The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  Where then? In the newly gentrified River North section next to the Michigan Avenue corridor? The building would obliterate acres of art galleries and studios, chic restaurants and boutiques. It would ruin a reclaimed neighborhood that had given the city considerable pleasure and pride. The mayor wouldn’t stand for it. And the real estate would cost Poe a fortune.

  Matthias sat back in his swivel chair, pondering the map as he might the actual city from an aircraft. Yeats had sounded extremely confident. Poe must feel the same. But why?

  He went downstairs and made himself a drink. His aerial painting of the building was still propped up on a bookcase. It almost seemed a living thing—haunting him, taunting him.

  His long-silent telephone now rang. He thought it must be Poe, that Yeats had quickly reached him.

  It was Diandra.

  “Matthias? You called here for Peter. The housekeeper just told me.”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you going to say to him?”

  “It was about the building. There’s an article in the Tribune.”

  “Matt, I need to talk to you.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “I don’t give a damn. Peter’s in New York. He’ll be there all week, bragging about his building on television shows.”

  “I can’t go to your place.”

  “No. And I shouldn’t go to yours. But we have to meet. I need to see you—in person.”

  He had an overpowering need for that himself. “Does he have you chained to the furniture?”

  “He’s left me perfectly alone. Free to do what I please. He doesn’t even talk to me. It’s creepy. I begin to wish he’d rant and rave, that he’d do something. I don’t know what he’s thinking.”

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go sailing.”

  “Sailing. Isn’t that a little frivolous, under the circumstances?”

  “We’ll be alone.”

  She thought upon it. “All right. I’ll change clothes.”

  “Meet me on the embankment of the Monroe Street harbor, by Buckingham Fountain. In an hour. I’ll tie up there.”

  She reached the rendezvous before he did. Sailing the Hillary across the harbor from the rental dock, he saw Diandra’s tall figure standing on the edge of the shore, her hair blowing out behind her in the breeze. She was dressed in white shorts and Reeboks and a navy-blue top, looking marvelous. Easing the sailboat off the easterly wind to glide obliquely toward the embankment, he glanced about at the people in the park. No one seemed to be watching her.

  After getting aboard, one hand to the rail, she leaned close and kissed him, quickly but warmly.

  “Do you get the message?”

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  “Know so.”

  She gave him a small smile, then seated herself forward, allowing him room to work the boat. With the wind out of the east, he had to tack back and forth almost constantly to clear the many craft moored in the harbor and beat his way to the opening in the breakwater.

  Once past it, turning abeam to the wind, he could sail up and down the lakefront on the same point of sail. He headed south, motioning Diandra to move nearer. He put his arm around her. The flesh of her back was warm beneath her thin blouse.

  “You wanted to talk,” he said.

  “First tell me what you were going to say to Peter.”

  “There’s a column in the Tribune today. It says his backers won’t let him put up the building on Cabrini Green. It made it sound as if there never will be a Poe tower in Chicago.”

  “Don’t think that for a moment. If there was anything like that in the wind, I’d have known it. Peter would have shot himself. He’s obsessed with the building, Matt. It’s as if nothing else he’s done in his life matters any more.”

  “But where’s it to go?”

  “It’s a big city.”

  “Cities get very small when you start looking for desirable real estate. Most of Chicago’s is along the lake, and that’s overbuilt as it is.”

  “He must have someplace in mind.”

  “I’m going to sail down past McCormick Place,” he said, referring to the huge, rectangular exhibition hall that sat like a beached aircraft carrier just to the south of Meigs Field. “Something occurred to me. There’s some open space over and around the railroad tracks behind Burnham Park and the lakefront. It would cost a lot, if they agreed to cede the air rights, but it could be done.”

  “Not a very prestigious address.”

  “Neither was Cabrini Green. The idea is to make it one. And it’s a lot closer to the Loop.”

  She stretched her long legs out over the centerboard housing. “I’m not sure what he has in mind.”

  “Let’s take a look down there anyway.”

  Though it was not a business day, Meigs was busy with small aircraft. A single-engined Cessna entered the landing pattern overhead at such a low altitude it seemed they could reach up and touch it.

  “The day is so beautiful,” she said, once the plane’s noise had abated. “You and I haven’t had many of those, lately.”

  “What did you want to say to me?” he asked.

  She took his hand in both of hers. “I don’t have a lot to say. I love you. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. I want to spend it with you. I’ve been miserable these last few days.”

  “You’d really leave him?”

  “Matthias, if you and I just kept on sailing toward the horizon now and never came back, I’d be perfectly happy.”

  She released his hand.

  “But it would be better if you finished the building project,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not going to just let me go—‘Good-bye, Diandra; have a nice life.’ He’ll want to bargain, cut a deal. He does that with everything. It’s in his rotten nature. If we were both to walk out on him, just like that—he’d go crazy. He can make it hard for us, Matt. He has a long reach. You could end up being very sorry you ever met me.”

  “But the building will take at least two years. We can’t go on like this, not for two years. Not for another goddamn day.”

  “I’m not talking about me staying with him. But if something could be arranged—if he thought he was having his way.” She turned to him, her knees touching his. “It would make a world of difference for you, getting this building up. You’ve been drifting through your life—not very happily, as far as I can tell. Now you’ve got hold of something. You’ve found yourself. You’re an architect, a wonderful architect. With this building, you’d be one of the most important architects in the world. I don’t want you to throw that away—not just for me.”

  He adjusted the tiller. The drift was taking them too close to the seawall that bordered the airport.

  “I want to be with you no matter what,” she said, “but please think hard about this.”

  “I haven’t heard a word from him since I so disgracefully departed your premises.”

  “He’ll want to talk to you when he gets back from New York. I’ve no doubt about that.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  She took his hand and placed it on the inside of her thigh. “We have several days of meantime, don’t we?”

  There was a distant clatter coming from the southeast, the sound more insistent and intrusive than the dull buzz of the airplanes. Matthias looked in its direction. There was a speck in the sky, growing larger.

  “Helicopter,” he said. “A big one.”

  She turned to watch. As it came nearer, bright in the light of the high western sun, they could see it was red.

  “It’s one of Peter’s,” she said, “coming in from Michigan City.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Who else has helicopters painted like fire engines? Not even the fire department.”

  “Everywhere you look, Peter Poe.”

  “Don’t worry. He’s not aboard. He called our housekeeper from New York this morning. This is one
of his big shuttles. They ferry the gamblers back and forth from the casino. The rich ones, anyway. The winners. The others take the bus.”

  The thudding chatter became a din. The big machine—a huge white “P” painted on the side—cast them in shadow as it thundered overhead, turning toward the airport. The runway was clear and there was no traffic in the pattern. The helicopter was going straight in, descending rapidly for a landing on the apron in front of the terminal building.

  Mango watched the approaching helicopter from the bridge wing of the Queen P, which was moored in the harbor just behind the airport. She had thought of taking the big motor yacht out onto the lake, where she’d have a clearer view, but it would stick out like the fucking Queen Elizabeth on the open water. She hated operating the big tub on her own, anyway, no matter how much of a thrill that seemed to give Peter, and it wouldn’t do to have crew members aboard.

  She’d given them the whole week off, for as long as Poe was in New York. They’d had little to do that summer anyway. Peter was so distracted by his big project, he hadn’t thrown a single party aboard the boat—and that was the ostensible reason for buying the oversize craft in the first place. The crew was grateful for the liberty, but seemed suspicious—especially the captain. Maybe they were worried this might be a harbinger of being laid off. There were a lot of rumors going around among Poe’s army of employees about his financial state.

  The hell with them. She’d explained that she’d wanted privacy to do some work for Poe—true, enough. They’d done as they were told. They damn well knew that if she wasn’t the boss, she usually spoke for him.

  Mango knew for certain Bobby Mann was on the chopper. She’d called him in the morning, to confirm that the way was still clear for their cozy get-together, and then called again at the scheduled departure time of the chopper shuttle—just missing him, as the man at the casino helipad had put it.

  She wasn’t missing him.

  After pausing to take a sip of her drink and a last drag of her cigarette, Mango picked up the little black box she’d set on the navigation console, amused at how much it looked like the controller of those remote control cars that kids played with. The outfit guy in Chicago who’d set this up for her had explained its operation. Simple enough. You aimed the antenna, activated the device with the metal switch, and, when the light turned green, pushed the red button. He said it would work within a mile range, and she figured it wasn’t as much as half a mile to the terminal building.

  The trick would be in the timing. The idea wasn’t to blow up the whole damned chopper, as Bobby’s people had so clumsily tried with Poe’s boat. The explosive charge was very small and had been placed in the main rotor housing. When the charge went off, the rotor blade was supposed to come flying off the machine, leaving it to screw a big hole in the ground. The helicopter had to be high enough off the ground to give its passengers more than a bad bump, but at the same time she had to make sure it was over the runway, and not just open water. It had to impact on airport property and do as much damage as possible. Gauging that would be hard at this distance, but she was concentrating. The man said the puff of smoke and flame at the rotor head would be barely noticeable. People might take it for an engine backfire.

  Mango clicked the switch and smiled when the green light came on almost immediately. She had the antenna leveled at the point in the sky where the chopper was changing from a small speck to a big red blob. She glanced down at the dock. There were a few people there, but no one was looking at her. What was she? Just a woman trying to work a portable radio.

  The red blob became more defined. She could even see the flare of reflected sunlight on the pilots’ window. It would probably help to have the sun in their eyes.

  The aircraft came toward the airport at an oblique angle, turning midway along the runway and seeming to pause, though it was coming right at the terminal. She watched it descend, counting to herself, remembering how long it took Peter to make a landing with this kind of approach in his private chopper. When the machine was about four or five stories above the terminal roof, she hit the button.

  At first, nothing seemed to happen, but then the helicopter suddenly darted down, a long black shape spinning crazily off to the side above it. Mango reached for her drink.

  Matthias had the sail out at a beam reach, and they could see past it to where the helicopter was heading for its landing. There was a pop, barely audible above the sound of the turbo engine, but Matthias thought nothing of it. Then at once he grabbed Diandra’s arm, gripping her tightly. The aircraft was plummeting, lunging forward as it fell, colliding with a great crash against the terminal’s huge floor-to-ceiling windows and bursting inside, exploding in a monstrous ball of crimson and orange flame. The wreckage carried far. In a moment, a thick, boiling, oily cloud of smoke rose from the other side of the building.

  Diandra was in his arms, holding him tightly, saying the same thing over and over: “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”

  When Zany had become a suit assigned to Area Six Burglary, the old-timers liked to tell him about how cop work was done in the days before the reformers had taken over the department. There’d been a six-foot-six mustache Pete of a patrolman over on the West Side who’d killed eight people in the line of duty and carried a sawed-off, pistol-grip shotgun in his belt that he reprehensibly referred to as his “nigger chaser.” A homicide dick down in the Central District was called “Yellow Pages” because of his penchant for extracting confessions from suspects during interrogations by coming up on them from behind and whacking them on the top of the head with a telephone book. It compressed the vertebrae in a very painful way but left no mark.

  A more contemporary legend had to do with two veteran burglary detectives who set out to nail some perps who were among the most sought after felons in the department case files, even though they’d never shed a drop of blood.

  Vietnam was in full swing then and body bags were coming back to Chicago in regular succession. The papers ran funeral notices for them, noting that the deceased had died in the war. Nothing like a funeral to get an entire family out of the house. When the bereaved were off at the memorial service, the burglars would hit the residence, having an easy time of it because the neighbors usually went to the funeral, too—as was to be expected with kids from the block getting wasted in the war. The bad guys chose their marks carefully, going for addresses in solid, respectable neighborhoods.

  When they’d ripped off half a dozen houses this way, the two detectives decided to put a stop to it for good. Using the house of one of their brothers-in-law, they placed a phony notice in the paper, giving the brother-in-law’s address as that of the deceased’s. As the family, looking suitably mournful, went out the front and got into their cars, the two detectives came in the back and, with the house lights out and two big service revolvers cradled in their laps, took seats in the living room and waited for company.

  The perps showed up right on schedule. When the homicide guys arrived on the scene in response to the subsequent “gunshots—men down” call, they found both burglars lying just inside the vestibule, each with big holes in him. The two detectives claimed they were fired on first. The perps had guns, but no bullet hole or anything was found in the walls. The investigators from Internal briefly looked into the matter, but nothing was ever done about it. No one wanted to hassle the detectives about it. You didn’t prey on people in mourning. Not during a war. Not in a family town like Chicago.

  Zany had been happy he’d joined the department in modern, more enlightened times, but now he found himself thinking about those two long-ago detectives real hard. He was sitting in an armchair in his darkened living room, holding his own service revolver in his hand. The front door was locked, and he’d set a wastebasket full of empty beer cans up against it. The back door was double-locked with a deadbolt, and all the downstairs windows were shut tight and locked as well—except for one, the living-room window he’d been sitting there staring at for more than an hour.r />
  The mysterious people who’d been after him about the paintings had stepped up their efforts, making threatening phone calls at all hours, and one night firing off a shot through a window that had almost taken out his computer. He figured they wouldn’t try to kill him until they got their hands on the canvas. They’d already broken into his car, to make sure he didn’t have the painting in the trunk they’d put a bullet through. But folks were known to change their minds—especially when they began to lose patience—and Zany didn’t want to take any chances.

  He’d asked George Hejmal for some protection, and such was promised, but Zany knew from his own experience as police chief what that would mean with such a small force—hourly drive-bys, the occasional window check.

  So he’d decided on his ruse. There was a bar four blocks away on the main street that he’d from time to time patronized in the past. With Judy off in Wyoming, he’d taken to making nightly visits. He did this for real at first, but this week turned to using the place for subterfuge. He’d drive over, parking his car prominently in front, have a beer or two, then get up to go to the men’s room, slipping out the back, returning to his unlit house to sit until near the tavern’s closing time.

  He’d clued the bartender in to what he was doing. The bar was crowded in the summer, and no one seemed to notice his sudden absences. If someone did say something about it, he could always make out that he was courting a lady on the sneak. He had no doubt local gossip was running in that direction anyway.

  Zany had never fired a gun at a human being. He’d killed a deer once in Wyoming, as a teenager, hunting, and regretted it forever after—the death in the poor animal’s eyes haunting him still.

  But there’d been death in the eyes of the girl on that boat, and fear in the eyes of the 7-Eleven clerks and the priest. And Judy’s. Enough was enough.

  Unlike the two old-time burglary detectives, he wasn’t planning on whacking these bastards. He just wanted to lay hands on a live human being who might be able to tell him just what in the hell was going on—and testify to it in court.