Windy City Knights

by Michael A. Black

  “He ain’t in right now,” the dispatcher said.

  “Well, he was supposed to look up some records for my partner, Detective Grieves out of Area Two.” I gave him my address and the date Paula had called them.

  “Oh, hell, I can look that up for you,” he said. “Hold on a second.”

  He put me on hold, then came back on the line. I could hear the rustling of papers as he spoke.

  “You said that was December twenty-eighth, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, here it is.” He paused to grunt slightly. “Call came in at five forty a.m., unit picked up female passenger six-oh-four, drove her to Lincoln Estates Holiday Inn.” His voice had a hesitating lilt to it. Like he had suddenly remembered something else.

  I waited to see if he’d offer anything. People will do that sometimes if you don’t rush them.

  “You know,” he said. “Seems to me that there was somebody else asking about this. Some guy demanded to see the manager.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Somebody wanting to know where the fare was picked up.”

  “Do you normally give out that information?”

  “Well, not normally, no,” he said. “But this guy said he worked for a lawyer. Said he could get a subpoena if he needed to. A real fast talker.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Maybe fifty, fifty-five. Gray hair, heavyset.”

  I was starting to get a clearer picture. “Did he look like a drinker?”

  “Huh?”

  “Did he have an English accent?” I asked.

  “Come to think of it, he did sound like a Brit.”

  Peeps, I thought. “Did you give him the address?”

  “Well, now that I don’t know,” he said. “He spoke to Mr. Williams, the manager.”

  “Let me guess, was this the same day? The twenty-eighth?”

  “You know, I believe it was,” he said. “How’d you know?”

  “I’m psychic,” I said, and hung up.

  So now I knew how Peeps had gotten my address to break into my house. Paula hadn’t given it to him. He’d gotten it from the damn cab company. Probably by flashing a “subpoena” with Andrew Jackson’s picture on it. But how had he known that I was involved? The message I’d left on Paula’s machine? I’d used my business number rather than my home TX, but if she’d had caller ID it would have been on there. Peeps must have had access to her apartment, listened to the answering machine, and gotten my home number. Now I was sure he did the burglary to my house, and probably the one at her place too, although that one had somehow seemed more vicious. But what the hell had he been looking for?

  I grabbed my stuff. Poking my head in the gym area, I spied Chappie talking to Alley. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Chappie had his hands up on each side of Alley’s head.

  “Hey, I’m taking off,” I said.

  Chappie glanced over toward me and motioned with his head for me to come over.

  “I don’t like the way this looks,” he said. He kept his hands up, moving them back and forth. “You see my hand now?” he asked.

  Alley shook his head, then nodded.

  “I see some…like fire sometimes,” Alley said.

  “I’m gonna have take to him in and have his eye looked at,” Chappie said. “That motherfucker Ross must have been thumbin’ too.”

  I nodded. Alley, who’d just gotten in from his night maintenance job, looked confused.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m takin’ you to the doctor,” Chappie said.

  “No,” Alley said, shaking his head. “No doctor. Please. No money.”

  “I pay,” Chappie said.

  Alley shook his head again.

  “No doctor,” he repeated.

  “Alley,” I said. “Don’t argue with Chappie. If he says you go, you go. He’s your trainer. Your boss.”

  Alley looked at the floor.

  “You want me to drive you?” I asked.

  “Nah,” Chappie said. “I’ll just have Brice watch the place. I gotta be sure they check this out right.”

  “What do you think it is?” I said.

  “Don’t like the way he seein’ them flashes,” Chappie said. “And his peripheral vision seems off. I’m worried about that eye more than the cut now.”

  “Great.” In between breaks in our workout, I’d told him about my talk with Father Boris concerning Smershkevich. “Just what the kid needs. More shit to worry about.”

  When I got home I found Laurie on the back steps shivering as she stood smoking a cigarette. As soon as I walked up, she took one more drag and pinched the ember off, letting it fall into the snow. I waved my hand in front of my face, trying to dispel the odor of the smoke as I went up the stairs. We went into the porch and then the kitchen.

  “Sorry.” She opened the garbage can lid and dropped the extinguished butt.

  “No problem. You been cutting down?” Since she’d been staying at my place I really hadn’t noticed her smoking very much. I silently hoped she was trying to quit. But then again, maybe she was just picking her smoke breaks more carefully.

  My kitchen table was covered with several groups of papers in various stacks. Georgio was curled up on a chair opposite, and slumbering Shasha had her back arched against the heating vent. Rags was meandering about the floor exploring everything.

  “Oooh, I wish,” she said, then gestured toward the piles of paper. “This is going slower than anticipated. Paula was not the most meticulous person. Her checkbook was a mess. I’m still not sure how much money’s in her account. And a lot of her bills went into collections before they were paid.”

  Live fast, party hearty, and let the bills fall where they may, I thought. Apparently, Paula hadn’t changed much since high school.

  “But anyway,” she continued. “I’ve been trying to organize things into three major piles. Bills that need to be taken care of, those that really don’t matter anymore, and stuff you might be interested in.” The third stack was by far the smallest, but I made a mental note to look through all three of them. I told her that.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “What ever you feel is best. You’re the professional.” She beamed a smile at me. “Say, I used your phone to make a call up to Michigan.”

  “Home?”

  The question seemed to catch her off-guard.

  “Ah, no…This was just a friend that I was supposed to call,” she said. “I’ll call home tomorrow, if it’s okay. Maybe I should look into getting a phone card.”

  The way she said “friend” made me immediately think “boyfriend.” I wondered if she did have somebody up in Michigan waiting for her. And if she did, where did that leave us?

  After making a quick protein shake for myself, I took Laurie out for lunch. We ended up going to a fast-food place where she munched down a salad and I had a coffee. Then we checked out a couple of moving outfits. She settled on the most reasonable one, and they agreed to meet her at Paula’s apartment Friday morning.

  “That’s okay, isn’t it?” she asked, turning to me. “I mean, it won’t interfere with your fight?”

  “It should be all right.”

  It was already getting dark when we left the moving place, and the temperature seemed to be dropping as fast as the sunlight. What ever snow had melted during the day’s thaw was now rapidly turning to ice. The salt trucks were out in force.

  “Chappie invited us to dinner at his house tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Interested?”

  “Oh, wow, that’s sweet of him.”

  “It’s sort of like a tradition,” I said. “The Sunday before I have a fight, we usually meet, eat, and go over our fight plan once more.”

  “Your fight plan?” she asked. “Is that important?”

  “Yeah. You got to have a plan to follow, or you’ll end up being lost.”

  “I can imagine,” she said. “But it still sounds pretty scary.”

  “Life,” I sa
id, exaggerating my voice, “is pretty scary. If you let it be. Now why don’t we go down the street to the multiplex theater and see a movie? Or would you rather eat first?”

  She smiled. “Anything you want, Ron. I just like being with you.”

  I was thinking how much I liked her smile, and how pretty she looked there in the fading light, that for a moment, I could almost forget that she was the little cousin of a girl I was once in love with a long time ago, maybe with a boyfriend in Michigan. And that she was also a client.

  Sunday’s early morning run wasn’t so early. After the movie Laurie and I had grabbed a late dinner at a restaurant, then stopped by a near by nightclub for some dancing and drinks. Actually, she had the drinks while I just had club soda. At close to midnight we’d gone home and things got romantic again. It all seemed so natural that for a moment it was as if she’d been a regular part of my life for a while. And would be for the future. But then reality crept in.

  Semester break…I wondered how long it would last. Not forever, that was for sure. Then again, had I ever expected that it would?

  When I got home, Laurie was watching TV and sorting out whites and colors from a stack of dirty clothes.

  “Why don’t I do the laundry while you’re at the gym?” she asked.

  I told her she didn’t have to ask me twice.

  I met Chappie for our scheduled “quick” workout, and he put me through the paces with the focus pads, the bags, and shadowboxing. He kept saying that I was looking “as smooth as silk” throughout the session, but at this point I wasn’t sure if he really felt that way or was just trying to bolster my ego. I mean, I was probably in as good shape as I was going to get, so it wouldn’t really help to push any more. And I didn’t believe the time I was spending with Laurie was all that detrimental either. As long as I got some rest in between. What it really boiled down to was peaking at just the right moment now, and I hoped that it would be Friday night. But I felt in my bones a sort of indefinable dread. A feeling that even though I’d prepared for this fight harder than I’d ever trained before, something unexpected was coming to knock me off the track.

  “Nerves,” Chappie said when I told him how I felt. “You just got to trust yourself when the time come.”

  Trusting myself, I thought. Something that I wasn’t doing very much of lately.

  CHAPTER 22

  The January thaw continued its steady rise, melting the snow and leaving the streets slick-looking. Most of the huge drifts and piles had shrunk substantially, allowing me free rein on the parkways and road shoulders as I sped through my three-and-a-half miles. After the pleasant dinner at Chappie’s the day before, and the nice cozy night with Laurie as we just relaxed together in a warm embrace, I was almost ready to put all the troubles and concerns about the case behind me and just concentrate on worrying about the fight.

  My quasi-euphoria, as it turned out, was short-lived. When I walked in the back door I heard Laurie in the shower and I wondered if I should knock and ask to join her. Save water, and all that. But my beeper was doing that intermittent chirping of an unanswered page. The screen lit up with a Chicago exchange and George’s badge number behind it, followed by 911. I went back into my office-room and called him.

  He answered on the first ring.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Where you at?”

  “Home. Just finished my run. Why?”

  “Me and Doug are over at the morgue on a case, but this Peeps thing’s starting to heat up.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I ain’t got all the details yet, but it might be a good idea to go make that pre emptive statement we talked about.”

  “All right.”

  “So why don’t you figure on meeting me up at Area Four, at Harrison and Kedzie,” George said. “And, Ron, try not to show up looking like a bum, will ya?”

  By the time I hung up, Laurie was out of the shower, standing there with a towel wrapped around her, trying to run a comb through her dark hair. She smiled at me and asked how my run had gone.

  “The run was fine,” I said. “It was the phone call afterwards that sucked.”

  After explaining to her that I had to go in and give a “pre emptive statement” concerning Peeps, she insisted on coming with me. Not wanting to look like a bum, I changed into my gray sport coat, dark slacks, and power tie. Laurie picked out some dressy black slacks and a purple sweater. In an effort to hurry, she’d let her hair dry naturally and it seemed to be missing its usual flip and body wave. It made her appear younger than she was, but she still looked like dynamite.

  I tried to persuade her to stay there, but she kept insisting she could corroborate that I hadn’t been alone with Peeps for long. Finally, tired of arguing, I agreed, and we went out to The Beater. The drive north in the midmorning traffic wasn’t bad, taking only about thirty minutes. I parked in the lot, and we went into the brick station house. But George wasn’t anywhere in sight. I knew I probably should have waited for him, but I was anxious to get this over with.

  The desk sergeant told us to wait and we sat down on the metal bench. Presently a blond guy with thinning hair came out. He was thick around the middle in dress pants, a blue shirt, and loosely knotted floral tie. A Chicago star was clipped to the left side of his belt, and a snub-nose revolver in a holster was on the right.

  “Mr. Shade, I’m Detective Reed,” he said. “Would you come this way please?”

  We followed him upstairs and he put each of us in separate interview rooms. After waiting about twenty minutes, Reed appeared at my doorway with another guy who was carrying a yellow legal pad. They entered and smiled.

  The other guy was tall with kind of an aging athlete’s build and a bushy gray-black mustache. When he turned I noticed that the hair at the crown of his head had thinned out too, but not as bad as Reed’s. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over big muscular forearms, and he regarded me with cold brown eyes.

  “Mr. Shade, this is my partner, Detective Randecki,” Reed said. “We’d like to talk to you about a few things.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” I said.

  “Detective Grieves from the Second District,” Reed said. “You know him?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Practically my whole life.”

  He and Randecki looked at one another, then Reed said, “So I take it he helps you out from time to time on cases you’re working on?”

  “Well,” I said, trying to stall. The last thing I wanted to do was to say something to these guys that would get George’s tit in the wringer. “Not really. If I get something, some information that he can use, I give it to him. He does the same if he hears something that I may be interested in, as long as it doesn’t compromise any police business.”

  “So do you have any idea why he was nosing around about a guy named Samuel R. Peeps?” Randecki asked.

  “You probably should ask him that,” I said.

  “You know Mr. Peeps?” Reed asked.

  “I met him once during the course of a case I’m working,” I said.

  “You ever been to his office?” Reed said.

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Last Thursday.”

  They both looked at each other, which I didn’t take for a good sign.

  “It was the first and only time I ever saw him,” I said. “Although I think I talked to him on the phone a couple of times.”

  “That so?” Randecki asked, matter-of-factly.

  I was starting to get a little perturbed by their tactics. I expected them to lurch into good-cop, bad-cop any minute.

  “And what was the nature of this visit?” Reed said.

  “I went to his office to question him about some photography work he did on a client’s relative,” I said.

  “Who’s your client?” Randecki asked.

  I looked up at him to slow the tempo a bit. It was none of their business who my client was. It was privileged information and they k
new it. But still, I was here to cooperate, and it probably wouldn’t hurt.

  “The young lady in the next room,” I said.

  “And who’s the relative?” Randecki asked. “What’s her name?”

  “Look, why don’t we quit playing cat and mouse here,” I said. “Are you guys on a fishing expedition, or what? ’Cause I’m getting a little tired of this bullshit, and I do have a lot of things to do.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, wise-ass,” Randecki growled.

  Ah, I thought, the bad cop finally rears his head. I played with the end of my power tie.

  “Joe, don’t get sore,” Reed said in an easy tone. “Ron here’s just trying to make a living.”

  “Guys,” I said, holding up a finger for each of my statements. “I went to Peeps’s office a couple of days ago. I questioned him about some pictures he took of a Paula Kittermann.” I spelled her name for them. “He did a portfolio. She was killed December twenty-eighth by a hit-and-run driver. Detective Grieves called me on the case to make the ID. I’m a friend of the Kittermann family, and they asked me to look into the accident. End of story.”

  “I hear you’re a kickboxer, Shade,” Randecki said.

  “Yeah.”

  “A real rough-ass.” He stared at me with a challenging sneer.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So you must know how to take care of yourself pretty well, Ron,” Reed said.

  I nodded.

  “You have any type of problems with Peeps when you saw him?” Randecki asked.

  “Peeps,” I said, “was an asshole.”

  Reed leaned forward in his chair.

  “Why do you say that, Ron?” he asked.

  “You run a background check on him?” I asked.

  “We’ll ask the questions,” Randecki said.

  “I’d be interested to see if Peeps had a rap sheet,” I said.

  “I’ll bet you would,” Randecki said. “Is that the kind of information that Grieves gives you?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “You own a pistol, Ron?” Reed asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What kind?”

  “A couple of ’em,” I said. “Why?”

  “You ever own a twenty-two?” Reed asked.