“Oh?”
Isaac Richmond smiled, said, “Even with the recommendation of a CPD lieutenant, you don’t think I’d hire you without some due diligence. I’m an old army spook—I don’t go into anything without a little recon. Your reputation is one of honesty and persistence, to a fault.”
“Perhaps to a major fault,” I said.
“Yes, you were quite the newsmaker a little while back. I do admire the way you handled yourself, but you made trouble for powerful people and I know your business has suffered as a result.”
“A little slow for a while but I’m doing fine now. Thanks for your concern.”
“No need for sarcasm, Mr. Dudgeon, I meant no offense.” Isaac Richmond stood and motioned toward the door. “Please sleep on it tonight, decide in the morning. Take the check home with you. And the keys. If you decide not to help me, return them here. You can do that much for an old man.”
I awoke to the sound of my own voice screaming, felt my body shaking from the adrenaline surge.
Fuck. Not again…
I rolled onto my back and took a few deep breaths to bring my heart rate down, pressed my palms against my chest to stop the shaking. Then came the tears. I let myself cry for a minute or two, then cut it off. I tried to push the images from my mind, but some images push easier than others.
And this particular memory slideshow was insistent. I was tied to a chair while a couple of very bad cops wearing very bad aftershave did very bad things to me. To call them cops is really an insult to cops. More like sadistic crooks with badges. They’d whipped me with an electrical cord, pried off a fingernail, knocked out a couple of teeth. And then they’d dislocated my shoulder and stomped on it.
That was almost ten months ago. They were both dead. But the images remained.
Get over it, Dudgeon.
I got up and stripped the sweat-soaked sheet off the futon. It had become such a common occurrence that I kept a fresh sheet and pillowcase on a nearby chair. The bedside clock read 3:23 A.M.
The nightmare had been triggered by rolling over in my sleep, onto my right side. Onto my shoulder, which now felt like someone had sunk a hot ice pick deep into the joint. I left the bedsheet in a heap on the floor, went to the bathroom mirror, and opened my mouth. No blood. I didn’t expect blood, knew that the taste of it was just a sense memory, but I always checked anyway.
The taste of blood, sudden sweats, and flashback images sometimes happened when I was wide awake. Sometimes triggered by pain in the shoulder or neck, sometimes by the smell of diesel fuel or Aqua Velva. And sometimes I couldn’t identify the trigger. The episodes had diminished during the months I’d spent with my grandfather down in Georgia but when I came back to Chicago they were right here waiting for me.
Chicago was full of triggers. Chicago was Trigger City.
I swallowed a couple of Percocet and took a cool shower. My doctor had insisted that painkillers were not a long-term solution and warned that my supraspinatus tendon was at risk and the shoulder would continue to deteriorate until I got the surgery. But I already knew. I’d read the MRI report—it was a mess in there.
I toweled off and put the new sheet on the bed, thinking You can’t live like this much longer, it’s just too exhausting. Get the surgery. Take Richmond’s money. He’s a grown-up. He said it himself, he’s got loads of money and he won’t miss it and you gave him fair warning besides. If the case is a loser, so be it.
So be it.
CHAPTER TWO
Lieutenant Mike Angelo, commanding officer of the Area 4 Homicide Section, leaned back in his squeaky chair and patted his belly, which threatened to pop the buttons of his polyester shirt. “You take the gig?”
I slid a book across the desk to him. The Guards, by Ken Bruen. “Brought you something,” I said. “An Irish detective novel. Great book, you’ll like it. Full of bent cops, very realistic. Present company excepted, of course.”
A gentle tease, and I wouldn’t even go that far with any other cop I knew. But Mike Angelo and I had built a good working relationship based upon earned respect. To call us personal friends would be a stretch, but I knew Mike was good people and I’d like to think he’d say the same about me.
Mike sent me a deadeye cop stare. “Cops make convenient punching bags the world over, why should Ireland be any different?” He picked up the book and flipped the pages and his eyes grew wide. I’d inserted his finder’s fee, spread throughout the book. Hundred-dollar bills. Twenty-five of them.
“Thanks for the referral,” I said. “Richmond wants eight weeks, exclusive.”
“No shit?”
“Even paid in advance.”
“I figure two weeks at most to confirm everything we already know,” Mike said. “What the hell you gonna do with the next six?”
“It’s not like that. Richmond says he doesn’t doubt the CPD.”
“So what does he want?”
“I think he wants to know his daughter better. He wants me to bring him the capital-T truth of her death, beyond the pertinent facts.”
“Oh Christ.”
“I know. I tried to turn him down but he wasn’t having any.”
Mike shrugged, “Ah, what the hell, he’s rich. Bring him a few tidbits that he didn’t know about his daughter, make him happy and spend the money with a clear conscience.”
“Nothing’s gonna make him happy,” I said. “His daughter will still be dead and he still won’t know her any better.”
“Not your problem.” Mike plucked a black three-ring binder off the stack on his gray metal desk and dropped it in front of me. “Joan Richmond’s deceased file. Just about as open and shut as I’ve ever seen.”
“Anything bother you?”
“Read the file, you’ll see. Steven Zhang was a paranoid headcase who killed his boss. Case closed.” He stood, picked up the book I’d given him, and headed for the door. “I’m gonna make dinner reservations for Susan and me at Anna Maria’s. God bless her, she prefers great food to fancy.”
“You’re a lucky man.”
“Back in twenty. Happy reading.”
The binder wasn’t as thick as most. Not surprising, given the circumstances. The cops had responded to a 911 gunshot call. They found Joan Richmond, dead of multiple gunshot wounds, in the foyer of her condo. A signed confession lay next to the body, written on Zhang IT Consulting letterhead. Naturally, the cops headed for the address on the letterhead. On the way there, the radio dispatcher announced a gunshot at the same address. The cops found Steven Zhang dead of a self-inflicted gunshot from the same caliber gun that had killed Joan Richmond. Ballistics later confirmed that it was the same gun. And the handwriting on the confession matched Zhang’s.
Steven’s wife, Amy Zhang, arrived on the scene in a state of panic. She told of Steven’s strange phone call, and phone records later confirmed it. Understandably, she had a meltdown when she saw what was left of her husband and she wasn’t much use to the police. But they came back a couple days later for a follow-up and she confirmed that Steven had recently been acting secretive and paranoid and had been launching into verbal diatribes that made no sense. She’d begged him to see a doctor but he had insisted that the doctors were all part of a conspiracy to poison him.
The detectives interviewed Joan Richmond’s boss and subordinates at HM Nichols. Joan was well liked but no one professed to know her very well. She had hired Zhang on contract and for the first couple of months all went well and she was happy with his job performance. She and Zhang often lunched together and coworkers said they seemed to be friends. None thought there was anything sexual between them. In the couple of weeks prior to the murder, Zhang started to display erratic behavior, acting fearful of his coworkers, not combing his hair or shaving his face, holding loud arguments with voices that seemed to exist only in his head. For the last week of his life Zhang wore the same clothes every day. When a coworker commented on it, he explained that someone was putting poison in his laundry soap, to control his mind.
The written confession gave further evidence of these same delusions. Apparently Zhang came to believe that Joan Richmond had been co-opted into the vast conspiracy against him. The tasks she assigned demanded that he read computer code that was designed to reprogram his brain so that he wouldn’t be able to carry out his “vital mission, imperative to saving American democracy.” Having been infected by the computer code, Zhang now received auditory instructions from “Them”—instructions that arrived as Joan Richmond’s voice, even when she was nowhere near. Killing her was the only way to silence the instructions, so he could carry out his mission.
The detectives interviewed Joan Richmond’s neighbors, none of whom recognized a photograph of Steven Zhang. Similarly, none of Zhang’s neighbors recognized a photo of Joan Richmond. They interviewed Isaac Richmond but he knew nothing about Zhang, had never heard of him.
I examined the crime scene photographs taken at Joan Richmond’s condo. Joan lay on her back. Her legs, slightly bent at the knees, lay to the right, crossed above the ankle. Her right arm was down by her side, while her left went straight out from her shoulder, like she was signaling a left turn. She wore blue jeans and a turquoise T-shirt. The first bullet had entered through her left cheekbone, and the tissue above the bullet hole was enlarged. There were three more entry wounds in the center of her chest. She’d been shot right in the heart, so there wasn’t a lot of blood. Her eyes were open, but there was nobody home.
Next came the photos from Steven Zhang’s town house. Zhang sat on a blue sofa, legs spread out in front of him, arms down by his sides, hands palm up. His head lay back to one side and his mouth hung wide open, like some drunken dinner guest, passed out and snoring in the middle of your party and making everyone uncomfortable.
He’d put the barrel in his mouth, shot up through the soft palate. That doesn’t slow a bullet very much and it had exited out the back of his head and splattered blood and brains and skull fragments all over the cream-colored wall behind him.
Mike Angelo returned just as I was closing my notebook.
“Get your fill?” He sat and his chair squeaked.
“And then some,” I said.
I picked up two beef sandwiches at Al’s #1 Italian and took them back to my office on Wabash. Vince Cosimo was sitting in my chair when I entered.
“Just test-driving it,” he said.
“Yeah yeah. Other side, rookie.” Vince squeezed his muscular frame into one of my client chairs while I grabbed two bottles of Capital Wisconsin Amber from the little bar fridge. I gave him a sandwich and he dug into it like the next day was Lent. Gave him one of the bottles, sat at my desk, and took a swig of beer.
Vince Cosimo had earned his blue card that summer and was working for me part-time. At first there wasn’t any work to give him. Isaac Richmond had been right—after the big ruckus and my four-month exile, I’d returned to Chicago to find that most of my clients had purged my name from their Rolodexes. Hard to blame them, really. They had to think of their own safety, and that of their families.
So it was strictly B-list gigs for a while. Process serving and petty insurance fraud and a couple of divorces to get me over. But I stuck with it and eventually word got around that I’d managed a truce with Chris Amodeo, and some A-list clients returned, followed by a surge of new clients. My pseudo-celebrity status was a hell of a draw, once everyone knew they could hire me without running afoul of the Outfit.
So now I often had work for Vince, but he lacked experience. I was bringing him along as fast as was prudent. I’d recommended him to an agency that specialized in serving subpoenas and they gave him about twenty hours a week. I gave him another twenty, but almost half of it was unpaid, since more than half of the time he was just observing how the job was done. I was trying to be a nice guy but I wasn’t looking to put Santa Claus out of business. Anyway, Vince made enough to get by while learning the trade. And Mary had left him, which significantly reduced his living expenses.
Vince wiped beef drippings from his chin, said, “How’d the job interview go?”
“It wasn’t a job interview,” I said. “It was a meeting with a prospective client.”
“Yeah, how’d it go? Any work for me?”
“Probably not. Too early to say.” I moved the second half of my sandwich to the paper in front of Vince. “Anyway I’ve already got you on a paying gig.”
“I’m still on that?”
“Did I tell you to stop?” I held Vince’s eyes until he looked away. “Then you’re still on it.”
“Yeah, but Ray…”
“I don’t want to hear it, Vince. Really.” I took another bite of my half sandwich and chewed, not tasting it. Washed it down with some beer. “Look, in a perfect world none of us would ever have to do divorce work. But I promise you, if you’re gonna make a career out of this, there will be ups and downs and you’ll have to do them.”
“This isn’t even a divorce.”
“Extended surveillance. One subject. Working solo. It’s the same profile as 90 percent of domestic surveillance jobs and most workman’s comp, too. It’s good experience for you.”
“Okay, but Ray…”
“What? You want to continue to apprentice under my license, or not?” I put the beer bottle on the desk a little harder than intended, which sent my Ernie Banks bobble head doll into a spasm of bobbling.
“You’re a bastard today.” Vince stopped eating and picked up his beer. We drank in silence for a minute and I made the executive decision to light a cigarette. I was mostly nonsmoking now but the time seemed right. I drew smoke into my lungs and felt the way you feel when you slip into that favorite sweatshirt you’ve had since college. Vince opened his mouth to speak, closed it, tried again and said, “I’ll do the job until you say it’s over.”
“Good.”
“But I’m your friend, so I gotta say what I gotta say. If you fire me, you fire me.”
I couldn’t deny him that. “Go ahead, unload. But I don’t want to have this conversation every week. Hit me with your best shot and then we’re done with it.”
Vince swallowed some beer. “It’s a little creepy, Ray.”
“A little creepy? That’s your best shot?”
“More than a little creepy. Paying me to spy on your ex-girlfriend? Solidly creepy.”
“Whoa. Did I not specifically instruct you to terminate surveillance any time Jill shows up?”
“Yeah but—”
“Then I’m not spying on her.”
“Spying on her boyfriend then. Still creepy.”
“I just want to be sure Dr. Feelgood isn’t bad for her,” I said. “Once I’m reasonably confident he’s a straight-up guy, I’ll pull you off the job and leave them to their blissful coexistence. But if he does turn out to be a bad guy, then I’ll warn Jill. And I know that doesn’t mean we’ll get back together. I just want her to be safe.”
“You’re rationalizing and you don’t even know how lame that sounds,” Vince said. “You gotta move on and forget about her.”
Actually, I was keenly aware of how lame I sounded. But I wasn’t just rationalizing, I was in rationalization overdrive, and I just didn’t care. It just didn’t matter.
“Thanks for sharing,” I said. “Hope you feel better.”
“Well that’s how I feel about it,” Vince shrugged. “I’ve had my say, do what you want.”
I stubbed out my half-smoked cigarette. “You can pick him up at Rush tonight. His shift ends at six.”
“I know when his shift ends,” said Vince.
“Good for you,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
Joan Richmond’s blood had been mopped up six weeks ago, but between sand-colored floor tiles, the grout bore dark stains where her body had lain. I stood for a minute, making mental comparisons between the hallway and my memory of the crime scene photographs.
Then I worked my way through the apartment, room by room, assembling an impression of the woman who had lived here. Eart
h tones predominated and the decor was tastefully generic and fairly gender neutral. It looked like the catalog photos for a midpriced furniture store. Clean, orderly, coordinated, and completely soulless.
There was still food in the fridge, some of the leftovers moldy. It was clear that Joan’s father had simply locked up the place after her death and had not returned to deal with the fact that she wasn’t coming back. The freezer held a bag of frozen peas, a pint of chocolate ice cream, and five microwavable low-calorie meals. And two blue bottles of Skyy vodka. I pulled the bottles out and now saw that one was three-quarters empty, the other waiting on deck. Most people would wait until the first bottle was empty before putting the next in the freezer. Hell, most people probably wouldn’t even buy the next bottle until the first one was empty. Joan Richmond was a drinker and, from the absence of appropriate mixers, I guessed she took her vodka straight. The five ice cube trays suggested she liked it to stay cold in the glass.
The bedroom was forest green with natural oak trim. Mission-style furniture. A masculine room, but for the duvet cover and pillowcases, which boasted a fiercely cheerful floral print by Liberty. Joan Richmond favored the right side of the bed, the side nearest the door.
The bedside table offered Accounting Today, Vanity Fair, The Economist. In the drawer, a pen, a notebook, and a pair of reading glasses. The notebook contained innocuous “to-do” lists—the sort of things jotted down to clear a busy mind at the end of the day and make room for sleep.
The matching table on the other side of the bed was vacant. No magazines, empty drawer. Like it was waiting for someone to move in and put his (or her) personal stamp on the place.
The bathroom contained all the requisite unctions, ointments, and creams that women employ as weapons in their foredoomed battle against nature and time. And the usual over-the-counter drugs. And sleeping pills. Consult your doctor, use as directed, for occasional use only…
Trigger City Page 2