Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  Greer transferred Bernie and Kevin to Michigan Avenue for the noon-to-midnight. Tension had been mounting since the Democrats defeated their own peace plank. When the protestors in Grant Park heard the news, the American flag near the band shell was lowered to half-mast, which triggered a push by police. When someone raised a red shirt on the flagpole, the police moved in again. A group of youth marshals lined up to try and hold back the two sides, but the police broke through, attacking with clubs, Mace, and tear gas.

  As darkness fell, demonstration leaders put out an order to gather at the downtown Hilton. Protestors poured out of Grant Park onto Lake Shore Drive, trying to cross one of the bridges back to Michigan. The Balbo and Congress bridges were sealed off by guardsmen with machine guns and grenades, but the Jackson Street Bridge was passable. The crowd surged across.

  The heat had lost its edge, and it was a beautiful summer night, the kind of night that begged for a ride in a convertible. When they were teenagers, Kevin’s brother had yearned for their neighbor’s yellow T-Bird. He’d made Kevin walk past their neighbor’s driveway ten times a day with him to ogle it. He never recovered when it was sold to someone from Wisconsin.

  “Hey, Dougherty. Look alive!” Kevin jerked his head up. Bernie’s scowl was so fierce his bushy eyebrows had merged into a straight line. About thirty cops, including Kevin and Bernie, were forming a barricade. Behind the police line were guardsmen with bayonets on their rifles. A wave of kids broke toward them. When the kids reached the cops, they kept pushing. The cops pushed back. Kevin heard pops as canisters of tear gas were released. The kids covered their noses and mouths.

  “Don’t let them through!” Bernie yelled. Kevin could barely hear him above the din. He twisted around. Bernie’s riot stick was poised high above his head. He watched as Bernie swung, heard the thwack as it connected with a solid mass. A young boy in front of them dropped. Bernie raised his club again. Another thwack. The boy fell over sideways, shielding his head with his arms.

  The police line wobbled and broke into knots of cops and kids, each side trying to advance. Kevin caught a whiff of cordite. Had some guardsman fired a rifle? The peppery smell of tear gas thickened the air. His throat was parched, and he could barely catch his breath. He threw on his gas mask, but it felt like a brick. He tore it off and let it dangle by the strap around his neck. Around him were screams, grunts, curses. An ambulance wailed as it raced down Congress. Its flashing lights punctuated the dark with theatrical, strobe-like bursts.

  Somehow Kevin and Bernie became separated, and a young girl suddenly appeared in front of Kevin. She was wearing a white fluffy blouse and jeans, and her hair was tied back with a bandanna. She looked like Maggie. Young people streamed past, but she lingered as if she had all the time in the world. She stared at him, challenging him with her eyes. Then she slowly held up two fingers in a V sign.

  Kevin swallowed. A copper he didn’t know jabbed her with his club. “You! Get back! Go back home to your parents!”

  She stumbled forward and lost her balance. Kevin caught her and helped her up. She wiped her hands on her jeans, her eyes darting from the other cop to Kevin. She didn’t seem to be hurt. She disappeared back into the crowd. Kevin was relieved.

  A few yards away a group of cops and kids were shoving and shouting at each other. Rocks flew through the air.

  “Traitors!” An angry voice that sounded like Bernie rose above the melee. His outburst was followed by more pops. As the tear gas canisters burst, a chorus of screams rose. The protestors tried to scatter, but they were surrounded by cops and guardsmen, and there was nowhere to go. The cops closed in and began making arrests.

  Coughing from the gas, Kevin moved in. He was only a few feet away when the girl with the long hair and peasant blouse appeared again. This time she was accompanied by a slender boy with glasses. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. The girl’s bandanna was wet and was tied around her nose and mouth. She was carrying a poster of a yellow sunflower with the words, WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS.

  The boy looked Kevin over. He and the girl exchanged nods. “What are you doing, copper man?” His eyes looked glassy.

  Kevin kept his mouth shut.

  “You don’t want this blood on your hands. She told me how you helped her up. Come with us. You can, you know.” The boy held out his hand as if he expected Kevin to take it.

  Wisps of tear gas hovered over the sidewalk. Kevin tightened his grip on his club. He stared at the kids. The girl looked more and more like Maggie.

  Suddenly, Bernie’s voice came at them from behind: “Kevin, no! Don’t even look at ’em!”

  Kevin looked away.

  “Don’t listen to him, man!” The boy’s voice rose above Bernie’s. “You’re not one of the pigs. You don’t agree with this war, I can tell. Come with us.”

  Kevin looked down.

  “Get back, you little creep!” Bernie moved to Kevin’s side and hoisted his club.

  The boy stood his ground. “You know you don’t belong with”—he waved a hand—“him.”

  A commander in a white shirt at the edge of the barricade yelled through a megaphone, “Clear the streets! Do you hear me, men? Clear the streets! Now!”

  Someone else shouted, “All right, grab your gear! Let’s go!”

  A line of police pressed forward, but the boy and girl remained where they were. Everything fell away except the sound of the boy’s voice. In an odd way it felt as silent as the cemetery behind the church.

  “Time’s running out, man,” the boy said, his hand half covering his mouth. “How can you defend the law when you know it’s wrong?”

  Bernie’s voice slammed into them like a hard fist: “Kev, don’t let him talk to you like that!”

  Kevin spun around. Bernie’s face was purple with rage. Brandishing his riot stick, he swung it down at the boy’s head. The boy jumped, but the club dealt a glancing blow to his temple. The boy collapsed.

  “Bernie, no!” Kevin seized Bernie’s arm.

  Bernie snatched his arm away. “Do your job, Dougherty.” He pointed to the kids with his club. “They are the enemy!”

  The girl turned to Kevin with a desperate cry. “Make him stop!”

  Kevin strained to see her face in the semidark. “Go. Now. Get lost!”

  “No! Help me get him up!” She knelt beside the boy.

  “What are you waiting for, Dougherty?” Bernie’s voice shot out, raw and brutal. He clubbed the boy again. The boy lay curled on his side on the ground, moaning. Blood gushed from his head. His glasses were smashed.

  “Do something!” the girl screamed at Kevin. “Please!”

  Her anguish seemed to throw Bernie into a frenzy. His eyes were slits of fury. He raised his stick over his head.

  Kevin froze. Everything slowed down. Images of Maggie floated through his mind. She could be in the crowd. Maybe Father Connor. Even his mother. He thought about Mike. And his father. What Bernie was doing. What his duty was. His duty was to serve and protect.

  * * *

  The moment of clarity came so sharply it hurt. His chest tightened, and his hands clenched into fists. For the first time—maybe in his entire twenty-three years—he knew what that duty meant.

  “Dougherty,” Bernie kept at him, his voice raspy. “Either you do it, or I will!”

  Kevin stared at his partner. Then he dropped his club and threw himself over the girl. She groaned as his weight knocked the wind out of her. Her body folded up beneath him, but it didn’t matter: she was safe. Kevin twisted around and caught a glimpse of Bernie. His riot stick was still raised high above his head.

  Kevin wondered what his partner would do now. He hoped the whole world was watching.

  PART III

  MODERN CRIME

  Skin Deep

  by SARA PARETSKY

  Michigan Avenue

  (Originally published in 1987)

  I

  The warning bell clangs angrily and the submarine dive
s sharply. Everyone to battle stations. The Nazis pursuing closely, the bell keeps up its insistent clamor, loud, urgent, filling my head. My hands are wet: I can’t remember what my job is in this cramped, tiny boat. If only someone would turn off the alarm bell. I fumble with some switches, pick up an intercom. The noise mercifully stops.

  “Vic! Vic, is that you?”

  “What?”

  “I know it’s late. I’m sorry to call so late, but I just got home from work. It’s Sal, Sal Barthele.”

  “Oh, Sal. Sure.” I looked at the orange clock readout. It was four thirty. Sal owns the Golden Glow, a bar in the south Loop I patronize.

  “It’s my sister, Vic. They’ve arrested her. She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it.”

  “Of course not, Sal—didn’t do what?”

  “They’re trying to frame her. Maybe the manager . . . I don’t know.”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Where are you?”

  She was at her mother’s house, 95th and Vincennes. Her sister had been arrested three hours earlier. They needed a lawyer, a good lawyer. And they needed a detective, a good detective. Whatever my fee was, she wanted me to know they could pay my fee.

  “I’m sure you can pay the fee, but I don’t know what you want me to do,” I said as patiently as I could.

  “She—they think she murdered that man. She didn’t even know him. She was just giving him a facial. And he dies on her.”

  “Sal, give me your mother’s address. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

  The little house on Vincennes was filled with neighbors and relatives murmuring encouragement to Mrs. Barthele. Sal is very black, and statuesque. Close to six feet tall, with a majestic carriage, she can break up a crowd in her bar with a look and a gesture. Mrs. Barthele was slight, frail, and light-skinned. It was hard to picture her as Sal’s mother.

  Sal dispersed the gathering with characteristic firmness, telling the group that I was here to save Evangeline and that I needed to see her mother alone.

  Mrs. Barthele sniffed over every sentence. “Why did they do that to my baby?” she demanded of me. “You know the police, you know their ways. Why did they come and take my baby, who never did a wrong thing in her life?”

  As a white woman, I could be expected to understand the machinations of the white man’s law. And to share responsibility for it. After more of this meandering, Sal took the narrative firmly in hand.

  Evangeline worked at La Cygnette, a high-prestige beauty salon on North Michigan. In addition to providing facials and their own brand-name cosmetics at an exorbitant cost, they massaged the bodies and feet of their wealthy clients, stuffed them into steam cabinets, ran them through a Bataan-inspired exercise routine, and fed them herbal teas. Signor Giuseppe would style their hair for an additional charge.

  Evangeline gave facials. The previous day she had one client booked after lunch, a Mr. Darnell.

  “Men go there a lot?” I interrupted.

  Sal made a face. “That’s what I asked Evangeline. I guess it’s part of being a yuppie—go spend a lot of money getting cream rubbed into your face.”

  Anyway, Darnell was to have had his hair styled before his facial, but the hairdresser fell behind schedule and asked Evangeline to do the guy’s face first.

  Sal struggled to describe how a La Cygnette facial worked—neither of us had ever checked out her sister’s job. You sit in something like a dentist’s chair, lean back, relax—you’re naked from the waist up, lying under a big down comforter. The facial expert—cosmetician was Evangeline’s official title—puts cream on your hands and sticks them into little electrically heated mitts, so your hands are out of commission if you need to protect yourself. Then she puts stuff on your face, covers your eyes with heavy pads, and goes away for twenty minutes while the face goo sinks into your hidden pores.

  Apparently while this Darnell lay back deeply relaxed, someone had rubbed some kind of poison into his skin. “When Evangeline came back in to clean his face, he was sick—heaving, throwing up, it was awful. She screamed for help and started trying to clean his face—it was terrible, he kept vomiting on her. They took him to the hospital, but he died around ten tonight.

  “They came to get Baby at midnight—you’ve got to help her, V.I.—even if the guy tried something on her, she never did a thing like that—she’d haul off and slug him, maybe, but rubbing poison into his face? You go help her.”

  II

  Evangeline Barthele was a younger, darker edition of her mother. At most times, she probably had Sal’s energy—sparks of it flared now and then during our talk—but a night in the holding cells had worn her down.

  I brought a clean suit and makeup for her: justice may be blind but her administrators aren’t. We talked while she changed.

  “This Darnell—you sure of the name?—had he ever been to the salon before?”

  She shook her head. “I never saw him. And I don’t think the other girls knew him either. You know, if a client’s a good tipper or a bad one they’ll comment on it, be glad or whatever that he’s come in. Nobody said anything about this man.”

  “Where did he live?”

  She shook her head. “I never talked to the guy, V.I.”

  “What about the PestFree?” I’d read the arrest report and talked briefly to an old friend in the M.E.’s office. To keep roaches and other vermin out of their posh Michigan Avenue offices, La Cygnette used a potent product containing a wonder chemical called chorpyrifos. My informant had been awestruck—“Only an operation that didn’t know shit about chemicals would leave chorpyrifos lying around. It’s got a toxicity rating of five—it gets you through the skin—you only need a couple of tablespoons to kill a big man if you know where to put it.”

  Whoever killed Darnell had either known a lot of chemistry or been lucky—into his nostrils and mouth, with some rubbed into the face for good measure, the pesticide had made him convulsive so quickly that even if he knew who killed him he’d have been unable to talk, or even reason.

  Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept—everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.

  “So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”

  She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette—the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”

  She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack—she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients—she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.

  When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence—any of La Cygnette’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.

  Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”

  “They’re lying,” she insisted.

  “Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”

  “You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”

 
“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”

  For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”

  “I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense. Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”

  Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t running back to Vincennes Avenue talking to her.”

  I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.

  Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her—not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.

  “First of all, she has very strict morals. No sex outside marriage. I’m thirty, mind you, but that doesn’t count with her. Second, he’s white, and she’d murder me. She really would. I think that’s why I never fell in love with him—if we wanted to get married I’d never be able to explain it to Mama.”

  This latest trip to Chicago, Darnell thought it would be fun to see what Evangeline did for a living, so he booked an appointment at La Cygnette. She hadn’t told anyone there she knew him. And when she found him sick and dying she’d panicked and lied.

  “And if you tell my mother of this, V.I.—I’ll put a curse on you. My father was from Haiti and he knew a lot of good ones.”

  “I won’t tell your mother. But unless they nuked Lebanon this morning or murdered the mayor, you’re going to get a lot of lines in the paper. It’s bound to be in print.”