The Last Night Out

by Catherine O'Connell

  The fireplug was Detective Ron O’Reilly, his voice a truck driving down a gravel road. Whiskey voice in the trade. Painfully bloodshot eyes the color of seaweed completed the picture. The giant was Joseph Kozlowski, his small black eyes like watermelon seeds in his massive face. His shoulders were set in a permanent slouch, his head bowed as if he had learned from banging into one too many doorframes.

  Whiskey Voice did most of the talking, while the leviathan loomed aside taking notes on a crumpled notepad unearthed from a back pocket.

  ‘Ms Delaney, we’re from Homicide. We were told you knew the victim,’ O’Reilly began.

  Homicide. Victim. Two stinging bites that told a story. Kelly nodded, trying not to stare in the direction of the ambulance and the gurney being wheeled toward it. ‘Yeah. We’ve been friends since high school.’

  ‘We’re sorry for your loss.’ His attempt to sound sympathetic was beyond pathetic. ‘The victim’s name?’

  ‘Angela Lupino Wozniak. Angie to her friends.’ Kelly hesitated, and then added, ‘But she may have been going by Lupino. She’s going through a divorce.’

  O’Reilly raised a brief eyebrow over a bloodshot eye.

  ‘Uh-huh. And the last time you saw the victim was …?’

  ‘Last night.’

  This time the eyebrow remained raised. ‘You were with her last night,’ he echoed, his raspy voice barely disguising incredulity.

  ‘That’s what I just said.’

  ‘Ms Delaney,’ said O’Reilly, without bothering to look toward the giant for agreement. ‘You wouldn’t mind coming back to Area 3 with us so we can get some more information, would you?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ she replied, already knowing the answer to that question.

  After a ride in an unmarked sand-colored Ford Crown Victoria with the air conditioning set to bring in the next ice age, they pulled up at Area 3 headquarters. It was housed in an ungainly brown building that sprawled half a city block. The parking lot was filled beyond capacity causing many vehicles to park on the sidewalks and the lawn. The irony of flouting the law in the very place it was administered was not lost on Kelly. After miraculously finding an empty space in the area reserved for detectives, the trio went directly into the building, bypassing the metal detectors everyone else was obliged to pass through. The lobby was a sea of desperate young faces.

  ‘Stick close,’ said Kozlowski. ‘These ain’t exactly model citizens. They do arraignments here.’

  As if he was telling her something she didn’t know.

  Kelly was ushered up some stairs and into a large, fluorescent-lit room, its air conditioning set as cold as, if not colder than, the car had been. What was it with cops? she wondered. Did they have ice for blood? The room was filled with dozens of metal desks, all facing forward like some grand adult classroom, three-quarters of them empty. The desks that were in use were all occupied by men, most of them talking on the phone. While there were flimsy ashtrays on many of the desks, every desk held a Styrofoam cup, presumably containing coffee. All heads turned to follow Kelly in her running shorts and tank top as she crossed the room in the wake of the two detectives, her long brown ponytail streaming behind her.

  They came to a stop at a paper cluttered desk with a plastic chair set beside it. ‘Have a seat,’ said O’Reilly. He passed behind her, leaving the faint scent of alcohol lingering in the air. Kozlowski grabbed a chair from the adjacent desk, turned it around, and straddled it. The chair was like a piece of children’s furniture beneath his bulk. O’Reilly unlocked his top drawer and shoved the morass of papers inside. Kelly wondered what else he kept locked in that drawer. A little hair of the dog? Mouthwash to cover it up?

  ‘Pardon the mess. I was catching up on paperwork when the call came in about your friend,’ he said.

  ‘You want some coffee?’ Kozlowski asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Kelly. She shivered and folded her arms across her chest. ‘But a little heat wouldn’t be bad.’

  ‘Sorry about the temperature. We gotta choice between hot or cold and since it’s summer we’re going with cold. You wanna jacket or something?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll survive.’

  O’Reilly flattened his hands on the desktop and spread his fingers apart as if to keep his balance. His thick hands bore the short nails of a nail-biter. He leaned in toward Kelly.

  ‘You do what for a living, Ms Delaney?’ he asked, the words more a command than a question.

  ‘Me?’ Kelly bristled, his brusque manner catching her off guard. She was none too fond of cops, with good reason, and this one wasn’t doing anything to change her opinion. She told herself to chill out and be cooperative. This was about Angie. ‘I’m a student at DePaul, working on my master’s in Psych. I waitress on the side to make ends meet.’

  ‘You knew the victim well.’

  ‘We’ve been friends for over twenty years. Since Immaculata.’ She filled in the blanks before he could ask. ‘Catholic girls’ high school in Winnetka.’

  ‘I wonder if you could tell me what the victim did for a living.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d stop calling her the victim. Her name is Angie.’

  ‘Right, sorry.’ A perfunctory apology. ‘Angie did what for a living?’

  ‘She’s a department manager at Bloomingdale’s.’

  ‘Long time?’

  ‘Thirteen, maybe fourteen years.’

  ‘You said she was divorced?’

  ‘In the process.’

  ‘A nasty one?’ The undisciplined right eyebrow raised slightly.

  ‘I’ve never heard of a good one.’

  ‘And the husband’s name is …’

  Jesus, did this guy ever ask a proper question? she wondered. His habit of framing questions as statements was annoying. ‘Do you mean what is her husband’s name?’ she snapped.

  He stared at her for a two-count before obliging her. ‘Could you tell me her husband’s name?’

  ‘Harvey Wozniak,’ she complied.

  O’Reilly asked her what she knew about Harvey. Kelly gave a brief history of Angie’s ex, a South Sider and commodities trader, fairly successful to her knowledge. He and Angie had been married ten years before separating. No, they didn’t have children. Kelly felt no need to fill them in on the miscarriages.

  ‘Let’s go to last night. You said you were with the victim—’ He corrected himself – ‘With Angie last night.’

  ‘Yes. At a friend’s house in Kenilworth. We were having a bachelorette party for one of our friends who’s getting married in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘A big party?’

  ‘More like a dinner, actually. There were only six of us. Unless you include the stripper.’ If mention of a stripper derailed O’Reilly, he didn’t show it, but Kozlowski coughed self-consciously into his hand.

  ‘Names?’

  She really wanted to punch him. ‘Carol Anne Niebaum hosted the party. The bride-to-be is Maggie Trueheart. Suzanne Lundgren. Natasha Dietrich. Me.’

  ‘You said six.’

  The look she gave him would have stopped a pit bull in its tracks.

  ‘Oh, right. The last time you saw the victim alive.’

  ‘I take it that’s a question,’ said Kelly. ‘About ten o’clock in Carol Anne’s foyer. Natasha had left and Angie and Maggie and Suzanne were heading down to Rush Street. I took a pass.’

  Before the conversation could go any further, a uniformed cop came up and whispered something in O’Reilly’s ear. The right eyebrow went up again. ‘That so?’ He stood and gestured to Kozlowski who also rose, his chair squeaking in relief. ‘You can wait right here,’ O’Reilly instructed her, an order, not a request. The two detectives followed the uniform from the room, leaving Kelly alone to congeal in the cheap plastic chair.

  A red second hand ticked off time on the white dial of the clock on the front wall. It was nearing eight, and she was supposed to be at Gitane’s at nine to set up for brunch. At this point, there was no way she coul
d make work on time, nor did she want to. It was abhorrent to think of dishing out egg-white omelets and endless cups of coffee on the heels of Angie’s death. But the job paid her living expenses and tuition, and she couldn’t afford to lose it. She eyeballed the phone on O’Reilly’s desk. No one had told her it was off limits. She picked it up and dialed.

  Her manager responded as expected, his underwear in a knot over having to handle the busy weekend crowd minus one server. Like she wanted to be freezing her ass off in some police station. Like she planned for her friend to be dead. As if people found a friend murdered every day.

  ‘All right, you can take today,’ he said in a huff. ‘But you better be in tomorrow. I can’t do a Sunday with only five servers.’

  ‘I’ll be there. I promise,’ she said.

  She placed the phone back in the cradle, relieved at having put a Band-Aid on her job. Then it dawned on her with a jolt that no one had checked the status of either Suzanne or Maggie. The two had gone to Rush Street with Angie. In all the chaos, they had slipped her mind. Wanting to be sure they were all right, she picked up the phone and dialed again. Suzanne answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hey, it’s Kelly. Are you sitting?’

  ‘No, I was actually leaving to go into the office. You just caught me. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m at Area 3.’

  ‘You’re where?’ Suzanne’s voice was studded with judgment.

  ‘Look, it’s not what you think. I’ve got some bad news. You better sit down for this one. Are you sitting?’

  ‘I am now,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘Something terrible has happened. Angie’s dead.’ Kelly went on to break the news as gingerly as she was capable.

  ‘She was in Lincoln Park? But that’s impossible. I dropped her off at home around three.’

  ‘Well, she sure didn’t end up there. She probably went out again.’

  ‘But she was so drunk.’

  ‘Yeah? That never stopped me.’ Kelly looked up to see O’Reilly and Kozlowski coming back into the room. ‘Look, I gotta go. Check Maggie, huh? I’ll call you as soon as I get home.’

  The two detectives reached the desk just as she hung up. Something about them had changed since they left her. They seemed more tense, especially O’Reilly. They know, she thought. O’Reilly took up his previous position behind the desk and Kozlowski straddled the defenseless chair again. O’Reilly tented his nail-bitten fingers and leaned in like Tizzy when she was ready to pounce.

  ‘So … were you all doing coke at the party last night?’

  ‘What?’ she flung back, caught off guard by the question and the fact that he had finally posed one properly.

  ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know that Angie’s nose was jammed with white,’ he stated, staring at her in a way that made her feel like a germ under a microscope. ‘What about the phone call you just made? Giving your dealer a heads up?’

  The questions were so outlandish that Kelly’s first response was nervous laughter. Then his inference set in and she leaned in toward him, resentful of the bleary-eyed cop reeking of alcohol. ‘I do not do cocaine, Detective O’Reilly. And I don’t drink either,’ she added, stepping on the word drink for his benefit. ‘I used the phone to call in to work. Then I called to check on Suzanne – who was with Angie last night and, for your information, who took her home. So why am I catching all this shit?’

  ‘Why all the shit? Well, let’s see. You were with the victim last night. Then you coincidentally stumble upon her body. Which you then tamper with, most likely destroying evidence. Added to that, you have a prior arrest for drug possession among other things. And you wonder why we’re giving you shit? You tell me.’

  So they knew. While she’d been sitting in this igloo playing penguin, they had been in some back room reviewing her history. Which, admittedly, wasn’t real pretty. So she’d been to Area 3 a couple of times before. The first time was on a D and D before being sent over to County. Her cellmates that night were a prostitute in torn fishnet hose, a woman wearing a bathrobe and pink foam hair curlers, and a twenty-something in tight designer jeans – soliciting, domestic violence, credit-card fraud. The metal toilet bowl had overflowed uneaten baloney sandwiches. She had been released the next morning. Her second visit was for possession. The possession charge had supposedly been expunged by one of her lawyer customers. Guess that was a wasted blowjob.

  ‘That was another life,’ she said in defeat.

  The seaweed eyes returned to her face, and he leaned back in his chair like a doctor finishing up a diagnosis. ‘OK. You’re done for now. Give Kozlowski contact info for the other girls, and we’ll have a squad take you home.’

  Tizzy mewed and jumped into her lap, jolting her gaze from the ceiling, startling her back to awareness. She petted the cat absentmindedly and thought about calling Suzanne. But even getting up to make a phone call seemed a Herculean effort. Her head weighed a thousand pounds, her eyelids a thousand more, and her body was covered in chainmail. Moving the cat aside, she stretched out with her long legs hanging over the edge of the sofa. She just needed to rest. She would nap for five minutes, no longer. As she lay there trying to erase the pale image of Angie’s face from behind her closed eyes, she wondered what she had done in some past life to deserve the shit sandwich she got in this one. Was she captain of a slaver? Concentration camp commandant?

  Whatever it was, it must have been heinous.

  FOUR

  I merged into the traffic on the Edens, my thoughts seesawing between my indiscretion – a euphemism if there ever was one – and the horror of Angie’s death. The combined weight of the two was overwhelming. I remembered learning in US History class that Teddy Roosevelt had lost both his mother and his wife on the same day and thinking that was more than a person could bear. While comparing my dilemma and Teddy’s was a stretch, I was imploding under a double whammy that felt just about the same, the loss of a dear friend and the possible loss of a future husband.

  My mind flashed back to sitting poolside at Carol Anne’s last night, drinking wine with abandon while the girls showered me with the typical bachelorette gifts: edible underwear, a rubber tree made of condoms, a necklace strung with miniature penises, obscene books. I was thumbing through my personal copy of The Kama Sutra when the stripper arrived, a blond Adonis named Tony who was dressed like a policeman. His first move was to handcuff me to a lawn chair. His second was to crank up Joe Cocker’s ‘You Can Leave the Light On’ on his boom box. Then he proceeded to liberate himself of his uniform piece by piece while we screamed like teenage girls with a peeping Tom in the window. Even Natasha, who usually had a stick up her ass, joined in the fun. After all, any woman would have had to be dead or mindless to not appreciate a body like Tony’s, the contractile tissue perfection of his stomach, the smooth mounds of his biceps, his carved triceps, his broad shoulders.

  Now Flynn has a nice build. He is tall and thin, ideally built for country-club sports, and I’m quite fond of his smooth, relatively hairless body. But this shaggy-haired blond creature gyrating in front of me came from an entirely different gene pool. He was primitive man at his best, and in my dreams he was swinging from tree to tree in the jungle, with me wrapped in his arms as willing victim.

  The music ended just as Tony got down to his last article of clothing, a fuchsia G-string restraining a lump the size of a quarterback’s fist. ‘What do you say, girls? Should I take it all off?’ he teased. With Natasha covering her eyes and Angie screaming for him to show us his gun, Tony shed that last bit of fabric, unveiling a package that would have made Sonny Corleone weep with envy. There was a moment of dumbstruck awe, after which the six of us let loose with howls so loud it was a miracle the real police weren’t called in.

  Later, after I had been freed from my bonds and an amply tipped Tony had taken his leave, I helped Carol Anne carry the glasses back into the kitchen. Her dark hair was damp from the humidity that managed to creep into the large, old house despite air-conditioning, an
d tight knots of it curled about her face. Her periwinkle-blue eyes sparkled at me, bright with impishness.

  ‘What did you think of the entertainment, Maggie?’ she said, suppressing a grin.

  ‘I’ll get you for this one, Carol Anne.’ I took another sip of wine and checked my watch. It wasn’t even ten o’clock. ‘Wow, I guess we’re getting old. This sure isn’t like your party.’

  ‘No, not quite,’ my best friend concurred. ‘But that was, like, a million years ago.’

  Actually it was only slightly over ten years, but it did seem like an eternity. To celebrate Carol Anne’s bachelorette party, we had commandeered a hotel suite downtown and most of us had never even gone to sleep. We had polished off cases of beer and filled the halls with the pungent scent of marijuana, much to the chagrin of the security guards, who were too intimidated to throw a group of good-looking twenty-somethings out on the street at four a.m. Now those times felt light years away, the freedom and spontaneity of post-college days traded in for careers or impatient husbands and children or both.

  We went into the foyer where Kelly and Suzanne stood talking beneath the glimmering chandelier. Angela was absent, on one of her numerous trips to the bathroom. Natasha already had one foot on the threshold. Draped in designer clothes and expensive jewelry befitting the wife of a commodities trader, her dishwater hair highlighted into a golden shimmer, Natasha was the weak link in our group. She was the friend you tolerated, something like a bunion you put up with because you didn’t want to suffer the pain of removal. Her mother and my mother had been Tri Delts together at Northwestern, which was how we came to be friends in the first place. History had cemented her position.

  ‘Got to get home to relieve my hubby from childcare,’ Natasha was saying, her excuse to bug out. Did she really say ‘hubby’? I wondered. She put her head close to my ear and raised a hugely diamonded left hand to her mouth to insure secrecy. ‘See you next Saturday,’ she whispered, referring to the lingerie shower she was holding for me at her Lake Forest home, something I had tried to beg out of to no avail, something in all honesty I was not looking forward to. She said goodnight to the others and walked down the driveway to her Mercedes.