways this could blow up. He’s seriously spooked. Odds are equal that he keeps his mouth shut or tells everything to Monroe.”
“Of if he figures Monroe is a lost cause, he could run to Johnson,” Lucinda said.
I thought about that. “Could be, but so far he’s always stood by Monroe. Finley seems to be Johnson’s closest friend. The other guys, I don’t know. Monroe expects them to line up behind him when he shows that Johnson’s been ripping them off.”
Footsteps approached on the concrete path. Lucinda and I shut our mouths and gazed up at the yellow fruit that hung in clusters from a palm tree. Gray light filtered through the foggy glass above the tree. More footsteps approached from the other side.
Stuart Felicano, the lead FBI agent, stepped into view on one side. The bridge of his nose was bruised where I’d hit him. But he wore a pressed blue suit and looked like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Felicano’s heavyset partner stepped into view on the other side, also in a suit. There was nowhere to run.
I looked at Lucinda.
She shook her head, her eyes stunned. “Jesus! I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone—”
“Good morning, Mr. Kozmarski,” Felicano said. “You look surprised to see us.”
“No more than if you’d swung in on vines.”
He smiled. “Do you have a moment to talk?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Still smiling. “We met with your friend Bill Gubman this morning.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He seems to be under the mistaken impression that he can make Earl Johnson’s crew disappear. No arrests. No trials. No scandal. He wants to bury them in an unmarked grave.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
His smile broadened. “So, that made us wonder about you. You’re at the Southshore shooting. You’re seen stealing from another site in Wisconsin. You’re working with Johnson’s crew. There’s a warrant out for your arrest. But you’re also hanging out with Gubman. He might be an old friend but he looks like the last guy you’d want to be found with. So what’s between him and you?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he wouldn’t know about you.”
“Makes sense. Most of the time I don’t even know about myself.”
His smile fell hard from his face. “Don’t be that way.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I can help you.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “You could help a lot. Have you learned anything more about Johnson?”
Other than that he was about to fall off a wall? I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“What about Farid el Raj?”
“What about him?”
“We hear he might be making a play on Johnson for control of the crew.”
Unless a lot more was happening than I knew, they’d heard wrong or gotten Raj mixed up with Monroe. “Are you listening to them on a wire?”
The other agent said, “That’s none of your—”
Felicano patted the air to quiet him. “No wires,” he said. “Johnson’s planted as much sound equipment in his time as we have. We wouldn’t get away with it.”
“That makes hearing things hard.”
“We still hear them.”
The other agent said, “So what about el Raj?”
“I don’t know about him either.”
Felicano shook his head. “You’re making a big mistake.”
“Welcome to my life.”
Two women in their sixties came down the path, talking about bromeliads. They wore dresses and canvas hats, like they were on a safari. One had a camera hanging around her neck. The FBI agents stepped aside and let them through.
When they’d passed, one of the agents said, “We could take you in on the warrant.”
I agreed. “You could.”
He tipped his head toward Lucinda. “We could take her in as accessory.”
Lucinda held her wrists toward him like he might want to cuff them. “You could.”
Felicano said, “Or we could leave you out on the street and see what happens. Guys like you don’t live long.”
“Whatever you prefer,” I said, like he’d offered me a choice between white meat or dark.
My attitude didn’t fool him. “I’ve dealt with guys like you before,” he said. “You can work with us and come out a little dirtied but alive. Or you can do it alone with one chance in a hundred of coming out clean, ninety-nine chances of coming out dead or filthy. I’d think the choice would be easy. But guys like you take that one chance. I don’t think you’re courageous and I don’t think you’re just a bad gambler. I think you’re afraid, scared to death of just getting by if getting by means compromising a little. Guys like you make no sense to me but that’s what I think.”
I tried a smile. “You nailed me.”
He shook his head again, disappointed, maybe disgusted. “One chance in a hundred. Is it worth it?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
He shook his head again. “We’ll be keeping our eyes on you,” he said.
“That’s reassuring,” I said.<
br />
He looked at me like I was being a smart-ass, but with the trouble I was in I realized I might mean it.
When they were gone, Lucinda and I sat together for awhile without talking. A siren passed outside, then was quiet, and the city was far away.
Lucinda said, “Could Raj be up to something?”
“No,” I said and thought about it some. “No.”
Behind us, water dripped from a pipe near the ceiling onto a hard surface. The waterfall trickled down an artificial stone face and collected in a basin.
TWENTY-FOUR
I DROVE NORTH AND bought a hot dog at Byron’s, then cruised for forty minutes looking for a place to park and eat. I went south and west and drove across Blackhawk Street until it dead-ended at the North Branch of the Chicago River. Five unofficial parking spots faced a thin strip of grass with leafless trees and then the river. One of the spots was open. I slid Raj’s SUV into it. The hot dog was cold.
When I finished eating, I tilted the seat back, closed my eyes, and thought about the mess I’d gotten myself into. I had plenty of time to think and plenty to think about. Too much time and too much to think about. I tilted the seat up again and watched the river.
The sunlight glinted off the tree branches. The river moved so slow you would never know it moved at all.
In the summer, now and then, a heron would stand on the banks looking for a meal. I’d never seen one catch a fish. Supposedly an eagle or two had tested the air above the water. But on a cold sunny afternoon in November no birds stood on the grass, flew in the air, or perched in the brown branches, not even a sparrow.
In the 1990s, when most of the factories closed, fish swam back into the lower reaches of the river. The EPA forced the remaining factories to treat their waste before dumping it and to put toxic chemicals into metal drums and ship them to a dumpsite in Indiana. A river advocacy group got excited and started imagining bass jumping in the shallows and beavers building dams in the shadows of the old smokestacks. They convinced the city to dredge the chemical waste off the river bottom. Except the dredged chemicals clouded the water and the fish that had returned went belly up and washed onto the riverbanks.
That made me think. Was Felicano right? Was I so set on shoveling the dirt out of my life that I’d moved into a dirt pit? Did I need to climb out and keep living, knowing that I would never get completely clean?
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