by Tracy Clark
I stepped closer to the bed. “It isn’t necessary.”
Ron turned to Marta. “Just five minutes.”
Marta stepped closer to the bed, held her star up so Stella could see it. “I’m Detective Marta Pena. I’d like to ask you about Nick Spada. Is that all right?”
Stella’s eyes locked on Marta’s. She blinked once. Stella’s body had turned on her, locking her inside a vessel that no longer served her. However, her mind was there, you could see it. She was still in the world. I watched as Marta took a moment to structure her questions in the limited time she had so that they could be answered by a blink of an eye. A strand of Marta’s black hair had come loose from her ponytail, and she took a moment to smooth it back before she started. “Do you remember Nick Spada coming to see you?”
One blink.
Marta appeared to struggle. I felt for her. This wasn’t normally how cops did things. I gripped the bed’s side rails. “Did he threaten you?”
One blink.
My heart nearly leapt out of my chest. A single tear slid down Stella’s cheek, her eyes imploring me to go on, to ask another question she could answer, the right question.
“Did he tell you he’d killed others? That he planned to kill you, too?”
One blink, then another. There was iron in her look, resolve. She couldn’t move her arms or legs, but she could think and she could hold out against Nick Spada, refuse to die. Marta and I exchanged a look. She hadn’t believed me before, but she believed Stella Symonds now.
“What about the nurse?” Marta asked. “Did she tell you Spada sent her?”
There was no response from the bed. Instead, Stella’s eyes scanned the room, looking for her husband, finding him sitting quietly in a chair near the window, his eyes fixed far away. This had to be his worst day ever. Maybe she wanted to spare him the truth, but we were well beyond that point now. When she turned back, she blinked once.
My fingers squeezed the side rail so tightly, I thought I might snap it in two. “And if you could, you’d tell him where to get off, right?”
Her eyes seemed to twinkle. She blinked once. Ron Symonds stood, signaling the end of our time. When Stella’s eyes closed, and stayed closed, he led us out of the room, the three of us huddling at the top of the stairs.
“We’ll book the fake nurse for attempted murder and assault,” Marta said. “And we’ll have a talk with Spada, though we may not be able to hold him unless the nurse gives him up.”
Symonds’s eyes widened. “What about Stella? What if he sends somebody else?”
Marta descended the stairs, her mind likely already on the next thing. “I’ll implement a special attention, send a car out. If you can, get someone, a relative, a friend, to stay close till I end this.”
Symonds turned to me, frightened. “What does that mean? We don’t have anybody. It’s just Stella and me. We’re on our own.”
I thought for a moment, then dug my phone out of my pocket. “No, you’re not.” I dialed the number, waited for the pickup.
“Whip? I need you.”
I was sitting on the Symondses’ front porch, nursing a headache, when a black GMC Yukon pulled up in front of the house and stopped. I eased my hand into my pocket, gripped it around my gun, my eyes on the truck’s windows. Ron Symonds was inside with Stella. It was just me standing watch until the squad car showed up, the one Marta promised. Even still, I knew the squad wouldn’t be there for nearly long enough, not if Spada chose to play the long game. I braced myself when the doors opened, then relaxed when Whip eased out of the driver’s seat. I’d been watching out for his old beater. I hadn’t expected the Yukon. I drew my hand out of my pocket, then stood and watched as three guys nearly as tall and as broad as tackling dummies got out of the car next and sidled over, Whip taking the lead. I’d requested muscle, but this was something else entirely. Whip smiled, but the other three looked as sober as hangmen, as humorless as Tolkien’s Orcs, their arms covered in faded tats, each dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and Timberland boots. Ex-cons, apparently—the success of their rehabilitation, at the moment, suspect.
“Hey,” Whip said, gathering me up in a big bear hug, which hurt like hell. “You okay?”
I stared up at the three giants, eyes slanted, my gaze one of suspicion. “Yeah, I’m good.”
The three mountains didn’t smile, blink, move, or even appear to breathe. They just stood there, blocking out the sun.
“You asked for muscle, I brought muscle,” Whip said. He looked absolutely elated that he was finally able to provide something I needed. “Let me do the introductions. This is, uh . . .” He stopped, suddenly embarrassed. “I’ll stick to Christian names, how’s that?”
He pointed to the first guy, about six five, dark, bald, a gold hoop ring pierced through his nostrils like a bull. “This is Phil.” He moved to the second muscle—Hispanic, dark, heavy eyelids, jowly, a thin surgical bandage under his right eye. I knew instantly why. He was having the teardrop tats removed from his face, in stages. “That’s Antonio.” And the third—one brown eye, one blue, white-blond hair cut short, eyelashes to match. “And this is Seamus.” He turned back to me, his arms akimbo. “Good enough?”
“You understand I only want a deterrent,” I said. “A safety wall? No one comes near the house who shouldn’t be here.” I made it a point to make eye contact with each guy. “No one gets hurt. No one dies.” I got no reaction at all.
“Yeah, I explained all that coming over,” Whip said. “We blanket the house and stick here till we hear from you.” He frowned. “You look worried. What’s up with that?”
I stepped away from the group, waving for Whip to join me. “You said you knew guys who specialized in security. You brought me ex-cons?”
Whip looked at me like he didn’t see the problem. “Yeah? So? I’m an ex-con. Who’d you think I was going to bring? Harry Potter and the rest of those baby wizards? This is the best security I know. All totally straightened out, by the way. Phil works construction, Antonio’s an ace mechanic, and Seamus is a personal trainer. Besides, who knows better than a bad guy how to stop a bad guy? And they don’t even half mind that you used to be a cop.”
I took one last assessing look, then got my head around it. I needed the house covered and I didn’t have time to do it myself. I had to get to Marta to see if she had Spada on ice.
Whip draped his arm over my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Bean. We got this. Not even Santa Claus could get into that house while we’re sitting on it.”
Chapter 40
I dunked the tea bag into a Styrofoam cup of tepid water, pulled it out, dunked it in again. I’d done it now more than twenty times. Marta was in with Spada and his lawyers, and I wasn’t allowed anywhere near them. Instead, I’d been relegated to a grungy interview room at the district to wait it out, sitting across the table from Jung, his eyes closed, snoring lightly, his mouth slightly open so that he emitted a low whistle every time air flowed in and out. He’d been here since I dropped him off after Swami Rain’s. It’d probably taken this long for Marta to get anything not weird out of him. I’d given him a full report before he nodded off, per our contract, and had had to endure a string of “No way, dude” and “Holy crap.” Yet, finding out that everything had culminated in my barely preventing a dying woman from being killed hadn’t been enough to keep him awake. Now I sat glaring at him, having overcome, at around the tenth dunk, an overwhelming impulse to stuff the tea bag down his throat. I faced quite the moral challenge.
Marta had the fake nurse in custody and Spada was in the building. But here I sat, watching my dippy client sleep as though he hadn’t a care in the world. I supposed that was what he was paying me for, to sweat the big stuff and the small stuff, to worry so he wouldn’t have to. Still . . .
The files meant nothing without a witness or a confession or some other irrefutable evidence. It was obvious to me, though I couldn’t prove it, that Spada hadn’t done any of the heavy lifting himself. I needed something or so
meone to tie Spada to the nurse and to Darby’s death. I stopped dunking, and thought of the guys who’d accosted me and stolen back Spada’s files. They were too big and too dumb not to have records. Maybe if the fake nurse wouldn’t roll over, they would? I could ID them. Who could forget faces that ugly? If I could tie them to Spada, that, along with the attempted murder of Stella and her voiceless testimony, might force Spada to try and make a deal. I didn’t care how Spada got put into a cell, only that he got there.
I stood, scraping the legs of the metal chair along the floor, but even that didn’t wake Jung. Granted, Marta had been grilling him for hours straight about the boat break-in before I got here, but still, who sleeps that soundly in an interview room? I walked out onto the floor filled with cops, all moving around, but there was no sign of Marta, Ben, or Weber. I wasn’t under arrest, I was free to go, but I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what was going on.
I finally spotted a detective I knew and made a beeline for him. Detective Londell Scott was a pudgy black guy, midfifties, jovial. When he turned and saw me, he started to chuckle, his wide neck straining his collar, his three chins hanging over it. He waved for another cop. “Yo, Baumgartner, she’s out. Where’s my fifty?”
“No way.”
I turned to watch a woman approach, her auburn hair cut short, her eyes a steady sapphire blue. “Detective Baumgartner. Shana.” She offered a hand to shake, a smile. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Mythic. You’re a PI now, Scottie says.”
I turned back to Scott. “Fifty?”
“We took bets to see how long you’d stay in interview. Shana here gave you the benefit of the doubt and bet me a cool fifty. Dumb on her part.” He checked his watch, grinned. “Twenty-four minutes.”
I shook my head. He was the same old Scott, a regular Minnesota Fats. “You still shorting the snack fund, Scottie?”
The communal kitty, fed by cops, paid for the chips, cookies, and snack food that kept the uniforms, detectives, and even the arrestees and witnesses going. For Londell Scott, though, the cookies and chips and sodas went down his throat, but nary a nickle ever left his wallet, though that was never the way he told it.
“Hey, what? Don’t start, Raines. I always pay my fair share, you know that. I put twenty in just last week, or was it fifty?”
Baumgartner rolled her eyes, but kept her mouth shut. She knew Scottie shorted the snack fund. Every cop in the building knew Scottie shorted the snack fund. Every cop who’d ever worked with Scottie, wherever Scottie worked, knew Scottie shorted the snack fund.
“Same old Scottie,” I said.
He wagged a thick finger at me. “And same old Raines.”
I looked around the floor. “Where’s Marta?”
They both stood there, mouths pinched closed.
“Really?” I asked.
Scott shrugged. “She’s following a lead.”
“A lead I gave her.”
“Well, now she’s on it, and she’s got her hands full by the looks of it.”
Baumgartner bounced on her heels, hands in her pockets. “Rich guy showed up with five lizard-faced lawyers. I heard they’re burying her in paper as we speak.” She glanced over my shoulder. “Speak of the Devil.”
I reeled. Marta trudged in, looking like she’d just been batted around by a jungle cat. She flicked her head toward the interview room and then headed that way. I followed.
“Hey, Shana,” I heard Scott say. “I say only one comes out standing. Put you down for twenty?”
I headed for Marta. “If you’ve got twenty burning a hole in your pocket, Scottie, put it in the damn money jar!”
A round of applause went up from around the room, cops catcalling Scott. I left them to it. Marta was standing by the table, watching Jung sleep, when I walked back into the room. She slammed the files she carried down on the table hard, the reverb finally startling Jung awake. He looked at Marta, then me. “Get out,” Marta told him.
Jung blinked. “I can go?”
“You could’ve gone hours ago. Why the hell are you still sitting here?”
He glanced over at me, staring as though he’d never seen me before. “Wait for me in the hall,” I said.
Jung got up and hurried out, and I closed the door behind him. Marta turned to face me. “Spada’s got times, dates, and witnesses that put him nowhere near Darby or Symonds. We’ve got no physical evidence linking him to anything. The nurse hasn’t opened her mouth since she got here. He came in when we asked him to, so that’s on his side, but he arrived with an entire law firm trailing behind him. Each one of the little stiffs was dressed in a five-hundred-dollar suit, each one ready to tap-dance all over my spleen and foul up my pension.” She lifted the folder. “See this? Legal mumbo jumbo that basically says we, meaning the Chicago Police Department—and, by extension, me—cannot talk to, contact, or even think about Nick Spada in regard to Ayers, Symonds, or Darby. If we do, we get our asses chewed up and handed back to us.”
“There wouldn’t be any physical evidence leading back to him. He hired the work out—Darby, the psycho nurse.”
“We may think it, but we can’t prove it.”
“Then get the nurse to flip.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do? We’ve got Florence Nightingale solid for aggravated battery against you and Stella, and we’re investigating her for the dead nurse in the trunk. But, like I said, she hasn’t said a word about that or about Spada, and until she does, we’ve got nothing else. And, let’s get real here, though we’ve got Stella Symonds’s nonverbal account that Spada threatened her, she’s a dying woman. All he has to do is wait her out. Long story short, we took a bite of the apple and got nothing. We go back for a second bite with nothing more than we have now and we get bulldozed.”
“Where’s Spada now?”
“He’s probably waltzing out the front door like he owns the place.”
I raced out of the room, through the office, heading for the ground floor. I pushed through the doors just in time to see Spada open the door on a black Cadillac. He stood there for a time, conversing with a gaunt little man in a blue power suit holding an expensive-looking briefcase.
“Spada!”
The startled look on his face quickly melted into a self-satisfied grin. When I reached the Caddy, the lawyer moved to act as a buffer between us. His mouth opened to protest, but Spada placed a hand on his shoulder to quiet him. “Ms. Raines, I suppose I have you to thank for this inconvenience?”
“That’s all it is to you?”
“I’m not quite sure what you think I’ve done, but I promise you I’m just an ordinary businessman. Besides, this is police business, isn’t it? Nothing to do with you?”
“It became my business when you had Darby’s body delivered to me.”
He shot me a woeful look that didn’t come close to looking sincere. “I was absolutely horrified to hear what happened to Vincent, but I had nothing to do with his death. He was a man with a colorful past. It’s ludicrous to think I had anything to do with that.”
“And slanderous,” the lawyer added.
“My lawyers seem to think the police don’t have a leg to stand on, and neither do you. Isn’t that right, Jerome?” He flicked a look at the lawyer, who reached into his case and came out with a legal document, which he shoved into my hands. A cursory glance told me it was a cease-and-desist order that put me in the same boat as Marta and the CPD. I was not to contact, harass, or approach Nick Spada from this point onward. I sneered at the order and thought of Big Percy Prescott and Earlene Skipper. What goes around comes around, I guessed.
I waved the paper. “You think this is going to do it?”
“I’m certain of it.”
Something over my shoulder caught Spada’s attention, and I turned to see what he was looking at. Jung was standing in the doorway, watching us.
“I assume that’s the young man who started all of this? Ayers’s friend?”
I turned to face him. “How do yo
u know that?”
“You’d be surprised at all the things I know.” He leaned in, his cloying breath a mixture of stale coffee and mint. “The next time you stop by my office, I’d appreciate your making an appointment first.”
I glared at him, watching as he eased into the backseat of the big car. “Jerome?”
Jerome moved to push me back. “One finger touches me, Jerome, and you’ll eat that briefcase.”
Jerome moved away quickly, positioning the case over his vital organs as though it were a shield. He got into Spada’s car on the street side and the car sped off. He knows a lot of things? But he couldn’t know about Jung unless Darby told him. Darby had been watching the marina, living on his boss’s boat. He had to have seen Jung hanging around. It wouldn’t have been difficult to put a name to the face, not with Spada’s means and access. I stared at the order, then stuffed it into a pocket, heading back inside.
“That’s the guy?” Jung asked when I reached him. “The guy who killed Tim?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why aren’t you going after him?”
“I am. But first I need to ID a couple of thugs.”
Chapter 41
It’s easy to underestimate the number of criminals trolling city streets every day, until you’re forced to pick through hundreds of their mug shots. They go on forever, one hardened face after another; some with tats, some without; some not so bad looking, others with a face only a mother could love. They came in all shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of depravity, running the gamut from petty thieves, who pinched toothpaste and gum from their local CVS, to stone-cold killers, who’d gut their own mothers for a pack of cigarettes and a scratch-off Lotto.
It took me more than two hours to find the thugs; by then, my eyes were shot, my head throbbed, and I was in a dark and dangerous place. Rayvon and Draymond Williams were their names. It turned out they were brothers, and they were just as ugly on the page as they had been in person. By the time I ID’d them, of course, I’d acquired an audience: Jung, Ben, and Weber. Scott hadn’t gone far, either. He’d wagered I’d find the right faces in record time, or die trying. He won another fifty. Marta was still working on the fake nurse and I knew she’d work her till she got something. Marta didn’t like being bullied any more than I did, and Spada’s priggish lawyers had punched every last one of her hot buttons.