by Earl Merkel
Santori might have smiled; it was there and gone so quickly that Herndon could not be certain.
“Well,” Santori said, without taking his eyes from the traffic, “we’re probably not as smart as we think, either.”
Chapter 28
Virgil Erlich chewed ferociously at the gum he had just popped into his mouth and remembered how good a cigarette tasted before an action began. The memory did not improve his temper.
“Do I need to remind you two whose party this is?”
“Yeah, Lieutenant, we remember,” Mel said sourly. He looked at Terry, sitting beside him in the back seat of Erlich’s Sheriff’s Police vehicle, and rolled his eyes. “We’re just along for the ride.”
“You’re along out of professional courtesy,” Erlich said, and his tone brooked no discussion. “You’re out of your jurisdiction. If there’s a collar here, it’s a county collar. Are we clear about this?”
He made a point of waiting until both Lake Tower officers had nodded, albeit grudgingly in Bird’s case. Then the Cook County detective pulled a handheld transceiver from inside the leather jacket he wore.
He keyed the transmit button.
“Central, this is Erlich. I’m gonna be out of service for a few minutes.”
• • •
The way the reports read later made no reference to the noises of the night, the nocturnal background ambiance that is noticed mainly when its absence signals danger. Neither was there a description of what, if anything, was said as the three officers entered the building. If a suspicious vehicle had been parked along the curb, they did not notice it; if a figure watched their approach from behind a darkened window, it did not register.
From the official incident report, there was nothing unusual noted about the building: nothing to raise suspicion, no reason to hold back or call for additional support in the post-midnight darkness.
Later, I would pore over the official record again and again, trying to determine if there was any intimation of the peril that awaited them inside, or if one of them had any premonition that it all was about to go wrong.
Erlich, with Bird and Posson in tow, slipped into the foyer of the three-flat. There, Erlich studied the lock on the inside door before producing a thin piece of flexible flatmetal. This he inserted into the jamb where the lockset met the frame, working by feel alone to finesse the slim-jim between striker and bolt.
The spring-loaded bolt snapped back with a satisfying metallic snick, and Erlich turned to wink at Posson and Bird.
“Benefits of a misspent youth,” he murmured, and held the door wide.
The trio eased through to the stairway passage and crept upward, stepping close where each riser met the wall to minimize unwanted noise. On the landing immediately below Sonnenberg’s apartment, they eased their weapons from concealed holsters before tiptoeing up the final stairs.
It was anticlimatic. The door to Sonnenberg’s place hung open, the room behind it empty and dark.
Still they entered cautiously, moving in practiced drill through each of the three small rooms inside. In the beam of Erlich’s pocket flashlight, they saw a thin patina of undisturbed dust on the lamps and tables. Despite the open door, there was no sign that the apartment had been visited in weeks.
Finally, the three of them stood again in the darkness of the front room, framed by the still-ajar door.
“Well, this is a waste of time,” Erlich said, lowering his pistol. “A damn wild-goose—”
There was movement from across the hallway as the door to the other apartment abruptly opened. Then the darkness flared blindingly white, as if a photographer’s strobe had been triggered.
Erlich spun and fell back against Terry, clutching at her arm and shoulder with an iron grip. It hurt, and she tried to push him away with the hand not holding her own pistol. But he clung to her with a desperate strength, and the sudden deadweight of his body dragged them both down, hard.
Terry hit the floor painfully, her head striking something solid on the way down. Her pistol bounded from her hand, clattering away in the dark. She lay flat on her back under an immovable weight, pinpoints of white-hot comets spinning crazily across her vision.
Simultaneously, another double flash and concussive explosion came from the hallway outside, countered by a volley from within.
Terry felt something hot pulse wetly against her jaw, again and again. She opened her mouth to shout, to scream at Erlich to get off her; as she did, the metallic taste of fresh copper pennies flooded her mouth.
For a single panicked moment, she knew that the torrent of blood was hers, that she was bleeding out from some horrendous pumping wound high on her neck. She tried to reach up with her left hand to find the severed artery, to somehow stopper it with her fingers. But she could not free her arm, pinned underneath Erlich’s now-inert body.
Then there was another gunshot flash, a double tap, and in the blue-white light of it she saw the terrible wound that had torn away the side of Erlich’s throat.
She twisted frantically, trying to free herself. Then a fresh fusillade of gunshots erupted from both in front and behind her, and the stroboscopic supernova provided an irregular-spaced, surreal illumination.
At the wall beside the door, she saw Mel Bird kneeling, his upper body bent around the jamb and both arms extended in a shooting stance. Then Bird was looking at her, his face contorted and his mouth moving as if in speech.
There were more flashes now, each stark in her vision as bolts of forked summer lightning; but she no longer heard the discharges that generated them, nor the words that her partner must have been shouting to her. The world had become a silent film, moving in a jerky, slow-motion parody of reality.
Terry saw a hand that might have been her own, the one that had held her lost pistol, push futilely at the leather-jacketed weight that held her down; it was no use. She looked up to see her partner moving to help, impossibly slow, and reached up toward him and safety.
Instead, the doorframe against which Bird had been leaning erupted into splinters, exploding once, twice. The third shot was into flesh, high on Mel Bird’s upper body—a shuddering impact that threw his body back into the hallway out of Terry’s sight.
But not before the shock of the bullet had flung Mel’s gun arm against the wall, knocking his heavy automatic loose from his grip. The pistol careened against the plaster and landed, spinning, on the hardwood inches from Terry’s outstretched arm. She stared at it for what seemed like an eternity, then strained the extra inch required for her fingertips to brush the weapon into reach.
Terry snatched up Bird’s pistol in a hand whose tremors she could not control. Then there was movement, two figures silhouetted against the window behind moving forward in a wary half crouch.
Terry twisted one last time, enough to center the luminous three-dot sight of Bird’s pistol on the foremost of the two figures. She fired, and in the recoil felt the slide lock back on an empty magazine. For an instant the muzzle flash dazzled her vision. She could not tell if her target had fallen, or what the second figure had—
The pistol flew from her hands even before she felt the pain of the kick that smashed against her wrist.
And then a man was standing over her. Terry could not see him clearly; all she could see was the impossibly large bore of the revolver he held, arm extended downward so that the muzzle was only inches from her forehead.
“My friend seems to have been wounded,” a voice from above said cheerfully; for the first time, Terry heard a low moaning from behind him. “You shoot well. That, or you are quite lucky. Let us see.”
She heard the double click as he thumbed back the hammer an instant before he pulled the trigger.
Instead of the explosion Terry expected, there was only the snap of a firing pin on an empty chamber.
“As I thought, fortune has smiled on you,” he said, and she heard the slight accent of his words. “But in the future, be advised: luck is a fickle mistress.”
Before
she could react, the dark figure kicked her again, this time viciously alongside her temple. Her world went black as suddenly as a lightbulb is extinguished.
She did not see him study her, almost fondly, before he stepped nimbly over her pinned form and was away through the doorway.
• • •
I flipped through the faxed pages that had just been hand-delivered from the police department across the hall. Quickly, I scanned them.
“Gil, we got an NCIC hit on the second guy—the one Terry shot,” I said. “His name is Vladimir Kolchenk. It’s the guy Sam Lichtman was talking about. He’s got a rap sheet a yard long, and that’s just what we know about in this country. There’s a notation that he’s suspected of involvement in overseas organized crime.”
I read further; the National Crime Information Center’s conclusion was clear.
“Gil, he’s Russian Mafiya. We need to sweat him about all this and about the other one. The one Sam Lichtman called Mikhail.”
Cieloczki was silent for a moment, and I could hear the murmur of voices talking in the background.
“Davey, we’ve got all we’re going to get out of Kolchenk. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Shock and loss of blood.”
“Damn.”
I could almost hear Cieloczki thinking. “Look, we’ve got to find out how all this fits together. Call Santori again, tell him what we have. Let’s get some federal support on this. Whatever we can pull together, let’s do it, now.”
“Gil, I want to take this outside,” I said. “Some of it, at least. All of a sudden, we’re knee-deep in Russians on this case. And remember, Levinstein had a history with them on the Jewish emigration issue. There are people, experts, who might have a better handle on the Mafiya angle—give us a new direction to start looking, maybe. I could make a couple of calls.”
“Make the calls,” Cieloczki said, and his voice was grim. “We need answers. I want them before anybody else gets killed. What else do you suggest?”
“We need to find Sonnenberg fast,” I said. “Vladmir Kolchenk and this Mikhail thought they hit a dead end on finding the painting. But they had seen Sonny creep the Levinstein house and come out empty-handed. By now, Mikhail knows he wasn’t just some unlucky break-in artist. Sonny may be all any of us have as a lead on the missing artwork.”
Chapter 29
Kay Cieloczki stood at the doorway to the converted downstairs bedroom that served as Gil’s den. These days, it was also serving as a makeshift home office for the work her husband was bringing from the downtown office he saw only infrequently.
It was now late morning, hours since the shootout. Gil had called from the hospital, the concern for the two wounded officers weighing down his words. One man—a Cook County officer named Erlich, with whom Gil had recently met—was dead; two Lake Tower officers were wounded, one of them critically.
Gil did not know when he would be home, he told his wife. In the interim, Kay was not to worry. Right.
She needed to calm her mind—no, she told herself, to fill it. She walked through her home, looking for labor that would block out her concern. And so she found herself outside Gil’s home office.
This was, she recognized, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her.
By nature, Gil was a neat person—so well organized, in fact, that it sometimes exasperated Kay, who considered herself no slouch when it came to the neatness department. Typically, Gil would enter a room—say, the kitchen—on one errand or another. There, he would notice a spoon or bowl on a counter, and thoughtfully return it to its assigned space and designated cupboard. Or he would enter the living room, note that it was empty, and innocently press the button that turned the TV off.
Never mind that in both cases Kay—herself perfectly capable of clearing counters and powering down electronic devices—might only have stepped out of the room momentarily.
Early in their marriage, it had been a source of occasional domestic friction that startled, then puzzled, a consistently contrite Gil. Now it was usually relegated to the status of an inside joke between them, one that Kay had taught herself to accept with grace. Still, bowls she had set out moments before continued to fly back to cupboards, television screens mysteriously were blank upon her return to whatever room through which her husband had passed in her absence.
It could be, Kay occasionally admitted to herself, maddeningly to the extreme. It brought a kind of Odd Couple aspect to their relationship.
Ironically, Gil’s deep preoccupation with the Levinstein arson was almost a relief to Kay. The demands of the case, combined with the fire department’s administrative workload with which Gil routinely dealt, had an impact in the Cieloczki household. For virtually the first time since in their marriage, the roles were reversed.
Kay surveyed the low coffee table next to Gil’s favorite chair with some measure of satisfaction. File folders, computer printouts, stacks of loose paper covered the tabletop—left where they lay when the call summoning Gil to the hospital had come early this morning.
It’s my turn to be Felix, Kay thought, and smiled to herself. And he can find out how it feels to play Oscar.
Kay moved toward the clutter and almost stepped on the plastic box half hidden on the floor beneath the table. It was the case to a videotape, but there was no label or marking to identify it or the cassette inside. She frowned; that was unusual in the Cieloczki household, unless the tape was blank. And if it was blank, why would it be in Gil’s stack of take-home work?
Kay shrugged and put the videotape on Gil’s chair. She began to straighten the table, starting with the tallest stack of folders.
Maybe, she thought to herself, I’ll pop it in the VCR later. Then I’ll paste on a label—handwritten, so he’ll notice who’s picking up after him.
It was a satisfying thought, one that almost made her chuckle out loud.
Chapter 30
“I have to see you,” Ellen said to me. “I think I’m being followed.”
Then she giggled, as if she had told an off-color joke.
She had called from the cell phone she had taken to carrying, telephoning the Lake County Fire Department and catching me at the desk Gil’s secretary had found for me. I sat on the periphery of the fire department’s cramped administrative work area, hard against a waist-high railing that marked the Lake Tower Sanitation department’s turf. I tried not to think of it as a metaphor for my current circumstances.
Around me, clerical workers whose names I did not know typed and filed and checked yellow work orders against plat maps. It was not the most private place to discuss whatever pursuit fantasies might have motivated my former spouse to call.
“Davey? Are you there?”
In the background, I could hear the ambient sounds of automotive traffic, the muted hum made by a multitude of conversations and, incongruously, the strains of what sounded like a mariachi band.
“Where are you, Ellen?”
“Where am I?” she repeated, and for an instant I thought she was asking me for the information. “Downtown, at a darling little sidewalk cantina. I don’t know the name of it—oh. It’s Hermosita’s, just off Michigan on Erie. I took an early lunch, Davey. I can do that, you know.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“I won’t dignify that with an answer.” Then she giggled again; this time, it sounded decidedly tipsy. “Besides, it’s almost noon anyway.”
“Ellen, I can’t talk right—”
“Don’t hang up! I’m serious, Davey—I think somebody’s been watching me. I saw him when I left the house this morning, and I just saw him walk past my table.”
“What does he look like? Give me a description.”
There was a pause.
“He’s…tall. Maybe your height. Dark hair, I think.” Her voice brightened. “And he was wearing glasses. Or…sunglasses.”
I had picked up a pencil, which I now placed back on the desk.
“I’ll call the Chicago police; they’ll send
an officer to help. What’s the cross street nearest you?”
“Oh, don’t do that, Davey. Could you come?”
I frowned.
“Ellen, I—”
“Please. When you get here, we can talk.”
And then, before I could analyze her motives or even phrase my response, she broke the connection. I sat at my borrowed desk among people I did not know, a dead telephone in my hand and a sudden, disquieting sensation in my gut. Throughout my marriage to Ellen, I had felt it often—usually, when she was about to do something that anyone else would see as cruel.
I wanted to call it curiosity, but I was fairly certain it felt like suspicion.
• • •
Ellen was not at the restaurant called Hermosita’s when I arrived from Lake Tower almost forty minutes later.
She had not returned to work, either, as I discovered when I called there from the cantina’s office. In fact, nobody at Ellen’s office had seen her that day; she had called in sick before eight o’clock, telling her supervisor she intended to spend the day in bed. But when I dialed the house where she and I had once lived together, there was no answer.
Of course, she might have been telling the truth, in her own way.
The telephone rang for a long time before I hung up.
Chapter 31
Chicago has always been one of the great newspaper towns, a place where the term “journalist” has never really replaced “reporter” as the preferred descriptive for the majority of the men and women who ply that trade here.
The difference is significant, a point of hard-edged pride any one of them would have fought over. More than a few, on occasion, did. But most kept their brawling both metaphorical and internecine; Chicago is a city whose tradition of thumb-in-the-eye competition is fiercely waged each morning between its two surviving major daily newspapers.